Physiolindalë

Stephen Hawking passed away today.  Hawking’s cosmology began at the Beginning, with cosmogenesis.  J.R.R. Tolkien included cosmogenesis in his mythology, too.  There is a connection, unlikely though that might seem. Here’s the text from Tolkien:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; …

Why music? Well, ever since the Romantic period, other artists have envied the musicians. “All art aspires to the condition of music,” said Walter Pater. “Poets such as E.T.A. Hoffmann … conceived of instrumental music as the language of a higher realm,” as Jonathan Friedmann put it. If you’re a Modernist writer, and you want to express something exalted, you use the language of music to do it.

But what exactly is music? There’s no way JRRT wanted us to imagine the Valar sitting in a concert hall, so this must be referring to something outside the mainstream definition.  When we’re talking about cosmogenesis, what counts as music and what doesn’t?  Well, “music” is only slightly better defined than “literature”. I like this definition from Robert Greenberg: “music is patterns of sound in time.”  [1]

Ainulindalë does not sound like the way musicians talk, so eventually I thought of looking at it as a scientist. From a physicist’s point of view, this passage looks very different.  It’s all about building the framework within which creation can take place: the introduction of time.

This is the idea behind the Hartle-Hawking state of the universe. At the Big Bang (and shortly thereafter), time and space weren’t so clearly differentiated as we see them now, looking (as we do) at length scales of a meter or so. Essentially, there wasn’t “time” per se. The four dimensions were all muddled together. When things cooled down a bit (literally), the symmetry was broken and we got the familiar dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. Stephen Hawking, the more famous member of the team that came up with this idea, wrote about it in A Brief History of Time, in a way that’s accessible to the educated layman. (When physicists are talking to each other, it sounds like this. The American Physical Society has made all of Hawking’s papers freely available if you scroll down on that link.) Here’s roughly how Hawking described it:

Our universe (left) and the way it was during the Big Bang (right)

The figure on the left shows a body moving in space (horizontal axis) and time (vertical). The “light cone” (imagine spinning the picture around the vertical axis) is the maximum velocity a body can have: the speed of light.  Massive bodies move like the black arrow, using up more time to cover less space than a light ray would. Back at the Big Bang, though, Hawking’s work showed that it all looked like space.  All lines moved sideways out from the origin. Moving in time didn’t happen until the Universe had expanded from its initial state.  Without time, there couldn’t be music.

The opening of Ainulindalë, therefore, can be read as a metaphor of the introduction of time into the universe. Or, in current jargon, the transition from Hartle-Hawking to Minkowski states.  The second sentence in the quotation above describes Eru separating time out from the other dimensions. “Music”, here, is a synecdoche of time.

[1] This is very much a late-20th-century definition, by the way.  Before the musical traditions of other continents were absorbed into musicology, and before the radical experiments of later Modernists, the definition looked rather different.