Diagram Research Group - Event I - David Burrows: Plane of Assertion and the Least Event

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:01]so i called this session or what i was going to talk about the plane of assertion and the least event and really it was about or really i got interested in this um what looks like an equation the famous zero one dash one zero or sometimes it's written as naught h naught which kind which looks like looks like an equation but um it's a diagram and we might not get into this but i also think it's a sigil which i guess john latham would really hate but it's a sigil in that it's condensed information that represents a very important concept for latham um i don't really know how to read this but i found this in the archive and it looks like he's working out this uh this figure um and the notes are kind of interesting because he's trying to count nothing there as far as i can see so um the zero one one zero relates to this time based spectrum as i understand it and the time-based spectrum has a m in the middle which is um it seems to be the point where time and space starts a would be the very beginnings of the universe or possibly nothing before there's an event p seems to be when humans arrive on the scene and q r and s uh seem to be where evolution has happened and we can be rational instinctive and intuitive you seems to be the end of the universe with zed interestingly being some unknown cosmic recurrence suggesting that the whole thing is a loop so i i first of all tried to get to grips with this by drawing this which is i guess a series of um dots kind of i guess grain of some kind representing probably particles but then becoming something planets humans whatever black holes and then dissipating which actually works as a model of the universe um as most people understand it both sort of standard i think and uh non-standard so i guess eventually or at some point i try and talk about this which is how i moved on where i tried to i tried to kind of put together latham uh and john wheeler and roger penrose's diagrams and ideas about the universe so um so i got i was very interested in this artwork by latham which is a proto-universe and i guess this is the zero and the one that's my understanding of it the glass being nothing although that's questionable what is nothing and the one being this blank canvas which either my computer screen is dirty or there's a little dot on it there um i'll have to ask gareth for an inquiry into that one so uh it's interesting it's called a prote universe so it's not quite a universe and the least event is basically this white canvas um which is a proton basically latham says and this is the story of rio which is a quite a large work it has the proto universe at the beginning it seems to me so the way i read this is um in relation to the zero and the one and the one and the zero is we got like the glass which is the zero then maybe we have some universes which are these blank canvases which again seem to have something on them but i think that really is the dirt of my computer screen then you have another nothing but then you have um it seems uh an event of some kind a proton and the proto universe becomes something and latham's idea i think is that um that the universe is not made up of permanent things or permanence isn't related to solid objects any appearance of permanence is due to a series of structure events the planet earth being i think a sort of singular unique um structure of events i guess that relates very strongly to the idea of the quantum uh and as you go on to the story of rio when you get around the corner these there are these big things like books as you'd expect from nathan which i guess could be planets or stars or humans or even black holes there's another piece the new nidri sorry the nu nidri heart uh this is only a small section of it but it's a series of glass vitrines with objects and books in it which are meant to be laid out like this so this is a diagram from the from the archive which shows a circularity or a looping so zero one one zero i think why it might be a sigil is it encapsul it kind of captures and condenses um this idea in a figure or an image but it also means that it's a diagram i think and that you read it from uh left to right but you can also read it from right to left so i put this in because i found this quite interesting this was in the um in the archive so some of you might have seen seen this where uh latham has this idea about humans it seems as her being kind of animal instinct having reason uh being able to kind of rationally work things out but then operating a kind of non-rational non-verbal intuitive level if i understand it rightly to understand time and in this diagram you get this green wave which is the uh the wave of the non-verbal and the non-rational and i guess that all happened in the one to zero part um so i'm not watching the time but i'll i'll carry on so the second part of the title which plane of assertion which is something that we've all talked about before to me strongly related to what latham was up to so we talked a lot about our purse cs purse and about this idea of the femic sheet so what we know is that a purse wanted to make these existential graphs which are diagrams where you get a piece of paper which is patterned or colored on one side of maybe white or another color on the other side and you cut a shape out and reverse it and what you've done is you've made a thing in the universe and he calls this sheet of paper that you do the cutting out on as i understand it i think this is right the femix sheet sophemic sheet really refers to a sheet in which you get latin and greek written on it so i guess that's kind of like a sheet which has multiple languages and the the uh existential graphs were as we've discussed before purse's way of trying to make something visual rather than writing algebra or mathematical formula to describe logical and i think importantly as we've um we got got this from from john the the femix sheet is a clearing so i think i've looked back i think i've called the femix sheet the sheet of assertion but what purr says is this feminic sheet is where you make an assertion and affirm something and the femix sheet is also a space in where you clear a ground to make this first mark which to me strongly related to the kind of sheet of glass the blank canvas and then the first kind of spray or the one second drawing that latham makes and so i guess you can call this clearing a kind of dwelling for thought because the clearing was also the idea of the the space that you make to to create a place to live which like people make clearings for villages i guess or cities um there there is a difference though uh between latham purse and also another person we've spoken about jule chatelet so to kind of get understand that a bit more and it's quite interesting doing this uh i made one of percy's diagrams following his instructions i think he must have just laid this laid the sheets down on the table because obviously when you cut a hole out and reverse it the thing falls out of the sheet so but i i um didn't do such a good job i used masking tape to fix mine in and this is just a diagram i think of like a logical proposition of humans or animals animals are mortal and then you just keep going and reducing down until eventually you get human as an animal as a mortal and the last diagram is human is is mortal but the yellow shape is the cutting out from the sheet of assertion which is the universe which i guess you could think of as some kind of a continuum and the yellow shape is a human i think and then the animal and the mortal are its relations or its um properties so what's what's interesting about this is that there there's no time in it in the way that there is in latham's diagrams although there is something temporal which is mortality in it but that's just like a a thing it's got it's got no kind of uh temporal description i guess what i was thinking was that perse's diagram might be considered poor in some sense which is what chatelle thinks but whether you can do this kind of work with latham's diagram or latham's approach is also questionable if personally could i jump in there yeah yeah um just to um although you're right that this diagram doesn't it doesn't describe us it doesn't describe um a temporal process it it absolutely is temporal isn't it in in yeah it kind of makes it makes the kind of um logic which is which is you know um being presented as a fact as a matter of fact in the in the sense that you've asserted it on the sheet um it turns it into a kind of temporal process which which is one of the things that diagrams do through