My Backyard

The picture you see here is one I took last week and sent to some of my family. There was no text. Just a subject line: “Our Backyard Fifteen Minutes Ago”. This is the language of my family.

We speak in terms of nature. We speak to each other of the weather, of the living things around us and by these observations we reveal ourselves to each other. Never too directly, mind you. It must be subtle. In my family, we hide ourselves in the landscape of our observations.

When I was eighteen, I discovered through these means that my brother, had become my friend. He rushed into the house to insist I come with him to the nearby ridge to see the “skyscape” of clouds: black upon charcoal upon slate upon blue upon gray, invading the evening sky. By this he revealed his belief that I would feel as he did.

I opt for this indirect method of communication, too. My mother still alludes to the day I called her, enthused about the overwhelming beauty of the woods on a spring day. As she noted, it had been since childhood that I had cried due to tenderness in her presence (and that was while watching “Lassie”). My call, admitting to tears in the woods, seemed to quench a long thirst of hers.

My mother, as you might expect, has had this same reticence. One that can be overcome if the language of nature was invoked. She rarely talks of how she feels toward us but, by bringing us to the screen porch and holding us up to see the robin’s nest built right up against it, she showed us her fascination and we learned when we were young that she had a desire to share her wonder.

So, between my sister in Missouri, me in New Jersey, my brother and parents in Pennsylvania and some select friends, short nature studies are shared. If you listen, you can hear the undercurrent of our joys and shared remembrances in these snippets: “I heard a beautiful birdsong before daybreak today. Do you think it was a mockingbird?” or, “Do you remember how rare it was ever to see a wild turkey? Well, there is a flock in my back yard,” or “Our backyard fifteen minutes ago. . . .”

What The Bleep Do I Know

I am one of those science junkies who is just knowledgeable enough to think she is beyond pseudo- and junk science but probably not so much as I think. I really do try to learn and study the underlying principles and even, at times, the underlying research. When the research is beyond me because of the inadequacy of my knowledge tools, I try, if it is important enough of an issue, to acquire those tools so that I can delve deeper.

So, when I wanted to know more about the digestive system, I read about the different functions of the stomach, the small intestine and the large intestine and then further about various secretions and absorptions. To understand these better, I drilled down to the functions of the Krebs cycle and the chemical channels and chemical pumps in the cell membranes which led me further to learn about acids and bases, salts and ions and electro-chemical voltage.

I then reached the point where my tools to understand were inadequate. Chain-reading Wikipedia only took me so far. I needed an understanding of chemistry that I did not possess. If I had been a real enthusiast in high school and college chemistry classes and if my brain cells had managed to retain that knowledge for 35 years, I might be able to understand the journal articles that use English only as an incidental subordinate language to chemical notation.

I say all this as a preface. I have what is most certainly a very rudimentary lay knowledge of quantum physics. I may even be flattering myself to think that I have weeded pseudo-science out of my knowledge in this area. But what I do know is that I can recognize instances where people have used their inadequate knowledge of quantum physics to come up with some pretty bizarre metaphysical misinterpretations.

The movie, “What The Bleep Do We Know” is one of these instances. It makes me angry. If someone like me can do armchair research sufficient to understand some fundamental concepts of quantum physics, why can’t those who are intelligent enough to do interviews, compose story boards and film, edit and produce a well-crafted movie use their minds to research their subject matter.

If the creators of this movie had done so they would have realized their understanding of quantum physics was wrong but they still could have produced a wonderful, thought-provoking movie. And, it would have looked almost identical to what they did produce. The difference would have been that the movie would have been the sort of thought-provoking challenge that arises from good myths, parables and morality stories. It would have stretched our minds but it would have done so by acknowledging the fantasy of the premise and drawing analogies and parallels to our experience and potential.

Instead, the movie’s creators took a misconception of the truth and tried to build that same uplifting story as a lesson in fact. The movie was crafted as a hopeful theory of where the “truths” of quantum mechanics might lead us in understanding our “true” potential.

Here is where the flaw is. Quantum mechanics does not, as the movie would have us believe, teach us that we, by our thoughts, can change reality. Quantum mechanics does not provide the basis for some new religion of positive thinking. Rather, it teaches us that the act of observing determines the state of quantum particles. The creators of “What The Bleep Do We Know” have confused “observing” with “conceptual thinking.” They took it as truth that the fundamental course of reality can be altered by our conceptual thinking whereas the truth is that the fundamental state of reality is determined by an act of observing.

We cannot change our reality, we cannot walk through walls, we cannot move to a higher state, merely by mastering our control of the quantum world through the agency of thought. (Maybe it will turn out that we are capable of these things but not because of what quantum physics teaches about possibility clouds resolving into particles or momentum.)

I am so disappointed. The movie could have been so good. And if one chooses not to investigate the truth of its premises, it still is good.

"I Really Don't Know Clouds At All . . ."

You might expect from the title of this post that Joni Mitchell has been on my mind. But, actually, I am thinking more of. . .

Julie Andrews who impressed upon us the beauty of the Austrian Alps, so inspiring as to evoke the metaphor of living music. What would Julie say about the beauty of clouds, which it turns out, truly are living? Maybe (well, but probably not) she would say something like Olivia Judson said in her blog, “The Wild Side”, on February 19, 2008.

Judson draws from a paper in Geophysical Research Letters in noting that the clouds, in spite of their frigidity, acidity and wildly fluctuating states, are full of bacteria. It’s not just that microbes have gotten swept up into unfamiliar hostile altitudes, doomed to bleak survival odds. To the contrary, it appears they are “growing, metabolizing [and] reproducing” in the uptown nimbus and cirrus neighborhoods. This, as Judson points out, raises the prospects that these microbes may well have evolved as a specific adaptation to cloud living.

It also turns out that, to some extent, it appears “microbes contribute to the formation of clouds. Clouds form when water droplets cling to particles in the air, such as dust or salt or ash — or microbes.” And, there is “tentative but mounting evidence suggests that cloud dwelling microbes may indeed biodegrade some of the compounds in the atmosphere. This could alter the composition of rain and snow; but more important, microbes could be affecting the chemical composition of the atmosphere itself.”

So, we may find that bacteria thrive in, help create and contribute to clouds.

What might we carelessly do to these fragile, angel hair ecosystems? It is certainly humbling and awe-inspiring to realize that not just the hills are alive but the very seeds of the clouds are singing with life!