From Chapter 3: No-Boundary Territory

The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two. It's not just that there are no boundaries between the opposites. In a much wider sense, there are no dividing boundaries between any things or events anywhere in the cosmos. And nowhere is the reality of no-boundary seen more clearly than in modern physics, which is all the more remarkable considering that classical physics—associated with such names as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton—was one of the true heirs of Adam the mapmaker and boundary drawer.

When Adam finally passed on, he left humankind his legacy of mapmaking and boundary drawing. And since every boundary carries with it political and technological power, Adam's bounding, classifying, and naming of nature marked the first beginnings of technological power and control over nature. As a matter of fact, Hebrew tradition has it that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge actually harbored knowledge not of good and evil but of the useful and the useless—that is, technological knowledge. But if every boundary carries technological and political power, it also carries alienation, fragmentation, and conflict—because when you establish a boundary so as to gain control over something, at the same time you separate and alienate yourself from that which you attempt to control. Hence the Fall of Adam into fragmentation, known as original sin.

Yet the boundaries Adam drew were very simple kinds of boundaries. They merely classified, and were useful only in description, definition, naming, and so on. And Adam didn't even make full use of these classifying boundaries. He had hardly gotten around to naming vegetables and fruits when he fumbled the ball and got kicked out of the game.

Generations later, the descendants of Adam finally worked up enough nerve to start fooling around with boundaries again, and more subtle and abstract boundaries at that. In Greece men of brilliant intellectual powers appeared—that is, great mapmakers and boundary drawers. Aristotle, for instance, classified nearly every process and thing in nature with such precision and persuasion that it would take centuries for Europeans just to question the validity of his boundaries.

But no matter how precise and complex your classifications, you can't do very much—scientifically at least—with that type of boundary line except describe and define. You have only a qualitative science, a classifying science. However, once you have laid down your initial boundaries, so that the world appears as a complex of separate things and events, you can then proceed to much more subtle and abstract types of boundaries. And the Greeks, like Pythagoras, did just that.

For what Pythagoras discovered, looking over all the various classes of things and events, from horses to oranges to stars, was that he could perform a brilliant trick on all these different objects. He could, in fact, count them.

If naming seemed magic, counting seemed divine, because while names could magically represent things, numbers could transcend them. For instance, one orange plus one orange equals two oranges, but so does one apple plus one apple equal two apples. The number two refers impartially to any and all groups of two things, and so somehow must transcend them.

Through abstract numbers, humans succeeded in freeing their minds from concrete things. To some extent this was possible through the first type of boundary, through naming, classifying, and noting differences. But numbers increased this power dramatically. For, in a sense, counting was actually a totally new type of boundary. It was a boundary on a boundary, a meta-boundary, and it worked like this:

With the first type of boundary, we draw a dividing line between different things and then recognize them as constituting a group or class, which we then name frogs, cheeses, mountains, or whatnot. This is the first or basic type of boundary. Once we have drawn our first boundaries, we can then draw a second type of boundary on the first type and then count the things in our classes. If the first boundary gives a class of things, the second boundary gives a class of classes of things. So, for example, the number seven refers equally to all the groups or classes of things which have seven members. Seven can refer to seven grapes, seven days, seven dwarfs, and so on. The number seven, in other words, is a group of all the groups which have seven members. It is therefore a class of classes, a boundary on a boundary. Thus with numbers, humans constructed a new type of boundary, a more abstract and generalized boundary, a meta-boundary. And since boundaries carry political and technological power, humans had thereby increased their ability to control the natural world.

However, these new and more powerful boundaries brought with them the potential not only for a more developed technology, but also a more pervasive alienation and fragmentation. The Greeks succeeded in introducing, through this new meta-boundary of number, a subtle conflict, a subtle dualism, which has fastened onto Europeans as a vampire battens on its prey. For abstract numbers, this new meta-boundary, so transcended the concrete world that humans discovered they were now living in two worlds—the concrete vs. the abstract, the ideal vs. the real, the universal vs. the particular. Over the next two thousand years this dualism would change its form a dozen times, but rarely be uprooted or harmonized. It became a battle of the rational vs. the romantic, ideas vs. experience, intellect vs. instinct, law vs. chaos, mind vs. matter. Those distinctions were all based on appropriate and real lines, but the lines usually degenerated into boundaries and battles.

