I am in the process of changing the name of my substack site to “The Spiritual Materialist.” Please bear with me. Thanks.

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

— Blaise Pascal, “The Misery of Man Without God,” in Pensées (1670)

Dear Readers . . . .

In this post, I would like you to join me in musing about Nothingness. I am not speaking about the physicists’ nothingness, called “the vacuum,” which is teeming with fields of energy and subatomic particles that flash into existence for a fleeting moment and then disappear. Nor I am talking about the ego-free sensation of transcendence when meditating or when soaring in the “zone” of creativity. And I am not talking about the emotional feeling of emptiness we sometimes experience when we have failed at a project or when a lover has abandoned us.

I am talking about the total absence of consciousness, sensation, and existence itself – when the special arrangement of atoms and molecules in our brains that make up our unique self, our awareness and memories, our ability to function as living beings in the world has disassembled and come apart. I am talking about the complete dissolution at the end of our lives and beyond. It is the same state of nonexistence as before we were born. This, I believe, is the nothingness that Pascal refers to in the above quote, although the French mathematician and philosopher lived long before we had any real understanding of the material basis of the world, including our bodies.

Let me first acknowledge and respect the belief, held by many of us, in some kind of Afterlife, whether Heaven and Hell, an immortal soul, or a reunion with God. I respect those beliefs. But I myself am a materialist, as I have said in previous essays and books. I believe that the world, including our bodies, is made exclusively of atoms and molecules. (Also, as I have described in my post The Miraculous from the Material, I consider myself not only a materialist but a “spiritual materialist,” in which our material bodies and minds can experience spiritual feelings, such as a connection to the larger cosmos, the appreciation of beauty, love). As a materialist, I believe that when we die, we have reached the complete and final end of our existence. Our atoms still exist, of course. If you could tag each of your atoms with your social security number, they could be tracked for centuries after your death as they mingled with soil and water and air. But you, as a conscious being, will no longer exist. You – to whatever extent it is possible to speak of a dissolved “you” – have merged with Nothingness. Certainly, it can reasonably be said that you have some manner of existence in the memories of living people you have left behind, or in the monuments you have built, but even these remnants of you will be gone in a century or two.

Now, I would like to argue that we cannot fathom this final condition, this Nothingness, to which I believe we are all headed and from which we all emerged. In fact, I would argue that Nothingness is the only thing in the world we cannot truly fathom or imagine. Science has revealed many strange things, far beyond our human sensory experience, but phenomena that we can nevertheless imagine. The ancient Greeks hypothesized that the world was made of very tiny, indestructible units of matter, too small to see. In fact, we have “seen” atoms with our electron microscopes, and we have correctly predicted their properties and behavior with our physics and mathematics. We can imagine atoms. Black holes are surely among the strangest things in the universe, but we can describe how they behave, we can calculate their properties, we have witnessed their effect on surrounding matter, and we can do computer simulations that help us visualize them. Combining our telescopic sightings with our theoretical constructs, we have measured the distances to stars and galaxies light years away from us, allowing us to fathom the vast stretches of space, on and on without limit.

All of these phenomena we can imagine. Not so with the fundamental phenomenon, Nothingness, the state occupied by our nonexistence for eternity except for the brief moment of our lives. Oddly, the Nothingness that we are talking about, even though we cannot imagine it, requires the one-time existence of consciousness. We are talking about the absence of consciousness, which requires the framing and context of consciousness, just as the meaning of “cold” requires the notion of “hot,” and the meaning of “dark” requires the notion of “light.”

We simply can’t imagine Nothingness. From birth on, we live in a state of Somethingness. Not only our thoughts, but the sights, sounds, and tactile impressions continually entering our bodies represent Something. Every minute of our existence, we are swimming in a symphony of sensations. And, with our higher level of consciousness, we are aware of that immersion. How could we possibly imagine the absence of all that? Perhaps the closest we can come to Nothingness is when we go into a coma, or a really deep sleep, so deep we aren’t even dreaming. Then we wake up in the morning and are aware that some time passed – how much time we don’t know until we look at a clock. We realize that there was a period in which we had no consciousness. Just void. We’re able to reflect on this void because we are awake in the morning and can consider things of the last few hours with our conscious mind. We can think back to the night before. But with death, we never wake up in the morning. There is no morning after. We can’t reflect. We can’t remember. There’s just this infinite void that lasts forever, insensible to our minds because our minds no longer exist. We can’t imagine that.

These musings make our brief moment of existence even more special. Not only is each of our lives a rare event, as I have written about in The Ordinary Miracle of Existence. But even given that rare event, the fleeting duration of our life, with an infinity of Nothingness before and an infinity of Nothingness after, all of which we cannot imagine, make our lifetimes all the more precious. Each of us is a unique and temporary arrangement of atoms and molecules that produces thought, self awareness, an ego, memory, consciousness. Never to come again.

I confess that I cannot wrap my head around these ideas. I am overwhelmed. I am hurtling toward that which I cannot imagine. Nevertheless, I am alive at this moment. I exist in the world of Somethingness at this moment. After writing these words, I will stand up from my writing desk and feel the floor under my feet. I will drink my warm cup of tea, sipping it slowly and tasting the passion fruit and honey. I will feel the silky fur of my daughter’s cat Yuki as he rubs against my skin. I will clean up the kitchen after my wife has cooked a delicious meal of pasta and shrimp. I will have a long soak in a hot bath. I will go to sleep. And I will most likely wake up in the morning. I will watch the reflected light shimmer on my bedroom ceiling. I will live another day, as best I can. I will try to do a little good in this fleeting world.

P.S. I have pondered some of these issues in a new novel, Preparing for Nothingness, to be published by Random House in early December. If you are interested, you can order the book here

I am grateful to all of you, my readers. A writer has two pleasures: the first is the pleasure of writing itself, alone with one’s thoughts and struggles to express those thoughts in words. It is a solitary pleasure. The second pleasure, more social, is in sharing the writing with others, in the hopes of bringing pleasure to others and changing their understanding of the world, at least a little. I thank you, my readers, for bringing me that second pleasure.

If you have read a few of my substack posts, you know that my writing roams from science to philosophy to culture. In a few of my posts, I’ve had conversations with interesting people. I hope to continue with that recipe, unless a number of you ask me to vary the ingredients.

For today’s post, I want to tell a personal story that happened on a small island in Maine where my wife and I have spent the last 35 summers. Our kids, and now our grandkids, have grown up with this island in their blood.

For many years, a family of ospreys lived in a large nest atop a tree near our house on the island. Each season, my wife and I observed their rituals and habits. In mid April, the parents would arrive at the nest, having spent the winter in South America, and lay eggs. In late May or early June, the eggs hatched. As the father dutifully brought fish dinners to the nest each day, the babies would grow bigger and bigger and in mid August were large enough to make their first flight. Throughout the season, my wife and I recorded all of these comings and goings. We noted the number of chicks each year. We observed when the juveniles first began flapping their wings, in early August, a couple of weeks before having the strength to become airborne and leave the nest for the first time. We memorized the different chirps the parents made for danger, for hunger, for the arrival of food. After several years of cataloguing such data, we felt that we knew these ospreys pretty well.

A few years ago, in August, when the two juvenile ospreys of that season were quite large and poised to take their first flight off the nest, a band of three eagles, working in concert, attacked the nest. One eagle led the father off the nest, another managed to lure the mother away, she thinking vainly to serve as a decoy, while the third eagle brazenly picked up one of the juveniles in its talons and flew away with it, possibly to devour it for dinner. The drama was accentuated by an aerial battle between the parent ospreys and two of the marauding eagles. My wife and I were at the scene, horrified to watch it unfolding. The juvenile being carried off to its doom, although severely wounded, apparently was able to put up a sufficient fight that its captor dropped it, and it plummeted to the ocean about a hundred yards from our house, almost certainly to drown.

It happens that another fellow, well trained in the behavior of birds, was with us at the time. His boat was tied to our dock. Without wasting a second, Jacob leaped into his boat, went out to the drowning juvenile, and fished it out of the water. Naturally, the bird was terrified, but Jacob knew exactly how to hold it so that it did not bite or claw us. He asked for a large box to contain the bird. The next day, we took the wounded young osprey to Avian Haven, a bird rehabilitation center in Freedom Maine. There, after 3 weeks of loving care, the bird had been nursed back to full health. During this period, I was in constant touch with the facility.

When the bird was well, one of the owners advised me that the bird should be released on my island, since that was its home and familiar territory. The man kindly made a two hour trip to bring the bird to the island. There, he took the bird out of its carrying box and showed me how to hold it, so that I would be safe from its powerful talons. With my grandchildren looking on, I counted one, two, three and tossed the bird in the air. It knew exactly what to do. It unfolded its wings and flew straight ahead to the open ocean. It was home, but I don’t think it ever came back.

By good fortune, we photographed the release of the juvenile osprey. You can watch the video at the following two links. Watch this video first, where the rehabilitated bird is taken out of its carrying box. Then this link shows the release.

The header photo for this post comes from the public television series “Searching: the Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” which remains available at www.pbs.org and on the dedicated website www.searchingformeaning.org. In this series, and in several of my recent books on which the series is based, I introduce the concept “spiritual materialism,” describing how a scientific view of the world is completely consistent with spirituality.

I call myself a spiritual materialist. By “materialist,” I mean that I believe the world is made of material stuff, and nothing more, and that material obeys rules and laws. Almost all scientists have such a belief. At the same time, like many of us, I have “spiritual” experiences: feelings of connection to other human beings and to the larger cosmos, moments of communion with wild animals, the appreciation of beauty, wonder. Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. We human beings stand in awe of those phenomena. That’s my view of spirituality.

I became a materialist early in life. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I installed a laboratory in a large closet off my second-floor bedroom. There, I collected little bottles of various chemicals like potassium and molybdenum and sulfuric acid, petri dishes and test tubes, beautiful glass beakers and boiling flasks, Bunsen burners, motors of different kinds, a microscope and glass slides, resistors and capacitors, batteries, photoelectric cells, coils of wire of varying thicknesses and grades, delicate pipettes, filters and crucibles, voltmeters and ohmmeters, scales, pressure gauges, and random devices I’d found in the discard pile of an electrical supply store that I didn’t understand but that looked interesting. It was in that homemade lab that I began my investigations of the material world.

I loved to build things. I read in Popular Science or some other magazine that the time for a pendulum to make a complete swing, called its period, is proportional to the square root of the length of the pendulum. What a fascinating rule! But I had to see if it was true. With string and a fishing weight for the bob at the end of the string, I constructed pendulums of various sizes. I measured their lengths with a ruler and timed their periods with a stopwatch. The rule was true. And it worked every time, without exception. Using the rule I had verified, I could even predict the periods of new pendulums even before I built them. Evidently, the physical world, or at least this little corner of it, obeyed reliable, logical, quantitative laws. I saw no reason to believe in the supernatural.

At the same time I was forming these materialist views of the cosmos, I also observed some amazing spectacles. With my microscope, I discovered an entire world, invisible to the naked eye. In a thimble full of water from a nearby pond, I saw tiny creatures wriggling and gliding about, shaped like ellipses with little waving hairs. Paramecia. I saw roundish blobs, pulsating with smaller blobs inside of them. I saw other minuscule organisms, hundreds of times smaller than a grain of sand, gyrating, turning, throbbing, sporting about.

Our family took vacations near Kentucky Lake, about 200 miles northeast of Memphis, where I grew up. Many mornings, if I rose early, I could see a mist hanging low over the lake. Ambers and lavenders and mossy green hues would refract in the air for an hour, then melt away like some rare species of plant in bloom only for one day.

In college, I had my first look through a good telescope and saw the rings of Saturn. Anyone who hasn’t seen them should. They are perfect circles. They are so perfect and pure that you think they couldn’t be real. You think that nothing in nature could be attain such perfection. And yet there they were, several hundred million miles away, austere, cold and crisp, floating in silent perfection.

Understanding the material and scientific underpinnings of all of these spectacular phenomena hasn’t diminished my awe and amazement one iota. In fact, such understanding only enhances my pleasure and awe.

So, I don’t believe in miracles, but I do believe in the miraculous, a comment I make on camera in the television series. The title of one of my recent books is: The Miraculous from the Material.

