The Misconception of Cosmic Space As
Appears In the Ideas of
Modern Astronomy
- and as contained in the understandably limited thinking embodied
in the conceptions of the nature of parallax
and redshift -
this Essay is undergoing a -revisioning,
getting even more dangerous
see
new physics
~!~!~!~
by Joel A. Wendt
- introduction -
Before
entering on to the main body of this essay, we should
consider briefly the
nature of thinking and of the imagination.
In this little book there are a number of
different comments on thinking and on the imagination,
coming from different directions, but here I want to point
out some basic facts as a foundation for the coming work.
The
first is that human beings think, and that there
is no science without the activity of human thinking.
Thinking determines which questions the scientist
asks, what experiments he conducts, and then
ultimately how the data provided by the experiments is
interpreted - that is what does this scientific activity mean. For this
essay we are confronted with the scientific meaning created
by human thinking in relationship to some considerable
portions of the data accumulated by scientific work centered
on questions concerning the stellar world. We
are asking here in this essay whether what science thinks
today of the meaning and significance of the stars is what
we ought to continue to think, in the future, or even
today to assume is still a reasonable understanding.
"Christ Blesses the Gray"s, by
themikehoffman
As scientists all possibilities need to be
on the table ... anything less is a fraud
... still, if you are afraid of the dark,
or of the mysterious, then maybe this
place is not for you, ... but if you want
to adventure, and still be scientific: The Fermi Paradox
Resolved discusses generalities,
here we get to nuts and bolts. Just
keep in mind there have been astronomers
since there where eyes to see stars ...
As
part of the process of examining the underlying
questions, we will be using a particular
capacity of the mind, which might be called the
imagination, or picture-forming capacity.
We make all manner of mental pictures in the
normal course of ordinary thinking, and in scientific
thinking we carry out this activity in quite specific
directions. Certain astronomical ideas, for
example the idea of parallax, are specifically grounded
in the picture-thinking connected to Euclidean geometry.
While we sometimes use a pencil and paper to
work out the details of this geometric picture thinking,
the fact that should not be ignored (but often is) is that
it is the mind of the human being that contributes
the fundamental activity from which our modern
astronomical conceptions arise. In fact, our
interpretation of the meaning of astronomical data is
entirely a result of mental processes, a number of which
are expressly born in the imagination.
Yes,
we carefully observe the stellar world with all kinds of
remarkable instruments. We also use a great
deal of mathematics in how this material is interpreted,
but we must never, in the process of unfolding this
scientific investigation of the world of the stars,
forget the centrality of thinking and of the imagination
to the whole process. If we take
thinking and the imagination away, there is no science
of astronomy. Why this is so
important will hopefully become more clear as this essay
unfolds.
- main body -
*"Our Father in
the skies..."
are the first words of the Lord's Prayer, as
translated by Andy Gaus in his book The Unvarnished Gospels. I start here to point out the fact
that the people living in ancient Palestine, at
the time of the Incarnation of Christ, had a different
kind of consciousness than we do today.
When they looked at the heavens, they
understood (and were taught by their wise elders) that the
sky was the abode of the Divine Mystery. In fact, they
understood the whole of Creation to be en-souled with Being and Consciousness. Since that time a different
conception of the heavens and of the earth has come into
existence for large portions of humanity. How
did that original conception change and what can we
learn by observing carefully the nature of that
change?
Everyone understands that if we make even the slightest error in the aim of the bow and arrow, by the time the arrow reaches the end of its journey, it doesn't take much of an original error to cause the arrow to have completely missed the target. Human beings are flawed, and science is the activity of human beings. In the following essay I am going to concern myself with clearly amateur* researches and thinking into the problems of parallax and red shift, as these ideas are used to create for us a conception of the world of the Stars.
Johannes
Kepler thought we were in danger of throwing
out the baby with the bathwater,
in our wholesale rejection of the ancient
understanding/knowledge of the starry world.
the best of ancient lore on the stellar world is here:
Practical
Astrology by, Comte C. de Saint-Germain
no other book on the ancient stellar wisdom combines into
a single system:
astrology, tarot, and numerology - want to know why?
Study that book...
*[While
I am not a member of the priesthood of the religion of
Natural Science, I do know how to observe carefully and
how to think objectively, so just because astronomy
isn't my
profession, the reader should not automatically
anticipate they will be misled. The reader should,
however, themselves test the themes outlined below
in their own careful picture-thinking. The
tendency of scientific thinking has been toward too much
analysis, and not enough
synthesis,
while the
return of a focus on the imagination will help us
move forward in the future toward a
needed balance between these two basic
gestures in thinking.]
The
fundamental question is this: the current
generally understood idea of cosmic space is that it is
essentially a three dimensional endlessness - a very big
box, which while it must have some unusual properties as a
container, it is nevertheless organized such that
everywhere inside it one can expect that the same rules of
physics we observe in the laboratory on the Earth, will be
true all that way out there...one upon a time in a galaxy
far far away. Is this conception of
endless three-dimensional space true?
Let
us consider a rather simple geometric thought experiment,
which everyone (trained mathematician or otherwise) can
do.
learn about casting/generating this figure: AKA: hexagon net in stepwise
measure ... <here>
Make
a picture of a small perfect sphere in your mind.
It has a center and a periphery.
That is the nature of the bubble in physical space, where
individualizing consciousness exists. A machine
can't write this stuff, given that only a human being
reads-into words what we do ... also individually.
We are point centers of consciousness, wandering troubling
seas ... We are love&magic, ... or not
<shrug> ... Sense8 sentience - all minds connected -
best scale is local, and to music - dancing ...
One can use the terms radius, circumference and
diameter with respect to this sphere, but they really
don't have any exact meaning unless we define one of
these characteristics by giving it first an exact
measure. For example, if we said the radius
of our mental sphere was one meter, well understood rules
of the geometry of a perfect sphere would give us diameter
and circumference (as well as other related
characteristics, such as the degree of arc of the
curvature of the surface, the area of the surface,
etc.).
The inner geometry of center and periphery - my ~!~
experience. Every object, inert or otherwise, has
existence certainly. Why deny/pretend that all the
ITS&THINGS also have consciousness and
will? The "smartphone" robs our ability to remember,
saving all kinds of data reducible to code.
Alladin's Lamp, with a dash of Dick Tracy's wristwatch
radio - dangerous waters as we borg ourselves and pretend
that the stuff ... well, a tool is only as good as the
tool user. The best tools are hand crafted from
scratch, and given ceremonial rites - everything is sacred
- even hell.
>"Shamans" 0ogle images here>
every
object, every surface, every place where we see,
light-is-with-darkness, or there is no color ...
Now keep in
mind that we don't have to conceive of this sphere in terms of
measure. It can just exist in our mind as a measureless
perfect geometric form.
Next, we
imagine the radius line, from the center of the sphere to the
periphery, increasing. We again don't have to
measure it, we just make the picture in our thinking of this
imaginary sphere as something that is slowly growing through
an elongating radius line. The radius line grows.
As that line grows all the other characteristics of the
sphere grow as well.
We could also
mentally cause the same effect by changing any other
properties. For example, if we cause with our
picture-thinking the area of the surface to increase, we
change at the same time all the other relationships.
