Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Howard Switzer's avatar

Elisabet Sahtouris wrote:

Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively -- at a distance from ourselves -- and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism.

This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real' world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God's geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.

This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present.

Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.

What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate?

What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander's theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus's celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?

Expand full comment
William Pritting's avatar

From: Quanta and Fields by Sean Carroll

Location 167 of 744 (Kindle ebook)

“The (electric field) force will fall off (dissipate) as an inverse-square law, just as in Newtonian gravity.”

“What if the outbound propagating spherical wave dissipated in its intensity as it propagated outbound such that the initial deceleration of the Apeiron field was intense enough to decelerate the Apeiron field down to the speed of light, but then the wave intensity dissipated such that further out Apeiron wasn't decelerated down to the speed of light resulting in Apeiron with a wave frequency speed that is faster than the speed of light, and that Apeiron is the Dark Matter?“

Expand full comment
17 more comments...

No posts