 Actinophrys sol * |  Galaxy NGC_0026 ** |
Many years ago, when I used to be a young television producer, I collected a great many of documentary film sequences having in common that they travelled into the extremes of the very small or outwards, into the immensity of cosmic Space.
On a spellbinding musical background of Chopin’s Valses interpreted by Dinu Lipatti, I edited many such sequences into a flow – a fifteen-minute zoom, from the huge far-away of the cosmic space into the infinitesimal close-up of microscopy - which I entitled “From the big infinity, to the small infinity”.
A mere 15 minutes of comparing the Universe and the utterly small, made short to fit the attention span of television spectators who would not suffer more. If I remember well, I made no comment along the sequence.
In my intention, the quiet subliminal shock was to be caused to see that - for our human eye – the remote galaxies on telescope, enlarged to meet the eye, were in no way different-looking from the small infinity of, say, a living cell, presented under an electronic microscope. With this, I wanted to communicate my intuition that the blurring of difference – the indifference of the eye – is reflecting some deep truth worth understanding.
What is huge relative to us and what is infinitesimal compared with our human size, both lose any visual meaning for our mind. Ultimately, eyes cut the Universe to our size.
All we can do beyond the span of our senses is to have faith in theories and call that knowledge.
At the time I was ignorant of Hannah Arendt’s work written some ten years earlier, of her disquieting statement I quote from “The Human Condition”:
“...it will be difficult to ward off the suspicion that this mathematically preconceived world may be a dream world where every dreamed vision man himself produces has the character of reality only as long as the dream lasts. And his suspicions will be enforced when he must discover that the events and occurrences in the infinitely small, the atom, follow the same laws and regularities as in the infinitely large, the planetary systems... In any event, wherever we try to transcend appearance beyond all sensual experience, even instrument-aided, in order to catch the ultimate secrets of Being, which according to our physical world view is so secretive that it never appears and still so tremendously powerful that it produces all appearance, we find that the same patterns rule the macrocosm and the microcosm alike, that we receive the same instrument readings. Here again, we may for a moment rejoice in a refound unity of the universe, only to fall prey to the suspicion that what we have found may have nothing to do with either the macrocosmos or the microcosmos, that we deal only with the patterns of our own mind, the mind which designed the instruments and put nature under its conditions in the experiment—prescribed its laws to nature, in Kant's phrase — in which case it is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that wherever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.” [1]
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* Actinophrys sol CC 3.o NEON_ja 2009
** Galaxy NGC_0026_GALEX NASA PD
[1] Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998 (p. 286-287) First published The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1958 by The University of Chicago 1958-98 ed. p 286-287
On a spellbinding musical background of Chopin’s Valses interpreted by Dinu Lipatti, I edited many such sequences into a flow – a fifteen-minute zoom, from the huge far-away of the cosmic space into the infinitesimal close-up of microscopy - which I entitled “From the big infinity, to the small infinity”.
A mere 15 minutes of comparing the Universe and the utterly small, made short to fit the attention span of television spectators who would not suffer more. If I remember well, I made no comment along the sequence.
In my intention, the quiet subliminal shock was to be caused to see that - for our human eye – the remote galaxies on telescope, enlarged to meet the eye, were in no way different-looking from the small infinity of, say, a living cell, presented under an electronic microscope. With this, I wanted to communicate my intuition that the blurring of difference – the indifference of the eye – is reflecting some deep truth worth understanding.
What is huge relative to us and what is infinitesimal compared with our human size, both lose any visual meaning for our mind. Ultimately, eyes cut the Universe to our size.
All we can do beyond the span of our senses is to have faith in theories and call that knowledge.
At the time I was ignorant of Hannah Arendt’s work written some ten years earlier, of her disquieting statement I quote from “The Human Condition”:
“...it will be difficult to ward off the suspicion that this mathematically preconceived world may be a dream world where every dreamed vision man himself produces has the character of reality only as long as the dream lasts. And his suspicions will be enforced when he must discover that the events and occurrences in the infinitely small, the atom, follow the same laws and regularities as in the infinitely large, the planetary systems... In any event, wherever we try to transcend appearance beyond all sensual experience, even instrument-aided, in order to catch the ultimate secrets of Being, which according to our physical world view is so secretive that it never appears and still so tremendously powerful that it produces all appearance, we find that the same patterns rule the macrocosm and the microcosm alike, that we receive the same instrument readings. Here again, we may for a moment rejoice in a refound unity of the universe, only to fall prey to the suspicion that what we have found may have nothing to do with either the macrocosmos or the microcosmos, that we deal only with the patterns of our own mind, the mind which designed the instruments and put nature under its conditions in the experiment—prescribed its laws to nature, in Kant's phrase — in which case it is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that wherever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.” [1]
-----------
* Actinophrys sol CC 3.o NEON_ja 2009
** Galaxy NGC_0026_GALEX NASA PD
[1] Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998 (p. 286-287) First published The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1958 by The University of Chicago 1958-98 ed. p 286-287
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