Moby Dick and Hawking’s “Ultimate Theory”

This cushion, which sits on the couch in my office at Stevens Institute of Technology, keeps me on my toes.

HOBOKEN, SEPTEMBER 7, 2024.  I started re-reading Moby Dick while lounging by the ocean last month. Now I’m sailing toward the finale here in Hoboken while gearing up for fall classes.

Melville’s 1851 novel, it occurs to me, overlaps with a 1981 essay I assigned my science-writing students, Stephen Hawking’s “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?” That’s my conceit, anyway, which gives me an excuse to gush over Moby Dick.

The book gets pegged as ponderous, deadly serious, and yeah, it does get heavy, and you’ve probably heard it doesn’t end well (except for the whale). But Melville (like Hawking) has a mischievous sense of humor.

Take the passage in which Ishmael, the narrator, rebukes “landsmen” who assume the white whale is “a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Why is that funny? Because of course Moby Dick is a fable and allegory! The book seethes with symbolic significance. It’s about our search for consolation in a malignant or, worse, indifferent world.

It’s about God or the lack thereof, about suffering and free will, about the problem of evil and its converse, the problem of beauty. It’s about how hard it is to plod through our puny mortal lives with death looming over us. It’s about the limits of understanding. I love all this stuff, it obsesses me too. But what I really love about Moby Dick...

Well, I love many things. The fussy scholarly digressions, the stream-of-consciousness (70 years before Joyce’s Ulysses!) glimpses into characters’ minds, the odes to the sea’s terrifying beauty, the iambic rhythm that rocks you like an ever-cresting wave that only breaks upon the final page.

But I really love the way big themes spring so naturally from this yarn about a particular man’s search for a particular whale. All Melville’s characters—Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask—are quirky individuals, even as each exudes a metaphorical aura.

Take Pip, the cheerful but timid little cabin boy, who jumps in fear out of a boat sideswiped by a whale and ends up bobbing up and down in the Pacific, alone, abandoned by his mates. By the time the Pequod rescues him, Pip has gone mad, his soul if not his body drowned by the ocean’s immensity.

Yeah, I get it, Pip, infinity freaks me out too.

And Moby Dick isn’t just a white whale. He’s mottled, with a wrinkled brow and crooked jaw. Moby Dick gains its peculiar power from these particularities. The novel recalls the self-violating command with which William Carlos Williams opens his prose-poem Paterson: “no ideas but in things.”

Williams means that generalizations, lessons, theories should emerge from the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, each humble item of which denotes the world’s wild improbability, or weirdness.

You don’t have to go on a death-defying voyage, Melville would surely agree, to discover the weirdness. I can see it when I’m lying on my couch staring at the glittering Hudson or in my office staring at a nervous student.

A guru once advised me that as you seek enlightenment, you shouldn’t neglect your chores. Chop wood, carry water. Grade freshman papers, buy girlfriend gift certificate to spa. Yeah, we carry out our spiritual quests in a demanding material world.

Melville, too, keeps reminding us that life poses practical as well as metaphysical puzzles: How do you stock a ship with a crew of 30 for a multi-year voyage around the globe? How do you flay a sperm whale and reduce it to its oily essence? Melville, via his avatar Ishmael, delights in informing us.

Ishmael clearly reveres science. He revels in conveying experts’ opinions on, say, the differences between fossil whales and modern whales, or sperm whales and right whales. And yet Ishmael points out that whalers know far more about whales than library-bound eggheads.

Toward the end of Moby Dick, Ahab destroys an instrument for calculating the ship’s position after he decides that “science” cannot help him complete his quest. Yes, science, for all its power, can only takes us so far.

Ishmael (like Hawking) takes swipes at philosophy too—for example when the whalemen lash a sperm whale’s head to one side of the Pequod and balance it with a right whale’s head on the opposite side. Ishmael compares this exercise to that of scholars waffling between Kant and Locke:

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

Come on, that’s funny. So is Ishmael’s comparison of a sailor who tumbles into a whale’s oil-filled head to someone who has “fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there.” The path of reason, whether in the form of philosophy or science, is not without peril.

Like all great art, Moby Dick resists categorization, but I like to think of it as a work of negative theology. Practitioners of this odd discipline insist that God cannot be described, let alone understood, and then they go on to describe God at great length. Melville does that, too, he utters the unutterable.

Back to Hawking’s 1981 essay. He fantasizes about finding a “complete, unified theory” that would “describe all possible observations.” This “theory of everything” would tell us how our particular cosmos--which allows for our particular existence!--came to be. The theory would thus solve the riddle of reality and bring physics to an end.

This “ultimate theory” was Hawking’s white whale. But there can be no ultimate scientific theory any more than there can be an ultimate work of art. Even the most sublime masterpiece—whether quantum mechanics or Moby Dick—falls far short of reality. There is no absolute certainty, no right way to look at the world, we’re doomed to wonder.

I’ll give Ishmael the last word. After riffing on the rainbows that form in whales’ misty exhalations, he muses over the consolations of doubt:

"For d'ye see, rainbows do not irradiate the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray... Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."

Further Reading:

Almost everything I write for this website overlaps with the themes of Moby Dick. See a full list of my columns here as well as my online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment.