West Marin is well known for its creative artists and thinkers. They go quietly about their business, appreciating our natural bounty and beauty, and, every once in a while, we get a glimpse of what they’re up to, what they’ve been working on and thinking about. Peter Barnes, the founder of Mesa Refuge and author of several books about economics, the climate, land reform and the commons, is one of those quiet thinkers. Lately he’s been considering something bigger than his previous subjects: the universe and how it came to be. He suggests the answer in his newest book, “A Symphony of Smithereens: How Our Universe Composes Itself.”
It’s a small book, the text comprising fewer than 100 pages, with several additional pages of glossary, bibliography, image credits and index. The book is printed on heavy paper that feels like velvet, and it’s beautifully designed by Mark Melnick. Its illustrations are illuminating, the writing clear and straightforward.
My appreciation is for the book as art more than as science. In fact, it was printed in a very limited first edition, with the 250 copies numbered, as fine art pieces often are. Barnes says quite clearly that he has no degree in science—though he did attend the Bronx High School of Science, “a nest for nerds,” according to him, and that he “was drawn to math, feeling in [his] bones that it was connected to truth and beauty.”
But I soon realized that to talk about “A Symphony of Smithereens” would require a mind that appreciates the subtleties of science and math, and that’s not mine. Fortunately, my cousin Steven Girshick’s does, so I asked him to collaborate with me to tell you about this extraordinary book. I would express my appreciation for the book as art, while Steven would talk about the premise, as Barnes describes it:
[T]hat our universe, from [its] violent beginning, built and organized itself into its present form. This is my premise because, if you choose not to believe in a divine designer, self-creation followed by self-organization is the only option left….
“How did inchoate smithereens,” the detritus of the Big Bang, “transform themselves into today’s astonishing assemblage of stars, galaxies and living beings, all moving in some kind of synchrony and obeying what appear to be universe-wide laws?” This is the modest question Barnes sets out to answer.
Steven writes:
Having been inspired by books about cosmology and related topics, for which Barnes provides a helpful list, this book presents the author’s personal synthesis of ideas aimed at explaining how the universe came to be. In presenting these ideas, Barnes conveys a sense of wonder. For example, he uses the word “magic” to mean visible events that rely on invisible forces, such as gravity and magnetism, and says that “our universe is built on magic,” even as he assures readers that by using the word “magic” he is not being supernatural. “Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet,” wrote Arthur C. Clarke, author of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” leading Barnes’s chapter on “Magic.”
The book’s central hypothesis is that “Cosmogenesis is a self-creating and self-organizing process driven by free energy and math.” The birth of the universe occurred with the Big Bang, an enormous explosion that generated the “smithereens” of the book’s title. The Big Bang also released an enormous amount of energy, some portion of which—the “free energy”—was available to power the self-assembly of these smithereens into stars, planets and galaxies, and ultimately the emergence of life and consciousness.
Barnes contends that mathematics—the language used by scientists to describe the principles by which the physical world operates—is physically embedded in the universe; it is “baked into” the universe and guides it. Thus, in a sense, it is mathematics that organized the smithereens. Barnes concludes:
Let me…admit that my hypothesis doesn’t include a formula that can be tested against reality. That’s not because I don’t think formulas are important; I do. It’s because I’m a wordsmith rather than a mathematician, and thus confined to the language of qwerty [the first six letters of the second row on a standard English-language or computer keyboard]. That said, I am confident that formulas driving the unfolding of our universe exist and will, in the near future, be discovered—if not by humans alone, then by humans aided by artificial intelligence.
While we wait for that discovery—Barnes estimates it will come within 20 years—enjoy the gorgeous symphony.
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of the “West Marin Review,” author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader. She lives in Point Reyes Station. Steven Girshick is professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and the author of the 2024 book, “Nucleation of Particles from the Gas Phase.” He lives in Oakland.