the use of space because as soon as something is spatialized um then we can kind of enter into that and you know go through things step by step or move things around in time so i so so that it's it's quite interesting in that sense i mean it might not be exactly what you're interested in but no i am i can't quite get my head around it that's the thing yeah okay i just i just wanted to make that point and i'll let you carry on no no that's that's interesting because it is where i'm kind of going which is right um so one of the things in one of the big uh problems and debates it seems in science is what is found what is fundamental or foundational to the universe is it space or is it time and so there's a disagreement about that which i can go into but it's also curious what you're saying because it's it's absolutely right that the the diagram is a kind of temporal thing isn't it because we even explaining that diagram i went through a process and uh there's also the way space as you if i understand you rightly dean space allows laying out in space allows that time sequence or temporal sequence which is kind of thought suggests that thought is a temporal time-based thing as well well yeah and and all you know to add to that i mean i guess the kind of spec this spatialization of time is one of the fundamental kind of principles and kind of uses of um of a diagram but but that in itself is is very much to do with how we um the kind of language we use to talk about time which which is always kind of spatialized so we think of time as uh as a line so time is almost is always given a a spatial metaphor it's like the it's like the only way that we can um kind of understand it so we'll talk about you know something that happened before or happened afterwards these are spatial metaphors um and um i think um what um what purse is doing here is he's not he's not he's not describing a time but he's involved in a in a temporal process so the so the diagram is an index of a temporal process whether that's him thinking through the thing which is kind of literalized in his instructions of how to construct one of these things by drawing the lines around them to negate certain statements and then cutting them out and turning them over it's a very kind of physical process um and then of course it takes us time to um you know just to work just to um to to go through it and to to figure out what it what it stands for yeah i hadn't thought of it like that and that's i've been concentrating on the what he's representing um i mean what what i think is interesting in relation to latham is that latham wouldn't see the human as this kind of thing in the universe i guess latham would say that there's a structure of events and also there's no universal time there's just this kind of relative time it just appears appears like that we i mean i don't know enough about perth i know he was really smart and well read and understood physics to an extent can i draw a curveball in yeah okay the concept of clearing and clearing the space for being is heideggerian and i just kind of uh quite kind of like the idea that this might be a map of the territory of division in space between animals and humans and and also conceptually because you know obviously in the enlightenment understanding the relationship between the difference between humans and animals and mortality and brutes was kind of a crucial philosophical problem so i'm just i just like to like the idea that that the the plaster the elastoplast shape is a little bit like a plane of assertion in a field of you know wilderness wildness you know that you carve a clearing out and within that clearing you the partition spaces for you know so i'm literally turning into a kind of a map of a territory between the human and the animal and the mortal that the human might actually be distinguished from the moral by the immortal animal by this interesting dotted line which might be kind of strange territorial line between yeah the thinking through the the difference between the human and the animal where the animals are kept whether the animals are kept in the house whether they're kept in the field and it also makes me think about mortality in graveyards and religion and like where humans put their dead so i just wanted to throw that out that this is also a map of a territory in a certain way uh in terms of declaring of human of human dwelling i think that's how that's how i understand these diagrams to an extent and i think it's it's clear that the human and the animal are distinguished and to do that you have to draw a boundary which as you say is really it's a loose boundary it's a it's a it's a porous boundary because you know we know we are animals we also know where other than animals and we share with animals mortality i suppose consciousness of mortality is a historically and for the enlightenment yeah an important distinguishing feature between assumptions about animal consciousness and human consciousness but anyway i just want to throw that out that is that's kind of relates to the topology of it and also set theory i guess where you know you have a set where you have like a is the set of and then it gives you like b c d e and you have to put that in brackets so you've kind of um already made a a kind of space and i think that this is some this is actually purse's version of that so i think that's really interesting because it is it's a temporal process but it's also a kind of making of boundaries and territories i've got another diagram which is interesting to look at in relation to this which is um a kind of a bit of a sort of bastardization of something by chatelet who we've discussed who's really critical of um set theory and topology and introduces this idea of perspective which saturday says oh you know perspective can be a cliche and also you have this vanishing point and you become beholden to it um this is a diagram of velocity uh and i lost i looked this up so i could get it right but velocity is is basically uh the change of something uh through time and through through measured time so these these squares could be counted as just one thing or these rectangles would be counted as one thing and each each division could be like a second or something or planck time or whatever um and for chatella he says you know like velocity implies that there's going to be a vanishing point or a perspective uh if i've put this i down the bottom which i've actually got from john wheeler but in in chatelaise diagrams some of them he seems to be interested in putting where the observer participant is but you could also kind of see this as the um quite kind of delusion spinosus diagram you could turn it into that which chatelle was as we know it's like a good friend of the laws and was interested in dollars but you could see this as a as one thing changing over time so instead of velocity you know you could see the thing changes in time uh or it could be the vanishing point is the past or the vanishing point is the future david can i just ask us what i'm also reminded of as you're speaking is film frames cinema frames yeah and the fact that you know obviously every one of those could be a still frame uh in a film and when run together consequentially it creates a illusion of motion yeah you know and movement in time and i just i don't know if you've any thoughts about delaure's thoughts on cinema relative to this kind of diagram uh the time image uh i haven't really that's such a complex thing to uh need a delays expert in it in the i don't i got a more um latham uh reference which is that in the diagram 0 1 1 0 with the dash if the middle is marked with m which is where time and space starts i think latham actually suggests in his notes that cinema understood this like 30 frames per second or so yeah i think that the cinema the film uh reference is also kind of interesting but the important thing is that um chatelais says that diagrams like the purse uh set theory diagram is poor because it just presents this this kind of thing that latham would say is thought to be permanent and exist not in time but what also is interesting is chatelaine introduced this this um perspective point where everything collap like condenses and you can't you you don't have you can't see it you can't have knowledge of it there's a kind of horizon limit um which he says that if you imagined it as a kind of photon moving through a vector that's where you know that einstein put himself right on that vanishing point can i can ask can i ask another point david quickly it's about this because um i'm just very conscious of yesterday i was trying to explain one two and three dimensions to my first year fine arts students and