Science 2

Richard Feynman once gave his sister as a surprise birthday gift, a text on astronomy. She was quite a bit younger than him, about nine years younger, and she couldn't read it. So she said, why did you give me something I can't use? And he said, just read as far as you can, and when you can't understand anymore, stop and go back to the beginning and begin reading again. And that eventually you will teach yourself to read the book. And she did. And she got her PhD in physics from Syracuse University and did her work on the aurora borealis. And she remembered this gift of this textbook on astronomy. She also remembered when she was four that Feynman broke one of the house rules. Their parents were working people in New York City, Far Rockaway, out on the Atlantic coast, and they said once children went to bed, they were not to get up. And Richard woke her up at night and said, I have to show you something. And she got dressed and they went out together in the night and went over to a golf course, and there was the aurora borealis showing in New York City from one of the rare times. And so she made a deal with him that he could study everything else in the world, but she only could study the aurora borealis. And he recounts how one time in Alaska, the electromagnetic properties of the aurora borealis intrigued him And someone said, why don't you study this aspect? He said, I have to ask my sister for permission. And the Japanese scientists thought that this was really strange. And when he ran across Feynman's sister, he said, why doesn't your brother study the aurora? And she said, he doesn't have my permission. So it's quite interesting the way science works. We're pairing Feynman and Mary Leakey together. And it's interesting how when you take a magical, conscious, dimensional read on the world, that there are very often shared resonances and that if you could follow these shared resonances, you would find that they make arcs of connectedness. Arcs of connectedness that later on could be like the skeletal structure for meaningfulness. And eventually, if you were able to carry it further, you would find that these circles of meaning always cluster around an actuality, and that there are, in fact, many levels of these circles of meaning around any actuality. And they are the resonances around what we would normally talk about as real things, real existential things, things that obtain things like what are made out of atoms and molecules and cells. One of the peculiarities is that these resonances do not occur chaotically. That they always occur at discrete levels and in between the discrete levels where they occur. There are equally discrete levels where they do not occur. And the fact that their occurrence and non-occurrence are both discrete was first noticed in a very profound way around 1900 by a German physicist philosopher named Max Planck, for whom the Max Planck Institute is named. One of the leading Areas in the world where nuclear physics is still studied, and many other things. Planck was famous in 1900 for identifying that the deepest registry of discrete actuality has some kind of a quanta, a measurable qualitative stuff, and that in between the various measurable quanta are discontinuities of measurability of quanta. And so again, our old pair of zero and one occur that there is such a thing as oneness, as discrete Substantiality, and there also to the same degree in an equilibrium are non. Occurring unities which are not unities but are zeros, and that the zero and one. Always occur together as sets, and that in the 20th century. It was discovered that those sets both what is sayable. What is measurable, what is quantifiable, and what is not occur in resonances that are arrayed in a particular understandability called a harmonic. Now, we have spent all of the 20th century trying to develop harmonic analysis of quanta and have rarely gone into the very mysterious harmonization of zeros. And yet that's still possible and is still there. One of the clues in the late 1920s in nuclear physics at the time was in trying to understand how electrons which surround it, was known by that time. They surround like planets or moons and orbits the nucleus of an atom. And at that time, it was thought that the nucleus of the atom was inviolable, that it was really the hard core, and that the electrons around it somehow were in orbits, and that these orbits would describe shells and that this was the way things were. And it was discovered that with a certain energy thrust into that atom or into certain atoms, you could knock one of the electrons out of its atomic configuration. And that, surprisingly, what was left was a hole that when electrons which belong there in the structure, the atomic structure of a particular discrete element, if one of those electrons is knocked out, the hole continues to occur in that atom, and that atom now is not that element, but a variant of that element called an ion, and that this process of ionizing matter, materia quanta involves. Not only that, now you have an ion, but that each ion has one or more holes in it. And so the development of hole theory had to go along with the development of looking at the quanta and the quantification of quanta, the resonances of those quantifications of quanta and the harmonic of the entire array, which now included holes about the time that it was realized that those holes which are not anything yet, continue to occur within the structure led to a profound, uh, discovery by a man with the most prosaic name, Carl Anderson. Carl D Anderson. I don't know if there are any statues at Caltech to Carl D Anderson or at MIT, but there should be. Carl D Anderson wrote a paper for his work from 1932, and the paper was published in the Physical Review in 1933, and it was called the Positive Electron. It was the discovery of the positron that there was such a thing as an electron, which was in essence a point of negative charge that's circled, that orbited, that participated in shells around a nucleus which had a positive charge was a proton, and that the most simple element, hydrogen, had this proton and this electron, this positive and this negative, and that together, of course they fit. They made a polarity, they made a secure base. They made an existential reality because the paired polarity of charges