Prospero's Books

Pushing the limits of human vision and imagination

Seed magazine has posted a fascinating and beautiful video about science as done on computers. Lee Billings's introduction:

Computer simulations and visualizations are performing the thought experiments of the 21st century and pushing the limits of human vision and imagination.

A complete and perfect whole

Albert Pike, one of the most colorful and controversial figures in American history, may be best known for his 1871 tome Morals and Dogma, written for the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite, an "appendant body" to U.S. Freemasonry. The book, of more than a thousand pages, seems to be the work most often quoted, usually out of context, by American anti-Masonic writers.

I'm admittedly quoting out of context as well, but I do want to forward a passage, cited by Greg at Masonic Traveler, in which Pike takes a strikingly modern systems view of the universe:

The Universe should be deemed an immense Being, always living, always moved and always moving in an eternal activity inherent in itself, and which, subordinate to no foreign cause, is communicated to all its parts, connects them together, and makes of the world of things a complete and perfect whole (665).

When silence is the best response

The best writing I've seen about the shootings this week at Virginia Tech comes from the Los Angeles Times:

In the Biblical Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.

If only it were true that Monday's mass murder on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was the kind of tragedy that moves us to quiet reflection. In fact, the shootings that killed more than 30 people and wounded nearly 30 others occasioned a blizzard of hasty conclusions, instant position-taking and the rehashing of old arguments. For the sake of the dead, for the sake of the living, and even for the sake of honoring this grim milestone — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — we should remember that there are times when silence is the best response. . . .

"I have heard many such things," Job says. "Miserable comforters are ye all." No newspaper is in a position to criticize anybody for capitalizing on tragedy or taking convenient positions. There will be time for both in the days to come. But now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event.

(Thanks to Jim Wallis at God's Politics for the link.)

The utterly miraculous lamb

At Science Musings, the amazing Chet Raymo has posted an Easter reflection in which he denies the existence of miracles, at least in one sense of the word:

Miracles don't happen.  Behind every event there are patterns of regularity that are at least potentially knowable.

Except, of course, for the prime event, the very existence of existence, the fact that there's something rather than nothing. The solution to that great mystery seems not even "potentially knowable" in a scientific sense. Even by Raymo's definition, that's a miracle.

But Raymo, too, reaches that point in his own way, in an incredibly beautiful paragraph:

On this holy Easter morning let us praise the yellow star that sustains us, now having eased its way back into a more bestowing verticality. Let us praise the extraordinary ordinary egg. Let us praise the utterly miraculous gamboling lamb. The crocus and the daffodil, arrayed more splendidly than Solomon in all his glory. The child's bright eyes when she spies the basket of candy. Let us praise an ordinary world that is more generous than capricious, that speaks to us of the sacred in every pebble and drop of rain.

Comprehension of the universe

A reader of this blog, Vox Anon of The Unicorn Man, has sent a note:

Comprehension of the universe seems more possible using your site as a point of departure.

Many thanks, Vox. You've understood the purpose of Prospero's Books better than I have. I'm grateful for your words.

A stubbornly persistent illusion

The Spring 2007 issue of The American Scholar, published by Phi Beta Kappa, carries a pair of two fascinating articles on "new definitions of reality." The first, by biologist Robert Lanza, treats the ways that the universe, as we know it, is created as we know it. Here's a sample passage, about our creation of what we call time:

Imagine . . . that reality is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn't alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music before and after the song you are hearing is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, that every moment and day endures in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. If we could access all life--the whole record--we could experience it non-sequentially. . . . In the end, even Einstein admitted, "Now [Besso--one of his oldest friends] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" (24).