Consciousness and the Universe

 I am taking some time off this blog to participate in the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, whose 2025 theme is Consciousness.

As a result, the publication of the next post is postponed.

Although the competition is geared toward academic and journalistic writers, excludes creative writing, and—as is often the case—requires that submissions be previously unpublished in any form (including blogs), I see it as a great challenge for the mind and a timely opportunity for me to reflect and take stock of past writings. It will allow me to reframe my thinking and, even, possibly redirect the process— all of this in a new format, a 10,000-word essay.

What have I learned so far? What conclusions, if any, can I make?

If you're interested in entering the competition, you'll find more information at the link below: 

While the dense, compact inner regions of today’s most massive ellipticals have already formed around 600 million years after the Big Bang, given that the Universe looks roughly the same in any direction, if we stood on the other side of the Universe looking back at the Milky Way and its smaller satellite galaxies within the Local Group alongside Andromeda, would we question the age and whereabouts of our very own existence? 

If whatever moves is something that feels, motion is its way of communicating. William James’ distinction between transitive and substantive parts — flight and rest — echoes this perspective. Points of gathering and overdensities serve as resting places along the cosmic horizon, where consciousness fades into fragments, flickering from afar. Quenched red galaxies and brighter objects draw waves in the sand with resting castles of early galaxies flying, so to speak, towards the witnessing Earth.

The Universe, in its present form, is a continuity of the past. Moments of agency are branching off the arrow of time, each crossing the Boundary. Those ontologically indeterminate splittings undergo countless physical stages, each acting on the other and so having a time-forwarding effect with freedom hereby displayed. As evolving states take their course, complexity grows inwards and outwards, increasing the probability of transitions into ever more diversely organized states with unforeseen outcomes.

Whether the Universe, a galaxy, or a society is considered to be an animate being, the general struggle is for entropy which becomes available through energy transition. Memory and agency together convert such energy into information. While the cosmic dawn marks the union of time and space, giving rise to two intertwined entities with independent meaning, measurements of their union are electromagnetic in nature.

If information is inherently physical, then light in itself is the message. Photons in the Quantum soup are better known as light among poets who marvel at the sun. While communication builds upon entropy, energy, and information, the motion of photons conveys something fundamental about the theory of everything, that their quantum nature allows them to be captured by stars, planets, black holes, and the human mind. 

 For all we know, the Questioner and the juggler are transcendently something else — a star moving in orbit around a black hole. Once upon a time, two stars were keeping each other company. The acrobat, catapulted into a higher dimension, reveals only its shadow on a flat surface while the Questioner is on a gradual inward spiral. Suffice it to say, they have no clue where their story is going, only that the acrobat’s head has caught up with its other parts. 

The parts had detached from each other and drifted away to prove it wrong. As they reunite with the acrobat’s head, they say in unison, “No, little acrobat, the three red dots squatting your head are crowding your memory. Motion as a tool of expression is not exclusively limited to the palm of your hand.” “Noted.” the little acrobat replies as it pushes upward in the dark. It proceeds to get a better handle on the distant landscape — the physical moment in the history of the Universe when early galaxies began to form and evolve.  

 In the dust-enshrouded scene of the cosmic dawn, the first hydrogen-ionizing photons ignited the early stages of cosmic reionization. Pristine, primordial gas clouds fragmented and collapsed, allowing particles, atoms, and molecules to evolve into stars — supermassive ones — and galaxies. The first galaxies began to form around 100 million years after the Big Bang as small dark matter haloes merged to become larger ones. 

Stretching cosmic time and expanding distances shape reality itself. Uncertainties come from differences in the perception of light and the inferred physical processes involving objects that had been unaccounted for. The little acrobat uncovers a map to open fields. It feels unsettled not only by the back-and-forth with its own parts but also by the realization that there are red dots too in the early Universe, acting like ancestors just like the ones occupying its head. 

Launched in late 2021, the Webb Telescope is designed to observe primarily in the infrared spectrum. As a result, most of the distant objects it has revealed so far are due to this redder coverage. A greater number than expected of very first galaxies, with young age stars outshining older ones, have popped up in the background. Objects, peculiarly brighter, are the most highly star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. 

Young and active formations coexist with primeval, massive red galaxies that appear to have gone into quiescence. While the glow of older stars in young clumps of a galaxy is dominated by the light from most recent bursts and clusters, the darker space between clumps is itself dominated by the dim light of ancient stellar populations. Time is local. Two of them, particularly luminous, GLASS-z12 and GLASS-z10, have built a billion solar mass only 300 to 400 Million years after the Big Bang.

A recent study focuses on eight of those red dots defined by their overly massive black holes, or, alternatively but not equivalently, under-massive galaxies making them look like off-centered blobs. They share features, like extremely high velocities and high densities, with the central regions typically associated with supermassive black holes, except for their nuclear structure and dust properties. Their spectral energy distribution exhibits a distinctive V-shape.

The little acrobat flees, chasing a glimpse of happiness on the cosmic horizon where Earendel nests. Drifting through space, on its circuitous course, freedom prevails. The light of Earendel in the Sunrise Arc left its source about 12.9 billion years ago and spent the intervening time crossing the Universe. A possible individual star system, it was first spotted by Hubble and then by the Webb Telescope.

Somehow the cosmic horizon is sprinkled with seeds of black holes. Primordial massive black holes could be remnants of the very first and exceptionally massive and metal-free stars. So inflated from collisions and accretion, those stars have produced black hole seeds that have become supermassive black holes such as the most distant quasar J0100+2802 which hosts a ten billion solar mass black hole less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. 

Like the chicken and egg, swirling gas and accreting black holes are not entirely separable events. Over time they follow a coordinated evolutionary path. The mass of a central massive black hole correlates with the luminosity, mass, and velocity dispersion of the galactic stellar bulge. One of those early galaxies, nicknamed Maisie’s Galaxy, existed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang. Another, GN-z11, 420 million years after the Big Bang, hosts a young stellar population, suggesting a rapid build-up of stellar mass. The nitrogen-enriched nucleus amid its particularly massive halo of pristine gas, contains an accreting black hole. A third is a merging system Gz9p3, 510 million years after the Big Bang. 

Most things seem to come in pairs or multiples on their way to be something more, or less, in a chaotic fusion. From the previous post, it becomes clear that there are two sides to every dance of give and take as with mass transfer within close binaries. Given that the majority of massive stars form in binaries or higher order multiples and that one out of every thousand stars ends their lives as a black hole, a large fraction of black holes end up with a companion like in the case of Gaia BH1. 

Within a tightly packed gathering of hundreds of thousands to millions of stars, hierarchical growth of black holes occurs through the formation of binaries, even triple systems, such as the recently observed binary black hole merger GW190521. Simulations demonstrate that if the binary inspiral time is longer than the time until the next galaxy merger occurs, a third massive black hole can enter the system. These triple systems disproportionately occur when the first binary is stalled. Black holes spiral inward and lose energy through gravitational waves, causing them to eventually merge.

The little acrobat consists of a geometry of nine temporal dimensions. Its parts have a mind of their own. While on a flat surface, it appears spatially, yet its body stretches temporally. From necklace beads to Star Queen it once was, it doesn’t have, still, a good bead on things. It is the same dancer who pirouettes around an axis of loops. Its parts balance on top of each other of their own free will. Yet, it sees nothing wrong with tunneling on its natural path — the time domain of Nothingness. It wishes to explore whether Nothingness fits with what is otherwise described as a pre-quantum pre-spacetime theory. And so, it rambles, dragging along its parts, and hones in on its next whereabouts.

