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November 30, 2011 Leave a comment
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Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time
December 25, 2010 Leave a comment
Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time
Robert Lanza, M.D.
When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor’s house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O’Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back to visit.
We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we’re usually referring to change. But change isn’t the same thing as time.
To measure anything’s position precisely is to “lock in” on one static frame of its motion, as in a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe movement, you can’t isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Consider a film of a flying arrow that stops on a single frame. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy: it’s 20 feet above the grandstand. But you’ve lost all information about its momentum. It’s going nowhere; its path is uncertain.
Beginnings And Endings
December 9, 2009 1 Comment
Beginnings And Endings
Cycle Of Life
As we walk through the world, the people we encounter appear so different from one another. We see babies, old men, pregnant women, and teenaged boys. We know couples on the verge of marriage and lonely widows. We interact with toddlers and the terminally ill. As different as each person seems, they are all living the human experience. They are just at different places in the cycle that begins with birth and ends with death. Every phase of the cycle of life has its gifts and its challenges. Each stage is temporary and ultimately gives way to a new phase. This ephemeral quality makes each phase precious, because it will never last. One of the wonderful qualities possessed by babies and young children is that they are unaware that a cycle of life even exists. They simply are present to wherever they happen to be right now, and they don’t give much thought to the past or future. Being around them reminds us of the joy that comes from living fully in the moment. On the opposite end of life’s cycle are our elderly role models. They are a reminder that each phase of life should be treasured. Time does pass, and we all change and grow older. Being aware of the cycle of life and our place in it makes us wiser. As we develop a true appreciation for the phase we are in, we can savor it more. A new mother going through a difficult time with her infant can more easily embrace her challenges because she knows that her child will grow up, and she will long for this time again. Difficult and challenging periods are inevitable, but – like everything that is a part of the cycle of life – they are temporary. When we are fully engaged with life, we get to savor and grow from each phase, and we are ready for the next one when it arrives. Fully embracing wherever you are in the cycle of life is the very essence to happiness.
Spacetime Tsunami
December 9, 2009 Leave a comment
Spacetime Tsunami
Terence McKenna Interview by Carla Sinclair
bOING bOING #10
bb: I just read Archaic Revival which was interesting. What do you mean when you say we are going to be unrecognizable to ourselves by 2012?
TM: Since I don’t work for any academic institution or feed at any government or corporate trough, I’m free to think anything I want about reality. And I think the phenomenon which most people can agree is happening is that time appears to be speeding up in human history, for example, or in the twentieth century, or in the last 25 months. So rather than see this as just something trivial or an artifact of the act of perceiving it, I would like to think that it’s real, that time is in fact speeding up. When you look back at the history of the universe, you see that this has been going on for a long long time. Things have been happening faster and faster and faster.
bb: Do you mean speeding up physically?
TM: Yeah. So that for instance, immediately after the birth of the universe, there was a long period of time where the only thing that was happening was that it was cooling. The amount of energy was so high that you couldn’t get molecules, you couldn’t get stable structures, you couldn’t even get atomic systems. The universe was very simple and very hot. As it cooled, it became more complex. Each drop in temperature allowed new things to happen which built on previous new things which had happened. So, for example, first you get electrons settling into orbits around nuclei, then you get atomic chemistry for the first time. The universe cools, and time passes, and you get molecular chemistry – bonds of lower strength that can form only at the lower temperatures coming into existence. That allows complex polymers to form.
The Illusion of Time
December 9, 2009 1 Comment
The Illusion of Time
Rodger Stevens
Picture yourself standing on the curb, watching the traffic go by. The traffic which is presently before you is called the present . . . you can smell it, touch it, see it, hear it, and so on. You can see about a block in each direction, up and down the street. This narrow slice is called the present. The past is the traffic which has already disappeared down the street , and the traffic which has yet to appear up the street we’ll call the future (to avoid needless confusion, we’ll call it a one-way street, even though what we call time might run in both directions, and even at right angles). Compared to the past traffic (which has been going past for millennia) and the future traffic (likewise), our block-wide present doesn’t look like much. Suppose further that as you are standing there, you hear a voice which says, “In about three minutes a green truck will come by.” You look up the street, you don’t see anything, but sure enough, in three or four minutes a green truck comes by. Amazing! You hear the voice again, and again you hear a prediction. You might freak out (if you are a fundamentalist), you might think it is magic, you might even set yourself up as a trance medium if you can get the voice to cooperate. In fact, though, it is only someone leaning out of a fourth story window over your head. From his position up there, your cosmic traffic announcer is looking at a present which is much wider than yours . . . from his higher perspective, his present includes part of what you call the past and the future; he is reading your future from his present.
The higher up the building you go, the more the past and future resolve themselves into the present. Going higher up in the building is raising your consciousness, which is the true meaning and intent of getting high. From the top of the building, you have raised your consciousness to the point where the so-called future and the so-called past have ceased to exist, and there is only the present. There never was anything but the infinite present, but from your incredibly limited perspective down on the street corner, you couldn’t see much of it, so there appeared to be a past and a future.
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