the anomaly

7/29/2019 The Anomaly

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The Anomaly

A very odd thing happened to me when I was 18 years old. It was the summer of 1979and I was home from my first year of college. While standing in my family's TV room

having a conversation with a childhood friend, I experienced an extremely abrupt and

vivid hallucination. Although I was aware I was still standing in the middle of the room,my mind suddenly entered an immense, black space. The space was vast and devoid ofanything except one thing - floating in the middle of the space directly in front of me

were two luminous parallel circles. They glowed a most beautiful aquamarine blue. Thetwo circles were set apart from each other and skewed at an angle so that one of the

circles, from my perspective, was half in front of the other. Each circle was exactly thesame as the other - a mirror image - and although they were distinct, their proximity and

self-reflective quality made them seem like they were one structure. The circles werestrangely cool, powerful and serene. They appeared to be composed entirely of light.

There was no sense of scale, no point of reference. There was no sound or movement.

As quickly as the hallucination had begun, it was over. I was back in the room and myfriend was still talking as if nothing had happened. "Did you see that?" I immediately

interrupted. For some strange reason I thought that he had seen the circles too. Hestopped talking and looked at me, a bit startled because of my outburst. "Did you see

that?" I asked again. The confused look on his face made me realize he had no idea whatI was talking about.

I quickly ran to get a piece of paper and pencil. I tried to draw the circles, to capture them

as best I could - the relationships, the distance between them, the angle, the perspective...

Below is one of the drawings I made on that day.


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The Ophanim

Years after having dismissed the event as some sort of bizarre aberration, I was flipping

through the pages of a book entitled Angels by Peter Lamborn Wilson in a downtownPhiladelphia bookstore. Though I am not a Christian by any means and would mostcertainly fall under the category of atheist, I have always been drawn to pre-Renaissance

Christian art because of its simple honesty and charming naivet.

One of the reproductions in the book suddenly caught my eye. It was of a winged angelwith two sets of double wheels by its side. The wheels were skewed at an angle similar to

the circles I had seen several years before in my hallucination.

I quickly flipped through the pages of the book, looking for similar images, when I ranacross another reproduction - this one of two interlocking circles covered with eyes and

wings. What were these symbols? What do they mean? I immediately bought the book.


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The reproductions are fifteen hundred year-old representations of what are commonly

referred to as Ophanim (literally "wheels" in Hebrew). Images of the Ophanim are foundthroughout ancient Byzantium and usually represented in this form. While doing further

research at the New York Public Library, I discovered a book entitled ChristianIconography by Adolphe Napoleon Didron (1886, Vol. II), which explained that the

Ophanim images were inspired by Ezekiel's description of the "winged and fiery wheels"in the Old Testament.

"And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind out of the north, a great cloud and a fire infoldingitself, a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of

the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst of the fire came the likeness of four livingcreatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one

had four faces, and every one had four wings, and their feet were straight feet; and thesole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot; and they sparkled like the color of

burnished brass." (1:4-7) "Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel uponthe earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and

their work was like unto the color of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and theirappearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they

went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for theirwheels, they were so high that they were dreadful; and the wheels were full of eyes round

about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went with them; andwhen the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.

Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and thewheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the

wheels." (1:15-20)


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Several years later I was traveling through Spain and paid to visit the Museu Nacionald'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. While wandering the halls of the museum, I turned a

corner and came face to face with the most startling representation of the Ophanim I haveever seen. On the wall was an eleventh century fresco transplanted from the apse of the

Church of Santa Maria in Aneu, Spain. Between two winged Seraphim were drawn two

sets of Ophanim. The one thousand year-old drawings on the wall were almost identicalto the drawing I had made six years earlier - or rather, I should say - the drawing I madeone thousand years later!

Master of Pedret,Apse of Santa Maria d'neu, 11th century, Fresco transferred to canvas.


