Apology by Plato (c. 428 BC – c. 347 BC), translated by Benjamin Jowett (1817 – 1893).
Read by Bob Neufeld.
Audio courtesy of LibriVox.
Many thanks to the reader and everyone involved!
China’s new quantum satellite will try to teleport data outside the bounds of space and time
The rocket carrying the first quantum satellite takes off in Jiuquan, China on August 16, 2016. (Reuters/China Daily)
Written by Tim Fernholz (qz.com)
This week, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite. So what exactly does this mean?
“[T]he satellite is designed to establish ultra-secure quantum communications by transmitting uncrackable keys from space to the ground,” Xinhua, China’s state news agency, wrote after the equipment was launched on a rocket from the Gobi desert. “It could also conduct experiments on the bizarre features of quantum theories, such as entanglement.”
Uncrackable keys? Bizarre features? Both true. This satellite is designed to literally teleport information, to distances 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) away.
It’s pretty wild stuff. We asked Spiros Michalakis, a mathematician and researcher at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, to walk us through it.
Quantum theory: the basics
Here’s a quick refresher in case you haven’t thought about physics in a few years, because this story is cooler when you understand these basics. Skip ahead if you’re already a quantum geek.
Most human technology is built around the classical physics that Isaac Newton and his inheritors came up with (equal and opposite reactions, that sort of thing). When engineers hit on electricity, Michalakis says, they perceived it in aggregate as a kind of a force; it’s either on, or it’s off. This understanding led to electric switches, which became transistors, and when you put all those transistors in a box and start turning them off and on with instructions encoded “11010001101”… it’s a computer.
But as scientists were developing electric computers in the 20th century, theorists beginning with Max Planck were ripping up the rule books. Their experiments with light suggested that something about classical physics didn’t quite add up. Soon they developed mathematical proofs to explain that the tiny particles that make up matter—protons, neutrons, and electrons—don’t necessarily behave like you would expect particles to behave. They can act as if they are in two places at once, for instance. (That’s one of those “bizarre features” the Chinese are talking about.) This is quantum theory. The first and most famous application of these ideas came in nuclear weaponry and energy.
Physicists are still trying to agree on how classical and quantum physics come together coherently. But quantum theory already underlies a lot of modern technology; the transistors on a silicon chip, in fact, wouldn’t work without it. Now engineers are trying to apply it to more futuristic things.
Spooky action at a distance
Let’s say that you take a very small particle, and set it up so that it could be in either one of two states. Let’s call one state “up,” and the other one “down.” (Quantum computers do something like this, using single atoms trapped in a magnetic field to represent either a “0” or a “1”.)
If you do this, quantum theory says that two things will happen. The first is that, although the particle will always be either “up” or “down” if you look at it, when you’re not looking, it will be in a kind of combination of the two, called a superposition. In quantum mechanics, the act of measuring something changes it; the superposition “collapses,” in the parlance, to either up or down.
The second thing is that two or more of these particles can be put in a situation of “quantum entanglement,” where they form a single superposition together. Then their physical properties are correlated. For instance, you can set them up in advance so that if you look at one particle and find it’s up, then you know, without looking, that the other must be down, and vice versa.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Let’s say you entangle two particles. Then you move one of them far, far away—to the other side of the planet, or to the moon. No matter the distance, quantum mechanics says, they remain entangled. If you look at the first one, and in doing so change it—collapsing the superposition—you will also change the other one. And this will happen instantaneously, however far apart they are.
Let that sink in, because this technique, called “quantum teleportation,” is crazy to think about. Light has a speed limit, and normally information cannot travel faster than light. Quantum teleportation is, in a sense, information traveling outside of space and time. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
Tangled up in space
Scientists have done experiments with quantum teleportation already. They have instantaneously exchanged information about the quantum states of photons, which are particles of light, transmitted 143 km between two of the Canary Islands.
But testing quantum teleportation at extremely long distances requires going to space. It’s the easiest way to set up laser communication between two distant points on the earth’s surface. That’s what the Chinese satellite, developed in cooperation with the Austrian Academy of Science, intends to do.
The satellite contains a machine that generates entangled pairs of photons by shooting a laser beam through a specially designed crystal. Each entangled pair will be split up and beamed down to stations on Earth approximately 1,200 km apart. If all goes as planned, researchers at those stations will share access to an entangled system. Any measurement on one of those photons will be instantaneously reflected in its opposite number at the other station.
A US company had partnered with researchers in Denmark and Singapore to launch a small satellite, or cubesat, with similar goals, but it was destroyed when the rocket taking it to the International Space Station exploded in 2014.
