ALSO BY PAUL R. FLEISCHMAN

Poetry

© 2013 Paul R Fleischman

All right reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system or technologies now knwon or later developed, without permission in writing from the author.

ISBN: 978-1-937650-26-1

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: From the Cell to the Galaxy

SECTION I: Voices of Wonder

SECTION II: What is Wonder? The Psychology of Wonder

SECTION III: Crowds of Atoms in Communion

Section IV: Energy of the Biocosmos

SECTION V: Microcosmos: The Creation Within Creation

SECTION VI: A Constitution of Wonder

SECTION VII: Light and Dark Wonder

References

Index

For Susan

Oh my love for the first time in my life,

My eyes are wide open…

John Lennon

Where I lived was as far off as many a region

viewed nightly by astronomers…a forever new

and unprofaned part of the universe.

Henry David Thoreau

Preface

I decided to write this book after asking myself two questions: What is the most valuable contribution that I can make to the fraught world? And, what do I want to spend my last years, months, days or hours thinking about, feeling, and doing? To both of these the answer was, wonder.

The topic that I find most urgent and interesting is the relationship between myself and the world, between the visions of cosmology, molecular biology, the evolution of life, and my mind. Some people search for their identity in ethnicity or gender. I wanted to locate myself as I am, in the context of M31, the “nearby” spiral galaxy pinwheeling fifteen quintillion miles away; and in the context of the short arm of chromosome 15, which silently formats me from within on the basis of its four billion-year-old chemical memory.

This exploration of wonder has four sources.

First, there is literature, poets like Whitman, Neruda, Keats, Dylan Thomas, and many others, who can evoke our wonder by describing theirs. We are not alone in our wonder, and have many friends and advisors, as well as some challenging mentors. Prose-poet Herman Melville, for example, beckons to us, mocks us, and reels out the story of his own courage, irreverence, wonder, and inconclusiveness. This book is written in reference to wonder-filled writing.

Second, there are the discoveries of science, which describe the world with the depth of genius compounded over centuries. Science is particularly revealing when it sweeps across disciplines to describe a whole. The movement of thought from our tiny interior cells out to cosmological origins and edges becomes numinous. Inside our cells are particles whose numbers and transformations echo galaxies and reveal something cosmological in the minute. The nature of life that molecular and cell biology can reveal to us (when these subjects are freed from memorizations and exams) is a glorious tapestry of our deep identity.

Third, there are the ideas of science, not its facts but its great concepts of cause, mutual influence, how the world is connected and held together. Our wonder at the world springs up from every bee and flower, the panorama of life, and also from its interconnections, which we now have a science to reveal as never before. We are embedded within a creative creation. We ourselves are new forms of emergence. Our home among the stars is lawful yet not predictable, impersonal but guided. Just as good citizens delight in benign laws, we are struck with wonder by the format of the cosmos.

The fourth source for this exploration of wonder is meditation on the arising and passing of the particles in my own body. This book partly derives from my lifelong, practiced awareness that every thing is an original, impermanent compound of disappearingly smaller parts. Everything is built and dissolves instantaneously in continuity. For the pervasiveness of this recognition, I am indebted to meditation as taught by the Buddha, but this book is neither about meditation nor Buddhism, nor am I a Buddhist, any more than the fact that I count on gravity to keep my feet on Earth makes me a “Newtonist.” Meditation is cultivated awareness within oneself of change according to cause, and it has prepared me to witness the wonder of the working of the world. Yet this book is not limited to the legacy of meditation, and could not have been written without the scientists and writers whose work has formed the basis for the text to leap from internal experience into language and concepts.

To write about wonder, I have used sources from literature, science and meditation, but I have also been lucky. Wonder is more accessible to people who have been freed from superstition and coercion. The openmindedness and partly-off-balance stance of wonder can feel intolerable to good but frightened people. Wonder emerges from a certain degree of confidence coupled to a kind of unknowing, and it is blackened out of existence by anxious entrenchment or conviction. I have been lucky to be granted intellectual opportunity in a relatively secure time.

By dwelling on wonder for so long, I hope I have added to the world and to myself a touch of liberation. Wonder is, among other things, a wand to dispel ignorance and appropriation. I remain inspired by the hope that truth will make us free.