Now lets return
to the increasing of the radius line. In your
imagination now picture that intersection between the radius
line and the periphery of the sphere. At this
intersection there is a degree of curvature of the arc of the
sphere. We can notice as we do this thought
experiment that as the radius line grows, the tightness of the
curvature of the surface lessens.
To help this,
lets imagine the radius line decreasing. We shrink
it, and as we do this the curvature of the periphery of the
sphere gets tighter and tighter, until we make the radius line
zero. When we make the radius line zero we have
lost the sphere, and it has disappeared into a dimensionless
point.
Yet, since we
are working without any need for measure, a zero radius sphere
is simply a point. Once we give measure of any amount to
the radius line of a zero radius line sphere (a point), the
sphere returns. A radius line of a nanometer takes
a point and makes it a sphere.
Seeing this
clearly with our geometrical imagination (which is quite exact
and precise, by the way), we now do the opposite and complete
the earlier exercise by increasing the radius line to infinite
length. Instead of a radius line of zero, it is now
infinite. What then happens to the curvature of the
sphere when the radius becomes infinitely elongated? [For a
delicious discussion of "infinity" see David Foster Wallace's:
Everything
and
More:
A
Compact History of Infinity.]
Well, if we
carefully follow out our precise and exact geometrical
imagination, we will be able to observe this process unfold.
As the radius line increases in length the original
tightness of the curvature of the surface of the sphere
lessens, until at the moment the radius line is infinite there
will be no curvature at all. The sphere has disappeared,
and undergone a metamorphosis into a plane. If we
think carefully about what we have learned here, we will see
then that any sphere of any measure of radius line is always
an intermediate geometric form arising in between a
dimensionless point and a plane at infinity.
This fact is
already well known in the profound mathematical science of
projective geometry, and we have now ourselves discovered what
is called there: the Plane at Infinity. The sphere then
is geometrically in between the infinitely large and the
infinitesimally small, or in between the plane at infinity and
a geometric point (which has no measure at all, unless we put
it into relationship with something else). A point by
itself is just that - nothing else. It occupies no space
at all.
Well then, what
is the point of this exercise?
There are
several. First it is crucial to realize that we can
think geometrically without using any measure at all. If
one is lucky enough to come upon a copy of Olive
Whicher's Projective
Geometry: creative polarities in space and time*, one has the possibility to study this wonderful
geometry using only a pencil, a straight edge and some paper
(large sheets are easier for some constructions).
Measure has been done away with, and the creators
(or discoverers) of this mathematics describe it is all geometry - meaning by this that every single other geometry
is a special case of projective geometry. Also George
Adam's Physical
and Ethereal Spaces.
*[check Waldorf
Schools or other Rudolf Steiner institutions for copies of
this book. It is often tragically out of print.]
The difficulty
for Natural Scientists has been how to apply this beautifully
symmetric, measure free geometry, to the natural world.
Science is rooted in measure, and while the ideas of
this geometry are recognized as significant, what could they
mean in a world that is already hopelessly entangled in a
science which has to use measure for everything?
With this
riddle in the background, let us now examine the history of
ideas by which the old view of the heavens as an abode of the
Divine Mystery came to be supplanted by a view in which space
is conceived as a near endless three dimensional container,
punctuated with mass caused curvatures (the space-time gravity
ideas following after Einstein, using the Reinmann geometry -
again a special case of the more general projective geometry).
Giordano Bruno,
who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600, is credited
with having first suggested the idea that a star might be like
the sun. Would that our histories were more accurate,
because what we think of as the sun today, and how he thought
about such matters (he was, among other disciplines, a deeply
thoughtful meta-physician*) is not quite grasped by believing
his idea, that a star and our sun were relatives, in fact
mirrors in anyway our modern conceptions. For Bruno, the
idea that a star and our sun were related, was a completely
different idea than we hold today. The details of that,
however, is a whole other matter.
*[Meta-physics,
contrary to modern views that it is not a science at all, was
really always seen as a product of a synthesis of ones total understanding. Modern
physics comes from taking things apart, from analysis. Meta-physics always had the task of
make the parts of all human knowledge into a single
whole. For a good example of modern thinking that is
"wholistic", as regards astrophysics, read Georg Blattmann's The
Sun:
the
ancient mysteries and the new physics.]
Bruno did agree
to a degree with Copernicus, and so in those years the ideas
being produced by natural philosophers (the grandfathers of
natural science) came to be at odds with the dogmas of the
Roman Catholic Church. While the previous age of careful
thinkers (the Scholastics), would have understood (keeping to
Aristotle) that there was a difference between quantities and qualities, the
scientific impulse coming to the fore in those years more and
more felt it could only deal with that which could be counted
or measured - that is quantities.
The various categorical qualities of Aristotelian meta-physics more and more
dropped away from consideration (although this was a long term
process and many thinkers (Kepler and Faraday, for example)
thought this was an error of thought to do so.
In any event,
pure astronomy slowly freed itself from the meta-physics
connected to astrology and related disciplines, by a process
in which the qualitative problems
were left aside and everything was more and more rooted in
only what could be counted (and measured). Kepler, it
has been forgotten, was an astrologer as well as the
discoverer of the three fundamental laws of planetary motion*.
Not only that, but Newton was an alchemist. The
tendency has been to frame the history of these thinkers as if
they thought as we do today, when anyone who actually reads
what they wrote discovers they did not. (For a comprehensive
examination of this overlooked history of science, read Ernst
Lehrs' Man
or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of
Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training
Observation and Thought.
Also read the physicist Arthur Zajonc's Catching
the
Light:
the entwined history of Light and Mind.
*[Kepler
believed, for example, that his formula and ideas regarding
the Third Law of Planetary Motion was a rediscovery of the
ancient's idea of the Harmony of the Spheres]
As this process
matures, it reaches a kind of high point in the 19th Century,
and two important ideas are given birth out of the context of
this leaving aside of the problem of qualities, and resting all theories of the starry world
only on what can be counted and measured. These ideas
are parallax and redshift. Such concepts don't
emerge on their own, so we have to work carefully with them,
still keeping in mind how dependent they are upon measure
alone.
The idea of
redshift doesn't come by itself, for example, for it is really
based upon spectroscopy. This science is itself not
based initially on stellar observation, but on work in the
laboratory where various fundamental elements are combusted
(burned) in such a way that they produce "light". This
"light" is measured according to the quantitative ideas of
Newtonian Optics, and so we get the "spectral" lines for such
basic elements as hydrogen.
As a result
stellar light phenomena, including light phenomena from our
sun, are used in such a way that it is assumed that this light
from the stars, and our sun, is produced in those places by a
burning process similar in kind (but not degree) to what was
done in the laboratory. If the light from a star, or our
sun, has a certain mathematically accurate vibration
(frequency), that is like or essentially similar to the
hydrogen line obtained in the laboratory, this light frequency
is then seen as showing us that in that star, or our sun,
hydrogen is being burned up, which combustion process gives
off that particular light frequency.
