“each body in the universe was attracted toward every other body”
We are lying on the dock, looking up at the sky. Night; lights off in most of the houses that ring the little lake; a sky full of stars. An app for my Android phone lets me aim it at the sky and learn what constellations I’m looking at. I’ve never been able to see those patterns, beside the obvious ones like the Big Dipper, so it’s exciting to finally find the upraised legs of Pegasus, the harp of Cassiopeia, the pointy head of Andromeda.
N. brought A Brief History of Time to the lake, and I was reading the first chapter that afternoon.
In 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, (”probably the most important single work every published in the physical sciences”), he “postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which each body in the universe was attracted toward every other body by a force that was stronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they were to each other.”
What a lovely thought - each body in the universe attracted toward every other body.
Hawking explains what’s wrong with Newton’s theory of the universe - Newton imagined that the universe itself did not move, but if that were true, and everything attracted everything, and big things exerted a much stronger attractive force than little things, then big things would keep on coming together, sucking everything else towards them, until all the matter in the universe would collapse into one massive superbody (”We now know it is impossible to have an infinite static model of the universe in which gravity is always attractive”). At least I think that’s what he’s saying.
N. believes in a universal energy that binds all things together. I’m an agnostic on that, just like I’m an agnostic about the possibility of human consciousness having any kind of survival after death.
I want to believe it. I used to think that wanting to believe it was the same thing as believing it. One summer while I was washing dishes one of the waitresses asked me if I was religious; I said I’m Jewish, but I’m agnostic - but she really just asked because she wanted me to ask her the same question. So I did. She said she believed in “a universal spirituality.” I thought that sounded absolutely marvelous. It’s what I wanted to believe - that the universe was alive, conscious, that we are all bound up together, that karma and goodness and love carry some kind of weight, comprise some kind of currency. “Yeah, me too,” I said, because I was twenty, and desire was belief. Belief, I believed, was a choice. It’s why I might have looked down my nose at the Christian fundamentalists that surrounded me - I imagined that they clung to their beliefs by choice, out of ignorance or passivity.
Now, I know that no matter how hard I want to believe in a “universal spirituality,” or a universal energy that connects all things, I can’t. I don’t. I just don’t. Most of the time.
And then, all of a sudden, I do.
Sometimes I feel it to the bottom of my toes, I know for certain that all matter in the universe is still bound together in a mutual ecstatic sentient embrace, and that there’s a web of energy that binds all living beings together, that there’s some kind of continuum of existences and animal life represents one tiny point on that continuum. Sometimes I believe that.
And then sometimes I think we’re just little blips, cut off from everything except the other little blips we’re lucky enough to build lives with, and every single solitary second we spend with them is a blessing far more marvelous than anything else we could ask of the universe. That no matter how much my asshole upstairs neighbors might be stressing me out, no matter how hard I’m worrying about whether I’ll have enough money to make it to the end of the month, I have to shut my eyes and whisper a prayer of thanks for the fact that I draw breath.
It’s like my friend Nikita says. Every day above ground is a good one.
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