Finally, it should be clear that I am not proposing wonder as vapid gaping. A wonder-drenched life is not denial of war, poverty or the stampede of collective human ignorance. The ability to feel wonder is a blessing received by someone whose ancestors and contemporaries struggled to throw off penury, ideology, and the pressure of the herd. I feel not only indebted and lucky, but grateful to the great phalanx of heroes, known and unknown, who pried open the door for me: writers, scientists, politicians, soldiers, immigrants, lawyers, protestors, contemplatives, and lovers.

If I contribute to a wider attunement to wonder, I hope this will also facilitate in its own way the reduction of violence directed at people and other lives. Who would destroy a breathing source of one’s own wonder? I hope to bring into words a recognition that every white pine is a semaphore waving from the origin of time. Inside its tall trunk are atoms and laws much older than the Earth. Wonder and reverence are the royal marriage.

I owe a debt to Dr. Ted Slovin, who listened with such intensity, enthusiasm, and honesty, demanding clarity and evoking color. He heard me, helped me to hear myself, and provided many corrections and useful references. Chitra Amarasiriwardena, Manish Deopura, Rick Crutcher, Karen Donovan, and Susan Fleischman took the time to carefully read the manuscript and offer suggestions.

Just before I go to sleep and when I wake up at 5:00 AM, I try to catch a glimpse, through my well-positioned bedroom window, of stars which are unimaginably distant lights among which we sail without anchoring reference. An absurd and dismaying logic locates us within a universe of galaxies, black holes, and quasars, billions of trillions of miles wide.

Out of the immeasurable cosmic vaults of the universe, matter, energy, and information have converged to orchestrate us.

All of the massive evidence of the great twentieth century points towards nothing that resembles a person guiding the universe, and reveals equally forcefully that somewhere in its deep pulsations the world has directive. There are rules that act like barriers, currents, and channels that say “yes,” “no,” “maybe,” “sometimes,” “never,” or “later” to the flow of events. There are signals by which everything to some degree has had limits set on what it must or cannot do. Something has touched and placed each one of the octillions of atoms that currently reside in me, and that have been guided there during a long cosmic dream. Order, loose patterns, and varied melodies have put in place the pieces out of whose coherence each one of us arises.

Weaving among the governors of the world like gravity, electromagnetism, or informatic constraint, among the stitches holding the seams of the universe, I believe, are threads of mind and wonder.

More than any idea, it is the irreducible complexity and incomprehensible presence of our long-woven awakening on our green Earth among cobalt galaxies, that impregnates us with wonder.

Introduction: From the Cell to the Galaxy

There is a large gap between the modern scientific worldview and the way we typically construct personal meaning. What does our life mean in a universe that is so big? When the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits around Earth on a satellite, takes an ultra deep field picture that delves into an area with an opening the size of a straw, the penetrating photo reveals thousands of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, and yet there are uncountable equally straw-sized circumferences with equal galactic populations spanning the sky. How can we relate to such an ungraspable spatial context? Or, what does our existence imply on our planet that generated dinosaurs for more than one hundred million years, but then threw away all those ingenious and lugubrious inventions? Won’t we also be thrown away? How can I relate myself to the scientific narrative in which I became immersed as a medical student, that I consist of trillions of tiny cells, each one of which is the product of billions of years of experimentation and molecular evolution? Am I too intricate to ever understand myself?

It is difficult to construct satisfying narratives that bridge our sense of ourselves to the realities revealed by science. Our failure to generate coherent new visions allows the human community to perseverate in archaic fables that have no truth value, and that are also filled with self-righteousness, divisiveness, and wishful thinking. The old fables are not only wrong in the way they describe time, space, and the evolution of levels of complexity; they also instigate false self-importance, which in turn triggers appropriation and aggression. When people cannot accept what they know, they proclaim what they wish to be true in a threatening tone of voice.

Then again, not everyone wants to be a scientist, and even science often presents temporary viewpoints that are soon discarded.

We want not only truth, but life-giving truth that can inspire and buttress us. Yet so much of what passes for “inspiration” is merely self-serving fantasy, hardly believable to those who desperately cling to it. Isn’t there a way to find comfort, inspiration, and adventure in the context of our new, empirically-tempered world views?

