17 March, 2006

Inspiration from discredited sources: Time and Fate!

The Edge: between Science and Philosophy

Today I remembered, since my play in the garden of Gold losses my mind in petty fights, that there's a place I'd love to be, somewhere where Causality meets the Human mind, and where Singularity is the closest thing to God.

Maybe is not really sane to keep literature on Foucault, Jung and Hawkings' Astrophysics in the nightstand. Maybe mixing and shuffling like an academic Chinese dish is not really a good way to draw conclusions on the meaning and fate of the Universe, but I can't help it, its just my way of doing it.

You see, the last edition of Mage: the Awakening (a dull remake of the mind-blowing Mage: the Ascension) has these little things called "Spheres", which describes "areas" of power of the different characters (who, as mages, manipulate reality through magic): Time, Fate, Death (Decay is more Politically Correct), Matter and others make up this "departmentalization" of reality (although very flexible, believe me). But, as I said, this was a dull remake of a great original, these Spheres (ten in total), were grouped in five "Towers" (don't ask), which grouped pairs of spheres.

One of the groups, I was reading lately, was formed by Time and Fate. Why is this so? I asked myself, who are Time and Fate related? Other combinations were more "obvious", like Matter and Death (so scholars say that matter is the static state of energy) or Forces/Prime (the primal force and its manifestation in the mundane world); but Time/Fate made wonder for a while how come these two got together…

Just for a while.

While reading Hawkings chapter on the Uncertainty Principle in "A brief history of time", he talk about something Social Scientists have know for a long time: the mere observation affects the object of study and changes its behavior, called it quanta (the energy of light shone on particles changes their position) or a focus group, just stating a problem changes it from its "natural state" and creates a new, different, situation (I believe Mickey have a better idea on this than me, go ask him :D).

Now, how does this relate to Time and Fate? (And why should we care!?)

Well, the poor Schoedinger's cat is still in the microwave, waiting for radiation to kill him (or not) creating what physics call a "wavelength", a possibility more than a state that shows that the cat is dead and alive at the same time. When we open the microwave the wavelength will collapse and the cat will finally meet his maker (or not!).

Also, I've delved deeply into two other lectures: one is for Jung's "qualitative time". When looking for a scientific proof for his Synchronicity principle (as opposed to the standard deterministic Causality principle), Jung needed to re-define time from the usual absolute-measured quantitative time, to a qualitative version were every moment per se holds a value that only when evaluated in relation to others we could determine whether it was meaningful or not. The second lecture affirmed this idea when dealing with how to interpret tarot cards (Hajo Banzhaf's work is very close to my view on oracles, treating them with respect and as a tool for inner development, not just for cheap trick and personal delusions), when an asker queries when does the card's answer will appear: Banzhaf says that, as the mayor arcane shows; cards, their symbols and their depicted situations and meanings do not evolve in a quantifiable way, your true love won't appear in three days (no matter how many people you cop in the chain letter), but what will happens is that when you deal with the processes interpreted in the drawing of the cards (hopefully having a deep, meaningful, sincere and educated interpretation), then your true love (as an example) may appear and you will be able to accept him/her (like a meaningful coincidence).

Finally, quantitative time is measured by the measuring of the happening of actual physical events that are actually more "reliable" than others, to rephrase it better: "that are not prone to the effects of probability and chaos and that repeat consistently".

Putting this all together, I came up with this (come on! you've already passed the boring part).

Time, is not a measure per se (Kant would kill me for this), is just the measure of the happening of an event or not. Imagine that Schoedinger's cat is a complete Universe, then, with no one to open the microwave, the cat would remain in its wavelength state, and there would be no "time" in this Universe, since no events happen.

Additionally, as the Uncertainty Principle tells us and the theory on singularity points complements (points in space time when all mass and energy, including gravity, converge and where quantum physics play a bigger role than the standard "Einstenian" ones), the "time" in this Universe would be ruled by Chance ( a.k.a. Mage's Fate Sphere), since unless the wavelength is collapsed (until the door is opened), there's only a chance of the cat being dead or alive, and a dual state of being of alive/dead.

So, as every event in the actual universe is, in some level, ruled by Chance (call it Entropy, Chaos or Fate) the relationship between Mage's spheres of Time and Fate are one of source/manifestation, were Time is the measure (the manifestation) of Fate (or how the Universe changes).

On a final note, the fact that atomic clocks are so popular is that the chance of the measured event to vary is minimal, but not inexistent...!

Go ahead, have fun playing with the Universe,

KX.

P.D.: Why do you care? don't ask me, you were the one how kept reading!