Tag: Roger Penrose

“Fog everywhere” and Other Confusions

Charles Dickens gives us wonderful sociopolitical insight in his serial Bleak House, with his imagery of impenetrable fog in the second paragraph of chapter 1:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier–brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Bradbury & Evans, 1852-1853.

Think of the Trump–Epstein cover-up and the machinations of the U.S. government to attempt to conceal everything in a similar fog. We discussed another dimension of our ignorance with Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that we “are unknown to ourselves”.

Let’s consider a third level of our confusion and how we attempt to extricate ourselves by expressing the world around us through mathematics. For example, the square root of -1 is i. ii is approximately 0.208. To a student encountering this concept for the first time, it can be inscrutable that an imaginary number to the power of itself results in a real number. To quote Wikipedia:

In electrical engineering, signal processing, and similar fields, signals that vary periodically over time are often described as a combination of sinusoidal functions (see Fourier analysis), and these are more conveniently expressed as the sum of exponential functions with imaginary exponents, using Euler’s formula.

Wikipedia, Euler’s formula [with added links]

The esteemed physicist Roger Penrose has said on multiple occasions that he believes the realm of imaginary numbers or complex analysis will be more informative in physics than real numbers. (See his classic book, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.)

Let’s conclude with our inevitable mortality as living beings as another source of perplexity and confusion. As we grow older, half of our mind is fixated on the enjoyment we get from life, while the other half is focused on the anxiety that it is not forever. We attempt to sidestep this anxiety by clinging to the escapist thought that “Besides, it’s always the others who die.”

Is the World Broken?

Gabriel Marcel was a famous 20th century existence-watcher. He kept circling back to conundrums which preoccupied him his entire life.

The first was how to explain the profound difference between a problem and a mystery. He says, for example, that a problem is something that you can surround, but a mystery is something that surrounds you. He also calls into doubt the ideology of scientism (the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality). According to scientism, the story of mankind since the rise of modern science, with people such as Galileo, is the transformation of all mysteries into problems. With the passage of time, those problems would be solved. However, when we look around us at such science-thinkers like Roger Penrose, Neil Turok and Carlo Rovelli, we find that science is becoming more mysterious and the mysteries are increasingly deep, as anyone who follows quantum mechanics can see.

For the second he kept asking, how it is that I both have a body but that I am a body? Think of the phrase “I am somebody” and notice the last word. The physical body cannot be disentangled from personhood.

In 1933, Marcel published the famous play, Le Monde cassé (French: The Broken World). Compare that to the previous article, “Why Is the World So Nightmarish?” discussing Céline’s 1932 Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit). Both of these works describe a human world which is completely adrift, disoriented and soulless.

As an existential thinker, Marcel always watched humanity and did a soul-audit. He was not particularly attentive to the other dimension of our earthly stay, namely political economy. In order to make up for this semi-absence, we bring in Gustav Stresemann, who gives us the lens for it. Stresemann died within weeks of the Wall Street crash of 1929.

A few days before his death, Stresemann, the leading German statesman of his time, gave a speech at the League of Nations. In this, he gave an update on the German economic situation of the moment. He stated that the numbers were superficially encouraging, but that Germany, under the surface, was “dancing on a volcano.”

The concept of a country or indeed the whole world in these straits is very profound. It tells us that as people like Céline and Marcel warn us, the world is potentially broken at all moments because the people do not even have a concept of self-possession. Furthermore, the cracks underneath the foundation of the world economy indicate a dangerous fragility at all times. In this larger sense, Marcel’s concept of the broken world combined with Stresemann’s dancing on a volcano, allow us to glimpse an instability that current education does not cover.