Lines of Force

"The view which I am so bold to put forth considers,
therefore, radiation as a kind of species of vibration in
the lines of force which are known to connect
particles and also masses of matter together.
It endeavors to dismiss the aether,
but not the vibration.
...

I do not perceive in any part of space, whether
(to use the common phrase) vacant or filled with matter,
anything but forces and the lines in which they are exerted.

...

The aether is assumed as pervading all bodies as
well as space: in the view now set forth, it is the
forces of the atomic centres which pervade
(and make) all bodies, and
also penetrate all space."

- Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867)
Thoughts on Ray Vibrations

Whirling Energy

"We are whirling through endless space, with and inconceivable speed, all around everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere there is energy. There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly. Then, with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides. The mere contemplation of these magnificent possibilities expand our minds, strengthens our hopes and fills our hearts with supreme delight.

...

Nature has stored up in the universe infinite energy. The eternal recipient and transmitter of this infinite energy is the ether. The recognition of the existence of ether, and of the functions it performs, is one of the most important results of modern scientific research. The mere abandoning of the idea of action at a distance, the assumption of a medium pervading all space and connecting all gross matter, has freed the minds of thinkers of an ever present doubt, and, by opening a new horizon - new and unforeseen possibilities - has given fresh interest to phenomena with which we are familiar of old."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Oneiric Spirits

"We [Hidatsas] believed, indeed, that this world and everything in it was alive and had spirits; and our faith in these spirits and our worship of them made our religion.

My father explained this to me. ‘All things in this world,’ he said, ‘have souls, or spirits. The sky has a spirit; the clouds have spirits; the sun and moon have spirits; so have animals, trees, grass, water, stones, everything. These spirits are our gods; and we pray to them and give them offerings, that they may help us in our need.’

...

Any one could pray to the spirits, receiving answer usually in a dream. Indeed, all dreams were thought to be from the spirits; and for this reason they were always heeded, especially those that came by fasting and suffering. Sometimes a man fasted and tortured himself until he fell into a kind of dream while yet awake; we called this a vision.

A man whom the gods helped and visited in dreams, was said to have mystery power; and one who had much mystery power, we called a mystery man, or medicine man. Almost every one received dreams from the spirits at some time; but a medicine man received them more often than others.

...

Believing as he did that the world was full of spirits, every Indian hoped that one of them would come to him and be his protector, especially in war. When a lad became about seventeen years of age, his parents would say, ‘You are now old enough to go to war; but you should first go out and find your god!’ They meant by this, that he should not risk his life in battle until he had a protecting spirit.

Finding one’s god was not an easy task. The lad painted his body with white clay, as if in mourning, and went out among the hills, upon some bluff, where he could be seen of the gods; and for days, with neither food nor drink, and often torturing himself, he cried to the gods to pity him and come to him. His sufferings at last brought on delirium, so that he dreamed, or saw a vision. Whatever he saw in this vision was his god, come to pledge him protection. Usually this god was a bird or beast; or it might be the spirit of some one dead; the bird or beast was not a flesh-and-blood animal, but a spirit."

- Edward Goodbird (1869 -1938)
Goodbird the Indian: His Story

Reflective Memory

"But what of the memory of mental acts:
do these also fall under the imaging faculty?

If every mental act is accompanied by an image we may well believe that this image, fixed and like a picture of the thought, would explain how we remember the object of knowledge once entertained. But if there is no such necessary image, another solution must be sought. Perhaps memory would be the reception, into the image-making faculty, of the Reason-Principle which accompanies the mental conception: this mental conception—an indivisible thing, and one that never rises to the exterior of the consciousness—lies unknown below; the Reason-Principle—the revealer, the bridge between the concept and the image-taking faculty—exhibits the concept as in a mirror; the apprehension by the image-taking faculty would thus constitute the enduring presence of the concept, would be our memory of it.

This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this image-making faculty does its intellection become a human perception: intellection is one thing, the perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also sense-perceptions."

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 - 270 AD)
The Enneads

Circumscribed Energy

"Form is simply force circumscribed, condensed.
Force is simply form indefinite, diffused.
...

