M.J. Rose

It’s true – the ultimate mystery is LIGHT. Even science is completely boggled by its spooky properties.  Here’s a handy little primer on the mysterious aspects, with some good, clear images that help describe what’s going on…

The Ultimate Mystery: What is light?

by Gary Vey for Viewzone

“In the following four pages of this article, you will learn that there is a mysterious link between your consciousness and the properties of a photon, the basic unit of electromagnetic energy. You will see how your consciousness has reversed the flow of time in laboratory experiments, changed the course of light from being a straight line and how what you know as “reality” is explained by some noted physicists as an elaborate digital simulation, in which you and I are characters (avatars). It’s all real — no conjecture. This story will blow your mind — if it does not then it means you do not understand it yet!

* * *
In the 19th century, scientists began to delve into the basic structure of the universe in an attempt to understand how it was put together. In one very simple experiment they sought to determine the nature of light, but the results were unexpected and created a mystery that the greatest minds have been unable to solve to this day.

To a physicist, light means an energy that is anywhere along the electromagnetic spectrum, from ELF waves to gamma radiation. Visible light is only a narrow part of the spectrum that is most familiar to us because our eyes can detect it. In the Newtonian model of the universe everything is made of particles, including light. Scientists began to think of light as being made from tiny “balls” of energy called photons.

In 1803 a physician named Thomas Young had been studying sound waves and thought that light was also a phenomenon involving waves. This contradicted the current theory. Young noticed that light could be slowed as it passed through a prism and the observed spectrum of colors seemed to be more easily explained as wave phenomenon rather than that of light “particles”.

Young decided he would conduct an experiment that would finally resolve the conflict. What he could not have known is that this experiment would open up a pandora’s box of brain-twisting enigmas that contradict our understanding of the universe and our own reality.

As you will see, the result of this experiment is a glimpse into another dimension where time itself can move backwards or stand still. This mystery has been with us for over 200 years now and we are no closer to solving it today. But when and if it is finally understood, civilization will dramatically change and our reality will have to be reconstructed.

The Double Slit Experiment (1803)

Thomas Young tried to keep things simple. He looked for examples in our everyday experience that revealed if things were solid particles or oscillating waves. I will attempt to explain his experiment using more modern analogies so that it will hopefully be easier to understand.

Let’s imagine that you have a wide cement wall with an open, rectangular window cut in it. At some distance beyond the cement wall there is second wall. This second wall is made of thin wallboard and has no window. You’re going to stand at some distance in front of the first wall and the window. You have a pistol [represented by the triangle below] and you begin shooting through the window. As you do this, you notice that the bullets are passing through the open window and hitting the second wall where they make holes…”

For the rest, click here.

If you needed one more good reason to visit Prague, here it is!

From Dangerous Minds,

Of Man, myth and magic: Prague’s creepy alchemy museum

“In 1576, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II chose Prague to be his home. More than any other person, Rudolf made Prague a hotbed of alchemical interest. Rudolf lived in the Prague Castle, where he welcomed not only astrologers and magicians but also scientists, musicians, and artists. In addition to noted alchemists Edward Kelley and John Dee, Prague was also home to the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the painter Arcimboldo, the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, among others. Rudolf arguably spawned the most intense period of occult activity in history.

If you want to know more about the reign of Rudolf II, you could do a lot worse than Peter Marshall’s The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague.

Celebrating this alchemical contributions of Rudolf II is the Museum of Alchemists and Magicians of Old Prague, located at Jansky Vrsek 8 on the western side of the Vltava. The museum consists of two levels of displays and tableaux that document Rudolf’s alchemists in Prague, especially Kelley. (There is a sister museum called the Speculum Alchemiae Museum, but that’s on the other side of the river, at Hastalska 1.)

Quoting Altas Obscura,

The main floor has displays and replica artifacts of the trade alongside such fantastical scenes as a failed magician being stolen up into the ceiling by the Devil while cackling sorcerers huddle around the glowing runes beneath. The second floor, which claims to be the actual tower where the real Kelley performed his esoteric experiments if decked out like an alchemists lab, all aged scrolls and stacked grimoires, complete with a half-completed homunculus, the ultimate alchemical achievement. The museum is more than a little sensational in its presentation, but to be fair these alchemists were likely more than a little bit showmen themselves. What better way to remember and learn about their arcane history than with a little bit of magical realism?

Here’s a peek at some of the treasures within…”

For the rest, and many bizarre pictures, click here.

Love is still a mystery.

“Perhaps it is expected that I should lament about how I have suffered living with a man like Diego. But I do not think that the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow, nor does the earth suffer because of the rains, nor does the atom suffer for letting its energy escape. To my way of thinking, everything has its natural compensation.” – Frida Kahlo

Those words seem like a metaphor for everything. Frida is speaking of her love for Diego, and yet isn’t this how all of everything really is? Work, art, health, beauty, age…and on and on. The darkness is the very home of light. Without it, light has nowhere to go…

From Brain Pickings,

Frida Kahlo on How Love Amplifies Beauty: Her Breathtaking Tribute to Diego Rivera

By Maria Popova

 
“As artists, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) and Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886–November 24, 1957) each possessed boundless talent bolstered by an unbending will. As partners, they possessed each other with a ferocious love, intense and complicated and all-eclipsing — the kind for which, in Rilke’s immortal words, “all other work is but preparation.” They wed when Kahlo was twenty-two and Rivera forty-two, and remained together until Kahlo’s death twenty-five years later. They had an open marriage long before the term existed as a trend of modern romance — both had multiple affairs, Rivera with women and Kahlo with both men and women, most notably with the French singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker and with the Russian Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky. Still, both insisted that they were the love of each other’s life — a deep conviction crystallized in Kahlo’s passionate love letters and Rivera’s affectionate account of their first encounter.

But nowhere does their uncommon love come more vibrantly alive than in Kahlo’s short portrait of Rivera, included as an afterword to his My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (public library). In just a few wholehearted, wholebodied paragraphs, she captures the enormity of their love. Her sincere humanity radiates a testament to the enormity of all love as a transfiguring force, the ultimate wellspring of beauty and grace…”

For the rest, click here.