Thinking Outside The Box 2: The Sphinx

 

 

” The riddling Sphinx compelled us to let slide

The dim past and attend to instant needs.”

********

“Well, I will start afresh and once again

Make dark things clear…”

 

Sophocles, from “Oedipus the King”.

Thinking Outside The Box

 

A Thought Experiment.

 

” … It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That protects us from so naively accepting as valid a ‘blurred model’  for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

 

Erwin Schrödinger, “Die gegenwärtige Situation in den Quantenmechanik (The present situation in quantum mechanics), Naturwissenschaften (translated by John D Trimmer in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society) – (the “cat” Thought Experiment).

Bacchus In The Vineyard

 

“I call upon loud-roaring and revelling Dionysus,

Primeval, double-natured, thrice-born, Bacchic lord,

Wild, ineffable, secretive, two-horned and two-shaped.

Ivy-covered, bull-faced, warlike, howling, pure,

You take raw flesh, you have feasts, wrapt in foliage, decked with grape clusters,

Resourceful Eubouleus, immortal god sired by Zeus

When he mated with Persephone in unspeakable union.

Hearken to my voice, o blessed one

And with your fair-girdled nymphs breathe on me in a spirit of perfect agape.”

 

Invocation Of Dionysus, from the Orphic Hymns.