Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Light in a box After Niels Bohr died, it was noted that there was a drawing of a box on a high corner of his blackboard, which was otherwise filled with equations. This reflected the long series of discussions he and Albert Einstein had had for many years, and the foundation of quantum mechanics. Einstein had died a few years before. The box represented Einstein’s box of light analogy at the core of their very enlightened agreements and disagreements. When I learned of this, I thought it would be nice to send somebody a gift, a box of light. I thought that I would fill it in a very bright room, and then close the lid quickly. I would have to do so in slight excess of the speed of light. As the weight of the lid would become infinitesimal, this would be a mission impossible. The alternative would be to capture a star in a very big box, which would be unwieldy, to say the least. The gamma rays would destroy the container anyway. Upon further reflection, I realized that the light in...

  From dust to dust If we knew everything absolutely everything  at a subatomic level there would be  no such thing as time Time emerges as a result of the blurring  based on intrinsic ignorance a consequence of  the macroscopic world  which we inhabit Time is the bonus  we must enjoy while we can while we are warm during our journey from  cold dust to cold again Aubrey Lieberman 2/15/24 

  Heated debate The entropic gradiant is a river flowing from a mountain of order, or high density of information, toward an ocean of lower informational density, or much lower order. The greater the the order, the more heat there is in the system.  This river flows from high order to low, losing heat in the process, which is the flow of time. The word entropy implies the opposite of order, high entropy characterizing the ocean in this analogy, low the mountain.  The choice of the term entropy was a learned or academic ploy that, as a consequence, entails an extra mental processing step each time we think about it. (Rudolf Clausius chose this term in 1865 from the Greek for ‘turning toward’). We should, perhaps, drop the term, as transition from order to disorder is more explicit.  However, I think that would be poetically unjust. Entropy is, after all, such a lovely word, and you would not be able to pretend to compliment somebody by congratulating them upon their h...

Free Will Awareness of choices made in a particular situation occur after a brief subconscious interval, the neurophysiology of which  can be recorded by monitoring alterations in the electromagnetic fields close to the brain, or by functional magnetic resonace imaging, before the individual becomes aware of a thought, impulse or the initiation of an action. This delay reflects the time necessary for a brain to recreate the user friendly interface, the screen which we refer to as consciousness. Some of what is manifest as brain physiology, comprehensible at the human level, is very slow compared to the nanosecond processing going on in the background. As a result, most of our “choices” are subliminal.  We are accustomed to thinking about choices as conscious or subconscious, but there is a timescale problem as alluded to, and behavior is always a result of activity in both domains.  In my view, the topic of free will is a perverse discussion. Subconscious processing is th...

  Precedence I believe we spoke poetically before we became prosaic Epic poems were written on stone and depicted on cave walls for tens of thousands of years Primordial language must have been embellished  in order to convey meaning within the availability  of relatively few words the maximization of language at the core of poetry Poetry and song are the sky and the sea  the savannah and the woods the mountains and waterfalls lakes and rivers the fragrance of flowers sounds of birds crickets and frogs the beauty that is sunrise the serenity of dusk  the feel of warm rain of a cooling breeze of the exuberance of the fire around which we are gathered to eat and drink to stay warm in the night to talk and laugh and sing I believe that this is why we tell stories so well and receive them with such alacrity  and do so potentially uncritically  We are alive within our primordial language  and only do business without  Aubrey Lieberman 2/14/24...

  Ponder At the unimaginable minuteness of the Planck scale there may be a granularity an ultimate cul-de-sac where time does not exist in which a quantum fluctuation may result in a phase change into the constituents that will become atoms bound by nuclear forces within and electromagnetism and gravity  in the boundless jelly  of spacetime without The origin of the potential energy  which becomes a universe remains a mystery a point at which the equations end Why there is something rather than nothing remains the enigma of all enigmas posed for the record by Parmenides almost 3000 years ago An entropic gradiant  drives the universe from order to disorder and back again Memory and time emerge from the convergence of entropy with consciousness consciousness resulting  from Darwinian evolution Intelligence emerges  from consciousness and enables the formulation of questions of this nature of which this one is the ultimate imponderable Aubrey Lieberman 2/...