Swerve

So I practice. Visualize space not as empty, but as overflowing with sensitivity and awareness: not an emptiness, but an ocean. Picture each supposed atomic particle as a world of luxuriant life, too tiny to bother with the occasional comet-like photon blazing by. What if there is not a single still, dead thing in all the universe? Turn the whole thing upside down. "An object at rest tends to remain so," intoned Mr. Newton: but as it turns out there is no such thing as an object, let alone one at rest. Everything that looks like an object turns out to be an eddy, holding its character only so long as the flow of the river and the obstructions it flows against remain. And the river and the pylon in turn are eddies, arising from larger flows and greater obstructions. If you try to understand why an eddy behaves as it does by scooping up the water it's made of and examining it in a bucket, the progress you'll make will be meager. "See? An eddy isn't real!" declares the Newtonian, proudly displaying the contents of his bucket. "It's an illusion!" And before his back is turned the eddy is there again, swirling in the same way, entirely untroubled by the interruption. Not real. Sure.

It actually matters, how we think about space. It matters dreadfully. We are sick from our delusions of vast empty spaces speckled here and there with inert particles, billiard-balls flying about from a dimly-conceived cosmic Break. This particle moves because something bumped into it, and that something moved because something else bumped into it, and so on. Why did anything ever move at all? Oh, that is a forbidden question! Only a very naughty child would ask that. 

Lucretius saw it: that to explain movement at all you had to endow atoms with a capacity, an inclination even, to swerve. You can worriedly push the necessity farther and farther away and farther back in time; you can assert, rather improbably, that there was just One Big Swerve a long, long time ago -- call it the Big Bang, if you like -- but something, at some point, swerved. Is it not more reasonable -- since we daily experience ourselves swerving here and there -- to assume that everything everywhere is swerving all the time?

Newton and Einstein, of course, were much smarter men than I am. The story goes that when Einstein first realized that his relativity equations accounted for the "wrongness" of Mercury's orbit -- its tiny but persistent deviation from Newton's laws -- he was shocked into silence for days. Had he actually seen into reality? Apparently so. 

But even he, though his faith was strong, could not demonstrate an deterministic universe. I am way beyond my writ, now -- I readily confess it -- but my point is, so are you. We know fuck-all about it. A little humility is in order here.