Qigong Anyone?

Hi Physics Buddies,

I really enjoyed the brief standing meditation exercise Larry led us through last week and asked him if perhaps we could do that at the start of class (after the quiz) every week...he asked me to ask you all. I spoke to a couple of people in class today who thought it a mighty fine idea. Please let me know if you too would like this to become a regular part of the class. (Or, please let me know if this sounds like the most awful idea in the world!) I will pass feedback on to Larry, or you could just let him know directly.

Thanks everyone for helping to make physics fun!

Frances

Week Four: Energy, Matter and the Four Forces

How has e=mc2 affected you?

E=mc2 has greatly affected the larger culture, and in that way it has affected me as well. E=mc2 took scientific thinking from absolutes to relativity. Perhaps this sort of thinking is what led to the 60s, and LSD experimentation, and cubist art...and the civil rights movement and the women's movement...who can be certain? All of those openings in the collective conciousness have impacted me positively. E=mc2 also led to nuclear energy and the atomic bomb. Chernobyl and Hiroshima. Lots of death and destruction. I was sixteen when the Chernobyl disaster happened. I recall those images of devistation and suffering well. These images led me into a more activist mindset, a realization that big plans by governments and scientists can lead to a great deal of suffering for others. I would really like to say that overwhelmingly I feel that Einstein's work has affected me in a positive way, but frankly I think the world might be a better place without it. Maybe I romanticize the caveman days but I don't think technological "advances" or an understanding of space through physics has led us to a better place than would otherwise be with us still crawling around in the trees like squirrels. We are ending up with the same realizations through physics that mystics told us thousands of years ago -- the world is connected, we are connected to everything in it, etc. Too bad we have had to go through all of this investigation and suffering in order to bring us back home, but I guess that's what growing up is all about. The only place to go now is to keep moving forward to try to find the god particle, which I imagine will either destroy us completely or liberate us...perhaps it's one and the same.

How would you compare the four forces?

Strong nuclear force
Weak nuclear force
Electromagnetic force
Gravity

Gravity and electromagnetism are apparent in the "everyday" world and have an infinite reach. The strong and weak nuclear forces are found only in the nucleus of an atom. Except for the weak nuclear force, the forces hold the universe together from the smallest bit to the largest bit like a chain. The strong force holds the nucleus of an atom together, electromagnetism holds the atom together, and gravity holds the planets, stars and galaxies together. The weak force causes particles to decay. Apparently physicists can't seem to put their finger on gravity, which is kind of funny to me since gravity can really put the finger on us (falling apples and pianos...our bodies are stuck here on this planet and yet where is the graviton?)...We don't know how gravity is transmitted, yet we know how the other forces are transmitted (photons, gluons, W and Z particles. Physicists believe that if they can tie all these forces together and prove they are the product of some larger force, they will then have found god, or in scientific terms, the one unified force that blew everything apart in the big bang. I have an inkling the answer might be found in superstring theory.

In superstring theory there are "extra" dimensions of spacetime. I think these extra dimensions do still exist at the subatomic level and that when the big bang happened the other dimensions inverted and became really, really tiny (subatomic particles).


What is the function of gravity?



One day I watched a dish drying in the dish rack knock over another dish and I got the apparently silly idea that we could use gravity as energy--it's always present and always pulling things down. When I looked into it, however, it turned out scientists have often made a big joke of this idea...it still seems kind of possible to me if you can build a perpetual motion machine operating by the force of gravity. Anyway, I think gravity is more complicated than its common reputation. The function appears to be to hold things in place without having them smash into each other or fly away from each other. It allows us to have relationships with people, places, and things. It holds us to the ground, but also has an infinite reach gently keeping everything connected in the universe. It can also be a dangerous thing...falling pianos, etc.

(Personally, I think that gravity is a byproduct of an object and does not exist separately from objects.)

Week Three: Synchronicity

What evidence can you find for synchronicity?

It is commonplace to call someone and for them to say "I was just thinking about you!" Or to wake up and get dressed and find you have on the exact same colors as your partner -- which one of you is going to have to go change? Or to be flat broke and suddenly an unexpected check shows up in the mail (this has happened to me on a number of occasions!). If you begin to pay attention, sychronicities pop up all over the place.

