A Sermon by Janet Joyner

for the Winston-Salem Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

September 17, 2006

A number of you have been wondering, from the title I’ve chosen, just what I’m going to talk about. Well, the title is deliberately mysterious. It’s a trick: to get you here and then deliver a Lesbian rant.

Titles, in our market-savvy world, have become ultimate teasers. Yet, in another domain, most teachers of language, and especially teachers of composition, have a collection of good title stories that represent the title as “dodge” – how NOT to address the question at hand. My favorite dodge/title story comes from France. The composition in question was on an assigned topic, Le Hibou (The Owl), written by a third- grader with the preposterous name of Émérantine DuCloz. This is how it would go in translation: The Owl. I don’t know much about owls, so I’m going to choose another animal: The Cow. The cow has six sides: a front, a back, a left, a right, a bottom and a top.

So: Threads, Strings and Poppies. Last year I heard Brian Greene, the famous physicist and string-theory specialist, lecture at the School of the Arts. Greene has that rare capacity of simplifying the complex – which probably means he really understands it. He can translate physics-speak about general relativity and the big world of space or quantum mechanics and the tiny world of subatomic particles into a language you think you understand. And he can make you believe that a single unified theory that can account simultaneously for both of these worlds is not only patently possible, but just around the corner.

During Greene’s talk, I recalled an essay that I read as a freshman in college by the 16^th century mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal. The essay has remained with me all these years because of its astonishing power of conception, of imagining both the big and the little worlds to their utmost extremes, along a single continuum. Which is what I was understanding Greene’s work in string theory to be about.

So, here I am thinking about the universe and powers of conception . . . (and children and education, of course) but if I had had the temerity to entitle this “The Universe and Powers of Conception,” something I can hardly claim to know about, at least not in the way I really do know about developmental issues in language acquisition, and pluperfect subjunctives, and French literature . . . if I had declared that as my topic, then you would have probably all stayed home . . . and rightly so.

And, like little Émérantine, I could still give us all a way out. I could say I don’t know anything about threads and strings so I’m going to talk about poppies. Then you all could go, and that would leave just me and our Drug Czar, Jim Campbell. But that’s not the kind of poppies I have in mind, Jim.

So, here we go: When I was a child, I used to wonder why there was anything at all instead of nothing. Much later, I would learn that other people had wondered the same thing too, for a very long time. (Blaise Pascal, of the threads in my title, would be the first one to articulate it, for me, as adult. ) And as it turns out now, these many years later, if string/M-theory is correct, nothing may not, in fact, exist. There may be no nothingness. But we didn’t know that at the time, any of us. And we still don’t . . . yet.

As a child, I spent a lot of time gazing at the night sky. In the summer, in low-country South Carolina, in the days before television, air-conditioning and towns illuminated by street lights, we spent the time between supper and bedtime on the porch or in the yard in the “cool of evening” with its canopy of constellations and the incredible Milky Way twinkling away.

With the comforting sound of adult conversation and laughter in the background, I learned to recognize and follow the ever-rotating journeys (from our perspective) of Orion, the Pleiades, the Dippers and a host of constellations that we have taken as familiars since the time our species first began looking at the sky.

To celebrate my sixth birthday, in May of 1942 (the year I would be beginning school, and quite possibly to encourage a budding interest in science – my father was a mathematician), my parents took me to the then-new Hayden Planetarium, which stunned me, simply dazzled me, with its domed ceiling and light show of the heavens projected on the ceiling.

This stuff still fascinates me. We live on a small planet that circles just an average sun (which at 5 billion years is halfway through its life-span). And that sun is on the outskirts of a galaxy that is just one among billions . . . in a universe that is quite possibly just one of many, and that may, in fact, be either flat or spherical, or saddle-shaped (but of no other shape) if string/M-theory turns out to be right.

I notice (now) that my question back then (the why?) arose from observing, from observing something so vast, so different, so far away . . . just from looking, really looking, enough to notice when things were different. “Why?”

So that’s the first of my themes: the importance of looking, of seeing in provoking the power of conception.

Threads. And Powers of Conception. Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662 (39 yrs), mathematician and physicist. At 16 he wrote a treatise on cones. At 18 he invented a calculating machine. We owe to him the laws of atmospheric pressure and the equilibrium of liquids, the arithmetic triangle, the hydraulic press and the theory of the gaming wheel. He precedes Isaac Newton by 20 years, but he was Newton’s contemporary for 19 years. If he’d lived longer, and if he hadn’t got mixed up with the Jansenists and their brand of Christianity, Pascal might have pursued the observations and conceptions about water in a bucket that led Newton to discover the laws of gravity – which still work, of course, on the scale for which they were intended. But Pascal was so puzzled by how a corporeal, material body could have a mind (which he considered the spiritual realm since it wasn’t material) that he turned to trying to find “evidence” in that direction. And the last years of his short life were devoted to meditation in that arena.