delivered an existential stable equilibria, which made something there like a hydrogen atom. No sooner did the discovery of electrons being thrown out by energizing, leaving holes that continued to occur, and the fact that mathematically there exists the possibility of a positive electron. A positively charged electron, a positron. And it was realized that there were in more complex atomic structures. As soon as you go from hydrogen to helium, the next jump onto the element hierarchy, the ladder of existential atoms of materia, that there was such a thing as a neutron that the neutron was just a little bit bigger than the proton, the proton being almost 1800 plus times the size of an electron, but that the neutrons size was exactly the size of a proton and an electron together, and that the neutron as a third Particle was bigger than a proton to the extent of an electron, and that it was neutral. It had no charge, and all of a sudden you had. The occurrence and distribution in actual mathematics of the atomic theory. The beginnings of an array of zeros that were factored in. You had neutrons and you had holes in ionized atomic structures. And all of this at the beginning of the 1930s began to occur with a puzzling type of rapidity. And it was like an intellectual forest fire which fed upon itself. And within just a short space of a few years, you had the development of a completely odd reality whose mathematics Increasingly checked out, except for some radical holes in the theory. And the fellow that we're looking at today with Mary Leakey. Richard Feynman later in 1948, in connection with two other men. We'll talk about a little later, filled in one of the holes, in theory. With the development, finally, of the form of quantum electrodynamics that. Was used ever since then and is used today. It's complicated. We don't have to go into the math. We don't have to go into the. Occurrence of this in depth. What we're doing is not learning nuclear physics, but we're learning how to learn, and we're using a 21st century expanded application of what was developed in nuclear physics in the 20s and 30s. But we're using it for education, and we're using it in an expanded way. So it means that it isn't just a replication in education of nuclear physics. We're not doing the nuclear physics of education. We're doing something even deeper from that. And all the time that we're doing it because it does not exist, because this kind of education has never existed in the way in which we are doing it. We are having to generate it initially out of nothing. And so we're doing something that is akin to the way in which the old Paleolithic artists made art emerge, not initially out in the broad daylight, but secretly hid in rare, unusual places like special caves. And it's in these kinds of special quiet away from the world venues that the beginnings of the Paleolithic cave art of interstellar education of the species is taking place. And it requires a quieting down. It requires an assiduous attentiveness, Like the care of a baby. Like the feeding of a child. Like the personal grooming of oneself. It requires a patient kind of care to let the accumulation of time and the openness of space work together with an energizing of consciousness, so that the three aspects the three dimensions of space, the dimension of time, and the dimension of consciousness, like a five dimensional hand, not only come to the ability to hold and grasp exacting quanta, but to release and let go in an exact way, as if one had not brought together an inorganic speck, but had brought together a special little caterpillar that, when it was brought together in this way. Instantly made a cocoon. And that the cocoon brought out a butterfly. And that in just a split second later, instead of the caterpillar, which one had you let go of a butterfly? Now, this model, this metaphor, this mythic image goes back about 3000 years, because the Greek word for psyche. Psyche means butterfly. It means that our spirit, the spirit of anything, our spirit, the spirit of particular stones, the spirit of a place, anything that has a spirit. That spirit is a psyche being which has wings and can be let to go free. In the 1300 years between the original early Greek realization of this and 1300 years later, the development of the most sophisticated high Dharma expression of this in Plotinus, the process became so remarkable for its transformative quality that it was finally, in Plotinus, not necessarily talked about in a natural way, but became integrated to become the archetype of the most remarkable, Formed thing in the cosmos. And that was the soul, the anima, the soul of a person, the soul of any thing, the soul of a place. And in Plotinus one can read very clearly his excellent use of both an open differential conscious language, very appropriate for the time, the most sophisticated in the world at the time, and its ability to not only let the butterfly go, but at the same time. One could look at it from the standpoint of being able to grasp, not grasp like possessing, but grasp in like being able to hold for a split second the caterpillar so that the cocoon would instantly form and the butterfly instantly emerged, so that the split moment later, when you opened your exacting grasp, the soul of something would be free. The spirit would rejoin its open aired context where it was free, so that instead of possessing something to have it in some greedy way, one became precisely exacting so as to be a fulcrum for the transformation to the psyche of anything, and to set it free, so that the whole process of coming exactly to an integral was not to hold it, but to entertain the fulcrum of its transform. And in Plotinus's time was the first time that anywhere on the planet, the mind of some men and women understood how to express transformation from a geometric city of Existentiality to a trigonometric function of spherical city, which is the basis of early harmonic analysis. So that in the time of Plotinus there was someone called Ptolemy, who was a mathematician, who wrote this beautiful understanding of the cosmos as being a harmony of the spheres. And it was a trigonometric vision of the universe, of reality that held for a thousand years unchallenged to go along with Ptolemy's. The book is misleading because of the medieval translation