it wasn't there weren't concepts that they were familiar with and you know the point on i did a rough sketch where i said okay here's a two-dimensional figure you know with with height and width and i'm going to draw a horizon line on it and put a point on that horizon line which would be in illusionistic space a vanishing point so it creates an illusion of depth but so that's kind of like your diagram but that point on the horizon line is still a one dimension a zero dimensional point on a one-dimensional um line right is that close to where we're going with this yeah except for chatelaine that point is also time and space but it's it's just not accessible to us so david yeah um what's beyond the horizon this dotted horizon we when we were discussing chatelaine before we were saying that it was something to do with the imagination uh i think for for chatelle it's um let's think about that well this is for chatelaine this is velocity so it's just that beyond that horizon that i think the particle or whatever it is continues but also it's like john wheeler said about his diagrams and uh what fedorka kind of tries to do i think is also an astro physicist tries to get you in to imagine something and relate it to gravity that these things don't actually um represent anything necessarily they're meant to like wheeler says his diagrams are often just to allow thought to happen but he's quite clear in saying look they don't represent the you can't use a diagram to present an equation or the result of an experiment although he does have a diagram of of the famous particle experiment so for chatelle it it's almost like a kind of unfor unfortunately i'm going to say it's almost like a metaphor although he says diagrams are better than metaphors but he he's he kind of thinks that you have to establish limit points or horizon points to actually work like go to them that's one understanding i have of of how he um articulates perspective and you know diagrams allow you allow you to do that i guess because it you can kind of be einstein and be sit on that photon as it's going through space i mean chateau um is um i mean he's doing something very very i mean his interest is is somewhere completely different from uh purse in terms of diagramming uh because purse is not diagramming space does the purse is diagramming uh is spatializing um you know logical propositions whereas um chatelais chateau's book is called figuring space and it's all about as far as i can understand it it's all about um try you know um kind of materializing materializing space or materializing the virtual as he would see it so it's a kind of combination of um of um kind of analogies that allow you uh to kind of project yourself into into the kind of into the kind of materiality of um of something which might otherwise be kind of rendered in a very kind of cold rational way through through ideas of um measurement on rulers and so on so um he's he's he's actually trying to almost he he's thinking about the way that diet diagrams um instead of a kind of let's say a kind of more common um understanding of diagrams is giving us a distance giving us a kind of distance a kind of synoptic view of over something kind of complicated he talks and he does it you know and it's incredible to read his book because it's um he kind of enters into the kind of development of um of of scientific thought and scientific theories through the kind of the diagrams and the analogies um which allow these um scientists through thought experiments or through um you know imagining themselves and then how that relates to um the kind of drawings they the drawings they do um to um to kind of transform space into something else and particularly to um uh to kind of penetrate it in a way this is what he's interested in so i mean it seems that this diagram that you're showing is is a is exactly what i was talking about before in the sense that the interval is a way of spatializing time but it does it in it does it in a dynamic way where we're not you know we're not getting a kind of um these things we you know we we um we understand you know what perspective does is it allows us to understand that these differently sized things and these differently positioned things are kind of homogenous in a sense you know we understand that the one of the um on the horizon is exactly the same size as the one uh where we're standing except that it what it's doing as soon as we don't we infer it from kind of conventions particularly conventions of renaissance painting right um but unlike the kind of cartesian we're given a position we're very much positioned in so we're so we we're kind of um we're brought into this space well the the thing that chatelaine develops is um what he calls spatial dialectics i think so i think you're right what what he is interested in is um space and mass and mass uh has virtual states which he kind of explains just as like water can become steam or ice um and i think his his uh criticism of the purse type diagrams would be that the plane of assertion in purses terms the the plane of assertion or the clearing would just be numbered as like human not human one two and we know from percy's first second thirdness that there's a that what he's interested in is the third thing which is the relation but you're right chatelaine's not interested in those kind of relations he's more interested in the fact that the the mass like the one thing is multiple and can be many things and i guess uh it's a question as to whether what purse is dealing with is language rather than actual reality the broader theory which is really important to bear in mind uh with perth and why he's so interesting and why he's really picked up by biosemiotics and so on is that there's a role for the interpretant right so the interpretant um is the kind of response and that response does not have to be a cognitive response that response to the sign let's say the response to you know a diagram is um is a is a sign um it's a um it's a kind of second order firstness in the sense that it's an icon of relations but it's um it um the uh there's the sign but then there's the inter the interpretation by the interpreter which might as well be a a feeling or an emotion um or some kind of energetic impulse or something as much as a kind of cognitive response so i i think for i think i think perth is actually very much a kind of uh you know very interested in um this kind of materiality but it's somewhere else down the line it doesn't exist on the realm of that diagram itself it's only when you bring the diagram into the world and introduce the interpretant that it becomes um a kind of physical thing i mean that's how i would yeah i think chatelaine just has a different purpose which is yeah that uh he the the idea of the spatial dialectic is that you have um you have different possibilities in imbalance and you you use your diagram or you think about uh matter and you you go towards these different uh virtual potentials it sort of says that you kind of rush towards one or the other um in the same way that you know water might become ice or or steam but chateau can doesn't allow for the world of perth yeah i'll quit um could i just show you a chatelaine uh yeah something shattered later because it's just relevant to this point and then i'm gonna stop shut up no don't dean if you shut up you're not gonna get paid oh yeah i forgot about that that's very important um hang on can i ask a question while you're finding it dean yeah if it doesn't distract you too much this is for maybe people who are watching who like me um aren't entirely sure what either purse or chatelaine mean by the virtual because you most people understand the virtual to be you know virtual reality um and i do know something about the history of uh the philosophical concept of the virtual and the um digital notion of virtual reality but i think that that might not be self-evident um so you know without leading on this it seems that you know the virtual reality which is constructed through any form of screen digital screen um is different in is different from the virtual that that you're talking about philosophically or is it i think with um chatelaine at certain times it's very simple there's there's like mass which can change in volume and density when it's actualized or in its actual state and uh mass has virtual potential to be a star or a black hole or so is it potential to become something other than it to change well the thing the mass itself is uh all these potential states i guess that's my understanding of it so so the virtual virtual the virtual is the potential states it could be in i think so yeah but it's very material it's like it's not