The first five years were heaven, the next five months were hell, and the last five days I found peace. That is my France in a nutshell.

Aix-les-Bains is the heartland of France – so are Provence and Amiens, Avignon and Annecey. But Aix-les-Bains is my heartland in France – just as the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite are my heartland in America. The geography is the same, the people similar. The milieu and pace measured. The ambiance and values are solid. It is a world which I can understand. It is a world where it is relatively safe to raise your children and send them forth.

There is greenness and there is golf. There are tourists and travails, but mostly there is the land and the love of the things on it. The people who are your neighbors, and the trees who are your air. The birds which are your song, and the stars you can actually see. These are the things that endure from season to season and give substance to life.

This is France and this is America. This is the world as it should be – much more so than Paris and New York. This is my world and the France Minou often shared with me.

13/10/2008 / August 1, 2008 / The Fives – 5 Years, 5 Months, 5 Days / Minou / Mixed / AFW, 736, © 2008 / CIP Oct 13 / SHE

Together her daughter and I managed till 10:00, and then she had to leave. I was afraid, deeply afraid. Minutes later the doctor came. Not the oncologist but the real caregiver, her own doctor. He had been here for her for years, and now lately had been coming almost weekly for months. He knew the score. Still I had him review my notes just to be sure. Her wishes were still paramount for me. Quietly and competently he helped her and went on his way. The die was cast. He knew the score. The steep descent had begun. I was petrified. I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was no longer physically capable of doing the only job I was born to do. It is in that moment that a man becomes useless. That is when he breaks. At least an hour loomed, perhaps an hour and a half. Could I bridge the gap?

Minutes later the fateful rattle again. Of course I went to her, but I wasn’t there. I was just playing for time. She wanted and she needed to get out of that horrible cage. No soul should be so bound, certainly not a hummingbird. I pleaded, “Wait, your dearest friend is coming”. She paused, she quieted for a moment, she may have even smiled but she couldn’t wait. She started to climb. “Wait! Wait!! I’ll call, I’ll call right now!” She paused. I ran for the phone. I ran back. I tried desperately to call. No answer. The minutes dragged and passed, each one an eon. I called again and again. Slowly I fell apart but held on till the instant her friend got there. Then I bolted.

Ten minutes later I returned, but I knew I was broken. Thankfully she had taken over, the storm had passed, a token of calm returned. I thanked God for best friends. I showed her my notes and set off to the pharmacy one last time. When I came back with the doctor’s last prescription I told her I had to rest. She took command. She was an angel. I went upstairs and lay down. A couple of hours passed. I came back down and she told me she had conferred with the doctor and the ambulance would come at 9:00 AM the next morning. Instantly I knew it was the end. I went upstairs to prepare. I never saw my sweetheart alive again. I never even kissed her goodbye. I had held her hand tightly for ten years, but I couldn’t even kiss her goodbye. Because no one else knew it was over yet. Certainly I did, and maybe her doctor, and her best friend. I knew, and it was dawning on them. Her best friend was the best friend any person ever had. She saved the last precious day. Her thirty hours were beginning. Mine soon would. They weren’t congruent, they weren’t similar, but they overlapped.

Here two stories split. My sweetheart started an ascent to peace. I started a descent into darkness.

13/10/2008 / February 22, 2008 / Thirty Something Hours (4) / Minou / Mixed / AFW, 740, / CIP / SHE

Let’s say she is an atom. Okay, no, perhaps a particle. Let’s say she is God – whatever you conceive her to be. Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Indira Gandhi, Princess Di or Alan Greenspan, if any of those are your favorite. Or, if you choose, a rock, a bear, a genome, an atom, a particle, Pluto or the universe. Everything or nothing – all Gods will work.

A God who can create herself in your own image, as well as in his own image, would indeed be omnipotent. This is a God we can all believe in, even if we are a stone. A God who was here from the very first particle, and will be here as long as there is a here, here. A God who is inherent in the first article, and has been created anew with each succeeding particle. A thing that replicates itself forever. A particle that embodies the actualization that opposites aren’t. A particle that morphs and recombines in an infinite variety. A cell that grows and mutates and bursts. An ‘it’ that contains everything and nothing. The concept and the presence.

Such a presence could play word games as though it were child’s play. ‘A’ for ‘the’, it for he or she, God for particle, and on forever. Periods and commas might, or might not, count. I deeply don’t think I am such a God, but in my fingernail there might be a particle that does. Indeed any or all of my particles might. Who knows? Perhaps all particles know. Even the shadow’s.