Perhaps the most miraculous of all things in nature is the human brain, and especially that strange, unique sensation we call consciousness: the feeling of being present in the world; the feeling of being a separate being; the sense of having an ego, an “I,” a Self; awareness of the world around us and, more importantly, awareness of being aware, the ability to remember the past and imagine the future. Consciousness is almost certainly a graded phenomenon, not an all-or-nothing thing. Some non-human animals such as crows and dolphins and monkeys surely possessing some level of consciousness. What I have described above refers only to the human level of consciousness. Philosophers, psychologists, and even neuroscientists are not sure how the sensation of consciousness arises from the material brain. But almost all scientists believe that the sensation is rooted in the material neurons of the brain and the connections between them. Somehow, in ways not yet understood, the chemical and electrical flows between those neurons produces the feeling we call consciousness. Because consciousness is a feeling, it is hard to pin down and hard to describe. One strong piece of evidence that consciousness, and all mental experiences, have a

material origin is the fact that various drugs can radically alter our consciousness and our experience of the world and even our personality.

All that said, I respect those who believe in a nonmaterial element of the world, whether the supernatural, ghosts, angels and devils, heaven and hell, psychokinesis, the soul, God. But I myself am a materialist. I believe that the world is made exclusively of atoms and molecules. Without any contradiction, I also embrace the paintings of Rembrandt, the feeling of being part of something larger than myself, the overwhelming sensation of falling in love, the comforting sound of rain on the roof.

Kip Thorne is a professor of theoretical physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. He has made major contributions to the physics of high energy astronomical phenomena such as black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves. Thorne was a co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the detection of gravitational waves, which are produced by cataclysmic events in outer space such as the merger of black holes. Such events produce little electromagnetic waves (eg light waves) but can be studied through their emission of gravitational waves, akin to a new sense organ with which to perceive nature. The detector is called LIGO, short for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. As early as high school, Thorne received recognition for his scientific ability as one of the winners of the highly competitive Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Thorne is also the author of many books, both technical and popular, including the standard textbook on Einstein’s theory of gravity, Gravitation, coauthored with Charles Misner, and John Wheeler; the popular book Black Holes and Time Warps; The Science of Interstellar (Thorne was an executive producer and science advisor for the Christopher Nolan film “Interstellar”); and The Warped Side of Our Universe, in which Kip writes free verse to accompany the paintings of Lia Halloran. Kip is also a dedicated educator and has supervised more than fifty doctoral students. I was one of Kip’s graduate students at Caltech from 1971 to 1974.

AL: I know your parents were academics. What is it that got you interested in physics and in theoretical physics in particular?

KT: My mother got me interested in astronomy by taking me to a lecture for teenagers about the solar system when I was eight years old. I just fell in love with it. We did a project together that got me off and running and being sort of self-starting. At age 13 I ran into the book One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow in a used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and I fell in love with two things there. One was the idea of laws of physics that control the universe. And the other was Einstein’s relativity theory of space-time. I fell so in love with these two ideas that I decided I wanted to be a physicist, to explore the laws of physics controlling the universe, and particularly Einstein’s relativity laws and their applications to astrophysics, which had been my first love. So, from age 13 on, my life was set.

AL: It’s amazing that you followed through from what happened at age 13.

Alot of boys at age 13 want to be firemen or policemen.

KT: Well, at age 8, before I went to that lecture, I wanted to be a snowplow driver, high in the mountains in Utah, where I grew up. That was the most powerful job in the world, I thought.

AL: When you went to Caltech, I think I remember that you were one of the youngest full professors there. You were around age 30 or something, plus or minus one. Did you have any thoughts about being such a young, full professor?

KT: Well, the one thought I had was that I had already gotten a considerable amount of fame in my field, and more than I felt like I deserved. And so I was already in a mode of trying to prove to myself that I was worthy of the notoriety that I was achieving.

AL: What extent do you think that scientists, and especially physicists, use aesthetic criteria in their work?

KT: There are people who do, particularly theorists. Chandrasekhar [Nobel-prize winning physicist], a wonderful friend of mine whom you also knew, had the attitude that beauty was the key to discovering the laws of nature. And he carried it to the point where, when he was writing down equations, he had to put them into the most beautiful form possible in order to be able to even think about them. And I think it is true. I do believe that the laws of nature, when you understand them properly, generally turn out to be rather beautiful. Nature somehow has that form. But, of course, the issue is thinking about the laws properly. So, that’s the struggle -- to find some way to take the purported laws and express them in a beautiful form. And then that may lead you toward truth. I do believe in that concept.

AL: Occasionally, that aesthetic leads us astray, like with parity [the idea that the mirror image of every process in nature is identical to the original image].

To some people, nature might be even more beautiful if right and left were totally symmetrical. But we’ve found that nature doesn’t follow that aesthetic.

KT: Yes, but I think many of us believe that is a sign that there is some deeper level of nature that is even more beautiful. And this failure is a hint to try to drive you toward that deeper understanding.

AL: Do you think that high schools and universities should require a certain amount of education in science?

KT: Absolutely. Particularly in terms of learning to understand how science works. And how scientists insist on attempts to see whether their ideas are true or not. And the process of working toward deeper understanding of truth. When I was growing up, there was a considerable appreciation of that. In high school, when I was a student, I think that that was taught to us. It was widely accepted.

That’s no longer true. Among the general public, somehow we have lost that. We have failed to educate people in this generation about how science really works. And why you should trust science up to a point. And how you evaluate, where you go to get some understanding of what is likely to be correct and what is not likely to be correct.

AL: When you talk about getting an understanding of science and how science works, I assume that you’re talking about critical thinking and comparing hypotheses to experimental results.

KT: Something like that. I’m talking about that, but beyond that. Take the example of the COVID [pandemic]. It was not known initially that the principal means of transmission was through tiny droplets in the air, so masks were not recommended. And when that transmission came to be understood, suddenly there was a recommendation to wear masks. The fact that there had been a change of recommendations became a cudgel for attacking science. And it became a political cudgel as well as a cultural cudgel.

AL: Some people were labeling science as wishy-washy without understanding that when we make recommendations, it’s with the best facts available at that time.

KT: Yes.

AL: Do you think that high schools and universities should also have training in the arts?

KT: Well, yes, I think that it’s important for people to appreciate the arts as well as the science and the humanities. When I came to Caltech as an undergraduate in 1958, we expected that about 40 percent of our classes would be in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences, and only about 60 percent in the hard sciences, which was the core of the curriculum. I think that’s no longer the case, but I benefited greatly from it.

AL: Why do you think that young people, let’s say university students, should have training in the arts and humanities? Why is that important?

KT: I think it’s important in several ways. I think it’s important culturally.

We live in a world in which the arts and the humanities are a major part of everyday life, or should be, and are for a very large fraction of us. It’s also that I have found that the arts and the humanities feed into my scientific work in useful and important ways. For example, my physical intuition is based on mental pictures. And those mental pictures can be rendered, as I learned in a collaboration with a great young artist, Lia Halloran, in very artistic ways that in fact facilitate my thinking about the laws of physics. We did a book of her paintings and my poetry together, and when I saw her renderings of my mental pictures, it changed my mental pictures in a very positive way. I think about some of the laws of physics in a somewhat different manner, just thanks to that collaboration.

AL: We’re talking about the arts and humanities, which is something that I’ve been interested in. Do you think that science offers the same opportunity for individual expression as the arts do?

KT: There certainly are opportunities, and there are many different ways to do science. Certain kinds of problems are best attacked in certain kinds of ways. But for many problems, an individual approach has a lot of power. So long as you do interact with others to get feedback on your thinking. For me, let me say that the kind of science I have most enjoyed is something where it is me, indeed, sitting alone thinking for along time and then having some sort of inspiration. And so I need the elbow room that allows me to do that. That’s not possible in a crowded field. So I’ve chosen to work wherever possible in uncrowded fields so I could do things in an individual way. But not all problems, particularly in the modern era, can be attacked profitably in that manner.

AL: Well, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment here. I can appreciate that individual scientists can approach a problem in their own individual way. But I would think that, ultimately, it’s the equation that can be rederived by anybody or the experiment that can be reproduced by anyone that has lasting value. Unlike, say, a painting by Picasso. There’s never going to be a painting like that again, or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that’s never going to be composed again. How would you respond to that comment?

KT: I think there are a number of examples of writings by scientists that are so powerful and so individualistic that they are landmarks in the way that a Picasso painting is. Feynman’s Lectures on Physics [Addison Wesley, 1964] is an example. Just absolutely beautiful and very unique in his approach to things.

AL: So I infer from that comment that you feel that sometimes a scientist’s writings are as much of a legacy as their actual scientific research.

KT: Oh, yes, very much so. And I think that is widely appreciated. In fact, I think most scientists can point to particular writings that had a powerful impact on them.

AL: Yes, you mentioned George Gamow’s book that certainly had a big impact on you.

I may have asked you this before, but you worked on the LIGO project to detect gravitational waves for decades before a successful detection. What is it that kept you going for so many decades? I asked Rai Weiss [chief experimentalist on the LIGO project; shared the Nobel with Thorne and Barry Barish] the same question a few years back.

KT: I’ll give you the same answer. It was fun. It was just so much fun. How could you not keep going?

AL: That is the same answer that Rai gave me. I didn’t know that you remembered that.

KT: It’s something that he and I discussed on a number of occasions.

AL: So it was fun. So that’s what kept you going.

KT: It was more than that. [Fun] made it easier to keep going. But I think the other issue was that in my case, I was in a unique position compared to most anybody else. I was close enough to the experiment that I had some sense of what was possible and what wasn’t possible. And how one might get to where we were trying to get. But I also had a pretty deep understanding, to the extent anybody did, of the strength of the sources [astrophysical objects that create gravitational waves, like collisions of black holes]. And I thought I knew where we were going and where we would hit pay dirt. I was right-on in my estimate of where we would hit pay dirt. And so, whereas most people working in the field, and basically everybody outside the field, just didn’t know when we were going to succeed – it could be around the corner, it could never come – I thought I knew, and I was right. And I had confidence we would succeed.

AL: Well, let me ask you one more question. And it’s more personal than the ones I’ve asked you. In recent years I’ve been thinking about my mortality. I believe that when many people get into their 70s and 80s, it’s hard not to avoid thinking of our mortality. Most scientists are materialists. Maybe not 100%, but most. Being a materialist gives me a certain perspective on my mortality – the fact that I’m made out of atoms and molecules, and eventually those will disperse and so on. Have you had thoughts about your mortality?

KT: Yes, of course I have. Particularly in recent times when I have had some medical issues. I’ve been through some things that made me really feel my mortality. But I don’t dwell on that. I adopted an attitude long ago that my intention is to live to age 110 and to continue to be productive up to near there.I picked 110 because I had long conversations with David Baltimore [Nobel prize winning biologist] and other biologists, about if you don’t get felled by some sort of disease or accident, how old can you expect to live? And they said, well, maybe the maximum would be 120, but 110 is a reasonable goal. So there’s my goal. And so the issue is what kinds of things can I do if I achieve that goal? To start living my life as though I’m going to achieve that goal.

I had been there, done that as an academic physicist. I had had a career of nearly 50 years, and so I decided for my next 50 years, I want to do something else – no longer conventional physics, because my mental capacity for doing complicated calculations is not what it once was. But things at the interface between science and the arts. And, in fact, you were an inspiration for me in a major sort of way. I decided I want to pursue a career similar to what you have had at that interface. So that’s what I have been doing, aside from the history of LIGO that I’m working on.

And I’m having enormous fun. I can see a number of projects that I want to do, that I think I’m capable of doing. Even as my mind slows down, I still have a fountain of knowledge and of insights that I think could make for some very interesting projects at that arts and science interface. And if I fail before 110, well, so be it. But anyway, that’s my attitude.

AL: Well, you’ve done pretty well so far. I’m extremely honored and flattered that I have been an inspiration to you. You’ve been an inspiration to me as well.

One thing I remember when I was a graduate student of yours 50 years ago or so – it just boggles me to think that it was 50 years ago. What I remember is that you were very concerned about the way that papers were written, not just the content, but the style, the literary style. I thought that that was pretty unusual that a scientist would be concerned about literary style. Sometimes when you would give me back drafts of papers with a lot of red ink on them, a lot of it would have to do with literary style and not simply getting the equations right. That impressed me.

KT: I wouldn’t have called it literary style in the sense that, as we know, the style for communicating science well is not the same style that you would use in normal literature. For example, we use a lot more parallel structure in scientific writing in order to more effectively communicate complex ideas.

AL: Yes, the style appropriate for our audience. Very clear writing and logical flow and all of that. So maybe literary is not the right word, but it was literary for that context.