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Master of Pedret,Apse of Santa Maria d'neu, (Detail)


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2001: A Space Odyssey

I was 10 years old when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and it had a profound impact

on me. The film opened my young mind to the possibility of alternative explanations for

what I will call the impetus - the underlying implicate order that seems to guide (for lackof a better word) the universe in its emergent march toward ever more complexity - fromquarks and atoms to dust and ice to life and consciousness and beyond. This underlying

forces and structure are what the fundamental sciences are determined to decipher, andscience does a pretty good job of explaining how things work but never really addresses

the questions of why. But then again, this isn't really its job.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the storyline revolved around this fundamental question -what is the driving force behind ever more complexity? The story didn't offer a purely

scientific explanation, but it wasn't an irrational (i.e., religious) one either. It seemed tohover somewhere in between - a subtle blend of science and mysticism that struck a

chord in me as a young boy.

The opening sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Dawn of Man, deals with theextraordinary evolutionary leap from ape to human. A mystically enlightened ape

discovers how a simple bone can be used as a powerful tool, or - more specifically - aweapon. After the ape and his clan brutally capture a water source from a rival group

through the deadly use of their new tools, he throws his weapon high into the air in aburst of newfound power and confidence. The bone twists higher and higher into the sky

until suddenly the image of the spinning bone jump cuts to a spacecraft floatinggracefully above the Earth. The year is now 2001. Modern humans, through the steady

evolutionary development of their tools over the ensuing millennia have progressed to the

point where their technology has allowed them to leave the confines of Earth and to beginthe colonization of outer space. (Incidentally, the HAL-9000 computer - a human creation- has become an conscious entity capable of defending itself). As the lyrical strains of

Johann Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz fill the theater, a double-wheeled space station driftsinto view, floating and spinning gracefully above the Earth.


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September 11, 2001

Several months after the attack on the World Trade Center, I was watching a TV newsreport of the last steel beam being removed from Ground Zero. There was a big

ceremony. The beam was draped with an American flag and placed on the back of a

flatbed truck. "Taps" was played. Policemen and fireman lined the ramp leading out ofthe excavation area while the truck slowly drove its way up to street level. The camerapulled back to a wide shot of the entire ground zero area. The image on the television

screen seemed oddly familiar to me. Where had I seen this scene before? Then it occurredme. The Ground Zero excavation site looked remarkably similar to the lunar excavation

area in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.


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In the second portion of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Haywood Floyd arrives onthe Clavius lunar base for a confidential meeting. We learn that scientists have recently

made a remarkable discovery - an object has been found on the moon that was"deliberately buried" over 3 million years ago. Floyd travels to the excavation site inside

the Tycho crater to see the object with his own eyes. When the exposed monolith alignswith the earth and the sun, it suddenly beams a powerful signal toward Jupiter.


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Apophenia

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns in random or meaningless data. The term

was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as "unmotivated seeing of

connections " accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness."Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of realitypresent in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in

healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological or mentalillness.

Peter Brugger of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Zurich, asserts that

"the propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas mostclosely links psychosis to creativity. Apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two

sides of the same coin."

There seems to be some kind of strange connection between the years 1968 and 2001,primates, the twin towers, Jupiter, the moon and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For instance, on Aug. 6, 1968, the first steel beams for the World Trade Center towers

were put in place by Karl Koch Erecting Company, at what will become the southwestcorner of the North Tower. At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, American Airlines flight

11 was crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: ASpace Odyssey had its world premier on April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in

Washington, DC.

Mohammad Atta was the hijacker-pilot in control of American Airlines flight 11 which

crashed into the North Tower on September 11, 2001. He was born in a small town in theNile delta in Egypt in 1968.

In Egypt, September 11 coincides with the first day of the Coptic New Year, which fallson the first day of the month of Thout. The month of Thout is named after Egyptian god

Thoth, the god of wisdom. Thoth was considered the heart and tongue of Ra as well asthe means by which Ra's will was translated into speech. He has been likened to the

Logos of Plato and the Word of God. He is also the Lord of the Moon. Thoth is usuallydepicted with the head of an ibis, whose beak resembles the shape of a crescent moon. In

the underworld, Duat, he appeared as A'an, the god of equilibrium, who reports when thescales weighing the heart of the deceased against the feather, representing the principle of

Ma'at, are exactly even. A'an is typically represented as a baboon with a crescent moonsurrounding a full moon above his head. The Greek equivalent of Thoth is Hermes, the

messenger god. Hermes gives us our word "hermeneutics" for the art of interpretinghidden meaning.


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Thoth as Baboon, Ptolemaic Egypt, circa 332 - 330 BCMuse du Louvre, Paris, France.

