Cosmic laughter


 


All right, it's been about two months. The simple explanation was that work heated up to a tremendous degree. It soon became apparent that my priorities were 1)work, 2)sleep &eat, 3)keep up on my reading, 4) talk to my friends, 5)everything else, including blogging.

It's been frustrating. Lots of thoughts that have been worthwhile posting, a whole lot of fascinating political developments, many worthwhile books etc. But no time.

I've managed to post little snarky comments on Eschaton and elsewhere--but they're the work of a moment and, for better or for worse, entries here have developed into more serious undertakings.

I have a little more time now. And so I turn blogward.

So I'm going to return with something I've been thinking of quite a bit--and even hinted at to some. It's definitely a speculation that teeters on the edge: it may be complete bullshit, or it might be the most important thing I've ever written.

If there's a center of strangeness in the world of quantum mechanics, it's the process called the collapse of the wave-function. In talking about the famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, most of the wondering focus is on a state of affairs in which the cat is both alive and dead. This is pretty wild, granted, but the truly amazing part is that somehow this superimposed state turns into a single state. People have come up with various models (like the many-universe models), but, as Roger Penrose points out (IIRC in The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind) that none of these models explain how the waveform actually collapses. There's a strong impulse to add an 'of course' to the process, since the end result is what's called reality.

I first came across the actual wave equation in an extraordinary course at the University of Chicago misnamed Advanced Freshman Chemistry, given by the extraordinary Stuart Rice. (It was the description of this course by a friend that convinced me to go to the U of C, and had all my teachers been like Prof. Rice, I would be a scientist today.) And in addition to the thrill of being asked in the first week of a freshman chem course to solve a partial differential equation in three variables, there was the astounding revelation that the square of the wave function was the probability of the particle's location.

What in the Mind of God was the square root of existence?

What, for that matter, is the Schrödinger wave equation? What is it a wave of? What is it a ripple in?

Physicists of the Niels Bohr school can shake a reproving head at us poor folks trying to makes sense out of all this, taking the position that "that's just the way the math works." They might be right. After all, the mission of science is to investigate how the world works and not what the world is. (The fallacy of the Carl Sagan view of the universe is that, being so good at the former, it must also be good at the latter--and therefore, the former is in fact the latter. And that ain't necessarily so.) we--I--may have to settle for a universe that can be described but not understood--but not yet.

So we have this fundamental function, that, squared, describes location, and, unsquared, describes--what? And it's also something that collapses from alternate states into one state--somehow--that is observed reality.

This is tremblingly close to the core of things--and teeteringly close to the edge of science.

And since it did not seem to be the business of physics--though physicists looked at it a lot--and that philosophers did not seem to be interested--although it seemed to be their bailiwick--I put that on the shelf and decided to study the Middle Ages, and subsequently to write comic books, instead.

That's part one.

Shifting gears about as heavily as they can be shifted, I've always been fascinated by laughter. It seems to be a deep reaction in us--as physiological as a sneeze, and yet also governed by the highest and most involved of conscious mental processes--knowledge, judgment, taste. A joke isn't funny if you don't have the cultural referents, and you may not think the joke is funny anyway. A joke can get old: kids laugh at things adults don't laugh at. And OTOH, something can be funny every time you see it or hear it.

And learning the reference does not teach you that a joke or a story is funny: if a skit depends on a movie you haven't seen, seeing the movie doesn't all of a sudden make the skit funny the way it makes it make sense. Laughter requires reason but is not a thing of reason.

And there's also the dark roots in aggression: the baring of teeth, the barking sound that looks similar to the aggressive posings in animals. And there is laughter that comes out of cruelty, that many say is the real core of humor.

So, what is laughter? And what's so funny?

One of my earlier stabs at a principle of humor was 'creative misuse.' A quintessential example is Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush eating his shoe with a knife and fork. Two things that don't belong together that suddenly work. But simply juxtaposing two disjointed and jarring elements doesn't make for humor: if it did, Eliot's The Waste Land would have them rolling in the aisles:

"the evening--now get this!--spread out like a patient etherized upon a table! *snort*"

(One of my best papers in grad school was comparing Eugène Ionesco's plays with Spike Milligna's (the noted typing error) Goon Show. They used the same techniques, but for opposite purposes--and different effects.)


Or take James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and juxtapose it with a pun. Well, one is longer than the other, but still Joyce uses the same principle as Grendel Briarton: (Two puns of particular pungency: There was a time when the Chicago subway's downtown tunnel system began to flood. It soon got so bad that fish were discovered swimming in them. They decreed it was a clear case of Carp-El Tunnel Syndrome. Or the other: during the 2000 Presidential Debates, it was questioned as to who would win George Bush seemed personable, but the Vice president always seemed perfectly prepared and spoke with mathematical precision. Could Bush stand up to his oppoenent's Al Gore Rhythm?) Finnegans Wake is chock full of such linguistic mashing, but very few people steal jokes from it.

Now, meeting halfway, there's the joke "How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two: one to put in the bulb, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly-colored power tools." I find this funny: God knows wherher you, Dear Reader, do.

It's easy to notice the two alien things brought together: it's less easy to say where the spark that is Getting the Joke comes from. But what it seems to me is that that spark is the perception--realization-- that the absurd elements come together--and work.

And are seen as a whole.

And are.

(I think that the laughter of cruelty comes from the presentation of a threat (a brutality, a deformity, a danger) which collapses as the viewer realizes it's not happening to him or herself, short circuiting the fear response with a relief that becomes pleasure. But I'm not certain of this.)

But it was late last year that, driving home late one night from a science fiction convention, (maybe because there had been lots of joking around and a fair amount of irresponsible scientific speculation, or maybe just the 307 Ale) that I began to think that I was looking at the same process in both places.

Laughter has its roots in animal surprise. It's a relief of tension. The collapse of tension, or the release of anger, show a similar reaction. But it's more than that, I think. Laughter is a very specific kind of surprise: it's the surprise of two things coming together that shouldn't come together, but do.

At the very core of it, it's that incomprehensible, delightful awareness of something coming into existence.

Like the wave function squaring itself and becoming location.

Like two or more universes of superposed states collapsing before the observer, to, in an incomprehensible, counterintuitive, but undeniable way, to become one event.

Now I know that there's probably no connection between wave-function collapse and laughter. It's absurd on the face of it. There's no way of even testing such an assertion. In fact, it may be meaningless in almost any rational sense of the word. And even if it were 'true' (whatever THAT means), does it have any possible relevance? to everyday life, or even non-everyday life? Maybe not.

But maybe, just maybe, we might realize something in us laughs because we see creation. Because we are surprised and burst into laughter as we see that there is something new under the sun. And maybe because we have from our animal beginnings only been reading the punchlines of all these quantum jokes--that we have been the punchlines of those funny stories--that we don't quite get it. And that maybe when we contemplate all the potentialities that kinda were becoming the is, we might gain some appreciation as we slip on the banana peels that make up the cosmos.

And the vision of a God laughing a trillion trillion times a second as She keeps creating the universe somehow has an appeal even to me.

There now. Happy?

Posted: Sunday - April 09, 2006 at 01:36 AM        

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