I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

I love the fact that yesterday, the day he won the Nobel Prize in physics, Peter Higgs couldn’t be found.  He was off “somewhere in Scotland” with no cell phone, no email, no address.  That, I think, is winning in style.

Higgs is the father, as it were, of the Higgs boson, aka “the God particle.”  As you might suspect, it wasn’t him who gave it so grandiose and eye-catching a nickname.  That was a colleague in search of a selling book title, who later said that what he really wanted to call it was “the goddamn particle.”

Not being a physicist, I’ve had trouble figuring out exactly what this boson is — in fact, what any boson is.  (Not that physicists have had it any easier:  it took ten thousand of them 53 years to follow up on Higgs’ first theoretical paper until they proved the boson’s existence just last year — after sifting 2,000 trillion subatomic fireballs through CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.  Yes, two thousand trillion — that’s why it’s large.)

But then lo and behold, this morning:  epiphany!  Denis Overbye at the NYT described the Higgs boson in terms I can almost grasp, along with a short video he begins this way: “The Higgs boson is not for the faint of heart.  It’s tough stuff, even for physicists.”

Gulp.  But gird up your loins, because this is worth it.  It brims with enticing ideas to play with — a grand portal to the intersection of physics and metaphysics.

The Higgs was the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model, a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the last half-century, explaining everything from the smell of a rose to the ping when your computer boots up.

According to this model, the universe brims with energy that acts like a cosmic molasses, imbuing the particles that move through it with mass, the way a bill moving through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming more and more ponderous and controversial.

Cosmic molasses.  Am into that.

Without the Higgs field, many elementary particles, like electrons, would be massless and would zip around at the speed of light. There would be no atoms and no us.

For scientists, the discovery of the Higgs (as physicists call it) affirmed the view of a cosmos ruled by laws of almost diamond-like elegance and simplicity, but in which everything interesting — like us — is a result of lapses or flaws in that elegance.

You can see why I love this.  It’s an intensely esthetic idea — an intensely existential, philosophical and psychological one too — in which flaws and imperfections are exactly what makes life interesting. There’s a touch of kabbala in it (real kabbala, not Madonna red-string theory).  A good dose of Spinoza, perhaps.  And a marvelous challenge to the naive and pernicious idea of human perfectibility.

At the heart of the physicists’ quest, Overby continues, was

an ancient idea, the concept of symmetry, and how it was present in the foundations of physics but hidden in the world as we experience it. In art and nature, something is symmetrical if it looks the same when you move it one way or another, like a snowflake rotated 60 degrees; in science and math, a symmetry is something that does not change when you transform the system, like the length of an arrow when you turn it around or shoot it.

All fundamental forces were the result of nature’s trying to maintain symmetries, physicists realized — for example, the conservation of electric charge in the case of electromagnetism, or the conservation of momentum and energy in the case of Einstein’s gravity. But…

By a process called symmetry breaking, a situation that started out balanced can wind up unbalanced.  Imagine, for example, a pencil standing on its tip; it will eventually fall over and point only one way out of many possibilities. The mass of the boson can be thought of as the energy released when the pencil falls.

“The energy released when a pencil falls.”  There’s poetry here, and I’ve only sampled it, so read the whole article (it’s misleadingly headlined — hello, NYT editors? — so scroll down to paragraph 10 and read on from there), and let the imagination soar…

I just spent a couple of days totally absorbed in a book that celebrates ignorance.  Even better, it celebrates ignorance in science!  Or to be a tad more precise, it’s about what the author, Stuart Firestein, a Columbia University neuroscientist, calls “the exhilaration of the unknown.”

So ignore the way the cover makes the book look ominous and boring.  It’s anything but.  In fact it’s a delight.  Because of course Firestein isn’t talking about willful stupidity, that “callow indifference to facts or logic that shows itself as a stubborn devotion to uninformed opinions.”  Not that at all.  He’s talking about “a particular condition of knowledge:  the absence of fact, understanding, insight, or clarity about something.”  This he calls “knowledgeable ignorance.”  Also known as “perceptive ignorance” or “insightful ignorance.”

Essentially, Firestein’s book is a celebration of mystery.  That is, of uncertainty, doubt, and unknowability – terms which apply as much to my agnostic inquiry of religion as to his equally agnostic inquiry of science (which originally meant ‘knowledge’).   Some scientists call his approach “agnostology” – a coinage that makes me laugh out loud and imagine a bunch of angels dancing like crazy on the head of a pin.  Me, I call it accidental theology.

Knowledgeable ignorance, says Firestein, is the kind that leads you to frame better questions.  And not with any single answer in mind.  “One good question can give rise to several layers of answers,” he says.  A perfect image:  layers of answers, like layers of clouds, each one shaped and influenced by the ones above and below it, each one distinguishable and yet part of the whole most of us dismissively shorthand as “sky.”

And then this:  “Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt.  There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be sure of its outcome.”

“Having faith in uncertainty” — if I believed in perfection, that would be a perfect definition of agnosticism!

Beauty salons were abuzz with the dismaying news.  Tattoo artists laid in new stocks of ink, ready for the deluge of flesh inscribed with astral signs needing to be re-signed.  Astrologists tried to assure their clients that they were still who they thought they were even if they weren’t.

