On Observing

On Observing

Every observer completes it truly, in their own key.

I

When was the last time looking at something ancient changed you, and did you realize what you were looking at?

Start with a bronze Buddha (choose any of them, in any quiet hall), one that has been looked at so many times the looking has become part of the metal. And there is a figure of Christ standing open-armed above a city in Brazil, finished within living memory, already met, I would guess, by more eyes than the temple Buddha gathered in a thousand years.¹ Different faiths, different centuries. The same strange fact underneath: people come away from these things altered, and cannot quite name by what.

Ask them and the accounts scatter. Some say the object felt alive. A few will insist it made a sound, a low hum at the threshold of hearing, as though the thing were holding a single sustained note. Set a scientist beside them and she sees none of that. She sees an object, a very fine one, and she can read the workmanship in its seams. She can follow the material backward like a thread: the casting, the foundry, the ore drawn out of the ground, the metal settling into the crust over an unhurried age, the crust itself a late skin on a planet that condensed out of a turning disk of debris, the disk a remnant of stars that had already lived and died. The copper and the tin in the Buddha’s skin were forged inside those earlier stars and scattered when they ended.² The soapstone wrapped around the Christ was quarried in Minas Gerais from rock billions of years old, older than anything that has ever knelt before it. To the scientist, the artifact is the most recent knot in a rope near fourteen billion years long,³ and that is wonder enough; she does not need it to hum.

The faithful need none of that rope. They do not arrive at the power of the thing by reasoning back to the Big Bang. They stand before it and the message lands whole: mercy, stillness, an arms-wide welcome over the rooftops. The lineage of atoms is beside the point. To one observer the object is an object. To another it is a vessel. Neither is misled. They are simply not looking at the same thing.

II

And here is the quiet scandal at the center of it. Two interpretations of quantum theory (relational quantum mechanics, and its cousin QBism, which treats every measurement as an experience belonging to the one who measures) read the physical world as holding no fact about a thing except in relation to something else observing it. No view from nowhere. No final, observer-free account of what the object simply is in itself. On that reading, reality is a set of relations, and each observer stands inside a different one.⁴

The physics gave me the shape of this thought, and it does not carry it. What carries it belongs to the philosophers: there is only seeing from somewhere. The scientist and the faithful are two instruments aimed at one bronze, each collecting the signal it was built to collect, and what either calls the object is its own reading stacked against the other’s, and against every reading taken there before. The scientist’s object and the believer’s vessel are two true relations, because there is no underlying thing standing apart from all observation to overrule them.

I notice, writing this, which of those observers I default to. I reason backward to the foundry, the ore, the dying stars, long before I let the arms-wide welcome land on me as anything but information. The rope of atoms is the relation I trust. I have had to learn, slowly, that the other one is not a lesser truth I am being polite about.

III

This is older than the physics. There is a name for what these objects carry. Walter Benjamin called it their aura: the weight an original holds by virtue of being here, having occupied this one place across all this time, having been present for everything that passed before it.⁵ A copy can reproduce the image and never touch the aura, because the aura is not in the shape. It is in the accumulated fact of having been witnessed. Every pair of eyes that ever rested on the Buddha left something the way a hand leaves oil on bronze. I call what they left a Trace, and it keeps moving long after the one who left it has gone home.⁶ The figure above the city has been wept at, prayed to, photographed, struck by lightning again and again, and repaired. None of that is visible in a photograph and all of it is in the statue, held in the relation between the object and the long parade of those who stood before it.

IV

Which is why the hum should not be dismissed. It has a precedent older than either statue. In Egypt there are two colossal seated figures, broken long ago, and for some two centuries, on many mornings but not all, visitors heard one of them sound at sunrise, a clear, eerie note as the first light warmed the cracked stone. The Greeks and Romans came from across the world to hear it and understood it perfectly: the statue was a fallen king greeting his mother, the goddess of the dawn, and the morning dew was her tears.⁷ We explain it differently now, or try to. The usual account is that the fractured stone, heating in the first light, pushed trapped air and evaporating moisture through its fissures, and the rock gave up a tone. The mechanism was likely thermal. The meaning is a son calling out to his mother at dawn, across two hundred years. The sound was real. What it was depended entirely on who stood there listening for it. The object did not change. The observer did, and so the object did with them.