The ape in the opening sequence of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (identified as Moon-

Watcher in the Arthur C. Clarke novel) is inspired to use the first human tool afterrecalling his earlier encounter with the monolith and its harmonic alignment with the sun

and the moon.


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The original Planet of the Apes motion picture was released in 1968. (Coincidentally the

film had its world premier at the Capitol Theater in New York City and was directlyfollowed by the New York premier of 2001: A Space Odyssey). The Planet of the Apes

remake staring Mark Wahlberg was released in 2001.

In the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, the remains of a crashed spacecraft are foundby astronauts stranded on the ape planet. What is striking is that the skeletal remains of

the spacecraft look eerily like the skeletal remains of the World Trade Center as seen inthe iconic image of the 9/11 aftermath. The film was competed and released prior to the

events of September 11.


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The year 1968 also marks the first time in history that humans escaped the gravitationalfield of planet Earth and traveled to another world. On December 21, 1968, the Apollo 8

spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with Mission Commander Frank

Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anderson board. At 55 hours and 40 minutes into the flight, the crew of Apollo 8 became thefirst human beings to leave Earth's gravity and enter the gravitational sphere of influence

of another celestial body - the moon. It was the first time humans truly left the confines ofthe Earth.


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Europa

As I perused through the Science Times section of the New York Times on May 20,

2008, I ran across the following article:

Arc-Shaped Troughs on Europa May Be Sign of Wandering Poles

by Henry Fountain.

"Europa, that icy moon of Jupiter, is famous for its odd surface features - long lines, pits,domes, spots and the occasional crater. Though the origin of some of these features has

been explained, many mysteries remain. Among the puzzles are several arc-shapedtroughs, first noticed in images from the Voyager missions. Two appear to form parts of a

circle roughly 1,400 miles across, centered near the equator. One is part of a circle of thesame diameter on the moon's opposite side."

As I read the previous paragraph, it slowly dawned on me that what was being described

was the discovery of two massive parallel circles on the moon of Jupiter. I immediatelywent on Google to see if I could uncover any more information. I found the following

article by Dr. Paul Schenk, the scientist who first discovered the circles:

The Crop Circles of Europa

by Paul Schenk, Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, Texas.

"During its rapid flyby of Europa in 1979, Voyager observed an enigmatic narrow

arcuate depression near the terminator [the dividing line between the illuminated and un-illuminated part of a moon or planet]. Although [the] Galileo [spacecraft, in 1996] failed

to achieve one of its prime mission objectives, near-global coverage of the Galileansatellites at sub-kilometer scales [its transmitter jammed], several terminator observations


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were acquired. With precision registration of all Galileo imaging now complete, a partialglobal map of these features is now possible."

"When finally mapped out globally, these arcuate troughs and depressions form two

startlingly similar circular patterns 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) wide, one each on

exactly the opposite sides of Europa."


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A new global mosaic (top) and corresponding map (bottom) of Europa shows the symmetry of its global

tectonic pattern.

I consequently corresponded via e-mail with Dr. Shenk of the Lunar and Planetary

Institute in Houston, Texas. It is believed that Europa is covered by a 60-mile thick iceshell that is separated from the moon's inner core by a saltwater ocean. The liquid ocean

would permit the outer ice shell to move en masse - a phenomenon known as true polarwander. Dr. Shenk theorizes that at some point, because it is colder at the poles, the shell

there became a little thicker, changing its mass balance. Over time the whole surface

could have shifted, so that the greater mass would approach the equator. What had been aflatter surface at the poles would have had to stretch and bulge as it neared the equator.That stretching, according to Dr. Shenk, would have created the troughs.


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In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the monolith is uncovered on the moon and

harmonically aligns with the sun and the earth, it suddenly beams a powerful radio signaltoward the planet Jupiter. This event prompts the launching of the Discovery spacecraft

toward Jupiter. When the HAL 900 computer is disengaged due to a "malfunction," a pre-

recorded message is played for the astronauts:

"Good day, gentlemen. This is a prerecorded briefing made prior to your departure and

which for security reasons of the highest importance has been known on board during themission only by your H.A.L. 9000 computer. Now that you are in Jupiter space and the

entire crew is revived it can be told to you. Eighteen months ago the first evidence ofintelligent life off the earth was discovered. It was buried forty feet below the lunar

surface near the crater Tycho. Except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed atJupiter the four-million-year old black monolith has remained completely inert, it's origin

and purpose still a total mystery."

