Algemeen

Life is really weird. Life is unlike any other phenomenon in physics. Stars, electrons, and black holes are all amazing in their own ways. Life is self-organizing chemistry which reproduces itself and passes on its evolved characteristics, encoded in DNA. In thermodynamics terms, it has the ability to reduce local entropy or disorganization, thus locally contravening the law of thermodynamics. In more biological terms; life is the  arrangement of molecules with qualities of self-sustenance and self-replication. It’s a bit more … only life invents, and the first thing life invents is itself. Life must be described in terms of its…

‘Man is destined by his reason to live in a society with men and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to make himself moral by the arts and sciences. No matter how strong his animal tendency to yield passively to the attractions of comfort and well-being, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacle that cling to him because of the crudity of his nature.’ – Immanuel Kant Humans are biophysically connected to the biosphere through the flows of materials and energy appropriated from ecosystems….

‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. But if I wish to explain it to him who asks the question, I do not know.’ – Saint Augustine, ca. 399 CE. Another year past, it seems as if time is speeding up. I’ve always been fascinated with time and the concept of time’s passage. Time seems commonplace, but it is perhaps the Universe’s greatest mystery. Throughout the history of philosophy (paradigmatically, in the work of Aristotle) time is a measure or dimension of change. If there are physical processes, it seems there is temporality….

Our world is at a turning point, humanity is at a crossroads. We can choose to live self-servingly, by which we try to command and control the biological and cultural heritage of the biosphere solely for our self-serving benefit. Or, we can co-create symbiotic systems through which we relate to and work with our living world and one another in life-affirming ways. Given the increasing characteristics of complex interconnection we face moving forward in our global context, it is only through the cultivation of a symbiotic approach to life and living that humanity can hope to evolve with the rest…

Earth, an ancient, extremely complex, multiple, all-planetary, thermodynamically open, self-controling system of living and non-living matter which accumulates and redistributes immense resources and energy and determines the composition and dynamics of the Earth’s biosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere and the nonlinear interactions and feedback loops between and within them. These components can be also regarded as self-regulating systems in their own right, and further broken down into more specialized subsystems. The sources of Earth’s evolving chemical complexity are the energies of solar diurnal disequilibria and the energies of physicochemical gradients at hot hydrothermal vents. The diurnal disequilibria arise naturally…

Time is often treated as some sort of fundamental substance. Time exists somewhere in our universe, flowing uniformly from past to future. Time is the progression of events from the past to the present into the future. Basically, if a system is unchanging, it is timeless. Time can be considered to be the fourth dimension of reality, used to describe events in three-dimensional space. We know time is there and passing; the movement of our watches says so. We are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We…

Physics has more than its share of mind-bending ideas: the slowing of time, relativity, the enormous coagulations of matter, like black holes, that can rupture space-time itself. The equations of physics describe how things change in time. From the equations of Newton, which establish the foundations of mechanics, to those of Maxwell for electromagnetic phenomena; from Schrödinger’s equation describing how quantum phenomena evolve, to those of quantum field theory for the dynamics of subatomic particles: the whole of our physics, and science in general, is about how things develop according to the order of time. Physics has already grown far…

The broadest of perspectives can locate the shift underway on planet Earth as the most recent scene in a vast pageant of cosmic emergence. A cosmological panorama takes us beyond the ambit of daily life and beyond even the larger compass of human history, offering a vantage point for pondering the contemporary predicament. A reminder of where we are in the immensity of space, the eons of time, and the majestic evolution of existence, this wide vista cultivates a sense of awe and humility, stirring resolve to renew the vitality of our precious island of life. Such reflections bring into…

Humanity is making tremendous progress.  Cities are a dense network of interconnected systems of increasing complexity, all of which use feedback information to exist in dynamic equilibrium. A new era of innovation for our urban future. A moment of recognition/realization The city as the general form of human settlement, as the ecological niche of our species, belongs to the world of antifragility. The city as a system has proven through history to be capable to adapt, self-organize, improve and take advantage of the unpredictable, in short to prosper in disorder. Not only does the city exist for ten thousands years,…

When I was in my early thirties, the certainties I had grown up with disappeared from my life. Doubt became the starting point of my exploration, which has led to a rich harvest via different pathways and crossings and as I dared to question everything, including rationality itself. I tried to find my way in the logical analytics of my thinking, and, on the other hand moved by my  sensitivity to the mystery of existence. I gained many new insights into the great dimensions of existence. For me the beauty consists in the fact that patterns, regularity, and form can…