Matter were an emergent property of energy;
Chemistry were an emergent property of matter;
Biology were an emergent property of Chemistry;
Psychology were an emergent property of Biology;
Culture were an emergent property of Psychology;
Love were an emergent property of Culture;
Energy were an emergent property of Love?
Full circle.
200 posts down, 800 to go...
Showing posts with label Physics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Physics. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
807 - Other People's Dreams
One, possibly the biggest, of the issues I've been wrestling with is the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity - the experiences I have externally (relationships, meals, physical contact in a built or natural environment), and those, like dreams, that are internal.
At point of dozing, hauling myself awake again, I've just caught myself imagining a tractor, straining through mud. The image came into my mind unbidden, but I was party to its creation, as in the process of inspecting it I evolved the mud against which the tractor wheels were set. At the same time I sensed bodily the strain the tractor would be undergoing. A second of clarity, then I was out of the dream state and back in the external world.
Reflecting on this, it seems to me that I used the image to relay within myself useful information about my state of being snappily and provocatively. The incentive was there to pull awake before a bog of sleep sucked the tractor down. Acting in such a way as to move the tractor, and thus myself, free of a catnap, necessitated a role change from observer to driver of the machine, in the process of which the internal state of mind in which I was able to stand separate from tractor me passed, to be replaced by one where I and tractor me, combined, re-engaged with the external world.
If in dreams I am encountering and watching the interactions between aspects of myself that is more or less what the poets, philosophers and psychologists I have read say happens. The difference is that reading about other people's experiences is no substitute for my own. I needed to catch myself in the act in order to know the truth of it. The biggest question is whether the internal world I experience in dreams is in any way connected to the internal world of everyone and everything else. Whether we can dream through each other's borders, perhaps not all of the time, but some of it.
The question then would be whether the tractor had some form of objective reality, one that I was borrowing, sharing for a while, perhaps share even now. Climbing mountains in the Lake District there were times when I set myself physically against the local stone. I reached the summits because in some sense I was identical to them (if we were a different state, I'd not be able to match foot against rock - there'd be no action:reaction). I concluded that in each of us there is a bit of mountain. That's true subjectively, and also objectively. Who's to say whether the words are a statement of science, or poetry, or both?
At point of dozing, hauling myself awake again, I've just caught myself imagining a tractor, straining through mud. The image came into my mind unbidden, but I was party to its creation, as in the process of inspecting it I evolved the mud against which the tractor wheels were set. At the same time I sensed bodily the strain the tractor would be undergoing. A second of clarity, then I was out of the dream state and back in the external world.
Reflecting on this, it seems to me that I used the image to relay within myself useful information about my state of being snappily and provocatively. The incentive was there to pull awake before a bog of sleep sucked the tractor down. Acting in such a way as to move the tractor, and thus myself, free of a catnap, necessitated a role change from observer to driver of the machine, in the process of which the internal state of mind in which I was able to stand separate from tractor me passed, to be replaced by one where I and tractor me, combined, re-engaged with the external world.
If in dreams I am encountering and watching the interactions between aspects of myself that is more or less what the poets, philosophers and psychologists I have read say happens. The difference is that reading about other people's experiences is no substitute for my own. I needed to catch myself in the act in order to know the truth of it. The biggest question is whether the internal world I experience in dreams is in any way connected to the internal world of everyone and everything else. Whether we can dream through each other's borders, perhaps not all of the time, but some of it.
The question then would be whether the tractor had some form of objective reality, one that I was borrowing, sharing for a while, perhaps share even now. Climbing mountains in the Lake District there were times when I set myself physically against the local stone. I reached the summits because in some sense I was identical to them (if we were a different state, I'd not be able to match foot against rock - there'd be no action:reaction). I concluded that in each of us there is a bit of mountain. That's true subjectively, and also objectively. Who's to say whether the words are a statement of science, or poetry, or both?
Saturday, 13 June 2009
814 - 3.00am Revisited
Ideas contained in the post I wrote at 3.00 the other morning have been steeping in my brain. Drawing a simple equivalence between body and mass, spirit and energy, works. It is fascinating to consider biblical texts about bodies impacted by spirit as observations of the effects of energy on mass. Here's a burning bush. Here's a stick enlivened till it becomes a snake. Here's a dead man walking, and a mass of people, hearts leaping, tongues waggling, spilling onto a street to declare the marriage of spirit and mankind.
