Science 11
Presented on: Saturday, December 15, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Science 11 and we're trying to bring to a juncture our entire two year programme so that, for yourselves, if you wish to exit the programme you can do so by an individual study, as it were, of the complementarity phase that's in the programme. If you wish to go through it again - because I won't offer it again - you can go back through the two years on your own, just passed, or you can check the website, Rogerweir.com. And we will be able to eventually put ten to year cycles available for you to download and to go through and this past 20 years is about half of the time that has been spent developing this. The book, The Learning Civilisation, will come out, hopefully, by the end of 2008 and it will have a complete documentary history, from 1965 through 2008, of endeavour of making a very complex presentation. It had to be refined over that length of time, more than two generations, because of the complexities and challenges that were inescapable and also because of limitations. No matter how many gifts we are given something of this scale shows up every limitation and many that develop along the way.
We're looking today at the second person in a pair that are like a pair to Richard Feynman, and the pair to Feynman is Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking. In a way Richard Feynman is a New York City trickster and Roger Penrose is really a classic British ... we would call him a magician, a magus is what they would have called him in the renaissance. The difference is that a magician seeks to produce for you the effects that are unexpected and seemingly unrepeatable whereas a magus is able to usher you into reality. Stephen Hawking is neither a trickster, though he has an incredible sense of humour, nor is he a magician, although he has survived motor neurone disease. And he is now 66 years old and he should have died 30 years ago but, instead, he's a hero and so the title today is Trickster Magician & Hero.
Hawking is a hero because he has been able to go out into dangerous terrain and to bring back what he has found and deliver it to the community. While Penrose and Feynman are very well known around the world, Stephen Hawking is a superstar: his brief history of time was on the new York times best seller list for 237 straight weeks, it was a best seller for five years in New York City where people get jaded and tired faster than any place other than hotel saloons in Los Angeles. Hawking, also, has been indefatigable of being able to revisit again and again material that would have and has languished in universities for hundreds of years and have never received popularity. His incredible volume On the Shoulders of Giants, takes five of the great astronomer physicists of all time and presents them with selections that go through so that you have Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein. He says here at the end of his introduction, to this volume that is almost 1,300 pages,
This volume illustrates so well our understanding doesn't advance just by slow and steady building on previous work. Sometimes, as with Copernicus and Einstein, we have to make the intellectual leap to a new world picture. Maybe Newton should have said 'I've used the shoulders of giants as a springboard.
Actually the phrase was not original with Newton, Newton was quite well educated, the phrase 'On the shoulders of giants' comes from Bernard of Charters in the 1100s; the person who traced it down was George Sarton who founded the history of science discipline in the United States and it was quoted by Edwin Hubble in his book The Realm of the Nebulae. We will come back to Hubble because in a very real way Hawking has tried to build also on the giant shoulders of Hubble and also another astronomer who he was not able to build on the shoulders of, Fred Hoyle. And we talked about him a couple of weeks ago, his The Nature of the Universe was one of the first great science bestsellers in the early 1950s. This is a 1950 paperback, the revised edition, The Nature of the Universe ten years later with in-papers of colossal astronomical mysteriousness. That Fred Hoyle was a champion of the steady state theory and Stephen Hawking became the champion hero, finally, of the Big Bang; that the universe began with a huge incredible singularity explosion and was not, as Fred Hoyle and many others contended, a steady state universe.
The quality of On the Shoulders of Giants, it being a bestseller even at 1,300 pages, led publishers, in this case Running Press, to put out a sequel, God Created the Integers which is a history of mathematics. And Hawking again uses the same format and he takes ... I think it's 17 mathematicians over 2,500 years and shows that what we're dealing with, here, that science builds on a historical context. And certainly our learning civilisation, it is founded very securely on the fact that forms will emerge whole out of a process and that the primordial process, from which primordiality of forms emerges, is nature. And nature, as a process, is a field so that when one wants to characterise the dynamic nature of nature, one has to go into field context, field concerns.
