The sense of Beauty.

Art and Science at CERN a film by Valerio Jalongo.

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“ The essential is invisible to the eyes” Antoine de Saint- Exupéry

Fritjof Capra in his book “The Tao of Physics” explores the border territory where the world of modern physics meets the oriental mysticism. Two worlds, two populations foreign to each other? Or can we nourish the doubt that, beyond the apparent distance in approach and language, they are deeply linked by timeless truths? Overcoming the resistances, we manage to go beyond the boundaries, the egoic labels assigned according to a sterile logic, succeeding with courage to go into that place without time or space where, once every certainty has been dissolved, it is possible to meet the Other and to create a new population even larger and stronger because it is able to integrate through the sharing of mutual wealth. Here then that our journey continues in search of further possible “meeting places” in order to draw a “map” that goes beyond the boundaries egoically traced in the course of history and remember the need to adopt a new point of view, a new approach that various authors, over the past decades, have tried to describe in its dynamics and in its various areas of application by identifying the intrinsic trans-disciplinary character, or an approach that overcomes the limits, often artificial, that separate the various disciplines.

We thus open ourselves to the Other to discover ourselves deeply interconnected in the dynamics of Love, in the constant search for that principle that sustains all change, «a principle that Greek philosophy had defined with the word thaumàzein, to indicate the ineffable moment in which Man suddenly saw the pre-established order of his certainty shattered in favor of a new dimension with himself and the other. In the experience of thaumàzein, or pre-dialectical astonishment, one discovers a different stimmung, a particular emotion of unity that can only be experienced and not described, because in this state every form disappears as one reaches the eternal source of the very genesis of the soul. […] If Love is thaumàzein, that is astonishment, it means that it disdains what is still separated and therefore “empty”, because it wants to know the possibility of the “full” of life, what Heraclitus had defined “the intimate nature of things that loves to hide”. Love therefore seeks the reconciliation of what is separate, the pleroma of the law that the Gnostics considered as the ‘whole’» (Frigoli, 2016). In this sense, contemporary physics proposes a vision of the world very similar to that of the main Eastern spiritual traditions that, instead of fearing emptiness, live it as a possibility of change, and therefore of life.

It is precisely in the tension towards the One that we meet the physicists at CERN who, in this film made in 2017 by Valerio Jalongo, express the constant «search for clues, for energy footprints» proceeding towards the original generating moment of all form making use of the Large Hadron Collider, a ring one hundred meters deep and twenty-seven kilometers long in which are produced billions of collisions between subatomic particles, a sort of time machine, where physicists try to capture the invisible dance that occurred a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang to get to a “tiny pinhead” from which it seems that everything began.
The moment physics was able to question itself, to go beyond the immediately visible, to go beyond a logic of simple bricks constituting the forms of life, towards the conception of a network made of infinite relations, since it had the courage to welcome the doubt, the limit, the crisis … it gave itself the opportunity of a rebirth. The research becomes experience, the true knowledge resides as much in the body and in the emotions as in the brain, as Victor Frederick Weisskopf would say «the strange world of quarks, mesons and Z bosons of modern physics must be both “felt” and “thought”». In the sacred place of their research, physicists refine their senses, and understanding that they can no longer describe Nature in a direct way according to the preconception typical of naive realists for which “what you see is”, they come to embrace the Artist who lives in them and imagine the not immediately visible using the language of mathematics to narrate the sound and dynamics of Life.

Which formula expresses the complexity of Life? Which equation describes its Beauty? What Symmetry is hidden in the forms of the universe? Everything that exists in the universe, from the most elementary levels of organization up to the most evolved living organisms, is characterized by an essential element: order, that is the coherence that is placed within a complex network and in turn organized that is expressed through a complex web of relationships. Order and coherence are possible thanks to the presence of information, as stated by Ervin Laszlo «in the absence of information, the energies present in the universe would be an accidental set of excitations at the fundamental state. It is only information that structures the sea of energy in the cosmic matrix and it is information that coordinates the interaction between the structures» (Laszlo, 2014). In other words, everything living is governed by laws that enable its existence by directing its development and counteracting its entropic drift towards disorganization and loss of coherence. These are functional laws that we can define archetypes, that is, organizing principles that represent an informative-organizational potential that unfolds in all levels of existence assuming a precise configuration. And so, in front of the cosmic dance that sees the universe engaged in a never-ending movement, the researcher needs a method «capable of developing an inner vision, a listening to the “inside” of the archetypal messages that as vital nodes make the microcosm resonate in accordance with the macrocosm» (Frigoli, 1985) in order to experience Nature in its totality and draw the art of living in harmony with it.

Cern — The Sense of Beauty | Full Documentary Movie — YouTube

Synopsis
Revealing the secrets of CERN, Europe’s research laboratory operating the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Giant machines capture images as mysterious as art, beauty and harmony becoming scientific models. Some at CERN believe in God, some believe in numbers. But all realize that the elusive nature of matter can only be understood with a sixth sense: the sense of beauty.

Cover image
Large Hadron Collider

Bibliography and webgraphy
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Capra F., (2008). Il Tao della fisica. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni
Frigoli D. (1985). Le metamorfosi della coscienza. Milano: Endas
Frigoli D., L’Amore: il paradiso perduto in Materia Prima, Amore e Odio. Numero XIV — Luglio 2016 — Anno V — Love: the lost paradise | ANEB — Associazione Nazionale Ecobiopsicologia
Officine UBU, Il senso della bellezza, https://www.officineubu.com/film/il-senso-della-bellezza/
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