Two quotes from Gaston de Pawlowski (1874-1933)

(image by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Jake Berry)


"…the fourth dimension….would not be able to be defined in any manner in our present language."

and

"When one reaches the country of the fourth dimension, when one is freed forever from the notions of space and time, it is with this intelligence that one thinks and one reflects. Thanks to it one finds himself blended with the entire universe, with so-called future events, as with so-called past events."

Part 2 – At c:

If at c is a vanishing what can be said about that beyond? According to the Minkowski diagram, spacetime can be presented as two cones touching at their apexes, positioned one on top of the other. The cones are visual presentations of the distances light travels in space over time. Since there is more time for light to travel in the distant past and the distant future the area covered by light is greater the further one observes in each direction. Since light has traveled the shortest distance in the present then it is represented by the point at which the cones touch.



However, at c all of the light in either direction is available immediately because the barriers of time and distance have been eliminated. Yet, the representation of the twin cones leave something unaccounted for –– that which lies outside the cones. Beneath c everything lies within the cones, but once we have arrived at c we are no longer within those cones.

This “area” outside has been called "??elsewhere??." The double question marks are appropriate because elsewhere suggests another place or time. The double question marks remind us that place and time depend on the reality inside the cones. I have chosen to disclose the condition that is not within the cones with an empty space, with the space that follows the colon. The colon indicates that at c the condition changes, and changes so radically that to represent it would be a fallacy. We cannot represent what lies at or beyond the absolute because representation is based upon the conditions the absolute imposes.

Everything then, up to this point has been introduction. The space beyond the colon does not represent space at all. It does not represent anything, but it does provide us with an opportunity. In order for us to take advantage of that opportunity we will have to investigate what we mean when we use the words 'perception’ and ‘imagination’.

Jake Berry 10.18.05

At c:

Since Einstein changed his revolutionary 1905 equation from E=mV2 to E=mc2 in 1907 c has generally been used to designate the speed of light. The c in modern science originally abbreviated for constant, but in the late 19th century c (from the Latin celeritas (speed)) was used by Max Plank and other physicists to indicate the speed of electrodynamic waves, so Einstein adopted the variable in place of V. And because in the Theory of Relativity light is both a speed and an absolute it makes sense to use c instead of the singularly applicable V.

Various experiments, most notably those that produce Cherenekov radiation, demonstrate that particles can travel faster than photons under certain conditions. The result is a kind of glowing effect that is analogous in the electromagnetic spectrum to a sonic boom. However, no experiment to date has demonstrated that information can be transferred faster than the speed of light, so c remains an absolute.

As every reader of science fiction or popular books that translate the difficulties of physics for the non-physicist knows, at c space contracts and time expands. That is, all of space is compressed infinitely thin while time no longer has any meaning beyond the present. To our ordinary perspective then space and time would become irrelevant and indistinct. Further, since we know light by way of space and time, it too would no longer retain its meaning. At c then we might say we vanish. I do not mean invisibility since invisibility retains space and time. Invisibility removes an object from the light waves that would make it visible. It is still there, but it is hidden. At c, vanishing is union with a practicable absolute and a theoretical beyond.


Jake Berry 10.14.05

Neurogeist 2

from an e-mail to Lissa Wolsack

Nature is what we are. Everything else is either self-deception or submission to the deceptions of others. We cannot remove ourselves from nature as long as blood flows in our veins and electro-chemistry in our brains and nerves.

Jake Berry 10.11.05

Neurogeist

From e-mails to Hank Lazer and William Doty

There is a slavish allegiance to chronology - to time as an unfolding toward some end. Or in evolution toward increasing complexity. Or in entropy the disintegration along a scale of time. How much of this has anything to do with reality? We utilize various tools, or place our consensus paradigm upon reality then behave as if the tool was the thing itself. Time, and measurement of whatever kind, may be finally unreliable – at best only useful in a context.
Perhaps it is best in art (or any attempt to realize things as they actually are) not to place too much faith in time, space, particular sets of dimensions. We are organisms that do particular things, but we should not mistake these things, or our abstract conceptualizations by their means, for what is real.

I am an animal pretending to be a man.

Jake Berry 10.06.05