Some Little Night Musings

The numerical value of fine-structure constant, a number of such importance in science that even some physicists refer to it as “mystical,” is 1 (one) divided by 137: 1/137. For convenience, it is sometimes referred to simply as 137.

One of the wonderful stories in physics emphasizes the importance of 137 as well as illustrating the arrogance of theorists. According to this tale, a notable Austrian physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, went to heaven after his demise and, because of his eminence in physics, was given an audience with God.

Speaking in a voice remarkably like that of the late John Huston, God said:

"Pauli, you're allowed one question. What do you want to know?”

Pauli immediately asked the question that he had labored in vain to answer for the last decade of his life:

"Why 1/137?”

God smiled, picked up a piece of chalk, went to a blackboard, and started explaining exactly why the fine structure constant had to be 1/137. Pauli listened for a while, then began shaking his head.

"No,” said Pauli, waving his hands, “Not even close. Why, that's not even wrong!”

He then took the chalk from God and began pointing out the mistakes that the Old One had made.

Now that's what I call chutzpah! About an idea that he thought was pure baloney, and as far from being right as possible, Pauli was famous among his colleagues for saying:

"Why, that's not even wrong!”

Pauli, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the exclusion principle, died in 1958. The number of the hospital room where he died?

You guessed it: 137.

As tiny, as diminutive, as minuscule as it is, a photon has inexhaustible energy in that it can propagate everlastingly—witness the photons that make up the cosmic background radiation that has been around ever since the Big Bang, and is it not amazing that these particles of light wave to us all the way from the very birth of the universe itself: fifteen billion years ago!

One of the paradoxes about light is that a photon, as a particle of light, has no mass and therefore no weight, and thus it may be said that a photon is “light” in more ways than one.

Milic Capek, a philosopher of science, has argued that although we may consciously acquiesce to the radical revelations of the new physics, on an unconscious level the old ideas of classical physics continue to exert influence, and we are still haunted not only by the ghost of Newton, but also Euclid and, going even further back, Democritus and Zeno.

If this be true, the question then becomes, what can we do about it?

Following a suggestion by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Capek proposes that we might take up a “psychoanalysis of knowledge” to rid ourselves of these ghostly and antiquated notions.

Such an analysis might make an careful inquiry into why tenaciously held opinions, such as politics, are so divisive. Such opinions, when given voice, come not from someone who is speaking his mind but, as Ken Wilber says, someone who is being spoken.

This new discipline could also be called Hauntology: the study of those ghostly elements in our unconscious that haunt our minds and imaginations and cause us to persist in mental and semantic inertia.

When the wheels of thought run in deep ruts, it's hard to get them going in new directions.

Process thought talks about “the presence of the past” and scientist Rupert Sheldrake has written a book with that title. In William Faulkner's novel, Requiem for a Nun, Gavin Stevens says: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” In light of this, imagine my wonder at a word that, out of the blue, fluttered up from my unconscious late last night and made me smile—jetzterday . . . which blends jetzt, the German word for “now” (pronounced yetst), and “yesterday.”

Ich bin Hy Nun . . .

Hy Nun? Nun, pronounced “noon,” is another German word for “now” and the clocks in that film, with their hands always moving, now till noon, and Grace Kelly, Coop's new Quaker bride, is rather like a nun as she prepares to leave town when the noon train arrives (Do not forsake me, oh my darlin') but who, nonetheless . . . is less the nun at the end when she stands by her man and helps him shoot Frank Miller dead.

One night it dawned on me that the rational criteria of “coherence” and “adequacy” clearly exemplify the archetypal theme of the many and the one: adequacy to the many facts of experience, and coherence as conceptual unity.

Therefore, after imaginative leaps and speculative flights, when you reason things through and assay your thought by carefully observing these two epistemic norms, the movement of your mind mirrors how “the many become one, and are increased by one,” in a moment revelatory of truth.

Moreover, if unity in diversity is a minimal definition of “the beautiful,” then a moment of such elegance of thought is also kalogenic, productive of beauty. Since all this is surely a good to be enjoyed, you thereby harvest that golden trinity of values: truth, beauty, and goodness.

Art and science have joined hands in at least one of the designs of military camouflage. How do you make a very large object, such as an airplane, virtually invisible to radar? Simple: take a lesson from Picasso and design the exterior of the plane with an assemblage of facets.

As Arthur Miller has noted: “The United States Air Force's B117, the Stealth Bomber, is a flying cubist sculpture.”