Ah yes.. it has been awhile since the last time the walrussez... A number of things needed attention. Barbara and I decided to take a class in poetry. Yes I said poetry. Along with the usual minutiae of everyday living we decided to go back to school. That, along with preparing the necessary slides for a class in Astrology that I will present at the Chester County Night School, has kept me busy busy busy. But all these activities served to center my buttoned-down mind on my favorite subject, science. So while the instructor was extolling the virtues of free verse, which conflicted with my expectations of rhyme and rhythm as in "Jack and Jill went up the hill" and "There once was a man from Kent" I got a sense that I was watching a transition.
The world was speeding up. The old leisurely rhythms and frequencies were being replaced by the younger generation speaking at a faster pace. They were using a language that didn't make sense to me like OMG and BTW and LOL. They were texting at a rate that was impossible for human fingers to perform. And they were doing it everywhere.
The public was looking for convenience and I don't mean only in the foods they eat. Cars that park themselves, 3G and 4G networks that promised greater speed and ease of communication everywhere one went. And all of a sudden it hit me. We are in the Quantum Age.
And how can you say that is so? Just look at how we passed through the Atomic Age. When the atomic bombs rained death and destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II, that was not the beginning of the Atomic Age. The Atomic Age began when the Greeks first conceived of a particle so small and so fundamental as the atom. The Race has added to that conception piece by piece over the millennia until shortly after WW I even, the Germans came very close to unleashing the power of the atom before it was actually done underneath the football stadium at the University of Chicago.
The Quantum Age perhaps was started by Alfred Einstein himself when he got the Nobel prize not for his great mathematical contributions to the laws of gravity and the like but for an experiment he ran on the power of light. Einstein and his team focused an intense beam of light onto the surface of a platium sheet and kicked an electron out of one of the platinum atoms on that surface. This experiment more than any other was the flag-bearer for the quantum scientists when they realized two things. One that the Experimenter was not only able to observe the experiment but to participate in it by changing the properties of that electron. And two, to do it at a distance. So now our worldview changed from an objective functioning to one of a subjective function. And this, folks, was perhaps about 100 years ago. So now there is more substance to that old piece of advice... "we create our own reality".
Perhaps if there is enough interest we can continue in this vein in the next installment. Oooops oh yeah my first burnt offering to the muse Erato.. originally titled "Time Travel" has been re-named..."The Phantoms of My Mind".
The Phantoms of My Mind
I toss and turn, I cannot sleep, I wrestle with the phantoms of my mind.
The things i did of yesteryear, were they reality?
Or were they just shapes and wisps of fog and shreds of memory?
Did I say this , did I do that as I go back in time?
And every night I lay me down with the phantoms of my mind.
Now all were not shadowy, the things that I had done.
Nor did every battle give me reason to atone.
As my black horse gallops through the halls of space and time,
And every night I battle with the phantoms of my mind
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