http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
This lecture is for the masses and doesn't really have anything new to reveal if one has been following the frontiers of science via popularizations such as this, but it's a very nice presentation of the key concepts to those who have had little or no exposure to them. For me it was merely fun -- fun to see some of my favorite concepts of astro-physics juggled with wit. That said, it continues to amaze me that physicists can have such precise eyesight -- seeing even that which cannot be seen, seeing TRILLIONS of years into the future and billions of years into the past -- and yet deny God exists. Nay, not deny, but actively haughtily resent the concept, "God," such that they will not deign to have a decent conversation about the concept, and in fact, we see in this lecture that religion is ridiculed relentlessly. The US Patent Office will not review any application that says it shows how to make a perpetual motion machine, because the Patent Office is so certain that the second law of thermodynamics is inviolate, and just so, will most physicists reject a conversation about spirituality, that is: out-of-hand. It is this certainty that besmirches science today; it is this certainty that allows this lecturer to be so smug that he is in fact laughing at religion just as religion once laughed at Galileo. The priests back then nudged each other's ribs with elbows and chuckled about the conclusions of science, and then, filled with such mirth, burned Giordano Bruno to death in the public square. Today, the neo-priests spend billions and billions on instrumentation such as the Large Hadron Collider in order to see if the Higgs Boson, the so-called God-particle, can have its snapshot taken. But, to improve the one instrument that could possibly be refined to the extent that "any thing" could be perceived they'll not only not spend a dime, but they'll excoriate anyone who suggests that they do such. I'm talking about the human nervous system -- the instrument -- and that its perceptual instrumentation can be improved. When they first put the Hubble telescope in orbit they found that the lens was warped and all their pictures were fuzzy. They had to fly out there and add machinery to de-warp the the conclusions of the lens, and wow, they pulled it off and now the Hubble gives nice pix. But will they spend any money on seeing if the human nervous system can be measured to "improve" its fuzzy perceptions? Nope. For the last 10,000 years we have recorded the summations of the best mental leaders of civilization. Think about that. For every 1,000 people, we can expect a genius to be born -- not just a smarty pants, but your genuine freaking brainiac. A genius of such cognitive acuity that even 10,000 years ago with almost nothing but the stars, the moon, and the embers of a camp fire to study would have come up with observations that are valid today. These geniuses from the depths of time, having, well, a lot of time on their hands, dwelt on inner realities as much as geniuses today are dwelling upon outer realities. Their conclusions are recorded in the scientific journals of their times -- that is: scriptures. These scientists seemed to agree on a host of spiritual truths. The yogi in India, the Zen master in Japan, the Christian mystics, the cabalistic Jews, the Muslim mystics, -- even America's founding fathers who were Masons were mystics -- and all of them wrote up their findings such that today we can see amazing agreement despite the vicissitudes of time and the evolution of local cultural mindsets. Yet, despite the deepest of genuflections being seen in, say, this lecture, when one scientist bows to the researched conclusions of another scientist with the same religious intonations of awe that we'd expect to see if, say, a priest was quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas or a Imam was quoting Rumi, no one blinks at the congruency of the two schools of thought. Let's take a big number that's small these days: one billion dollars. If science spent this ridiculously small sum on developing a clarity about the subtleties of consciousness, what might emerge from such "well funded" research? I would expect that science would begin to see that, yeah, maybe just maybe, consciousness can be refined such that a yogi or nun or a caveman living on locusts and honey could directly perceive consciousness having the same core qualities that this lecture spotlights about empty space -- that is: objects of consciousness are something from nothing just as ALL THIS came from a Big Bang out of a singularity. Every major religion's scriptures agree that God is omnipresent yet unobservable -- that's what this lecture says about nothing -- "empty space" is the only (no) thing that can be everywhere without interfering with "things" and yet be the source of all (manifest) things. Heisenberg proved that instrumentation has a limitation on refinement -- there are aspects of reality that cannot be fully observed without the observational instrumentation altering the observed. Mystics say, "Yep, you cannot grab God by intellectual tongs just as the eye cannot see itself, but there is a loop-hole: one can BE God and arrive at a certainty about that status that is self evident and self validating even if the intellect cannot arrive at certainty." There's the research that needs to be funded on the cheap -- relatively. When I was growing up, it was a common phrase to hear: "That guy should have his head examined." Well, isn't it about time that we grabbed some yogi - just for funzies -- and examined him? Answer: nah -- what could we learn from a guy wearing a diaper in a cave in India? Shame on science for such small mindedness that it's looking for its car keys -- not where they probably are -- but in the circle of light under a nearby streetlamp, because the light is better there. Edg