Wonder is a form of intellectual innocence, coupled to a quest. To live with wonder, one must persevere in unknowing, re-encountering and participating. Wonder is not empty-mindedness, but an energetic engagement. We are born out of the world and contain within ourselves all of its processes which are activated in us as we meet them face to face in the course of our day, so that when we encounter it fully, the world awakens our reason, intuition, emotion, and wonder.

In moments of wonder we simultaneously contain a search for truth, an openness to reawakening, and a delight in what is. It is like our eyes. We see all day, yet we always want to see more. We want to see something new every day. Nothing lifts our spirits better than new scenes and fresh landscapes, but at the same time, nothing we see is entirely new, and we count on our sojourn in, say, Herefordshire, England, to reveal, along with its mossy churches and cockeyed hills, the same old gravity we know in America. Along with the new, we want enduring realities that help us feel at home in the world. We delight in both sacrosanct truths and fresh revelations.

When we dilate with wonder, we activate a unique form of complex knowing that integrates many kinds of awareness, thought, and feeling. The experience of wonder is itself a remarkable creation by the world within us, as I hope to show. We crave narratives confirmed by evidence, that are uplifting, and that bring our lives to a sense of fullness.

I hope to present science in an authentic and readable way that affirms the spiritual innuendos that remain suspended among the webs of statements and evidence. This is not a mere science book, but it is a consistent-with-science book.

We will steer between three kinds of closed minds and glide down the wide expanses between them. The first zone of closure is to imagine that the universe is run by a person, or by something like a person, or to imagine that the organization of the universe, from galaxies to cells, reflects a being something like your father, or something like the confabulating author of patently ignorant books. If you try to imagine yourself making galaxies of billions of stars spread over billions of trillions of miles, or, conversely, if you try to imagine yourself making a minute cell containing tens of thousands of complex, nearly perfect molecules, these imaginings will reveal how unlike we are to the forces that originated and organized the galaxy and the cell. Anthropomorphic creation fantasies diminish and distort the world.

The second way to close your mind is to conclude that the world is a machine, fixed by law, purposelessly clanking, making and unmaking matter and rag dolls like us. If you imagine yourself to consist of atoms and molecules organized by mere fate and chance, and you think of the octillions of atoms in your own body so exquisitely, skillfully interacting, you can quickly see what a “leap of faithlessness” the belief in “meaninglessness” is. An assertion that the universe is empty or void is no more scientific than a statement that the universe was made by a bearded man in the sky. Many of the most basic questions that we ask remain beyond science, such as: “What is mind?” “What is the origin of life on Earth?” “Of the trillions of stars we estimate to exist, how many have inhabitable planets, and inhabited by what?”

As ignorant as we are, why would we cleave to any conclusion? One of the main points of this book is that the density of interactions of law and history within the universe is formative and creative at a level that to us remains trans-calculable and transcendent. Science is not well served when it is used as a source of dogma or of prematurely foreclosed conclusions.

The third kind of closed mind is giving up, no longer trying to wake up within the world.

Wonder glides past three errors: ignorance (beliefs), cynicism (atheism), and laziness (agnosticism). Wonder arises with the freedom to worship and revere evidence and inconclusiveness.

We do not now possess either the intellectual capacity or adequate information to claim that we can speak for the universe. We cannot say we have reached a full and final understanding of it. But we also recognize the woven complexity and emergent luminosity within ourselves and our world. The complexity I am referring to means the galaxies and the cells, with their long history, their detailed precision, their self-generating cause-and-effect loops. The numinosity I am referring to is the green, suncatching leaf, or our curious minds, or the astronomer, or the visionary poet. These presences within the world, these beings, constitute mirrors which have emerged from the universe and which look back at it with kinship, awe, dread, love and wonder. Through us the universe can become alive and gaze at itself with both alienation and recognition.

Therefore, our sense of wonder will lead us in the following direction: we will look at the world in a way that is free from the arbitrary divisions imposed by our routine sense of time, space, and scientific discipline. All the connections we are aware of will be permitted to emerge. At the heart of the evocation of wonder is that sweeping emotion, that stretching across, that connecting: origins to immediacies, light years to centimeters.

