Things of interest, besides UFOs

While most of you have a slight or inordinate interest in the UFO phenomenon, most of academia and science find their obsessions elsewhere; UFOs are of little or no interest to intellectuals of various human disciplines.

For instance, Mathematics is/are getting enormous attention by persons for whom mathematics was a peripheral or subsidiary process, for them, at one time.

Edward Frenkel’s book, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality proposes that mathematical structures (equations, numbers, arithmetic, et cetera) are among the “objects of reality”; they are every bit as real as anything in the physical or mental world. Moreover, they are not the product of human thought; rather they exist timelessly, in a Platonic realm of their own. [Writes Jim Holt, on page 29 in his NYRB review of Frenkel’s book, December 5^th, 2013]

Max Tegmark’s article in Discover magazine [December 2013, Page 44 ff.] from his book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality [Knopf/Doubleday/Random House, NY] insists that “Everything in the universe – stars, chess games, and you – is part of a vast mathematical structure.”

Again, citing Plato, Tegmark writes “that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematics [which] makes us self-aware [that we are] parts of a giant mathematical object.” [Page 47]

“Modern physics has made it abundantly clear that he ultimate nature of reality isn’t what it seems.” [op. cit]

Tegmark’s piece falls inside that same Discover issue which has Zeeya Merali’s article, “Do We Live in the Matrix,” another ongoing theme of science which is at the top of the discussion ladder lately.

Merali notes that “Tantalizingly, just weeks before The Matrix came out … astronomers analyzing the light from distant galaxies published hints that the universe’s ‘constants” might not be so constant.” [Page 26]

Math and quantum physics meld in such a way that physicists and scientists are questioning reality, abandoning string theory, but still trying to salvage M-Theory, as scientific thought is now geared to the Platonic ideas of reality, existence outside the cave.

(You can find Steven Weinberg’s “Physics: What we Do and Don’t Know” at NYRB.com, the November 7^th issue of the Review for more, if interested.)

Not quite The Matrix but Sue Halpern’s “Are We Puppets in a Wired World” [NYRB, November 7^th 2013, Page 24 ff.] will provide a slew of works showing how the internet and current technologies impact and alter our lives and reality itself.

Consciousness and thought processes are getting a make-over once more, with almost everyone in psychology, philosophy, neurological science, et al. weighing in on the matter of brain versus mind.

Oliver Sacks is my go-to guy for mind/brain analogues but you can find all the current discussions, online (via Google or Bing), although I suggest discrimination about what you find or read. (Some of our visitors here only get their information and “smarts” from writings online or YouTube, not being forensic about the source or authors of the stuff they think is intellectually pristine.)

And, finally, while working on a Shakespeare book, I’ve discovered one more playwright and writer of his time who might have been part of the consortium that created the Shakespeare oeuvre, George Chapman.

That, to me, is more exciting than UFOs, Roswell, or anything in the paranormal realm; it’s to do with our human reality, within or without the Matrix.

So, UFOs be damned. They offer little in the way of practical knowledge about what we are or who we are. And they take us from thinking sensibly often.

Others, of a more-rational bent, eschew UFOs, and one can see why, if they (including me) abandon their obsession with the obtuse phenomenon.

There is more to life and reality than UFOs can resolve, whether they remain unexplained or eventually get a solution from some real UFO researcher.

RR