(With thanks to David Bohm.)
Imagine Charlie Brown is a physicist, and he has fish. Four different fish—or so he believes. One type of fish is four inches long and has a head on the left and a tail on the right. Another kind is four inches long and has a tail on the left and a head on the right. Another kind is just a face, with a fishy mouth and two fish eyes. And the final kind of fish is nothing but fin.
Charlie is bored, so he makes some calculations. How many rotations it takes to get from left-handed fish to right-handed fish in non-Euclidian space; how to generate the fish-tail from the fish-face using calculus and imaginary numbers. Someday, he tells you, he’s going to come up with A REALLY BIG EQUATION that brings together all of his other equations about the fish.
But he never comes up with the really big equation. When he shows you his notebooks overflowing with calculations—all of the intricate variables and symbols and designs he has invented to describe the fish—you smile and tell him you’re proud of him, and you tell him how much you love him, because you do.
But there comes a day when you have to give Charlie some sad news. You sit him down and say: Darling, listen. Don’t take this the wrong way, but there aren’t four different kinds of fish. There’s only one fish that you’re seeing from four different directions. All those equations—now, don’t get me wrong, I love them and I can see that you’re very smart—all those equations don’t actually mean anything, because the fish doesn’t exist in space. The fish exists in time.
You’re afraid this is going to disappoint your beloved Charlie, perhaps even crush him a little, but, no—Charlie is resilient. He is not crushed. In fact, he seems excited by this new information, and he goes back to the drawing board, back to his notebooks, and he re-calculates all of his equations as taking place against the fabric not of space, but time. This takes several centuries.
When he shows you his results, again you have to break some sad news to him. Darling, you say, listen. This is all very good and nice, and you’re even more clever than I realized. But time is not a thing unto itself. Time is emerging from light. When we talk about Snoopy and his doghouse and whether he’s on top of the doghouse or inside the doghouse and whether it’s Saturday or Tuesday, those conversations are all make-believe. There is no Tuesday. Tuesday only exists inside Snoopy’s head, and Snoopy is not made of Snoopy. Snoopy is made of light. You consider momentarily putting your hand between the projector and the screen to make Snoopy disappear for a second, or briefly blotting out the sun and moon, but you don’t, because you’re afraid this will frighten Charlie.
But Charlie is not afraid. Snoopy is made of light! he says, and something seems to spark to life inside him. He is going to use this new information to gain a deeper understanding of the fish! So he goes back to his notebooks and re-calculates all of his equations once again as if they were taking place not against the fabric of space nor time, but as if everything in the world were made out of light, or quanta, and while he’s at it he also makes up a little rhyming jingle about Max Planck.
After he sings you his Max Planck song, and shows you his new calculations, you kiss him and make him a cup of tea. Together, you summarize what you have learned. The fish is all one fish. And the fish, deep down, is made of light, which exists outside of space and time, because it is light from which both space and time are emerging.
But in the end, you have one more bit of news for Charlie. Even light is not fundamental to the universe. Light, too, is emergent. From what? he asks. From consciousness, you say, and as you say this, your voice gets very big and fills the room. Darling, you say, although your voice is no longer a voice now but is just a feeling of overpowering love. The fish is you.
