To the many fans of the site/blog I offer an apology. To those of you who have been asking why there are no images accompanying the latest posts here is the answer, it’s easier than replying to you individually. The techno-gods wont let me upload images at the moment and I don’t know why. Images satisfy a different part of our brains to the bit that does words or the patterns that make up written words and then trigger the neural pathways in our assemblies associated with those words.

It’s like the many yous that occupy the package that is the one you. There’s you that interacts with colours and shapes and so on. There’s you that interacts with words and ideas, the cognitive you that understands, has perceptions and creates. They are all responsive to diffeent triggers so I always try to add an image to engage that part of you that digests the image rather than the written word.

Until the techno-gods relent, in the form of someone telling me what I’m doing wrong, the apology is all I can offer. It’s not done out of spite…. honest. 

Being in the zone or chasing the muse is the thing that any creative person seeks. There are different states in life, there is the ordinary state and there is the extraordinary state. Then there are the directions, upwards or downwards. A human being is like a spider at the centre of its own web and the conscious or self determining person can plot their own course through life. there will be challenges and hardships along the way, there will be victories and defeats, we will all have our days in the sun and our backs against the wall. The true definition of character is how we manage these various situations that we find ourselves in.

I attended a reunion at the weekend of people who I’d been to school with. Then decades have gone from singular to plural and some thirty years have passed since some of us last had any contact. Our days have unfolded into a series of events that we found ourselves to be players in. There can be no judgement, none of us is placed to make such calls but we all did different things with what we had available. The defining factor being that we all made our choices and pursued the paths that we felt most appropriate for us.

There is no difference ever for anyone, there will always be decisions to make, and experience has shown me that there is no such thing as the right or wrong one. There is only ever the decision you make and that will sanction an unfolding of sorts. Some of those unfoldings will push you further into places you never imagined, some of them will allow you to cruise. Some philosophies quote karmic influences, multiple lives and the completion of cycles. Some speak of the law of attraction and yet others speak of the supremacy of chance in human affairs.

I am reminded of the wise words attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Follow your muse, get in the zone however you can - there a myriad of methods and techniques you can employ but that is a subject for elsewhere. The main thing is to be creative and add to that which is fine and of quality that already exists within the world.

All that matters is development. Growth, advancement, evolution, making progress are the only real issues in life.

There are families, love, partners, children, all of the rest of us, but… without an ongoing refinement of the appreciation of these things they may as well not exist at all. Your personal growth needs a forum to play out in, it needs a stage to tread. We and all those who you have more personal relationships with are that forum. The world is that arena.

As we develop we become more useful to ourselves, to others and to the world. These are simple things, they are not especially profound but they are significant.

Happiness is defined in no small part by resilience and it is only when we embrace what is around us and engage fully with the world that we can develop resilience. It is the small things that count, our lives are a continuum of small things that coagulate to form the template of experience that we refer to as we progress. 

     Back to our original premise in this section, suppose that the physical body we are all occupants of was actually a holding structure for very high Universal force and this force was known colloquially as the human spirit – and it’s very important you see that it doesn’t matter at all what we know it as colloquially. What matters is that you are able to acknowledge the existence and presence within your life of an extremely high order of transcendent material. Don’t let’s get carried away here, this isn’t to say that we are right to be arrogant and conceited and all those other things that we can fall into so easily because we’re so special and of such a high Universal calibre.     

If truth be told you have just about nothing to do with it at this stage, it’s like your eyebrows or the shape of your nose or how tall you are, they are incidental matters in your life that you have no executive power over other than cosmetic appreciation. This is where another developmental dichotomy comes into the equation. I’ve allude to sleep, hypnotism, somnambulism, sleepwalking, arrested development and a whole other variety of ways of saying the same thing and that same thing is that the spirit inside of you, regardless of what it actually is, is in a passive state, it resides within in a state of dormancy or hibernation. The high point of your developmental thrust or activities is to release the spirit from its quiescent state and to bring about its activation. Don’t speculate on what that may mean, at the moment just know that it is the case and as I have mentioned already recently it is an idea that requires thorough extension and assimilation.     