There is a lot of throwback in the story below as it appears to be the only way to carve a path forward. A theory of everything is a human theory. The mind wrestles with uncharted territories. It clings to its own interpretation while new ideas are crafted, waiting to be vetted through validation processes. Yet, time messes it up, leaving the mind out of sync for it can never catch up. If humans are offsprings of stars, could their philosophical system hold the universal key? From the reflection to the reflecting, from the reflecting to the reflection, there is a positioning of a being whose being is already unveiled. 

As she collects the ontological pieces of entropy, the Questioner dwells on Sartre’s words. Breaking the boundaries, she wonders whether transcendence is a piece of the puzzle, for transcendence, too, is irreversible. There is an expectation in transcendence of reaching a certain value, heedless of the choices made to get there only of the freedom to make them. Reflection is recognition rather than knowledge. It makes the unveiling exist for itself in the form of an elsewhere in relation to itself. It implies a pre-reflexive understanding of what it wants to recover. 

Probabilities measure the likelihood that the Universe splitting into subsystems in which sources of entropy production crop up and grow, undergoes a single experience,  a unitary transcendence. Should the expectation be for the Universe to know its target value? Probabilities tell how certain the intended value and meaning is reached over time. Like a whole outcome space in which all possible occurrences take place as randomly as they do, the Universe emerges from infinite probabilities. 

The being unveiled, however, does not reveal itself as a given. Being apprehends itself as being, Sartre wrote, insofar as it is not, in the presence of the particular totality of which it lacks and which it is in the form of not being it and which is what it is. Probabilities underscore a state of latency while preventing such a state from being. Transcendence needs that which it lacks and that which it is not to coincide with being. 

Following Flaubert’s footsteps, the Questioner, a DIY enthusiast, aims a paradox: writing on an invisible subject within a philosophy of presence that basically says something is there to witness it. Given that nothingness is the negative form of something in the absence of that something, one can only be aware of its absence in the presence of what is, has passed, will be, and is always becoming. 

Transcendence digs deeper into the being until it meets Nothingness, the rhizomatic time domain. While the mind experiences the emergence of one reality out of many, it experiences in its dreamlike state intertwined layers of events and thought processes, entangled as in a quantum superposition, until they streamline and pop up into a single conscious moment. In other words, there is indeed a quantum Observer in the simmering soup of the mind before the clarity of the collapse sets in. 

The mind, in its dreaming state, escapes, by a paradox, into true free will. As it wakes up, it realizes it just caught a glimpse of all the choices beyond its control and the freedom they all share. It begs the question of the mirroring reality beneath consciousness and its symbiotic relation with the Universe. The mind holds within its own transcendence.

While the Questioner’s hypothesis that there is no consciousness without gravity derives from the necessary existence of a gravity-induced Universe, if gravity interacts with all matter, including things without mass, what is absent from quantum entanglement and before the collapse that would deny the existence of consciousness? The Questioner struggled in the past to situate, first, consciousness in the evolution of everything and, second, humankind in the evolution of consciousness. 

The same conundrum came back with revenge. Through proximity or at distance, when does consciousness kick in? Are superposed states an agency of feelings? A recent paper suggests that a conscious moment occurs whenever a superposition forms, not when it collapses. It states that a quantum system may be composed of many experiencing minds, albeit often very simple ones. Those bits of feeling, however, are simply moments of agency. 

By now, agency, sentience, and consciousness have crisscrossed paths, making consciousness a rare incidence for it is sparse across time and space. Transcendence is a key element of consciousness. For it to occur, everyone and everything need to apply themselves to its pursuit, then, and only then, would all transcend. Its fundamental characteristic is to transcend the ontic towards the ontological, Sartre wrote, and to surpass itself towards the particular being that it would be if it were what it is. 

Transcendence must be able to manifest itself through infinite dimensions. In those solitary moments, the dreamer processes and integrates totality, without the slightest distance, which the awake mind lacks. For true consciousness to be achieved, it should exist at a zero distance from self, as a presence to self that its being carries within. Thought processes occur within such a philosophy of presence. 

Knowledge flows in fractals within its reach. It grows and branches out into alternate theories and models, grappling with key issues of dark matter, gravity, antimatter, and time itself, notably the Modified Newtonian Dynamics, the Dirac-Milne Model, and the Timescape cosmology aimed to explain cosmological observations as a result of backreaction and replace dark energy with mechanisms linked to gravitational energy. 

A recent paper suggests that dark matter and modified gravity could be dispensed with, provided that the existence of topological defects — thin shells of gravitational fields — can be affirmed or denied. Caught in the fast-growing Local Void or subject to pockets of overdensities, attractors and repellers dominate individual streams of time, each with their own sense of being.

Processes reverse while living beings separated by eons of time and cosmic distances may feel time differently. Are those bits of time only perspectival or do they weigh on the overall passing of time and affect the expansion rate of the Universe?

While there is no interaction between photons and the Higgs field nor with neutrinos, could a conscious moment be beyond the realm of light? Within a philosophy of presence, photons are fireflies of higher dimensions, gatekeeping the mind’s quest. Is time moving forward or photons doing the motion? Let’s say that there is a population of photons at a quantum state. Entangled, they don't necessarily share information. The population decreases, and spreads to the next quantum state. Through adjacent experiences, they form a light cone extending from past to future. Their timeless inner beings interact with other particles, transition and collapse. 

Is the emergence of time dependent upon the inflow of photons into atoms or consciousness going forward and falling back? Given that photons are time-forwarding, what does it mean if they spend a physically meaningful quantity of negative time as atomic excitations? In a superposition state, photons may be separated from their antiparticles by a zero distance. Does the delay observed, like thunder and lightning, provide evidence for their existence?

Trapped in an atom cloud, photons may oscillate backwards and forwards in time. Appearing simultaneously rather than being mutually exclusive, they would perform a balancing act, ontologically speaking, between being and not being. Such an act describes a rhizomatic time domain that allows for a sequence of events to dip below the surface. Could dark photons, carriers in the dark sector, be reflectors of negative time? From reflection to reflecting, from reflecting to reflection, there is a positioning of a wave particle whose being is already unveiled. 

An impalpable split has crept into the being between for itself and in itself, between clear intent — openly pursued choice — and what is inherent, a being that it would be if it were what it is. There is transcendence in immanence. The present dialogue underscores the divide. The Questioner yearns to understand and digs for herself every rabbit hole on her path. She doves wholeheartedly into hitting her target while the little acrobat escapes, flees almost to the point of vanishing.

The for-itself takes the form of a presence, Sartre wrote. It is the in-itself losing itself as in-itself to establish itself as consciousness. By a paradox, nothingness is at the very heart of transcendence and conditions it. The little acrobat, losing track of itself, is the Questioner’s own nothingness. Its parts have drifted away.  Each one was another ball in its juggling act. Its disembodied soul watches them flow, dropping away. Yet, what catches its soul and still would not let go is its head making waves into Nothingness. It puts it right back on its nonexistent shoulders for the creative process to continue. “What has left of the time I passed bodiless?” it mumbles. 

“What has left of that time,” the Questioner answers, “ is my reflection on the Universe, the theory of everything and Consciousness.” From the reflection to the reflecting, from the reflecting to the reflection, a hidden code of figures and symbols allows thinkers — past, present and future — to carry the torch of enlightenment. Words are used and reused in an open dialogue that abides by the principle of difference and repetition. 

While the dialogue goes in loops on its linear quest, it falls like snow, freezes like time, and rests like noise. It is an occasional chirping, a cracking sound of the snow dropping a new coat on the ground. The Questioner yearns to find common ground and mulls it over but proceeds instead to nurse the injury to her juggling soul. While the distance at which the little acrobat stands from her is zero, it has kept its elusive dimension. 

No matter how deep nothingness haunts her own being, it can never quite coincide with herself.  Drawn to Nothingness, the little acrobat follows its bliss. Since it let its balloon go, it finds a renewed interest in the differential growth of the Universe and hopes to investigate further. Feeling restless, it hasn’t got the time to explore the unseen nested inner binary as if such dynamics could shed light on its own relation with the Questioner.

