Science 7
Presented on: Saturday, November 17, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Science 7 and we're looking at the way in which a recalibration is so new it is not hearable for a long time, like this maturation programme, our learning, is so new that it has taken a long time to be refined. One of the things that has come out of science is featured in three sets of scientists. The first set was Einstein and Niels Bohr, the second set is Barbara McClintock and Vera Rubin. The death of Barbara McClintock when she was 90 in 1992 had all of her friends contribute to a book called The Dynamic Genome, and this is the cover of it, and there is a piece of Indian Corn, maize, on the cover, and she spent almost all of her life raising corn, raising maize, relentlessly, alone in her field, and literally was alone in her field, and when one takes a look at how long it took for her work to really come into play, it's astounding, because she was born in 1902, and the Carnegie Institution in Washington put out in 1994 this little booklet on jumping genes, to show some of the further developments from Barbara McClintock's work with maize, and she is still in the news. This is from June 2005. Jumping genes may aid in brain diversity. '
Virus-like genes that jump from spot to spot in the genome may help shape the nerves in our brains, possibly helping explain why brains differ so much even in identical twins. The finding reported in the current issue of the journal Nature [which is the international science journal. There is another magazine called Science that is almost its equal.] The finding reported in the current issue of the journal Nature investigated a genetic element called an L1 retrotransposon, a piece of DNA that has the ability to make copies of itself and insert them in new spots in the genome. About 20% of the human genome is made up of L1 retrotransposons, although most are damaged and cannot move around. Scientists had considered them to be largely junk. Previously these elements had been known to jump only in testes and ovary tissue. [So they found a way to put a stain on these elements and put mice, a team led by Fred Gage, neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, found that they jumped around in the brain.] The team observed the activity of an L1 retrotransposon that had been engineered so that every time it jumped within the genome the cell would glow green. 'The modified L1 was put into mice and we saw these green neurons all over the brain and nervous system. It was pretty amazing.' The jumping appeared to occur inside neural stem-cells that gave rise to brain and nervous system cells. The scientists saw signs that the jumps could alter the development of the cells.
So that by the 21st century, we're understanding that Barbara McClintock's work was one of the deepest insight triggers in the whole history of science. She stands on a par with scientists like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Her work was something that came out of a personal prismatic quality that she did not relinquish. She was never absorbed into the authoritarian social world, either looking for approval or looking for a more comfortable life. Her quality is that of an artist, like Einstein, who reached back into her experience to trust, because her experience flowed in the field of nature. And because her experience, her mythic experience, her images, her language, her feelings, because they were at home flowing in the field of nature, they were also then at home flowing in the field of vision. And that the field of visionary consciousness as a differential opens out just as the field of nature comes to emergent objectivity, two unities. And so existence, anything that exists, is itself, is what it is, and maintains that by an iterative frequency of having the dynamic polarised, and because it's polarised it synches into stable objectivity, not just once but each time the energy frequency reaches that threshold of emergence. So that the ancient Palaeolithic wisdom of our kind, going back some 160,000 years for our species but about 45-50,000 years ago, a marked change, a threshold came upon our kind, and out of this was the self-consciousness of being able to express one's personal spirit in art, and that the art was a way of tying the images and the language and the feelings into bows that could be arranged; and that the arrangement of those bows in their order combed experience so that the flow of experience now as modulated in terms of sets of existential emergence in accordance with their harmony. And art for the first time sensitises us to the harmonic of our spirit prism being able to inhabit our experience and through that to participate in nature as a field directly. The late 20th century used as an ideal for that the Zen experience. One is instantly real. And that reality has a tone of recognition, of remembrance. Barbara McClintock worked with corn from the time she was an entering junior at Cornell University in upstate New York, 1922, so for 70 years she worked with corn, with maize. And she worked with it in such a way that she would immerse herself so naturally in the field of having her field of vision and the field of nature so together that they would no longer