Howard Bloom’s God Problem Tour
Dates: Mar 23 – Apr 4, 2013
Location: United States
What the hell is Howard Bloom up to now? Nothing. One of the most important nothings confronting science today, he says.
Bloom is a scientific thinker who has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, [and] Freud,” by Britain’s Channel4 TV, “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine, and “The Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium” by Buckminster Fuller’s archivist Bonnie de Varco.
And he is about to blitz Boston, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Los Angeles with a book talk that has blasted minds at places like the Harvard Coop and the Columbia University Bookstore. Bloom is discussing his latest book, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates. And more. Or is it less?
Bloom’s 46-minute God Problem talk has generated after-talk dialogs that have lasted from three hours to nearly seven hours. At Brooklyn’s Body Actualized Center, for example, Bloom’s God Problem performance was up against the opening night of the Rolling Stones’ 50th Anniversary Tour at the nearby Barclay Center. Yet Bloom packed the place. And the audience insisted on staying and dialoging from 7 pm to an astonishing 1:45 am in the morning.
Why? Bloom tries to get across a scientific mystery. A mystery right under science’s nose. Take science’s most often-used metaphor, the wave. A wave generated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean travels over five thousand miles to reach the coast of Japan. And it retains a visible identity the entire way.
What’s more, it can have enormous power. If it is a tsunami, it can sweep entire parking lots of cars and villages of homes in, let’s say Fukushima, away. In fact the wave can wipe out as many as 16,000 lives. Or 230,000 lives in the case of the tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004.
And yet, says Bloom, the wave doesn’t exist. It is a nothing. A no thing.
Surely that’s absurd. The relatives of the victims of the tsunamis in Fukushima and Indonesia will tell you just how real a wave is. But, says, Bloom, imagine you are a molecule of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. How do you spend your time? You bob up and down. You circle in place. When you bob up to the top, you help make the peak of a wave. When you bob below the surface, you make that wave’s trough.
But here’s the weird part. When you circle back to the surface the second time, you make the peak of yet another wave. Yes, another wave. A wave with yet another identity. A wave whose impact on the shore may have its own, separate consequences.
So what travels the miles from a seabed-quake zone to the shores of Fukushima? Nothing. No thing. No water molecule makes that trip. What, then, crushes homes in Fukushima and carries their remains inland? Says Bloom, an immaterial pattern does that damage. A pattern that picks up recruits in one spot, grabs them in a fist, then abandons them and picks up new recruits. An immaterial pattern that somehow manages to maintain its shape, its form, its identity. A pattern that accomplishes this despite its utter promiscuousness about the matter it musters; the matter it seduces, kidnaps, recruits, and organizes; the matter it momentarily contains,,,and then abandons.
Bloom shows you the power of a wild variety of these nothings, these no-things. Why? To make you think. To immerse you in science’s next big questions. And to hopefully make you part of the answer.
What is Bloom’s God Problem tour about? The power of nothings. One of the most mind-stumping and important powers in this cosmos.
Itinerary:
3/23 7 pm EnlightenNext, Studio Soto, Channel Center St, Boston, MA 02210
3/28th 6 pm Elliott Bay Books, 1521 Tenth Avenue Seattle, WA 98122
3/30th 7:15 pm Live Wire Radio, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Portland Or, Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR 97211, (503) 719-6055
3/31 7:30 pm Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR, 97209
4/2 Stanford University Bookstore, 519 Lasuen Mall Stanford, CA, 94305
4/3 Books Inc. in Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102
4/4 University of Southern California Bookstore, 840 W 36th Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90089
Comments (8)
by JLL
Just descriptions of a process and no closer to the truth. Describing photons, electricity, software, physics, all of the things which are around us. As if describing the physics of cell phones has anything to do with what we talked about over the phone. The meaning conveyed over sound waves or the meaning and sense or lack there of conveyed over this computer screen by someone you don’t even know. And where did the sense of wanting to know come from? The hunger for knowledge.
As if, you knowing the word “gold” means you are rich.
by Bri
When I was about eleven years old I saw a simple fountain. It was a small rectangle with two water jets dividing it exactly into thirds. The water jets were of a large diameter and low preside so they came plopping back down into the pool. The frequency of those splashes was perfectly in tune to the size of the pools, so that they created what is called a standing wave. It is as the name sounds. There were waves projecting up from the pools surface by about four or five inches. They stayed in the same place, just jiggling like jello. I could see the lesser waves radiating out from the splashes and reflecting back off the walls of the pool. I figured it out right away that they were reinforcing each other at the point where the waves stood still. It was basically making a helmholzs resonator in water. I wondered if the designer planned for it, but later I went back and it wasn’t happening, so it was just a coincidence.
We use this principal all over the place. Any resonant cavity is creating standing waves at the fundamental frequency of the size of that shape. The waves of water were being created by the energy of falling back into the pool. The waves themselves are a electro magnetic mechanical phenomenon akin to sound waves. Everything we perceive with our senses are different forms of electromagnetic radiation. Everything we perceive is waves of different frequencies propagating in different materials. Everything is emergent patterns in waves. It’s really the basis of string theory, but that is taking vibrations to a whole nother level. All the subatomic particles are infinitesimally small strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. That will really bake your noodle.
by Sally Morem
We deliberately stand up in a pattern, but water molecules move up in response to jostling. I don’t think there is anything at all supernatural about water jostling in patterns.
by Cris Sheridan
Does Bloom try to answer where the wave comes from?
by Bri
Oh my god this is so deep I can almost get my toes in it. Next up string theory. Just a bunch of waves. But what’s it moving?
by Sally Morem
We humans do this at baseball games. We do The Wave by standing up quickly after people have sat down near us. And then we sit down. And then the next group of fans stand up. So, an ocean wave is something in the same way The Wave is something, a pattern of motion.
by MTX
In your scenario, people consciously get up, in the water, molecules have no other choice.
a wave is energy and energy is not nothing
by bob
The wave analogy is an appeal to ignorance.