The Masks Of The Universe Poem by Paul Hartal

Rather than planets and stars and galaxies,
the universe is made of changing stories.
Furthermore, I also believe that physicists,
astronomers, or other experts for that matter,
don't really discover the physical world
but invent it through observation,
measurement, imagination and language.

The universe wears many masks.
And despite all the efforts of the astronomers
it remains forever evasive and elusive,
hiding its profound truths and ultimate secrets
behind its mysterious veil.

Similarly to scientists, artists, too, are fascinated
by planets, stars and galaxies. Painters, such as
Giotto, Turner and van Gogh, depicted the glories
of the night sky. Although most scientists would
probably disagree, at the end of the day,
the universe of the scientist is no closer to reality
than the world of the artist.

But what is reality? you might well ask.
So let us define reality, somewhat in a Kantian
fashion, as objective actuality that accords
with the material conditions of existence.
In other words, reality is not an illusion,
a mirage, or hallucination.

Science claims that it describes the world
realistically, as it actually is, and not as an
illusory appearance, thought or language.
However, the fact is that our cosmological
vision has changed many times throughout history.

For the ancient Greeks, for example,
the universe was made of earth, air, fire and water.
Influenced by Pythagoras and Ptolemy,
Kepler in the seventeenth century interpreted
the cosmos in musical terms. He envisioned
The proportions of the natural world in accordance
with the harmonic theory of the music of the spheres
and applied regular polygons and Platonic solids
to his astronomic model of the solar system.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, like Kepler
and Galileo, Newton saw the universe
as a colossal clockwork immersed in
the infinite attributes of space and time,
Einstein later drew a very different picture of
the cosmos in which time became united
with space as the fourth dimension
and matter in its turn warped space-time.

To modern astronomers the universe is the dance
of atoms and waves. One of the most fantastic
conjectures in contemporary cosmology concerns
the Big Bang Theory, which in essence asserts
that the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago,
out of nothing when the nothing exploded.
And if you think that this is just a poetic whopper,
then, please, see, for example, "A Universe from Nothing"
by Lawrence M. Krauss, an internationally known
physicist.


Although science and art differ
in numerous specific areas,
they are both semiotic systems
that involve creativity.
They both advance by structuring
and interpreting the world
through symbols.
Accordingly, we have to bear in mind
that all the pivotal concepts of science,
among them space, time, matter and numbers,
are metaphors.

Many will frown and disagree with all this.
Reductionists will argue, for example,
that, unlike the arts, the scientific method
employs objective observation and mathematics,
which is a very powerful and exact subject.

Now, I admire the power and precision
of mathematics, but the Queen of Sciences
is not infallible. Actually, mathematics
features such irrational rules as the prohibition
to divide by zero while it allows to multiply by it.

Consequently, Bertrand Russell views mathematics
as a mystical discipline, a "subject in which
we never know what we are talking about,
nor whether what we are saying is true."

Einstein on his part also points out that "as far
as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality,
they are not certain; and as far as they are certain,
they do not refer to reality."

Thus, in conclusion we find that the universe
is a mysterious place that refuses to reveal to us
its deepest secrets. We still don't know
whether the cosmos Is finite or infinite.
Also, the greatest existential questions remain
unanswered: Where do we come from? Who are we?
How was the universe created?
Does the universe have a plan?
And where do we go to?

The universe wears many masks
and the latest cosmological theories
are just further additions to the cloakroom.