Originally published at: Ioan Petru Culianu, argonaut of the 4th dimension | Boing Boing
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This reminds me: I’ve long been interested in academics and death: academics as killers, professors murdered, the influence of some scholar’s work on others who ended up killing,etc. Ted Anton’s book on Culianu fits here: Eros, Magic and the Murder of Professor Culianu. Cracking good read.
It appears that (probably?) rogue Romainian agents hunted him down in the bathroom at the university, offed him, and got away. But who knows. But more importantly: WHY?
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This is probably a bad combination of ignorance, shallow-end understanding of things like string theory and unified field theory, and weed but:
Why do we need a field for each particle? Why not particles existing in the intersection of fields?
In string theory it seems that you can represent fields as dimensions, sort of.
Is consciousness a dimension/field that interacts with other dimension/fields to create the world we know?
Stoned minds want to know.
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That’s what particles are in modern physics, quanta of fields. If you don’t have a different field then there isn’t a different particle to put into the equations, just a different state of the same type.
Note a field is something that takes on different values at different points in space and time…scalar values for fields like the one that gives us Higgs bosons, vector values for fields like the one that gives us photons, spinor values for fields like the one that gives us electrons. They aren’t dimensions and it doesn’t really make sense to talk about them intersecting, though with higher dimensions you can sometimes have one field do the work that two did before.
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bad combination
good combination
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Arthur C. Clarke
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I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about. Thanks for the attempt at edification.
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desiderata: In the quoted section, ligatures got destroyed. (fl in fly, leaving y) and stuff. I think. I don’t have a lot of typefaces on this box, so…
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Surely, Culianu was indeed an argonaut of the 4th Dimension, and - maybe it’s the 30% THC weed talkin’ - but I seem to remember some old professor or wizened Knower of All Things who used to lecture me on a 5th Dimension.
He’d repeat himself every week, and I was but a wee child when I attended his talks, but his opening spiel every week went something like, “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. (And yet he was a “man” himself! curiouser and curiouser!- AramJahn) It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.”
I can’t remember the NAME of that dimension though. I think it had a name. I wanna say it was the dimension of the Outer Limits, but I don’t think that’s it.
Anyone?
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I was just a young serling myself when I attended those lectures, but if I recall correctly, I was seated somewhere in the twilight zone.
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“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.”
— Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic
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