Consciousness and the Universe

A visual trail opens up. It passes through light, sound, and water, goes up skyscrapers, and makes its way through clouds into the Sun. It is the same old path that starts off with concepts and reaches into the physical world. A theory of harmony spans over an invisible abyss. A bridge connects an array of correspondence principles, first thought of conceptually, then in the most concrete ways. Ideas, too, are conveyed by colors of light, wavelength, and sounds. They, too, spring from a host and need a medium to reach receptors whose spatiotemporal location is intrinsically linked to an inner self of past images and ancestral memories. Do reason and logic have anything to say, or does freedom lead the way beneath the surface of things?

The Pillars of creation have been studied over the years, providing us with new insights. Snapshots taken since the very first time the structures were captured with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 are fragments of a moving scenery. They are located in M16, one of the nebulae “with stars” listed by Charles Messier in his original catalog of 1771, which Jean-Philippe Loys de Cheseaux first observed based on a list he compiled in 1746. Messier wrote that in the night of June 3 to 4, 1764, he (re)discovered a cluster of small stars, which appeared in the form of a nebula.

The Universe is made of views of events which unfold as each piece of information is passed on from one event to the next. As with the formation of stars and planets by accretion, when events go through stages, they add newly integrated features to living mechanisms. Whether nebulae move away, asteroids face the Earth, or galaxies are seen face-on or edge-on, image processing attempts to produce a unified picture that converts a set of composite data into assigned colors. 

Pillars are common in star-forming regions, notably the Mystic Mountain in the Carina Nebula. Like light and shadow on a face,  their curly plumes in infrared light reveal a complex morphology, outflows of translucent gas, embedded stars, and stratified structure. It is speculated that their transitory existence is contingent upon the explosion of supernovas and that their shape is subject to change until they break off and tumble down. 

Pillars of creation may be as wide as the distance separating the Sun from Barnard’s Star, and the tallest could stretch from us to Proxima Centauri. Their life span may be a few million years in the grand scheme of things. Their heads are ionized and photoevaporated by the nearby cluster NGC6611 making the clouds look like mare’s tails in the sky. The first pillar to the left consists of two separate entities. The upper part flows behind the ionizing stars with tails of evaporating cometary globules pointing away from us. The lower part stands in front of them with tails pointing toward us. The pillars are divided into three principal components, with the third shape being unspecified, like a horse with no name.

Pillars of creation rise in the midst of the Eagle Nebula, like stalagmites on a cave floor. The eagle with dark wings hovers over a secluded cove, the nest of ascending cloud chains. Its bird’s eye view catches the physical and spiritual sides of things. Pillars are ethereally anchored on a ridge, drawing mass and energy. The limpid folds of gas and dust are stripped of their substance by hungry stars.

On the visual trail, fundamentals co-arise as trains of thought rapidly succeed. Poets rise early to catch the Sun’s eyes. They listen to the inner voices of the past, present, and future until they float back down in the light of the setting Sun. They tell stories of their encounters with shapes and forms of the Universe. A journey through space resembles a stroll into the woods. The play of shine and shade on the trees feeds their inspiration. 

Into the dark Woods of the Universe, there are trees whose roots grow beneath the surface of things. Pillars are gigantic tendrils of cosmic dust reminding poets of tree limbs. Once scale falls from their inner eye, pillars become winter trees wrapped with naked vines, filiform bodies reflecting light in the nebula’s den, sculptural figures. The subtlety of all things lies within the collapse of spacetime, the riddance of scale.

Misty-topped columns bursting with activity are spiritual beings whose subtle presence earth-bound receptors feel. Niched within hollow cavities of nebulae, they stand tall like slender buildings of the New York skyline as if they, too, were part of a laboratory for architecture, a nursery for creation. Gas pillars and concrete skyscrapers become one, merging into a shapeless Universe. 

Pillars of Creation are castles built of sand echoes repeating an unuttered feeling endlessly that there is no agency without space, no sentience without time, no consciousness without gravity. They reveal the outline of a hermit who stands face to face with three bodies sitting upon each other shoulders, all asking the same thing: “Why, on Earth, would we live and die if not to achieve a higher purpose?”

Robert Burnham Jr. saw the silhouette of the Star Queen in the outline of the middle pillar (from the right). In my mind’s eye, I see an alchemist in her workshop working on the agency of physical and spiritual processes, transforming chaos and forming stars. She weaves a network of intricate connexions within the ever-changing architectural structures, funneling a timeless essence through spacetime. She feeds the genesis of things and keeps a fragile balance shuffling matter with energy. 

The star queen I draw below is made with beads from my old necklace, strung on a thread. They create a subtle chain of rings precariously balanced together on top of each other like a house of cards, the house of everything. They form a dancer who, I imagine,  pirouettes around an axis of loops. Information cuts across lines. Circles intersect. I only have an intuition. I only feel a little nudge in that direction.

There was a wall of clouds on the horizon at daybreak. The dead poets had gathered all night around the simmering pot of concepts, debating over what could have plucked the humming strings in the silence of the night. Their minds were flying high above the glittery surface of the Earth, playing catch with fading echoes of all the chirping, croaking, booming, rattling, whirring sounds of Nature, forming a choir down below. 

There was a buzzing sound in their ears of voices from beyond the grave. Bertrand Russell whispered that strings of events are connected according to the laws of motion. One such string is called one piece of matter; another is called a person, and the transition from one event in the string to the next is called “a motion,” like a motion picture of multiple flows into one flow, strings of the Universe. 

Johannes Kepler joined in the philosophical ramble. By string, he meant the length of any motion or any other length capable of emitting a sound. He clearly associated distance to sound. A string is a distance traveled by any motion, even that of a gravitational wave or a radio emission. On the one hand, there is distance, mass, and electric force. On the other, there is entropy, beauty, and melody. Beauty refers to the visual; melody refers to the sequence of sounds. Where, then, does gravity fall? Since gravity isn’t an entropic force, it seems fitting to place it along distance, mass, and electric force. 

The fool on the hill who tagged along recounted the story of her profound experience with light, sound, and water, prompting the symposium to shout to Joseph Mallord William Turner whether he could add sounds to his paintings of the Unveiled from beyond the grave. In a conceptual reality where distances are humming strings,  there exists a table of correspondences between colors of light, wavelength, and related sound frequencies. 

In the first light of the Sun, they composed poetry using metaphors like meteors of the sea, birds of the cosmos, and flowers of the sky. They formed rhymes about the Earth being a soundscape of ringing rocks responding to echoes of singing stars and balancing planets. They swore there is a connection between light-givers — optical transients with fleeting lights — and light-bearers — anglerfishes whose lure inhabits a bacteria called photobacterium.

Wishing to co-create a poetic code for the house of everything, they disappeared over the horizon, chasing communication keys and following trails of vanishing stars falling off an invisible tree like autumn leaves. Humming strings waved, making faces in the clouds.  Light beings came along, playing peekaboo by the silvery light of the Moon which hung below Jupiter. The Earth, deafened by the sound of temperature rising, cast her shadow over the Moon. 

On my way to New York City, trees swung fall leaves, bowing down to the rapid translation of commuters. Gravity pinned down the heavy stream while dead leaves freely rose, blown by the wind. Dancing branches sang to the tune of the trumpet and the harp whose strings were strained beyond limit by the lyrical Lady so that they snapped free. The gradual collection of strings of events resembles a gathering of kindred spirits. Beyond human perception, a string in harmony with another will always vibrate sympathetically.

