Science 9

This is science nine, which means that we have after today, just four presentations, three more in science. And the last presentation will be the eighth interval. And if you're following this, I think it's easy to appreciate that this final month in science has a square capacity. That is, the four lectures can be put into a matrix, can be positioned in a set of four, and that they hold a possibility of transform which would not ordinarily occur were they just to be a series in a linear fashion of four. If you have a cardinal series one, two, three, four, that cardinal series makes a line. It has not only a numerical sequencing, but it implies a geometric line and occurs to the mind to be very savvy in terms of plane geometry and in terms of time sequence, not only time sequence as one, two, three, four, but time sequence in terms of causality. And for most of the intellectual life of our species, we have lived within the confines and the limitations of the bounds implicit, as well as occasionally discovered to be explicit within those kinds of conditions. Those limitations have not for a long time now applied to us. And yet there's never been an education that has given a maturation process to people outside of that cardinal linearity, outside of that karma. And so we're having to develop from scratch over. I started this in 1965. I guess this is now 36 years going on, 37 years. And it's a joy as well as a difficulty. When something new is being presented. It is not understandable because it's new, but when it's as radically new as this, there are no confirming reference that you can coordinate or correlate, so that it is a process of just simply immersing yourself in the practice of letting it occur in the way in which its emergence actually happens. And for most people, naively, they would come to a lecture or two or 3 or 4. And for them it is a linear series of lectures, and they simply have the cardinal numbering, and it has hopefully some kind of build up instructionally so that the instruction sequence will divulge some kind of a geometric or some kind of a form which the mind can see in its way, not just visually, but in comprehension to understand, and that once it sees those forms, it can decide whether or not it's worth paying $30 a time to continue. Common as that is, it's irrelevant. It's extraneous to actually what is occurring here. And so I'm presenting the last four science lectures with a specific proviso to be conscious that we're not building nine, ten, 11, 12 in a line, but rather as all of the lecture sets, every four lectures constitute a matrix so that it is nine, ten, 11, 12 within a large parentheses. And because it is grouped in that way, those groupings are amenable to a transformation from the mind as a brain to the mind as a prism of consciousness. Now, this is a very ancient technique, one that was developed many times in human history. Perhaps the most famous of the early examples of this form Of using a group of four set in a matrix of transform was the development of Greek tragedy some 2500 years ago, and Greek tragedies were never plays. They were never just a play. Any given Greek tragedy was a member of a set of four. The only set of of four that we have from antiquity is the three plays, the trilogy that constitutes Aeschylus Oresteia. And we don't have the fourth play because the fourth play was not a tragedy. It was what was called a satyr play, now a satyr play. Sator is some man with goat legs who chased the girls, but that goat legged man who chased the girls was actually Pan. And Pan was notorious in mythological antiquity, not for his goat legs and chasing the girls, but for the pipes that he played. The pipes of Pan were the archetypal symbol of a kind of wild music that, once heard by man, induces him to be wild and chaotic, in the sense that he no longer fits within the categories of urban and social decorum that one becomes literally a wild beast. As Matisse said of himself when he understood how to do this and how to be this way. Matisse began being a Fauve, a wild beast, in that he no longer confined his colors to form. He allowed himself to color outside of form, and even to the extent to where there were no outlines at all. There were just the colors that in their interpenetration presented the painting. And in this Matisse learned from Monet, and also learned from Cézanne that you can stagger forms in such a way that Cézanne saw that if you look to see Mont Sainte-victoire in a special, deep, penetrative way, and that you stagger The form that you believe that you're seeing, so that the form overlaps just slightly. Many times you get a form that is like that of a bell that has been rung, where all the vibrations of the bell are presented at the same time. And so you get a vibratory presence of Mount Saint Victor, which then you paint. And Cézanne painted it many times because he was fascinated that one could be extraordinarily present, not only seeing Mount Saint Victor in that way, but making a painting of Mount Saint Victor, that when the audience, when the appreciator looked at that painting in a Cézanne way, he saw through Cézanne's eyes, into the resonant penetration of the gestalt of all the possibilities of Mont Sainte-victoire at once. And as Cézanne saw in that, that way Matisse saw form in a Cézanne way and mixed it with Monet's sense that color was even more primordial than form, because form belongs to the mind, whereas color belongs to light, and light belongs to God. And so when Matisse learned that you could put a Cézanne form of the bell rung resonance all together in pure color, you had the birth of one of perhaps the greatest artists of the 20th century, and the old Matisse in his wheelchair in the 80s. In his 80s, could take a piece of colored construction paper and a scissors, and he could cut out of a pure field of color forms that had a Cezanne resonance not in the focus like a mont sainte-victoire, but in the gestalt of all the forms put together on a wall. The wall is a matrix, and so the old Matisse would cut out these forms out of a piece of blue construction paper, or red or yellow. He liked primary colors, because primary colors forbid us from assuming that the forms are not tangible. If you use mixed colors, Matisse found out. And this was backed up by Kandinsky. If you use mixed colors, it's more difficult to believe that they're formed. Whereas if you use primaries red, yellow, blue, it's easier for the mind to believe that one is seeing a certain forms. The old Matisse understood that it wasn't just seeing the resonant possibilities of the form transformed into pure color, but that one could make a variety of such