like the sun will turn into a rabbit or but um which might be more delicious sorry no but i mean i'm i find myself really at my limits all the time here like with the physics and i find it really incredibly exciting but with the purse and the and the chatelet i find myself at my limits of understanding but i think i think that's here i think that for for chatelaine certainly in relation to what i was talking about uh the virtual is is is simply this sort of uh potential or becoming of some other state same for you dean is that sorry mary um for chatterley is the virtual things that might happen so things that are not extraordinary so gas and water nice they relate um but for delusion is the virtual something that's more extraordinary uh well i think i'm not sure i mean again i might be at my limits but de l'hoes for instance is quite birxonian so um we know that there's the cone that bergson has of memory and the virtual would be like the past and then all all possible pasts or even uh bergson says you know you're you're going to go to the shops later so that you kind of your future would be going to the shops but you've also been to the shops in the past so there's there's a much more kind of time element to the virtual for dollars which is also why i think he's critical of purse but chatelaine's just dealing with um in the part in the very early bit of the book which i was referencing to he's just interested in maths and stuff i think but yeah but anyways dean do you want to um oh yeah okay so um okay are you seeing that yeah it's a little mad so this is this is um it's a diagram by uh ampere and uh in the actually in the final chapter of um of chatterley's book um which which is only the only chapter i've read apart from the in introduction it's quite it's quite hard going especially if you you don't actually know the the history of kind of um you know the development of um physical theories and so on but it's all about the development about electromagnetism and the um he kind of begins by by uh with this kind of problem of um magnetism being sought in terms of a length in thought of in terms of either side of a magnet um or the poles on earth as being this kind of north-south which are kind of connected to a line so how to introduce a spatiality how to how to spatialize it and this is what happened through the development of various kind of famous figures of the theory of electromagnetism and um he talks about it he's it's interesting the book because it's full of it's full of diagrams but the diagrams are all kind of homogenized to uh and it's never quite clear because he's he's so interested he's so into the actual discussion he's so into the head and and even the kind of you know this i would call that the kind of virtual space of creating something through mathematics and through what he calls kind of analogical devices which might actually be kind of experiments and so on so you've got analogical devices um you know little kind of laboratory set up or something and then you've got thought experiments and then you've got the mathematics and you bring them all together and the the diagram kind of fits into that in terms of being able to kind of capture these these gestures which are created by these combination of things um so how to how to talk you know how does space start palpitating is the kind of way he kind of describes it it starts palpating with this kind of electromagnetic energy and one of the key figures obviously is kind of ampere and emperor actually i found this i mean i didn't there's no reference to it in chatelaine apart from his description but he talks about little man on this uh on this on this kind of sphere and um you see what ampere does here is he's got the he's got the north and the south pole but he's got the electric current the voltage going right up from his feet to his head and then he's pointing uh to the left or is it to the right i can't remember which way around roundy is but whichever way is pointing that's the way that the magnetic uh field is is is turning and then faraday later turns this into turns this little figure um into the call screen uh and it's still it's still used in kind of physics education apparently to um describe you know um uh the kind of orientation of these different forces or this single two elements of this single force kind of acting but i love this little hand-drawn thing which is i think it was in a letter um to someone where he's this is he's doing exactly in a diagram he's doing exactly what chatelaine is describing which is you don't you don't have this kind of um you need to have a kind of cartesian overview or kind of synoptic view of a kind of um uh uh you know a rational grid and at the same time you don't you want to kind of transcend the kind of newtonian um laws of uh you know ideas of um this you know um interaction at a distance um and the vacuum right and and also time being being uh reversible and so on so i think this little diagram it does exactly what he's doing which is actually he's projected himself through kind of think in in having to think through a kind of theory and come to some kind of understanding and a breakthrough he's literally kind of through this diagram um projected his own body into this completely new space which is actually a much more accurate way of describing what's going on than thinking about magnetism as going along a line like a ruler or something so yeah i just i just interjected at that point and um i could show you some more uh diagrams which which relates to this um actually a distance problem could i could yeah oh yeah i i i wouldn't mind going back to an earlier diagram just but uh but no but okay you had a diagram at the beginning and it really struck me as as you were talking it's the it's the it's a very early diagram of uh from latham of this timeline and this wavy line it's a new right yeah if you go yep oh wrong way yeah next next that's one no next one no oh yeah i think that was the one is that the one is that the one that you said you didn't couldn't decipher with the one to 101 yeah okay just to say that when you showed that i had a flash and this may or may not be relevant but it's um that uh when i first met the philosopher nick land um he was doing a diagram which was very similar to this and what he was trying to map was to to the coincidence of two different kind of temporal graphs and the first was kondratyev waves which are the soviet for the soviet economists who said that there were these business cycles of 52 years which coincided with developments in technology so there were these 52-year cycles and terence mckenna's concept of time wave zero uh which is you know a concept of human consciousness moving towards some culmination point um that he said would happen in 2012.

[00:45:53]and nick was trying to correlate those two temporal historical lines and the convergence point so why was it 2012 that this would happen and for that to happen in the contractive waves weren't weren't um uh equal so this idea that they were they were they were asymptotic so they were getting sharper so the technology consciousness thing was getting smaller and smaller and smaller and eventually by 2012 it would reach it would reach you know what he called the coming singularity but then the techno singularity would happen in 2012 but the interesting point that reminds me of latham and this this diagram was that nick was preoccupied with whether or not it happened at like midnight on you know on the 12th you know the first of the you know the first of january or the you know the 31st of december and it was literally getting down to the minuscule micro point of what side of this temporal calendrical thing would the happen you know but it's to do with this micro calculation within a huge larger framework for this minuscule event which actually from a cosmic perspective is a is a mega event so i just wanted to mention that that was reminded of this kind of thing that's right that's very lathering isn't it i mean the um it's the kind of thing that latham would do is to try to kind of try to find a pattern between um to you know between economics and um physics or something you know try to try to plot some kind of correspondence between them i mean he was continually doing that really in a way it seems that he was continually trying to map these these complex and different systems and find the synchronicities is that the right word it's probably not probably not quite right but so i just wanted to mention this thing about the micro event or the least event and how it gets smaller and smaller and smaller it's a bit you know what do you call us the paradox xenos paradox i suppose is what it's quite