Nature's Tapestry

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns,
so that each small piece of her fabric reveals
the organization of the entire tapestry."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
The Character of Physical Law

Postscript/For readers of my blog who have an interest in physics. I will use this image as a backdrop to segue my way to linking to a truly remarkable history of physics that has recently been made fully open access under a Creative Commons license through the OAPEN Library and Taylor & Francis: Károly Simonyi's A Cultural History of Physics; Amazon and Google have Kindle and eBook versions available, respectively. Before getting to the book itself, what made me think of using this image (which I captured earlier today while on a walk in a local park)? For me, the leaf is a microcosm of nature's fabric, in which the whole is encoded in every part, as Feynman describes. Simonyi's book is essentially an attempt to unweave the tapestry of physics from its individual threads strewn across history. 

I first came across (and eagerly purchased) a hard copy of this book when it was published in the United States in 2012; it is still available for purchase for about $174 in USD. IMHO (as a Ph.D. physicist) this is by far the best single-volume technical and cultural history of physics, emphasizing the interplay between physics and the humanities, but also never shying away from the irreducibly technical nature of the material. It is a rare fortune to have free access to such a treasure! I urge any and all of my readers with even a passing interest in physics to download a copy to savor, read, and study. 

The book includes technical passages, quotations, biographical information, and color plates to enrich the reader's experience. It originated from Simonyi's lecture series, which he began after political circumstances in Hungary forced him out of his academic career. ​Over decades, he revised and expanded the work, which was published in multiple Hungarian and German editions.

Additional note about Simonyi's book. I resonate on a personal level with the story behind how this book came to be (before it was originally published), as described in the book's forward and preface. Much like my mom and I spent the better part of a decade putting together the biography of my dad, the artist (as I've discussed elsewhere on my blog), it was through the efforts of Károly's son, Charles Simonyi (who is also a luminary: Charles led the development of Microsoft's first application software, including early versions of Microsoft Office) that A Cultural History of Physics was published outside of Hungary; indeed, it was Károly Simonyi's long-held dream that this would eventually happen. After his dad passed away in 2001, Charles collaborated with A K Peters (now part of CRC Press) to oversee the translation and publication process. He ensured the English edition was carefully compared to the original Hungarian text to restore its conversational tone and authenticity, provided additional material and support for the project and to the publishers, translators, editors, and family members who contributed to the book's release in the United States. ​

Punctum

"Occasionally (but alas all too rarely) a 'detail' attracts me. I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value. This 'detail' is the punctum. [...] Very often the punctum is a 'detail,' i.e., a partial object.[which] is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole-and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). [...] A detail overwhelms the entirety of my reading; it is an intense mutation of my interest, a fulguration. By the mark of something, the photograph is no longer 'anything whatever.' This something has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void (it is of no importance that its referent is insignificant). A strange thing: the virtuous gesture which seizes upon 'docile' photographs (those invested by a simple studium) is an idle gesture (to leaf through, to glance quickly and desultorily, to linger, then to hurry on); on the contrary, the reading of the punctum (of the pricked photograph, so to speak) is at once brief and active [...] The studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not ... However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. [...] There is another (less Proustian) expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a 'detail,' it fills the whole picture. [...] Last thing about the punctum: whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.

- Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980)
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

An Invisible Influence

"The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colors or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behavior, but this does not prove that form and behavior are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere."

- Rupert Sheldrake (1942 - )

Mystery of Life

 "Beauty is the mystery of life.
It is not in the eye it is in the mind.
In our minds there is awareness of perfection ...
See perfection in every thing around
you.
...
All human knowledge is useless in art work.
Concepts, relationships, categories, classifications,
deductions are distractions of mind that we 
wish to hold free for inspiration.
...
Happiness is being on the beam with life
– to feel the pull of life."

- Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004)
Beauty Is the Mystery of Life

Absence/Presence

 "In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in
perennial Presence you see appearance.
Though the two are one and the same,
once they arise, they differ in name."

- David Hinton
The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius

Shadow and Light

"You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Equivalent

"There are no forms in nature.
Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes.
You as an artist create configurations out of chaos.
You make a formal statement where
there was none to begin with.
All art is a combination of an external
event and an internal event…
 I make a photograph to give
you the equivalent of what I felt.
Equivalent is still the best word."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

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 😊

Musical Dream

"We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands of millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint...a symphony...but we lack the ears to hear it.

...

What am I then? A dream? 

...

A dream will always triumph over reality,

once it is given a chance."

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

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

Fall, Leaves, Fall

"Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day."

- Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848)

New Zealand Zen #2

 

"I asked the leaf whether it was frightened because it was autumn and the other leaves were falling. The leaf told me "No. During the whole spring and summer I was completely alive. I worked hard to help nourish the tree, and now much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am also the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. So I don't worry at all. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, "I will see you again very soon." That day there was a wind blowing and, after a while, I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because as i floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I bowed my head, knowing that I have a lot to learn from that leaf."

- Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022)
Peace Is Every Step

Note. I saw these little Zen leaves at Queenstown Gardens in New Zealand. Of course, since New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere, our (i.e., northern VA's) spring is its autumn, we were treated to a spectacle of color and recently fallen leaves, not just at Queenstown, but throughout our stay on the southern island. The mostly 50/60ish degree weather was also a welcome respite from the looming 80/90ish weather we typically get where we live (and are now experiencing after we got back from our trip). Here are a few more leaves that caught my attention in Queenstown.

Holistic Morphology

"Since nothing can exist that does not fulfil the conditions which render its existence possible, the different parts each being must be co-ordinated in such a way as to render possible the existence of the being as a whole, not only in itself, but also in its relations with other beings, and the analysis of these conditions often leads to general laws which are as certain as those which are derived from calculation or from experiment."

- Georges Cuvier (1769 - 1832)

Leafless Tree

"If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top – ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong."

- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Nothing Exists in Itself

"To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."

- Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)

Moby-Dick

Dancing Rhythms

"Everything in the universe
has a rhythm,
everything
dances."

- Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014)

Celestial Hues

"I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's 'Dream') at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume."

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Swann’s Way

Enfolded Mysteries

"That we do not construct the external world to suit our own ends in the pursuit of science, but that vice versa the external world forces itself upon our recognition with its own elemental power, is a point which ought to be categorically asserted again and again.

...

From the fact that in studying the happenings of nature we strive to eliminate the contingent and accidental and to come fully to what is essential and necessary, it is clear that we always look for the basic thing behind the dependent thing, for what is absolute behind what is relative, for the reality behind the appearance and for what abides behind what is transitory.

...

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. Music and art are, to an extent, also attempts to solve or at least to express the mystery. But to my mind, the more we progress with either, the more we are brought into harmony with all nature itself.

...

If you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change."

- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Mystagogic Objects

"If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.

...

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

...

The universe is mystagogic."

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)
Fragments

Musical Imagination

"Perception is never purely in the present,

it has to draw on experience of the past;
We all have detailed memories of how
things have previously looked and sounded,
and these memories are recalled are
admixed with every new perception.

...

Music can also evoke worlds

very different from the personal,

remembered worlds of events,

people, places we have known.

...

Every act of perception, is
to some degree an act of creation, and
every act of memory is to some
degree an act of imagination."

- Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)
Musicophilia