Burningman 2020:

the Multiverse: CANCELLED due to Covid-19

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the Multiverse

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." –Walt Whitman

The 2020 Black Rock City event theme explores the quantum kaleidoscope of possibility, the infinite realities of the multiverse, and our own superpositioning as actors and observers in the cosmic Cacophony of resonant strings. It’s an invitation to ponder the real, the surreal and the pataphysical, and a chance to encounter our alternate selves who may have followed, or are following, or will follow different decision-paths to divergent Black Rock City realities. Welcome to the Multiverse!

Continued below...

Building a Phoenix The phoenix bird is a mythical bird from Greek mythology. ... The classical, mythical imagery and symbolism of resurrection, of life reborn anew and transformed, resonated with the Christian story. The phrase rise like a phoenix from the ashes is often shortened to rise like a phoenix, or even rise from the ashes. - Wikipedia I lost my home in the 2018 Camp Fire that until now has been the most costly fire in terms of lives and property loss in the state of California. After we knew our home was gone I had a thought while using a putty knife that it had a lot of them up in Paradise but all without handles, then that it would take a lot of tools to rebuild the town. The thought of building a Phoenix from the burnt up tools from my house (and later many others) followed almost immediately. From that time on, my wife and I revisited Paradise about a dozen times to find tools and silverware from the ashes. This didn't begin as a burning man project, but since my year revolves around that event, it is a natural that I would try to take it this year. As I type this, the Covid-19 Pandamic is racing around the world, and I don't know if burning man will happen this year. The Phoenix will be built even if it never makes the long trip to the desert. Overview Pages: the Plan part 1: Making Plans | the Plan part 2: Cross Sections | the Plan part 3: Longitudinals the Plan part 4: Wings, Tail & Legs the Plan part 5: Base wizzard's chronological Photos: Picking up in Paradise 1 | Picking up in Paradise 2 | Treasures in Campbell Building Starts | Building 2 | Building 3 | Building 4 | Building 5 | Building 6 | xxx | xxx | xxx Gwen's chronological Photos: Paradise 1 | Paradise 2 | Paradise 3 | Build 1 | Build 2 | Build 3 | Build 4 | Build 5 | Build 6 | xxx

Wire Trees

While on the farm, I've gone back to making a new wire tree-something I started doing over 40 years ago.

In the Wonderland of quantum mechanics, the tiny particles we are all made from exhibit strange and paradoxical behaviors. Quantum entanglement, first described in the 1930s, describes the ability of two entangled particles to behave identically even at great distances, and for one to react to a stimulus applied to the other, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” The idea of quantum superposition is even spookier: the fact that something can exist in multiple potential states until it is observed, at which point it becomes either this or that, here or there, alive or not alive. As the joke goes, “Schrodinger’s cat walks into a bar. And it doesn’t.” The phenomenon has been well-documented, but how it actually works remains the subject of wild speculation. In one interpretation, the act of observation collapses the waves of possibility into one reality and the others instantly vanish. But there’s another explanation, called the Many Worlds theory, where all the possible choices continue to exist simultaneously as separate branches of reality, each one as real as the next.

“These parallel universes are not ghost worlds with an ephemeral existence; within each universe, we have the appearance of solid objects and concrete events as real and as objective as any.” ― Michio Kaku

Only one of these paths may seem real to any particular observer, but what is “real” anyway? How can we know what is real? We’ve known since the days of Plato that our senses provide an imperfect simulation of the real. Take vision, for instance: a limited portion of the light spectrum is taken in by a pair of analog processors, producing electrical signals that are filtered, inverted, converted to 3-D, and projected inside the brain. And somehow this projection system works just fine when our eyes are shut, dreaming in REM sleep. There are some who believe that this dream-time is actually the real world, and that waking life is not. This resonates with the ancient idea of the cosmic lotus dream, in which the sleeping Brahma dreams us all. And in modern theoretical physics, the study of black holes has led some to the holographic universe theory, which posits that everything we perceive as material, including ourselves, might in fact be a 3-D projection of a 2-D reality, in which information is the only “real” quantity and the rest is just a cosmic deep-fake.