– Albert Einstein
I walked in and found Einstein ruminating and slowly walking along the length of his laboratory. “Why doesn’t this moment feel impossible? Given all the random and chance events that went into creating this moment we should be experiencing the impossible!”
He saw me and announced with a finger pointing skyward, “It is only by the slimmest possible chances that life arose on this Earth. Do you know how slim a cord we dangle on? The universe exploded into a flurry of matter and anti-matter. Thus, matter and anti-matter should have canceled each other out leaving nothing. Among scientists it is unanimous; matter and anti-matter were created in equal amounts and should have annihilated each other. By all accounts matter should not exist! But by some inexplicable reason it is believed that an unexplained random chance event occurred allowing enough matter to escape annihilation and create all the matter we see in the universe today.
"But this random chance event - Why did it occur? No one really knows. The latest debates say that an unknown process called baryogenesis created the asymmetry between matter and antimatter.” He looked at me poignantly waiting to see if I knew what asymmetry meant. I nodded and he continued. “By unknown scientists mean hypothetical. Baryogenesis is still a hypothesis and yet somehow somewhere this incongruency is not the be all end all of their conclusions or theories - they still continue to believe a linear sequence of events gave rise to all we see.”
He sat down, weathered but sharply focused. “In spite of this incongruency scientists’ logic prevails and the timeline or sequence of events that led up to the creation of earth are still accepted as truth bearing. He looked at me and blinked repeatedly as if seeing something astounding.
“And yet another logical incongruency exists,” he said springing from his chair and quickly perusing his shelves of books. He found one and plucked it from its encasement. He leafed through and found a page with a turned down corner. Then he read aloud. “If it were not for a slight fluctuation in the density distribution of matter, theorists contend, galaxies would have been unable to form and life would have been unable to evolve (Parker).
“And still another logical incongruency exists! If the Earth were a million miles closer to the sun the Earth would be to hot for
life to evolve. Another million miles away and the Earth would be too cold for life to begin. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In spite of all these incongruencies in our logic life is here. And still this moment does not feel impossible. How did your logical incongruency go?”
I looked at him surprised by the sudden recognition and a bit shocked because I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. Einstein nearly rolled his eyes at me. Instantly I felt insignificant, embarrassed and uncomfortable the same way I did whenever my father rolled his eyes at me. I felt like I let Einstein down and yet at the same time I faintly knew what he wanted of me.
“Let’s go into the future for a moment and examine some logical incongruencies there. Let us imagine that in some far off distant future Earth there is a civilization of intelligent beings that have found scattered, rare remnants of our civilization. They have found our writing but are unable to translate. They have found our manner of living in terms of the layout of our homes, its fixtures and amenities. They have found our planes, trains and automobiles but they have yet to find a skeleton, or any remnant of what we look like neither in books nor pictures.”
“How could they not know how we look Einstein?”
“This is only their first archaeological dig and it is occurring in various parts of their world and their findings are the first acknowledgement of a race of intelligent beings that came before them. And also these beings look entirely different from us. They are so different as to be nearly inconceivable. They are impossible beings whose very nature is similar and yet utterly different from anything we can know or speak of. And for some odd unknown reason they have come to the conclusion that the intelligent beings that existed thousand of millennia before their time had tentacles - not hands. As of yet there is no shred of evidence to refute this conclusion but lots of evidence to support it.
"Now, your task is to stretch your imagination and conceive of the impossible. Next week you must come back with a definitive yet still highly unimaginable idea of what these future beings that are digging up the remains of our civilization looked like. To do this you must go and gather every bit of knowledge you have, then look at the full length of your knowledge and compare and contrast all the weird and crazy ways this future intelligent life form may look like. Then you must go one step further and create the impossible! You must come back with a very definitive yet still highly unimaginable idea of what these future beings look like. Give your imagination all the awe in the world, in the universe and let the imagination dream a current of awe that will pull you into allowing yourself to conceive of and achieve the impossible.”
He looked at me quizzically as if waiting for me to complete the assignment immediately.
“I can’t do this on the spot!”
“Of course you can’t.” He said frowning mischievously. “How was your assignment from last week?”
Finally, a chance at redemption. I was thrilled. I told him that the most absurd conclusion I could come up with was that the perceptual environment was infinite.
