Recently asked to write an article for a radical paper, I sent the following, which is to point on ending the Oil Era equally -- having to do with a unifying theory of everything. We are at that point. Similar to the point where it was proved the world is round, not flat, 500 years ago. Such facts are focal points, as I attempt to point out -- which makes it possible to relax and go about accepting positive outcomes. A radical idea, indeed! Here's the article: If anyone prints it please email me a copy and credit me with these ideas, if you use them in work that goes forward. Aho. kath@jeffnet.org About 2000 words, K. String Theory & Saving Our Butts © Kathleen Surbaugh, September, 2005 (Used with permission.) I've been getting letters from various folks - John Kerry, Howard Dean, Walter Cronkite even - asking me to pitch in and "help save the Democratic Party" these past few months, by doing one thing or another in addition to giving money. Sign this. Call so-and-so. Write "X." Join . . . . Sounds like the same old bullshit to me. Same old bullshitters, too, for that matter! Like I have been for a long time, I've been considering: WHAT EXACTLY IS IT THAT NEEDS SAVING? AND BY WHAT MEANS CAN THIS NECESSARY SALVATION BE ACCOMPLISHED? In other words: What is it useful to do? With my very limited resources, what ought I support, back, try to further and sustain, amplify and promote, in terms of being the most helpful to the life-force overall?The Democratic Party? Last time I looked, which was last year, it was a tele-outreach club of people like me run by the usual "West Wing" types - basically, media hypes who work on formulas and eat a lot of lobster on the campaign trail. Grasping at straws and calling them "issues" in a culture viewed neither with much knowledge of Greek classics nor with a Taoist sense of time. "Disjointed," "inconsistent,""flip-flop" they were called by the more invariable louts and low-brows of the opposition, both sides re-hashing time-worn arguments - in which pettiness prevails. No. Contending for control, making trade-offs, pay-offs, deals-down-the-road -- ain't gonna git it. What is going to save us - physically, politically, spiritually (if given to these terms) - is going to have to involve in infusion of an important new idea. I mean something comparable in scale to "the world is round" sort of development, back in the 15th Century, with Galileo, that finally ended the dispute over authority that we now call "the dark ages." What is required, in effect, is an enlightenment. Governance by remote oligarchy, rigid thought control through local outlets, unthinkable consequences for lack of conformity (in thought, not just in deed,) systematic "dumbing-down" for nearly the entire population, secrecy, Secrecy, SECRECY! -- coupled with reduction of legal recourse and social services, defunding of public education, deterioration of infrastructure, loss of police protection: This was the very definition of Dark Ages decline. Does this not describe the era post-1963 in the USA? Such a concept -- revolutionizing in nature -- exists. It is a modern physics/philosophy perspective, called "String Theory." Seen in context, this theory boils down to a "unified set" theory of everything – large, small, near, far, past, present, future. This theory has been demonstrated in the practical sense that, in 1492, Columbus put an exclamation point on the theory, "The earth is round!" Certainly, not all debate ended about this matter when Columbus returned to Spain with booty and slaves, convincing as that may seem, today. Observers of reality are rarely disinterested and open-minded; vested interest influences even the best of us when challenged by information that puts our claim to personal authority or to a powerful role at risk. Then, as now, individuals who grab for 50 X or 5 million X their share of personal control are generally quite vested in both seeing things and keeping things just as they are (so long as they, personally, are calling the shots.) So, seeing is usually not believing. Generally, it is a signal to taking up arms! First, the professors and experts in the given field resist. Those who have been vested in error, basically (then, as now -- our best thinking, to date!) stand to lose power, position, clout. Along with the pundit, those they serve resist: the aristocracy (then, dukes, earls, etc, now -- CEOs, but still, basically, familial dynasties, dukes, earls, sheiks, warlords, headed by males.) Their visible structure resists(then, the priesthood, Inquisition, now FBI, Homeland Security, Military, public figures) by creating ever-present threats that drain off attention, generate fear, punishment. Media is flooded with trash and advertizing and moralizing ("dumbing down" at high volume.) We the public shall hear no news of this news. We haven't made the appropriate connection yet - but we will. As sometimes happens once a perspective is gained, some things feel self-evident, as well as work elegantly -- and that's OK, too! How's that for new science? The String Theory says that basically everything is made of little squiggles that seem to behave many different ways, depending, to a greater or lesser extent on how we manipulate or observe the process. Energy/matter are basically "strings," i.e., squiggles which are energy/matter, depending how viewed, whether pressured, released, going fast, slow. Aha! I'm sure you've just said. I'll bet that just made everything perfectly clear about Bush vs. Kerry and Individual and Basic Civil Rights? About Terrorism, and Eco-terrorism as practiced by the Multinational Corporations? About International Warfare Economies as a basis of Global Politics? Right! Well, just in case you'd like a amplification on these points, let me break it down for you just a tad: What exactly does String Theory, the idea the everything is made up of little squiggles in various forms of motion and rest, have to do with LIFE, DEATH AND EXTINCTION AS WE KNOW IT (OR MAY VERY SOON)? Everything, basically. Since we are all made from them and so is everything else, from the stars to the atoms themselves, with no exceptions. Oh, but that's not a good answer. A little too general. (Like saying "God is everything." Yes, but will this wisdom help get my car started if my battery is run down, unless combined with battery cables or a Triple-A Card?) Some insights gained about "squiggles" over the past thirty years can probably be an aid to developing similar specific tools for jumpstarting new approaches to human politics, to rebalancing intraspecies ecology and to restoring the overall life-sphere of this planet: For openers, lets pause to consider that our best minds in this specialized area of research weren’t expecting to find and weren't looking for "squiggles." They were looking for objects. Particles. Stuff. String Theory still has many