Potential

by Winston Riley

This isn't rocket science. No, much more complicated than that.





Disclaimer: I couldn't make it through a 10th grade physics class at this point. Reading The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin's new book covering "The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next," has been challenging enough. Forget me explain E=MC2 or what the hell is going on with black holes. Forget me, in fact, really grasping neutrinos, unification, supersymmetry or dark matter (other than being pretty up to date on the whole "Luke, I'm your father" gig and having a pretty good handle on how things went bad for the Darthmeister). As a matter of fact, the whole story of Strings vs Quantum is brand new to me. I mean, I've tuned in and read my share of stuff. I've struggled through much of Zukav's Dancing Wu Li Masters, and over the last few years read articles about String Theory. Plus I've watched What the Bleep and being sort of a new age kind of guy, I get this feeling of Quantum and Religion are starting to be bedmates. But honestly, I wouldn't have known until reading Smolin that Quantum is out and Strings are in. I would have guessed that Strings were just the newest knowledge "block" with the whole mysterious quantum story.





But to cut to the chase. This thing about "the observer." I think we can all be included in the conversation of turning this around and examining it--whether we're physicists or just schmo's like me. Some of us meditate and we've come pretty face-to-face with the phenomena of watching the switch flick back and forth between observer and observed. Just to make sure we're on the same page, let me elaborate a little more on this.





You start watching your thoughts or your breath or your lower dan tien or whatever, and you get a flicker of awareness that NOW is all there is. If you can hold that awareness, you stay in the NOW, but if you "think" for a moment, you either notice that "now" just passed or you anticipate it coming up, with your next thought. Naturally, in this thinking mode, NOW won't present itself again. NOW is something which you are always part of naturally, but if you go to observe it, it will allude you.





This is the tricky part because it is in the "going" to observe it part that will trap you. In other words if you don't "try" to observe it and just "be," you can actually observe NOW as also being the observed. You see, we're back to the whole duality thing. I suspect that unification may be related, but man those formulas and terms are too much for me.





Stay with me...


Back to this switching mechanism I mentioned. On/off and the binary schtick of computers seem to mesh nicely with this particle theory thing. I won't get it right but when Einstein noticed that the thing which messed him up was that the particle seemed different between the time that it wasn't observed and the time that it was. Smolin helped me see this in a new light by referring to the phenomena as potential. The particle (or whatever the matter was he was describing) would either be a wave or matter. I know I don't have the terms right, but if you can hang with me, I hope you'll agree that terms aren't important--this is a concept.





What I'm picking up on right now can also go back to Einstein's thing about time/space and his experiment with the moving train. If I'm not mistaken he actually made a movie or the idea of a movie by taking still shots and flipping through them. I may be mixing up documentaries or books, but again, it is the concept which is important. So if you have to just breath this in or whatever....





So the NOW could be a snap shot. If you strung a series of these now snapshots together, they would make a movie. A fantasy really because there is no movie and NOW never stops to be captured. But for us to "turn it around" and examine it, we have to stop frame, unless we are in the state that allows us to observe as also BEING the observed. In which case we have a much higher aptitude to comprehend reality. We are actually reality itself, while in that state, and have no need of a "thinking" mechanism. To function, as physical beings, we certainly require the thinking mechanism. Our brain is, after all, part of our physical self and is functioning on other levels without our having to instruct it. It is making our heart beat and processing our last meal, shedding dead cells and building new ones. All of this on a physical, chemical, and biological level.





But the mind part--the part which we would be hard pressed to "find" is part of the puzzle. The physicists need to include it in their formulas. I suspect it is the link between the mystery and the state of the art. It can be described as the "observed" and if carefully--very carefully--defined, it could also be described as the observER. But the distinction must be made between thinking and "being."





So there is something to this thought of snapshots and stringing together this fantasy movie. Like it has been done thousands of times on the whole Einstein space/time thing but now with some new rules.





Rule One: NOW never stops but can be measured and observed. (It seems to have had a beginning, as I understand it, whether that was as the big bang or something like a big bang which sprung from a multiverse).





Rule Two: NOW can not be affected by energy, mass, light, density or mind.





Rule Three: Mind is non local. All information of all time since the start of NOW, or possibly before, has never been lost. Information has no place to go, therefore it does not go away. It exists only in mind but can be observed by the many parts of "self."





Rule Four: Self is a function of a process, totally related to matter. Self is the connection between man and non duality. (Non duality may be mind).





Rule Five: Potential has a direction and a force. Isolating the direction (keeping in mind we're dealing with at least nine plus one dimensions--if not 25 or 26) and being able to measure the force may reveal the missing step to moving physics to the next step.





Naturally, as a schmo, I've got no business making rules about physics. But what else am I going to do when driven to wake up to write this crap?