White Holes

Twenty years ago, there were still many who doubted the existence of black holes. When in January 2000 I moved from the US to France, my new department chair asked me: ‘You don’t really believe that black holes actually exist, do you?’ Now he has changed his mind. This is not meant as a criticism; it illustrates rather the beauty of science: there is nothing wrong with changing your mind, given that we are all still learning. The best scientists are the ones who change their minds often, as Einstein did.

The West has been able to use the creativity of analogical thinking very effectively, building new concepts generation upon generation, building the castle of scientific thought, a magnificent legacy of the West to today’s global civilization. But the fact that thought grows and develops analogically rather than syllogistically was most clearly recognized in the East. The logic of reasoning based upon analogies had already been analysed by the Mohist school,⁷ a philosophical school that flourished in China around the fourth century BCE, and is implicit in one of the greatest books ever written, the Zhuangzi, in which the analogical structure of reasoning is subtly employed. Scientific thinking makes good use of logical and mathematical rigidity, but this is only one of the two legs upon which its success has been built. The other is the creative liberty taken with the conceptual structure, and this grows through analogy and recombination.

An electromagnetic field is not a field of wheat; Einstein’s slowing down of time is not the one that we experience when bored; there is nobody pushing and pulling when Newton’s forces act. But the analogies are manifest. Making an analogy involves taking an aspect of a concept and re-using it in another context, preserving something of its original meaning while letting something else go, in such a way that the resulting combination produces new and effective meaning. This is how the best science works.

I think that this is also how the best art works. Science and art are about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning. What happens when we react to a work of art is not down to the art object in itself, of course, still less to some mysterious world of the spirit: it lies in the complexity of our brain, in the kaleidoscopic network of analogi-cal relationships with which our neurons weave what we call meaning. We are involved, engaged – for this takes us out of our habitual sleepwalking, reconnecting us instead with the joy of seeing something anew in the world. It is the same joy that science gives. The light in Vermeer’s painting opens our eyes to a resonance of light in the world that we had not previously been able to perceive; a fragment of a poem by Sappho (bitter sweet is Eros) opens up a world in which to re-think desire; one of Anish Kapoor’s voids of pure black disorientates us, like the black holes of general relativity. And like the latter, it suggests that there are other ways of conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

[...] We would not be able to make observations, or to reason, because to think is to dissipate energy. We would not have senses, because our senses record things – in other words, they produce memories. They would not work in a situation of equilibrium. We would not be able to hear music, since music exists in our heads only because we can remember the preceding notes. In a universe in equilibrium, we would simply not exist as thinking and feeling beings.

It is because disequilibrium is so necessary to thinking that it is so natural to us to think of time as directional, and so difficult to accept the idea that the orientation of time is not fundamental. The time of our thinking is directional because our thinking is itself an irreversible phenomenon. Because we ourselves are irreversible phenomena. We are children of time.

In a naturalized version of Kant, we can say that an arrow of time – that is, the three conditions outlined above: disequilibrium, separation of the systems, and long relaxation times – is a necessary a priori condition for consciousness, because knowledge is a natural phenomenon in natural beings such as ourselves, whose sensibility and thoughts are a macroscopic phenomenon that depends precisely on the macroscopic directionality of time.

This, in the end, is the answer to the question as to why it is so difficult for us to accept the idea of a nature that is not oriented in time – because our very thinking is itself a child of the orientation of time. It is itself one of the products of the initial disequilibrium.

We always make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as different from the world around us, of thinking that we are looking at it from the outside. We forget that we are like other things – that we, too, are like the things we look at.

For this reason, every investigation of things ends up closely involving ourselves.

When we seek to understand white holes, we do so not as pure reason, not as part of a world different from the objects that we are trying to understand. We are processes guided by the same stars.