In Section I, voices of poets and scientists will evoke the sense of wonder. Their diverse perceptions make a “snap,” like a window shade rolling up in the morning. While they share the sense of wonder, they do not share any common conclusion about the nature of reality or of the world. Section I is intended to open the windows and let in air and light. When we listen to our ancestors in the pursuit of wonder, we are asked to tolerate some degree of dismay and confusion, but we gain a bracing and energizing renewal, with freedom of thought and freshness of perception. Section I provides the necessary spring-cleaning. Although this Section weaves together writers’ voices, it is not a précis or a review. It is the first step at the start of a journey, the curtain rising.

In Section II, I try to answer the question: What exactly is the sense of wonder? This is a psychological question about a state of mind, but my answer requires locating our psyche itself, in our bodies, on our planet, within the world. Our wonder is a localized form of a property of the world about which we wonder. Something about the world itself awakens in us when we feel the sense of wonder. Wonder is a type of complex awareness which participates in complex knowing and feeling.

Sections III, IV and V form an integrated whole, a journey through our best contemporary insights about ourselves. We, within whom the sense of wonder resides, must be studied, in order to understand how we respond to, mirror, and hold the world in wonder. These three sections are scientific, a kind of medical school for an accurate biology of wonder, because I hope to show how life itself is intrinsically connected to the sense of wonder. We are highly dense centers of atoms, energy, and information, compounded over long eons, following laws, opportunities, and vicissitudes. We temporarily cohere as people, due to the regime of the universe, which embraces both order and fresh happenstance. We are temporary expressions of the same creative processes that wove everything else, and that will continue to shred, renew, and re-create everything. We contain all the necessary ingredients, and the deep recipe. Wonder surges out of any study of our own molecules, cells, and processes, because of their unimaginable dimensions of time, numbers, and complexity. I hope that by the end of the empirical probing of our molecular nature that concludes Section V, wonder will no longer seem to be just one state of mind, but the most accurate and vibrant display of our experiences. It is within our molecule-made body that wonder bursts forth.

Wonder is the light by which the world is best revealed…though not completely! There are important reasons why wonder feels like our truest self and our most accurate monitor, and why we can’t “finish it off” with finality.

Section VI, “A Constitution of Wonder,” provides a reorientation. In the way that a political constitution provides a framework for society, a simple enough yet elastic enough rulebook, Section VI summarizes and tabulates the insights within our modern, lit-up world of wonder. It provides twenty viewpoints to keep wonder in focus. It summarizes the previous chapters in a manner that will make most sense to someone who has already absorbed their more global descriptions. Section VI anchors the previous chapters, but not too tightly. Wonder can in fact become our inseparable companion, but it can’t be leashed or made to walk in little circles. Our traveling companions always include uncertainty and perpetual expectation.

Section VII attempts to evoke wonder from the immediate texture of human life. After traveling through light years, eons, molecular biology, and whales, it would be beneficial to bring our wonder down into the realm of our day-to-day psyche. Rightly perceived, the people we love and know best become our fountains of wonder. Paraphrasing the quote from novelist Thomas Wolfe that appears in Section I, Chapter Three, we can say that every person is a window on all time, and here is my person…

Every person consists of atoms that have been sorted and arranged. The energy for this task explodes out of other atoms as they are being melted inside of suns, and then it ripples down to us as sunlight. In the black space between the sun and us, the world undulates, and the waves of sunlight convey energy that can be used on Earth to bond, communicate, create, and transform. Energy has pulsed through the void, and bathed the Earth, and due to this glow the Earth has had the power to rearrange atoms in uncountable magnitudes, over eons, until the atomic world has been reshaped into whales and women, astronomers and novelists. Everything we see and touch consists of matter rearranged by information and energy.

Everything is in connections and bonds.

Life, mind, and love, our human nature, have been created in partnership with the rules that run the world. Our sense of wonder, which is a state of mind inside of a funny mammal, has within its grout the whole antecedent universe, its atoms, suns, electromagnetic waves, planets, and long-cooked constellations of cells and molecules that all are within us who feel the wonder. Our personal wonder is the local glow from a cosmic fire. Just as the Earth gets sunlight, we get in our mixture of chemicals the capacity for wonder. Within our thoughts and feelings, small components of the universe itself are being rearranged.

