The first quotation is from the biologist JBS Haldane who remarked that “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose ”(Haldane, 1927). By this he meant that the physical makeup of human bodies and human minds is inevitably limited and the result of this limitation is that much of the physical world is outside of the grasp not only of our hands but also of our minds. An overwhelming amount of the universe is composed of entities that are too small to see, to fast to keep up with, too enduring to outlive, too brief to glimpse, too vast to hold in a single thought and too far away to spend the same moment of time with. The world that our senses both construct and construe, both limit and give birth to, is a tiny subset of the entirety of what happens, a small island of sensitive human supposition in an ocean of queerness and insensibility. We approach this ocean clutching the mental equivalent of stone axes and flint arrowheads; what hope do we have of seriously navigating these seas and mapping the lands beyond the horizon?

We are, as Richard Dawkins memorably put it, “Middle sized objects moving at middle speed ”(2003:19) and this size and speed is an important part of what makes us what we are and how we think.  The scales at which all of creation operates stretches in size from the Planck length to the horizon of visible space, a scale of some 40 or so powers of magnitude, and as Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams relate in ‘The View from the Centre of the Universe’ , we occupy a tiny proportion of this scale somewhere in the middle; a place on the continuum of being with its own local interpretations of universal laws; its own biological customs and practices. From an evolutionary perspective we have been middle sized objects for a very long time, since before we had an opposable thumb, since before we had language, since before we had consciousness, since before we had the complex non-conscious processes we have today. We were middle sized objects moving at middle speed when our entire psychophysiological repertoire was limited to flight or fight, breeding and eating. It is as middle sized objects that our being asserted itself such that our physiology, and indeed our psychology has designed itself to function within that particular range and scale of operation, to solve problems and exploit opportunities offered within that range and scale.  Driven by the attractions of pleasure (nature’s reward for survival-enhancing behaviour) and the distress of pain (the stick that nature holds in her other hand), those of our ancestors who were best able to respond to these coaxings would be those who survived the longest, and therefore were most likely to leave their imprint in the genetic record.

The processes of evolution are contingent and conservative, and there is no place within its mechanism for wild experimentation and flights of fancy. Should nature occasionally have the urge to assert herself as some kind of avant garde artist, the beautiful mutants that would result from such bohemianism, less well equipped to solve the problems of middle sized objects moving at middle speed, would never make it into the museum of natural history we carry in our genome. For this reason we have never evolved eyes capable of seeing into the heart of the atom, or into the reaches of outer space; our hands bypassed the evolutionary pathway that led to their being able to feel x-rays or the gusting of the solar wind.  In survival terms our DNA has everything to lose and nothing to gain from experimenting with such extended sight and surreal touch. We can hear the roar of a lion and the wimpering of a potential next meal, but not the background hum of the universe. We can hold apples in our hands, and we can hold the hand of a lover, but have never had need to grasp a quark.

We now know that we do indeed live in a world of quarks and x-rays, and we might relish the idea of being able to sense these phenomena directly (who among us has never wished for the X-Ray vision of Superman). And regardless of how useful such natural sense-making capacity might be in the modern world of mutagenic radiation and carcinogenic UV, the capacities to see outside of the middle sized box of our own embodiment is totally beyond us.   The glacial speed of evolutionary development means that whilst we may think thoughts appropriate to the 21st century, we think these thoughts with ancient bodies and old brains.  We are Fred and Wilma Flintstones living in the universe of George and Judy Jetson.

Standing across from this sentiment, and holding up the other end of our problem, is Albert Einstein, who is reputed to have said that “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle”. (Einstein in Calaprice, 1996: 272). There is no sense here of our ever reaching a point in scientific enquiry at which we are confronted by a world beyond our ken; the point that Haldane seems to find inevitable. Instead there is the sense of a looking back and a looking around, at seeing how far we have come and the incomparable queerness that we have miraculously found the means to suppose.

Our thinking does not seem to be constrained to the mundane middle. We may not be able to grasp a quark in our hands but we do appear to be able to entertain one in our minds. X-rays may pass through us unsensed but somehow we are able to imagine them and express this imagination sufficiently well to have a great deal of knowledge about them and control over them. This ability to comprehend the world beyond the realm of our stone age senses is the mystery that Einstein spoke about.  Our (possibly unique) capacity to think the extra-sensory unthinkable gives the lie to Haldane’s pessimism at the queerness of quarks and the inexpressibility of x-rays. The fact that these things are comprehensible does indeed seem a miracle.

And if our minds were indeed constrained to limits of the sensible how would we be able to entertain any thoughts and ideas which have no physical referents in the material world at all, the abstractions not only of physics but of politics, society, culture, religion and ‘the self’? 

Do we live in a universe that is forever queerer than we can suppose, or do we in fact inhabit a universe of almost miraculous comprehensibility? Is there a way in which the universe can be both queer and comprehensible? So here is the problem I introduced at the beginning, a problem of understanding. Given that we already seem to be supposing some phenomena which are mighty queer, what are the methods of our queer supposing?

Calaprice, Alice, The Quotable Einstein (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1996).

Dawkins, R. and L. Menon (2003). A devil’s chaplain: selected essays. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Haldane, J. B. S. (1927). Possible Worlds: And Other Essays. London, Chatto and Windus.

Primack, Joel R. & Abrams, Nancy Ellen. (2006). The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos. Riverhead Books.