detractors for the simple reason that it stands our conventional view of the universe on its ear by exchanging matter to pretty much non-matter. Our best physicists have built particle accelerators at great expense to smash atoms into smaller bits in order to find the pieces - not thinking for a moment that the bits themselves were, to a large extent, constructed by the act of being smashed into each other, in effect, strings pushed head to head upon each other, wadded up into little balls, dancing back, as though objects. This possible understanding is quite radical, recent and revolutionary. An earlier challenge to conventional linear thinking in scientific method arose through work in particle physics, to the concept that the experimenter could remain detached, could sit outside and not be an integral part of what they were doing. This is a component within the Theory of Indeterminancy - a formal theory of how the act of attempting to measure things can have measurable impact upon things, time and space! Getting away from theoretical physics, consider how our species culture, the one that seems to be dominant on the planet these days-- has built bombs - nuclear bombs. How the "squiggles" have been made to "bump into each other" - seen as matter - used for aggression, linear-brain goals. Note, also, our culture's approach, so far to fields of electricity, to water technology - to every field of engineering, in fact. Notice even how our over-balanced on the left-brain linear-thinking has massed huge amounts of electrical energy around the middle latitudes of the earth. Same with carbon fuels. Ozone. Other forms of pollution and excrement. The "squiggles" have been slammed into each other - as objects, end to end. Tons and tons and tons of them. Plus we are pretty fat, as individuals. Slamming a lot of squiggles into each other in our bellies, too. On our butts. Over the belt-line. You get the picture, I'm sure! Big cars, big houses, big piles of you-know-what! We are the stack it higher, deeper and slam it harder species. Not a dance of energy, a beat of it, a drumming, pounding, driving, thumping, compounding of strings building up around the middle latitudes of the earth, people included. Burning up. Being poisoned. But why? Where did we get it so wrong? How has our understanding, at a species-wide level, been so far removed from the true pulse of reality that we’ve been crashing and breaking into everything, blindly and willfully while considering these behaviors to be non-violent and ordinary, oblivious and closed to any options beyond our own tumultuous view? The most likely answer: Linear-brain aggression-centered human culture probably began to dominate other cultures when people got desperately hungry and cold during the Ice Ages (20-12,000 years ago.) Pragmatically, those groups who chose to kill or subjugate the people down the valley and take what they had (rather than take time and trouble to bond with them by learning their language and cooperating with them) won the short-term argument, back then and survived. They have, culturally, been justifying this behavior, "as necessary," ever after. Tribes and villages, too, that starved out, enslaved or killed outright emigrants in need rather than admitting them are in the same boat. What kind of invaders made it? Ice Age Pragmatists likely lead our species to select for ruthlessness, defensive/aggressiveness, physical power, and "pack"-level hunting skills, as well as tremendous envy, appetite, and lust for the obvious riches and benefits of "good life" as they perceived it, in the valleys and at the sea shores cultures which were the targets. In establishing cultural norms and setting values during a time of terror, crisis, panic – outlooks which perpetuate fear-based aggression – humanity as a species has gotten more and more invested in actively deforming the "squiggles" toward acceleration, compression, build-up and collapse, as the Ice Age Warrior-based general outlook has taken progressively more and more cultural ground. These "kill or be killed," "them or us" approaches (traditionally, traced back to the Assyrians/Aryans/Mongolians hoards, sweeping down from the North,) are not life-affirming outlooks. They produce DEATH. Thus, philosophically, they are MISTAKEN. A species that embarks upon domination of a planet with this sort of flawed outlook, given it has sufficient power to do harm to the life forms and nature in proximity. In the String Theory Model of the Universe, one cannot "out-run" or "live down" past errors. They accumulate. Gather. Collect. Don’t go "away" because there isn’t any "away" to go to. One cannot "bury" the past. We are all in glass houses, in effect. What we do is on the front page of the paper, for all to see. Every day. All those cultures sacrificed to expediency – they remain. Within the scattered molecules of what has been bulldozed and thrown to the side are the many-side solutions to the softening of our species’ character. The fact that physics supports this reality, that unity exists and that substance is illusion, once grasped and understood has power to transform us, beyond what we may first grasp. Give this understanding time. It won’t take long. Not in stellar perspective. Aggression was always a bad idea and a mistake, in terms of the physics of life. Nice to be able to prove that? Rest at peace in this fateful understanding? String Theory - as it fleshes out, and it does flesh out - demonstrates that aspects of what has, in Western Culture, been termed "liberalism" is rooted as firmly in fact as were the "arguments" that the world is round. These discussions we describe as "arguments" -- try visualizing these as similar to a gathering of ants taking place over time, each waving in "sense" to a growing realization of an existing truth about something (perhaps something that itself shifts and changes, or perhaps something that remains constant, steady and reliable through time.) The feelers wave and touch, the little animals dance, gesture -- thus it is with us, as we build communication 'understandings" among ourselves, living graphic holograms, as shared aspects of our larger being, in a very real sense, carried in the space and time connecting each of us. Genocide and destruction of our ecosystem is then, self-destructive in a very real sense, if we look at shared input and range in such a manner! The world is, more or less, round, after all. Hard to argue that down, in the old sense, where "argue" meant "suppress," isn't it! And so painful! No matter how many folks you burn at the stake or people, these days, you thrust into prisons without lawyers or threaten to torture! The world remains round. The wise shall live upon it, like stout trees and like wind: rooted firm, yet flexible; penetrating, poised, discerning and unstoppable. Aho! For all our relatives. Aho.