Objective Fact and Subjective Reality

Good books are always worth reading again. Lately I’ve been re-reading Gregory Benford’s Timescape. Timescape was first published in 1980. It details a world that is suffering from ecological destruction in which a physicist is trying to communicate with the past to prevent some of the planetary harm that has occurred. I keep going back to re-read one passage, about a set of shelves to hold canned goods the physicist had made for his wife. She complains that the shelves are crooked. (Emphasis added)

…the shelves did seem at a tilt. He had made them on a precise radial line extending dead to the center of the planet, geometrically impeccable and absolutely rational and quite beside the point. Their home was warped and swayed by the times it had passed through. … This kitchen was the true local reference frame…

Nicholas of Cusa said that

the world machine will have, one might say, its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, for its circumference and center is God, who is everywhere and nowhere.

Our lives, our beliefs, our actions, don’t revolve around the ‘objective facts’, but around meaning. Until the 16th century people believed the Earth was the center of the universe. At that time it began to become clear that not only is the Earth not the center of the universe, it isn’t even the center of this solar system. Yet when dawn comes we still speak of the Sun rising. We imagine our galaxy as the center of the universe. The Earth continues to be the psychological center of our physical world, because this is where we are. The physical facts are irrelevant. In the same way each and every one of us is the center of the world.

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