The New Age of the Organism. Architectural Design Profile No. 129, New Science New Architecture (C. Jencks, ed.), pp. 44-51, Royal Academy of Art, 1997 Mae-Wan HoBioelectrodynamics Laboratory, Open University, U.K. Organic space-time versus mechanical space-time I am told the comet in our sky visited us 4000 years ago. As it revolves once around the heaven, earth has revolved 4000 times around our sun, and human beings have gone from stone age to space age in 160 life cycles. The comet looks like a giant eye in the sky, now within our orbit and looking down on us, having seen, perhaps, many other worlds in far-flung reaches of the universe during its space odyssey. Mechanical space and time are both linear, homogeneous, separate and local. Psychoanalyst-artist Marian Milner (1957) describes her experience of "not being able to paint" as the fear of losing control, of no longer seeing the mechanical common-sensible separateness of things.
Organism versus mechanism The end of mechanistic biology A theory of the organism. Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Psychology - Arnold Mindell, PH.D. Quantum Mind. The Edge Between Physics and Psychology This is the second edition with new preface from the author. In a single volume, Arnold Mindell brings together psychology, physics, math, myth, and shamanism – not only mapping the way for next-generation science but also applying this wisdom to personal growth, group dynamics, social and political processes, and environmental issues. Beginning with a discussion of cultural impacts on mathematics, he presents esoteric but plausible interpretations of imaginary numbers and the quantum wavefunction.
In this context he discusses dreams, psychology, illness, shape-shifting (moving among realities), and the self-reflecting Universe – bringing in not only shamanism but also the Aboriginal, Greek, and Hindu myths and even sacred geometry from the Masonic orders and the Native Americans. Big Problems Need Small Solutions. Issue 297July/August 2016Natural Healing Undercurrents Big Problems Need Small Solutions by Charles Eisenstein Cover: Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 1932 by Georgia O'Keeffe. © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/ DACS, London Issue availability Order the current issue now Issue available as PDF Reprint permissions Illustrations by Valériane Leblond www.valeriane-leblond.eu Let me present a logic that has immersed me ever since, as a teenager, I became aware of the state of the planet. Contained within this logic is an implicit hierarchy that values the contributions of some people – and some kinds of people – more than others.
The logic of bigness devalues the grandmother spending all day with her granddaughter, the gardener restoring just one small corner of earth to health, the activist working to free one orca from captivity. Yet the logic seems indubitable. Here we come to what some call the “theory of change” that underlies the ambition to do a big thing, to scale it up, to reach millions. Complexity, Uncertainty, Emergence and Creativity | The Age of Transition Blog. “If you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change.” Max Planck Complexity means a different theory of causality The future of a complex system is emerging through perpetual creation.
Complexity is a movement in time that is both knowable and unknowable. The way we want to make sense of the world around us often has to do with causality. But there is something significant happening today. Cybernetics recognized a much more complicated causality. Complexity challenges the assumption of earlier systems theories that movement in time can be predictable in the sense that X causes Y, or that the movement follows some archetypes.
Complexity means a different theory of causality. The most important insight is that it is often not possible to identify specific causes that yield specific outcomes. The future of a complex system is emerging through perpetual creation. The big new idea is to reconfigure agency in a way that brings complex relationships into the center. The paradoxes that sit at the very core of physics ... Theoretical physics is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago: at the subatomic level things are simultaneously particles and waves. Like the duck-rabbit illusion first described in 1899 by the Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, subatomic reality appears to us as two different categories of being. But there is another paradox in play. Physics itself is riven by the competing frameworks of quantum theory and general relativity, whose differing descriptions of our world eerily mirror the wave-particle tension.
When it comes to the very big and the extremely small, physical reality appears to be not one thing, but two. Where quantum theory describes the subatomic realm as a domain of individual quanta, all jitterbug and jumps, general relativity depicts happenings on the cosmological scale as a stately waltz of smooth flowing space-time. Many physicists are Platonists, at least when they talk to outsiders about their field. The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are. During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose.
We owe much of today’s mainstream adoption of practices like yoga and meditation to Watts’s influence. His 1966 masterwork The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (public library) builds upon his indispensable earlier work as Watts argues with equal parts conviction and compassion that “the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.” He explores the cause and cure of that illusion in a way that flows from profound unease as we confront our cultural conditioning into a deep sense of lightness as we surrender to the comforting mystery and interconnectedness of the universe. What It’s Like to Live in a Universe of Ten Dimensions. By Maria Popova What songwriting has to do with string theory. What would happen if you crossed the physics of time with the science of something and nothing? You might get closer to understanding the multiverse.
In Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space, Rob Bryanton — a self-described “non-scientist with an inquisitive mind,” whose dayjob as a sound designer involves composing music for TV series and films — proposes a theory of the universe based on ten dimensions, a bold and progressive lens on string theory based on the idea that countless tiny “superstrings” are vibrating in a tenth dimension. For a taste, here is a mind-bending explanation of ten dimensions might mean: The project began as a set of 26 songs, exploring the intersection of science and philosophy.
