Visit to a blind student's school🧑🦯🧑🦯(community medicine)
Matter
1. What is matter?
• Matter is everywhere.
• Matter is everything.
– Matter/Mater/Mother
• “From whom all corporeal things take their source.”
• Matter shares its dualistic existence with
Energy.
• To study the changes and effects of matter is to
come closer to understanding Life‟s secrets.
2. Mind Over Matter
• It is easy to confine the study of matter to the realms
of Chemistry and Quantum Mechanics.
• Is it really the case science has „taken care‟ of all
things material?
• Is artistic practise thereby condemned to pick up the
unquantified debris left by scientific investigation?
• This presentation attempts to investigate just about
everything to do with matter. Which is just about
everything.
3. Quantification
• To quantify something is to count or measure
it.
• Sense experiences are confined into sets.
• This is the way in which we try to understand
and control the world, which is fundamental to
science.
• Mathematics and logic are the most precise
methods to express quantification.
4. Algebra
• Is the “relation of relations”.
• This meta-language shows the need to consider
each object as being in relation to another,
within a certain context, or set.
• The very abstract nature of this branch of pure
mathematics means that it can exist entirely
self-contained, without even referring to
anything instantiated.
5. Art and Science
• The dichotomy is becoming outdated and
irrelevant.
• It is unhelpful to categorise and define any two
modes of thought as mutually exclusive.
• This becomes clear as soon as we attempt to
define anything.
6. Some Brief Semantics…
• When we define a word, we can only describe
it in terms of what it looks like.
“The simple question: What is it like? Invites a comparison. We cannot, in fact, define
anything in terms of itself. We must bring it in its relationship to its environment.”
-- P. A. Coggin – Art, Science and Religion
• There is no such thing as an entirely self-
contained definition.
• Language, then, is revealed to be entirely (and
absurdly) self-referential.
7. Self-Reference
•One of the biggest puzzles of
language and thought
•An artefact and necessary product of
human existence
“This is a sentence” – self-
evidently true meta-sentence
“This is not a sentence” –
paradoxical meta-sentence
Drawing by Theodoros Pelecanos, from Synosius (1478)
The Ouroboros, the snake-like creature portrayed to be perpetually
eating its own tail, is an ancient alchemical symbol included in tracts to
represent the infinite and holistic nature of existence. We will
(inevitably) return to this theme later…
8. The Pre-Socratics
• The Philosophers of Greece c.600BC were the
first to really think about matter.
• The fundamental assumption at first was that
everything was made of one substance…
13. Empedocles
• Broke the cycle when he considered
that, if everything were really made of
one thing, there would be no reason for
it to undergo any changes or to be
destroyed.
• So he came up with the long-standing
notion of the four
elements, Fire, Water, Air and Earth;
their interactions governing the changes
in the universe.
• He famously met his end by jumping
into Mount Etna, possibly to prove a
philosophical point.
14. The Building Blocks of Life…
• It was Anaxagoras
who proposed the
incisive notion of
matter being
constituted of parts
of everything else,
which correlates
with the findings
of modern particle
physics. “You are what you eat.”
-- Dr Gillian McKeith (and Anaxagoras)
16. Aristotle
• As well as writing
vociferously on just about
everything, this philosopher
can be credited with inventing
the scientific method of
induction.
This is a stone
All observed stones have fallen to the
ground when dropped
Therefore, this stone will fall to the ground
when dropped.
• Of course, this method of
thinking is not without its
problems…
17. Aristotle
• More relevantly, Aristotle employed the notion
of the four elements in his natural philosophy
(the archaic term for science)
• It stuck in the Medieval world, and was
accepted as the basis for all fields of study
• It is particularly prevalent in the secretive field
of alchemy.
18. Alchemy
• From Arabic “Al-Kemi”, meaning “Divine
Chemistry”.
• Primarily known as the process of facilitating the
transmutation of base metals into gold, it‟s also an
esoteric branch of philosophy.
• Though its „scientific principles‟ have been
superseded by modern developments, its claims
should not be dismissed as ignorance.
• Alchemy necessitates an understanding of matter in
terms of universal truths, both physical and spiritual.
19. The Philosophical Elements
• SULPHUR – “The stone which burns” - Fixed
Principle
• Earth (Visible)
• Fire (Occult)
• SALT – Quintessence (solidarity)
• MERCURY – Volatile Principle
• Water (Visible)
• Air (Occult)
20. The Four Elements
Air Fire
Hot, Dry
Wet, Hot
Summer
Spring
Choleric
Sanguine Nature Nature
21. The Four Elements
Earth Water
Cold, Dry Cold, Wet
Autumn Winter
Melancholic Phlegmatic
Nature Nature
22. Elementary…
This type of
thought now
belongs at the
back of gossip
magazines as a
facetious form of
pseudo-science.
So what
happened?
24. The Sceptical Chymist
• Boyle‟s monumental work made the
distinction between chemistry and alchemy.
• This is the beginning of the end of the holistic
view of the natural world.
• Thinking becomes black and white.
26. The End of the Renaissance Man
•Although Boyle‟s
contribution to human
knowledge is
invaluable, the culture
of „specialisation‟ that
accompanied it has
given many a narrow
worldview.
•The closest we have
to a Renaissance Man
is probably this man…
27. Modern Matter
• Classical theories of
physics and chemistry
have been deemed
inadequate in
explaining the world
completely, or for
accounting for the
origins of the universe.
• New theories in
quantum mechanics
have helped to „fill in‟
these „quantificational
gaps‟, despite being
sometimes bizarre in
nature… Isaac Newton
28. Invisible and Indivisible
• Matter is no longer a matter of simple
experiment and observation.
• The atom, that ancient Greek idea, is now the
fundamental principle of modern quantum
mechanics.
• But it‟s also highly problematic; in that it is
really, really tiny.
An Atom (actual size)
29. Up and Atom
• The Atom has come a long way since the days
of the Ancient Greeks…
30. Theory and Fact
• The reason that the
atom has evolved so
much is because it‟s a
theoretical entity.
• This means that
Scientists have to make
conjectures based on
probabilistic
calculations.
• It seems that, the more
we know about the
world, the more
abstract it becomes.
31. What‟s the Matter?
• Matter seems to have disappeared.
• Quantum mechanics suggests that a system
exists in all possible states until
observed, when we index it in one unique
state.
• What was once a case of simple cause and
effect, experiment and observation, has
become as elusive as a supernatural agent.
35. Nothing
• It is from this development that I have decided
to take a holistic approach in my scientific
investigation.
• I have been inspired to study the nature of
Nothing as the equal of Something, where both
are considered matter.