Thank you for the conversation, Kip.

Dear subscribers to The Artful Cosmos,

First of all, thank you for following my posts. It encourages me in my writing, thinking, and life to know that you are out there and willing to spend the time to read what I write.

I want to announce an upcoming new conversation with Kip Thorne, my PhD thesis advisor at Caltech a half century ago. (Kip and I are both still alive.) Kip has done research on Einstein’s theory of gravity for all of his career and, in 2017, won the Nobel Prize in physics for his theoretical contributions to the detection of gravitational waves from outer space. That experiment, called LIGO, has allowed us to “see” the collisions of black holes and many other cataclysmic events in space.

In the conversation, I hope to talk to Kip about his career, the role of aesthetics in science, the importance of art as well as science in education, his motivations, and other topics.

See you in a week or two.

Alan

One can view all of human history (our art, our science, our exploration, our invention) as a gradual increase in perspective, of ourselves and of the world.

Perspective begins at a young age. Toddlers first begin using words such as meand mine around the age of 2, showing an awareness of themselves as separate from the outside world. Shortly thereafter, conscious exploration and discovery begins: Parents and caretakers at first, then the nursery, then the house, then the neighborhood. Little by little, we humans gain an understanding of what the world contains. We socialize, we read, we travel, we experience. But, in hindsight, our perspective remains highly limited. A significant minority of Americans—more than 20 percent—have never traveled abroad. More than half of us live in the same state where we were born.

Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension, if not as individuals, then at least as a human civilization. We have learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. And the size of our galaxy is practically inconceivable. It takes a light ray, which travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, 100,000 years to cross from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Other galaxies—many other galaxies—exist too. The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse. Think of an ant in New York City contemplating a trip to San Francisco. Our houses, our roads and bridges, our cities are a speck in the cosmos, a dust mote, one grain of sand on a vast beach.

We have also enlarged our concept of time in the cosmos. We have learned that the universe began about 14 billion years ago. That’s about one hundred million human lifetimes ago. Just as our entire planet is a speck in the cosmos, our individual lives are fleeting moments in the grand unfolding of time. And, as the Buddhists always emphasize, everything is impermanent. Everything passes away. The ancient cities of Sumer and Egypt are long gone, as are the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire; Port Royal of Jamaica; the English coastal village of Dunwich. All gone. All that we see around us today will one day be gone. Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.

It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in. But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all. Advances in biology have shown that the instructions for creating each individual human being are encoded in a set of molecules called DNA. Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.

Or consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not

It is almost impossible to wrap our heads around such things. We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago. And we have found it not through Prince Henry’s ships but through our laboratories, our telescopes, and our minds. So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.”

I can speak only for myself. First of all, gratitude ought to replace entitlement. Gratitude not only for my great good fortune in a long chain of accidents, but gratitude to the individual human beings who have helped me along the way. Some years ago, I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat and learned about the concept of the “retinue,” a constellation of mentors that one imagines hovering nearby. Attempting to put this beautiful idea into practice, I collected the photographs of a couple dozen people who have guided me in my life—parents, high-school teachers, college teachers, music teachers, rabbis, colleagues. Some had already passed away. I made a poster of the images and hung it above my desk. Each day, I look up at the poster and give gratitude. It seems like a simple thing, but the gesture helps me position myself in the world, helps me slow down and take a moment to acknowledge my good fortune as the recipient of caring attention and the good fortune of simply being alive.

Two millennia ago, the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the fragility of life when he wrote in his Meditations: “Whatever you do, whatever you project, so do and so project as one who may at this very moment depart out of this life.” With my one brief moment, I can try to make the world a slightly better place. Gratitude without action is empty. The mentors hovering above my desk all gave me something. Although I cannot return the favor to each of them individually, I can return it to the world. I can attempt to pass on the kindness and good faith and caring.

There is an irony here. As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible? Not the universe, which is without mind. And not the huge number of human beings who could have been but never were. I can hardly be responsible to people who do not exist. I believe it is a responsibility to myself—to not waste my precious life. In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here. I breathe. I see. I feel. I experience this grand spectacle of a cosmos I find myself in. That is not a thing to be wasted, or left unobserved.

Notes: A longer version of this essay was published in the Atlantic on June 2, 2026

I have been philosophically inclined since a young age. Not that I am necessarily proud of the fact. It has its pluses and minuses. While some boys were trading baseball cards or arranging dates with the cute girls in class, I was doing stuff like sitting under a tree and pondering such questions as: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Most of my questions, like many interesting questions, had no answers.

One question I kept coming back to is: ‘How did we get here?’ As I got older, I learned that such a question actually has an answer – from scientific discoveries. The answer, although almost certainly correct, is still fantastic, mind boggling, almost unfathomable. In fact, there are quite a few things that are true but seem impossible. I’ll tell you one of those things: How we got here.

You were born from a tiny seed within your mother. And she was born from a tiny seed within her mother. And she from her mother. And so on, back and back through the dim hallways of time until we arrive at a particular cave in Africa, 100,000 years in the past, with a particular woman sitting by a fire. That woman knew nothing of cities or automobiles or electricity. But if we could follow her daughters through time, we would eventually arrive at you. If each of those daughters of daughters had pressed an inky thumb on a large piece of parchment, one following the other, there would today be several thousand thumbprints on that parchment, leading from that ancestral woman 100,000 years ago to your thumbprint today.

If this story does not seem impossible, or at least incomprehensible, let’s go further back in time. According to modern analysis of the DNA of fossil animals and other biological research, your ancestral mother descended from more primitive creatures, and those from more primitive, until we reach single-celled organisms squirming and gyrating in a primeval sea. And those first living cells emerged from the billions of random collisions of lifeless molecules, by chance forming things that could form outer membranes, spawn more of themselves, and tap energy from the roiling sea. And before that, the ancient air of earth – methane and ammonia and water vapor and nitrogen – blew over the seething volcanoes. And before, the gases swirled and condensed from a cloud in the primeval solar system.

I will tell one final story. Every atom in your body except for hydrogen and helium was made in massive stars long ago and blown into space when those stars exploded. That material later formed planets and then was tossed into the air and soil and oceans of Earth and eventually incorporated into your body. How do we know? Evidence supports the Big Bang theory, which holds that our universe began in a state of extremely high density and temperature and has been expanding and cooling since. In the first moments after t = 0, the universe was far too hot for atoms to hold together. During the first 3 minutes, the universe cooled enough for the simplest atomic nuclei, hydrogen and helium, to form, but was thinning out too rapidly to make carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and all the other atoms our bodies are made of. According to nuclear physicists, the formation of those atoms occurred millions of years later, when gravity was able to pull together large masses of gas to form stars. The temperatures and densities at the centers of those masses again began to mount, starting nuclear reactions, which fused the existing hydrogen and helium atoms into the larger atoms that make up our bodies. Some of those stars exploded, seeding space with the newly forged atoms. With our telescopes, we have seen exploding stars and analyzed the chemical composition of their debris.

If you could label all the atoms in your body with your social security number and follow them backwards in time, those atoms, those exact atoms, except for hydrogen and helium, would return to particular stars. Incredible, but almost certainly true!

When we die, the atoms of our bodies are dispersed into air, water, and soil. Some of those atoms will become part of other people in the future, particular people. Likewise, some of the atoms in our bodies now were once part of other people who lived in the past. It is even possible that some of the atoms in your body were once part of the body of that ancestral woman sitting by the fire in a cave 100,000 years ago.

In this way, there is a profound connection between all of us — past, present, and future.

What could possibly come after dinosaurs (my last post)? Black holes, of course.

Black holes are the strangest objects in nature. They were theoretically predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity in 1917, but Einstein and other physicists did not believe in their actual existence until decades later. As described in mathematical detail by Einstein’s theory of gravity, called General Relativity, gravity slows down time and warps the shape of space. Furthermore, according to the theory, gravity exerts a pull on light as well as on mass.

Here is the basic idea of a black hole. It has to do with what is called “escape velocity,” the velocity a thing needs to escape the gravity of a planet or a star. If you throw a rock up into the air, you know that it reaches a maximum height and then falls back to Earth. But if you throw the rock fast enough – in the case of Earth, at the gigantic speed of 7 miles per second or greater – it will keep travelling up and up until it reaches outer space, never to return to Earth. You have thrown the rock with “escape velocity.”

If you had a giant vise and could squeeze the Earth to a smaller size, its gravity would be stronger, because the mass of the Earth is more concentrated, and a greater velocity is needed to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. Now, keep squeezing the Earth to a smaller and smaller size. With every reduction in size by four times, the escape velocity doubles. By the time the squeezed Earth is about a tenth of an inch in diameter, the escape velocity has mounted to 186,000 miles per second, the speed of a light ray. Now, not even light can escape the gravitational pull of the Earth.

Of course, there are no giant vises to squeeze down the Earth. But some massive stars, after they have exhausted all of their nuclear fuel, squeeze themselves down under their own gravity and keep contracting until the escape velocity has reached the speed of light. Such a star has formed a black hole. No light can escape it. And it warps time and space to an extreme degree in its vicinity. A clock at the edge of a black hole would stop altogether.

According to the theory, the material of the parent star keeps contracting inside the black hole until it reaches an enormous density where quantum physics takes over. Physicists still don’t know what happens at the center of a black hole.

For decades, black holes were considered the playthings of theoretical physicists. Until 1972, when first black hole was discovered in outer space. It is called Cygnus X-1, and it is about 7000 light years from Earth. (A light year is the distance light can travel in a year.) In miles, Cygnus X-1 is about 41,000,000,000,000,000 miles away, in our backyard cosmically speaking, but too far to go for a hamburger.

By good fortune, I was a graduate student in physics at the time of the discovery of Cygnus X-1 and one of the first people to do research on the astrophysics of black holes. But first, how was Cygnus X-1 discovered, given that black holes, unable to emit light, are invisible?

Many stars in space are members of “binary star systems,” two stars orbiting each other. We know that such stars are in orbital motion because their colors shift back and forth, from blue to red, as they approach us and then recede from us while circling a point between their companion star. This shift in colors is called the “Doppler shift.” A similar phenomenon occurs with sound, as the pitch of a train rises as the train approaches and fall as the train moves away.

For the vast majority of binary stars, we see the colors of both stars shifting back and forth as they orbit each other. In the case of Cygnus X-1, we saw the light from only one star of the binary pair. The other star was invisible. The visible star, orbiting an invisible companion, is called HDE226868 and had been observed long before 1972.

But that didn’t seal the deal on the invisible star being a black hole. There are very compact stars known as neutron stars that do not emit any light. The first neutron star was discovered in 1967. However, according to the theory of neutron stars, they have a maximum mass of about three times the mass of our Sun.

Now, in a binary star system, it is possible to infer the sum of the masses of the two stars by the amount by which the colors shift, indicating their velocities, and the time for one complete orbit (measured by the time for the colors to shift from blue to red and then back to blue). Furthermore, the mass of HDE2226868 could be estimated from its average colors, which identified it as an “BOIb” star, known to have a mass of about 20 times the mass of our Sun. Working backwards, that gave a mass of its unseen companion, Cygnus X-1, as about 15 times the mass of our Sun, far too large to be a neutron stars. All of these observations for the HDE226868 – Cygnus X-1 binary system were published in the scientific journal Nature, in February 1972.

I became a graduate student in physics at the California Institute of Technology in the fall of 1970. Like most graduate students, for the first year or two I concentrated my time on taking courses in advanced physics. Then it was time for me to choose a thesis advisor and a thesis topic. There were two “hot” fields of physics at that time: elementary particle physics and general relativity, especially its astrophysical applications. The field of elementary particles was glutted with new PhDs, and I feared that I would not be able to get a job in that area, so I decided to try the second option.

By good fortune, the physicist Kip Thorne, in his early thirties but already considered one of the world’s leading experts on the astrophysics of Einstein’s General Relativity, invited me to enter his research group. (Kip was later to win the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on gravitational waves.) I was joined in Kip’s group by four or five other graduate students and a couple of post-docs.

Me, puzzling black holes in the late 1970s

Then, Cygnus X-1 was discovered! What a heady moment to be a young physicist. At that time, there were probably only about a hundred grad students in the world working on black holes. We members of Kip’s group were constantly going into each other’s offices, excitedly sharing our latest calculations. (We were all theorists, as was Kip.) We would write equations on the black board, discuss them, lament with one other at each dead end. Two of Kip’s most brilliant students, Bill Press and Saul Teukolsky, had worked out what happens when a ray of light skirts the outer edge of a spinning black hole. Our tools were pencil and paper and computer simulations.