Whether we consider coarser matter which can be weighed and felt, or that more subtle, lively, and active matter we call ether, or again the spiritual principle, which is energy simple, we have then always before us only harmonious collections of forces, symmetrical activities, ordered powers, more or less conscious of the part they play in the infinite concert for which the Creator has composed the glorious music. Let us set aside for a moment the variety of groupings which determine the succession and the manifold aspects of these forces, and there will remain, as constituent principles of the web of the universe, as irreducible and primordial ingredients of the world, nothing but dynamic points, nothing but monads.

The term of the rigorous analysis of phenomena is, definitively, the conception of an infinity of centers of similar and unextended forces, of energies without forms, simple and eternal. We ask what these forces are, and we assert in answer that it is impossible to distinguish them from motion. Force may be conceived, but not shaped to the fancy. The clearest and truest thing we can say of it is, that it is an energy analogous to that whose constant and undeniable presence we feel dwelling in our deepest selves."

- Fernand Papillon (1847 - 1874)
The Constitution of Matter

Starry Space

"Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as ‘the infinitely little;’ no blade of grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere.

But the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged center of a very limited universe, was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of starry space, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, which the telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes.

For if Bruno must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of the earth - the infinitely little; he looked back, gratefully, to another daring mind, which had already put the earth into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens. If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds innumerable.

...

And his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that larger survey, making the utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in that endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new conditions. The immovable earth beneath one’s feet! one almost felt the movement, the respiration of God in it. And yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, the prospect, the music, the music of the spheres! - he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even."

- Walter Pater (1839 - 1894)
Giordano Bruno

Fluid Becoming

“The body pre-eminently—that which we are most justified in isolating within the continuity of matter, because it constitutes a relatively closed system—is the living body; it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others within the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real."

- Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)
Creative Evolution

Overtones and Vibrations

"String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string. One of the basic things about a string is that it can vibrate in many different shapes or forms, which gives music its beauty. If we listen to a tuning fork, it sounds harsh to the human ear. And that’s because you hear a pure tone rather than the higher overtones that you get from a piano or violin that give music its richness and beauty.

So in the case of one of these strings it can oscillate in many different forms - analogously to the overtones of a piano string. And those different forms of vibration are interpreted as different elementary particles: quarks, electrons, photons. All are different forms of vibration of the same basic string. Unity of the different forces and particles is achieved because they all come from different kinds of vibrations of the same basic string."

- Edward Whitten (1951 - )

Universal Consciousness

"A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the keynote, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense material Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of Matter hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the works of a vast occult Intelligence.
...
They are the seven colours of the light of the divine consciousness, the seven rays of the Infinite, and by them the Spirit has filled in on the canvas of his self-existence conceptually extended, woven of the objective warp of Space and the subjective woof of Time, the myriad wonders of his selfcreation great, simple, symmetrical in its primal laws and vast framings, infinitely curious and intricate in its variety of forms and actions and the complexities of relation and mutual effect of all upon each and each upon all. These are the seven Words of the ancient sages; by them have been created and in the light of their meaning are worked out and have to be interpreted the developed and developing harmonies of the world we know and the worlds behind of which we have only an indirect knowledge. The Light, the Sound is one; their action is sevenfold."

- Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950)
The Life Divine

Mystery of the Infinite

"When the King conceived ordaining

He engraved engravings in the luster on high.
A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed
within the Concealed of the Concealed
from the mystery of the Infinite,
a cluster of vapor in formlessness
set in a ring, not white,
not black, not red, not green, no color at all.
As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors.
Deep within the spark gushed a flow
imbuing colors below,
concealed within the concealed of the mystery of the Infinite.
The flow broke through and did not break through its aura.
It was not known at all until,
under the impact of breaking through,
one high and hidden point shone.
Beyond that point, nothing is known."