Your purpose, in development terms, is to place yourself in the best possible position to be able to access whatever it is that you need to bring about the most favourable conditions for your own journey of progression. This is something that is a highly personal area of work and requires much preparation. This is the sole reason for the existence of all organizations - whether they be religious sects, occult and esoteric schools, secret societies, esoteric councils and symposiums, secret gatherings throughout the ages and most of them, by definition, will be unknown to all but the very select few - that aspire to facilitate human growth and development. The reason for their secrecy has been most often to protect the participants whose knowledge was usually contrary to the orthodox beliefs of the time that they lived in and left them open to persecution in one form or another. This encompasses a range of pogroms and persecutions from the more well known things such as the Entifada to the hidden techniques of those magi and adepts who became ‘guns for hire.’   The self appointed custodians would argue that it was to protect the knowledge from falling into the hands of crude or vulgar people, which may be partially correct. However if you deny a seeker access to the ways how can you complain that someone without the benefit of your education or instruction is vulgar or crude?  The flaw in this argument is that knowledge then becomes the prerogative of an elite; exclusive and distorted by concepts such as rank, class or privilege. The knowledge becomes stagnant because it is not unravelling and forcing an upsurge in the quality of humans who are caught by the contagion and the awareness that there must be a more resonant stance to be adopted in appreciation of the emancipation of the human race.      

We are fortunate now that we live in an age of remarkable transition. It is possible to speak of such things openly and there is an opportunity for the human race to make a comparatively huge leap forward. This is the most powerful work than can be done to help the planet, refine yourself and become a mindful and conscious agent of change within the Universe.  

 image:mumbleyjoe

Just when you thought it was impossible, it becomes possible. When you had no time, you made the time, when you faced down the total vastness of a problem you saw the chink in the armour and thus were able to make your move. It is these things that enable us all to go on, to push, to persist and to get there in the end. It’s just that sometimes when we’re in the middle of our greatest endeavours we are insensitive to the fact of it.

Gratitude is the GR - attitude, or the Get Real attitude. You may disappear up your own backside without it and that is, of course, not only physically challenging but uncomfortable too. Being is the most sublime of properties, connecting to a flow that permeates all things and being oneself carried along on a current of stillness and sensing the very aliveness of all things is a worthy place to be.

Doing is fine but can only ever be relevant in the context of laying a foundation for being. What you do is the seneschal of being. The state of being with something greater and far larger than oneself, the sense of being within a Creation that could crush you like a gnat yet supports, nurtures and encourages you to push ever onwards. A pioneer of the human spirit once said to me, ‘you Westerners are always scurrying about, wondering what you should be doing, this is the sure way to miss the passing moment, the vital second as it washes the place you are in.’ Naturally I was too busy to hear him at the time, but has it not been said that the first thing you hear is the last thing you know?

Let me share some anchors of sanity with you, those things that are whispers in the ear as you triumph in your chariot, “remember friend, you are not a god, you are but mortal…”

The three rays of the sun, warming, healing, nourishing

To see the new year’s crop of fledglings leave the nest and begin to explore their world

The acknowledgement of others - and be sure to give credit where it is due, merit is worthy, merit acknowledged is within the gift of the human

All of those people that have helped you on your journey, no matter how seemingly insignificant, we accomplish nothing alone

Those that have taken the time to share the benefits of their wisdom with you, especially when you were too foolish to realise it

Those people whose presence is an inspiration - such things are worked for, they are not accidental and the benefit they dispense is their generosity, not their weakness

We are family, our authority is the same whether we are a beggar or a billionaire. The essential spark of life courses through our being and radiates out from us as a beacon, we follow in the footsteps of Creation, enlightenment allows us to get closer to walking alongside. Become enhanced, be magnificent with humility, radiate a steady urgency and you will be welcomed into an ocean of stillness that cherishes you and all you represent.   

 image: b/a

Thank you for the generous comments you’ve sent. They are much appreciated and I hope the blog is becoming a point of reference. Time is pretty constrained right now so I’m going to post exerpts and essays that may come up in a different font and with the paragraph breaks missing, I don’t know why that happens, my cut and paste skills are clearly wanting!

