The Olympic Torch of a Living Culture

The tradition of the Olympic games carries with it a deeply symbolic ritual, that of the Olympic torch. The Olympic torch is never allowed to be extinguished. Myth has it that Prometheus stole the Olympic flame from the
gods. Extinction of the flame was considered a great tragedy for it was not in the power of humans to rekindle it. According to Carl Jung, myths arise from the archetypes of the collective unconscious and signify truths meaningful in the alpha, theta and delta brain states. In these lower frequency brain states, rational language gives way to a symbolic, intuitive, mythical one that is, nevertheless, completely meaningful to the human psyche.

Each brain state has also a kind of lock-in mechanism so that when one is in a particular state, that state seems to be the only real one and others as derivative of that. In the beta state that is the normal conscious state, for instance, the dream state appears unreal. However, when one has moved to the alpha state whether by a creative immersion or by a hypnotic trance or by other means, the beta state may appear unreal likewise. Culture is an immixture of experience in several such states.

To illustrate, the motives that lead one to the pursuit of a scientific domain are often non-rational, emotional and intuitive. They may arise due to the sense of curiosity, surprise, wonder, awe, mystery and magic of Nature and her workings. Or they may be due to the feeling of order, harmony, majesty, the perception of mathematical beauty or a sudden sense of the hidden unity behind all appearances. These rationally and perhaps, non-justifiable feelings have passionately driven many a great inquirer into scientific inquiry.
 Johannes Kepler. In his "Mysterium Cosmographicum", is indignant at the need to justify the scientific pursuit,  

"We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment."

In "Brighter than a Thousand Suns," Robert Jungk writes how the physicist James Frank, "would tell his pupils that only one who was entirely absorbed by physics and actually dreamed about it could hope for enlightenment. He spoke of his own inspirations in the language of a medieval mystic.
"The only way I can tell that a new idea is really important is the feeling of terror that seizes me.""
The great mathematician Henri Poincare speaks of how 

"A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature."  and that,

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing then life would not be worth living. Of course, I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances. Not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science. I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp."

A perfect illustration of Poincare's words is captured by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar as he writes about the discovery of the rotating solution of the Einstein field equations by the New Zealand mathematician, Roy Kerr,

"This shuddering before the beautiful, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound."

In the above stirrings of deep emotion are to be found all that one speaks of as the culture of a domain. This culture provides the indomitable energy, enthusiasm and drive to pursue first the domain then enter the field and contribute creatively to inquiry and research.
When the culture is living, it sparks the tinder minds and hearts into a flaming aspiration to discover and explore, inquiry and engage in research, to learn, to teach, to share the joys of learning, to bring the fruits of inquiry to enrich and ennoble humanity, to look upon the whole of existence with that deep and exalted feeling. 

 When the culture is absent, learning becomes rote, education reduces to training, teaching gets relegated to mere lecturing irrespective of meaningful communication between the teacher and the taught. Wonder and beauty disappear from life. Day to day existence becomes a chore.

There are times, however, when the culture becomes obscured and retreats into the subterranean tracts. A pall of routine descends on the domains. The flame almost dies down and yet, here and there, some embers continue to smolder. It is then that all efforts to fan and rekindle the flame become significant. This is aided especially by those great visionaries of the past whose works can be most understood and appreciated by posterity. In Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, at least, Paul Dirac, Julian Schwinger, David Bohm and John Bell, and Henri Poincare, David Hilbert, Elie Cartan, Alexander Grothendieck,  and Alain Connes to name a very few, are such personalities who impact their posterity more than their present times. Today, their writings and contributions act like beacons to rekindle the flame. It is as if they envisaged our present need in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley,   

"Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!"  

Fortunately, their thoughts are alive and already in the throes of quickening a new birth.  It is for all inquiring individuals to fan the sparks into the blazing flame of a living culture and derive warmth and nourishment from it. The CFRCE Theoretical and Mathematical Forum invites such individuals to come forward to rekindle the flame.