distinguish in terms of a mnemonic/memnonic order. One of the proofs of this, she was able to immerse herself so deeply in the yoga of the moment and its concentration that she one time finished a final exam at Cornell, but realised that she hadn't put her name on the blue book and she couldn't remember her name. And it took about 20 minutes for her to come far enough out of the total instant participation in the field of conscious nature, to have it come to her what her name was. And she said, she had told this when she was very old and quite famous, 'People would have thought I was cuckoo.' She would be able to take a cob of maize, later in her life, and by looking at it, look into it in the depths that she was able to characterise the whole ten chromosome genetic code of this particular cob of corn, and after a while she used to take her vacations in the winter-time, when the ground is frozen on Long Island where she was at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, and she would go to South America and she traced back the way in which the detail of the genetic code of maize and its chromosomes could be traced back to the way in which corn was developed in the New World in the first place, and found that there are four or five independent sites that originated maize back more than 10,000 years ago. She was able to pinpoint where these places were and the movement of American Indians who were able to carry with them the corn and improve it as they went. And one of the odd things is that corn, like bread wheat, has no way to propagate itself in nature. It has to be propagated by human hand. Natural goat grass has big wings that when you go through a mutation and you come out with emmer wheat, about half those wings go into making more kernels, but with bread wheat all the energy is taken away from all of the wings and makes a very large head of grain, but the grain having no way to propagate itself, will just fall to the ground where it is. So bread as the staff of life has to be sowed by human hand, and corn in the New World is exactly what bread wheat was in the old world. There are cereals that depend upon human conscious cooperation for them to continue to exist, and it is not just the consciousness as a dimension that is added to nature, but there is another dimension of the person that is added to nature, and a third dimension of knowing the history of where this came from and what it does, so that one can then improve it and carry it through, and the improvement is that fourth extra dimension, is where science comes into play in reality. One of the most difficult things for us to understand: science is not born in the mind. Science is germinated in the differential conscious space of vision, in theory. And that the theory is not opposed to practice, but the theory, the vision, reaches all the way back to the existential practice, the ritual level, and it's only by our phases that we can finally come to understand how all of this works, and develop a deep refinement, a recalibration about learning and about ourselves and our manifestation into infinity. The mind puts a ceiling and caps in integral and that is called realisation. Technically that is the idea of realisation, and not reality at all. The Zen classic that illustrated that was a series of ten pictures called The Ten Bulls by Kakuan, a great Zen master artist, that the man is drinking in the village with the others and he sees that his work is going to be easier if he can get that bull and tame that bull and teach that bull to do his work, and as he does this, in The Ten Bulls, of that step there is a moment where he realises that the bull and the world and himself are a complete mystery, and there is in the ninth of the ten a blank page, there is no image whatsoever, it is the Zen realisation of pure consciousness that is not in the mind, and so it has no images whatsoever. And in Zen the phrase is, from the Chinese wu wei, no mind. Theory occurs in the field of consciousness, of no mind. It is a space that is generated beyond the mind's form, and because that space is generated by a completed cycle of integral, the space of theoretical visionary consciousness is able to play freely and to create, and so whatever structures were unified in the mind, they are now released, the imagination is released into creative imagining. The memory is recognition in remembering, and so the play of creative imagination and remembering, when it has an emphasis on creative imagination, the forms that will come out will be the forms of art, will be not only the forms of art but will be the artist. When the remembering has a more emphasis in that ratio, instead of there being a form immediately, there is a process of remembering, which is really history. But because it's a differential, the remembering is kaleidoscopic, it does not have any bound. It has the ability to generate possibilities of possibilities of possibilities, and so the creative imaging becomes a creative possibility of remembering, and science being the forms that come out of this kaleidoscopic remembering, are like the cosmos. It has no bounds, it has no shape, it is not limited to existence. It is not limited to the mind, but occurs in a cosmic freedom play that is infinite.
