Journey's end, a rationalization

it is serious business: speculating on that which cannot be known

The principle function of a poem, especially a prose-poem, is to invoke the universal and to prompt the reader to respond, to enter a dialog. In fact, the most successful poems liberate a storm of creative responses, often more significant that anything the author creates. The corollary of this is to acknowledge that it is a mistake for any author to try to explain themselves.

It begins with Newton, July 5, 1687, with the publication of, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.[i] Working with the discoveries principally of Galileo and Keppler, Newton laid the foundations of physics for the next 230 years and was not challenged until Einstein’s publication of 4 papers in November 1915, his expository masterpieces on General Relativity.[ii]

Newton’s preternatural insights laid the philosophical foundations that would dominate physics and all of the quantitative sciences for the next 250 years; the belief in a reality which we may approach, perhaps never reach, but through measurement, analysis, induction, deduction, may define mathematical models that both predict and exploit the dynamics of the natural world. This belief in an ineluctable reality, metaphysical existence, was the motor that drove science into the 21^st century. Newton’s determinism and elucidation of causality was the platform for science. The development of natural evolution, Freudian psychoanalysis, genetics, chemistry—all were edifices rooted in this substrate.

But the great troublemaker, Einstein, and those who followed laid a different foundation which would undermine metaphysical reality.[iii] The problem first recognized by Newton was that his model required an invisible physical force, gravity, to connect heavenly bodies and that this force must act instantaneously over vast distances. As astronomical measurements became more refined, other problems arose, primarily the unusual behavior of Mercury in its perambulations around the sun. There was nothing in Newton’s model to account for the origin and behavior of gravity. Yet the power of Newton’s mathematics devoured all doubt.

Einstein’s General Relativity solved these conundrums handily by making gravity not a force, but a property of space-time. Masses distorted space-time making dimples and ripples which would influence the movement of other masses and explain the dynamics of Mercury’s unusual orbit. This altered Newton’s metaphysical existence by demonstrating that gravity and the dynamics of the universe resulted from a relationship between space-time and heavenly bodies—relational reality. But Einstein stirred the pot even more violently when he proposed that the photoelectric effect was the product of “bundles” of light—photons—acting not as a wave but as particles on a conducting surface. Soon, wave-particle duality, quantum indeterminacy, quantum entanglement, and even our understanding of the foundations of matter itself, would be called into question.

In his 1946 Nobel Lecture, Wolfgang Pauli, one of the great pioneers of quantum theory, expressed skepticism of the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, despite its successes which would soon revolutionize electronics and our understanding of the quantum world.[iv] He worried that physicists were being seduced by mathematical fictions because different theorists often developed mathematical formalisms for the same phenomena (usually shown to be equivalent). He went further, collaborating with the psychoanalyst Carl Jung to propose that recurring “coincidences” such as premonitions that appear more common than allowed by chance, was evidence for acausal connections between events and perception—“synchronicity.” Thus, perhaps, there was a connection between the physical world and the psyche.[v]

As the quantum world undermined Newton’s determinism and quantum theory changed or brought into question causality, the fundamental question arose as to the source of the weaknesses in quantum theory. While developments in quantum theory have stabilized some of the more troublesome areas, the dominance of metaphysical existence has been shaken and relationalism has risen to provide an alternative path.

What does this have to do with the prose-poem, Journey's End? The images of the poem examine the connection between consciousness, the universe and space-time. These connections, relationships, connect consciousness in death with a receding world leaving only a fading three-dimensional image as a lasting reference for consciousness whose connection with the world is eventually severed. This does not mean that the consciousness no longer exists but that it is no longer a part of the universe. The universe cannot know the fate of the consciousness of the dead since it is no longer connected.

So, the mystery continues.

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[i] Author Isaac Newton, Language Neo-Latin, Publication date 1687, Publication place England, Published in English 1728, LC Class QA803.A53, Original text Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at Latin Wikisource

[ii] 1915, November 4: Einstein abandons the Entwurf theory[1] and submits to the Prussian Academy of Science the first of series of papers, titled "On the General Theory of Relativity".

1915, November 11: Einsein submits "On the General Theory of Relativity (Addendum)", in which he introduces the hypothesis that macroscopic matter could eventually be reduced to "purely electromagnetic processes"[2].

1915, November 18: Einstein submits "Explanation of the Perihelion Motion of Mercury from the General Theory of Relativity", in which a calculation based on the new theory provides the expected result (45'' instead of 18'')

1915, November 25: Einstein submits the definitive version of general relativity in paper titled "The Field Equations of Gravitation", in which he proposed three alternative systems of gravitational field equations, the last two of which were generally covariant.

[THE ABOVE ENTRIES TAKEN FROM https://einsteinrelativelyeasy.com/index.php/einstein/83-the-einstein-field-equations-series]

[iii] Paul Hunt, Existence, Reality and Quantum Cats, The Poetic Justification for Pan-Relationalism, https://medium.com/philosophytoday/existence-reality-and-quantum-cats-7871b1af5735

[iv] Wolfgang Pauli, Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics, Nobel Lecture, December 13, 1946. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/pauli-lecture.pdf

[v] Jung, Carl Gustav, and Wolfgang Ernst Pauli. [1952] 1955. The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, translated from German Naturerklärung und Psyche.