Science & the Yellow Submarine – Part II

Science & the Yellow Submarine – Part I explored the scientific implications of the Beatles’ iconic 1968 film, Yellow Submarine, a treasure  trove of cosmological insights made to order for the 21st century convergence  of Science and Theology. 

We watched as the Beatles (or their writers) deconstructed our ‘Universe’ into  a system of ‘branes’, called ‘seas’: Seas of Time (time), Science (space),  Monsters (things), Headlands (thoughts), Holes (Le Neant), and the enigmatic Sea of Green. We set out on a voyage that will take us through each brane on  our way to a place (or state of mind) called, Pepperland.  

We didn’t get far! In fact, we only made it through one sea, the Sea of  Time…but oh what a ‘time’ we had there! In this issue of ATM, we will finish  our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So hang on, tight!  

Note to Readers: In this essay I use ‘Pepperland’ to refer to Pepperland  Proper, the last stop on our journey, and ‘Pepperland’ to refer to reality in its  entirety, i.e., Liverpool, Pepperland Proper, and the Yellow Sub itself. 

When our journey ends, we will discover that Pepperland, Liverpool and the  Yellow Sub are just three different manifestations, three different personae, of  one reality. In the end…it’s all Pepperland! 

So, next stop: the Sea of Science! If the subject of the Sea of Time was Time  (“it’s time for time”), then the subject of the ‘Sea of Science’ should be  Science, but it’s not! It’s Space. (Perhaps the editors didn’t like the sound of  ‘Sea of Space’.) 

This sea is characterized by its rectilinear grid and the Platonic solids that  populate it. It’s ‘Plato meets Descartes’. 

Against this background, various waveforms undulate. This sea can’t seem to  make up its mind whether it’s a 2-dimensional surface or a 3-dimensional  solid. Figures emerge out of a flat background and enclose a volume, only  to undergo further deformations that turn them back into 2-dimensional  surfaces.

Years after Yellow Submarine, it was discovered during the study of black  holes that there is no difference between 2-dimensional surfaces and 3- dimensional spaces. They both encode the same amount of ‘information’. A  hologram, for example, is a 3-dimensional image generated from 2- dimensional film. For that purpose at least, the 3rd dimension is superfluous. 

Now the voyage to Pepperland moves from ‘time and space’ to ‘things and  thoughts’; we are entering the Sea of Monsters, followed by the Foothills of  the Headlands. The first two branes probe the world as we experience it (spacetime); the remaining branes explore us as the ones who experience  that world. 

The ‘Monstrous Sea’ is populated, well, by monsters. The occasional dragon  notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore; or if we  do, we don’t recognize them. We Liverpudlians have done a pretty good job of  purging ‘monsters’ from our immediate vicinity…but only our immediate  vicinity. Believe me, monstrosity is alive and well in our world, as the Beatles  were only too well aware! 

The Sea of Monsters is populated by a variety of creatures that exhibit some  physical traits similar to ours but others that are very, very different. Most  striking is the wide combination of ‘organs’ that ‘Beatle-Biology’ allows. In  Liverpool, we are still just experimenting with Bionics. In the Sea of Monsters,  most creatures exhibit a combination of organic and mechanical features. 

D’Arcy Thomas in On Growth and Form found parallels between biological  and non-biological patterns. R. Buckminster Fuller did something similar in his  two-volume work, Synergistics. Ultimately, technology and biology are not  incompatible: if a form works in one realm, there’s no reason it might not work  in the other as well. 

Yellow Submarine is an example of ‘ontological democracy’: it treats organic  and mechanical forms as equals. Form is form and that’s an end to it. Organic  vs. artificial is a false distinction. Our jealously guarded ‘ontological categories’  are reduced to ‘ontological soup’. 

One of the creatures in this ‘monstrous sea’ is the ‘dreaded vacuum’. Like a  black hole, this creature sucks into itself everything in its environment. 

“We’ll be sucked into oblivion…or even further,” says Young Fred, the newly  appointed admiral aboard HMS Yellow Submarine; and sure enough, they  are!

The ‘dreaded vacuum’ not only sucks up all objects in its path, including our  yellow sub and its crew, but it also sucks up the fabric of spacetime itself.  Ultimately, it even sucks itself, tail first, into oblivion: The Beatles’ universe is  an ouroboros.  

