The Infinite Within Another Finite

The other day I saw an image that looked, at first, like an ultrasound scan. It was a dim field crossed by fine, branching filaments, with small knots of brightness where the threads met. Something unborn seemed to be taking shape in the dark.

It was not a child. It was the universe.

What I was looking at was a slice of the map made by DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. For five years, five thousand optical fibres in that single instrument were each nudged into place by its own small robot, night after night, to catch the light of distant galaxies and quasars. The plan had been to capture 34 million galaxies and quasars. The instrument worked so efficiently that it captured more than 47 million, spanning nearly 11 billion years of cosmic history.

I kept returning to the word sonogram. A sonogram does not show you the child. It turns signals the eye cannot see into shapes a trained eye learns to read as a spine or a heartbeat. DESI’s map is made through the same kind of translation. It does not photograph the universe as our eyes would see it. It splits each faint light into its spectrum and measures how far that light has shifted toward red. From that shift, together with a model of how the universe expands, astronomers estimate distance. The map is an act of interpretation. It is a beautiful one, but it is shaped by the instrument, the method, and the questions being asked.

The light it reads left those galaxies long before anyone was here to read it. Some of it set out before the Earth existed.

What unsettled me, though, was not the distance. It was the depth.

We speak of the universe as an expanse, measured outward in light-years and galaxy counts. But it opens inward too. Under a microscope the familiar world loosens. Tissue becomes cells, cells become molecules, molecules become atoms, and atoms open into particles and fields. Go outward and galaxies gather into filaments. Go inward and solid matter thins into fields and probabilities. In both directions the world stops looking like a collection of things and begins to look like a set of relationships.

As a watercolourist I know a small version of this. Step back from a wash and it is sky. Put a loupe to it and the sky dissolves into pigment settled in the valleys of the paper: granules, tide-lines, the dried edge where the water stopped. Neither view is wrong, and neither contains the other. The painting is both, and the eye decides which one is there.

This is why I find myself imagining concentric universes. I do not mean that physics has found worlds nested like Russian dolls. It has not. I mean that each scale discloses a world whose contours depend on how it is observed. Scale changes what can be seen and what can be measured. Quietly, it also changes what can be imagined.

Physics, in its own language, offers a related thought. In 1972 the physicist Philip Anderson argued that complex systems cannot always be understood by describing their smallest parts. New patterns emerge at each level, and they need their own concepts and laws. More, as he put it, is different.

I first felt this before I could think it, in a dream I have never quite been able to put down.

I was flowing. Rushing, really, among billions like me, all moving toward something enormous that pulsed. I could not see it. I could only hear it: a beat, steady and immense. We were drawn toward it by the sound alone, the way a tide is drawn without being told. Somewhere in the dream I understood what I was. I was a blood cell, travelling toward a heart, inside someone’s body.

What stays with me is not the image. It is that I was entirely myself. I had the same consciousness I carry as a human, the same sense of an inside and an outside. Everything within me had become micro. Everything beyond me was an infinity that was somehow also enclosed: the infinite within another finite. My awareness had not shrunk. Only my position had changed.

I woke with a thought that has not left me: perhaps consciousness is concentric.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.Rabindranath Tagore · Gitanjali 69

I hold that thought carefully. A dream is not evidence, and a blood cell hears nothing; it has no inner life at all. But a dream is an instrument too. Like the microscope, like DESI, it translates, and what it translated for me was a change of scale felt from the inside. I did not learn that a cell is conscious. I felt how relative my own “vast” and “small” are. The body I think of as my small self might be, to something within one of its currents, a cosmos with a beating centre.

Between the microscope and the telescope, between the cell and the galaxy, stands the observer, and the observer is not standing outside.

Merleau-Ponty returned to this thought in his final, unfinished work: the one who sees is also visible, made of the same “flesh” as the world being seen. We do not survey the cosmos from a balcony. We are woven into the cloth we are trying to read.

That is true quite literally. Many of the elements in a body, such as the carbon, the oxygen, and the iron in the blood, were forged in stars and scattered before the Earth formed. It would be too easy to say that every particle in me has lasted unchanged for billions of years. Matter does not wait. It moves through stars, soil, rain, air, bread and blood. What endures is rarely an arrangement. More often it is a lineage: material passing from form to form.

A body, then, is not a sealed beginning. It is a temporary gathering.

For a few decades, ancient material takes the shape of a person who can look up and ask where matter came from. The body is young, but its substance is old. Its life is brief beside a galaxy’s and vast beside the flicker of a particle that lives for a fraction of a second. No single rhythm can hold all the rhythms of the universe.

This unsettles the simplest question we ask of anything: how old is it? What exactly are we dating? The material, the shape, the pattern, or the moment the parts began to gather? In the studio we date a painting by the day it was signed, but the ochre on my palette was earth long before it became colour. A river is older than the water passing through it. A flame continues while its fuel is replaced. A person stays recognisably themselves through years of bodily change. Perhaps age belongs not to a thing alone, but to whatever we decide is continuous within it.

Here I find myself drawn toward Advaita, not as a scientific conclusion but as a lens. Advaita asks us to question the separateness we take for granted: self and world, seer and seen, the many and the one. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Uddalaka tells his son Shvetaketu that once you know one lump of clay, you know everything made of clay. The pot and the bowl are only names; the clay is what is real.

Physics does not prove that the universe is one in that sense. Ancient philosophy should not be made to wear a lab coat either. The two speak through different methods and must be judged differently. But they meet at a question: when forms change, what do we mean when we say something remains?

Stars do not remain stars. Bodies do not remain bodies. The map changes as instruments sharpen; DESI is already observing again, extending the map it has just completed. The observer changes as the mind learns to see. Still, through every transformation, something is passed on: matter, energy, cause, memory, relation.

Perhaps permanence is not a thing standing still outside change. Perhaps it is the ground we sense beneath the changing forms, the whole in which every particular appears, lives its brief life, and dissolves.