Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality
by Anthony Aguirre
The opportunities for coincidence expand at every moment of every day that you do anything. It is exponential. It boggles the mind. That it only takes a tenuous connection for two things to feel like kismet, well, the sheer quantity of connections—between big things, small things, all things—keep stacking up and up and up. At a certain point, any quirky series of events can probably be explained with math.
It is weird to think about how these weird moments only stick when, say, I take a break from reading Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality to scroll through twitter, see a cool article from Ars Technica about Magic: the Gathering being classified a Turing Machine, text it to my friend, and then return to Cosmological Koans only to flip the page and see, “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.” That’s a quote from Alan Turing. Whoa.
Yeah, that’s amazing. Then again, how many articles do I blithely scroll past that would relate perfectly to the book I’m reading—or literally any activity in which I am then engaged—but they don’t even register in my brain because they aren’t about a subject matter in which I have an active text chain? Probably a lot!
What if I had read one more page of Koans before scrolling through twitter? Clicking that article after seeing the Turing quote wouldn’t have felt magical, I suspect, because I understand the sheer volume of material online—contrasted with what is contained within one book—means you’re going from narrow scope to broad source. Nothing about that moment screams “glitch in The Matrix.” Just like, yeah, an article about Turing machines, because duh, there’s an article about everything online. A broken clock is still right twice a day; a dumb article about making a Turing machine out of a fantasy-themed collectable card game is incredibly relevant when someone is reading a book about, uh, whatever Cosmological Koans is about. What are the chances the next page of a book would cover the exact same topic as an article I just read?? Now that is a coincidence that feels super weird, mostly because I can’t properly grasp probability!
And what is Cosmological Koans about, anyway? Well, there’s a series of of basic—mmm, perhaps “fundamental” is a better word here—fundamental philosophical thought exercises.
Do you like Zeno’s Paradox? Good, that’s in there, now in arrow form: “What is this single moment, at which the arrow hangs, in midair?” This, of course, clicked with a quote I had recently read from Hitchhiker Guide: “The ship hung in the sky much the same way that bricks don't.” Obviously. Top sentence in written English. Prove me wrong.
Beyond every section making me think of something else, there is an actual section—ostensibly about the nature of reality—that relates perfectly to both the whoa-weird-connection-vibe I keep harping on as well as the, “Your social security number has been suspended” phonecalls that have to work on someone since they keep happening—a double-nested coincidence? The “gotta work sometimes” longshot—that I’ve cited before as “No coincidence, no story”—really explain my understanding of life, the universe and everything (am I on a scifi roll or what?). I lifted the phrase from This American Life Episode 489, which is not the episode that is re-airing as I write this. It is really weird when I point out things that are not coincidences.
Anyway, back to Cosmological Koans. There’s even a whiff of fantasy-themed collectable card game in the book, as each little fundamental puzzle has been formatted around a continued narrative of faux far-eastern travelogue. I love it. It’s like the whole book is made up of the parts of fantasy novels where the experienced wizard teaches the protagonist about the magical destiny they have within themselves: when Zedd teaches Richard Wizard’s First Rule; when Rand learns about the Flame and the Void from Lan (sword wizard?); Belgarath to Garion regarding The Will and the Word; Kelsier/Vin/allomancy; Luke hearing some vague stuff about The Force from old Ben Kenobi. Okay, sometimes it’s a space wizard in disguise. Training is an awesome way to flesh out a universe’s rules without lecturing directly to the reader. But what if there is no one to teach young Skywalker the ways of The Force?
Which brings me to roller derby.
No, no, really.
In one of those fun coincidences that feel fated, my wife and I went to see roller derby while I was reading this book. Why is this a coincidence? Well, because between the two of us we knew precisely one fact about roller derby: people wear roller skates. Two facts: there are teams. End scene.
One of the things I love about my wife is that she indulges me in my extreme weirdness, even when it runs counter to her particular style. If she had her druthers, she would have spent the afternoon googling “roller derby” so she knew exactly what the cool moves were and why the plays went off the way they did. This was some high-level playing, after all—the Bay Area championships between Oakland and Berkeley. Did I mention we were going to the championship?? Yeah! Woo!
Back to how we knew bupkis about roller derby: I wanted to keep it that way. I wanted to do our best to figure out the rules as we watched the game.
Now, if you already know the rules of roller derby, you can probably guess that this went about as well as, uh, a bad thing that happens in a roller derby game. Someone falls? Anyway.
Without any structural understanding, we completely failed to get to the actual rules that the match followed. We cobbled together enough understanding to function: cheer when we should; gasp when appropriate; intuit who was winning. But the rules we keep hammering together were fundamentally incorrect.
Five people per team, four of them trying to stop the fifth star-helmeted member from the other team from skating. That much we got.
At the peak of our hubris, we pronounced that scoring was based on distance traveled. It is not. No, how many rivals the scoring skater, who is dubbed “the Jammer,” passes is the key: each passed member of the other team is a point. We inferred negative points for the Jammer being knocked out of bounds; the reality is that you simply don’t get all four points available if you don’t pass all four blockers. And don’t even get me started with star passes—we didn’t recognize there were different helmets outside of the person skating around really quickly, and that the sometimes-pivot person had a striped helmet is a detail that cannot imagine I would pick out without at least a half-dozen full matches under my belt. And that’s if I had the other rules already correct. Which I didn’t.
But as more jams went by, our random and occasional accuracy only served to lead us deeper into the abyss of our own incorrect assumptions. To which I cannot but help draw the parallel of scientific thought. We basically recreated the Ptolemaic epicycles. It takes a Newton-level galaxy brain to dig astronomy out of that type of rabbithole: in our case, it was a quick trip to wikipedia during halftime of the second match.
But what if the rules weren’t there? Could we reconstruct roller derby on our own based only on our observations and suppositions? How long would our league—with out-of-bounds negative points and an estimated quarter-loop-distance scoring system—hold together? Would more and more rules need to be tacked on to approximate what we couldn’t quite understand? And, what if our rules actually had an impact on what the players were doing—they heard us, maybe, and some started following our rules while the rest kept doing things the normal way? I’m not sure, pretend this observation-impacting-reality metaphor is good, please. Okay, moving on.
Once you know the rules, nothing but the rules seem to make sense and all the tentative, speculative nonsense gets brushed away. But when you’re still trying to figure them out? Anything that holds together for more than a moment feels etched in granite.
The section I read the next day in Cosmological Koans: “The game wears on, each move taking longer than the last. Try as you might, just when you think you understand the rules, a played stone proves you wrong.” Hey! That’s just like what I was thinking during roller derby! What a, and let’s say this all together now, “What a coincidence!”
Cosmological Koans is not a book that can take apart your mind and rebuild it with cosmic understanding. All it can do it point out how interesting some things can seem. It tells you, “Hey, doesn’t it seem strange that sometimes the second Jammer skates just as far as the first one but gets zero points instead of four?” And then you get to think about that for a while.
But with subatomic particles.