Kyle,
Pagels has always been one of my favorite authors, though it's been decades since I read him. I'm not a physicist, just someone for whom curiosity has been a primary emotion.
There is a fundamental Catch 22 that makes reality a tough knot to untie. The better we get at understanding the enormity of the situation, the more overwhelming it seems. This manifests itself in many ways. Even those who climb to the pinnacle of power find themselves trapped by it. For one thing, the higher up the ladder you are, the more dependent on the ladder you are. Also those who do climb the highest ladders are often those most adept at climbing each step, rather than those who can envision the larger situation and are at a loss when they do get to the top. As our current economic and political leadership so aptly exemplifies. Specialists when you need generalists, but no generalist could make it that far. The "Peter Principle" writ large. Also, definition is limitation and limitation is definition. To transcend this material reality, we need to shed the very knowledge of it that makes it real. That's something of the situation of the spiritual absolute, the source of our being, as the essence from which we rise, as opposed to the deistic assumption of an all-knowing ideal. We are limited by our very knowledge, as we use it to escape the limits of our ignorance. Consciousness is the raw energy of the moment, going into the future. Knowledge is that comets tail of information streaming away into the past.
The principles of this are not just a consequence of human fallibility, but are elemental to the nature of reality itself. In many ways, reality is an illusion. Just think of what you know from physics. It's mostly empty space, with an odd assortment of counteracting forces that do not seem to have an underlaying physical substance. Of course particle physics is determined to find one, but as far as they push the envelope, there seems to just be another layer of activity holding it up. Currently it's strings, with extra dimensions curled up inside. Could they just be describing vortexes, with the geometry of their inner surfaces curled around inside?. Instead of looking for answers at the extremes, how might this relate to our own scale. Apply the relationship I drew between energy and order to nodes and networks. This focus on particles is like defining the network in terms of the nodes, yet in our everyday experience, we have come to realize the nodes are effect and the network is cause. The problem with this attempt to create a static model, reduced to the nodes, is because, as I pointed out originally, reality is an illusion, manifested by competing forces, so if you freeze the frame, you don't have a bunch of nodes stopped in place, but just an non-fluctuating vacuum. So it seems physics has given us the concepts to see beyond the physical, even as it is stuck in the effort to find it.
Fortunately I'm not trying to make a living at this because those who do, don't care for this line of reasoning and I wouldn't be able to climb very far up the ladder. Which isn't to say there isn't a great deal to learn from crashing these particles together and seeing what comes up, but I do think the larger pattern might be as basic as the convection cycle. My first clue was learning that the expansion of the universe is effectively balanced, or nearly so, by the force of gravity; Omega=1. Gravity and the expansion co-exist, so if they cancel each other out, it's a complimentary cycle, not a sequential one. Think of the model of gravity as the ball on the sheet of rubber. Where there are not gravitational objects, would the sheet be flat, or would it be pushed the other way in reaction to those areas where there are gravitational wells? Yes, the space is expanding, but it's also collapsing into these wells at the same rate. It's like running up a down escalator. The floors are not actually moving apart because you have to cover more space, since that space is folding into the floors(and being pushed back out as radiation). So light that crosses space is stretched, but it's a front of a wave that is also falling into all the innumerable gravity wells along the way, so it is both stretching and collapsing. (Of course we are only measuring what collapses into our telescopes and that has climbed a long way.) The light is being continually stretched and the further it travels, the more this effect is compounded. The redshift light is further redshifted so that eventually the source seems to be receding at the speed of light and this creates a horizon line over which visible light cannot go, only black body radiation. Thus other galaxies are redshifted directly away from us, proportional to their distance. Big Bang Theory tries to explain why other galaxies are redshifted such that they appear to be all moving away from us and not have our position as the center of the universe by saying that it is space itself which is expanding. The rising loaf of bread analogy. The problem with this argument is that if space is expanding, than our only real measure of space, the speed of light, should increase proportionally. Example; If two sources are x lightyears apart and the universe were to expand to twice its previous size, should they be 2x lightyears apart, or should they still be x lightyears apart? If they are 2x, that's not expanding space, that's an increasing distance of stable space. If they still appear x lightyears apart, as they should if space itself is expanding, than the whole argument is meaningless in the first place, as it wouldn't explain redshift. So yes, our measure of space expands for the light which crosses these enormous distances, but it is effectively an optical effect on that light, just as the bending of light around a gravitational object is an optical effect that causes the source to appear to move from our perspective, not because it does move. I realize I'm going way out on a limb here, if you haven't followed the history of the Big Bang theory and all the questions raised and the logical patchwork required to save it, from Inflation Theory to Dark Energy. Not to mention all the minor fudges required to fit the age of its processes into 13.7 billion years. I must say though, that it is a masterwork of math, but than so were epicycles.
Say the universe is explainable as a convection cycle. Galaxies would be the gravitational vortexes into which matter falls and energy radiates away from. That which falls into the black holes is ejected as electron jets out the poles. On the other side of the cycle is the cosmic background radiation that has traveled over that previously mentioned horizon line and cooled to the point it is only stable to the "dew point" phase transition of 2.7k. Above that and it effectively condenses out as particles. How does radiation condense? Consider that it effectively travels as a wave, yet when we try to measure it, it strikes our sensors as particles/photons. Just as moisture in the air condenses out as drops of water.
Now put it into the relationship of order and energy, as I defined them in terms of the two directions of time; The energy is constantly going onto the future, as the information defining the units of time fall away into the past. Everything is ultimately only the energy, just as time only exists as the present, but as this energy is constantly radiating out as waves and collapsing back down as particles, it creates this dichotomy of the pure energy and the information it creates and which defines it. These are the two directions meeting in the middle. Just as the energy is constantly expanding and gravity is constantly collapsing, it is a simultaneous process.
I'll leave it at that for the moment, as most people don't get that far before assuming I'm another fool(which may be true, but isn't proof I'm wrong). If I wanted to win this contest, I would have been wise not to go this far, but the fact is that my observation that time as a consequence of motion, rather than the basis for it, means that time goes future to past, grew out of trying to make sense of cosmology, so it is hard for me not to get quickly drawn into this larger conversation.
