The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

Why do apples obey the law of gravity?

When I was a little boy I discovered I could drive my parents crazy with word games. I would intentionally interpret a homonym the wrong way to prove that something they'd said was ambiguous. Or I would ask "Why?" after every answer they'd give to my previous question.

I have never outgrown either game. The first annoys people and I end up appologizing a lot. The second annoys me and I have to stop asking myself "Why?".

Why does an apple fall to the ground? Because gravity make the apple and the ground attract one another. Why does gravity do that? Because it's a law of nature. Why do apples obey laws of nature? THEY JUST DO.

THEY JUST DO marks the outer edge of scientific knowledge. Between that outer edge and another edge ever further out lies a zone about which meaningful questions can be asked. Any further out and you're likely to be talking nonsense. But that second edge is blurry and what's meaningful to you may not be meaningful to me.

Today physicists feel they are on the verge of answering the ultimate question, of formulating a Theory of Everything. (They even use the acronym TOE to refer to such theories). What they mean by this is that they will have understood all the four forces of nature and classified all the elementary particles of matter. Even to a materialist like myself, the universe is much more than matter and energy. All that a TOE will give us, as Steven Hawking points out in his oxymoronically titled, "A Brief History of Time" is a set of formulas to feed into computers so that, given all the time in the world, and all the electricity that could ever be, they will be able to predict which way your billiard ball will bounce off this one cushion.

A rigorous TOE will be a monumental step in human evolution, let alone physical knowledge. But it will only be the first step in a much vaster journey. Like other consolidations and plateaus, it will soon be treated merely as a shoulder upon which to stand and from which can be seen a new horizon of questions that have become meaningful.

Questions like why do matter and energy obey laws anyway? Why does an empty universe need a big bang? Why does E = MC²? Why is space three-dimensional (or four-dimensional or 11-dimensional — depending on how many pop science books you've read)?

The most common experience we have, about which physics has never found anything sensible to say, is the idea of "now." Physics talks about events in relation to another on a uniform scale of time, but cannot define what "now" is. The physics of "before" is identical to the physics of "after", while the experience of "now" remains completely and profoundly distinct from "past" and "future". Why is that?

The most common experience we have, about which no philosopher let alone physicist has ever found anything sensible to say, is the experience of "I", but it is a mysterious experience. When we open our eyes and look around us, why is there only one "I" but many "them"s? If you were inventing a universe you could easily imagine a species that shared an "I", or a species of robot that had no sense of "I" at all. So we do we have exactly one "I" per person?

Why are "I"s immobile? Why are "I"'s stuck to individual bodies forever and ever? I didn't chose to be stuck to Dean Hannotte, so why am I stuck to him? Why will I never know what it's like to be inside anybody or anything else? Since I can't conduct such experiments, are statements about the "I" completely beyond the realm of science? If so, to what intellectual resource must we turn to find the answers to these questions?