The Africa Paradigm

    As a child I remember thinking that Africa was at the end of the street where I lived. Naturally enough there was a high wall so that the lions and elephants and zebras were contained which explained why they didn’t come running down St Saviours Road and cause traffic chaos.   I had seen images of these exotic creatures and something called elephant grass, which was taller than a child and seemed like the ultimate adventure playground. I had no concept of the world as being made up of land masses and oceans and subsequently had to fit this abstract notion, Africa, within the terms of reference I had.      My terms of reference were, at that time, limited. I had no capacity for understanding different climates, the fact that I was four years old and living in the middle of England did not interfere with my brain’s ability to place Africa with an entirely different ecology, weather system, landscape and so on.   To me it was just over the hill at the top of the street in a place just beyond my boundaries and somewhere that I didn’t go. Where I went – kindergarten, the high street with my mother, on the bus, playing in the garden - was what I knew; what I didn’t know, well that was where Africa must be.      When I consider this now, some forty years later, it tickles me and also gives me a profound insight into the way our cognizance works. What I did in my desire to make sense of my world was to fill in the gaps as I imagined they probably were.   It never occurred to me to ask where Africa was so for a time that was my best available appreciation of what I will call the Africa Paradigm. If you can make the leap in perception with this one, we’ll place this in a context that will explain much of what you do concerning things that you have insufficient data for.     I had heard of Africa and had a collection of images that I could associate with it. I needed a framework to place that in so I created one from what I knew. This is what humans do, we are pattern makers, tool makers and we utilise those things that are available to satisfy our needs, in that instance the need to create or maintain a cohesive world view.   At that stage in my development I was trying to piece together abstract concepts in a cohesive way, which is the stage beyond arbitrary and random items floating in an unformed universe.      This is how it works, freeform ideas enter your consciousness and don’t always hook up with their contemporaries and so they exist almost as free radicals.   If you know anything about physiology you will know that free radicals exist in the blood and are potentially damaging if they attach themselves to cells and can bring about a process called oxidation, which essentially accelerates many degenerative conditions in the human body.              This is why anti oxidants are necessary because they negate the effects of free radicals. So these unformed and random impressions and ideas float around in a sort of mental consommé without any real definition. If a person’s head becomes full of these free radical concepts then they basically suffer from what I would call life without context or life without meaning, they know lots of things but can’t put it all together to form a recognisable pattern.     So when I was younger, and this is the process we all go through, I was trying to rationalise and piece together the incompatible information that I had which, using the analogy, I would liken to the activities of an anti-oxidant. Incompatible in that the links between them were not obvious so I had to fill in the gaps myself – the Africa Paradigm.      You’ll find this if you ever study witness statements. Three people can witness an incident and they all see the same sequence of events in the same situation yet they will produce three statements that differ wildly from each other and that is because the brain has this tendency to fill in the gaps rather than admit that it is in shortfall or lacking the necessary information. Watch this, it is a very real phenomenon and is something to grab by the tail and bring under control, that’s a process we’ll be covering in another book in this series.    So I had an unformed view of the place where I lived, the planet that I lived upon, my terms of reference were limited by my life experience and I was unable to stretch to things that I had not been introduced to so there was a huge shortfall between what I imagined the case to be, i.e. Africa at the end of the street behind a big wall, and the reality, Africa thousands of miles away, across continents and oceans.      Even though I had heard of the ocean and understood that there was this place where the world was watery and populated by fishes and whales and seahorses, I could not connect the two pieces of freeform information together, Africa and oceans. I had heard of miles but certainly had no concept of what thousands of them might be so those three ideas existed as free floating radicals within an unformed dynamic.      It began to change as I came to understand that things were connected and had to be pieced together. So this was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without having any picture as a guide or any clue as to what a jigsaw was.  Can you see the process and the difficulty that each of us has in trying to make sense of our world?      As we progress there are all sorts of co-conditions that join up with this such as fear of censure, embarrassment and so on according to the nature of the environment that you grew up in. So this study in particular is going to join up some of the ideas that you might have in ways that shed light on the situation and also introduce ideas that you may not have considered before.     Each of us prior to instruction or guidance has an Africa Paradigm that can apply to anything at all that we have picked up along the way.  You know that there are things to be picked up, your senses are being constantly assaulted by information, images and impressions all of the time. There is out and out warfare for your attention and we shall cover that later. 

