What a difference an e-mail makes.
The world got a little overexcited this weekend when it was reported that the U.N. was appointing Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman to be the world’s official meeter and greeter should any extraterrestrials happen to spin by. This from a report circulated by NewsCorp’s “NewsCore” wire service:
THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.
Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN’s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.
She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before - and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any “first contact”.
… Professor Richard Crowther, an expert in space law and governance at the UK Space Agency and who leads British delegations to the UN on such matters, said: “Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a ‘take me to your leader’ person.”
Perhaps fearing a little reporting would get in the way of this Onion-esque story, no one bothered contacting the world’s newly appointed alien ambassador. Until today, that is, when The Guardian’s Matthew Weaver spoiled everyone’s fun:
Finally an email from Othman herself would have prompted our Martian to trudge back to his spaceship. “It sounds really cool but I have to deny it,” she said of the story. She will be attending a conference next week, but she’ll be talking about how the world deals with “near-Earth objects”. Our alien will just have to try someone else, or stop reading the Sunday Times.
Perhaps NewsCorp was just going for its H.G. Welles moment.
On the nature of reality, Mind and Matter:
In 2001., the letters between Carl Jung and Professor W. Pauli, Nobel
laureate-physics, were published under title, "atom and archetype" -
1932-1958...
This long association produced some extraordinary ideas about the
human mind and reality, and here are a couple of them....
Jung and Pauli concluded that "acausal connections" exist in the
space-time continuum, which Jung termed a 'synchronicity principle.'
This means that unrelated events of a psycho-physical nature, appear
as "meaningful coincidences" - with the emphasis on meaningful.
They also indicated that number is pre-existent to ego-consciousness,
and forms the most primal archetype of order in the human mind.
As Jung said:
Since the remotest times men have used number to establish meaningful coincidences, that is, coincidences that can be interpreted.
It is generally believed that numbers were invented, or thought out by man, and are therefore nothing but concepts of quantities containing nothing that was not previously put into them by the human intellect. But it is equally possible that numbers were found or discovered.. In that case they are not only concepts but something more-autonomous entities which somehow contain more than just quantities.
Unlike concepts, they are based not on any conditions - but on the quality of being themselves, on a "so-ness" that cannot be expressed by an intellectual concept.
Under these conditions they might easily be endowed with qualities that have still to be discovered. I must confess that I incline to the view that numbers were as much found as invented, and that in consequence they possess a relative autonomy analogous to that of the archetypes.
They would then have in common with the latter, the quality of being pre-existent to consciousness, and hence, on occasion, of conditioning it, rather than being conditioned by it.
Here is an example, with appropriate comments by the research
group PEAR, Princeton University, School of Applied Science.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/cosmic/
The numerology system is called "Chaldean." Copy here:
http://www.crystalinks.com/numerology.html
The star Kochab is long known in mythology, with references
dating to 2467b.c.e. It, and a companion star are called, The
Guardians of the Pole.
Other details in search: numomathematics-entelekk
#1 Posted by Todd Laurence, CJR on Mon 27 Sep 2010 at 03:07 PM