The auxiliary tandem process to nature is myth, mythic experience, but rather than being a field, mythic experience is a flow, the flow of experience, the flow of images, the flow of language, the flow of feelings. That found themselves on the sequences of forms that emerge out of nature. And those forms are existential forms of what exists, of the things, of the stuff and not only of the things and the stuff but what the things and the stuff do, characteristically, the sequences of the actions that sustain and found them as things, as existentials. And so experience runs on the track of what is existentially there in the pragmatic ritual action that emerges into form out of the field of nature. And the symbolic thought form, the form of the mind, emerges out of myth and correlates itself with the existential things and when it is correlated, accurate to the mind and repeatable to the rituals, we say then that the correspondence is a referent and the referentiality establishes an identity.
And in this way one's self identity is the correlation by referentiality of your idea of yourself with the actual actions that you do: you are what you do. And so to modify, to refine, to change, your idea of who you are or someone else's idea of who you are, you modify or change or refine what you do. And so the form of your existentiality, in this way, refines itself in the identity with the idea of yourself in your mind or the idea of you in someone else's mind, that that identity becomes more and more referentially accurate. And this, generally, is the cycle, the cycle of integration, that most of the world most of the time operates with. But one can step outside of this entire circle, this entire cycle, it's like the four seasons; that if you step off the earth into say low earth orbit even, there are no seasons, there is no cycle. All of a sudden you are outside of the world and what is important to you is to know that what you are doing now has never been done before on the earth. For one thing gravity doesn't hold and so you float in orbit and you can do many things when you can fly around, almost like a super hero.
And if you go to other planets or other large bodies like our moon, or you go to Mars or you go further out. And, as one goes further out, one finds that there are worlds upon worlds upon worlds. Each one will have a different cycle of integration. In our star system alone there are several hundred different cycles of integrals that are going to be available to us within the next 30 years and especially our children, coming up and on into the future history. So that a visionary quality is absolutely essential, as it was to rare men and women before, it is now the province of every man and every woman all the time from here on. And in this way someone like a Stephen Hawking is really heroic because he has gone out into that visionary field and brought back from that visionary field another dimension that was never there in the natural cycle. It is a visionary dimension and one of the qualities of that visionary dimension is that it replaces nature in its flow as experience. And experience now becomes visionarily suspended as, if it were taken away from gravity, and experience now becomes possible in experiments, and the possibilities in the experiments are wide open, they're boundless.
One can experiment on almost anything at any time and so what happens is that Stephen Hawking, like an ancient hero, a hero that comes back now expands the mythology, the mythic horizon, so that one has to include a new kind of a form that comes out and the hero or the heroin establishes the possibility, the formal space of a new kind of a form of a person. That person now will become a person who has the ability to transform themselves completely, not in terms of a referent to ritual, not in terms of just identifying in terms of existentials but, now, of opening up the possibilities of different facets that do not settle for identification, that exceed identity and that bring possibility into play. And one has an art of the transformed person on the level of an artist, being able to create a life like a work of art. A sense of person where the experiments where you have gone through now progressively displace the old limitations of experience and you now are able to see that there are not only new possibilities but that there is a new flow of experience that is no longer founded on the tracks of ritual, on the roadbeds of existence but they come into play as history. In the historical sense is truly a kaleidoscopic consciousness that can run on any possible not even just tracks but suspended like a Maglev train will be magnetically suspended above the tracks, or a rocket ship or a UFO, it is able to go outside of any kind of tracks.
One of the charming vignettes in film, at the end of the film Back to the Future where the young kid is saying goodbye to his favourite inventor who's just come back from the future and is going to take him there and he says there's a problem in the future with your descendents and you have to come to the future to fix this. And he says 'Well, are we going in this car?' And he says 'No,' and then the car lifts up, the wheels fold in and he says 'Well, what's happening?' and he says, 'Where we're going we don't need any roads.' Cars no longer are limited to roads. Our future: we are no longer limited to the cycles of nature on this planet, we are no longer limited to identities that could only be modified before, could only be expanded through experience before, could only be given an augmentation of images before. We are now begun on a new species, Homo sapiens stellaris, where a whole star system is going to be the matrix out of which we prepare ourselves for interstellar adventures.
