Bridewell Museum, Norwich

The Bridewell museum in Norwich is a microcosm of industrialisation. In my recent visit to this museum I discovered that it has exhibits which are representative of all the prototypical elements of industrialisation: Machines, shopkeepers, and most important of all the avid consumer who can exchange money earned for manufactured goods. The consumer showcased at the museum was a country parson who made special trips into Norwich to buy, carefully monitoring his expenditure at the same time. As for machines, the working Jacquard loom and a electromechanical traffic light controller represented the antecedents of computerisation. 

See Facebook album here: 

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10202101714052219.1073741833.1468664406&type=1&l=0569b63aec

The Riddle of The Sphinx

The Time Traveller was confronted by a sphinx with a faint shadow of a smile on its face.

In the two years following 1998 I wrote two essays that were inspired by my reading of H. G. Wells book “The Time Machine”. These essays can be downloaded as one PDF from here. They were my personal exploration of the loss of religious faith that is closely associated with the kind of world view implicit in The Time Machine. My copy of Wells' story, which I read in the nineties, was presented to me by my brother-in-law Jonathan Benison. It was very helpfully annotated by Jon’s erudite editorial notes, notes which proved to be very illuminating as I struggled to form my personal view on the message in the book. Jon himself was also struggling with the issues raised by the book and it was clear to me that he too didn't accept what he referred to as “reductive half-truths”; in this sense Jon was a fellow traveller and pilgrim.

The general tenor of the book is bleak and nihilistic. In fact it is difficult to derive much consolation from Wells' world view; that view is one of a cosmos which in the large scale is utterly indifferent to human affairs and concerns, a place where beyond our very parochial context there can be found no meaning and purpose. Wells sends his Time Traveler on a mission into the far future thus giving him a startling retrospect on the heady and confident times of Victorian England. Or were they confident? Doubts were beginning to set in, it seems. From the distant vantage point of nearly a millions years hence ephemeral human affairs, according to Wells, pale into insignificance. This is what Jon Benison refers to as the cosmic perspective.

Wells was writing in late Victorian England and his views were based on what he believed to be the ramifications of the relatively new evolutionary theory. The riddle of meaning that the science of the day posed Wells and mankind as a whole is, I believe, very aptly symbolized by the figure of the Sphinx which the Time Traveler meets and which looms forbiddingly over the whole story. It has now been well over a century since the book was published, but that same riddle confronts us today. Wells was either warning us to respond proactively to the riddle of the cosmic perspective or Wells himself had actually acquiesced to it. These essays are my own reaction to this riddle.

"The Universe doesn't care about us!" said one atheist when he saw this spectacular meteor entering the atmosphere over Russia.

Further relevant links.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-1.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-3.html  

Rock of Ages

Perched Granite Boulder, Lands-end, UK

During a recent holiday on the Pernwith peninsula (near Land’s End in Cornwall, England) I took a set of photographs of the coastal scenery and rock. These photographs can be seen in this Facebook album. For comparison I have also added some photos I took in 2006 on Bodmin Moor. (Also in Cornwall)

Both Bodmin moor and the Penwith peninsula are the eroded remains of huge granitic intrusions. Granite is melted and re-solidified Earth’s crust, although the exact mechanisms of both the intrusion and the subsequent production of exfoliation joints in the granite by erosion is still the subject of academic debate according to this wiki article.

Whenever I’m confronted with scenes of cliffs, valley’s and rock pinnacles such as we see at Penwith, the deep time needed to generate this “rock of ages” landscape feels very real. In this particular connection crustal melting caused by plate collisions that built mountains was followed by the slow cooling of rock deep underground. This slow cooling is evidenced by the large crystals of Penwith’s coarse grained granite. (See the large white feldspar crystals in one of my photos). All this was followed by an extremely slow process of grain by grain erosion. In fact when one beholds a rock pinnacle of granite and imagines that it was once underground and surrounded by an extensive apron of extremely hard igneous rock one senses that the length of time needed to leave this isolated outlier must be immerse, let alone first erode the mountain of rock above it.

As far as Cornwall is concerned both Bodmin Moor and the Penwith peninsula have the greatest concentration of Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments.  This may be simply because these granite landscapes provided a ready supply of very durable stone. Or, and this is a speculation, did these ancient people, seeing the marvellous rock formations around them desire to ape whatever agency they believed created them?  We have, of course, no idea what these prehistoric communities believed about a cosmos whose workings on the grand-scale was utterly mysterious to them. Extrapolating from what we know today of preliterate societies it is quite likely that prehistoric communities understood their surroundings in terms of the operation of background sentience. To them, therefore, the landscape was full of awareness and sacredness. Today, however, with our mechanical paradigm, we understand how insentient processes have generated these remarkable forms; we see these processes as being utterly unaware of us and themselves, with no power of empathy; in effect they are psychopathic! No surprise, then, that an atheist, when he saw the frightening and awesome spectacle of the recent meteor entering the atmosphere over Russia, should say “Nature doesn't care about us!”

Today we have to dig a bit deeper, quite a bit deeper in fact, before we find sacredness. But then we know a lot more than those simple Neolithic societies; a lot, lot more. So where we lose we also gain. We know today that conscious sentience is not to be found at the low level of the bit, byte, particle, or boulder but at the high level of the grand organization of the world . (See also here)

The Cheesewring, Bodmin Moor, UK. Perched pillows of granite.

Note: 
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html