ENCHANTMENT, MAGIC, AND KNOWLEDGE
The mathematician, the scientist, the thinker, the meditator, the mystic, all of them journey in a world most of us rarely sense or see. On certain occasions that world’s light leaks through to each of us, and we are smitten, transfixed, caught in the whisper of a fleeting, frenzied rapture – and then the moment fades, the light dims, and the long spare dream of our so-called reality drowns us once again. We diligently hammer up narrow stairways to heaven, and we industriously pave out broad highways to hell. In all the busyness, we forget enchantment.
Enchantment blooms on a diverging road all its own, some imaginary axis bent and twisted into trails of wonder. From the old Scottish ballad “Thomas the Rhymer”, a mysterious lady draws a traveler into a world that alters him forever. She shows him three roads, this first the narrow way to heaven, the next the tempting road to hell, and then, winding across a fern-covered hillside, a road which he must follow never to return unchanged:
“‘And see not ye that bonny road,
Which winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where you and I this night maun gae.”
‘But Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever you may hear or see,
For gin ae word you should chance to speak,
You will neer get back to your ain countrie.’
The vast and teeming reaches of science and mathematics are a bewildering Elfland to any traveler there. One never really returns unchanged from the enchantments of unfolding truth. Worse yet, when one attempts to convey meanings brought back from these strange realms of abstraction and application, one is cursed by the incomprehensibility of one’s descriptions to those who have never followed.
The poem evokes the discovery and exploration of complex numbers, of quantum mechanics, of undecidability, of fractal patterns, of infinite infinities. And even now these bewitching marvels lie beyond mundane explanation; their users and explorers walk in an enchanted world, sensing colors beyond the eye’s greedy takings, gathering vibrations from stars and atoms, traversing bewildering webs of interconnection and flow. And under their charm, we follow.
The passage between the imagination of fancy and the imagination of truth is less a bridge and more a gateway. We dance and run and walk this passage in both directions, shedding fancies to embrace truths, and shrugging off truths to seek fancies. Our humanity hungers for discipline in freedom, and freedom in discipline, and back and forth we go. As soon as we discover the shape of a rule or a structure at the feast of realities, we rebel and run; then in our rebellion we tire, to stare inward from outside the bastions and banquets of truth, hungering again for the feast; and finally we come again to the gates and offer up some little wild, new-discovered dainty as our price of readmission.
When Wolfgang Pauli brought his neutrino to the gates of physics, he said, “I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”[1] Pauli was unafraid of the journey back and forth between fantasy and physics, and in his correspondence with psychologist Carl Jung, he wrote concerning his seemingly-stray thoughts outside the rigors of his researches:
“… I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies … Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.”[2]
Steven Weinberg saw two distinct extremes of roles among physicists: the sages, who reasoned forward from principles in a series of comprehensible steps, and the magicians, who take great leaps into the unknown to land upon some insight no one has previously perceived. Weinberg writes:
“The authors of physics textbooks are usually compelled to redo the work of the magicians so that they seem like sages; otherwise no reader would understand the physics.”[3]
Pauli played both roles from time to time, and in the case of the neutrino, he was a true magician.
[1] Pauli, quoted by Frederick Reines, in his "Foreword" to Spaceship Neutrino (1992) by Christine Sutton.
[2] Pauli, in a letter to Carl Jung (16 June 1948).
[3] Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 68
