Call Me Mr Fahrenheit

Hurray! Einstein’s Law, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, appears to have been broken. Physicists at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, designed to discover the ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson, have found neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.

This is all the language of some arcane wizardry. These various particles are essentially mathematical entities, and no-one has a clue what one would actually look or feel like. Instead, by way of compensation, they are given attributes such as strangeness and charm. For me, they bring up ideas around what it means to exist. Something that exists for a few billionths of a second and can only be described by an equation, does it have an inner life? What does it feel like to be a quark? Or a tau neutrino? Or a gauge boson?

Is it all some kind of joke that just about holds together mathematically, enough to convince these modern wizards that their world is real? I’m serious. The powers of a real wizard come from a dynamic balance, from harnessing and harmonising the elemental energies of Earth, Fire, Air and Water. On an inner level, this means paying attention with all the faculties – Sensation, Intuition, Thought and Feeling respectively – in order to know and in order to act. Let’s chuck in Imagination as well, just so the scheme’s not too neat. Wizardry is quite natural, it’s just that most of us aren’t very good at it.

But these modern wizards are one-sidedly using a rational model of reality. And what has happened? It long ago exploded into irrationality. That’s what I mean when I say there’s a joke being played. A joke that any psycho-analyst would understand. It’s like trying to function in an orderly manner around a Piscean. The more you try and organise them, the more will events occur that subvert those attempts. You are going against the nature of a Piscean, the sign that is the summation of all the other signs, and that operates in an intuitive and free-flowing manner. (You see the hideous mess Pisceans get into when they try to live in an organised way!)

Reality, even material reality, is like this. Yes, it can be labelled and organised by processes of thought. Up to a point. Go too far and it will explode back at you, just as the quantum world has done. There is a place for science, for rational modelling. But it also has its place in a wider scheme and these sorcerers apprentices, for that is what they are, mistake the book of spells for the actuality.
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The Pisces Albert Einstein never accepted quantum physics – relativity and the macro universe were his forte – but for the wrong reason, for the reason that “God does not play dice.” In other words, that the universe is governed by immutable laws, and everything is therefore in principle predictable. In the quantum universe, events happen by probability, and things lose their thingness – on alternate days of the week, these particles are waves of energy.

Einstein had a brilliant imagination, yet his instincts were that there were immutable laws. Sun in Pisces (Imagination) widely square Moon in Sagittarius (the law-giver.) Laws are useful – up to a point. The conflict between Einstein’s Sun and Moon was a conflict between creative imagination and a need for certainty. The latter won out, to the extent that his only significant achievements were in his twenties, and thereafter he lost credibility as a research physicist. Mercury conjunct Saturn in Aries gave him a precocious (Saturn), groundbreaking (Aries) mind (Mercury), which at the same time became very conservative (Saturn again.)

That nothing can travel faster than the speed of light was a brilliant insight couched in terms of immutable law. Perhaps Einstein’s Jewish background, rooted in tradition and the Old Testament, contributed to this temperament, because Moon in Sagittarius does not have to be like this (though it is the classic signature of religious fundamentalism.)

Be that as it may, a pillar of 20th century physics seems to be crumbling. The scientists have tested and re-tested their results to the extent that their findings would normally by now be called a discovery. But they remain too controversial.

I have several thoughts. Firstly, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light is counter-intuitive. You just press the accelerator a bit harder and you go faster. Secondly, whose laws are these? They are purely human laws. We the sorcerers apprentices invented them, not nature. They are essentially mathematical abstractions, yes with a beauty and relevance of their own, but they are still abstractions. To say they are immutable, unlike all other products of the human imagination, seems absurd.

And finally, here’s my thought for the day. Maybe the ‘laws’ of physics have changed over the last century. 100 years ago, nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. But this theory has been so insisted upon, made such an immutable foundation stone of the way we think about the world, that there has been an equal and opposite reaction. Just like the quantum world exploding into irrationality. Reality cannot be pigeon-holed like this. You try to put it in a box, and it will do something contrary.

Again, I’m serious. Reality is fluid, not fixed. And it is vast compared to our tiny human brains. How can we have the presumption to proclaim universal truths? You do that in an insistent sort of way, and sooner or later something contrary will happen.

"Imagination is Reality", said the poet William Blake. We imagined a Christian universe, we felt it to be real, and people had visions of God and Angels and the Virgin Mary. Miracles occurred. Reality conforms, transfigures according to human mythologies. Being a product of the Imagination, the Christian mythology eventually started to lose its power, maybe after centuries, but this is what happened.

Then again, you imagine a rational universe with truths based on empirically-tested theories, and what do we find? Reality conforms (maybe it humours us), and the universe appears to obey scientific laws. For a few centuries, maybe, until that paradigm, that mythology starts to lose its hold over our minds. The law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light is breaking down, at a time when science and its offspring, modern technology, have become inimical to our survival. What laws will begin to break down next?