Amateur Night in the Cosmic Café

              For those of us who can’t get enough of cosmological speculation, quantum physics, and theories of everything, I, like you, have questions. There are two of them which, simply by pondering them, my life has been enriched. Sometimes, that is all we really need.

Let’s begin here: There is an astrophysicist and esteemed cosmic interpreter named Janna Levin.  If you have never read her books, (like Black Hole Blues or Black Hole Survivor Guide), please put them on your list. They are not only mind boggling; they are perspective shattering. And what we all need these days is a good shattering of our perspectives.

              Better yet, do a search on your favorite video-pimping web site for one of her talks. They are captivating. Here is the first question I would love to ask her, one ponderously conceived while watching – for at least the third time – a recent interview of Professor Levin by Mayim Bialik:

                            Could it be that we are Hawking radiation?

Put very simply, Hawking radiation, as discovered by Stephen Hawking, refers to the fact that black holes emit radiation, slowly losing their mass over time. This is counter to our earlier belief that nothing, not even light, can escape the heavy-handed gravity of a black hole. As it turns out, they spew out massive streams of radiation as if they had sprung a leak at both ends.

Here’s why that matters for this discussion. All particles come in pairs, entangled pairs. In lay-speak if one spins to the left, the other inevitably spins to the right. Put another way, they are oppositely charged, and if they meet, they annihilate one another. (I prefer to think that they join hands and jump off the ledge of existence, desiring nothing further.)

              Take a deep breath. Let me say that I have already allowed my world view to cast its net into some pretty strange places. I am rather comfortable accepting that, for example, we are tiny quantum fields living in a giant quantum field and not the ape-like evolved species we thought ourselves to be. That alone took deep study to reconcile with my spiritual beliefs. But I have willingly and joyfully spent hours listening to the likes of Brian Greene, Leonard Suskind, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and many others who have fed my personal “black hole of curiosity” for many years now. Lately, the journey they have taken me on has been supplemented (and stretched) by probing in the opposite direction with the Gnostic texts, Sumerian mysteries, Bhagavad-Gita, and lately, the Pistis Sophia and Innana, Queen of Heaven and Earth.  

For me, the most curious thing about black holes is that they figured out a way to disentangle those particle pairs somehow, instantaneously propelling one out into space while absorbing the other beyond the event horizon, where it can never escape. As far as we know.

For years, it was sad for me to contemplate the idea of that kind of forced separation until I discovered the Gnostic accounts of Sophia. Strangely parallel to what I picture happening with the black holes and entangled particles, this goddess of wisdom, the youngest of the divine emanations known as Aeons, decides she wants to know the unknowable. Since Aeons could only emanate in male-female pairs, Sophia, unwilling to compromise, performs an unsanctioned and apparently unthinkable act: she attempts to acquire knowledge without her paired partner.  

The story goes that this resulted in her giving birth to the Demiurge, although I am withholding judgment on that. My suspicion is that her partner turned into the Demiurge without her to guide him, kind of the reverse of Adam’s “creating” the flawed Eve from his ribcage. Choose your own path here.

Consider that, for entangled particles, facing their destiny means annihilation. What if they have a choice, and in some unknown, alchemic cauldron – like a black hole maybe – there are billions and billions of Sophia-like particles, spinning to the left no doubt, that fracture off through an imperceivable force hidden on the event horizon and free themselves from a most unsatisfying destiny? To me, it sounds like something any self-respecting left-handed particle ought to do.

Although there is more than one source for information about Sophia, I’m just focusing on a broad-brush view because I am not interested in writing a whole book about this. For me the central point is that Sophia chose to explore on her own, to acquire knowledge on her own. For the fun of it.

I can relate.

So that is the first question I would ask Janna Levin: could we, male or female, possibly be created from Hawking radiation? If you would like to know the second question, stay tuned because I will get to that in another post. But first, I want to hear how all this strikes you as a reader. I really prefer a conversation at this point because, frankly, my Sophia-self is still quite nascent, and wouldn’t mind a bit of company on this journey.

Note that I am not interested in establishing any credentials for this discussion. This is Amateur hour.  Curiosity and a desire to find psychological nourishment in pursuing deep questions is sufficient. And we amateur speculators tend to have a lot of that. How beautiful that there are such “cosmic interpreters” as mentioned above who enjoy breaking this stuff down into digestible bites for us to consume, speculate upon, and indulge in from new perspectives. That is called Creative Imagination, and I think that phrase is truer than we know. Let’s refuse to annihilate our own musings in the face of what is truly a phenomenal Universe still creating itself.

Go ahead, give yourself permission to unleash your creative imagination. You don’t need a single degree or signed and stamped piece of paper to do that.

It is your birthright.

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