The Darkest Stuff of the Human Mind

Back in my first year of college, lo these many years ago, I took a physics class. Now, there are some who will argue that it was less a "physics" class and more a "get-out-of-science-free" card. And yes, the class was given many nicknames, like Physics for Poets, Physics for the Lazy, or Stars and their Friends (thank you Orhan Pamuk).

But I also really loved that class. Due to a singularly unpleasant chemistry class and a youthful disposition, I let math and science fall somewhat by the wayside in high school, meaning that I didn't have the calculus credit or the wherewithal to become a physics whiz in college. But that doesn't mean that I'm not interested in science. I find the theoretical conversations that exist in the realm of physics to be not so far removed from the philosophy classes I did take in abundance. And furthermore, I am always deeply enchanted when I find that there is math out there to support an idea that sounds perfectly insane.

So anyway, this physics class. What I remember most strongly, besides the fact that the professor tossed out popcorn balls to illustrate the Big Bang, was a cosmological notion I came across while studying for the final.

I can't remember the exact wording, but the gist was this: if dark matter - which is an important, if highly debated, part of the scientific explanation for gravity in the larger universe (or so I've been led to believe) - indeed exists in a non-speculative sense, it makes up the majority of all that exists. Therefore, everything we've ever studied on a grand or minor scale, from entomology to cosmology, is nothing more than the ephemera of the universe.

How's that for a reorganization of your priorities? When I got tired of studying, I ran down to Bob's, the student-run coffee shop, and told my friend Ashley what I had read. I was so excited by the idea that my every aspect was bubbling over, but poor Ashley was tired, and she looked at me and said:

"Adrienne, it's finals week. Please do not give me even more to think about."

Oh well. Sorry Ashley.

From what I can tell, the study of the universe and its structures is full of these gratifyingly bizarre facts and theories, and the one I read about today - in a New York Times article by Dennis Overbye - may just be the strangest one yet. Not surprisingly, what really got me about this theory was the aesthetics of the thing, spurred by a moment early on in the Times article. Overbye wrote:

"The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us."

There you have it: a Boltzmann brain. It's simple, it's smart, and it floats in outer space.

For me, the creepy and interesting thing about this concept is not its lasting implications for physics, consciousness, or thermodynamics. Rather, I am fascinated about what it would mean for the existence of this moment, as I am experiencing it.

If I were a mere figment in the imagination of a "freaky observer," as the Boltzmann brains were called, that would mean that a snapping synapse in the empty universe was resulting in a person who was reading about that same synapse. My life would be an imagined headline in an intelligent mind, proclaiming that the mind itself may turn out to be real .

To me, this is rather like a person convincing themselves that their dreams indeed believe in them.

*****Photo Credit: Jef Poskanzer on Flickr.com.