This new meta-boundary—that of number, counting, measuring, and the like—was not really put to use by natural scientists for centuries, until the time of Galileo and Kepler, around the year 1600. For the intervening period between the Greeks and the first classical physicists was occupied by a new force on the European scene—the Church. And the Church would have none of that measuring or scientifically numbering-up of nature. The Church, through the influence of Thomas Aquinas, was closely allied with the logic of Aristotle, and Aristotle's logic, for all its brilliance, was predominantly one of classifying. Aristotle was a biologist, and carried on the classifying begun by Adam. He never really got the full swing of Pythagorean number and measurement. And so neither did the Church.

But by the seventeenth century, the Church was in decline, and humans began looking carefully at the forms and processes of the natural world. And it was at this time that the genius of Galileo and Kepler entered the drama. The revolutionary thing these physicists accomplished was simply to measure, and measurement is just a very sophisticated form of counting. So where Adam and Aristotle drew boundaries, Kepler and Galileo drew meta-boundaries.

But the seventeenth-century scientists didn't just resurrect the metaboundary of number and measurement and then sophisticate it. They went one step further and introduced (or rather, perfected) an entirely new boundary of their own. Incredible as it seems, they came up with a boundary on the meta-boundary. They invented the meta-meta-boundary, better known as algebra.

Put simply, the first boundary produces a class. The meta-boundary produces a class of classes, called number. The third or meta-metaboundary produces a class of classes of classes, called the variable. The variable is best known as that which is represented in formulas as x, y, or z. And the variable works like this: just as a number can represent any thing, a variable can represent any number. Just as five can refer to any five things, x can refer to any number over a given range.

By using algebra, the early scientists could proceed not only to number and measure the elements, but also to search out abstract relations between those measurements, which could be expressed in theories, laws, and principles. And these laws seemed, in some sense, to "govern" or "control" all the things and events marked off with the very first type of boundaries. The early scientists produced laws by the dozens: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." "Force is equal to the mass times the acceleration of the enforced body." "The amount of work done on a body equals the force times the distance."

This new type of boundary, the meta-meta-boundary, brought new knowledge and, of course, explosive new technological and political power. Europe was rocked with an intellectual revolution the likes of which humankind had never seen. Just imagine: Adam could name the planets; Pythagoras could count them; but Newton could tell you how much they weighed.

Notice, then: this entire process of formulating scientific laws was based on three general types of boundaries, each building on its predecessor and each being more abstract and generalized. First, you draw a classifying boundary, so as to recognize different things and events. Second, you search among your classified elements for ones that can be measured. This meta-boundary allows you to shift quality to quantity, classes to classes of classes, elements to measurements. Third, you search for relationships between your numbers and measurements of the second step until you can invent an algebraic formula embracing them all. This meta-meta-boundary converts measurements to conclusions, numbers to principles. Each step, each new boundary, brings you a more generalized knowledge, and hence more power.

This knowledge, power, and control over nature was, however, bought at a price, for, as always, a boundary is a double-edged sword, and the fruits it slices from nature are necessarily bittersweet. Man had gained control over nature, but only by radically separating himself from it. In the mere span of ten generations, he had for the first time in history awarded himself the dubious honor of being able to blast the entire planet, himself included, to smithereens. The earth's heavens were so choked with fumes that birds were abandoning existence; the lakes so clogged with greasy sludge that some of them would spontaneously catch fire; the oceans so dense with insoluble chemical Jello that fish were buoyed to the surface like Styrofoam on mercury; and the rains that fell to the earth in some places would corrode sheet metal.

And yet, during the span of ten generations, a second revolution in science was forming. Nobody guessed, or could have guessed, that this revolution, when it finally culminated around 1925, would signal the surpassing of classical physics—its boundaries, meta-boundaries, and meta-meta-boundaries. The whole world of classical boundaries shattered and fell before the likes of Einstein, Schroedinger, Eddington, deBroglie, Bohr, and Heisenberg.

As you read the accounts of this twentieth-century revolution in science given by these physicists themselves, you can't help being struck by the awesome nature of the intellectual upheaval that occurred in the brief span of a single generation, 1905–1925, dating from Einstein's relativity theory to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The classical boundaries and maps of the old physics literally fell apart. In 1925, Whitehead stated, "The progress of science has now reached a turning point. The stable foundations of physics have broken up. . . . The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?" And Louis deBroglie said, "On the day when quanta, surreptitiously, were introduced the vast and grandiose edifice of classical physics found itself shaken to its very foundations. In the history of the intellectual world there have been few upheavals comparable to this."