30 | New Scientist | 7 September 2019
Book
Cosmological Koans:
A journey to the heart
of physics
Anthony Aguirre
Allen LaneLET’S start with the basics. Koans
(pronounced co-ann or co-arn,
depending on who you talk to)
are paradoxical vignettes integral
to the practice of Zen Buddhism.
A grain of sand thrown into the
machinery of the mind, their
purpose is to frustrate, to inspire
and to enlighten.
Cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter, who did much to
popularise koans in his classic
book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
eternal golden braid, saw them
as attempts to “break the mind
of logic”. Or, more explicitly,
ways to stop the mind from
using logic where deeper modes
of thought are called for.
Some koans, such as the sound
made by one hand clapping,
have entered the realm of cliché.
The purpose of these riddles isn’t
to elicit an answer. Rather, it is
to stimulate a lengthy mental
journey that may lead to
unexpected insights.
Combining Zen Buddhism
with fundamental physics, as
a new book does, can seem an
odd choice, but there are plenty
of parallels between the two
disciplines. Most notably, both
devote themselves to the study
of truths unattainable through
words alone.
For this reason, the koan is the
tool of choice for Anthony Aguirre
in Cosmological Koans, his
attempt to give readers a flavour of
present-day thinking in theoretical
physics. As co-founder of the
Foundational Questions Institute
and a cosmologist at the Universitytruly impartial observer; quantum
mechanics forced us to confront
the inherent unknowability of
the universe; current cosmology
asks if the universe is as it is only
because we are here to see it.
If these are the kinds of
questions that have you
clamouring for more, then
Cosmological Koans is for you.
The book threads the paradoxes
along the journey of an unnamed
17th-century traveller, journeying
from Venice to Japan, sometimes
willingly, at other times by chance.
Portions of the story are told
in chronological order, others
in flashback or flash-forward.
The overall impression is one
of peering down the fourth
dimension, witnessing the
traveller’s life happening all at
once, in hundreds of different
places and different times.
Each of the traveller’s
adventures offers an opportunity
for Aguirre to tackle a particular
topic in fundamental physics. So
the wanderings across Asia equate
to the many paths an unobserved
particle can take in quantum
mechanics, while an all-knowing
djinn encountered in a desert
cave acts as Laplace’s demon,
an imagined entity capable of
predicting the future trajectories
of all particles in the universe.
Some of these analogies are
clever, others are laboured to the
point of collapse. For example,
visualising the flow of the Lhasa
river, alternately stopped by
dams and enabled by tributaries,
is no easier than thinking of
current flowing around an
electrical circuit. Instead of pairs
of Galileos throwing balls at one
another in Venetian gondolas,
give me beams of light bouncing
between mirrors.
Sometimes, dabs of narrative
colour serve to obscure rather
than enhance. The references toof California, Santa Cruz, Aguirre
is ideally placed to survey the
paradoxical nature of his field.
In the case of physics, the
trouble begins with mathematics.
It is the language the universe
speaks, but most of us who live
here can barely string together a
sentence. The insights it captures
aren’t always easy to visualise
or verbalise, resulting in clumsy
paradoxes and simplifications
that scrub away precision.
That hasn’t stopped generations
of physicists (and their
predecessors) from using their
work to ask profound questions
about the nature of reality. Zeno’s
paradoxes probed the intrinsic
character of time; the Copernican
revolution revealed that Earth
wasn’t at the centre of creation;
thermodynamics taught us
that randomness runs reality;
relativity banished the notion of aViews Culture
Ditching logic might
help us understand
the cosmosMOHAIMEN WARETH/EYEEM/GETTYCan Zen explain physics?
If you are struggling to grasp fundamental physics, you need all the help
you can get – even paradoxes borrowed from Buddhism, says Gilead Amit“ Mathematics is the
language the universe
speaks, but most of
us can barely string
together a sentence”