This is so
important a fact (actually assumed to be universal) that in
the movie Contact, the frequency used to send the message to Earth
from the fictional stellar civilization is the hydrogen light
frequency times pi. That is, it is a material constant
multiplied by a geometric constant.
All the same,
there was a problem with the hydrogen light frequency, for
example, from the stars. The observed light
frequency in the normal range for hydrogen (assumed to be an
exact universal constant) isn't actually quite so exact to
observation. Various stars' hydrogen lines are
discovered to be a bit off center, so to speak, such that they
can be described (in the assumptions of physical astronomy) to
be either red shifted or blue shifted. The greatest
number of stellar objects are red shifted (only a very very
few are blue shifted).
Following
Newton, color is a spectrum of light frequencies, with a red
end point, where beyond which it becomes invisible to the eye,
or a blue end point (actually violet, but convention names
that end of the spectrum the blue end) where beyond this end
it also becomes invisible to the eye. We see with our
eyes a normal color Newtonian spectrum (so it is assumed) and
at the edges of this visible spectrum the light is no longer
visible, although it still can be observed and measured with
instruments (the red end becomes infrared or heat, and the
blue end becomes ultraviolet, leading then to such as x-rays).
The wavelength of the frequency at the red end is longer
and longer (elongation), and the wavelength of the frequency
at the blue end is shorter and shorter (compaction).
These questions
arise: what does it mean that light from the stars is not
exactly showing us the precise hydrogen line we came to know
in the laboratory, and what do we make of the fact that this
shift toward the red (the dominant types of shift) itself
varies? Some stellar objects show small redshift
and other's quite large redshift.
The original
dominating idea for the meaning of the phenomena of the
redshift (elongation) of such as the hydrogen line frequency
was arrived at by creating an analogy between light waves and
sound waves, in 1842. We all know (or experience at
least) the so-called Doppler effect - the shift in sound of a
train horn as it comes toward us or away from us. This movement toward or away produces a change in the pitch
(auditory frequency), even though we know that the actual
pitch the horn is making never changes. The change in
pitch is heard because of the movement of
the source of the sound (which compacts or elongates the
frequency, as perceived by the ear,
which is relatively stationary).
By analogy
then, redshift was thought to give evidence of the movement of
the object away from the observer on the Earth. Whatever
was going on, most of the stellar objects had this redshift
phenomena (in varying degrees) and from this analogy was born
the idea that the Universe is expanding (which then later is
supposed to logically give us the Big Bang - an explosion
which creates an expanding Universe). I point out
this last to urge the reader to notice how interwoven are all
the ideas we have today about the physical universe, such that
if, for example, redshift doesn't really mean what we think it
means, then this idea of the expansion of the Universe loses
one of its main supports. (See link at end of essay for
current thinking on this problem in conventional astronomy.)
The first
problem to arise after the more or less universal acceptance
of this theory, was the recognition that while light
was superficially a wave phenomena (a movement
propagating in a medium), similar to sound, the analogy didn't
really hold, so a lot of thought went into how to revisit the
redshift phenomena and appreciate it better.
Unfortunately, while many scientists feel certain
older kinds of ideas ought to get dropped away from any
current point of view, some ideas seem quite unwilling to be
abandoned, so the Doppler analogy remains, even though
contemporary physics sometimes sees light as both particle and
wave simultaneously (depending on what questions you ask, and
which experiments you do).
One of the
newer theories as regards redshift (moving away
from the Doppler analogy) is that it is partially a
consequence of the temperature in the star. Another sees
some redshift phenomena as reflecting the influence of gravity
wells.
I point this
out only to suggest that theories themselves are in constant
motion (a kind of social Brownian-motion among different
minds). I am not so much interested in the current
theory here, because it is my view that the resolution to the
fundamental question lies in a quite different direction.
Let us now
leave redshift behind, and go on to the idea parallax, which
arose a few years before redshift historically (1838, so it
says on-line).
The basic idea
of parallax is that it enables us to measure (remember what
was said above about measure) how far a star (or other stellar
phenomena) is from the Earth. Basically this is done by
coming up with an observational angle, that can be measured on
the Earth, and is made possible in large part by the orbit of
the Earth around the sun. Since I can't put in a drawing
here (the reader can go on-line if they desire) I'll try to do
this with words.
Place on the
grass of a football field, in your imagination, two poles.
One pole is at the center of the goal line, and the next
at the center of the 10 yard line nearest that goal line.
Now go down to the goal line at the other end of
the field, and set up a transit (a device for taking the
measure of an angle of changes in a sight line).
Move the transit from one side of the field to the
other, stopping every yard, and make observations of the angle
of observation between the two poles obtained by viewing them
from the moving transit.
As we do this
the angle we are measuring changes. This angle is widest
at one side of the field, and then contracts, until we are
right opposite the two poles (at which occurrence the near
pole occults the other, or stands in front of it), and then
the angle expands again as we move toward the opposite side of
the field.
Now imagine
such an activity taking place with respect to the light
phenomena of stellar objects. The transit is actually
the earth, which moves constantly, changing the observational
"angle" with respect to distant objects. As this
earth-transit moves, some of the distant objects seem to
occult each other, as if one was in front, and the other
behind.
However, since
these objects are so far away (apparently), the angles that
are measured are very very very small (small fractions of
seconds of degree of arc). One writer suggested that if
you took a quarter, and looked at it from a distance of three
miles, measuring the angle between a transit observation of
one side of the quarter, and then the other side - this
picture suggests how small an angle is actually being measured
by this method (parallax) with regard to the nearest star to
the earth (for stars believed to be further away, the "angle"
is progressively smaller).
Using this data
(the angle measurements coupled with our knowledge of the
diameter of the Earth's orbit) we can use the basic rules of
Euclidean geometry to determine the length of the sides of the
resultant triangle. This information (with a couple of
other geometric ideas rooted in measure) then gives what we
think to be the distance of the stellar object from the Earth.
Now since
redshift is believed to tell us that most stellar objects are moving
away from us, these distances change over time, which then
appears to give us a kind of confirmation of the parallax.
The problem is that some of these observations came in
conflict (an inconsistency between redshift and parallax).
One of the most obvious of these was discovered by
the astronomer Hal Arp, who as a result for a time found
himself to be seen as a heretic by his fellows, and was
temporarily shunned (couldn't get telescope time to continue
his research (see his book, Quasars,
Redshifts,
and Controversies).
Basically what
he observed (using conventional astronomical ideas and
methods), was that Quasars (quasi-stellar objects), while they
had a very high redshift (suggesting they were traveling very
fast away from us, and since they were thought to have been
doing this for some time - no changes in rate of velocity
and/or acceleration were assumed, they were also thought to be quite far away, while the parallax
measurement seemed to imply they were much nearer.
Quasars seemed to occult (get in front of) much slower
(less redshifted) stellar objects). The two phenomena
could not be reconciled. Were Quasars near or far?
I'll not go
into what were the conventional adjustments made (its all very
complicated, and unnecessarily so in my view) in order to
preserve the basic set of ideas of modern astronomy, but we
can (with justification) simply step past these ideas.
Why?