The key is the key
Besides demonstrating a super-long entanglement, the scientists working with the satellite want to test new communications technology. It’s important to realize that we can’t send information like “Hey, how are you?” through quantum teleportation, much less teleport actual things. But smart thinkers realized that being able to share basic information about the state of atomic particles across distance could create a powerful encryption tool.
This is where the unbreakable code comes in. Perhaps the most powerful method of encryption is the “one-time pad,” where messages are encoded using a private key known to both parties; theoretically, if the key is random, is as long as the message, is never reused, and is kept completely secret, it cannot be broken. Which sounds really good, code-wise, but it has long been impractical to ensure that two parties can always access a key that meets those standards.
Quantum entanglement could help. If people on two ground stations share access to a large enough set of entangled photons, beamed to them from a satellite in space, they can generate a sufficiently long, random key by teleporting quantum information between the entangled particles.
Nobody would be able to detect the transmission of the key. “It’s very secure from the point of view that if your eavesdropper wants to listen in, usually they are within space and time,” Michalakis says. “The data is not transmitted through space time, it goes underneath in mathematical subspace.”
Once the people in the two stations have created a key, using their entangled particles, they can use it to encrypt a message. This can be sent by whatever method they want. “You can use a telephone the moment you are sharing a key that nobody has access to,” Michalakis says.
But what if someone managed to intercept the laser beam from the satellite that had originally shared the entangled photons between the two stations? Here’s what is truly amazing: Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, any attempt by a third party to measure the particles in the entangled system would be immediately detected by the other two, making them aware that their code could be broken.
Quantum supremacy
The field of quantum information is still in its infancy. As we continue to learn the fundamentals of how quantum phenomena work at a large scale, the data collected will help physicists understand “the process that takes you from the quantum richness of the universe to the classical world we see around us,” Michalakis says.
It may be easy to see in this shades of the Cold War race for technological dominance, but Michalakis is confident that research will be shared within the scientific community. His hope is that this experiment is the first step toward a global network of research facilities sharing access to entangled particles beamed down from space—a kind of global, cloud-based quantum computer.
Michalakis, for obvious reasons, is particularly excited about anannouncement from the White House last week that the US needs a plan to invest in quantum technologies in a serious way; while US labs have done groundbreaking work in the field, there hasn’t been public funding on the scale available in Europe and Asia.
“Come on, this is for the US, we have some of the top institutions working on this, we have some of the best people, it makes no sense for us to not take this seriously,” he says. “There are economic reasons, and a matter of pride.”
At the moment, though, it’s China that looks like the pacesetter.
Enola Gay – Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
Enola Gay
You should have stayed at home yesterday
Ah-ha words can’t describe
The feeling and the way you lied
These games you play
They’re going to end in more than tears some day
Ah-ha Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
It’s eight fifteen
And that’s the time that it’s always been
We got your message on the radio
Conditions normal and you’re coming home
Enola Gay
Is mother proud of little boy today
Ah-ha this kiss you give
It’s never ever going to fade away
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
Ah-ha Enola Gay
It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away
It’s eight fifteen
And that’s the time that it’s always been
We got your message on the radio
Conditions normal and you’re coming home
Enola Gay
Is mother proud of little boy today
Ah-ha this kiss you give
It’s never ever going to fade away
Written by Christopher Henry Difford, Glenn Martin Tilbrook • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group
STEPS TO REV IT UP – by Calvin Harris H.W., M.
I am asked what will it take to rev up our spiritual community? Well since you asked, I say darling that’s easy. Stop being complacent. By all means stop believing in that selfie photo of your Ego, that’s only a snap shot taken in time. Well if you must, yes look at it, see the result of what such out pictured beliefs have left you – giving too little, too late and living small, hoping that it will be enough to suffice and to just get by with.
Oh I hear a comment, as I am looking around… ah yes, you there… that clown in the back aisle of the unconscious, yes you, please speak up honey, we all want to hear… what was that you said… Thank you for your remarks all I can say to that is – anyone who has ever known me, knows I am not a size queen, any size will work really, the key word here is work. I have only ever asked anyone to come higher, starting with myself.
Living large in Truth I believe to be the true ambition and the reality of our spiritual life. A foundation stone to our community. One that our ego’s have over time in the name of self-preservation come to fear and as a result the downsizing of our lives, and our community has been the result.
I think Marianne Williamson expressed it best in her 1992 book “A Return to Love …”, where she states:
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?…
When we let ourselves become invested by self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual deficiencies, the dangers of acceptance of a mediocre personal existence becomes a reality, we become unknowingly devious to our self and cause destruction to our spiritual community, being ineffectual in our powers to affect change for ourselves and community.
