A short thought this time.
while listening to a PBS (of course you knew I would be the kind of person the would do that), conversation with S. James Gates, I was reminded of so many things.
Of the love of SiFi that was given to my by my mother, desperate to ween me from the comic books of the day. She encouraged me to read books, novels any damn thing that wasn't a comic book, and I did. I was a plyable little fart, easily lead to water. She offered the literary world and I plunged in right up to my ankles. Heinlein, Azimov, DelRey, the list is not quite endless, but you couldn't prove that by me. I read any thing that could be called SiFi, and a scattering of things that wern't, not enough to matter.
Why did a conversation on a PBS program encite this? well, S. James Gates is a leading proponant of String Theory, and I love String Theory.
As a child, dealing with his mother's death by cancer around the age of nine, his age, not his mother's, he burried his hurt in SiFi and it lead to a life long study of Physics.
Now, I'm not a scientist, don't make any claim in that direction. Hell, the only scientific class I took in high school was some mish-mash of anything that could be labled "science" all in one easily digestable grey lump for those of us that were totally useless in the scientific realm, and I was painfully terminally bored the whole time. Where I had fun was in my math classes, where one year just out of cantankerousness I proved that, mathmatically, the interior dimensions of a sphere were infinite, and that was my last hurrah.
What grabbed my attention with Mr. Gates was the string theory.
The first time I heard of string theory I felt a resonance of truth. It made sense to me in a fundimental way that no other idea has ever done.
Srings of vibrating energy all in an infinite variety of "tones" that make up all matter.
There are those amoung us that have always been different, they see things, hear things. Could some of them be right?
Composers especially have the ability to create amazing, astounding, glorious pieces of music that transport the soul to places of beauty. Could some ot them have the ability to hear the "music" of the Universe?
Hildegard von Bingen, may well have been one. She is thought to have had "visions" as early a age 3, and these visions were with her through out her life.

Some how the idea of string theory and the Music of the Spheres are compatible notions.

more to come............