When Brown College cosmologist Stephon Alexander steps as much as the rostrum in June to simply accept the 2024 Frantz Fanon Award for Excellent Achievements in Science, Philosophy, and Management, offered by the Caribbean Philosophical Affiliation, he’ll step as much as the dais excessive in each mental and leisure worth.
Maybe he’ll inform his fellow associates tales of his early childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, and of his subsequent household transfer to the Bronx at eight and of attending DeWitt Clinton Excessive Faculty, the place he fell beneath the spell of physics and its trainer Daniel Kaplan, and the place he would skip college to go on non-public excursions into Manhattan and groove on the palaver of a gaggle of truant misfits calling themselves the 5 Percenters.
Or he might focus on how he overcame his “worry of failure and the sensation of being an imposter” as he rose by means of the ranks of researchers in theoretical physics, changing into “the one black physics PhD scholar at Brown (and certainly one of three within the US),” and the way that worry and feeling carried over to his postdoc research at Imperial School in Britain with Nobel laureates, the place he resisted being simply one other physicist who would “shut up and calculate,” and as an alternative improvised and mooned over the courageous new work in quantum mechanics. And even when he returned to the States to do a uncommon second postdoc at Stanford these emotions continued, however have been now seen as helpful anxieties for the manufacturing of significant discourse and theorizing in string concept.
He might inform his associates about Einstein’s underappreciated musicality, and Frizzled Mane’s imaginative romps by means of the cosmos, his infantile enjoyment of astral projections, his gedankenexperiments that led to his basic concept of relativity and the way he impressed these researchers in supergravity who adopted in his stardust. Alexander might inform of how he was awed by his encounter with Nobel laureate Chris Isham, who suggested Alexander on the best way to grow to be a great physicist: “[S]prime studying these physics books. It is advisable develop your unconscious thoughts; that’s the wellspring of a terrific theoretical physicist.” This was good news to the improvisational thoughts of Stephon Alexander.
If worse led to worst, then Stephon might lay apart the jibber jabber and pull out his saxophone and play a quantity from his album, Here Comes Now, maybe the tune impressed by his friendship with Ornette Coleman, “Contained in the Mirror,” which explores the place of self within the cosmos. Or he might play some Coltrane and reprise a short Wired talk the place he relates how the nice horn participant’s music confirmed him the connection of physics to music, which led to his writing The Jazz of Physics, which was revealed in 2016.
Or Stephon might simply rise up and ship among the ample mental items from his two books, The Jazz of Physics and the 2021 quantity, Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider’s Guide to the Future of Physics. Every of them is highly effective in distinctive methods.
The Jazz of Physics is a superb e book. It’s stuffed with attention-grabbing and weird anecdotes. It’s well-paced and pays homage to the greats of cosmology and astrophysics. It’s written by somebody who appreciates the necessity to use colourful analogies to clarify troublesome ideas in science. The memoir that takes you thru the creator’s early introduction to science — by means of music. Alexander is a musician—a saxophonist—already in a band by the point he’s launched to his first charismatic teacher, Mr. Daniel Kaplan, at DeWitt. Alexander describes how Kaplan launched the very top quality to physics:
Mr. Kaplan walked into the center of the room, sat on an empty desk, and took a tennis ball out of his pocket. He threw the ball up within the air and caught it.
Kaplan then asks the Query that hooks younger Stephon, “What’s the speed of the ball when it returned again to my hand?” And when the child responds, “It’s the identical,” the trainer smiles, and the start of an exquisite relationship is had. It will get even thicker, when it seems Kaplan is a grasp composer and performs baritone sax. Their stars are aligned. (Alexander re-tells this episode with Kaplan in a TED talk price watching.)
Finally, Kaplan steers Alexander towards John Coltrane and his secret hyperlink to Einstein. Alexander returns to this second, not solely within the e book, however later, after his profession in cosmology has taken flight and he finds himself delivering a TED speak and holding, then bouncing a tennis ball whereas asking Kaplan’s query of the viewers. This connection between Coltrane and Einstein turns into an inspiration for Alexander’s later adventures in string concept—resonant each in his physics thoughts and on the sax. That is, after all, a really welcome key perception to Coltrane’s musical pondering for these not absolutely invested in his sound.
