…“there be dragons”

In searching for the smallest particle, called the atom by the earliest scholars in western culture, we have uncovered mysteries whose telling is reminiscent of another search.

In gazing at the night sky, earliest man speculated on the distance of the farthest light, which must surely be the edge of the universe, the largest conceivable entity.

Since unlocking the mystery of light’s prismatic tricks, the earliest exploiters have manipulated it to search for the largest body and its smallest part as if they were looking in different directions for different things with little to share.

Having succeeded in searching beneath the physically evident level of perceivable light, the photon, theorists had only quantum duality to speculate about the remaining, barely traceable separate subatomic forces.

Having launched high-resolution cameras out beyond, not only the obscuring atmosphere of earth, but beyond the solar system, theorists still have only spectrum analysis and the focal angles and lengths to plot the what and where of distant particles, er, ah, … bodies. I forgot, science is slow to change perspective, nearly as dedicated to their big bang back-story as religions are to their big bangless nativity narratives.

Double Helix Nebula

Large and small are directions in a continuum anywhere along which, if the observer maintains the scope of the changing spacial/temporal scale, will look much the same. I have watched traces of particles so small and instantaneous they could penetrate my once-thought-solid body from all directions while it stood, otherwise unaffected, by the giant cosmic ray detector at Redstone Arsenal. This process goes on everywhere always. From the perspective of a being, as much larger than the sun as I am than an atom, a galaxy might appear to be a sperm or a germ rapidly riggling along its way.

It is this metabolic wall of perception perspective that has been the guardian of universal mysteries, promising “there be dragons” scrawled across the map of human consciousness. Asking to be made “one with everything” is ignoring a pre-existing condition.