V

Most of us only ever stand in one of these relations at a time. We see the object or we feel the vessel; we hear the physics or we hear the king; and some part of us, quietly, is busy assembling the case for why what we see is the version that is really there, and is ready to defend it, to prove it to whoever stands beside us. That readiness is a kind of glare. It is the self, leaning forward to be right, and it falls across the line of sight like light on glass, letting through only the one reflection it came to find.

I know that glare from the inside; it is usually mine. I have stood in front of one of these things already arguing, already assembling the case for the reading I walked in carrying, so busy being right about the thing that the thing itself never quite reached me.

Imagine, instead, an observer whose Jays are aligned (a Jay being one felt moment of meeting something: someone looking, what the looking is like, and which way it faces). The need to prove the seeing has fallen away, the way a window stops calling attention to itself once it is clean. Meditation, in nearly any of its old forms, is a way of washing that glass: sit still long enough and the argument inside you runs out of breath. With nothing leaning forward to win the point, there is nothing left to choose between. Such a one would not have to pick the rope of stars over the open arms, or the thermal note over the singing king. They would stand in every relation at once.

I am not that observer, or only rarely, and never quite on purpose. But I have felt the glass go clear for a breath or two, and in that clearing the choosing simply stopped mattering. Long enough, anyway, to believe the chord is real, and to suspect that the only thing ever standing between me and it was me.

The object would not resolve into a single answer; it would hold all of its answers open and true together: the foundry and the prayer, the fracture and the song. To that observer the thing would do exactly what the accounts have always whispered it does. It would hum, because the dawn is warming the stone and the king is calling his mother and both are happening. It would glisten with an endless turning of color, every gaze that ever fell on it a relation it still holds. And faintly, all the way down, it would carry the whole history of its own becoming, back to the dying stars, not recalled but present, all of it, at once.

The scientist is right. The faithful are right. The one who hears the hum is right. Each is right about what they came asking; a false claim about the alloy would still be false.⁸ But there is no privileged seat from which to correct them, because the power was never a property the object kept to itself and dispensed. The power is the relation: the meeting of a particular looker and a thing that has been met countless times before.

So if something ancient has changed you, and you could not have said what you were looking at, you were looking at the relation. It was every pair of eyes that came before yours. And it was you, finishing it.

Every observer completes it truly, in their own key. The aligned observer simply lets them all sound at once, and hears, for a moment, the chord.

Notes

1. Christ the Redeemer, on the Corcovado above Rio de Janeiro, was designed by Heitor da Silva Costa and sculpted by Paul Landowski, with the face by Gheorghe Leonida and engineering by Albert Caquot; it was inaugurated on October 12, 1931. The reinforced-concrete figure is clad in soapstone tiles. It is struck by lightning several times a year; a strike in January 2014 chipped the right thumb, and the statue has been restored repeatedly.

2. The two metals arrive by different routes. Copper comes mainly from the weak s-process in massive stars, with further contributions from the explosions that end them. Tin comes mainly from the main s-process in low-mass asymptotic-giant-branch stars, which do not explode but shed their outer envelopes over long ages, with a share from the r-process; its lightest isotopes are p-nuclei. Either way the atoms were made in earlier stars and released as those stars ended. Käppeler et al., “s Process.” The soapstone is a terrestrial metamorphic stone, cut in Minas Gerais from rock billions of years old.

3. The age of the universe is 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years. Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2018 Results. VI.”