It seems that Albert Einstein was a music lover who performed the violin and piano. We’re instructed that his spouse would watch him tinkle and tickle the ivories (and the ebonies) after which jot down figures. Alexander tells us in regards to the basic connection between Einstein and Coltrane:
[Coltrane] was a musical innovator, with physics at his fingertips. Einstein was an innovator in physics, with music at his fingertips. Nonetheless, what they have been doing was not new. They have been each reenacting the connection between music and physics, which had been established 1000’s of years earlier when Pythagoras—the Coltrane of his time—first labored out the arithmetic of music. Pythagoras’s philosophy turned “all is quantity,” and music and the cosmos have been each manifestations of this philosophy. Within the arithmetic of the orbits of the planets rang “the music of the spheres,” taking part in a concord with the tones of a vibrating string.
One amusing part of the e book is Alexander’s description of skipping college and going off on adventures within the metropolis. He tells of coming beneath the unintentional however ultimately welcome tutelage of a gaggle of misfits calling themselves “the 5 Percenters.” They’d an odd cosmology that entertained the notion that “humanoid-like aliens [had come] from area to work together with ‘the unique Asiatic black man.’” (Appears like Solar Ra already.) They might maintain “mental debates” that Alexander likens to “battle rap” that he sees as a type of escape from a bleak future. Alexander tells us,
I sought my escape by means of comedian books, video video games, and my newfound love for science. These guys adopted a worldview from their chief Clarence 13X, a former scholar of Malcolm X, who, after attaining religious enlightenment, unfold the next gospel all through the streets of New York Metropolis:
– 85 p.c of the plenty blindly observe faith.
– 10 p.c of the plenty are intentionally deceptive the plenty.
– 5 p.c are enlightened and understand that they’re “gods” of their very own future.
– Arithmetic is the language of actuality, and with a purpose to grasp nature, a 5 Percenter should perceive the mathematical patterns underlying nature: they known as this supreme arithmetic.
Alexander is surprisingly influenced by this latter perception, and its implied freedom is an inspiration for his personal future mathematical and musical flights of “class.”
Within the first chapter of Worry of a Black Universe, “Escape from the Jungle of No Creativeness,” Alexander states, “Darkish vitality resides in all empty area, not simply outer area, and permeates all existence.” Then he spends appreciable time telling us that “we” don’t know what it’s, but it surely’s in all places, and it’s the actual star of the universe, not mild and matter. He chides these colleagues too afraid to face the monster beneath the mattress, and asks rhetorically, “Will we dread the darkish a lot that we venture our fears onto the very phenomena about which we’re scientifically ignorant?” He provides, “Does the scientific group worry embracing ‘darkish’ concepts from outsiders, particularly if the concepts might not be in a type that the group is comfy with, if they don’t match seamlessly into our theories and anticipated practices?” This query is without delay each scientific and sociological. As readers, we cringe and instantly see its relation to the title.
Alexander is fascinated with taking goal on the “institutionalized cultural and social expectations” he has to cope with as a minority in his discipline. Race is decidedly a difficulty. Will one achieve belonging to the membership? If allowed in, will one’s white colleagues resent the inclusion? Alexander believes outliers like himself carry worth that isn’t acknowledged. He explains:
Marginal folks in disciplines like physics could also be in a worthwhile place to innovate basically as a result of they’re more likely to broaden the plurality of concepts, approaches, and strategies within the self-discipline. They’re much less probably than those that “slot in” to really feel the strain to stay inside the constraints of their self-discipline. In my case, although I had the identical technical coaching as my postdoc friends, my social isolation from the group enabled me to each not replicate conceptual blind spots and to embrace concepts on the fringes of established information. However how might science emancipate itself from this destiny of suppressing contributions from outsiders?