The mind that sees and understands the star is no less radiant than its object.

SECTION I

Voices of Wonder

Chapter One

On The Seashore of Endless Worlds

“By the toil of others we are led into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light.”

Seneca (C.D.N. Costa, Tr.)

Many thoughtful people before us have been wonder-struck. What did they say? Why are some people so filled with wonder that they become spokespersons for it? We have around us, like elders seated at our campfire, these exemplars of the life of wonder.

The word, “wonder” is commonly associated with Rachel Carson, who wrote A Sense of Wonder while she was dying. At the end of her life, that had included the global controversy provoked by Silent Spring, her triumphant critique of pesticides, which made her the first effective worldstage eco-activist, Carson narrowed her final attention to one boy, and to her beloved Coast of Maine. She felt wonder radiating from nature, from the ocean, trees, moon, and moss, a state of mind that she could share best with a child. Although she felt wonder spontaneously emanating from the natural world, she also understood that wonder is a socialized perception, a communication between people and across generations. Wonder feels natural but is also partly cultural. Rachel Carson wrote, “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder. It is our misfortune… that true instinct…is dimmed and even lost…If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside…I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life….” Her book brims over with pending death and her desire to transmit her spiritual legacy to one, and then to all, true disciples, about “…where the land slopes upward from the bay and the air becomes fragrant with spruce and balsam.” She wanted her nephew, Roger, not so much to know, as to feel and become “receptive to what lies around you,” through all his senses.

Carson was not unique in associating wonder with childhood. In A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas plunges his hand “into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holiday memories” and out comes an evocation of wonder. Thomas’ reverie threads his adult sensibility through his childhood impressions, creating a boyish yet sagacious nostalgia:

“Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harpshaped hills…before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchessfaced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed…Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground, and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss…”

Thomas intoxicates us with a colorful, cozy world. His wonder arises from an adult’s longing for the comforting domestic dimensions of childhood: time stretching out, and senses flooding into each other. Nature becomes an active playmate; the hills themselves are daft and happy. The snow is alive, and everything feels timeless and immediate. Fear is for adults who are ignorant and wonder-challenged. It would seem easy to feel wonder when your memories are pearls of poetry.

The most famous exponent of wonder, the poster-boy of wonder, is Albert Einstein, whose brilliance and subsequent persecution removed the stigma of romanticism or naiveté, and who insisted upon wonder’s enduring value for the soberest enterprise. The cerebral mathematical scientist insisted that he, too, was at the core, another child of wonder. Einstein wrote (as quoted in Einstein by Walter Isaacson) “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written these books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being…” Einstein linked wonder to a childhood of books, libraries, knowledge, and incredulity, a meeting ground between the freshness of ignorance and the wisdom of the sage, who recognizes the limits of his own gnosis.

Einstein embedded in the canon of human thought as precisely as E=MC², his sparkling credo called, “What I Believe,” which he specifically wrote to both fulfill and thwart the many people who wanted him to become either a prophet or a guru. (There are several slightly varying translations from German into English). In this credo, the master tells us where he will and won’t allow himself to be positioned:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

Einstein was treading between two pitfalls. On the one hand, he wanted to avoid the mechanistic, atheistic, dead vision of the universe that is often associated with science. Einstein was emphatic that he was not an atheist. On the other hand, he did not want to be misunderstood as believing in any known religion, or any anthropomorphic God. Einstein elaborated his credo in the third person in an attempt to preserve its spiritual innuendos, while making sure he had abolished any affiliation with the narcissism and superstition that he felt plagued organized beliefs:

“Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole…This kind of religious feeling knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image, so that there can be no church…based on it…It is the function of art and science to awaken this feeling…” (From Ideas and Opinions).

Although wonder has a religious flavor, for Einstein its domain was in the arts and sciences.