My project was to figure out what happens when gas begins spiralling around a black hole (as shown in the opening illustration). In a binary system containing a black hole, gas from the outer layers of the normal star is siphoned off by the black hole and begins spiralling around it, getting closer and closer until it falls into the hole. The spiralling gas heats up to high temperatures, so that it emits X-rays, and the colors and temporal fluctuations of those X-rays reveal information about the black hole.

So that was my job. I wrote down all the equations and put them on a computer and let the computer grind away. To my surprise, and also to the surprise of Kip, the gas did not quietly smooth out into a disk around the hole. Instead, the disk began clumping into rings, producing wildly fluctuating flares of X-rays. I was baffled and thought I had made a mistake in my equations, or perhaps my finding was the spurious result of the known difficulty of translating continuous space into the segmented grid nodes required of a computer. I kept repeating the computer simulations with the same result. I was baffled.

Then one of Kip’s postdocs, a young physicist named Doug Eardley, more mathematically sophisticated than I, looked at my equations and said, “Oh, in the inner part of your gaseous disk, you’ve got a diffusion equation with a negative diffusion coefficient. Clumping follows naturally from that.” Silly me! The clumping result was real. Doug and I wrote up the result and published it in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Science is always exciting, especially when researching a newly discovered phenomenon. When a scientist is gripped by a problem, he or she will work on it night and day. Science is especially thrilling when you find something that surprises you, something unexpected. That’s when the most progress occurs. And the clumping instability of gaseous disks around black holes was certainly a surprise. It wasn’t a monumental discovery in the grand scheme of things, but it was a real, unexpected discovery, and Doug and I had found something out about the behavior of nature that was not known to anyone before us.

I could tell that my fellow graduate students at Caltech were committed to physics for life, and almost all of them have followed that career path. I loved physics, as they did. But my commitment was to a creative life, whether it be physics or some other activity. Since childhood, I had been interested in the arts, especially creative writing, as well as in science. Even as a graduate student in physics, I was already publishing poetry in small literary magazines. I continued to write poetry, stories, and essays while working in physics up until my early forties, when my physics research began winding down. By that age, the best work of most theoretical physicists, and essentially all mathematicians, is behind them. I was lucky to have another creative field, writing, to put my energies and passions into. But I will never forget my career in physics, and the thrill of those early days, and nights, with black holes.

Dear readers,

I hope that you have been enjoying my recent posts. In mid May, I will post an article about black holes. I was fortunate enough to be a graduate student in physics when the first black hole was discovered, in the early 1970s, and I did part of my doctoral research on those mysterious objects. I was in the right place at the right time.

Please let your friends know about my substack site, “The Artful Cosmos.” I promise never to have advertisements or fee requirements on my site. It is simply for your enjoyment, and mine.

Barry James is a self taught commercial paleontologist, who reconstructs dinosaurs from bones sent to him from around the world and then sells the completed skeletons to museums and private collectors. He has built some 160 dinosaurs. He and his late wife April worked together and were considered leading experts in the preparation of dinosaur skeletons, combining his meticulous scientific approach with her artistic touch. On a warm day last month, I visited James at his workshop in a reconstructed dairy barn. Just inside the front door of the barn, I was greeted by the enormous, jet-black skull of a triceratops, more than nine feet in length, mounted on a metal post. The place looked like a mad scientist’s cluttered lab. In place of test tubes and coils of wire were tables of dozens if not hundreds of dinosaur bones, a table with newspaper articles and glowing letters of appreciation from universities and museums. On one wall hung pterodactyl bones and John Lennon quotes.

AL: When did you first get interested in fossils?

BJ: I was seven years old when I found my first fossil, a shell. When my father was digging a hole in the ground to plant a tree, I saw a small limestone rock. As I turned the rock, I saw a very small shell fossil.

AL: Not many kids that age would understand what a fossil is, or how old it might be. When did you first get interested in dinosaurs, in particular?

BJ: When I was eight years old, my parents took me to the New York Museum. I saw huge shell fossils and Dinos. Never could I think that years later, I and my crew would work on major Dinos for museums around the world.

AL: You are one of the world’s experts in reconstructing dinosaurs from their excavated bones. Why did you take up this profession?

BJ: To show all students, young and old, what can be accomplished when we all work together. Fossils must be found, then prepared and mounted, and [the reconstructed dinosaur] brought to museums for adults and children to see and maybe to touch.

AL: I see lots and lots of bones lying on tables. I gather these are all the different bones of the triceratops that you are now building. I am amazed that you can figure out where each of these bones goes in reconstructing the beast. I think that if young people could see your shop here, they would be even more interested in dinosaurs.

Why do you think that kids get excited by dinosaurs?

BJ: They know about Dinos since being babies. Clothes, hats, etc. have Dinos printed on them. As [people] get older, they realize that real Dinos exist. Just look at the Flintstones and all the other cartoons.

AL: True, real dinos exist, but they are long gone, and I think kids know this. That is why they can feel safe looking at these powerful and massive creatures. My amateur opinion is that if dinos were walking through the neighborhood today, most kids (and adults) would be extremely frightened. Also, I think the elaborate names of dinosaurs, like tyrannosaurus rex and triceratops and brachiosaurus, might add to the fascination with dinosaurs.

Do you think it is important to educate young people about dinosaurs? If so, why?

BJ: Yes. We all have to realize the past in order to understand the present. How the animals lived and protected their young. All of this is what mammals and humans are like. Only, we [humans] are more advanced and should help our young have a great life.

The above photo shows an unusually well-preserved dinosaur skeleton, a Camptosaurus known as Barry, sold on October 20, 2023 at an auction at the Hotel Drouot in Paris. The creature was restored in 2000 by Barry James, from whom it got its name. The bones of this older Barry, which dates from the late Jurassic period some 150 million years ago, was first discovered in Wyoming in the 1990s.

AL: Do you subscribe to the theory that the dinosaurs were killed off by a massive asteroid that slammed into the earth and kicked up a lot of dust?

BJ: Absolutely. There is plenty of evidence that a massive asteroid landed on what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which caused not just a cloud of dust, but a massive about of debris to fill the air as well as massive tidal waves.

AL: I understand that you wanted to create a dinosaur museum in Sunbury, your local community, but the idea was vetoed. Why did that happen?

BJ: Me and April, my wonderful wife, were willing to buy a building in Sunbury and donate many fossils and skeletons of prehistoric animals, but the mayor said ‘No, we don’t want you to teach our children about evolution.’

AL: What can dinosaurs teach us about the world and about ourselves?

BJ: We should all live in peace and help our children and all humans. Dinos help us understand the past, which will likely help us in the future. They and us are from planet Earth.

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I hope that you have been enjoying my conversations with interesting people. In a week, I will be posting another conversation with an extraordinary person, Barry Jacobs, who is one of the world’s leading dinosaur paleontologist and who has reconstructed over 160 dinosaurs.

Paul Ingbretson is an outstanding representative of the “Boston School” of American impressionism, a tradition that began in the early twentieth century with such painters as Edmund C. Tarbell, Frank Weston Benson, William McGregor Paxton, and Joseph DeCamp. The Boston School combines the accurate drawing and aesthetic design of the 19^th Century European academy with the vibrant color and light of the French impressionists. Ingbretson has taught a long line of private students, is president emeritus of the prestigious Guild of Boston Artists, and currently hosts a podcast on painting shown on Youtube, with 20,000 subscribers. All of the paintings below are by Ingbretson. It is a pleasure to welcome him to this conversation with me.

AL: What got you started, what got you interested in painting, and what age did you first get interested in painting?

PI: My introduction, where I actually first saw painting, I was a five-year-old kid in the first grade class, and the unfinished Smithsonian portrait of George Washington was sitting on the wall up in front. Across from it a little bit was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. I didn’t even see Lincoln; I just saw this unfinished section of the George Washington, and I kept looking back and forth between these scrawls that were obviously made by paintbrushes and [Washington’s] nose. It was an intriguing point in my life, and I don’t even think I thought twice about it for the next 45, 50 years. Then all of a sudden one day I looked up and remembered that moment in that classroom. But that was it, and then I just stayed that way, I just kept having some sort of vague interest, but it was never quite fleshed out in any way. I’d be always jealous that other kids were doing better than me in drawing or something.

AL: So when you saw this unfinished portrait of George Washington, you wanted to be able to do that, or wanted to understand how it came about?

PI: Well, it was similar to a guy I heard talking about why he became a weatherman. He said, ‘I was standing out in my yard one day, and the sky opened up and there were like eight layers of clouds going eight different directions, and I looked up and I had to understand that.’ So I think there was just a point of intrigue, and it just never left my brain. As it turns out, my overall career has been one of digging in and digging in, analyzing painting. So there was something about it that was already going on, [at age 5], and there was something weird about that, you might say adult.

AL: Do you think that painters look at the world differently from other people?

PI: Do writers?

AL: I’ll talk about writing after you talk about painting.

PI: I think it’s inevitable that they do, but it’s because of painting that they do. It’s what paintings they’ve seen and things like that. I don’t think we painters necessarily start with any better eyes. Everybody loves a beautiful sunset or a flower or a beautiful woman or something like that. But not everybody actually sees painting. I think that when you start seeing painting - I know that every time I come out of a show - like I saw a Sorolla show when I was probably in my mid-twenties - and I came out and I saw Sorolla colors all over the place. That kind of stuff doesn’t leave you.

When most people see paintings, they want to know what they’re about. When I see paintings, I actually am finding the corollaries like a poet would, the rhyme scheme and that sort of stuff.

AL: So does that make you see the world differently?

PI: Yes, no question. It does. In some sense, you’re looking at the world and saying: ‘Is that a painting?’ And you’re constantly doing that. ‘Is that a painting?’ But you also just simply have eyes, I think, that are slightly different. It’s the same for somebody who has to write dialogue, as a writer. I am convinced I don’t hear dialogue like you do.

AL: I’ll frequently see Jean [my wife, who is a painter] when we’re outside take her hands like this, and with her fingers she’ll make a frame. She will look at the scene through her fingers and see if it would make a painting. And the other thing is, she talks a lot about composition, and she’ll take a long time setting up a still life in the studio and talk about how she’s trying to get the composition right. I was wondering when painters look out in the world, whether you think about the way the elements fit together and make a composition.

PI: Mostly, I don’t much think that way in terms of the scene being a composition, although I look through my fingers just like Jean does from time to time. But what I see out there are pictorial elements. Sometimes you see, as Degas said: ‘Is there anything more beautiful than two different values of the same color side by side, setting each other off?’ But when I think of composition, I’m always framing. When I’m out there, I might be looking at elements that might be useful in a composition. So if I see a pattern or a form in the clouds or whatever . . . Those are the kinds of things I start picturing that might be useful. So it’s elements.

AL: Well, I think I’m trying to answer my own question as a writer. We’re talking more about fiction than nonfiction now. I’m always looking for stories. And when I hear people talk about experiences they had, I’m thinking about whether it would make a good story. I do listen to dialogue, maybe more than the average person. My particular brand of fiction leans on ideas more than the average novelist. And so I am always thinking about ideas that intrigue me. I keep a notebook of ideas. If an idea sticks with me for a year, I feel that it’s something I have to write about. Most of the ideas I have are bad ideas. But if an idea sticks around for a year or so, I figure, well, it might be a good idea and worth pursuing. And of course, then I have to put different elements together to make a story or a short story or novel or whatever.

So let me ask you a very broad question. And this goes beyond painting to art in general. Why do you think that we make art?

PI: Oh, that’s a good one. Gee, I never thought I was going to hear that question.

AL: Well, I’m hoping that I can ask you one or two things you haven’t already heard.

PI: I don’t know if you’ve read they guy who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I was reading [Pirsig’s] other book, Lila, But I remember he had that thing, and I can describe this to you. When I was like 18 or something, there was something that had to get out. And I had no idea what the heck it was, but I couldn’t be trapped. I had 21 jobs before I was 21. I hated them all. I needed some money. But there wasn’t one of them that had anything in it that had a long [impact], that made connections. I was in the hospital world a bit. I was in every job you could think of, restaurants and everything else, factories. But I had this . . . like my fingers, there was a tension in my fingers. There was a sense of paralysis if I didn’t get out there and to do this thing that I didn’t even know what it was. Do you know what I mean? . . . It was like I was just going to die if I didn’t do this thing [become a painter].