Einstein's observation that energy and mass are equivalent replicates the insistence of the gospels that Jesus is a consummation of God and man, so that we can conclude that what the gospels say, science says. And vice versa. "It's okay: we're neither dead meat or unlicensed energy. We're both in interplay. That's the way it should be, and that's the way it is."
The way it is is a pretty good definition of the kind of universe I'd expect a loving god to create. But it is also no more or less than science expects to observe.
And in effect, the shift of perspective represented by the gospels away from God=Spirit, Humanity=Flesh, to God=Spirit and Flesh, Humanity=Spirit and Flesh, is identical to the shift science is itself undergoing away from Humanity=Observer, Cosmos=Observed, to Humanity=Observer and Observed, Cosmos=Observer and Observed. And just to make clear that what I am not saying is that all scientists are just unwitting Christians, this shift of perspective is surely present in all cultures, and marks the point in maturity where a person accepts that his or her life is neither the exercise of will on flesh, or flesh on will, alone, but both exercising on each other. In other words, it's a function of growing up.
Einstein's observation that energy and mass are equivalent replicates the insistence of the gospels that Jesus is a consummation of God and man, so that we can conclude that what the gospels say, science says. And vice versa. "It's okay: we're neither dead meat or unlicensed energy. We're both in interplay. That's the way it should be, and that's the way it is."
The way it is is a pretty good definition of the kind of universe I'd expect a loving god to create. But it is also no more or less than science expects to observe.
And in effect, the shift of perspective represented by the gospels away from God=Spirit, Humanity=Flesh, to God=Spirit and Flesh, Humanity=Spirit and Flesh, is identical to the shift science is itself undergoing away from Humanity=Observer, Cosmos=Observed, to Humanity=Observer and Observed, Cosmos=Observer and Observed. And just to make clear that what I am not saying is that all scientists are just unwitting Christians, this shift of perspective is surely present in all cultures, and marks the point in maturity where a person accepts that his or her life is neither the exercise of will on flesh, or flesh on will, alone, but both exercising on each other. In other words, it's a function of growing up.
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
820 - E=(...and the rest)
Posing this question to myself:
What would it do to my theology if I drew a simple equivalence between the religious concepts of Body and Spirit, and the scientific concepts of mass and energy?
Not so much to work out complicated equations, but to admit the descriptive commonalities between the pairs, in the light of contemporary science?
Body and mass are both about substance (thinking of the creation of a clay Earth, and humanity out of that clay, for example), whereas Spirit and energy are about movement and change (thinking of the dynamism of motivated dust, either blown by the spirit 'where it will', or, stepping up a level, descriptive of those attributes of humankind that, in the opinion of biblical writers, separate us from the animals).
The difference between scientific and biblical accounts being that we have now framed the concept of evolution, allowing us to see that the progression from dust to animals, and animals to humanity, is one of complexity, a result of the interaction between mass and energy over the lifetime of the universe, rather than one of fundamental ontology.
My problem with the comparison? I suspect its simplicity, and that, as like as not, is a result of my upbringing in a society where religion and science have been held separate, both by scientists and church people. My fear is, I think, one of category error - a muddying of the waters, the risk of foolishness. Studies of fundamentalism point to disgust as its defining emotion, which is thought to have evolved to enable us to avoid the kind of contamination that results from tainted water and food sources, and might put our survival at risk. It's hard, in this case, to shake the feeling that I'm slipping into an ill-thought-out pseudoscience, neither fishy coelecanth nor trickster coyote in a crow mask.
But the links I've drawn are observational, and in that sense, uncontroversial. They are not making a metaphysical case for an untestable substance (spirit in its popular, separate-from-natural sense, such that one might say there is mass, and energy, and spirit as well), neither discounting the existence of a motivating force behind, or even in the nature of it all (Love as I have understood it/her/him [must return to this!]). All they do is challenge (whilst affirming) a dualism, the way Einstein challenged and affirmed it in his famous equation.
[Written in the wee small hours. There's something to be said about what one experiences in altered states of consciousness - such as dreams - and how these relate to tangible reality. My inclination is to say that describing the 'journeys' one takes in these states as being through the spirit world - as I have sometimes thought - is not absolutely helpful.]
What would it do to my theology if I drew a simple equivalence between the religious concepts of Body and Spirit, and the scientific concepts of mass and energy?
Not so much to work out complicated equations, but to admit the descriptive commonalities between the pairs, in the light of contemporary science?
Body and mass are both about substance (thinking of the creation of a clay Earth, and humanity out of that clay, for example), whereas Spirit and energy are about movement and change (thinking of the dynamism of motivated dust, either blown by the spirit 'where it will', or, stepping up a level, descriptive of those attributes of humankind that, in the opinion of biblical writers, separate us from the animals).