Ideas come as fast as they leave to the point that she can’t catch them fast enough. Moseying away from the chatter in her head, the Questioner drops the one piece that has fallen in place. She pauses for now so she can join for a little while the dead poets, on the other side, who ask, baffled: “These days, how do humans sleep?”

Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique

            L’Etre et le Neant

While it genuinely wants to lend a helping hand, the little acrobat is deeply fearful of losing its way amidst the landscape of probabilities. It proceeds once more to review the Questioner’s notes on the concepts that have invited themselves into the circle of fundamentals. It ponders over dark matter’s elusive nature, hoping to patch holes in the story of the dark sector. On one hand, a search is underway to seek evidence of dark matter in tiny trails of destruction imprinted within a rock’s crystalline lattice. On the other hand, Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) — whether modified inertia or modified gravity — disputes the necessity of such existence. At the one end of the theoretical spectrum, there is neither dark energy nor dark matter. At the other, an early dark energy may have decayed rapidly after recombination with negligible dynamical effects at late times.

Some dreams tell the incompleteness of an ideal. In them, ideas are drawn in pictorial forms. Carved in sand, their messages are washed away. Time, like a poetic image, can’t hardly separate its transforming action from the detail in the variations. Information slips through. Pieces are missing. At the heart of motion and communication lies a fundamental question: Can something remain its authentic self through the waves of resonance?

An eagle once asked the riddle of existence:”“What is, has passed, will be, and is always in the state of becoming?” On the edge of knowing, the little acrobat vows to answer as it crosses the threshold of the house of everything built brick by brick of evolving possibilities. New perspectives open windows in its exterior walls. It climbs high up in the roof rafters from where time, Nothingness, and the Quantum universe escape into thin air. There, carved into the beams, it finds the code of a hidden order inscribed in the language of absence with concepts dubbed dark energy and dark matter entering the circle of fundamentals.  

In the race to unravel the mystery of time, theories are incomplete. They are partial representations of the riddle’s answer. They are adaptations, borrowing bricks from one version to the next with the ultimate goal of building a more complete house that counts for everything. Perhaps, the race is futile. There is no underlying theory. Like pieces of a puzzle, they fit quite perfectly under specific conditions and agree with each other where the circumstances overlap. 

Statistical fluctuations come into being, enabling translational motion, repetitive patterns, and dynamic interplay of emerging entities. The riddle finds an array of answers in the timely manifestation of the Universe’s variations — its cosmological evolution in terms of cosmic time and material content. The quantification of cosmic time and measurements of material content constitute its algebraic form. As these calculations grow more precise, they change the preconceived idea of its topological outlook.

The accelerated structure formation at early times — that the Webb Telescope has confronted the human mind with—challenges the dark matter paradigm. Astronomers looking for one thing stumble upon another while MOND physicists interpret these anomalies as evidence of their theories. As astronomical observations deepen, they bring into question the basis of the Universe's algebraic expression. The apparent landscape at early times casts doubt on the cosmic time. It may however reveal deceptive, influenced by the presence of massive dark matter halos and nearby supermassive black holes.

Teachings are passed on by figures of the past and present who paint details of a four-dimensional reality with walls pierced by higher dimensions. The pursuit of a unifying theory turns into a quest for these higher dimensions with out-of-the-box concepts. With the expansion of the observable Universe, ideas and concepts sprout continuously. They pile up steadily mounting a landscape of ghost towers emerging off the ground as the knowledge base grows.

In Thoughtland, ‘dimension’ above and below the surface refers to a degree of freedom, a higher state, and perhaps another Universe as if transactional exchanges extend beyond the Boundary allowing dark matter to break down into massless fermions, or photons at the threshold of the visible sector. A single unique mesoscopic dimension was recently introduced as a ‘dark dimension’ in which the smallness of the dark energy leads to the emergence of a tower of weakly interacting light particles — graviton excitations coalescing into five-dimensional black holes.

Our juggler fumbles with new ideas. It follows an unmarked path in its very own swampland in which fields are drawn in geometrical patterns up and down the surface. It wishes to rein the horse, named time, to a stop and wonders whether it is the emergence of time or that of consciousness that necessarily depends on the inflow of photons into atoms. In a swirl of concepts, time is an invariant variational while the Universe is a variational invariant. The invariance of time is due to its dynamical necessity while the Universe lacking a singular beginning is invariably filled with variational details, preceded by and vanishing into a rhizomatic Nothingness. They are one and the same.

The core mechanism driving time carries the illusion that there is a necessary trend towards the betterment of it all. But from its standpoint — how things have passed, are, will be, and how they are always in a state of becoming — they tend to gravitate towards chaos for evolution takes them there. Being near (or in the midst of) chaos describes the stampede at the acrobat’s feet.

Whether or not consciousness is dependent upon the light of photons, it came last. First came agency, then sentience, then consciousness — a by-product of evolution. Had consciousness come first, there would have been a lot more consciously thought-out processes in the Universe aimed at upholding feelings of sympathy — a togetherness of being — once referred to by Kepler. But the order of appearance in the script is set. Kepler, the ghost of the Past, laments, “Where, the heck, have I ever seen the bond of sympathy, the state of feeling together?” 

Sympathy is a level up from Whitehead’s take on ‘feeling.’  Feeling, the experiential way of an ‘individual’, differs from sympathy, the experiential way in togetherness. Feeling might be what triggers and animates those variational details. But Freedom, Existence, and Essence rule over how agency — a sort of territorial assemblage — plays out. Agency is how one variation relates to a community of them. In theory, only, sympathy, Kepler’s ideal, would have been able to uphold cohesion. 

Going through a major transition, the conscious acrobat turns inwards, fully aware of the incredibly small value but rather heavy burden that its balloon of dark energy puts on its body. Bound with ropes, like a ball and chain, it waits for a chance to let it go. In the language of absence, if the ratio of ordinary matter to a nonexisting matter is governed by an invisible balloon, how does it affect the layout of its bubbles? It longs for its free will to prevail. 

Its hitchhikers, meanwhile, hunker down, recalling the reality of their own evolution — death as they individually experienced it. Windows to the past, the three squatters need an ear to bend and confess: “We have been dead for a long time. We are, what humans would call, relics from an era gone million years ago. Consciousness has a price, little acrobat, that you might not be willing to pay. As you question your own raison d’être, you must realize that the problem with existence is that it is plagued with a fundamental fear. Struggles shape the ebb and flow of existence. Even the Universe is just a sphere rubbing against other spheres trying to make a place for itself, trying to exist within the Multiverse.” 

Swamped in a forest of theories, the conscious acrobat would rather not be caught any longer in the labyrinth of particles and their crisscrossing fields. Deep down, it only wants to play, throwing lassos around targets, pulling and releasing them as it pleases. Its own ethereal nature is drawn irresistibly towards Nothingness, the strongest attractor of all for it feels at home in the shadows. With time coming to a stop, it retreats to where there is no light of photons. Its three companions withdraw in silence. 

In the end, its bubbles detach from each other. One by one, they get carried down the cosmic flow. They tumble with filaments, breathe through comets, and return to the circles of dance in the deeper patterns of agency. Could such an outcome have been foreseen? As its rolling head emerges out of slumber, it swears it dreamt of what sort of a thing the Universe is in its simplest form. Breaking the silence, it utters words to describe it. But in a split second, it all vanishes. The image could not be wrung out of its slumber.

The little acrobat scratches its head — it isn’t for the faint of heart.  Running back and forth through the Universe helps build its stamina. On the celestial bridge, it listens to the sounds of the Earth and the swishing stars. From its vantage point, its heart unites with kindred spirits everywhere who gaze at passing comets and flickering northern lights. Whether it is made of early or late dark energy, the little acrobat can't let go of its balloon. 