The Dream Program: CFRCE Theoretical and Mathematical Minimum Program

 http://www.cfrce.com/theoretical-physics-program

This Dream Program liberates the doors of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics to all inquiring individuals, whether they have formal background beyond that of high school or not, whether they are so-called, "young or old", "good or bad", "brilliant or dull", "fast or slow," or indeed any of the immature classifications that arbitrarily limits human potential and relegates it to the mere passing of three-hour artificial, de-contextualized, examinations that have little to do with the future of the individual or of the actualization of one's deepest potential.

This program aims at empowering every individual to empower oneself and rekindle the dreams and aspirations that he or she has been forced to extinguish, perhaps during the earlier years or perhaps during the very present course of one's studies. The main theme of the program is that Theoretical Physics and Mathematics support a cultural domain that is immensely enriching and ennobling and that all one needs to absorb it is to simply aspire for it and work at it in the same manner as one works in acquiring any other culture like music, art, and poetry or programming and webdesign for that matter.

From, Richard Westfall, "Never at Rest - A Biography of Isaac Newton"

"Let us try to place ourselves in the position of a young man in 1661, eager for knowledge, though of wholly untested capacity, as the new world of learning unrolled before his eyes. What an incredible challenge to the imagination - a world undreamed of in rural Lincolnshire, a world of many continents as extensive in their diversity as in their number. To the north lay the frigid lands of mathematics where one must breathe the bracing atmosphere of rigor. To the south lay the fetid tropical jungles of alchemy with their strange mythical fauna. Temperate lands for experimental investigation lay between. Manifestly, the very vastness of the new world placed it beyond the capacity of any one mind to grasp and to comprehend, finding an ordered cosmos where only chaos appeared. Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps some rare individual, one of the intellectual supernovae who have burst forth intermittently but most infrequently into the visible heavens of a startled world, might grapple effectively even with such a task. Other worlds new to Newton also opened themselves to his gaze in Cambridge, and his exploration of them played an important part in his life. Had he limited himself to them, however, his name would have passed long since into oblivion. As I said before, the only reason anyone writes a biography of Newton is because he chose to enter a world not only new to himself as to all undergraduates, but to man himself.

In Cambridge, Newton discovered that a new world had been discovered. He discovered as well something still more important. The early adventurers had only scouted its coasts. Vast continents remained to be explored....

On "The CFRCE Theoretical and Mathematical Minimum Forum"

Every era of human progress brings forth both opportunities and challenges with it. In a deep sense, these opportunities and challenges may be seen as twin aspects of an underlying complexity. One would perhaps like to interpret the opportunities as an affirmation of some desirable order and the challenges as a negation of that same order. So is it that often, the human mind seems baffled by its own inability to deal with the world order. Essentially, this could be felt as nothing but the mismatch between the complexity of the individual human mind and that resulting from the collective mind of humanity. The issue, therefore, is one of harmonizing the two complexities - the inner, cognitive complexity and the outer, environmental complexity.

As is well established in Cognitive Neuroscience, the human brain is a complex adaptive, bio-physiological and bio-psychological, active processing system. Any infiltration of information from the environment immediately stimulates it to learn and soon, match its own complexity with its appraisal of the outer. But there is a catch. It is possible for the environment to so condition the brain that it becomes subject to what the Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls, "severe and systematic errors."

In a perfectly rational world, one has the choice to grasp the probability and utility of all possible outcomes and then take our stand. But one rarely has all the facts. One can't possibly know all the outcomes. Even if one did, one has neither the temporal flexibility nor the neurological capacity to analyze all the data. So one ends up making decisions based on limited, often unreliable, information and also limited by the brain's processing power and the environmental time constraints. One usually tries to overcome this barrier by a well-known subconscious strategy: heuristics. As Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler write in their book, Abundance, "Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts: time-saving, energy-saving rules of thumb that allow us to simplify the decision-making process." Severe and Systematic errors compromise the brain's intrinsic processing capability.

The task of education is to hone the brain to optimize these errors. But there is here, a challenge. The brain learns spontaneously and naturally, from anything and everything the environment impacts it with. But provided, it does so subconsciously. Because, the subconscious processing speeds are enormous compared to the conscious. Conventional education developed in an era where the environmental complexity increased linearly and locally. In the 20th century all this has changed. The environmental complexity is increasing exponentially and globally. An education adapted to linearity is simply inadequate to deal with exponential growth. Fortunately, the brain also is essentially non-linear, exponential in its learning. It is forced to remain linear and local by educational conditioning. So all one has to do to come to grips with the environmental complexity is to liberate the brain from its linear conditioning. Here's where the cultural appreciation of a domain comes in. Cultural appreciation requires one to embrace the non-linear and global nature of the domain.

