Connectedness and transience

The interdependence and impermanence of all phenomena holds a central place in Buddhism and many other belief systems1. Causal relations are observed everywhere, in forces imparted and borne at all scales from fundamental particles within atoms2 through organisms in Earth systems3 to galaxies in the cosmos4. Transience sustains the perpetual dance of interacting entities, yet our acquisitive natures shrink from accepting reality as interaction and not state. We crave the freedom to furnish our condition with satisfactory permanence beyond the grasp of others. We may even aspire to personal relations with god5.

Does anything exist free from all dependence on everything else, and hence in a state of everlasting permanence? Although neutrinos, the lightest and most pervasive of elementary particles, rarely interact with other matter, they are born from violence in stellar nuclear fusion and interstellar collisions. And we have learned how to capture them6. Noble elements, including helium and neon gases, and platinum and gold metals, have little reactivity, which makes them all the more useful and desirable to us; we use them up. Dark matter exchanges gravitational influence with all matter. Empty space ripples with electric and magnetic fields. Even black holes, the most isolated objects we know, emit Hawking radiation and eventually evaporate. If the Universe itself stands alone, why would it be the exception? Perhaps our Big Bang was just one in an endless series7, each with aeon-specific laws of physics. What about an all-powerful god that imparts force but suffers none? Monotheism does offer an attractive certainty, of a connected and eternal presence. We must then accept that our happiness and reason echo in a seemingly “unreasonable silence” from above8. And we need to agree on the one god.

• Buddhism has a systematic framework for understanding interdependence and impermanence. Similar ideas appear in Hinduism and Taoism, and in indigenous traditions.
• Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 uncertainty principle refuted classical understanding of an objective reality independent of the observer. Quantum reality precludes simultaneous knowledge of complementary physical properties, such as a particle’s position and momentum.
• Alexander von Humboldt’s 1805 Tableau Physique records his observations and interpretations of Andean Mount Chimborazo’s mutual dependencies in physical, climatological and organic phenomena.
• Baryonic gases expelled from galaxies fall back into them over cosmic time.
• Early 5ᵗʰ century Hindu ruler Kumaragupta I depicted himself on coins feeding a sacred peacock.
• Physicist Wolfgang Pauli was already renowned for despising untestable theories when he confided to a friend in 1930, “I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.” The elusive neutrino, which passes through ordinary matter almost without trace, was his desperate remedy for a puzzling loss of energy observed during radioactive transformations of atomic nuclei. Twenty-six years later its existence was finally confirmed by direct detection in emissions from a nuclear reactor. Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines had trapped the mysteriously light and fleet neutrino in a heavily-shielded detector weighing 9 tonnes. They proudly telegrammed their news to Pauli, who replied by return. The great theoretician, famously inept in the laboratory, preferred valediction to congratulation: “Thanks for message. Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.” Naturally occurring neutrinos were first detected in 1965, some years after Pauli’s death, in the products of galactic cosmic rays hitting Earth’s atmosphere. Reines and his team had observed them in a 37-m long detector array set 3-km deep inside a gold mine in South Africa.
• Roger Penrose’s 2006 proposal that our Universe follows from preceding aeons, has supporting but contested evidence in apparent anomalies within the Cosmic Microwave Background.
• Camus, A. (1942) Le Mythe de Sisyphe. In ancient Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to an eternity of repeatedly hauling a boulder up a mountain only for it always to roll back down before he reaches the top. Albert Camus concludes that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy with this meaningless toil.

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index