Week 7 - Fractals as patterns of complex systems

Fractals are never-ending patterns formed by repetition - be it repetition of a process, a formula, or a shape... Fractals represent dynamic systems and show where and how small shifts can have big effects down the road in a feedback-driven system. Fractals frequently occur in nature - the branching of an oak tree, for example, or in the body, as with the branching of the bronchi in the lungs.

One might even consider that the paths of our lives and could also be visually represented by fractals. While procrastinating writing this, I randomly (“randomly”) clicked on a link from the Brain Pickings blog to hear Amanda Palmer read the poem by Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish Nobel laureate. The description, on Brain Pickings, fit right in with this theme (http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/02/amanda-palmer-reads-wislawa-szymborska/?mc_cid=2e1e781938&mc_eid=b96d4cf73a ):

“Amanda has previously lent her beautiful voice to my favorite Szymborska poem, “Possibilities,” and she now lends it to another favorite from this final volume, “Life While-You-Wait” — a bittersweet ode to life’s string of unrepeatable moments, each the final point in a fractal decision tree of what-ifs that add up to our destiny, and a gentle invitation to soften the edges of the heart as we meet ourselves along the continuum of our becoming.”

I've seen fractals described as "the pictures of chaos". Perhaps we, too, could be described as such.

Week 6 - Resonance in my world:

A few years ago, on a whim, I rented a cello for several months. It was so completely random, and it made me so happy. I am not a musician, and I had never had any interest whatsoever in stringed instruments like violin or cello. Aside from a 6-month flirtation with taiko drumming, I hadn’t played an instrument since I quit band in fifth grade. But I had recently decided that it would be fun to learn the guitar - easy to get ahold of, relatively inexpensive, and that almost everyone I know plays at least a little. Soon after telling a friend about this idea, I was raving about seeing a concert by Zoe Keating, an experimental cellist whose music I love. When my friend responded with the suggestion that I take up cello instead, I brushed off the idea as silly... and then found myself two days later in Best Music renting a cello. Why did this happen? I chalk it up to resonance. I simply loved how the low vibrations made me feel, particularly in my chest. I still had no interest really in learning how to play, but I really wanted to explore the sound and resonance. Although the cello ultimately went back to Best, in this, at least, I was successful. And it led to further explorations in resonance and sound healing, including learning to use tuning forks on the body, which eventually contributed to my decision to attend school in Chinese medicine.

Resonance is a concept that appears on my mindscape rather often. Resonance is not just sound. I think/talk about "resonating" with people, with ideas, with places. I think it stems in part from having done a lot of qi gong and tai qi, becoming attuned to how flow feels in my body, how everything feels to my body.  Perhaps I like the word 'resonance' because it sounds a little less 'California' than talking about vibes, but that's ultimately what it's about for me. Vibration. But perhaps 'resonance' is a more precise description, too, because, as Webster says, it's really about about vibrational relationships - "resonance: a sound or vibration produced in one object that is caused by the sound or vibration produced in another".

Class 5 - kinda off topic but inspired by this week's questions

When I was an undergraduate, I took a multidimensional math class. It was called something like 'Beyond the Third Dimension'. I took it because the instructor was brilliant and it pretty much blew my mind. I do have a knack for numbers, but my training and experience was not at the level of being able to comprehend 4th and 5th dimensional space, and I had no real intention of even trying. (There were two TAs for the class - one was involved in computer modeling of hyperspace, and the other was a poet. Fortunately, I was in section with the latter.) I just wanted exposure to some of those mind-blowing ideas, to have a little more idea of some of the things of which I was totally ignorant. In that I succeeded! My takeaway for the class was to get a very broad-concept grasp of things. 

In all of the talk in this class that we've had about dark matter and dark energy, part of what has been running through my head is what if some of the ‘missing’ matter/energy resides primarily in dimensions that most of us don't know how to perceive or access. Those brief moments when electrons appear in one place and then another place - who's to say those two places are not contiguous in some other dimensional space, that we are simply seeing projections of a more-than-3D object pass through 3-dimensional space? I don’t know enough to provide any substantiation or evidence for this idea – I just know enough to wonder…  (Alas, this wondering does not fall neatly into any of the questions for the week, but I started intending to write about fractals and sacred geometry in hyperspace, and this is where ended up.)