Sometimes it feels like God not only has the ability, but delights in the ability, to present H.self in the guise that you are most comfortable accepting. Either he understands or she is the herd. He might present as black or white here, on Mars as red, and on the moon she might be cheese. Certainly it’s multilingual, multi musical and an artist. It would appear he had faith in many faiths. Let’s just call it PBU for short. The Power Beyond Us.

Now – to the meat of the matter. Opposites aren’t. The furthest far is right next door. The hottest hot is deeply frozen. Good and evil coexist in a particular fashion. Perhaps, as knowledge becomes more nearly clear; at the instant the universe is at its furthest most reaches; when it arrives at its coldest cold; and becomes a true circle – we have the singularity. Reverse deflationary contraction producing virtually instantaneously the hottest hot and nearest near. The universe is reduced to a vibrating Planck length. Opposites aren’t. PBU is reborn, unbeknownst to all but H.self for untold millenniums. From Nicolas of Cusa to Edward Witten an unbroken thread: Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64); Giordano Bruno (1548-1600); Blaise Pascal (1623-62); Immanual Kant (1724-1804); Albert Einstein (1879-1955); Edward Witten (1951-); Beyond. Dare I say full circle. Just a flicker of an eyelash before good and evil begin again.

13/10/2008 / November 2007 / Opposites Aren’t / Physics / Best / AFW, 805, © 2007 / CIP / OAR

Before Copernicus he had the concept of the earth’s rotation, and it wasn’t even circular. Before Gregory he conceived the Gregorian Calendar. Before Witten the stutter of the infinite. Before me the notion that opposites aren’t. We start with Nicholas Cusanus.

I never knew him. Until very recently (December 2, 2007 to be exact) I couldn’t have told you that he even existed. Strangely, I had read of him just months before, but his name hadn’t registered. I’m fairly sure I came across him in the Dark Ages of my youth at UCLA, but I don’t remember. And yet it seems that I have been stealing his thunder. Many of his ideas live in me. A distant echo, 500 years later. Distorted and different, but still reflective DNA. His lines are easily traceable to tomorrow. His name is spelled quite differently in Latin, German, English, and/or French. Nicolas of Cusa, Nicholaus Cusanus, Nicholas of Kues, Cusa, or Cusas – all the same man and he has frequently been called the First Modern Man.

Certain elements of his thought I want to dwell on. Cusanus was extremely advanced in mathematics and physical science for his Age. His concept of the cosmos – rotation in a then static world was close to revolutionary. Centers and circumferences were primary to him. His notions of infinity pronounced. Absolute maximums and absolute minimums were the beginning and the end. Ignorance and knowledge everything. All very modern. And yet he was a Cardinal, a Papal Legate and a man of God.

It is not my intention to go into major detail here. For that you would need to read De Docta Ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance, 1440). There you could get a feel for the incomprehensible incomprehensibility, and an understanding of his view that opposites coincide. Perhaps a little easier would be to read Jasper Hopkins of the University of Minnesota, probably the foremost expert on Cusanus in the English language. You could consult The American Cusanus Society (Thomas Izbickie, John Hopkins University). However, opinions vary across the board, and most of the real scholarship is in German, Latin or French, in that order. Our purpose here is just to pick up on mostly what others picked up on. They carried it forward into the succeeding centuries. Here the role of Giordano Bruno is critical.

13/10/2008 / December 2007 / Nicholas Cusanus / 1401-1464 / Physics / Best / AFW, 810, © 2007 / CIP / OAR

He was a poet, a rebel a mystic, and a man of science. Most of all, for us and our purposes here, he was a conduit, a transition between centuries. Still he deserves our attention if only for his bravery. He dabbled, as most of humanity since him has dabbled, in danger. It has become exciting, and now usually harmless, to pretend we are brave. For him it was exciting and extremely dangerous. He was burned at the stake. He paid the price with grace. Somehow, now we believe we are courageous when we are the herd. He was courageous and a martyr when it mattered. He led that which now has became a stampede. Giordano Bruno was a free thinker before it was free.

