From Dark Matter to Moby Dick: “All Deified Nature Absolutely Paints Like the Harlot”



Posted: Tuesday, November 23, 2010

by Marc Adler

While reading a recent New York Times article about NASA's quest to confirm that dark matter underlies everything in nature, I couldn't help but recall the chapter in Moby Dick called "The Whiteness of the Whale."

The Times article explains that Sam Ting, a celebrated scientist and winner of a Nobel, will launch a device known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer into space in search of definitive evidence that dark matter lies at the core of the universe. As The Times explains, "you might think that you learned in high school that the universe is made of atoms and molecules, protons and electrons, stars and galaxies, but over the last few decades astronomers have concluded-not happily-that this is all just a scrim overlying a much vaster shadowy realm of invisible dark matter' whose gravity determines the architecture of the cosmos."

In addition to offering potential for tremendous technological breakthroughs, the experiment is of deep philosophical interest. The aforementioned chapter of Moby Dick philosophizes in this vein by hitting on the novel's prime theme: that beneath all matter lies something sinister and forbidding, "the ungraspable phantom of life," as embodied by Moby Dick.

In "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishmael discusses why it is the whale's whiteness which intensifies its horror. He marvels at the idea that whiteness is "at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." The tendency of whiteness to exaggerate the terror of things already terrible such as Moby Dick or "the heartless voids and immensities of the universe" which "stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the milky way" conjures the sinister agent that lurks at the core of existence and of which all living beings are subtly aware.

Likewise, in a breathtaking sequence which anticipates Darwin, the narrator describes how a colt living all its life in a "peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey" will upon being assailed by the smell of a mere buffalo robe "start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright" because even this "dumb brute" possesses "the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world."

Whiteness and the white whale symbolize the notion that all we see on the surface is an illusion, and that at bottom existence is filled with emptiness: because light, which is itself white/colorless, functions as the "cosmetic" that produces color, and consequently all "earthly hues-every stately or lovely emblazoning-the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods, yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; these are all but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified nature absolutely paints like the harlot."

It is always fascinating to see the way science reinforces art. Interestingly, the great thinkers in both the humanities and the sciences typically pursue truth with the same vigor and passion, even if their conclusions are frightening-just as Melville waxes poetic about the fundamental void inherent in whiteness and permeating the universe, Sam Ting exuberantly leads his team of scientists towards confirming that dark matter pervades all of nature.

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