My previous blog entry goes into significant detail about synchronicities I have experienced in my own life. Most recently last Tuesday I had this experience rather profoundly. Around noon I was experiencing a deeply unsettled feeling like something bad had happened, or was going to happen. This feeling wasn't connected to anything in the present that I could put my finger on and it went beyond the feeling one gets from having too much caffeine. It was so troubling that I called my husband to ask him if everything was okay, and to ask if everything was okay with his family, etc. Everything was fine. Two hours later as I sat in a meeting at work on the UC Berkeley campus seven shots rang out in the air in front of our building and a man lay dying in the parking lot. When I got home that evening and told my husband what had happened he asked, "Did that happen before or after you called me?" It had happened after. And suddenly my uneasy feeling made a lot of sense to both of us -- so much so that we did not question the cause of my feeling. It was clearly a premonition.

Here is a story about synchronicity, similar to the one Carl Jung describes when working with his patient who had the golden scarab dream. It comes from the webiste of Dr. Leslie Gray, a Native American psychologist (www.woodfish.org):

The Reality of Power Animals
For a shaman, the guardian spirit or power animal a person meets on a shamanic journey is just as real in non-ordinary reality as a rock or a bear or a human being is in ordinary reality. These entities are not mere figments of the imagination, projections of the unconscious, or useful symbols for personality integration, as psychotherapy might describe them.

The way Gray treated a client who came to her with a nightmare illustrates the difference between shamanism and psychotherapy. The client, who had been working with Gray for a couple of months, was under considerable stress. She had recently divorced and moved to the area, had not yet found work and was living with a new lover. The night after a session in which Gray had restored her guardian spirit, the woman dreamed that a red spider attached itself to her vagina. At her next session with Gray, she asked what this meant. Rather than launch into dream interpretation as a psychotherapist might have done, Gray explained to her that analysis is only one way of working with dreams. The shamanic way would be to remove the spider rather than interpret its meaning.The client agreed to let Gray conduct a classic shamanic ceremony for removing harmful power intrusions.

As Gray prepared to enter non-ordinary reality, a spider crawled across the pillow on which she was sitting. She picked it up, held it in her open palm and showed it to the client. The client turned pale and shrieked. The spider in Gray's palm was the same red color and had the same markings as the one in her nightmare. Gray took the ordinary spider outside, released it, and returned to the task of removing the non-ordinary spider.

After the session, the woman improved dramatically. She began to interview for jobs and actively pursue new friendships. She also reported feeling more energy. She no longer described herself as depressed. Gray does not claim to know what the nightmare meant or why removing both the ordinary and the non-ordinary spider appeared to have such a beneficial effect. Analyzing the problem and its resolution is not of great importance to her. What she does know is that the techniques worked, and that's enough for her.

In the red spider case, Gray directly intervened to empower a person she considered dispirited. Such intervention is not always necessary. Often people can heal themselves using shamanic techniques even if they have no previous experience with shamanism.


Based on what you know, how would you explain connectivity?

I feel that connectivity and sychronicity are caused by consciousness. Many seemingly inexplicable things might be explained if we would be willing to attribute more power to the invisible transmission of consciousness. But science has for many hundreds of years seemed to want to bring everything down to a mundane level in order to extricate the ideas of "religion" and "superstition" from the "real world." "Seeing is believing." It is perhaps naively hopeful to think that nothing exists outside of what we can perceive with our limited human senses. And, I would propose, not as much fun!

In medicine there are concepts such as the placebo effect and spontaneous remissions and studies pointing to the power of prayer in healing. In physics we have evidence of quantum entanglement and the power of the observer to impact that which is observed. In daily life we have all had experiences like "deja vu," "intuition," and some degree of "ESP." In biology we have unexplained "mutations" occurring in the genetic code and holes in the evolutionary record, leaps in form from one state of being to another. How can one really explain butterflies whose coloring mimics poisonous butterflies as a defense mechanism, or who have evolved to look like they have owl eyes on their wings? Simply evolution? I kind of don't think so...