- "Creation of Elohim," Zohar

Crumpled Manifolds

"The whole process of applying this complex geometric transformation to the input data can be visualized in 3D by imagining a person trying to uncrumple a paper ball: the crumpled paper ball is the manifold of the input data that the model starts with. Each movement operated by the person on the paper ball is similar to a simple geometric transformation operated by one layer. The full uncrumpling gesture sequence is the complex transformation of the entire model. Deep learning models are mathematical machines for uncrumpling complicated manifolds of high-dimensional data. [...] Our own understanding of images, sounds, and language, is grounded in our sensorimotor experience as humans -as embodied earthly creatures. Machine learning models have no access to such experiences and thus cannot 'understand' their inputs in any human-relatable way [...] this mapping is just a simplistic sketch of the original model in our minds, the one developed from our experience as embodied agents—it is like a dim image in a mirror."

- François Chollet (1989 - )

Seed Unfolding

"The One, perfect in seeking nothing, possessing nothing and needing nothing, overflows and creates a new reality by its superabundance. [...] The process is like the unfolding of a seed, moving from simple origin to termination in the world of sense, the prior always remaining in its place, while begetting its successor from a store of indescribable power - power that must not halt within the higher realm [...] but continue to expand until the universe of things reaches the limit of its possibility, lavishing its vast resources on all its creatures, intolerant that any one should have no share in it. Nothing is debarred from participation in the Good, to the extent of its receptivity. "

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)
The Enneads

Materializing Reverie

"My pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, the water that leads life towards the next village...Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green. ...The stream doesn’t have to be ours; the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring. [...] Water becomes heavier, darker, deeper; it becomes matter. And it is then that materializing reverie, uniting dreams of water with less mobile, more sensual matter, finds the full weight of its repose."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter 

Entangled Paths

 "At quite uncertain times and places,

The atoms left their heavenly path,

And by fortuitous embraces,

Engendered all that being hath.

And though they seem to cling together,

And form 'associations' here,

Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,

And through the depths of space career."

- James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879)

Everything is Flowing

"...everything is flowing—going somewhere,
animals and so-called lifeless
rocks as well as water."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

Hieroglyphic Apparitions

 "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Nature

Zen Compositions

"The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

...

But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.

...

Trying not to grasp is the same thing as to grasp since it's motivation is the same, my urgent desire to save my self from a difficulty. I can not get rid of this desire since it is one and the same desire as the desire to get rid of it."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Postscript. My last post explained what my recent series of "autumnal abstracts" has to do with quantum mechanics. This post is meant to convey the complementary explanation of what my autumnal abstracts have to do with Zen. Leaving aside the unintentional recursivity of the word "complementary" (since the concept has a formal meaning in quantum mechanics), here is an alternative summary of how using knee-high waterproof boots to get "up close and personal" to patterns of leaves in the creek - ostensibly to get better compositions - failed miserably. As I explained in the last post, no matter how slowly I approached a clump of leaves, invariably, the ripples induced in the water by my boots would dislodge one or more of the key elements of whatever composition I saw in my mind's eye. By the time I stood over the spot where I saw the original pattern, most of the leaves were gone. Here is where the Zen side of story begins...

The first day I donned my boots, it took me about a dozen attempts to learn how to "minimally disturb" whatever it was that caught my eye; to emphasize, not one, two or a few tries, but an embarrassingly many attempts. It was vastly harder than I anticipated. At some point - after my 3rd or 4th failure - I dejectedly poked my tripod into the water, angry with myself at being unable to do such a "simple” thing. So there I stood, knee-deep in water, immersed in a euphonious Siren call of delicately beautiful patterns I so wished to capture but which vanished the instant I approached them, when the absurdity of it all finally struck me like a Zen-master's cane! I doubled over with laughter, as multiple versions of Alan Watt's "the harder we try to catch hold of the moment..." aphorisms leapt to mind.

Adding to this genuinely Zen-like moment was the fact that two joggers just happened to be close enough to see and hear me. They both turned in unison to see what the source of the absurd laughter was. Without breaking stride or uttering a word, they just stared at what from their perspective must have seemed a "not quite all there and possibly drunk photographer" and ran off into the woods. I laughed for a few more moments, resolved to remember this little creek's Zen lesson, and resumed searching for interesting and evanescent patterns.

