March 16, 2010
You are never alone
Filed by Bil at 10:19 pm under The Arts, The Science
Holy crap, you guys. It’s taken a couple hundred years, but I think science and Transcendentalism are crossing streams.
One Universe Too Many? String Theories, The Multiverse And The Future Of Physics.
(Quick summation: physicists are getting to a point where they are trying to explain things that cannot be observed.)
This article poses an interesting question, one that deserves to be asked: is the idea of alternate realities and multiple universes a moot point? Do we need to be concerned with other universes at this point in our history, when we haven’t even placed our own feet further away from the Earth than the moon?
The answer, of course, is no. We do not need to study these things. Should we study them? That’s a completely different question.
I, for one, can see no reason not to study. Think about where we might be in the future if, somehow, the occasion does rise when this knowledge would come in useful. What if we need an answer that we might have had, but we end up telling ourselves, “Hold on, we’ll have to come back to this after we learn some more.” Could be high-stakes.
Or perhaps the study of other universes might reflect an answer to a question we hadn’t even asked yet – is it worth our while to ignore such information? Again, the answer is no. The word that seems to be missing from both sides of the arguments presented in the article above is “yet.” These things cannot be observed yet. But once upon a time, germs couldn’t be observed, and sure enough, they are real, and even worth studying.
Interestingly enough, the whole blog article seems to be a newer version of a very old question: do we look to the sky for answers, or do we look on the ground?
Socalled - You Are Never Alone from JDub Records on Vimeo.
Carry on, scientists. Figure out as much as you possibly can. Tell the rest of us what you find. At this stage, every advancement comes from standing on shoulders, so let’s get our own shoulders as high as we can to help out the next generations.
I guess the same can be said for art. Any advancement in art in this day and age comes on the shoulders of giants. There are only a handful of different stories; each new story is merely a retelling of an old story, just in a different form and perhaps with different characters and different settings. And of those, there are only two things that a story can be about: love or death. (That last statement can be both proved and disproved by pretty much the same arguments, so don’t think too much about it.)
The law of conservation of energy: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed from one state to another.
I humbly submit to you, the patrons of the bar, distinguished ladies and gentlemen with drinks in your hands and hearts in your chests, a theory of conservation of art:
Art can never be old or new, it can only be re-experienced.
Either you are always alone, or you are never alone.
Discuss.
To re-experience is the only reason for art to exist, and, one could argue, the only reason for us to be alive.
Art puts new information on the tape in our head (or the hard disk, or the solid state drive, depending on how newfangled your noggin is), and is one of the few life experiences that systematically gives us new perspectives from which to judge the world around us.
That’s why we have to keep doing it, again and again and again.
Interesting imagery, ‘new information on the tape in our head’…Of course we can tell the difference between art and real life when we sit and think about it, and of course it’s a completely different experience to watch a play about someone shouting at their kid than to see someone in real life shouting at their kid…but the way we remember them, the physiological way we remember them - that’s the same. Getting back to the science of alternate realities, I wonder: after the experience is complete and in the past, is what was reality still reality? Is fiction still fiction?
You look EVERYWHERE. Sky, ground, whatever. All science is worth studying. The notion that some knowledge is irrelevant, or that a necessity of any kind needs to be demonstrated in order to proceed, is ridiculous and irresponsible. You have no idea whether the information gleaned will be “worth knowing” until after you know it. Additionally, it is not your call to say how useful or not information is, even in regard to your own research. As you say, standing on shoulders, who is to say what doors the keys we find today will open tomorrow.
Regarding art: same. All art is worth doing. Every form of expression is worth putting out there. As with the researcher, so too with the artist. It is not the artist’s call whether their art is good or not, relevant or not. That is up to the people who come later. Once the paint is on the canvas, the artist himself becomes a member of the audience, no more or less credible as a critic than the casual gallery patron.
Also, you can write plays about robots who neither love nor die.
-Tom
People by nature obsess about the past or, more importantly in the case of alternate universes, what could have been. It’s how we learn from our mistakes. I don’t think there would really be an option but to study alternate universes when the technology becomes available. The impulse is going to be too strong for too many people and that’s not a bad thing at all. Tampering is another story, and for the most part would almost certainly end poorly so I think it would wind up being more of a trade-off. On the one hand, it’s good to know how different things can work under different circumstances, but to try to recreate those circumstances in your own favor, especially after they’ve already happened, could complicate things completely. If people see something that works better than what we already have, they might unnecessarily try to apply it to something that already functions perfectly well on its own. While it would be extremely valuable to see these different systems and gain information we may not be aware of, the question is whether the cost of knowing the information and the inevitable temptation that ensues will outweigh the benefit.
But to re-experience art makes it perpetually new, don’t you think?
I think the process of discovery is the same way. We are continually re-experiencing what we recognize as the world with our tremendously limited skills of perception, so I don’t believe there will ever be a time when we have too much information. Thus, the world around us will be different every second, and thus always new and exciting and terrifying.
“…what we recognize as the world with our tremendously limited skills of perception…” I think this hits the nail on the head. Both high physics and high art seeking to transcend what we might not see with our own sensory limitations. That’s pretty awesome. Science & art existing in harmony. Even sometimes collaborating.