Into the Abyss

Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

In the vast sea of American literature, few works loom as large and as mysteriously as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.1 Published in 1851 and largely ignored in its own time, it is often, and correctly, hailed as the greatest American novel.2

Writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, Eli Wizevich notes the book’s difficult birth:

Moby-Dick, which Melville wrote mainly at his Arrowhead estate in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, masterfully married his deep personal experience and research on whaling tales with philosophy, natural science and revelatory biblical prose. In late June 1850, the novelist proposed the partially written novel to his British publisher, Richard Bentley, and promised that he would have it completed by “the latter part of the coming autumn.”

But the writing process took much longer than expected. Moby-Dick was becoming a whale of a book, dense with detail, emotion and plot. To make matters worse, Melville’s American publisher, Harper & Brothers, refused to give him an advance because he still owed the company money from past book deals.

Melville sought loans from friends to sustain himself through another year of writing….Finally, in the fall of 1851—a year behind schedule—Moby-Dick was ready for publication. Bentley released the first British edition, titled The Whale, on October 18. Harper & Brothers, notwithstanding Melville’s debt, published the first American edition of Moby-Dick on November 14.

For those far removed from their school days, the novel tells the story of Ishmael, a restless New Englander who signs on to a whaling voyage aboard the Pequod, a ship captained by the brooding and peculiar Ahab. Ishmael befriends Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Pacific, and together they join a diverse crew that includes Starbuck, the cautious first mate; Stubb, the irreverent second mate; and Flask, the bulldog-like third mate.3 The ship sets sail from Nantucket on what appears to be a routine three-year whaling expedition. But it soon becomes clear that Ahab has no intention of pursuing whales for profit—he is fixated on finding and destroying Moby Dick, a legendary white sperm whale that took his leg on a previous voyage. As the ship rounds the Cape of Good Hope and crosses the Pacific, Ahab’s obsession intensifies, drawing the crew into a fatal pursuit that culminates in the destruction of the Pequod and the deaths of nearly all aboard, save for Ishmael, who survives to tell the tale.4

The mask is what we see—the world of surfaces, the realm of perception and appearance. It is “unreasoning” because it offers no explanation, no comfort, and no ultimate meaning. It is reality as brute fact: visible, perhaps, but not intelligible. To Ahab, this realization is intolerable.

Captain Ahab is a figure of searing clarity and terminal delusion, driven by the need to confront what lies behind the veil of appearances. As I was re-reading the novel recently, I could not help but be struck by the similarities between Ahab’s view of the world and what physicists have discovered about our universe in the past century. In the novel, Ahab frequently contemplates not just his fate but the very nature of the cosmos: a universe in which what seems to be is not and all is illusion. Take, for example, the moment when Ahab comments on the delusion of reality that each man must overcome in order to exist:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed— there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough (Moby-Dick, Ch. 36).5

Ahab’s phrase, “the unreasoning mask,” captures the essence of the Captain’s view of the universe. The mask is what we see—the world of surfaces, the realm of perception and appearance. It is “unreasoning” because it offers no explanation, no comfort, and no ultimate meaning. It is reality as brute fact: visible, perhaps, but not intelligible. To Ahab, this realization is intolerable. He cannot accept that the world might be empty of reason or moral design. His urge to “strike through the mask” is an act of metaphysical violence—a desperate attempt by humanity to penetrate a universe that refuses to answer. In contemporary physics, this mask evokes the limits of observation. Behind the probabilistic veil of the quantum world, there may be no hidden order or deeper truths—only indeterminacy. The mask, in other words, may be all there is.

I do not read Melville’s words as metaphor; rather, they are a scientific declaration. Reality, Ahab insists, is not what it appears to be—ever. Events, objects, even living things are but surfaces stretched across a void. Behind them lies no divine pattern or moral architecture—only indifference, or worse, something like “inscrutable malice.”6 Ahab’s dread that there is no ground beneath appearances anticipates a core realization in twentieth- and twenty-first-century physics. In quantum mechanics, the world is not made up of discrete, solid particles operating like billiard balls. Instead, particles exist in uncertain states until they are observed. Werner Heisenberg put it this way: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”7 Against all human expectation, reality does not sit waiting to be discovered; it comes into form through observation.

The development of quantum mechanics since Heisenberg has deepened the problem of the “unreasoning mask.” Consider quantum entanglement, in which two particles become so deeply correlated that their states are defined only in relation to each other, even when separated by vast distances. This phenomenon—described by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance”—defies classical logic and offers a striking parallel to Melville’s metaphysical unease.8 What is the whale, if not entangled with Ahab’s own psyche of obsession? What is the meaning of the great chase across the seas, if not dependent on the observer’s frame? Indeed, muses Ahab at one point, what is the point of life itself, once we have realized the universe’s true nature:

Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! (Ch. 37).

Ahab’s musing on how his life’s joys decayed through “high perception” finds a parallel in the field of quantum decoherence, which explains how the classical world we observe emerges from quantum states through a process of interaction with the environment. The theory suggests that a perfect quantum world, exposed to anything else—even mere observation—loses information about itself, and this loss eventually creates the things we see and touch. In other words, the “noise” of our perception collapses the quantum state and creates our “reality.” The physicist Carlo Rovelli put it this way: “What we call reality is a process. It is the result of interaction.”9 Melville’s novel is full of such collapses. Sermons turn into farce, seas become continents, hunters become the hunted, prophets become fulfillers of prophecy, and heroic quests unravel into madness. Indeed, Melville’s narrative structure itself resists closure, as if the story is still decohering before our eyes.