Just returned from a trip to Egypt.

It’s a place I’ve always loved for its history, I don’t believe that any person can look at the record of Ancient Egypt without awe and humility.

As ever, my life is truly blessed, I saw and experienced things there that left me humbled and grateful for the bounty that chose to reveal itself to me. Just one such event: while I dived among the tropical coral reefs surrounded by the most extraordinary marine creatures a huge whale shark joined me and we swam along together, our lives conjoined for a brief mutual moment. To be with such a giant, so huge, yet so sublime and in its own element is exquisite in a way that words can only hint at.

Get out there, grasp life by its vitals and don’t let go. Play the game and your rewards will be immeasurable. 

nb: pasted this in, can’t insert paragraph breaks. Treat it as a ’spot the paragraph’ competition. Prizes to be announced…

Being born here is the greatest adventure of all. Bar none. There are things on this planet that simply have no parallel or equivalent elsewhere. As such we are blessed with the most extraordinary of gifts, our lives, and the ability to see and hear, to register with our senses and to be in this place where huge advances and remarkable development is possible. We arrive pristine, fresh, untainted and ready to begin. Our lives are the most sublime experience and there can be no over emphasis placed upon the significance of this for each of us. In the universal scheme of things we are winners many times over and that is before we even begin here.   There then follows an assault course, a marathon with a heptathlon, decathlon and every other obstacle you care to name thrown in for good measure. In this dash we encounter a matrix of competing agencies who each vie for our attention and ultimately our fealty. They want what you have more than you want what they have. This is a huge point to try to understand because the way that we are programmed can sometimes create a false sense of humility and an excess of gratitude. We co-exist as equals by the same authority that sanctioned and commissioned each of our lives and as such merit mutual respect as a base platform in all our dealings with one another.  The path that our lives lead may vary dramatically but that common birthright never changes, our legacy is a mutually felt endowment. Over time, and significantly before you or I were born, there has come to pass a set of systems, organizations, agencies, bodies and entities created by people that exert a controlling influence over our lives. That influence is a matter of fact and not a matter of opinion. As the human race has multiplied and prospered it has organized itself in such a way as to attempt to ensure its continued proliferation and growth. The challenge that you face is knowing the context, genesis and provenance of these structures. Without understanding this trio of causes there is an inevitability surrounding the confusion that will become established in your cognizance regarding the nature of the world that you are a part of. In pursuit of your own innate desires to expand and grow as an individual and as a being you may become sidetracked by ancillary matters that demand your attention. These ancillary matters can take various guises but ultimately they are quenching upon the flame of Enquiry that resides within each of us and propels us ever onwards. This may account for spans of time ranging from seconds to decades that subvert the universal compulsion that seeks to establish itself within your framework or field of being; the desire to grow and to refine. At birth we are complete with a set of latent abilities, desires and the dormant structures through which these things may express themselves and act as a beacon to the universe at large. We are a microcosm, a core concentrate of what the universe is and a resonance or symbiotic relationship between the two – macrocosm and microcosm – is established when the gift of life is conferred upon any living organism but especially upon human life which is the most refined expression of that relationship between the universe and its creation. This set of precoded qualities is of such a high order that they can rightly be compared to a set of treasures that have been placed in you for safe keeping. This is not a negotiated deal; a universal agent does not turn up at your house and ask for a quiet word before producing a binding contract. This is an automated system established as a covenant between the human race and its creator as part of the integral design and functionality of that relationship. Don’t worry, it’s automatic, it’s part of the deal and what you do about it is up to you because intrinsic within that matrix of possibilities is the element of choice. For the mechanism to work it must be through acquiescence and not oppression, there must be agreement between both parties - macro and micro – or the quality of free choice is lost and it becomes a tyranny. The universe is not a tyrant, it does not need to be, its power is absolute and the manifestation of that power is something that we, if we are fortunate, may catch occasional glimpses of. If we saw or came into the presence of such a potent universal power it would, in a vernacular sense, overload our circuitry and cause us to meltdown at multiple levels. Along the way there will be various diversions and distractions and in no small degree it is a matter of stamina as to whether or not you can resist these various distractions that will, in no uncertain terms, besiege the temple of your senses and your mind and populate them with their own affairs. The reason is as ever, a simple one, your potency, the treasure you keep, the repository that you are comes with an absolute pedigree and all things understand that to engage with you is to add potency and to live vicariously as a result of your attention. That means have a care for the things that you mix with, they want you more than you want them. This initially seems like a paradox because you are born here as a foundling, without anything and at the mercy of those constituents of the circumstance you find yourself in; and of course this is all completely unknown to and by you. Your hope is that you are subject to a relatively benign set of circumstances and that those charged with your well being, your parents, are sufficiently able to meet their responsibilities to you on behalf of the universe without damaging what you represent. These are serious and weighty considerations. You join a relay of generations whose best attempts to translate