Spring! E = mc2, Mon Amour...

Spring has arrived—lavish with the usual jazz hands and fragrant intoxicants. Our unfortunate fealty to the Age of Reason precludes our playful use of the word “Miracle”, and we've been asked not to join hands and dance helplessly through the sudden profusion of lupine, poppy and lavender. But you know Spring.

As we stare longingly through double-paned glass She's rolling out her finery; a busybody picnicker unpacking her little sandwiches with the craziest smile. Let us sing this quiet Hymn to Her. Spring! She snuck in behind the headlines. Wave at your neighbor through the picture window. Step outside and gesture aspirationally at the surrounding technicolor glory from which we nutty animals emerged. Grin broadly at passerby in a demonstration of shared humanity. Look fondly on your houseplants and sigh with pleasure. We are ... here.

Schmience

What is Spring? Life loudly reasserts Herself, that’s what. Frosty the Snowman is reduced to a sad puddle and we laughingly kick his dumb top hat over the fragrant hedge. Bears awaken from their slumber, stretch luxuriously and start singing. Forest bunnies stand on their hind legs, link their furry little arms, dance in a circle and are set upon by singing bears.

Fall and Winter exit with a curt bow, the biosphere slams the door behind them and goes shamelessly crazy with celebration, in colors that happily stress the limits of the visible spectrum.

The plant kingdom opens its smiling yap to the bath of sunlight, stems and leaves and less pronounceable plant bits blush with chlorophyll, unreasonably happy bugs gather in humming, musical clouds to swirl deliriously through fields of wildflower.

Little boys and girls chase each other from the merry-go-round to the kickball field and back again, following a heart-powered program at least as old as the Bo?tes Void. That is, Wyeth politely yields the floor to Chagall.

Spring: The Hard Problem

The magic of Spring has a somewhat reductionist explanation. The Earth is inclined on its axis just so. Begat by a generally incomprehensible explosion 13.8 billion years ago (we’re assured through straight faces), today our stupidly lucky rock makes its lumpen way around the neighborhood fireball, here tilted toward the Old Dear, there away.

This angular disposition yields changes of seasons, cyclical eruptions of joy in the plant and animal kingdoms, and hastily folded notes handed secretly around in third period algebra. Cellular Life does its thrilling and largely mysterious Springtime jig and we find ourselves smiling through tears. Pardon the Grammar, But Ain’t Life Grand? [Mel Torme, et al]

Here’s the problem: Technically, Life’s a miracle; or if not a miracle, a monstrously boggling equation, a glissando of numerical chutzpah.

As [the sometimes stammering] physicist Roger Penrose has noted—along with Martin Rees, Paul Davies, and many many others of the slide rule set—the universe we live in is a crazily privileged subset of all possible universes. How so?

Let’s just say the Cosmos is one of the most neatly built cuckoo clocks ever to self-assemble from an exploding scrapyard. Following the hallowed and probably soundless "Big Kapow" (or whatever they call it) the fine, feathery quanta of the concussed universe fell together with an exactitude that can ulcerize a mathematician. You can look it up. Start with Anthropic Principle.

Life Inside a Spark

But the so-called “Fine-Tuning” of the universe? At best it’s a preamble. The explosive scattering and later clumping of exploded quantum debris into stars, galaxies, and jauntily tilted, sun-drenched?home planets is not explicable, nor need it be. Exactly how we got from fiery primordial chaos to Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River is anybody's guess; we're just very (very) lucky it went that way. E?=?mc2, mon amour.

The one thing we can say is this: the indefinable thrill that attends the arrival of Spring suggests both greater and fainter forces than those at work on our warily flirtatious protons and neutrons. This is the Hard Problem of Spring.

Something momentous is going on. All the time. But if you exist, and love, and mow the lawn and teach the kids to drive in the eternally blossoming spark of a lightning strike, that wild improbability is the fabric of your everyday. Get your arms around it. We’re all of us the insanely improbable payoff of the craziest bet modern math can describe. And when you know that the whole of your existence is balanced on a knife edge of brute impossibility, powdered donuts taste better. They just do.

The Big Kapow? continues to prove itself one of the more generous explosions in cosmic memory. It's not that we survived the explosion—we are the explosion. Spring is impossible. Long live Spring.

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