The vacuum leaves us with precisely nothing, nothing that is except Jeremy  Hillary Boob, PhD (JHB). But that’s ok because the Boob is ‘nothing’, quite  literally, as expressed in this formula: 

1 + (~1) = Boob 

At the time Yellow Submarine was produced, it was generally believed that  black holes annihilated information as well as objects, fields, etc. Years later,  Stephen Hawking suggested that information was not destroyed by black  holes, but was conserved after all, albeit in a form that renders it useless for  any ‘work’.  

Astoundingly, Yellow Submarine proposed the exact same theory, 6 years  earlier. JHB is Hawking radiation! That’s what the Boob is! Information without  order. If Stephen Hawking got his ideas from the Beatles, he should have  given them proper credit…and maybe he meant to do just that when he  famously said, “We stand on the shoulders of giants”.  

After the vacuum has done its worst, we are left with JHB. Jeremy consists of  all the information that existed in the universe prior to its implosion. As  Hawking proposed, information is conserved but disorganized in the Boob.  Take this snippet of dialog for example: 

“Do you speak English? 

“Old English, Middle English, a dialect pure. 

“But do you speak English? 

“You know I’m not sure.” 

But back to our journey. We need to pick-up the pace if we’re to reach  Pepperland by nightfall. The first three ‘physical seas’ have been wiped out by  the vacuum monster. The ‘physicality’ of Liverpool served us well through the  Seas of Time, Science and Monsters but it won’t be much use to us going  forward. ‘Physicality’ itself has vanished. What remains? 

Information (Booby)…and the sub itself. Even though the submarine was  sucked up by the vacuum monster, it avoids ‘oblivion’ because, turns out, the  sub is the Eternal Present that we’ve been looking for at least since the days 

of Ponce de Leon. Therefore, the sub can never be erased, annulled, or  destroyed. As long as there is anything that is, it is. 

Next stop: the Foothills of the Headlands. Do people tell you that you “live too  much in your own head”? Or do you sometimes wish that you could live life  ‘virtually’ rather than physically? Either way, this is the sea for you! 

Headlands is the domain of pure thought. It takes the form of transparent  heads unencumbered by functioning bodies. In the Headlands, thoughts lack  orientation, consistency, coherence, purpose, and effect. (Hmm, sounds like  we’re ‘inside the Beltway’!) 

In the Headlands, we see the consequences of an ‘all-in-the-mind’ ontology  (e.g. Philosophical Idealism) and believe me, it’s not pretty. Bottom line: “mind  matters but mind matter” - another bumper sticker to buy as a souvenir of our  trip. 

After the Headlands…the Sea of Holes! We’ve passed through bodies &  ideas, forms & concepts; what’s left? Nothing…but that’s a good thing. In  Beatle-World, something and nothing have a complementary and dialectical  relationship. 

Now we are passing into the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relation of  figure and ground is reversed. The sea itself is the ground and the holes in  that sea (ground) constitute the figure. Nothingness (Le Neant) has now  become concrete…so concrete that Ringo is able to put a ‘hole’ in his pocket,  quite literally. 

The Sea of Holes is the inflection point in our journey. The ‘figure-ground’  relationship has reversed; for the rest of the voyage, it’s ‘ground-figure’. 

Something similar happens in Dante’s Divine Comedy. There, the  travelers (this time, Dante & Virgil), having reached the lowest rung of Hell  (Inferno), witness Satan, encased in ice. Dante begins the ascent of Mount  Purgatory, but when he looks back, he is surprised to see that Satan is now hanging ‘upside down’ in his block of ice. 

The topology of the Sea of Holes is radically non-orientable. There is no  consistent sense of directionality, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher  drawing on steroids. 

In fact, the Sea of Holes is a paradigmatic example of non-orientability. Any  system (Pepperland) that contains a ‘locally non-orientable’ component (like  the Sea of Holes) must be ‘globally non-orientable’ as well. 

It turns out that the orientable universe familiar to us muggles is just a special  configuration within a sea of non-orientability.  