Because fundamentally the problem is due to the fact that phenomena of redshift and parallax is organized in accord with Euclidean geometry and the need in science to measure. In effect, at every point in the development of these ideas (though scientific thinking and imagination), we exported to Cosmic Space those conceptions that were true here in the center (the Earth), and further, we assumed* that these conditions were an invariable constant.
*[There is no empirical evidence for this
whatsoever - it is 95% theoretical.]
For example,
the distance we measure using the idea of parallax can't
actually be tested empirically. In essence, we export
from our Earth reality the concept of Euclidean
three-dimensional space to the apparently farthest reaches of
the starry world, but at the same time have no way of testing
the set of assumptions behind the activity of exportation of
such an idea. We can't go off to the side of the container in which all stars are held, and measure from
another quarter whether in fact the distance the parallax
formulation gives us is correct.
For another
example, we find the hydrogen frequency line by a laboratory
experiment here on the surface of the Earth, and then assume
that nothing of physics changes at cosmic distances, and that
the universe will obey the same laws way out there that it
obeys here. Under the influence of these assumptions we
export our earthly picture to cosmic spaces, something that
really isn't justified if science wishes to remain properly
empirical.
All our
observations are made on the Earth or from near-earth space.
It is really only in our mind that we go outward toward
cosmic space. If that is the case, then we must be
very very careful in how we let one thought grow from the
other. Clearly if there is an error in thought
(remember our arrow to the target analogy at the beginning of
this essay), then the further out in space our imagination, of the picture of the
meaning of the data we collect here goes, the more a
small error in our thought will produce a quite large miss in
our understanding of the truth.
While there
were many small mistakes made (such as the assumptions
observed regarding the hydrogen line), there is one single
idea that saves the situation as it were. We set aside
Euclidean geometry and substitute for it Projective Geometry -
the fundamental geometry of which all other geometries
(including Euclidean) are a special case. Let us next
then try to apply this geometry to the image creation aspect
of our thinking, because after all it is the image we are
making of cosmic space that is important. It is the mind
that travels to cosmic space, riding the ideas we have created
from the data only empirically observed here. We, who
live today, have traveled far down the historical path of one
kind of mind-created image, and now it is time to perhaps
deconstruct it and create something new.
Lets recall the
older (or current) image first, namely of a three dimensional
emptiness, filled with stars which are like our sun, some
surrounded by planets like our planet. It is a
powerful image. Science fiction, books and films, tell
all kinds of tales. If one were to suggest that this
might not be correct, most people would think you were crazy.
Return now to
our earlier work in which we expanded the radius line of the
sphere to infinity and observed how the sphere became a plane
at infinity (or the reverse, where if we contract the radius
line the sphere disappears into a dimensionless point).
Also keep in mind that the geometric form never changes
its basic nature - it just transforms at the different extremes (the infinitely large
and the infinitesimally small radius aspect).
A lot of people
should have some trouble here, because they conceive of
infinity as something much larger than say the multiple light
years of measure we have applied to the distance between the
Earth and the stellar objects. In this regard, lets look
at some apparent facts so far developed under the old
methodology.
For example,
the so-called nearest star, Proxima Centuri is thought to be
4.2 light years away (its degree of arc in parallax is .77233
seconds of arc - which is by the way the largest degree of arc
using parallax measures, for every more distant object will
have a smaller degree of arc). 4.2 light years (this
next is an amateur calculation) is 24 billion miles (that's
24,000,000,000, or 24 thousand million). The
farthest distance objects are high multiples of that.
We'll return to this a bit later.
Remember, we
have exported an idea to cosmic space which we can't
empirically test. Science, tied to the idea of counting
and measure, has exported to cosmic space a measure (huge
light year distances), which idea can't be checked by any
other means. As a result, we are quite right to
challenge this exportation of measure to test whether it is a
thought that is properly rigorous. Since we cannot
empirically test the assumed measure, we are left with the
quite definite necessity to even more carefully and rigorously
subject that idea to the tests of
logic.
Here is a very
important question. If at the center of our infinitely
small sphere, the point, there is no actual space, once we
have created any measure of radius distance (a nanometer, for
example), we now have three dimensional space, then what
happens at the infinite radius, when the sphere disappears and
becomes the plane at infinity? Is this transition as
apparently sudden as the one from the point to the very very
small sphere? [Again, for a
delicious discussion of "infinity" see David Foster Wallace's:
Everything
and
More:
A
Compact History of Infinity.]
If we actually
think very carefully about this we will notice (using our
geometric imagination) that even the transition to the very
very small is not sudden. There is a lot of work on
theses themes in mathematics, and you can Google it by
starting with Zeno's
paradoxes. In any event, at the
infinitesimally small end of the transition, from the
sphere to the point, the process
itself is likewise smaller and
smaller in nature, while the transition from the very large
sphere to the plane at infinity must, by virtue of laws of
symmetry common to projective geometry, be larger and larger
in nature. Keep in mind we are thinking here of the transformational process,
from one geometric state or form to another state or form.
The plane at
infinity doesn't appear suddenly out of nowhere, but as we
approach it the nature of three-dimensional space is slowly
undergoing a metamorphosis. Three-dimensional
space is becoming plane-like in its fundamental nature, but
not all of a sudden. Space itself is changing, and
the rules of physics applicable to a purely three-dimensional
sphere (Earth conditions) will no longer, at these extremely
large distances, apply.
What are huge
light year imagined measures then (such as the 78 billion
light years assumed for diameter the visible universe - there
being thought to exist a greater universe we cannot yet see
even with our instruments)? They are simply a fantasy or
myth, born in the assumptions of the scientific imagination.
Since we cannot conceive of anything as knowable
scientifically, without measure and counting, we presently are
unable to conceive of the universe without measure either.
Again, an assumption that causes the arrow to miss the
mark. The question right here then is whether the
current limits of our imagination and thinking reflect the
actual limits of reality. Confined for a time in the
limited box of Euclidean Geometry, we stand on the cusp of
transcending those limits by applying the more universal
Projective Geometry.
This should not
surprise anyone, for we already know that in particle physics,
where the transition of matter endowed space becomes
infinitesimally small (remember the sphere collapsing into the
point - which has led us into all the paradoxes of quantum
physics) the conditions there are suggestive of all kinds of
alterations of the rules observed at a more (relatively) macro
scale of matter. At very small dimensions, the rules of
physics change, so why would we be surprised that at very
large dimensions, the rules of physics will also change.
In fact, in the
wonderful movie Mindwalk, the character of the physicist describes matter
as a huge emptiness, punctuated with geometric points, where
fields of force intersect. In effect, there is nothing
there at all in terms of substance (or what we call matter)
but this organism of intersections of fields of force in
various kinds of pure geometric points (no space). No
space at the infinite periphery, and no space in the
infinitesimal point. In between, the perfect geometric
sphere mediates between the greatest and the smallest. "Think on it: how the
point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou
understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and
then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for
thee in the finite." Rudolf
Steiner.
Now if this is
true, then as macro cosmic space becomes more plane-like and
less like the normal physical conditions of the Earth, we
ought to be able to observe phenomena (just as we do in the
very smallest dimensions revealed by quantum experiments) that
reveal to us that this condition of
space itself has altered.
Space, being no longer three dimensional at the plane at
infinity, must become something else.