close to is how close can you get to the event that that might be something different but um i think the question is like can you predict these things so that goes back to the that could be a sort of question as i understand it in science where uh so lee smalling who's an astrophysicist who was kind of on this spa like space side of things or he's famous for the kind of loop quantum gravity theory um who i've mentioned before he he would say there is no future it hasn't happened he just thinks that there are events all the way down he says which i guess is like a reference to the turtles that are holding up the universe and that the future isn't written um it's kind of difficult to get your your head around but he would say that there are just a series of moments i've no idea what these moments are and your moment would be different from my moment but he said that what's what's important in this is that if there isn't time in that sense there's no novelty and there's no agency um so what i was wondering because there's the other i've got some things to explain some that problem which is um yeah because latham was latham uh didn't like gravity waves or gravitons and that the basic problem of that is um if there are gravitons that means that there's space at the quantum level which he didn't believe because in his theory uh space happens after the least event but in in um maybe this is the way i've understood it this is by faye dawker so she would say that this is her life and the blue is her being born and the green is her being is her death so we experience that as a timeline and as a flow but actually it's just a block and kip thorne the astrophysicist who's been responsible for ligo or collaborated on ligo he says that you know basically we have this illusion of time and events but he says the universe is like a book so we hold a book in our hands and it's all there we read it and it's like it it's like a flow of time but actually it's it's an analogy and there's the reasons there are reasons for that that we all know but if that's true then uh what nick land is saying it's possible to work it out yeah but if if smalling's right and i suspect this is what latham thought as well so i just got a few two more yeah yeah yeah if latham is right then there are kind of events which are unwritten and what might make that stand up in my naive amateurish understanding is that you uh latham thinks the universe is cyclical or events like they've happened and then go back to zero and then there's another event so penrose who just won the nobel prize has been working on this and actually thinks that our current universe is an eon and there was one before it and there's one after it and there's a kind of pattern of photons that might maybe cross into the next eon that creates gravity of some kind and it could it could mean that that universe is slightly different i don't know but that's that's a kind of interesting question that latham sets up and i'll just throw into this as well that latham's plane of assertion is not static as well the 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 and the a to z means that in his diagram different parts of the diagram are materially different which is why i think you use the glass and the the paper so there are two there are kind of two problems there that i was interested in i i made this mobius strip thing which is a complete loop uh and we know that mobius strips only have one side and i guess this explains the whole idea of the kind of universe as one object which um if it's if that's how if that kip thor model is right then latham is is uh it's possibly wrong i guess cool i just wanted to say a couple of things just quickly just to you know at that time when nick was formulating the time wave zero 2012 thing and he was saying that the you know one of the things he was saying that was freaking a lot of people out was that the future had already happened and it was communicating to us from the future so actually we were going it was like a time we were going backwards in time in fact it's like the angel of history you know we were flowing towards an event which had already happened so the future had already happened we were moving towards it being sucked into it like a so he's reversed the whole sense of time as something which has eight which is you know direction towards some positive goal that's something which has been sucked into a hole so we're actually experiencing something unraveling backwards in forwards in time but towards an event that happened but that was what he was thinking back in the early 90s and it's i don't know what he thinks now so but what i was really struck by the the the um the quantum space diagram it's just purely left field again it's not like it's how much it reminded me of palmistry uh and the way in which there are lines on our hands you know the death line the lifeline the intersection and palmistry presumably is also based on some sense of like where are you on the palmistry timeline you know like is everything predestined or rather is there freedom in that in that map of your predestined intersections of different parts of your life so i was just reminded of palmistry um oh that's right that's right and that that is again that is the that is the spatial metaphor of time so so that diagram i don't know if you can go back to it david um it which one the the um the one who was talking about her death and her birth and how oh okay um that's what you were talking about john yeah yeah definitely this one that's the one yeah yeah yeah so it's like although she's trying to um get us to think differently about time this is a pure timeline it's past and there's future and you and you move up it and if you want you can move you can move back down it and and go backwards and go back in time but it is a timeline so i don't know how you know the question is would it be it would be possible to represent time as not a line if if that's the purpose of the you know explaining the theory uh it instead of a line though i think we're meant to imagine it as latham might see it as um a structure of events so faye dawkel but it's but it's a lot yeah and yeah but it is a timeline so could you could you do the structure of events without this timeline faye docker argues you can and says that children do it so children children know that they have to do something in a certain order which is like uh brush their teeth say good night sometimes they might do it sometimes well there you go the theory collapses when you come yeah i'm not sure but order is really important i mean order is really really important but she suggests they can grasp growing up yeah and then they can kind of kick against that but they find telling the time harder you know the idea of like okay you're gonna go somewhere um in seven days time at two o'clock uh is you know that that kind of timeline thing is harder to grasp you have to be quite old you're already quite old before you can grab that idea i think so she i mean i don't know if this stands up but it's an interesting idea she's saying you know like if you children have the right idea which is uh you know there's a structure of events rather than a timeline um and kip thorne would just say you know it's our reading the book yeah you know that we we experience a flow but but actually that's just uh because we're kind of built that way or our experience but a book is a is another classic um spatial metaphor for time you know our life is a book you know it's yeah but it's it it's the idea of uh of the block really of um the block brain which kickthorne thorne uh he's a brilliant nobel prize nobel prize winning scientist but he also helped christopher noland um create interstellar and he used this kind of analogy of flat flatlands that idea of different dimensions and suggest that there's a higher bulk dimension in which all the um dimensions including time are in and that if you're one of those higher bulk beings like there is in the film that tesseract you will just see everything at the same time there will be no timeline you will just see this block i mean what ravelli says i think uh in his book on time who ravelli who worked with um smalling on the gravity loop gravity loop theory um sorry quantum loop um is it quantum leap gravity quantum loop gravity it put those words in the right order yeah yeah i can never remember which way they go but yeah um is that really time is time is a kind of effect of of memory right it's the effect of traces you know it's almost kind of freudian the way it describes time because time is literally just the little traces that we have of of events that happened and the traces of those events um makes us