A common theme I noticed in this week’s classes was the idea of difference and variation. We often dream of meeting aliens, beings from another far off location in the vast, infinite universe with customs and ways of life we couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to fathom. We in fact, do not have to look so far to be as equally bewildered. Hank Morgan’s adventures in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court show that the world was a vastly different place just a few thousand years ago, with as equally different people and customs of their own. Sure, they’re our ancestors, same species, but Hank Morgan’s experience as a person from the relatively distant future being pulled back many centuries sort of shows us how “alien” the past can be. There was a time we thought the earth was flat, that certain people were lesser because of skin color, that climate change was a myth (well, some still believe that one). The earth and all of its inhabitants, are weird. We’re strange. All of us. We just have to alter our perspective. The many cultures that exhibited themselves in Expo: Magic of the White City also seemed odd to the people not native to the United States. Belly-dancing, circus acts, strange technology from every corner of the globe. It’s not hard to imagine the gaping jaws of citizens during this time upon seeing the grandeur of German weapon engineering. We often so get caught up in technology that we barely take the time to appreciate it every once in a while. A piece of machinery that can connect you to most anyone on the entire planet, that has access to exponentially that of what a library can physically hold, is currently in your pocket! We do not have to stretch our imagination very far to be amazed at what is around us. Perspective can make things weird and fascinating; it can make the smallest animal so complexly structured, and the universe, as we know it, a tiny speck. It’s why we stress the idea of an open mind, to accept difference and live in solidarity amongst ourselves.
Another concept that stuck out to me the most of our two classes was the notion of energy balance and the basic laws of physics and thermodynamics. How everything, from meditation, life, and quantum mechanics, all rely and succeed with balance. Even socially, as The Human Motor described, the balance of the pace of technology and social norms is important in society; one cannot outweigh the other without repercussions (labor strikes, working conditions, etc.). From labor workers during the Industrial Revolution, to the infant stages of fusion energy we are currently engineering today, humans and life itself searches for the most efficient use of energy.
Prof. Perrone’s thoughts on string theory and the idea of multiple dimensions also left me scratching my head. Michio Kaku’s book Hyperspace is something I have attempted to read in the past but left me in a similarly confused state. Biologically, we apparently cannot fathom the idea of the infinite size of the universe, it is but an arbitrary thought we can only attempt to understand. The idea that there is even another galaxy containing life as complex as ours is something hard to accept, but after all, life is but a recipe in the universe’s cookbook containing ingredients like water, carbon and oxygen right? With the aftermath of the Hubble Telescope and our current understanding of math and statistical probability, the conditions that created life here shouldn’t be too hard for the universe to do again in another far off solar system, should it? With the idea of there being more universes is incredibly awesome. That these grandiose bubbles of universe act theoretically in the same way molecules of water interact with each other is absolutely amazing. And who’s to say our laws of physics apply to other universes? Could the very physical laws everything in existence that we know of in our universe follows whether they like it or not somehow be different in others? The fact that we know gravity can bend time, something we see as so structure and rigid in our daily lives, makes it seem like these two concepts are some sort of magic. We theorize science in on such an imaginative, almost fictional level that we make it seem like a sort of magic bestowed upon us by a higher being. Although, after all, magic is just science that we don’t understand, right?