Mid-morning. The house is quiet but for music for the three dogs you are not too fond of. Everyone else has gone shopping up at Polaris Shopping Center. Carol brought you a donut and a half from Schneider’s. The girls went up for coffee and donut treats earlier. At eleven-thirty you are going to Pasquales Italian for lunch and a Graeter’s ice cream across the street in old Uptown Westerville. Then, you are off to the Dayton airport, and from there home.o
Holy crap! No more cream filled donut for breakfast, BS shot up to 202 the highest ever. Personal pizza for lunch, 700 calories and that will be pretty much it for the day.
You dropped off Linda and Jean at Dayton and stopped at Tylersville and Cox for a Graeter’s before crossing the street to VOA Centre and Carter’s where Carol is shopping presently.
A couple of days ago I read two ‘articles’ in Edge. The first focuses on cells and how we came about:
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“. . . For more than a billion years, the only life on this planet consisted of bacterial cells, which, lacking nuclei, are called prokaryotes, or prokaryotic cells. They looked very much alike, and from the human-centered vantage point seem boring. However, bacteria are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement — indeed, all interesting features of life except perhaps speech! They're still with us in large diversity and numbers. They still rule Earth. At some point, a new more complex kind of cell appeared on the scene, the eukaryotic cell, of which plant and animal bodies are composed. These cells contain certain organelles, including nuclei. Eukaryotic cells with an individuated nucleus are the building blocks of all familiar large forms of life. How did that evolution revolution occur? How did the eukaryotic cell appear? Probably it was an invasion of predators, at the outset. It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another — seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving large numbers of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.
One kind of evidence in favor of symbiogenesis in cell origins is mitochondria, the organelles inside most eukaryotic cells, which have their own separate DNA. In addition to the nuclear DNA, which is the human genome, each of us also has mitochondrial DNA. Our mitochondria, a completely different lineage, are inherited only from our mothers. None of our mitochondrial DNA comes from our fathers. Thus, in every fungus, animal, or plant (and in most protoctists), at least two distinct genealogies exist side by side. That, in itself, is a clue that at some point these organelles were distinct microorganisms that joined forces.”
From The Third Culture: Lynn Margulis 1938-2011; “Gaia Is A Tough Bitch”, Edge.org – 23 November 2011
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The second ‘article’ of interest in Edge is on the larger universe. I enjoyed both because my thinking recently has been from the rather small in ‘physics’ – the soul. The cells are small too as far as our physical humanity is encased so I liked this direction. And, to go from the small to the extremely large:
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. . . A lot of amazing things have to happen for the universe to not be incredibly small, and I can go into that.
One of the things that has to happen is that the energy of empty space has to be very, very small for the universe to be large, and in fact, just by looking out the window and seeing that you can see a few miles out, it's an experiment that already tells you that the energy of empty space is a ridiculously small number, 0.000 and then dozens of zeros and then a 1. Just by looking out the window you learn that.
The funny thing is that when you calculate what the energy of empty space should be using theories you have available, really well-tested stuff that's been tested in accelerators, like particle theory, the standard model, things that we know work, you use that to estimate the energy of empty space, and you can't calculate it exactly on the dot. But you can calculate what the size of different contributions is, and they're absolutely huge. They should be much larger than what you already know it can possibly be, again, not just by factor of 10 or 100, but by a factor of billions, of billions of billions of billions.
This requires an explanation. It's only one of the things that has to go right for the universe to become as large as we see it, but it is one of the most mysterious properties that turned out to be right for the universe to become large, but it needs an explanation.
Funnily enough, because we knew that that number had to be so small, that is the energy of empty space, the weight of empty space, had to be so small, it became the lore within at least a large part of the physics community that it was probably zero for some unknown reason. And one day we'd wake up and discover why it's exactly zero. But instead, one day in '98 we woke up and discovered that it's non-zero. One day we woke up in '98 and we discovered that cosmologists had done some experiments that looked at how fast the universe has been accelerating at different stages of its life, and they discovered that the universe had started to accelerate its expansion, when we used to think that what it would do is explode at the Big Bang, and then kind of get slower and slower in the way that galaxies expand away from each other. Instead, it's like you went off the brakes and stepped on the gas pedal a few billion years ago; the universe is accelerating. That's exactly what a universe does if the energy of empty space is non-zero and positive, and you could look at how fast its acceleration is happening, and deduce the actual value of this number. In the last 13 years a lot of independent observations have come together to corroborate this conclusion.
It's still true that the main thing that we needed to explain is why the cosmological constant, or the energy of empty space, isn't huge. But now we also know that the explanation was definitely not going to be that for some symmetry reason that number is exactly zero. And so we needed an explanation that would tell us why that number is not huge, but also not exactly zero.
The amazing thing is that string theory, which wasn't invented for this purpose, managed to provide such an explanation, and in my mind this is the first serious contact between observation, experiment on the one side, and string theory on the other. It was always interesting to have a consistent theory of quantum gravity, it's very hard to write that down in the first place, but it turned out that string theory has exactly the kind of ingredients that make it possible to explain why the energy of empty space has this bizarre, very small, but non-zero value. . . .