of the Arabic name for it. It's called the Almagest. It means the shape of the larger universe as a cosmos, spheres within spheres, within spheres, around some kind of a nucleus and the nucleus there. In Ptolemy's world was the earth, the unmoving earth. And as a complement to the Almagest of Ptolemy, he also, because he was very complete, because he lived at a time of Plotinus, where there was a high Dharma understanding of all this, he wrote the complement to his Almagest, which is all the spheres around the unmoving earth. His complement was a book which showed the structure of the earth, and it was called the Geographica, and his Geographica was revolutionary because just a few hundred years before him was the first time that anyone ever did a realistic geography of the earth. The man, a couple of hundred years before him who did it, was named Eratosthenes. And Eratosthenes was one of the great geniuses of his day. He was chosen by Ptolemy, the second Ptolemy Philadelphus, to be the head of the Alexandrian Library, the head of the biggest research institution in the world at that time that had ever existed. The Library of Alexandria had the equivalent of a million books 2300 years ago. And not only books, but it was a collection of men and women who studied those books and specialized and wrote studies on and commentaries on things that became more and more specialized. And so it became a research institution as well as an archive. And so the Library of Alexandria wanted to know, like a modern university, everything about everything, and to bring it together in one place with the books and the community of people who could read and write those books, and they're talking with each other. And to make all of this together as a unity of reality at the time. And Aristotle, Eratosthenes was chosen by Philadelphus, the second Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Philadelphus means. Friend. Brother. Brotherly friend. The city of Philadelphia is named for Philadelphus in the United States because of deep connections. Eratosthenes was the first to gather triangulations of information, like the length of shadows during the entirety of a day, from points as disparate as Ireland and India, and put together an approximation of the size of the Earth for the very first time. And it's within about 2% of the actual size of the Earth. And they realized in Eratosthenes day in Philadelphus Alexandria that the known World covered only about 1/60 of the entirety of the mathematically projected world. What in the world was the rest of the world? What was the other 59/60 of the world then? We thought this was the world. As radical as Philadelphia's geography was the geography of Ptolemy. Several hundred years later, about 500 years later, revolutionized that, because Ptolemy's Geography showed that there was still a carryover of an old geometric city, a kind of a flat world ness that was just bent around the idea of a complete globe. And whereas Eratosthenes was a geometer who was fudging on a whole sphere in Eratosthenes day. One of his co-workers in Alexandria was Euclid, who did the textbook on geometry. But in Ptolemy's day, his Geographica is made on a trigonometric basis, not a geometric basis. He's at home in spherical, in functions of radii with not only arcs, but of whole sections of curves, and realized by that time that the very optics, the very seeing of anything, involves a special kind of geometry trigonometry brought together in a subject in mathematics born at that time called conics, conic sections, that light occurs in light cones, and that these light cones can be analyzed both geometrically for cross sections of them, but trigonometrically for the entirety of the cone and the entirety of the projected volumes that include not only the light cone, but the context within which the light cone occurs. And so Ptolemy's Geography balanced his Almagest, which was of the larger universe, and his Geographica was of the center of that universe. The earth, and linking the two together was a third book of his called The Optics, and for a thousand years these works were the standard excellence of thought on these matters in the world, and the first person to challenge effectively this entire outlook. To bring it into such a question was Copernicus. And Copernicus said, the center is not the Earth. The center is the sun that the Earth also moves. But deeper than Copernicus. When somebody that you hardly ever hear about, he had the tenacity of a Dane because he was Danish, he got involved in a severe tussle one time and lost the tip of his nose, and they had to replace it by metal. So he had a metal nose. His name was Tycho Brahe. One of the biggest craters on the moon is called Tycho in honor of him. And Tycho was quite an operator and he got the royal Danish king to give him a special little island where he could have a replica in his time of what they had in Alexandria. Only instead of the big Alexandrian Library, he had a little research institute, and he gave it a kind of a utopian name, Uraniborg, the number one universal place. And Tycho, who was not very good at math, he was like Richard Feynman. He really wasn't very good at math. He tried to get around it all the time. So what Tycho did is he made beautiful, accurate instruments to make beautiful, accurate measurements. But instead of making them handheld instruments, he made them really huge so that he could lay his entire body in the arc of one of these great big computing machines, and he plotted Started out with Danish tenacity. Minute by minute, hour by hour, night by night, the movements of planets against the stars in the sky. And when he had this huge sheaf of incredibly accurate observations, the ancient Chinese observations, the ancient Babylonian observations were as good as natural human eyes could do. But Tycho forced the issue by making it magnified to such an extent that his measurements became so precise beyond the limits of what the human eye normally would be able to discern that he had a helper in his uraniborg laboratory who happened to be the greatest mathematician, probably of all time. Up to that point. His name was Johannes Kepler, and Kepler looked at these figures of the orbit of these planets, and he knew enough about trigonometry and math of spheres. He knew these orbits are not circular. There's no way that they're circles. They're harmonic, does not show circles within circles. They're harmonic. Turns out to be ellipses that the planets do not move in circles. Nothing moves in circles that in reality they move in ellipses. And while some of the ellipses are very close to circles, none of them are circles that evidently God is after an interesting reality and not a stable, dead, perfect perfection. He doesn't like perfect circles. He likes really beautifully subtle ellipses. And some of those ellipses are incredibly flamboyant. We know now that the elliptical orbit of Pluto is only the tip of the iceberg, that there are objects in this Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune, there may be 50 100,000 objects about the size of Charon of Pluto's moon, and that they all move in these beautiful elliptical ballets. And some of them are so elliptically flamboyant that they become comets. And some of them take, like Haley's Comet 77 years to make just one elliptical orbit that comes in really close to the sun, thumbs its nose at it, and goes way out past Pluto so far that it goes out almost to the edge of where the gravitational hold of our star system would be. And that way out there, obviously almost a half light year away on the edges of Conceivability is another aspect, another shell, another orbital resonance in the harmonic of elliptical wholeness of a star system, and out there as an enormous cloud of smaller bodies. And the Dutch man who found this named it for himself. As you would. And he called it the Oort cloud. Oort. And so beyond the Kuiper belt, which is inconceivably far, is even maybe three times that far, an Oort cloud. And that obviously, star systems all have this kind of increasing harmonic of waves sometimes occupied by planets, sometimes by moons, sometimes by planetesimals that make asteroid belts, sometimes even further out like the Kuiper Belt, and sometimes incredibly far out like the Oort cloud. And that if you really looked at our star system with a reality, it's about a light year across several thousand times farther than just the orbit of Pluto. And that Kepler, when he understood that this elliptical harmonic, made mathematical sense, he could compute the relationships close enough that he wrote a book called The New Astronomy. And whereas Copernicus was interesting in his prying loose the habit of a thousand years, Kepler's 1604 New Astronomy completely revolutionized the possibilities of looking not only at astronomy, but the concomitant that was there from Ptolemy's days of looking at geology, at looking at geography in a different way, and a third of looking at optics in a different way. And it took almost the entirety of the 17th century before somebody came along, who was a better mathematician than Kepler, who could look at Kepler's handling of these computations and apply them specifically to that bridging element, the optics, And to write a new version of Opticks, a version of Opticks that's so transformed Ptolemy's Opticks as to make them forever a fossilized curiosity on the dusty shelves of what we used to call dead history. And that young man he was in his 20s was Isaac Newton, and his work on the Opticks is first. Great work was so startling that when he sent his little papers in on Opticks to the Royal Society in London, to Hermann Olberg, who was in correspondence with all the great leaders of astronomy and physics and math of the day. He sent out Newton's paper to a few people, and they said, this is crazy. This? This can't be. And Newton being a shy, almost painfully shy young man, not very good looking, kind of uneasy about everything in the world, because he had come to understand that he could poke his finger through what other people thought was stable reality. And not only could he poke his finger through, but that when he did, the whole fabric of the world started to tear and he became terrified by the fact that he might be bringing the end of the world because he was able to tear up the old world, and he didn't know what to put in its place. He didn't know what goes there. If you tear all this away because the entirety of human confidence in understanding themselves and where they are and how things work is all based on a house of cards, and that the game played with those cards is actually irrelevant to reality. It was a terrible realization for him. What was untouched at the time? The only person in the world who thought about these kinds of dimensions of problems on the level of Newton, was Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Franklin in his correspondence with just a few people. He didn't want it to be let out, but he suspected that the Earth, that the geological evidence of layering meant that the Earth was enormously old, that there in no way could be a creation of the Earth and 4004 BC. According to the Book of Genesis. And it took again almost a long lifetime for a man named Lyle to come along. And in the early 1830s, about a hundred years before the period that we're looking at the 1930s, in the early 1830s, Charles Lyle published a two volume set called The Principles of Geology, which showed that the Earth is not only millions of years old, it is even more than hundreds of millions of years old. It must be billions of years old. And one of the odd things that came out of this was that the time scale of man in the early 1830s expanded suddenly from thousands of years to billions of years on a geologic basis. We're going to continue this after a break and we'll come right back. So the Principles of Geology by Sir Charles Lyell. I'll bring a two volume set of it next week, so that you can see what it looks like. In the century between 1831 and 1931. Science developed in the most peculiar way that was unpredictable. Instead of fortifying the world, it dissolved the world. In the 100 years between 1831 and 1931. We faced an unprecedented situation where we became more and more exacting about how tenuous our thoughts about reality were. How tenuous Existentiality was, and in the early 1930s it was suddenly discovered mathematically first and then experimentally brought out, that not only is the atom able to be penetrated and has moving parts, but that the nucleus of the atom can be penetrated and it has sub atomic parts to itself. With QED quantum electrodynamics, you get the theory of how light interacts with matter, how photons interact with the electrons, and quantum electrodynamics. In the next 25 years was even more refined. To something called QCD quantum chromodynamics, which is how the quarks that make up the. Nucleus have an interaction also. And we today are on the verge of being able to. Say that this kind of peeling of the onion continues in such a peculiar way that when it was first noticed in the early 1930s, begun to be intuited in the late 1920s, but seen in the 1930s, one of the difficulties was that when you get down to exactness, there is a transform threshold at which the complexities become infinite. All of a sudden, all of the figures which were leading to more and more precision, beautifully change and lead to infinities. As if the delicate, grasping, focusing hold of man's. Not just his mind, but his consciousness. The most exact that he becomes specifically of integrals. At the very same moment they turn into infinities which are must be freed because there's no way to hold them. In the early 1930s, when this was apparently not only the case, it was going to be the case from then on Out. And the problem was, how can you be confident in your measurements and your quantification, which is necessary to work with matter, to work with light, to work with all of this universe? How can you work with the quantification of this universe when you know that at a certain threshold of exactness, you have to deal with infinities all the time? And we talked last week about how the process of fudging on this is called renormalization, that there is a way, there's a mathematic, there's a technique of gently lying to yourself that all of this is fine locally, and none of it is relevant cosmically. That there is in fact a very difficult problem here of how to make an interface between the very exactness that's there locally in a corner of the universe, as it were, in an angle of vision, you can be exact, but in visuality as the total vision, you cannot be exact. There's no exactness because there are no boundaries. And so you have a very curious world where you find books that occur with titles Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics. There are areas that one can say to an exactness that would startle previous generations. And yet there are areas where nothing can be said. Not because you can't say it, because it's truly unsayable, and it's the unsayable ness that always pairs itself with what can be said that makes the set of what is real for us forever now. We can't take our wings off and crawl back into the cocoon and go back through the digestive juices and re-emerge as caterpillars again to munch naively on our mulberry leaves. We've made it through, and we're now part of the silk clothing of the future. And it's a wondrous world. But books come out like this. One of Richard Feynman's closest friends, Freeman Dyson. This book by him is called Disturbing the Universe, and this book by him is called Imagined Worlds, and this book by him is The Origin of Life, which was a special lecture given at Trinity College, Cambridge and The Atlantic Monthly, November 1977 had his article on colonizing the Solar System. And this is the kind of activity of people surrounding these kinds of people. And yet looking at the nucleus, the electron, the photons of light all tie in together with a concomitant arc of meaning that's in this harmonic that was explored by initially by the Leakeys. By Louis and Mary Leakey, initially more than anyone else. So that. Here's a book by L.s.b. Leakey. Unveiling man's origins. Ten Decades of Thought about Human Evolution. Published in 1969 and the co-author with L.s.b. Leakey is Vanne Morris-goodall. And then was Jane Goodall's mom. Unveiling man's origins that when we're looking now at reality, we have to look at the entire harmonic in order to be realistic, in order to be practical, and that this harmonic includes both all the ones and all the zeros together in sets, in resonant sets, in waves, and that somehow, when one looks to see the resonant waves of a completion, one is looking at an energy form. Energy is a frequency of waves that includes the intervals of their periodicity, where nothing occurs except the interval ness which lends to it the frequency not based on time so much, but based on the resonant frequency. And so energy becomes a constituent of reality that is deeply related to the way in which, at the peaks of the resonant wave, you have particles that hold in time, and you have troughs that do not occur and hold outside of time. So that when one is looking to be practical, you can't look at something you can pound anymore. It hasn't been that way for more than a hundred years. You can't even look at something you can grasp anymore. There was a French socialist philosopher in the 1840s named Proudhon, and his socialist motto was property is theft. To think that you own something means you stole it. We live in a cosmos where theft is not possible because no one owns anything, not even ourselves. And there was a time in the 1920s where one of the deepest issues was the self energy of the electron. Its self energy had to be the basis for identification, for energetic particle congruence. And some of this we have to look at and we'll look at it next week. What we're concerned with now this week relates to last week and next week. And that is that each of these lectures, each of these presentations is not a dot on a line. They don't link together as this lecture, this lecture, this lecture linked by a time line. And therefore you're linking dots together. And that's what the lecture series is. It isn't that at all. It isn't that on at least 4 or 5 orders of difference, monumental orders of difference. So that the presentation happening now is a morphed resonance in a frequency of energy which is occurring in space, has a time quality, but not a time index. Because when consciousness comes into play in space time, it becomes the index and not time. That as long as you're dealing with time as the index to space, then you can talk about space time. You can even put space time together into a matrix. And indeed, that is a part of the situation that Paul Dirac worked with in his famous equations that led to the development of quantum electrodynamics in 1927. That you