The difference between scientific and biblical accounts being that we have now framed the concept of evolution, allowing us to see that the progression from dust to animals, and animals to humanity, is one of complexity, a result of the interaction between mass and energy over the lifetime of the universe, rather than one of fundamental ontology.
My problem with the comparison? I suspect its simplicity, and that, as like as not, is a result of my upbringing in a society where religion and science have been held separate, both by scientists and church people. My fear is, I think, one of category error - a muddying of the waters, the risk of foolishness. Studies of fundamentalism point to disgust as its defining emotion, which is thought to have evolved to enable us to avoid the kind of contamination that results from tainted water and food sources, and might put our survival at risk. It's hard, in this case, to shake the feeling that I'm slipping into an ill-thought-out pseudoscience, neither fishy coelecanth nor trickster coyote in a crow mask.
But the links I've drawn are observational, and in that sense, uncontroversial. They are not making a metaphysical case for an untestable substance (spirit in its popular, separate-from-natural sense, such that one might say there is mass, and energy, and spirit as well), neither discounting the existence of a motivating force behind, or even in the nature of it all (Love as I have understood it/her/him [must return to this!]). All they do is challenge (whilst affirming) a dualism, the way Einstein challenged and affirmed it in his famous equation.
[Written in the wee small hours. There's something to be said about what one experiences in altered states of consciousness - such as dreams - and how these relate to tangible reality. My inclination is to say that describing the 'journeys' one takes in these states as being through the spirit world - as I have sometimes thought - is not absolutely helpful.]
Thursday, 26 March 2009
867 - Wild Money
I'm riffing on Jay Griffith's books, Pip Pip (which I've just started) and Wild (which was a beautiful and formative read a year back). Also a post I wrote near the start of the blog, and the pressure I place myself under, from time to time, to justify what I do in monetary terms - which is a question to do, I think, with identity.
In Pip Pip Jay writes about cultural perceptions of Time. She juxtaposes the abstract measurement of time favoured by the West, all clockwork and binary, with the innate sense of time we carry within us. The sense that is wild, and therefore of a piece with the rest of Nature, that monitors where we are in time by our hunger patterns, the impact of light on skin, the buzz and birdsong of other lives around us. Abstraction, she argues, seems thin by comparison.
Much of what she argues is concerned with the politics of cultural driving forces, and therefore that other abstraction, money. She quotes the 'miserable' Benjamin Franklin, who made the link explicitly: "time is money". And what I'm wondering is (and probably in her book she gets to this, but I've not read it yet), is there, therefore, such a thing as wild money?
I like my idea about money being a work battery, abstracted from the sheer sweaty bulk of a sack of produce (or the time taken to harvest it) to the point where it can be contained as a row of imprints on a magnetic strip, a line on a bank account. I also like the insight that all it requires to sustain the meaningfulness of that line is a massive social contract, in the same way that batteries store energy, but only if you keep them in optimum condition.
Spelling it out further: just as it takes energy to store electric energy in battery form, it takes energy to store kinetic energy in monetary form, so that all one does, by maintaining a viable financial system, is shift the burden of work from the harvester to the gold-miners, accountants, IT people, forgery prevention units, till manufacturers, wallet-makers, educators, nutritionists (because it takes wits to remember all those pin numbers) and yes, defense establishment, who perpetuate the systems of symbols that a successful financial transaction rides on. And if, in the end, all we are talking about is the reallocation of energy expenditure from one area to another, isn't it fair to say that money, as much as anything else in nature, is ultimately subject to the laws of conservation of energy?
I think this prepares the ground. If we have a spectrum of increasing abstraction, with graft at one end and financial currency at the other, and if we also recognise that neither end is more or less energy efficient than the other, we can begin to argue that exchange can legitimately occur anywhere along that line. We can proceed to argue that anything that involves the reciprocation of effort for effort is worthy of the term 'money', and that the imposition of one form of currency on a people is an act of cultural imperialism. We can start to celebrate the varieties of moneys available to us, just as Jay celebrates the varieties of time. Indeed we can start to talk meaningful of 'worth' across peoples, and even species, holistically.
I don't think this is to say, necessarily, that modernism 'got it wrong' - just that there is no reason to proceed as if modernism is the only right there can ever be. Richard Kearney, postmodern philosopher and Irish peace-broker, among other things, is right on this: Postmodernism, which gets a bad press in some quarters, is surely about the recognition that modernism is only one of many many cultural, indeed personal, stories open to us. It is therefore truly wild. So it would seem entirely reasonable if, just as postmodernism has led to the rediscovery of diversity and paganism at the heart of our cultural and religious systems, so too we should be rediscovering our place within a cosmically wild economy.
