撰文：向云飞 

心灵自由30天写作第三期第一篇

This is a notes and summary plus some personal reflection from the NOVA ducomentary <The Fabric of the Cosmos>

Episode 1: Space

Empty space is not nothing.

It is fabric, can bend, can twist, can ripple, it helps shape everything in the world around us.

Our World is made of space. Space is everywhere.

The perception of movements inside a absolute empty space, indicates that there must be something in space so that I can move with reference with.

Something, out of nothing.

Issac Newton: Space is a empty stage, a framework, it is passive, absolute, eternal, and unchanging.

But it has to be real, it’s not nothing, to provide a benchmark for certain kinds of motion(the skater)

Albert Einstein: Revolutionized our idea about space by study light speed, which moves 671 million miles per hour, and it is always traveling at this rate regardless of relative speed of objects.

Since Speed is the measure of the space that something travels over time, if the speed of light were to remain constant, Space and Time must work together, constantly adjusting by exactly the right amount to ensure the speed of light remains unchanged. This is the absolute quality about light.

Time and Space have to cease to be absolute, they have to be relative. They melt together with motion, forming a single entity: Spacetime

Then Gravity is a shape of Spacetime. (bending of spacetime caused by heavy objects) The fact that Moon orbits around earth is because the spacetime got bent because of the mass of earth.

So, space is a active fabric, intervowen with time, effects the objects move within.

Leonard Schiff: Used gyroscope proved Einstain’s theory, the shiftting of axis

Quantum Mechanics:particles are constantly popping in and out of existence, they erupt out of nothingness, quickly annihilate each other, and disappear,

Hendrik Casimir: these particle should cause the space to do something we can see: Two plates pushed together, when the particles between them are pushed out, they should be pushed by the particles in the space,

On atomic level: empty space are flooded with activity that can force objects to move

Petter Higgs: Space is like an ocene, particles move inside and gain mass.

The existence of a field(Higgs field)

Supernova observation shows that the universe’s expanding is speeding up, so there must be a springiness.

Something fills the space and counteracts the pull of gravity---Dark Energy(70% of universe)So, the weight of empty space itself is 70% of the weight of the entire universe.

Through the ideas of Higgs and dark engergy, the very expansion of the universe may be coming from the energy of empty space itself.

Einstein hypothesized 80 years ago, universe must be either contracting or expanding, he called itcosmological constant(The outward push force that counteracts the gravity)

Idea of Holograms: All the objects, the material reality may be a projection of information that’s stored on a thin, distant, 2-D surface.

If we throw a wallet into blackhole, a 2-D version stored with all the information, remains on the surface.

The information content that fell into the black hole, can be expressed entirely in terms of just the outside of the black hole.

You can capture what’s going on inside the blackhole, by referring only to the outside, In theory, I can use the information on the ouside to reconstruct my wallet.

Space within the black hole, plays by the same rule as space outside, or anywhere else, if the objects in the black hole, can be desribed by information on the black hole’s surface, it might be that everything in the universe is just a projection of information stored on some distant, 2-D surface that surrounds us, what we experience as reality may be something like a hologram.

Anyway, this world is an illusion.

And I see the Marriage of science of contemplative literature(religion, psychology, spirituality, mysticism) is coming to a solid form.

Plato had similar proposition with his Allegory of the Cave: What we saw as objects, things ,people, are the imitates of forms. Forms are the essences of objects, there are Form of tableness at the core of all the tables, Form of horseness at the core of all the horse, and world of Forms is transcendent to our material world, and the essential basis of reality.

The objects that are seen, according to Plato, are not real, but literally mimic the real Forms. In the Allegory of the Cave expressed in Republic, the things that are ordinarily perceived in the world are characterized as shadows of the real things, which are not perceived directly. That which the observer understands when he views the world mimics the archetypes of the many typesand properties (that is, of universals) of things observed.

The parallel is astounding.

Within psychological interature, I always like to see Freud as Newton, Jung as Einstein. Freud’s idea about unconscious, dynamics within the psyche, had laid the scientific ground for all the later development and new-unfoldments. From the study ofhysteria,and later extensive study of neurosis, he developed a comprehensive and coherent model of human psyche. And later, Jung came along with the idea of collective-unconcisous, archetypes, and a whole new way to interpret dreams, and analyze psychic activity. He proved Freud’s limitation, short-sight, and drastic incompleteness in terms of understanding human psyche, though in no way should render him as a great thinker and his ground-breaking contribution.

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