forms and put them together into a larger matrix, like a wall. And you would have a harmonic vision that was not possible otherwise by the mind that the mind learned to see. No longer in terms of itself, but gave itself over to the experience of the artist person who was doing the seeing and only used the mind as part of the way of Gestaltung of seeing so that a matrix could take a double transform. You could transform form from being just exactly only what it existentially is into being the collected resonances of all of its energy. And you could take that transform and transform it a second time and put it into a relational gestalt that could be as far flung as one wanted to have. Now, this is the old alchemical wisdom of double distillation. One distillation is actually a fermentation, and it's only the second transform that is a true distillation. The first transform turns water into wine. The second transformation turns wine into cognac. And this was a very powerful discovery. To be able to do this in art and the early part of the 20th century is when all of this happened, and it all happened concomitantly to the practice, not only in art, but to the practice at the same time by different group of people in science. So that science, at the very same time as the artists from Monet to Matisse, were discovering this capacity of forms in a matrix setting to accept, transform and to accept it in a double way so that one had not only a circle that transforms into a spiral, but you had the possibility of having paired spirals that work together in a way in which time itself was transformed. Not just space, but time also, but also the conscious dimension was a transform of the mind. And so you had literally a capacity that finally blossomed by mid-century, in the 20th century, of understanding that life structures itself really by the process of expression from a double helix. And it was the biological complement to the discovery some 30 years before founded on a mathematical understanding. Some 80 years before, concomitant with the beginnings of Monet, was the understanding that electromagnetic energy works with a double resonance, the resonance of electrical vibration and the resonance of magnetic vibration, and that they work together. And when those two vibratory energies work together in a braided way, they present electromagnetic energy, which in its frequency has nodes which act as if they were particles. As if they were points that could be geometrically aligned. And that our traditional mind was used to looking only at the nodes, only at the points, and not at the energy context of the entire frequency. And we have learned in the 20th century to look at the entire frequency. We see not only the particles, but we also see the waves. And we now, in the 21st century, need to have this kind of education to learn to see that the particles and waves are together always as a set, and that those sets can be presented in matrices, and that those matrices accept a double transformation. One A symbolic transformation to go from the mind to consciousness. And the second one distilling consciousness through history to become cosmic, to become real, and one of the great discoveries yet to be made in the early 21st century. And hopefully an education like this will create the opportunity, at least for a population of people, to discover that we are, in fact, real. We are not epiphenomenon from a crap game. As Einstein said, I can't believe that God only plays dice. He really is interested in reality, not just in winning. So there is a deep understanding and that understanding that came from Greek tragedy. Having a set of three plays that formed the trilogy of the tragedy, and then a fourth play, which was of a different mode from the tragedies called the satyr play, which brought the energies of Pan into the sequence of the Greek tragedies, where each tragedy presented a deeper and deeper realization of the fragility of what we thought was trustworthy, confident, certain to fracture that so that it was then realized to be irreparably destroyed. And then the satyr play came in and brought its confusing wildness of the pipes of Pan, to put that confusing wildness into the pessimism of the three tragedies together, and to dispel, like a dessert of a happy ending, the unendurable realization that not only is life no damn good, but that it is not real, and further, that it will never be real. With the realization that that in itself is but a mental limitation, and that the pipes of Pan tell us that life is quite real and quite wild beyond the confines of our ability to say no to it. So that Greek tragedies, as the trilogies and the satyr play were a quaternary where a series of four were a matrix of four, and later on, when that was rediscovered in the Renaissance, of course, the whole development of drama, when it became conscious again and drama became conscious on the level of Greek tragedy in England, in the person of William Shakespeare. And so Shakespeare's plays are written in sets. Also, matrices of the real and the way to see Shakespeare is to see him in cycles of four, so that you get the full distillation, as well as the full fermentation as well as the play itself. Not only is the play the thing, but the whole world is the stage. Little wonder that when Shakespeare and his friends built a theater, they called it the globe. And over the stage of the globe, the roof of the stage had the zodiac, the 12 constellations of the zodiac, so that the zodiac as a complete circle. Actually, it became like an ellipse. By that time, they were starting to be quite conscious of things. It was as if all of the action on the Shakespearean stage had a cosmic halo. And that's why the great quotable phrase all the world is a stage that, once one learns to see in this way, learns to comprehend in this way, learns to be conscious in this way, the resonances of that conscious time space can be further transformed into a harmonic. And there is such a thing, not the harmony of spheres so much, but the harmony of artistic personal resonances. And our harmonic proves to be the cosmos itself. Each and every one of us were we able to see in a super Matisse, Cézanne, Monet? We would understand that the cosmos not only loves us, but is a harmonic of all of our possibilities at once, so that the realization of our focus is not that of a point or a dot or a certainty, but even more certain. As Ophelia once said, it is more primordial than the one. It is better than the good. And so there is a great huge shout of joy that comes from this kind of education, because the opportunity is there to really go many orders beyond what you thought certainty