It is slow on these dog-days of summer, vacation time weaving its way into the slight yellowing of leaves, plans already being made for the return to college, and much needed yard work contemplated - the brush, the cutting of firewood - and canning. Another week until canning, the tomatoes and peppers coming in in too-rapid abundance, threatening to rot on the ground even as we eat more and more, peppers and tomatoes becoming not side-dishes but the main fare, digestive systems expressing alarm that even the dog notices, although she never disapproves.
Peppers; the ones in greatest number are the hot ones, Santa Fe orange and jalapenos and various kinds of chili, each to look so different when ripe that I forget and, with all that there is, sometimes pick the unripe, which I know are unripe by the seeds in the pods. Sometimes they are barely formed, little white mites in a sea of pulp, or sometimes there are no seeds at all, just the pulp, waiting, as it were, for the seeds to miraculously form from this nothing, this inedible and useless looking mass that is critical to the pepper plant's continued survival. As one such unformed one split open to the knife this morning, the question came: how the heck does the pepper know how to form the seeds from this nothing, seeds that contain all that is needed for another complete plant?
Botanists know; they have photographed the process and they can name every phase, and the micro biologists can position their electron microscopes and show the unwinding and realigning of DNA as it positions itself for its call to action, its one duty in existence: to continue life. But still, it is an order come from nowhere.
In Amanda Gefter's book, "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn," she talks to a well-known physicist about something forming from nothing, the very question that every school kid asks and what set her on her quest. Barring the grand stroke of the word "God," she wants to see the proof, the DNA of the development of an" it," of something from nothing, and the physicist has his answer: with a pause in the quantum (I forget the details and will not look them up now), an instability could arise that brings about something from nothing. But there is a problem: first, there must exist, somewhere out in nothing, the basic laws of physics that somehow exist outside of something. We are, then, back at the drawing board.
Physicist David Bohm had a grand idea, although he, too, cannot locate the beginning of that nothing that makes something. Instead, he draws a picture that is easy for us who had trouble passing first year calculus: he calls that place before something, if we can call it a place, the "implicate order." It is an endless, timeless sea of potentiality that constantly reaches beyond itself, like solar flares from the sun, to produce realities, whole universes of laws and even life, whose time is as limited to the Great Potential as a solar flare is to us. Up it rises from infinite energy, and then it is gone, another cosmos burst forth and swallowed in the great sea. This idea has even been used by Sci Fi writers to explain faster-than-light travel, for by accessing this great sea, the infinite energy needed for such speeds is readily tapped. Of course, the problem is in the doing.
But this has long been reached by the mystics, who call this implicate order the "God-head," the font of creation, an element (but only an element) of that which cannot be defined. In it are not only the laws of being, but of morality and of meaning, the physics of God that no physicist of today dares to tackle in its totality. It is the "plenum," the fullness, and no aspect of life however lived can escape it, no aspect of experience can be beyond its scope. It is the All and it has been granted, as a curse or a blessing, to humans throughout time because we want it; because we are made for it, whether we know it or not; we are made to seek the ultimate. It is in our pulp, in the potentiality of our being just as the pepper seed is in the potentiality of the pepper plant. We see the pepper - or death and birth - and wonder why. We see the laws of the universe and wonder, how? We can go round and round about it, slice it and dice it as our cultural climate sees fit, but in the end, it is the same: we want to know.
In the plenum of our being, we will know. The potentiality must be made actual. "Tiger gotta hunt, bird gotta fly, man has to sit and wonder, WHY WHY WHY." So Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but he was more cynical. He thought it was useless - "Tiger gotta sleep, bird gotta land, man got to tell himself he understand." Man, to him, had to make a religion, any religion, so that he could be at peace. But it doesn't stop there and never has. There are always a few who know, who really know, and try to tell us. And in our 'pulp' we listen and learn and someday, or sometime beyond time as we know it, we, too, will know. Bird gotta fly, yes, and man gotta - and will - know. FK
Peppers; the ones in greatest number are the hot ones, Santa Fe orange and jalapenos and various kinds of chili, each to look so different when ripe that I forget and, with all that there is, sometimes pick the unripe, which I know are unripe by the seeds in the pods. Sometimes they are barely formed, little white mites in a sea of pulp, or sometimes there are no seeds at all, just the pulp, waiting, as it were, for the seeds to miraculously form from this nothing, this inedible and useless looking mass that is critical to the pepper plant's continued survival. As one such unformed one split open to the knife this morning, the question came: how the heck does the pepper know how to form the seeds from this nothing, seeds that contain all that is needed for another complete plant?
Botanists know; they have photographed the process and they can name every phase, and the micro biologists can position their electron microscopes and show the unwinding and realigning of DNA as it positions itself for its call to action, its one duty in existence: to continue life. But still, it is an order come from nowhere.
In Amanda Gefter's book, "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn," she talks to a well-known physicist about something forming from nothing, the very question that every school kid asks and what set her on her quest. Barring the grand stroke of the word "God," she wants to see the proof, the DNA of the development of an" it," of something from nothing, and the physicist has his answer: with a pause in the quantum (I forget the details and will not look them up now), an instability could arise that brings about something from nothing. But there is a problem: first, there must exist, somewhere out in nothing, the basic laws of physics that somehow exist outside of something. We are, then, back at the drawing board.
Physicist David Bohm had a grand idea, although he, too, cannot locate the beginning of that nothing that makes something. Instead, he draws a picture that is easy for us who had trouble passing first year calculus: he calls that place before something, if we can call it a place, the "implicate order." It is an endless, timeless sea of potentiality that constantly reaches beyond itself, like solar flares from the sun, to produce realities, whole universes of laws and even life, whose time is as limited to the Great Potential as a solar flare is to us. Up it rises from infinite energy, and then it is gone, another cosmos burst forth and swallowed in the great sea. This idea has even been used by Sci Fi writers to explain faster-than-light travel, for by accessing this great sea, the infinite energy needed for such speeds is readily tapped. Of course, the problem is in the doing.
But this has long been reached by the mystics, who call this implicate order the "God-head," the font of creation, an element (but only an element) of that which cannot be defined. In it are not only the laws of being, but of morality and of meaning, the physics of God that no physicist of today dares to tackle in its totality. It is the "plenum," the fullness, and no aspect of life however lived can escape it, no aspect of experience can be beyond its scope. It is the All and it has been granted, as a curse or a blessing, to humans throughout time because we want it; because we are made for it, whether we know it or not; we are made to seek the ultimate. It is in our pulp, in the potentiality of our being just as the pepper seed is in the potentiality of the pepper plant. We see the pepper - or death and birth - and wonder why. We see the laws of the universe and wonder, how? We can go round and round about it, slice it and dice it as our cultural climate sees fit, but in the end, it is the same: we want to know.
In the plenum of our being, we will know. The potentiality must be made actual. "Tiger gotta hunt, bird gotta fly, man has to sit and wonder, WHY WHY WHY." So Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but he was more cynical. He thought it was useless - "Tiger gotta sleep, bird gotta land, man got to tell himself he understand." Man, to him, had to make a religion, any religion, so that he could be at peace. But it doesn't stop there and never has. There are always a few who know, who really know, and try to tell us. And in our 'pulp' we listen and learn and someday, or sometime beyond time as we know it, we, too, will know. Bird gotta fly, yes, and man gotta - and will - know. FK
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