Atoms It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists. And physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is the atom’s way of knowing about atoms. ~ George Wald I love this provocative string of statements: so playful and poetic. Excellent food for thought, for sure -- but are they actually true? George Wald was a biochemist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on …
Science & Spirit
The Setting Sun
Looking at the sun going down, the eyes of Copernicus had seen the world turning. Looking at a glass of still water, the eyes of Boltzmann saw atoms and molecules frenziedly moving. ~ Carlo Rovelli, from The Order Of Time Attended a lecture, last night, by Buddhist scholar/practitioner Anne C. Klein. The teaching was rooted in the deep poetic wisdom of Longchenpa's The Basic Space Of …
Practice Notes: Magic
Tip Of The Tongue I've been feeling curious, as of late, about the experience of not-quite-but-almost remembering something: of having it right on the tip of the tongue, so to speak. In these moments, there's the distinct sense of knowing that I know something--of almost palpably feeling the presence of this information, pressing up from who-knows-where--yet the final revelation of it has yet to …
Jung, Pauli, Pythagoras: Spherical Mind
For a really fun ride -- that's likely to blow your mind (in a good way!) -- have a look/listen at this talk by B. Alan Wallace, in which he playfully/seriously introduces his Special Theory of Ontological Relativity. Topics touched upon include: * the so-called "placebo effect" and pitfalls of being a flat-minder; * the correspondence between physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl …
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Interstitium: Hidden In Plain Sight
It's hard to deny that -- regardless of its occasional (or even frequent) illnesses and injuries -- the human body is a truly magnificent creation: All those moving parts, all those bones and muscles, organs and systems, arteries and veins, all those 37.2 trillion cells .... somehow working in concert, dancing together, maintaining a mostly harmonious relationship. It really is quite …
Plus-One
Geometry Consider (as pictured above) the event of a three-dimensional sphere passing through a two-dimensional plane. From the point of view of the plane, how this event unfolds is as the seemingly miraculous appearance of a dot, which then expands into a circle, whose diameter continues to expand for a while, and then -- for no apparent reason -- stops expanding and begins to contact, until it …