The other woman that we're taking, Vera Cooper Rubin, was very similar in many ways to Barbara McClintock. Both of them attended Cornell and got degrees there. Both of them finally ended up sheltered by the Carnegie Institution, Vera Rubin in Washington DC and Barbara McClintock at the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory. The director for many decades of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory was James Dewey Watson, one of the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA, and it's on the north shore of Long Island, facing Long Island Sound across which would be Connecticut, Barbara McClintock was born in Hertford, Connecticut, but when she was six her family moved to Brooklyn, and so she grew up in Brooklyn. She went to PS139 and Erasmus High, and wanted to go to university because she loved science, loved learning, but her mother was a stickler for girls being fine young women who could marry men who could provide for them and take care of them, so her two older sisters became what the mother desired. They married well, had very successful lives, but little Barbara McClintock was treated as if she should have been a boy, because she was the third girl in a row. There finally was a brother, but by that time she was characterised as a tomboy, which she didn't mind at all. And being a very small, slightly, elfin creature, with extraordinary yogic capacities that were developed in her in a completely original way, and only later in life did she come to understand that these are very, very high powers indeed. Her ability to engage in conversation with little children was always remarked upon, that they didn't seem like little children anymore, that when they were talking with little Barbara McClintock they were talking like real matured spirit persons. They were no longer categorised because they were released in her presence to disclose their actuality, rather than the current status in their maturation, and she extended this to all kinds of living things, including corn. She went to extremes sometimes to protect her corn. In that part of long Island, when she was first there in the early 1940s, there were still a lot of marauding racoons at night, so she would take her sleeping bag and sleep in her cornfields to protect them from the racoons. She raised generation after generation but her first great work was done in the period 1929 to 1931. She got her Bachelor of Science degree at Cornell, her Masters, and then in 1927 her PhD, and she stayed on to do research there in botany. All of her work is collected together and available in Genes, Cells and Organisms, in the Great Books in Experimental Biology, and these are the collected works of Barbara McClintock and her collected papers are selected here because the full collection, The Barbara McClintock Papers is in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the society founded by Benjamin Franklin. Her papers are 70.5 linear feet. The reason why she had such voluminous papers is that after a while, she realised that it was almost futile to try to publish her work because no one was believing it. No one was understanding it and no one really cared. And most of her work was done for herself, and kept on 3x5 cards and kept in voluminous, detailed photographs and kept in private reports and after a while she would publish her reports only in the Carnegie Institution Annual. When she would come out, even as late as the 1950s, and deliver papers that were extraordinary and astounding, they were so complex and so new that the language would not be heard, literally. Important scientists would say, 'I couldn't understand a word of what she was saying' and those who are familiar with this education have heard a thousand times of people coming in and saying, 'I didn't understand a word of what he was saying.' Because the language becomes refined, in such a way that you must not hear the language but you must hear through the language, and it's akin to somebody who has learned to read. You do not look at the ink shapes to read. You look through the words to be able to read. I'm using a transparent symbol mind to convey instantly to your sense of recognition and when it is matured you will hear not only all of what is said, you will hear that there are layers of possibilities, new understandings of what is said, and one of the women who helped collect the contributions in The Dynamic Genome, of remembering Barbara McClintock, her name was Nina Fedoroff, Russian descent. In fact there's a great photograph of Nina talking to Boris Yeltsin after the Soviet Union was thrown away and Russia came back. Many Russians went home to Russia just to visit, for the first time to be able to see a Russia that had been gone for 70 years. The Soviet Union was a veil, an overlay. Nina Fedoroff said, 'Once I began to understand from my own genetic work what Barbara McClintock was doing and talking about, I would go back and re-read her papers [which were there at the time at the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory. And she said,] not once or twice but over and over again,' and at each repetition seemingly there was an overlay, so that one now was able to see not just in three dimensions or four dimensions, but in a series of multi-dimensional, not a universe but a cosmos of possibility, which she was constantly exploring. And the constancy of the exploring was that though it seemed from the outside that she was just repeating planting her crop of maize, tending it till it matured, harvesting it and then going into the lab with microscopes, other techniques, to analyse, and through the winter doing the analytic, and she did this 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week for almost half a century. A real yoga. Like my presentation here is yoga that's unbroken, every single Saturday since 1983, about the time that Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. More than 1200 in a row. You can't do that thinking to do it, to plan to do it; you have to simply do it. It's a Zen no mind presentation, not a representation. Barbara McClintock had a problem twice over because she was a woman in what was traditionally thought to be a man's world. There are very few women professors outside of topics like Home Economics. The prejudice against women as being professorial level co-presenters with men was extraordinary, even though intelligent women have always been apparent and at times, in certain areas, the smartest person on the planet would be a woman. There are times where it was so extraordinary that there are legendary women in history who have that capacity. In her time the Queen of Sheba was the most brilliant person in the world, and the only person that she felt was on a par with her was Solomon. There were times, 1500 BC in Egypt, where Hatshepsut, who always wore a false beard for formal presentations, became one of the greatest of all of the Egyptian pharaohs, and when one looks across from Thebes across the Nile and sees her burial palace, Deir el-Bahri, it looks like a 22nd century development, it looks like a science building that was built 3500 years ago but might be built in the next couple of hundred years. It has that eerie quality. Barbara McClintock and Vera Rubin share something extraordinary. While Barbara McClintock was working with the very, very small she was working with the little nodes and aspects of thread-like chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell of corn, Vera Rubin was working with galactic structures - not just the galaxy but was working with the development that went beyond just galaxies. In the book that we're using by her, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters, she relates:
Surprisingly, progress in deciphering the structure of our own galaxy has not kept pace with extra-galactic achievements. We know that we live in a spiral galaxy, although its detailed morphology and dimensions remain a mystery. We do not know how far our sun is from the centre; nor do we know our rotational velocity about the centre with an accuracy sufficient to determine the galactic scale to within 20%. Astronomers now understand spiral arms as a wave phenomenon but the theory is more successful in the general than in the specific. Initial progress in reducing the detailed structure of the distant nucleus of our galaxy has come from very-long-baseline interferometry in the radio spectrum and from observations of ionised neon emission and the infrared.