Once the Discovery spacecraft reaches the Jupiter, the mysterious monolith appears once

again - this time freely floating in space around the giant planet. When the monolithharmonically aligns itself with Jupiter and its moons (Europa, et al.), the famous

psychedelic sequence is set in motion, leading to the film's climax - the birth of the Star

Child.


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The Solar Cycle

Every 11 years the sun goes through a period of intense solar activity, marked by flares,coronal mass ejections and sunspots. This 11-year cycle is called the solar cycle. Once

the peak sunspot activity (or solar maximum) is reached, the sun's magnetic poles reverse

themselves and the cycle starts all over again.

The solar cycle was discovered in 1843 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, who after 17 years

of observations noticed a periodic variation in the average number of sunspots seen fromyear to year on the solar disk. Years later, Rudolf Wolf compiled and studied these and

other observations. He reconstructed the cycle back to 1745, eventually pushing thesereconstructions to the earliest observations of sunspots by Galileo and contemporaries in

the early seventeenth century.

Between 1699 and 2008 there have been twenty-eight solar cycles. The years 1968 and2001 mark two of the years in which the solar cycle was at a maximum.

The peak solar cycles going back to 1950 are: 1946, 1957, 1968, 1979, 1990, 2001, 2012.

Scientists have searched for the reason behind the 11-year solar cycle for many years, buthave come up empty handed. That is, until recently.

In April of 2008, a paper was published by I.R.G Wilson and colleagues from the

University of Southern Queensland, which postulates a plausible explanation. Theysuggest that Jupiter and Saturn, the most massive planets in the solar system, affect the

sun's rotation and hence its sunspot activity. The authors believe that the tinygravitational tug of Jupiter and Saturn speed up or slow down the sun's orbital motion

about the barycenter (the solar system's center-of-mass). When the sun's orbital motionchanges, so too does its equatorial rotation rate, which provides strong evidence that there


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is a spin-orbit coupling mechanism operating between Jupiter and Saturn and the sun.George Hale (in 1919) discovered that it took two Wolf cycles for the magnetic polarity

of sunspot pairs to reverse and then return to their original state. This means that thesunspot activity cycle actually takes 22 years to repeat. The time of oppositions and

conjunction (i.e. syzygies) for Jupiter and Saturn closely corresponds to the time at which

the sun experiences its maximum change in torque about the center-of-mass of the SolarSystem.

Not only is there a connection between the years 1968 and 2001, but Jupiter itself plays aprominent role.

Archetypes

Archetypes, according to Carl Jung, are innate universal a priori psychic dispositions that

form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universaland innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and

instincts of human beings. Archetypes are components of the collective unconscious andserve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behavior.

The origin of the archetypal hypothesis dates back as far as Plato. Jung himself compared

archetypes to Platonic ideas. Plato's ideas are pure mental forms, which are imprinted inthe soul before it is born into the world. They are collective in the sense that they

embodied the fundamental characteristics of a thing rather than its specific peculiarities.


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Plato asserted that forms, and not the material world of change known to us throughsensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality.

A form is aspatial and atemporal. Atemporal means that it does not exist within any time

period. It did not start, there is no duration in time, and it will not end. It is neither eternalin the sense of existing forever, or mortal. It exists outside time altogether. Forms are

aspatial in that they have no spatial dimensions, and thus no orientation in space, nor dothey even (like the point) have a location. They are non-physical, but they are not in the

mind as well. Forms are extra-mental.

Logos was originally a classical Greek word meaning "word," but beginning withHeraclitus (ca. 535 - 475 BC), it became a technical term in philosophy used for the

principle of order and knowledge in the Universe.

To the Stoics, beginning with Zeno of Centium (c. 300BC), the logos was the activereason pervading the universe and animating it. The Stoics also referred to logos

spermatikos, or the law of generation in the universe, which was the principle of theactive reason working in inanimate matter. They believed that humans also possess a

portion of the divine logos.