can talk about this, and we'll talk about it next week, of how there are four dimensions that can be brought together within a matrix, within a bracket of consideration, and that can be treated as a set and that dealing with sets. Now Matrices of time space. Four coordinates together allows for one to take a completely different order of appreciation for what you're doing in terms of the real. And yet, when you bring in a fifth dimension like consciousness into that matrix, so that instead of a matrix of four, you have a peculiar mathematical structure that you can't even talk about as a matrix. It's like adding the thumb to the four fingers. You suddenly get a different capacity. Instead of being able to count or to point or to cling. You can sculpt, you can change. You can come into a different facility so that a five dimensional continuum, a conscious time space, throws you into a completely different mathématique that's different and is unexplored, largely unexplored. But this education is a process that's at least a five dimensional continuum, so that when the 2002 2003 outline of the education comes out, it will say an inquiry into continuous education when it's not as simple as, oh, well, it's lifelong learning. Yeah, it is that. But on the deepest level it's a different dimensional take on what learning When it occurs five dimensionally. Not only is, but isn't at the same time, so that the zero and the one are always there together. And one of the sweet things about that is that logically, zeros can operate as if they were infinities. And you can do a kind of a math which doesn't involve renormalization, because you're not hampered by boundless masses of infinities in the way in which you calculate, because your calculation is not one sided, always looking for the integral order. The differential array of possibilities is also of interest and operable, but not in terms of the time index, which makes the array of possibilities then fall under the aegis of statistical chance and most mathematics, most physics, most astrophysics, up to 2001 deals with probabilities as the way to deal with infinities and zeros, and this is not sufficient. So there needs to be something called a high dharma mathematics, which doesn't exist yet and also does not not exist because there's no yet there. And what this is, is an educational inquiry process to develop a population of people who are at home in that realm. Because just like that generation of people who were raised in that realm where Lyell's Principles of Geology was published, published in England and read it was only about 30 years later that you find Darwin's Origin of Species, the theory of evolution, because he was set into a context, into Lyell's context, where the time scale of billions of years allowed for there to be hundreds of millions of years for life forms to change and modify. Without that kind of time scale, you would not have had the development of the ability to think of evolution as a theory in the first place. So this education is going to prepare Pioneer have emerged, a kind of a boundless ground where by 2030 there will be men and women coming into maturity where they will be able to entertain a different kind of a mathematic that's not bothered by infinities whatsoever and won't have to fudge, won't have to tell little white pleasant lies and settle for the best chances you can take for the best statistical probabilities that if we're 99% certain, that's got to be good enough. They will be able to be very comfortable with the conditions that have zero probability and happen anyway. So that this is a completely different scale of learning. It's not a modification of anything that's out there by any stretch of any imagination. This is something that is beyond imagination. Now the title today the lectures. Paleolithic. Hominid. Cosmic. Paleolithic. Because when we bring L.s.b Leakey in unveiling man's origins, bring in Mary Leakey, Mary Leakey disclosing the past in page 90 of disclosing the past. Mary, who was had a front row seat. She was, in fact, on the stage, is a major protagonist in how all this came out. That evolutionary theory, which had been applied to animals and had been seen that it applied to rock strata, it was up to someone like Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey to understand that those rock strata that go back hundreds of millions of years also go back and smaller condensations of them millions of years, and that if you could take a rock strata of, say, five, six, seven millions of years, you would be able to trace the fossil evidence of the evolution of a life form, including man. And so they began to look real early in the late 1930s for something that no one thought existed, because no one believed it could exist. That there would be fossil evidence of man millions of years old. And they chose a spot very close to where Lewis grew up in Kenya, Olduvai Gorge, where the geologic strata were exposed in such a way that you could go back millions of years along the facades of the cliffs, and you could calibrate the time, geologic time, by the strata, so that whenever you found something, you could tell approximately how old it was. And they were looking for evidence that ancestors to us, as he called it, Adam's ancestors, that there were hominid creatures related to us that lived millions of years before Adam was supposed to have been born. And they looked together patiently for more than 25 years without finding a thing they want on the pure fuel of shared presence vision. All that time they were written off, all that time by all those experts who knew their university stuff and drew big salaries on it and had world fame on it. And Richard and Mary had a particular vision, which is recognizable in retrospect as that old high drama, Paleolithic artist confidence that it will be there because our looking for it will meet it. We're not just going to find it there, but it will call out to us and our looking, and it will be in Shakespeare. He used the phrase all the time of well meant something as well met. When you find it at the moment that it called to you. Somebody once said a really good tie calls out to you by me. I'm for you. It's a process known as love of discovering in the instant that you belong together, because you are on the same resonant frequency. You