Travels Through Time
Poet TS Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
These words came to mind when I heard that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) antennae located in Washington State and Louisiana had registered the waves of sound traveling from two black holes colliding a billion light years back and away across space and time. One light year is the time it takes in a Julian calendar year to travel 5.878625 trillion miles in a vacuum. In the same moment a scientist gazing through a telescope first notes a distant star’s twinkle, that star may have burned out. Most of what we know about outer space is based on light, not sound. The recordings from LIGO sound faint, however, considering distance and time, those sounds roar.
The LIGO recordings did more than discover proof of Einstein’s theories, the LIGO recordings demonstrated that scientists could develop technology that might prove Einstein’s theories. I first heard the following question asked in Philosophy 103 at OCC. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? My answer: set a tape recorder in the forest. Philosophers who first asked the question had no tape recorders. Physics suggests that everything is energy, much of which we are still unaware. Known truth and science grow from what went before within our capacity to understand. Our capacity and consciousness continue to expand. Notions of an evolving universe and a higher power behind that evolution are not mutually exclusive. 
Our human consciousness grows from our first sensations and life lessons as filtered and encoded by our brains amid whatever vibrations surround us. The human connectome is the brain’s system of pathways and patterns, all of which develop in context. Currently, scientists working on the NIH Human Connectome Project are using brain scans to map neural connections of brains in healthy volunteers, a mapping, they admit, is complicated.
I read a lot about neuroscience and I often see pop-type articles using the same test results to draw different conclusions. For instance, researchers observed that the brain scans of people told to signal their decision to push a button just before they push that button, show that the decision to push was made seven seconds before the button pushers think they’ve decided. Some writers suggest these results challenge notions of free will. We exercise our wills in context. Mind-body processing is faster when the situation requires it. Our prior learning flows through our individual connections, with certain brain areas growing larger with use. I mistrust simple conclusions about human consciousness resulting from observations made in lab experiments where research ignores the whole environment, including the past, to satisfy hard science performance based criteria.
In his 2015 memoir “On the Move,” the late neurologist Oliver Sacks writes of his sadness over the aversive pharmaceutical and electrical technologies that he witnessed being used to treat patients suffering from Tourette’s, autism and other brain based illnesses. I was reading “On the Move,” when an NPR interview grabbed my attention. David Kaczynski, interviewed about his memoir, “Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family,” mentioned MKUltra, the CIA mind control program eventually investigated by the Senate. The term MKUltra always grabs my attention because there was an MKUltra manual in a parlor in which I found myself, at the age of six or seven, role-playing with someone who wanted to experiment with psychology in dealing with children. At first, I felt important and happy to help. Now I remember this time as uncomfortable and confusing.
David Kaczynski told NPR that his brother Ted was a shy 16-year-old Harvard student when Harvard invited him to participate in a psychological study. The experiment, which David suggests was part of Harvard’s MKUltra participation, subjected Ted to insults and rejection to study the effects of stress. David Kaczynski believes Ted stayed with the experiment to prove he could. “Every Last Tie…” provides the context around a life, Ted’s life, that without David’s book, might only be known by where it went and not how it started, or what happened between there and here. Ted sent bombs through the mail to call attention to his manifesto condemning technology because of technology’s potential for harm. He would know.
I believe technology proves this: we, and everything, are energy, powered, pushed and propelled by various forces as we travel through time individually and as one.
Keep looking out. Inquire within.
Music & Events Calendar