Consciousness. Consciousness as an energy that exists outside the boundaries of space and time. In my early twenties some friends and I were fooling around with a modern version of the Ouija board. I had become a complete disbeliever in everything invisible before then. The messages that came through that board in those magical months were astounding and profound. One of unforgettable messages was: "What you believe you will find." These experiences we had with the Ouija board showed evidence, in my mind, to a connectivity with conscious energy. And the message of this energy communicating through the board said to us, basically, the power of the mind is profound.

David Bohm said "Reality" means "everything you can think about" as reality is derived from the roots "thing" and "think." I ask if another interpretation of this might be that reality is every thing you can think into existence.

Furthermore, consciousness is not something that belongs only to us big-brained humans. Before modern science most cultures the world over had a belief in animism -- extending consciousness to everything. Now in modern physics, matter that is supposed to be "dead" and predictable shows signs of being impacted by observation and behaves in a most uncertain fashion. If we all come from the same stardust, are made up of essentially the same matter, wouldn't it follow that not just human beings have consciousness? That we are intimately connected with everything in the universe?

So, based on what I know, I explain connectivity as a universal consciousness that pulses through every little bit of the universe.

Week Two: Quantum Mechanics & Thoughts on Synchronicity

guess who's going to have trouble with the 500 word limit on the mid-term paper? um...sorry this is so long. I will shoot for more brevity next time around.


Uncertainty

Physics is like real life. It’s funny that we’re all so stunned that there is something in science that is uncertain. Scientists are used to setting up controlled experiments with a clear outcome. We've all come to expect this. But if we step out of the science experiment, into our messy lives--psychology, emotion, spirit, human relationships, relationships with other living beings--all of it is uncertain. We are all so entangled, and there are so many factors, billions of perspectives to the same event, an infinite number of outcomes...there is always a large degree of uncertainty. If you get into your car to drive to the store to buy a loaf of bread any number of things might happen. You might never come home. You might meet an old friend. You might find a stray puppy. The store might be out of bread...though when we got into our car, the purpose was certain, and the outcome was certain: drive to store, get a loaf of bread. Sometimes we like to live our lives like a science experiment.
We can strongly predict the behavior of that which is not "alive." When that which is not alive behaves unpredictably, we are confused.

In regard to this quantum question, the Uncertainty Principle, it tells us that we can measure only one quantity of a subatomic particle at a time because the behavior of a single particle is so unpredictable. This would suggest to me that perhaps subatomic particles possess consciousness...perhaps they are "alive," operating from some internal will and not following some law of physics as the "dead" matter at the atomic level does.

If the observation of the particle influences the particle’s behavior, and if light is behaving as both particle and wave, depending on what we do with it and what we try to observe, perhaps there is some sort of communication going on here, and transfer of mental energy from one seed of consciousness to another?

The only thing left to do really is scratch our heads and smile in wonder. And perhaps play with these little subatomic particles that like to surprise and elude us like tricksters.


Causality

It seems almost silly, living in the real world, to even begin to think that each effect has just one cause and each “cause” has just one effect. The only place where this very clear cut sequence of actions happens is in a controlled environment. Still even in those controlled environments, there is always a “margin of error”; something that scientists tend to ignore, accept, keep quiet about. What is happening in that margin of error? That question intrigues me...

I love the concept of the Butterfly Effect, made popular by the epynonymous movie of 2004. Some little event can have, and I would bet always does have, multiple effects, rippling outwards, impacting so much more than one might ever suspect. An example:

My friend Lyle had his bike stolen. The direct impact/effect of this is that he now rides a different bike. Cause, effect. But the situation is so much more complicated than this. The impact of his stolen bike ripples out: His friend Anthony had a junky old bike he would give to Lyle. Anthony had to wait for me to drive Lyle over to his house to pick up the new bike. While Lyle was getting the bike Anthony gave him a photocopied book--200 loose pages-- which Lyle set on a parked car as we maneuvered the bike into the back of my truck. The wind kicked up. Two hundred loose pages went fluttering down the middle of the street. The neighbors saw. We dropped the bike and chased the papers down the street. It was exhilarating and a beautiful sight to see. I was laughing and laughing. We recovered all but ten of those pages. Lyle needed that book for school. He did not read those ten missing pages. Perhaps those ten pages would have been life changing for him. Perhaps he failed his test because those were the most important ten pages. Was the cause of him failing his test because he got bike stolen? And what caused the bicycle thief to steal his bike? And on and on...We are all intricately connected in chaos...billions of fluttering pages bumping into each other causing this and that...And by the way, because his bike got stolen now Lyle knows how to fix up an old bike...