occur in the same energy peak and trough. Because a frequency is not only the peak, but the trough as well, that all the ones and zeros that form that Resonance belong together, and that these are how we belong energetically together. And Mary and Louis Leakey looked for those first bits of fossil man, millions of years old, that were on their resonance, and their task was to maintain unbroken the continuousness of that resonance until it happened that if they were scattered, they would never find it, so that it was a visionary yoga, which they held together between only the two of them and the boys that they birthed and raised, and the dogs that they, uh, kenneled and loved, and the native Kenyans who helped them to do the camp stuff. And this entourage was held together by a shared frequency peak and trough for about 25 years. And then it did show. It showed up and we'll talk more about that next week. But what was interesting was how the resonance that the Leakeys held was very close to the resonance that the atomic physicists and mathematicians were holding at the same supposed time index. And yet they were dealing with the cosmos of the very large and the cosmos of the very small. And it was so tightly close together that week by week, day by day, you can piece it together. And this is what's called a hermetic circle. A hermetic circle is not a geometric circle on a plane. It's a conic section of the way in which a shared vision happens in reality. Here in Mary Leakey's book, page 90, she writes. That our chief preoccupation on getting back to Nairobi in 1946. In Kenya was with the organization of the first Pan-African Congress of Prehistory and Paleontology, the very first. But it never occurred to anyone to have a number of people from around the world come together for a conference, on a conference on what? On prehistory and paleontology. And it happened in Nairobi in 1947. They were planning in 1946. This was very much Lewis's brainchild, as he was holding that yoga with Mary together. All that while about ten years into the holding of it, he saw that we need a lens to help us to diffract the visionary energy into a spectrum which can help us to analyze. It's the very same principle, folks, that Newton used in his optics. He understood that Kepler's math was so incredibly brilliant. There were maybe 2 or 3 people in the whole of the 17th century who could have understood Kepler's math on the level of Newton, Christiaan Huygens, a few others. That's it. One hand. Not because other people were not smart enough. They were not educated and trained to be smart enough. Yet today, there are hundreds of millions of high school students who can follow the math easily. And they say, what's the big deal with Kepler? But in the 17th century, it was a very big deal. And what Newton saw was that Kepler's math, transforming the optics of thousand year old Ptolemy, didn't have an aspect of experimental investigation, experimental science, to give it a base that you can do the math up here, but you've got to have experimental science down here, and you bring the two together, and those two together make this set of theory and practice. And when you have the set. Together of theory and practice, then you have something which not only can be used as a theory to look and to look for and to look at structure, but you can also use that as a fulcrum to apply it. And so that what comes out is not only mathematical theory but technology. Science is not only theory, but practice. Technology. Applying it. Making something work. Making it work. And so Newton brought in a prism, and he went into a darkened room and sat there alone. Young 23 year old, gawky genius, British shy, child man. And he let in one little shaft of sunlight to touch that prism, and it threw up a rainbow spectrum against the wall. And he was fearful. He was fearful because he knew enough to know that his science was touching a religious sacred dimension. He was scared to death. He confessed later that it bothered him immensely because he was afraid of transgressing against God. That's why he spent the last 30 years of his life trying to investigate the Book of Daniel and the book of the apocalypse, to see how they fit together, because he didn't want to transgress against God. Why was this? We know so little about the Bible these days that we don't even recognize when we hear it. But the symbol of the first covenant between God and the earth is the rainbow. The very first covenant that Abraham makes in Genesis with God. God says, I seal this covenant by putting my sign in the sky, which is the rainbow. So when Newton saw the rainbow come out of sunlight, from that prism was the first spectrographic analysis in the world. He was stunned that the energy frequency of sunlight diffracts into a rainbow. And so you have this very odd kind of a thing. Can you imagine that when you take. Something like the electron. This is the volume I showed you last week. The centenary volume from Cambridge University Press, published in honour of 1996. 100 years since the discovery of the electron. But here's a volume published in 1973 and published in Holland. Electron Emission Spectroscopy, proceedings of the NATO Summer Institute, 1972. Electron emission spectroscopy. When it talks here, the starting point for our discussion will be the excitation of an atom to a highly excited ion containing a vacancy or a hole in a core level. Because in the early 1970s, the deepest issue in the world for places and institutions like NATO and science was to try to come to grips with the technological application of what we have found out. How then, does this change how we work? And the fact that atoms have holes in them was very, very, very, very big and continued to grow. When Newton looked at that spectroscopy of the prism of how a crystal lattice structure will diffract sunlight into its constituent rays, he saw that the rays of the rainbow each have their own frequency that they occur, because the energy for each one is infinitesimally different enough so that here you have green and there you have blue, and over here you have yellow, and further on you have orange, and then you have red. And that this is an energy frequency calibration. And that light has that property has that, and that the energy of whatever is carrying light, the photon, the