“Yes,” he said unimpressed. “Given that we are always moving in space and time, there are always two things that change with specific measurable consistency, an objects location in space and time. Right now, as we sit still, we are moving in six different directions at once. We move at 1038 miles per hour with the rotation of the Earth. The Earth itself moves at 67,00 miles per hour along its orbit around the sun; the solar system in which the Sun and Earth reside in glide along at 135 miles per second; the region of the galaxy that we exist in moves along at 155 miles a second; and the galaxy itself is trucking along at 185 miles per second. Thus, we are moving in six different directions at once. And if we were to locomote ourselves either by walking or driving or taking an elevator we would be moving in seven directions. Therefore, even if there are no detectable perceptual changes in the object, the fact that the objects we are looking at and we ourselves are moving in six different directions should give us the impetus to search for the smallest, slightest perceptual changes because the objects position in space and time has changed.”
He turned and placed a wide eye on me – “Every single debate in academia surrounds or rather covers up or attempts to expound upon logical incongruencies! Logical Incongruencies!” He said pointing his finger skyward. “What we have here is the phenomena of logical incongruencies! These exist everywhere. In all of academia. In every subject, topic and discussion.”
“What are logical incongruencies?”
“Logical incongruencies are gaps in linear way of thinking. It is as if our reasoning goes in a straight line and then suddenly it inexplicably jumps to the left and starts a new line of reasoning. For example, in spite of the fact that the beginning of the universe, this explosion from a singularity of nearly infinite mass, defies everything we know, we still pick up our yardstick of reasoning and continue to measure things as if we actually believe that we have an accurate idea of the world, of the universe, and our humanity.”
“And this sucks because we are wrong we don’t have access to our imagination! Is that what you are saying?”
“No, what started all of physicists and cosmologists know is impossible! Beyond comprehension. Beyond our current understanding of physics. This gives us plenty of room to posit that the universe is the most intelligent thing there is.”
My jaw just about flung open. Here was a research level one university professor actually asserting the existence of God. I was stunned and shocked.
He smiled knowing the effect his words had on me.
“Just for the sake of entertaining your imagination, lets say that the universe could have been intelligent from the very beginning! We can hypothesize that what came out of that initial explosion was a highly intelligent awareness. From there we can posit that perhaps the movement of this intelligence affected the ratio of matter to antimatter in order to ensure its survival and propagation. This huge, vast and inconceivable awareness then trickled down into intelligent galaxies and then was downgraded a bit to form the first generation of Suns that scientists say must have existed out there billions of years ago! And this generation of suns held the universe in its grips for eons! Perhaps these Suns were aware of themselves as some inconceivable aspect of the universe. Then after eons these Suns crumbled and gave birth to yet more intelligent galaxies and within those galaxies another round of Suns.” He smiled and his eyes meandered to the window watching the light stream through for a few moments.
“The supreme awareness of the universe continued to trickle down from Suns to the planets like the Earth. The Earth in turn re-birthed this universal awareness into plankton and such on and so forth. This of course means that the dinosaurs had much more intelligence that we do. We are nothing compared to their intensely searching intelligence.”
“But Einstein, they were huge REPTILES! The lowest form of consciousness we know to exist is driven primarily by the instinct of fear!
“What do you know? You act as if you know everything! Perhaps it is true that our reptilian minds are a mere shadow of the dinosaur fear and anger instinct but what was encased inside their tiny minds?”
“Brain matter!” I said aloud. “Small brains and big bodies produce dumb animals! The ratio of meat to matter, brain matter, has to be like ours. There is a word for it . . . ”
“Otherwise there is no intelligence?!” He said smiling like a Cheshire cat.
“Yes!”
“That is absurd! Who has filled you with so much crap?! How do you account for the coordination of growth, healing, and hormonal secretion within all that mass? And more importantly where is consciousness located in all that dinosaur mass? Let’s throw out the hypothesis that the brain is the center of consciousness. How do you know that the dinosaurs weren’t aware of eternity and thus from their perspective their own perception and conception of time, space and movement seemed to take place on a galactic scale thereby forcing their consciousness to exist during the same era as the first generation of suns?”
Before I got a chance to repel his ridiculous statements he went on. “Further, why does the ‘amount’ of brain matter indicate intelligence? Perhaps WE are intelligent because our anus exists between 3 1/2 feet to 5 1/2 feet above the ground! It is easy to demonstrate that the closer the anus is to the ground the less intelligence an animal demonstrates. And opposingly, it is easy to demonstrate that the higher the anus is from the ground the less intelligence the animal demonstrates. Thus, the median range for producing intelligence is right here!” He sprung out of his chair and nonchalantly presented himself stood as part of the demonstration.