There was some irony there. A strange coincidence. It was the very force of opposites that kept Cusanus alive after he died. The Bruno bridge served as the connector of the Fifteenth Century to the Seventeenth. Were it not for that bridge Cusanus might well have been forgotten almost completely by succeeding centuries. Gradually it became less and less fashionable to consider church scholarship as worthy of scientific recognition or even acknowledgement. Today Cusanus would probably be almost unknown and buried deeply in the dusty archives below the Vatican. He was saved only by the championship of Giordano Bruno. On the scientific side Bruno was chiefly inspired by Cusanus and Copernicus, and then he was burned at the stake. Delicious irony. The ebb and flow of contradictions assured Cusanus of an afterlife. It was the martyrdom of Bruno that made Bruno a hero to the Renaissance. And heroes of heroes live on. A coincidence, or an opposite, or both? The PBU works in wondrous ways. A bridge too far.

Some say that Bruno’s science was mostly derivative, and that in fact he didn’t know much astronomy. Certainly he was strongly influenced by Nicolaus Copernicus and Nicolaus Cusanus. He believed in an infinite universe with a plurality of worlds whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere. He was often associated with Neo-Platonism, the Hermetic tradition, pantheism, and heliocentric ideas, but probably his most original work was in the area of mnemonics, semantics, and mystical concepts. His De Umbras Idearum (The Shadow of Ideas) had echoes of Cusanus shadows of truth.

With his works indexed, and he himself burned at the stake for heresy and blasphemy, he quickly became the Forgotten Philosopher. Slowly though, as is often the case with martyrs, his star ascended. Like his compatriot and contemporary, the outlaw artist Carvaggio, the condemned Bruno rose from the ashes largely due to similar streaks of independence. Bruno is said to have had a fairly strong influence on Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and much later on James Joyce. Fairly heavy company for being forgotten.

13/10/2008 / December 2007 / Giordano Bruno / 1548-1600 / Physics / Best / AFW, 811, © 2007 / CIP / OAR

It is with Blaise Pascal that the drumbeat of the infinite becomes to loud to ignore. He eerily echoes Cusanus when he talks of: “The two infinites which are to be found in all things, infinite largeness and infinite smallness.” The absolute maximums and absolute minimums of Cusanus, or, as I prefer, the opposites that aren’t. We can contemplate but not fully conceive the potential infinities in the old Aristotelian sense, but the double infinity is the hallmark of nature. Descartes carries the same idea even further forward but prefers the word ‘indefinite’ thus getting ever closer to string theory.

There were some other major contributions to mathematical theory by Pascal. Some were particularly germane to our discussion, and others a little less so. Early on he contributed to the study of fluids and vacuums resulting in the barometer. Some other primary examples are the foundations of probability theory with Fermat, his work on conic sections which so influenced Leibniz, and of course the Pascaline. The latter, for good or ill, was one of the world’s first digital calculators in 1642. He also was responsible for one of the clearest statement of scientific method in the 17th Century.

Blaise Pascal was a child prodigy and, like many other prodigies, he burned out young. After the age of 18, ill health dogged his relatively short life. There was however an aspect to this youth that still resonates for us going forward into the future. His father. Etienne Pascal, was a member of a group of perhaps the most eminent thinkers and scientists of Europe at the time (including the likes of Descartes and Desargues). Every Thursday or so they met at Marin Mersenne’s home to discuss the latest in mathematics, science, philosophy, and theology. From the age of 14 on his son quietly attended those sessions. Mersenne himself contributed the Mersenne Prime that is intimately connected to the so called perfect numbers from Euclid to Euler. Even today it is vital to encoding, and the Pascaline, in its latest distributed computing form, bears on that also.

Mersenne though, as ‘the Father of Acoustics’ may have influence way beyond what is currently attributed to him. His oscillating frequencies and their relationships to various harmonies begin to have a tone in string theory. I don’t pretend to understand the math, I just hear the music. But it is the dance – the math and the music – that ultimately will be key (should I say chi?) to comprehending the vibrations. There, and probably only there, will the X Factor shimmer into relative focus.

13/10/2008 / December 2007 / Blaise Pascal / 1623 – 62 / Physics / Best / AFW, 812, © 2007 / CIP / OAR

John Barrow in his The Infinite Book, under the heading, A Little Kant quotes a little Nicholas of Cusa – it’s from On Learned Ignorance. It is hard to get a straighter thread than that: “For the intellect is to truth as an inscribed polygon is to the inscribed circle. The more angles the inscribed polygon has the more similar it is to the circle.” The infinite, the circle, reality and pigeon holes – it all seems to end up, adding up to, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Okay I took liberties in the juxtaposition, and the fit is not pure congruence, but the parallels between perceived reality and actual reality are. They are both parallel and real. These two then, were on a line that ran in circles.