photon can absorb energy, more energy and it will change its color. It will be slightly different, so that the array of the energy frequency of a photon has some kind of deep affinity with the energy array of the electron, and where the electrons are in terms of their not their orbits so much, not their shells around the nucleus. Nucleus. Nucleus. That there is something else that's happening here, that there is something akin to what the old Jewish mystics used to call the shimmer of the presence of the Lord. That there is a. Is it Shekinah? Shekinah, Shekinah? Yeah, there's a quality of that to matter, that it has a mystical shimmer in its presencing, and that it is not limited to boundedness so much as that that bounded boundary has an ability for interchange, and that's how two different atoms come together. That's how a sodium atom and a chlorine atom come together and make a crystal of salt, because their boundaries exchange energy positions into a stability together, so that every complex element in the cosmos has a shared presence structure. Feynman, in one of his books, took great pride in something that happened at a university he was teaching at at Cornell University in upstate New York, and he had a friend who chose Shows a size level of 100,000 times smaller than the smallest grain that the human eye could see distinctly, and shows as that 100,000. He chose a grain of salt as that small form that you could see with the naked eye, and then on that grain of salt they engraved with electron instruments little holes in the atomic structure, about 100 atoms across, that made the portrait of an eye on the grain of salt on the atomic level. And Feynman says, don't be so awed by this. We could have gone to much deeper level even by then, but we chose 100,000 because we wanted to have 100,000 times smaller than what you could see, so that we could also have a pair to it 100,000 times larger than you could see. And that somebody set up mirrors over many acres on the surface of the earth, and then positioned those mirrors so that they would reflect sunlight, and then took a satellite photo from 600 miles up and the mirrors blanked out, just the pixels that those acres represented in the photograph at 100,000 times the size. And it showed the same eye drawn on the landscape of the earth. And he said, the wonder is not that we can do this technologically, but that we understand what we're doing and we're playing not with reality, but we're playing with our ability to understand and inquire. We're not after having control. We're after having the freedom of inquiry to enjoy the spectacular gift of beauty. That reality is for us. And this is what it's all about. Mary Leakey says we're planning, in late 1946, the first Pan-African conference in Nairobi. And at the same time that this was happening, the first post World War Two conference on physics was being held at the very same time on Shelter Island off the coast of New York, off the coast of Long Island. Shelter Island Conference this is the book on the second Shelter Island. Two proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics, Published by MIT press, and in it is a chapter called A Short History of Shelter Island, won by Silvan Schweber. For a number of years before he became president of the New York Academy of Sciences. This man that he's going to be talking about, uh, Duncan MacInnes, began to ask people if they thought this was a good idea to get people together. In the fall of 1945, soon after World War II. Duncan MacInnes, a member of the Rockefeller Institute, past president of the New York Academy of Sciences, went to see Frank Jewett, the head of the National Academy of Sciences, about an idea he had for specialized science conferences. He felt that scientific and technical societies had grown so large, had become so narrowly specialized that no critical discussions were taking place at their meetings. This is on the surface, and this is what you give out in press reports. The real issue was the atom bomb. The real issue was that we had tapped an energy level technologically that could destroy everything. And the only person who physically saw the first atom bomb was Richard Feynman. He was lower on the pecking order, so he wasn't in the advanced group six miles from the Trinity test site. He was placed 20 miles back, and he never got the memo that you're supposed to have dark glasses. He knew from his physics background that the only thing that could hurt the eyes would be ultraviolet aspects of the explosion, and he knew that the windshield of a truck would shield him from the ultraviolet. So he went in and sat in the cab of a truck, and he was the only person to watch the first atom bomb with the naked eye. And the flash was so brilliant in that split second that he said he flinched and his eyes flicked down to the floor of the truck, and he saw the explosion in purple shadow against the darkness of the base of the truck, flicked his eyes up and saw the dark black cloud with yellow orange roiling in it, rise off the floor of the desert into the mushroom shape. And he was the only one who physically saw it. The naked eye And something deep in him, not snapped, but came back into focus because just a few weeks before, he had lost his wife, Arlene, to a death by tuberculosis in an Albuquerque hospital. He had been gifted not only with being selected to be a part of the Manhattan Project, he was the youngest person around there, I believe. He was barely in his mid-twenties, but he'd been given special permission by Robert Oppenheimer to visit every weekend his hospitalized young wife, Arlene, in Albuquerque. And Feynman said, no matter what anyone else says about Oppenheimer, he was always attentive to the personal details of those people that he was responsible for. And he chose Feynman for the same reason that others came to trust Feynman. Feynman always was there, like on a Paleolithic level, to bring up objections regardless of how important you were. If he felt that there was something that needed to be said. Later on, Niels Bohr said to his son Aage, he said, next time we have a meeting about some high level issue, let's call in that young guy first and then we'll talk to the other important people, because we can trust that he will ask the poignant questions immediately. More next week.