The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  IV

  Archaeology is the science of man’s evening, not of his midday triumphs. I have spoken of my visit to a flame-wreathed marsh at nightfall. All in it had been substance, matter, trailing wires and old sandwich wrappings, broken toys and iron bedsteads. Yet there was nothing present that science could not reduce into its elements, nothing that was not the product of the urban world whose far-off towers had risen gleaming in the dusk beyond the marsh. There on the city dump had lain the shabby debris of life: the waxen fragment of an old record that had stolen a human heart, wilted flowers among smashed beer cans, the castaway knife of a murderer, along with a broken tablespoon. It was all a maze of invisible, floating connections, and would be until the last man perished. These forlorn materials had all been subjected to the dissolving power of the human mind. They had been wrenched from deep veins of rock, boiled in great crucibles, and carried miles from their origins. They had assumed shapes that, though material enough, had existed first as blueprints in the profound darkness of a living brain. They had been defined before their existence, named and given shape in the puff of air that we call a word. That word had been evoked in a skull box which, with all its contained powers and lurking paradoxes, has arisen in ways we can only dimly retrace.

  Einstein is reputed to have once remarked that he refused to believe that God plays at dice with the universe. But as we survey the long backward course of history, it would appear that in the phenomenal world the open-endedness of time is unexpectedly an essential element of His creation. Whenever an infant is born, the dice, in the shape of genes and enzymes and the intangibles of chance environment, are being rolled again, as when that smoky figure from the fire hissed in my ear the tragedy of the cast-off infants of the city. Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born—but who, nevertheless, are being unmanifest, a lurking potential in the dark storehouse of the void.

  Today, in spite of that web of law, that network of forces which the past century sought to string to the ends of the universe, a strange unexpectedness lingers about our world. This change in viewpoint, which has frequently escaped our attention, can be illustrated in the remark of Heinrich Hertz, the nineteenth-century experimenter in the electromagnetic field. “The most important problem which our conscious knowledge of nature should enable us to solve,” Hertz stated, “is the anticipation of future events, so that we may arrange our present affairs in accordance with such anticipation.”

  There is an attraction about this philosophy that causes it to linger in the lay mind and, as a short-term prospect, in the minds of many scientists and technologists. It implies a tidiness that is infinitely attractive to man, increasingly a homeless orphan lost in the vast abysses of space and time. Hertz’s remark seems to offer surcease from uncertainty, power contained, the universe understood, the future apprehended before its emergence. The previous Elizabethan age, by contrast, had often attached to its legal documents a humble obeisance to life’s uncertainties expressed in the phrase “by the mutability of fortune and favor.” The men of Shakespeare’s century may have known less of science, but they knew only too well what unexpected overthrow was implied in the frown of a monarch or a breath of the plague.

  The twentieth century, on the other hand, surveys a totally new universe. That our cosmological conceptions bear a relationship to the past is obvious, that some of the power of which Hertz dreamed lies in our hands is all too evident, but never before in human history has the mind soared higher and seen less to cheer its complacency. We have heard much of science as the endless frontier, but we whose immediate ancestors were seekers of gold among great mountains and gloomy forests are easily susceptible to a simplistic conception of the word frontier as something conquerable in its totality. We assume that, with enough time and expenditure of energy, the ore will be extracted and the forests computed in board feet of lumber. A tamed wilderness will subject itself to man.

  Not so the wilderness beyond the stars or concealed in the infinitesimal world beneath the atom. Wise reflection will lead us to recognize that we have come upon a different and less conquerable region. Forays across its border already suggest that man’s dream of mastering all aspects of nature takes no account of his limitations in time and space or of his own senses, augmented though they may be by his technological devices. Even the thought that he can bring to bear upon that frontier is limited in quantity by the number of trained minds that can sustain such an adventure. Ever more expensive grow the tools with which research can be sustained, ever more diverse the social problems which that research, in its technological phase, promotes. To take one single example: who would have dreamed that a tube connecting two lenses of glass would pierce into the swarming depths of our being, force upon us incredible feats of sanitary engineering, master the plague, and create that giant upsurge out of unloosened nature that we call the population explosion?

  The Roman Empire is a past event in history, yet by analogy it presents us with a small scale model comparable to the endless frontier of science. A great political and military machine had expanded outward to the limits of the known world. Its lines of communication grew ever more tenuous, taxes rose fantastically, the disaffected and alienated within its borders steadily increased. By the time of the barbarian invasions the vast structure was already dying of inanition. Yet that empire lasted far longer than the world of science has yet endured.

