You might recognize “without form and void.” It’s one version of a modifier in Genesis. It’s what the writer says about Earth before the creation. From the very beginning of our intellectual heritage, form and substance have been important concepts. By the time of the Greek philosophers, form had become, in part, either “perfect” or “imperfect,” either possible or impossible. There are only five “perfect solids” according to Plato, and no one has invented another. * Thus, in Plato’s sense of “form” all solids that are not one of the special five must be imperfect.
Perfect is an interesting word. It has had various meanings, including the common “without flaw,” and “ideal,” but here I’ll use the use the word in the sense “complete” with a corollary sense of “balanced.” When the eighteenth-century optimists said, as Voltaire satirizes, that of all the possible worlds this one is perfect, they were echoing the idea of the hierarchy of being, or, as it has been termed, The Great Chain of Being. If you recall, that idea was the one used to battle the early Darwinists: The world couldn’t be evolving, they argued, because a Perfect Deity made a Perfect World—the Best of All Possible Worlds. God was “perfect” because God was “complete,” that is, in need of nothing. The Creation was “perfect” because there were no gaps: God, Angels, Humans, Animals, Plants, and Rocks, all part of that hierarchical Great Chain. Such a universe had no room for new species because it was complete.
You might argue that the Anthropic Principle is a continuation of that basic idea. This world, because it exists in a balance of forces that manifests itself as the venue for our existence, is “perfect.” Maybe we can’t find “ideal” forms in addition to Plato’s perfect solids, but all the less-than-ideal forms exist in a perfectly formed universe, and it is that overriding universal “form” that is complete and whose completeness allows us to exist. The physical forces in this universe are “just right.” Think of those who argue for a multiverse—a universe of universes—and their usual statement that those other universes “might” have physical conditions different from ours and, therefore, might not be able to support life as we know it. **
The form of our universe as a problem doesn’t compete with our need for bread, milk, and eggs. Most people don’t go about their days thinking about “perfect forms,” unless they do so when they encounter something “imperfect,” like not getting bread with soup, as in the Seinfeld episode about the Soup Nazi. *** But what does any complaining about life’s imperfect forms get us? “No soup for you” is the Either/Or. We can’t change the way the world works because we aren’t in control of the fundamental forces and the way they arrange matter and energy. And here is where “form” and “perfection” (or completeness) come into our lives. If the world is “perfect,” why does it permit human shortcomings, things left out, and the as yet unresolvable problem of evil? Why is the bread sometimes missing from our bag?
In that Seinfeld episode, George is Biblical Job after the Adversary (Satan) takes away all that is complete and before God restores it to completeness. And if George is a modern representation of the medieval allegorical Everyman, his not getting bread with his soup is an analog of all lives. Sometimes the bag doesn’t contain the expected piece of bread.
I had a late colleague who received a merit award for his teaching. In receiving the award in front of the faculty, he merely said (though he was given to long conversations in daily life), “Excellence is a journey.” That’s the core of human motivation. Completeness, and thus, perfection isn’t our daily lot. More often than not, the bread isn’t included with the soup, not necessarily intentionally, but once it’s missing, it’s missing. The form of life goes on in imbalances that we cannot correct because they appear to be imposed by a “Soup Nazi” who acts on a whim.
Wanting that perfect form, wanting perfect symmetry that mimics Plato’s solids, we look at the imperfections, the imbalances, the lack of symmetry and we praise it where we subjectively impose it. “She has a perfect body”; “She has a perfect face”; “He is Mr. Universe”; “He has his act together.” In looking at the mirror, we notice our personal imbalances: “This is too thin”; “This, too fat”; “Here’s a mole”; “Why don’t I have a body like So-n-So, who’s just perfect?” And we extend the physical imperfections to all things intangible, such as intellect, wit, and personality, seeing in others what they probably don’t see in themselves. Everyman, the character we all are at times in the drama of life, hears “No soup for you.”
How balanced is your universe? The physical one in which you live has ratios of strength among the fundamental forces that keep it in existence as we know it. As John Leslie points out in Universes,
“Gravity…needs fine tuning for stars and planets to form, and for stars to burn stably over billions of years. It is roughly 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster.” ****
Maybe we do exist in as perfect a universe as is possible because of those fundamental and balanced forces. ***** It’s just that that perfection, that completeness, exists on a very basic physical level. Those perfect solids of Plato are exceptions within the universe of our daily lives. Getting bread with one’s soup in the Soup Nazi’s deli occurs regularly, but not always. Good occurs, but evil occurs, also. Your one nostril, eyebrow, or breast might be slightly different from the other, though to the rest of us it is a detail and an imperfection we never notice. We don’t see the mirror you that you see. And if your mirror universe is like universe number 10^640 that is supposedly an exact copy of your personal universe, only you see the imbalance. Only you look into the bag that is “supposed” to contain take-out soup and bread to see that the bread is missing.
