- Vitaly Vanchurin
The World as a Neural Network
Saturday, January 20, 2024
The World as a Neural Network
Monday, January 08, 2024
Symbolic Communication
- Bernardo Kastrup (1974 - )
UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Full of Fire
- Edward Fredkin (1934 - 2023)
A New Cosmogony
Tuesday, December 05, 2023
Fungal States of Minds
Thursday, November 09, 2023
Observer-Centric Virtualities
Sunday, March 05, 2023
The Mind of Some Eternal Spirit
- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe
Friday, January 13, 2023
Inviting Childhood's Wonder
- Charles Sherrington (1857 - 1952)
Man on his Nature
Postscript. A much-deserved shout-out to Maria Popova and her extraordinary blog, The Marginalian, from which this quote - and the reference to this book (which I did not know of before, and immediately ordered!) - both come from. Thank you Maria! 😊 A little bit more about the book appears here.
Wednesday, December 07, 2022
The concept of a World
- Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Friday, November 25, 2022
Abstract ETCs
Monday, September 19, 2022
Little Ripples
edge of a world of which
we have no experience, and
where all our preconceptions
must be recast."
- D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
On Growth and Form
Monday, August 08, 2022
Atoms with Consciousness
There are the rushing waves…
mountains of molecules, each stupidly
minding its own business… trillions apart…
yet forming white surf in unison.
before any eyes could see…
year after year…
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?…
on a dead planet,
with no life to entertain.
tortured by energy…
wasted prodigiously by the sun…
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.
repeat the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves…
and a new dance starts.
masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing
a pattern ever more intricate.
here it is standing…
atoms with consciousness…
matter with curiosity.
wonders at wondering…
...I…
a universe of atoms…
an atom in the universe."
- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Untitled Ode to the Wonder of Life,
Quoted by Maria Popova (1984 - ), The Marginalian
Sunday, August 07, 2022
Vedantic Complementarity
- Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)
"The general opinion in theoretical physics had accepted the idea that the principle of continuity ("natura non facit saltus"), prevailing in the microscopic world, is merely simulated by an averaging process in a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature. This simulation is such that a man generally perceives the sum of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes."
- John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)
Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
"The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object."
- Erwin Schrödinger (1887 - 1961)
Thursday, August 04, 2022
Act of Perception
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Monday, July 25, 2022
Electromagnetic Phenomena
- Nancy Forbes (1952 - 2021)
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Higher Dialectic
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)
Science of Logic
Wednesday, February 09, 2022
We are Stories
complicated centimeters
lines drawn by traces
left by the (re)mingling
together of things in the
world, and oriented toward
the direction of increasing
entropy, in a rather particular
corner of this immense,
chaotic universe."
Sunday, February 06, 2022
Cosmic Sea of Energy
It is full, a plenum
as opposed to a vacuum,
and is the ground for
the existence of everything,
including ourselves.
The universe is not separate
from this cosmic sea
of energy.
quantum interconnectedness
is that the whole universe
is enfolded in everything,
and that each thing is
enfolded in the whole."
Saturday, February 05, 2022
Mathematical Beauty
world is made manifest
in Form and Number,
and the heart and soul
and all the poetry of
Natural Philosophy are
embodied in the concept
of mathematical beauty."
- D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
Postscript. As may be the case with many of you, my day-job constraints leave me precious little time to devote to purely aesthetic pleasures (notwithstanding those that occasionally overlap with more mathematical pursuits). Sometimes, as now, even my weekend time is filled mostly with staring at gibberish on a computer screen, and pounding away at my keyboard to produce picture-less reams of technical reports (even as I day-dream of month-long photo-safaris in far-away lands). Thus, the short walks my wife and I take through our neighborhood after breakfast each day have become immeasurably important physical and spiritual oases for me. The simple pleasure of encountering beautifully haphazard arrangements of natural forms rejuvenates and nourishes my soul. The images in the triptych above were taken no more than a few minutes apart during a walk that itself lasted less than a half hour. But what a joy it is to stumble upon such humble transcendent beauty hiding in plain sight! The great polymath Thompson's book, On Growth and Form (the first edition of which came out in 1917, and which to this day remains an extraordinarily beautiful book to read) is essentially a 1100+ page erudite argument that biology can be reduced to mathematics (a sentiment that a much younger version of myself would have been happy to accept): "It behooves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things. They are very great names indeed which we couple with the explanation of the path of a stone, the droop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in a cup. It is but the slightest adumbration of a dynamical morphology that we can hope to have until the physicist and the mathematician shall have made these problems of ours their own." For those of you interested in exploring (taking a deep-dive, really, into) the broader entanglement of art and science, here are some slides I used for a 2017 presentation at a Humanities and Technology Association conference (held that year in Newport, RI). This lecture is one of three I've given in (relatively) recent years during which I wore both of my hats, as physicist and photographer. The other two lectures were given at the American Center for Physics (College Park, MD in 2009) and at the Morrison House (Alexandria, VA in 2011).
Sunday, January 30, 2022
New Riddles
- Alfred Noyes (1880 - 1958)
Sunday, January 23, 2022
Fragmentated Wholes
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order