Feeling antsy, it moves around like a yo-yo, reflecting on what stirs the information to flow through its multidimensional body from the threshold of what has yet to exist. It may be that information travels, in replay patterns, from upper level concepts to lower material parts. Motion refers to a dichotomy that may be seen as a before-after relationship. Motion does the expressing while communication does the channeling of information, for instance locally, with human concepts such as gravity, entropy, energy, beauty, and melody, and through figures, numbers, and equations.

The little acrobat proceeds to go through the notes written over the past six years by the Questioner. It is not getting lost on her that her makeshift diagram of collapsing circles does a much better job of leading the story. It pursues the journey while she is left with picking up the ontological pieces of entropy — that is, in a nutshell, the degree of randomness unmoved by what the choices are only by the freedom to make them. With her evanescent shadow by its side, the little acrobat follows the waterline from north to south, along streams, around lakes, through rivers and canals, into the bay and the ocean as if they were trails of a distant star-forming galaxy. 

From the hills of Poughkeepsie to the shores of Nantucket, she finally gets what it meant by an ‘intimate sense of belonging.’ Whether seagulls squeal, herons squeak and hawks screech, they all dive headfirst into the rippling water, as if burying their heads in the sand, to catch wiggling fish under the sun. The sighting of a non-periodic comet is a time-stamped occurrence beyond past and future knowledge. While it is a unique event, it may last days or weeks, as with Comet Mitchell (C/1847 T1), observed over roughly two months in 1847. A comet that does not come back to the vicinity of the sun mirrors the life of a tree or a person. Time flows. It runs like yarn through power looms, endlessly forming all things, small and big, swift and slow, weaving every individual story.  

Tinkering around all things, the little acrobat hopes to get all its ducks in a row and find words to encapsulate a theory of everything, considering all the alternatives and how it feels like to hold within foreign states of mind. The theory of everything would not just be mere information about information, but information about existence in itself and by itself, prompting the little acrobat to question its own raison d'être. It climbs up and down mountains, peering through telescopes to observe ice-rich planetesimals that span over an undefined period of time. 

The Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA, is responsible for identifying, designating, and maintaining the master files of observations and orbits. As of November 13th, this year alone, the MPC reports the discovery of 2,482 near-objects including the mini-moon  2024 PT5, 17197 minor planets, 54 comets (such as C/2024 S1 ATLAS), and over 30.7 million observations. 

Motion and communication involve the collection and transformation of dust aggregates, the effects of thermal processing. Paired with communication, motion provides a visual and acoustic reading of Oort Cloud comets. The length, shape, and orientation of their dust tails, their position in the sky, and their nucleus composition cannot however offer certainty as for the calculation of their period. 

C/2023 A3 (紫金山–ATLAS) was initially detected by the Near-Earth Object telescope in Xuyi 盱眙, Purple Mountain 紫金山 Observatory (Jiangsu, China). A few weeks later, it was ‘rediscovered’  by the Sutherland facility in the Karoo (South African Astronomical Observatory) as part of the ATLAS project, which includes two Hawaiian telescopes — at Mauna Loa Observatory and on Haleakala (alongside PAN-STARRS  on the same site) — and the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.

Chess pieces are few,  and the positions in which they may be placed,  numerous as they are,  have a limit. These are the rules that apply to their movement. In the infinite game, however, cosmic circumstances such as the path of a planetesimal weave a never-ending story that tells, only a little at best, of individual movement and whereabouts. A throw of dice will never abolish chance.

Planetesimals unbound to a star are unsung heroes. Cast out from star-forming regions, they develop a ‘mind’ of their own, a unique ‘individuality’.Their evolution through time and space, shaped by an array of cosmic circumstances, raises the fundamental question of how, by a ghost of a chance, some accretion processes prevail from dust particles to planetesimals to planets and the life that inhabits them, and so weaving invisible threads of memory. They contribute unknowingly to the big picture through the dissemination of their material into cores of objects far beyond the interstellar  — and even intergalactic — medium. As with most things, retracing their steps isn’t easy. While the chance of a planetesimal originating from another galaxy is slim, it may have been carried forward through previous galactic mergers. 

Like the Turritopsis jellyfish, planetesimals would span forever if not for a chance encounter along their paths, caused by the gravitational tug and pull of other objects. And when shattered, their pieces, like the vertical and horizontal movement of genes, may swing back. The thing about chance, though, is that it brings out freedom in the mix of limitations and limitation in the abundance of freedom. As chance manifests itself, limitation is inferred in existence.

Hyperbolic comets, with their water-ice sublimation and recombination of radicals at great heliocentric distances, hint at processes leading perhaps to their fragmentation and disintegration that would forbid them to ever achieve an immortal existence. A gravitational slingshot mechanism expels objects and debris into interstellar space. Comets and asteroids drift through the interstellar medium where free-floating planets, occasionally, wander. Confined in distant reservoirs, they could remain on relatively stable orbits for timescales of billion years. 

On their inbound path, planetesimals reenter star systems like a boomerang, a ball on a pool table, or a shuffleboard disk. Communication sometimes implies the redundancy of a message about returning objects whose properties become more refined. In and out of human view, they appear and reappear as reimagined pieces of a puzzle. Whether they begin as centaurs or arise from the Oort Cloud, comets are more likely remnants of our own planetary formation rather than interstellar objects from a nearby star system, as Oumuamua is claimed to be. Was it a dark comet exhibiting non-gravitational accelerations inconsistent with radiative effects?  Could its flattened shape be the result of gravitational collapse and gradual erosion by stellar winds? 

If motion is a way of communicating, the movement of the solar system within the spiral arms of the Milky Way is not only linked to where and how it was impacted by asteroids and comets’ debris but also to how and where the first planetesimals came to bear the signature of their parent cores. The layers of the Earth’s crust, the configuration of its natural features, and its mineral content might hold clues of past encounters. Some rocky bodies may have kept and passed on the remanence of a magnetic field dating back to the pre-accretionary nebula field, thus broadening the concept of spatial-temporal identity.

The dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe continues in a roundabout way. Seeking answers from the Earth, the little acrobat puts in good use its newly-found attributes and mumbles with its LUCA mouth, “Along the trails, my eyes — LBCA and LACA — have watched ducks bathing in the river, cows, horses and alpacas in the fields, a seagull resting on the lakeside and cormorants perched on a line seemingly chatting over snowy bed of fluttering milkweed seeds. Are they all evidence of motion and communication?” 

The Earth replies: “The Universe is filled with pitter-patters of a transcendental nature. Information isn’t primarily what binds me together with the sun, the Milky Way, and everything else, feeling is. The ‘I’ — as overwhelming as it is — will never dispel the haunting presence of all that was, is, and will be. From the horn of plenty where the sun sets to the flower of the trumpet vine where the sun rises, earthly forms move and communicate, mirroring all other forms of the Universe. Although they are spacetime-dependent, they aren’t mere limitations for they share the inner ability to transcend and shape into pluridimensional components. That which moves communicates through echoes and resonances, rippling outward across the Boundary, from what feels on the inside to what is felt on the outside. Outgassing in comets, for instance, hints at their inner activity. The inflows and outflows of galactic formation and the devolatilization of comets mirror processes like inhalation and exhalation as if a pulsing heart beats within. While these cosmic rhythms are non-intentional expressions, they display a deliberate act of communication, saying in substance: “‘I’ exist in the midst of it all.” The Universe driven by the emotion of time reveals itself by expressing itself. While all objects — even I — eventually jump off the train of existence, the Universe through each bit of feeling comes to grips with the process of motion and communication by which information gives rise to consciousness. This is the nature of the Dialogue between the Universe and Consciousness.” 
 