Pascal’s infinite largeness and infinite smallness, echoes Cusanus. The shadow of ideas is carried forward by Bruno from Cusanus to Kant. All here, all interweaving elements – they lead across the centuries. And how about the progressive universe with a center of high density and matter thinning out as one moves away from the center. Many common elements here. Still it is the infinite, and the nature of knowledge that suffuses all. Here is where Kant is the fulcrum. I don’t pretend to comprehend the elements of sensibility; the understanding of the categories; the giving of synthesis through the act of imagination and apperception. Nor do I fully grasp the seeing and reproducing; a priori deduction, noumenal and phenomenal, empirical and ethical, transcendental idealism – the list goes on and on. Sometimes it becomes the parsing of words to the level of absurdity. I must admit though I liked his term Categorical Imperative – even stole it years ago and named one of my games after it.

There are a couple of phrases I jotted down once. I don’t know where from – maybe I stole them too, maybe I wrote them. “Pigeon hole is a shade of black” was one of them, “Organize enough, and you will forget why” was the other. They seem to me to sum up Kant. Of course he loved pigeon holes, and perhaps he foreshadowed black holes. Certainly the two led to uncertainty. With a little luck the latter might save us from the former. Otherwise we may know too much one day, and then know nothing at all. That is what ties it all together. We’re edging closer to a singularity. Of course our next candidate took some giant leaps. His was a kind of synthesis one could eventually grasp. It just took most of a century.

13/10/2008 / April 2008 / Immanuel Kant / 1724-1804 / Physics / Best / AFW, 816, © 2008 / CIP, Oct 13 / OAR

The idea that in a few years of your spare time, while working at the Swiss Patent Office, you could rewrite the whole of scientific history is ludicrous. Produce the papers on Brownian motion, Special Relativity, mass-energy equivalence, photoelectric effect and the photon, all while gainfully employed on other projects – absurd and impossible, but true! It was the start towards his Nobel Prize in 1921, but even that may end up not being his main claim to fame. His General Theory of Relativity, a short time later, was closer to the mark, as well as a 1919 solar eclipse. But actually it was his failures that may end up being his greatest legacy. His lonely quest for a unified theory, and his musings on a cosmological constant are what animate 21st Century physics.

From the late Twenties till his death in 1955 Einstein was on an increasingly solitary mission to unify the widest possible range of natural events under the rubric of the fewest possible physical principles. He had already unified space, time and gravity, but that was not enough. He wanted to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. His search for a unified field theory went unfulfilled. It was often seen by young physicists at the time as a quixotic voyage by a great, but old man, who was past his prime. From the Forties through the Seventies that was the status quo.

With the advent of String Theory the search gradually became au courant again. With it’s fuzzy math the raison d’être worked both ways. The obscuring of 0 and 1 by quivering solved many of the difficulties encountered by contemplating the infinite. Fairly certainly many current physicists would characterize that assertion as an over simplification. They would be right, but string theory is essentially a simplification to make the math work. God may not have played dice, but he did the math. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are not quite so foreign when you take an oscillating average. Okay, they are right! It is an over simplification.

But the grandest of ironies is the ‘Cosmological Constant’. Originally it was conceived in order to maintain the myth that the universe was static. Of course, at the time, everyone, including Einstein, thought the myth was true. It represented the possibility that there is density and pressure in empty space, to balance the attractive force of gravity and prevent matter and energy from forcing the universe to collapse in on itself. The net effect of a negative pressure cosmological constant was to create a repulsive gravitational force. With Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding, Einstein was only too happy to jettison his cosmological constant, and even called it his biggest blunder. Now the universe just oscillates between the spatially open, the spatially flat and the spatially closed. The age problem of the universe is another compelling reason to believe in the existence of a cosmological constant. Now, as a marriage of convenience the constant is reborn and his biggest blunder may end up as his greatest legacy. Again it is a simplification that my simple mind can’t fully comprehend.

Let’s not forget the thread from Cusanus. Einstein is reputed to have once said: “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” Of course my favorite quote from him is: “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”

13/10/2008 / April 2008 / Albert Einstein / 1879-1955 / Physics / Best / AFW, 817, © 2008 / CIP, Oct 13 / OAR

And so the journey arrives in the here and now – Cusanus, Bruno, Pascal, Kant, Einstein, and Witten. Edward Witten is the last in our line – and the first to be contiguous with his immediate predecessor. For four years, between 1951 and 1955, they actually shared our little globe. He is also alive today. I suppose it would be fair to ask is Witten now, where Einstein once was. In the late Twenties, or early Thirties Einstein would have been, oh let’s say 52-53. Witten today is about 57. For certain the locale is the same. Both led The Institute for Advance Study, Princeton, New Jersey. The search is similar – one sought and the other seeks a unified theory of everything. The latter is still producing, but has the rate slowed?