was, and which can now be shown in every science, on every Mathematical level to not be very certain at all. And yet so ingrained is the old and its ruts that every time we use wagons with wheels, they fall in those ruts. So you have to learn to not only travel by wagon wheeled vehicles on roads, but you have to learn to fly. Because when you fly, the ruts don't make any difference at all and you don't need wheels. Remember the great phrase at the end of back to the future, where the scientist comes back to the future and tells Michael J. Fox, he says, you've got to come with me to the future. He had just been to the past and had solved something involving his parents so that they could meet and fall in love so that he could be born. And so the scientist comes back and tells him, now you have to go to the future. And he says, well, why? He says, because your son is doing something only you can go and correct in the future. And he says, well, uh, is this car going to take us here? I don't. And the scientist says, where we're going, man no longer needs roads. There is a deep quality of mystery in making a matrix out of the past and the future at the same time. As long as we believe in the rutted road that time runs like an arrow only forward. We are naive on level of pre-kindergarten. Very, very very childish. Not childlike to consider that time moves in a cardinal serial fashion only is to misunderstand on many levels, and many orders to begin to question. That was at many nodes in human history, a dangerous enterprise. Not because of persecution from outside though that was there. People who begin to be different from everyone else start to be identified by everyone else as strange. And if you're too strange, too long, you are cast out. You're thrown out. You don't belong with us because you don't. And the real difficulty was not of being thrown out by others, but by being thrown out by your own mind, because your own mind becomes the severest critic of strangeness and does a little bit of a regressive jujitsu on you. And what it results in is a mythification of the fractured radicality, so that it is presented in a reconditioned way. And out of this comes a mental ideational attitude, which was at one time about 1900 years ago called Gnosticism. Meaning knowers that people know. That people know by their minds that the mind knows that it is wise. Wise as a serpent. But I think the phrase was always coupled with another aspect, another phrase. It was not just being wise as a serpent, it was also being gentle as a dove. And that they go together as a set. And the gentleness as a dove is one of letting, a graceful descent of naivete leaven and undercut the mistrust of the wisdom of the serpent. That all of this is something you have to follow. All of this is something which is just authority, that it's wise to know that you should question authority, and especially question structure and question content, and that that kind of Gnosticism leads to a permanent conviction that radical doubt of the real is justified because everything that is presented is fractured and flawed. And what's especially flawed about that is that idea, because it is only an idea, is not real. It occurs as a function in an epiphenomenal way of the mind's own limited working. And of course, the ancient way of dealing with this was to take the partial fragmented transform of the mind, which had become a knowing had become a gnosis, and to transform that gnosis further, so that it became conscious to level of harmony. And one of the most profound writings on this occurs in Plotinus against the Gnostics. And you can see that there is quite a difference a marked at first, gently nuanced, but eventually radical difference between the Gnostic ideas and its mythology and the Hermetic Consciousness and its harmonic. They're quite extraordinarily different. The reason for all this is not just to apprise you of the delicacies that are available through this kind of education. This is really an ocean of possibility. But to also be a lead in, because the last pair of books that we're using, one of them is called Black Holes and Time Warps, and the other is a book by Nancy Kress, a science fiction book called Baker's Dozen, or the expanded version of the main novelette in here, Beggars in Spain. So we're taking a woman's science fiction novel and one of the great popular science books of the late 20th century. Kip Thorne, by the way, uh, had Stephen Hawking, among other people, read through the book and criticize it. Uh, he said the first two readers were women, and they tore to shreds, and he thanked them. Uh, one of the women who tore it to shreds is a science writer for the LA times. Uh, Casey Cole, who has lectured in this very room on on the nothing on the amazing things about the nothing. Just a month or two ago. One of the reasons of using Kip Thorne's book, though, is that Kip Thorne is the Feynman Professor of Physics at Caltech, and he's also my age, born the same year, and has very interesting kind of life pattern that, unbeknownst to him, is very harmonic. With mine, I've fallen into lots of time warps and black holes in my time too. I've been places where not only does light not escape, but the only thing that escapes was enlightenment. And by dissolving so that I was not there at all, I was not there at all. The difficulty of presenting something like black holes and time warps is that it is very refined, even though it became a national bestseller and very popular. And I want to try to present it in such a way that you can appreciate the beautiful refinement of Kip Thorne. His specialty is gravitation. His lifelong concern is to find gravitational waves. And at Caltech, if you go behind the general services building, where the campus police are, among other things, back to where the loading docks are, where the trucks bring in equipment and supplies for all the Caltech laboratories, you'll find a white vehicle that's like a trailer home with no windows. And that white, windowless trailer home has a little sign on it that says gravitational wave research Lab. And they have been working because to find gravity waves, or to find the particle that carries gravity waves, the graviton will allow for a final unification theory of bringing Einstein's relativity into sync with quantum mechanics. And if that is done, we will be in a position to understand, probably for the first time in a scientific way, that ancient Hermetic wisdom, that reality is gorgeous beyond belief. For not only will gravity join the other energies that are now understood electromagnetism, the strong force that holds the atom together. The weak Neutral currents that are there