By: Kasey Rasmussen

Kasey Rasmussen — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:45:36 +0000

The saddest thing about it is that in the Y universe, they have a saying that goes; “The grass is always greener on our side of the fence.”

By: charlie finch

charlie finch — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:20:54 +0000

For 30 years I have possessed two books, “Principles of Cosmology and Gravitation” and “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity” by Max Born, which I have, as with “Ulysses”, tried to make it all the way through and repeatedly failed. If you examine NASA’s video release of Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight, you will see, in the control room, a series of incomprehensible, fastchanging numbers, which algorithmically work out the trajectories of this simple flight into the ether. As eager as any humanist to find the eternal grail of meaning in physics, I stumble blindly through the cave of numbers. As artfully as many, especially Ron Rosenbaum, try to translate these equations into philosophy, one cannot help conclude that it is a failed game, just as exotic formulations such as “string theory”, “quasars”, “anti-matter”, “black holes” and other bric-a-brac are the lame efforts of theoretical physicists to mollify us humanist idiots. C.P. Snow formulated this not-so-grand divide between two intellectual subsets mutually exclusive of each other, fifty years ago. We are talking past each other, and Bohr’s notion of the observer fundamentally changing the position of the observed is a cruel and malicious metaphor for this irrevocable split. To think in numbers is to exclude poetry and irony; to think in words is to deny reality. The humanist marvels that numerated universes approaching infinity can be extrapolated from matter the size of a period; the mathematician conceals the limits of his own tools as a fixed place of observation as the sands of poetry shift at the speed of light under his feet. The dilemna of two intellectual crowds babbling past each other can be summarized by one question, “What is Time?” Encapsulating time in the too-neat conceit of spacetime ignores the prison of causality which is the time humans are condemned to experience. No sequence of numbers turned in on itself can erase it. To posit other universes or empty spaces filled with invisible anti-matter, a necessary constant so that the physicist’s equations will not evaporate into meaningless is fanciful speculation that no poet would attempt: a ridiculous breach of logic even for the dreamer! When we humanists buy into the superiority of the community of physics theory, we are trading in our souls for a stack of equations.

By: charlie finch

charlie finch — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:55:04 +0000

Action at a distance is implied by all our interpretations of reality from viewing starlight at the end of a million light years to the effect of environments on the development of species in Darwin. The ancients attributed this to the ether, Newton to gravity itself, Einstein to the curvature of spacetime. The interchangeability of waves and particles are the expression of the elasticity of this distance, how it functions. To insist on fixedness (a static plinth of measurement) is unnecessary: all reality leaves a permanent imprint like the steps of the tortoise in Zeno’s Paradox. It ravels and unravels itself like a great ribbon, one universe, infinite shadows.

Comments on: After Obama/Mccain Could We Take Up Einstein/Bohr

By: Kasey Rasmussen

By: charlie finch

By: charlie finch