Once Before Time - Martin Bojowald [130]
About seventy years after Thales, becoming is at the center of Heraclitus’ philosophy: “I see nothing but becoming. Don’t let yourselves be fooled! It is your short sight, not the essence of things, that makes you believe you see solid land in the seas of becoming and demise.” Modern cosmology was led to envision the large-scale change of the universe only by direct observations of its expansion, as evidenced by the escape velocities of stars in distant galaxies. Even Einstein was initially misled by too short a focus and attempted to find static solutions of constant volume in his general relativity. He managed to do so by artificially introducing an extra term, the so-called cosmological constant, only to dispose of it soon after Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe. Only in recent times does the cosmological constant again play a large (though unpopular) role in the possible modeling of dark energy.
For Heraclitus, moreover, the worldview is cyclic in the strict sense—based on several cycles; and like Thales, he views one of the four ancient elements as the fundamental one. For him this is fire, which periodically destroys worlds and allows them to be resurrected in conflagration: “This world order, the same for all beings, has been created by no God and neither by Man, but it was always and is and will be forever lively fire, measuredly glowing and measuredly quenching.” Heraclitus thus counts as a founder of ekpyrosis, later popular with the Stoics. Ekpyrosis has itself been resurrected in modern cosmology—by the same name—in a string-theory-motivated model by Justin Khoury, Burt Ovrut, Paul Steinhardt, and Neil Turok.
Parmenides, as we’ve seen before, is diametrically opposed to the insight of his contemporary, Heraclitus: All change is illusion. Nothing emerges or wanes, it simply is. The reason is of purely logical nature, for no being can come from nonexistence: “The decision about this relies in the following: it is or it is not! … How, then, could all that exists emerge in the future, how could it once have emerged? For if it did emerge it is not, and just the same if in the future it should one day emerge. Thus emergence is quenched and demise is lost.” Emergence from nothing is impossible: “For unspeakable and unthinkable is how it could have been nonexisting. What duty should have driven it to sooner or later begin from nothing, and to grow? Thus it must either be at any rate, or not at all.” In physics, in the same way, the beginning and end of everything exist at most in the form of singularities, outside any theory and logic.
Fifty years farther on, Empedocles follows in Parmenides’ steps, but adds new elements. The relationship is clear, for instance in the following sentence: “For as it is impossible for something to emerge from the nowhere existing, so it is undoable and unheard of that the being could ever be eradicated.” Building on this idea, a clearly cyclic run of the world ensues: “Now, insofar as in this way the one emerges from the many, and the many in turn sprout from the decay of the one, to this extent emergence happens, and life does not remain unchanged; but since their continuing change never ceases, they always remain untrembling [gods] during the cycle.”
Crucially new with Empedocles is the insight that interplay of two counteracting forces is necessary for stable equilibrium: “For how [those two forces (conflict and harmony)] once were, so they will [ever] be, and I believe that never will the infinite eternity be deprived of the two of them.” In his use of the terms “harmony” and “conflict” one clearly sees how Empedocles came to this insight.