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quarking up the wrong tree by patrick harpur, taken from fortean times magazine. quantum physics is just another attempt to pin down the unknowable, and patrick harpur finds echoes in greek mythology, fairy-lore, ufology and the romantic poets' excursions into the realms of imagination. |
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ufo's come from: remote planets, inside a hollow earth, other dimensions, within our psyches and so on. that is, they come from beyond, below, behind, inside, within etc. competing theories about ufo origins have one thing in common - they are all literal readings of spatial metaphors. this gives us a clue as to their real origin: imagination, which in esoteric philosophy (such as alchemy) has always been more important than, say, reason. as described by coleridge, keats, blake and yeats, imagination is an oceanic realm of images which exists independently of us, although we participate in it. it prefers personified images such as gods and daimons; but 'image' also includes the ideas and dramatic patterns constituting the myths which (whether we know it or not) underpin our lives. actually, imagination does not contain images as 'ocean' or 'realm' imply; it is image. like plato's 'world' of forms or jung's collective unconscious, its archetypes cannot be known separately from the images by which they represent themselves. analogously, imagination is in itself non-spatial but always represents itself - imagines itself - in a non-spatial way. so, when confronted with its images (they can be quasi-physical like ufo's) we always imagine a space of origin. but these spaces, whether outer or inner space for instance, are only metaphors for imagination itself. we are correct to take them as real, but mistaken if we take them literally. as sallust said of myths: "these things never happened; they always are." in ufology, the multi-spatiality of the theories of ufo origins represents the non-spatiality of imagination which, like the traditional definition of god, is 'an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere'. fairy lore sensibly makes multi-spatiality a part of its beliefs: the faries are simultaneously said to live underground or in the air, under the sea or on islands out to the west. the ancient greeks had a similar variety of locations for the realm of the d |
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the ancient greeks had a similar variety of locations for the realm of the dead. thus a useful metaphor for imagination is the 'otherworld', which can be located at any, or all, of the prepositions i started with. the 'otherworld' begins at the boundaries of the known, whether off the edge of maps where there be dragons or new worlds; beyond death where paradises and infernos lie; or, for a child, simply beyond the garden gate. as literal boundaries are extended, so the 'otherworld' is re-imagined. as the earth was explored and the wild places domesticated, their daimons (fairies for example) shape-shifted into extraterrestrials. the aliens of the fifties from venus and mars had to re-locate to distant star systems as soon as these planets became better understood. the 'otherworld' also lies beyond the bounds of our senses. the fairy-tale nature of outer space is evident from the names of its denizens; red giants, white dwarfs, black holes, singularities etc. at the edge of the universe, inconceivably huge somethings recede at speeds close to that of light. called quasars, they might just as well be called ufo's. cosmology is more like some archaic gnostic myth than anything we might recognise as science. at the other end of the scale, the subatomic 'realm' is simply fairyland. in both cases the cosy newtonian world is inverted and the laws of space, time, matter and causality are distorted or ignored. (in fairyland, time is elastic, space zooms in and out, matter shape-changes, cause is... acausal and magical.) |
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in both cases the uncertainty principle applies. fairies, like particles, are there and not there; like electrons they are both material and non-magical. they are quantum events at the bottom of the garden. we cannot know particles in themselves, but only by the traces they leave, like tiny yetis. they are as elusive, maddening and paradoxical as fairies ever were. upness, strangeness and charm are names as fit for ufo's as for quarks. both fairies and particles are disturbed by the act of being observed; subject and object are not finally distinguishable. particles whose existence is predicted obligingly turn up - if we didn't know better we might almost say they had been imagined into existence... and so on. scientists, like fundamentalists, can easily fall prey to literalism. their 'otherworlds' are metaphorical realms literalised into 'fact'. (actually, the whole universe is an imaginative construct which kindly supplies data for whatever view of it we care to hold.) the subatomic world is not a bad imagining; it's just rather grey and meaningless compared to the glittering halls of fairyland - to say nothing of the world william blake, without the aid of particle accelerators, saw in a grain of sand... |
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interesting indeed. |
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The Fortean times is ace. There was a good TV series based on it on UK tv a couple of years ago. |
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i also loved it. but then the TV show stopped and so did the magazine it seemed |
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i really dont feel like reading all of that so im just going to nod and act like im thinking about it. |
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thanx Disasemble Im glad u liked the reading ;) |
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quite an interesting paradigm. If i read this on amazon.com or something, i'd probably be interested in buying it. I'm about to read "6 easy steps" by some supposedly famous physisist, though I've never heard of him. I'll see if that can shed any light on what the hell quantum mechanics is supposed to be, or if the theory has successfully been used to do anything. I don't know much about it but so far sort of agree that it's weird... imagined stuff. |
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