The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #125101   Message #2769396
Posted By: Donuel
19-Nov-09 - 04:17 PM
Thread Name: BS: What made you a science junkie
Subject: RE: BS: What made you a science junkie
Unless I rewrite something, it sounds like English is my second language and has a tendency to hurt the brains of literate people so...

I became addicted to science at an early age. To give you an idea of my formative influences my first two pre school books were the Cat in the Hat and The Ice Age. I could innately read both although my parents were dubious. As a 6 year old kid I was lucky that my mom got me a Scientific American magazine subscription. Sure it got me in trouble at school when my essays were about Evolution and a true timeline of the Universe but it was invaluable. Then a 7th grade Earth Science teacher named Mr. Daily did something I never saw before, he cared. He taught me the principles and pitfalls of observation. This proved to be crucial in understanding scientific method. Later in college I learned that the unknown has a place at the table and can be called Phenomenology instead of BS.

To this day the subject of the Ice Ages still resonates within me like a distant memory and is still a fascinating study. Later books like the Ascent of Man as well as Connections by Burke and even works by Joseph Campbell had a powerful influence upon me.

Often religion presented itself as a barrier to scientific inquiry within the Bible belt in which I grew up. Not as a defense for zealous wrench slingers, but the study of the nature of religion does indeed add a wider scope to scientific understanding even if it only believing in a truth which is "unseeable". Some myths and organized religions have more to do with science than others but I would defend the notion that religion does provide a platform for knowing and wonder that can be valuable, especially in the arena of cosmology as portrayed in the book The Tao of physics and others.

I have lived to see many of the accepted scientific notions of their day thrown out the window. Some were preposterous to begins with such as Phrenology but there were were other widely accepted ideas like the steady state theory and the notion that the age of cataclysmic impacts was over. Many of the speculations by Velikovski and Tesla have been vindicated. When it came to understanding E=Mc2 I mistakenly thought I understood but I really did not have a handle on it until my forties and still get stuck today when I think of two timelines at once.

On the other hand I saw some early discredited pioneers proved correct. In genetics the notions by a Russian scientist in the 1800's claimed we could inherit ability and knowledge from recent as well as distant ancestors is now proven with the discovery of exo-genetic coding of our DNA. I saw Jules Verne's fictional inventions proved correct.
I began to feel that I too could invent things if I gave them enough thought, and I was right. Contending with nay sayers in science is no different than any other endeavor be it the arts or politics. It's easy for people to stand their ground and yell "impossible".

My greatest scientific opportunity, or curse, was to witness 3 events that were totally unexplainable by main stream physics. That I can recount them is a miracle in itself since we usually do not see or remember something that is 'Completely Outside' our normal frame of visual reference, language and everyday experience. Take for example a fictional scene where you look at a tree and it suddenly becomes twice as tall and then back to its original height in a split second. You would think your eyes played a trick or simply dismiss it as some sort of glare and never bring that moment to mind again.

In other words when something that you depend on to always be a certain way appears to do something impossible, we tend to dismiss it. Well you can't dismiss everything you can't explain. Like a guy who sees and feels his first earthquake, I knew what I saw and could not forget. Sometimes there is plenty of evidence left behind and sometimes the evidence is less obvious.

I have mentioned this one particular strange occurrence many times before, and can describe the physical parameters with ease. What I suspect that I saw was a fourth dimensional object poke its nose into our 3D space and time. It had light and color of a subtle yellow pink nebulous semi transparent glow. It had the shape of two spheres about a foot in diameter each and about 4 feet apart. It had motion of about 1.5 miles per hour as one sphere followed the initial sphere as they passed through one brick wall and then another wall of wood and plaster 9 feet up from the floor and 2 feet down from the ceiling. It had sound like a high pitched sizzle or hiss. They scared my cat who immediately puffed all its hair out on end and hissed at the slow moving spheres. It scared me because I wanted to put my hand right inside it but I could only manage the courage to try and touch the outer part of their glow while I was standing on the sofa.
The globes had now passed through an inner wall and I had to go through three other rooms to get to where I estimated they would re emerge in the immense vestibule of the once glorious mansion of the man who invented Evening in Paris Perfume. When I searched for the globes they were gone.
But all of this is just an ourward description of the experience and does not tell of the deeper experience.

Seeing, feeling and hearing these "glowing globes' was not so difficult even though they were completely out of the ordinary. What is difficult to describe is what it had done to time, something I always held somewhat predicable and inviolate. It caused my perception of time to become non linear for about an hour and caused such a peculiar confusion that each time I found a clue to what was now different, I carefully noted it and tried to put time back in a linear framework and make sense of what was happening. I said to myself "OK I was just in this room but now it is locked from the inside and the cat is outside even though I closed the door so the cat would not get out." I made excuses for not remembering or the cat being to fast for me, but by the end of that hour when time returned to normal it was clear that time had just done a peculiar circle that I had never encountered before. The peculiar feeling of being partly in the very near future and the present at the same time is yet another clumsy way to describe what I felt. This was not just missing time or having time slow down due to focused attention, this was new. It was outside my ability to explain it.

As a result I started reading books on time and dimensions beginning with Flat Land.
Today I am comfortable with knowing that my space time is less than 4% of all the stuff and dimensions using this space all at the same… existence. In a way I came to feel that we must take care to not harm what is unseen. This is probably a notion Oppenheimer may have given a passing thought when 300 atmospheric nuclear tests had poisoned our planet and children with leukemia. They may have effected more than our own 3D world.

What do I think of other dimensions?    Since it 'affected' me I guess we probably effect it. Time waves, gravity waves, 11 dimensions, virtual particles from other times, dark matter, tachyons moving in contrary time? I reckon its all true. Einstein once said, "Our thoughts go against the grain of space time". I believe we do have experiences and ideas that jump up and over the currents of space time like a salmon swimming upstream.

Seeing is not believing, and feelings, while powerful, are not evidence of truth. Together they are a starting point on the search for truth.

I think my unusual experiences have happened to many people, but they interpreted it differently or not at all. Finding out empirically what strange phenomenon is responsible for the perception, is the stuff of scientific inquiry. While the unknown is made of wonder and can be as electrifying as magic, the scientific explanation should not burst the wonder bubble but rather lead to the control of new and tremendous human abilities…which sadly is usually first exploited for war.

Countless people have speculated upon the serious trouble mankind would get into if we ever got a handle on the manipulation of time. Maybe there are some scientific secrets worth keeping for now.