Taking the roads less traveled, the little acrobat goes on reading a book by Ed Yong, The Immense World. Communication alters perception — both its own and that of others. Every uttered thought, written word, and encounter it has shapes the Dialogue between the Universe and Consciousness. Upstream, the slow-moving bird continues its solitary existence. Downstream, more great egrets have found safe haven on an island off the shore as bald eagles in pairs fly in and out over the river, diving to catch fish. If a bald eagle makes a sound, regardless of whether it’s saying something, what does the silence of the great egret amount to when it flies off gracefully above the water? Even its quiet motion conveys a message.

As the Sun dips below the horizon in the West, the little acrobat goes on surfing gravitational waves, gliding through molecular clouds before slipping into the hollowness of a black hole. Could black holes be producing magnetic field seeds like trapped quantum information poised to be released? As much as it had in the past marveled at the great egret, it feels an even greater fulfillment, sensing magnetic fields beyond galaxy clusters — in gaseous filaments, underdense voids, and intercluster bridges. 

Unnumbered individual things, seemingly all alike and all unchangeable play hide-and-seek in the Quantum Universe where there are no strands of personal order until differences in their nature, configuration and motion unfold. Above the surface, no event ever happens more than once, James Clerk Maxwell noted in Matter and Motion. The essence though isn’t lost even as initial quantum sparks do not survive. 

Time is the ability of the ontological condition to endure, but its innate porosity ultimately does not allow it to do so on an individual level. Collectively, the essence subsists in the process of becoming. It extends in strings of resonance. All the time passing on those roads, the little acrobat holds onto the awkward yet insightful words by Whitehead in its heart, that a ‘feeling’ is the appropriation of elements to be components in the internal constitution of actual objects. Those multilayered components highlight differences between one event and another in the nature, configuration, and motion of the objects concerned.

It scatters seeds along its path to help retrace its steps and backtracks a bit reminiscing its encounter with the Time Mind and their discussion about initial magnetic seeds. Energy fields exist on all scales. Rotating and drifting plasma generate electric currents, which in turn produce and amplify magnetic fields. Fields travel to the edges of galaxies and, on even larger scales, to the distant intracluster regions. 

Self-generated fields in constant fluctuation act upon each other, with feedback from supernovae that blow out matter and cosmic winds driven by star formation. Inflows and outflows proceed directly and indirectly like the underground networks of a forest. These motions participate in the swapping of ‘feelings’ through galaxy clusters and across space and time. Realists may argue that space is not a conducive medium like the sea. In fact, it is an even greater insulator than air. But in the air, poets would contend, flowers sticking their heads out hold on to their invisible electric halos. Pollen flies, leaping from flowers onto bees, even before they land. From the air, migrating birds sense the weak magnetic field of the Earth. 

Traveling asteroids and roaming plasma carry the hidden message of their original sources. What happens when the magnetic moment of a celestial body reacts to the magnetic field tied to a star, and when an asteroid is accreted by a magnetized white dwarf, does it compare to an electric fish buzzing signals to other fishes with its electric field? If magnetism, electricity — and, to a larger extent, gravitation — are affections of the same substance, the necessary condition for the existence of such a substance is its ubiquitous extension. 

If whatever moves is something that feels, motion is its way of communicating. Like an electric fish using the same discharges for navigation and communication, there is a universal language that sees no distinction between navigation and communication. Navigation however implies a volitional act, in the same way we asked before whether stars’ motion is deliberate. The term ‘motion’ might be more neutral, leaving aside any volitional theory of causation. 

Are all things just moving, or are they navigating in any given medium — whether in space, air, or water? In the search for cosmic consciousness, the little acrobat gets down to brass tacks: time invites motion and motion is a form of expression, independently of the data collected by the human mind. Stars do not need eyes to sense light from afar and that which they self produce. Their fields are clouds of thoughts, limbs of action. To the little acrobat, a dweller of the Boundary, motion equals what it holds in its bubble-shaped hand — distance, mass, and electric force — while communication encompasses one of its core bubbles — entropy, energy, and information. Indeed all its bubbles have a purpose. It just needs to hold onto them a little while longer.

Whether celestial bodies passively detect other fields, actively open lines of communication, and sense their own self-made fields, such a sense may be fragile — lost and regained across time and space. Like electroreceptors that operate in both passive and active modes, and magnetoreceptors that are buried deep and elusive, such a sense reveals a deep-seated awareness of the Dialogue. Six hundred million years ago, the common ancestor of all living vertebrates almost certainly had an electric sense. These electric senses, which might also function as magnetic senses, appear, disappear, and reappear, branching off from each other.

Like the Great Egret, the little acrobat goes on exploring new fishing grounds. “How does it feel to breathe in unison with trees, oceans, the Earth, and the Sun?”  — that was its initial intent to find out. But in the end, it gives up on being human or any other living being for that matter. It chooses instead to exist on a larger scale, unafraid of burning its invisible wings.  To the Questioner who has become a mere shadow by its side, it says: “Six years down those roads, haven’t you understood anything? No, information is not the primary link between Consciousness and the Universe. The link is a feeling, an intimate sense of belonging.” 

As it navigates through the Universe, the internal and external relations woven by spacetime are its field of investigation. It grasps at distance something from without… from somewhere outside the world of stars. It is swayed by James Clerk Maxwell’s belief that the Universe is fed from moment to moment by an agency external to itself,  tucked away in other parts of the Multiverse or in the dark sector where the universal organism plans its every step behind the scenes, or even in the togetherness of the rhizomatic Nothingness and the Quantum Universe from which Chance arises. 

Chance has it that electric and magnetic fields perform a self-regulating dance, leaving enough time and space for ecological and biological processes to niche within irregular steps of stability levels. Molecules and proteins, formed and enriched by these processes, produce an ever-expanding array of fields varying in size, some significantly fainter than others. Chance — the extensional criterion — holds unto its essential qualities of freedom, essence, and existence.

In the world of stars, pollen-like particles seemingly fly and leap from body to body. Bee-like things gather, transport, and transfer encoded information through magnetic fields, along gravitational waves, from pulsars, magnetars, and galaxies whose combined radiation they emit generates and reinforces the magnetic force. Motion transmits signals. Diffuse radio emissions produced from electrons spinning in magnetic fields provide information on the formation and evolution of the cosmic web across time and space while low radio frequencies uncover old remnant sources. Whether magnetic, electric, or gravitational, the Universe is full of vibrational signals. In the Impossible Sea, they are all talking, in choir or solo, of objects buzzing and feeling near and far.

James Clerk Maxwell,  Matter and Motion

James Clerk Maxwell, The Dynamical Theory Of The Electromagnetic Field

James Clerk Maxwell, A treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

Ed Yong,  An immense world

Matt Strassler, Waves in an impossible sea

Back on Earth, the little acrobat is set to feel all the feelings. With the help of the Questioner, it hopes to craft a coffee table book with portraits of all it meets. It wanders along a four-mile stream on the Earth's surface and marvels at a long-legged bird wading through the shallow waters. As it observes the great egret, it wonders what it is to be a dazzling white bird standing still. Time surely must feel different to the slow-moving bird.

The Juggler, as it is also known, follows the stream flowing into the river that slowly merges into the vast Ocean. There, sea lions blow bubbles just like it does. Whistling dolphins and flying rays show the same free will to explore, breaking up and down surfaces. It meets a castaway crab on a flotsam waiting for a chance to hop on a passing turtle. Time surely feels different to the patient little crab. It then dives deeper into the uncharted forest beneath the surface of the waters and crosses paths with a tiny jellyfish, no larger than a fingernail, whose species, Turritopsis dohrnii, is swarming the Ocean. 

