2003-10-07

The garden of cosmic speculation


Some fantastic books on the shelves of the library in the Royal Institution:
Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity. And something intriguing called History of
Magic & Experimental Science (by Lynn Thorndike).

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He wrote a book "the architecture of the jumping universe" -- cool title

cicero:
second nature? [think it's agriculture]
third nature: garden
fourth nature: industrial
zeroth nature: the *laws* of nature; physics

the garden is an attack on reductionism in science *and* art (like damien
hirst's Hymn, which is not transformative, not creating anything, not full of
meaning, just amplified in size).

sometimes parts of the garden break: slumps because of moles... work with it.

- Gaia: life + chemical composition + physical conditions (this was also an
attack on reductionism)

"contrained art & constrained invention" ... but still we have all of life on a
single globe, down to the present. [cosmogenesis, as he says later. a single
continuously unfolding event. like a garden. a steerable system with a long
relaxation time]

- a soliton is a "topologically trapped" [packets of energy] wave. a
half-twist. there can be anti twists. they move through each other. he made
some beautiful soliton wave gates!

[i misread my notes just now as "a solution is topologically taped", 'taped' as
in the expectances of a cybernetic machine are taped out.]

"holds the past into the present, and the future" [a mechanism for
cosmogenesis. this is where time binding comes from. without the ability to
time-series the universe, we could have no learning, no memory. our brain does
this with long loops to have a 'remembered present' to compare to fictional
presents (which include potential futures)... counterfactuals, etc.]

soliton waves: trapped energy patterns *because of feedback*.

a photo of earthwork art: "spiral jetty" by robert smith. looks like it's in
the sky, not on the lake.

lakes in the garden are drawn like the Ueda strange attractor.

in another place he did the lakes and hills [edinburgh?] it was to cover a
sewerage plant. in microcosm it was replicated in a pebble pattern in the
ground leading into this garden. the attractor of the pebble pattern is the
central hole of the manhole covering the controlling electronics (the hole you
use to hook the cover up). the cover is the centre of the inner planets & the
attractor. and a motto i can't remember "make haste, to decode". don't hurry
through a garden, but hurry to understand.

we live in a cosmogenesis, a constantly creating ongoing event -- a proces.

"big bang" is like saying "your mother is a firecracker". an untrue and
"alienating metaphor" (it wasn't big; it wasn't a bang. hot, rapid expansion).

"narrative is what gives identity", you tell your story... "and your place [in
history] unfolds"

on unicellular first life: "nothing to eat except themselves. A hard time for
life."

"manifold/manyfold universe" - baby branes - theory of how the universe was
formed

"multiple inflations" theory

"not less is more [...] more is difference"

"science is the longest unbroken meditation on the universe"

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questions.

patterns is what we're revealing.

a question says symmetry is often preserved (christopher alexander emphasises
*pattern*) in nature. this is curious -- "when you break symmetry, you make a
new form of symmetry" [ -- it's transformational, like Bateson. but Bateson
says (in mind and nature book) that you only see pattern because of the *cuts*
you make].

he started at the time of the Santa Fe institute and the new sciences.

'fractal cities' - important book, neglected, about this paradigm and its
importance in town planning.