within atomic structure, and all of them will be given a matrix by gravity, by understanding gravity, by understanding why it is that light bends over enormous distances by gravity to such an extent that there are things like galactic lenses that 12 million light years away, or 10 billion light years away, there can be a gravity source so powerful that stars or galaxies behind it, their light bends in such a way that there are four images of that light source, not just one, a set of four, and that we can now resolve through the Hubble telescope and through other powerful telescopes since built, the two Keck ten meter telescopes in Mauna Kea. We can understand that what we are looking at here is a cosmos that allows for light to be bent in a quaternary way, over distances that are almost the entire diameter of the known universe. Not only is this a wonderful, popular, mysterious, subtle book, but Nancy Kress is a writer is an example of one of the finest late 20th century, early 21st century science fiction writers. She was born in January 1948 and has been married several times. And as she says in one of her comments, She says anyone who's ever been married knows how strange it is to live in a household where there are completely different versions of the real, always going on and how impossible that is. She's currently married to another science fiction writer, Charles Sheffield. British science fiction writer who also is a very fine in science and his man on earth. The Marks of Man as seen from Space and Earth watch a survey of the world from space. A pair of books by her husband, now a great science fiction writer in his own right. What does our earth look like to us? Were we to look with universal eyes? And part of this, of course, is a perspective that is just beginning to have its resonances combed into a harmonic. The very first time that that ever happened was with Voyager two, several years after it left the orbit of Neptune and went further out, not only further out from Neptune, but because Pluto and Charon, its moon, were within the orbit of Neptune. Voyager two was the first man made extension, the first extension of ourselves that went outside of the collection of all the planets of our star system, and looked back with its camera and took a family photograph of all the planets in the sun together. All the planets, all the moons, all the asteroids and our star. Altogether, it was the first family photograph of our star system, and it was remarkable to see that in this photograph. Now, with early 21st century technology, we can go back into the light registry of that photograph, and we can not only pick out the Earth as an object, as a point of light. The Earth, by the way, from a distance, looks like a blue star, a variable blue star. The Earth's light changes as much as 150%, sometimes in its view from um, uh, what I would say we should call the edge of interstellar space. But not only that, we now have the Spectrographic technology to look at those that light data and to mathematically tease out the ability to see that this star, which is our whole planet seen from the edge of interstellar space, we can pick out the fact that we have an atmosphere, that we have oceans, that we have continents with vegetation. And the search is on now to build by 2004, a series of satellites that will work together as a gestalt, as a matrix, as kind of like a matisse, Cézanne, Monet technique of coloring outside the lines of limitations, and to be able to see up to 150 light years away, planets around stars, not as objects, But as spectrographic registry on level of being able to understand if they have atmospheres, if they have oceans, if they have vegetation, and that's about three years away. So that we live in a time where visions of the future are not just of the monsters and the girls, preferably nude and preferably ugly monsters, but that these visions are transforming agaln into history, that history is a transform from the limitations of integration into the differentiability of possibility, and that that visionary range of possibility is transformable again into a harmonic of reality. And so vision through the higher order of transform of history actually becomes real. And not only is there a universe of the idea of a universe in the mind, but there is a cosmos in actuality of possibility without end, which includes us. All of this is extraordinary, and we're going to come back after the break and take a little look at some more of science and science fiction at the end of our education as a matrix of four, because the first four lectures of nature will be the rabbit out of the hat, with these four science lectures being the hat and the first four lectures of Nature in 2002. Coming right up will be the rabbit out of that hat, because I will show you in the interval lecture that this hat made by these four lectures is precisely as I can, that the hat will be empty. And yet in January I will pull a rabbit out of that empty hat. Let's come back to where we left off. We're looking at a pair of books again. Our technique of pairing books. And now you can understand that books that are paired can not only be two books which are brought into juxtaposition, but they are, as a pair, can operate as a tuning fork and can tune resonance, and that resonance, once established, can be further transformed into a harmony so that an education like this is refinable indefinitely. Men and women using an education like this will be able to refine themselves to any degree necessary to be at home in an ever widening cosmos. At the end of one of the great science fiction novels. The voyage of the Space Beagle. Darwin's ship was the Beagle, and this was a spaceship of exploration called the Space Beagle. The author, A.E. van Vogt and I'll talk about him next week, and maybe I'll bring his, um, his wife, his widow here so that she can be in the in the audience. But at the end of his novel, he said. And the Space Beagle, with its little selection of humanity, sped into a night that had no end and no beginning. We're coming back to the tuning fork. And of course, we're not following a text. If we followed the text, we would have to explicate the text. And that's a medieval model, and it's based on a scholastic certainty that there is a logic that can be instructed that ends in the certainty of knowledge, which then you can trust will be a basis for our lives, and we know now that that's not possible. It's just simply not ever real. It is only provisional. It is only projectable. And that is what is meant by a mental illusion. And indeed it is a mental illusion. Smoke and mirrors the confidence that something can be in a cardinal