AL: I can talk about why I write. And I write, I think, for at least two reasons. One is it’s a means of self-expression. That’s related to your saying that you had this thing that you wanted to get out. There was something inside of you that had to get out. So it’s a way of expressing. But also, for many years now, I’ve thought that I wanted to make the world a slightly better place. I don’t have any grand illusions that I’m going to make the world a much better place. But maybe a little better place, a little bit. Writing is the way that I attempt to do that. So it’s not just for myself, but it’s the hope that my writing will change people a little bit for the better.

PI: You may have seen some of these studies like the one at the Colorado Women’s College as it was called then. They were doing studies there about music, in which they found that plants grew way better with classical music. And certain kinds of rock music would actually just destroy the plants. And then there’d be the normal plant, [the control], the one that they measured everything by. I’ve always assumed that there was a relationship between that and painting. When you’re putting something on the wall, you spend your life trying to figure out what it is about this that is potentially nourishing: the idea of elevating the mind and all that sort of stuff. Well among other things, just sheer unity, the going together. If people are walking by and the picture is chaos, that’s one thing, but if they’re walking by and it’s order, I suspect that that’s a good thing, in the same way as a song does that. I’ve always pursued that. I want to leave something of value behind, just in the same sense that the Mathematician’s Apology author [G.H. Hardy] talks about.

AL: Yes, I love that book. When you say you want to do something that’s nourishing, I assume that you mean nourishing to other people in addition to yourself.

PI: I do mean to other people. And in the same sense as an actor or actress. It’s not about how they feel when they’re acting, it’s about how you feel when you hear them. Whether you’re communicating and whether you’re even playing a role that’s participating on an adequate level so you can be part of that bigger thing. But yes, so you’re watching a painting to see if it’s [affecting other people]. I had a woman come up to me [at an art show], and she said, ‘this is my favorite painting.’ And she didn’t know I had painted it. And I said, ‘that’s very nice of you to say that. I’m glad to hear that. What do you like about it?’ Because I want to know what people like about it what I’m trying to bring to them. Well, it’s that color. It’s the color, you know.

AL: When I write, my first audience is myself. And I do try to please myself. And then the second pleasure is pleasing other people. When I use the word pleasing, I mean it in the broad sense of pleasing.

I’d like to think about art in general. Do you think that art is an exploration of the outer world or the inner world, or both?

PI: It’s always both. I think what happens is you wind up as an incarnator. But incarnation implies something beyond. I get students to look at pictures, to collect objects that belong, that are in color harmony with each other. And there’s something about just that exercise that puts you in a whole other realm. I remember the first time I saw three colors at once and what they were doing to each other. I felt like taking off my shoes. I felt like Moses at the burning bush. What is that? And so that compulsion or whatever that is -- I’m trying to get people, students to meet up with this other thing, this thing that’s happening there that’s bigger than all of us. And I think it’s the cosmos. There’s something about this that’s so big. And we’re just touching on elements of it. I like it that we all have to drive down our own little roads and find this.

AL: We’re all looking for meaning in something or other. I know that you are not a scientist, but you have an idea about what the scientific enterprise is about. What would you say are the differences between science and art?

PI: Einstein had a student come in with a theory. And Einstein just handed it back to him quite quickly. And he said, ‘it’s not beautiful.’ That’s kind of in the world I live in. I believe that’s our connection. There’s a rational side to painting. There’s a thing about what I’m doing. I’m searching this out scientifically, so to speak. I want to know the nature of this animal, and I want to do it according to its own form. I want to be there in the room. So when it’s all over, so to speak, I’ve been one of those guys who understood the game. And I think that’s a scientific enterprise, if you want to put it that way. But at the end of the day, we have this whole combination of truth and beauty. So we simply are painting what we see in front of us with this knowledge that you have to say yes to it’s truth, and yes to something else that you’re bringing. Ingres said at one point [to one of his students], ‘I find you’re drawing that leg ugly. I see beauty in that leg.’

AL: I think we can agree that science and art are both seeking truth. Do you think it’s the same truth or are they different truths?

PI: I don’t know. That’s a fascinating question. Yes. I see it in people like yourself, Einstein, or the people that are in your world, MIT or Harvard. I see that something they’re looking for, in a sense, is the same thing I am. Why painting? And is this the mind of God? What is this compulsion, this search for meaning? It’s not [simply] accuracy. I’m betting that scientists aren’t there for that reason [accuracy] They’re not trying to see how many sort of angels can dance on the head of a pin or molecules or whatever else, right?

AL: I’ve posed this question to myself many times, the one I just asked you. Not that I understand it. But the way that I think of it is that the truth artists seek is more of an inner truth. And the truth that scientists seek is more of an external truth in the external world.

PI: So you’re digging into astrophysics, astronomy or whatever that world is. Your initial intrigue with all that stuff wasn’t bigger than stars or whatever?

AL: Yes, it was definitely bigger. But what I’m saying is that scientists believe that there’s an external world out there that’s independent of the human mind. We just said a few minutes ago that one of the things that artists are doing is trying to express something of themselves.

PI: Yes.

AL: I don’t think that scientists are trying to express something of themselves, although some of their personality does leave an imprint on what they do. But the ultimate test of a scientific theory has nothing to do with the person who created it. It’s not attached to the personality of the scientist. It’s a truth that other people could test in other laboratories elsewhere in the world, or other scientists could derive the same equation. Whereas I think that when you make a work of art, it’s intrinsically attached to the person who created it.

PI: Absolutely true.

AL: So to me, that’s a difference.

PI: Yes. I see both elements. For me, if you said your world is planets and my world is red, yellow, and blue -- it’s still the same. To me, it’s the same research problem. But at the end of the day, my problem is actually to say what I think about those things. It’s more of an opinion in a sense. It’s not an opinion precisely. It’s actually a reflection

AL: It goes through you. It passes through your mind and body.

PI: Yes. It’s not an attempt to be cold-bloodedly objective, like this is the object and I’m going to analyze it for you.

AL: So that’s a difference between the scientific enterprise and the artistic enterprise. And I think that relates to what I said earlier -- that art is more about the inner world and science is more about the outer world. That’s the way in which I meant that statement.

PI: Okay, yes.

AL: So who are some of the artists that you most admire and would you like to be in the company with?

PI: Whether Degas is God?

AL: Yes.

PI: That is an interesting thing. What happens is you sort of have these gods as you’re going along, you have these idols. Well, those are all bad words together, aren’t they? But you have these people who hold something for you. And then there’s this distilling by the time you get to my age. There’s a distilling about real value. And where do you hold that? One of the earliest questions Gammell [Ingbretson’s teacher] ever asked: ‘Who are the best five painters in history?’ And everybody agrees. It’s Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael, and it goes on, and there’s five of them. And maybe if you’re lucky, Velazquez and Rembrandt can sneak in there. But what happens is, if you go over a long time, you start actually understanding the nature of your form a lot better. And you change your mind about that [the best painters]. So I don’t hold Leonardo in the same place I did at one point. There’s a [similar] kind of thing that you’re doing in the sciences, and that’s the evolution of knowledge. It is just like that [in painting]. So by the time I get to where I am today, I don’t think anybody has seen painting like Degas. So, if I was going to throw a single name at you it would be Degas. Nobody’s ever seen painting that comprehensively. And Gammell’s comment about him - ‘Degas is always interesting’ - you don’t say that about anybody. But if we wanted a little list, there’d be different people for different categories and different reasons.

When I was teaching, it was always who my guy was right then. I’ve been a Bouguereau guy on some level, different people. But, you know, this idea of sustaining interest, you know, like they talk about a good book, you’ll read it three or four times, right? In fact, C.S. Lewis says you haven’t read it if you haven’t read it three times. But what did Oscar Wilde say? You can tell it’s a good painting, because you have to go back and look at it again. Well, that’s the kind of thing. So you get a guy like Degas and he remains interesting. He wasn’t as interesting at the beginning of his life. And then this middle phase, and he’s getting more. And all of a sudden at the end, he’s doing stuff you haven’t seen anybody do before.

And you’re at the place where Degas himself says something funny. He said, ‘When we get to the end here,’ and everybody was saying Bouguereau and Leighton and all these guys were the extension of Veronese who was putting in all together - Titian and Veronese being the great colorists theoretically of all time - Degas said: ‘When the boat comes down the Seine or whatever river goes through Paris -- when Veronese disembarks, he’s going to reach out for my hand and not Bouguereau’s.’ I love these things. They do embody the dedication Degas had to color. And we don’t think of him precisely that way.

And what Degas does with color is music. One of the things I tell students all the time I’m teaching composition: I’m saying this is all about logic. It’s more about logic, which is the same logic of music. There’s an internal logic. But it’s the logic that’s so involved in your own personality. You’re in a place where you don’t know what’s going on anymore in a certain odd sense.

AL: There’s also a cultural context. You can have people in China listening to a piece of music or watching a painting and Americans and they may not receive it in the same way.

PI: Well, yes. I’ve been a cosmopolitan, shall we say, collector of painting. So I’ve seen the music in Chinese painting, Japanese painting, and Persian painting. I’ve seen it cross-culturally. It’s not in every piece. I’ve even seen it in modern art and some of my students get all upset with me. But there is a thing going on there that is what I think of as the golden thread, or the kernel, or this ‘thing’. So I think when you’re actually in [art], when you’re at the heart of it, it’s cross-cultural. And yet, at the end of the day that’s why subject is nothing; its not cross cultural. That’s what I’m always in search of: What is the nature of this form, and am I painting to everybody? Not to everybody, but to the core. I’m sure writing is all the same thing.

I’ve known the writer and cultural critic Maria Popova, for many years. She is the creator and author of the widely known website The Marginalian, which seeks the meaning of life through reflections on science, philosophy, and literature. Maria is also the author of several books, including Figuring, several books for children, and, most recently, Traversal. Maria is a voracious reader. She says, modestly, “I read, then I write about what I read.” It is a pleasure to invite Maria to a conversation with me.

AL: I understand that your very popular website, The Marginalian, is coming up to a 20th anniversary.

MP: Well, you’re the physicist. Can you explain to me where the time has gone?

AL: No, I cannot. I cannot. Clock time, Cronos, says that it’s coming up to the 20th anniversary. What led you to start this wonderful website?

MP: Well, this can’t be a question about free will. A combination of necessity and chance, I suppose. I had come to the US from Bulgaria as a teenager by myself, lured by the promise of liberal arts education, which is sold as something that will teach you how to live. And, instead, I found myself in this factory model for minds, where I very quickly realized I was being taught how to take standardized tests and how to memorize. And I felt betrayed. I also felt trapped because I was working four jobs to pay for this very unsatisfying education. And so I started going to the library, going on the internet, completely blindly grasping at anything that gave me a sense of meaning.

I was living at the time with a great deal of loneliness and confusion and culture shock and psychological suffering of various kinds. So I started keeping a record of things that I was reading and finding that could be anything from Aristotle to street art. And meanwhile, one of the four jobs I had was in a small creative agency — six young idealists who wanted to change the world with the communication arts. The creative director, Steve O’Connell, had devised the first successful anti-smoking campaign in history, and I think that inspired him to try to do more. But they were circulating around these emails with supposedly inspiring stuff that all came from within their own field -- advertising and communication. And I, at 21, said, no, no, let me tell you how to do your job. Creativity is combinatorial. You have to look to other fields if you want to make something new. So I said, ‘Could I start a weekly thing? Every Friday, I am going to send you guys three interesting things that I learned in my own quest for meaning.’ And they were like, okay. So I started this regular email from Gmail with the cc to the seven of us. And very quickly, they said, ‘can you add my dad? Can you add my girlfriend?’ And I said: ‘guys, I have a full college course load and four jobs. I can’t administer an office email.’ So I thought the most obvious solution would be to build a website that anyone could visit. Now, this was before blogs. I did not know how to build a website. So I thought the most obvious solution would be to take a night class in another university and learn how to code. I didn’t have the money to take a night class. So I thought the most obvious solution was to eat store brand tuna and oatmeal, the most nutritious, cheap combination, three times a day for three weeks to save money — enough to take the night class, which I did. And I built the world’s ugliest website. But the point is now anyone could just go to it.

I don’t know what happened between that point and now -- how these seven guys became however many million people. My process has not changed. The form has changed greatly. They were short snippets, and now they’re thousand word essays, but it’s still the same search.

AL: It’s not an ugly website. It’s a beautiful website now with beautiful art on it.

