This is the conclusion to a five-part series of essays on time. Begin here to see if it makes sense: Jazz: Time-Wreckers, Part I of V (002)
Part V: Building Bridges
As a child, I used to play G.I. Joes with those little green plastic soldiers as the real men’s minions. And every time, since we were playing on tables and floors, we had to invent bridges to take our imaginations where they longer to travel for the next battle. And crossing into the countries of our enemies, we knew they would also have the imaginary ability to fly but still use bridges.
What two cities of different countries are bridged without both their countries also touching?
To touch is also to feel.
I now seek something that is both finite, like science, and infinite, like math;
I now seek something that is neither and both at the same time, like a bridge.
Contradictory while correct.
And perhaps, that is something that can not only
Encompass math and science, but also
Perform math and science, while
Communicating both so that I might
Discover what I could never invent.
Here, I return to the all-encompassing adulting child of Wigner’s Eastern European world of theoretical physics – Einstein.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
He speaks of the idea of beauty and experience, colliding with the truths of infinite art and finite science. I hope I may discover something here just for me.
From this man who could not approach the subject of his thesis by experiment, studying the unobservable, we witness the surprising.
Famously, Einstein turned inward, allowing his imagination to lead him to conduct his famous thought experiments. (See the chapter on Grand Theory for more on Einstein.)
He synthesized his imagined observations and, only then, worked out the mathematical formulation. Years later, when the stars and planets participated with the weather, his fellow scientists observed nature bring his thoughts full circle to mathematical alignment.
He believed without seeing.
He published without seaming.
For this resplendent scientific man,
Began in dazzling cerebral intuition,
Turned to infinitely profound math, and
Finalized with natural observation.
For what two cities of different countries are bridged without their entire countries also touching? This idea kept popping up in my mind, despite its unelegent prose.
And perhaps, a mind is best sparked when flinted
to encompass math and science witted,
to perform math and science, while
communicating both so that man might go
discover that which man could never invent, yet know.
So, Einstein himself links both finite and infinite.
to each touched his imaginative undiminished,
to neither finite nor infinite, knowing
both finite and infinite, as paradoxically going,
mediating bridge to cross he invites.
Einstein transcended his entire field, not by rote causal logical computation, but through stories of wonder through his wandering imaginative potential. Could my earthly sight ever reach the luminous heavens, but by a vivid mind?
It’s almost as if he saw two tunes by the same band with the same title, then ignored convention to play them in totally different modes of time.
The Mind
Brubeck, that time-shifter, knew if the musical world, dimensionally fixed in a twelve-tone system, were ever to up-transpose the jazz world, it must rhythmically break time’s constraints.
Genius played five beats over four, not because it was desired but because it was necessary. Not because it was easy but because it was thought impossible. Greater than we could have invented with absolute omniscience of melody and consumers.
And Take Five, on an album originally shuttered by Columbia Records, became the best-selling single in jazz history.
The mind again links.
The math again thinks.
The maid again dances.
I realize artistry requires all three realms to succeed:
The Limitless.
The Constrained.
The Mind.
The mind ascends as that preferred medium to bridge the unfathomed with the normal.
Causality
Robertson’s book precedes the history. Einstein’s thought precedes the experiment. Mind’s idea precedes our natural action.
It began to appear to me that not only is the mind also mediator, but also the causal agent of that measureless idea bringing forth meaningful action in our world.
A logos is where mind produces meaning; meaning precipitates material. Causality implies order.
Order matters.
If the mind generates the purpose, so too must the purpose effect substance. Everywhere, I realize communication collapses into a unity of all three communities.
As I clunkily repeat, when two cities of two different countries are bridged, so too will their countries be made bridged as well, I see the same here. When one object within a sphere collides with an object of another sphere, not only do those two objects take on some of the characteristics of the other, such as their locations, but also must their containing spheres touch to some degree.
As any moving object has a location, the first must also have space and time within which to move. Therefore, it too will impact the other object’s time and location forever. Both the properties and energies of each object, and their separate properties, will be absorbed in some sense.
This is how the story, wrapped in an imaginative sphere, meets the telescope’s observations within nature’s sphere.
The mediating mind corrects time. But the causal link only happens one way.
Impossible for the infinite to be changed by the finite.
Impossible for the finite to not be charged by the infinite touch.
Only must the infinite sphere, when bridged to the finite sphere, render the original time of the lower sphere usurped for the purposes of the higher now immediately decipherable.
The vast ocean’s water titanically sinks the lesser broken container. The mediating infinite mind corrects the time of the finite necessarily, as the scientific mind corrects the science to match the math, never trumping math with science.
And every mind I’ve ever met came with a person attached.
Mediating mind.
Robertson’s book necessitates the history must occur.
Einstein’s thought impacts the experiment viewed on the planets.
An infinite mind would superintend over our natural history.
Ultimately, every act impacts all three: mind, meaning, and material. And consequently, every finite act brushes against eternal consequence. Our very reading of this sentence from physical paper into our thoughts demands it be true. True for every played note across all metered dances.
If it were not true, I would have to maintain that the infinite purpose invading finite natural time be bound by the lower. Which is the illogical wishfulness of some. A stronger man will not be bound by a man gasping for breath on his deathbed.
So, time, if ever met with that which is from outside of time, would necessarily be altered. Not only forward in a causal chain, but also backward in a refining golden chain; righting all of time’s history from before its historical meeting, Aligning all preceding actions with their single future-revealed purpose.
And so, I think I discovered a time-bender: he whose unexpected prophecies paired later with a historical act, thereby breaking causality and its measuring rod, time, mathematically proved divine.
A single memory forces my past to present itself for inspection of my present soul.
Order matters.
Reorder meaning.
My skin should have been opened before the surgery was completed, not before.
The refining divine redefines the untrue. The recovering divine refloats from dark blue. And so, what if a single bridge might bridge every possible definition of all bridges, a kind of quadrupled entandre.
The ship’s bridge where the captain’s controls sit.
The river’s bridge where the ship’s height to restrict.
The abridged story where the child can most easily imagine.
The tune’s bridge where the author’s double melodies mediate where true song fathomed.
The time-wrecking prophets of math, genius, and the imaginative personal mind, are but bridge-builders, as the rewrite order and recompose time itself. And from my perspective, as both the researcher and the subject, I sense a theme I cannot see but believe I may feel within me.
Time has been assassinated, along with causality:
And if just one of these rewriting prophets has crept down past time’s tolled crossing into our world, it will have forever built a broad bridge crossing between our two great realms, making it now possible for other minds improvising their rhythmed inventions to wreck their way into our planet, rendering causal havoc on those icy storied mountains which once sunk us deeper into night’s sea only now to see ourselves sinking higher because a divine bridge uplifts our every step over that stormy water.