He wrote down these thoughts on scraps of paper and strung the scraps on threads, which he hung from the ceiling. The different threads represented different strands of thoughts. At his death, the strands were collected and published just in the order of the scraps on the threads. The collection is called Thoughts. And some of these are probably familiar to you: “Man is only a reed . . . but he is a thinking reed.” Or “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t comprehend.” But it is his thought #72 on our powers of conception which Greene’s lecture brought back to me.

#72 is one of Pascal’s longer meditations. The date is sometime between 1658 and1662 (Newton would have been between 15 and 19 years old). In #72 Pascal has us project our imagination as far out into the visible world of planets and stars as possible. “But if our view be arrested there,” he says, “let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature would in supplying material for conception . . . The whole visible world is but an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature”

Pascal then has us go in the opposite direction and imagine the smallest of worlds, and the smallest of creatures on that world, which he depicts as a “mite with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humors in the blood, drops in the humors, vapors in the drops . . . ” And again, once we have exhausted our powers of conception, we are just at the starting point of the particle world.

#72 depicts us, then, as creatures of the middle ground whose powers of conception are forever incapable of capturing the extremes of the two worlds, the macro and the micro.

And Pascal will spend the last four years of his thinking in trying to find evidence for the one unifying principle that the Jansenists would call God. And, of course, he doesn’t succeed. He finally opts for his now famous “bet”: Since you can’t know, you have two choices: Either you bet that there is a God and live accordingly; then when you die and find out He exists, you’ll have won everything; if you find out He doesn’t exist, you’ll have lost nothing. But if you bet that He doesn’t exist (and really live it up), and then you find out that He does, you’ll have lost everything.

(When I dug out my college text and reread the “bet’ in preparing for today, I discovered that with my 1954 powers of conception I had written in the margin: “He doesn’t mention, however, that if She doesn’t exist and you chose to live frugally and altruistically as if She did exist, then you would have missed some great good times.”)

So much for Threads.

Strings and the Power of Conception. I’m really not going to say much about string theory, or string/M-theory, as it’s called today. I’ve only attended one lecture and read one book, but what a book it is: The Fabric of the Cosmos.

The basic revolution that string theory brings to our understanding of subatomic particles is that protons and electrons may not be the spaceless dots we used to think they were in the standard view of particles. Instead, they may be vibrating filaments of energy, one-dimensional strings of energy. They do occupy some space. If this is so, it changes everything.

Imagine a world with more than three spatial dimensions. What would they be? String theorists postulate some “furled,” or curled-up dimensions (seven more than the three dimensions that are “unfurled” in the world we experience – left/right, forward/backward, up/down. Imagine a flat universe, not like the ancients’ perception – where you’d come to the edge and drop off – but a universe like a video game where you’d wrap around and come back to the opposite frame. Imagine a world that had no beginning, no time zero, but a cyclical world in which blast, expansion, contraction, blast, expansion, contraction are all that there is or ever has been.

The second revolution in string theory, called M-theory, views quarks (the smallest particles into which protons and electrons have been divided) as “flat” things. They call them branes – b.r.a.n.e.s. – and this theory holds that among the several kinds of branes are 1-brane, 2-brane, 3-brane, and p-brane. A 3-brane would be two flat things joined by an open string.

Greene thinks the 3-brane scenario holds the greatest promise of refining some of the knotty issues not dealt with in general relativity, especially with the big bang and the role of gravity. “A common misconception,” Greene says, “is that the big bang provides a theory of cosmic origins. It doesn’t . . . [The] big bang is a theory that delineates cosmic evolution from a split second after whatever happened to bring the universe into existence, but it says nothing at all about time zero itself. And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all. In fact, if you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize the big bang presents us with quite a puzzle. At the huge densities of matter and energy characteristic of the universe’s earliest moments, gravity was by far the dominant force. But gravity is an attractive force.”

How does that jibe with the expanding universe?

But in the 1980s, with the M-theory revolution, an old observation of Einstein’s was resurrected in a sparkling new form, giving rise to the concept of inflationary cosmology. That old observation was that under certain conditions gravity could become repulsive, and according to the theory the necessary conditions prevailed during the earliest moments of cosmic history. So, what happens in this brane-world scenario is not a big bang but a big splat.