MP: Well, thank you. But this is not what it looked like [at the beginning]. It’s interesting because the Library of Congress archives it. I don’t know what that means, how it lives. I do wish one day to see the very first page that I published. It would be a horrifying thing.

AL: Did you imagine that this website that you created originally for seven people and their fathers and uncles, did you imagine that it would go for 20 years?

MP: Well, I think very quickly I reached a point where I couldn’t imagine my life without that, meaning without the metabolic process of learning, reflecting, and connecting things. For myself, I mean. And I never really did it for anyone. So I didn’t have a sense of audience or the world. But it became integral to me as a person. So it was never a thing that I did and would stop doing any more than I can be and stop being.

AL: So it’s sort of like a writer keeping a journal.

MP: It’s a combination between a journal and a commonplace book.

AL: Yes. I keep a journal myself. I don’t write it in every day, but I write when I have a thought that I want to remember, or I see a place that I want to remember, a person I want to remember.

MP: Do you surprise yourself in your own journal in the very act of observing and reflecting on what you observe?”

AL: Yes. I try to surprise myself as much as possible all the time.”

MP: Self-surprise is what makes life worth living.

AL: I know that when I write fiction, if I plot out my characters and I know what they’re going to say, they’re dead. I have to create characters that can surprise me and say things that I hadn’t expected and do things I hadn’t expected. And that’s what brings them to life. I feel like I have to do it for myself as well as for fictional characters.

MP: What a lovely thought.

AL: I think you and I probably agree that there’s no cosmic meaning, handed down from Mount Sinai, and that each person has to find their own meaning. To use Rebecca Goldstein’s language, each of us must find out what matters to us. I have come to the realization that what matters to me is to try to make the world a slightly better place. I know that sounds trite. So ,have you personally found what has mattering or meaning in your life?

MP: Well, the challenging thing with these big questions is that the answers always seem so trite because they’re so simple and common and true. But I think we are here to learn how to love better and how to be a little less certain, love the world more, love each other more, love life more, and have more questions than answers.

AL: One of the wonderful things you do in both your books and in your website is explore the intersections between science, art, history, literature. So in your viewpoint, what are some of the intersections between science and art?

MP: I don’t believe in that notion. I don’t believe that these are separate categories of experience. For things to intersect, they have to start out from different outsets. I think they are all languages for interpreting and understanding the world that are complementary, that are, in some way, arising from the same source, which is the human imagination, the human zeal for meaning and for truth. And there are different instruments for how to do that. But I don’t think there are these separate chambers. I think in the past century and a half, the fragmentation of these fields, the way they don’t communicate with each other, has really set us back. One example, very plain, is why was Galileo able to unsettle so much dogma with his drawing of the moon phases? Well, it’s because the art of perspective had not yet made it from the Arab world to England, where another astronomer, Thomas Harriot, had drawn a picture of the moon that was two-dimensional and looked like Swiss cheese. But perspective drawing had made it to Italy and Galileo was trained in it. And he drew these phases that showed the moon suddenly as this rugged material body, as physical as the earth, not this ethereal thing. Suddenly Earth and the so-called heavens were revealed as made of the same matter. There are many more such examples, but we have less and less of that today.

AL: Now I’m going to give you my point of view, which might be slightly different from yours, but the same in many ways. I do agree that both science and art attempt to express part of our humanity and the truths that we think we find. However, I’ve always thought that a big difference, besides the difference in methodology, is that the truths science seeks are in the external world, outside of ourselves, whereas the truths that art seeks are internal, within our human minds. [See my substack post “Reality and Perception” for further discussion of why I maintain this view.]

MP: I knew you were going to say that, but I will challenge you and your not negligible interest in Buddhist philosophy by pointing out that yours is a very dualistic model, the external and internal reality. External and internal truth is a form of dualism.

AL: But it’s not the Cartesian dualism.

MP: Not the Cartesian, although there are elements of it. There are elements to it, because our theoretical models of reality are prostheses of the mind, which we test with measurable things that are prostheses of the body — our telescopes our microscopes our colliders. This man, Descartes, has done more damage to human experience than anyone in the history of our species.

AL: Well, I’m not a Cartesian. I’m a materialist. I’m a spiritual materialist, which is a very important qualification. Very important.

In your writing, and I think this applies to both your books and your website, I detect here and there a tone of sadness and longing. And of course, if you’re writing truly about human beings, that’s bound to come in, because we have dimensions of sadness and longing, and as well as joy and happiness. And so, my question is: Do you think that sadness leads to greater art than does happiness?

MP: I think it really depends on the wiring of the organism. I don’t think suffering is necessary for great art, but I do think feeling life deeply is, in both directions. Some people feel their sadness more acutely than their happiness, and then for them, the answer would be yes. Some people feel the joy, the brightness more acutely than the sadness. I will say, though, I think there is a fundamental sadness to being alive, which is a combination of the fact of our mortality that is always with us — however much we may dissociate, deny, avoid, and obviate it — and the knowledge, however subtle, however suppressed, that we don’t matter to the universe one bit. The universe is unfeeling, and here we are having to live with all of our feelings and find a way to matter to ourselves and each other. I think there’s a sadness to that, but I think out of that sadness, art exists. We would not make art if we didn’t feel that we are dying and that we don’t matter.

AL: That’s a good answer. I haven’t done a systematic study of this, but anecdotally, in looking at the artists that I can read about and know -- musicians, painters, writers -- it does seem to me that many of them have a sadness in their life and are drawing on that sadness to produce their art.

MP: I don’t know whether it would be useful to do a systematic study of this. And people have tried, and they’re always so limited because there are such limits to how much you can know about another’s inner world. But I will say every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for whatever it is they’re living with and living through.

AL: You’ve written about many different people in your books, in your website, a great many. If you could become one of those people, do you have any favorites?

MP: Oh, wow. It really depends on the day and on what I want of my day in my life. Today, I’m thinking about Mina Hubbard, the woman who mapped Labrador with her belted pistol and compass and her wide-brimmed hat. And I would love to be her for a day. I would love to be Walt Whitman for a day, but could not carry all that heartache more than a day. I think we read in order to be other people. And the fact that I have written about so many other people means that I have wanted aspects of those many different lives.

AL: That’s a good answer. I also think that we read a lot to compensate partly for having only one life. And it gets back to the question of mortality, that we can, to a small degree, live other lives and be in other places by reading.

MP: Yes. And I think one of the extraordinary dangers and tragedies of our time, which is directly and causally related to why people read less, is that we live in the century of the Self and people are less and less interested in what it’s like to be someone else. And I find that so tragic.

AL: A couple of nights ago, I went to hear a lecture by a Harvard political philosopher named Michael Sandel. He wrote a magnificent book called The Tyranny of Merit. He argues that our society is built on what he calls a meritocracy: that if you just work hard, you can achieve anything that you want. And what he points out is: That view ignores the tremendous influence of luck: who your parents are, where you were born, and so forth. Many people think that they completely own their success, that it’s completely due to their own talents, and they don’t acknowledge the role that luck has played in getting to where they are.

My last question for you: How can we best acknowledge this factor of luck in how we live our lives? That’s the mega question. How should we live our lives? There’s this wonderful line in Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day. ‘Tell me, what do you want to do with your one wild and precious life?’

So if you accept this fact luck plays an enormous role in how we get to where we are -- those of us who’ve had good luck -- how can we acknowledge that in our lives? In your case, you were able to come to the U.S. and study. I came from an upper middle-class family in which both of my parents had been to college. I had tremendous good fortune. How can we acknowledge, in the way that we live our lives, this role that our good fortune has played in our lives?

MP: That is such a layered and deep question. Some years ago, probably about 10 years ago, I was biking on the West Side bike path in New York, feeling quite pleased with myself with how fast I was going against the wind, when all of a sudden I could tell there was someone behind me, gaining on me, catching up. I pedaled faster and the other bike got closer and closer and I pedaled and I felt so demoralized because I’m not exactly weak, but I was pushing it as hard as I could. And finally, this person passes me and I see that he’s on an electric bike. I immediately think: what unfair advantage, here are my poor quadriceps going at full human potential and this guy has a battery. And then I see that he has a delivery service logo on his back, and I my grudging perspective on his advantage suddenly changes. This is his life. It’s surely harder than mine. There’s also such a thin film of chance events between my life and his -- meaning that could have been my life when I came from Bulgaria at age nineteen with $800 that my family had cobbled together barely to last me through the year. And it was all gone by the time I’d gotten textbooks and bedsheets for my dorm.

And between then and the moment on the bike so many chance events have interceded to make sure I’m not a delivery person in New York. And sure, he might have an incredibly rich inner life -- playing the violin at night with the love of his life and all kinds of other existential privileges that most of us don’t have. We’ll never know. We’ll never know why we’re not someone else and what it’s like for them to be themselves. I think remembering that daily is so important -- that we are an accident of chance, and we’re only here to make it worthwhile.

I think there’s something more practical, too, which is quite countercultural today. And that is not get hung up on the two things people lead with these days, which are identities and opinions. Because these are the least true, most mutable parts of a person that are very much functions of those chance events over which we have no control. I think it takes a real discipline not to live as an identity in the world.

AL: I would say that maybe in the last ten years I’ve become more and more conscious of this fact of how much I’ve benefited from luck. I’ve been trying to figure out how to translate that into action. Not just recognition, but action. And I’m working on that.

MP: Well, you do it beautifully with the distribution of your resources, your time, your love, your funds, your generosity of mind. I think that’s all we have, ultimately.

I’ve known the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for many years and have learned a lot from her. She is the author of both fiction and nonfiction and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her latest book is titled The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. In this book, Rebecca says that it is a uniquely human trait to want to matter, to be worthy of attention. Ultimately, she emphasizes, it is our own attention of which we want to be worthy. Mattering to others has to do with our relationships with others, but the mattering instinct, as she explains it, has to do with our relationship with ourselves. It is a pleasure to have Rebecca join me in conversation today.

AL: Rebecca, what is the difference between mattering and meaning?

RG: I always found the phrase “the meaning of life” quite squishy. No, actually worse than squishy. To speak of the meaning of life in the context of human lives—to apply the definite article—is to insert a hidden premise: that there is one meaning, one purpose, at which all human lives should be aimed. I reject that hidden premise and so I reject the phrase, “the meaning of life.” To the extent that there’s one purpose at which all lives are aimed it’s the same for all life forms, whether it’s a blade of grass struggling up through a crack in the sidewalk or it’s a human life: it’s to have the genes of the organism replicated in future generations, just as the updated theory of natural selection says. But that’s not what people are speaking about when they use the phrase “the meaning of life.” It’s specifically human lives they have in mind, and because the hidden premise is, in my opinion, false, I reject the phase. But that doesn’t mean I reject the notion of “meaningfulness” when applied to human lives. But I can only explain meaningfulness by explaining what I mean by the mattering instinct. “Mattering” is the more basic term, and “meaning” and “meaningfulness” are secondary, defined in terms of “mattering.”

So what does “mattering” mean? We speak both about what matters and about who matters, and in both contexts “mattering” means being deserving of attention. When we say that something doesn’t matter, we’re saying don’t waste too much attention on it. And now to the “mattering instinct,” which doesn’t intrinsically have to do with our mattering to others but rather mattering to ourselves. We can’t help paying a tremendous amount of attention to ourselves. It’s pounded into our very identity that we automatically feel that we are deserving of our own attention, just as it is for all creatures that have evolved the adaptation of attention to aid their own survival. But the difference with us humans is that our enormously complicated brains, which have evolved a highly sophisticated capacity we call self-reflection, are able to gain enough mental distance from ourselves to pose the question: do I really matter? What’s my life supposed to be about?

There’s a famous cartoon that says it all. I reproduce it in the book. You see a fishy creature crawling out of the water, proceeding to a couple of four-legged creatures, and then a chimp-like primate, and finally a man. The thought balloon over all the creature says “Eat, survive, reproduce.” But the thought balloon above the man says, “What’s it all about?”

