ENTANGLEMENT

There is a new concept in science, and it is called entanglement.  Objects, or forms, can only exist within a continuum of other forms.   This means that there cannot exist simply one form, such as a pencil.  Instead, your pencil is part of a universal visual and geometric biology.  Knowledge of one form is entangled with the knowledge of every other form.

This concept was recently reported in the New York Times.  And while it is great that scientists studying phenomena like black holes and quantum physics are proving this in the laboratory, the belief is not new.  For one, Thompson, in On Growth and Form, writing in 1913, stated that the elements of a mammal cannot be understood in isolation.  For example, a skeleton is meaningless, when the connecting ligaments and tissue are eliminated.  When you separate the skeleton from the organism, the inherent knowledge disappears. Or a rib bone, while beautiful as a form, is meaningless as a mechanical element when seen in isolation.

“The skeleton begins as a continuum, and a continuum it remains all life long.  The things that link bone with bone, cartilage, ligaments, membranes, are fashioned out of the same primordial tissue, and come into being pari passu with the bones themselves.”  Thompson p1018.  

Thompson’s quote above sure sounds like entanglement.  And, in fact, all of our drawings are entangled systems.  The knowledge of one element of our form is inseparable from the whole.  When you remove one part, the description of that part disappears. Knowledge of a system is distributed thru out the system.  And because it is distributed thru out the system, the knowledge exists simultaneously in more than one location.  

Hegel said the same thing, writing around 1800; 

“The organic being is, in undivided oneness and as a whole, the fundamental fact, it is the content of inner and outer, and is the same for both.”  Hegel p151.

The NYT writes, in their usual breathless and hyped manner, that all of this is exciting and new.  When in reality, Hegel and Thompson knew all of this a century or two ago.  And we also know this when we draw our transparent, holistic, and entangled forms. 

 

1.  Overbye, Dennis.  “Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe  New York Times.   10 October 2022.

2.  Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth.  On Growth and Form.  Dover Publications, New York.  1992.

3.  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.  The Phenomenology of Mind.  Dover Philosophical Classics.  2003.