At the tropical garden of Valombreuse, red-tailed hawks hovering over bare trees and white-tailed deers on the side of the highway are replaced by hummingbirds hopping on porcelain roses. In the lost paradise surrounded by water, ego is a skin-shedding reptile crushed by the passing of time, a frog-poet grappling with illusionary rhymes. As I listened to the sound of the ocean waves crashing on the long sandy beach, the cacophony of the falling waters came back into my mind. 

Since sounds travel slower than light, beauty and melody are split. They are a two-step experience. What we sense through sight and hearing occurs unevenly as a result of the infinite number of strings that separate us from every droplet bouncing on the ground in a single extended event. At the rate at which waves roll down the beach, a compound sound emits a number of harmonically related vibrations. As sound travels through air, water, and matter, it causes vibrations along a greater number of dimensions than the linear form of a single string. Wave frequencies superimpose on each other. 

Transformed sounds and waves travel across spacetime and through matter.  Steadiness implies that even gravitational waves are part of a conversion chain. In the Universe occurs the limitless transmission of multiform waves. For them to travel, they require a source (host), space in-between, and a receptor. While sounds can’t move through empty space, gravitational ripples travel at the speed of light and distort the fabric of spacetime. Humming strings connect points of the spacetime manifold.

If being came out of something, that something which came out of the shadows has a sound for property. Is a sound incidental or fundamental? Humming strings whose shape and size bring about the lowest frequency grow to become moving sounds and waves of the ensouled Universe. Strings cross each other and vibrate like a string orchestra performing a movement. The Universe, in its plurality, is a resonance chamber, a music studio. Resonance in and out of matter carries waves of a discreet melody played on the keyboard of time.

Russell and Kepler seem miles apart. Can a length be anything else but a motion across spacetime? How can the transition from one event in the string to the next be a motion, and the length of any motion be a string? And how can a motion not make noise or give an impulse that causes a vibration? Those questions feed into the debate on how we perceive the Universe, whether we view it as a patchwork of events or an ever-changing geometrical figure. 

A string carries the meaning of all orders of events. That which plucks the humming strings in the silence of the night relates to the ontology of a string that carries the unspoken intent of a linkage. From the sounds of moving objects, we feel that stars, galaxies, and other bodies might also produce noise friction through the intergalactic and interstellar medium. Stars rustling radiate radio waves covering the muffled sound of Nothingness whose grip loosens to let strings break free. Strings become random motion, seesawing events separated by segments of silence. 

Is light withdrawing or darkness covering the light with its cloak? Do sentient beings and inanimate objects reflect light, or do they have an intrinsic light within them whose brightness varies according to spatial and temporal circumstances? Brightness or reflection? We speak of relativity in luminous intensity and observe the brilliance of each inanimate object and sensitive being according to the luminous intensity of each other. Nothingness within bears the intrinsic light.

The Universe communicates with waves going back and forth along strings in time-like intervals. Sounds are what we hear. Vibrations are what we feel. The representational content of a human experience feeds on a steady flow of energy, which manifests light-years away into cosmic scenes of random beats, X-ray flares, and radio bursts. We’re told that bright radio bursts release as much energy as the Sun does in days or even years. They are ephemeral-like events, usually lasting for about one-thousandth of a second. However, a three-second radio burst was reported to have at least nine overlapping components. Somehow my mind made the connection with birds’ songs. There are high-pitched calls of long duration, like the gentle and clear whistle of white-throated sparrows, and repeated series of notes, such as the distress call of Carolina Wrens. 

Red and orange sunset extended over the clouds. Under the starry dome, I flew back home from New York City. There were pockets of lights along the Eastern Seaboard, which looked like snaps of fireworks. In the native garden, birds chirping came in and out of bushes as if they wanted to say hello. Bikes’ wheels squeaked as they rolled over red and yellow coating left by trees on the Custis trail a while ago. Time goes on.

Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres

To lift your mind up:  there are breathtaking online magazines such as Emergence, well-written articles by Lee Billings in the Special Collector’s edition of the Scientific American (Summer 2022), and flows of ideas in Aeon so much so that my head is spinning, overrun with disheveled thoughts I can’t straighten up. I don’t know why some linger longer than others. I only know that they need to be rearranged together. I hope that by spelling them out one by one, those ghostly imprints will either enter a more straightforward line of reasoning or simply vanish.

The Universe is a breeding sphere, a breathing field strewn with islands of consciousness. From massive stars to strains of cyanobacteria, an immanent thing rests upon its quantum nature of freedom, essence, and existence. To us, reality wears a coat of light and water. It is a screen of molecules woven into the electromagnetic field. To us, life and consciousness intertwine. We are unable to conceive one outside of the realm of the other. In our eyes, consciousness is glued to the ground, prevented from escaping into space the way Earth’s gravity keeps oxygen down.

Given that we are carbon-based living beings breathing in oxygen in a hydrogen-dominant Universe, should we expect that any form of life and consciousness derives from those same physicochemical parameters, modeled after our own experience of biological building blocks on Earth? As hard it is to imagine life beyond what is conventionally accepted, it is even less intelligible the extent to which consciousness — in the most general terms — occurs. 

More than our inability to imagine a greater diversity for niches of life and consciousness, our attempt at classifying them beyond Earth and the Solar system, beyond spatiotemporal boundaries, takes the risk of downplaying all the possibilities. Intuitively, though, we feel the heaviness of an invisible map drawn not only through physical places and distances we travel. Threads weave the present into a monster blueprint that is slowly expanding. Such an invisible web is full of dynamics pulling and repelling, splitting apart our bodies and souls. It extends across time, keeping tight invisible cords while mounting scaffolds of consciousness breaking up beneath the surface of things. 

There’s the image in my head of a fracture that almost completely surrounds Artemis corona, the mouse-shaped feature on Venus.  It cuts through the same way as with the deep-sea Aleutian Trench to the south of the Bering Sea, whose maximum depth is 78 times that of the fault line at the Mosi-oa-Tunya Falls. Physical fractures merge with disappearing time intervals. Time is gravity written in geometrical patterns. In trench-like areas with weak gravity, time feels different. Climbing out of the shadows, extremophiles move away from the quantum realm to set up biological niches on their own timescale. Inside the crust and in the depths of celestial objects, there are microorganisms from which more complex lifeforms will, in time, emerge.

In a Universe crisscrossed by invisible time-dependent spatial relationships, past, present, and future poets are mind travelers looking through the lens of telescopes at stars and planets. Planets depending on their position, are on their own timescale, and as time goes by, stars increase in size, pushing further away the habitable zone. Those much closer to the galactic center may have an even slower timescale than the Sun. Far from city lights, poets watch the night sky gradually changing with the continuous launch of human-made satellites since the sixties. Could one of them get out of orbit and reach a nearby planetary system? Could it drift for millions of years and return to an Earth that was once its home? Could Oumuamua be a drifting satellite launched aeons ago by an alien civilization?

It may be that the goal set by Emergence to underline timeless connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality inspires me to say the following: In a perfect world, the Outer Space Treaty would have meant right from the start for States Parties to conduct exploration so as to avoid “harmful contamination.” Are we harming, even if unknowingly, undiscovered lifeforms? Are we subjecting them to our system of values, convinced anyway that if there are life forms out there, they’re probably microorganisms deemed inferior to human life? In our current effort to remove space debris, we acknowledge the potential risk of leaving behind waste and shards of metal in Outer Space and on extraterrestrial objects the same way we have recognized it to be environmentally harmful to our oceans.

