Allen Lane
LET’S start with the basics. Koans (pronounced co-ann or co-arn, depending on who you talk to) are paradoxical vignettes integral to the practice of Zen Buddhism. A grain of sand thrown into the machinery of the mind, their purpose is to frustrate, to inspire and to enlighten.
Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who did much to popularise koans in his classic book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid, saw them as attempts to “break the mind of logic”. Or, more explicitly, ways to stop the mind from using logic where deeper modes of thought are called for.
Some koans, such as the sound made by one hand clapping, have entered the realm of cliché. The purpose of these riddles isn’t to elicit an answer. Rather, it is to stimulate a lengthy mental journey that may lead to unexpected insights.
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Combining Zen Buddhism with fundamental physics, as a new book does, can seem an odd choice, but there are plenty of parallels between the two disciplines. Most notably, both devote themselves to the study of truths unattainable through words alone.
For this reason, the koan is the tool of choice for Anthony Aguirre in Cosmological Koans, his attempt to give readers a flavour of present-day thinking in theoretical physics. As co-founder of the Foundational Questions Institute and a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Aguirre is ideally placed to survey the paradoxical nature of his field.
In the case of physics, the trouble begins with mathematics. It is the language the universe speaks, but most of us who live here can barely string together a sentence. The insights it captures aren’t always easy to visualise or verbalise, resulting in clumsy paradoxes and simplifications that scrub away precision.
That hasn’t stopped generations of physicists (and their predecessors) from using their work to ask profound questions about the nature of reality. Zeno’s paradoxes probed the intrinsic character of time; the Copernican revolution revealed that Earth wasn’t at the centre of creation; thermodynamics taught us that randomness runs reality; relativity banished the notion of a truly impartial observer; quantum mechanics forced us to confront the inherent unknowability of the universe; current cosmology asks if the universe is as it is only because we are here to see it.
“Mathematics is the language the universe speaks, but most of us can barely string together a sentence”
If these are the kinds of questions that have you clamouring for more, then Cosmological Koans is for you. The book threads the paradoxes along the journey of an unnamed 17th-century traveller, journeying from Venice to Japan, sometimes willingly, at other times by chance.
Portions of the story are told in chronological order, others in flashback or flash-forward. The overall impression is one of peering down the fourth dimension, witnessing the traveller’s life happening all at once, in hundreds of different places and different times.
Each of the traveller’s adventures offers an opportunity for Aguirre to tackle a particular topic in fundamental physics. So the wanderings across Asia equate to the many paths an unobserved particle can take in quantum mechanics, while an all-knowing djinn encountered in a desert cave acts as Laplace’s demon, an imagined entity capable of predicting the future trajectories of all particles in the universe.
Some of these analogies are clever, others are laboured to the point of collapse. For example, visualising the flow of the Lhasa river, alternately stopped by dams and enabled by tributaries, is no easier than thinking of current flowing around an electrical circuit. Instead of pairs of Galileos throwing balls at one another in Venetian gondolas, give me beams of light bouncing between mirrors.
Sometimes, dabs of narrative colour serve to obscure rather than enhance. The references to “djinnium” as shorthand for computational power prompt much unnecessary flipping back of pages, as does the coinage of “metakalpa”, where the phrase “a very long time” would do as well.
The book can suffer from an unnecessary orientalism. The djinns are given cod Islamic names (Laplace’s demon becomes djinn Ibn-La-Plaz), the samurai are stoic warriors of superhuman ability and the Buddhist monks are as enigmatic as they are profound. It’s all more Kung Fu Panda than one might wish.
What Aguirre does remarkably well is to find a way of threading many of the most interesting questions in theoretical physics onto a single narrative chain. Everything from the principles of relativity to the diverse interpretations of quantum mechanics by way of entropy, the anthropic principle and the universe’s dramatic inflation soon after the big bang are covered succinctly and accessibly in the course of a few hundred pages. At its heart, the book does offer a compelling answer to the question of how to talk about the un-talk-about-able.
Of course, other approaches are available. Tim Radford’s recent book, The Consolations of Physics, shows the mileage in sideways peeks at science through history and culture. Then there is Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, in which he attempts to harness the power of poetry to the cause of physics, and Helen Czerski’s Storm in a Teacup, which revels in the specific phenomena of daily life.
But Aguirre’s embrace of the koan marks him out. Clearly, for him, the greater the multiplicity of paths – to lapse into the koanesque – the nearer we may get to some sort of enlightenment. About physics, at least.