There’s a kind of unease that we experience in exercising this capacity of self-reflection, seeing from the outside all the attention we necessarily lavish on ourselves but being able to ask ourselves the question of whether we’re really deserving of our incessant self-attention. The existentialists called this the experience of the absurd. And we humans react to it by making a choice—if free will exists anywhere it exists at this level—a choice as to how we’re going to pursue our lives in order to make it a life that matters. This is where my concept of a mattering project enters in, and this is where the great diversity between us enters in. The very aspect of us that makes us so alike—and different from other animals—also spawns the greatest differences between us. So one person’s mattering project might be to make as much money as possible, another’s is to create things of beauty, another’s is to contribute to the advance of knowledge, another’s is to cultivate their relationship with a higher spiritual being, which they may or may not call God, another’s is to raise a flourishing family. The diversity of mattering projects is immense, but I distinguish four basic strategies in the book, which divides us into transcenders, who see their mattering in terms of a higher being; socializers, who see their mattering as mattering to others, which might be their friends, family, community members, or, as in those who pursue fame as a mattering project, as many strangers as possible; heroic strivers, who see their mattering as achieving certain standards of excellence which can be intellectual, artistic, athletic, or ethical; and competititors, who see their mattering in zero-sum terms: to feel that they matter they must feel that they matter more than others. It’s in terms of our individual mattering projects, which channel our longing to matter, that I define meaningfulness and purposefulness. When our mattering projects are working for us, then it seems to us that we’re living a meaningful, purposeful, and coherent life. That’s what I mean by saying that meaningfulness is secondary to mattering.

AL: The way that I’ve always interpreted meaning is that it is kind of abstract, it’s cosmic, whereas mattering is very specific to each individual. And it’s much more concrete because each individual has different things that matter to them.

Do you think that the cosmos has any meaning? Does it make any sense to ask whether anything matters to the cosmos.

RG: I don’t exactly know what your question means. You could say that the meaning of the cosmos are the laws of nature that explain it—most importantly the second law of thermodynamics. If that’s what you mean then you could say that the meaning of the cosmos, as predicted by the second law, will end in a state of maximal entropy, which physicists call the heat death. But if you mean by your question, does anything matter to the cosmos—that is does the cosmos find anything deserving of its attention—then I don’t think the cosmos has any meaning. Nothing matters to the cosmos. I don’t think the cosmos has the capacity to pay attention and so to make distinctions between what matters and what doesn’t.

AL: It sounds like that you need a mind for mattering. And the second comment is my guess that there are people who don’t consciously search for mattering.

RG: You need a mind to entertain the first-person question ‘Do I matter.’ In fact, you probably need a human mind, or in any case a mind capable of the kind of sophisticated self-reflection that poses such a question. But you don’t need to have a mind to matter—that is to matter to a being that does have the capacity to pay attention. For example, a lot of things matter to me. Knowledge matters to me. Beauty matters to me. Kindness matters to me. Justice matters to me. As far as your second comment, I think that certain pre-conditions must be in place in a human life for the first-personal mattering question to be asked. So you’re right, not every human asks this existential mattering question. So, for example, if the basic need to survive is what requires their full attention, they don’t have the luxury of stepping outside themselves and self-reflectively posing the question of whether their life really matters. But if they do, then they will try to find a mattering project in order to have a reason to live. This is one way to express the great difference between us and non-human animals. The latter don’t need a reason to live in order to flourish. We do.

AL: You argue in your book that the mattering instinct is uniquely human. How do you know that it’s uniquely human? We know that there are other non- human animals that have a high intelligence, like crows and dolphins and chimps. So, how do we know that there aren’t things that matter to them?

RG: We don’t know for sure, but what I mean by the mattering instinct—which by the way isn’t strictly speaking an instinct—requires not just consciousness, which of course many animals have, and not just some awareness of self, which again other animals appear to have, those who pass the so-called mirror test. No, to contemplate the questions I’m discussing requires the kind of high-level self-reflective distancing that goes way beyond the kind of self-awareness that even the most intelligent of animals display. It is, again, to demand a reason to live.

I spent some time in Africa, in Uganda and Tanzania, with Richard Wrangham, an evolutionary anthropologist now retired from Harvard who studies chimpanzees. He knows his chimps the way you and I know our children and grandchildren. I spent a lot of time with him, watching the chimps. And they’re very much like us. They’re very gregarious and they’re also quite political—at least the males are. As I’m sure you know, there’s an alpha male and when another male chimpanzee wants to challenge the alpha male—to run for office, as it were— then the troop of males will break up into different “political parties” backing one of the two candidates. As far as the females go, they’re not as political. What they’re focuses on—very Darwinian all this—is keeping their young alive, which often involves protecting them from males. The payoff, by the way, to being the alpha male, as well as to being on the team that supported him, is sexual access to females, which of course—again it’s all very Darwinian—gives them an advantage in perpetuating their genes into the future. Observing the chimpanzees, especially under the tutelage of someone like Richard, you recognize how similar so much of their behavior is to human behavior. But what you don’t see, what even Richard who knows chimpanzees intimately never sees, is any sign of an existential crisis of the kind that comes from our first-personal self-reflective mattering question, that has us trying to justify the self-mattering that’s pounded into our very identity. Their brains are simply not equipped with the capacity to see themselves from such an extreme distance of self-reflection as to ask themselves: what’s it all about? Is it all worth it? How do I achieve a life worth pursuing? They don’t construct different mattering projects, as we do and which makes us act so differently from one another, to the point where we often have great difficulty understanding one another.

AL: Can you tell what matters to people just by looking at their behavior?

RG: Not always. What matters could be very private, something that doesn’t show itself to the outside. I tell the story of a friend, Scott Harney, whose mattering project seemed to have been centered around the love of his life, to support her in every way he could. He was a great romantic and seemed to define his mattering project. It had been different in his youth, and people often change their mattering projects over the course of their lives. Scott had wanted to be a poet and had even gained admission to Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop at Harvard. But he could never get anything published and he had given up. It was only after he died that his partner, the biographer Megan Marshall, found the poems he had been perfecting all of his life. He had given up on trying to publish his poetry—sending out those pieces of himself only to have them rejected—but he’d never given up on his poetry. All along he had been cultivating his chosen art. Megan chose among his poems and had them published in a book which was praised by many illustrious contemporary poets. There are many examples I could give of misreading people’s mattering projects. Sometimes their mattering projects are intentionally hidden because they’re far darker than the person wants to appear.

AL: A lot of people have been talking about artificial intelligence, especially since Chat GPT came out and electrified the world. And there’s been a lot of discussion about whether an AI can become conscious. I’m a materialist, as I think you are. So, being materialists, we believe that everything that the brain can do, including consciousness, is ultimately rooted in the neurons and the connections between them. In that case, there’s no reason why we couldn’t ultimately, in principle, build a machine that had all of those digital neurons and the connections between them. So, as a matter of principle, all of the attributes that we assign to consciousness could be acquired by an AI. So, my question to you is, do you think that in principle, that ultimately an advanced AI will have things that matter to it?

RG: We already have AI that is intelligent. To spend any amount of time with the AI we now have is to know that they are intelligent. We already have AI endowed with superintelligence in certain domains, intelligence that surpasses our own. Intelligence, however, which is functionally defined, is different from consciousness. But I think, like you, that we could, at least in principle, create AI that is conscious, that has feelings, that has a point of view, has emotions, and even a sense of self. And, at the next level, we could, again in principle, create AI to which things matter, that is which distinguishes between which things it thinks are deserving of its attention and which things aren’t. In principle, we could even create AI that asks itself the kind of existential questions that we ask ourselves and will then have to decide on their own mattering projects. I would hope our species would have the sense to not take these final steps in the development of AI, even if the technological advances allowed for it. It would be to take an irreversible moral step, and not only because these machines might decide that we humans don’t matter—the stuff of sci-fi horror movies. But even without that horror scenario, to create such machines endowed with the same existential dimension as we are is to create a different form, a silicon-based form, of humans, who would have to be granted the full rights of humans. We have difficulties enough acting morally toward one another without adding machines into the moral mix.

AL: Let me ask you one more question, very hypothetical. What would the world be like if nothing mattered to us human beings? Beyond having our basic necessities, like food and water and shelter, suppose nothing mattered to us. How would the world be different?

RG: Plato writes about this in The Republic. He calls it the city of pigs. It’s not that nothing would matter to us. Our food would matter to us, our kin would matter to us. But that’s true of other animals, and to be explained on Darwinian terms. Those chimpanzee babies certainly matter to their mothers. But what you’re really asking is what if this higher-order justificatory self-reflective question about our own self-mattering was removed from us. Well then, we’d be very much like the chimpanzees I observed with Richard Wrangham. We wouldn’t take on long-term mattering projects. We’d simply be happy in our pleasures and sad in our pains.

AL: Would we be happier?

RG: Yes probably, we’d be happier. To take on the burden of needing to justify ourselves in our own eyes in order to live a flourishing life is to open ourselves up to new forms of misery, such us feeling that we’re failures, that we haven’t contributed anything, have squandered our potential and wasted our lives. In the book I argue that the mattering instinct leads to our species’ greatest achievements but also to our greatest atrocities. That’s not so surprising since the mattering instinct gets to the core of us, and we’re obviously a species capable of great achievements and great atrocities. But I also think, as I argue in the book, that there’s something estimable, a certain intrinsic dignity, in being a species whose members feel that they have to take on the burden of living lives that they can regard as mattering. It makes us the values-seeking creatures that we are. And this is true even when we get our values terribly wrong—for example, taking on mattering projects that undermine the mattering of other humans.

AL: I recently sent a message to my two daughters. I figure at this point of life that I have a little bit of wisdom to impart on them, not a lot but a little bit. And so the message that I sent to them, a couple of paragraphs, was that the goal of life is not necessarily to be happy, but to be fulfilled. And I think that’s what you’re talking about. Happiness is something that comes and goes. But fulfillment is a longer-term, deeper thing.

RG: The ancient Greeks called this feeling of being fulfilled eudaimonia and they made it very clear that it was distinct from the episodic emotion of happiness. The emotions evolved to be short-term. They evolved to give us feedback about our present circumstances. Are you feeling hatred, fear? Withdraw ASAP from the situation. Are you feeling happy? Stick around, the situation is good. But fulfillment, or eudaimonia, is taking the long projective view of one’s life. To feel fulfilled requires both fulfilling relationships with others, because we’re gregarious creatures evolved from gregarious creatures; but fulfillment also requires a good relationship with ourselves. And that’s the extra piece that being human is all about. That’s what the mattering instinct is all about.

Thank you everyone who has signed up to receive my substack posts. To keep you all interested and entertained, starting tomorrow (April17), I am adding a new feature to my substack site: conversations with prominent writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and other interesting people. The first will be philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and the second will be Maria Popova (author of the well known website The Marginalian). If you like my posts, please let your friends know about my site. I will try to answer all comments.

Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object’s loss –
Perception in itself a Gain. . . . . .
The Object Absolute is naught.

Emily Dickinson, poem 1071 (1866)

I apologize for the sporadic nature of my postings. My mind is constantly brimming with thoughts, but I am often distracted by events in the world, as all of us are, and I sometimes do not have the liberation of spirit needed to write down my thoughts. Nevertheless . . .

A few years ago, I met astronomer Pascal Oesch, an assistant professor at the University of Geneva. Professor Oesch and his colleagues share the distinction of having discovered the most distant known object, a small galaxy called GNz-11. That galaxy is so far away that its light had to travel for 13 billion years to get from there to here. I asked Professor Oesch if this faint blob on his computer screen feels like part of nature, part of the same world of Keats and Goethe and Emerson, where “vines that round the thatch-eves run; to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees”? Oesch answered that he looks at such distant smudges every day. Sure, they’re part of the universe, he said. But consider the abstraction (thought I). A few exhausted photons of light from GNz-11 dropped on a photoelectric detector aboard a satellite orbiting the earth, produced a tiny electrical current that was translated into 0s and 1s, which were beamed to earth in a radio wave. That information was then processed in data centers in New Mexico and Maryland and eventually landed on Professor Oesch’s computer screen in Geneva.

Is GNz-11 real? What about the subatomic particles that materialize and vanish in nanoseconds within the seven thousand ton detector at the CERN atom smasher? Are they real? And what is “reality” anyway?

Here’s my tentative definition of reality: That which exists independently of our human perceptions. Of course, right off the bat, this definition is hypothetical, because everything we know and experience of the world necessarily comes through our senses and our brains. We cannot escape our brains when we perceive the world. So, it is somewhat a leap of faith to believe that there’s something out there when we’re not looking.

Some philosophers, notably the Irish thinker George Berkeley (1685-1753), have argued that there’s nothing out there beyond the human mind. It’s all in our heads. When we run our hands along the rough bark of a tree and feel it, perhaps the tree is not really there, says Berkeley. “Tree” is just a name we give to an apparition that strikes our senses in a certain way. When we smell the spicy aroma of blue cheese, perhaps the cheese exists only in our minds, he says. And it’s very hard to prove Berkeley wrong. External reality could be an elaborate illusion.