Before we
believe this is a poor idea, recall that already we have been
taught about the so-called gravity wells
(especially near such objects as our Sun). Many of us
have seen images, either on TV or in a page in a magazine,
which suggests that near a massive object, space itself is distorted. Light, we are told, traveling near this
imagined state of a gravity well, can't travel in a straight
line. This is thought to have been proved by Einstein's
predictions regarding light from Mercury as it passes toward
us from the other side of the sun (when Mercury's orbit causes
it to hide (be occulted) behind the Sun. Using the
Reinmann geometry (a special case of projective geometry)
Einstein was able to calculate exactly the amount of the
bending of light by the gravity well our our Sun.
Since we already know how to imagine a distorted near space around a massive object like our Sun (recall that Bruno thought our Sun and stars were of a similar nature) it is not too great a leap to imagine a fully transformed space at the transition from the very large sphere to the Plane at Infinity. In a sense, the image of gravity wells is already a transformation of our ideas of space itself, although not going so far as to free itself fully of the need to measure. What I am suggesting is that we take our spacial imagination faculty all the way, and also bring projective geometry itself all the way into play as descriptive of the natural world.
Keep in mind that in current theoretical astronomy, scientists
are unable to explain stellar motion without adding to their
assumptsions about the total visible mass of stellar objects,
9 times more mass in the form of the so-called Dark
Matter. Estimates of the total mass of visible objects
can't explain apparrent stellar motion (using conventional
ideas), so, in order to save the theory,
invisible mass - Dark Matter - has been invented.
But this
invention is unnecessary if we use projective instead of
Euclidian geometry. Which is of course exactly what our
observations of light, and other phenomena of the stellar
world, can tells us if we let them. Once we overcome the
one-sided Euclidean geometry previously applied in parallax,
and substitute Projective Geometry principles, then all the
anomalous problems of redshift and other mass-centered
problems are resolved.
The reason the
hydrogen line of stellar objects is different is because it
(the light) originates in a kind of space which itself is
different). A star isn't a sun (unless we change our
ideas of our near sun-space - going back to Bruno, which is
entirely justified but a whole other problem). Those
stellar objects with large redshift characteristics (such as
Quasars) are deeper (a presently necessary poor choice of
words, for it implies a continuation of three dimensions)
within the transformed plane-like space. In fact, if we
make a picture only of the redshift (disregarding Euclidean
parallax) phenomena by itself (and related other astronomical
facts of stellar radiation and mass phenomena), a new kind of
picture emerges.
Think for a
moment on all the pictures we have been graced with of the
starry world from the Hubble telescope. Everyone
has seen these. Rich colors, but not empirical [See "How
Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty - Photoshop of course"].
Marvelous shapes and forms. Just looking at the
redshift characteristics we can make a picture of an object
that is remarkably active. It is not static or at rest
in relationship to the Earth, but dynamic. Its
relationship to other stellar objects is more fixed (perhaps
musically harmonious, because there is a dance of such objects
- including our solar system - all based on the projected
geometric form of the vortex*), but the light phenomena, which
our instruments observe, suggests (since we observe this
variation of redshifts, x-ray stars etc) that stellar objects
have dynamic properties. The various kinds of radiation,
pouring toward the earth from the cosmic periphery, are not
constant, but rather always changing and dynamic.
*[A vortex is,
in terms of projective geometry, a dynamic form. That is, it is, in its actual
nature, in movement. A tornado funnel cloud is a vortex,
and we see a vortex every time we flush a toilet. A
vortex is also a relative of the cone of light, which is how
we think of what light does when it enters the eye through the
lens. These cones of light are well described in all
their geometic properties by the rules of projective geometry;
and, a vortex is simply a dynamic (moving) cone-like form in
nature.] [See the
amazing visual art of DjSadhu]
Many stellar
objects are extremely dramatic (x-ray and neutron stars, for
example). Keep in mind that these pictures are created
by a thinking which has removed all qualities, remaining only in quantities. To better appreciate this lets make a
little analogy.
Consider a
flower garden in full late summer bloom. Vivid colors,
lots of insect life and birds dancing and playing. For
some almost violent growth (how fast does a sun flower grow,
on its way to a height of 12 to 14 feet in three months time).
Of course, to the gardener it makes no sense to
disregard the way such a garden makes us feel (its qualities),
but if astronomical thinking were applied to a flower garden,
all that would disappear. We'd end up with a bunch of
numbers (how many, of which kinds, what frequency of light
were the colors, what was the speed of growth etc. etc. etc.).
Our actual experience of the
garden is washed away by the process of limiting our thinking
only to the quantitative.
Now think (if
you can remember) of a time when you were deep in Nature, away
from city lights, and lay on your back in a meadow looking up
at midnight at the night sky. Thousands upon
thousands of stars, and your mind naturally saw everywhere
patterns. Moreover, we feel awe. The starry
night touches something deep inside us, that can only respond
with marvel and wonder. We forget this living in our
cities, and we have also forgotten (and losing) even the
ability to have such a view because the atmosphere itself is
becoming so polluted that less and less of the stellar light
passes through it to our eye. [For a more careful
discussion of the nature of consciousness as regards qualities
and quantities, go here: "I am not my
brain; the map is not the territory".]
This is what we
observe - what we experience. What we think - what is
our mental image or picture - having been formed by modern
astronomical ideas, is that this endless emptiness is filled
with objects like our own planet and solar system. But
now we are discovering in this essay the possibility that deep
space is not three dimensional at all. Cosmic space is a
peripheral plane of light, alive with dynamic processes
creating what? What is this new kind of space - the
plane at infinity - from which stellar light pours down upon
the Earth, and then becomes captured by our photographic
processes? The light from the stellar world is dynamic,
and when we make an image (Hubble stares at certain regions of
space for 10 or 11 days at a time), we have eliminated that
dynamism, and made the picture static or fixed.
Lets take a
small side trip here, to consider light itself. The book
mentioned above, Catching the Light: the entwined
history of light and mind, goes into
remarkable detail and history. Keeping our projective
geometry idea in mind, we might then make a relationship
between the sphere that has collapsed into a point, and what
is now called light quanta or photons. As mentioned
above, these quanta exhibit all kinds of properties that
normally spacial (in a three dimensional sense) objects do
not.
For example,
the world we see of trees and clouds does not reveal the micro
world of light quanta and the other many strange particles
known to modern high energy physics. The scientist
doesn't see much of this either, except with his instruments
and the image making powers of his mind.
We could say
(from our more naive point of view - which has a special
validity) that it is as if light quanta have stepped outside
of time and space (this is one way of viewing what the
experiments with light show to us today through quantum
physics). To help here, let me add another idea from
projective geometry.
We know in
Euclidean geometry this general rule: parallel lines never
meet. In projective geometry (of which, remember,
Euclidean geometry is a special case) parallel lines meet at
infinity. To appreciate this better we need to practice
another imagination, for we can with our picture thinking
follow quite easily in thought the wonderful paradox expressed
here.
