Misunderstanding Extremes
From the extremely small to the extremely large
Imagine a black star.
Is it possible?
Black has no borders without the presence of another colour to restrict it. Black is the absence of colour.
We can only see stars that shimmer and twinkle in the night. The absence of colour denies our eyes function. How then can we see a black star?
That’s the name one of the biggest hip-hop duos had given themselves — Black Star. It comprised Mos Def and Talib Kweli. They are some of the most prolific MCs in the industry with profound impact. Having received fame and celebrity status in extreme proportions, they are a good sample to use in understanding extremes.
Black stars are an example of what it is to be extreme.
Black holes are a form of a metamorphosed star, converting from a large mass into an entity so heavy that it distorts space-time so profoundly that light cannot escape once it is inside its event horizon.
Now, here’s the first example of misunderstanding extremes. We know that black holes have a boundary, the event horizon. It is this horizon where once crossed, one cannot come out. Even light can’t escape.
But nobody can tell once they have crossed this horizon.
How can a boundary of an extreme celestial object have subtle features that we cannot see or feel when crossing it? Countries have border patrols. Cities have signs welcoming you to their centres. But black holes just let you in without any invitation. And once you’re in, forget ever leaving.
Extremes can be difficult to grasp.
Numbers
Yo, from the first to the last of it,
The whole and not the half of it— Mos Def.
If a bank loans you $1,000, it owns you.
If the bank loans you $10 trillion, you own it.
This is an example of the extremes which can be difficult to understand.
In primary school, proportionality is so ingrained in our teaching that we often find ourselves projecting:
If I got this when I was this, what if I had done this, wouldn’t it have increased by just as much?
And there’s where we go wrong.
Numbers play an extreme game so mind-bending, it can consume you just like black holes without you knowing.
Consider the two numbers 0 and 1.
They are finite — there are only two of them. Anybody who has read up to this point has sufficient brain matter to understand how one progresses from 0 to 1.
However, between 0 and 1 lies infinity. There’s an infinite number of fractions between 0 and 1. I could say the same thing between 1 and 2, or between 2 and 3.
The misunderstanding comes when from a finite end of 0, one progresses from increasing fraction to fraction into infinity, but somehow ends up in a finite end of 1. How is it so?
What’s more, there are transcendental numbers, like pie, which are fractions that if converted into decimal points, go on forever, without repeating. Decimals are supposed to be identical to fractions, but it appears fractions have a finite description. Pi is 22/7 as a fraction, but we’re forced to stick with at least four significant figures when we consider the decimal version of it — 3.142.
These extremes are too difficult for our minds to comprehend.
It’s an example of how we create solutions to our problems but end up unknowingly creating more problems. Problems are bountiful and solutions are barely enough. As Mos Def said:
The full and not the half of it.
Still in the subject of fractions, 1/1 and 2/2 is just 1. But 0/0 is not 1. Why? The number 7 divided by 1 is 7 but when I tried dividing it by 0, my calculator told me I could not divide the number by zero. If the number exists, I should be able to divide it. Why does it tell me that I can’t?
Maybe I have a small mind. I simply cannot understand these extremes.
Time
Time too is mind-bending.
Before Einstein, we thought it was absolute. After the tongue model changed everything, we discovered it was relative. Time behaves so much like space.
His theory, however, is a classical one.
After the development of quantum mechanics, some schools of thought elaborate on how the present reshapes the past. What they say is that the past is not set in stone. It contrasts with how we experience our past-present directions. A broken glass is a broken glass. I can tell what happened in the past. Something shattered it. Glass cannot re-unshatter.
An arrow of time appears because disorder will be a step into the future and order a step into the past.
When we see the sun’s rays, we are seeing into the past. The light hits us roughly eight minutes from when it leaves the sun. Whatever hits us was in the past, but our minds try to predict everything outside us so we can survive in this plague of information delay.
I often contemplate how we were taught anatomy when I was in medical school and see just how flawed it is. Understanding the structures of the brain is okay, but it too is outdated since the brain works in networks rather than discrete centres.
If we were to wait for light to get to our eyes, cross the ten layers or eleven layers of the retina, go through the optic nerve, cross and get into the optic tract, through the midbrain, and the different flows into the occipital cortex, before we could make decode it, then relay it to our cortex so we can understand that a beautiful lady or a dashing man was standing in front of you, the chance would have slipped past you by then.
The brain therefore has to predict to literally keep up with changing times.
It’s a shift in paradigms — our brain predicts the future, and our world hits us so we can make sense of the past. Yet we believe we are living in the present.
These extremes are a tad complex for my small brain to comprehend.
Scale
People thinkin’ mc is shorthand for misconception — Talib Kweli
Scale changes the ballgame.
Think of the atom. It has a nucleus and electrons. When we draw it or see it on screens, it looks like a bunch of marbles that know which lanes to stick to and hence never bump into each other.
Charming.
An atom, however, is mostly space.
Adjusted to scale, the distance between the surface of the nucleus and the first electron is equal to the length of the solar system thirteen times. The electrostatic force between the electron and the nucleus is so strong that it traverses such a vast distance.
It gives us perspective into the kind of forces particles experience. Even more is the kind of energy one has to surmount for them to dislodge an electron from an atom.
The theory of Organismal Selection stresses the relevance of mergers to organisms. It even considers atoms to be organisms. With a distance equivalent to the length of 13 solar systems, preserving such a merger is the work of sheer will and determination. It is the kind of determination we see in organisms who don’t want to die any time soon. Quarks, the sub-atomic particles, are at a different level altogether.
But if we zoom out and look at cities, they have different features from atoms. The properties are emergent. Cities pack large numbers of people in a small space, just like black holes.
As a result, they tend to have a different microclimate from their surrounding. It reminds me of the Macrotermes, the termites that survive in deserts but have created mounds so large that their insides have a different climate from their surroundings. Inside these mounds, they farm fungi, Termitomyces. It’s the kind of farming that we have never been able to execute despite our ‘advanced’ understanding of organisms.
The scale of our advanced civilization is outsmarted by creatures we call ‘low’ in complexity. However, some tribes think termites we partners with God in creating the universe. These narrations tell us how difficult it is for our minds to contemplate extremes.
Zoomed further out and into our shared universe, we encounter the space-time fabric. We call it a fabric because the leading theory, general relativity, is our best bet on how celestial objects behave. But the same theory does not tell us what happens inside the heart of the largest masses we know — black holes.
The centre is where mass is packed infinitely in a tiny space, called the singularity.
Here, our laws stop working.
I used the same logic to break apart Natural Selection, whose singularity is the first organism, ergo, the title of my book. The first organism is where all mainstream theories of evolution break down, except mine.
It explains why it might be misunderstood because it is an extreme in itself.
What I’m trying to say is…
Extremes are the black stars of our universe.
We don’t understand them but when we take time to explore them, they are fascinating. They are the points that stretch our theories by testing to see if they still hold where we least expect them to.
The hip-hop duo, Talib Kweli and Mos Def took up a name that contrasts everything you can think of about stars, except in the celebrity life.
The first step to getting comfortable with extremes is modesty and acceptance of how little you don’t know.
If we say we will live forever, do we understand that? Or when we argue that love is infinite, do we understand this extreme? What level of infinite?
When you meet a bend don’t be stiff about it.
Extremes exist to bend us. And bends are the physical evidence of differently shaped forms.
Rather than misunderstanding extremes, I’d rather we explore them.
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