If We Could See Inside Others Hearts

Cubism

       Following their 1907 meeting in Paris, artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered the Cubist style, a new vision for a new century that inspired paintings that were initially ridiculed by critics for consisting of “little cubes.” Often painting side-by-side in their Montmartre, Paris, studios, the artists developed a visual language of geometric planes and compressed space that rejected the conventions of perspective and representation. Cubist works challenged viewers to understand a subject broken down into its geometrical components and often represented from several angles at once.

Cubists abstracted from real life to make their work, but most often maintained small identifiable clues to a realistic figure, whether a woman or a violin. The artists adopted a neutral palette of browns and blacks, intending the viewer to focus on the geometric composition rather than the color. Cubism marks a pioneering moment in the history of art—one that ended when many of its leading practitioners, Braque among them, enlisted to fight in World War I....




'' The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain "
                                                                                                     Georges Braque




MoMA

A Lesson to the Next Generation

When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.

Martin Luther King

  

What You Don't Do

Sometimes it is what you don't do which defines you. It is the negative space that shapes your life.

It is the things you don't say, the decisions you don't make, the actions you don't take.

These things can set you apart from those that do.

Time Travel Paradoxes

It's impossible to consider the subject of time travel without addressing the issue of paradoxes. These occur where time travel would result in what appear to be logical inconsistencies or impossibilities.

Many people believe that the paradox problem is itself enough to render time travel impossible. Regardless of the physics, the philosophy of time travel is a fascinating area for "thought experiment".

Various paradoxes have been raised, these usually involve an apparent breach of causality in one way or another. The most well-known version is the "grandfather paradox".

The Grandfather Paradox

This is a very simple idea with serious repurcussions for the concept of time travel. Let's say that I invent a time machine and travel into the past. I meet my own grandfather when he was a boy and kill him.
The result? One of my parents is never born, therefore I can never be born.

So I couldn't have gone back in time and killed him.

This is a logical contradiction - and a philosophical nightmare!

Resolutions

There have been numerous proposals for dealing with the apparent causal paradoxes of time travel.
The easiest is simply to say "so what?". The paradox only exists because of our "common sense" view of linear causality - possibly related to the arrow of time. If we step back and look at the system as a whole then we can see a multi-dimensional causality. Unfortunately most of our existing laws of physics assume linear causality in one direction or another, so this resolution is unpopular.

An alternative is to call on the "multiple universes" theory. By travelling into the "past" we are actualy travelling into an alternate or parallel universe. From the moment we arrive, the universes start diverging. Whether the universes "split" or whether they always existed in parallel in some higher "dimension" is a matter of taste.

One side-effect of this resolution is that we can never return to our original time - we are stuck in the parallel universe and can only move forwards into its future. If I shoot my grandfather then get back into my time machine and return to 2013 it will be a 2006 where I was never born. Once I have stepped on that butterfly then my original universe is forever inaccessible to me.

Another interesting idea is the "mobius strip" timeline, discussed here by Anthony Edwards. How the mobius strip generalises to multiple dimensions when multiple time travellers are involved is beyond my grasp - I get lost after the klein bottle!

An interesting technical approach to resolving the paradox is the Novikov self-consistency principle proposed by Dr. Igor Novikov. This essentially says that paradoxes won't happen - it's impossible to create a paradox however hard you try. In this view the universe is in some way "self-righting". If you attempt to shoot your grandfather then something will go wrong - you'll miss, the gun will jam, etc. Or, if you succeed, you'll later learn that your father was adopted; so he still gets born and still marries your mother. This reminds me of the anthropic principle: the universe is this way because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here.

Perhaps the simplest resolution of temporal paradoxes is to say that since they only occur when we travel into the past, then travel into the past is impossible but travel into the future remains a possibility.

Unfortunately this makes time travel rather pointless - it achieves little more than we could get through long-term suspended animation or near light speed travel.

Your Children are not Your Children

They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

© Kahlil Gibran, 1923, 1973.

The Multiverse Theory

Anyone who has not spent the last ten years on a desert island, has at least once heard of “the multiverse”, or parallel universes. As many of us have seen, parallel words, in theory, are worlds very similar to ours, with little (or in some cases, large) changes or differences. The multiverse theory speculates that there could exist an infinite number of these alternate realities.
What’s the point? In a parallel reality you have already killed the dinosaurs, and you are lying under the ground at a depth of eight feet (because that’s what happened there.) In the other you might be a powerful king. In another you might never have even been born since your parents never met. Now that’s a memorable image.