Picture two parallel lines (I can do this here):
_______________.________________
________________________________
Now imagine the
top line, in the center of which is a point, rotating around
that point. Picture, for example, the top line crossing
the bottom line at about a 45 degree angle toward the left
side of the page. As we rotate this line further to the
left, the angle of crossing gets smaller and smaller, until at
infinity it no longer crosses the line. Yet, if we keep
rotating the line in the same direction of rotation, as soon
as it goes the smallest possible distance further, the top
line starts to cross the bottom line at the farthest distance
to the right.
When we couple
this idea with our appreciation of the plane at infinity, we
can with our geometric imagination feel (picturing it is hard,
but logically we can feel this is right - and all these ideas
have been proved by those working with the rules of projective
geometry using algebraic-like formulas and calculations) that
these two lines, which could be seen as parallel lines
contained in a sphere, will at infinity arrive at the same
point on the plane at infinity, because as we saw before, when
the radius line of the sphere is infinite it is no longer a
three-dimensional space. The rounded sphere has become a
plane, an all encompassing plane to be sure, surrounding from
the infinite periphery (the unseen universe imagined by
cosmologists) all that was at one time interior. The
surrounding geometric quality
remains, but since space itself is transformed, it
accomplishes a kind of paradoxical miracle.
To travel to
infinity in one direction (in terms of the spherical
three-dimensional nature of ordinary space) means to return
from the opposite direction, for once within the plane at infinity, the line that intersected
the ever flattening arc of the sphere is now simultaneously a
point that is everywhere. The point, in the center
dimensionless, expands, first becoming a growing
measureless sphere until it ultimately becomes a plane.
Our geometric imagination never has to leave the proper
and logical train of geometrical thought. Once more: "Think on it: how the
point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou
understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and
then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for
thee in the finite." Rudolf
Steiner.
If we then
appreciate that the night sky is the plane at infinity, and
that the measure we exported from our earthly perspective is
not valid out there in cosmic space, then the light quanta,
existing there outside of time and space, radiates toward us
from this cosmic periphery, only becoming space-bound when within
three-dimensional space. At the periphery, light quanta
are not limited by the so-called speed of light, but are
everywhere at the same time, yet somehow differentiated, for
that is what we see, not just with the eye but with all our
instruments as well. This violation of the
previous limiting idea of the speed of light has now been
disproved in certain quantum physics experiments (Google: Alain
Aspect 1982).
Light comes
towards us from the stellar reality. If that reality is
not spacial in the sense that we previously assumed (rooted in
three-dimensionally matter based bodies like suns and
planets), then what is it? What can exist in the
transitional space in between a true three-dimensional sphere,
and the pure plane at infinity? If out there is not an empty space in which three
dimensional matter arises, what does arise there in that space
that, like the infinitesimally small, will not allow itself to
conform to Earth-like physical laws?
These are the
questions that have to be faced if we apply projective
geometry to the relationship between our Earth center, and the
peripheral plane at infinity. If we look at the stellar
phenomena, such as redshift, then what meaning can be
attributed to that kind of existence which creates light that
violates the rules we know at the Earth center?
Perhaps it
would be better (disregarding the word "deeper" above) to
think of these objects as more filled with Life. The
plane at infinity, as transformed space, reveals a high level of dynamic properties in
all its light radiations. Could that dynamism be
Life? Why could we think that and remain within reason?
Something is
happening out there that comes here. Light is created
out there and comes here. Our science has made all kinds
of pictures for us of what is happening out there, yet these
pictures are not empirical, but entirely theoretical.
Moreover, they are entirely material and assume that the
laws of physics at cosmic distances will be the same as they
are on the Earth, which already we have noticed is not
justified for the very very small.
If we work from
the idea of the plane at infinity first (for which projective
geometry grants us every right), then we might ask whether or
not space itself
is created out there. We see the light coming toward us
from the cosmos, and we notice its dynamic properties (all the
various intensities of redshift, among others - Quasars,
neutron stars etc). If we discard measure (which
projective geometry doesn't need), then the plane at infinity,
with its inward radiating light is perhaps creating space
itself, not from a point center (such as the Big Bang), but
from the cosmic periphery.
The plane at
infinity (transcendent of matter oriented three
dimensionality) creates three
dimensional space and time, by radiating light inwardly from
the cosmic periphery. Redshift is not old light
receding, but its opposite - new light becoming space and
time. This is exactly the idea of a student of Rudolf
Steiner's, George Adams Kaufmann, in his 1933 essay on cosmic
theory (rooted in projective geometry): Space
and the Light of Creation, which
essay's first chapter is Radiation of Space (the second chapter is The Music of Number, and the third and last chapter is The Burden of Earth
and the Sacrifice of Warmth). [This
book small book on cosmic theory is quite difficult to find,
although connecting to a Rudolf
Steiner
library may help.]
What kind of
power could create Space itself? Our point centered
assumptions, working from only quantities, have only been able
to think of a spiritless matter filled Universe, born in a Big
Bang. Certainly, working inwardly from the cosmic
periphery (the plane at infinity) which the new geometry gives
us every right to do, what is that which can be out there that rays inwardly the creation of Space itself?
"...and in it was life
and the life was the light of the world..." The power (fiat
lux - let there be light) surrounding the Universe, is Life,
and the Life creates the Light, and the Light rays inwardly
creating Space and Time, in the center of which the Earth of
living matter and substance arises, itself a narrow spherical
band, for Earth life is only on the surface - go too deep and
it is fire and there is no life, go too high and it is airless
and again no life.
From the plane
at infinity, through the inward plane-ward sculpted spheres of
light, resting for a moment at the Earth periphery, where
humanity unfolds its evolution, then eventually still
collapsing to smaller and smaller spheres, ultimately
disappearing into pure point centered geometric intersections
of fields of force and the mysterious light quanta we discover
in our laboratory experiments in quantum physics.
But is it light quanta that is born first in the
cosmic periphery, and then flies inward ultimately dying into
very very tiny points from out which are built living matter
and substance?
Should not,
according to the laws of symmetry so essential to projective
geometry, there be both a similarity and a difference between
the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small? If
life is created at the cosmic periphery, does it die into the
very very small, only to be reborn instantaneously once more
in the cosmic periphery? Recall our imaginative
experiment with the parallel lines. If time and space
rules don't apply to light quanta (photons), this will be true
both at their point of first appearance and then again at
their point of disappearance.
Yet, something
not quite right here. The measureless sphere exists in
between the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small.
Appearance and disappearance are the same process in a
way. Here again is Rudolf Steiner: "Think on it: how the
point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou
understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and
then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for
thee in the finite."
Created out of
the uncreated and formless, generating space and time, falling
then inward toward the center from the periphery until
collapsing into the nothingness once more of timeless and
space-less point centers, before returning instantaneously
again to the cosmic infinite plane of life.
And, the
simultaneously opposite: Arising out of the uncreated
and formless nature of the mysterious light quanta, radiating
outward from an infinite number of point centers, spreading
out toward the cosmic periphery, there to disappear into the
remarkable spaceless and timeless plane at infinity.
A mystery aptly caught in the image of a mobile imagination of the gesture in space that creates the form we know as the lemniscate - the symbol for infinity.