Completion—perfection—occurs only in matters we cannot control, such as the fine-tuning of the universe’s fundamental forces and in those five perfect solids. We don’t have time to look at all the details of other universes—other people—that seem to be perfect and balanced in perfect ratios like gravity and electromagnetism. We look from afar at the "worlds" of people seemingly more fortunate, more perfect, and that perspective blurs the details of their lives and hides their imperfections. “Why can’t our family be perfect like their family?” “Why do they get to have that ideal life”? “Why does everything work out for them?”
“Excellence is a journey”; completeness, too. Balance is temporary in daily life, so we could paraphrase my late colleague and say, “Perfection—or completeness—is a journey.” Say you were able to enter one of those other universes or the life of another, would you do so in expectation that all the forces are fine-tuned with all their strength ratios just so balanced that all forms would be perfect?
Those Platonic solids might be teases, but they are also motivators. In them we see what perfection would look like and, more importantly, that some kind of perfection is possible. Their perfection can serve as motivation within the reality of daily imbalances and shortcomings. When we are motivated to strive for perfection, we do so in the knowledge that those five forms are all that there are. Other perfect forms are unattainable, but we have a model that underpins our striving.
We might be creatures of wishful thinking. We know ultimate and continued perfection is unattainable, but we’ve seen those perfect forms. “Surely,” we think, “such perfection is within my grasp. Others seem to have reached perfection. If the void that became the universe of forms houses some examples of perfection, maybe I’ll be the first to attain similar perfection.”
You won’t, but don’t worry. Everyone else has gone to the deli only to find, upon leaving, that someone forgot to include the bread with the soup. That doesn’t prevent you from making repeated trips to that deli. Sometimes the bread is included. Sometimes the forms seem “perfect enough” in a “perfect world” that contains numerous imperfections. Dealing with imperfections is not so hard when one looks at the structure of the universe and its limiting forces. Your bag might not have bread in it at the moment, but it has the soup. Don’t spend time complaining about what you don’t have; you might lose what you do have if the Soup Nazi says, “No soup for you!”
*Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron, and Icosahedron.
**Yes, there are arguments to be made that somewhere, maybe in a universe to which we might assign the number 10^640 that a mirror universe exists in every detail we are and know.
*** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6SWr9gWKZM This YouTube clip shows the development of the scene plus the scene to which I refer.
***Leslie, John. Universes. London. Routledge. 1989. p. 5.
****Gravity, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (the electroweak force), and the strong nuclear force. Leslie writes that different strength ratios among the fundamental forces would have resulted in a universe that couldn’t engender or maintain life: “…a slight strengthening [of electromagnetism] could transform all quarks … into leptons or else make protons repel one another strongly enough to prevent the existence of atoms….” p. 4. And he writes, “The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn ten thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stronger than gravity. So we can well be impressed by any apparent need for a force to be ‘just right’ even to within a factor of ten, let alone to within one part in a hundred or in 10^100—especially when nobody is sure why the strongest force tugs any more powerfully than the weakest.” p. 6.
Perfect is an interesting word. It has had various meanings, including the common “without flaw,” and “ideal,” but here I’ll use the use the word in the sense “complete” with a corollary sense of “balanced.” When the eighteenth-century optimists said, as Voltaire satirizes, that of all the possible worlds this one is perfect, they were echoing the idea of the hierarchy of being, or, as it has been termed, The Great Chain of Being. If you recall, that idea was the one used to battle the early Darwinists: The world couldn’t be evolving, they argued, because a Perfect Deity made a Perfect World—the Best of All Possible Worlds. God was “perfect” because God was “complete,” that is, in need of nothing. The Creation was “perfect” because there were no gaps: God, Angels, Humans, Animals, Plants, and Rocks, all part of that hierarchical Great Chain. Such a universe had no room for new species because it was complete.
You might argue that the Anthropic Principle is a continuation of that basic idea. This world, because it exists in a balance of forces that manifests itself as the venue for our existence, is “perfect.” Maybe we can’t find “ideal” forms in addition to Plato’s perfect solids, but all the less-than-ideal forms exist in a perfectly formed universe, and it is that overriding universal “form” that is complete and whose completeness allows us to exist. The physical forces in this universe are “just right.” Think of those who argue for a multiverse—a universe of universes—and their usual statement that those other universes “might” have physical conditions different from ours and, therefore, might not be able to support life as we know it. **
The form of our universe as a problem doesn’t compete with our need for bread, milk, and eggs. Most people don’t go about their days thinking about “perfect forms,” unless they do so when they encounter something “imperfect,” like not getting bread with soup, as in the Seinfeld episode about the Soup Nazi. *** But what does any complaining about life’s imperfect forms get us? “No soup for you” is the Either/Or. We can’t change the way the world works because we aren’t in control of the fundamental forces and the way they arrange matter and energy. And here is where “form” and “perfection” (or completeness) come into our lives. If the world is “perfect,” why does it permit human shortcomings, things left out, and the as yet unresolvable problem of evil? Why is the bread sometimes missing from our bag?
In that Seinfeld episode, George is Biblical Job after the Adversary (Satan) takes away all that is complete and before God restores it to completeness. And if George is a modern representation of the medieval allegorical Everyman, his not getting bread with his soup is an analog of all lives. Sometimes the bag doesn’t contain the expected piece of bread.