their appreciation of what the deal is for human life have resulted in the various cultures that exist now and have existed throughout history. Everything within those cultures has been the end product of people’s best efforts to express their interpretation of life as they discovered it. All of these things seek you out, they need what you have though the reverse may not necessarily be the case and in such an arrangement there is the question of who benefits from the engagement? An inorganic entity or the most refined expression of creation in the known universe? So you see, this is the greatest opportunity but also there is a risk involved; the risk of being sidetracked or shunted into the sidings of life while the journey leads elsewhere. The Bard has said ‘to thine own self be true’ and this is a noble and worthy maxim; the issue it raises is more substantial, and that concerns the self that you are being exhorted to be faithful to. Clearly anything with the intelligence to create the expression that we falteringly call the Universe is not a gambler and has placed certain reserves into their magnum opus, organic life, at whose apex we, the human race are positioned. Those reserves are precoded urgencies or desires that give a life direction. They can be compared to stabilisers on a child’s bicycle that allow it to learn to ride without falling off until it has learned or coded itself with those necessary linings that constitute the ability to ride a bike. They are instinctive properties and take as their first point of reference self preservation. Clearly there are higher motives in life than merely preserving it but this is an absolutely fundamental principle that sets the stage for all else. Precoded in you is the desire to extend the boundaries of your territory, like the shoot that extends itself into the soil or the air to encompass as fully as it may the environment that surrounds it and to fulfil its design purpose. There is just such an innate desire within human life and we all have it within us, the urge to extend yourself beyond our current territory and expand into something greater. That something remains unknown but the attraction is irresistible because within that unknown is the belief that there is something better, more accomplished and more refined. That is a notion that operates at many levels and encompasses a broad remit but the inner drive to pursue improvement is undeniable. The journey to improvement is precarious and the nature of the hazards the lie strewn in its path diverse. At times the only guidance comes from the inner resolve and understanding that creation placed a network of failsafe devices within the unfolding dynamic of your life, each of whom is mercilessly committed to and charged with the gathering of opportunity for your life to flourish. Your mission is to find sufficient intelligence to make informed decisions about the way that your life will progress and the direction you want it to take. The key here is what you want rather than what you have been told, coerced, dogmatised or indoctrinated by. And this is a fine line because most of what has come into existence is the result of good intention. People have tried, for whatever motives, to set out a pattern to follow that provides a sound foundation and the ability to function within a particular society or culture. That is an admirable objective because it brings about a utilitarian scenario where average is good and normal is desirable. Let’s not get sidetracked ourselves here with the possible implications of this but concern ourselves with the desire to improve which can be termed, variously: expand, grow, extend one’s range, improve oneself, become better, refine, broaden one’s horizons and so on. The necessary and key factor here is the desire to break out of the constriction that inevitably the life becomes subject to. If we think physically then it is like trying to wear children’s clothes for all of your life, there comes a point when you simply can’t fit into them and unless you subject yourself to something akin to the foot binding practiced on Chinese women until the last century you have to change. That’s physical but in experiential and at all other levels the same principle applies, so we have the situation whereby people become in a sense deformed because of the diminishment of their opportunities to expand at the mental, emotional and ultimately spiritual level. This gives rise to a sense of inner constriction, a feeling that they are somehow missing out on something important, which is the case and is being accurately reported back to them by those inner agencies charged with the task of providing opportunity. Notwithstanding the range of adversities and adversaries to be negotiated we find ourselves in the special place. This is the place where informed and reasoned contemplation and decision making can be engaged with. Your objective is to discover for yourself what your place and your purpose within the universe is and what that compels you to do and to be. Yours is to discover the way to extend your own consciousness and subsequently the consciousness of creation which has charged you with the task of animating its dormant universe, sleeping and awaiting its quickening. You are the agent of awakening wherein mutual or symbiotic development, the universe, partially dormant, lies and you, partially dormant, a shared emancipation and flowering that compels the darkness of ignorance to retreat in the face of the light of illumination. You are free in the confines of the universe, with permission to explore and discover according to the extent of your ability. You did not come here to contest the truth or to fight anyone’s theory; you came here as a nascent spark of universal opportunity with the promise of conscious integration into the ways and the principles of the universe as a platform upon which to create a higher development. You did not arrive as the devotee of any creed, theory, religion or philosophy; you came as an explorer seeking opportunity to pioneer the human spirit and to become enhanced and uplifted by that endeavour. Allegiances, preferences, loyalties formed along the way are incidental and matters of personal choice sublimated by Creation’s desires seeded in you and seeking, by proxy, propagation at the conscious level. A dormant universe can only wait for its awakening, the kiss of life can only be provided by an awakened or enlightened human who themselves are an intrinsic agent of the mechanism of activation wherein their state and frequency is a catalyst for growth.   