Is the Universe weird?

Yes, I think so. I think it is so much stranger than we allow ourselves to admit on a daily basis. I’m not sure we could survive if we paid attention to all the oddities of the Universe. What would happen if the whole world tripped on acid at once? Do we need some collective story about how things work in a predictable fashion in order to survive? It seems so. Most tribal societies had one designated shaman...the one who was allowed to pay attention to the weirdness. Who will find the food, cook the dinner, and build the house if we are all tripping on acid and paying attention to the weirdness?

Thoughts on Synchronicity...

Since I left Washington state five years ago the guiding forces that exist in the world have pushed me to engage more with planet earth, and less with the mystical, meta-cerebral realm in which I have lived most of my life. These days, I often feel like an alien, having come into "civilization" just recently and having missed many of the real world experiences that most other people seem to have had. It's "Welcome to Earth 101." The world used to feel so easy--just the right person, thing, or idea, would pop into my life as if on cue. My dreams were sacred messages from a higher, more enlightened world. "Synchronicity" was a common experience for me. I was being given a great deal of help from some place else, and welcomed it readily, relied upon it heavily.

I moved to California based on a synchronicity. Growing weary of teaching second grade for many years, I put forth the wish to work with wild animals. Within about three weeks I had landed a job in California working directly with gorillas. Shortly after arriving in California I began seeing a shaman (actually a sha-woman) on a regular basis. I was attempting to break through some blockages I felt in my heart of hearts and she showed up to help. During the first visit she looked at me, listened to me, and then pronouced, "We look at three things: your mind, your body, and your heart. Your mind is in good working order, your body is healthy...it is your heart we need to focus on." I left her apartment that day, crossed the street, and noticed a scrap of paper blowing along the sidewalk. I bent down to pick it up. It was folded in half. I opened it. The only thing on this paper were two hand-drawn hearts, mirroring each other. Later the sha-woman explained to me that I was on a vision quest. Many more unbelievable synchronicities occurred during the months that I visited her. Ideas in my head, or stories I was reading would manifest exactly, almost immediately, in the physical world.

Just before this time, I began to get this clear message that my direct connection with the "other" world was about to end. I was being asked to stand on my own two feet, to learn to trust MYSELF, to connect with the earth, the here and now. It was as if someone had been holding me my whole life, and now was pushing me off, up, to stand by myself, like learning to walk. I saw the sha-woman for several months, but still felt as if my life were not manifesting in ways that is "should" be, or could be. There was still the blockage.

It has been four or five years since I was pushed from the arms of what feels to me like the great spirit. I have been walking "on my own" during this time. It has been the most difficult period of my life. I am learning and growing tremendously, but it hasn't been easy. I have learned to use a screw gun, to grow my own food, to fix broken things, to notice how things are built...and I am aware of my own energy more and more and the intricacies of relationships (and the difficulties) are more apparent to me...I have learned to notice when I feel grounded and when I feel ungrounded. Synchronicities seem few and far between these days...they are like some distant memory. So much so, that I had almost forgotten the unbelieveable synchronicities of my time seeing the sha-woman until I read these links assigned to us for class. Maybe it is a coincidence, or maybe a synchronicity...maybe it is time to merge the two worlds. I hope I'm ready.