One of the qualities that was peculiar, that Vera Rubin brought out, was the development of the understanding that if the laws of physics hold, galaxies should not be able to hold themselves in their shape. They would either condense or they would fly apart. The angular momentum would disperse them or they would clump together and become like a supermassive black hole. That they hold their shape is because the visible matter is just a trace element in the actuality of existence, and she is one of the founders of the theory of dark matter and dark energy. That what we took to be existence is just the froth on the surface, which cannot be seen in visible light, but that the visible light has a very special quality, that froth has a trace element within it, a froth within the froth, and that froth is life. So in a very peculiar way, The Gospel of John begins: 'In the beginning was the word and the word was life, and the life was the light of men.' Has that infolded presentation of the three great jumps, that there is something that triggers by saying, in the right way, that is life, that is light, and in our learning, our education, we're coming now, with Science 7, to understand the Cosmos as an infinite differential form generates the field of nature. That nature as a field is generated by a dynamo, which is the cosmos itself in its movement, and the most effective inner-working of the cosmic generation of nature is life, and it expresses itself within a medium that is like a threshold, it's like the cell membrane, and that is light. And light as the membrane of our life, gives us an opportunity to interdimensionally be real with the infinity that comes from the cosmos through the language, through the word, into life eternal, not life eternal as life a summation, but life eternal in that it never was not. This is a peculiar aspect of science, of actual science, and you find on the level of Einstein or Niels Bohr, Barbara McClintock, Vera Rubin, we're going to take Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, and pair those with Richard Feynman, when one comes to real science there is a doing of it which opens out into a sense of the mysterious wonder that one is quite real doing this. That recognition is the field within which vision functions to open up the transformative dimensions that allow time, space, to carry their existence and their integral into a larger ecology of eternity.
We're going to come back after the break and take a closer look at Barbara McClintock, how she was the first person on the planet to understand that the creative freedom of play in the genome is not only universal, it is cosmos making. It's the way in which life is real.
Let's take a break.
Let's come back to the character of the person of Barbara McClintock. In 1983 she was 81 and in that early eighties this is how she talked.
Asked how she found out about the Nobel Prize she said, 'I heard it on the radio this morning.' Laughter crinkled her face.
'No one called you?'
'No, I don't have a phone at home. I haven't for years. When I go home, I don't want that phone to wring. I want to be free.'
'What will you do with the prize money?' someone called out?
McClintock, a slight woman with a short, plain haircut and a wry sense of humour, answered, 'I don't even know what the award brings in.'
'It's $190,000,' she was told.
McClintock laughed. 'Oh, it is? I didn't know. I'll just have to get to one side and think about this!' The Nobel committee must have been surprised on October 10th 1983 to discover that Barbara McClintock had no telephone. For her the lack of a phone was typical. With no need for a big house, fancy clothes or much money, she lived a no-frills life, a light microscope was her research tool. This brilliant scientist could get along with very little. McClintock's work centred on maize, the multi-coloured India Corn often seen at thanksgiving.
