cosmos

Worlds within worlds micro / macro / cosmos

Human affairs appear insignificant when set against the awesome depth of the night sky. Yet the cosmic drama unfolding in the birth and death of stars and the distant evolution of countless worlds is deeply rooted within us.

Take a virtual tour round the known universe The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010. Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/univ…

Does the universe have hidden dimensions?

This little video asks some simple but revealing questions about our perceived world of three dimensions.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/does-the-universe-have-hidden-dimensions/p08ybyvp?autoplay=true

micro cosmos

I remember experiencing a burst of light within on reading about the subtle exchange of energy at the synaptic level of the brain. With regard to the physics of consciousness, how extraordinary to realise that our thought processes are subject to quantum fluctuations that move in and out of time at the most intimate level of our physical being. Having talked about it with friends and eager to know more about the physics involved, I eventually had the opportunity to ask the Pro’ Bohm for more clarity on the matter. He informed me that the instrumentation had not yet been developed to fully explore the phenomena. Quantum effects of this kind are seen to permeate everything and I wondered how knowledge of it would impact perception as a whole.

Some might say micro phenomena of this nature, which have been around a long time are of little significance to living on the everyday level, just like the relativity of space/time. If we dismiss such things as having only marginal importance, we are likely to accept a self limiting view of reality and cut ourselves off from the unfolding mystery and beauty of cosmos at the very core of our being.

How synapses work

For those interested to know how synapses work on the biological level, the Salk Institute have published this simulation of the process that takes pace in a rats brain.

Advances in the field of physics and biology have revealed a universe of sublime beauty and complexity, which appears ever more mysterious the deeper scientific inquiry is able to penetrate. In recent decades developments in understanding the structure and dynamics of the physical universe has led a few scientists, notably physicists, to fully acknowledge the significance of anomalous aspects present in the process of ‘objective’ observation and analysis. Acknowledging a natural limit to a strictly objective methodology has revitalised a lost element in scientific inquiry akin to natural philosophy.

William Blake’s painting ‘Isaac Newton’ in which the artist depicts the famous mathematician at work with his dividers, encapsulates his fiery critique of the European Enlightenment. Blake passionately resisted the notion that everything could be subjected to reason and ‘scientifically’ reduced to a well reasoned set of component parts. Born in 1757 Blake had first hand experience of the social upheavals of the industrial revolution and its rapid expansion into the nineteenth century. He raged like a prophet against the dawn of absolutism in science which he regarded as equally pernicious as state sponsored religion. His writings still shine with penetrating insights which lay bare a deadly determinism that had taken root in the human psyche.

‘He who sees the infinite in all things sees God’

‘He who sees the ratio only sees himself only’

Compare this with the following:

‘We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own’.

Arthur Eddington Space, Time and Gravitation. 1920.

This statement by an eminent astrophysicist reflects, albeit poetically, how science and in particular physics had uncovered significant anomalies inherent in the observer/observed matrix of the objective mind.

With hindsight we can now see how the mechanistic frame of mind that was to dominate the industrialized west in the nineteenth century was based self limiting concepts of mind and nature and what it means to be wholly human. This was clearly understood in a wonderful essay written a whole century and two world wars after Blake by Werner Heisenberg, one of the major contributors to the revolution in modern physics. The essay entitled * ‘The Physicist’s Concept of Nature, published in 1958 examines the truth and value of scientific inquiry from the classical observer / observed point of view in the light of more recent interactive relationship with nature based on a clear recognition of what can be said about nature within the limits of both what is observable and implied by the methodology..

*A PDF of this essay is avaliable online at :

https://pedropeixotoferreira.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/heisenberg-werner-the-physicists.pdf

An interview with Pro’ David Bohm (1917-1992) Anihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI66ZglzcO0