However, I would argue that Berkeley is almost certainly wrong. And it is the triumph of science that makes him almost certainly wrong. Throughout the centuries, and especially in the last few, science has been impressively successful by first assuming that there exists an objective reality independently of our perceptions, and then making accurate predictions about what will happen when we drop a rock or strike a match in a gas called oxygen or attack the pneumonia bacterium with the fungus called penicillin. It would take an avalanche of lucky coincidences for all those successful predictions to be mere juxtapositions of scenes in the imagination.

Just as importantly, if the external world were all a mental fantasy, then scientists would rarely be surprised by the world. But we scientists are constantly surprised. In 1880, when American physicist Albert Michelson attempted to measure the motion of the Earth through the ether – an invisible and gossamer substance assumed to fill all of space and to be responsible for transmitting light in the same way that air transmits sound – he got null results. That is, he could not determine any motion of the Earth through the ether, even as our planet orbited the Sun. It was as if the ether did not exist. But surely light, like sound, could not travel through a vacuum. There had to be some material medium transmitting the waves of light. Michelson was so convinced of the necessity of the ether that he thought he must have made a mistake. He repeated his experiment over and over. Finally, in 1905, Einstein proclaimed that the ether didn’t exist. And in 1907 Michelson received the Nobel for his failure to find it.

Even granted that an external reality exists, outside of our minds, there is the question: Can we know that reality? I think not. In his book Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, the great quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote that “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

All we know of nature is what our measuring instruments tell us. For example, if we connect a voltmeter to a morass of wires, resistors, and batteries, the needle points to a particular number, telling us the voltage between two points of that electrical circuit. And that number is all we know. We can hypothesize about what the electrons might be doing as they flow through the wires, or whether “electrons” actually exist, but all we know is where the needle points.

I would argue that the ultimate aim of science is to predict where that needle will point. One can view all of our theories in science, replete with their equations and diagrams and assumptions, as simply tools for predicting where the needle will point. Questions about the “true nature” or underlying “reality” of the electrons and wires lie in the domain of philosophy, not science.

To be sure, we have built some pretty fancy instruments, which have gone far beyond our meager sense perceptions and enormously extended what we know of the physical world. We have created devices that can detect X-rays and radio waves, invisible to the human eye. We have built piezoelectric nanofiber acoustic devices that can hear an ant’s footsteps across a quiet room. Still, we know only where the needle points.

So, there’s a hierarchy of levels of experience. First is “reality,” which we can never know (but can philosophize about). Then there is the superhuman perception of the world as revealed by the instruments we build and measurements we make with those instruments. At the bottom of the hierarchy, but most immediate and vital to us feeling creatures, is our human perception. That human perception is a world of its own. As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

I’d like to dwell a bit longer at the bottom of the pyramid, our human perceptions. Our perceptions of the world – what we take in with our own eyes, ears, nose, hands, and brain – from a scientific view are notoriously unreliable. In courtrooms, witnesses who saw exactly the same event sometimes give markedly different accounts of that event. Onions smell delightful to some people and sickening to others. A sixty degree day feels cool in August and balmy in December.

And then there is memory, which forms a large part of our self identity. Neurobiologists tell us that memory isn’t the replay of a video camera, but instead a pastiche of neuronal fragments gathered from here and there, wandering smells, oddly cut visual scraps, translucent experiences laid on top of one another. Moments, scenes, moments that never occurred in the external world materialize in our minds. Others that may have been captured by cameras dissolve in a sea of ambiguity. It’s all in the electrical currents and flow of particular molecules. Neurobiologists tell us that connections between the billions of neurons in a human brain change over time. If so, the universe shifts and shifts and shifts in our minds.

Marcel Proust, the artist of memory, described the situation in his novel Swann’s Way:

I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished . . . .

How will I end this brief essay on reality and perception? Elsewhere, I have calculated that the fraction of all matter in the universe in living form is one billionth of one billionth, likened to one grain of sand on the Gobi desert. Each of us is an exceedingly rare arrangement of atoms and molecules that can feel, sense, think. We living beings are the only mechanism by which the universe can observe itself. Whatever unknowable thing is reality, and despite the limitations of our sensory perceptions and the Proustian unreliability of memory, we sentient beings are here, now, to gaze upon and record this dazzling spectacle of a cosmos we find ourselves in.

Notes

“vines that round the thatch-eves run . . . ” from “To Autumn” (1819) by John Keats

“What we observe is not nature itself . . . ” Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958) by Werner Heisenberg (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007) p. 32

“The mind is its own place . . . Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton, Book I, lines 254-255

“I put down the cup and examine my own mind . . . ” In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 Swann’s Way, (1912) by Marcel Proust, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1992), pg 61.

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How many schemes may die
In one short afternoon
Entirely unknown
To those they most concern –
The man that was not lost
Because by accident
He varied by a ribbon’s width
From his accustomed route –

Emily Dickinson, poem 1150

Accident and chance play a gargantuan role in the world, far larger than we acknowledge.

The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago because an asteroid 7.5 miles in diameter, in its random journey through space, hit the earth. Asteroids that size strike the earth only every 50 to 100 million years. How different would be all life on earth, including ours, if that asteroid had arrived 50 or 100 million years later.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, by accident. Before leaving on a vacation, he carelessly left a petri dish of staphylococcus on a lab bench, in the open air, instead of enclosed in his incubator. When he returned to the lab, he was shocked by what he saw. Where there should have been opaque yellow clumps, the staph was clear as dew. Their cell walls had been burst open. Evidently, something had floated down from a window or the stairwell below, the spores of the penicillium mold, and destroyed the bacteria.

The Dead Sea scrolls, dating back 2000 years and considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time, were found by accident. In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd was herding his flock in the hills of Qumran, near the northern end of the Dead Sea, when he wandered off to track down a stray. Along the way, he nearly fell into a deep vertical cave. According to reports, he dropped a stone down into the darkness and heard a pot shatter. He then returned to the spot with another shepherd, and the two men lowered themselves into the cave and retrieved several clay pots, containing the invaluable papyrus.

Accident. A word said or not said, an appointment cancelled or kept, a person met on the street or at a bar, even a single step to the right or the left can change the course of a life. The world rushes headlong towards us, yet at each moment it can branch this way or that, imperceptibly. A thousand accidents await us each day, most inconsequential, but not all. We are oblivious. We are dust motes, pushed this way and that by the invisible molecules of life.

I met my wife at university, where she was a graduate student and I a postdoctoral fellow. We met by chance in the “key punch room.” In those days, the instructions given to computers were embodied in cards, each about the size of a letter envelope. After figuring out what you wanted the computer to do, you typed the instructions on a special typewriter that punched holes in the cards, one line of code per card. You then placed the cards in a chute, which fed them to the computer. On each college campus, there was a room for doing all this. For months, I had been languishing in my attempts to meet potential romantic partners. I had tried undergrad parties, bars, even knocking on the doors of unsuspecting female faculty members whose photos I’d perused in the university directory. One day I was in the card punch room, totally focused on punching my cards, the last place I would go to meet a young woman. My future wife happened to be there on the other side of the table, punching her own cards. What if she had stayed home that day to read a book? My daughters Elyse and Kara would not exist.

The odds at work, silently, silently, are staggering. Consider that each one of us originated with a single sperm cell merging with a single egg. In each menstrual cycle, one egg out of a thousand survives, and in each delivery of sperm, one out of 300 million reaches that one egg. If my arithmetic is right, that means that each one of us is 1 out of 300 billion human beings that could have been created by our parents. None of those other 299,999,999,999 human beings exist. But they might have.

And physicists have proposed that our entire universe is an accident, one of zillions of universes in the so-called “multiverse.” Actually, not quite zillions, but roughly 10⁵⁰⁰ as estimated by string theory. The vast majority of those universes would not have the right conditions for life to emerge – not only life like us but life of any kind. All the elements needed for life were forged in the nuclear fusion reactions in stars, and it turns out that you need special conditions in a universe to form stars (a narrow range for the strength of the nuclear force, a narrow range for the amount of dark energy, and so on). By definition, we happen to exist in one of the small fraction of universes with the right conditions for life. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here to discuss the situation.

Each one of us – including our universe as a whole – is a walking accident, a confluence of highly improbable events, large and small. Every day, a chain of accidents sends us one way or another, shapes us and changes us.

What are we to make of such ubiquitous serendipity, largely beyond our control?

I cannot begin to fathom the accident of our universe. But I can attempt to think about the accident of my own life. The first thought that comes to mind is humility. It is not by my merits that I exist, but by chance. It is not by my by merits that I was born with a healthy body and certain abilities, but by chance. It is not by my merits that I met the woman who is my wife, but by chance. Certainly, I would have found a mate sooner or later, and perhaps my merits might have played a role in that hypothetical situation, but the particular woman I met, and all the particulars following, were chance events. Undoubtedly, some of the success I’ve had in my life is not by my merits but by chance.

Most important is the accident of being alive at all. As we go about our daily routines — making lunch for our kids, going to our jobs, shopping for groceries, doctors’ appointments — we do not consider our great good fortune in simply being alive, considering the staggering odds against that. Shouldn’t we be grateful for being alive? Shouldn’t we pay attention to this amazing world around us? A few years ago, taking into account the recent astronomical findings that about 1 in 10 stars has an orbiting planet with conditions suitable for life and extrapolating from our own biosphere on Earth, I calculated that only about 1 billionth of 1 billionth of all material in the universe is in living form. That’s equivalent to a few grains of sand on the Gobi desert. And probably a much smaller fraction in intelligent living material. We few grains of sand are the only means by which the universe can observe itself, record its history. Doesn’t that fact bestow on us great privilege, and great responsibility?

And what of other people? Realizing that chance has played a role in their lives as well, I should give them some slack. I should not be so judgmental of their particular situations. Aren’t we all flotsam and jetsam tossed about by the random currents of life? None of us follow straight lines of our choosing.

Then there is the meaning of chance for the deterministic rules of cause and effect. As a scientist, I am fully committed to the idea that every phenomenon has a physical cause, so that, in principle, every action could be reduced to something like “Atom A bumped into Atom B, which then bumped into Atom C . . . . ” But when random events are involved, or if the system is so incredibly complex that we cannot know where all the atoms are and how they are moving, then causality loses some of its usefulness. There were a vast number of atoms moving this way and that in my wife’s brain that made her decide to visit the key punch room that day long ago, and a much vaster number of atoms in the brains of all the other young women in the vicinity who might have gone to the key punch room that day. The role of chance in the world certainly does give some pause to the cozy notion of determinism.

If I could make some kind of “causal action map” that showed the decisions and activities of a person in a single 24-hour period, starting from the time they wake up in the morning until the time they go to sleep at night, and, as we move north on the page, indicating each successive point of the day where some new decision or action was taken and the various forces working on those actions, I would find the map quickly branching out into an infinite number of tiny threads, like looking at a coastline with a more and more powerful magnifying glass. (And I haven’t even mentioned quantum physics.)

I have on my bookshelf a worn copy of the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese classic of divination. The book uses 64 hexagrams to predict the future in various situations, both cosmological and personal. Even among the experts, the meaning of a given assembly of hexagrams is subject to different interpretations. If my understanding is correct, this book supports the philosophy that each event follows from a confluence of many different forces working simultaneously, some of them by chance, and that phenomena in the world cannot be reduced to “Atom A bumps Atom B and Atom B bumps Atom C . . . ” The I-Ching may have been written thousands of years ago to protect against randomness and chance, but it also seems to acknowledge and embrace those unpredictable forces.

In the end, the future is always uncertain. And contemplating the zillions of accidents that have brought me to this moment in time is too much for my limited brain. What I know is that I am here at this moment. I can feel the keyboard under my fingers. I can hear my breath moving out and moving in. I can see the shadow of the sun slowly sliding across the floor.

I am also the host of the public television series, “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.” I am interested in exploring the connections between science, the arts, and philosophy. I write both fiction and nonfiction.

If you are new to my work, some books you might read are:

Are science and spirituality compatible?

Are we just material atoms and molecules?

Why do we long for permanence when everything in nature is impermanent?

How do we experience the passage of time?

How do we live a good life and prepare for the end of life?

due out December 1

How rare is life in the universe?

What are the pluses and minuses of modern technology?