Week One: The Meaning of Time

A. Answers to this week's quiz:

1. What attracts me to Chinese Medicine...

The basic premise that humans are part of the natural world--a premise I think is integral to Chinese Medicine--sits right with my inner compass. Curved lines, the cycles of the earth, wild wisdom, the pull of the full moon, the open sky, running in the wind, floating in the ocean, building a campfire, digging in the dirt, meeting eyes with a squirrel, a hummingbird, a harbor seal, a grizzly bear...well... I feel at peace with these experiences (the grizzly bear was behind a large fence!) more so than with cold tile floors, windows that won't open, sirens and alarms, perfect angles, wall to wall carpeting, and the belief in scientific absolutes. What does it mean to be well? What does it mean to be sick? I see a lot of people out there sleeping on the streets driven mad by our human-made structures and "order", and not getting well after ten minutes in a doctor's office and a lifetime of drugs...I see a lot of people dressed tightly in costume following the leader and dying of heart attacks, with a belief that they must squeeze themselves in to this mechanical order of contemporary "civilization"...There is hope with Chinese Medicine. And the practice has been around for thousands of years. I'm betting something wise has been learned in that time.

My attraction to the healing arts stems from an in-born passion to know the human body and mind. I want to transform my knack for identifying the location of someone else's pain into helping to heal that pain. In most cases the removal of their suffering will lead to a reduction in suffering for us all.

2. What do I honestly think of Physics, really?

Physics is one way of looking at the world. It is no more--or less--relevant than poetry. It's a lens, a path of investigation, and one that, like poetry, has yielded some fine stories. However, the rules that physicists have birthed can be used for large scale destruction. Come to think of it, though, poetry may have led to some bloody revolutions...so yes, physics is like poetry. Of all the sciences it seems to be the most poetic, the most willing to investigate the invisible, the most mystical. If I had to choose one branch of science to be my religion, it would be physics. Where the questions are bigger than the answers. I like that.

3. Now that I think about it, have I ever experienced time slowing down?

About six years ago, laying in a strange bed hundreds of miles from home, time stopped for me. It was like walking into the point between being asleep and being awake, though I was fully awake. It felt like "time" had become a sphere, as though I had entered into wormhole, and there around me was always. The past, present, future didn't exist, only there with me then was eternity. Now was forever. There was no yesterday, no tomorrow. Something with the air was different; it felt as if my lungs had never breathed before that moment. Everything hovered and buzzed in peace.

B. My reflections on this week's class: The Meaning of Time

This was a "timely" class for me. I've been thinking about clocks recently--wanting to get rid of them. Without clocks--and without being so caught up in time--the world would, I presume, become much more vibrant, animated, and real. Just like it does when I go on an Internet diet. You're forced to get your head out of the flattened two-dimensional world and then the eyes pop open, allowing greater richness, clarity, and dimension. Without time, the world becomes embodied. There is space.

Our westernized conception of time is kind of a bummer for me. I am often "late"; wanting to finish what I'm doing and resenting some pre-arranged agreement to be ready for something at a certain time. How the heck am I to know what's going to happen between now and then? How do I know how I'm going to feel when the time comes?

I think it's trippy, to use a very scientific word, that physicists are investigating things like what happened in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang occured. I like considering ideas like black holes and white holes because I think they are metaphors for the rest of life. As I said above, maybe not so plainly, I think the discoveries we find in physics is just God talking to us in another language that some people are inclined to speak. Similar lessons could be learned from the mundane experience of buying ice cream.

I would like to more deeply understand many of the concepts that were brought up in class so that my thinking about them is not so immature.

C. Impressions on the links about Quantum Mechanics:

I felt a little crazy after pursuing those links on Quantum Mechanics. I kept wanting to understand the content better which led me deeper and deeper into thought chaos. Coming out of it, with my mind swirling, I realized a few things:

Time = Change

The only constant is change--if you are looking for a constant to find comfort in, go for that one because it is the only constant there is.

Physics seems to be all about motion. I read on one of those web sites, "Nothing can ever be at rest." Whoa. Doesn't the universe ever get tired?

I shouldn't get my mind all wrapped up in physics theories and go out and try to use a screwgun. I got really mixed up by the real world all of a sudden. I think I need to integrate the theory and doing parts of my brain better...it made for a difficult morning trying to build some simple flower beds. I just kept thinking "What is light?" and "Time doesn't exist!" and "A time machine will never work because everything is happening all at once. Running time backwards assumes time is linear and that the changes never happened!" and finally, " "How many physicists have gone mad!?" Meanwhile, I had to fix a lot of crookedly screwed together pieces of wood...

This is an interesting link I found on scientific inventiveness and sanity... http://www.uh.edu/engines/ut-1.htm