I was incensed. “Yeah right! But brain size correlates with brain matter. Intelligence and brain size may go together or they may not but at least there is brain matter there as a possible source of intelligence. The anus is not a source of intelligence."
“My boy, my boy. Are you saying that the height of the anus has nothing to do with intelligence because the anus is not directly connected to brain matter?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Bipedalism! Bipedalism rose the animal from the ground and managed to get the anus at the height needed for intellectual banter!”
“But if you are using the height of the anus and comparing that with other species to determine intelligence you need a third thing, a third point.”
“Like?”
“I don’t know . . . like . . . Like some kind of energy line or frequency that governs over the 3/12 to 5/12 feet area."
“Why is that?”
“Because the height of an anus cannot be a measure for intelligence.”
“But the anus is connected to the brain right?”
“Well yeah but . . . “
“ - then perhaps that ultra fine intelligence that burst forth from the universe’s humble beginnings made it so that animals whose anus' can get in that range and have bipedalism would be intelligent!”
“I guess this explains why cats always sit on the backs of couches, huh?”
“Further, lets hypothesize that on a galactic level there is a resonance, much like the gravitational pull of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, between all the plankton in our galaxy. Since their collective mass outweighs any other creature on the planet they are the most intelligent species not only on our planted but throughout the galaxy.”
“There is no given reason on this Earth that you are right because your argument is arranged solely from an idea that has no observable merit!” I felt just like my father. He was always on my ass to be a scientist when I grew up and constantly threw my own ideas back in my face with nearly that exact same line.
Einstein burst into laughter and laughed so hard tears welled up in his eyes. When he finally caught his breath he said, “My little tour of the imagination is merely a demonstration to show you something. Without setting things up in polar opposites you will be trapped in a single view. I am sure you’ve heard the scientific story of the creation of the universe and some people whole-heartedly believe this is the case but that is bad thinking. Who was it that said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function?”
I shrugged my shoulders attempting to hide the fact that I had never heard that such an idea.
“What if this obsession with the linear evolutionary view of the universe is the result of the structure of the left brain? And the right brain, the more imaginative non-linear side is the source of the biblical version. This means the conviction that is held onto so dearly by evolutionists and to an equal measure by creationists could be the sole result of how information is predominately processed by either half of the brain.”
I laughed aloud. “But that would mean that there is rampant dogmatism on both sides. That would mean that countless years could go by without knowing that one’s beliefs were merely the result of the brain structure. It means that years upon years of a peoples lives are spent in meaningless toil debating over the way the brain processes information without ever knowing it!”
“How do we know it is not this way? Born and raised in an environment one would have been taught, versed and coached to embrace being a republican or a democrat – creationist or scientist. The body would grow to uphold these views and tie them to emotions creating a nearly unmovable being. But why do that? Why not see and explore both views without investment by having the audacity to go into the imagination on a journey of awareness.”
“Hmmm?”
"In order to think accurately about anything one has to take what one knows to opposite extremes thereby stretching the imagination and reason in tandem. Reason and imagination do not work in tandem when one side of the brain dominates the other. By stretching the imagination and reason in tandem one slowly becomes capable of achieving and learning extraordinary things. The thought experiment was meant to give you an example of stretching your imagination and reason together thereby touching upon awe and laughter two important ingredients in having no investment in the outcome of the impossible events that surround us. With awe there is clarity of thought and sobriety – no obsession. Without that stretch between imagination and reason we are nothing. I can guarantee you that. But with it we have everything and everthing is within our reach. Everything!" He smiled and turned on the radio dialing it to the classical music station. Vivaldi's Four Seasons played in the laboratory.
"Your time with me will be well spent. You are going to learn an exquisite art form - the art of engineering a conscious experience. So far your imagination is not trained to do this and it is your God given inborn right. Right now you are as rigid as a two-ton barracuda! You're an unmovable being! You’ve never stretched the imagination and felt born on the wings of angels!”
He danced a two-step and snapped his fingers.
"Your imagination is passive to reason when indeed it should triumph. Now you must do everything in your power to find your hands in your dreams. Repeat to yourself, 'I intend to find my hands in my dreams.' Not blindly, as if this were an affirmation of something that already exists, but in tandem with the highly reasonable and demonstrable idea that almost nothing in this world holds the imprint of the human hand. Diligently search for and compare almost all objects you encounter with your hands. Perhaps even write a list of present day objects that may lend a clue to that future civilization that the beings who existed in our times ruled their world with their hands.”
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