While Dylan Thomas presented us with a charmed village soaked in nurturing perfection, Einstein descended into the cradle, the infancy of wonder, and discovered an impersonal experience of space-time that was both eerily congruent with human thought, yet fundamentally beyond human thought. The essence of his position was in the question: why do mathematical formulas seem to capture reality? Why is the world lawful; how did the laws come to be; why does the internal activity of the human mind—the creation of math—fit the universe’s regularities?

As much as Einstein insisted on wonder, he re-positioned himself away from mere astonishment. He was not vague or dumbstruck. He did not fixate on “Wow.” He took a stance: there is something beyond, to which he applied the words, “Spinoza’s God,” a lawgiver, though not a participant in our daily lives. The human mind—even Einstein’s mind—has limits of understanding. We will always remain children in a research library, indirect knowers. The ultimate, the sublime, manifests in the order of the universe, which we can know only through its inexplicable resonance with mathematics. Scientific truth consists of “…the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements.” Einstein’s universe was ordered and elegant. There was one irreducible unity. He wrote in Ideas and Opinions: “…Whoever has undergone the intense experience of success in the domain of rational unification of the manifold, experiences profound reverence for the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence.”

Einstein said, “incarnate”—not that reason is part of the world, not that reason is useful in understanding the world, but, for Einstein, reason was inside of existence. When existence came into being, reason was already in it. The universe was actually a manifestation of Reason. Einstein felt, (as quoted by Isaacson) “a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant.”

Despite the fact that he felt the universe is a product of reason and intelligence, Einstein also believed there is a limit to understanding beyond which no person can ever pass “…unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.” The human apparatus, mind and math, simply cannot grasp the code embedded in existence. Wisdom’s goal cannot be a thought, but must pass out of the realm of reason into a feeling: “…the cosmic religious feeling.” (As quoted in Isaacson and Ideas and Opinions).

Einstein bequeathed to us an irony: the master of the rational, who believed that the universe itself is essentially rational, also believed that rationality has limits which only feelings can transcend.

Once again, we find Einstein walking a middle path between what he saw as two errors. One error was to lack faith in the universe’s ultimate, transcendent derivation from reason. The other error was to assume that we now, or ever will, fully understand “the mind of God.” Our deepest connection must remain not a thought, but a feeling.

If we try to summarize Einstein’s wonder-struck mind, we find a person in resonant connection with childhood feelings, who treasured those feelings and gave them centrality. He recurrently sought escape from the prison of self, to fuse with the universe in a cosmic religious feeling. He justified, or amplified those feelings, by applying the powers of intellect, reason in its most rigorous form, mathematics, to reduce the welter of the world to unifying, simplifying formulas, which revealed that the universe is in its essence an incarnation of reason. He was humbled and uplifted by this emotional and intellectual communion with the superior intelligence within the world. He named this superior intelligence within creation, “God,” but did not try to placate, cozy-up to, or influence this remote and incomprehensibly superior other. He wanted, as quoted in Ideas and Opinions, to “purify the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism.” He recognized a limit to human thought. Like a mystic, he communed with the reason incarnate in existence, but like a worshipper, he believed there is an unbridgeable barrier between himself and the secret core of the universe’s ways. Because he revered but could not truly comprehend, he was left rotating in an orbit of wonder.

Einstein’s awestruck humility, and his heartfelt sense of human diminution, made him one of us, an any person, despite his millennial intellectual status. He attracted so much adoration because he was at once as puzzled as the rest of us, while he was at the same time the quintessential genius.

Between the cradle and the grave, Einstein developed and changed.

Ironically, Einstein’s wonder in old age became caged behind a linear determinism, which he himself as a scientist brought into question, and which was subsequently toppled during the twentieth century, and replaced by probabilities, multi-determinisms, paradigm relativities, cultural constructivism and many other modes of scientific explanations, which we will explore through the thoughts of many other writers in this Section I. Einstein in his last decades became stuck in the position of an orthodox believer in a rigidly mathematical clockwork universe. Was it age, or his science, or the horror of the Holocaust that buried the wonder-struck child? Einstein’s need to affirm a clear, simplifying, mathematizable order within creation, a rational God, made him a determinist who, ever logical, even denied his own free will. He entrenched himself in refutation of the creative variabilities, options, choices, chances, and elaborations that form the basis of modern science. His tragic blindness, of the otherwise supreme humanitarian and scientist, became codified in his famous quip, that God does not play dice. He demanded of the universe fixed relationships, free of chance, which does not seem to be the way things work, as we will explore in detail. After all, it was the God of the Hebrew Bible who affirmed free will, and it was the science of quantum physics, which Einstein founded and then rejected, which revealed probabilistic oscillation as the foundation of the mighty world. In The Expanded Quotable Einstein he wryly sighed: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”

Is it true that as we age, wonder fades? Rachel Carson worried that was too often true; Dylan Thomas killed himself by drink before he could find out, and Einstein seemed to fulfill this gray prophecy.

