Filaments

Filaments of silent matter surround us. Rivers of particles pass through, unscathed. Fields of energy engulf us, curving through vacuum. Invisible glue coagulates light. Briefly alive, we try to decode time's transit, to unwrap hidden forces that fuel the ever accelerating distance. ====================== I am deeply inspired by the scientific forays helping us to discover habitable planets besides earth, showing us that we are almost certainly not alone in the Universe. I feel wonder at our efforts to place our precarious existence into the context of this 13.8 billon year old reality, and at our model-building nature, trying to understand the shape of space and time. As I sought inspiration for this music in the realms of physics and cosmology, I found that the concept of the Anthropic Principle helps to connect my sense of wonder with the scientific curiosity that keeps us doubting what we think we know. The Anthropic Principle observes that our particular universe is well suited to evolve consciousness within it, as evidenced by the fact that we exist. As we look within our own consciousness, we find our place in this immensity, as an eye of the universe observing itself. This doesn't place humanity in a special central position, but does make note of the surprising complexity of our existence. As we proceed to undermine the dynamic balance that helped us evolve on this Eden Earth, putting our own future in doubt, we should pause to understand the miracle that allowed us to exist at all. ====================== Filaments are the strands of condensed energy-matter that formed out of the earliest inflationary period in our universe, and helped pull together the gasses that eventually became our cosmos. A Majorana Fermion is a particle that is also it's own antiparticle. In condensed matter physics, it might help us understand how superconductivity works, and in cosmology it might hold a key to the puzzle of dark matter. Scintilla describes the light of the stars, which help us look back into time as well as distance. Aetherfields ponders the idea that empty space might actually have a propagating substrate, an aether - an idea rejected in the last century, but reexamined more recently, to try once again to unify gravitation with quantum physics. Entangled gets it's name from a special relationship between two particles, when the state of one can be known by the state it's entangled partner (for example, the polarity of two photons that have been generated symmetrically.) Bell's Theorem allows that in this manner, information might travel faster than light. Eulalia is a group of near-earth asteroids, and (495) Eulalia is identified as the source for a meteorite landing near Sutter's Mill CA in 2013. It appears that much of the earth's past and future - and the ingredients for life itself - are shaped by frequent bombardments from space. Laniakea is the name given to our local supercluster of galaxies, spanning 160 megaparsecs with around 100,000 galaxies including the Milky Way. Aetherfolds imagines the warping of space-time by gravitation or motion. Telomeres are repeating bits of DNA at the tips of our chromosomes, which augment every time a cell divides. Perhaps these act as ticking clocks, defining our biological age, reminding every cell of our mortality. ====================== Robert Rich has helped define ambient and electronic music, with over 40 albums across four decades. Rich began building his own analog modular synthesizers