Saturday, February 12, 2011

Ancient Ecocosmology?

The taste of mystery does not belong only to the fanciful among us.

Mystery is real and powerful.

Take for example the most mysterious book so far known, a book older than the Gutenberg Bible, a book not yet translated, the book with an unknown name, but now called The Voynich Manuscript:

The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the early 15th century [circa 1404] and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. The author, script, and language remain unknown: for these reasons it has been described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript".

(Wikipedia, cf. The Voynich Manuscript website). Tenet Four advances a theory that within the ecosystem are answers to questions we need to have as a civilization.

Some of the most profound mysteries of science and power are very, very old, as we pointed out in an earlier Ecocosmology post:
While watching the other species in the world around us, scientists noticed that some of the tiniest of them are good at quantum mechanics:

A team of University of Toronto chemists have made a major contribution to the emerging field of quantum biology, observing quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

"There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

(Quantum Mechanics at Work in Photosynthesis). Algae have been familiar with these quantum mechanical processes for nearly two billion years.

(The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old). Contempt for the natural world is an exceptionalist religious doctrine of modern origin.

Is what we call the The Voynich Manuscript some missing wisdom this civilization could use to stem the tide of the epoch of criminal insanity that threatens to bring us down?

In any case, it is no mystery that the new phrase "global weather wierding" should give us pause.

UPDATE: Software engineers are using AI to figure it out (Famously Indecipherable Coded Manuscript Cracked by AI?).

3 comments:

Randy said...

Brings up an interesting quandry: which came first, photosynthesis or quantum mechanical dynamics? Link

Tabitha said...

Link not there ^^

Dredd said...

The link is to the Wayback Machine copy ...