Consider, for instance, an illustration. In the mathematical domain of Lie Algebras and Lie Groups, there is the concept known as exponential mapping. The key idea of this is to simply connect the linear, local with the exponential, global aspects of a certain manifold (a manifold is something that looks like a space locally). Herein is a profound implication. If the culture of Lie Algebras and Lie Groups had been presented to young minds in the formative stage, they would have been better adapted, subconsciously, to the challenge of the environment. One would argue that "Lie Algebras and Lie Groups" cannot trickle into a culture. They are far too esoteric. But so is the concept of credit and currency, banking and finance and so may things one deals with in everyday life. They are all abstract. Yet, children come to have easy facility with them. So also, exponential mapping is something undergraduates can learn culturally as a more sophisticated version of the series expansion of a function, the relation between first-order linear approximation and the full series. And there are far simpler examples than this. And far simpler ways to convey them as a culture.

Therefore, the central message of this forum is that our inner cognitive complexity is more than a match to the outer environmental complexity and learning to appreciate domains as a part of culture facilitates this immensely. Theoretical Physics and Mathematics form twin domains that do this powerfully and evocatively. The Theoretical and Mathematical Minimum Forum espouses the corresponding domains as a part of culture.

Isidor Isaac Rabi on the Culture of Physics

"Quantum mechanics and relativity affected me deeply - personally. It affected my attitude toward the world. I've always thought of physics as a sort of ivory tower, from which you venture forth into all other human affairs, of all kinds. That's why I became a physicist. I could've earned more money as a lawyer...

...With science I felt I could grab on to actual things and try to understand them. And then they turn out to be so extraordinarily mysterious! Newton's laws of motion, the laws of the electromagnetic field, relativity - they're so far removed from experience, but yet there it is. It's a measure of all the other things that I look at. It gives you an approach to the human race, apart from these inherited things of nationality and whatnot, which you can't take very seriously. That's what science was for me - a citadel. I know some place where I can find out things which are so, and not trivial. Far from trivial....

...So relativity can have an enormous effect on how I regard myself in the world. It's hard to communicate to other people who haven't that experience. Since it is, as far as we know, a universal human possibility to investigate nature, and the nature of discoveries is so remarkable, so wonderful - if you want to think of the goal of the human race, there it is. To learn more about the Universe and ourselves. In physics, the newest discoveries, like relativity and the uncertainty relation, uncover new modes of thought. They really open new perspectives."

CFRCE Theoretical and Mathematical Minimum Forum

The march of human civilization streams forth as a holonomic ascent from complexity to complexity. At each rung of the ascent it consolidates the gains of its experience and becomes self-conscious. Points of progression and retrogression continue to accumulate towards an ideal dimly seen by the greatest minds of that era and yet that spur on the generality of humankind towards some grandiose endeavor. That which is of lasting value to the civilization begins to diffuse itself into the consciousness of humanity, at first as something inaccessibly mysterious, and then as something to be grasped technically, and penultimately as something to be applied and utilized, and through all these often conflicting and contradicting goals, eventually trickles down into the undercurrents of civilization as the distilled essence of the best and noblest of gains. This becomes the predominant tone of the culture of humanity.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, Science has unquestionably so seeped into the consciousness of the race. Yet, it's cultural ramifications are only dimly felt being now in the penultimate stage of its diffusion. As this begins to happen, the true meaning of scientific thinking that is often so obscured by unenlightened educational conditioning begins to reveal itself in all its glory. It is, therefore, of great significance to understand the minimal of Science that is the nucleus of scientific culture. Theoretical Physics and Mathematics offer a window of opportunity to the inquiring human being, because, as the great Theoretical Physicist Lev Landau, once jokingly said, all one needs to learn it is a pencil and paper. The CFRCE Theoretical and Mathematical Minimum Forum aims to espouse precisely the diffusion of this culture.