The moving carriage of time places us all in a constant state of transition that, for most, goes in one direction, except for the Turritopsis jellyfish repeatedly turning the clock back. Yet, even as it uses tricks to rejuvenate, its surroundings do not reverse. Time exists both externally and internally in a somewhat dissociative way. Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka achieved a similar process when he made an adult cell return to an earlier stage, a biological age close to zero. 

Surely, time must feel different for a cell and a tiny jellyfish. To be individually conscious of time is to be confined in solitude. Going upwards and downwards, the little acrobat can’t quite figure out what they feel. Shapes and colors of cells and jellyfish merge in its head with those of clouds of cosmic gas. If all those it meets would communicate, they certainly have stories to tell about time, the Universe, and Consciousness.

It hits the trail at the bottom of the Earth’s Ocean, where it bumps into a weird-looking frogfish with leg-like thins using its own built-in fishing pole. Time surely must feel different to the bottom dweller that lies still, relying only on its lure pole to catch prey. All of a sudden, the frogfish lunges forward and snatches in its mouth a fellow urchin whose time has just come to an end. Wary that the frogfish might feed on it next, our little ‘street urchin’ scurries away. 

Despite all the twists and turns, it persists and squeezes into every nook and cranny of hydrothermal vents that well up transitional beings. They remind the little acrobat of the outflows of gas pillars. It asks each of those strange beings whether, to them, time feels different, hoping that they could somehow communicate. Sounds, modulated up and down in pitch, postures and gestures relay the expression of their inner beings. It hopes to learn, from creatures that eat their own bodies and those that regenerate after being torn apart, how to let go of its own parts. Surely, time is right in their wheelhouse.

Taking a page out of their playbook, it blows and pops its parts ceaselessly. Ultimately, it realizes that what it really needs to build is resilience, also known as ‘riding it out’, ‘being patient’, and ‘waiting for better circumstances’. Whether to redirect its focus on every ounce of its bubbles or make them all disappear, it pledges to hold onto its head. With its last remaining bubble held up high, three red ‘dots’ are added to its soup for a thought as if actual eyes and mouth grew in its pursuit of evolution. 

It names them LBCA, LACA, and LUCA, otherwise known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), the Last Bacterial Common Ancestor (LBCA), and the Last Archaeal Common Ancestor (LACA). LUCA, to which time certainly feels different, is a 4.2 billion-year-old thermophilic anaerobe with an early immune system. It was thriving in one shallow hydrothermal vent that the little acrobat had earlier explored. It tagged along like a crab hitchhiking a ride. 

LUCA had sent messages about the newly found home to its closest relatives, LBCA and LACA. They, too, came along, delighted to find each other growing and evolving on the acrobat’s head. A series of exchanges develop between them and their host. With its new features as conduits for feelings, the one-head acrobat becomes increasingly aware of what it feels like to be others — a community of universal shapes. Reflecting on the patchwork of posts assembled by the Questioner over the years, it remembers those she has encountered so far, from the circle of poets to the scientists’ corner. 

    It mumbles through its new-found mouth, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘I’.” 

At the Boundary, the breath of nothingness fades in a sequence of events while the flow of things emerges. A unitary evolution unfolds, allowing humans to inherit the psychological trait of their inner child from a tiny jellyfish that ages backwards. Above and below, is time nothing more than an ability to withstand?

      “Surely,” it murmurs, “one is eventually followed by many.” 

Awaiting better circumstances, the one-head acrobat misses its body parts. Together, they have gone a long way from necklace beads to nebular Queen. Truth be told, each has a purpose. Feeling safer, it grows new ones — fungus-like cones on a pine tree — and returns to its old shape. It happily shakes its feet grounded in light, sound, and water, tapping intuitively into the divide between agency, sentience, and consciousness. In the end, it never lingers in one place for too long, investigating each microcosm as if it were the whole Universe. Trees breathe in the heat as the ozone spikes. Geese, ducks, and seagulls live side-by-side in the four-mile stream. The great egret walks slowly through the muddy water. 

“How does it feel like to breathe?” The little acrobat wonders. 

It leaves them all behind and flies off, reaching for stars.  From above, resting trunks and bare limbs on the ground resemble an elephants’ cemetery. It distinguishes no more between the deep fissures of the Grand Canyon and those of Victoria Falls, whose resounding waters have left the imprint of a ringing echo in the haunting silence that fills its head.

Nicklas Brendborg, Jellyfish age backwards

Arik Kershenbaum, Why animals talk

As the tinkering acrobat runs about revising its body parts, it recalls confessing to an interstellar visitor how hard it had tried to escape the pull of abstract thinking, only to fail each time. It feels at home among circles of concepts, dancing words, and geometric drawings. Yet, circles are merely oversimplified figures trembling into imperfect orbits. It had hoped to pop all its bubbles. Instead, it leaves them as they are to pursue writing a book about Nothingness.

Still holding its red balloon of dark energy, it bumps into Gustave, a well-known dreamer, after Maria, the Nantucket astronomer, has vanished into thin air. Gustave sees himself in the little acrobat and decides to stick around, at least for a while. As they begin their journey together, like two ducks gliding across the water, he says, “Indeed, what seems beautiful is a book about nothing, a book without external attachment… a book which would almost have no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible.” 

Nothingness, the strongest attractor of all, is winning back the little acrobat’s heart. They decide to pick up where it left off: exploring the predicament of an 'absolute' vacuum and the fundamental emptiness deriving from it. Whether it lacks a medium that can slow down light or any matter or energy capable of bending space, if gravitation and electromagnetism are two facets of the same underlying structure, the distinction between gravitational vacuum and electromagnetic vacuum becomes irrelevant. 

This ‘absolute’ is simply geometry stripped of any substance. It precedes the onset of 'matter' conditions, marked by a subtle presence of low energy and a slight indication of gravitational interaction. While emptiness fluctuates, geometry creates matter. It is the emptiness’ fluctuations that stir the layout of all things, essential to the formation of atoms and the expansion and contraction of distances in between. 

From an old Nature article, our two amateur ‘sleuths’ infer the existence of a gravitational dark energy connecting our world to the ‘hidden’ sector. The vacuum energy which may be all that is referred to as ‘dark energy’ has an incredibly small value, if not zero, compared to the bulky Universe. It lies at the Boundary, like an in-between entity with one foot in the hidden sector and the other on the ‘matter’ side.

They can’t quite wrap their heads around how negative energy and entanglement are intimately related, only that energy levels in a vacuum may fluctuate from zero to negative numbers. They know by experience the great impossibility — that a simple sequence of events dipping below the ground could induce the quantum vacuum to release energy it didn’t appear to have. They swear that a deep resonance brings information across.

Our two imaginary characters are dwellers of their own topological space. They are intimately aware that the hidden sector pertains not only to the realm of consciousness filled with dreams and probabilities but also to the realm of the unseen where extra dimensions reside. Are there gatekeepers to those higher dimensions? Photons maybe, as their flickering lights induce consciousness. The distinction between gravitation and electromagnetism becomes clearer when the degree of separability between them increases. As quantum entanglement decreases, ‘matter’ conditions get a start. 

After much sleuthing, the Juggler and its ghost friend are in a bind. They recap what they have learned so far: ‘Below the ground’ sounds a lot like what poets, painters, and composers alike have conveyed before with verses, paint brushes, and musical notes. Gustave, a writer during his lifetime, is very familiar with the process: at every burst of inspiration, words rise through.  If you ask them, they would say that all the extra dimensions, compactified in the quantum vacuum of spacetime, unfold before their very eyes.

The little acrobat knows too well what fills its head, the togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe. Humans, however, it’s a different story. Shedding light on human thought, Gustave says, “The future torments us, and the past holds us back. This is why the present escapes us.” Despite the present being the only reality humans physically experience, even the night sky seems stuck in the past filled with compelling stories of astronomical events frozen in time. 

