Ramblings on fragments of Heraclitus

This is the most important idea I've encountered in a while, and I'm still absorbing the implications of it: The End Of A Physics Worldview: Heraclitus and the Watershed of Life

Heraclitus is one of my favorite philosophers. Click here for a nice primer.

There are two related links of importance that I'll write about in future blogs.

1) John Perry Barlow mentions Heraclitus in his TEDx Hamburg talk on enantiodromia. Here is the most important part of that talk:

There is a war going on between those who believe that the power of information lies in its capacity to be withheld-- that information is power if you can keep it to yourself. This is not how it works really. Information is power if you can share it, validate it, vet it, and contribute it to that global awareness that we are all here in the process of creating.

2) The importance of strife is quite explicit in the Heraclitian world view: Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might perish from amongst gods and men". For if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist.

I connect that quote also to my favorite poem by Robinson Jeffers, The Great Explosion::

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no
way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each
other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae
like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with
fireworks
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
the howling fireblast that we were born from.

But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the
whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back
and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty.
We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's
Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care
and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the
tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to
meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not
--of faceless violence, the root of all things.