OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | Of Feynman & Einstein And His Theory Of ‘Death Doesn’t Exist’ … | Farrukh Dhondy

“I looked in the glass and the image was dark

Which sort of meant I didn’t know myself

Which was literally disturbing -- the message was stark!

Then I placed the Bible back on the shelf.

It was saying I would see myself face to face

But only when I ascended from a Christian death

Leaving behind the whole human race

And speaking to Peter out of breath?”

From Cubby Cubby In My Heart, by Bachchoo

My friend, my god-sister, Nadira Naipaul sends me a -- I won’t call it startling, but certainly thought-provoking -- video. It’s a pronouncement of perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes by a very respected pioneering American physicist called Richard Feynman.

Gentle reader, I hadn’t seen this video before or heard of it, because when I knew of Feynman, perhaps this manner of video communication didn’t exist. I mean, that in my undergraduate studies at Cambridge, in my short and happy life, in the mid-1960s, as a student of quantum physics (Yessss, true!) I revered his writings and lectures and learnt so much from them. In fact, I, and other physics students at Cambridge University thought of him as the foremost exponent of the fascinating science that we were students of.

The video that Nadira, Lady Naipaul, sent was entitled “Death Doesn’t Exist”. Feynman died in 1988, so he must have made the video before that, ironically asserting that it wouldn’t happen? No! Gentle reader, it’s much more complicated than that.

Nadira sent a text with the video she asking me to “explain”. I viewed it twice to try and absorb Feynman’s argument. He was saying that this was not something he’d thought up, he was merely explaining what Einstein had written in a letter to the family of his friend Michelle Besso, who died in 1955.

In the video, Feynman explains what Einstein means when he says that “death doesn’t exist”.

Every human and every thinking creature knows that it does. And that’s where Einstein’s philosophical argument intervenes. The key is not whether in “reality” birth and age and death do “exist”. The key is the word “knows”.

Feynman tells us, quite matter-of-factly, that Einstein’s letter to his dead friend’s family doesn’t have any words of condolence, empathy or the “thinking of you” genre of sentiment. Besso collaborated with Einstein on the corollaries to the theories of relativity. These involved an encyclopaedia of equations. The one everyone knows is e=mc(squared), “c” being the velocity of light. Velocity is distance covered over time. In the case of light, this is 186,000 miles per second.

Other equations emanating from Einstein’s formulation of relativity tell us that time is a relative concept and that, if I am to make up a simple example, if a creature was passing the earth on a satellite whose velocity approached that of light itself, this creature’s measure of time would be very different from ours.

That doesn’t mean that the creature’s “perception” would differ. It means that time itself would elastically stretch or shorten!

Confused? Of course! Physics after relativity -- whose formulation by Einstein and subsequent physicists actually changed our entire perception of time and space. That’s where and why “know” in the above sentence operates. For now, we see through a glass darkly, but the equations of relativity tell us the “truths” that our consciousness can’t accept, interpret or face.

Feynman tells us, as Einstein did, that TIME has quantity, but in the mathematics of relativity it has no direction. To the human mind, that’s absurd.

We all know the past was before the present and the future lies after it. Fact! (as Donald Orange Booby would say) But relativity maths would classify that as Fake News (as Booby would say) (Yeah, yeah! -- get on with the physics --Ed!)

Einstein tells us that space is curved. No, the men in the white suits didn’t carry him away.

Space curved??? OK, think of it this way -- if a shadow on curved surface could think, being a two-dimensional creature, to it, the curve would be a straight line. So, a four-dimensional creature will see that our straight lines are actually in curved space?

And death not existing? Well, if time has no direction, just quantity, then all time is eternally present. Its passage from past through present to future is an illusion of consciousness and therefore the change that our minds perceive doesn’t actually exist -- all states of being are notches on an infinite line.

The chain of consciousness is, in one religion, is dubbed “maya”, or illusion. Yes, Hinduism -- as interpreted by Adi Shankara in the Bhagvad Gita, the song of God -- who according to the song doesn’t exist as a singer, though in some manifestations he dances and in another plays the flute.

The Gita also says we are but atoms and space, the aatmas which like drops to the ocean of Brahma -- the universal energy. (e=mc2 anyone?)

The monotheistic religions -- starting with Zoroastrianism and then Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- suffer from a completely different illusion -- that of continuity of time in another place, or even two places depending on where you land up.

What can be considered historically ironic is that it was the freedom of doctrine of these monotheistic religions that gave rise to Western science and Newton and Einstein, though Shankara’s universe was closer to Einstein’s deductions as in the Feynman exposition.