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Happy New Year!
A medieval manuscript of an Aristotelian treatise
Today we celebrate the birthday of the year, although we can’t really say that the year was “born” on this day. There is something very arbitrary about the beginning of the year, just as there is something profoundly arbitrary about the international date line and the lines with which we striate the planet to divide it into time zones.
For small, finite creatures like ourselves, and for the macroscopic features of our experience, we can often definitively determine the moment of birth, or how a given object otherwise came into existence. For entities of indeterminate extent, like time and the earth and the universe, it is difficult to determine any point of emergence in time, and, of course, for time itself this is highly problematic.
Aristotle wrote a short treatise about things that are born and which also die, On Coming to Be and Passing Away (as it is usually, but not invariably, translated). As Aristotle’s work was developed in the Middle Ages, there came to be a radical distinction made between things “below the sphere of the moon” (and therefore “sublunary” in Ptolemaic cosmology) which come into being and pass away, and things beyond the sphere of the moon (and therefore “superlunary”) which were believed to be unchanging and eternal, like Platonic ideas.
This Aristotelian-Platonic-Ptolemaic cosmology eventually became so embedded in human thought that the idea of the universe having a natural history was too radical even for radical thinkers to embrace. In Einstein’s early formulations of general relativity he introduced the cosmological constant to stop the universe in its tracks and make it behave. It took most of the twentieth century for cosmologists to get beyond this and embrace the idea of the universe itself as something that comes to be and passes away.
On my other blog, in Of Flowers and Sunflowers I wrote:
In several posts I have suggested that, in five hundred to a thousand years, when industrialized civilization has matured, there may come another axial age in which the civilization we are in the process of creating produces a mythos equal to itself, and thereby creates a world in which we might live comfortably with industrialization and its discontents. If this does come to pass, the scientific understanding of the world, which has been so central to the technologies driving industrialization, will be central to the future industrial Weltanschauung, and it may also come to pass that the stories of origins formulated by science, now converging on a degree of specificity enjoyed by the Greek gods and their exploits, will provide us with new places of pilgrimage. At such places, our extended sense of ourselves as part of the natural world, and as part of our shared natural history, will allow us to sympathize with, if not identify with, the earliest antecedents of life on earth, which is our story also.
To “places of pilgrimage” I would now like to add, “times of celebration.”
I can imagine a scientific civilization of some future time when naturalistic events are celebrated as public holidays. For example, we might pick a day and call it “Big Bang Day,” and this would celebrate some particular day about fifteen billion years ago when the Big Bang occurred, because we could, in theory, extrapolate the 24 hour day (based on the earth’s rotation) backward into history until we came to the particular day that was the day of the Big Bang.
The selection of such a day would of course be arbitrary — it would be the establishment of a convention, which by another name is a tradition, which is a convention constitutive of a culture — but the selection of a particular day as Big Bang Day would be no more arbitrary than the length of the day itself. There are a great many planets in the universe, and probably only a few (i.e., many million, rather than billions and billions) have something like a 24 hour day. There are days much shorter, and days much longer to be found elsewhere in the universe.
Aliens on a planet with a different length of day would identify a different day as Big Bang Day than we as human beings would celebrate as Big Bang Day. Though all species in our universe would share the blessed event of the Big Bang, each would celebrate the Big Bang in its own particular way, and part of being human (even after we have migrated to other worlds with different lengths of day) would be to celebrate Big Bang Day on a date extrapolated from the 24 hour day of the earth. In this way we might celebrate the birthday of the universe.
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