In Worry of a Black Universe,we learn once more about superpositions and emergence and changeless change and the lectures of Chris Isham, Quantum Cosmology professor at Imperial School in London. And as soon as once more Isham is telling Grasshopper to look inside his desires and within the work of Carl Jung for clues as he navigates his approach by means of the common labyrinth. He has weekly discussions with Isham and comes round seeing from his mentor’s viewpoint:
A type of was the issue of time in quantum gravity. Whereas our bodily (and psychological) expertise of the circulate of time is taken as truth, time disappears within the equations of quantum gravity. Isham labored on this downside and was a proponent of a brand new notion of time known as inner time. It was no shock to me to study that these concepts have been impressed by his exploration of psychology and mysticism.
The purpose is each attention-grabbing and nonetheless related. The opposite day I used to be perusing an article posing the premise that “The Afterlife Is In Our Heads,” an epiphenomenon, because it have been. Regardless of how one resolves questions in regards to the substantiality of time or afterlives, we’re nonetheless left with phenomenological questions on how and why these appear to seem. Returning all the time to the phenomenological is simply fantastic with Alexander.
It’s additionally the case, although, that scientific conclusions—or paradigms—are momentary. In Worry of a Black Universe, as an illustration, Alexander makes an attempt to push the envelope of the universe’s enlargement. However whilst I used to be studying the e book, articles popped up in my inbox telling me that the notion of an increasing universe could now be in query.
Regardless of the case could also be with enlargement, nothing might put together me for Alexander’s finish sport. In the hunt for what was as soon as known as a God particle in physics, Alexander delves into pantheism. Shifting into the black ether, Alexander discovers as an alternative not simply that consciousness is in every thing, however that black consciousness is in every thing. He discusses the notion that “that the universe was simply certainly one of many, which have an enormous vary of potential values for the cosmological fixed, with none first rules to pressure its worth.”
This state of affairs is simply actually potential as a panpsychic schema. Alexander continues:
Panpsychism posits that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter, the identical approach that mass, cost, and spin are intrinsic to an electron. So in response to panpsychism, the electron and all substance come geared up with their very own inner protoexperience of being an electron. This would possibly sound loopy. Undoubtedly there’s a query about how an entity, say an electron, can have its personal inner expertise with out resorting to an electron mind. The reply requires new physics or a contemporary perspective on identified physics.
Braveness and creativeness are conditions for such a shift. Or, as Alexanders posits:
The time has come for a brand new Newton, to reunite the physics of the extraterrestrial with the physics of the terrestrial. Such an integration would possibly facilitate our understanding of darkish matter and darkish vitality, enabling a greater understanding of who we’re and of the cosmos by which we reside.
If Alexander is appropriate, we would nonetheless ask: maybe Alexander himself will become the brand new Newton—or the brand new Coltrane.
Worry additionally brings us on just a little journey to the Bantu-Kongo folks of West Africa for inspiration and solutions. Alexander writes:
Within the Bantu cosmology the universe began in a state of nothingness known as mbungi. Right here nothingness contains the absence of area and time. Bodily objects, comparable to particles and fields, often exist in space-time. So mbungi is a prephysical state that’s divided into what manifests because the bodily, spatiotemporal world and a common consciousness.
Unpacked, the idea of mbungi would have radical implications for the way we conceive of the bodily. Alexander surmises:
Allow us to assume that consciousness, like cost and quantum spin, is prime and exists in all matter to various levels of complexity. Due to this fact consciousness is a common quantum property that resides in all the fundamental fields of nature—a cosmic glue that connects all fields as a perceiving community.
To 1 unreceptive of an outsider’s perspective in physics, this will seem as baseless heresy or just proof that Alexander has been sniffing glue. I’d have a tendency strongly towards the alternative view: Alexander’s perspective could have the capability to remodel each physics and the sciences usually. And, certainly, adopting such a view could have implications past the scientific realm as such: taken severely in a broader social milieu, maybe it might finish racism as we all know it.
Choose parts of this essay have beforehand appeared in the author’s review of Fear of a Black Universe published in Op-Ed News.
John Hawkins
John Hawkins is a contract journalist and poet who writes principally about tradition, politics, and the humanities. He’s at the moment pursuing a PhD in philosophy on the College of New England (Australia) and, concurrently, a masters in humanities at Cal State Northridge. He blogs at his Substack website, TantricDispositionMatrix.