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Philo of Alexandria (20BC - 50AD), a Hellenized Jew living in Egypt, attempted to

develop speculative and philosophical justification for Judaism in terms of Greekphilosophy. Philos philosophy represented contemporary Platonism, incorporating Stoic

doctrine as well as elements of Aristotelian logic and ethics and Pythagorean ideas. His

primary importance is in the development of the philosophical and theologicalfoundations of Christianity.

Philo used the term Logos to mean an intermediary divine being, or demiurge. Byfollowing the Platonic distinction between imperfect matter and perfect idea, he

postulated that divine beings were necessary to bridge the gap between God and thematerial world. The Logos was the highest of these intermediary beings, and believed

that "the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things togetherand binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated." Philo

asserted that Platonic ideas are located within the Logos, but the Logos also acts onbehalf of God and was God's instrument in the creation of the universe.

Structure, Symmetry and Meaning

A nuemenon is a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of thesenses. Classically, the nuemenon is the higher reality known to the philosophical mind.

Platonist frames of thought draw a dividing line between two realms. One realm, theinferior of the two, is the material, the physical world of sense experience. It is the

"phenomenal" world, the world of objects, of the body, of immediate perception. Theother, superior realm is the world of the immaterial, the spiritual, the world of realities

not accessible to the body's senses, the world know by intellect or spiritual sense, the

"noumenal" world.

Kant argued that the phenomenal world is an expression of power and that the source

from which this power comes can only be the noumenal world beyond. We cannot knownoumena (or the things-in-themselves) directly, but can only infer noumena by our

observations of those things that can be sensed, that is, of phenomena. According to Kant,we can know phenomena because our mind structures phenomena, but cannot know

phenomena beyond how our mind structures it.

The Structuralists believe that every system has a structure and the structure itselfdetermines the position of each element of the whole. Structuralists are interested in

structural laws that deal with coexistence rather than change. They believe that thestructures themselves are the 'real things' that lie beneath the surface or the appearance.

Post-structuralists argue that language (i.e., any system of communication) is a code

whose parts derive their meaning from their contrast from one another and not from anyconnection to the outside world. Language can indeed amplify and transform meaning,

but there is an aspect of the post-structuralist argument that does not conform to scientificunderstanding - the assertion that language has no connection to any supposed "outside


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reality."

Recent insights suggest that meaning is an immanent trait of structure, a latent property tobe articulated and amplified in structure. It is, in essence, a priori, not to be explained in

terms simpler than itself - for there are none.

As Eco pointed out, the thing about semiotics is that a sign can only be a sign if itsignifies something. The meaning of a thing has to originate in the structure of space in

some way - in the structure of the real physical world. For a scientist, it is exceedinglydifficult to say anything coherent and useful about the physical world when one posits

that it is entirely a subjective creation, or at any rate must be treated as such.

Mathematics is the science of structure and structural relations. Many mathematicalobjects, such as sets of numbers and functions, exhibit internal structure. Geometry is a

part of mathematics concerned with questions of size, shape, relative position of figures,and the properties of space. The theme of symmetry in geometry is nearly as old as the

science of geometry itself, but it was not until the 19th century that the unifying role ofsymmetry as the foundation of geometry had been recognized. Felix Klein's Erlangen

Program proclaimed that, in a very precise sense, symmetry actually determines whatgeometry is.

Symmetry is a real property. It is a precise and well-defined concept of balance or

"patterned self-similarity" that can be demonstrated or proved according to the rules of aformal system. Rotate a circle and it remains symmetrical. In fact, it is the most

symmetrical two-dimensional object with respect to rotation symmetry. The circle alsoexhibits mirror symmetry. Slice it down the center and the two halves are perfectly

symmetrical. This is true no matter where you slice it as long as the bifurcation runsthrough the radius.

In his landmark article "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural

Sciences," the physicist Eugene Wigner observed that the mathematical structure of aphysical theory often points the way to further advances in that theory and even to

empirical predictions, and argued that this is not just a coincidence and therefore mustreflect some larger and deeper truth about both mathematics and physics.

Wigner begins his paper with the belief, common to all of those familiar with

mathematics, that mathematical concepts are applicable far beyond the context in whichthey were originally developed. Based on his experience, he says "it is important to point

out that the mathematical formulation of the physicists often crude experience leads inan uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of

phenomena."

Wigner states that "the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences issomething bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation ofthe laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."

the anomaly

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