Territories and uncharted lands have been seized by right of conquest throughout human history. Such a principle left permanent scars and became institutionalized in our human psyche. Seventy years after the  Supreme Court upheld it in 1823, one of the wealthiest people in the US, John Jacob Astor, described in his scientific romance Outer worlds “that would have satisfied a poet” while inciting others to “mine the hills for copper and drain the swamps.” One hundred twenty years later, are we still more eager to follow in the footstep of Christopher Columbus than to fill the role of custodians of Outer Space?

Historical knowledge is a window into human nature. Outside the traditional ways of conducting business as usual, let’s ask fundamental questions about what life is and what consciousness entails before proceeding with the next Gold Rush and the race to drill the ground of planetary bodies. There are interdependent variable quantities and extremely long range correlations sprung from underlying microscopic degrees of freedom. An evolutionary approach to consciousness should be part of our ongoing discussion on space exploration. From planet-changing species to the responsibilities that come with the awareness of our role and duty within the Universe, we ought to grow and consciously feel those invisible ties in order to address the failures of the past and cross the threshold of complexity. 

Settlements come and go. They share the same habitat through loops of temporalities, cosmological and biological events moving in cycles and synchronicity. In a recent article, Caleb Scharf made a reference to the human colonization of the Pacific Ocean, to the length of time that separates the arrival of seafarers from the mythic Hawaiki to that of Europeans. “If typical planetary civilizations can last for a million years and if only 3 percent of star systems are actually settleable”, he writes, “there is roughly 10 percent probability that a planet like Earth is not been visited in at least the past million years”. If time is written in geometrical patterns, then numbers set the rhythm at which those patterns and relationships are formed in space. Will we become the Maori explorers of the future visiting star systems in the next million years?

Four years have passed since I started researching the relationship between the Universe and Consciousness. I feel I have momentarily lost the axis around which I revolve: the fundamental idea that the Universe reveals itself by expressing itself and knows itself through every bit of experience. I have lost the whimsical nature of a poet frog, run over by the wave of History. Living with the Unknown means we are bound to make mistakes, face uncertainties, and show humility.

The white-throated sparrows have returned to the native garden. In the depths of my soul vibrates the crystal clear sound of their whistle. Solitude is a fantasy, a veil cast over our collective demise. Clouded by the haze of doubts, the mind sinks under waves of cosmic symmetries and rides above rivers of terrestrial analogies, catching a glimpse across spatiotemporal lines of the extent to which consciousness can grow. There are communication keys on sheets of gravitational waves that poets catch in their dreams and feel in the earthly signs of light, sound, and water. 

I woke up from a deep slumber to Thoreau’s words to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. If reality is the process of time and evolution, why did my journey to Zambia and the African savanna feel more real to me? We’re told that it is all a matter of perspective, that even the sight of a rainbow is an individually experienced optical phenomenon. There is no single designated lookout point from where to watch reality unfold.

A 300-mile drive from Lusaka, the transboundary Mosi-oa-Tunya Falls (Victoria Falls) more than a mile-long slide down the vertical walls of basalt rock in a free fall. Like a curtain of falling water, the Zambezi River drops abruptly under the force of gravity from a towering height. The resounding waters rush down as if, the legend says, it were the spirit of Nyami Nyami, still angry at how the population was resettled and its stream was forcibly regulated by the construction upstream in 1950 of the Kariba Dam. The planned binational hydroelectric project (BHES) downstream — led by Power Construction Corporation of China and General Electric — may repeat history with its foreseeable impact on the environment and the livelihoods of the local population in the face of climate change.

From an image taken on board the International Space Station showing the deep fissures on the surface of the Earth, the Zambezi River plunges straight down within the spatiotemporal boundary of a fault line from which the misty vapor spills over like white scum. Is a fraction zone the same as a fault line? Do the turbulences the plane experienced over the Charlie Gibbs fracture resemble the tremors I felt on the opposite side of the Falls?

The tightly packed water molecules fight their way down the stream. Thereafter,  the riverbed divides into a stretch of steep-sided gorges zigzagging. The column of vapor rising and the roaring Falls contrast with the seemingly smooth and tranquil river which swells before the Falls into a plateau of islands from where hippos bellow when — I could just imagine — a crocodile swims by. Along the bank extends upstream a National Park much smaller than the one in South Luangwa. It manages however to keep out of harm’s way ten white rhinoceros.

Across from the Falls, a pedestrian overpass dominates a riverine strip which one crosses to reach the very last piece of land on the Zambian side. I felt dizzy when I walked across the bridge 350 feet above the ground. As far as my eyes could see, the horizon was blocked by the misty cloud. I could not distinguish the other end of the fault line three-quarter mile away.

Where reality lies is the Place of the Rainbow, an ancient name cited by David Livingstone for the Mosi-oa-Tunya Falls. The Sun came down on my left while I faced the end of the rainbow. The multicolored arc circled at my feet while the other end stretched away from the Sun on the Zambian side. At one point, there was a double rainbow, barely perceptible. Do rainbows arise and circle on both edges of the curtain? Hoping to find order in what we observe, I wonder whether our perspective is the same or whether it freely varies. 

Could I have seen a rainbow touching the Earth at my feet had I crossed the border with Zimbabwe and reached the right bank of the vanishing river? And if observers stand every 20 inches from each other on the opposite side of the Falls, with their back turned to the Sun, will they all see light striking water droplets and the refraction of three-dimensional air bubbles repeatedly breaking and forming in the same way I did? I wonder whether, through complex processes, exquisitely orchestrated dancing waters unfold or whether we can assume their randomness.

The configuration of the fault line encloses a system of event occurrences causally dependent on each other. Within those topological boundary conditions — bathed in the evening light and battled by macroscopic quantities of water — rainbows are a window to the microscopic collision of droplets. They illustrate how a many-body system works. The smoke-sounding, rainbow-making waterfalls appear in local equilibrium, doing what they are supposed to do, what is expected from them on that ordinary evening of the dry season. 

The fluctuations of the waterfalls reflect the translation and rotation of masses of water continuously occurring. It may be the immeasurable number of water molecules moving all at once, locally and globally, which convey an image of symmetries in motion. Their distribution in staggered superpositions abides by the geometry of steep walls and narrow channels. Versatile droplets burst, spray, roll. They go in and out of existence, from a state of nothingness to a state of being. What is their degree of freedom?

As they fall off the elevated ground with gravity, are they following a non-deterministic path? The linear fault line,  as if it were a spatiotemporal chasm, acts as a control line for the flow of water, each droplet on a short-lived time path falling prey to gravity. As time went by, a choreography of water-made wormholes, vortex, and spirals rising and wriggling popped into my head.

Shortly after my return to Lusaka, I went on a quest through malls and markets for Nyami Nyami, hidden away at the bottom of a basket or the back of a display. It brought me to the Aylmer May Cemetery — an old graveyard from colonial times — next to which stand today the offices of two of the major foreign-owned mining companies. 

Truth be told, I see the human world through the prism of history. Along the roads, the centenary trees wailed, chained to the ground. The next day, in a matter of seconds, the wind blew, and the clouds gathered without a drop of rain. 

While the hope is to discover a true mirror of nature that exhibits the essence of reality, I have lost my footing through the mirroring surface of the Earth. After a two-leg flight and a 19-hour layover, I went home the same way I came. There are so many ways to describe where reality lies that they all contradict each other. If reality is what we think we know, it is also what we think we observe. There is undoubtedly a part of unknown in reality. Reality is singular. Reality is discrete.

