Month: October 2021

A follow-up on the previous post–

The 20th century artist Giacometti has done some drawings that show our world as mostly empty space with thin lines holding it together; they remind me of the particle traces that commonly illustrate physics experiments.

Here’s one of his drawings:

And here’s a lovely montage of a physics particle-trace image with a photo of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá superimposed over it:

(linked from another post of Vahid Ranjbar’s, on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet of the Universe)

This is leading me to visualize the world as a very complex series of mathematical operations (for lack of a better word) which in turn generate matter (probably space too). Unfortunately I can only make vague noises about math, I lost track at calculus, so maybe my admiration is misplaced. But we do know our physical world, and the atoms comprising it, are mostly empty space, and that’s the feeling Giacometti’s drawing evokes.

On a similar topic, Mandelbrot sets and fractals were popular in the 80’s and 90’s; there was even a ms-dos program called fractint for generating them, which I had a lot of fun playing with. A good book on some of the research is James Gleick’s “Chaos: making a new science” originally published 1988.

(The movie is Arrival, which I mentioned before)

I’ve been following the writing and videos of physicist Vahid Houston Ranjbar for a while (isn’t that a wonderfully international name? Persian, American, Indian) but somehow failed to notice this post from 2017.

… On first blush it would seem a ridiculous violation of … physics to “remember the future”. But when I think about it more, I must confess it takes a bit more thought to understand why we don’t remember the future in the way we can remember the past. If we suspend for a while what we ‘think’ we know about causality, it is not immediately obvious why …

He also has a series of videos on youtube on the theme of the Platonic Ideal way of viewing the world vs the Materialist view. And this video which he did is an introduction to a Bahá’í view of the changes to our world that started mid-19th century.

Luke Slott’s music has been growing on me in the last few months. When I first heard it a year or two ago, it seemed nice but very simple, sort of like practice exercises. But as I look at what he’s done recently, I think that simplicity is deceptive– it’s very subtle and very much a devotional. He’s creating a new album for the upcoming centenary called Home of Light, and he’s posting the songs on YouTube as they’re done.

The first song, “Tablet of the Land of Bá”, takes its text from this Tablet by Bahá’u’lláh to His Son, who had gone on a visit to Beirut. To me it’s the expression of very human feelings. The photos of Akka (Acre, Israel) and the prison from that time are very touching too.

The second song, “Whatever we are (Still are we Thine)” is especially touching to me right now. It reminds me in its simple directness of the “Another world” video I mentioned some months ago.

He’s also doing a series of “Vignettes” sharing his thoughts about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the process, and giving us Tucsonans a nice view of Dublin greenery in the background (minus the likely humidity). They also contain advertisements for his work, but nicer than the average ads.

Another song I keep coming back to, not so simple, is a setting of The Tablet of Ahmad.

(his homepage is www.lukeslott.com)

[updated 5/23/22]