  But what of the empire of science? Does not its word leap fast as light, is it not a creator of incalculable wealth, is not space its plaything? Its weapons are monstrous; its eye is capable of peering beyond millions of light-years. There is one dubious answer to this buoyant optimism: science is human; it is of human devising and manufacture. It has not prevented war; it has perfected it. It has not abolished cruelty or corruption; it has enabled these abominations to be practiced on a scale unknown before in human history.

  Science is a solver of problems, but it is dealing with the limitless, just as, in a cruder way, were the Romans. Solutions to problems create problems; their solutions, in turn, multiply into additional problems that escape out of scientific hands like noxious insects into the interstices of the social fabric. The rate of growth is geometric, and the vibrations set up can even now be detected in our institutions. This is what the Scottish biologist D’Arcy Thompson called the evolution of contingency. It is no longer represented by the long, slow turn of world time as the geologist has known it. Contingency has escaped into human hands and flickers unseen behind every whirl of our machines, every pronouncement of political policy.

  Each one of us before his death looks back upon a childhood whose ways now seem as remote as those of Rome. “Daddy,” the small daughter of a friend of mine recently asked, “tell me how it was in olden days.” As my kindly friend groped amidst his classical history, he suddenly realized with a slight shock that his daughter wanted nothing more than an account of his own childhood. It was forty years away and it was already “olden days.” “There was a time,” he said slowly to the enchanted child, “called the years of the Great Depression. In that time there was a very great deal to eat, but men could not buy it. Little girls were scarcer than now. You see,” he said painfully, “their fathers could not afford them, and they were not born.” He made a half-apologetic gesture to the empty room, as if to a gathering of small reproachful ghosts. “There was a monster we never understood called Overproduction. There were,” and his voice trailed hopelessly into silence, “so many dragons in that time you could not believe it. And there was a very civilized nation where little girls were taken from their parents. . . .” He could not go on. The eyes from Ausch witz, he told me later, would not permit him.

  V

  Recently, I passed a cemetery in a particularly bleak countryside. Adjoining the multitude of stark upthrust gray stones was an incongruous row of six transparent telephone booths erected in that spot for reasons best known to the communications indust
ry. Were they placed there for the midnight convenience of the dead, or for the midday visitors who might attempt speech with the silent people beyond the fence? It was difficult to determine, but I thought the episode suggestive of our dilemma.

  An instrument for communication, erected by a powerful unseen intelligence, was at my command, but I suspect—although I was oddly averse to trying to find out—that the wires did not run in the proper direction, and that there was something disconnected or disjointed about the whole endeavor. It was, I fear, symbolic of an unexpected aspect of our universe, a universe that, however strung with connecting threads, is endowed with an open-ended and perverse quality we shall never completely master. Nature contains that which does not concern us, and has no intention of taking us into its confidence. It may provide us with receiving boxes of white bone as cunning in their way as the wired booths in the cemetery, but, like these, they appear to lack some essential ingredient of genuine connection. As we consider what appears to be the chance emergence of photosynthesis, which turns the light of a far star into green leaves, or the creation of the phenomenon of sex that causes the cards at the gaming table of life to be shuffled with increasing frequency and into ever more diverse combinations, it should be plain that nature contains the roiling unrest of a tornado. It is not the self-contained stately palace of the eighteenth-century philosophers, a palace whose doorstep was always in precisely the same position.

  From the oscillating universe, beating like a gigantic heart, to the puzzling existence of antimatter, order, in a human sense, is at least partially an illusion. Ours, in reality, is the order of a time, and of an insignificant fraction of the cosmos, seen by the limited senses of a finite creature. Behind the appearance, as even one group of primitive philosophers, the Hopi, have grasped, lurks being unmanifest, whose range and number exceed the real. This is why the unexpected will always confront us; this is why the endless frontier is really endless. This is why the half-formed chaos of the marsh moved me as profoundly as though a new prophetic shape induced by us had risen monstrously from dangling wire and crumpled cardboard.

  We are more dangerous than we seem and more potent in our ability to materialize the unexpected that is drawn from our own minds. “Force maketh Nature more violent in the Returne,” Francis Bacon had once written. In the end, this is her primary quality. Her creature man partakes of that essence, and it is well that he consider it in contemplation and not always in action. To the unexpected nature of the universe man owes his being. More than any other living creature he contains, unknowingly, the shapes and forms of an uncreated future to be drawn from his own substance. The history of this unhappy century should prove a drastic warning of his powers of dissolution, even when directed upon himself. Waste, uncertain marshes, lie close to reality in our heads. Shapes as yet unevoked had best be left lying amidst those spectral bog lights, lest the drifting smoke of dreams merge imperceptibly, as once it did, with the choking real fumes from the ovens of Belsen and Buchenwald.