I’ve lost my sense of continuity between the places I’ve been. Amid fragmented realities, my living essence seeps increasingly through the temporal, physical, and conceptual gaps which pull apart the reality that constitutes our human existence. Each place is an element of reality I can’t quite reassemble within my mind and body. 

Reality is anchored in our consciousness only through the increase of the length of time. Without physical and mental entanglement, we may be less aware of the reality of our surroundings. I feel as though I have unknowingly stumbled across the essence of reality: it is the misty cloud at the Falls that turns into fog over the Fall line on the trail to Rosslyn. It is the setting sun at the Falls that rises through the fog this morning. It is the wet drops of the Falls that become rain lightly falling on my skin. It is the rainbow I saw through the prism of history.

The observer of the human soul passes on the three rings of intuition, sensibility, and self-awareness. It may be that my words wish to relay to others the relentless flow of things, the moving set of situations and circumstances that engulf life and matter, myself including. Every once in a while we all need a change of scenery and forget for a brief moment that something deeply rooted inside us never really goes away regardless of the latitude of the place we live in. 

Thousands of miles away from home, we are held by the puppet strings of our emotional responses and homegrown biases. Like little probes swung by turbulence drifting 12 billion miles away from Earth hooked by a timeless connection with other space missions and observatories as if they coud listen to each other faint whispers, we swing back and forth in the web of social relationships between standing up for what we believe and the influence of others, hoping to strike the right balance. Interstellar objects under the gravitational pull from the Sun, Jupiter, and on jump into the interstellar medium, beyond the solar wind, where they will be slowly pulled away by the magnetic field from another neighboring star (1).

I departed from my beloved surroundings— the luxuriant native garden and the straight architectural lines and steel sculptures rising out of Glenstone landscape — to dive into the unknown. After a two-leg-flight and 21 hours later, I crossed the Gulf of Aden to reach Africa. From above I could already discern smoke rising from burning land and wildlife gathering in the water as the plane descended. I traded a murder of crows and a pair of vultures feasting on neighborhood trash for black and white pied crows — evocative of the smaller London magpies. One was perched on a wall along Leopards Hill Road; others were flying above Latitude 15, and a pair hopped on the front lawn of the Cathedral.

On the plane over the clouds at sunset, I was convinced that free will dominates the Universe. But when I reached the Mambwe District in Zambia’s Eastern Province, I felt the resurgence of a long-forgotten bond with my ancestral lineage the way I imagine space probes keep forever in their structural design the memory of those who engineered them, carrying the imprint of their souls and that of humanity. The great force of history, James Baldwin wrote, comes from the fact that each one of us carries it inside us and is unconsciously controlled by it. I still struggle with that idea, but felt on this journey into rural Zambia the weight of history, through intense dreams and emotional turmoil.

What stayed with me, though, is the unsolvable mystery of event symmetry, the mirror reflection of universal events. It is less about whether the throw of the dice could ever abolish chance than its occurrence while the ship sinks during a storm — the odd synchronicity in sceneries and landscapes, individual and collective actions. I jumped into the unknown, my hardwired brain resembling a gravity-assist interstellar probe on the edge of the heliosphere touching the far-flung corners of the galaxy, torn between the urge to resist and falling prey to the raging cosmic rays.

At Glenstone, a quotation by the late William Weiner tells the story of matter so shaken to its core that it leads to a change in inherent form to the extent of bringing about a change in the destiny of the material. Bits of matter form and grow, fragment, and reform the way I see physical bodies and human, if not cosmic, consciousness do. I have stalled where the intervals have disappeared, my living essence dripping into the shadows of Nothingness. Neutrinos, I feel, stand at its gateway. Once produced, they annihilate each other, leaving none behind.

The quantum state of the Universe, like a topology of breaking and reconstruction of boundaries in interparticle interactions brings images to my mind of spatiotemporal chasms, crests, and troughs of wave-particles the same way I see unfold social interactions when we clash and embrace each other time after time. Gap closing occurs with the popping up of surface states (2), leading to surface quantum criticality. If global and local symmetries emerge in the process, do they also apply to spatial divisions and disappearing time intervals? Do they rule over phase transitions? The changing topology across the quantum critical state may indicate that change itself is information encoded in the quantum field.

The observable manifestation of a particle is the result of an excited state of the quantum field. The question then I raise pertains to the behavior of particles. In their quantum walk as they propagate — going down multiple paths at once — do they ignore each other, stick to one another and try to get as far away as possible from each other all in the same breath? The Universe tingles at every point of contact and sinks back in disappearing intervals. 

If particles were words, the excited state would amount to the tingle we feel with the sense of closeness before the inspiration sinks back again. The Universe in its evolutive form bears a resemblance with a present thought, although not ignorant of the time-gap, which still regards itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past. Particles, likened to specks of metaphysical dust acting as a proto-will, trigger the awareness of information. While global symmetries may refer to the symmetry of charge conservation and time reversal, supersymmetry, if supported by evidence, may involve the emergent symmetry of fermions — particles that form matter — and bosons — which mediate the interactions between them (3). 

In the South Luangwa National Park strewn with ebony, apple-leaf, tamarind, and sausage trees, zebras, impalas, giraffes, waterbucks, monkeys, and others appear to live in peace side by side — except for the predatory lions, leopards, and wild dogs. We crossed the dry and sandy Luangwa riverbed in search of the iconic African baobab beyond the pristine mopane forest far from the reach of elephants. We dwelt upon the hidden life of trees and wondered if baobabs are falling prey to the changing climate the way white oaks back home seem to be. Symmetries in my head refer to those parallel events across spatiotemporal boundaries.

As if they perceived the presence of a threat, I watched animals within a 500-meter perimeter stand still, their head turned in the direction of a nearby field of tall grass, in a posture that incidentally reminded me of museum-goers gazing with perplexity at Serra’s latest installation. On other occasions, there appears to be, in a herd or a smaller group, the most curious one, the explorer ceaselessly staring while others carry on. 

The observing giraffe keeps an inquisitive eye on me. She feels the bond that ties her to the whole Universe. She has no doubt that any life form would know the coldness of the breeze, the brightness of the full moon over the Luangwa River and the thickness of the dust haze the way she experiences it. She has no doubt that the one whom she observes knows, too well, how it feels to walk, run and fall. 

Living beings feel the touch of gravity, the mounting tingling during intervals before collapse, the heart murmur of the Universe. The jointing and separateness among parts of the stream of consciousness may reflect a time-gap. Such a gap is intensely active, bringing every point of contact and every surface state toward a specific direction. A game of hide-and-seek plays out in the vast expansiveness of the Universe. The other end of the Janus point hides in gaps, spatiotemporal chasms, and disappearing intervals, which sculptors hopelessly want to transpose in their work as the negative space. 

William James spoke of the resting places of the 'substantive parts,' and the places of flight of the 'transitive parts'.  Do a pair of pigeons or pied crows signal to each other when it is time to fly? Upon their landing on the ground, I observed their resting places — the cement fences around houses and compounds, the squeaky sound of the left-hand drive cars, the pool players, the young students walking and the flowering trees along Leopards Hill Road. 

(1) Scientific American, July 2022, p.40

(2) Topological Quantum Critical Points in Strong Coupling limits: Global Symmetries and Strongly Interacting Majorana Fermions

(3) Absence of emergent supersymmetry at superconducting quantum critical points in Dirac and Weyl semimetals

Words like beads on a necklace create a series of images. They are the voices in my head. When one speaks of Nature, it is the Earth-bound nature I see, not the Universe as a whole. I imagine that one encompasses the other, that the Universe is a reservoir of Nature, and that Nature is a separative stage of the Universe, a kind of outgrowth. We, humans, are neither at the center of the Universe nor even at the center of Nature.