Of course it’s possible to be invisible. There is no problem with it, the ancients referred to the ‘blue cloak of invisibility’ but that is another story maybe for another time.

To those many fans of the blog, lol, there has been activity behind the scenes. Stand by, all will be revealed in the fullness of time. I remain, as ever, open to interaction and send my very best wishes to all who hang on with baited breath for the utterances from this particular contributor to the bear garden.

What is unknown is the buttress of what is known. If you focus upon what you know then you can become an expert in it, if you focus upon what we collectively find enigmatic then you become an experienced enigmatist. When your boots are a little too big try these for size.

Is time an illusion?What’s at Earth’s Core?How does a fertilized egg become a human?What happened to the Neanderthals?Why do we sleep?Where did life come from?How can observation affect the outcome of an experiment?How do entangled particles communicate?Why do placebos work?What is the universe made of?
Astronomers scouring the heavens with powerful telescopes can see objects that are billions of trillions of miles away. These observations have proven essential to piecing together a fairly refined picture of the history and evolution of the cosmos. Nevertheless, a gaping hole remains in our understanding of a basic question: What is the universe made of? For more than 100 years we’ve known about atoms, and over the past century or so we’ve gone further and identified atomic constituents like electrons and quarks, as well as their exotic cousins - neutrinos, muons, and the like. But there is now convincing evidence that these ingredients are a cosmic afterthought. Current data shows that if you weighed everything in existence, these familiar particles would amount to about 5 percent of the total. Most of the universe is composed of other stuff, which, with all of science’s deep insights, we’ve yet to identify.How do we know this? Well, over the course of many decades, astronomers studied the motion of galaxies and the stars within them, and found that the gravity exerted by this luminous matter was insufficient to account for the way these heavenly bodies moved. Only by positing large amounts of additional matter that doesn’t give off light (visible, x-ray, infrared, or any other kind) and is thus invisible to telescopes, could the data be explained. Through detailed cosmological measurements, scientists also discovered that this so-called dark matter couldn’t be made of the same electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up everything with which we are familiar.Then, in the late 1990s, two groups of astronomers, one led by Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the other by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, found something even stranger. Through observation of distant supernovas, these astronomers measured how the expansion rate of the universe has changed over time. Because of gravity’s relentless pull, most everyone expected that the expansion would be slowing. But the data from both groups showed the opposite. The expansion of the universe is speeding up. Something must be pushing outward, and luckily Einstein’s general theory of relativity provides a ready-made candidate: A uniform, diffuse energy spread throughout space can act as an antigravity force. Since this energy gives off no light, it’s called dark energy.Collectively, the observations establish that about 23 percent of the universe is dark matter and about 72 percent is dark energy. Everything else is squeezed into the remaining few percent.Several experiments are now under way to identify dark matter. Scientists are searching for what they suspect is an exotic species of particle. Some studies are looking for clues by analyzing particles bombarding Earth from space; others, like the Large Hadron Collider, will analyze collisions between extremely fast-moving protons that have the potential to create dark matter in the lab. We are guardedly optimistic that we’ll be able to identify dark matter soon. By contrast, the question of dark energy is wide open. What is its origin? What determined its quantity? Does the amount stay constant or vary? These are critical questions. Calculations show that if the amount of dark energy had been slightly larger, the universe would have blown apart so quickly that life as we know it could not exist.
- Brian Greene, author of The Elegant UniverseWhat is the purpose of noncoding DNA?Will forests slow global warming - or speed it up?What happens to information in a black hole?