  “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped,” Emerson had noted in his journal, “the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly.” Wisdom interfused with compassion should be the consequence of that discovery, for at the same moment one aspect of the unexpected universe will have been genuinely revealed. It lies deep-hidden in the human heart, and not at the peripheries of space. Both the light we seek and the shadows that we fear are projected from within. It is through ourselves that the organic procession pauses, hesitates, or renews its journey. “We have learned to ask terrible questions,” exclaimed that same thinker in the dawn of Victorian science. Perhaps it is just for this that the Unseen Player in the void has rolled his equally terrible dice. Out of the self-knowledge gained by putting dreadful questions man achieves his final dignity.

  *For purposes of space I have chosen to ignore the short-lived doctrine of the early century known as catastrophism, since I have treated it at length elsewhere.

  THREE

  The Hidden Teacher

  Sometimes the best teacher teaches only once to a single child or to a grownup past hope.

  —ANONYMOUS

  THE PUTTING OF formidable riddles did not arise with today’s philosophers. In fact, there is a sense in which the experimental method of science might be said merely to have widened the area of man’s homelessness. Over two thousand years ago, a man named Job, crouching in the Judean desert, was moved to challenge what he felt to be the injustice of his God. The voice in the whirlwind, in turn, volleyed pitiless questions upon the supplicant—questions that have, in truth, precisely the ring of modern science. For the Lord asked of Job by whose wisdom the hawk soars, and who had fathered the rain, or entered the storehouses of the snow.

  A youth standing by, one Elihu, also played a role in this drama, for he ventured diffidently to his protesting elder that it was not true that God failed to manifest Himself. He may speak in one way or another, though men do not perceive it. In consequence of this remark perhaps it would be well, whatever our individual beliefs, to consider what may be called the hidden teacher, lest we become too much concerned with the formalities of only one aspect of the education by which we learn.

  We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight. Moreover, our teachers may be hidden, even the greatest teacher. And it was the young man Elihu who observed that if the old are not always wise, neither can the teacher’s way be ordered by the young whom he would teach.

  For example, I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider.

  It happened far away on a rainy morning in the West. I had come up a long gulch looking for fossils, and there, just at eye level, lurked a huge yellow-and-black orb spider, whose web was moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass at the edge of the arroyo. It was her universe, and her senses did not extend beyond the lines and spokes of the great wheel she inhabited. Her extended claws could feel every vibration throughout that delicate structure. She knew the tug of wind, the fall of a raindrop, the flutter of a trapped moth’s wing. Down one spoke of the web ran a stout ribbon of gossamer on which she could hurry out to investigate her prey.

  Curious, I took a pencil from my pocket and touched a strand of the web. Immediately there was a response. The web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a blur. Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, I could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best, raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist.

  Moreover, I considered, as I tramped along, that to the phagocytes, the white blood cells, clambering even now with some kind of elementary intelligence amid the thin pipes and tubing of my body—creatures without whose ministrations I could not exist—the conscious “I” of which I was aware had no significance to these amoeboid beings. I was, instead, a kind of chemical web that brought meaningful messages to them, a natural environment seemingly immortal if they could have thought about it, since generations of them had lived and perished, and would continue to so live and die, in that odd fabric which contained my intelligence—a misty light that was beginning to seem floating and tenuous even to me.

  I began to see that among the many universes in which the world of living creatures existed, some were large, some small, but that all, including man’s, were in some way limited or finite. We were creatures of many different dimensions passing through each other’s lives like ghosts through doors.

  In the y
ears since, my mind has many times returned to that far moment of my encounter with the orb spider. A message has arisen only now from the misty shreds of that webbed universe. What was it that had so troubled me about the incident? Was it that spidery indifference to the human triumph?

  If so, that triumph was very real and could not be denied. I saw, had many times seen, both mentally and in the seams of exposed strata, the long backward stretch of time whose recovery is one of the great feats of modern science. I saw the drifting cells of the early seas from which all life, including our own, has arisen. The salt of those ancient seas is in our blood, its lime is in our bones. Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments, or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.

  And war it has been indeed—the long war of life against its inhospitable environment, a war that has lasted for perhaps three billion years. It began with strange chemicals seething under a sky lacking in oxygen; it was waged through long ages until the first green plants learned to harness the light of the nearest star, our sun. The human brain, so frail, so perishable, so full of inexhaustible dreams and hungers, burns by the power of the leaf.