The difference between the two words may be that one was more commonly used in the past. Words carry memories. Pascal urged us to contemplate the whole of Nature in Her full and grand majesty. The whole visible world, he added, is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of Nature (1). One meaning however has endured: Nature and the Universe both provide a sense of unity. They imply the existence of one single entity across time and scale. What was a theory of Nature has become a theory of everything. And to scientists, such a theory poses a mathematical riddle rather than an epistemological one. Rules that have been tested and verified most stringently are elevated to the status of Laws of Nature (2). Those Laws of Nature support each other like building blocks in a game of reciprocal causality. They come together, Matthew Bothwell writes, to produce a Universe filled with these ridiculously vast –- and incomparably beautiful –- structures. 

Nature though isn’t a passive player, a mere landscape. “Being” I recall, “came out of something, nature came out of Being”.  Nature is the genesis of growing things. It is a process of creation and refers to the life of the Universe. Indeed, the most surprising in cosmology is that the nature of the Universe requires continuous creation—the perpetual bringing into being of new background material (3). 

Somehow by the power of creation, Nature does something that seems impossible, making more energy available. Nature shapes the Universe. Its overpowering effects bring the Universe out of Nothingness, moving it forward. Not only Nature does not allow anything to perish, Lucretius wrote, till it has encountered a force that shatters it with a blow or creeps into chinks and unknits it, but Nature also repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another’s death (4). It is as if we could follow the tracks of Nature within the Universe.

In Nature we see fractals, and patterns, constantly and regularly occurring along a set of well-defined categories. Are Laws of Nature ineluctable and their number finite? And why is it that Nature often seems to make sense on the assumption that it has a purpose? (5) Nature becomes a fateful thing to which the Universe obeys, that which subdues the Universe. I wonder why it all comes down to the existence of governing laws from which the Universe can’t escape and where the urge to make sense and find order in all things comes from.

Nature versus Nurture is preceded by the ontological debate over steadiness versus evolution. Within the boundaries of physics, we look at Nature processes. As the nurturing conditions provide for evolution, the indecipherable process has complicated our understanding of the conservation of ontology. Nurturing conditions affect the geometry of the whole system. The evolved stage of Nature under the direction set by entropy bears waves of feeling and emotion across spacetime. Today what conservation of ontology means, in the most practical terms, is the conservation of Nature. 

Let’s say that the Janus point stands at the narrow neck of a sandglass. If the Universe were an expanding glass bulb and each grain of sand the size of Webb’s view of the Universe, what would constitute the steadiness of sand? To Fred Hoyle, no matter how far in time and space we, observers, view the cosmos, we will still be able to see about the same number of galaxies as we do now. At first sight, he explained, it might be thought that this could not go on indefinitely because the material forming the background would ultimately become exhausted. Following in the footsteps of Lucretius, he added that “the reason why this is not so is that new material appears to compensate for the background material that is constantly being condensed into galaxies”. Today, the advancement of new technology which allows us to peer deeper into the far reaches of the Universe seems to comfort us into such impression.

In the end, where the realm of Nature begins remains an open question. Should the natural boundaries of the physical Universe extend beyond? It seems far-reaching to start Nature at the quantum level since Nature appears less probabilistic on the surface than seemingly mechanical. For Bohr, I recall, neither particles nor waves are attributes of Nature. They are no more than ideas in our minds that we impose on the natural world. But some have argued that Nature clues in a fundamental truth — quantum mechanics is unique in enabling the assignment of a non-redundant, complete final boundary condition to every system. The ambition of quantum mechanics is to predict the behavior of Nature. And the more we introduce global symmetries into the quantum world, the more Nature claims its design.

Aristotle observed that Nature may also represent an immanent thing from which a growing thing begins to grow. So what constitutes the steadiness of sand? If the Universe is conceptual in nature, that which is preserved, carried across time and space may be its conceptual origination, an immutable and undifferentiated essence within the evolutive appearance of reality. The immanent thing which perdures, despite or owing to variation processes, is the quantum nature defined by Freedom, Essence, and Existence. The Universe goes through stages — the agency of physical and dynamic properties and the sum of all its features weaves a network of intricate connexions within the ever-changing architecture. 

“To a man laboring under calamity,” Emerson wrote,  “the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population” (6). Nature only wears the colors of the spirit. To me, the Universe from its initial state is free to explore what it means to be.

A deer in the park, 

Lilies in the pound, 

The reflecting Sun, 

Stars, rings, and galaxies.

Rabbit crossing

Music in my ears

Highway sounds piercing

People running and biking.

Sun burning

Light in my eyes 

The beat of the drum

Clouds gathering and time passing.

Woodpecker pecking 

Stand by watching

Dog walking 

A grain of sand catching a breeze.

(1)Blaise Pascal, Pensées

(2) James Trefil, Cassell’s laws of Nature 

(3) Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the universe

(4) Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

(5) Peter Dear, The intelligibility of Nature

(6) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

The tiny blue planet on which we live, crisscrossed with shades of gray, lies far away from the spatiotemporal boundary of yellow-intensified violet indicative of explosive energy release. At the boundary, time flows to the surface like a river carrying particles from phantom to dust. Waves rise and fall. They are metaphysical specks acting as proto-will. As we experience the world through the blue oceans and the green foliage, our minds connect to the white light of the Sun. The approach of the Unveiled announcing the first lights breaking free from the Shadows and the grip of Nothingness relates to the all-pervading tone caught by Turner in his paintings. It is less about details than the color of light itself.

I haven’t moved much from the edge of the boundary. While Cosmic Dawn stands as the final frontier of what is out there to observe, I have stalled where the interval has disappeared, neither on one side nor the other of the Janus point, but where darkness precedes and no direction has yet been distinguished. The absence created by the departure of the white-throated sparrows was filled by the mating calls of frogs. The falling catalpa flowers and the tadpoles in the pond signaled the late spring and replaced the pink and purple ground coat of cherry blossoms and redbud flowers. My ethereal essence is seeping through disappearing intervals. 

Disappearing intervals are time-like feelings devoid of quantified mass and without spatial shape. Time washes them away. We believe that if — as in the conception of Minkowski — space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into such mere Shadows, then only the union of the two may preserve an independent reality. But feelings, too, have an independent existence that allows for their rise and fall of their own free will.  At every point of contact, feelings come and go. It is as if a film unrolls a series of scenes by way of which time is mapping out endlessly the spatial coordinates of History. But History is an illusion that the train of time will stop and that every station is capped under the lid of a four-dimensional hypersurface. 

The scope of reality may be independent but limited. The thing about information is that it is contextual, depending on the circumstances that form the setting of an event. A medium is required for every transfer of information — sound, light, or energy. No message is received faster than the speed of light, even though there is evidence of faster-than-light signaling in quantum superposition,  motion in GW170817 jet, and ejection from the black hole MAXI J1820+070. 

Information was already lost when primordial magnetic fields transferred a significant fraction of their energy to heat the colder intergalactic medium at Cosmic Dawn. The union of time and space was crafted with encoded information to at least 10,000 to 100,000 times more than it is currently known to us. The loss of information involved energy dissipation and decay of primordial magnetic fields. It was as irreversible as time itself.

