Our intrepid Seeker, who feels entirely justified in wondering why there’s Anything, continues his discussion with the Ghost of Stephen Hawking, who is not quite sure it merits any thinking time. But before things can wrap up, the situation is complicated by the sudden arrival of yet another spirit entity! Part 1 of this dialogue happened here.

Prelude

The Seeker returns to his armchair with a fresh cup of Lemon Balm tea, known in French as Melisse, and takes a slow sip.

Scene Two

Ghost of Stephen Hawking: Ahh! Your enjoyment is truly exquisite. (lost in memories) My lack of a body burns me indeed sometimes!

Seeker: Happy to provide you with vicarious sensuality. As long as it doesn’t get creepy.

Ghost of Stephen Hawking: It wont. I’ve got considerably more ethical substance than some of the denizens I run into around here.

Seeker: So where were we?

GSH: The universe JUST IS.

Seeker: I mean of course we know that it is. Adds little to the comprehension. But why is it?

GSH: Why not?

Seeker: When confronted with phenomena, it is quite naturally a human thing to seek for an explanation of it, to expand one’s understanding and apprehension of the phenomena by seeing what it is a part of, what it is connected to, what are its ramifications, and its causation. Certainly this drove your academic probing of the physical nature of the cosmos during your career. If in youth you began to intensely wonder just exactly how it was that gravity bended space, you did not dismiss the mood of inquiry by blithely declaring ‘why not?’. You can decide that some question cannot be grist for science’s mill, but you can’t claim it is unscientific of me to wonder about it. Or are things different for the disembodied?

GSH: Fair response. But we must distinguish between how things function, what behaviors they exhibit, and the mere naked fact of their existence. Science asks HOW and answers in a supremely competent manner; it doesn’t veer into WHY. I most definitely asked myself how the observable characteristics of in-proximity bodies moved in space, but having exhaustively characterized how gravity operates I never then asked why gravity exists.

Seeker: It just seems like hunting the cause of something or its reason for happening is tightly embedded in all human inquiry, including science. You notice light appearing to bend in water, as when we misjudge the exact location of an underwater seashell, and you hunt the explanation via theory and experimentation.

GSH: True, true. But that’s science!

Seeker: Why not follow this chain of causation back and back to the first cause? It seems like scientists are all about causation when the phenomena is close at hand, but once it reaches the birthing of the cosmos things are declared spooky or off-limits.

GSH: Hmmm. You’re beginning to remind me of Freeman Dyson.

Seeker: Wow! Happy to take that as a compliment. How is Freeman? Really good guy! Earth misses him.

GSH: He’s another one up here who is already semi-ascendant. And before his time. Only put in a few years so far.

Seeker: (smiles) I can half-imagine why. His soul is not so bogged down by purely physical or ‘natural’ concepts. He’s capable of entertaining the spiritual, or the ‘supernatural’.

GSH: (wincing) Watch your language, alive earth human! –SOUL– You speak of and utter “Soul” to me? What possibly could that superstitious word designate?

Seeker: Well for starters, I designate by it whatever you are utilizing to converse with me now. Since you’ve already admitted that the body is out.

GSH: Why not let our mutual search for truth play within reasonable boundaries? In other words, tennis WITH a net as opposed to WITHOUT. We needn’t consider what I am or how my ideas come to you. Instead we should examine their pragmatic veracity and seek ways to weigh them experimentally, scientifically, objectively.

Seeker: Given our somewhat unbelievable present circumstances, I doubt we want to stand on ceremony and presume we can even approximately determine where the border between objective and subjective lies. I mean one of us has a body and one does not!

GSH: Good! Exactly why we should narrow the focus of our dialogue to not wander off into the ethers… (a little plaintive)

Seeker: (gentler) But Stephen, if I may, you are the one — you and your academic brethren — who’ve supposedly without intellectual immodesty been engaged in a half-century quest for ‘Theories of Everything’. For what you call Grand Unification. The final conceptualization purporting to eradicate all future impetus for mystery. Everything means everything. Quite a hollow victory to eliminate half of the stuff before even setting out!

GSH: (winks at him, metaphorically) Recall that my purpose, my directive you could say, is to prod you along into a refinement of your deep questioning by acting as an opponent. Or, if I can, seduce you into error. Let us agree that whereas Science capital-S methodologically avoids the philosophical WHY, there exist other aspects of human cognition, consciousness, which steadfastly — capriciously — refuses this avoidance.

Seeker: Nay — embraces it. Cleaves to it as the most natural thing.

A Brief but Pregnant Silence…

GOSC: (inquisitively) Meoooow!

Seeker: (alarmed) Who for the love of Swedish meatballs was that!?

GSH: Oh Newton help us! Not you again!

Ghost of Schrödinger’s Cat: (jovially) Verily. Tis I. The Ghost of Schrödinger’s Cat. An archangel has granted me dispensation to look in on your discussions, provided I not interfere too crudely.

Seeker: A cat ghost? Who is Schrödinger?

GOSC: Meoooow. I’ll let Hawking explain. I’m not supposed to say too much.

GSH: Was.

Seeker: Huh?

GSH: (with resignation in his voice) Was, not “is”. Schrödinger is no longer among the living.

Seeker: Oh. He liked cats?

GSH: (getting more animated) Unknown. Schrödinger was a great theoretical physicist whose thought experiment posited a cat inside an impenetrable box. No sound or light could escape. Also inside is a radioactive pellet which may or may not “activate” at any instant.

Seeker: Good God! I hope that experiment never became actual!

GOSC: (purrrs… )

GSH: (dismissive) Of course not! The point is that without opening the box no physical observer can know whether the cat is living or dead.

Seeker: (incredulous) That’s the point?! What the heck’s the point of that?

GSH: It beautifully illustrates a central tenet within Quantum reality. You cannot know the superposition of any particle without distinctly measuring it — taking stock of it obsevationally, if you like. Statistically, the cat is neither alive nor dead but in a state of unlimited potentiality. Only the observational act causes one path — one universe — to happen instead of the other.

Seeker: (scratching his head) How is that even ‘Science’? And why on earth did Schrödinger have to get radioactive pellets involved?

GSH: Well, Because…

GOSC: (cuts him off) Meooww. Hawking — let me take this one.

CONTINUED NEXT TIME…

_______RS

Note : You can read the beginning of this dialogue here. And the conclusion, when available, here.
Image : a different artist’s conception of Purgatory.

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