perceive time as something real yeah um whereas it's absolutely true you know for the small child they just don't think of time in that way and it's it's very strange to try to communicate with them about you know what's even what's happening in an hour or something but um but it's in it's it's like whether things are event structured so the singularity of ai i guess would be an event but but i remember gareth saying um you know latham works with uh the coal board and a good result would be that they start in 1970 whatever they think about wind turbines and alternative power that suggests to me that latham uh thinks that the future isn't written whereas there is this other model which is really seductive and possibly true and the standard model of science i think is this that at least at the level of um the laws of the the universe that govern kind of particles and black holes the future is written you can kind of uh see now that parts of the universe like black holes are coming together um and that we're in the exciting bit where it's more kind of spread out i could i could explain this a bit but if anyone wants to i trust i think it's a really important insight david that you know like you know just that you know anti-determinism seems to be something that latham you know the whole idea of the artist placement group that an artist could be put in industry or some other sector and that they by doing art they are doing something to transform the time bases it seems to me that the latham was aware and i haven't i'm not familiar with the extent to which he was ecologically conscious about global warming or catastrophism or whatever but it seems to me that there must have been something about that that the the rigid logic of deterministic materialism and and science was wrong and there was an opening and there unless we recognized that i mean i don't know if there's an antic like say anti-catastrophism but these days you would certainly see that that there's a logic which is ruining things which is pursuing things in a certain way and if we can open up consciousness to a greater scale of time that somehow we can do something about that but without that opening you know we're in trouble yeah i guess this is why i was wondering whether 0 1 1 0 is like a sigil because it uh a sigil is something where you write a lot of modern schedules where you write a desire down get rid of all the vowels use all the constants to make a an image and then you kind of burn it in on your brain unconsciously you cut you you're affected by that uh this the zero one one zero isn't quite like that but it's this kind of um figure that's a diagram which if you unfold it all of his ideas about this event structure are contained within it but it's almost it's like a kind of thing that's immediate there and it's like a flash in terms of an image which uh you know maybe kind of communicates that idea to you but it it also seems a lot of his terms get taken up by the artist placement group and sort of function in that way as a kind of to create this kind of community with this these principles in some way he says um he says something in relation to apg which is which is maybe relevant to john's point um so he's he he he's got this question about um he calls it the problem of motivation in post-capitalist societies which is um i guess it's a kind of it's something that various people have kind of grappled with you know what what what's going to happen to everyone when they're not when they're not when they don't have to you know uh get out of bed in the morning and go to their job you know to pay the rent or something well uh we're gonna you know end up in some terribly kind of several state of entropy or something but he he talks about devising a stratagem to facilitate public determination in regard to their future so so there is a kind of question of a future being a kind of human-created future which which seems to be to do with the public imagination and this seems to me the what the vital role of artists probably as opposed to the vital role of um scientists is in society for um for latham that they can kind of tap into some some something kind of motivating in terms of a future right a future which looks different from the present yeah and i suppose as well just to quickly note on that that that period from the late 60s through the 70s it was a period when there was that idealism of the three-day week there was still the idea that automation and robotics would transform the world of work and what our problem would be leisure time uh which is i think linked to the you know the idea of post-capitalist work well that was a labour party manifesto basically wasn't it but nobody voted for it so not enough people so yeah just i just mentioned that in the sense of the kind of idealism that there might be a you know a world where people didn't have to work as much as they do so yeah i mean i think that's right it's really it's interesting to me reading physics as someone who can't claim to properly understand it but i kind of thought oh yeah this idea of space is fundamental and the future is written i kind of thought yeah that's right but then uh for various reasons but also in terms of like for agent the sake of agency you have to have time you got i've got an image that i thought would interest mary i think which is kind of relates to this which is um so you're you were very interested in the time what's it called the stroller time-based roller um but you might have to say what that that is i guess because i haven't got an image of it yeah it's a it's a kinetic artwork where he has rolled up a sheet of canvas on a roller and you only see the front of the painting when it's in front of the roller so the the painting is facing away from the audience and you only get to see a tiny section of this timeline um when it's round the roller yeah so is this another this is yeah so like it's quite interesting like this is a diagram uh which in the top he where it explains in the text that he thinks he's trying to think of the universe as a sphere but then he's got this idea of the universe unrolled which kind of was just an association but then the circles is um is basically the small circles at top and bottom at the beginning and the end of the universe or the big bang and the the uh big whimper if that's how you see it although there's a there's evidence that might not be the case but uh well not evidence but theories that might be the case but i guess the question is in relation to the time roller i know you're going to talk about it mary won't go into it too much but um it's it seems that the in the latham diagram the future isn't unwritten but there is a kind of uh moment in it where there's space and there's what um there's this uh wheeler's diagram of the self-excited universe i.e humans appear in the cosmos and they look back um and can see the beginning of like background radiation and beginnings of the universe and that's in latham's diagram isn't it it's in the role of blind as i understand it and it's it's even down to the fact that there's an armchair next to it and so that's something else that's interesting with latham and it comes back to that like what is the plane of assertion because there's a point in the diagram which is also latham outside of the diagram which is this intuitive person or this um this thing that wheeler drew he read wheeler i think he got a lot from wheeler but wasn't satisfied with wheeler saying you know it's all there's this kind of chaos created by quantum theory so leighton had this circular notion of time so one zero zero one but i wonder what he would have thought about the position of the intuitive artist or the intuitive being who has a through their knowledge of time basis they have a intuitive understanding of bigger chunks of time so maybe they would be more interested in ecological events that could happen in a thousand times in a thousand years or a million years so where would all that relate to this notion of that the future is written and we're just being sucked into it as john was saying i would have thought that lathan would not be favorable of that um notion that no it's written i've got that's a good question so i don't know if i've got this right but um so uh that is a good question so i think the cyclical nature of things is just that something starts at zero becomes one least event there's extension there's the impulse and the discharge and then something goes it goes back to zero so i think it's it's cyclical in the um there's nothing something happens and then you go back to nothing so i get well i'm i don't know enough really because it's been such a short time doing the research but john