What do I mean when I say spirituality?

               I ultimately have faith in God and am technically an Episcopalian, just like Freeman Dyson whose math and physics game theory I seek to vindicate, with Buddhist tendencies. But more than anything else I worship mother nature. And by that I mean the laws of math and physics themselves, but not in the pessimistic sense that Brian Greene suggests where he discusses how cosmology makes him and his amazing scholarship feel like he is staring into Nietzsche’s abyss and he recognizes how utterly insignificant he is (and all humans are), and how this impulse made him want to leave a legacy, as do I. 

That’s not my type of faith, and that’s not my view of time, which is aligned with Stephen Hawking’s somewhat discredited (and now back in vogue) theory of the “Big Crunch,” in which it is at least theoretically possible time never ends and there is no heat death to the universe, because it is reborn over and over again, kind of like in the science fiction movie Cloud Altas I recently mentioned.

             But I did promise a post about John von Neumann and if he actually invented game theory. Based on my exhaustive research, von Neumann was the first human to ever create, as a scholarly matter, an exhaustive and systematic theory of games. But, as I discussed, games themselves predate game theory and have been around since humans evolved from our common ancestors that have always had the desire to create. I don’t know much about cave persons (though I did see Jared Diamond speak live), and I’m no anthropologist, cultural anthropologist, or evolutionary biologist. I only know I personally saw cave art in France when I was in the fourth grade, which shows how incredibly privileged I am, even if yes, I’ve also known hunger (later in my life). And I also know games existed in many ancient cultures all over the world, and that the famous game “Go” was invented in China, and that the Aztecs and Incas also had games. And that von Neumann was a chess junkie, like my father, in addition to playing poker. (Chess isn’t my game. I prefer card games like the pattern recognition game Set. I’ve never lost to anyone, and if anyone can beat me in Set, I’d love to meet you, though I haven’t played in years.)

             But, looking into von Neumann’s life, he, like me, shared a strong interest in biophysics, which is essentially using physics to study nature, and by nature I mean the natural world as opposed to the cosmos. My physicist uncle (shout out if you read this) was a biophysicist who studied spider silk and how incredibly strong it is (far stronger than many materials humans make). Biophysics can also be used to explain phenomena such as optics, and the colors of a rainbow, and my tagline for this blog is that DT can never take away a rainbow, which is true. Here is an amazing math paper about the physics of rainbows, which is something that fascinates me. It’s hardcore math, just like how I like it, but there are other explanations for readers who are less into math than I am, and I’ll link another here. One of my favorite childhood books was about goblins who tried to steal rainbows from the plants who created them, which is why the rainbows decided to move into the sky, which is a cute children’s story, but I do think children should learn about the physics of rainbows.  

              I, like von Neumann, am deeply interested in biophysics and in plants, and see math in so many plants and in nature, including in seashells (though not James Comey’s seashells, and ultimately, really folks how credible is James Comey’s explanation that he didn’t know what 8-6 meant when 8-6 is literally a description of the measurements of a grave? Not that it matters because Republican members of Congress have also used this term and no one went after them) where one can see the golden ratio, or the Fibonacci series. And my interest in biophysics isn’t purely a physics-based interest, it also has applications to law. Ancient societies and cultures used the world of plant-based medicine to heal sick people before modern medicine (which I obviously endorse, and practiced FDA law from the perspective of the First Amendment and was pre-med in college). When I wrote this post, I was eating ginger and turmeric vegan ice cream, and ginger and turmeric come Asia and are known to have healing properties and have been used by medicine persons around the globe, and people who study ginger and turmeric from the perspective of biophysics are really cool.   

Another Nobel laureate I deeply respect was the first woman to ever win the Economics Prize and her name is Elinor Ostrom, and she studied ancient cultures from all over the world (though I’ve heard accusations that she romanticized them, and there is the concern I respect and acknowledge of romanticizing the past, and doing so from a somewhat Imperialist perspective). Ostrom studied ancient societies, including their approach to nature, and humanity’s relationship with nature, and how, for example, in ancient Japan, Japanese harvesters used samurai as police during the harvest to ensure everyone in society pulled their weight and participated in crop harvesting, though of course there were humane exceptions made for being sick, or otherwise not being able to fully participate because Japanese and Asian cultures have a much better understanding of mutualism than in the United States. 

How does this relate to spirituality? I guess my ultimate view of faith separate from apart from the view that God is a rainbow, or God is a seashell, or God is the birds that flock all around us, or God is the fish that school in the ocean, is a view based on another recreational activity, which isn’t a game, but is inspired by the creative impulse, and that is music. Music and math abilities are linked, and before I went into math and physics, I performed with a professional children’s choir and sang since I was a third grader, and later in college was in a popular acapella group at Dartmouth. As to music, the best metaphor I’ve ever heard for spirituality is that the world is like a gigantic symphony or concert hall, where each being is in their respective place, and we all need each other. I had occasion to go to the San Francisco symphony years ago, and it struck me that all the sounds I was hearing up in the balcony were caused by acoustics of the concert hall, and the reflective shields designed to bounce back music all over the hall so the best metaphor for faith is a symphony and I guess God is a conductor, but God is really nature, and nature is math and physics. 

p.s. The tritone is a sacred sound (even though it is referred to as the Devil’s interval), and it’s used in one of my favorite musicals, The West Side Story that is built around the theme of the tritone, and the tritone can be explained and modeled mathematically, and I commend understanding tritones to anyone who wants to understand music and math, and I was tested on tritones when I was just a kid to get promoted in my choir.

-Cortelyou C. Kenney (6/7/2025, 11:25 am)