And we're reminded by this of the peculiarities. The more one becomes visionary the more the creative imagining and remembering disclose a boundless freedom. So that the spirit person is actually a jewel, prismatic, of a cosmos that is completely free. Because it is real to refine, and become endlessly whatever possibilities you would like to follow up. Our kind, conscious, spiritual beings, all over the cosmos, continually recycle and recirculate that consciousness of the gift of freedom. And its origin is not in existence. Existence is a phase of it. The mind's integral is not the culmination of it. It also is a phase within it. It has its place in the way in which energy frequency will rise and fall and create periodicity by its wave iterative and will create space by the complement to the time periodicity of blossoming in volume, and so time and space are related in such a way that when they are in the field of nature purely, it is only an ocean of dynamic, does not have any kind of a path. The path is the energy frequency and so the energy, when it becomes polarised so that it will have its movement between positive and negative, electron and proton, that polarisation is like the banks that are elastic and however the energy frequency will increase or decrease the elasticity of its time-space banks will modulate, so that one can come to understand out of nature comes an existential that is precise and because of its precision its unity is always able to be discerned, in terms of the shape in space and the iteration in time, to any degree of accuracy that one would like to have.
A billionth of a billionth of a second is an atosecond, its' the space that is smaller than the movement of an electron in its motion around the nucleus of an atom. That movement of the electron in its time-space is about 10 atoseconds. We have the ability now, even early in the 21st century, to be able to discern an image that is subatomic in atoseconds. What is curious is that the electron, a point of negative energy, does a pirouetting as it moves. It's not just a point but it is a point because it is in motion, has almost the quality of being a little line of light, a little line of electricity. And that can be aligned so that the electrons will be organised and flow in a laminar way, in which case one gets light that is not laser. Whereas sunlight is a kaleidoscope of diffraction, and not just because it comes through an atmosphere or comes through almost 100 million miles of space, which is not completely empty but has molecular gasses and other attractions like gravity and so forth, but even in its origin light is already ancient when it leaves our sun, our star, and our sun is a medium star. It takes a million years for the bell-like pulse of our sun to release the energy that has been constantly bubbling up for that million years and reaches the surface of the sun in these millions and millions and billions of bursts of these energy waves so that our sun, like any star, it rings with light. It's a bell of light. And that release has an energetic boost because in being released in these billions of volcanoes of the vortexes of the way in which electromagnetic energy as light is released, it makes a chorus of resonance, so that the koruna of the sun is millions of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun or the interior of the sun, and it is that extra dynamis that gives light its impulse to shine from the star. What happens with a galactic structure is that its ringing takes place in magnetism, in magneto electric energy which does not register as light but registers differently as a gravity, a gravitation, so that one can, like Vera Rubin, understand that the sourcing of shape in the universe is by a massive gravitation of dark matter and has its accelerator dynamic because of dark energy. And that what is carried with this is the froth of material that is light registerable and within that the deeper silence, until it learns to sing, of life which sings to the light, and that singing to the light adds a harmonic which then comes into play and the universe blossoms as a bouquet of the cosmos, and the fragrance, the perfume, of those trillions and trillions of bouquets that are fresh each moment are the energy by which the field of nature is generated. All of this is symbolised in our iconography in this learning, by the rainbow infinity sign. Its concourse is that all the colours of the rainbow are indeed a covenant, but a covenant of the eternal and not time-dated nor space-limited. With someone like Barbara McClintock, to discover that the genetic order, the structure of the genes, is not only mutable but it happens all the time, many times, thousands of times, and she was the first to understand that the process is roughly like this. She was the first to be able to see the array of the ten chromosomes of maize in their set and to be able to see that within that set there were genes that were the triggers, the turning on or turning off of the DNA sequencing instructions, and that those genes having that capacity were able to have an intrusion called a dissociator, like a genetic particle, she used the term dissociator, and then would symbolise it Ds, that when the Ds is attracted into the gene, it's attracted into the gene in such a way, in the middle of it, that it shuts off the capacity of that gene to communicate and translate anything, and so what you come up with is a blank. And so you have a gene to make a colour that this corn is going to be yellow, or this corn is going to be red. And if a dissociator comes into that colour gene, there will be no colour, that corn will be colourless, but there is another aspect, another particle, that she symbolised Ac, an actuator, an accelerator to turn it back on, and if this happens where the dissociator is replaced by the actuator, the dissociator leaves and the gene comes back, but it blinks back and forth, and so the colour will be speckled. And depending on how long it takes for that to happen, the return or not, the speckles will be blotches or they will be lots of little ones or they will be just a few minute ones, and so you can tell the sequencing time of that action of the bouncing of the dissociator and the actuator back and forth within that gene, and over the decades she became able to read the cobs of