O living inscription of the beauty of love Missalled in aureate virginity, What message of heavenly strength and bliss in thee Is written with the Eternal's sun-white script, One shall discover and greaten with it his life To whom thou loosenest thy heart's jewelled strings. O rubies of silence, lips from which there stole Low laughter, music of tranquillity, Star-lustrous eyes awake in sweet large night And limbs like fine-linked poems made of gold Stanzaed to glimmering curves by artist gods, Depart where love and destiny call your charm. Venture through the deep world to find thy mate.   more »

... Modern cosmology has revealed a universe teeming with dark matter and unseen energy, entering a new stage of inflation. ...

According to a paper that will appear in October, we're lucky to be able to reach this understanding—literally. The authors of the paper run the clock forward 100 billion years and reveal that it's going back to the future, a conclusion clear in the paper's title: 'The Return of a Static universe and the End of Cosmology'. ...

The authors go on to ponder what this means in terms of the anthropic principle: the idea that we exist in a universe that's got conditions favorable to life largely because anything else would preclude any life arising that could ponder the universe. They suggest that there's another layer of complexity on top of that, namely that we only recognize that there is an anthropic principle because we came along at the right time. Too much earlier, and we wouldn't be able to detect that the universe is in a new inflationary era, which tells us that it's dominated by dark energy. Too much later, and we wouldn't be able to know that there's a universe at all. As the authors put it, "we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe: the time at which we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time in the evolution of the universe!" ...    more »

Thanks to RY Deshpande for referencing this article.
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Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth — the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient “coincidences” and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the result would be lethal.

To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set 30-something knobs to fully describe the world about us. The point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned precisely, or the universe would be sterile.

Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms could not exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses, and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear’s porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. So what’s going on? ...   more »

This is a continually updated course developed over several years by a Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia. Though I haven't yet read all of it, my initial impression is that it's quite thorough and can provide a good background for reading SCIY.
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Part 1 consists of notes on the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of this course in consciousness. We establish the context of our discussion within the three major types of metaphysical philosophy, ask the questions that are naturally raised when one begins a study of conscious mind, summarize the scientific data that must be taken into account in any attempt to understand the phenomena of consciousness, and present a simple, understandable description of the philosophical and quantum theoretical basis for the need to include consciousness in our description of the material world.

We shall see that, from a sound, scientific point of view, not only is it impossible to understand the material world without considering the consciousness of its observer, but, in fact, it is Consciousness which manifests the world. However, it cannot be the individual consciousness of the observer that does this, but it must be nonlocal, universal Consciousness. ...   more »

The Big Wow theory is the colloquial name for a paper by Italian astrophysicist Paola Zizzi entitled “Emergent Consciousness; From the Early Universe to Our Mind” gr-qc/0007006 which proposes the possibility that the early universe comprised a giant quantum computer with a complexity comparable to that of the human brain. Specifically; she states that the universe reached a level of quantum computational complexity, during the period of cosmic inflation, to undergo what Penrose and Hameroff have called Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch-OR, allowing the emergence of consciousness.

Zizzi’s paper builds on the work of Whitehead, Chalmers, and others, as well as Penrose and Hameroff, but it is fundamentally a theory of Loop quantum gravity which derives some of its power from the Holographic Principle. It suggests that the universe’s conscious moment, or ‘occasion of experience’ came at the end of the inflationary period in physical cosmology, and was the event that allowed the universe’s quantum state vector to reduce, thus selecting the conditions for our specific universe, out of a superposed multitude of possibilities. ...   more »

The Minority institutions [in India] that were typically envisaged to enjoy the state’s protection were those which would actually serve to preserve minority languages, customs and traditions but the question is, are they fulfilling their mandate? ...

Let me end with an example from my own life. I studied in a school run by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The Ashram management in no sense of the term attempted to” convert” any one to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy but in every turn and gesture, they indicated in word and deed, that they cherished Sri Aurobindo and his successor, The Mother and their teaching wasn’t just lip service for them. Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is not easy to understand, but in the school assembly where his teachings were unabashedly taught, the school principal and other speakers made every effort to present them with passion and reverence and the atmosphere was live and electric and Sri Aurobindo’s thinking and influence was every where and it wasn’t phony.

My Ashram school of course wasn’t a minority institution, but to me it represents all that a minority institution should be. Its mandate was to promote the teachings and ideas of Sri Aurobindo and it did so earnestly and with compassion and grace. In the same way, the definition of what is a minority institution is not to be determined by who owns a piece of property or who sits in the board room but by the larger question ---- is the institution fulfilling its mandate? ...   more »

US researchers who reviewed over a dozen studies on the effect of echinacea have concluded that the popular herbal remedy reduces a person's chance of catching a cold by 58 per cent. And they found that it also cuts the duration of a cold by an average of 1.4 days. ...

Using a method that calculates the Odds Ratio of incidence of the common cold in the pooled participants, the researchers found that echinacea decreased the odds by 58 per cent (the statistically significant odds ratio was 0.42 with a 95 per cent confidence interval ranging from 0.25 to 0.71). -- They also found by using a random effects statistical model that the effect of echinacea was to reduce the duration of a cold by 1.4 days (the statistically significant weighted mean difference was -1.44 with a 95 per cent confidence interval ranging from -2.24 to -0.64).