does but i'm just going to say i'm guessing latham thinks that within one to one you know there are events and at the level not at the quantum maybe but at the level of human culture and things you could change things and smalling suggests that the laws of evolution sorry smalling the astrophysicist who believes in time and thinks all this kind of space thing is rubbish suggests that the laws of the universe of physics evolve they're not set at zero so this is this is very similar to purse i mean i i i looked up that smaller smalling sky and he's he's got a but he's he's got a whole theory about cosmic evolution right and um this is so this is so similar to purse what person's writing about uh pers calls it evolutionary love evolutionary love is the the kind of thirdness the kind of final stage of um of a kind of process of of of kind of evolution which would which would involve um kind of variation as a kind of firstness then mechanical necessity as the secondness then creative love this is to do with kind of creativity but i mean um percy's kind of cosmic theory which is in which is in this essay he writes evolutionary love which is kind of kind of bonkers because it's um it's a kind of theory of everything really um you know including logic and language um biology physiology psychology and um and the physical laws of the universe but he he he brings it all together he kind of synchronizes it in uh with it with this notion of evolution you know this is this is what it's really about there's a kind of development and again he ends up in a situation very similar to that wheeler diagram where and it's quite hegelian and he he he says it is kind of coming from hegel and and and and schlegel really um um sorry yeah schlegel yeah uh hegel and schlegel is that right yeah it's like a comic it should be a cartoon we should do it yeah no it's funny because that's i'm going to do the words i'll do it yeah but but this is it's a kind of idealism i guess where you you know eventually the universe is the the it's a kind of anatomic principle i guess but it's it's way where the universe is you know gets to a stage of development um having evolved over so many billion years and you know all the kind of um whatever moments of order that have been created through various um molecules forming in the stars and so on and then life coming coming coming about and eventually you get to a point where there's a kind of human consciousness that is able to look and understand uh the beginnings right so that's where it kind of ends up just like that diagram yeah i know john wanted to say something but like no no that's that's what i should just say yeah a couple of things but firstly yeah that's absolutely i think that's absolutely right and absolutely essential and and you know anyway i'll be i'll try to talk about it when i do my thing but i don't know if i'll be able to but but that that wheeler diagram of the eye which sees itself is precisely that right like the consciousness starts with the little arrow it goes down gets wider and wider so there's a certain point where something evolves in the in the universe called human consciousness which is able to figure out how the universe came into existence right that's you know slow process you know they thought it was god at first and they realized it's just matter whatever but but that does suggest that there's a that there's a moment it's not quite the right word for it but cosmic consciousness or cosmological consciousness seems to be something that that happened is an event we humans have achieved some sort of consciousness of how the universe was created et cetera et cetera and i won't go too far into that but that's very well alfred kosibski's structural differential which i might talk about is designed to show that the loops it always goes back to itself in it's almost exactly like the the penrose diagram but david there's one thing i wanted to just say i'm sorry dean i know there's lots of other things but you as you flashed through your images i saw them pressure image yeah which is one of the three three diet three drawings diagrams ways of representing the theories of cosmic compression after expansion and i was wondering if that is in any way what latham's yeah i think it's the one with the angels isn't it but any there could be that one it could be but um is what latham's piece that you talked about with the sand and the circle and the elements is is that i just saw a correlation between the piece you talked about and these diagrams my my first response would be no but i it might be but the the reason that this is in here i guess is um because if there was time i wanted to like look at uh roger penrose who's um who we should celebrate for winning the nobel prize we should we should celebrate his his diet he's uh he's overhead forget to dive they're amazing aren't they so fantastic so inspiring actually yeah this is his um so i'll run through this because it's the only way i know how to do it to kind of build in the esh a bit but so uh this is his picture of the big bang in the universe and he's not he's not happy about the idea of cosmic inflation which is to explain like how the universe kind of kind of grows whatever and also he's not happy with it because it doesn't explain how gravity comes about as i understand it that's that's what he says so and i guess it means he's not kind of happy with the idea that it's just this big bang that before it there's nothing no time no space so his problem also seems to be that uh his intuition is that there's a cycle and that uh before the big bang there's a universe and after the end of our universe supposedly there's another universe and he needs to show that the beginning in the end is the same and he does it i don't properly understand it but he does it through conformal geography so that's his diagram of uh trying to uh explain how the beginning and the end if we can call it that is the same so if they just say it reminds me of the ends of the roller in a way by creating a roller rather than a cone you have the two ends that are the same but they're related but i wonder if that actually just to put that on there no that's absolutely right yeah because it's it's the same all the way down it just goes round around forever yeah he says that um and maybe each time you pull it up and down it should change but it it doesn't i guess uh at least time is a different event because because because the two zeros at each end if you like if you like you could see that that if you put the ends of the rollers as zeros and the ones at the beginning the roller is in between the two ones so every time anything happens in that that it's it's happening as an event in time but the far ends of the roller uh are so linked in in a penrose way but that's just a specul totally wild speculation yeah so i mean the roller is a bit like um an analogical device what um chatelai would call an analogical device to um yeah to kind of picture some something um i think penrose is a great uh performer and he he takes his big bang uh diagram and he gets he turns it upside down and then he takes uh the big crunch which is basically the end of the universe is um when all the black holes uh start moving towards each other and collapsing into each other to make one big black hole and they'll because that's known as the big crunch even even wheeler uses that so i don't know but i think it's a term that it goes back even to wheeler so that big crunch is basically all the black holes and he just says it's a mess but then what happens is that uh black holes which are cold become slightly warmer than the surrounding universe because there's nothing there and you know this and as i understand it then you have heat entropy and you have hawkins notion of rate of radiation leaking from the black hole so all you end up with is protons which have no mass photons photons yeah so he kind of puts the big crunch on the big bang and so his i think the conformal um the conformal geometry is his way of creating an image to think about this so we know he i think we mentioned this before when we met before that penrose knew escher and was really interested in what what esha was doing and there's also this diagram object that penrose talks about which is this impossible triangle in which it just it it just seems to move backwards and forwards so i guess it's trying to create in the mind this idea of something that is that seems the beginning of the end or close or far away being being the same thing the triangle just to um it's quite interesting i heard an interview with with penrose and he actually uses this triangle but it was given to him by um by penrose and worked out between him and