Space. The Final Frontier.

Last night bright-eyes and I went to a lecture on campus. It started at 6:00 and finished around 10:30pm. Then we hit IHOP and got back around midnight. My head and tummy were both stuffed.

The speaker was Nassim Haramein, an Italian physicist with some pretty radical ideas and a way of explaining them that was absolutely magical. He was one of those kids in school that remind me of some of my brothers. Stuff that other kids would just absorb verbatim and spit back out on the tests, he would think about and try to make sense of first. Like the idea of dimensions.

He was excited to learn in his elementary school class that they'd be covering dimensions! I still remember being excited about this too. But he too was disappointed with the results. First the teacher drew a dot on the board and said this is dimension 0, but it doesn't exist. WTF? I can see the dot dude, what do you mean it doesn't exist?! Then he drew a series of dots connected in a line. This is the first dimension, it doesn't exist either. Then he drew a box of lines, this is the second dimension, it also doesn't exist. Then he explained the third, which miraculously springs into being while being built on these dimensions that don't exist. How can you combine 3 things that don't exist to make a 4th that does? There's some sleight of hand here.

And what Nassim drew out, in a most entertaining way, were all sorts of sleights of hand going on in physics and our "current" understanding of the world.

Like most original thinkers, he turned a lot of things on their head. Here we are trying to understand the nature of matter, which is .00001% of what exists and seems to dissolve into smaller and smaller units the deeper we go down. We're just about at the physical limits of this exploration today with the Hadron Collider, which is a huge tunnel, 17 miles in circumference that they haven't even been able to turn on yet without it failing due to the complexity and scale. All this just so we can smash the smallest particles we've found so far into even smaller particles.

Meanwhile, as they go deeper down the rabbit hole, looking for the "God particle" that is the ultimate building block of nature, they are ignoring the 800lb gorilla in the room. Space.

Perhaps, like a vortex in water, that becomes visible in contrast the rest of the translucent environment of water, matter is just a particular dynamic of space?

This was just were he started; it was a wild, humorous and informative ride. He will definitely stretch your mind...

His project page is here. He has some DVDs also if you get curious.