A four-dimensional reality lies within a higher-dimensional geometry. Shrinking extra dimensions encrypted with information, waiting to be released, could transfer entropy into the four-dimensional Universe, providing a new way to solve the horizon and flatness problems. Entropy isn’t just a probability of change in agency; it refers to the concept of concrescence and implies a linkage of entropy with becoming. 

Is there then such a thing as a true, ontological state? Gerard t’Hooft argues that the Universe started to be in such a state and its “evolution law is such that, at all times in the future, it will still be in an ontological state”. Regardless of the initial state we started from and what was lost in the past, “the state in the future will be an ontological one”. What we have here, he asserts, is a conservation law, the conservation of ontology.

In geometry, I see the simplicity of forms and the essence of beauty. While a conservation law determines the conservation of the ontological state, suppose, Eddington wrote, that “we were asked to arrange the following in two categories ⎯ Distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty and melody,  entropy would be placed alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three”, as if entropy could be perceived intuitively. I would then understand that, in the conservation of ontology within the Universe’s contours of information fluctuation, there is entropy, beauty, and melody. 

While entropy measures the randomness of the choices but does not care what those choices are, beauty and melody are the qualitative properties necessary for the Universe to feel and be felt. Sounds may have a transcendental nature, outside the boundary of our three-dimensional physical reality. Emerging from the quantum realm, a sound is elicited by any motion of any length even that of an intuitive spark in one’s head. Resonance inside mirrors sounds outside. There exists a sounding field and the field of consciousness is filled with its ringings. The Universe, as I imagined, is a symphony of lights and sounds played on the keyboard of time. 

How could a higher-dimensional Universe be revealed out of a flat surface of reality? The union between time and space appears out of balance, with extra dimensions mostly referred to as length-like potentials of a spatial nature. But if at the dawn of everything, a kind of union of time and space was formed, resulting in the two intertwined entities having independent significance, why then would space be the only compact manifold as if extra dimensions shrink as spatial ones expand, creating a “dynamical” or “cosmological” dimensional reduction?

It isn’t that higher dimensions are non-existent. They may be empty, rather lacking the physical properties we are familiar with. To catch a glimpse at extra dimensions, there’s a need to zoom in and out and in the process, all things come in and out of consciousness. Our interest in what is not there and how to interpret such absence comes from the understanding that 95%  of the Universe is unseen, made chiefly of hidden dark energy and concealed dark matter. The lack of proximity does not enable us to see the wells from which particles crawl out. 

Our Universe is caught in the illusion of a three-dimensional house whose back door is time. Beyond its three macroscopic spatial dimensions, it is as if it holds a series of big and small geometrical structures, each adding to the multifold reality. Entities and their properties reveal themselves during the inputs and outputs of physical processes. Time, I feel, is the universal constant. 

It is a paradox that something so elusive and intangible as the ontological state of the Universe across time and space is the subject of a conservation law, with the caveat that the ontological states needed to describe the micro world, are likely to differ in many ways from the classical laws we are used to, Gerard t’Hooft concedes. A conservation law selects which quantum superpositions can be allowed and which not. So if a strong correlation between the ontological variables, as a result of their shared past, contributes to the conversation of ontology in the future, could an internal compass or external attractor pulling forward the essence of reality be in the form of a melody?

Such elusiveness is reflected in human endeavors. From Mallarmé’s Throw of the Dice to Scriabin’s Enigma, we feel embedded in the crisscross hatchings of the universal landscape, unable to escape. To borrow Alexander Scriabin’s words, the ontological state of the Universe may be “terribly slippery and evasive, and in this slippery evasiveness,” there is beauty and great coquetry. And there’s no way you’ll ever catch it…So we are bound to the dark side, the Shadows. Even what we have learned to know as the baryonic matter is mainly spread through the diffuse plasma and gas of the intergalactic medium. And then there is us on this tiny blue planet lost in the midst of only ten percent of the star-made baryonic matter, confronted with what we observe and gifted with the ability to dream and reflect. 

We carry dreams that will be further shaped by those who follow. Dreams will seed, grow and become fruits reaped by a community of minds.

It may be that a throw of dice will never abolish chance, but as soon as the infinite game is on, each time the dice are tossed, it gives a nudge, a direction and builds things to a higher specification. It sets the course like, in the case of the Universe, when constraints are placed upon cosmological parameters. As silence ceases, noise becomes more definite, more in a hurry. After hesitation shown in the first moments, a kind of increased rustling replaces the interval that had disappeared (1). 

The Universe starts by preparing and stirring pairs of particles and antiparticles like poets mix ideas in their heads. And then it throws the dice. Within the initial chaos and the intrinsic degrees of freedom, there are potentially the unique Numbers that cannot be others (2) — the necessary fine-tuning of cosmological parameters allowing for the existence of one poet writing the tale of a roll of dice amid a shipwreck. 

The Universe resembles a free spirit testing the waters until it finds its way and so, setting the course of its uncharted destiny. Randomly through particles’ interactions, mergers of celestial objects, multiplicity of events, the path upon which it finds itself opens beneath its feet. What sort of a thing the Universe is in its ultimate and simplest nature? Freedom is the essence of its existence. We must recognize, Sartre wrote, that the indispensable and fundamental condition of all action is the freedom (3) of the acting Being. It is the freedom of a diffuse sense of being that spreads through all things.

Against all appearances, it isn’t Mallarmé who brought me to London. It is Longfellow’s soul, whose presence I felt near the Lighthouse of Portland, which guided me to the circle of poets in Westminster Abbey. I passed by where lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking in the scientists’ corner as I dwelled upon his words about the rolling of dice. Einstein often used that very same expression to convey his idea, that surely, God did not play dice. To him, the Universe is absolutely determined and could not be inherently probabilistic. But as Stephen Hawking pointed out: Not only does God definitely play dice, He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. The other way to look at it would be to say that our lack of proximity does not allow us to make a proper assessment — possibly because what we can’t see stays below the surface, not in contact with the outside world. 

From the surface of a page to the surface of a painting, what is it with shipwrecks in stormy seas that captures the minds of poets and painters alike? Somehow Einstein’s words brought me to Mallarmé’s poem which unfolds like a music composition, a visual representation, a dance choreography. Words scattered on blank pages, like stars in the sky, are debris of a shipwreck swept away, floating on the swinging and rocking waves.  Each word and group of words are events spread in timelessness, matter build-up adding texture to the fabric of spacetime. 

I pause to meditate upon the uppermost layer of things and how it reflects reality. Gerard ’t Hooft argues that there simply are not more degrees of freedom to talk about than those discrete degrees projected on the surface called boundary. Still, on the oil painting surface, J. M. W. Turner made the Sun rise through vapor. He painted the blurred boundary of skies and waters, the ocean foam, the reflection of clouds in the waves. Art opens to the Infinite. My eyes see the bubbling gathering of the Unveiled whose approach I feel. 

Beyond the daily conversation we engage with others, what if our souls could communicate with one another? What if museums were a place for those ghostly encounters? Whatever the artists’ intent is, their artworks trigger something more and bring to the surface what is deep within. The profound meaning isn’t the fragmentary nature of events whose projection on the surface is what we can see. It is that, in the background, events are interlocked, implicated in one another timelessly. Events fit into each other, blending as if they were one and the same. They relate in my mind to the prismatic art of creation. There exists a simultaneity of events: the tossing of dice in a shipwreck. 

On the surface, we wonder whether there is such a thing as a sheer coincidence,  a supreme conjunction with probability (4). The Universe began its waking day with a Big Bang and will end at the stroke of midnight. One event mirrors the other. A formless existence of an accidental nature — like a brewing storm on a still surface — reveals the hidden process through which what is merely potential frees itself from the fateful suspension of time as if in a landscape painted by Turner. 

