Yeah, Jason did ask me to talk a little bit about something
I was interested in.
And of course, that was intimidating and alarming.
And so I had to write something, because that's always
my response.
So I'm going to read a talk.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's good that I had this--
well, I want to thank you for inviting me,
first of all, and for coming.
But it's good that I had this impetus
to write this thing because, you know, now, it's a little essay.
And it's-- I sent it to this internet magazine called
Jacket.
So anyway, this will ultimately be
about my interest in science, but it begins with religion.
So it makes it kind of a good segueway, then, from Dante,
I guess.
"My mother was an evangelical Christian, a fundamentalist.
There was nothing mystical about her religion.
Fundamentalists are nominalists.
They call people to believe on the name of the Lord.
At least, I've heard that phrase.
By nominalism, I mean the sense that words
refer to discrete, non-transferable essences.
What mattered to my mother and people
like her was to know what she would have called the truth.
There was very little emphasis on subjective experience.
I grew up within the fundamentalist framework,
but even as a young child, I was a bit different.
I wanted to correlate dogma with experience.
My mother was quite embarrassed when
I tried to give all my possessions to the poorer child
next door, uncomfortable with that sort of extrapolation,
perhaps.
I wanted to experience raptures.
In that, I was disappointed.
Rapture would have to wait until I discovered art,
but that's another story.
It is often said that fundamentalists
are literalists.
What is seldom said is that they are also materialists.
At least, my mother was.
She believed in the solid, separate reality of things,
indissolubly linked with names.
Metaphor, which exchanges or carries across,
made her uncomfortable.
The Garden of Eden, for instance, was a spot on Earth.
It couldn't also be, for instance, the womb.
A cannot be non-A. Equation is a slippery slope.
And yet, of course, Jesus is the ultimate stand-in.
What happened to him is meant to carry over,
to carry a cross, which is the literal meaning of metaphor,
to us all.
Is it only evangelicals who are in a state of tension
about the relation between the singularity of event
and the promiscuity of metaphor, or is it
the whole Judeo-Christian tradition?
I left Christianity behind in my teenage years.
But predictably, I didn't leave the questions or the habits
of mind I formed within it.
For the last 15 years or so, I've
taken an interest in cosmology and physics.
I don't think it's because I'm looking
for an authoritative view of reality different from the one
I grew up with.
In fact, these sciences don't seem to offer that.
Perhaps it's because reading the Bible
has given me the habit of trying to imagine
the creation and the end.
Religion has given me a taste for ultimate questions.
And I find the concept of the origin
of the universe more mind-boggling, stranger,
more awe-inspiring without theology than with it.
I took to occasionally writing versions of the creation
story in my poems.
Here are two short fragments from my poem,
'The Creation.'" So this isn't the whole thing,
just two pieces of it.
OK.
"Let us move fast enough in a small enough space,
and our travels will take first shape, then substance.
In the beginning, there was measurement.
How much does self-scrutiny resemble mother touch?
I imagine the biblical echoes are evident here.
'Let us make man in our image' becomes 'let us move fast
enough,' et cetera.
And 'in the beginning was the word,' of course,
becomes 'in the beginning, there was measurement.'
I can't remember exactly what the scientific sources were,
but certainly, the mysterious role
of measurement in quantum physics
enters in, as does the equation of energy or movement
with matter or substance.
There is some mischievous impulse behind such rewritings,
of course.
What could be more scandalous than a woman playing God?
But there's also a more serious desire,
one conserved from my days in church,
to unite experience with concept.
What does creation feel like?
How can humans understand it?
Or, more appropriately, how do we not understand it?
How does it feel to stand inside uncertainty?
Like many of you, probably, I take a perverse pleasure
in quantum physics' uncertainty principle.
Is it because quantum fuzziness seems to underwrite metaphor?
The interference pattern on the detector
shows that as long as its trajectory isn't registered,
the single photon has taken both possible paths
from the beam splitter both.
I want to shout this to my poor, dead mother, Eden as--
[LAUGHTER]
--Eden as place on Earth and womb.
Fundamentalism may be a kind of materialism,
but apparently, no one really knows what matter is.
Things with mass are material, but what is mass?
According to physicist Brian Greene's book,
The Fabric of the Cosmos, there are two possible explanations
for mass.
Quote, 'The mass of a particle depends
on how much drag force it experiences as it
wades through the Higgs 'ocean.
The Higgs ocean is a new version of the ether
for-- this is not Brian Greene.
This is me talking about what the Higgs ocean might be.
The Higgs ocean is a new version of the ether formed
by the ubiquitous presence of a theoretical,
as-yet undiscovered particle called the Higgs boson.
'Or else,' Greene continues, 'a similar scenario likely plays
out in string theory.
If a huge collection of strings all vibrate in just the right,
coordinated way throughout all space,
they can provide a uniform background that,
for all intents and purposes, would be indistinguishable from
a Higgs ocean.'
Whatever beautiful mathematics buttresses these theories,
they are clearly still speculative.
And if we don't really know what matter is, then
materialism, and therefore literalism, is in trouble.
Clearly, I take some personal pleasure
in this, though that doesn't mean in the least
that I am a dualist or that I believe
in an afterlife and a spirit world.
I'll finish by briefly discussing the poem,
'Back,' which is the last poem in Up To Speed.
[INAUDIBLE] the hand-off.
OK.