Entropy
There is no centre to the cosmos because it didn’t start somewhere. It started everywhere. This is not some metaphysical statement about how we’re all connected or an attempt at imbuing the universe with spiritual agency. This is the science, or at least our best understanding of it. Space itself was created along with matter and time. And it’s been expanding ever since, as all the ‘stuff’ that formed in it became more and more delineated and complex. Because there is no centre and because light can only travel at a fixed speed, the further away from us we look, the further back in time we see.
In 2012, the WMAP satellite created an image of the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background or CMB. It is this image that I used for the background of my first text in this program.
The CMB is essentially a map. It shows the tiny temperature fluctuations between different regions of space in the early universe as it was more than thirteen billion years ago. It is a blueprint for all the structure that we now see in the cosmos because it was these tiny fluctuations that caused matter to form in some places but not in others. Where it was infinitesimally colder, it was also denser and these cool spots became the point where pure energy and elementary forces began collapsing into matter.
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How do we work out where we are if there is no centre? We make a centre. We use triangulation: multiple points of view that converge on a single focal point. It’s only a relative measure but the focal point remains the same even as the space between those points of view expands.
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Continuum.
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I was chasing two forms of expansion. I wanted to move past the author being sole content creator and point of view, and I wanted to move past narrative being primarily written. I asked for three perspectives from visitors to triangulate our shared position in Kosmos. One in words. One in image. One in sound. I thought I had made it simple and easy—You can use your mobile phone, I said—You can give just words or image or all, I told them. Together, I thought, we can create our shared centre as we expand in different directions.
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The CMB is the oldest map there is. When I noticed that each room of Kosmos was a slightly different temperature, I thought about the similarities for the first time. I wondered whether this had an effect on how people moved through it, where they would stop and where they would wait for each other when they were done. Each room smelled different. The sour resin smell of the back-left room reminded me of a house where an artist used to live, and their poured and polished resin sculptures that encased plastic flowers. Each room sounded different. The low drone of the air-conditioning was loudest in the warmest rooms. I had made a kind-of sensory impressionistic map for myself but it was incomplete, small. Space is cold, silent and sterile. Everyone ended up in the largest and warmest room. They just waited there.
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I assumed that people wanted to do more in a gallery exhibition than just listen and look. I assumed that if I gave them the means to record their experience, to leave their mark, to make something together that they would take it. I assumed that the method I had created for doing so would be the most natural way to do it. I still don’t know for sure whether my assumptions were right or wrong. Digital technology promises to amplify our efforts ad infinitum. It makes expanding distance feel smaller. The prospect of this reach spawns a seductive thought process: I can use the internet and the smartphone to bring everyone’s perspective together—these three mediums of image, sound and words will allow me to map an expansion that has no centre and triangulate that illusive shared position. All that’s needed are the tools and the process and the result will come as if self-evident. Something revelatory would be illuminated where all these points of view intersected.
In the end I got just three photographs and didn’t know what to do next.
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One of the most fundamental physical laws of the universe is that entropy can never decrease. Entropy is commonly misunderstood as a measure of disorder, the classic example being that one never sees a broken cup jump back onto a table and reform. According to this definition, over time the universe and everything in it should expand into an increasingly disordered system. This is not accurate. Entropy can be better understood as a cumulative measure of the unknown. In each moment and in every situation, there are an almost infinite number of outcomes but we only experience one. This means that with each passing moment, the number of unrealised outcomes increases exponentially. Entropy can never decrease because despite not coming to form part of our conscious experience, all the unrealised outcomes must continue to exist as just that, unrealised outcomes. That field of possibility must perpetuate from moment to moment so that the eventual outcome of a given situation can come into existence, along with all the others that will never be.
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An increase in entropy is associated with a decrease in the energy available to do work. With the passage of time, a fully-grown body and mind feel smaller and less powerful in a perpetually expanding field. The search for a grand unifying theory, a simple idea with universal resonance, feels further away. But as the perceived distance increases so does the desire to overcome it, desire not being a force subject to the laws of the natural world. Failure to realise a desired outcome does not destroy all outcomes. It delivers you to an unexpected new position. It does not destroy the unrealised position.
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A map cannot record the positions that never came to be, but attempting to map the unknown often delivers results none-the-less. The WMAP image of the CMB was the second attempt to map a signal that was discovered by accident. A signal that was, at one point, thought to be caused by pigeon shit. Failure can be an integral element of any new discovery or an indication that you’re wrong. Both need to be possible in order for one to be right.