corn, and to understand that they are related, in a very sexual way, to the stalk of the corn. The stalk of the corn ends with a tassel and its' the male member of corn, it fertilises. The cobs have silk at the end. That's the female genital of the corn, and receives the pollen. And she became a very attentive, very careful surgeon in the field of making a very minute slit in the top of the stalk to bring just a few elements like semen of the corn out, and then be able to suture it back together she used brown tape to do this, and then she would slowly, over the years, teach herself how to recognise the whole genetic development from the stalk and from the cob, in terms of the interchange of the tassels and the silk. You could be degenerate and run a TV show Stalking the Silk. But other than that kind of Hollywood senseless humour, it is a great huge thing to understand that her ability to be attentive to this was a concentration that went beyond her mind, beyond her body, and was an immersion in a harmonic of her spirit in the cosmos. So that when the cosmos generated the field of nature, she was generated with it into the field of nature. She had long moments where she was not only, as the French would say, au natural, she was completely nature. So that she was able to be there at the moment of the first iteration that would become the existential new corn, fertilised, and that kernel gave rise to a new stalk with new cobs. Every year she went through this truly shamanic offering and those fields ... Alone in Her Field, she was not alone in her field, she was with her family. She became a corn mother in every sense of the ancient wisdom understanding, a corn mother. The archetypal corn mother most familiar to you is Demeter, who is famous not for having a son or a husband, but famous for having a daughter, Persephone. And that Demeter and Persephone, the mother-daughter, are a pair that are not put together but that are infolded permanently, eternally, because that daughter will become a mother who will have a daughter, and it is not a cycle of nature so much, like seasons, but it is an eternal return of the seasons in infinite variations and possibilities. On this planet there are latitudes where the seasons are very unequal. If you're in the Yellowknife region of the Mackenzie territories, there are times where the sun will hardly set at all, and there are times where it will hardly rise at all. There are star systems, like ours, that have planetary bodies that have no seasons whatsoever. Mercury will have burning summer always on one side and frigid interplanetary cold on the other. It will have, at the poles, a little bit of semblance of some kind of shift and there are star systems without end, planets without number, in which the cycles, the seasons, are kaleidoscopically varied. What is real is that the mother-daughter relationship is always that existentiality of the whole being will be that of fertility. And that the response to that by the masculine is to participate in the gifting of that fertility into reality. And so it is a curious thing, the most like our kind, as we saw when we were in the phase of ritual, is that of great primates like the chimpanzees that came into their existence about 70 million years ago, and like Jane Goodall, another Barbara McClintock, living at Gombe in the forest with generations of chimpanzees so that she knew them individually, saw that the masculine quality was that of patrolling the boundaries to make sure that the membrane of the territory was secured, and the females tended to be there like a nucleus at the centre with raising the young, cooperating to become pregnant. And that one of the curious things is that bands of chimpanzees, the males will defend their territory against the others, but if a female goes into another territory she can go to the centre. She becomes a part of the treasury of the fertility of life and this is a curious kind of a quality. What happens with galactic structures is that at the centre, holding the pivot like in our galaxy, will be a black hole, and that black hole will be a part of the invisibility of the dark matter on the boundaries. That boundedness of that dark matter allows for the pivot to occur without destroying the shape of the galactic disk and so it preserves itself for literally billions and billions of years. In 1966 the discovery of quasars, which are the bright cores of galaxies so far away that their visible discs are not able to be seen; in fact the accrual of large galaxies like the Andromeda or the Milky Way were not there some 13 billion years ago, and early galaxies were much smaller, but the integral was always to bring them together into larger and larger aspects and star systems like our own, being about 4.5 billion years old, come almost 10 billion years after this kind of a process was initiated. Everywhere that we look the elements of life are distributed throughout the universe, even in between stars, not just on planets or moons, but in between the planets, in interplanetary space, and in interstellar space, and now we're understanding even in intergalactic space, the elements of life, the molecular structures are already present and there. There is more water in the star system, our star system, on the edge of it than there is... if you look at the earth's oceans it a drop in the bucket of how much water there is beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt objects. That the source of water of making oceans is actually billions of comets that have icy material that accrued over several billion years. Our planet was more than 1.5 billion years old by the time there was enough mix of water and molecular origins of life for the bacteria and the Achaea to emerge initially, about three-and-a-third billion years ago. She was asked when molecular biology was being developed, about the same time that galactic astronomy was being developed, the large and the small at the same time; the large not only large in size of galactic and super-galactic clusters, but of going back in time, and the very small of going back to the very origins of the creative play that makes life fertile for all beings, not just a sexuality that is there because of critters (or creatures) but there is a molecular origin of sexuality. It's there in the way in which life itself occurs.
