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Rupert Sheldrake: science more non-linear than we appreciate

October 4, 2013

Rupert Sheldrake talking about how science, that great bastion of exploration, still has its mechanistic head on. Mechanistic science, top down, and hierarchical. Sheldrake argues science as an idea still wears the mindset that everything is machine like, fixed like Newtons concept of cosmology. That there is no mystery in this world, all can be ordered and measured, indeed his story about the variations in light speed are compelling, and the attempts to regulate its speed at a constant, when in fact it varies, as does gravity, is illuminating.

Rethinking science, rethinking cosmology: Sheldake for me is a connection to another set of ideas such as Lee Smolin who says our entire cosmology as one that is; indeterminate, dynamic, and highly networked at an atomic level. A universe that is curved, open, diverse, and where the laws of nature are not fixed as Newton argued, but rather more in a constant state of flux and evolution. And that the true theory, a deeper theory of the universe still awaits us to be uncovered. Physics once seen as the purest form of truth struggles to explain so much of the world around us, and Smolin argues that we are used to thinking of the laws of nature and the universe as deterministic, defined and arranged by unchanging laws. But of course this is not how nature works, nature is an open system, consequently, as new states arise in nature, new laws evolve to guide them.

And despite billions of years of opportunity our universe does not exist in a state of ordered equilibrium. Maybe that is what humanity desires, perhaps even craves – but it is a dangerous thing to turn a truth into a heresy, so that we may not examine our true nature.

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