The Light and Sound Experience Part 1: - Sound

December 19, 2023

 Mind your P’s and Q’s


Are manners anything more than an outdated British custom of social airs and graces, for fear of upsetting the other? 

 Manners have for many years ruled the behaviours of the civilised British gentry, with records dating as far back as the early 18th century. Over time, these customs have trickled down from, ‘on-high’, and form the profoundly ingrained set of etiquacies; that make up the backbone of our social interactions today. From forming orderly queues, to quite literally begging for pardon: - manners seem to have found their own way of tidying up the world in which we live.
 

As the radicals and anarchists, the liberals and freedom fighters began to philosophise about life and its loves, the confusion for many lies in the rational of it all. For instance, does it really make sense to excuse ourselves, or to limit the freedom for self-expression; for exhibiting mere natural behaviours? I mean, if folk want to get offended, that’s their problem, right? 


I’ve travelled to distant countries, where the idea of manners, really have felt like a long way from home. I’ve been pushed out of the way by grandmothers and grandchildren alike, almost sat on, on top of buses and experienced the total non-existence of customer service at the best of times… and I can say, it felt bloody annoying. Indeed, nothing made me appreciate more, the stiff, uptight, and people pleasing ways of life back in Britain.

In this muddle of inter-cultural, personal, and eccentric behaviours, we can’t, by any means, control what fancies folk might perceive to find annoying. But manners appear to be less about the perceptions of the afflicted and more about the righteous and careful consideration in which we choose to move about and respond to in this world. When we hear an unwelcome noise, or are ruffled up the wrong way, there is nothing quite like the sounds of a sincere apology, to help clear the tension in the air. Words and sounds quite literally carry energy, with the rarefaction and compression of air molecules emanating first through a mechanical vibration. When we speak, energy is departing the vocal chords of one person and headed straight for the eardrums of another! In this way sound is a process of energy transfer, and the absorption of this energy into something or someone else. 

The aristocracy didn’t just make a point of speaking to each other nicely, they also had a thing called finishing school.  They determined that how we carry ourselves and the development of a gentile character, would be a pretty darn important asset to cultivate in life. Just ask a magician whether words carry power and you will soon find out. Sounds can certainly invoke feelings in the recipient, and in turn sounds are released in accordance to the feelings of the originator. So is it possible that the energies of our emotions are being carried with these words too?


From the way that we speak to each other, to the utterances that make up the mudra of our personal being, how we hold ourselves determines the energies that emanate. Manners are a form of awareness and respect, they are the all-encompassing expression of ‘seeing God in everything and everyone’, to take that ultimate reverence for the divine and to apply it to all others.



The Light and Sound Experience Part 2: - Light

December 19, 2023

 

 

                                                           The Split Personality of Light

Forget military service, or a year’s work experience in industry. Why even bother to take a gap year out to go trotting merrily across the globe? Nothing in my opinion would enrich our lives more than if we all took a year off, in the contemplation and study of the very real *dichotomy and strangest behaviour of light.


Thanks to Gaven Pretor-Pinney, author of The Wavewatchers’s Companion, I have been, ‘mind blown’, over the past five months, knee deep in the reading and research of such a fascinating and mind-boggling subject. Because still to this day, “most scientists who have worked in the field of quantum mechanics would be at great pains to say, that they too have found the nature of light as bloody mysterious as the rest of us”. 


Since the mid-18th century, the predicament most physicists found themselves in, was the argument of whether light was a particle or a wave. Over the centuries, reputable scientists such as Newton, Young and Einstein, were able to convincingly theorise new evidence that would periodically overturn societal thinking of light’s behaviour at the time. This alternate - ‘is light a wave’ or ‘is it a particle’ conundrum continued steadily for over three centuries. But then, in 1923, the bonkers behaviour of light was finally revealed; in the famous double slit experiment conducted by Davisson and Germer, who discovered that light had all this time been leading a double life... inconspicuously moving around as waves, but behaving like particles, only while being observed [naughty].

                      

                                               
Davisson and Germer’s brilliant experiment didn’t, however, reveal that light’s behaviour changed through the mere act of looking at it. It was in the analysis of light, that had given rise to its duality and curiously still, this phenomena not only occurred through the mind of the human observer, but the same was true when the experiment was performed only in the presence of a machine. 
 

The peculiarity of light remains to this day bizarre, and there is no end in time and money spent in its continued pursuit. Could it be less of a question of ‘why’ does light behave like this and more of a question of what could the conscious self have to do with it? Where does the answer lie? Maybe not at the end of the Hadron Collider, but perhaps at the end of a very long and deep meditation. Is it that sometimes science can only bring us only so far, and that some things will remain as unanswerable as magic! 



Sometimes it’s far easier to forget the unfathomable than to continue to keep figuring it out. But in the thought, study and fascination of our magnificent universe, isn’t it marvellous that we are able to bring a little meaning into the mundane. Owing to this strange wave – particle phenomena, my studies have been endlessly fascinating... life doesn’t always require a million-dollar scientific set-up to reveal to us it’s great mysteries, or to find in it your own truth.
So is light a particle or a wave? It’s most definitely both and we just don’t understand it. Some might also ask, “did God create the universe or did we just evolve here”? Well maybe it was both and we just don’t understand it… because it wasn’t one or the other… it was most definitely everything. 


*Dichotomy – a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.


There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Hamlet.