The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind (review)

The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind. By F.David Peat. New York: Perseus, 2000. Pp. 232. $26.

The central premise of this long essay is that there is a fundamental relationship between the creation of the universe, creativity in nature, and creativity as a human endeavor. This is a hard thought to communicate; many religious experiences are. However, I believe the author has failed to make the case that these different phenomena are really manifestations of the same elemental force. The problem is not that the arguments he marshals are incorrect or incomplete, it is just that they arise from a Zen-like insight that occurred to him while off in a foreign country sitting for long periods of time just staring into space. I will grant that at the root of it all there are some very mysterious aspects to the universe that seem so implausible that any search for additional wisdom is warranted.

The author's background as a theoretical physicist prepares him well to address these issues. Physics prepares one in several ways. First, it asks the big questions: what is the origin of the universe? what is that nature of matter and energy? what are the forces that propel the universe? what is the nature of time, and why does it move forward? Physics also prepares an observer to address questions in an abstract context, by speaking in the language of mathematics and symbolic logic. Finally, physicists commonly acknowledge that there is a gap between the precise analytic approach of quantum mechanics and relativity and the answers to the questions being posed. It is this gap that irrationality and religion must fill. For example, if the universe started with a singularity that broke down and exploded in the big bang, what came before this and why did it happen? It is not clear that physics per se can answer these questions, at least at a level that would satisfy us.

The author would like to fill this gap with a process he calls "creativity," the motive force of the universe. This force is manifest at all levels in the universe from the big bang to a child's sketch. It is what makes things move forward. While I don't buy it, I will say that there is little I can offer in place of his notion. One could propose that time is a mysterious force that moves things along, but that is not very satisfying or even very likely. Time is a metric that describes one of the dimensions of our universe, not a force that moves things forward. The author suggests that there is a force that drives time forward, since physics seems to work just fine in reverse. Could entropy be that force? This answer doesn't work either, since entropy is a summary of the many microevents that themselves can go toward either a more ordered or a more disordered state. Entropy is just a statistical description of the state of a system over time. Something else is pushing things along.

What about the expansion of the universe? At least some physicists believe that the forward arrow of time is intimately linked to the expansion of the universe, and that in a collapsing universe time would run backwards. Would entropy work backwards under these conditions? Would the universe proceed from a disordered to a more ordered state over time at all levels? Wouldn't this be interesting? I think we might adapt to this bizarre world. First you are dead, then you become alive at the end of your life and work backwards from elderly to adult to adolescent to childhood, finally going out of existence at birth. Nothing troublesome there. On a daily basis you arise at night and go about your day in reverse. Things proceed from being done to being undone.

OK, you say, but what about causality? Causality seems to...