Etude

For some composers, an étude is a piece for a pianist to study, more than for a listener to savor. Perhaps it was because he sensed this as a danger that Chopin wrote études that were engaging to the audience. In this one, he begins with one of his all-time most beautiful melodies, and Lang Lang milks it for full value.

— Fred Chopin was born 204 years ago today.

Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram

One of the most powerful things you can do with mathematics is to prove that two theories that offer different prescriptions for calculating something will always end up making the same predictions. The calculations will always come up with the same answer, even though they may look different. A simple example is adding up 7 copies of the number 6. You get the same answer as adding up 6 copies of the number 7. It works in this one case. Furthermore, you can prove that it always works, that N x M is always going to be the same as M x N, no matter what numbers N and M stand for.

In 1948, Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger came up with different theories for combining relativity and quantum mechanics to predict what happens to an electron. The theories used different languages, different techniques, different mathematical methods. Physicists noticed they seemed to give the same answers, though. A young genius named Freeman Dyson went back and forth between Feynman and Schwinger, learned enough about both theories that he understood them deeply, and proved that they would always yield the same answer. The two very different theories were equivalent.

Einstein’s theory of gravity, sometimes called General Relativity, is 100 years old and it is still the standard way to calculate what happens in very strong gravitational fields. String theory is an upstart, and no one agrees yet how to calculate with it. But one version of string theory predicts what happens in strong gravitational fields. Is it the same as Einstein’s theory? The question is too complicated to approach, so far. But last week, some Japanese physicists published the result of a very complicated calculation, done two ways via Einstein and via string theory. The answers came out identical. That makes us suspect that the theories that look so different really are equivalent.

— read more from Nature

Why does this article talk about holograms? I think it’s because a hologram is a 2D representation that contains all the information in a 3D scene, and Einstein’s GR is a 4-dimensional theory that contains all the information in a 9-dimensional string theory. But I’m not so sure of this, and if you understand more about it than I do, please write me.

Celebrate life: Deep passion and deep detachment

“[How do I do it?] Well, it's always a mystery, because you don't know why you get depleted or recharged. But this much I know. I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential. And I've learned from the Bhagavad-Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me to take on the next challenge, because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.”

— Vandana Shiva works through modern science and native cultures to preserve our biological legacy.

Doubting doubt

“Our minds are riddled and confused with doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is the greatest block to human evolution.  Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence.  We have become so falsely “sophisticated” and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth…

…

"Our contemporary education, then, indoctrinates us in the glorification of doubt, has created in fact what could almost be called a religion or theology of doubt, in which to be seen to be intelligent we have to be seen to doubt everything, to always point to what’s wrong and rarely ask what’s right or good, cynically to denigrate all inherited spiritual ideals and philosophies, or anything that is done in simple goodwill or with an innocent heart.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche, from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Come slowly, Eden!

Lips unused to thee,
Bashful, sip thy jasmines,
As the fainting bee,

Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums,
Counts his nectars—enters,
And is lost in balms!

— Emily Dickinson

Little Duck

Now we are ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf.
No, it isn’t a gull.

A gull always has a raucous touch about him.
This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.
He isn’t cold, and he is thinking things over.

There is a great heaving in the Atlantic,
And he is a part of it.
He looks a little like a mandarin,

Or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree
But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher.
He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.

Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.

And what does he do, I ask you. He sits down in it.
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity – which it is.
That is religion, and the duck has it.

He has made himself a part of the boundless,
by easing himself into it just where it touches him.
I like the little duck.

He doesn’t know much.
But he has religion.

— Donald Babcock (from The New Yorker, 4 Oct 1947

Identify what you deeply want

The things that we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from. From the normal vantage point, it certainly seems that only with discipline can we withstand the temptations that surround us: overeating, drugs, video games, mindless internet surfing, and everything else we consume.  These things are undeniably destructive to our own lives and beyond; therefore, it would seem, we cannot always trust desire at all.  But when we recognize that these are not really what we desire, our goal becomes not to suppress desire but to identify the true want or need, and to fulfill it.  That is no trivial task; it is a profound path of self-realization.

— Charles Eisenstein

Boredom is so endemic to our culture, particularly among youth, that we imagine it to be a near-universal default state of human existence.  In the absence of outside stimuli we are bored. Yet…boredom is virtually unique to Western culture (and by extension to the global culture it increasingly dominates).…greed like boredom is absent in most hunter-gatherer cultures based on a more open conception of self.

Staying young in spirit

One of the myths of aging is that we cannot do all the things that we once could. But the actual fact about aging is that we retreat from doing exploring the full scope of our personhood.  As our search for a vocation settles into a fixed “job,” as our search for a mate settles into marriage, as our many expectations settle into a finite number of fulfillments, as our aspirations settle into steady certitudes, and as our broad range of potential movements settles into a narrow band of habitual movements, we will inevitably find ourselves looking in fewer directions and moving in fewer dimensions.  As the possibilities in our life are sorted through, discarded, and finally edited down to a daily routine of actualities, our living functions become limited and specialized.

The accepted personal goal of “adulthood” is, it seems, to settle down and obtain security, to obtain a fixed pattern of life that allows us to escape from the insecurity of freedom and the incertitude of new aspirations.  To the degree that individual human beings are seduced into the accepted belief that personal fulfillment means a settled, secure, and circumscribed mode of life, so, to that degree, do the functions of one’s living body adapt, becoming simpler, more straightforward, and rigid.

— Thomas Hanna

Listen to Nicolas Altstaedt performLied for Cello and Orchestra by Vincent D’Indy, born this day in 1851.

D’Indy was a musical prodigy who didn’t take formal lessons until his teen years. He had a stubborn, almost dogmatic Christian faith, and a conservative view of music. He was famous and influential in his own lifetime, and largely forgotten after progressive musical trends passed him by.

Altstaedt is a young cellist with extraordinary expressive subtlety and range. You can watch him play the Lutoslawski concerto.

Lucid dreams as a probe of the nature of reality

Let me ask you a very important question.  Why should you ever deny the value and importance of your own personal experience, of your intuition, of what you discover through deep introspection, of what you learn not by looking outside, but by focusing your attention within?  Your own subjective experience, your own consciousness, is the most important tool you have to learn about the world!  In fact, it can be argued that it is the only tool you have to learn about the world!

— Video by Dolors

“The existence of quantum theory has changed our attitude from what was believed in the nineteenth century.  During that period some scientists were inclined to think that the psychological phenomena could ultimately be explained on the basis of physics and chemistry of the brain.  From the quantum-theoretical point of view, there is no reason for such an assumption.  […] for an understanding of psychic phenomena we would start from the fact that the human mind enters as object and subject into the scientific process of psychology.”
— Werner Heisenberg

“Dreams pass into the reality of action.
From the actions stems the dream again;
and this interdependence produces
the highest form of living.”
Anaïs Nin