Ahab’s resistance to, and lack of respect for, the unknown becomes a suicidal project. This conclusion is what makes Moby-Dick a work of philosophical prescience in addition to a one of literary genius.

Niels Bohr emphasized that in quantum mechanics, reality is not simply revealed by observation, but produced through it: “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”10 This boundary—between being and saying, knowing and perceiving—is precisely where Moby-Dick operates and what makes the whale such a source of terror, for it, too, is ungraspable in essence. Ishmael catalogs him as whale, as symbol, and as myth. To Ahab, he is the face of evil itself. To Starbuck, he is a brute creature. Each interpretation is partial, and each man transforms the whale’s unknowable nature into the object of his fixation.

The multiverse concept posits that every quantum event spawns multiple branching universes. While speculative, this theory reflects a fundamental willingness to reject a single, ordered reality in favor of coexisting outcomes. Melville, in his dense layering of action and symbol, his digressions into cetology and color, likewise resists singularity. Ahab insists on one meaning; Ishmael sees infinite possibilities, even if most are terrifying or absurd. In other words, the epistemology of quantum theory and the metaphysics of Moby-Dick both confront the same crisis: the collapse of certainty. In Melville, as in quantum physics, each sailor’s observations brings about a form of reality but the author never settles on one as true.

In Moby-Dick, each man’s universe exists alongside the others, and even the great white whale, like an electron, resists localization. The creature means everything. It means nothing. It is restless yet unchanging. Perhaps like our own universe, it simply devours any meaning we try to impose upon it. It is this realization that drives Ahab mad, for he longs for truth and suffers in the face of ambiguity. Faced with infinite possibilities, Ahab decides that the whale—universal uncertainty and indifference—must be pure evil, and he must confront and destroy it:

Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out (Ch. 36).

Ahab’s resistance to the unknown becomes a suicidal project. This conclusion is what makes Moby-Dick a work of philosophical prescience in addition to a one of literary genius. The novel stages a drama that parallels one of the central paradoxes of modern physics (and perhaps the human condition itself): the more closely you look at something, the less the thing itself remains. For Melville, the whale is not the answer to anything; rather, it is all the questions the universe refuses to answer.

Ahab insists on one meaning; Ishmael sees infinite possibilities, even if most are terrifying or absurd. In other words, the epistemology of quantum theory and the metaphysics of Moby-Dick both confront the same crisis: the collapse of certainty.

The universe’s unyielding silence is what wounds Ahab most of all, and this epistemic wound runs deep in twentieth- and twenty-first-century physics. Albert Einstein famously resisted the indeterminacy implied by quantum theory. “God does not play dice with the universe,” he insisted.11 Yet the emerging consensus was that He does—or at least, that the universe operates without deterministic law at the deepest level.12 Max Born, who helped develop quantum theory, replied: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”13

Melville, had he lived to read the exchange between Einstein and Born, might have recognized in it the outlines of Ahab and Ishmael. One demands order from the void; the other learns to drift. Ahab, like an observer demanding that particles fix themselves in place, cannot abide flux, and so he drives his crew into a trap he calls destiny. As he proclaims:

The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way! (Ch. 37).

That sense of entrapment—the idea that the human mind, once locked into a paradigm, can destroy itself in its pursuit—is not foreign to science. The physicist Richard Feynman warned against the illusion of total knowledge:

We must leave behind the idea that we can describe everything precisely. That is the way nature is. And if we want to go along and understand nature, we must be prepared to accept the fact that nature does not allow us to make any statements about what the situation will be in a future time except in terms of probabilities.14

Melville’s masterpiece is no different.

The literary critic Gillian Beer has written that Melville “resisted finality” and crafted instead a literary form that “hovers between the empirical and the infinite.”15 If Ishmael survives, it is not because he wins. It is because he watches. Unlike Ahab, he does not demand a single meaning from the whale—or from the world. His approach is tentative, digressive, and filled with contradiction. He does not resolve the whale into symbol; he lets it remain a mystery. In doing so, he mirrors a kind of quantum humility. His narrative is a field of probabilities, not a chain of causes. The whale, like the cosmos, offers no clear reflection. It is Ishmael’s gift—and curse—to be the one who endures its blankness and returns to tell his story. His method is not heroic certainty but resigned historian. He catalogues the flukes and superstitions, the sermons and storms, the color and contour of a beast that finally cannot be known. Ishmael’s journal, seen not even through an omniscient narrator’s eyes, is as close as Melville allows us to get to truth.

“What is that exact truth?” I asked myself at the end of the novel. Perhaps it is that the more precisely one tries to pin down the world, the more it splinters. Like a resistive force that increases the closer we get to the truth, Melville’s own text seems to reject our attempt to grasp it fully, constantly multiplying digressions and ambiguities rather than clarifying them. As for the famous white whale, it reminds me of Schrödinger’s cat: alive and dead, myth and brute, all at once. Reflecting upon its nature, I recall that physicists continue to wrestle with what can be known. As Rovelli also writes: “We understand the world better not by imagining what it is, but by understanding how it interacts.”16 Likewise, the whale, in the end, is not a creature to be bound and comprehended. It, like the novel itself, is an interaction: a collision between the perceiver and the perceived. Perhaps that is Melville’s message to us: a quest to understand life will end in failure. All one can grasp is life’s cycle of creation and collapse, which, like Melville’s great haunting creature, shimmers, awes and terrifies us, and then simply vanishes forever into the abyss.