sequence of linearity, built up to be logically sound and trustworthy, is erroneous on at least a dozen angles of critique, and outclassed by at least five orders of maturation. Mathematics in the late 20th century became so enormous that no one could follow the field, and even subfields were not followable. Because there are new math books on unexplored areas of mathematics at the rate of hundreds per year, if not thousands. Here's a little monograph published in one of the great mathematical series, the London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes, number 189, published in 1994, Cambridge University Press. Its title is locally presentable and accessible categories. Locally presentable and accessible categories. It's about the structure of logic at its, um, not its bones, but at its molecular level. And when you open it. Chapter one locally presentable categories. The first chapter is devoted to an important class of categories, the local presentable categories, which is broad enough to encompass a great deal of mathematical life. All of the varieties of algebras. Implicational classes of relational structures which takes in most university logic courses interesting cases of post sets, that is, domains and lattices. Now you're getting into transform, matrix talk, etc., and yet restricted enough to guarantee a number of completeness and smallness properties. And it goes on from there to a discussion of locally finitely presentable Categories and goes on there to a new series of locally presentable categories and then goes into Representation Theorem. And here one comes into a very wild kind of statement under section one point C representation theorem. The aim of the present section is to prove that the following classes of categories coincide. Now, one of the odd things about geometric thinking is that in order to follow the stages of difference within a Geometric proof. You have to see that what you're talking about now is linked with what you were talking about before, so that the geometric sides have to have what is called in geometry, a congruence. This statement about this triangle is linked to this statement about this triangle because these triangles are congruent. It's the same triangle. It's not the same triangle, but it is representing that idea of that triangle. And you want to make sure that you're talking about an equilateral triangle, not an isosceles triangle or some other kind of variant. And in these categories there are three that are listed. And then you come by page 36 to a little section called free completions. That recall that a diagram whose scheme has less than lambda morphisms is called lambda small. And then it goes on to talk about regular cardinal lambdas that algebraically are applicable to these geometric structures, to these categories of logical representation. And all of this is a very small envelope that contains most of the varieties of math that you would ever want to run across. And all of those are in a very small envelope in an office now that doesn't have any walls and has all kinds of invisible stenographers that don't even use envelopes. So we're moving into an incredible differential conscious cosmos. Don't get left behind. Here's the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience with its supplement. November 2001 just came out. Molecular approaches to neural development. And when you turn to one of the introductory articles, the sponsors forward by a Chinese man named Donald C lo at the Cogent Neuroscience Incorporated in Durham, North Carolina. Uh, Cogent Neuroscience paid for the supplements, so they allowed him to write an introduction challenges for neuroscience in the Post Genome World. Now that the human genome is known, the term genome is increasingly being used in rallying calls to the research community to redouble efforts in understanding gene function and regulation. In a world where the human genome sequence will soon be known in its entirety. In part, such appeals and their new jargon are aimed at moderating government and public expectations about the immediate medical impact of the Human Genome Project on the development of new medicines that all of this, vis a vis the human conditions, will emerge only indirectly over time. And this is like a lead in to our science fiction novel by Nancy Kress. The novel is called Beggars in Spain, the little novelette that won her several prizes appears in this collection. Baker's dozen, a collection of short stories, 12 short stories, and the first one is called Beggars in Spain, and this story is about genetic engineering. It's about a little girl named Lucia, who's born in the near future, who is genetically modified so that she doesn't sleep, and she becomes a new variant of human being, the sleepless and the sleepless, because they never sleep, find that they have much more time than regular people to learn whatever they want to learn, and that they develop radically fast, and that after several decades of this, they become enormously Insightful because not ever sleeping, they accrue an energy of penetrating perception about life and people and things, coupled with an enormous burgeoning learning. And the sleepless began to consider themselves as a new species of man. And of course, beggars in Spain was followed by two sequels, Beggars and Choosers. The little graph graphic of molecular biological transform Stuff and Beggars Ride, showing that the transform goes even further than anyone had imagined. And all of these came out in the mid 1990s, from 1991 through 1998. Nancy Kress herself quite interesting. Lady born in 1948. January of 1948. And so we're pairing with something in astrophysics on the cutting edge about gravity waves with a woman science fiction writer writing about genetic engineering and the changes in mankind that are varieties that most certainly will appear in our lifetime. We need to have a little bit of background. We need a little bit of context for this and not just context about Nancy Kress. Her first novels were fantasies, The White Pipes, The Golden Grove, and then she discovered and she wrote fantasies. She was trained As an English teacher. And of course, she was a literature when she was younger. And then she began to change, to write different kinds of stories. One of the interesting early stories is called shadows on the Cave Wall. And of course, this comes from book ten of Plato's Republic. The shadows that people mistake for reality. Another collection of hers called The Aliens of Earth. That it may be that future mankind will seem to be the real aliens at home in the cosmos. Will they be at home on the Earth? And one of the aspects that she develops