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  • The Swerve

    The Swerve

    ... and I wish you also to know that
as particles are carried by their inertia 
along straight lines through the void,
at uncertain instants and locations 
they diverge slightly
by an undetectable change of momentum.
For, if they didn't swerve, they would all fall
straight through the deep void like raindrops,
no interaction would be born, no collision arise
in the primordial material: so nothing ever would nature create.

    [Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 2, 216-224]

    Greek philosophy began when some thinkers questioned the mythological explanations for the origin and nature of the world and instead offered naturalistic ones.

    Thales was the first of them: he stipulated that everything was made of water in its different states and that all natural phenomena came from the physical transformation of water. He was followed by a string of thinkers who proposed different ingredients and mechanisms: Anaximander (an indefinite primordial substance), Anaximenes (air), Heraclitus (fire), Empedocles (the four elements: earth, water, air and fire), Anaxagoras (an infinite number of elements). They were collectively known as physicists, from the Greek term physis, meaning nature. Besides their speculations on the origin of things, they advanced scientific understanding in many fields. They are considered the ancestors of modern scientists.

    A further innovation came when Leucippus and Democritus proposed the atomic model of reality, maybe spurred by the critique of motion and change by Parmenides and Zeno. This theory asserts that everything is made of invisibly small unchangeable particles, atoms, meaning indivisible in Greek. Every object is a combination of different atoms.

    Greek philosophers were not the first to formulate atomism. The Indian school Charvaka (also known as Lokayata, meaning prevalent among the people) was already doing it in the 8th century BCE. They rejected traditional religion and supernatural forces; instead they believed that direct perception is the source of knowledge. They had a materialistic, atomistic and deterministic view of nature. Their philosophy of life consisted in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

    There was still one aspect of the world that wasn’t explained in Democritus’ atomistic view: how does the unlimited variety and richness of the world arise from the deterministic motion of atoms? The answer to this dilemma came from the 3rd century philosopher Epicurus. He proposed that there are non-deterministic occurrences when the atoms deviate randomly from their course. In Greek this is called parenklisis; it is better known by the Latin word that Lucretius uses: clinamen, which we translate in English as swerve.

    In my translation of the passage where Lucretius writes about the swerve I purposely used modern terminology: particle, inertia, momentum, void. Surprisingly, these are literal translations of the Latin terms (and the exact same word for momentum), although Lucretius obviously did not have in mind our modern technical sense. The word that Lucretius uses for the Greek atoms is corpora, literally meaning bodies. At least one scholar (Thomas Nail) claims that Lucretius meant something quite different, but the general consensus is that he meant atoms.

    Modern physics and cosmology theorize something analogous to Epicurean swerve: quantum indeterminacy. Subatomic particles are constantly subjected to random variations of their state: their future position and momentum is not determined by their present condition and in fact they cannot even be measured precisely at the same time. There are different interpretations of the ontological meaning of quantum indeterminacy. The Copenhagen interpretation says that we shouldn’t even try to give a physical meaning to quantum states and we should just “shut up and calculate” (it is just meaningless mathematics). The hidden variables interpretation speculates that there is a deeper level of reality that would restore a deterministic explanation. The spontaneous collapse hypothesis holds that quantum states transition randomly into classical reality; the larger the system, the more likely the transition, that’s why large-scale reality is never in a quantum superposition. The many worlds explanation maintains that the universe exists in a superposition of infinitely many versions of reality and every quantum event splits it further. (Thomas Nail claims anachronistically that Lucretius already had a notion similar to quantum superposition.)

    Modern cosmology explains the existence of complex structures in the universe (clusters, galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets) in a way reminiscent of Epicurus. Usually quantum fluctuations dissolve in an infinitesimal time and never affect the macroscopic world. But it is thought that at the beginning of the universe, just after the Big Bang, there was a period of inflation when it expanded very fast, so fast that quantum fluctuations were stretched into variations at the macroscopic level. Therefore all the large-scale objects, from galaxies to humans, ultimately owe their existence to quantum indeterminacy.

    Reading

    The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt is the story of how Lucretius’ poem was fortuitously rediscovered at the beginning of the Renaissance after being forgotten for centuries and almost lost.

    The best exposition for non-experts of quantum mechanics and its interpretations is in Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll. If you want to know more about the origin and especially the fate of the universe, read The End of Everything by Katie Mack.

    Thomas Nail’s unconventional interpretation of The Rerum Natura is in Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion.

  • Venus

    Venus

    Mother of us all, pleasure of humans and gods,
nourishing Venus, who, under the gliding stars,
vitalize the open sea and the fruitful lands,
because of you every living species
is conceived and born into the light of the sun:
at your approach the winds flee you and the clouds
scatter away, to you the prolific earth
offers lovely flowers, to you the surface of the sea smiles
and the serene sky shines with suffused light.