Only one of the studies they reviewed looked at a echinacea in combination with vitamin C. This reported a reduction in cold incidence of 86 per cent for the combined dose. Because there was only one study in this category the authors felt they were not able to say with confidence whether the two supplements were better than echinacea alone at fighting off colds. ...   more »

…like a shining answer from the gods Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri. Advancing amid tall heaven-pillaring trees, Apparelled in her flickering-coloured robe, She seemed burning towards the eternal realms A bright moved torch of incense and of flame That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth A pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine. There came the gift of a revealing hour… This intimation of the world’s delight, This wonder of the divine Artist's make Carved like a nectar-cup for thirsty gods, This breathing Scripture of the Eternal's joy, This net of sweetness woven of aureate fire.   more »

Thanks to RYD for referring us to this article.
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SINCE THE 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically-connected global village, thanks to the Net. -- So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures — From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.

Mr. Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, U.K., has been researching this topic for more than four years. What he wants is to show how ideology is used to warp time. "In other words," he says, "how we're told that the importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now, but what the more advanced models might be able to do one day." He is particularly interested in exposing the "nonsense of technological determinism," which he describes as "the theory that someone builds a machine, the machine sprouts legs and runs around the world changing it." -- Mr. Barbrook believes we can trace today's deterministic views of technology to the Cold War; when the Soviet Union and the United States dedicated huge resources to demonstrating which empire better represented progress and modernity. During that period, the U.S. repackaged the space rockets, atomic reactors, and computer mainframes it was developing in the pursuit of atomic Armageddon into prototypes of better things to come.

"Nasa's spaceships would evolve into luxurious interplanetary passenger liners," says Mr. Barbrook. "General Electric's nuclear fission reactors would become fusion plants providing limitless energy for all. IBM's computers were prototypes of artificial intelligence." Soon, the implication went, loyal obedient robots would be at humanity's beck and call. ...   more »

Eta Carinae is a mysterious, extremely bright and unstable star located a mere stone's throw - astronomically speaking - from Earth at a distance of only about 7,500 light years. The star is thought to be consuming its nuclear fuel at an incredible rate, while quickly drawing closer to its ultimate explosive demise.

When Eta Carinae does explode, it will be a spectacular fireworks display seen from Earth, perhaps rivaling the moon in brilliance. Its fate has been foreshadowed by the recent discovery of SN2006gy, a supernova in a nearby galaxy that was the brightest stellar explosion ever seen. The erratic behavior of the star that later exploded as SN2006gy suggests that Eta Carinae may explode at any time. ...   more »

Thanks to Rakesh for suggesting this article:

BEIJING — It was only three months ago that international energy officials revised a prediction that China would surpass the United States as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases by 2009 or 2010. It could happen, they warned, as early as the end of this year. -- That may have been conservative.

China's emissions of carbon dioxide, the most significant greenhouse gas, already have exceeded those of the United States, according to a report released this week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. -- The study estimated that the surging demand for power from China's rapidly expanding economy caused carbon dioxide emissions to rise by 9% in 2006. That increase, coupled with a slight decline in the United States, meant that China's emissions for the year surpassed those of the U.S. by 8%, the Dutch report said. ...

China's emissions have outpaced predictions because the economy has grown faster than expected. With construction booming, China produces an estimated 44% of the world's cement, Olivier said. And with its factories' fuel needs rising, China has been completing construction of coal-fired power plants at a rate of about two a week. -- In the next eight years, the International Energy Agency estimates, China will build as many power plants as exist today in all of the European Union countries. Birol said the West needs to find incentives to help China invest in cleaner forms of energy than coal, because when coal plants come on line, they generally last decades. ...   more »

Rose of God

Here is Sri Aurobindo’s Rose of God with suggested six stressed syllables in each line. I am putting the stresses on vowels ...   more »

According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a massive body like Earth should bend the space-time fabric of the universe, causing it to curve and flex like a trampoline supporting a bowling ball.

Nearly three years ago, NASA’s oft-canceled $750 million Gravity Probe B Relativity Mission finally shot into space with one goal –– to quantify Einstein’s predictions from Earth’s orbit. Earlier this year, at the meeting of the American Physics Society, principal investigator Francis Everitt delivered the first results: Gravity Probe B has verified Einstein’s theory to within 1 percent. ...   more »

Even weirder than dark matter—the invisible stuff constituting most of the mass of the universe—is dark energy, a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate. Weirder still is a recent discovery that dark energy has been around for most of the history of the cosmos. “Nine billion years ago, dark energy was already wielding its repulsive influence on the universe,” explains Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess. But the repulsion didn’t win out against the force of gravity until 5 billion years ago, when cosmic expansion kicked into high gear and began accelerating. ...   more »

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.” ...   more »

A morn that seemed a new creation’s front, Bringing a greater sunlight, happier skies, Came burdened with a beauty moved and strange Out of the changeless origin of things. An ancient longing struck again new roots: The air drank deep of unfulfilled desire; The high trees trembled with a wandering wind Like souls that quiver at the approach of joy, And in a bosom of green secrecy For ever of its one love-note untired A lyric coïl cried among the leaves… Across the deep urgency of present cares, Earth’s wordless hymn to the Ineffable Arose from the silent heart of the cosmic Void…   more »