Stephen Hawking in a very real way is a hero of this nascent world and it's curious because as he became confined more and more through his motor neurone disease, finding initially as a young man, just married and just starting out in the world, that he was having trouble tying his shoelaces and little things. And progressively becoming more and more clumsy and finally getting checked and found that he had an incurable disease, there's no cure for it, and that he would progressively become a vegetable. As a hero he refused to become a vegetable and began refining himself in the sense that he would meet every stage of physical debility with an overwhelming response of creativity; that his spiritual person became freer and freer as his existential body became more and more limited. And almost as he was confined to being able to move his eyes, occasionally to give almost like just only a Mona Lisa smile and to just waver two fingers, technology kept advanced so that he was able with a two inch voice box put in and a computer link-up to be able to continue to communicate with the world and to write. By now it's several dozen books and has become the outstanding figure in the world, the first figure in the world to hold the position that Einstein held some couple of generations ago.
The confidence at the beginning of World War 2 and the ensuing horribleness of atomic bombs and the cold war, those of us who lived through that beginning era, where it was born more horrific almost month by month, there were three figures in the world who stood like a tripod of the incredible depths of heroic decency of human beings. One of them was Albert Schweitzer camped out on the, as he said, the edge of the primeval forest of Africa, the second was Ghandi in India among the 700,000 impoverished villages battling the British Empire for independence and freedom which was won and Albert Einstein. And in a way Hawking has become like Einstein: he has maintained the understanding of ordinary people around the world that though science has become almost impossible for anyone to follow, in any kind of a detail, there are people like Hawking who really do understand the core of it, the history of it, the practice of it and are able to bring back to ordinary individuals.
The quality that is there in his joking, to make it at home with people: he said 'When pulsars were first discovered [1967] the first pulsars discovered were labelled LGM1 and LGM2, the initials LGM stood for little green men,' to try and alert people that this was something that one could have a sense of humour about. What was devastating was that pulsars are rotating neutron stars, that an ordinary star of some size has gone into a collapse where all of the atomic structure has collapsed and what has been left are just the neutron cores, neutron/proton cores of the atoms so that a teaspoon would weigh a million tonnes. And when they rotate, because they are so gravitationally dense, their magnetic fields lay like tattoos on the surface so that when they rotate and there is a light source that comes out of the rotating neutron star, that pulsation, that pulsar, sends out a laser signal that is clear for millions of years across the universe, millions of light years.
In the origins of trying to understand how, by the mid 1960s, there could be a larger sense of power, which on a scale was more horrific than even hydrogen bombs, came the correlation that neutron stars can collapse even further and become black holes. And it was Stephen Hawking, more than anyone else, who devoted himself immediately to try to understand and to convey to ordinary people in the world something about black holes. That they were really not the ultimate monsters of science fiction but they were astronomical occurrences in a universe large enough to countenance them as just other experimental scientifically investigable objects and processes. The quality of Hawking to do this was in tandem with his ability to go back to the origins of the universe, to what he came to prove as the Big Bang theory. That the origin some 14.7 billion years ago was from an intense singularity that creatively spewed out an incredible, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, plasma that took some 300,000 years before there were enough early particles to form atoms. And that only when atomic little mini solar systems formed and were able to separate themselves or to make a space between them was there a space in which the communication between atoms of hydrogen would be photons of light. And for the first time one had a space in which there could be light and further complex structures beyond just atoms of hydrogen.
All of this would be baffling if one were hearing it for the first time and when Hawking began publically making these sashays in the 1960s it was the first time that the public had ever come to realise this. The scientific world had gone through what the popular world went through in the 60s; the scientific world went through it in the 1920s, about 40 years before. And the leading figures in the 1920s were Einstein and Bohr that we started our science with and Edwin Hubble produced the coup de grace. His person is now held as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, of course the Hubble telescope is named after him and it's extraordinary because when Hubble first came to astronomy he had come out of the First World War as an officer, he was a major. And when he first went to Lick observatory in northern California he came in World War 1 major's costume so that all the early astronomers forever after called him 'The major'. He was a very tall militarily disciplined character, the only luxury that he gave himself was that he smoked a pipe, very carefully, very measurably, and he had the temperament to be able to go to the new Mount Wilson Observatory where the hundred inch telescope was launched in 1917, he went there within a year and a half of it being launched in November of 1917 and he became the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory.