In a non-orientable universe, there are no privileged vantage points, no  privileged directions. In fact, there are no beginnings, middles or ends at all.  However, every ‘point’ has two distinct and opposite orientations (like ‘up and  down arrows’ on a Mobius strip).  

“Go for a walk?” Ok, where do you want to go? “Doesn’t matter just head out.”  Pretty soon we get to our ‘destination’ but there are a couple of problems: our  journey has brought us right back to where we started except that now  everything is somehow inverted or reversed. In the Netflix series, Stanger  Things, they call this ‘Upside Down World’. 

“So, what now? Turn around and head back?” No need, just keep walking  ahead. Sure enough, we’re soon back ‘home’ and this time everything is back  to normal. We are in ‘Right Side Up World’ again…and ready to cross into  Pepperland at last…if only we could find it. 

First, we must pass through one more sea, the Sea of Green; but there’s a  catch: out of a seemingly infinite array of holes in the Sea of Holes, only one  hole connects the Sea of Holes to the Sea of Green…and on to Pepperland. 

This is a problem for our Argonauts! As we know from the study of Black  Holes, all holes look the same so we can’t examine the holes for clues. How  about the surroundings? Any helpful signs there? Nope! Remember, the  ‘surroundings’ are ‘nothing’. There is only one possible way out: stochastic  trial and error…which has an infinitesimal likelihood of success. 

Infinitesimal…but not quite zero. Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the one  and only hole that functions as a passageway to the Sea of Green, but the  Sea of Green is not like the other seas. It’s merely a featureless, ultra-thin  membrane separating the other branes from Pepperland. So full speed ahead! 

Once the Beatles arrive, they discover that they bear an “uncanny”  resemblance to four of its permanent residents, “the originals”, Sergeant  Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course, we later learn that the Beatles  are the Sergeant Pepper band! Initially, “the originals” are separated from the  rest of the Pepperland by the dome of a “big glass bowl”. It is as if the cosmos were censoring itself. If the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club  Band, then both ‘copies’ cannot coexist. The ‘big glass bowl’ maintains the ‘cosmic order’. 

But that order is about to be shattered! Remember, Ringo has a ‘hole’ in his  pocket (from the Sea of Holes). Ringo applies the hole to the side of the “big  glass bowl” and through the medium of nothingness the ontological barrier  dissolves and the two realities merge onto the same extensive plane. Just as  the branes connect Liverpool with Pepperland, so Ringo’s hole (anti-brane?)  connects the temporal Beatles with their eternal alter-egos. 

Is this an illustration of the Christian doctrine known as Resurrection of the  Body – the ultimate unification of ‘heaven and earth’? 

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Beatles under the aspect  of eternity (Parmenides’ Aletheia) while the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s  Band under the aspect of history (Parmenides’ Doxa). 

When Ringo’s hole connects the two realms, we learn that the division of  Universe into ‘temporal’ and ‘eternal’ rests on a false distinction. Temporality  and eternity are complementary aspects of a single phenomenon. 

So it turns out that Liverpool and Pepperland are really the same place! We  never left the Pier after all. Liverpool is the spatiotemporal aspect of  Pepperland and Pepperland is the eternal aspect of Liverpool.  

Nothing that happens in Liverpool stays in Liverpool. Whatever happens in  Liverpool happens in Pepperland and vice-versa. In the language of John Bell  (Bell’s theorem, 1964), Liverpool and Pepperland are ‘entangled’. In the  language of Jesus of Nazareth, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. 

And what about the sub itself? That also is Pepperland…in its aspect of  Presence: Spacetime (Liverpool), Eternity (Sub), and Presence (Pepperland),  the 3 faces of reality, Pepperland. 

If we were writing in the 4th century CE style of the Nicene Creed, we might  say that the Yellow Submarine ‘proceeds from Liverpool and from  Pepperland’. The sub (Present) never leaves Liverpool…or Pepperland for  that matter. Nevertheless, it continually shuttles between them. In any event,  the ontology of Yellow Submarine is overtly ‘Trinitarian’. 

I hope you enjoyed our two part voyage to reality’s core. I apologize if the  music and the graphics are not up to the Beatles’ original. But I hope my marginalia may have made your trip worthwhile. I hope to see you soon on  our next all-inclusive cruise.

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.