Ever wondered how big the universe is? It's pretty fucking huge. Lots of room and if scriptures or whatever sacred authorities are to be believed, inhabited solely by us humans on a grandiose speck of dust we call 'Earth'. Ain't that convenient. All that space and just us to excrete in it. Wonder what 'God' was thinking. "I'll build a mansion the size of a country and have it lived in by ants". Seems strange to me, all that trouble for a bunch of beings who are hell bent on destroying themselves and the planet, not to mention possibly creating rogue particles that may destroy the universe (Read: Large Hadron Collider). Eeps. If there's advanced intelligent life forms out there, they better watch out 'coz us humans be coming!'
On a serious note though, we have entered a new year and I sense something. A change that is to come, an awakening of some sort, like on a spiritual level. Bear with me folks, I have a couple of years to go before I'm admitted to a loony bin. Haven't yet hit the peak of my insanity. There's a book I read a few years ago, probably the best book I've ever read and quite possibly changed the way I viewed the world from that point on. It's called "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters" by Gary Zukav and it talks about a fusion between spirituality and physics. There are several different pronunciations of Wu Li in Chinese, each with a different symbol and meaning, but spelled and pronounced the same in English. Some of these meaning are : Physics(hence the name of the book), Patterns of Organic Energy, My Way, Nonsense, I Clutch My Ideas, Enlightenment. The book talks about what sages and mystics of old have been saying for thousands of years and what our physics has only just discovered in the past few decades. That there is a connection between everything contained in the universe, a connection so subtle that we cannot 'feel' it with our limited senses. When Einstein came up with E=mc2 (where 'E' is 'energy', 'm' is 'mass' and 'c' is the cosmological constant or 'the speed of light')it was a profound statement that changed the way the universe was thought of. What it basically connotes is that energy and mass are the same thing, not just interchangeable forms of the same thing but THE SAME THING. We are all, at our very core, patterns of energy.
The book, in the chapter named 'Enlightenment', talks about a theorem that is so on the fringe of theoretical physics that most physicists are unaware of it. It is the most famous legacy of the late physicist John S. Bell and is named 'Bell's theorem' after him. The discovery is known as the most profound in all of science and completely perturbed Einstein, who unwittingly helped further the theory in his quest to debunk it. Bell's theorem today is largely ignored because of it's implications to science. If we were to believe in Bell, the universe as we know it is vastly different from the universe as it IS.
Here's an excerpt from the book. It's a heck of a lot of reading, but I'm in the mood to inflict pain, so here goes -
"Bell's theorem showed that either the statistical predictions
of quantum theory or the principle of local causes is false. It
did not say which one is false, but only that both of them
cannot be true. When Clauser and Freedman confirmed that
the statistical predictions of quantum theory are correct, the
startling conclusion was inescapable: The principle of local
causes must be false! However, if the principle of local causes
fails and, hence, the world is not the way it appears to be,
then what is the true nature of our world?
There are several mutually exclusive possibilities. The first
possibility, which we have just discussed, is that, appearances
to the contrary, there really may be no such thing as "separate
parts" in our world (in the dialect of physics, "locality fails").
In that case, the idea that events are autonomous happenings
is an illusion. This would be the case for any "separate parts"
that have interacted with each other at any time in the past.
When "separate parts" interact with each other, they (their
wave functions) become correlated (through the exchange of
conventional signals) (forces). Unless this correlation is disrupted
by other external forces, the wave functions representing these
"separate parts" remain correlated forever, For such correlated
"separate parts," what an experimenter does in this area
has an intrinsic effect upon the results of an experiment in a
distant, space-like separated area. This possibility entails a
faster-than-light communication of a type different than conventional
physics can explain.
In this picture, what happens here is intimately and immediately
connected to what happens elsewhere in the universe,
which, in turn, is intimately and immediately connected to what happens elsewhere in the universe, and so on, simply
because the "separate parts" of the universe are not separate
parts."
PHEW! (What the fuck is Yashvir high on, and where can I get some eh?)
What Bell's theorem intrinsically 'proved' was that the most fundamental particles in the universe communicate with each other INSTANTANEOUSLY, across thousands of light YEARS, probably even from one end of the universe to the other! Faster than light communication. There's only two things that come out of this. That either there is NO free will, and that everything is superdetermined, or that it leads to the many worlds theory, where the world is constantly splitting into separate and mutually inaccessible branches, each of which contains different editions of the same actors, performing different acts at the same time on different stages, which somehow are located in the same place.
There may be still ways to understand the failure of the principle of local causes, but the very fact that it must fail means that the world is in some way profoundly different from our ordinary ideas about it. (Perhaps we really are living in a dark cave).
So coming back to what I was saying earlier about there being some sort of change and spiritual awakening (I don't sound all that whacked anymore, do I?) and about feeling these things, there is something in store for us. I don't know what it is, but this is the best time to be alive, when future generations will look back and imagine what it must have been to live in this day and age of such great changes, where mankind would make the decisions to tackle the challenges imposed upon it and work in unison to create a better planet.
