A Silver Path

In an interview with Elizabeth Finkel for Australian science journal “Cosmos”, Dr Michio Kaku recalls a visit with his parents to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as a child. On this particular day, as he sat and watched the carp swimming around in their pond, he began to think about how the carp would not be able to concieve of other worlds.
“A carp-engineer would believe that was all there is; but a carp-physicist would see the ripples on the surface and start thinking about unseen dimensions,” says Kaku.[1]
In various other interviews and lectures Dr Kaku expands on this amazing childhood epiphany, relating how the carp swimming in the weedy pond-world beneath the surface of the water experiences and can concieve of only three dimensions; two spatial (being forward/back and side/side) plus one of time. The carp has no concept of “up” as it exists beyond the surface of the pond. But if someone were to lift the carp out of the water, it would soon be confronted with a world where beings “swim” without fins, breathe without water, and myriad other previously unimaginable things.
While Kaku uses this analogy, to great effect, to set the scene for thinking in the 11 dimensions described by String Theory, I find it also a useful analogy for understanding World Views and Individual perspective.
For some time now I have been researching for what I thought was going to be a simple article about the commonalities between traditional peoples around the world and throughout the ages and their collective commonalities with the current direction of theoretical physics in the west.
Taking the “fish-out-of-water” approach described by Dr Michio Kaku’s analogy, I saught to reaquaint my self with history and prehistory from the perspective of the corresponding world view, introducing my “inner-carp-physicist” to these new perspectives.
Right from the first, given that my previous research into physics, religions, cosmologies, mythologies and traditional arts and sciences had already revealed to me a great deal of common ground; it soon became clear that a far deeper current ran beneath the surface and spread to include a far greater and more diverse array of practices, beliefs and schools of thought than I had reckoned.
I’ll be sharing some of what I’ve found in my ongoing research project which I’ve dubbed “Deep Thought” on my website, DIMPLEMOON, here on this blog, and by way of free-thinking online communities. I welcome and encourage discussion and debate on the ideas I put forward. When I write, be it poetry, story or article, I do not strive to change any person’s mind, nor bend their opinions to suit my own. I seek only to inspire people to form opinions of their own where they have none, and to challenge those which they do hold.

Resources: [1] “THE MAN FROM THE 11th DIMENSION: The strange worlds of Michio Kaku” p 68, Cosmos, Issue 2, August 2005