Yes

In the June 10, 2010 New York Review of Books, noted British American physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson reviewed a new book by Nobel Prize winner physicist Steven Weinberg. The tone is largely positive, but toward the end Dyson makes an interesting observation.

He says that Weinberg juxtaposes “militant atheism” on the one hand and absolute faith in the ability of science to explain everything on the other. He tells us that Weinberg believes that science will soon have developed a “Final Theory” with a set of mathematical rules precisely describing every aspect of our universe.

Dyson: “I distrust his judgment about philosophical questions because I think he overrates the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the totality of nature.” I couldn’t agree more. I think that our understanding of the universe has grown and will continue to grow at the exact pace of the evolution of our consciousness.

A hope that absolute truth exists is misguided and a belief that one does often gets sublimated, cathected, and comes out as arrogance at best and fundamentalism at the extreme. To make a contribution to the common consciousness and enjoy the experience, one need only find a way to be comfortable living in the question of it all.

And, Wednesday (June 16) being Bloomsday, of what better example might one think than Ulysses? June 16 was the day of Leopold Bloom’s perambulations about Dublin in James Joyce’s great novel. It is long, complex and of beautiful erudtion. One of its themes is the concept of parallax, which in this case can be defined as the enhancement of an observation by the integration of differing perspectives.

The three main characters provide this in great measure. Molly Bloom’s famous final, almost unpunctuated, more than 40-page stream of consciousness, reconsiders many aspects of her life and relationships and concludes with joy and affirmation:

“…as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

++++++++++++++++++++++

*Joyce picked June 16 because that was the day of his first date with the woman who would be his wife.

**There is beauty in the video clip, but it is no match for a reading of the prose. Yes?