IMPERFECTIONS

Painting adapted from book cover photo

A close-up of a Siberian husky with one blue eye and one brown eye on the cover of the book Imperfections by Elmo Pievani intrigued me. The book is a treatise, not on how to overcome your own perfectionism, but, how the universe developed because of imperfections.

The book is a short dense academic volume; the kind I need to re-read every sentence to understand what the author said. Telmo Pievani explains how the universe came into being because of a random particle, something that caused disruption, irritation, or anomalies that lead to the creation of the smallest particles that were slightly different from each other. His thesis: if everything had been perfect, nothing would exist because nothing would have changed. His examples rest on DNA which duplicates itself over and over again, but with random errors that generate changes on the DNA threads. What would humankind be like if our DNA did not change over time? Remember that most of us still carry some Neanderthal in us. Without DNA changes there would be no red hair, no blue eyes, no seven-foot tall basketball players. We would all look alike, act alike, think alike, or not even exist because the act of creation depends on disturbance.

"Small Changes"

Pievani also writes about infinity, which is an idea that I have a hard time thinking about. I always want to enclose infinity with edges somehow because thinking of the alternative of space without edges is too hard. Yet Pievani also concludes that within the creation of the universe is its own destruction, which scientists imagine will occur within 400 million years from now. If the universe is no longer there, I have to ask: what will be there? Isn't a void something too? Similar to the concept of zero, which for a long time was not given a symbol by mathematicians because then zero became something, and not zero. And what about considering the idea that there are more than one universes? I could get lost trying to even imagine any of these ideas.

I may never finish this small but heavily weighted book, but it sure has me thinking of something other than the human-made chaos we are experiencing right now.