Nina Fedoroff, who we talked about a little bit before, in writing of how transposition was discovered, writes at the beginning in these sentences.
McClintock's studies on mutable genes began as an interesting tangent, making use of what she'd learned in her extensive earlier studies on the behaviour of broken chromosomes.
She was attracted to trying to explore the possibilities of a university appointment and she was invited to go to the University of Missouri by a friend of hers, and when she was there she was doing work on the way in which the recently discovered x-rays and x-ray power would affect chromosomes, and found that they broke, but they broke in such a way it was not a clean break but they were like pulled apart, so that the ends were frayed. And she was the one who intuited, who visioned, that those frayed ends of the broken chromosome would circle around and seek to make a new unity and in doing so they would make a ring chromosome, and that this was a whole cycle of the breakage and the re-bridging and coming back together, and she is the one who saw ring chromosomes from mutational damage of radiation before it was possible, physically, to see it. And within a short space of months of research, knowing what to look for and where to, the first ring chromosomes were seen.
She was then invited to go to Stanford University where one of her friends from Cornell was working on a problem that had come up on pink bread mould, and she went to Stanford for just a little while, and within a couple of days of being there she was able to understand that the seven chromosomes of pink bread mould would form a set, and that there should be a way to understand, as she had in the ten chromosomes of maize, the structure of Neospora, which is pink bread mould, of how its structure must be similar in operation to that of maize, and in very short time she was able to characterise it in a couple of brilliant papers. She began to get a reputation of being a difficult little independent munchkin who really knew her stuff, and of the reasons she really knew her stuff is that she did not mix with others so much in her work, but she immersed herself in the actuality of the nature that was not before her but coursing through her. She had the perfume of nature in her spirit person and therefore was always anointed with actuality and able, in this way, to discover, and Vera Rubin very much the same way in galactic astronomy.
Vera Rubin says:
The stars are like the cells a galaxy. We must be able to understand them. Crucial to our understanding of star formation is a knowledge of the interstellar gas and dust from which new generations of stars are born, but the interstellar gas and dust itself is born from a super-space. But that super-space has a medium [which we call now dark energy and dark matter.]
One of the peculiarities of it is when you take a large sample of galaxies in a field, they will show clustering shape. Not only clustering shape but also voids, so that there is a concentration together and there's a concentration of not being, of being away together, being together and being away together, so that you will have clusters and super-clusters and great voids, all in a tapestry that is dynamically interchanging and by our coming into play with that, our conscious person becomes more and more prismatic in the sense that we begin to have an affinity with the cosmos. We literally step into heaven and participate in it, and in doing so our planet in our star system become sensitised and tends to have its fertility in that way with that vector, with that ratio of vectors so that it gains, at a certain threshold, a fantastic explosive momentum. The explosion of creativity. Just like 45,000 years ago for the first time there is art in the world. Before that there was no art. And Palaeolithic art explodes and seems to be everywhere on the planet, in Australia, in the Pyrenees, wherever. We are now at that membrane where our interstellar dimensions of spirit are being activated, but they do not activate from a planet. They do not activate from culture. They activate on the basis of star systems, of star system civilisations, which have more dimensions than a geography of a kingdom is to have. it isn't just that it's bigger. It's wider. Our Cassini exploration of Saturn's system is a billion miles away and we're learning that everything that we thought about it was naive. Such a small moon as Insolates, hardly 500 miles in diameter, has fresh water geysers that are huge like volcanoes, and spreading H2O molecules in a ring around Saturn just as the moon of Jupiter, Io, spreads sulphur atoms in a kind of a ring. We're learning that our quality of blossoming now is on the scale where we were covetous of a terrain which was going to be our own, when our reality is that we live in an infinite paradise and the appreciation of the variety and the freedom is exactly what Walt Whitman said he discerned about nature, Mother Nature. When he was 70 years old, and because of Whitman's physiological illness of premature aging, at 70 he was almost like equivalent of 90-100 years old, he said in Democratic Vistas, right at the beginning, to try and heal the Civil War, robber baron aftermath, in Democratic Vistas he said 'Nature obviously prefers freedom and variety, and as her children, if we prefer this, we will be at home in nature and be able to find ourselves everywhere we look.
More next week.