Moreover, of
all the mysterious facts quantum mechanics has discovered, it
seems that it is the mind itself that determines the nature of
the collapse from potential becoming (probability) into
manifestation. Consciousness is crucial.
Without consciousness there is no manifestation,
only probability. Could not a Larger more Infinite
Consciousness exist at the Periphery, where time and space
themselves are first manifested? Then too, if the Great
Mind can do that, what then is involved in the small mind,
when it thinks and acts so as to unfold its own creative
imagination and exact picture formation in learning of and
practicing the measureless beauty of projective geometry?
In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was
toward God, and God was what the Word was. It was with
God in the Beginning. All things happened through it,
and not one thing that happened happened without out it.
In it was life, and the life was the light of the
world....*
So Christ
advises us to pray: "Our Father in the skies..."
*translation
from the Greek of a part of the prologue to the John Gospel,
from the book, The Unvarnished Gospels by Andy Gaus.
Of course,
currently Natural Science hasn't the capacity to appreciate
such a change in their understanding of the Cosmos. But
this book isn't written for scientists, its written for those
Christians, who might like to have a sense that one can still
be deeply religious and not abandon the rational.
What we have
done, by the way, is look at the image building processes of
the fine minds at work in natural science, which have created
a kind of myth regarding the stellar world - a myth quite
different from that held by more ancient minds in ages long
ago. We have not returned to those ancient myths so
much, as taken up, out of the advancing progress of natural
science itself, a particular discipline (projective or
synthetic geometry - all geometry), and applied it to move
past the current astronomical myth to what perhaps might well
be the kind of truth the physicist pursues when he chases his
holy grail of the so-called: Theory of Everything. (See
my latest book: The Art of God: an actual theory of
Everything)
Most versions
of the Theory of Everything rely on highly abstract
mathematical complexities - a kind of near-secret symbolic
language only useful to the priests of Natural Science.
Would it be possible to construct a Theory of Everything
using ordinary language? Can the symbols of words on a
page and simple concepts, understandable by ordinary
consciousness, produce a better Theory of Everything?
May it not be necessary in fact to reintroduce qualities
and mix those with quantities, if we are actually going to
have a true Theory of Everything?
Doesn't such a Theory not only have to explain
consciousness, but our form of consciousness - why we live in
the world in between the very very large and the very very
small?
We have
constructed this essay in a way that makes it possible for the
naive consciousness to behold in their own minds something
that so far has been presented to the world as a secret
mystery only knowable to the mathematical adepts of the
religion of natural science.
We live in a
time when there are to be no more priests, of the religious or
the scientific kind. No more claims that the ordinary
and naive mind has to be dependent on another for their
understanding of the world and of the universe.
The Universe
wants to be known, just as we want to be known. "You see, for now we
look as if in a mirror, shrouded in mystery; but then we will
see face to face. Now I partly discern; but then I will
perceive the same way that I was perceived all along.
And so we will have faith, hope and love, these three:
but the greatest of these is love."*
*[Andy Gaus, Unvarnished
New Testament - end of chapter 13,
of St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians.]
addendum
- many questions remain -
No reader
should consider that the above has exhausted all the
remarkable possibilities of projective geometry in advancing
our understanding of the Nature World as it appears to both
our senses and our scientific instruments. All I
have really done is try bring to light aspects of
thinking and the imagination that many don't yet appreciate.
Nor is the
above perfect by any means, for it is clearly the work of an
amateur. That fact, however, should not stop us from
going onward and asking all the many questions that still need
to be asked. [As an aside: in my considerations of the
nature of electricity and its relationship to Nature, I
discuss how space itself needs to be carefully rethought in
order to appreciate that "space" itself needs to be
reconceived even as regards electrical and magnetic phenomena:
"Electricity
and the Spirit in Nature - a tale of certain considerations
of the present state of science, in the light of a
modern practical understanding of the nature of mind".]
For example,
does the plane at infinity collapse into one point, or into
all points? We can think of the very smallest, as we
observe them in the local conditions of the earth in our
laboratory experiments, as a very huge number of such point
centers. All matter and substance seems to be built up
out of light quanta, and other oddly named particles.
Now a plane,
which has no measure, is infinite in all directions.
It can also be constructed, under the well known
rules of projective geometry, of points. There is,
in this geometry, a plane of points, a plane of lines, a point
of lines, a point of planes, and a line of points and a line
of planes. If we recognize that the Plane at Infinity is
made up of all possible points, then what keeps it from
radiating toward our Earth-Center that which becomes all the
many point centers from which matter and substance arise.
Once there, in this infinite number of point centers,
that which has first radiated inward, returns once more to the
periphery. This our geometric imagination can
experience.
A deep study of
projective geometry reveals several kinds of processes which
arise according to the basic relationships of plane, line and
point; or, the source or origin of light (the plane at
infinity), light becoming space and time (radiation of space)
and light dying into the source once more through its collapse
into the infinite number of point centers quantum physics
discovers. To this we add the process of that which
radiates out from point centers towards the periphery.
In the light of understanding
this, we can come to quite new conceptions of how crystals
grow, and what is happening at the growing point of a plant.
Such work has been done, in fact, by the Goethean
Scientists pointed out in the above essays.
In addition to
these questions then we are right to ask another: what is the
nature of the space occupied by the imagination itself? We know this exists, and not only
that it exists, but that we create it.
We consciously create imaginative space ourselves.
What are we that we can do something that has such
kinship with the space and time creating activity of the
Mystery at the Plane at Infinity?
"Imagination is more
important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to
all we now know and understand,
while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there
ever will be to know and understand."
Albert Einstein [emphasis added, ed.]
- healing materialism -
The human being
possesses a remarkable power in that he (or she) is able to
make images and share them with others. Meaning streams from one to another upon this product of
the picture-thinking imagination. We are taught science
out of this image creation capacity. We tell the
wonderful stories of our ancestors out of this same image
creation capacity. What we frequently don't do well, is
find a way to be scientific about this image creating capacity
itself.
Of all the
scientific disciplines that will enhance this image building
capacity, in a logically rigorous fashion, it is the
discipline of projective geometry (as taught by such as
Whicher above) that will be the most fruitful. At
the same time, the human being is more than rationality - much
more.
That human
culture produces art and religion, as well as science, ought
to give us a significant clue. Whicher's book
takes account of this, to a degree, by including a number of
pictures of art, including religious art. What is less
appreciated is the role of human intention, of human will, in
all this (the will is the
point-of-meaning center of the same consciousness which the
quantum physicist recognizes is needed for the potential to
collapse into the real).
At the end of
the main body of the essay above, I tried to remind the reader
that we are part of reality. Quantum mechanics has seen
this, for the potential of quantum events only collapses into
actual space and time when our consciousness participates.
The genius of Owen Barfield discusses participation in detail, in his book Saving
the Appearances: a study in idolatry.
In this book,
through a wonderful examination of what the deeper study of
human languages can reveal, Barfield shows us how there is an
evolution of consciousness, to go
along side the physical evolution so far discovered. For
Barfield, the quite ancient times could be called: original
participation. This was a time
when the human consciousness was instinctively one with
reality, thus giving birth to all the ancient myths.