As Translators and with the tool Releasing the Hidden Splendour, we can take hold of our courage to investigate such concepts as ambition, powerful, achievement, fabulous and successful, wearing the conscious mantel of Truth, to pierce though widely held misunderstandings.
Those so called spiritually aware people, who are complacent, that is without action, without emotion (having emotion means to e-mote = the ability to move), without that action your community receives nothing of substance, It becomes works without conscious action.
The enlightened cannot refuse their emotional responsibility, to put on their mantel of bigness, and their ability to wield great power and responsibility, or they forfeit their birthright.
You have a moral responsibility- that is the ability to respond wisely and intelligently with that which you have received in the service of yourself and community for the greater good.
I am reminded of words found in an email sent to me from Ben Gilberti by Bentinho Massaro who wrote:
‘We don’t deserve to own this planet going into fourth density if we are not ready to serve its greatest good ambitiously.
I encourage all truly awake, aligned and pure-hearted people out there to step it up and get in touch with their biggest, most powerful possible version of themselves, and then pour that whole-heartedly into fearless service to All. Only we can manifest heaven on Earth, and we owe it to ourselves and each other.’
So I say let’s REV IT UP – looking forward to seeing you at Assembly 2016 in Long Beach, Ca, September 2-5, 2016 at the Westin Hotel.
Love & Blessings
Calvin
Bolero de Ravel Christoph Eschenbach Orchestre de Paris
Egon Schiele’s “Seated Male Nude (Self Depiction)”
Egon Schiele (June 12, 1890 – October 31, 1918) was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. Wikipedia
“The Lovers” by René Magritte (1928)
René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21, 1898 – August 15, 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Wikipedia
Biography: Pericles (history.com)
The so-called golden age of Athenian culture flourished under the leadership of Pericles (495-429 B.C.), a brilliant general, orator, patron of the arts and politician—”the first citizen” of democratic Athens, according to the historian Thucydides. Pericles transformed his city’s alliances into an empire and graced its Acropolis with the famous Parthenon. His policies and strategies also set the stage for the devastating Peloponnesian War, which would embroil all Greece in the decades following his death.
PERICLES: RISE TO POWER
Pericles was born into one of Athens’ leading families. His father Xanthippus was a hero of the Persian War and his mother belonged to the culturally powerful Alcmaeonidae family. He grew up in the company of artists and philosophers—his friends included Protagoras, Zeno and the pioneering Athenian philosopher Anaxagoras. Pericles’ earliest recorded act, the financial sponsorship of a play by Aeschylus in 472 B.C., foreshadowed the future leader’s wealth, artistic taste and political savvy. The play expressed support for Athens’ embattled populist leader Themistocles over Pericles’ future archrival, the aristocrat Cimon.
Between 463 and 461 Pericles worked to prosecute and eventually ostracize Cimon for allegedly betraying Athens and emerged as the leader of Athens’ democratic party. In 454 he led a successful military campaign in Corinth and sponsored the establishment of Athenian colonies in Thrace and on the Black Sea coast. In 443 he was elected strategos (one of Athens’ leading generals), a position he held, with one short interruption, for the rest of his life.
PERICLES AND THE ATHENIAN GOLDEN AGE
The golden age of Athenian culture is usually dated from 449 to 431 B.C., the years of relative peace between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. After the second Persian invasion of Greece in 479, Athens and its allies throughout the Aegean formed the Delian League, a military alliance focused on the Persian threat. Following a failed Athenian attack on the Persians in Egypt in 454, Athens’ leaders pushed to transfer the League’s treasury from Delos to Athens. Three years later, a coinage decree imposed Athenian weights and measures throughout the league. By the time Pericles was elected strategos, the league was well on its way to becoming an Athenian empire.
During the 440s and 430s Pericles tapped the league’s treasury to fund vast cultural projects in Athens, most notably a series of structures on the city’s hilltop Acropolis: the temple of Athena Nike, the Erechtheum and the towering Parthenon. Built to the highest standards of aesthetics, engineering and mathematics, these white marble structures were decorated with intricate statues and friezes carved by the era’s greatest sculptors.
Pericles’ social innovations were equally important to the era. He worked to democratize the fine arts by subsidizing theater admission for poorer citizens and enabled civic participation by offering pay for jury duty and other civil service. Pericles maintained close friendships with the leading intellects of his time. The playwright Sophocles and the sculptor Phidias were among his friends. Pericles’ consort Aspasia, one of the best-known women of ancient Greece, taught rhetoric to the young philosopherSocrates. Pericles himself was a master orator. His speeches and elegies (as recorded and possibly interpreted by Thucydides) celebrate the greatness of a democratic Athens at its peak.
