Tag Archives: Douglas Adams

Can You Be Serious? How Can This Stuff Possibly Work?!

At first blush, for some of us, the art of reading psychology, interpreting events, and considering future or as yet un-manifest possibilities from the position of the planets in the solar system seems amusingly counter-intuitive at best, and dangerously absurd at worst. To think that national leaders have altered policy and personal life according to the dictates of heavenly bodies.

Well it simply isn’t rational, reasonable or reliable.

I recently took in a well presented youtube video on developments in astronomy over the past couple of decades. The astronomer, obviously highly intelligent and well educated, prefaced his presentation by saying that not only is space-time stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine. He also said that we should allow ourselves to consider that everything in our current understanding may be mistaken. Then, scarcely drawing breath, he declared astrology to be ‘rubbish’. This was done without a trace of ironic self-awareness. It was a confident pronouncement on a subject of which the clever gentleman clearly knew not very much.

In politics you expect this kind of thing …

… Surely not in science.

Except, consider the trouble Galileo had when moving the perspective from the Ptolemaic, terra-centric, to the helio-centric that we now understand as closer to the actual mechanics.

 

I once played Neils Bohr, the great Danish scientist, the founder of Quantum Physics. I grappled to understand the physics and the maths in the play, falling short by quite a distance. But I did gain the knowledge that at a sub-atomic level a particle can also be a field. That is significant.

When you also consider that we, inhabiting three dimensional space-time, see everything at a certain speed, and that, to quote George MacDonald, “size is nothing, but form is much”, and also, as Zoroaster is reputed to have declared, “as above, so below.”

I have seen variations of the idea that solar systemic construction is analogous to molecular and atomic structure expressed in; Marvel comics, in at least two of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and in that excellent exposition by Rodney Collin Smith in his book, Theory of Celestial Influence. And while the correspondences may not be exact, it is a starting point for those of us (like me) who lack the physics, the maths, the geometry, to discuss with empirical proofs.

Douglas Adams had it right when in the opening paragraph of his masterpiece, Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, he said, “Space is big, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

For your consideration here is a splendid scale model. If you watch you will notice that the creators of this model are considering the orbit of Neptune to be the outer boundary of the solar system … apart from that, it’s great for a sense of the spaces involved.

Not only is Space big in the ordinary sense of miles, light-years, and similar metrics raised to the nth degree. It is big by successive orders of magnitude.

Personal space, social space, global space, solar space, galactic space, inter-galactic … inter-universal, inter-dimensional? And going in the other direction to the infinite smallness of the sub-atomic, relationships of distance, motion, speed, energy are what holds matter together.

The great Russian thinker Piotr Demianovitch Ouspensky put it simply when he explained in his book ‘Tertium Organum’ that the trace of a movement of a body in any direction perpendicular to itself is its fourth dimensional aspect.

A point moved in any direction will demonstrate in the trace of its movement; a line.

A line moved in any perpendicular direction to itself, will, in the trace of that motion, describe a plane.

A Plane moved perpendicularly to the plane in which it lies, will become by its trace, a solid.

And, a three dimensional body with its motion traced will describe the fourth dimensional aspect of its existence.

The fourth dimension is what we call time.

Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus. By formula he was able to move between dimensions. The area of a circle when raised a dimension by calculus becomes the volume of a sphere.

What if our three dimensional perception of solar motion and the motion of the Sun’s planetary family is inadequate to the fourth dimensional influences that fall upon us? What would the next higher dimensional aspect of the body of the solar system look like if we were able to perceive it?

I have no idea of the exact validity of these conjectures, but as someone with an aspected Uranus in Leo in the 11th, I very much enjoy views which are conventionally supposed to be heretical. A highly articulate example of such is here

I invite discussion, disputation, and other free exchange of ideas from skeptics and those better qualified than I. Do bear in mind though, at an intuitive level I don’t need convincing. After all, it seems self-evident that certain national leaders in several divers countries were put here to make Nostradamus look good.