Who needs spiritual/religious mysticism? Science has plenty of it. And here's the great thing: it is real!
In the August 31 issue of New Scientist magazine I came across a letter to the editor that blew my mind. Repeatedly. Because every time I re-read the letter, I got the same Whhhhhaaaaaatttttt? sensation.
Wilken Sporys from Christmas Hills, Victoria, Australia commented on a New Scientist story about the nature of reality that I blogged about last month.
The basic notion of the story was "Something has to go -- reality, relativity, causality, free will. They can't all coexist as how they are currently understood to be." Sporys said:
Who is to say that our understanding of any of them is right? Certainly, relativity tells us that time and space are not quite as we perceive them.
Any object travelling at the speed of light will arrive at the same instant that it left, without travelling any distance at all.
Time and space only emerge as an object or particle slows below the speed of light. Yet to us time and space seem indisputably real.
Wow... Any object travelling at the speed of light will arrive at the same instant that it left, without travelling any distance at all.
I knew this, from reading several books about relativity theory, but I obviously didn't really know it.
Because I kept thinking about that sentence, and not grasping it. Which isn't surprising, since I exist within time and space, and an object travelling at the speed of light doesn't.
It's a matter of perspective. This is how Einstein came up with his theory of relativity, I recall. Visualize what it would be like to be a photon of light. He could do that. I can't.
When I hear about light reaching Earth from a star 2 billion light years away, I picture that light zipping along at 186,000 miles per second, taking 2 billion years to get here. But that's my point of view. Like the letter writer said, photons of light don't take any time or travel any distance.
Here's another way of saying this.
One of the methods Einstein used to help formulate his theory of special relativity was to visualize what the universe would look like from the perspective of a photon. Einstein saw that life as a photon would be quite bizarre. For instance, if you were a photon, time would have no meaning to you. Everything would appear to happen instantaneously.
Imagine for a moment that you are a happy little photon created by a star in another galaxy some 4 billion light years away. From my perspective here on Earth, it took you exactly 4 billion years to travel from that star till you reached my retina. From your perspective, one instant you were created and then the next, you are bouncing off my eyeball. You experienced no passage of time. Your birth and death happened instantaneously.
This is because time slows for you as you get closer to light speed, and at it, it completely stops. This is also another reason why nothing can go faster than light. It would be like slowing down a car to a stop, and then trying to go slower than completely stopped.
One should think of the speed of light as ‘infinite speed’. A common misconception is thinking the speed of light is just like any other finite speed. The speed of light is only finite from the perspective of the outside observer; from the perspective of a photon, it’s infinite. If you move at exactly the speed of light you could go anywhere, no matter how far, in exactly zero seconds.
Far out. Sign me up. I hate to travel by car, plane, or whatever. Seats are uncomfortable. I get bored. Light speed travel sounds great.
In a fruitless attempt to truly grasp this "no time and no distance" thing, I spent a minute watching a "minutephysics" video. Didn't help. Just blew my mind again. Maybe you'll have better luck.
Yes Einstein is the mystic that caused a lot of people to fall in to the hands of other mystics. The evidence that his beautiful mental construction is just another poem being told gets bigger and bigger if you want to see it. Where is the time machine or the spacetime whormhole or the warp engine that relativity promised?
Before Einstein we had an aether theorie confirmed by Blavatsky Steiner etc. People that could see into the unknown where Einstein needed a stick and his brains to find an explanation. But his explanation did not really explain anything but it fixed the bookkeeping.
The powers that did not want us to have free energy are also the ones that blinded us after Einstein where technology was much further at the start of the former century.
But how do you stay rich with oil or the old ac Tesla network if you adopt the new Tesla technology that has mostly gone to the undertow. But it will rise again!
Posted by: nietzsche | September 06, 2013 at 06:45 AM
From 'prodigal genius' a Tesla biography:
Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or a tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasa or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance.
Can Man control this grandest, most awe-inspiring of all processes in nature? Can he harness her inexhaustible energies to perform all their functions at his bidding, more still cause them to operate simply by the force of his will?
If he could do this, he would have powers almost unlimited and supernatural. At his command, with but a slight effort on his part, old worlds would disappear and new ones of his planning would spring into being. He could fix, solidify and preserve the ethereal shapes of his imagining, the fleeting visions of his dreams. He could express all the creations of his mind on any scale, in forms concrete and imperishable. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, guide it along any path he might choose through the depths of the Universe. He could cause planets to collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light. He could originate and develop life in all its infinite forms.
To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man's mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement, which would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny.
Posted by: nietzsche | September 12, 2013 at 09:28 AM