Awhile back I wrote about me: “A younger mind than mine can compute differently by holding more facets clearly in context. Does that automatically make his product superior to mine? Is he always closer to the truth?” I didn’t answer then, still can’t – but I do wonder if it’s germane. Perhaps it is possible that, with experience, we get better at synthesis. Youth generally doubts it. On such a question rests the possibility of Witten succeeding where Einstein failed. Let’s at least see how far he has gotten.

He won a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1982, The Dirac Medal in 1985, A Fields Medal in 1990, The National Medal of Science in 2003, and an Honorary Doctor of Science, from Cambridge University, 2006. He is primarily a mathematical physicist - the Fields Medal is the highest honor for a mathematician. He marries math to Quantum Field Theory. Of course his math is way beyond me – actually beyond almost everybody – but way, way beyond me. However he has never won a Nobel Prize, maybe never will. That’s at least partly because the technology to prove some of his theories won’t be invented for a long, long time. Still the terascale of the Large Hadron Collider, just about to come online at CERN, could help. Of course he could win in 2021, as a fitting centennial to Einstein’s.

Some of his concepts such as anomaly cancellation, theory equivalence, mirror symmetry and gauge invariance are almost comprehensible to a layman, even if the math is not. Some of them, under varying names and degrees of applicability, trace back to Cusanus, Bruno, Pascal, and Kant. Even more go back to Einstein. Man, it seems, has been struggling with infinity under various guises almost forever. If the one dimensional trajectory becomes a two dimensional orbit, is that different in kind from the debate between a point and a wave? Little loops of vibrating string oscillating in varying harmonies are a way of looking at things that can resonate in the mind, if not yet under the macro microscope. It is successful primarily because of the fuzziness it produces. Space-time itself becomes fuzzy. Thirteen/WNET used the expression “Quantum experiments were more actuarial than actual.” Maybe solid things became fuzzy waves, but produced good vibrations. Is that the extra dimensions? Maybe, maybe not, or maybe sometimes on average, if it’s a Planck length or universal.

There are a few techie sorts, a few nerds, and a lot of communists who would like to do away with God in all H. guises. For the rest of us – Buddhists, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus and a host of others – we know there is a PBU. From Cusanus to Einstein and maybe Witten too – we don’t really know his views on this subject. He was raised in a Jewish family – beyond that we don’t know, and perhaps shouldn’t. Some years ago on a physics forum they asked the question: “Does the world’s smartest man, Edward Witten, believe in God?” The overwhelming response was who cares? What does it matter? It is not his area of expertise… and other such comments. They had a point, but since it was a physics forum, they might also have had a bias. There was an article in National Geographic (March, 2008) entitled The God Particle by Joel Achenbach. It was a fascinating piece on the LHC at CERN. Still, I thought it a bit presumptuously titled. Journalists and physicists, both it seems, have to sell magazines and colliders respectively. At any rate that brings us back to Cusanus and full circle.

13/10/2008 / April 2008 / Edward Witten / 1951 – / Physics / Best / AFW, 818, © 2008 / CIP, Oct 13 / OAR

I do not subscribe to the false pride of the fully knowledgeable. Science and knowledge is a morphing, oscillating, blurry blob, that takes on the coloration of its age and simply awaits re-tinting again. That of course includes this treatise, as it does virtually everything else ever written. Some writings include a few pearls that stand, at least for awhile, the test of time. Most simply contain grains of sand that are difficult to distinguish between. These are my grains of sand and hopefully a pearl or two. Words are just grains of sand made up of particular letters in various languages. A particle physicist might be able to relate. The scaling and the fractions and the fractals are all that remain.

Speaking of particle physicists I am not one. At most I am a particle. I am neither a physicist, nor a scientist, and certainly not a mathematician. I am a dabbler and an occasional synthesizer. I suffer the incomprehension of too little knowledge, but also the freedom from a straight jacket. I find almost everything a double edged sword, and from that perspective I often gain an insight. Some of them are dead flat wrong. Quite a few have an element of truth. One or two might be right on. Still, most physicists would call it philosophy. I don’t. It’s not that elevated.

13/10/2008 / December 2007 / Knowledge / Physics / Best / AFW, 807, © 2008 / CIP / OAR