Keats too, for all the beauty of his Grecian urn, addresses it with the words
Thou, silent form! Dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When Keats wrote these lines, he must have known that all too soon his home would be a grave. Is Platonia a graveyard? Of a kind it undoubtedly is, but it is a heavenly vault. For it is more like a miraculous store of paintings by artists representing the entire range of abilities. The best pictures are those that somehow reflect one another. These are the paintings we find there in profusion. There are very few of the mediocre, dull ones. Despite what Ladislaw says, the best paintings have a tremendous vibrancy. Turner does almost bind you to the mast of the Ariel. Indeed, Ladislaw’s own words immediately before the passage quoted above are: ‘After all, the true seeing is within.’ Frozen it may be, but Platonia is the demesne where ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ and the boughs cannot shed their leaves ‘nor ever bid the Spring adieu’. With that perfect ode, Keats did achieve the immortality for which he so desperately longed.
In a fine essay entitled ‘The timeless world of a play’, Tennessee Williams praises great sculpture because it
often follows the lines of the human body, yet the repose of great sculpture suddenly transmutes those human lines to something that has an absoluteness, a purity, a beauty, which would not be possible in a living mobile form.
He argues that a play can achieve the same effect, and so help us to escape the ravages of time. ‘Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a truly awful sense of impermanence.’ Again, this is very beautiful writing, but has Williams failed to see the truth all around us – the Platonic eternity we inhabit in each instant? Is it blindness that drives him to seek eternity? Some people can pass a cathedral without noticing it.
The desire for an afterlife is very understandable, but we may be looking for immortality in the wrong place. I mentioned Schrödinger’s curious failure to recognize in his own physics the philosophy of ancient India (especially the Upanishads) he so admired. There is a beautiful passage at the end of his epilogue to What is Life? that nevertheless strikes me as wishful thinking. He poses the question, ‘What is this “I”?’ Here is part of his answer:
If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones … Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death.
Thus, he argues that our personal ‘ground-stuff is imperishable, holding us together through all the changes of life. He ends with this affirmation of faith: ‘In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.’ But earlier he had praised the great Upanishads for their recognition that ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self). He seems to want to have his cake and eat it, to be dissolved in the all-comprehending eternal self yet still retain a personal identity. He is not finding a canvas, he is clutching for a straw.
Tennessee Williams faced up to things more squarely: ‘About their lives people ought to remember that when they are finished, everything in them will be contained in a marvelous state of repose which is the same as that which they unconsciously admired in drama.’ Exactly: this is the truth and beauty of Keat’s Grecian urn. Williams goes on: ‘Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.’ Yes, though it’s not a magic trick but simply the opening of our eyes.
Some years ago, I heard Dame Janet Baker interviewed on radio. She was asked if she ever listened to her recordings and, if so, what were her favourites. She said she almost never listened to them. For her, every Now was so exciting and new, it was a great mistake to try to repeat one. In her singing she made no attempt at all to recreate earlier performances and do the high points the same way as the night before. Again and again she spoke with the deepest reverence of the Now and how it should be new and happen spontaneously. ‘The Now is what is real’, she said.
I thought it was the perfect artistic expression of how I see timeless quantum cosmology. By definition, every Now in Platonia is new, for all the Nows are different. But some are vastly more interesting and exciting than others. Miraculously, these are the Nows that the wave function of the universe seems to find with unerring skill.
What a gift too is the specious present. Appreciation of poetry and music would be impossible without it. I can live without motion if I can sense it as the line that runs through a story all bound up in one Now. Janet Baker is right. Watching motion, listening to Beethoven, looking at a painting by Turner – all are given to us in the Now, which we experience as the specious present. Einstein seems to have regretted that modern science – and his own relativity in particular – had taken the Now, the vibrant present, out of the world. On the contrary, I think the Now may well constitute the very essence of the physical world, the first quantum concept (as David Deutsch refers to time). The artists always knew it was there, and worshipped at its altar. It was Dirac’s rediscovery of the Now at the heart of general relativity that started my quest.
I do also feel that novelty is a genuine element of quantum mechanics, especially in the many-worlds form, not present in classical mechanics. In the main text I spoke of lying down to sleep and knowing ‘not what we should wake to’. I see no fundamental line of time and causal evolution along which we march as robots; each experienced Now is new and distinct. I think that the many-worlds hypothesis is the scientific counterpart of the thrill of artistic creation that Janet Baker feels so strongly. It is something essentially new for which there is no adequate explanation in any supposed past from which we have tumbled via a computer algorithm. There is no explanation of any one triangle in terms of any others, and the same is true of all Nows.
The Italian painter Claudio Olivieri, a friend of Bruno Bertotti, creates paintings in which he evokes a sense of timelessness. He expresses his aim through this poem:
A free translation is as follows:
This does express the main ideas I have tried to get across in the final part of the book. Each experienced instant is a separate creation (birth), the ever inaugural act of existence, brought to life by the gathering of all times. The thrill that Janet Baker experiences in each Now is the assolutamente unico ma imprevedibile presente, that finding of ourselves in one of the instants that quantum mechanics makes resonate especially strongly with other instants.