October 12, 2006 - 01:00
For example: I’m still working my way (VERY slowly) through Brian Greene’s book on space, time, and the texture of reality, The Fabric of the Cosmos --and being blown away, bit by bit, before bedtime each night, or before arising in the morning, by Greene‘s description of a world (it happens to be our world) in which
The smallest, indivisible constituents of matter…are composed of a tiny filament of energy…
Extra dimensions might be so tightly crumpled that they’re too small for us or any of our existing equipment to see, or … large but invisible to the ways we probe the universe…the reality we have known is but a delicate chiffon draped over a thick and richly textured cosmic fabric…the entirety of human experience …left us completely unaware of a basic and essential aspect of the universe…even those features of the cosmos that we have thought to be readily accessible to human senses need not be.
quantum mechanics shatters our own personal individual conception of reality….our universe is not local …. intervening space…does not ensure that two objects are separate, since quantum mechanics allows an entanglement…to exist between them…
The need to abandon locality is the most astonishing lessons arising from [contemporary physics]. By virtue of their past, objects that at present are in vastly different regions of the universe can be part of a quantum mechanically entangled whole….
I’d say, nonetheless, that his careful adumbration of quantum entanglements works quite effectively as a metaphor for--a way of articulating--my understanding of the complex interconnections, here, between history and the present, between the richness of this country and the poverty of its people, between what happens in the U.S. and what happens in Central America, between my life and work and friendships in the Philadelphia area, and ditto, ditto, ditto here….
In such a universe, what can it possibly mean to “be more present”?
Comments
last post, maybe
Submitted by Shaye (not verified) on October 12, 2006 - 09:11 Permalink
trying to find your comments
Submitted by admin on October 14, 2006 - 21:33 Permalink