Aboriginal Physics Newsletter

electron microscans of plankton (radiolaria skeletons, less than .1mm)

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

 And Eternity in an hour

-William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’

The radiolarians are among the most beautiful microbial eukaryotes.  They are significant components of the marine plankton and are characterized by mineralized cytoskeletal components that appear as nested spheres and spines; so that they often look like as tiny free-floating star-bursts.

When large numbers of them and their planktonic relations get together, they look like this; (more…)

When God sprinkled the earth with humans or when they climbed out of clam-shells as in Haida Creation Myth, they were quickly attracted to oases, forest groves, green valleys, snug harbours and paradisiacal islands, like iron filings attracted to magnets.  ‘Community’ thus evolved, in the ‘habitat-orchestrates-the-inhabitants’ manner as Nietzsche has described it; “evolution is a process of diffusion in which outside-inward flow predominates over inside-outward flow.”  That is; the dynamics of habitat orchestrate the dynamics of the inhabitants; when a tree grows tall and sprouts dates, it orchestrates tree-climbing behaviour in humans; ditto for valley corn, prairie grain, forest game and marine fisheries. (more…)

they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.

Musings on the globally pervasive quest for ‘more personal’ community: . . .- It seems that many people have grown tired of living within a system that is ‘constantly bickering with itself’ and seems, in many ways, to be growing more ‘internally intolerant’.  The discomfort is not coming simply from differences in views and their associated debates, since these have always been accepted as part of normal living and the normal social dynamic. It seems instead to be coming from the growing un-civility of it all.  We may applaud the significant extension to our ability to communicate furnished by cell phones and internet technologies, but these technologies open the door, as well, to an extreme impersonality [e.g. ‘bullying’ that exposes the private life details of an individual to a voyeur crowd that can easily exceed the capacity of the Coliseum] and to the infusing of discordant notes that continually accumulate and never seem to get resolved, engendering a lingering ambiance that is sort of graffiti like.  In the new media, many speak in abusive and derogatory tones that ‘would not be tolerated in a physical space’.  At the same time, the boundarylessness opens the way for new connections that have the potential to bring people together in a ‘more personal’ community.

What kind of change is in its birthing process? (more…)

This essay is for sharing with those who may have interest in the intuition that rational thought is screwing up our understanding by ‘going with vision, thought and language’ rather than with our ‘feeling experience’ of situational inclusion in the unfolding spatial plenum.

.

escher's 'print gallery' / including the observer in the observed

Rational thought turns us into judges that accept, LITERALLY,  the forms we see ‘out there in front us’ and ‘their actions’ as if we were ‘not included’ in what we are looking at ‘out there in front of us’.  Thus an oppressive regime that allows extreme wealthy and poor classes to form (protects the continuing disparate wealth shift by ‘right to own and possess’ laws, sees ‘theft’, the inevitable ‘short circuits’ that develop between such extremes, as actions in-their-own-local-right perpetrated by forms or ‘beings’ that exist in their own local right. This notion that ‘local forms’ and their actions are ‘real’ is something that we gather from our visual sensing and that we further affirm in thought and language by defining and word-labeling these forms.  As John Stuart Mill observed; “Every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the local existence of the object [form] defined.” (more…)