(By the way - if you have never read Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott, I highly recommend it. )

Class 4 - Energy, matter, and force

There are several dimensions by which the four fundamental forces - strong nuclear force, electromagnetic force, weak nuclear force, and gravitation force - might be compared:
- Relative strength
- Duration for which the force can act
- Messenger particle
- 'Direction', e.g. attractive or repulsive or both
- Mass
- Range/distance
- 'Behavior'
- Exceptions or limitations to when forces act
- Examples (which is perhaps the most elucidating)

Class 3 - Synchronicity

What evidence can you find for synchronicity?

I could offer any variety of cool stories, but I don’t think they qualify, one by one, as evidence for synchronicity. My background is in Western research, and although I can see the problem with it and even rail on its shortcomings and narrowness, my paradigm has not yet shifted to such a degree that I would call anecdotes “evidence” unless they were taken together and examined in some systematic way. 

I could also, I am sure, offer some complicated scientific substantiation to support the existence of synchronicity – but I am not well enough versed in that science to do so at this time. 

So I will just talk about the habit of synchronicity as evidence for its existence. I was listening to a podcast a week or two ago, and someone was talking about studies on self-described lucky and unlucky people. To sum it up really briefly, the unlucky people habitually honed in on the negative things that happened in a given situation, and the lucky people saw the positive. These researchers had the idea that ‘luck’ could be trained and went about working with people to do so. In a similar way, I think that synchronicity can be a frame of mind – people who practice noticing synchronous and serendipitous events end up experiencing more of them – like Renee and her lucky parking. Is the noticing just like a pair of (rose-colored) glasses? Or does it actually invite more "meaningful coincidences" into one's reality. (Does like attract like?) I suspect that it is a bit of both. Perhaps I'll try my own little synchronicity training experiment and report back at some point.

Class 2 - Quantum Mechanics

First things first - the universe is DEFINITELY weird - that's what makes it so great.

I really appreciated the inclusion of the preface for the dissertation on Santeria as part of this week's reading. I find it really enriching to have field-of-study crossover or cross-pollination. It gets the metaphors rolling, which is one of the approaches I find helpful for thinking about abstract topics such as 'uncertainty'.

It is also interesting to try to tie the readings together. Kristina Wirtz used Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a tool for talking about her method of conducting this ethnographic study on Santeria. I see the quantum camera as another really good metaphor for her approach: "Instead of trying to 'see' an object, the quantum camera simply 'feels' the rise and fall of photonic waves in quantum fields around the camera." It seems that Kristina was acting kind of like a quantum camera - instead of trying to tie down or define Santeria in space, herself, she sought to use series and patterns of measurements (religious practitioners' own "discursive activity") to approximate the trajectories of some of the elements of this cultural phenomenon known as Santeria. She was working to produce an image through the cloud of culture and subjective experience...

Homework Week 1

(Note - This is copied over from my blog post at a different address. I just created a new account for school-related blogging. Please disregard the old one.)

Homework Week 1

Ah,  my very first blog post...

Part 1 - 'the quiz':

What attracts me to Chinese medicine? 
I have been drawn to the study of Chinese medicine through many routes and for many reasons. I've long been interested in health, and my first career has been in public health. But probably the strongest influence on my decision to go to school in this has been my history with martial arts and internal arts.

What do I honestly think of Physics, really? 
My high school experience with physics was neither particularly good nor particularly bad. I never really took the opportunity to explore the more esoteric aspects that have piqued my interest since then, so I am actually looking forward to this class and its syllabus.

Now that I think about it, have I ever experienced time "slowing down" or "speeding up"? 
I have a sense of time passing far more slowly as a child than it does now. With regard to specific incidents of time changing speed, most that I can think of involve martial arts, fighting, and that sort of thing, particularly during moments of intense focus or deep relaxation.

Part 2 - Discussion - The Meaning of Time:
I find one of the most comforting and relaxing things is to stare at star-filled skies at night in dark places. I have always avoided learning much about astronomy so that I won't have patterns to 'know' and seek out. To get lost amongst stars is the closest I can get to grocking infinity. I can't really wrap my brain around it, but if I let go I can just float there for moments and it doesn't matter. Infinity of space and infinity of time are equally mind boggling. What is interesting to think about is time not just as an infinite continuum going into the future and into the past, but as a continuum of increments what are infinitely large and infinitely small. You can chunk it any way you want, but there is always farther to go, longer, shorter... Is there a smallest unit of time? Is there a point at which time becomes something else? If it becomes something else, is it a thing, is it of different dimension? Can we touch it? Can we manipulate it?