Unified Theory

"The mind calls out for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is in an obvious sense "unified." The universe we find ourselves in is interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else. There is no way we can have two theories of nature covering different phenomena, as if one had nothing to do with the other. Any claim for a final theory must be a complete theory of nature. It must encompass all we know. Physics has survived a long time without that unified theory. The reason is that, as far as experiment is concerned, we have been able to divide the world into two realms. In the atomic realm, where quantum physics reigns, we can usually ignore gravity. We can treat space and time much as Newton did-as an unchanging background. The other realm is that of gravitation and cosmology. In that world, we can often ignore quantum phenomena. But this cannot be anything other than a temporary, provisional solution. To go beyond it is the first great unsolved problem in theoretical physics."

- Lee Smolin (1955 - )
 The Trouble with Physics

Holiness of the Mountain

"Phædrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.

He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn’t enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn’t ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take."

- Robert M. Pirsig (1928 - )

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Star-Stuff

"The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

Postscript. For those of you wondering what this is "actually" an image of, it is a tight crop - about 1 cm square - of a mildly edited (i.e., basic luminance adjustment, white balance, noise removal, and selective contrast and sharpening) image of an onyx marble stone drink coaster I sometimes use to rest a cup of coffee on while working. Perchance, I happened to catch a glimpse of this phantasmagoric, dreamlike vortex swirling atop a Himalayan mountaintop! I never cease to marvel at the beauty that literally surrounds us throughout our lives; nor at the timeless wisdom contained within the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus (purportedly, since no one has actually seen the original tablet):

"As above;
so below.
As within;
so without.
As with the universe;
so with the soul."

Informational Processes

"The greatest flaw of conventional physics is the acceptance of magic that has been forced upon all of us by our ignorance of the science of informational processes. This is particularly true with respect to Newtonian motion. We have no right to complain about the fact that nowhere in all of contemporary physics is there a commonsense model of motion. We haven’t had a way to know better. Newton swept this matter under the rug and Poincare and Einstein convinced us that we must believe that there is nothing under the rug. Intoxicated by all our fantastic accomplishments since Newton, it is human nature to avoid dwelling on dead-end issues. So, as smart as we all are, concepts of motion have remained in a state similar to the vitalistic theories of life that flourished in the past. 'Things move.' 'Mass has inertia.' 'Like begets like.' The idea that physics can get along without a fixed reference frame is utter nonsense from an informational viewpoint. It does not matter how brilliant and convenient the theory of relativity is or how many experiments validate its formulas. It is our collective misfortune that, until recently, no one has ever had any competent idea of what an informational point of view is."

- Edward Fredkin (1934 - )
Introduction to Digital Philosophy

Space

 "We do not know space.
We do not see it,
we do not hear it,
we do not feel it.
We are standing in
the middle of it,
we ourselves are
part of it,
but we know
nothing about it."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Mythology

"That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.

...

An entire mythology is
stored within our language."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951)

Temporality #3

 "No permanence is ours;
we are a wave
That flows to fit
whatever form it finds"

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
The Glass Bead Game

Postscript. One last "improvisation" on finding ways to render the ephemeral beauty that lives and dwells in flame (as described in Temporality #1) before I move on to other images and musings. The base images in this example are selected from the same set I used for my earlier examples (i.e., roughly 100 or so macros of flame, exposed between 1/2000th and 1/5000th sec). Also, just as in the last example (Temporality #2), each panel of the triptych is effectively an average (in terms of luminance) of three separate images. But this time, I loosened the constraint that individual photographs must retain their original orientation. I've written a short Mathematica program that automates the process of assembling triptychs of luminance-averaged layers, wherein each image either remains "as is" (i.e., in its original upright position), is reflected horizontally or vertically (as in a mirror), or is reflected both horizontally and vertically. Of course, this vastly increases the set of randomly assembled images. Assuming 100 "base" images - i.e., original flame macros - a 3 panel assembly consisting of 3 layered base images, each of which can assume any of four orientations, leads to over 50 million! combinations! But, while this makes it difficult, if not impossible, to sample even a small fraction of the "abstract triptych space," it can also yield striking images that would otherwise likely remain unknown. Of course, there are myriad associated aesthetic, conceptual, and philosophical depths that can be mined here (e.g., "What does the space of all possible 'creative' excursions from a starting set of images even look like?" - echoes of Stuart Kauffman's space of the "Adjacent Possible"), but I best end the discussion here, and let the lone exemplar above speak of what lives in that unimaginably larger universe of latent realities.