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR AND THE DEATH OF PERICLES
As Athens grew in power under Pericles, Sparta felt more and more threatened and began to demand concessions from the Athenians. Pericles refused, and in 431 B.C. conflict between Athens and Sparta’s ally Corinth pushed the Spartan king Archidamus II to invade Attica near Athens. Pericles adopted a strategy that played to the Athenians’ advantage as a naval force by evacuating the Attic countryside to deny the superior Spartan armies anyone to fight. With all his people collected within the walls of Athens, Pericles was free to make opportunistic seaborne attacks on Sparta’s allies. This financially costly strategy worked well during the war’s early years, but a plague hit the concentrated Athenian population, taking many lives and stirring discontent. Pericles was briefly deposed in 430, but after the Athenians’ efforts to negotiate with Sparta failed, he was quickly reinstated.
In 429 Pericles’ two legitimate sons died of the plague. A few months later, Pericles himself succumbed. His death was, according to Thucydides, disastrous for Athens. His strategies were quickly abandoned and the leaders who followed lacked Pericles’ foresight and forbearance, instead “committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.” The glory of ancient Greece was far from over—Plato was born a year after Pericles’ death—but the golden age slid away.
Book recommendation: “Autobiography of a Yogi”
Autobiography of a Yogi is an autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda (January 5, 1893–March 7, 1952) first published in 1946. Yogananda was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India, into a Bengali family.
Autobiography of a Yogi introduces the reader to the life of Paramahansa Yogananda and his encounters with spiritual figures of both the East and West. The book begins with his childhood family life, to finding his guru, to becoming a monk and establishing his teachings of Kriya Yoga meditation. The book continues in 1920 when Yogananda accepts an invitation to speak in a religious congress in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He then travels across America lecturing and establishing his teachings in Los Angeles, California. In 1935 he returns to India for a yearlong visit. When he returns to America, he continues to establish his teachings, including writing this book.
The book is an introduction to the methods of attaining God-realization and to the spiritual thought of the East, which had only been available to a few in 1946. The author claims that the writing of the book was prophesied long ago by the nineteenth-century master Lahiri Mahasaya.
It has been in print for seventy years and translated into at least forty-three languages by Self-Realization Fellowship. It has been highly acclaimed as a spiritual classic including being designated by Philip Zaleski, while he was under the auspices of HarperCollins Publishers, as one of the “100 Most Important Spiritual Books of the 20th Century.” It is included in the book 50 Spiritual Classics: Timeless Wisdom from 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose by Tom Butler-Bowdon. According to Project Gutenberg, the first edition is in public domain and at least five publishers are reprinting it and four post it free for online reading.
Read the book free online: https://www.ananda.org/autobiography/
dreamhawk.com/inner-life/secret-of-time-and-satan/
Secret of Time and Satan
By Edward Carpenter
Is there one in all the world who does not desire to be divinely beautiful?
To have the most perfect body-unerring skill, strength-limpid clearness of mind, as of the sunlight over the hills-
To radiate love wherever he goes-to move in and out, accepted?
The secret lies close to you, so close.
You are that person-it lies close to you, so close- deep down within-
But in Time it shall come forth and be revealed.
Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away what you have,
Shall you become beautiful;
You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;
Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and healthy, but rather by discarding them;
Not by multiplying knowledge shall you beautify your mind;
It is not the food that you eat that has to vivify you, but you that have to vivify the food.
Always emergence, and the parting of veils for the hidden to appear;
The child emerges from its mother’s body, and out of that body again in time another child.
When the body which thou now hast falls away, another body shall be already prepared beneath,
And beneath that again another.
Always that which appears last in time is first, and the cause of all-and not that which appears first.
2
Freedom has to be won afresh every morning.
Every morning thou must put forth thy strength afresh upon the world, to create out of chaos the garden in which thou walkest.
(Behold! I love thee-I wait for thee in thine own garden, lingering till eventide among the bushes;
I tune the lute for thee; I prepare my body for thee, bathing unseen in the limpid waters.)
3
Wondrous is Man-the human body: to understand and possess this, to create it every day afresh, is to possess all things.