is a planet far away in another star system. And two novels so far. Probability Moon and Probability sun. And there'll be a third one, a trilogy. She didn't realize she was going to have to write a trilogy, and maybe she will write a fourth work that will undercut these three. The probability comes because she has a confidence in what she calls shared reality based on on probability. She says that's what my book is about. Probability. All of reality is a probability, not an actuality. And not only physical reality at the quantum level, but the realities that we see are a probability, not a reality. And of course, this is a part of the new Gnosticism and is available for critiques on many levels. What her world is. All of the beings of this world can know each other's thoughts and attitudes perfectly concomitantly all the time. And if they start to deviate from the shared reality of the norm, they begin to get headaches. And all of this then kept them in line. And in order for as long as they had lived on that planet until they got somebody in a prison who wasn't, one of them was a human being who didn't share their reality at all. And it started to occur to some of the beings that there was a different kind of reality altogether from theirs, and this was a great shock to them. Where does all this come from? The roots of science fiction can be traced back a long way. You can go back to Greco-Roman Romances. You can go back to a book by Cyrano de Bergerac about people on the moon. You can go back to Jules Verne and his science fiction novels. But the person I want to go back to is H.G. Wells, because it was H.G. Wells who an explosive series of books, one after the other, beginning in 1895 and lasting into the beginning of the 1900s for about 7 or 8 years. Not in a row, not in a sequence, but in books that began building and generating a matrix. H.g. Wells's works established a matrix out of which creatively science fiction for most of the 20th century developed. The first book in his series came out, and this is a first edition. It's a little tiny book, The Time Machine, 1895, and the next year, the first edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau, and the next year, 1897, The Invisible Man, and the next year, 1898, The War of the worlds. Do you get it? By the time War of the worlds came out, the fourth novel in four years, it was apparent that Wells was generating a field which had not been understood before, and the field was one that we would call now science fiction. And science fiction has a newspaper, the newspaper of the science fiction field, locus. This is the issue that has the science fiction convention in Philadelphia. The Philcon. The Millennium Falcon, because it was in 2001, and it has the little poster of Benjamin Franklin with two aliens listening to Franklin. And of course, in Philadelphia, there are aliens who listen to Franklin on Market Street and other streets all over all the time. H.g. Wells established the sense that in this matrix of themes, the time machine, the Island of Doctor Moreau, of someone surgically tampering biochemically with animals to make them human, or trying to make them human, and only succeeding partially so that he had an island of freaks that were no longer animals and yet no longer men, and had to be disciplined by the law. What is the law? And the first law was not to shed blood because the animal shedding blood was a savage state. And so the first law on the island of Doctor Moreau, not to shed blood, not to eat anything that has blood in it. And of course, the first film made was not called The Island of Doctor Moreau, but was called The Island of Lost Souls, made in the early 30s with Charles Laughton as Doctor Moreau. A really fearsome film. The Invisible Man. The War of the worlds. And by 1899, the fifth in a row. When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells 1899, author of The Invisible Man, The War of the worlds, etc., and The Sleeper Awakes is reissued by the University of Nebraska Press as a commemorative classic. And all of this before 1900 and in the early part of the 20th century, actually still 1899, but released right at the end of it. Tales of Space and Time by H.G. Wells. And when you look at it, you see that Wells had branched out the stories in here. One is called the Crystal egg, one is called the star. One is a series of five parts a story of the Stone age, back to UG Lomi and Oya, and the Cave bears and horsemen and lions. And the other is a story of days to come. So here's Wells already by late 1899 early 1900, going back into the past and going far into the future again And putting all of these together. And the final story in here, the man who could work miracles. A pantoum in prose. So that by 1900, H.G. Wells had established a matrix out of which modern science fiction was to be born. And one of the first realizations that comes out of this is that it wasn't the Americans who first sensed this, though. A lot of Wells works were published in the United States within months of the publication in Britain. But it was the Europeans, not the Americans or the British, but the Europeans and especially the French. And the very first science fiction film reproduced in this DVD. Landmarks of early Film A trip to the moon, made in Paris in 1902 And featured the woman in the moon and became an archetype that was followed up. Welles himself then did the First Men in the moon and still in print in many editions, including a facsimile of all the illustrations done in large style. And Welles in his development, went on until this novel that appeared in 1937, Star Begotten, a biological fantasia, and Welles increasingly became not just a science fiction writer, but he became concerned with the future of mankind, that there was something odd going on, and he wanted to get down to basics. And so in 1903 he delivered a lecture in London at the Royal Institution, and its first published in 1913. This is the little first edition. The discovery of the future. The discovery that the future is not a tabula rasa. It's not a blank. Nothing. That then we keep looking to the past, which has caused the present to come into being, and that this is the certainty that we have. He calls these people, with all due respect, legalists constantly looking at the precedents of the past, looking at what has been proved, looking at what works, and using that to generate a certainty by which one can then step into the unknown and that the future Well, obviously arrange itself in terms of the known past, in terms of the focus that we command at the present, and that Wells, by 1903 was saying, I have shown in the last eight years through the matrix of