Has David Birnbaum solved the mystery of existence?
David Birnbaum made his fortune selling jewellery to movie stars. Now he has published a 'remarkable and profound' investigation into the origins of the universe. Is there any reason to take it seriously?
Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian, Saturday 19 October 2013
In the summer of 2012, a number of philosophers at British and American universities received a bulky, unmarked package in the post. It contained a 560-page book, written in English but with the Latin title Summa Metaphysica, by an amateur whose name they didn't recognise: David Birnbaum. It isn't unusual for philosophy departments to get mail from cranks, convinced they have solved the riddle of existence, but they usually send stapled print-outs, or handwritten letters; Summa Metaphysica stood out "for its size and its glossiness", says Tim Crane, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge. The book was professionally typeset. It even included endorsements from Claude Lévi-Strauss, the legendary French anthropologist, who described it as "remarkable and profound", and from the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who once collaborated with Einstein. It would later transpire that 40,000 copies were in circulation, a print run any academic philosopher might kill for. The book claimed to have sliced through countless fundamental problems in philosophy, physics and theology, and there on the spine, where the publisher's name appears, was one deeply reassuring word: "Harvard".
Then the story grew stranger. In May this year, the US-based Chronicle of Higher Education reported that prominent scholars – scientists, philosophers and theologians – had been persuaded to attend an expenses-paid "international academic conference" at Bard College, a respected institution in upstate New York, devoted to Birnbaum's work.
"We are especially pleased to announce that David Birnbaum will be present during discussion," the invitations glowingly explained. They hinted that his work might point the way toward a reconciliation of science and religion.
But the event itself, on Bard's leafy campus beside the Hudson river, proved disorienting. It was "definitely, absolutely the strangest conference I ever attended", the astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser told the Chronicle.
Tammy Nyden, an expert on Spinoza, the great rationalist of 17th-century philosophy, "felt hesitant about the invitation to begin with", the Chronicle reported, "but because it was taking place at a venerable institution like Bard, she decided to go".
On the one hand, Birnbaum's work had attracted plenty of credible endorsements: a typical blurb for Summa Metaphysica, attributed to a mathematician at Warwick University named Hugo van den Berg, described it as "unparalleled and magisterial". On the other, nothing about Birnbaum's approach was conventional.
Conference-goers were surprised to find him handing out Summa Metaphysica T-shirts; it subsequently emerged that he had provided thousands of dollars of his own money to fund the gathering. Nyden recalled feeling uneasy: "Here's someone with a lot of money," she thought, "and they're buying a lot of legitimacy."
The academics could be forgiven for never having heard of Summa Metaphysica's author. But, in fact, he was far from unknown: David Birnbaum is a prominent figure in the New York jewel trade, a private seller of high-carat diamonds and other rare gems, with a clientele that has included celebrities – Goldie Hawn, James Gandolfini – but consists mainly of the anonymous super-rich. For some time now, aided by his wealth, Birnbaum has been on an altogether different mission: to convince the world he has made an astonishing breakthrough in philosophy. It is a quest that has seen him accused of "academic identity theft", epic levels of arrogance, and the unauthorised use of Harvard University's trademarks. But it also raises fascinating questions. These days, only a tiny number of people understand enough theoretical physics, or advanced philosophy, to grasp what these disciplines tell us about reality at the deepest level. Is it still conceivable – as it was a century ago – that a gentleman amateur, with some financial resources, could make a real, revolutionary contribution to our understanding of the mysteries of the universe?
There is no shortage of people who would say no, at least in Birnbaum's case. His work, said a commenter on the Chronicle's website, "reads like L Ron Hubbard had drunken sex one night with Ayn Rand and produced this bastard thought-child". One scholar who became professionally involved with Birnbaum described the experience as "unsettling, unfortunate and, to my knowledge, unprecedented in academic circles". Another just called him "toxic".
But then again – as Birnbaum pointed out to me, more than once, during the weeks I spent trying to figure out exactly what he was up to – just suppose that a scrappy, philosophically unqualified Jewish guy from Queens really had cracked the cosmic code, embarrassing the ivory-tower elites: well, isn't this exactly the kind of defensive response you'd expect?
The science writer Margaret Wertheim has made a specialism of studying people she calls "outsider scientists": obsessive amateurs, usually with little or no university education, who assert that mainstream science has taken a wrong turn, and devote themselves to constructing elaborate alternative theories of reality. The star of her 2011 book on the subject, Physics On The Fringe, is a trailer-park owner from Washington state named Jim Carter, who rejects quantum physics, arguing that the universe is actually composed of minuscule doughnut-shaped particles called circlons.
[String theory also envisages tiny loops of vibrating 'strings'.]
Whatever else may be said about this theory, Carter's painstaking, multicoloured circlon diagrams are gorgeous; Wertheim once curated an exhibition of them at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Wertheim is unashamedly sympathetic toward her cast of eccentrics, a fact that led some critics to misread her as arguing that their ideas ought to be taken seriously. What she really wants us to take seriously, though, is the motivation behind their efforts: their insistence that the deepest secrets of the universe, as she puts it, "ought to be understandable by an ordinary, thoughtful person, who's willing to do some contemplating". Science is supposed to explain the world to us, turning shimmering mysteries into intelligible truths.
But, in practice, few of us will ever understand the cutting edge of a field such as physics, because it requires so much advanced mathematics; we must take it on trust. "What happens to a society when the official cosmology, the official picture of the world, is literally incomprehensible to 99.9% of people?" Wertheim wonders. "On some level, isn't that just a very unhealthy situation for a society to be in?"
Summa Metaphysica seems to have sprung from this same insistence that the world should be figurable-out. It is nothing less than an effort to answer the most brain-bending question of all: why does anything exist in the first place? William James, brother of Henry, called this question "the darkest in all philosophy"; the astrophysicist Bernard Lovell warned that thinking about it could "tear the individual's mind asunder". "Like all deep incomprehensibilities," writes Jim Holt in his recent book Why Does The World Exist?, "it lends an opening to jocularity." When Holt put the question to the American philosopher Arthur Danto, he shot back: "Who says there's not nothing?"
Birnbaum isn't joking, though. Summa Metaphysica is actually two books: a 270-page preliminary volume, then the 560-page main event. (He has also published at least 15 ancillary works and operates, by my count, at least 12 websites, including philosophy1000.com, womb1000.com and potential1000.com.) It is an exhausting read, partly thanks to its length – volume two alone has 90 appendices – but also because much of it is written in a kind of rapturous, mystical prose, liberally peppered with capitals.
A typical sentence reads: "The cosmic trajectory is from the bottomless VOID to the limitless EXTRAORDINARY." Birnbaum's big idea is what he calls "the Quest for Potential theory", or Q4P, or occasionally Q4P
[infinity symbol]. The sense that he is unveiling hidden, pan-historical connections sometimes gives his work the flavour of Dan Brown.
etc...
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/o ... hilosopher
At that point I started to lose the will to live... 8)
