“European robins may maintain quantum entanglement in their eyes a full 20 microseconds longer than the best laboratory systems, say physicists investigating how birds may use quantum effects to “see” Earth’s magnetic field. “Quantum entanglement is a state where electrons are spatially separated, but able to affect one another. It’s been proposed that birds’ eyes contain entanglement-based compasses. “Conclusive proof doesn’t yet exist, but multiple lines of evidence suggest it. Findings like this one underscore just how sophisticated those compasses may be. “’How can a living system have evolved to protect a quantum state as well — no, better — than we can do in the lab with these exotic molecules?’” asked quantum physicist Simon Benjamin of Oxford University and the National University of Singapore, a co-author of the new study. “That really is an amazing thing.’”
Tag: art
Wabi Sabi, Ikebana & Zen
Wabi Sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence specifically impermanence, the other two being suffering and emptiness or absence of self-nature .
Quantum Meetings
As an artist and a sometimes curmudgeon. I’d love to meet Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Van Gogh, Moore, Rodin, Calder, De Kooning, Pollock. Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Mendieta, Bourgeoise, Basquiat and Dubuffet to name just a few. Add Weston, Newton, Avedon, Munkasi, Steiglitz and O’Keeffe, La Chappelle, Watson (Cyclops) and Adams. Add the doyen of the fashion photographers, the magazine design genius Alexei Brodovitch, and the great fashion editor Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazarr and the list goes on and on. It will not and cannot end!
The End Is Always Behind You
When you are ready to “die” for your honor like a samurai, or for your art, like an artist, you triumph and live. The samurai who goes to battle already “dead” comes back. The cowardly samurai who wants to live does not. Only those who hesitate die. Risk all and live! Just do it like a Top Gun and aim yourself at the devil. He will get out of your way. The fearsome fallen angel with pointed ears and tail is a pimp for the unholy and he has no taste for a battle with a fearless human. God. Satan or human, the Devil goes down!
BACH’S MIND: Part 4
I return to Bach, in a sometimes mad, often chaotic, and fortunately tuneful world. Who was this supposedly contented father with his family of musical children? What kind of children did he raise that left his widow, their mother Mary Magdelena to abject poverty after he died. Surely, he could not have been so selfless, loving and simple a person. Perhaps, genius that he was, totally absorbed in his music, he raised children who resented him, who secretly resented his genius even while the rich princes and patrons and the public applauded and enriched them.
BACH’S MIND: Part 3
The power of music derives from the singular fact that you hear music in “isolation.” When you look with your eyes, you encounter a complex field of vision filled with a multitude of objects of different sizes and colors, which I term the “camouflage effect.” When you listen to music, you hear the particular selection that you are listening to and nothing, or almost nothing else. The world around us appears to our eyes as a vast jungle filled with a thousand or a thousand thousand different kinds of trees, vines, creepers, chaos. The world of music is a mountain top, ringing in the clear air above the tempests below, where, alone, and in the dark, you hear the sough of the wind, the slide of glaciers, or the cry of a high flying bird–a crane perhaps.
BACH’S MIND: Part 2
Bach’s music transcends an illusion of reality created from five billion years of evolution from a whirling burning ball born from vast clouds of dust to a green planet, humans, and the beauty of Gaia, the earth mother. Music takes us into the cathedrals of Bach’s mind where great chords and eloquent chorales create paradise. What is holy is the art surpasses imagination and creates a holy cosmic stage for the great orchestra of the universe to perform music that surpasseth understanding.
BACH’S MIND: Part 1
Outside my studio the sky is clearest blue. I think of many years of pleasure listening to Bach’s last, unfinished work, the Art of the Fugue. After thirty-five years and more of listening (it took ten years for me to hear the work as melody and architectonic grandeur) it remains ever fresh. The work grows more beautiful, like the sounds of the sea, the patter of rain, the murmur of the wind, ranks of cloudscapes and rainbows, a snow capped mountain range soaring into the heavens. Bach is of nature as nature is of Bach. The artist and the web of nature are distinct antipodes of a universal sameness — evolutionary poles that stretch across a cosmos of thought and action — the world entire. The Art of the Fugue plays in my heaven. Eternally.
ROSES
To see into a rose in its full glory, pistils stretched out to seduce pollen from darting bees, delicate and ferocious, an immolation of blushing colors, is to see paradise lost, the innocence of Eden slain by dragons, a sinister sacrament of bloody wafers.
Spiritual Journeys With A Warrior Photographer: Part 1
We feed and force feed our pliable brains with streams, rivers, torrents of new knowledge, magical potions that renew it again and again. We must exercise our brains to their limits, if there are limits, with the difficult, inexplicable mysterious knowledge of quantum physics and metaphysics, Eastern philosophy, the TAO, Zen and all the myriad discoveries and expressions and revelations of all of the arts and sciences. New art, new science, they are the same. We learn the most from that we find hard to understand, and/or fear or dislike the most. We are the fearless rebels that create the future.
Moonlight Sonatas
Light is the universe itself. Light is not in our universe, we are in light’s universe. That is why no matter how fast you move towards matching the speed of light, light everywhere moves away from you at the same speed of 186,000 miles per second. Einstein’s theory of gravity was proven by experiments which showed changes in positions of the stars in images taken during total eclipses. That meant that space around the sun was curved. It did not mean that the sun was there when unobserved. The Copenhagen Interpretation has been much disputed but is largely accepted after one hundred years as scientific fact. The universe is stranger than we know and quantum mechanics is stranger as well.
Senegal
I had been to Africa a number of times as an adventure travel photographer. My personal goal was to avoid making the usual grimy, sick or starving children that so often stare out at us from the media. My intuition proved correct. The children were beautiful, well mannered, enthusiastic and very much aware of the United States, as were their parents. It was an opportunity to step back in time and discover a rarely seen image of the people, young and old, of Senegal or Africa. It was a privilege. The images tell the story.