The English romantic poet, William Wordsworth, built a career on the mournful conviction that wonder is a trait of youth that is destined to fade. He wrote in his famous “Intimations of Immortality,”

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; —

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more…

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy…

Other writers blame the loss of wonder upon cultural developments. In a widely quoted and re-quoted aphorism, from his bestseller, The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 for helping to prove a portion of Einstein’s unfulfilled dream of unifying scientific laws into fewer and more sweeping laws, pinned the loss of wonder on the growth of information that accompanies maturing individuals and maturing civilizations: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Weinberg’s aphorism echoed another legendary atheistic anthem by French Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod, who wrote in his influential book, Chance and Necessity, “Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance.”

Although Steven Weinberg’s famous comment has made him the hero of atheistic skeptics, and a straw-man for theists to attack, great minds do not easily get stuck on one-sentence conclusions. Weinberg has also less famously written about science and meaning in his essay, “A Designer Universe?”: “So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate.” Is it possible that this irreducible mystery occasionally, or even frequently, thrusts Weinberg (who demonstrated the unity of the weak and electromagnetic forces), into a mood of wonder? Does great science derive from the inspiration of wonder, or create new arenas of wonder, or kill it?

Probably the most revered scientist who ever lived was Sir Isaac Newton. Adulation for him has never dimmed, and twentieth century giants, like Einstein and astronomer Edwin Hubble, literally lived their lives in his presence, as his portrait hung on both of their walls. Yet Newton’s personality has a very negative reputation. Stephen Hawking wrote, in an appendage to his Brief History of Time, “Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man…with most of his late life spent embroiled in heated disputes.” Newton is described elsewhere as cranky, isolative, and arrogant, a sort of Asberger’s enfant terrible. Furthermore, his enduring discoveries have been used to form the constitution for fixed, deterministic, reductionist science, which portrays a clockwork, impersonal, inflexible world. Yet if Newtonian physics has been erected as the centerpiece of a mechanistic and dead universe, it is the product of his diminished interpreters, not of Newton himself, who wrote (as quoted by Carl Sagan in Cosmos):

“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

There is our child of wonder again, inside the mind of the discoverer of calculus and gravity. Whatever personality problems he may also have had, the emperor of science, Newton, like Rachel Carson, Dylan Thomas, and Albert Einstein, saw the world with beginner’s mind. Newton was a boy draped in a cloak of wonder.

There is a striking parallel in phrasing between England’s great scientist, and lines of India’s great poet. Rabindranath Tagore described in Gitanjali how wonder is born in a child’s mind at a specific location:

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet…

They build their houses with sand and they play with empty shells…

For scientist Newton, and poet Tagore, wonder was associated with the seashore, the location that has the longest view, and the meeting of three phases of matter: solid earth, liquid ocean, and immeasurable sky. The seashore served both Newton and Tagore as an image for child’s play among horizonlessness and primary unmediated wonder.

As science progressed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was an initial outcry that cold reason was killing wonder, but those days are long past, and in the shadow of Einstein, Newton, and many others, science has reversed vectors and become the source rather than the nemesis of wonder. The old days, when wonder was falsely associated with romanticized “spirituality” or “religion,” have receded, and wonder has opened like a sparkler under the match of expanding information. Wonder is no longer associated with soothing mythology, but with grasping reality. As wonder has become more synonymous with knowledge, it has become more amplified, rather than diminished, with personal age. We will encounter a cadre of distinguished scientists who, after a lifetime of careful studies that culminated in a blaze of recognition, finally in retirement allowed themselves to depart from factual scientific journals, and to write their own books of wonder. The scientific world-view has also expanded poetic wonder, which could at last throw off the strictures of ideologies and expand into direct personal experience.

