Electric Universe

"The watcher’s eyes are likely to swivel forward in a sequence of stately turns as the screen’s pixel glows: each quarter-ounce mass of eyeball tugged by six flat muscles, in a glissando slide within the slippery fat lining the orbital cavity. The eye blinks, the widened pupils are in position, and the incoming electromagnetic waves roar in. Ripping through the thin layer of the cornea, they decelerate slightly, with their outermost edges forming a nearly flat plane as they travel inward, carrying the as-yet-undetected signal from the screen deep into the waiting human. The waves continue through the liquid of the aqueous humor and on to the gaping hole of the pupil. The human may have squinted to avoid the glare, but human reflexes work at the rate of slow thousandths of a second and are no match for these racing intruders. The pupil is crossed without obstruction. The stiff lens just below focuses the incoming waves even more, sending them into the inland sea of the jellylike vitreous humor deeper down in the eye. A very few of the incoming electric waves explode against the organic molecules in their way, but most simply whirl through those soft biological barriers and continue straight down, piercing the innermost wrapping of the eyeball, till they reach the end-point of their journey: the fragile, stalklike projection from the living brain known as the retina. And deep inside there, in the dark, barely slowed from their original 670 million mph, the waves splatter into the ancient, moist blood vessels and cell membranes, and something unexpected happens. An electric current switches on."

- David Bodanis, Electric Universe

A Pattern is a Message

"Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.

...

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water.
We are not stuff that abides, but patterns
that perpetuate themselves.
A pattern is a message...

...

...and may be transmitted as a message. How else do we employ our radio than to transmit patterns of sound, and our television set than to transmit patterns of light? It is amusing as well as instructive to consider what would happen if we were to transmit the whole pattern of the human body, of the human brain with its memories and cross connections, so that a hypothetical receiving instrument could re-embody these messages in appropriate matter."

- Norbert Wiener (1894 - 1964)
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Geometry of Music

 "Music is the arithmetic of sounds
as optics is the geometry of light."

- Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)

Secrets of the Universe

 "If you want to find the secrets of the universe,
think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.
...
In crystal, we have a pure evidence of
the existence of a formative life principle,
and though we cannot understand
the life of a crystal, it is
nonetheless a living being.
...
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena,
it will make more progress in one decade
than in all the previous centuries
of its existence."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Cymatic Urphänomen

"She [nature] is the sole artist, creating extreme contrast out of the simplest material, the greatest perfection seemingly without effort, the most definite clarity always veiled with a touch of softness. Each of her works has its own being, each of her phenomena its separate idea, and yet all create a single whole."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
 The Metamorphosis of Plants

"The notion of the Urphanomen is an invaluable illustration of the concrete nature of Goethe's way of thinking which dwells in the phenomenon. The primal phenomenon is not to be thought of as a generalization from observations, produced by abstracting from different instances something that is common to them. If this were the case, one would arrive at an abstracted unity with the dead quality of a lowest common denominator. For Goethe, the primal phenomenon was a concrete instance - what he called 'an instance worth a thousand, bearing all within itself.' In a moment of intuitive perception, the universal is seen within the particular, so that the particular instance is seen as a living manifestation of the universal. What is merely particular in one perspective is simultaneously universal in another way of seeing. In other words, the particular becomes symbolic of the universal."

- Henri Bortoft (1938 - 2012)

The Wholeness of Nature

Photographer's note. To help contextualize the relevance of the quotes, I need to point out that the image above contains three (out of a total of about 24) "snapshot" views of a single unfolding cymatic process. Not only does the triptych show only a tiny fraction of what my eye saw through the viewfinder, but the apparent sharpness of the images also belies the frenetic swirling and rhythmic thrashing of the water because my relatively slow 1/40th sec to 1/60th sec exposures smear over finely detailed patterns. But, while we may be unable to "see" the cymatic Urphanomen in its full splendor (and, even if we could, perhaps would understand as little as does Philip K Dick's "electric ant" after it tries seeing all of reality at once), "each of her works has its own being, each of her phenomena its separate idea, and yet all create a single whole." 

Perfect Imperfection

 "Wabi sabi is a state of the heart.
It is a deep in-breath and a slow exhale.
It is felt in a moment of real appreciation
—a perfect moment in an imperfect world."

- Beth Kempton (1977 - )
Wabi Sabi

As Long as Autumn Lasts

 "As long as autumn lasts,
I shall not have hands,
canvas and colors enough
to paint the beautiful
things I see.

- Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)