Panda sculptures in eye of needle by Chen Forng-Shean/2011. Credit: Xinhua.
Apparently, we live in a macroworld that differs greatly from an underlying quantum-microworld. If you are like me, you might think of both worlds as encompassing ranges of size, something scalar. The Macroworld’s entities exist ostensibly on a scale that spans sizes from super groups of galaxies down to you and me, and the critters that live on and in us, plus those minerals that are left after a cremation. All those littlest of macro-things are visible under powerful microscopes, and they, like us and the giant galactic aggregations, belong to the Macroworld. And then, no matter how small you get with the Macroworld, you encounter a division, a break, a gap on the other side of which entities become so super small that they don’t even appear to be “things”: The atoms, for example, and their subatomic components in their nuclei, the protons and neutrons that have their own “parts,” those Up and Down quarks that are members of a secretive quantum population now numbering about four dozen “particles.” And the leptons? Don’t get me started on electrons, muons, and their like. No, there’s no real continuation of the Macroworld that joins the Microworld on some sliding scale that we can see. Here’s a bag of photons, don’t open it until someone says, “Turn on the light.”
There’s no transitional point: Macroworld and Microworld, though somehow mysteriously connected because the latter is the ultimate constituent of the former, appear to be separate. We jump from one to the other, intellectually bouncing from the visualizable to the unvisualizable, from the variably sized particles to the unimaginably small and strangely dual particle-waves. The universe seems to break into two discrete universes at that gap with no discernible transition form. In the Macroworld, we can imagine a sliding scale, a continuum of sizes. But what of that strange Microworld, in which electrons, muons, and tau “particles” have widely different masses with no “particles” of transitional sizes lying among them? The gaps conspicuous by the absence of any intermediate forms distinguish the Micro from the Macro worlds.
Have you ever seen the artwork of Taiwanese artist Chen Forng-Shean? * He can draw on a grain of rice, and so can Vladimir Aniskin, the guy that Pringles hired to paint landmarks—like the Taj Mahal—on rice grains. ** Reportedly, there are about a dozen such “micro-artists” capable of picturing the big on canvases of the very small, objects that are so small that seeing them requires a purposeful hard look. Work like that must be tedious. Forng-Shean supposedly spent some months painting a portrait of a Taiwanese political figure, and he reportedly painted the faces of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky on the tip of a matchstick, their affair being “hot” news at the time.
Now, one might ask why anyone would jeopardize painstaking work by placing it on a grain that an ant can steal or on a flammable—indeed purposefully flammable—stick. Stop here for a joke I heard as a kid. A prisoner spent years in solitary confinement, but he wasn’t alone. There was an ant in his cell. As they bonded, the prisoner began training the ant to do tricks. The ant responded so well that the prisoner said to himself, “When I get out of here, I’m going around the country to do shows with you, my little friend. We’ll make a fortune.” On the day of his release, he took his pet ant and went to a bar not far from the prison, sat down, ordered a drink. Placing the ant on the bar as the bartender served his drink, he said, “You see that ant?” The bartender, seeing the ant, crushed it with his thumb, and asked, “Yeah, what about it?” Whereas many in America were scandalized by a President having sex with an intern in the Oval Office, many were like the bartender, squashing it as a tiny nuisance.
But there’s more to consider. More like the sculptures placed inside the eye of a needle. *** Ever thread a needle? It’s not an easy job to make a sculpture that fits inside a hole so small that seamstresses and tailors don their reading glasses when they thread the needle. The Met or the Smithsonian wouldn’t need big rooms to display such tiny sculptures that the janitorial staff might mistakenly throw into the trash. “I did? Sorry. I was just dusting.” Perspectives on the big and the small are highly variable.
The big and the small. Let’s ponder, and let’s let our pondering start with Bill and Monica portrayed in miniature on a matchstick. Two ideological sides debated the significance of that political “scandal.” On one side: “It’s just sex.” On the other side: “It’s a defilement of the Oval Office.” One side minimized; the other, maximized, and the gap between the two sides was as wide as that between the Macro and Micro worlds, un-crossable, a division in kind as well as a division of sizes. Sex in the Oval Office was for many just particle-waves, quite fuzzy, an analog of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Like an electron whose position and movement cannot be simultaneously known, Clinton’s presence in the Oval Office was known, but his movement? Heck, we have his own words: “I did not have sex with that woman.”