Inside a black hole, gravity is so intense that neither matter nor energy can escape. But in 1975, Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking said that something does escape: random particles now known as “Hawking radiation.” So if black holes eat organized matter - chock-full of information - and then spit out random noise, where does the information go?Hawking said it gets locked up inside as the black hole eventually evaporates, destroying the information in the process. Which creates a paradox. Because the rules of physics say information, like matter and energy, can’t be destroyed.Hawking was confident. He convinced his super-genius counterpart at Caltech, physicist Kip Thorne, that he was right - but Thorne’s colleague John Preskill remained skeptical. So they made a bet: Hawking and Thorne said the singularity at the heart of a black hole destroyed information; Preskill said “nuh-uh.” Then, in 2004, Hawking reversed his position and decided that things that fall into a singularity aren’t lost; their information does leak out, though no one, except maybe Hawking himself, can explain why or how. He presented Preskill with a baseball encyclopedia from which, presumably, information can be retrieved at will. Preskill accepted only grudgingly. “Even if you’re Stephen Hawking, it’s possible to be wrong twice,” he says.
- Erin BibaWhat causes ice ages?
Scientists know that small-scale ice ages occur every 20,000 to 40,000 years and that massive ones happen every 100,000 years or so. They just don’t know why. The current working theory - first proposed in 1920 by Serbian engineer Milutin Milankovitch - is that irregularities in Earth’s orbit change how much solar energy it absorbs, resulting in sudden (well, geologically speaking) cooling. While this neatly fits the timing of short-term events, there’s still a big problem. Over the past few decades, studies have shown that orbital fluctuations affect solar energy by 1 percent or less - far too little to produce massive climate shifts on their own. “The mystery is, what is the amplification factor?” says University of Michigan geologist and climatologist Henry Pollack. “What takes a small amount of solar energy change and produces a large amount of glaciation?”Studies of ice and seabed cores reveal that temperature rise and fall is heavily correlated with changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations. But it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Are CO₂ rises and falls a cause of climate change or an effect? If they are a cause, what initiates the change? Figuring this out could tell us a great deal about the current global warming problem and how it might be solved. But as Matthew Saltzman, a geologist at Ohio State puts it, “We need to know why greenhouse gases fluctuated in prehuman times, and we just don’t.”
- John Hockenberry, WIRED contributing editorWhy do the poles reverse?
Almost 800,000 years ago, compasses would have pointed south. A little further back, they would have pointed north. Evidence for such reversals comes from lava flows and cracks in the ocean floor, places where newly formed rock makes a record of the magnetic polarity. We know that as Earth spins, the liquid metal in its molten core churns, generating an electro-magnetic field. We also know that shifts in the movement of the core can alter the polarity of that field and that it takes about 7,000 years for the orientation to flip-flop once the process of reversal begins - something that happens on average two or three times every million years. But no one knows how it works. Some scientists believe the poles migrate slowly from one end to the other; some theorize that the magnetic field shuts down and then reemerges with opposite polarity. As for what triggers the event, experts have suggested that a huge impact - say, a giant meteor - could create a disturbance in the core. But research by Gary Glatzmaier, a planetary science professor at UC Santa Cruz, shows that a violent catalyst isn’t needed. So why does pole reversal occur? “That’s like asking, why do hurricanes start?” he says. “Well, they’re always trying to, and sometimes the conditions are just right.”
- Geoffrey Gagnon Why do we die when we do?
