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span
discussion forum
background
In this discussion, you could introduce your ideas about
time and space. span indicates history and distance as well
as futures and proximity. What of the totalities or cosmologies
within which we live or which are imposed on us? You could
discuss ideas about consistency and inconsistency; about lifetimes,
epochs and eternity; or about beginnings and endings. span
could evoke ideas about measurement, pattern, substance, cycles
or expanse. Perhaps span is also addresses modes of thought
which proffer totalities such as philosophy, politics and
theology.
What are your ideas about span? Here are some ideas about
span from others.
"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord
God, "who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty."
New Testament, Revelation 1:8
To most people it is obvious that the universe forms a coherent
whole. We recognise that there are a great many components
that go together to make up the totality of existence, but
they seem to hang together, if not in cooperation, then at
least in peaceful coexistence. In short, we find order, unity
and harmony in nature where there might have been discord
and chaos.
Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint,
Penguin, London, 1989, p 6
Millennium does mean, by etymology, a period of one thousand
years. This concept, however, did not arise within the field
of practical calendrics, or the measurement of time, but in
the domain of eschatology, or futurist visions about the blessed
end of time.
Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the
Millennium, Vintage, London, 1999, p38
Life on Earth is more than 3.8 billion years old, but only
organisms built from many different kinds of cells hold a
fascination for those with a passion for patterns. After such
organisms evolved some 600 million years ago, all hell broke
loose, and the history of life on Earth has been one complex
pattern ever since.
Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life on the
edge of Chaos, Phoenix, London, 1993, p63
The future is perpetually giving birth to true novelty.
Human history is a little like biological evolution: what
there is in the present goes together in new ways to produce
things in the future, the likes of which have never before
existed.
Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity: the science
of history, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2000, p 207
No matter how few or how many, how ill or well conceived,
distinctions everywhere and anywhere have made for meaning.
It is only when they rupture, leaving a background with nothing
on it or figures against no ground, that negation floods in.
Meaning needs a content set in a context which needs in turn
what holds the two apart. It is as if in these latest excursions
we had mistaken the hollow within its ring for zero, or took
sero to be the surrounding space that the ring shut out. But
zero is neither - it is the ring itself; pure holding apart.
Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is:
A Natural History of Zero, Penguin, London, 1999, p194
Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly
in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some
patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in
scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones.
Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials
science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles
into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges,
and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys.
James Gleick, Chaos: The Amazing Science
of the Unpredictable, Minerva, London, 1996, p308-309
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