Bibliopath #25: In which we make up everything
Dear reader,
Believe me, I never thought it would come to such an extraordinary step—but let's talk about physics.
A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrates and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.
This comes from the end of the Fourth Lesson of Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist with a gift for explaining simply without dumbing down, and who writes like a poet.
Gasp. But Guan, I hear you say, why would choose to read a book on physics for fun? That's so ... (looks around, worried) ... high school.
Well, let's look at that sentence again. Rovelli is describing particles—the level of matter smaller than protons and neutrons, which includes quarks (which, as Rovelli points out, was named from a phrase in James Joyce). Just like an ocean is made up of billions of individual drops of water, just as a human body is held together with individual skin cells, so the universe is made up of these elements—even though they are hard to detect and measure and especially to predict.
It's a little cliched perhaps to end with a list of elements but what saves it for me is that unexpected item—"the smiling faces of the young at parties", which both gives human context to the rest, and brings us to a viewpoint to see that last: "the night sky studded with stars".
The parenthetical, "which vibrates and fluctuate constantly ...", is both a summary of what he's been describing—the equations that physicists use to describe matter at the particle level are currently inadequate for the task—but also contrasted with the greatness of the task at hand: particles create a reality that we cannot yet describe.
And as Rovelli points out, this is what language does as well—each speech, each page, each thought is created from letters and from words and from sentences. And so, in this sentence both combine, as he uses a handful of letters to leave us marvelling at the immense mystery of two languages, and the majesty of what, as the tired joke goes, makes up everything.
Constantly in awe,
Guan