. . . I think we're ready for Oprah, almost, and I think that's a question where we're going to come full circle, we're going to learn something about the really deep questions, about what is the universe like on the largest scales, how does quantum gravity work in cosmology? I don't think we can fully solve this measure problem without getting to those questions, but at the same time, the measure problem allows us a very specific way in. It's a very concrete problem. If you have a proposal, you can test it, you can rule it out, or you can keep testing it if it still works, and by looking at what works, by looking at what doesn't conflict with observation, by looking at what makes predictions that seem to be in agreement with what we see, we're actually learning something about the structure of quantum gravity.
So I think that it's currently a very fruitful direction. It's a hard problem, because you don't have a lot to go by. It's not like it's an incremental, tiny little step. Conceptually it's a very new and difficult problem. But at the same time it's not that hard to state, and it's remarkably difficult to come up with simple guesses for how to solve it that you can't immediately rule out. And so we're at least in the lucky situation that there's a pretty fast filter. You don't have a lot of proposals out there that have even a chance of working.
The thing that's really amazing, at least to me, is in the beginning we all came from different directions at this problem, we all had our different prejudices. Andrei Linde had some ideas, Alan Guth had some ideas, Alex Vilenkin had some ideas. I thought I was coming in with this radically new idea that we shouldn't think of the universe as existing on this global scale that no one observer can actually see, that it's actually important to think about what can happen in the causally connected region to one observer. What can you do in any experiment that doesn't actually conflict with the laws of physics and require superluminal propagation. We have to ask questions in a way that conform to the laws of physics if we want to get sensible answers.
I thought, okay, I'm going to try this, this is completely different from what these other guys are doing, and it's motivated by the holographic principle that I talked about earlier. I was getting pretty excited because this proposal did not run into immediate catastrophic problems like a lot of other simple proposals did. When you go into the details it spit out answers that were really in much better agreement with the data than what we had had previously from other proposals. And I still thought that I was being original.
But then we discovered, and actually my student I-Shend Yang played a big role in this discovery, that there is a duality, an equivalence of sorts, and a very precise one between this global way of looking at the universe that most cosmologists had favored, and what we thought was our radical new local causal connected way of thinking about it. In a particular way of slicing up the universe in this global picture in a way that's again motivated by a different aspect of the holographic principle, we found that we kept getting answers that looked exactly identical to what we were getting from our causal patch proposal. For a while we thought, okay, this is some sort of approximate, accidental equivalence, and if we asked detailed enough questions we're going to see a difference, and instead what we discovered was a proof of equivalence, that these two things are exactly the same way of calculating probabilities, even though they're based on what mentally seemed like totally different ways of thinking about the universe.
That doesn't mean that we're on the right track. Both of these proposals could be wrong. Just because they're equivalent doesn't mean they're right. But a lot of things have now happened that didn't have to happen, a lot of things have happened that give us some confidence that we're on to something, and at the same time we're learning something about how to think about the universe on the larger scales.
From: “Thinking About the Universe on Larger Scales”, by Raphael Bousso, Edge.org -- 23 November 2011
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The selections show a representation of considerations. Nothing deals with an imaginary point where “you can consciously exist” and see three universes in the star-like distance and then move inward through one of the universes to an individual soul which is what the book is about to suggest Merlyn can indeed do. Richard Graystone is the ‘medium’ if you will that allows this ‘conditional’; well, Graystone and myself, the Amorella.
In a sense, this is a modern adaption of the Great Chain of Being:
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The Great Chain of Being
(Borrowed from "The Renaissance" at CUNY: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/ren.html)
Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended. ("Hierarchical" refers to an order based on a series of higher and lower, strictly ranked gradations.) An object's "place" depended on the relative proportion of "spirit" and "matter" it contained--the less "spirit" and the more "matter," the lower down it stood. At the bottom, for example, stood various types of inanimate objects, such as metals, stones, and the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Higher up were various members of the vegetative class, like trees and flowers. Then came animals; then humans; and then angels. At the very top was God. Then within each of these large groups, there were other hierarchies. For example, among metals, gold was the noblest and stood highest; lead had less "spirit" and more matter and so stood lower. (Alchemy was based on the belief that lead could be changed to gold through an infusion of "spirit.") The various species of plants, animals, humans, and angels were similarly ranked from low to high within their respective segments. Finally, it was believed that between the segments themselves, there was continuity (shellfish were lowest among animals and shaded into the vegetative class, for example, because without locomotion, they most resembled plants).
Besides universal orderliness, there was universal interdependence. This was implicit in the doctrine of "correspondences," which held that different segments of the chain reflected other segments. For example, Renaissance thinkers viewed a human being as a microcosm (literally, a "little world") that reflected the structure of the world as a whole, the macrocosm; just as the world was composed of four "elements" (earth, water, air, fire), so too was the human body composed of four substances called "humours," with characteristics corresponding to the four elements. (Illness occurred when there was an imbalance or "disorder" among the humours, that is, when they did not exist in proper proportion to each other.) "Correspondences" existed everywhere, on many levels. Thus the hierarchical organization of the mental faculties was also thought of as reflecting the hierarchical order within the family, the state, and the forces of nature. When things were properly ordered, reason ruled the emotions, just as a king ruled his subjects, the parent ruled the child, and the sun governed the planets. But when disorder was present in one realm, it was correspondingly reflected in other realms. For example, in Shakespeare's King Lear, the simultaneous disorder in family relationships and in the state (child ruling parent, subject ruling king) is reflected in the disorder of Lear's mind (the loss of reason) as well as in the disorder of nature (the raging storm). Lear even equates his loss of reason to "a tempest in my mind."
