Quantum science and poetic expression

quantum ripples in chaosI sent a friend an article by Deepak Chopra earlier today with the note “Read this – it’s a window into what is running through my mind all the time!” Chopra’s article was about the Higgs boson and its implications for billions of religious people the world over. Or at least, that’s what it started out being about. He goes on to talk about different view of quantum mechanics. You know, waves versus discrete states and superposition and all that good stuff that makes blood shoot from your nose if you think about it for too long. At one point, he talks a bit about how consciousness itself is capable (due to the relatively high gravity of the brainpan once you leave Planck space) of collapsing waveforms into observable pieces of reality. Whew.

Instead of the conventional view that consciousness emerges from complex computation among brain neurons, they [the scientists in question] propose that consciousness involves sequences of quantum computations in microtubules inside brain neurons, not between them in the dendrites and synapses. The quantum computations in the brain are also ripples in fundamental spacetime geometry, the most basic level of the universe.
It would appear that the world is what we make of it. While all the theorizing about quantum capability and observer hypotheses and what these things mean for a panentheism rooted in science is nice, but I’m also a fan of poetic expression of such ideas, like the offering from Poetry Chaikhana a few days back. The poem is called “Creation’s Witness”, and was written by Abdul-Qader Bedil looooooong before we even knew that there could be something smaller than the atom.
At time’s beginning
that beauty
which polished creation’s mirror
caressed every atom
with a hundred thousand suns.

But this glory
was never witnessed.

When the human eye emerged,
only then was he known.
No matter how deeply we stare at the observable and unobservable universe around us, no matter how many “Eurekas!” we hear from the laboratories of the world, no physical equation will equal the capacity of the human tongue to express the larger-than-life ideas and loves that drive us. Science can only tell us so much about our world. We need the language of the heart for the rest.

Sweet ripples in East Africa by Flickr user Kalense Kid
  • Share/Bookmark

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.