Last week was in de Volkskrant a nice article about nothing. Science editor George van Hal describes the state of affairs in physics about whether something can arise from nothing. Can we even imagine something that isn’t there? Furthermore, dark matter does not seem to be nothing, but something nonetheless and there is a possibility ‘that we will literally disappear into nothingness’. Not by death, but simply because a rapidly expanding orb of literally nothing will completely engulf our cosmos. The physicist Jan Pieter van Schaar is not yet concerned about this, because such events are rare. You can only expect them on ‘time scales’ that are much older than those of the universe.
Yet.
In these kinds of explanations, the interested layman in me always refers to the letter that the poet Jan Hanlo sent to Willem Frederik Hermans, when he treaty van Wittgenstein had translated. Hanlo wrote that although he had understood little of Wittgenstein’s treatise, he had experienced reading it as pure poetry. That’s pretty much how I got the part about nothingness. More than thirty years ago I was once guided for a day through the tubes of the particle accelerator in Cern. Together with my colleague Rob Sijmons, we received an explanation from the physicist Simon van der Meer (1925-2011), who could call himself the discoverer of the W and Z bosons. In the evening in my hotel room I wondered what I had understood, but before I had the answers, I was drawn into a sleep of the darkest matter.
‘Das Nichts selber nichtet’, the philosophical oracle Martin Heidegger once said, and this has often been laughed at by the positivist opponents. It’s nothing nothing, but if you are to believe modern physics, there is some truth to that. Or maybe nothing at all. It is claimed that even Heidegger could not understand himself.
Man is dwarfed by all this physical violence, somewhere out there ‘in a meaningless corner of the universe’, as Van Hal puts it. On the same day that his piece appeared, in de Volkskrant also a consideration by the philosopher/lawyer/writer Jurriën Hamer with the headline: ‘Our country is in such a bad state because we voters too did not take the future seriously’. There was a time when physics and philosophy had common ground, but this is hardly noticeable at Hamer. According to Hamer, we are no longer in control of the problems, because we are unable to look ahead. He uses the word ‘we’ with emphasis. In his case, it is quite the pastor-we who tells us, the flock, that we are all guilty of the disasters that will be poured out on us in the future.
I personally have no feeling at all for such reasoning, in my deepest essence I find them banal. It is not even that difficult to show that we are not so bad at all, nor is it difficult to recognize that there are also serious problems that require a solution in the not too long term. We happen to live in a small part of the world where freedom, prosperity and justice reign. But a ‘we’ that unanimously points the way to the future does not exist and probably never will.
Good thing, too. It is expected of leaders, but it does not surprise me that it is always impossible to look twenty years or more ahead. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, which no one predicted in 1988. Who predicted that Balkenende, initially only known for the croquette notion in the Amstelveen city council, would once again become minister of state? In fact, I’ve never seen one long-term prediction come true in my entire life. Perhaps that would have happened if those predictions had not been anticipated afterwards.
It is possible that all those gloomy climate predictions will come true, but whoever drives through Europe today must notice how the landscape is changing due to the many windmills. When you’re young you’re right in the middle of it, but anyone of my age will notice that the transition is taking place at a rapid pace. You can complain that things are not going fast enough, but in Europe a war is currently raging that ‘we’ did not want.
Admittedly, I also sometimes think that we are all going crazy and that it will never work out. For example, I read that people with a stomach reduction ask for a discount in all-you-can-eat restaurants. But otherwise I remain an incorrigible optimist.