At each shift of the paradigm, the impossible presents its impeccable credentials… and the unthinkable becomes the norm. -Rabbi Michael Berg

We stand at the most exciting crossroad that have ever existed in the course of human history.  Scientists like Nassim Harremien (Blackhole Physics) and David Anderson (Time warp Generator) are at the cutting edge of thinking outside the box.   What they are saying opens the mind to what is possible.  And without new possibilities we have no future. We crave a new infusion of inventiveness and creativity to achieve a better future, yet we hesitate at the brink of transformation.  The evolution of our worldview is a process which takes us into the future of possibility.  It is not a static rendering of reality. Look at how mind-body medicine was ignored just 20 years ago...

Dim lights

Anderson’s ideas, whether they are legitimate or not I am not in a position to say, give us an opportunity to look at spacetime in a different way...  He seems to be putting into practice Einstein’s theory that mass warps the field of spacetime...  Whether or not new applications can be made from this we will see, but it seems like it would be worth having an open discussion about.

The history of discovery and new ideas are always incomprehensible to the establishment: the heart pumping blood, continental drift, to name two.  Einstein said “it is the theory that allows what one can observed”.  Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): Current scientific paradigms are established by its members belief in a set of prevailing theories. This is their psychological and theoretical apparatus in which they observe and explain the world. Einstein said “it is the theory that allows what one can observed”.

Kuhn states that when members of the existing paradigm are confronted with evidence that could violate their relevant ideas, these things are called anomalies, experimental errors or out and out frauds.   Until the evidence for new ideas and theories are so overwhelming that a whole new set of belief structures are put in place that prevail for the next era; only to be replaced eventually by others that will show some piece of evidence to refute or evolve to the next level.

What we are facing here, on all levels, is a worldview collapse.  Because we are now in the position to open doorways to the unknown; the mysterious; what has yet to digested and spit out by the mainstream.  Unfortunately the true scientists and sages of the past, from Socrates to Galileo, have always been attacked and silenced.   Not even the earth beneath our feel is more solid and real for us than our nothion of reality.  That is why it can be so tramatic when confromted with the unknown. (UFOs, aliens, ghosts, paranormal, etc) Threatening what everyone believes to be true can be dangerous and frightening to people's idea of what they think their life is about.  Society yearns for the security there is in their "notion" of a fixed reality.  And so it goes…

As Jung said in Man and his Symbols: “"It is a common illusion to believe that all we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory , which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts not an everlasting truth."  

Most of the things that have changed the world were declared impossible before they were done.  

My favorite example, and one that relates to Anderson in a way, was the total denunciation of the Wright brothers first flight, even though for millenniums man had wanted to soar through the sky like a bird.  The Wright brothers flew in 1903, but leading scientific experts of the day were so convinced, on purely scientific grounds that heavier than air flight was impossible, they never bothered to even investigate the claim. 

The celebrated Victorian physicist Lord Kelvin, known not only for his pioneering work on thermodynamics, said flatly that "heavier-than-air" craft were impossible.  He also thought X-rays were a hoax, and that radio had no future. And Simon Newcomb a leading scientist of his day said:  “Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope….The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force can be noted in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances in the air.”

 In 1906, Scientific American called the Wright brothers a “pair of hoaxers” and if such a thing was true, someone would have reported it.  People might say it that wouldn’t happen today, but I don't think human nature changes as fast as human technology.

The exact quote from Scientific American, January 13, 1906 was:  "If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face  -- even if he has to scale a fifteen-storey skyscraper to do so -- would  not have ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long  ago?"

It was not until President Theodore Roosevelt ordered public trials at Fort Myers in 1908 that the Wrights were able to prove conclusively their claim and the Army and scientific press were compelled to accept that their flying machine was a reality.   

Charles Fort was another one who demontrated human's stubborn resistance to change.  More to come on him in upcoming blogs...

Men have often thought that the limits of their vision were the limits of the universe. -Shopenhauer

All great truths begins as blasphemies. Bernard Shaw.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Arthur C. Clarke

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. - Galileo Galilei

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.  ~ Louis Brandeis

Just to conclude with a line from Michio Kaku book: Physics of the Impossible:  “The real question is, are they impossible with technologies that lay decades, centuries or even millennia beyond ours? Perhaps these ‘mpossibilities’ are merely very difficult engineering problems.”

Arthur C. Clarke once said:  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."