When you're on the top of Mount Wilson the temperatures are cool even in the summertime and the wintertime they're dreadful. The observing time must be in the night time and so for years and years every night, Edwin Hubble stood, almost alone, he had a helper named Milton Humason who would come most evenings to help out a little bit and keep him company but it was Hubble who stood at the 100 inch telescope. And he was the first man to be able to patiently look further than anyone has ever looked into the universe. And his first book is called The Realm of the Nebulae and its' published by Yale University Press and this is one of the first photographs ever taken not of stars but of stars in another galaxy.
This was taken august 24th 1925 and he writes here, 'This is the outer region of the great spiral in Andromeda [that's Essier 31, named for a French astronomer who gave 108 astronomical sites and this is number 31] A star cloud, an open star cluster, a globular star cluster, and a Cepheid variable star at maximum luminosity are marked in the photograph.' So they're marked here by Hubble in August of 1925 and the Cepheid variable was at that time in the 1920s what pulsars became in the 1960s. They have a cycle of brightening and dimming and by being able to tell that there were individual stars within this nebula meant that it was no longer in our star system, not just the stars nearest but all the stars that one could see except for these nebula clouds and that these nebula clouds were not clouds anywhere near us. In 1925 the best estimate that could come up, Hubble said, it's at least 700,000 light years away. It's actually 2.2 million light years away, it's one of the closest galactic structures to us.
Hubble points out, and later on Hawking will refresh this for many people but not quite in the depth that Hubble did, that the first person to really understand this published a book in England in 1750: Thomas Wright who was saying that he felt from, his examinations, that, actually, these nebulae were very, very far away and represented whole clusters of stars that were not part of our milky way. The argument was taken up by a philosophic genius in Germany named Immanuel Kant who in 1755, as Hubble and Hawking point out, made the first estimate of what these nebulae were and for 250 years, this was the standard best that man could do. Kant said these are island universes and our universe must then be an island; that the Milky Way large as it is, enormous as it is, complicated as it is, that the universe must be so large that this is but just an island in this ocean. And one of the qualities of this ocean is that it is endless.
One of the qualities that Hawking brings out is that Hubble and Einstein in his estimation were held together by an ingenious priest named Lemaître who studied under Sir Arthur Eddington and who came up with an idea that the universe was identical in any direction and because it was identical in any direction it must have a common origin, it must have had some kind of a beginning. That if you run this commonality all the way back it would funnel back to some kind of a beginning and this was the tap route, says Hawking, of the Big Bang theory. Actually, when one takes a look at the history of science, it is not Lemaître but it was a Russian named Alexander Freidmann who came up with this idea of the commonality of the universe and the origin in a Big Bang. And it was Freidmann's work that really was redone by Lemaître, he was assigned by the Vatican to go and study astronomy so that astronomy could be brought under the purview of the Vatican and clear them of this onus of Galileo inheritance. And so the Vatican began then to sponsor various conventions on science, especially on astronomy, in Vatican City, in Italy, to show everyone that they were on the very edge, the cutting edge, of science. Hawking went there in 1975 and also in 1981 and received blessings from the Pope, Pope John Paul. He realised when the pope told him 'You are free to investigate everything since the Big Bang but don't go into the Big Bang because that's god.' And Hawking said that he was filled with trepidation because he had just delivered a very complex lecture on what the Big Bang really was and that they didn't find god there. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to our endeavour which is to make a resonant interface through our hearing, through our imagination, through our remembering, and this is the field of differential consciousness in play. It is in this field of consciousness that theory takes place, not as a theory, not as an integral but as a differential array in play. It is the field of consciousness out of which the person emerges who is a prism. It is the diffraction through the prism of the person of the field of consciousness that plays the spectrum of the kaleidoscope of historical consciousness. And it is out of the spectrum of historical kaleidoscopic consciousness that science forms emerge as facets of the cosmos. The mind, in its integral, will always, always, come up with a universe, a one place for everything, ordered as much as can be and reference back to existentials so that experience between the poles of the existential ritual action things and their movement and the symbolic order of ideas and thought, the way that they should be organised. That experience will more and more be codified, the images arranged, the feelings modulated, the language more and more referentially logical so that all of this, then, will be the blossoming outcome, the fruit, of what nature delivers to us.