The tongue and all that proceeds from it; spoken and written words, languages, commands, controls, the electric telegraph girdling the earth;
The eyes ordaining, directing; the feet and all that they indicate-the path they travel for years and years;
The passions of the body, the belly and the cry for food, the heaving breasts of love, the phallus, the fleshy thighs,
The erect proud head and neck, the sturdy back, and knees well-knit or wavering;
All the interminable attitudes and what they indicate;
Every relation of one man to another, every cringing, bullying, lustful, obscene, pure, honorable, chaste, just and merciful;
The fingers differently shaped according as they handle money for gain or for gift;
All the different ramifications and institutions of society which proceed from such one difference in the crook of a finger;
All that proceed from an arrogant or a slavish contour of the neck;
All the evil that goes forth from any part of a man’s body which is not possessed by himself; all the devils let loose-from a twist of the tongue or a leer of the eye, or the unmanly act of any member-and swirling into society; all the good which gathers round a man who is clean and strong-the threads drawing from afar to the tips of his fingers, the interpretations in his eyes, all the love which passes through his limbs into heaven:
What it is to command and be Master of this wondrous body with all its passions and powers, to truly possess it-
that it is to command and possess all things, that it is to create.
4
The art of creation, like every other art, has to be learnt:
Slowly slowly, through many years, thou buildest up thy body,
And the power that thou now hast (such as it is) to build up this present body, thou hast acquired in the past in other bodies;
So in the future shalt thou use again the power that thou now acquirest.
But the power to build up the body includes all powers.
Do not be dismayed because thou art yet a child of chance, and at the mercy greatly both of Nature and fate;
Because if thou wert not subject to chance, then wouldst thou be Master of thyself; but since thou art not yet Master of thine own passions and powers, in that degree must thou needs be at the mercy of some other power.
And if thou choosest to call that power ”Chance,’ well and good.
It is the angel with whom thou hast to wrestle.
5
Beware how thou seekest this for thyself and that for thyself.
I do not say Seek not; but Beware how thou seekest.
For a soldier who is going a campaign does not seek what fresh furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave behind;
Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely use and handle is an impediment to him.
So if thou seekest fame or ease or pleasure or aught for thyself, the image of that thing which thou seekest will come and cling to thee-and thou wilt have to carry it about;
And the images and powers which thou hast thus evoked will gather round and form for thee a new body – clamoring for sustenance and satisfaction;
And if thou art not able to discard this image now, thou wilt not be able to discard that body then: but wilt have to carry it about.
Beware then lest it become thy grave and thy prison -instead of thy winged abode, and palace of joy.
For (over and over again) there is nothing that is evil except because a man has not mastery over it; and there is no good thing that is not evil if it have mastery over a man;
And there is no passion or power, or pleasure or pain, or created thing whatsoever, which is not ultimately for man and for his use-or which he need be afraid of, or ashamed at.
The ascetics and the self-indulgent divide things into good and evil-as it were to throw away the evil;
But things cannot be divided into good and evil; but all are good so soon as they are brought into subjection.
And seest thou not that except for Death thou couldst never overcome Death-
For since by being a slave to things of sense thou hast clothed thyself with a body which thou art not master of, thou wert condemned to a living tomb were that body not to be destroyed.
But now through pain and suffering out of this tomb shalt thou come; and through the experience thou hast acquired shalt build thyself a new and better body;
And so on many times, till thou spreadest wings and hast all powers diabolic and angelic concentred in thy flesh.
6
And so at last I saw Satan appear before me- magnificent, fully formed.
Feet first, with shining limbs, he glanced down from above among the bushes,
And stood there erect, dark-skinned, with nostrils dilated with passion;
(In the burning intolerable sunlight he stood, and I in the shade of the bushes);
Fierce and scathing the effluence of his eyes, and scornful of dreams and dreamers (he touched a rock hard by and it split with a sound like thunder);
Fierce the magnetic influence of his dusky flesh; his great foot, well-formed, was planted firm in the sand-with spreading toes;
‘Come out’ he said with a taunt, ‘Art thou afraid to meet me?’
And I answered not, but sprang upon him and smote him;
And he smote me a thousand times, and brashed and scorched and slew me as with hands of flame;
And I was glad, for my body lay there dead; and I sprang upon him again with another body;
And he turned upon me, and smote me a thousand times and slew that body;
And I was glad and sprang upon him again with another body-
And with another and another and again another;
And the bodies which I took on yielded before him and were like cinctures of flame upon me, but I flung them aside;
And the pains which I endured in one body were powers which I wielded in the next; and I grew in strength, till at last I stood before him complete, with a body like his own and equal in might-exultant in pride and joy.
Then he ceased, and said, “I love thee.”
And lo! his form changed, and he leaned backwards and drew me upon him,
And bore me up into the air, and floated me over the topmost trees and the ocean, and round the curve of the earth under the moon-
Till we stood again in Paradise.