But notice, there had to be somebody looking for something who knew enough about the physics canon to recall Einstein’s old theory that even he had thought too insignificant to continue working on.

If the brane-world scenario turns out to be true, we have to rethink everything – the shape of the universe, to start with (it may be flat, or spherical, or saddle-shaped but no other shape); and the cosmos and time may be cyclical. So there would be no time zero, no nothingness. Greene thinks, as do many of his colleagues, that the cosmos may be quantum mechanics writ large. And strange as this stuff seems, he does make it sound quite plausible. (I, of course, am tempted to scribble in Greene’s margins: Well, you may have explained away “nothingness,” but that still doesn’t explain why there’s “something.”)

There is a chance that upcoming experiments, even next year, will bring string theory within the realm of observable physics and become an experimental science. A whole new generation of technology is about to give us the most extraordinary powers of “seeing” into both the macro and micro worlds that were unthinkable even a decade ago.

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, is scheduled for completion in 2007. They think its acceleration will be powerful enough to produce small black holes. Evidence of extra dimensions is what theorists hope for. But how do you see the unseeable? By piggybacking on the law of conservation of energy. If after splitting the particle, there is less measurable energy than in the beginning, the only place the energy could go is to slip into one of the tiny furled dimensions we can’t “see.” If the experiments next year do in fact corroborate the “disappearance of energy,” string theorists will be encouraged that they are on the right track.

Last week’s Time magazine carries an article about astronomer Richard Ellis’s telescopic “bagging” of three celestial objects believed to be early galaxies, from a mere 500 million years after the big bang. What fascinates me about that story is the enhanced power of seeing by which he “bagged” them. (The current technology distance record is 1 billion years after BB or BS.) This enhanced power of “seeing” comes from another dusted-off theory of Einstein who thought the possibility too rare to be significant. That theory was that gravity itself could be a “lens” for distorting and reflecting light coming from behind. Einstein was wrong about the frequency probability, but not the fact; and the “gravity lens,” as it’s called, is an instance of using knowledge to enhance the limited powers of technology and has become the cornerstone of modern cosmology. But somebody had to recall that old theory and see it in a new way.

What I find so compelling, dramatic really, in Greene’s long story that weaves the fabric of our cosmos is the cumulative power of a very long chain of seeing, questioning and conceiving. It is a kind of connection . . . a faith we have in each other that the quest will be dedicated to accuracy. It is honest work. It’s real shock and awe. But we’ve all but expunged these kinds of surveys of a canon, surveys of a whole body of knowledge, from our undergraduate curricula. I think we need to demystify and dejargonize them the way Greene does and re-instate them – much, much earlier. We are becoming far too illiterate. Which means ignorant of past lights. Which diminishes our powers of conception.

If you want to teach middle- and high-schoolers to really learn to read, then give them texts that require their full attention. Something to chew on, to measure themselves against, to aspire to. If they can chat, or multitask, or do group work about a text, then the text isn’t worthy of them. And we waste the opportunity to expose them to what is truly awesome: a mind following the traces of a mind. And this should be across the board, in all disciplines. Exposure to the BIG LOOK is crucial. For the powers of conception, it matters that a physicist reads Pascal and plays an instrument with strings that vibrate. That’s my second point. Which brings me to . . .

The poppies. When I was a child, each Memorial Day we schoolchildren were given red paper poppies to pin to our shirts, and we were marched down town to the World War I memorial statue. Somebody always read the poem by the Canadian Army med corps physician, Lt. Colonel John McCrae. It’s one many of you will know:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead.

Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

I had to search out the lines following those opening ones that every schoolchild used to know. I had forgotten the part where the Dead speak. I guess, as a child, I blocked out the bits about the war, perhaps because we were in one again, by then, and our daddies were over there; or maybe it was all just too much. But the lines I have never forgotten are the last ones in the poem, lines which have always remained, for me, emblematic of some kind of tribal connection, and expectation . . . as though we were in the midst of some kind of solemn relay race, and that one day our turn would come to grab the stick and run . . . to where or to do what, I didn’t know. Here are those last lines:

            To you from falling hands we throw

            The torch, be yours to hold it high.

            If ye break faith with us who die,

            We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

            In Flanders Fields.

So here’s the rant: What is the faith we should not break? For my part, I think it’s like that child’s view of a solemn relay. It’s about connection, and expectation, about what we owe, and what we give. It’s about truth – looking for it, and telling it.

And one of its facets is a beam that streams from so far back that it stretches beyond the invisible and yet still arrives to illumine the path of each child . . . who, by his or her birthright, is entitled to a real adolescence that accomplishes its task: the second birthing, the developmental stage of self-definition that nature intended.