this enormous variety of archetypal works, that this ain't so, that even if it were so in the past, it is now not so ever again, because mankind has matured beyond the limitations of past and present, and has learned to vision futures that never would have been even suspected, and to work patiently towards them. One of the great examples of an H.G. Wells future vision. Confidence that you can work towards. It was the American voyages to the moon. When JFK announced it as a goal, it was not technically or engineeringly feasible or possible or mathematically possible to actually go to the moon. The capacity to do so was generated while they were working pell mell towards accomplishing it, and the fact that there were a series of voyages actually to the moon is now disbelieved by a younger generation of people there, convinced that all of this was governmentally manufactured and never really happened at all. Incidentally, Wells's first published work is called The Stolen Bacillus, about biological terrorism, and was published in the 1890s. This is the Little German Travelers edition, because they didn't want to have this let loose on the British public. The Victorian public. It was a very touchy thing that somebody might steal a bacillus and began using terrorist tactics to infect an unsuspecting public. That was about 107 years ago. A little collection of critical essays on Wells is called H.G. Wells Reality and Beyond, an exhibition. One finds a book by Rosalind Haynes. H.g. Wells, The Discoverer of the future. The influence of science on his thought, and especially the great science fiction writer Jack Williamson, who's still alive at about 95, lives in Portales, New Mexico. H.g. Wells, critic of progress but perhaps one of the most disturbing of all of his works, this study of it, the prophetic soul. A reading of H.G. Wells Things to come. Because some 35 years, almost 40 years after he wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the worlds. After about four decades of maturation himself, in which Wells became not only a great novelist outside the science fiction field, but the great social critic of that whole era, writing many books of critique and also writing an outline history of mankind, and two huge volumes that sold so many hundreds of thousands of copies that it's still being used as book club selections around the world, but by 19 early 1930s. Wells had seen, and he wrote in Things to Come, a devastating realization that the refusal to learn to learn would lead to a war catastrophe that would simply end the civilization that people had known, and that only out of the ruins and embers of that civilization, in its cinders and embers, would come a small pocket of human beings who had learned to learn and would then bring something new, including space travel again, which had been let go. And the film things to come. Directed and made in the 1930s. 1936 is quite an extraordinary work. Even now, the science fiction films that deal with Welles's material include the fabulous performance by Claude Rains and The Invisible Man, The War of the worlds, The Time Machine. Almost all of Welles great works have been made into films. And yet, when you looked at the development of science fiction in the 20s, the late 20s and in the 30s, you found things like Buck Rogers rather than H.G. Wells. You found things like the first Buck Rogers is this March 1928 issue of Amazing Stories and the first comic book of Buck Rogers, 1936. Compare the fact that Wells's Things to Come was made at the same time as this Buck Rogers comic book is a vast difference in aspect. The Buck Rogers mythology is a mulching of the future in terms of an old tribal past, whereas Wells is visioning the future in a differential consciousness, trying to get in tune with the cosmos. It is a completely different way of proceeding, and in fact, the first H.G. Wells type science fiction film since Things to Come in 1936 came 14 years later and it was called Destination Moon. And this screenplay was written probably by the inheritor of the H.G. Wells mantle, Robert Heinlein. And by 1950, when Heinlein did the screenplay. It was evident that science fiction had developed a peculiar split personality. There were a handful of writers who understood the future in a visionary way, looking towards the harmony of a history. And one of Heinlein's great accomplishments was to make a matrix for all of his stories, called his Future History. And on the other hand, there were the vast bulk of people hack writers just trying to earn a buck. Just trying to make a sale, just trying to get some doodad monsters out there to get things going, entertainment wise. And largely, science fiction has been inundated by the entertainers, by the clowns derisively used, whereas the visionaries have largely not only taken a back seat but begun to disappear. Except for two little pockets of writers, one of them the women who were never co-opted in the first place, and the other, the British, who stopped reading because they weren't making as many sales as their American counterparts. So they stopped reading the schmaltz of the 40s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and went back to H.G. Wells. Went back to Wells in the sense of seriously trying to find a way to develop that kind of theme. And their hero was the true bridge between H.G. Wells and the modern British science fiction writers. And that man was Arthur C Clarke. So that there's a whole string of lineages in the science fiction field, and you can move from H.G. Wells through Arthur C Clarke to maybe 5 or 6 really great British science fiction writers like Stephen Baxter today, who has written two novels in tandem with the old Arthur C Clarke, as if he's passing on the mantle, as if he's saying here, this is important for you and one of Baxter's great works, and I'll bring a copy of the first edition next week is a development of H.G. Wells The Time Machine. So there is a conscious This historical linking in visionary futures, in science fiction by the women and by the British writers. Largely, it's the American women. The American women who were never co-opted in the first place, though there were a couple of American women who were such great science fiction writers in terms of the romance. But the romance was a romantic view, a romantic vision of the science fiction field and not written just to make money, not written just to entertain, but written to present a woman's romantic vision of life and of possibility. And the greatest of those was a female writer named Lee Brackett. Lee I g h. Leigh Brackett was married to another very fine old science fiction writer and Edmond Hamilton. But Leigh