Week Eight---Classical Physics ....

Newton's Three Laws of Motion and Me ....Most everything that I have learned about life, I have learned from riding my bicycle. A route that may be harder on the way to my destination, I can rest assured, will be a breezy downhill on my way back home---it all balances out. Newton's First Law: Objects at rest, remain at rest; objects in motion remain in motion, in a straight line at constant velocity, if, and only if, a force is not applied to change its state of motion. I am most happy for my bike's brakes---I am not a fixie riding hipster. When the light turns red, more often than not, I hit my brakes---thus applying force to my spinning wheels---and bringing myself to a halt before I am taken out by oncoming traffic. Newton's Second Law: The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to its mass. Every now and again, not so often these days, I go riding up in the hills. And while I do enjoy a mighty uphill crawl, I get ambivalent about the drops waiting on the other side. I am sorry to say that this is the only time I wear a bike helmet. Bombing the roads down from Grizzly Peak, I have reached velocities of 45mph (using a digital speed-o-meter)---gravity feels like a thirsty beast, and again, happy for those brakes. Newton's Third Law: If two objects interact, as in a collision, the force of the first object exerted on the second object is matched by the force of the second object exerted on the first object of the same size, but in opposite directions ...Lucky for me, I have never been in a real bike accident. But today, as I was riding my bike I came upon a car accident and thought of Newton's Third Law. The two vehicles were smashed into each other, and from the damage, I assume that they were going pretty fast, thus colliding with much force. (It seemed like everybody involved was okay.)

Our "energy efficient" culture---I used to go to the gym. Working out on my elliptical trainer I would take in the scene around me---a sea of other warm bodies perched upon workout machines, sweating with intent. Bicycles, treadmills, and ski machines ....all plugged in. We use energy to expend energy. How inefficient is that? (And how "inefficient" is an overfed culture that relies on 'gyms', rather than true hard, physical labor, to use up the calories, or energy, that it consumes ....we may spend more time laboring intellectually, but in the process, we are oft times merely inventing more things to feed our varied and voracious appetites.)

Descartes has a lot to answer for! ....Yes, he does. How quaint it all was---the world was tame and contained, predictable. The Mystery was solved. Until the early twentieth century when someone (namely, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg) decided to take a closer look. The blanket of everyday reality looks very different when you inspect the threads. Quantum physics shredded the blueprints for the mechanized universe and Wonder was reborn. And to this day, we still do not fully understand how the Great Machine works. Cartesian reductionism may have been the doctrine of its day, but its tenets no longer apply. Thought is a product of brain activity---no doubt that the brain is involved in thought, but it is one of our many physical organs involved in the process of thinking, but the brain does not think on its own. The brain itself has no sensory nerve endings---how could it possibly be solely responsible for telling me what I feel? Most of the Universe is dead---life is a process of being and becoming. Always dynamic never static. Never as predictable as we wish it was. How could most of the Universe be dead? Show me proof great scientist. Scientific descriptions are independent of the observer and the process of knowing---pure objectivity is some-kind-of-impossible. We are always trying to achieve an end by some means. Quantum physics has proven that probability is all that we can ever know. The act of observation---intention---is what brings phenomena into being. There is no such thing as independence in the great tangled web of the Universe. We are separate from nature---how can we be separate from nature when it is Nature thyself that nourishes us? Try as we may, Nature can not be reduced to charts and graphs. Chemistry is full of exception after exception ....Nature apparently does not even follow its "own Laws'.