This original
participation eventually faded away, giving us an intermediate
state, called by Barfield (and others): the on-looker separation. Humanity is pushed out of the
condition of original participation by the Gods themselves, so
that we can by this independence learn to experience our
freedom and our ego (self) consciousness. The
on-looker separation is itself marked by special changes in
language, in art and also gives rise to natural science.
It is as on-lookers (forgetting our role as
thinking observers) that we build the images of the natural
world, both earthly and cosmic, as only matter and never
spirit.
But the natural
world will not submit for long to that false view, and so
quantum mechanics finds that it must reinsert human
consciousness into its concepts of the basic physics of the
world. With this now well established basic scientific
knowledge, to which we can add the discipline of projective
geometry (especially with its understanding of visual cones of
light), the path is laid out of science itself toward what
Barfield called then: final participation.
Quantum
mechanics tells us that our consciousness is needed for the potential to be able to collapse into the real. Projective Geometry tells us not just
rules about the light cone of physical space, but as well the
light cone of internal imaginative space. Rudolf
Steiner's introspective science (outlined in A
Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception and The Philosophy of Freedom) shows us how to experience the world of image
building (organic form) and concept creation (pure thinking)
in a fully mature participatory way.
At the same
time, I don't participate solely as a rational being, but as a
being to whom art and the sacred have meaning. In a
certain sense, given the often raw nature of emotions, the
human being is often simultaneously: irrational (overly
emotional), rational (mentally disciplined) and transrational
(capable of huge leaps of non-logical intuitional insight). If
I add these dimensions of my being to my imaging building and
conceptual formulations, what kind of picture of the world
will I paint? Given this question, I will end with a
couple of stories as a kind of demonstration.
In the
mid-seventies I was traveling with some friends in Northern
California. We were a group of adults and children, and
during the day a few of the adults were designated
camp-parents, while the others were free to wander farther.
Thus I found myself, on the evening of the Summer
Solstice, sitting on a beach in Northern California watching
the Sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
As the Sun set,
the sky slowly grew darker and stars slowly appeared.
This is what I observed as I continued to watch
the point on the horizon where the Sun had set.
Together, as a group, at the precisely same degree
of arc of the edge of the ocean, there appeared three stars in
a somewhat vertical line. The Sun goes down, and
soon thereafter where it went down a vertical line of three
stars appears.
Now the reader
should realize that I was at that time quite convinced of the
spiritual reality of things, out of my own direct experience.
As a consequence, when I observed our natural
world I perceived it as a teaching.
For example, we can observe that of all the many
inorganic and organic beings that appear in visual space,
there are a variety of forms. Of this variety of
forms, only one form, one shape, has hands that have been so
creatively freed by our ability to be able to stand upright.
Moreover, this
human being changes his living environment in profound
ways. We act upon the creation, as if it was within us
that the creative power itself was slowly incarnating.
To my thinking then, there existed a kind of dialog
between the world of the senses and my own inner being (the teaching). Here I was on a beach watching the
Sun, itself a very special form (we receive light and heat
from it that are necessary for life - without the Sun we do
not live). As this form set on the Summer Solstice, the
first stars to appear (the night teachers),
were three.
This then is
what the teaching sang to me on that beach: one becomes three.
So the Mystery of the Trinity was written right there in
the most simple events of the world of the senses. One
becomes Three.
The ambient
light became slightly dimmer, and not too soon thereafter,
above the three was four, in the shape of a kind of box,
standing on one of its corners above the last star of the
three. The One becomes Three and then Four is added to
become Seven. Those who know what is sometimes called
the occult significance of Numbers will recognize here all
manner of analogies, about which nothing more need be said.
(for the more traditionally fixed of mind, the Sun set and in
the order described, the constellation of the Great Bear
emerged, standing on its tail above the same place on the
horizon the Sun had set on the night of that particular
Summer Solstice - yet this constellation did not appear
all at once, but in a very definite sequence as the day light
faded and the night lights manifested themselves).
In this way I
was initiated more deeply into the Mystery of the Night
Teachers, and while I wished my life would have allowed me to
study over many decades this teaching by which we noted not
just the starry sky, but when and in what order the stars
emerged, I did then realize that those who observed from such
as Stonehenge saw a world of wonder we have still yet to fully
appreciate.
One more
similar picture. If the shape of the sense world is from
a Creator, and this Creator is such profound Mystery that we
have hardly yet begun to appreciate all the He has done and is
doing, should we be surprised by the manner and depth of the
teaching that awaits us both within and without?
Consider, sunrise and sunset.
Something that happens all over the world
everyday, and has done so for eons.
If we, as an
aspect of final participation,
re-ensoul the world of the senses with being and consciousness, might we
not then begin to see that when the Sun sets, when the shape representing (in its
speaking-teaching) the Highest of the Mystery, recedes from
our sight, at that moment the stars, one by one and then in
groups, slowly emerge, slowly appear in the dark and by their
order of appearing and by the shapes and forms they thereby
render, they can be seen as singing praises to this Highest.
He sets, and they rise and sing.
Then the night ends, the regular night-singing has passed, and as the Sun begins to once more return to shed Its light and warmth and life on humankind, the stars recede, and kneeling down, in groups and then one by one, they give way to that which they honor above all else. Yet, this is not all.
For the shape
of time and space, of stars and suns and the world of
humankind, is also teaching. We are
there too, and what are we, we human beings, that the Highest
and all the Angels look down upon us - surround us and gift us
with such Love we hardly appreciate it. Not just that
but more, for we are not only looked down upon from Above, but
we are also carried through cosmic space by the Earth - Father
Sky and Mother Earth - as the world's oldest peoples and
cultures well know.
The dark moist
earth is the Mother, from which all that grows and nourishes
flows. The waters that give life, the very air we need
to breath. There in the center of all, looked down
upon by Father Sky, upheld and nourished in the Womb of Mother
Earth, sits the human being, the upright shape with the hands
and the creative and curious mind. That is the real
question of final participation: Who are we?
recent news concerning Red Shift
Sept. 12,
2008
Port Angeles, Wa. This week, dozens of leading astronomers,
researchers and other scientists from around the globe met
for a Cosmology conference.[1] The conference provided eight
panels composed of experts in every facet of cosmology
including the reality of expansion, quasars, dark matter,
dark energy, “black holes”, and the true nature of the
microwave radiation from space. One astronomer made his
presentation live from Germany using video-link technology.
Organizer Tom Van Flandern said “This was a thrilling
success. We heard and discussed three new mechanisms
explaining redshift and a new equation modifying our
understanding of gravity. If any of the redshift proposals
passes experimental tests that would mean we do not have an
expanding Universe; that the Big Bang theory would be
without its strongest foundation.
Physicist John Hartnett from the University of Western
Australia said “it’s amusing that our conference occurred
just as they fire up the Hadron Collider in Europe. Most of
our presenters showed the deep problems with the Big Bang
while a 40 billion dollar project starts up to trying to
find an elusive particle to keep the Big Bang story from
collapsing.”
From the many lines of evidence presented at the conference,
It now appears that those concerns were justified.
Presenters also outlined the principles that a good
cosmology should be based on. Chief among them is that it
should not require a series of miracles to remain viable.
[emphasis added, ed.]