There are those who believe that there is only one objective reality. It isn’t that the hidden sector is unthinkable, due to information loss. It is that it doesn’t exist, denying therefore the probabilistic properties of the underlying degrees of freedom. Chance, they say, is born out of pretense. And there are those, whom Smolin calls magical realists, who imagine what lies beyond the phantom divide. Chance and fate on a universal scale are so intertwined that we are unable to separate one from the other. We can’t tell which side the Universe is on.

To the magical realists, chance has three properties. It is real, concrete, and eternal (4). How then can chance and variation rise up to the surface? How can it come out from an absence of meaning to get to a state of intended meaning? In short, in an act where chance fulfills its own idea by affirming or denying itself, Mallarmé wrote, in the face of its existence, negation and affirmation fail. It contains the Absurd -- implies it but in a latent state and prevents it from existing: which allows the Infinite to be (4). Chance, whose tangibility manifests itself in the tossing of the dice, is all at once Freedom, Essence, and Existence.

Concepts caught in a circle dance have switched places: Time, Gravity, Space. Freedom, Essence, Existence. If I were to imagine the underpainting of the universal canvas, I would describe how dark energy is diffuse throughout the Universe and would raise the possibility of hidden interactions, through gravity, between the inflationary quintessence and the ordinary matter. Adding another layer to our story, there exists a relation of a particular event — the rolling of dice — to the three Universals of Time, the Quantum Universe, and Nothingness. 

It may be that existence — whether that be of a particle, a wave, or dice — precedes essence. But Nothingness is the origin of their essence. How did the Universe come into being? Infinite interweaves with disorder at the threshold of Nothingness. Sartre, endowed with a sculptor’s mind, visualized the negative space. If negation is the original structure of transcendence, he wrote, what must be the original structure of ‘human reality’ in order for it to be able to transcend (3) the Universe? 

Sir Arthur Eddington wrote that the practical measure of the random element which can increase in the Universe but never decrease is called entropy. He added that measuring by entropy is the same as measuring by chance. If God doesn’t play dice, I suppose He knows what entropy means. In any event, I leave Turner behind. My traveling soul is drawn to Cleveland.

1. Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur
2. Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard 
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
4. Quentin Maillassoux, Le Nombre et la sirène
5. R. Howard Bloch, One Toss of the dice

As I review earlier posts, I hope to mend holes in the original goal I had chosen for myself to imagine what cosmic consciousness is. It is not that there are different levels of consciousness but that there are various degrees of receptivity and sensibility. Questions still linger: Since there exists an interconnectedness of all beings and matter — past, present, and future — why is it that, even in contact with the outside world,  human consciousness remains unaware of such connection?   If a suprahuman form of consciousness possesses a depth of meaning and a clearness of vision beyond our comprehension, shouldn’t stars which have been around for billions of years, have developed by now a conscious memory?

The ethereal body of my living soul hangs on a string from the Moon. At a human level, consciousness is chatter between body, heart, mind, and soul. By soul, I mean that there is a part of eternity in humans, an ethereal essence. I once thought of time as a four-wheeled carriage on an endless road. I even thought that it is all at once the invisible carriage, the wheels with repetitive patterns of emergence, and the horse that leads us, with our heads in the clouds, through the expanding space. We are transported where we can’t see, endowed with an intuitive mind besieged by fears. Regardless of whether we find the missing time logs in the story of the Universe, the past even riddled with holes is unchangeable. What is, then, the meaning of our personal lives?

Great minds will be known for generations to come by the quotes they leave behind.  Although they are often used out of context, most quotes are quite inspirational. E. O. Wilson defined the meaning of human existence as “the epic of the species”(1). We are, I feel, the ants that he studied all his life. We live and die to advance the welfare of the community not for our profit, may that community be made of humans or stars. And the future is “what we will choose to become”. Where then do we go from here: Chaos or community? (2) It depends. 

Wilson also observed that we “would rather believe than know”(3). A belief is a refuge where the mind goes when nothing seems to make sense. We believe in beauty, higher purpose, and the power of good against evil for we need the courage to carry on. Wilson later wrote that we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. “The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information, think critically about it, and make important choices” (4). To those synthesizers who wish to be void of purpose, intuition is their pilgrim’s rod and doubts pave the path on which they often trip. 

The holographic principle states that information concerning the interior (of a volume element) “dissipates away due to information loss, while only the information located on the surface survives, possibly because it stays in contact with the outside world”(5). Beyond the surface area of a black hole’s horizon, should such a principle apply to our surroundings, the people we know, the Earth, the Moon, and the entire Universe? Do we live in a holographic world where all that we see and know is only the surface, a small part of it? How then can we be able to gather the right information, think critically about it, and make important choices?

Phytoplankton blooms can be seen on a satellite image, but research is still needed to evaluate the cascading effects of the increasing rate at which it occurs in the Arctic and elsewhere on zooplankton and the oceans’ food web. On our planet where coastal lands erode under villagers’ feet and extinct birds are inert sculptures haunting the last sites where they were seen, the thing about knowledge is that we think we know what we know, but by the time we know, it all has already past. 

A belief is a refuge where the mind takes comfort in the face of death and destruction. Where have the white-throated sparrows been these past few months? Did they fly further south to escape the unusually cold winter? Did they neglect the native garden after a few white oaks were taken down in the neighborhood? Today, though, I hear them loud and clear. They are passing by until the time will come to leave. Do they know how it felt like to be a great awk or a heath hen?

What stays in contact with the outside world, what is derived from interactions with the physical environment defines the relational property of consciousness. There exists an ‘in-between’— an interface, a point of contact — where a human, a star, a planet and even a black hole make contact with something of a different order, feeding one’s own sense of being. Such an inner resonance — that is individual consciousness — triggers and is triggered by time-specific interactions with the Universe.    

From the surface of things, I uttered a feeling that there is no Consciousness without gravity, that there are gravity waves of consciousness — billions of them — running through a multilayered spacetime. I circle back to the question of gravity as if  I were a planet making its very first revolution. I ended the previous post with the same fundamental question I started with: does dark matter even exist? If it does, it may be a gravitationally polarized fluid — although an invisible one. Dark matter could be what a gravitational field clothes itself in. If it does not, any calculation or indirect observation related to its mass and behavior may be the result of an illusion caused by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum. 

Ideas are subject to gravity, too. They fall up and down, drip by drip. They need time to enter the space of knowing. Without gravity, will fall leaves know which direction to fall? Will trees know how to position their roots? Are the curves in the spacetime continuum meant for stars and galaxies to move along them? Gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime. It may be the presence of a gravitational field, Penrose writes, that takes the description of a physical system out of the realm of pure quantum physics. The gravitational field becomes the ground for absorption and emission of discrete bundles of quanta. Does the process involve the gravitization of quanta or the quantization of gravity?

Spacetime is discrete and so is consciousness. Cosmic consciousness stands for the gathering of clouds of shared resonance and ripples of information, in which all spatiotemporally localized points of contact are built upon quantum entanglement. Stellar consciousness emerges out of the gravitational energy of stars and extends its reach beyond their gravitational field. Hindered by an army of armors, shells, and layers, caught in the fabric of spacetime, consciousness communicates in an incoherent language and slips by unnoticed. Here is a belief that the time flow which precedes that of things is the breath of consciousness. Within the time flow, there exists the essence of a wave. When silence ceases and noise grows, waves of consciousness spread under the pull of a multidimensional gravity.