Chapter Two

The Whole Universe in Its Variety

The nineteenth century American poet, Walt Whitman, was a revolutionary, who embedded into poetry the content of new scientific discoveries. Into the radical oceanic rhythms of Leaves of Grass, he inserted scientific astronomy and cosmology rather than theology:

I am the acme of things accomplished, and I am the encloser of things to be…

Immense have been the preparations for me.

Cycles ferried my cradle.

For room for me stars kept aside in their own rings.

All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me…

Nineteenth century science exploded the biblical sense of time and space. Here were dinosaur bones and the stratae of rocks, and telescopically expanded skies, and measurements that revealed the immensity of our galaxy. The idea of a few-thousand-year-old world evaporated. Walt Whitman and his late nineteenth century contemporaries were forced to wonder about the origin and relevance of their individual lives in the context of large time/space dimensions. Many people attacked science and tried to make its dimensional revolution go away. Other people felt diminished by the coordinates science seemed to reveal. Whitman embraced a zone of expanded purpose, a more elaborate pre-planning for him. The big platforms of the world gave him a more wonderful stage on which to declaim his poetry. His bumptious wonder included, but was not tied to, science:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me…

…I wander’d off by myself,

Into the mystical, moist night-air, and from time to time

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

A mixture of scientific information and direct experience allowed Whitman to see himself within the “Kosmos,” “vast trackless spaces,” even plate tectonics, “the ancestral-continents grouped together,” galactic evolution, “there are millions of suns left,” with its attendant wonder about everything. Whitman’s wonder was like a shooting star that plummeted from the “Kosmos” and fell glowing at his feet.

A child said, ‘What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; how could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became…

Whitman fused with a delightful and indefinite world of scientifically provoked, open-minded wonder. (All quotes are from Leaves of Grass).

As the number and refinement of scientific explanations expanded, the number of missing explanations in the web of truth also multiplied. Science stopped promising to explain everything, and instead, opened up cascades of questions. Within causal thinking, there is an infinite regression, by which events are explained by antecedent causes, which were events, and which require antecedent causes. This process led Whitman to wonder. He saw each leaf of grass as resulting from a causal web of expanded and illimitable space, time and history. It takes a whole universe to craft every detail within it.

All truths wait in all things…

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow… I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.

So Newton’s scientific revolution entered poetry and amplified wonder, based on the scientific dictum that all laws act in all domains. (Later, science, as we will soon see, challenged Newton’s dictum of cosmic uniformity, and created a vision of the world that contains domain-specific laws and phenomena). In Walt Whitman’s vision, one blade of monocoecious grass is an inheritor of the laws of the universe, grown from the light of the stars. Everything that has ever happened is needed to explain anything that is now happening.

The message of science, as expressed by the poet of the scientific age, was that webs of universal laws, repeating over eons, touch down in each microcosm in each moment.

The world is a matrix of intricate causal interactions. A blade of grass and the starry sky share the same laws, the same creative processes, and the same unanswered questions.

But this was not an entirely new realization. Before the scientific cultures of Europe and America, similar insights had already animated traditional thought in India. That the microcosm reflected and necessitated the macrocosm was realized through meditation, intuition, vision, and verse.

Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first Nobel Prize winner for literature, 1913, wrote in Gitanjali:

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds, leaving my track on many a star and planet.

Tagore experienced his personal life (which Einstein, who later was to meet with Tagore, called “the prison”) as actually existing in a long continuum, that began with the origin of light, and which had traveled the long rays of stellar and cosmic evolution. Although Tagore had certainly read Whitman, his own imagery was more influenced by the scriptures of India, in which the unity that Einstein had imagined he had glimpsed, and which he sought in vain to mathematize, was a long-accepted assumption. Speaking to the universe as if it were a person, Tagore marveled that cosmic law also operated in his personal life:

Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among the dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoing from star to star.

The Western educated Indian poet, Tagore, the child of wonder, felt the same about the dust at his feet and the vault of the stars. His world was a self-communicating entity, every part of which contained the essence of the whole.