The field of consciousness obviates the confidence that this is not only so but is the way in which it should be so. So that in the integral order of the world, of thought, of mentality, the state of mind allows a little bit of windows of insight, will allow some even the opportunity to open the door of insight but hold in great fear of trepidation anyone who not only opens the windows but leans out to look through them, not only opens the door but walks through it into new dimensions. One of the great illustrations of the high Renaissance, Florentine Renaissance, is the medieval Ptolemaic world in all of its concentric rings - this is before Copernicus - and the fixed stars as the final large, geared, construct and some renaissance magus philosopher has climbed out to look outside of the entire arch with all of its subsidiary levels, and what he looks to see there is that there are stars that are not fixed, there are swirls that are unimaginable and that his eyes are the size of saucers.
When we look at the beginnings of civilisation, about 4,000 BC, 3,500 BC, in a place like Sumer which is in today's Iraq around where Basra is, you find statues of men and women in gowns that have large embossed floral designs and their eyes are all pupils, their huge eyes are eyes of seeing and this tradition went on for about 3,000 years. When it came to having occurrences, spiritual conscious festivals like the Eleusinian mysteries, one family was in charge of running those programmes and the epoptai family are the seers, they're the family whose history went back for thousands of years and their descendants, partially living in that area of Greece - Eleusis is a long afternoon's walk from Athens - it is only the seers who are able to see outside the world. And when they look outside the world they look with eyes that are theoria, theoretical. The Greek term translates directly as contemplation, contemplative. They are not looking to see the world, they are looking to see seeing, through which the world will be transformed.
The great Heinrich Zimmer writing on the art of Indian Asia, said it is a mistake to transfer the way in which the binocular vision of two eyes look to focus to see things in the world, look to see, to follow, the things in their detail in the world. It's wonderful for the world but it's a mistake to then transpose that and say that one has to look within so that one has a focus of seeing within and the ability to have that focus able to follow the detail within. And almost every so called spiritual teacher on the planet today will endorse that that's what you should do, you should be able to visualise, you should be able to follow through, you should be able to be specific and detailed. And all of this is a lie. It goes against the actuality of wisdom, it obviates the workings of the field of consciousness, does not ever allow the spiritual person to emerge and there is no history for people who cannot do that and there is no science. As Zimmer points out, when you look within the eyes do not look to focus, they look kaleidoscopically at the allness and it is out of the allness of the field of consciousness as another dimension, added to the dimensions f space time. So that now you have a quintessential five dimensional complex field of nature and consciousness, together, and now what you are seeing you are seeing into in such a way that the existential are penetrated into seeing their possibilities. And this is why theory is so powerful, it sees the possibilities that are hidden, they are in between the lines, they're in between the acts, they're not limited to the stuff.
And the whole development of this, of course, in wisdom about 2,300 years ago, both in China and in the classical swath from India through Egypt, in both nexes the development of alchemy was always the ability to see: that with an extra quintessential dimensional field one can transform anything. It's not to make lead onto gold, it's to make the limited existentials of the world and their correlations with a limited mind, transformed so that now they are able to work with zeros and infinity and everything in between. The binary is not the focus, the binary is the zero to infinity field and in ancient wisdom this was called eternity. One is not looking for the Big Bang, that ends either with a big crunch or with a constantly expanding boundless universe; to the wisdom traditions around the planet for all time this is a sophomoric school textbook limitation, that shows up more about the mentality of the time than it does about the reality which the cosmos really exhibits and is.