In Pip Pip Jay writes about cultural perceptions of Time. She juxtaposes the abstract measurement of time favoured by the West, all clockwork and binary, with the innate sense of time we carry within us. The sense that is wild, and therefore of a piece with the rest of Nature, that monitors where we are in time by our hunger patterns, the impact of light on skin, the buzz and birdsong of other lives around us. Abstraction, she argues, seems thin by comparison.
Much of what she argues is concerned with the politics of cultural driving forces, and therefore that other abstraction, money. She quotes the 'miserable' Benjamin Franklin, who made the link explicitly: "time is money". And what I'm wondering is (and probably in her book she gets to this, but I've not read it yet), is there, therefore, such a thing as wild money?
I like my idea about money being a work battery, abstracted from the sheer sweaty bulk of a sack of produce (or the time taken to harvest it) to the point where it can be contained as a row of imprints on a magnetic strip, a line on a bank account. I also like the insight that all it requires to sustain the meaningfulness of that line is a massive social contract, in the same way that batteries store energy, but only if you keep them in optimum condition.
Spelling it out further: just as it takes energy to store electric energy in battery form, it takes energy to store kinetic energy in monetary form, so that all one does, by maintaining a viable financial system, is shift the burden of work from the harvester to the gold-miners, accountants, IT people, forgery prevention units, till manufacturers, wallet-makers, educators, nutritionists (because it takes wits to remember all those pin numbers) and yes, defense establishment, who perpetuate the systems of symbols that a successful financial transaction rides on. And if, in the end, all we are talking about is the reallocation of energy expenditure from one area to another, isn't it fair to say that money, as much as anything else in nature, is ultimately subject to the laws of conservation of energy?
I think this prepares the ground. If we have a spectrum of increasing abstraction, with graft at one end and financial currency at the other, and if we also recognise that neither end is more or less energy efficient than the other, we can begin to argue that exchange can legitimately occur anywhere along that line. We can proceed to argue that anything that involves the reciprocation of effort for effort is worthy of the term 'money', and that the imposition of one form of currency on a people is an act of cultural imperialism. We can start to celebrate the varieties of moneys available to us, just as Jay celebrates the varieties of time. Indeed we can start to talk meaningful of 'worth' across peoples, and even species, holistically.
I don't think this is to say, necessarily, that modernism 'got it wrong' - just that there is no reason to proceed as if modernism is the only right there can ever be. Richard Kearney, postmodern philosopher and Irish peace-broker, among other things, is right on this: Postmodernism, which gets a bad press in some quarters, is surely about the recognition that modernism is only one of many many cultural, indeed personal, stories open to us. It is therefore truly wild. So it would seem entirely reasonable if, just as postmodernism has led to the rediscovery of diversity and paganism at the heart of our cultural and religious systems, so too we should be rediscovering our place within a cosmically wild economy.
Thursday, 11 December 2008
951 - The Whitley Bay Smoke Cell
This is the Welch sweet factory on Laburnum Avenue. A photo of it, circa 1925, can be found on the Tynetown website here.
I'd heard that John Welch was the father of Denise Welch, the actress, who attended Bygate School in Whitley Bay. So to check this out I started to look online for information about Welch's. And he wasn't her dad, though, assuming there has only ever been one sweet manufacturer called Welch in North Tyneside, his was a family firm.
And then, as I searched, I found a link to the Whitley Bay Smoke Cell, supplied by an American science firm called Sargent-Welch.
The catalogue invites you to "closely observe Brownian motion in smoke particles using this apparatus....A box with a plastic lid features flanges that allow easy attachment of a standard microscope".
I was intrigued. Why "Whitley Bay Smoke Cell"? I tried digging further.
Here is an experiment using the apparatus described in full. And here is Wikipedia's description of Brownian Motion.
But, online at least, amidst reams of school science catalogues, no mention of why the Whitley Bay Smoke Cell is called what it is. Any blogger out there care to do some digging and let me know, I'd be really grateful! One of you is a physicist, I know, and E, as this is my fiftieth post, you owe me that beer you promised!
[This post started off exploring 'Microtrends, Beats and Tipping Points". How a moment, captured in a photograph, spins into a story with lasting resonance. I've gone way off topic! I'll have to drag myself back tomorrow.]
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