Since we're talking about Taoism (see post below), how about this op-ed in today's NYT by Margaret Wertheim. She discusses what shadows, immaterial presences that do not require energy to move, might mean for modern physics:
ON Thursday, on the summer solstice, the Sun will celebrate the year’s lazy months by resting on the horizon. The word solstice derives from the Latin “sol” (sun) and “sistere” (to stand still). The day marks the sun’s highest point in the sky, the moment when our shadows shrink to their shortest length of the year. How strange to think that these mundane friends, our ever-present familiars, can actually go faster than the sun’s rays.
I remarked on this recently to my husband as we sat on the porch with our shadows pooling by our chairs. Nothing can go faster than light, he insisted, expressing what is surely the most widely known law of physics, ingrained into us by a thousand “Nova” programs.
That is the point, I explained: Nothing can go faster than light. A shadow isn’t a thing. It’s a non-thing. It’s the absence of light.
Special relativity dictates that we cannot move anything more quickly than the particles of light known as photons, but no law says you can’t do nothing faster than light. Physicists have known this for a long time, even if they generally do not mention it on PBS documentaries.
Brilliant! Not only does this give us a new insight into "doing nothing," but it also helps illustrate the fusion of being and non-being. Thing only makes sense in relation to no-thing; material is tangible only because of immateriality. You get it...
Well, this explains the belief that "wu-wei" means to "do nothing" -- it's actually the fact that those who embody wu-wei are moving so quickly that we cannot see what they are doing (given that our eyes register sense data via the sensation of photons); thus, the Taoist looks to us as if he/she is standing still. Well, he is, and he isn't. All at once.
Hey...maybe this is what Bush is doing?
Posted by: Chris | June 20, 2007 at 05:57 PM
Initially there is an issue with word play
In the statement:
"A shadow isn’t a thing. It’s a non-thing. It’s the absence of light."
Well it's the edge between the dark and light which "Defines" the shadow. Which then bring up: Yin and yang of white and black: Light and nothing.
The author is both right and wrong because of that. Since while nothing is nothing, the shadow is something when you included the boundary layer of the edge which "defines" the shadow. Which she actually mentions later in the article, which is why nothing cannot transmit information Faster than light.
So you can also mix Yin and Yang to your Taoist comparison of her statement.
Peace
Posted by: casey kochmer | June 20, 2007 at 07:59 PM
Are flow forms Taoist technology? See "Streamlining Energy: Biomimetics and Flow Forms" at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/18/22456/9338 for more pictures and words.
Posted by: gmoke | June 21, 2007 at 01:05 AM
The tyepad has been wholely blocked(or GFWed)in mainland china, so reading your blog should be through proxy breaking that damn Great Fire Wall.
Posted by: nickwong | June 23, 2007 at 07:43 AM