When we come to and god created the integers by Stephen Hawking, his introduction begins with a quotation from Richard Feynman, not from one of his books but something spoken by him. In fact it reads 'American physicist Richard Feynman spoke in a 1964...' it was spoken at Caltech and it was in one of his early deliveries for his introduction to physics. In 64 and 65 Feynman at Caltech brought out a series of extempore presentations on - and I brought last week the three volumes that are boxed; Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and I brought the rare paperbound questions and problems for it. He said this and Hawking quotes it at the beginning of God Created the Integers. 'We are lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It's like the discovery of America: you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature.'
We're discovering for the first time, permanently, the science in its cosmic refinement because we are at an interface where our species now must inhabit the cosmos, not just a world and not just a completed global empire, not just an economy based on a global empire that can be extended out piecemeal to satellites orbiting as long as they don't leave earth orbit or to just sending machines out to explore and send back data to this planet where no one can leave. We're going to leave, not all and not all at once but the species is expanding, now, and our home will be a whole star system, about a light year across. It will be our sandbox in which our play will prepare us so that interstellar adventures and activity within about 30 years will be within reach, will be there.
In the 1920s there was an extraordinary cast of characters and one of the most unlikely were a pair of French nobles, they were French royal princes, the duc de Broglie, Maurice and his brother Louis. And Louis de Broglie, one of the most extraordinary figures of the time and his bestseller is called Matter and Light: the New Physics about that era and that transform of which he was a major part. He said if light and matter are related and you want to investigate matter, you could do so by coming around by way of light and investigating in that way. And one would reverse engineer so that the problems of mater are not just matter that in its complexity is difficult to investigate but light can be investigated in such a way so that you can investigate matter by light, by making light very complex. And we now have something where we don't just to just have astronomy of looking at something in terms of its visible reflected light but we can have a spectrum of light and that this whole spectrum of light is every possibility in the expanded electromagnetic field of light. And we are now able to see in a way where we can investigate matter by penetrating theoretical insight light.
And one of the finest ways of presenting this was by Jacob Bronowski in his pioneering television series, thirteen part series, called The Ascent of Man. In one of the early episodes he had a whole array of scientific equipment and all of it was trained on the same object which was somebody and he showed what that somebody looked like across the entire electromagnetic spectrum from investigating it from different scientific equipment. The only place that you could see who it was, the person who it was, was with the human eyes. Our eyes focus exactly and precisely on where the spiritual personality of someone is, we're made, literally evolved, over billions of years. Not just billions of years on this planet, life has only evolved here for three and a half billion years; according to the Big Bang life has evolved for over twelve billion years. But according to ancient wisdom we are eternal; we have never not been able to see clearly to the spiritual person of someone else and of ourselves.
De Broglie in the preface to Matter and Light, 'Thus a few decades have witnessed the downfall of the best established principles and most firmly supported conclusions. A fact which shows the need of caution in basing general metaphysical principles on the advances of the different sciences,' which you find all the time in the world now. People who are schoolboys or schoolgirls in terms of science, whipping up crème cocos based on what they have heard basic science is. 'Such a process,' writes de Broglie, some80 years ago, 'such a process would be tantamount to building on ever shifting foundations. And once we have grasped by how much the sum of what we do not know exceeds the sum of what we do know, we shall feel little taste for precipitant conclusions.'
The ancient way of making it graspable was that as you begin to look not with the transposition of the outward focus of your eyes to things to see what they are so that you could pound on them, and what they do so that you could repeat that, or what you are so that you could indentify that and have confidence in that identification. That you learn to look within to the full infinite spectrum that includes a zero and that your logical procedures in the world are but sample cases, temporarily, and nothing to lean on, nothing to build on but just experiments in investigation. It is a difficult thing to realise that by 2008 there are more maths books being published every year now than have ever been published before in the history of the world because the burgeoning fields of mathematics, the possibilities, are opening further and further. It's not only a bouquet that is complex, that one could say 'Well, look at all the new things,' it is fields that extend beyond the capacity if the earth to grow this array, this garden of possibilities.