Before launching into the additional dimensions, Bryanton also breaks down the familiar three: HT It’s Okay To Be Smart Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Alice in Quantumland: A Charming Illustrated Allegory of Quantum Mechanics by a CERN Physicist. By Maria Popova Down the rabbit hole of antimatter, or how to believe six impossible things about gender stereotypes before breakfast. As a lover of science and of all things Alice in Wonderland, imagine my delight at discovering Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics (public library) — an imaginative and unusual 1995 quantum primer by particle physicist Robert Gilmore, who has under his belt experience at Stanford and CERN.
Besides the clever concept, two things make the book especially remarkable: It flies in the face of gender stereotypes with a female protagonist who sets out to make sense of some of the most intense science of all time, and it features Gilmore’s own magnificent illustrations for a perfect intersection of art and science, true to recent research indicating that history’s most successful scientists also dabbled in the arts. Gilmore writes in the preface: In the first half of the twentieth century, our understanding in the Universe was turned upside down. Touch.dangerousminds. It was in January OF 1944 that Benoit Mandelbrot fell in love with geometry, “in its most concrete and sensual form.” ”That part of geometry in which mathematics and the eye meet.”
During a math class, when Mandelbrot was nineteen years of age, at the Lycee du Parc in Lyon, young Benoit realized he could visualize algebra as geometric images. The class professor had been discussing a mathematical problem when Mandelbrot became instantly aware that he had the ability to change algebra into pictures. He then realized that once you can see pictures, the answer to a problem is obvious. In 1958, Mandelbrot left France and joined IBM in America. Engineers at IBM had found an issue with transmitting computer information over telephone lines.
Bringing these elements together, Mandelbrot developed a “theory of roughness” which he used to show that another dimension existed between 2-D and 3-D, this suggested there was a mathematical order to the seeming mess/chaos of the natural world. The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking. By Maria Popova Carl Sagan was many things — a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher.
But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and common sense, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality, published mere months before his death in 1996 — Sagan shares his secret to upholding the rites of reason, even in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda. Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods: The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:
The Universe in a Glass of Wine: Richard Feynman on How Everything Connects, Animated. Scouts in the Dichotomous Desert: Ethical Man in the 21st Century. The 13 Best Science and Technology Books of 2013. By Maria Popova The wonders of the gut, why our brains are wired to be social, what poetry and math have in common, swarm intelligence vs. “God,” and more. On the heels of the year’s best reads in psychology and philosophy, art and design, history and biography, and children’s books, the season’s subjective selection of best-of reading lists continues with the finest science and technology books of 2013. (For more timeless stimulation, revisit the selections for 2012 and 2011.)
Every year since 1998, intellectual impresario and Edge editor John Brockman has been posing a single grand question to some of our time’s greatest thinkers across a wide spectrum of disciplines, then collecting the answers in an annual anthology. In 2012, the question Brockman posed, proposed by none other than Steven Pinker, was “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” Puffer fish with Akule by photographer Wayne Levin. In art, the title of a work can often be its first explanation. Opportunistic Quantum Leaps in Human Evolution | Hardshell Labs™ “What is here is elsewhere.
What is not here is nowhere.” – a Hindu proverb DIY quantum applications. Figure 1: Anti-gravity Engine. 2: an Infinite Force Engine. 3: Wormhole. All three easily engineered at home with your cat and buttered toast. Where do really new and productive ideas come from? The answer you perceive is going to depend on who you’re talking to and their cosmology. Although this is clearly a time of great upheaval in Earth’s history, in many senses we’re reorganizing civilization to include new sets of important values in human consciousness. This wasn’t the first time someone noticed this. One of the next important human perspectives on the planet, monotheism, held that spirit didn’t even exist on the planet, and was only in the sky.
Now, fast forward to scientific method and complex technologies. Then in the last 170 years the world and universe became infinitesimally smaller because of global travel, modern electronic communications and space travel. So, take heart. Time Reborn: a new theory of time - a new view of the world. Godliness in the Known and the Unknowable: Alan Lightman on Science and Spirituality.
By Maria Popova “Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand… the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” “If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from,” Carl Sagan wrote in his timeless meditation on science and religion, “we will have failed.”
It’s a sentiment that dismisses in one fell Saganesque swoop both the blind dogmatism of religion and the vain certitude of science — a sentiment articulated by some of history’s greatest minds, from Einstein to Ada Lovelace to Isaac Asimov, all the way back to Galileo, and one that Sagan echoed a decade later, three months before his death, writing: “The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” Alan Lightman (Photograph courtesy of MIT) As a scientist, I firmly believe that atoms and molecules are real (even if mostly empty space) and exist independently of our minds. This Explains Everything: 192 Thinkers on the Most Elegant Theory of How the World Works.