I had a late colleague who received a merit award for his teaching. In receiving the award in front of the faculty, he merely said (though he was given to long conversations in daily life), “Excellence is a journey.” That’s the core of human motivation. Completeness, and thus, perfection isn’t our daily lot. More often than not, the bread isn’t included with the soup, not necessarily intentionally, but once it’s missing, it’s missing. The form of life goes on in imbalances that we cannot correct because they appear to be imposed by a “Soup Nazi” who acts on a whim.
Wanting that perfect form, wanting perfect symmetry that mimics Plato’s solids, we look at the imperfections, the imbalances, the lack of symmetry and we praise it where we subjectively impose it. “She has a perfect body”; “She has a perfect face”; “He is Mr. Universe”; “He has his act together.” In looking at the mirror, we notice our personal imbalances: “This is too thin”; “This, too fat”; “Here’s a mole”; “Why don’t I have a body like So-n-So, who’s just perfect?” And we extend the physical imperfections to all things intangible, such as intellect, wit, and personality, seeing in others what they probably don’t see in themselves. Everyman, the character we all are at times in the drama of life, hears “No soup for you.”
How balanced is your universe? The physical one in which you live has ratios of strength among the fundamental forces that keep it in existence as we know it. As John Leslie points out in Universes,
“Gravity…needs fine tuning for stars and planets to form, and for stars to burn stably over billions of years. It is roughly 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster.” ****
Maybe we do exist in as perfect a universe as is possible because of those fundamental and balanced forces. ***** It’s just that that perfection, that completeness, exists on a very basic physical level. Those perfect solids of Plato are exceptions within the universe of our daily lives. Getting bread with one’s soup in the Soup Nazi’s deli occurs regularly, but not always. Good occurs, but evil occurs, also. Your one nostril, eyebrow, or breast might be slightly different from the other, though to the rest of us it is a detail and an imperfection we never notice. We don’t see the mirror you that you see. And if your mirror universe is like universe number 10^640 that is supposedly an exact copy of your personal universe, only you see the imbalance. Only you look into the bag that is “supposed” to contain take-out soup and bread to see that the bread is missing.
Completion—perfection—occurs only in matters we cannot control, such as the fine-tuning of the universe’s fundamental forces and in those five perfect solids. We don’t have time to look at all the details of other universes—other people—that seem to be perfect and balanced in perfect ratios like gravity and electromagnetism. We look from afar at the "worlds" of people seemingly more fortunate, more perfect, and that perspective blurs the details of their lives and hides their imperfections. “Why can’t our family be perfect like their family?” “Why do they get to have that ideal life”? “Why does everything work out for them?”
“Excellence is a journey”; completeness, too. Balance is temporary in daily life, so we could paraphrase my late colleague and say, “Perfection—or completeness—is a journey.” Say you were able to enter one of those other universes or the life of another, would you do so in expectation that all the forces are fine-tuned with all their strength ratios just so balanced that all forms would be perfect?
Those Platonic solids might be teases, but they are also motivators. In them we see what perfection would look like and, more importantly, that some kind of perfection is possible. Their perfection can serve as motivation within the reality of daily imbalances and shortcomings. When we are motivated to strive for perfection, we do so in the knowledge that those five forms are all that there are. Other perfect forms are unattainable, but we have a model that underpins our striving.
We might be creatures of wishful thinking. We know ultimate and continued perfection is unattainable, but we’ve seen those perfect forms. “Surely,” we think, “such perfection is within my grasp. Others seem to have reached perfection. If the void that became the universe of forms houses some examples of perfection, maybe I’ll be the first to attain similar perfection.”
You won’t, but don’t worry. Everyone else has gone to the deli only to find, upon leaving, that someone forgot to include the bread with the soup. That doesn’t prevent you from making repeated trips to that deli. Sometimes the bread is included. Sometimes the forms seem “perfect enough” in a “perfect world” that contains numerous imperfections. Dealing with imperfections is not so hard when one looks at the structure of the universe and its limiting forces. Your bag might not have bread in it at the moment, but it has the soup. Don’t spend time complaining about what you don’t have; you might lose what you do have if the Soup Nazi says, “No soup for you!”
*Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron, and Icosahedron.
**Yes, there are arguments to be made that somewhere, maybe in a universe to which we might assign the number 10^640 that a mirror universe exists in every detail we are and know.
*** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6SWr9gWKZM This YouTube clip shows the development of the scene plus the scene to which I refer.
***Leslie, John. Universes. London. Routledge. 1989. p. 5.
****Gravity, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (the electroweak force), and the strong nuclear force. Leslie writes that different strength ratios among the fundamental forces would have resulted in a universe that couldn’t engender or maintain life: “…a slight strengthening [of electromagnetism] could transform all quarks … into leptons or else make protons repel one another strongly enough to prevent the existence of atoms….” p. 4. And he writes, “The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn ten thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stronger than gravity. So we can well be impressed by any apparent need for a force to be ‘just right’ even to within a factor of ten, let alone to within one part in a hundred or in 10^100—especially when nobody is sure why the strongest force tugs any more powerfully than the weakest.” p. 6.
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