Demonstrating Hidden Exotica...in Mirrors

Best known in popular circles for "The Physics of Star Trek," I enjoyed Lawrence Krauss's "Hiding in the Mirror:The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond" on several levels:

1)"Lewis's Narnia was not like Tolkein's Middle Earth; located far, far away and long, long ago. Rather, it could be accessed simply by entering an old wardrobe located in a professor's cluttered house in the country." (13)

I love LOTR as

much as the next, but the accessibility of Narnia; the premise and promise that the Kingdom is not just " far, far away and long, long ago," but actually accessible (liminally; thin-spaces) in the cluttered closets of contemporary life is attractive...

A la Elizabeth Browning: "Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. "

2)Seeing Van Gogh et al as a parallel pioneer to the physics revolution/reformation catalyzed me into wondering who the Luthers/Van Goghs are in the church's current Reorientation.

(Note: a potential "Luther of physics" is here):

"Ultimately the growing call for a new vocabulary to express our world resonated most strongly with visual artists, whose aesthetic is directly tied to pushing gainst the limits of our reality. I write earlier about Van Gogh freeing us from the tyranny of color, and demonstrating exotica otherwise hidden in daily objects....(Then came) Picasso and others who also began to transform the very definition of art....It has been said that a picture paints a thousand words, but what if, as Pavlosky steesed, words fail completely?" (87)

Note; not only does that paragraph trump most seminary textbooks; isn't "demonstrating exotica otherwise hidden in daily objects" the church's calling, turf and territory ? Nevermind, we abdicated in favor of erotica...and gnosticism.

In the most amazing Sunday School song you never heard in Sunday School (below), the prophet Mike Roe of the prophetic 77s called it "You sod...swapped it (your birthright) all for a bowl of prk and beans."



3)As I have been teaching the gospels, his glossary definition of the Grand Unification Theory (now snagged at getting the fourth of the the classic (synoptic) "forces of nature" to coalesce and merge with the mysterious fourth source (gospel) hit me, comparing synoptics and John..and well, all of life:

GRAND UNIFICATION: The theoretical notion that the three nongravitational forces in nature..can actually be unified in a single framework, and moreover, that at a very small sacel...all of these appear to have the same strength (263)



4)Finally, he quotes Bono...or something like that:

"So it is that mathemeticians, poets, writers and artists almost always choose
beauty over truth.
Scientists, alas, do not have this luxury, and can only hope that we do not have to make the choice." (253)