Friday, June 12, 2015

New Information

The title of this blog has changed, as you may have noticed.  New information came to light, as they say.   I named this blog after the one of the winds of Ka'u, whose name I got from a passing conversation with a friend who happens to be a great authority on all things native Hawaiian.  I thought she called the wind ehulepo but perhaps I misheard her, because it is called kuehu lepo in the song "Aloha No Ka'u."  My daughter Ua pointed this out to me.  And it makes more sense, linguistically.


Aia i ka lae hema o Keawe
P ā mai ana ka makani Kuehu Lepo



There at the southern tip of Keawe
The Kuehu Lepo wind blows



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Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Wow, it's been more than a month since I've "blogged" or written anything of substance, really.

 I've read many interesting books, the meantime.  Most stimulating perhaps was "The Science of Interstellar" by the movie's consulting physicist Kip Thorne, with its discussions of wormholes, our universe as a four dimensional membrane ("the brane" in physics nerd-speak)within a five-plus dimensional "bulk" and, more prosaically, the politics and mechanics of how a movie gets made.

The most fun was reading Books Two and Three of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Phillip Pullman, which also involves worm holes of a sort, dark matter, and multiple universes interwoven with the grand Christian eschatological vision of John Milton, and lots of talking animals.  What's not to love about that!

And I've come to the conclusion that, pace Kip Thorne and the other techno-physicists that want to escape this planet for an interstellar destiny, there are only three physical dimensions.  And there are no wormholes, or ever will be, that will let us escape our three-dimensional physical bodies. (Except maybe death?)

There are however at least two other dimensions: Time and Meaning, but these are biological, rather than purely physical dimensions.   And that is where "the sciences" and "the humanities," in the current,  rather silly, division of knowledge, meet up, ineluctably - although we don't really know it yet, so wrapped up are we in the technology that a purely physical physics has delivered to us (at our peril.)  We have a ways to travel yet before we see ourselves clearly as minds within the larger mind of the world/universe/universes, if we ever do.