4. Register note. This is the seam of this essay, and the one worth marking plainly. The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that the values of physical variables are defined only relative to an observing system; QBism holds that a measurement outcome is an experience personal to the agent who elicits it. Rovelli, “Relational Quantum Mechanics”; Fuchs, Mermin, and Schack, “Introduction to QBism.” Both deny a view from nowhere, and both are interpretations of the quantum formalism, among several. Their subject is physical quantities and measurement outcomes, not bronze statues, not meaning, not what happens to a person standing in a quiet hall. Three things separate what they say from what I am saying: a difference of scale, since decoherence leaves everyday objects determinate; a difference of domain, since neither says anything about significance or reverence; and a difference in the word observer, which in relational quantum mechanics means any physical system whatever and need not be conscious at all. Rovelli is explicit that consciousness plays no privileged role. Bohr’s complementarity, two descriptions that exclude each other yet are both needed for a full account, is the older physics neighbor of the essay’s two true readings; he meant it of light and matter, and it is borrowed here only as a picture. Bohr, Atomic Theory. What carries the thought is philosophical: Nietzsche’s perspectivism, that there is only a perspectival seeing; Goodman’s many true world-versions with no privileged original; Putnam’s internal realism, truth as warranted within a scheme rather than from outside every scheme. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, third essay, section 12; Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking; Putnam, Reason, Truth and History. Nagel’s View from Nowhere appears here as the position I am declining rather than the one I am leaning on. He defends the aspiration to observer-independent objectivity that this essay sets down. Nagel, View from Nowhere. I would rather name the borrowing than let a reader think the physics proved something it never claimed.

5. Benjamin, “Work of Art.” Written in 1935–36, the essay locates the aura of an original in its presence in time and space, its unique existence where it happens to be, and the authority it draws from having endured. Benjamin’s argument runs toward the withering of aura under reproduction; the use here, aura as accumulated witnessing, extends him rather than reports him, and the extension is mine.

6. Johnson, On Facing, sets out the Trace at length: what a life leaves behind ripples on through time whichever way the life faced, and the ripples are good only so far as that life was aligned.

7. The Colossi of Memnon at Thebes are two seated figures of Amenhotep III. The northern one was fractured, traditionally by an earthquake in 27 BCE, though the date and even the earthquake are disputed. For about two centuries afterward visitors reported hearing it sound near sunrise. Strabo heard it and suspected a trick; Pausanias and Pliny also record it. More than a hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions left by visitors survive on the statue’s legs, many noting the sound at the first hour; others show it did not sound every morning, and the poet Julia Balbilla records that it stayed silent on the first day of her visit with the imperial party of Hadrian in 130 CE. The silence that followed is usually credited to a repair under Septimius Severus around 199 CE, a modern inference rather than a recorded fact. The thermal explanation is a plausible hypothesis that can no longer be tested. Strabo, Geography 17.1.46; Bernand and Bernand, Inscriptions grecques et latines. The Greeks took the figure for Memnon, son of Eos and Tithonus, greeting his mother; Ovid tells how the goddess of the dawn still weeps for her son, and her tears are the dew. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 13.

8. The claim is that no observer occupies a position from which to overrule the others, not that every account of the object is equally accurate. The scientist’s foundry and the believer’s welcome are answers to different questions.

Bibliography

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Bernand, André, and Étienne Bernand. Les inscriptions grecques et latines du Colosse de Memnon. Bibliothèque d’étude 31. Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1960.

Bohr, Niels. Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1934.

Fuchs, Christopher A., N. David Mermin, and Rüdiger Schack. “An Introduction to QBism with an Application to the Locality of Quantum Mechanics.” American Journal of Physics 82, no. 8 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4874855.

Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hackett, 1978.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Facing. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20603463.

Käppeler, F., R. Gallino, S. Bisterzo, and Wako Aoki. “The s Process: Nuclear Physics, Stellar Models, and Observations.” Reviews of Modern Physics 83, no. 1 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.83.157.

Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Hackett, 1998.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Indiana University Press, 1955.

Planck Collaboration. “Planck 2018 Results. VI. Cosmological Parameters.” Astronomy & Astrophysics 641 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201833910.

Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

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