Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations
HOME / OSCILLATIONS AND WAVES / Coupled Oscillations and Resonance

World Première:

 

A child in Quebec who was learning about how plastics persisted endlessly in our ecosystem said:

( If a thing cannot be un-made then it should not be made. )

477

We say that time passes or flows by. We speak of the course of time. The water that I see rolling by was made ready a few days ago in the mountains, with the melting of the glacier; it is now in front of me and makes its way towards the sea into which it will finally discharge itself. If time is similar to a river, it flows from the past towards the present and the future. The present is the consequence of the past, and the future of the present. But this often repeated metaphor is in reality extremely confused. For, looking at the things themselves, the melting of the snows and what results from this are not successive events, or rather the very notion of event has no place in the objective world. When I say that the day before yesterday the glacier produced the water which is passing at this moment, I am tacitly assuming the existence of a witness tied to a certain spot in the world, and I am comparing his successive views: he was there when the snows melted and followed the water down, or else, from the edge of the river and having waited two days, he sees the pieces of wood that he threw into the water at its source. The ‘events’ are shapes cut out by a finite observer from the spatio- temporal totality of the objective world. But on the other hand, if I consider the world itself, there is simply one indivisible and changeless being in it. Change presupposes a certain position which I take up and from which I see things in procession before me: there are no events without someone to whom they happen and whose finite perspective is the basis of their individuality.

479

Correspondingly, therefore, the subject must not be himself situated in [time], in order to be able to be present in intention to the past as to the future. Let us no longer say that time is a ‘datum of consciousness’; let us be more precise and say that consciousness deploys or constitutes time.

492

Time exists for me only because I am situated in it, that is, because I become aware of myself as already committed to it, because the whole of being is not given to me incarnate, and finally because one sector of being is so close to me that it does not even make up a picture before me—I cannot see it, just as I cannot see my face.

From Time to Temporality, Rhythm and Event 1/2, part 2/2

Sha Xin Wei, 19 & 21 Jan 2021

Stanzi Vaubel's Indeterminacy Seminar, a project from Building21 @ McGill University

Chinese thought: non-dualism, relationality, transformation

From a BBC podcast about a renowned herbalist Li Shizhen 東璧 (1518 – 1593)

"When in pre modern China, people generally had a very organic view of the world around them. So one overarching idea was that everything around us is interconnected, interdependent, and networked together. And that in other words, rather than thinking of the natural world, as that bit of the world around us that's untouched by humans, the Chinese planted human beings right in the middle of it. Now, a second main underlying idea there is that therefore, in order to understand the natural world, rather than trying to identify by or physically what things are, it is much more important to try and explain how things relate to each other. So describe the relationship of various beings, objects, plants, animals with each other. A [third] underlying idea was that everything around us in the natural world is constantly subject to change. The only certainty we have, ironically, about what happens around us is that things are constantly changing. And so everything is subject to transformations, to metamorphosis. And so the, I suppose the sage or the observer, or the scholar needs to put his finger on  explaining why changes happen and how they happen. Now, to do that you need a conceptual toolbox, and the Chinese developed that, you know, over the centuries. One is to think of everything in the world as consisting of complementary opposites. The Chinese call it Yin, and Yang, you know, the shadowy side of a hill, versus the sunny side of a hill so that you can think of things in terms of hot, cold, high, low, black, white, and so on. So that's one toolbox they had.  A second model that was applied to the understanding of the natural world was the idea that everything somehow can be classified into a group of five or following a sequence of five phases. These were natural elements identified as early as the fourth century BC fire, you know, wood, metal, earth. And I left one out here water, I think. And so the whole purpose of it is basically to just describe the pattern of change and describe ways of sequencing of how things follow on from each other. The result of that is that that you know, for the right or the wrong reasons, people who categorize nature in pre modern China seem to be always impelled to have to do this in groups of five and categories of five. And a final, not insignificant feature really about the way in which the Chinese and pre modern China handled nature or saw that relationship is that they used a language which drew substantially on figurative language. They used analogies to talk about nature comparisons. metaphors, rather than a highly technical sort of language and that sometimes takes getting used to.”

Roel Sterckx, Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University
BBC In Our Time 20191128

Collaborative Situated Media - IRCAM

“rhythm" can be the name for the patterning joining antecedent and emergent, here and elsewhere:

Ensemble play in the face of pandemic, by students in an online course:

Actorie Anul 1 - Tehnică Vocală

First Year Acting - Vocal Technique 

UNATC I. L. Caragiale, Bucharest

(the top art academy in Romania)