Brackett, though she published in all the gaudy pulp magazines, especially Planet Stories, that always had a half clad woman rayguns and monsters, she didn't make her living from that. She made her living writing screenplays in Hollywood because she was taken under the wing by Howard Hawks, especially, and her first great screenplay. She wrote in tandem with William Faulkner, the screenplay for The Big Sleep. And then she wrote several screenplays for Howard Hawks. Near the end of his life, when he got interested in the trance form of the so-called Schmaltz hero figure of the popular American imagination into a real Greek comedy presentation of heroism, Greek comedy, romantic epic westerns and, of course, he chose the archetypal Western figure at the time, John Wayne and Howard Hawks made for films, and Leigh Brackett was involved in all four films. All four films star John Wayne. All four films are Westerns, although only three of them look like Westerns. The fourth is like a satyr play. It's not set in the American West, but it's set in the most ancient East, in Africa, in the Serengeti plains, it's called Hatari. The three Westerns are all of a set because it's the same theme that is held like a crystalline structure and rotated. It's the very same theme, but rotated three times in such a way that you get three variants of the same lattice structure, which shows you finally when you take the three of them together, plus the African fourth, and you put them into a set, they look like a Shakespeare cycle. And one of the greatest film directors ever, Howard Hawks is very capable of carrying it out. Larger than life figure. The three Westerns are Rio Bravo, El Dorado and Rio Lobo, the last film that Hawks made, 1970. Leigh Brackett wrote all four screenplays. Her last work, by the way, she was contacted right at the end of her life. She was ill, but it was such a beautiful chance to develop the next stage of a great science fiction mythology. She wrote The Empire Strikes Back, the second of the Star Wars film, so she was really somebody she knew how to write. She got big bucks for that. But her favorite was writing pulp science fiction from a romantic woman's visionary world, the black Amazon of Mars and stuff like that. Those writers who came out, those women American women writers who came out of the Leigh Brackett, um, almost want to say Creative Cauldron believed in romantic magic, not in witchcraft, but in romantic magic being a transform of the ordinary beyond the confines of an entertainment that it isn't just an entertainment, but that the deepest charm is not in entertainment, but in a rising consciousness of visionary freedom. And that that is really romantic. And so the great women science fiction writers. Nancy Kress, one of the best of them all, come out of that kind of a lineage so that the British men and the American women are writing very good science fiction now. One can come to an encyclopedia of science fiction done about ten years ago, and already see how burgeoning the field has become. The women, the theme of women in science fiction. The theme of women science fiction writers was collected together in several um uh. This is called Women of Wonder the classic years from the 1940s to the 1970s. And here, women of wonder. The contemporary years from the 70s through the 90s. And you can see a difference in the imagery, a difference in the approach. And one of the most perspicacious collections of essays, this one, I don't know how it got out of the Library of Congress Copyright Office, but it did, uh, bought on the net by Kit Reed, a good writer in her own way, called Weird Women Wired Women and has an introduction by another fine woman, science fiction writer, um, Connie Willis. And we'll get more into Connie and to Nancy Kress and so forth next week. What I'm presenting is that this matrix of science nine, ten, 11 and 12 operates on a much higher level, a hyper conscious level than you might suspect. And what it is transforming, what it is distilling is something that has already gone through a fermentation. It has already gone through a transformation before that, earlier this year, our presentations on vision, our presentations on art, into the presentations on history formed in a very complex way, a lattice crystalline structure that had already come through a transform and was ready to take the higher energies that are being given to it now in science, and show us a prism that is not just a rainbow, but a prism which shows, like a cosmic spectrograph, all of the delicate nuances that are now possible to be seen, that in the light of a single star, we could now pick out planets that had forests even 150 light years away and that were just beginning. And all of this is just out of the ability to differentially conscious journey into the visionary possibilities not of probability, but of possibility. The Hermetic Way is through possibility, not Gnostic probability. The Probability is always a card game dealt by the mind. Whereas possibility is life lived consciously and turns out not to be just a probability. A statistical hopefulness, but turns out to be the possibility that always matures into the real actualities. And it's this tone that I'm hoping to set. One of the most difficult things is to appreciate how conscious modern science, now at the Cutting Edge is here from Nature Neuroscience challenges for neuroscience and the Genome World. The Chinese author Donald Lu puts in here. Max Delbruck once said that the study of bacteriophage, having no obvious relevance to human disease, was ideal for the pursuit of pure science because it freed the investigator from the temptation to better the human condition, and therefore from the distortions in science that such temptations can sometimes engender. Times have changed since Delbruck's day, but 50 years ago. Translational medicine is gaining increasingly wide attention in the basic science community, and there has been no stronger stimulus to this increased convergence of basic and clinical sciences than the realization over the last decade or two, that the rapid evolution of molecular and genetic approaches has all but abolished the gap that historically divided these two segments of biomedical science. And so we see again That the gaps. Categorically, the divisions by category have not only dissolved in the 19th century, but have dissolved forever in the 20th century and are of no use whatsoever in the 21st. He goes on to say, probably what we will have to deal with in neuroscience from here on out is the brain as a whole. I think by 2010, the brain will be put back into some one and we will have to deal with human beings as a whole. Thanks.