For two days, the revelation that astrological signs and the actual position of the stars don’t really match up – a shocker, I know – commanded the attention of many of those who had no idea where to find Tunisia on a map, let alone the political dimensions of what was happening there.  I mean, this was cosmic.  Our planet, it turns out, has a slight celestial wobble known as a precession, and the resulting realignment vis-à-vis other planets and stars, while old news to astronomers, was devastating to devotees of the zodiac.   It meant that the dates of astrological signs would have to be recalculated so that “a Gemini” might in fact be “a Taurus,” and so on.  Talk about an existential crisis…

Three millennia ago, astrology was a grand explanatory system of the universe;  now it’s good for little more than a New Yorker cartoon or a lame pickup line.  The Pew Forum reports that only 25% of Americans believe in astrology, though that’s an oddly lowball figure given that some 75% believe in angels and demons, heaven and hell.   Perhaps Dan Brown has made angels and demons kosher, while astrology still reeks of Nancy Reagan.

My one close encounter with an astrologist came years ago as a birthday gift.  She was “the best in New York,” I was told.  In the spirit of inquiry, I turned up at the appointed hour to be confronted with a perfect cliché:  heavy eye makeup, mother-earth dimensions swathed in a purple velvet muumuu, long black hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks, and the overwhelming odor of too many cats in too small a space.

“Virgo, cusp of Libra” she intoned, nodding sagely.  “You must be in the helping professions…?”   When I tired of her amateurish probing and told her what I did for a living, she closed her eyes in ecstasy.  “Ah yes, a writer — I can just see the words flowing out of you onto the page…”

“Powerful image,” I said, gritting my teeth against the Hollywood stereotype.

“Oh but this is all incredibly powerful,” she said, “which is why so many very powerful people practice it.”  And then added, in a tone of hushed reverence:  “You know, Hitler was really into astrology…”

At which I did what I should have done at the outset, and walked out.

Yet this past couple of days, I read the reports about the possible reassignment of the zodiac with a kind of bemused interest.  I would still be “a Virgo,” it seemed (rats – the most boring of all the signs), but no longer on the cusp of Libra.  I’d go the other direction and now be on the cusp of Leo, leaving me to imagine the wow-factor significance the purple muumuu would find if she saw the book by my bedside right now:  John Vaillant’s wonderful The Tiger.

Then ABC News and others focused the full weight of their investigatory reporting on the issue, and decided that astrology already had the wobble covered (or was already wobbly enough – it wasn’t clear, as is clear from this report on abc.com, filed under Entertainment).   Cosmic crisis averted.

But I liked that realignment idea.  Isn’t that exactly what we’d all like to see?  If the whole planet can realign itself in relation to other stars and planets, maybe there’s still hope for those of us spinning on its surface to realign ourselves in relation to each other.  I just hope it happens a bit more quickly.  It seems that our particular celestial wobble takes about 26,000 years, which means that in 23,000 years the night sky will be back to where it was when the Babylonians first invented the zodiac.  It’d somehow be reassuring to think that there’d still be humans around to see it.

The response to my TEDx Quran talk in the week since the video of it was released has been magnificent, and the comments here on the AT, on YouTube, and on many other sites, have been immensely moving, humbling, thought-provoking, and inspiring, sometimes all at the same time.

All of which means that I haven’t had much time for my usual reading.  So when I finally curled up late last night with last week’s New Yorker, I thought it would just be a relaxing break.   Instead, Jonah Lehrer’s densely argued article on scientific research called “The Truth Wears Off” had me sitting straight up in alert attention, and his conclusion left me kind of breathless:

We like to pretend that experiments define the truth for us.  But that’s often not the case.  Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved.  And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.  When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

This article is dynamite.  I mean that almost literally, since Lehrer explodes the carefully nurtured image of scientific research as the ultimate arbiter of fact.  It demonstrates what he calls “the slipperiness of empiricism.”  And it challenges the faith in science – I use the word “faith” advisedly here – of “new atheists” like Sam Harris, Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett (a foursome I think of H2D2 for short).

Lehrer focuses on what he calls “the decline effect” – the way much research across a wide range of fields, including psychology, ecology, biology, and medicine, fails the most basic scientific test, which is replicability.  If other researchers can produce the same results, then the research is valid;  if they cannot, it has to be assumed flawed.   And many, in some fields even most, cannot.  Results that initially seem ground-breaking often fade with each replication of the research, and sometimes even turn negative.

“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth,” says Lehrer.  As one somewhat depressed biologist told him:

We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some – perhaps many – cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their significance, and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs.

Citing the example of wildly divergent results for the efficacy of acupuncture in the Far East as opposed to Western Europe, for instance, Lehrer writes:

This wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see.  Our beliefs are a form of blindness.

It gets downright scary when he talks to a Stanford epidemiologist who looked at the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.  “Of those that had been subject to replication, 41% had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.”   It gets even worse when the research is in a “fashionable” field like genetic differences in disease risk for men and women.  “Out of 432 claims, only a single one was consistently replicable.”

The Stanford epidemiologist suspects “significance chasing,” where “scientists are so eager to pass the magical test of statistical significance that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy.”   They don’t do this deliberately, but unconsciously.  “Knowing” that something has to be true, they find ways to make it seem so.

“The decline effect” may in fact be a decline of illusion, says Lehrer.  The problem being that it’s very hard to let go of illusions:

Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in textbooks and drive standard medical practice.  Why?  Because these ideas seem true.  Because they make sense.  Because we can’t bear to let them go.

Because, in short, scientists are as human as the rest of us.  And the very idea of truth — that absolute ideal of veracity — is as slippery and troubling as ever.