The Material Power of Immaterial Things By Howard Bloom

This cosmos is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.  Among other things, it is replete with immaterial forces that have power over material things.  Yes, immaterial forces.  Forces you and I can’t see.  What in the world do I mean?

At the very birth of the universe in a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, the elementary particles to beat all elementary particles were born.  And they were born by the gazillions.  In a truly random universe when a gazillion things are slammed into existence in the same instant, there should be a gazillion different kinds of those things.  But there weren’t.  There were only thirty six different kinds of quarks.  Born all at once, simultaneously, all across the face of this fresh stuff called time, space and speed.  So this is not a random universe.  Not at all.  It is regimented.  It is constrained.

How in the world could these regularities of quarks come to be?  What was keeping the number of quark forms to such an astonishingly low number?  An immaterial disciplinarian.  Not a god.  But a form-shaper behind what Herman Melville called the pasteboard mask of material reality.

Those first quarks gathered in groups of three, driven by something else immaterial—a communications, compulsion, and propulsion system we call attraction and repulsion.  Where did these attraction and repulsion communiques operate?  In the empty space between the quarks.  And what did they consist of?  Nothing.  No thing.  Invisible fields.  They were, to steal a phrase from Albert Einstein, spooky action at a distance.

Today’s particle physics has managed a workaround.  It says that particles are held together by something material, gluons.  In other words, every mystery comes down to a material particle.  Please.  Give me a break.  Haven’t they heard of the immaterial force called gravity?  Yes, they have.  They’ve boiled the cosmos down to immaterial forces called fields.  And in today’s science, the immaterial fields are sometimes more real than the material things those fields produce.

After the birth of elementary particles came the mass dance of what science calls pressure waves, waves that crossed the face of the cosmos like the waves that travel thousands of miles across the sea.

Waves are far more mysterious than you might think.  In the ocean, water molecules circle up and down.  When they circle up, they make the peak of a wave.  When they circle down, they make a trough.  And when they circle back up, they make the peak of guess what?  Yet another  wave. Yes, a wave with another distinct identity.  But aside from rock and rolling in place, those water molecules do not do any traveling.  Yet something does travel. An immaterial force grabbing hold of material things.  A wave.

Let’s take it from the wave’s point of view.  You are a wave moving across the face of the Atlantic.  You have a distinct identity.  And yet every minute you are made up of a different team of water molecules.  You are never made up of the same constituents from one instant to the next.  You are literally nothing.  You are no thing.

And yet you are real as real can be.  You are so solid that when you come near the shore of Maine, a good surfer can position his board on your back and ride you.  You are so solid that if I go out to the very tip of a rocky outcrop in Maine to get a better glimpse of you, an incoming wave, you, that wave can smash me to smithereens.  Yet, remember, you are not the same team of water molecules from one instant to the next.  You are no thing.  Yes, I can be killed by no-thing.  So can you.

As a wave, you are not a thing.  You are a pattern grabbing hold of one fistful of things after another.  You are a process.  Switching your team of things from moment to moment.  Yet retaining an identity so powerful it can kill me.  So what are you?  An immaterial procedure recruiting solid material things.  Yes, an immaterial procedure.  An immaterial pattern.

Now let’s switch back to minutes after the birth of the cosmos.  You quarks have ganged together in threes.  One form of threesome makes a proton.  Another form of threesome makes a neutron.  In other words, from your threesomeness, from your social gathering of three quarks, something immaterial arises, a higher property that can’t be predicted from mere quarkness.  It’s the ghostly identity we call proton and neutron.  And that emergent identity will be the very essence of what we call material things.  It’s material as hell.  Yet, in a sense, it doesn’t exist.  It is a strange higher personality summoned from the nothingness by a trio of mere quarks.

The higher personality of quark threesomes, like the wave, is nothing.  It is no thing.  And yet that higher identity stamps itself into being all over the universe.  An identical personality appearing everywhere at once.  The strange identity of a proton or a neutron.  Where does that higher identity come from?  How does it come to be?  It is yet another example of the material power of immaterial things.

Cognitive scientist and literary theorist Bill Benzon recalls an experience that helps explain the strange ghosts summoned into existence by the social interaction of quark trios.  In addition to his science, Benzon is a jazz musician.  He explains that when all four members of his jazz quartet are grooving together, at a certain point something higher arises, something with a personality all its own.  It is a melody no individual is playing but that all four musicians can hear.  And instead of performing to each other, these musical virtuosos now play to the melody that no one of them is producing.  A melody that technically does not exist.  Another instance of the material power of immaterial things.

Which brings us back to another mystery of the early universe. Ten thousand years after the big bang, the cosmos is a thick soup of particles, particles in a bump-‘em car smash.  Particles moving at superspeed, colliding with others of their kind, ricocheting off those others and smashing into yet more fast-moving neighbors.

Despite the destructive forces of those smash and bangs, the particles participate in a common enterprise.  First they squeeze together.  Then they move apart.  In dances that ripple from one  end of the cosmos to the other.  In the process they do what the water molecules of the Atlantic will someday do.  First they come together and make the peak of one wave, then they pull apart and make a trough.  Then they come together again and make the peak of yet another wave.  And those waves cross the face of the universe like a sound vibration crossing the face of a cymbal.  They make one more thing that does not exist—music.  In fact, music in a very low B flat.  Forty eight octaves below middle C.

And what is that music?  Another ghost-like reality bringing forth material things.  Or being brought forth by them.  Another hint at the power over matter of immaterial things.

For those of us in science there is a lesson.  Move beyond our obsession with particles.  Move beyond our slavish focus on material things.  Move beyond the science that insists that you can’t understand anything until you break it into bits.  The time has come for science to look up, not down.  The time has come for science to study the mystery of the ephemeral, the mystery of the transcendent, the mystery of form without substance, the mystery of immaterial things.  The time has come for science to probe the higher identities that pop out when you have a social gathering, whether it’s a gathering of atoms, a gathering of dust clouds, a gathering of their products–galaxies, stars, planets and moons.  Or a gathering of complex molecules and cells in you and me.

Yes, the time has come to understand the emergence of “selves,”  the emergence of individualities, the emergence of  identities.

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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.  Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment.  I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.”   For more, see http://howardbloom.net or Home – Howard Bloom Institute