As soon as the Spring day reveals its appearance
and the fruitful west wind breathes free,
first the birds of the air announce you
and your arrival, their hearts stricken by your force.
Then beasts and flocks prance on lush pastures
and swim across swift streams: thus all seized by your
enchantment they follow you ardently where you lead them.

Finally, over seas and mountains and raging rivers,
in the leafy homes of the birds and in the green fields,
instilling sensual love in everybody's breast,
you cause them to propagate passionately the generations of their kinds.

Because you alone govern the nature of things
and without you nothing emerges to the bright shores of light
and nothing pleasant or lovable is made,
I wish you to be my companion in writing these verses
that I venture to compose on the nature of things,
for our Memmius, that you, goddess, led to excel
in all things at all times with honour.
Therefore give, o goddess, eternal enchantment to my words.

                                  [Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 1, 1-28]

    These are the first verses of the philosophical poem On The Nature Of Things (De Rerum Natura) by Titus Lucretius Carus, an ancient Roman writer who lived in the first century BCE. The book explains in passionate poetic language the doctrines of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived two centuries earlier. Epicureanism says that the world is made of invisibly tiny particles, atoms, that flow according to the laws of nature and sometime swerve randomly. Humans, like all other creatures, are made of atoms and cease to exist when the atoms scatter. But we shouldn’t be afraid of death; instead we should dedicate our life to the pursuit of pleasure and friendship.

    We don’t know anything about the life of Lucretius. The fictitious story told by Saint Jerome centuries later is just an expression of Christian prejudice. Lucretius was born in around 100 BCE and died in his forties, leaving his great book unfinished. The book was probably edited and published by Cicero, who was an admirer. Another admirer was Virgil, whose Georgics were inspired by De Rerum Natura.

    The first century BCE was a time of upheaval and conflict in the Roman world, that eventually led to the collapse of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire. There were a series of civil wars in which generals attempted to seize power. The latest, between Pompey and Caesar, broke out shortly after Lucretius’ death and resulted in Caesar becoming Dictator. The poem is addressed to Gaius Memmius, a Roman politician and orator, who had been a supporter of Pompey before changing his allegiance to Caesar. Besides being the dedicatee of Lucretius’s poem, he was also a protector of the poet Catullus. He was a refined Graecophile intellectual and a scheming politician. His machinations eventually caused his downfall and he was exiled to Greece for electoral fraud.

    De Rerum Natura is very different from the classical epic poems of the time, that glorified the actions of gods and heroes. Their models were Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil would later produce the equivalent Roman example with the Aeneid. Lucretius’ book is more similar to the treaties by Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, which sometimes were written in poetic form and had the title On Nature. Notable examples were Anaximander, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Unfortunately these books are lost and only fragments survive. In spite of the different character of his poem, Lucretius starts by following the tradition of opening with an invocation to a deity, here Venus, the goddess of love.

    In the Latin original, Lucretius calls Venus the generatrix of the people of Aeneas. Aeneas was the hero who escaped from Troy after its destruction by the Greeks and travelled to Italy, where his descendants founded Rome. So “the people of Aeneas” means all Romans. This would include all potential readers, so it is a way of including all of them as children of Venus. That’s why in my translation I generalize it to “us all”.

    According to Epicureanism, gods do not intervene in our world. So we must interpret Venus not as literally a goddess, but as a personification of the universal force of love. Lucretius calls Venus pleasure (voluptas) of men and gods. Pleasure is the highest goal of life according to Epicureanism. Another indirect reference to traditional religion appears in the reference to the West wind (Favonius). According to classical myth, the god Aeolus kept the winds locked in a cave and released them according to the seasons. In accordance, Lucretius says that the west wind is reserata, literally unlocked.

    In the last verses above Lucretius for the first time states, twice, the title and topic of his book: De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) and calls upon Venus as the ruler of nature. The word translated as enchantment is lepor, which is often translated as charm. It is the universal erotic and generative force of Venus that enraptures and leads all creatures. In the last verse, Lucretius asks the goddess to give eternal lepor to his words. So he is asking her to infuse her own power into the poem.

    On Translations:
    There are several good translations of De Rerum Natura in English. The one by W. H. D. Rouse in the Loeb Classical Library is plain and readable. An impressive poetic translation is the recent one by A. E. Stallings in rhyming fourteeners.

    My own translation cannot compete with these: I’m not a classical scholar and English is not my first language. My interest is sparked by the parallels between Lucretius’ worldview and the discoveries of modern science. In this sense, I’m influenced by the Italian translation by Piergiorgio Odifreddi.

    I’m also interested in the relation between Epicurean and Buddhist ethics. My inspiration came from a course by Stephen Batchelor and John Peacock on the parallels between the doctrines of Buddha and Epicurus. I’m encouraged by the discussions with the Ten Perfection group of participants to a recent course by Stephen Batchelor: many thanks in particular to Tom, Mary and Joe.