Thursday 12 April 2012

The Infallible Law of Error

"The Infallible Law of Error"! Now where on Earth did that title come from? Well, I made it up because I liked the paradox of the "law of error" claiming to be infallible. It sums up my experience of both science and religion.

The text in the centre of the work with this title is a quote from one of quantum physics biggest brains on the planet. He said "at the heart of a very large black hole lies a tiny singularity. And a singularity is…when we don't know what to do!" Basically Einstein got it right when his theory of relativity explained the universe on an atomic, planetary and galactic scale. It also predicted the existence of black holes but got it wrong when he said that they were rarely or unlikely to exist in reality. Not only do they exist (and perhaps abundantly as it now seems that they could well be the very core of EVERY galaxy)  but within a black hole Einstein's theories just don't work. Things just get too weird. It's up to the more recent theory of quantum gravity to begin to explain what's going on in the tiny "heart of a very large black hole". Yet what we are finding is that Einstein's theory and the theory of quantum gravity profoundly contradict each other yet both exist within the paradox that is our universe. Fascinated? Confused? I am!

Einstein expressed a flash of insight though when he said (and I paraphrase here)  "Religion without science is lame, science without religion is blind" and this is what the work titled  "Lost Blue Heaven" touches on.

The other works titled "Fads and Fallacies in the name of  …ScienceFaithReason" and also to an extent "Resistance+/-Acceptance" play with the history of our understanding and eventual harnessing of electricity. It spans from the  days when we thought electrical phenomena to be purely a Divine manifestation, through the time of The Electricians entertaining us with their wondrous tricks to the 18th century scientific experiments and contradictory theories of a Divine animal electricity (proposed by Luigi Galvani) or a universal electricity (proposed by Alessandro Volta) endowing all life. It was Volta who invented the electric battery or Voltic Pile and it was his colleague Galvani who famously made the dissected frogs legs twitch with it.

Are you still reading this? Glad to hear it. So its not just me that's fascinated by all this stuff then?

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