~Merdeka

"... the old search for the absolute is heavy and it has weighed us down for long enough. It implies that there is a stopping point, a final destination; it reeks, really, of Aristotelian belief in the meaningfulness of being at rest, of Newton's absolute space, of hierarchy, in knowledge as well as in society, of stasis.

We have also had enough of the weight of utopianism, which comes of the idea that it is possible to arrive at a description of the ideal society by pure thought, indeed by the thought of one or a few individuals. And, we have had enough of the weight of violence, and its justification in terms of any and all systems by which people can be made to believe in their special access to absolute knowledge.

Against this I would like to set the lightness of the new search for knowledge, which is based in the understanding that the world is a network of relations, that what was once thought to be absolute is always subject to evolution and renegotiation, that the complete truth about the world is not graspable as any single point of view, but only resides in the totality of several or many distinct views. We understand now that there is no meaning to being at rest, and hence no sense for stasis; this new understanding of knowledge might be said to be imbued with the freedom of the principal of inertia and grounded not in space but only in relations. And these develop not in absolute time but only in succession, in progression. Finally, this new view of the universe we aspire to will include a cosmology in which life has a proper and meaningful place in the world. That is, in the end the image I want to leave is that life is light, both because what we are is matter energized by the passage of photons through the biosphere and because what is essential in life is without weight, but only pattern, structure, information. And because the logic of life is continual change, continual motion, continual evolution.

Finally, the new view of the universe is light, in all its senses, because what Darwin has given us, and what we may aspire to generalize to the cosmos as a whole, is a way of thinking about the world which is scientific and mechanistic, but in which the occurrence of novelty - indeed, the perpetual birth of novelty - can be understood.

The old image of the Newtonian universe was as a clock: heavy, insistent, static; in this metaphor one feels both the iron hold of determinism and, behind it, the threat of the clock running down. Further, this was always a religious image as a clock requires a clock maker. Against this I would like to propose a new metaphor for the universe.

For reasons that I thought were quite irrelevant to its content I was drawn to finish this book here, in the greatest city of the planet, my first home. A few weeks ago I took a walk around, looking for a metaphor with which to end this book, a metaphor of a universe constructed, not by a clockmaker standing outside of it but by its elements in a process of evolution, of perhaps negotiation. All of a sudden I realized what I am doing here for, in its endless diversity and variety, what I love about the city is exactly the way it mirrors the cosmos I have been struggling to bring into focus. The city is the model, it has been all around me all the time. The city is an endless negotiation, and endless construction of the new out of the old. No on made the city, there was no city-maker, as there is a clockmaker. If a city can make itself, without a maker, why can't the same not be true for the universe?

Further, a city is a place where novelty may emerge without violence, where we might imagine a continual process of improvement without revolution, and in which we need respect nothing higher than ourselves, but are confronted with each other as the makers of our shared world. We all made it, or no one did, we are of it, and to be of it and to be of its makers is the same thing.

So there never was a God, no pilot who made the world by imposing order on chaos and who remains outside, watching and proscribing. And Nietzsche now also is dead. The eternal return, the eternal heat death, are no longer threats, they will never come, nor will heaven. The world will always be here, and it will always be different, more varied, more interesting, more alive, but still always the world in all its incompleteness and complexity. There is nothing behind it, no absolute platonic world to transcend to. All there is of Nature is what is around us. All there is of being is relations among real, sensible things. All we have of natural law is a world that has made itself. All we expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility. All we may gain of knowledge must be drawn from what we can see with our own eyes. All we may look up to as judges are each other. All that is possible of utopia is what we make with our own hands. Let that be enough."

Lee Smolin (Theoretical Physicist and Professor of Physics at the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State University)