Rhythms and Endings
The rhythms of the Hudson River soothe me.
HOBOKEN, JULY 3, 2025. Reading Woolf’s novel The Waves made me acutely aware of rhythms that rule my life. So did studying wave functions during the covid pandemic, as you’ll see from this excerpt from My Quantum Experiment. – John Horgan
It’s a blustery morning, I’m heading back to Hoboken from Manhattan. Passing through a park on my way to the Brookfield ferry terminal, I spot a plaque with a poem on it, “Nature Poem” by Tommy Pico. Two lines jump out at me:
When Nature palms my neck I can’t tell if it’s a
romantic comedy or a scary movie
I can’t tell either. Will our movie have a happy ending? And what would that mean, anyway? Isn’t the happiest ending no ending? I brood over these questions while waiting for the ferry. The wind is kicking up waves on the Hudson, making the floating pier rock, and I think of the rhythms that rule my life, the days and nights I spend with or without her, teaching or not teaching, and the longer undulations of seasons, semesters, years.
The repetitions can make life feel monotonous, humdrum, especially under this lockdown, but they keep me grounded, too. They lay down a beat for improvisation, doing new things, like studying complex numbers, and they help me cope with unpleasant surprises, like getting sepsis in my elbow. I move toward the illusory asymptote of wisdom as I age, approaching the all-too-real asymptote of oblivion. The waves dance up and down on the Hudson, the river ebbs and flows and swirls, the water ends up in the ocean.
Don’t forget the inner beats that define us, propel us, the rhythms of the heart, lungs, brain. A single neuron oscillates faster than the fastest jazz drummer. Now imagine 100 billion drummers, sticks blurring, their individual rhythms generating higher rhythms, meta-rhythms. Neuroscientists eavesdrop on this incessant neuronal clamor, hoping to discern the harmonies underpinning consciousness.
Then there is the subatomic scale where electrons and quarks shimmy and shake. That’s the beat beneath the beat, the heartbeat of reality. An electron flutters like a sine wave, up and down, or like a point racing around a circle, round and round, and the rhythm of one electron merges with the rhythm of others to form a cosmic rhythm, the wave function of our universe. String theorists hear strings thrumming down at the Planck scale, that imaginary microrealm at the bottom of space and time, and multiversers imagine a trans-cosmic beat, universes bursting and collapsing. Our vast cosmos is just a grace note in this eternal symphony, as evanescent as a whitecap on the Hudson.
Are we on the upswing of a sine wave, about to crest? Is reality, from the broadest perspective, cyclic? And what do we want to be the case? What would be consoling? Let’s say things are, on the grandest scale, cyclic, and we’re in a bound state. From the trans-cosmic perspective, human progress appears local and fleeting and hence in the long run meaningless. In exchange we get the comforting prospect of eternal recurrence.
Or maybe our universe is the only one that ever existed, that ever will exist. When we die, we die. Death is death. We give up eternity, the perpetual return, and accept our mortality. In exchange, we get the thrill of feeling, knowing, that this great adventure on which we are embarked is one of a kind. It has never happened before, it will never happen again. Yes, we’re doomed, so let’s make the most of our existence, let’s have fun while we can.
After I get off the ferry, I sit on a bench beside the Hudson to jot down these thoughts. When I’m back in my apartment, Skye calls. She’s been dwelling on something awful that happened in her childhood, something she thinks was her fault, the death of a family pet. My daughter has built up a kind of mythology around the event, it’s her original sin. She feels terrible guilt, after all this time. She asks what I remember about the incident. I assure her she was innocent, it wasn’t her fault. She was four years old.
Skye has endured so much trauma in her short life. The death of people close to her, including her first boyfriend, lost to heroin. My heart breaks for her, I’m desperate for her to be happy. After our call ends I have a hard time focusing on my quantum project. I set my notebook aside and listen to music. My iPod, on shuffle, plays “Instant Karma,” and I hear it as if for the first time:
Why are we here?
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Lennon’s lyrics make my eyes well up, as does the refrain:
Well we all shine on
like the moon and the stars and the sun
Yeah we all shine on
on and on and on…
Do we all shine on and on? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Certainly not the physicists who claim that information lasts forever, or that mind can endure even in the face of heat death. Sometimes I’m not sure I want us to shine on and on. I’m soothed by the prospect of a final darkness that brings our frantic busyness to an end.
No, I take that back, I don’t want our frantic busyness to end, I want it to last forever.
Further Reading:
My Quantum Experiment (available for free online and for a price from Amazon).