The Web of Connection

Dear Diary,

With all the chaos and downright insanity in Washington right now I have had this topic on my mind for some time.  Like it or not, we are all connected.  This vine spread out over a wall and although some parts were larger than others they were all ultimately connected to a single source.


Now, I do not claim any great knowledge of physics but I do know that over recent years scientists are making more and more claims to this effect.  We are all the stuff of stars and we are all connected.  Richard Feynman, in a lecture explaining how physics is connected to all other sciences, offered this explanation.  It sums things up pretty succinctly for me:


"A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"


I think we humans are prone to over thinking things.  Our rational minds want to prove or disprove everything with visible, verifiable facts. If they can’t see it, touch it or test it it doesn’t exist.  That’s fine, as far as it goes, but even some scientists are beginning to get an inkling that perhaps there are some things that we just cannot explain and that is fine as well.

So, relax.  We are all connected.  Just sit back and enjoy that glass of wine!


Two lanterns hang alone, yet their light mingles together as one. ~ Rumi