Einstein once remarked, famously, that God does not play dice with the universe. He said this in reaction to Quantum theory which, based fundamentally on probability, robustly affirms that God does play dice with the universe and, to mix metaphors, that there might even be a Joker in nature’s deck of cards.
Is the universe a cosmos or, perchance, a chaosmos?
Chaosmos is a word that James Joyce coined and, by combining chaos and cosmos, his meaning is that order and disorder,1 law and chance, necessity and freedom, permanence and change, creation and destruction, classical determinism and quantum uncertainty—each of these plays a basic role in the nature of things or, to turn it the other way around, the things of nature.2
To say that God plays dice with the universe is, of course, a metaphor that agrees with what Joyce affirms about chance. But, in the final analysis, chance is a good thing, even though, like yin and yang, it has its dark side. As philosopher Charles Hartshorne has said, No risks, no opportunities.
Notes
1. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce crosses “order” and “disorder” to form “thisorder”—a word that transcends both of its components. As John Bishop has observed, critical attempts to impose order on Finnegans Wake never work because “they impose, by force, a sham coherence on materials that are not so much incoherently disordered as thisordered, arranged in ways that resist the attacks of logic because informed by an associative, non-narrative coherence of their own.” (John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, p. 311)
2. Philip Kuberski sums it up nicely:
“Indeed the play of determinacy and indeterminacy is everywhere, from the shifting patterns and molecules in our bodies to the circulation of signifiers that form the shifting patterns of human science, language, history, and criticism. Whether one turns to Werner Heisenberg, James Joyce, Jacques Derrida, or Lao Tsu, one sees this interpenetration of disorder and order, chance and necessity, improvisation and adherence, differentiation and relationship. The world is a continual coincidence of ‘quantum weirdness’ and classical determinism. And the familiar phenomena of everyday life, like dripping faucets, cigarette smoke, rushing streams, the weather, have been found by the new sciences of chaos to behave unpredictably while describing, when graphed, stunningly beautiful and truly strange patterns that indicate an uncanny kind of order within disorder. With these insights recent scientists have begun to reconceive the relationship between chance or stochastic processes in biology and the appearance, formation, and evolution of life forms. Our own bodies, and other natural forms, may be understood someday in terms of ‘chaotic’ patternings.” (Philip Kuberski, Chaosmos: Literature, Science, and Theory, pp. 2-3)