A Recent Interstellar Comet...

I recently went to the planetarium in Auckland with my family, and it was literally a night beneath the stars and constellations. A real joy and a brief escapade into a world where one feels completely insignificant. It's good for the soul. My mind was wandering as we went through all the constellations and I became lost in a brief trance when Sagittarius was mentioned, partly due to an old book I read a few years back - Witness of the Stars. I'd also recently read about the 3I/ATLAS comet, emerging like an arrow from Sagittarius on it's interstellar voyage — it really reminded me though of how we perceive stellar events in the times of today, which is more mechanistic than story like. The ancient peoples used to read the stars like we use GPS-apps. In essence, the old constellations were the earliest user interface to traversing through life. They turned the sky into a map you could carry in your head. Farmers used them as a calendar. Sailors used them as a compass. Parents used them to tell stories. That wasn’t decoration. It was compression. Whole packets of meaning fit into a handful of bright stars.

The constellations were our first attempt to read the “text” of the cosmos.

What’s interesting is how close this is to what some physicists now say about reality: that information is more basic than matter and energy, and that what we experience as the physical world is an expression of deeper informational structure (Currivan 2017, 4, 7, 23, 78–79).

"Physicists, in particular, have entered into a new stage of their science and have come to realise that physics is not only about physics anymore, about liquids, gases, electromagnetic fields, and physical stuff in all its forms. At a deeper level, physics is really about organisation – it is an exploration of the laws of pure form." - Nexus (Buchanan 2002)

So what is a passing comet, is it a lump of matter being obligated to gravity, or is there some part of the story we are missing? Comets move because equations describe what we observe given the influence of gravitational fields. That’s useful, but it leaves something out, especially to an ancient observer from antiquity.

If the universe is readable, the first readers, much like the ancient Babylonians, were people who drew lines between stars. They took scattered points and pulled a story out of them. These peoples named and numbered stars as if the sky were a book. E. W. Bullinger even called the Zodiac a “Heavenly Volume of Divine Revelation” given by God (Ps 19, Ps 147, Rom 10:18) and read the constellations as a long prophecy stitched into the night (Bullinger 1893, 323; 236).

They probably would have done the same with 3I/ATLAS...

This micro-story above is purely illustrative of course, but it's always interesting to see how the ancients would view world events, through very different eyes.

Constellations create forms that emerge, fade, and return. When you look that way, information starts to feel more basic than matter. Jude Currivan argues the universe behaves like a high-resolution, dynamically regenerated hologram—not metaphorically, but in the sense that information has ontological primacy (Currivan 2017, 4). On this view, what we call “stuff” is the surface of a deeper order: “in-formed” patterns emerging from ordered, nonphysical levels (Currivan 2017, 29, 43, 55, 112). Space-time itself can be treated as a Planck-scale, informationally pixelated boundary that keeps projecting the world we see (Currivan 2017, 4, 51). Light is the perfect carrier for this—able to embed and distribute vast amounts of information (Currivan 2017, 73, 82). Even the math we need, like the complex plane and the imaginary unit i, points to non-material organisational principles (Currivan 2017, 104, 106).

The Bible calls this organizing principle to our universe Logos—the Word. “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God,” says Hebrews, “so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible” (Heb. 11:3, NRSV). If you think in informational terms, that line sounds almost technical: instructions precede appearance. John starts the same way: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1, NRSV). “Word” in that usage isn’t chatter; it’s instructions. Code that frames a world and keeps updating it.

"Some theorists have gone as far as suggesting that spacetime is a quantum code. They regard the lower-dimensional hologram as some sort of source code, operating on a huge network of interconnected quantum particles, processing information and, in this way, generating gravity and all other familiar physical phenomena. In their view the universe is a kind of quantum information processor, a vision that appears only a hair’s breadth away from the idea that we live in a simulation. Holography paints a universe that is being continually created. It is as if there is a code, operating on countless entangled qubits, that brings about physical reality, and this is what we perceive as the flow of time. In this sense holography places the true origin of the universe in the distant future, because only the far future would reveal the hologram in its full glory.” - Hertog, T., On the origin of time: Stephen Hawking’s final theory, Bantam Books, 2023

If the universe is in-formed, then it is logical to assume that there is an informer. Any system that acts like a story has something doing the telling (Currivan 2017). Currivan’s language about an in-formed universe fits this frame, where a cosmic mind both initiates and keeps co-creating on all scales (Currivan 2017, 78, 140, 142, 148–49). If there is an in-formed universe, we expect an in-former (Currivan 2017, 142). Max Planck put it starkly: behind the force is a conscious and intelligent Mind—“the matrix of all matter” (quoted in Currivan 2017, 71).

A good mental model is the hologram. Not as a metaphor, but as a way to think about how a world could be rendered from a boundary of information. In a hologram each part contains something about the whole, a "microcosm image" (Gen 1:27) of the whole. Small changes can cascade because the parts are entangled by pattern. That explains why tweaking information can rearrange what we call “physical” so fast, and why similar shapes show up at wildly different scales (Currivan 2017).

This view also fixes a common mistake about time. We talk as if reality were a finished painting. It’s not. It’s a draft. Meaning arrives in motion. John Haught calls this living in anticipation: the universe isn’t done; it’s becoming. The search for rightness—truth, goodness, beauty—isn’t a distraction from nature but part of how nature wakes up to itself (Haught 2017). Once you accept that, you stop arguing about final answers and start working on more complete questions.

There’s another consequence. If information is primary, losses change shape. Stories don’t erase; they integrate. They keep what mattered by writing it forward. That doesn’t make pain trivial, but it does explain why memory and lineage feel so important to us, and why patterns persist when parts don’t (Haught 2017; Currivan 2017).

“But any life that is vigorous and open to challenge and compassion and the real activity of thought knows that, as we journey, we create many tabernacles of absence within us. Yet, there is a place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory, as a kingdom, is full of the ruins of presence. It is fascinating that, in your memory, nothing is lost or ever finally forgotten.” (Walking in Wonder, John O’Donohue)

So yes, keep the equations that explain the trajectory of a comet. But let us not miss the narrative in the stars. The stars are still stars, and also a text—one we’re learning to read and also to write (Currivan 2017; Haught 2017).

A video summary

References

Bullinger, Ethelbert W. 1893. The Witness of the Stars. London: Alfred Holness.

Currivan, Jude. 2017. The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.

Haught, John F. 2017. The New Cosmic Story: Inside Our Awakening Universe. New Haven: Yale University Press.

NASA. 2025. “Comet 3I/ATLAS.” NASA Science.