In the ongoing debate over the nature of reality, the extra dimensions may be what is ‘hidden’ from humans’ view and experience. If on all of those different dimensions, there are a lot of other fields, then the labyrinth of particles is a multidimensional one. Humans however can anchor local appearances against the backdrop of time. To some, those dimensions marked with different time stamps, look like a light cone structure that extends between past and future with both ends in infinite shadows. 

Those shadows are out-of-focus projections showing snapshots, in the present, of their timeless inner being, one photon at a time. Time is revealed in the threads that weave the present into a monster blueprint of space, melting past and future into an invisible web full of dynamics pulling and repelling, splitting apart humans’ bodies and souls, keeping tight invisible cords while mounting scaffolds of consciousness breaking up beneath the surface of things. 

Time ignites movement in all dimensions, prompting objects to rotate, vibrate, move up and down, forward and backward. By connecting past, present, and future,  humans create a mental image of an intricate manifold. From afar, spacetime looks the same in all directions on large enough scales. In close-up, the quiet Milky Way is a neutrino desert, contrasting with large-scale clustered structures filled with exploding stars and binary objects merging, all bursting with gamma rays. If those large-scale structures leave aligned footprints in the night sky, is it merely by chance?  And if one gazes back at this corner of the Universe, would they make the same observation?

Gustave and the little ‘street urchin,’ lost in the Quantum Universe, swim through the deep Ocean and find themselves stranded on a different type of island. Whether it is outside or inside the horizon of a black hole, they are unable to know its exact location. They follow the cross-dimensional trails, dream of the Higgs field and the strong force dancing with geometry, and visualize matter mounted on a brane embedded in a five-dimensional bulk space. 

Our little acrobat has become a stargazer in the Universe’s Ocean where shapes of nebulae and supernova remnants compete with those of translucent jellyfish and squids. Gustave sees genuine happiness in his friend’s eyes and says, “Humans, too, will be filled in the future with immense joys. They will travel among the stars, with air pills in their pockets. Unfortunately, the rest of us came either too early or too late. We will have done however what is most difficult and least glorious: the transition.” Already contemplating its next adventure, the little acrobat vows to dip deeper below the ground, and wonders whether the Earth's oceans’ floor holds the key to the mystery. It hopes to one day ask jellyfish and squids whether, in their own experience, time feels different. 

Gustave, the Dreamer of balloons, bids his companion farewell with these concluding remarks: “The most beautiful works are those in which there is the least amount of substance. The closer the expression comes to the ethereality of thought, the more the word adheres to it and disappears. The future of the Arts lies in these paths, where form no longer knows any orthodoxy and is as free as the will that produces it.” Free will leads the way beneath the surface of things. He, too, vanishes beyond the Boundary. 

Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 1850-1854

The little acrobat travels far among stars through colliding galaxies as their ballooning bubbles of wavicles stretch and expand. It turns around and jumps over the Moon to reach its home base where it grows wings and flies high through the realm of human thought. Wishing to connect dots, clarify points, and make corrections, it pauses and reads a detailed record of waves’ whereabouts in an impossible Sea by Matt Strassler.

On the deeper patterns of the Universe, it learns about the existence of an amotional medium — a space pervading everything, including humans. Unseen and barely perceived only in some indirect ways, such a space gives itself away by its physical and structural ‘void patterns’. Our face-blind acrobat who unknowingly juggles principles, fundamentals, and properties returns to the drawing board, hoping to make sense of its body parts. The chest bubble ‘Freedom, Essence and Existence’ wraps its heart as those of ‘beauty and melody’ and ‘feeling of space and emotion of time’ balance at its hips and knees. 

In part, what makes it impossible is that we lose ourselves in a sea of words. The word ‘energy’ applies to different processes. Most of the internal energy of ordinary objects — that is most of their rest mass — is stored in protons and neutrons. Space however entails the existence of a ‘vacuum’ energy which may be all of what is referred to as ‘dark energy’. Our wriggling acrobat is clueless about whether ‘energy’ should rise to its chest or even to its head. It is however acutely aware that naming is the art of actualization. 

Our leading character in the infinite game is as conceptual as it is representational. In a theory of everything, abstract and actual components must combine. Lifted to its chest, a ‘vacuum energy’ may be the hidden essence in existence while freedom derives from Nothingness and precedes essence and existence. The difficulty of placing ‘vacuum energy’ in the acrobat’s body is twofold: If there is a vacuum energy, does it imply the existence of an ‘absolute’ vacuum? And if space is inferred in the idea of vacuum energy, then the word ‘space’ should suffice since it has already such an intended meaning. 

Vacuum energy participates in the process of becoming. It is involved with all this changing across microscopic distances and times. It is the code of a hidden order that stems from the dark sector. As if it were a primer used by painters on a macroscopic canvas, such vacuum energy is the cause of the fundamental emptiness of atoms and when stars collapse under their own gravity crushing the space within to form denser and smaller entities. Any field stiffened by the Higgs field, Strassler explains, has vacuum energy that depends on the Higgs field’s value. If it didn’t exist, atoms would never have formed.

Against all odds, the acrobat finds its way back to the labyrinth of particles. Elementary particles are tiny quantities — parts of a field. A photon, gluon, or even ‘graviton’ comes into being in the shape of a field. Once named, each ‘individual’ whose related energy and/or associated mass is measured becomes a ‘field’ as if it were a collective noun. From neutrinos to Higgs bosons, fields are properties of the amotional everywhere medium. Their wave frequencies intertwine. 

The word ‘frequency’ defines the vibrating energy of a quantum. Things don’t just flow, they vibrate. The faintest possible tremor that is the minimal vibration, with the smallest possible amplitude is a quantum, may that be light. The higher frequency is, the larger the mass. The rest mass represents the energy needed for the wavicle to exist — which in turn is set by the resonant frequency of its field. 

There is a temporal order in the layout. Time invites motion whether things flow or vibrate. Wavicles roll, pitch, and yaw on the ‘plane’ surface. Motion allows them to oscillate back and forth. As if the ‘glue’ precedes what glues together, gluons and quarks get trapped before protons and neutrons ever exist. A greater impossibility lies in the existence of an energy field in which positive-energy particles scatter backwards in time with negative energies. Quark fields and electron fields contain particles and antiparticles while there is only one type of photons. 

Wavicles pop in and out in their fields of operation as if they were fireflies lightning in the dark. Subatomic structures decay while others form. In step with ‘energy', ‘mass’ refers to different kinds of processes. While the Higgs field gives quarks and anti-quarks their rest mass, any ordinary object obtains the majority of its rest mass through the strong nuclear force.

Fields have their own rules of engagement. The everlasting Higgs field is a strange space-suffusing entity, an elusive presence and a sort of stiffening partner, unaware though of whether it is an ‘agent’ or a ‘patient’. Strassler explains that it does not interact directly with the electromagnetic field, provides electrons with the entirety of their rest mass while ignoring photons altogether. The electromagnetic field, for its part, has no interaction with any of the neutrinos' fields. The Higgs field isn't either the carrier of gravity. Still, light and gravitational waves travel at the same rate. They are profoundly interrelated. Perhaps they are different facets of a single, underlying structure.

Certainly, we may be able to capture the internal view of the Milky Way, but we remain the outsiders to the inner experience of writhing particles and scattering elements as much as we are to merging stars and colliding galaxies. To the little acrobat, a ‘field’ has a dimensional aspect. The cosmic field encompasses a bundle of one-dimensional experiences. Each individual experience is unidimensional in how the subject finds itself experiencing, as when the light is absorbed one photon at a time. 

