Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh starts today - "If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in [a] sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either . . . "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb to be," we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have a paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paperinter-are. . . . "To be" is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is."
Thich Nhat Hanh, setting next season's fashion
Now, get ready to connect the dots ! Amanda Gefter, editor of the New Scientist's CultureLab writes about the new concept of Duality physicists have stumbled upon. In "This Will Make You Smarter" - Perhaps the most radical incarnation of duality was discovered in 1997 by Juan Maldacena. Maldacena found that a version of string theory in a bizarrely shaped universe with five large dimensions is mathematically dual to an ordinary quantum theory of particles living on that universe's four-dimensional boundary. Previously, one could argue that the world was made up of particles or that the world was made up of strings. Duality transformed or into and — mutually exclusive hypotheses, both equally true.
Now duality doesn't exclude the existence a single truth. Only that truth is more subtle that we thought. We live in the "meso-world", at mid-scale between immense galaxies and invisible atoms. It is understandable that we cannot grasp how we are a part of a whole and how what appears contradictory probably isn't. But we, as a species, have accepted that the Earth isn't the centre of the universe for instance. Now a new leap in understanding is under way ! Good morning meso-friends :D