Back Home Again In Indiana

I believe that Ed Tryon is alive and as well as someone can be in the 21st century in a large city like New York. I also imagine that he would be amused by our speculation regarding his rumored demise when we should all be concerned with our own.

I remember seeing Ed sit on South 7th Street on the front porch of Margaret Whitmer sometimes when we were kids or on 9th at Annabelle Bohannon's. I know that he worked tirelessly at improving his basketball skills and I suspect that he transferred that work ethic to his profession. I'm unsurprised to get a report (15 years late) that he had great entusiasm about his work. And his work (at least as of 1997) is at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hunter College of the City University of New York

Ed studied in the field of Particle Physics and Cosmology and earned Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. We can call him Dr. Tryon. Some of his childhood friends have reached out to him via e-mail and I have not heard the results yet. I, myself, wouldn't know what to say to someone who actually has an understanding of particle physics, quantum mechanics or cosmology. Sometimes I will read a popularized book on the subject and it seems like I understand it at the time, wave/particle duality are easily swallowed by minds that absorbed the concept of the trinity, but the abstract leaks out of my mind when I close the book and look around the room at solid objects. I suppose if I bumped into Ed on an elevator and we each had name tags on... I suppose I could engage him in a conversation about Margaret's smiling eyes or Annabelle's faint freckles.

A lengthy Harper's article puts Ed's work in perspective with others read it or the excerpt below in case the link evaporates or you find the original too long.

... Tennessee Williams once said that "a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with." That sentiment has not stopped certain contemporary philosophers of a Platonic kidney from asserting that the world exists because it is so much better than nothing. The leading exponent of this Axiarchic School is the Canadian philosopher John Leslie. With considerable sophistication, Leslie argues that the cosmos exploded into being in answer to a need for goodness. "Suppose there is no nihilistic force fighting the existence of things," says Leslie. "Then absolutely any valid ground or reason for things will tend to bring about their materialization. And ethical realities supply such grounds or reasons." What about the problem of evil? Plotinus said that the murdered were themselves murderers in a previous life. Christian apologists invoke the inscrutability of God's designs. Hegel claimed that the conflict and wickedness were mere appearances. The Axiarchists, to their credit, do not try to make evil disappear. Rather, pointing to the majestic complexity of living things, they submit that the world is on balance good enough -- that is, at least marginally better than nothing. So its existence is ethically required. Given a sufficiently developed sense of irony, one can almost accept this.

The alternative, after all, is to believe that the triumph of Full Being over the Absence of All Things was just a matter of reasonless luck. Or that, as the Hunter College physicist Ed Tyron is fond of putting it, "the universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time." Tryon holds the distinction of being the first of the "nothing theorists," a cabal of theoretical cosmologists (clustered mostly upon the banks of the Cam and the Charles Rivers and on Manhattan's Upper West Side) who are trying to fathom what happened before the Big Bang. It was in 1969 that Tryon, doing a bit of woolgathering during a talk by a visiting celebrity physicist at Columbia University, suddenly blurted out, "Suppose the universe is just a quantum fluctuation?" This was greeted with a good deal of harrumphing by the several Nobel laureates present. What the callow Tryon was suggesting was that the entire cosmos might have bounded into existence out of nowhere -- in complete accordance with the laws of physics.

The key to it all is the notorious Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which says that, provided the scale is tiny enough and the duration is sufficiently brief, anything can happen. Little space-time bubbles can froth up from nowhere, elementary particles can appear and disappear. Add to this the "inflationary theory" developed by Harvard physicist Alan Guth in the early 1980's, which allows minuscule things to blow up to colossal proportions in the blink of an eye -- miraculously boosting their own energy in the process -- and the cosmogenic possibilities are endless. A random blip in the void can easily cascade into a Big Bang. "It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch," Guth observes. "The universe, however, is a free lunch."...