And when you look at it, almost all of the transforms that make this possible bear the names of someone who first created it, who first discovered it. So that the saying that mathematics is an art means that the mathematics makers are artists. And next week when we take a good look at Penrose and Penrose transforms and Penrose's twister hieroglyphics, that are very much like Feynman's diagrams as a new math hieroglyphic, and to understand that we are witness in the last generation of the beginnings of a new kind of symbolism. A symbolism that went through its early hieroglyphic phase, from the 60s until now, and is ready to go, for the first time, into the ability to write incursive this new language where the symbols are transparent. That their meaning is not encased in the defined bounds of what they mean, but the defined bounds of what they mean is a temporary special case only, dwarfed by all of the possible cases which have never been thought of and never explored.
One of the most incredible new writings around the turn of the century, published first in 1911, right about the time that many of these discoveries were coming out, it is Arnold Schoenberg's new book on the harmonics of music in which he developed for the first time a twelve tone scale for music, not based on any of the scales that had ever been used before. And not only could one write music in it - Anton Webern and Schoenberg and Alban Berg all wrote exquisite music in the twelve tone, even Stravinsky. But what Schoenberg says in his harmonics of music at the time, it's 100 years ago, he said there are an infinite number of scales for music, there are musics without end that could be played and composed and heard. And we are just beginning for the first time to take our first baby step to what we were taught was dissonance is but a larger realm; that if you have a large enough thoeria as a field of consciousness for sound and ratios and proportions, dissonance is but a very large ratio of a new harmonic. We have this ability and so de Broglie, just to finish with him, writes 80 years ago,
Yet it is fair to observe that the advance made by Quantum Physics has opened entirely novel perspectives on a great number of questions and that the future orientation of metaphysical doctrines will almost inevitably be deeply influenced sooner or later. And it is equally fair to observe in passing that no less a physicist than Niels Bohr thinks that the "uncertainties" and "complementary aspects" of Quantum Physics are sure to find a place sooner or later in biological theory.
And of course it was only a few years after this that at good old Caltech a young genius named Linus Pauling applied the quantum realms to chemistry and wrote a textbook published in 1935 that has gone through several editions. Next week I'll bring my copy, the third edition of Pauling's quantum chemistry and it has about 200 bookmarks in it of major things that one needs to remember to go and look up. An incredible application, and out of this came a sense that now this can be applied everywhere all the time but, in order to be able to play, one has to be able to enter into the field of differential consciousness. If you play it in the mind, it will become a labyrinthine mentality that will always play out as if it were a game. And the most crucial exemplary document tagging this for all time was written by John von Neumann, the Theory Of Games and Economics, published by Princeton in the 1940s. Von Neumann at the time was building some of the first computers, braniac, was the designer of many of the new items, moving into electronic computing whereas previous examples like from Pascal all the way to the development by Vannevar Bush of the differential calculator, were all mechanical.
Von Neumann showed that if you limit yourself to a mentality your sense of theory will become a sense of labyrinthine gamesmanship and you will try to stack the winning for yourself of the games. And you can see today the young are playing games that get more and more complicated, that serve to weave them back into an almost infinite sense or arcadesmanship that then parades itself as something new when actually it's a devolution. It makes you addicted to the mentality rather than frees you to fly outside of the mentality into the realms of the ecology of spirit and consciousness.
One of the qualities that is there, early on, we talked at the beginning of Alexander von Humboldt and this book on Humboldt's Cosmos is about his travels in South America but after he wrote and published 30 big volumes on his travels, the last two volumes are reprinted in penguin classics as a personal narrative of a journey to the equinoctial regions of the new continent. His final work, the last volume, five, was published a couple of years after he died in 1859 at the age of 90. His five volume work is called Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe and this is the English translation published in London in 1852. Von Humboldt, one of the great universal geniuses of all time and he says here, reminiscent because Hawking and Hubble and many of those educated, having a historical background, understand that this was an important watershed. 'Special results of observation in the domain of cosmical phenomena' not just looking at phenomena as things, as existentials, as ritual things that do things but to look with a cosmic eye.
