Science

Is That Me On Your Universe’s Big Screen?

January 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

Experienced creators know that they are not fully in control of their creations. The general consensus I hear from novelists is that their characters are real, and the writer’s job is to tell a true story, in which the characters act consistently with their own personalities.

I know something about this from the work of writing songs. My best work has directed me in its own making – drawing me forward to the place where it already exists (David Wilcox talked like this at a house concert I attended once, and I knew precisely what he meant . . . uh, more or less).

As I was falling asleep the other night, I dreamily wondered if I am a character in the story that is the cosmos in which I exist; and if whatever we call God is the creator of this story.

Ideas are the center of reality, says Jim Holt in Radiolab’s recent podcast “Solid as a Rock.” My romantic religious heart swells to this notion.

In my little mind, art and science and religion gracefully fuse in the postulation of string theory – a place where multiple dimensions, even multiple universes, are accepted as highly plausible. I envision a universe where the Doctor really is flying around in his TARDIS, simply because people from my universe have created him. And of course I speculate about the artists who have created my world. Am I a character in another universe’s movie?

Don’t fret about my addled brain. I’m currently reading Lee Smolin’s book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. I’ve only just begun Smolin’s book, but it promises to be a push-back against the academic community’s enthusiasm over string theory. Perhaps he will bring balance to the force.

(Although it is sad to think that there may not actually be any Skywalkers out there, anywhere . . .)

Helicopter Parents and Trophy Kids

June 14, 2011 — 12 Comments

I heard Lori Gottlieb interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio this morning. Here is the article about which she was interviewed. This idea of not fixing everything for our kids seemed especially timely in light of my last post.

I’m interested too in thinking about our culture’s disdain of the ordinary (as noted in the article, no one wants to be “average”). And yet, there is a sort of pushback in our mainstream culture, against a drive for excellence. It’s sort of a paradox; we tell our children they are special, we say everyone is special, but if everyone is special, then really no one is special! Then if someone aspires to excel in a certain area, we call them arrogant or competitive. And, as Gottlieb notes, if someone is weak in a certain area, we try to discover what is wrong, what external circumstances are standing in their way; and we communicate that no one should be especially weak or especially strong in any distinct area of life.

What do you think – about this or any other issue raised in the article? I’m looking for a stimulating conversation here, folks!

The Myth of the Present

March 5, 2010 — 3 Comments

“By the time you look at something it’s already history,” sings Bruce Cockburn in his song “Tie Me at the Crossroads.” I’ve been pondering this fact a lot lately. Every image, every event, must be perceived by the observer through senses that take time, however fractional, to perceive.

The eye takes in light (which even before it hits the eye has already traveled away from the initial event), then processes the light and sends that picture to the brain, which must itself process the picture to give the observer information about the event.

So too with the ears receiving sound waves, the nose taking in smells, the tongue reacting to tastes, and the skin registering the pressure of touch. Our senses give us their impressions of the past. We never truly experience the present in the present; we are constantly processing our sensory experience of history.

But what even is the past? Is it anything more than the collected observations of various people, ultimately the picture of events painted inside their minds based on their own limited processing capabilities?

Recently I finished reading Andrew Parker’s The Genesis Enigma, in which he notes this fact with the observations of a scientist. Parker has spent much of his career studying the inner workings of the eye and tracing its development throughout biological history, yet he says that only recently has it really sunk in for him that we truly live in a virtual reality world.

He is referring not to digitally-created realities – which in this understanding now become  secondary virtual reality – but to the world we all – and each – perceive. Parker reminds us that the “real world” actually does not contain colors, but only light waves of varying lengths. It is the apparatus of our eyes and brains that makes color a reality to us the observers.

Birds can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, so their eyes see markings on flowers and insects that humans’ can not. Dogs’ range of hearing and smell, most of us know, are greater than those of humans.

What if, Parker asks, there is all sorts of information around us that actually exists, which we simply cannot access with our range of senses or our current scientific instruments?

For thousands of years people have held that there are two modes of reality, two worlds, two tracks. The physical and the spiritual; the material and the mystic; the temporal and the eternal. But what if there has only ever been one reality, one unified system of everything?

What if those “spiritual” sensibilities we speak of having, impressions of truth, beauty, sadness, love, longing, and such things which cannot be scientifically explained, actually come from something as real, as material even? – as the light waves hitting our eyes, the sound waves received by our ears?

What if these impressions are just as measurable as cold or pain or depth or distance, but science has yet to fashion the instruments needed to detect them or explain how humans have the access we do to such things? What if they are just as real as anything else we observe, but at this point we can only dimly access them?

Would this prove or disprove anything about the existence of God?

This is me thinking out loud. I’ve got no hidden agenda or point to make, except for one brief observation that both atheists and science-denying religionists often begin from the same basic assumption – that “God” must be defined as a supernatural being responsible for all the things that science can’t explain. I’m going to leave it at that and ask readers to think out loud here along with me. What do you think?

Sustaining Motion

September 28, 2009 — 4 Comments

I used to believe that with the right amount of effort, therapy, money, discipline, and time, I would achieve the perfect state and then maintain it. I would live in the right town, in the perfect house, with the right person, drive the right car to the perfect job, be the right weight, achieve the perfect hairstyle, have the furniture arranged and the yard landscaped just right . . . and then hold that pose – forever! Perfect! Permanent!

One moment in the life of my late grandmother, Hazel Dominguez Tindall.

One frozen moment in the life of my late grandmother, Hazel Dominguez Tindall.

But not possible. Nothing is ever standing still. My body moves involuntarily with every breath, my heart pumps without my conscious consent, my cells are factories in constant production. Even when I die, my body will not be still, as decay takes over and every atom moves on to become part of something else. The earth on which I stand spins at nearly 1,000 miles per hour, one small mover in a vast expanding universe.

Plenty of movement is required simply to sustain life. But the time and place where I live has “progressed” to a state far beyond simple sustenance. I can get anywhere in the world in a matter of hours or days, learn about anything with a few mouse clicks, communicate my ideas through a plethora of instant media options. Because so much is possible, it takes plenty of energy for me simply to sift through it all, to decide what I will do, buy, wear, eat; and to deal with my own and other people’s expectations and reactions to my choices.

With all this motion around and within me, I find deep healing in the disciplines of rest and reflection. Rest is not perfect stillness, but a deliberate slowing down, setting aside the oars and moving with the water rather than forcing my way through. Reflection is not absolute silence, but a thoughtful tuning out of the noises I ordinarily attend to, so that I can listen to the echoes of the recent moments through which I’ve moved.

Beneath all the layers of progress-driven sound and light, life is still a flowing river. The more I try to hold a living thing in a freeze-frame squeeze, the more energy I must expend – and even as I inflict any level of un-natural stasis upon that thing – be it my face, a relationship, a belief system or a zucchini, it slowly begins to wither in my grasp – or speeds up the natural rhythms that end in death, another way of saying the same thing.

This is why the bugs and baby bunnies my daughter captures usually convalesce until either they are released or they die. It explains why my marriage has suffered seasons of stagnancy, and why the fresh greens I stash in my refrigerator often need to be re-classified as compost.

Healthy living things are always growing. Evolution is the heartbeat of life. We deny the goodness of life when we try to force living things to stand still. Paradoxically, we affirm the goodness of life when we regularly and deliberately slow the pace we’ve picked up trying to keep up with those Joneses, and choose instead to move with the rhythm of the forces that sustain us.