(1) E.O. Wilson, The meaning of human existence

(2) Martin Luther King Jr., Where then do we go from here: Chaos or community?

(3) E.O. Wilson, Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology

(4) E.O. Wilson, Consilience

(5) Approaches to Quantum Gravity, Daniele Oriti (Editor)

Staring at what is missing from this view of the galaxy NGC 24 in the Sculptor Constellation: that’s what dark matter is about. It is finding the invisible. By now tens of thousands of papers have been written on the subject of dark matter. Wrapping our heads around them is unfeasible. Swamped by an array of questions, the birdlike mind watches from above. The possibility that a gravitational force, largely due to the mass of the Milky Way halo could play a role in the trajectory of celestial objects such as Oumuamua and the putative Planet Nine brings me back to a review of what I have gathered so far on dark matter.

If some are convinced of the existence of dark matter, others show skepticism. Theories intend to explain discrepancies in the distribution of dark matter between small and larger galaxies. It is suggested that the motion in retrograde manner of dark matter has important effects on the morphology and evolution of barred disc galaxies. If we can’t confront dark matter, dynamic mechanisms involved in the interaction between dark matter particles and baryons appear to be even more elusive. Sifting through data accumulated by the ATLAS experiment, it is concluded that no more than 13% of Higgs bosons produced in the Large Hadron Collider could be transformed into particles invisible to the detector. 

We travel through time building models and developing scenarios on how it began and what features were those of the early Universe that led to the current setting. A singularity out of sight lies beyond spacetime, at the beginning of the Universe. Hydrogen atoms gas fed the formation of the first entities: stars and black holes. The 21-cm spectral line produced by hydrogen atoms is an essential finding. The cooling effect or momentum transfer may have occurred between minicharged dark particles and baryons. On the edge of the infinitely small, it is suggested that only a fraction of those milli-charged dark matter particles interacted with ordinary matter.

Theorists looking for lost time at the birth of the Universe grapple with the ontological nature of reality.  We’re told that it all started with equal numbers of matter and antimatter but that we observe today a nonzero mass difference. At later times matter eventually will decay, with the baryon number reverting to zero. At CERN,  researchers are attempting to find any evidence of interaction. One of the Antiproton Decelerator experiments at CERN, the ALPHA collaboration, reported its first measurements of certain quantum effects in the energy structure of antihydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen.

The line between the invisible and the visible, although swinging slightly bringing light into darkness, has not been crossed. While we do not know what dark particles are, we succeed at narrowing down the object of our search, placing constraints on their properties. Could dark matter be present right under our nose, gravitationally bound to celestial objects such as the Moon or Jupiter? 

Dark matter could be so many things that I would not know where to start. It may be a cold, fuzzy, collisionless fluid. It may be composed of a type of not yet discovered particles: right-handed neutrinos, baryons of mirror matter, or even fifth-dimensional dark fermions, to list a few. The cogenesis of dark matter and a process called leptogenesis — that produced the matter-antimatter asymmetry — may have occurred in the presence of primordial black holes. Those cosmic objects from the firsts moments of the Universe were in a microstate. Some became, in the course of their evolution, centers of galaxies while others still wander around without populations of stars orbiting them.

Romulus simulations can predict which supermassive black holes, following a galaxy merger, will make it to the center of their new host galaxy and how long that process takes. Many binaries are said to be formed after several billions of years of orbital evolution, while some never made it to the center. Milky Way-mass galaxies are found to host an average of 12 supermassive black holes, which typically lie throughout the dark matter halos.

Supermassive black holes are invisible and extremely heavy objects. Do the same invisibleness and heaviness apply to dark matter? Could dark matter accumulate near black holes, forming spike distribution on a black hole event horizon? Could it fall through the true horizon to a cosmic hidden sector? The introduction of extra dimensions, a fifth-dimension force or a mirror universe would make a serious dent in the concept of nothingness, diminishing its scope further. If there is no such thing as nothingness that precedes the generation of space from 'zero time’, then there may be no end to the shrinking entities of the Universe. Nothingness may stand as a threshold of a hidden dimension of spacetime. It would, though, require us to believe in something to exist beyond.

Space, like the sea with its currents, hosts tidal shocking and stripping causing gas clouds of baryonic matter and dark matter to jostle into each other,  pulling each other in and out. Tracks or wakes as if in the sea implicitly hint at density perturbations within spacetime and the existence of something in the makeup of the Universe instead of nothing. Satellite galaxies such as the Large Magellanic Cloud in its first infall may leave, through the Milky Way, dark matter debris no longer gravitationally bound to it. 

How to study dark matter footprints and stellar stream distortions is key to disentangling processes involving stellar streams and dark matter halos. Scenes of their encounters, impacting each other’s shape and velocity, are set in spacetime, etched in the memory of galaxies. Some see the Universe as if clusters of baryonic matter were embedded into halos of dark matter. Space acts as a screen on which scenes of universal life are projected. Scientists tackle both ends of the Universe: the extremely small and the infinitely large. As they try to identify the microscopic nature of dark matter, they attempt to describe at the same time the role of dark matter in the macroscopic Universe on the edges of galaxies. Spacetime becomes a scaffolding upon which large mergers alter the morphology of galaxies and dark matter halos.  Could a single field be responsible for both inflation and dark matter? Dark matter and dark energy may be two faces of the same coin.

In the end, dark matter may be heterogeneous, behaving differently depending on scale and location, whether it be in halos around galaxies and galaxy clusters or around galactic centers. Its heterogeneity would allow the possibility for collision and interaction between dark matter particles. Some would even imagine the self-interacting dark matter to be in many ways like what we observe with the baryonic matter. Could dark matter be at times warm or hot, linked to the thermalization history of the Universe? Could there be dark photons? Dark matter may not only be comprised of self-interacting dark matter but also made up of primordial black holes.

Radio surveys by EDGES, LOFAR, and HERA — which provided its first set of data — as well as in the future SKA, among others, are the first results available to us in our investigation into the topology of the early Universe. In a bouncing Universe, Penrose imagines dark matter particles as gravitational entities called erebons which decay completely at the end of each eon to then be created afresh at the beginning. Perhaps, he adds, we will need detectors of a different kind to see erebon decays in our eon. Adding to the detection of gravitational waves by observatories such as LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA, we expect the James Webb telescope to match images to some of the early radio emissions and provide answers to lingering questions about black holes at the dawn of time. Furthermore, if dark matter particles could annihilate into gamma-ray radiation, it is suggested that the intensity of such events near a black hole could provide a good opportunity to detect the dark matter annihilation signal. 

The principle called Occam’s razor states that plurality should not be posited without necessity. Which of the above-mentioned hypotheses provides the simplest explanation? Instead of new particles that we have not discovered yet, could we do away with dark matter? A new Relativistic Theory for Modified Newtonian Dynamics is said to be best at reproducing key cosmological observables. But if its mass can be calculated and its increase and decrease recorded, with the advent of cosmological events such as the infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud, how can the concept of dark matter be dismissed by the introduction of a modified force of gravity? Could both represent fragments of reality?

Dancing around the center of the galaxy, we are lost in a land where a never-ending stream of questions flows. I still ponder why the length of time light travels from the galactic center to the Earth is within the same order as the time it takes for the Earth to go through one complete precession cycle.

Poets, I feel,  are not dying. They have fallen into a deep slumber, carried on a time ship hoping to return to where it all began.