'In pursuance of the aim that I had proposed to myself as obtainable in a degree commensurate with my own powers and with the present state of knowledge I have considered nature in the two volumes of the Cosmos which have already appeared in a two-fold point of view. I have sought to represent her first in the pure objectivity of external phenomenon and next as the reflex of the image received through the senses on the mirror of man's inner being: his ideas and feelings.'
The first volume of cosmos looks at the things, the existentials, and the existentials for him were museums full of new things. When he returned to Europe after five years he brought 60,000 new plant species with him, he brought animals beyond belief, no one had ever seen, from South America and Central America. He brought mineral samples, he brought every conceivable kind of thing, he was wealthy, courageous enough, he simply crated or caged and brought all of it in an entourage. On his way back home he stopped to visit Jefferson and he stopped to see the coronation of Napoleon, he stopped to visit Goethe, then he went back to Berlin and it was too stuffy for him even though he was made chamberlain of the German emperor - von Humboldt's father had been chamberlain to the previous emperor. He moved to Paris because it was a city where he could write and publish his works and there he got the insight to travel into Central Asia and as he came back to Europe he had become a planetary figure.
He wrote cosmos in order to show that the transforms of the person open up the world in ways in which you would never have been able to imagine before. So volume three of Cosmos is the cosmological eye and for the first time an improvement on Kant's island universes appears in print in section seven of volume three of Cosmos. Just to give you a few things, the headline is The Nebulae, Whether All Nebulae Are Merely Remote and Very Dense Clusters of Stars [Are These Only Remote And Very Dense Clusters of Stars?]or something else and the first examples he takes are the two Magellanic Clouds. In Europe you can't see them because they're in the southern sky but in the southern sky of this earth the Magellanic Clouds, the large and the small, are like many galaxies, they're satellites of our galaxy much like the very large moons of Jupiter are satellites of Jupiter and the large Magellanic Clouds is like Ganymede and the small like Europa to our whole galaxy.
And he writes, 'Besides the visible celestial bodies which shine with sidereal light,' that is to say they're visible to us out there in the celestial realm but in their own right they do not shine celestially, that's mythic imagery, they shine as stars, sidereal, they have their own dimensional realm which is a part of reality and we must adjust ourselves to being able to see not just that they're celestial but that their sidereality is a part of our reality. Next week I will bring us back to this when we come to Penrose and enlarge upon it.
The greatest writer on alchemy in the 20th century was Carl Jung. In The Collected Works you will find a volume called Alchemical Studies but the really powerful volume, the great magnum opus of Jung is called Mysterium Coniunctionis, couple of volumes. In the German it had a third volume which is published not in the collected works of Jung, it's published in the Bollingen Series but as a separate volume called Aurora Consurgens. Edited by Jung's great ... one of his great helper, Marie-Louise von Franz, a female magus of fairy tales and their understanding and meaning. It is a manuscript written on his death bed by Thomas Aquinas, he died at 49, he was a universal genius and he wrote an alchemical work which was hidden away and not published, not talked about and it went all the way back to his teacher Albertus Magnus who showed him the mystery of plants and animals and minerals and the mysteries of alchemy as well. Jung, in his commentary written in 1956, just the year before he wrote about UFOs, a new modern myth. In Mysterium Coniunctionis he says if you go into the depths of the image spectrum of the inner human being you will find in that spectrum at its deepest, the farthest reaches of the cosmos that have curled around and are there. That we are a part of an immense ecology of reality, it is not that that is really far out there so much that it is really deep in here as well.
And so our education, our programme uses the rainbow infinity sign. What's the phase after science? Nature, fresh again in better penetrative depth. Next week we'll take at Penrose and especially his great work that came out last year called The Road to Reality. We are not looking for a comprehensive plan, we're not hoping to be monumental holders of the authority of a plan, we're looking to be artists who are free to kaleidoscopically play in the real. Next week.