tetsukoizumi | | Page 53

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“April is the cruellest month,” writes T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) in the opening line of his The Waste Land. How can April be the cruelest month? Gone are the coldest months of winter, at least for the people living in the Northern Hemisphere, when the very earth they tread on seems to be dead and frozen. With the arrival of warm, gentle spring showers, lilacs and other flowers come out of that dead land, as Eliot himself notes. Is April not the month we associate with the image of resurrection? Although it varies from year to year, does not Easter fall on in the month of April for most years, the time of celebration for Christians all over the world? How can it be the cruelest month?

April 15—or April 16 in the year when April 15 is a Sunday—is the dreaded deadline for Americans to file their individual tax returns. April can be the cruelest month for those Americans who find out that they owe a large sum of money to the Internal Revenue Service because of their large unexpected income for the previous year due, for example, to receiving an inheritance or winning a lottery. The April 15 deadline is indeed a cruel reminder to Americans that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”, as Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) wrote in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy.

April can be the cruelest month for the people living in Tornado Alley, the area in the central region of the U.S. known for frequent and violent tornados, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Among these tornado-prone states, Kansas is probably best known to Americans—to non-Americans as well, for that matter—thanks to the vivid images of Dorothy being swept away by a tornado and carried to the land of Oz in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. While the National Weather Service does a good job today predicting the approach of violent weathers that potentially generate tornados, mental preparedness can never cover the loss of life and property a violent tornado causes, which happens quite often in the month of April in these states.

If April can be the cruelest month for some Americans, it can also be the cruelest month for some Japanese. For Japanese students, from primary schools to universities, April is the month the new school year begins. For young children who are starting the first year in primary schools, April is the first time they will be separated from the comfort of their homes and thrust right into the regimentation of school life, which can be quite traumatic for those who are naturally shy and timid. When they start “creeping like snail unwilling to school”, they may be exhibiting a sign of school phobia, or what the Japanese educators call “school refusal syndrome”, which has become one of the serious social issues facing school-age children in the last couple of decades. Although the exact number is difficult to come by, the Ministry of Education, which officially recognized the seriousness of the problem two decades ago, estimates that more than 100,000 school-age children may be suffering from this syndrome.

In Japan, April is also the beginning of the new business year as a result of the government’s decision to set the fiscal year to begin on April 1 and to end on March 31, the decision made back in 1886. Just like school-age children, new graduates from high schools and universities start their new career in business in April, facing the prospect of the regimentation of the workplace, which includes long work hours, daily rounds of visiting bars with superiors after the day’s work, and a low wage that reflects the traditional hierarchical wage structure called nenko jyoretsu. New entrants will soon learn about the reality of ubiquitous guidelines and regulations set by the government in the business world. While the watchful eyes of the government bureaucracy in Japan may not be as intrusive and menacing as those of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984, they are still conspicuous enough to people in the business world, especially “on a bright cold day in April when the clocks are striking thirteen”.

April can also be the cruelest month for the Japanese when the yellow sands that originate in the deserts in the Northwestern region of China come all the way to the Japanese archipelago carried by the trade wind. While exports from China to Japan have been steadily expanding with the rise of Chinese manufacturing industries, the yellow sands must be said to be an unwelcome export from China, which has become the land of heavy pollution with industrialization. On days when the yellow sands cover the sky, even blocking the sunlight, the Japanese, especially with respiratory problems, are advised by the weather bureau to limit their outdoor activities. April with the yellow sands in the sky can be the cruelest month for the Japanese as they are deprived of the opportunity to fully enjoy viewing cherry blossoms, which is by far the most favorite activity for them around this time of the year. In a country where the Buddha’s birthday is celebrated on April 8, the cherry-blossom-viewing-season cut short by the yellow sands is another cruel reminder of the Buddhist teaching of impermanence for the Japanese, considering that the peak of the viewing-season lasts only for a week or so at the most.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” The question, which Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) asked in his The Principle of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason (1714), is so fundamental to philosophy that it is often called “The Question” and is regarded as “philosophy’s central, and most perplexing, question”, according to the Oxford philosopher Bede Rundle who adopted it as the title of his 2004 book.¹ The question, as a matter of fact, has been science’s central, and most perplexing, question as well, for generations of scientists have sought to explain why we observe an abundance of matter—from elementary particles to stars and galaxies—in the universe. In the context of scientific endeavor, “The Question” should perhaps be rephrased as: “How is there something rather than nothing?” This is so because, as the American physicists Lawrence Krause points out in his 2012 book, A Universe from Nothing, scientists have to be cautious about “why” questions.²

As for the question of how there is something rather than nothing, we have witnessed a remarkable progress in particle physics in recent decades, culminating in the discovery of the mechanism by which elementary particles acquire their masses. We tend to consider scientists to be an unemotional and rational lot. That this is hardly the case was amply demonstrated on July 4, 2012, when the discovery of a particle related to the Higgs mechanism was announced at CERN in Switzerland. The occasion was greeted with such excitement and exuberance by the physics community that some of them likened the discovery to the appearance of the Messiah they had been waiting for, prompting the popular media to call it the discovery of God particle. In any event, the discovery was, according to the American physicist Brian Green, “the most important experimental achievement in the field of the last 50 years”³ With that discovery, scientists seem to have finally succeeded in explaining how something can come out of nothing, thus negating Lucretius’ claim that “nothing can come out of nothing”, the claim that has been embraced by generations of philosophers and scientists in the West.