Miniaturizing or Maximizing. Ideologues see no transitional stage. All minimizing relies on discrete entities, unconnected except that they fall into the Microworld. And fuzzy entities at that, wavelike just like electrons, muons, and their sundry quantum friends. One sees no details, nothing to hold on to, sees waves whose function never collapses into a discernible point. A sex scandal centered in the Oval Office? Nothing to see here. Move along. It’s a minute and morally fuzzy occurrence at best, fuzzy like images of electron clouds. But for those living in the Macroworld even details so small they fit on the tip of a matchstick or inside a needle’s eye are objects with size, so they ask, “Are you having trouble seeing the details that we see? Here’s a magnifying glass; here’s a microscope. You can’t deny they are there. Just look. They’re both visualizable and visible just like those tiny eye-of-the-needle sculptures.”
Is this difference between maximizer and minimizer just the difference between absolutist and relativist, the former seeing a continuous world and the latter, a discontinuous one? Or does the difference lie at an unbridgeable gap between dogmatic and situational ethical systems? Is it ironic that those who see Moral Macroworld identify a sliding scale of “sin” whereas those who live in a Moral Microworld see unconnected particles that unpredictably become waves so small that they are insignificant even though such waves are the underlying fields of all existence?
Of course, that question means little in the abstract. It does, however, become meaningful when we ask it with respect to ourselves. Are we like Forng-Shean and Aniskin? Are we micro-artists? Do we sculpt or paint our representations of the world in forms so tiny they can fit in the eye of a needle or on a grain of rice? Do we have to offer special lenses to others if we want them to see what we see?
Notes:
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdyMaA2Fdo
**https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/pringles-commissions-artist-to-paint-the-taj-mahal-on-a-grain-of-rice-/
***https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrDQryp7qtgXEcAKAUPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=sculpture+inside+a+n+eye+of+a+needle&type=asbw_8923_CHW_US_tid1304¶m1=9pmwKAmHAwUYOZqhXRlOsPi0A5nvGG3aDS7HcsILbFdSzB0OzJKF4MhPbfSw0dwG¶m2=9dUI1n2R0BLDxNuWfiP4aWyjOZc2NBa%2Bx2opBYQCDMSB7nBAfwbAzkkglZNKi5o21u72Jm8TatlnU7NDGbP7F8Lft0aXvravgWuUt1wLTDRGoZDy1s38eFH2mqhQf7J35YCbQdFh0U0Q40PE25%2BEeG%2Bt%2By660cfFWnTypqgOdcCh6oeUKommRcasmvm8lFwkEnSQF0mdjDREWaDEylpBCR6opzVl9tWDsitQ3lxkkt5XAWlgIdbOwLtQmRO37FMzX7zK%2B8A9aPEYz%2Fks8LYCoaaNxbbX727LR85B7aTpArI%3D¶m3=NwVEMR%2FzKcG52XsVBYEh2zk2Yklq85vdfspZPoqz2M1qypHRDDTed5vIiOf0QJloIYNIhURx5ygk43IbuWBmnSO6VJi0Lg%2BHXK15j4L%2FFbtWkrI4tZva2CSdO%2BO8zcxNbLhvWNCxu7qqZlXKkcHyRMxTbDmIz%2FQSaXI6BhFbS7u1h8SHx6xNUode3q0bwwW15lyOrPltOAQ1NF3RFwaPKJpjw0aPZymrr4n3k760BU6XrRc2OetVsw4Wyxu%2BHrg%2FTzMaL%2FOFUwIqnyf5n8PZ4zrWs2x7rc7JosTr%2F4Le3G9h122GIo7kFbpTklRUmOH47hs4M3SE1UquvZaKiWVwhnyhFdTQ5wepwSAJNX3ePbc3D40RwEWmA6o94GXj5oiV¶m4=hCnqV8iYhcxJ8iNIX4W0h5lX%2BTiGVQRFr9QrJ7mD9OE%3D&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&ei=UTF-8&fr=yhs-iba-syn
RSS Feed