Though Renaissance writers seemed to be quite on the side of "order," the theme of "disorder" is much in evidence, suggesting that the age may have been experiencing some growing discomfort with traditional hierarchies. According to the chain of being concept, all existing things have their precise place and function in the universe, and to depart from one's proper place was to betray one's nature. Human beings, for example, were pictured as placed between the beasts and the angels. To act against human nature by not allowing reason to rule the emotions--was to descend to the level of the beasts. In the other direction, to attempt to go above one's proper place, as Eve did when she was tempted by Satan, was to court disaster. Yet Renaissance writers at times showed ambivalence towards such a rigidly organized universe. For example, the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, in a work entitled On the Dignity of Man, exalted human beings as capable of rising to the level of the angels through philosophical contemplation. Also, some Renaissance writers were fascinated by the thought of going beyond boundaries set by the chain of being. A major example was the title character of Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus. Simultaneously displaying the grand spirit of human aspiration and the more questionable hunger for superhuman powers, Faustus seems in the play to be both exalted and punished. Marlowe's drama, in fact, has often been seen as the embodiment of Renaissance ambiguity in this regard, suggesting both its fear of and its fascination with pushing beyond human limitations.
From: faculty.up.edu/asarnow/GreatChainofBeing.htm
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Alas, a dark humor creeps out with the mention of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. With it I see a lifted black veil and find my mind shifting to “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Hawthorne if I remember correctly. Below is the Plot Summary from Wikipedia:
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The story begins with the sexton standing in front of the meeting-house, ringing the bell. He is to stop ringing the bell when the Reverend Mr. Hooper comes into sight. However, the congregation is met with an unusual sight: Mr. Hooper is wearing a black semi-transparent veil that obscures all of his face but his mouth and chin from view. This creates a stir among the townspeople, who begin to speculate about his veil and its significance.
As he takes the pulpit, Mr. Hooper's sermon is on secret sin and is "tinged, rather more darkly than usual, with the gentle gloom of Mr. Hooper's temperament". This topic concerns the congregation who fear for their own secret sins as well as their minister's new appearance. After the sermon, a funeral is held for a young lady of the town who has died. Mr. Hooper stays for the funeral and continues to wear his now more appropriate veil. It is said that even the dead maiden would not be able to see his face, and if the veil were to blow away, he might be "fearful of her glance". Mr. Hooper says a few prayers and the body is carried away. Two of the mourners say that they have had a fancy that "the minister and the maiden's spirit were walking hand in hand". That night another occasion arises, this time a joyous one- a wedding. However, Mr. Hooper arrives in his veil again, bringing the atmosphere of the wedding down to gloom.
By the next day, even the local children are talking of the strange change that seems to have come over their minister. Yet, no one is able to ask Mr. Hooper directly about the veil, except for his fiancée Elizabeth. Elizabeth tries to be cheerful and have him take it off. He will not do so, even when they are alone together, nor will he tell her why he wears the veil. Eventually, she gives up and tells him goodbye, breaking off the engagement.
The one positive benefit of the veil is that Mr. Hooper becomes a more efficient clergyman, gaining many converts who feel that they too are behind the black veil with him. Dying sinners call out for him alone. Mr. Hooper lives his life thus, though he is promoted to Father, until his death. According to the text, "All through life the black veil had hung between him and the world: it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and still it lay upon his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his dark-some chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity".
Even though Elizabeth broke off their engagement, she never marries and still keeps track of the happenings of Hooper's life from afar. When she finds out that he is deathly ill she comes to his death bed to be by his side. Elizabeth and the Reverend ask him once again to remove the veil, but he refuses. As he dies, those around him tremble. He tells them in anger not to tremble, not merely for him but for themselves, for they all wear black veils. Father Hooper is buried with the black veil on his face.
From: Wikipedia – Plot Summary of “The Minister’s Black Veil”
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We, through our humanity and imagination, can indeed see further than we may even wish to see. That is my situation here and I would have myself been near madness with dread and doubt were it not for the purpose of adding setting to the Merlyn series books. I can lift the veil from universes leveled to souls within a fiction. Why not?
Such a very dark humor you have, orndorff, that allows you to write of such matters as if you were dusting off a shelf of once bound books. – Amorella.
The Merlyn books and blog suit my general interest, Amorella. They are who I am rather naked. How can it be wrong to explore the conditions of our species and myself?
Such theatre, boy, you and your breed, your species, has such a need of inner drama and dark comedy. Post. – Amorella.
We appear to be built to be self-entertaining. Those are my words for it. rho
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