Dimensions feature a whole and a series. A whole refers to the entire medium of a ‘star’ or the reduced scale of a ‘wavicle’. A series represents each category of a particular medium or field. On a cosmic field, host of many others, resonance is the echo of an information shared on the same wavelength through the twelve fermionic fields primarily composed of one neutrino field, one electron-like field, and two quark fields. From wavicles to the vibration frequencies of carbon-based lifeforms, all that talk about fields makes the little acrobat wonder whether there is such a thing as a field of consciousness with its own terms of engagement. 

It has flown high in the realm of human thought and appears tired from travel. It lands on a sandy shore covered with slipper shells to catch its breath and watch the sunrise. “Nothing is what it seems,” it sighs, “Even an edge-on view of the Universal plane is only an imperfect line between a field of existence and a rhizomatic Nothingness.” An old lady named Maria who walks by has the biggest smile on her face. It gathers the courage to ask: “If whatever moves is something that feels, is there a wavefunction that describes the field of consciousness — the vibrating energy of its wavicles?” 

“Without feelings, there is no resonant form,” she kindly replies, “Consciousness is a web of resonance chains. It, too, is vibratory. While humans hold an insignificantly small place in space, the field of consciousness overlaps all the other fields that have allowed them to be recipients of the same elements and trace minerals as stars and nebulae. Farewell, Little acrobat!” She then continues her stroll along the shore and floats into the air.

Matt Strassler, Waves in an impossible sea

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

Catherine Zucker, Mapping our galactic backyard

Zach Cano, Adventures of a Millisecond Magnetar

Arwen Rimmer, Largest-ever Catalog of X-ray Sources Tests Cosmology

Monika Young, Neutron Star “Glitch” Precedes Mysterious Radio Flash

If imagination is more important than knowledge, rolling waves of time, sound and matter translate and rotate, swirl and tremble at the surface and on the horizon. At daybreak, when the dim sky barely shows its colors and spirits wait around a while longer before the rising sun, deep memories are passed on ethereally “How could one who has never felt the rain cherish waterlilies?” A surrealist mind asks. It has intentionally chosen imagination over reason, fearing that reason is self-stultifying.

Like an evolutionary makeshift of older stars and younger stellar activity, nebulae offer a landscape of timelines. As orbits align with orbits and spin with orbits, nudged by chance, spinning and rotating objects are global manifestations of outflowing particle chains transitioning and drifting, polarizing and circulating. They are the macroscopic appearance of spinning particles in gravitational fields. Gravity surfaces at boundaries, crystallizing and splitting forms and shapes, opening up geometrical degrees of freedom.

A surrealist mind departs from this shore to a space of time where revelations are made. Yet, it harbors doubts. If there is no place in the Universe where gravity does not exist, and if there is no consciousness without gravity, then consciousness may rise even out of the accretion disk of a black hole as it falls into singularity. The greater the force reality exerts, the more it hinders the mind’s ability to draw from the invisible which, in turn, ceases to yield anything of a conscious nature. 

If imagination is more important than knowledge, the mind should find inspiration in the knee and ankle of the energy spectrum of cosmic rays isotropized by magnetic waves. It should visualize massless gravitons propagating on the boundary of cone-shaped black holes, and electron-positron pairs interacting with rings of magnetic fields off their mouths. The Event Horizon Telescope has revealed twisted bundles of strong magnetic fields around the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Its mass is connected with the luminosity, mass, and velocity dispersion of the galactic stellar bulge. Most black holes are surrounded by a non-zero magnetic field, although we have not yet detected one as strong as a magnetar’s. When host galaxies collide, binary formations and triple dynamics can occur during the merging of their black holes.

If imagination is more important than knowledge, then layers upon layers of the mind’s and the Universe’s imaginary time rule over the real time. Intuitively, a surrealist mind senses that these layers collapse into one ultimately. As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, it holds the hand Mirror of the mind and the Universe. Knowledge is the outward form of imagination when it translates to the real world. 

When gravity couples with spacetime, it becomes chiral. Chirality is the expression of free will, a choice between right-handedness and left-handedness in a Multiverse made of an infinity of opposite directions. Chirality nudges the ins and outs and evokes the breaking of the Mirror. Between negative and positive energies lies infinity. Between beneath and above, there’s a surface and its boundaries. Even time has left-handed and right-handed orientations. Chirality enables the directional flow of time, with chiral gravitational effect tilting in one direction. 

From dust lanes to dust rings,  clouds of spin-waves scatter left and right, making a 180-degree cut into the roundness of the Multiverse. The chirality of elementary particles extends into macroscopic manifestations,  as in the ciliary force. Chirality relates to topology when stars and planetary systems surface in clusters, hot stars spin and rotate in super-bubbles. While chiral plasma instability may be the origin of primordial magnetic fields, magnetic fields seem to have favored and amplified homochirality, a single image forming on the surface and, down the roads, the left-handedness of amino acids and proteins and the right-handedness of DNA, RNA and their building blocks.

The stellar mass and star formation rate are indicative of a galaxy’s metallicity. Low-metallicity systems with lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium dominated the landscape at early epochs of ionization. While the number of massive black holes may be reduced by up to a factor of ten at high metallicity compared to metal-poor, low-oxygen ancient systems, approximately one out of every thousand stars will still end their lives as evaporating black holes. This suggests that the Milky Way potentially contains hundreds of millions of black holes of which we are currently aware of only a few hundred of them. 

At any level of metal enrichment, minerals and elements are left to themselves or placed at the disposal of volitional bodies, as it is for seeds dispersed by the wind. While magnetite may be cause for an initial, albeit minor, bias toward one form of a chiral molecule, the Moon could provide evidence for deposits, such as iodine, a key mineral in the biological evolution of life, dispersed from nearby collisions of neutron stars caused by gravitational waves. 

The eclipse briefly reversed roles as the Sun became a crescent. Switching places, the Sun and the Moon turned the Universe upside down. “Imagination,” they said at once, “holds the key.” The Sun hovered over the Earth’s canopy, resting atop tree rings as if they were rescalable slides of nebulae. “ Elephants, too, are contagious,” it mumbled to itself, recalling a white elephant Charlemagne had around the time that it struck the Earth with a powerful storm. 

In the constellation of Cepheus lies the over 20 light-years long Elephant's Trunk Nebula. Edward Emerson Barnard commented about the dark markings on his photographs of the sky. “There seems to be no question,” he wrote, “that some of them are real objects which are either entirely devoid of light or so feebly luminous when seen against the Milky Way as to appear black.”

The roads of the Universe are lined with symbolic events, some otherworldly, others in real time, in sofar as a surrealist mind cannot tell them apart. Some believe that dreams allow time reversal like a bursting white hole turning the clock backward while others see them as prophecies. In any event, they provoke in one’s mind the collapse of spacetime and the riddance of scale. Once scale falls from the inner eye, physical and non-physical symmetries and synchronicities emerge along cross-dimensional lines, merging into a shapeless Universe.

A surrealist mind dreamt of an elephant on a basketball field, a giant bear snoozing on a rooftop, the Earth quaking, and tornadoes looming in the distance. In real time, elephants cross the Zambian River with their calves close by, a young bear strolls the neighborhood and a sculpture of a white elephant stands in a distant land off the coast. Dreams and reality are asymptotic symmetries. They move along with each other and may fuse randomly. Yet, they remain apart. Dreams follow the same paths as the waking mind. It is how the inner process of imagination works. A dream nonetheless is a shadow — an abstract line etched deep in the recesses of the mind until imagination frees the absurd and allows the dream to take on a physical form. 

John Herbert Matthews, The surrealist mind

Benjamin Peret, Paul Éluard, and Ela Kotkowska, 152 proverbs brought up to date. Chicago Review 50, no. 2/3/4 (2004): 173–84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40785372.

The Saturday Evening Post, What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck, Saturday Evening Post Society, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1929 October 26

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Rudolf Steiner, An outline to the Occult, 1922