That's What Human Beings are Capable Of

 

                                        Chickadee here, wishing you a Happy Solstice

 

“Life takes guts.”

--Lucille Ball

 

If a bumblebee was as far from us as the moon, scientists could, with a telescope, pick up its heat—that’s what human beings are capable of.

 

 

 

Amanda Uhle, a publisher, writes this: 

 

“A dangerous crackpot texts me several times a day.”

 

“He’s manipulative. He’s paranoid. He’ll flatter me and then say horrible things about people I admire. He wants me to give him money. I get at least three wheedling texts a day from this ne’er-do-well.”

 

Once, Uhle said, she had an ex-boyfriend who was similar. He seemed great at first, then she caught him in a lie, and then a really big lie. And she didn’t like the way he treated women, so she told him it was over and stopped taking his calls.

 

 He just wouldn’t take no for an answer. After Uhle stopped answering his calls, he drove 200 miles to bring her candy and to suggest she come to her senses and take him back.

 

This ex-boyfriend would call so many times at night (this was years ago when she had a landline) she was losing her sleep and getting jumpy. Finally, her roommate said, “Why don’t you just unplug and go to sleep.”

 

Uhle told her that if he was going to call anyway, she felt safer knowing when and how he was, rather than wondering what he might be plotting behind her back.

She didn’t support our ex-president, the one sending her texts every day, but covered his election as a reporter. And at first thought, his texts were illumining, for she wanted to know what he was up to. 

 

Now they are scary.

 

For some Americans, the ex-president still holds appeal. Uhle says she isn’t one of them, but she bets plenty of people clicked the link under the recent text that asked, “Why haven’t you claimed your Christmas Stocking yet? Do you NOT want to MAKE CHRISTMAS GREAT AGAIN?”

 

I understand that the country was ripe for a rebel, and this rebel had a cause. Too bad it was himself.

 

In a recent interview with Hadley Freeman, George Clooney said, “I’d be so ashamed, if for instance in the past (mine) regime if I been on record for being against some of the horrific things he’d done. My kids would be like, ‘So they were putting kids in cages, and you didn’t say anything?’ The blow-back is nowhere near as bad as the shame I’d feel.”

 

(The blow-back was that TV hosts mocked him, an actor, for being political.)

 

Clooney’s dad made one rule that Clooney has followed. “I don’t care what you do in life, but challenge people with greater power than you and defend those with less power.”

 

Clooney has a new movie titled The Tender Bar, a coming-of-age film, a tender movie with no prickly political overtones. Instead, it is a straight‑down-the‑line coming-of-age story about a young boy whose single mother and irascible uncle help him to get ahead in life.

 

“The whole country, for the last five years, has been engaged in hate and anger, and I’ve been part of it at times,” said Clooney. “I’ve been angry, and this movie (The Tender Bar) is such a kind story. It’s such a gentle film, and I wanted to be part of that, and I thought maybe an audience would want to be part of a gentle experience.” 

 

You Matter

 

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next."

– Jonas Salk

 

I need to be nicer to all those tiny atoms serving us, especially those inside my body. That extends outside of me, too, to the animals and plants. Golly, rocks are made of atoms. Water is made of atoms. I guess we are all connected. 

                                                          

Have you heard of the "Split-beam scientific experiment? I had heard of it. Most of us have. Still, I didn't understand it. However, I was intrigued when I read Gregg Braden's account of it in his book, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief.

 

Why scientists thought of shooting a proton (a light particle) through a hole is beyond me, but it turned out to open the door to quantum physics.

 

I always wondered about people who thought metaphysical people were cuckoo and was tempted to ask, "Have you ever read anything about quantum physics? It's crazier than anything we can conjure. 

 

Were those scientists playing around in the lab one day, or were they seriously investigating light particles? I don't know. I hope they were playing, for much is accomplished with a glad heart.

 

The first split-beam experiment occurred in England in 1909 and is still being discussed today. Physicist Geoffrey Ingram Taylor found a way to shoot "the stuff of atoms," that is, quantum particles of light called photons from a projector to a target some feet away. He placed a barrier between the projector and the target. He must have figured something was afoot, for the barrier had two slits.

 

The thought at the time was that a photon is a particle. That proton was pulled out of the atom as a particle. Therefore, one would think it would go through a hole through which it was aimed, like a bullet, and hit the target on the other side.

 

However, the photons did something unexpected.

 

They passed through both holes.

 

Just as water can travel through a window screen as it thaws from ice to a liquid, Taylor's photons did something similar.

 

 

The photons, they surmised, instead of being a particle, became a wave, and that wave could pass through multiple openings.

 

This was mind-boggling. Because until that time, there was nothing in conventional physics that could change the nature of its existence.

 

Thus, a new kind of physics entered the picture—quantum physics. (A quantum is a packet of discrete energy.) 

 

Taylor and his associates asked these questions:

 

1. How did the particles know' there was more than one opening?

2. What caused the particles to change into waves to accommodate the two openings?

 

 

Then they went on to ask a third question.

 

"Who knew there was more than one opening in that barrier?"

 

Their answer? 

 

The people in the room.

 

Was it possible that the people's consciousness in the room influenced the particles?

 

This opened the door to something almost unthinkable at the time. It suggests something that the most ancient and cherished spiritual traditions have stated since the beginning of our existence: That thoughts and beliefs affect matter.

 

Yeah, I know, it's weird.

 

This experiment has been repeated many times with fancier and more sensitive equipment. In 1998 Israel's Weizmann Institute confirmed and published "Quantum Theory Demonstrated: Observation Affects Reality." 

 

They stated that photons are influenced by being "watched," The more intense the watching, the greater the watcher's influence on how the particles behave. 

 

When I first heard that experiments with atoms are influenced by being watched, I thought that we caught those tiny atoms sitting on the toilet, and they were embarrassed. So, they jumped up and did something else. 

 

I'm not up on the latest discoveries on what is happening with quantum physics, but I know that the old image of the atom as a nucleus with electrons buzzing around it like a solar system now has another view. Now there is a thought that the electrons that buzz around the nucleus are more like a fog. They are probabilities. 

 

Old though--that the electron, or electrons, are buzzing so fast that if you tried to touch one with a needle, you would always hit it. New thought—they are a realm of probabilities. There is a possibility of a particle being everywhere and anywhere.

 

Yeah, that boggles my mind too. 

 

We could take that further, but I don't want to go too deep into physics. Besides, I'm not a physicist. I'm a scout. I go around finding things and bring them home. I could be a hunter-gatherer, but I don't hunt animals. I hunt for ideas. And I like being a scout for I can ride my horse while searching for the best road to travel.

 

This view of the world as possibilities opens a whole new way of thinking. Some say this field of possibilities is consciousness, and everything happens in the field. That would explain why poking an atom in Los Angeles is instantly felt by its sister atom in New York.

 

Don't blame me. I'm only the scout.