The natural optics of mirror neurons and the Platonic chemistry of fullerene
The violent fanatical resentment of scholarly knowledge of ancient Greek reached a violent crescendo under the rule of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria. In Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, the beginning of the Middle Ages began with the murder of the custodian of the Great Library of Alexandria, Hypatia. In 415 Saint Augustine declared Hypatia’s Platonic mathematics to be the work of the devil, contaminating Western science to this day. Finally, after almost a thousand years of Platonic scholarly research, Plato’s Academy was banished from the Roman Empire as a heretical institution by Emperor Justinian I, in 529.
Cosimo Medici re-established Plato’s Academy during the 15th century near Florence and appointed Marcilio Ficino as its director. Harvard University Press reports that Ficino’s ‘Platonic Theology’ upheld the spirit of the Great Italian Renaissance. In light of this, Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical genius was certainly not central to the Renaissance at all. The Platonic tradition of Greek philosophy clearly warned against using the perception of the senses, particularly vision, to understand the knowledge of all things. Leonardo used the eye as the source of all knowledge, followed by Descartes and Sir Francis Bacon, making them pivotal people in establishing the mechanical industrial age. Albert Einstein inherited the scientific legacy from him by making vision central to quantum mechanics.
The concept of atomistic Platonic love that represents an atomic science to prevent the destructive evil of formless matter from emerging from the physical atom, to which Ficino alludes, did not achieve the rebirth of Platonic Science for ethical purposes. Einstein’s E=Mc square dominated 20th century science and caused the first appearance of nuclear chaos in the physical atom. The nanotechnology of the 21st century, instead of developing the Platonic technology of superhuman survival, accelerated Einstein’s main law of all sciences, towards what Einstein declared inevitable extinction. The exponential advancement of time associated with what is now known as quantum biological holographic information-energy was beyond Einstein’s comprehension. Einstein’s multi-billion-year timeframe until humans must go extinct has been shortened by the advent of potential nanotechnology nuclear weapon design, which could be carried, undetectable inside a small wallet.
This nightmare scenario is the result of a Western schizophrenic scientific mindset. FM Cornford’s Before and After Socrates has been required core curriculum reading since 1932, for the advanced education of senior government administrators, maintaining the fabric of Western democracy throughout the world. On page 65, the book states that “Plato and Aristotle are among the greatest fathers of the Church”, which is a nonsensical claim, since the church has considered Plato’s mathematical research to be the work of the devil. Sir CP Snow warned that if we did not reunite science with the Platonic tradition of the Greek humanities, civilization would collapse due to the Einsteinian worldview. Plato’s ‘Science for Ethical Purposes’ was built on a fractal mathematical logic that extends to infinity. Such mathematical ethics is obviously linked to the life process. This is in direct contradiction to the world view of conventional science in which all life must go extinct. Plato’s logic was correct, because nanotechnology has revealed that Candace Pert’s emotion molecule evolves as an infinite fractal expression.
The religious contamination of political science prevented ethics from becoming part of atomic physics. Alexander Hamilton defined liberty as secured through the design of government, which, in turn, was based on the principles of physics and geometry. The physical principles belonged to the published work of Sir Isaac Newton and the geometric principles belonged to Euclid. None of these logical bases extended to infinity. However, Newton’s ‘Heresy Papers’, discovered last century, completed the mechanical description of the universe with a deeper philosophy that employed infinite Platonic mathematics belonging to Plato’s infinite ‘Science for Ethical Purposes’. When Giordano Bruno taught atomistic platonic love at Oxford University, he returned to Italy to be imprisoned, tortured, and burned alive by the Church for doing so. Not surprisingly, Isaac Newton did not publish the ideas of his contemporary, Bruno, who is now also considered one of the fathers of modern science.
The concepts of atomistic Platonic love belonged to the Platonic ‘Science for Ethical Purposes’ and also to the ‘Science of Universal Love’, both taught in universities in Greece during the 3rd century BC. Their mathematical structures had been based on the sacred geometries developed in ancient Egypt from mythological theories of creation, which Einstein referred to as intuitive mythological mathematics. The 1957 New York Library of Science published a book titled Babylonian Myth and Modern Science. The book associated Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity with Babylonian mythological mathematics. The difference between the atomic theories embracing Platonic love derived from the mythological mathematics of ancient Egypt and the sacred geometric mythological mathematics of Babylon is important.
Egyptian sacred geometries tried to prevent civilization from returning to chaos, while Babylonian mythologies tried to worship chaos as the goddess of war, Ishtar. The recent discovery of the mirror neuron demonstrates that compassion evolves as an infinite fractal expression. Charles Darwin based his theory of evolution on the economic policies of Thomas Malthus for the East India Company, a ruthless organization that forced the Chinese government to accept large shipments of opium as payment for Spanish silver bullion. Darwin claimed that the key to his theory was the second law of thermodynamics, the law that Einstein later proclaimed should govern all science. Darwin later wrote his Descent of Man, in which he pointed out that compassion was such a strong drive within humanity that it must surely play an important role in the theory of human evolution.
Nanotechnology shows that quantum biological energies intertwine with Einstein’s quantum mechanical energies to evolve consciousness. Human survival technology can be guided by a new Platonic chemistry of fullerene, advocating a medical science in which Platonic love embraces the Egyptian-Greek mathematics of infinite compassion. As Buckminster Fuller wrote, that choice is now ‘Utopia or oblivion’.
© Professor Robert Pope,
Advisor to the President Oceania and Australasia of the Einstein-Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics and Advanced Mathematics (IFM)