When asked why things die, physicists don’t hesitate: It’s the second law of thermodynamics. Everything, be it mineral, plant, or animal, a Lexus or a mitral valve or a protein in a cell wall, eventually breaks down. What that looks like in humans - what exactly it is that makes us age - is a question for biologists. It’s DNA damage by free radicals, maybe, or shrinkage of the caps on chromosomes. Telomeres, as they’re called, get smaller with each cell division. When they hit a certain length: apoptosis, or cell death. But for the best explanation of the when of our mortality, you have to ask the ecologists. They have a rough way of calculating life span. Basically, the larger the species, the slower its energy-delivery systems (all that internal tubing, all that complicated traffic); the lower the metabolic rate, the longer the life. Animals can live fast or burn slow. “If you’ve ever picked up a little mouse, it’s effectively vibrating, its heart is beating so fast,” says Brian Enquist, an ecologist at the University of Arizona. “A blue whale’s heart is like a slow metronome or the ringing of a church bell, a very slow bong… bong… bong.” Yet both get roughly the same number of beats - 100 million and change, spread over two years for the mouse and roughly 80 years for the whale. “There’s this beautiful invariant: All living creatures have about the same amount of energetic life,” Enquist says. Yet while many animals outmass us humans, few outlive us. Why the long life for us lightweights? Like the hide of a rhinoceros or the claws of a tiger, human cleverness makes us tough to kill. That means random longevity-enhancing genes have a pretty good shot at evading natural selection. A bird that gets eaten in its second month of life never passes on whatever fluke mutation might have given it - and its progeny - an extra year or two. As for the ecologists’ neat mathematical equation, “primates are a little different,” Enquist concedes. “For the number of heartbeats we have in our lives, we live a little longer than we should, and it’s a big mystery why that is.” He speculates that the difference for us outliers will be explained by brain size - or, rather, by how much time and energy humans spend growing their brains relative to the rest of their bodies. Why lavishing that extra energy on brainmaking translates into disproportionately long lives, Enquist isn’t sure (and at 37, he has only about 36 more years to figure it out). Luckily, the same biological aberration that allows people to contemplate their own mortality is responsible, albeit indirectly, for delaying it.
- Susan Dominus, writer for The New York Times MagazineWhy do we still have big questions?
Information is expanding 10 times faster than any product on this planet - manufactured or natural. According to Hal Varian, an economist at UC Berkeley and a consultant to Google, worldwide information is increasing at 66 percent per year - approaching the rate of Moore’s law - while the most prolific manufactured stuff - paper, let’s say, or steel - averages only as much as 7 percent annually. By this rough metric, knowledge is growing exponentially. Indeed, the current pace of discovery is accelerating so rapidly that it seems as if we’re headed for that rapture of enlightenment known as the Singularity. In fact, we may be nearly there. A decade ago, author John Horgan interviewed prestigious scientists in many fields and concluded in his book The End of Science that all the big questions had been answered. The world of science has been roughly mapped out - structure of atoms, nature of light, theories of relativity and evolution, and so on - and all that remains now is to color in the details. So why do we still have so many unanswered questions? Take the current state of physics: We don’t know what 96 percent of the universe is made of. We call it “dark matter,” a euphemism for our ignorance. Yet it is also clear that we know far more about the universe than we did a century ago, and we have put this understanding to practical use - in consumer goods like GPS receivers and iPods, in medical devices like MRI scanners, and in engineered materials like photovoltaic cells and carbon nanotubes. Our steady and beneficial progress in knowledge comes from steady and beneficial progress in tools and technology. Telescopes, microscopes, fluoroscopes, and oscilloscopes allow us to see in new ways and to know more about the universe. The paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers mean even more questions, expanding not only what we know but also what we don’t know. Every new tool for looking farther or deeper or smaller allows us to spy into our ignorance. Future technologies such as artificial intelligence, controlled fusion, and quantum computing (to name a few on the near horizon) will change the world - that means the biggest questions have yet to be asked.
- Kevin Kelly, author of Cool Tools