‘Leaps in human understanding begin with imagination.’ Photo: The ouroboros, August Kekulé’s inspiration for the structure of benzene
Having a wobble: Keith Denerley’s Thought for the week
‘When Newton formulated his theories of gravity, he saw himself as discovering the laws of God.’
I made a discovery last week. I’d been re-reading Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. Alexander is a neurosurgeon who, after a remarkable out-of-body experience, realised that the seat of consciousness is not the brain, but on another dimension altogether. He dares to summarise quantum physics thus: ‘All the objects in the physical universe are made up of atoms. Atoms, in turn, are made up of protons, electrons and neutrons. These, in turn, are (as physicists also discovered in the early years of the twentieth century) all particles. And particles are made up of… Well, quite frankly, physicists don’t really know. But one thing that we do know about particles is that each one is connected to every other one in the universe.’
How on earth can this be? Perhaps instead of picturing a lump of balls so small that any microscope would demolish them (for the observer always disturbs the observed, and there is no such thing as pure objectivity), one could imagine a jelly – the sort one finds at children’s parties, turned out from a mould in the shape of a castle, a mountain, or an animal, on a plate all aquiver.
Touch the jelly anywhere, and the vibration travels right through the mass. Imagine! Maybe telepathy is possible from Europe to Australia. Perhaps prayer can affect the fluttering of a butterfly’s wing in California. Suppose it actually matters whether I fill my mind with good thoughts or bad. ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God…’
I then remembered a wave machine we once observed in school. When we dropped three pebbles simultaneously into the pool, the waves spread out and went through each other. On this analogy, the ‘particles’ of ultimate matter seem rather to be ‘centres of vibration’.
Most leaps forward in human understanding begin with imagination. August Kekulé, for example, who founded the theory of chemical structure, discovered the shape of the benzene molecule in a daydream. He was stuck in his work, he said, and began to doze, whereupon ‘the atoms were gamboling before my eyes… My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions… could now distinguish larger structures… all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and… spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.’
When Newton formulated his theories of gravity, he saw himself as discovering the laws of God. Can we perhaps wonder, as we contemplate our primordial jelly, whether ‘underneath are the everlasting arms’?
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