Digital Realm Then and Now

Hello there friend from far away telepathically receiving my thoughts via my pixel pulsations. What’s that you say? I’m not communicating with you telepathically? Balderdash…I am able to transmit these ideas to you over infinite distances at the speed of light…Sounds like telepathy to me…We’ve just gotten very used to it.

In this buzzing, undulating electronic world of ours sometimes it’s hard to appreciate the fact that we are truly living in the future. The electronic devices humans interface with a daily nonchalance are some of the things our ancestors dreamed about in elated trance like states. Electricity…what once just existed to the human mind as external lightning now can be communicated with directly through computers…in such a tremendously short amount of time the human spirit has taken us to planes we could never possibly imagine. It’s no wonder we’re facing so many existential threats as a species. We are absolutely all living during a rate of unprecedented change…In my opinion this is not to be faced with terror or nihilism, but an attitude of excitement and curiosity. In this fissionable and relative reality truly anything is possible.

I wanted to write a little tribute to some of the forerunners of quantum thought and the pioneers of the digital realm. As an artist and craftsman I appreciate the giants’ shoulders I get to stand on and looking back at the un-ending chain of inventions that allow me to conduct my craft on such a complex device blows my mind. 

Modern physics began to take off after the diabolical apple fell in the perhaps apocryphal story about Isaac Newton just chilling and then getting hit with a dose of Divine Providence that inspired him to invent the theories of gravitation and calculus. In the spirit of his times Mr. Newton (who was a terrible investor, doubt he would’ve been a Hodler) set up his frameworks of physics based on the materialistic concepts of mass, force, inertia, momentum, the conservation of energy, and entropy (which ambiguous hotly contests the entropic idea of the second law of thermodynamics…see ambiguous particle systems). Newton’s ideas gave rise to industrialized nations who applied his concepts for economic and social gain. The Wright Brother’s airplane was arguably the highest (pun not really intended) human invention to come about from strictly Newtonian physics. 

As the world industrialized and stewed itself in a delicious broth of Victorian materialism a young man named Albert Einstein was born. The peculiar child was an awful student growing up. I’m pretty sure his parents thought he had a learning disorder or something. Einstein achieved nothing even close to spectacular throughout most of his early life. He did not go to an elite school nor did he receive an elite job after he graduated from school…in fact, he searched for a teaching post in vain for two years. The cliché genius we all know today was viewed as a total nobody at that point in his life. He took a job as a patent clerk where he evaluated the worthiness the patent applications. Ironically enough many of the patents he looked over were related to ideas he would be renowned for in the future such as questions about the transmission of electrical signals and electromechanical ways to sync time. Ahhh the transmission of electrical signals…this idea led Einstein to the most trippy revelation of his time period: mass is energy and energy is mass. Newton thought the world was solid…Einstein said nay sir you are but wrong…what appears to be solid is merely energy vibrating at an extremely slow rate when compared to light, and even better Einstein was able to prove this empirically which validated his theory of relativity hypothesis.

Our next early trippy friend’s name was Werner Heisenberg. He extrapolated upon Einstein’s theory of an electric energy universe by asking the question: what makes things come into certain states from other states? Is there a modus of communication to the energetic level that allows it to be manipulated? Mr. Heisenberg said yes, and he reduced the states to a 0 or 1 or in state/out of state. Welcome to the digital age. Oh my can you imagine how difficult it was for Mr. Heisnberg to demonstrate a probabilistic quantum digital world without having a computer screen? This man had to get up in front of the establishment and make the claim that the universe is clusters of mutable electrons while being armed only with a piece of chalk and will power. “But how can your claim have any veracity Mr. Heisnberg…?” said science critic A. “If what you’re saying is true then I should be able to walk through walls guffaw guffaw good sir and that is just not the case *group guffaw*” Mr. Heisenberg did what any sagacious scientist did and continued to push his ideas forward even though they might have been considered to be weird. 

Now, thanks to Einstein, Heisenberg and other quantum thinking physicists we take the quantum reality for granted. Today, humans are pretty much born directly interfacing with the quantum realm. Remember, at the most rudimentary level being able to interface with the quantum realm is determining the output of an electrical decision making process…people do that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times a day. The simple ability to press a key on your keyboard and have it visualized as pixels through your word processing software is a quantum process not even dreamed of when Werner Heisenberg was originally presenting his idea. Now, people interact with the quantum realm at such a high level for such a long frequency that it could be argued that the quantum electro realm is considered to be more real than the slower 3D material biological realm.

As a digital artist who works solely in the realm of changing the color of pixels on a screen I owe extra gratitude to the people who helped invent the technology, which allows me to perform my craft. It is due to their drive and hard work and spirit that I, and other people, get to live in a more fun and beautiful world. The fact that what we consider commonplace today was once considered weird and esoteric is also a reminder that what is considered weird and esoteric today could tomorrow be considered common place. The history of science shows us that the people who get laughed at are sometimes actually right. Making fun of outlandish ideas without testing them because you are afraid of them or they sound ridiculous to you makes you the opposite of scientist. For some reason establishment scientists seem to become the people who are the best at suppressing real scientific inquiry, perhaps because if new ideas proved to be true it could invalidate their entire careers. Tying ideas like “career, ego, status, tenure etc.” with science are extremely dangerous for the field. Way more dangerous than idiots expounding theories that may or may not be true. The worst thing that can happen in the field of science is the suppression of any idea. Science at it’s best is an empirical outcome mode of thinking that operates as a competition of ideas…to leave out any idea from the competition would be extremely irresponsible as a scientist. I implore you if you have a weird idea to test it out, intelligently, because who knows you could just end up inventing the next thing humans all need and love. Also, if you are breathing you are a scientist. To be a scientist means to pay attention to patterns of cause and effect, one does not need anything but their own sensory input, patience, and repetition to become a scientist.