This is a poem which was originally published in the book What is time. I did not give any explanation during the writing, assuming curious readers would try to understand it by themselves. However, now I think otherwise. Hence the material presented in it is good for few articles in the blog. Here is a way to look at what Newton saw in his observation.
These few great minds although I haven't included all of their names here, were separated by time and space, hence maybe they never thought seriously about each other. But as a time, travelers from future, we receive their message today and we have good opportunity to compare contrast and argue about what they have seen to better understand the truths about nature. Which is the goal of our mindfulness.
The great thought Experiment
Let's imagine Friday afternoon in 1600's Newton alone by himself under an apple tree and observed an apple falling down. There are several ways to look at this phenomenon, or observation. One way is just the way the Newton saw.
What Newton saw.
What Newton saw was an apple separated from the tree falling down, due to gravity over a period of time. And he knew a continuous mathematical function would describe this phenomenon and further, developed field of calculus to study such function. And it seems most of the observable phenomenon happening around us fits into these models, of continuous functions.
What Albert Einstein saw.
Albert Einstein after years and years saw, that although the observation of Newton seems true, when the condition of the observer changes the observation, itself changes. As an example, instead of the stationary observer (like stationary Newton under the tree) If the observer moves, there will be time dilation and time compression. Hence, although Newtonian equations are true. In infinite time scale, infinite speeds, we needed Einstein's equations.
What Schrödinger saw
In the last Century, we have seen many great minds apart from Einstein. Schrodinger was one of them. And we are moving from classical physics to quantum. He did his own thought experiments on a cat in a box. And argued. What if Newton never saw the apple falling. What if neither stationary nor moving observer there to witness the event. Did it happen at all? And this is the principle of the cat in the box argument. Because unless observed nobody would ever know whether it happened or not. Hence until we observe, both are true. Apple did and did not fall from the tree, until Stationary or Moving Newton saw the apple, where it is.
What Fredrich Nietzsche saw
Fredrich Nietzsche, on the other hand noticed, that although we talk about taste of the salt. Nobody can ever know, what other person feel when their tongues touch NaCl. We can assume we all feel the same. But nobody can build a yardstick to universalize what we experience. Hence whatever we measure, is relative to our world. This is illustrated in our argument on prisoners of mind. If we compare this with Einsteins space time continuum. Even time is relative, as nobody can be in your space in the exact moment. Hence, you would know, if God exists, he should be living in us at this very moment.
So Fredrich Nietzsche saw, no matter what we argue about, we can never know, what happened. As neither we can confirm, or oppose what other person observed, as these are two relative worlds, completely separated from each other without any overlap at all.
I am not sure; you would understand the gravity of these observations. But if you would like to understand the meaning of life, even consciousness, you would need such intuitions, to get closer to the truth of the world. Let's begin the mindful journey today.
Comments