So, are my (still ongoing) "autumnal abstracts" a lesson in quantum mechanics? in Zen? or something else entirely? In the end, it's all just a matter of perspective 😊

Quantum Compositions

"Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object ... Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.

...

Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means at our disposal. In this way quantum theory reminds us, as Bohr has put it, of the old wisdom that when searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both players and spectators. It is understandable that in our scientific relation to nature our own activity becomes very important when we have to deal with parts of nature into which we can penetrate only by using the most elaborate tools.

...

Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer … we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal."

- Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976)

Postscript. At the end of my last post, I promised to explain what my recent series of "autumnal abstracts" (which I started in mid September) has to do with quantum mechanics (yes, quantum mechanics). The simplest explanation (sure to induce a mild groan in readers) is that since my left-brain "day job" is anchored on my being a physicist, physics in general, and quantum mechanics in particular, is never far from my thoughts 😉 But no, that's not the full explanation. The real connection is part whimsy and part serious (the serious part is expertly summarized by one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg, above). As I explained in my previous post, I've recently been "rewarding" myself after long work days by driving to a local trail that runs along a shallow leaf-strewn creek, and spend however much time remains before the sun goes down searching for intimate compositions of leaves, rocks, and reflections within the water.

For my first few outings, I had no issues. I would park myself on the little bridge I need to cross to get to the trail from where I leave my car, set up a tripod, and use a telephoto zoom to isolate patterns of interest. Here is a taste of what I see from the bridge:

Of course, I didn't limit myself to just standing on the bridge. I prowled around the area surrounding the bridge, and explored different perspectives made accessible by positioning myself somewhere along the left and right banks of the creek. And, indeed, in this way, I usually walked away with at least few decent keepers. But I also noticed that the best compositions (at least in my mind's eye) were always just beyond my reach. I needed to get into the water! And that's where quantum mechanics comes in ...

The solution was simple enough. I put on a pair of knee-high waterproof boots, tucked in my pants, grabbed a waterproof (well, water resistant) tripod, and started composing "up close and personal" in the water; or so I thought. I immediately ran into an unexpected "quantum mechanics"-like problem: after seeing some pattern of interest (say, some combination of leaves, rocks and reflections), I would naturally walk over to get a better look and see where to best anchor my tripod. But no matter how slowly I approached, invariably, the ripples induced in the water by my boots would dislodge one or more of the key elements of whatever pattern caught my eye. By the time I got to the original composition, the pattern was either gone and/or replaced by another only less than half as good. This happened over and over again, no matter how slowly - ever, so slooooowly - I walked toward some entangled leaves. A text-book (albeit, whimsical) example of the well-known, but no less mysterious, quantum mechanical "observer effect." The analogy actually runs a bit deeper: while observer-induced perturbations also happen in "classical" physics, the difference is that quantum mechanics does not allow the observer to reconstruct what the "true state of the system" was after observing it; the act of observing the state irretrievably scrambles it. Just as, in my case, "seeing and moving toward a" pattern of leaves irretrievably destroys it. (BTW, at the risk of overloading most readers of a photography blog, it is worth mentioning that entanglement - a subtle nod to which appeared in the phrase "entangled leaves" - is another inherently quantum behavior that is best left for a future post) 😊

Sensations In The Mind

"They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or original qualities do exist without the mind in unthinking substances, do at the same time acknowledge that colors, sounds, heat cold, and suchlike secondary qualities, do not--which they tell us are sensations existing in the mind alone, that depend on and are occasioned by the different size, texture, and motion of the minute particles of matter. This they take for an undoubted truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now, if it be certain that those original qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind. But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moving, but I must withal give it some color or other sensible quality which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible qualities are, there must these be also, to wit, in the mind and nowhere else."

- George Berkeley (1685-1753)
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

Ineffable Flow

"Water flows, clouds move,
never stopping or settling down.
When the wind blows, the leaves fall.
Like the fish swimming
or the birds flying,
I walk and walk,
going on and on."

- Santōka Taneda (1882 - 1940)