Anything you give your time and polish with attention will become a lens in your search for meaning, adding metaphors to the back room of your most urgent calculations.
In my nascent stages in pottery, I have seen with great amazement how two different glazes, when combined, produce a completely unexpected result – something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a completely different order. In extreme conditions in the han, which can reach the temperature of a red star, chemistry and chance combine to make a third glow that may appear more beautiful than either of the two, or disastrous, mutated, tragically cracked with transparent dirt and covered with burst bubbles.
This, of course, is what happens in our most intimate relationships, themselves a product of chemistry and chance. Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person unlocks the power that lies in the other, so that a third entity can live – the dynamic reality of relationships – burns the idea of each person as a collection of natural things, pointing to the real nature.
A century after the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore observed that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this physical world,” physicist Carlo Rovelli traces a scientific approach to that same truth in his excellent book quantum prime. Heligoland (public library), titled after the windswept North Sea island where twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg arrived at the idea that became the mathematical blueprint for the amazing cathedral of quantum field theory: that revolutionary explanation of how one aspect of reality – one thing, one entity, one part of nature – manifests itself in any other. Because every definition of a thing is a claim about its nature, the core of the theory is the claim that interaction is the fundamental truth of the universe, that there are no such entities – only dynamic manifestations when we get a glimpse of the latest and call that bright picture.
Rovelli writes:
The world that we know, that is related to us, that interests us, that we call “reality,” is a large network of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves through interaction with each other.
[…]
The properties of a thing are how it works with other things; The truth is this is the web of interaction.
This is why objectifying — the impulse to reduce something or someone to a set of structures — always misses the point of objectivity, and why we always get closer to reality when we “ground” the universe, as Ursula K. Le Guin puts it in her wonderful meditation on the intersection of poetry and science. The intersubjective – dynamic reality that emerges from the interactions between objects with seemingly solid structures – is the essence of the quantum world, and is the essence of human relationships. The one who is in a certain relationship is no more you or less of you than you are deep down alone, because there is no you – the self is not the container of your interaction with the world but the content.
Noting that “the phantasmal world of quanta is our world,” Rovelli writes:
The world is fragmenting into a spectacle that does not accept a global perspective. It is a world of ideas, of manifestations, not of entities with definite structures or unique realities. Architectures do not reside in things, they are bridges between things. Things are only like that in relation to other things, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a spectacle, a game of mirrors that exists only as a reflection of each other.
Through the lens of quantum entanglement, he puts what I have learned from the fireplace:
Even if we know everything that can be predicted by one thing and another, we cannot predict everything by two things together. The relation between two things is not something contained in one or the other of them: it is something other than that.
The great irony of this pragmatic approach is that all of our explanatory models are inherently externalist claims about it, yet they all emerge from our mental work, which is intrinsic in nature. In a passage reminiscent of quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger's koan-like insistence that “this life you live is not just a part of the rest of life, but in a sense the whole of it,” Rovelli writes:
If the world consists of relations, there is no meaning without them. The world's meanings, in the final analysis, all come from within. They are all in the first person. Our perception of the world, our perception, as it is inside the world… is not exclusive: it depends on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all physics, is based. When we think of the perfection of things, we are thinking from outside the universe, we are looking at it from outside. But there is no “exception” in the perfection of things. An outside view is an absent view. All the meaning of the world comes from within it. The world seen from the outside does not exist; there are only internal perceptions of the world that are part and parcel of each other. The world is this reflection of complementary ideas.
This basic state of being, for me, is the first and last proof that the measure of our life is the light within us.