The discovery of the Higgs boson confirms the favored theory in particle physics that the Higgs field pervades the vacuum and gives mass to elementary particles, the mechanism known as the Higgs mechanism. Although it is not composed of actual matter, the Higgs field carries a type of charge, which allows particles to acquire masses. The discovery of the Higgs boson, an actual particle with definite mass, was an experimental confirmation of the theory of the Higgs mechanism by which elementary particles acquire masses. Since the Higgs field is everywhere and spread throughout the universe, the universe itself—bosons, electrons, quarks, and other particles—can emerge from the quantum vacuum, lending support to the claim that matter in the universe can emerge from empty space, that something can come from nothing.

What is important to note is that when physicists talk about “nothing”, they are talking about “empty space”. What is also important to note is that what physicists call “empty space” is not quite empty. As Frank Close explains, “The basic idea is that there is a kind of tension existing in otherwise ‘empty’ space that manifests itself by producing forces on objects that happen to be in the vicinity.”⁴ The sphere of influence of this tension is what is called a field. Fields are ubiquitous in the universe from the electric field that fills the empty space within the atom to the gravitational field of the Sun that keeps the Earth in its orbit. Now we have the Higgs field that is everywhere and is spread throughout the universe.

That a field is filled with a kind of tension implies a mechanism, or an activity, which explains how something comes from nothing, how there is something rather than nothing. In the parlance of physics, that activity is energy that exists in empty space even in the absence of matter or radiation. As Laurence Krause explains, “the energy stored in empty space gets turned into an energy of real particles and radiation, creating effectively the traceable beginning of our present Big Bang expansion.”⁵ Another American physicist Lisa Randall explains it this way: “Essentially, when you jiggle the Higgs field—add a bit of energy—you can create an actual particle. A single field both permeates the vacuum—empty space—with a nonzero constant value everywhere, and is also responsible for particle creation.”⁶

Needless to say, Leibnitz could not have anticipated the discovery of the Higgs mechanism, for he wrote his The Principle of Nature and Grace three centuries ago. What is remarkable about Leibnitz is, however, that not only did he pose the fundamental question about why there is something rather than nothing but he also anticipated the presence of some mechanism by which something comes out of nothing. Having posed the question, Leibnitz went on to provide his own answer: “I reply first that all things are created ex nihilo, not from preexisting matter at any moment whatever, for even matter itself is created; and it is of no consequence that some other things might have existed already in the past, for in that case they would have been annihilated later.” But how does something appear from empty space, out of nothing? Here is Leibnitz’s answer: “I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general.” Replace the word “activity” by the “Higgs mechanism”, we can see how insightful Leibnitz’s remarks were in explaining the appearance of matter in the universe.

The idea that something comes from nothing, while it may have been difficult for the people in the West to accept, has not been so for people in the East, to the extent that they have been familiar with the ideas expounded by such prominent thinkers as Lao Tzu and the Buddha. The idea that the universe is a field full of potentialities is well expressed by Lao Tzu: “The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled. Oh, the unfathomable source of ten thousand things!”⁷ Those ten thousand things are, according to the Buddha, sankharas that we observe in the phenomenal world around us, including ourselves. But all these sankharas are intrinsically empty, as the Buddha explains in the following dialogue with Ananda: “In what way, venerable sir, is it said, ‘Empty is the world?’ It is, Ananda, because it is empty of self and what belongs to self that it is said, ‘Empty is the world’.”⁸ Indeed, “nothingness” can be said to be the ground state of the universe in the Buddha’s view: “By completely transcending the base of infinity of consciousness, aware that ‘there is nothing,’ a monk enters upon and dwells in the base of nothingness.”⁹ As for the mechanism by which something comes from the base of nothingness, it is the idea of paticca samuppada, or “dependent origination”. Since nothingness is the ground state in Buddhist thought, the fundamental question to be asked is not “why is there something rather than nothing?” but “why do we see something rather than nothing?”

Rundle, Bede, Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Krause, Lawrence, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, New York: Free Press, 2012, Chapter 9.
Greene, Brian, “Mind and Matter”, Smithsonian Magazine, August 2013.
Close, Frank, Nothing: Avery Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Krause, op. cit. Chapter 9.
Randall, Lisa, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, 2013.
Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Bhikku Bodhi, In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005, p. 347.
Ibd., p. 398.

Author Archives: tetsukoizumi

Is April the cruelest month?

Why do we see something rather than nothing?