his father because his father was a mathematician i mean the whole family are kind of scientists and mathematicians and chess grand masters and that so he he'd he'd kind of gone to some kind of conference when he was an undergraduate and they'd had a an eschew exhibition because they thought all the scientists would be into esther which of course they are all the mathematicians yeah um and then escher and then penrose kind of formulated this with his father and sent sent it to escher who started using it in some of his famous works i wonder what latham would have thought of escher well the artists artists are very snobby about they are yeshua aren't they you know kind of yeah yeah but i mean that's what i was referring to dean i don't know if i made uh sort of i don't think is that the earlier drop sculpture by latham which there's only a segment of which is the sand and the the yeah was that i was wondering if that isn't is that if there isn't a correlation between that diagram that model that the the nu nidri heart isn't do you think that has anything to do with that i think the thing about that conformal geometry is that the shapes um throughout remain the same in like all the the ratio of all that yeah it's kind of like a fractal isn't it yeah and it but what what interests um what interest penrose is that even though they're the same they can't they obviously disappear towards a kind of horizon for shatterly which creates a kind of a limit so it's there i don't quite understand it because there is nothing infinite in nature as i understand it but it's the idea that there's a kind of infinite progression which is a limit rather than going on forever which i think is related to the end of the universe or the beginning okay so i'm i'm not clever enough to really no but the quote on your slide latham suggests that any degree of permanence is due to an ever-present universal recurrent event rather than continuity as a rather than continuity as a physical object object sort of thing so permanence is the recurrence of an ever-present of an ever-present universal recurrent event i know it's not the same i'm just trying to work that out in my head as i read it i'm not i don't think it's the same because i think for latham this is a and not a conformal piece of geometry but i thought mary you might be interested in this when you come to talk about scores because it's i it's written about as a um as if latham thinks of the the whole i mean you already know this because you said it to us yeah so this is a kind of score in a way i guess but um i'll just go back to lathing because uh to penrose because there's a really interesting amazing thing which works on paper but i've no idea whether it's real in terms of science so what he what he says he says this is this is fun well i won't do this that's wheeler's black hole and that's uh penrose's black hole what he says is um if you take account of entropy and you think about it in relation to the universe you can have uh two states seemingly two different states being the same you can have minimum and maximum entropy being kind of the same so what's really interesting is if you put entropy into the archive of flat time house it nothing comes up so either nobody's read the archive to index it but they have indexed gravity and we know that um like gravity anxiety is too strong a word but if unfortunately the graviton has been discovered and latham said that's it that's the end of my uh story but um there's lots of stuff about gravity nothing about entropy but if you introduced enterprise entropy into latham's uh zero one one zero and the the strip it it actually could work in the way penrose says perhaps because he's he says our idea of um entropy so he like uses the idea of gas in a box which is like in the top left box you've got like a clump of particles or whatever they are and then the gas spreads in the box when the gas is completely spread out and mixed with the other gases in the box that's maximum and that's like the heat uh the notion of heat entropy in which like uh the kind of hot dissipates to or spreads and gives energy to the cool as i understand it i probably got it all wrong but it doesn't go the other way basically so in terms of heat entropy or the gas in the box where everything's completely spread out that's maximum entropy and that's kind of like the uh beginning of the universe but in gravity everything spread out is minimum entropy maximum entropy is a black hole that's collapsed so it's a kind of i don't i think you know he's obviously a clever man so i'm not gonna say it's a trick but it's in terms of putting the thought in my head it's quite brilliant and he does that he does this thing where he lays the pen on the overhead projector so that you can see the the gravity minimum entropy against the maximum gas or heat entropy and the the purpose of doing this which um i kind of if you remember like this is the that's a 0 1 1 0 between 1 and one is the universe around here the reflective intuitive organism is um actually wheeler's uh u with an eye on it everything that that uh you were all talking about and if you put the if you put um penrose's black hole here you can kind of see what you know we've got like uh and you can index it to the one over zero one one one zero and if you have a heat entropy and gravity entropy running along the top and the bottom if you follow the gravity entropy this is where um the universe begins to create space i guess or there's a there's gravity and planets are made and humans are formed and whatever you end up with this maximum entropy where everything goes to the big crunch i guess where the black holes all come together and they there's images of the universe going away from us using blue and red shift which shows that that's actually happening that that there are these bigger clumps appearing but then if at this point if you introduce the heat entropy because the black hole becomes slightly hotter than the universe around it it becomes it begins to leak radiation and photons you get uh the heat entropy situation where you get this maximum entropy which is like the zero one uh the least event the proton the proto-universe that you get in latham's diagrams and i guess what what you get with the zed in latham is some event in the future that's undetermined if we don't know what it is um with penrose you get this idea of the big crunch being the beginning of the big bang so for there's a kind of looping and i guess the question is is whether in that looping every loop is different or with smalling you get the kind of idea that the universe kind of develops and its laws develop as it develops and then maybe there will be a different set of laws for the next universe because it's slightly different or perhaps it's exactly the same and then in every universe nick land can say in 2012 at 12 o'clock ai is born um i mean in terms of practical like dealing with covid giving people jobs i guess it's very it's very kind of academic but um i think what's interesting is about this kind of lack of this idea of determinism or not which uh it certainly had done its job on me latham's um i find what i find interesting is what what you've done um you know i guess this you know like what what you've done with this sigil as you call it is you've stretched it from the way lathan defines it which is the least event which is the um as i understand is it the planck constant is that what you call it it's the time it's something it's some kind of um minimum time that something takes to cross an electron or an electron takes to cross i think it i think at the least event so i don't know enough but i think the least event is not the same as the planck constant because it right because planck gives us um the smallest things that can be measured yes but i guess i guess uh lathan doesn't maybe he does but what latham actually says it's a proton but you know that you can break a photon a photon sorry not a proton i've probably said i've even put protons it's it's it's the time a photon takes to cross freudian slit there there's so that's a that's a spelling which um i have to correct and photoshop in um but i guess a photon can be broken down you know the the the lowest or the well gravity suggests that there's quarks and gluons and there's at least a point um i took a note of it where where where lathan describes this zero one one this this this um sigil as you call it as a um as the diagrammatic form of this of this least event right so it seem and that maybe that's maybe i've got that wrong but that's it seems to me that's what he says at some point zero and the one the he says between zero and one is between the the quantum and uh i guess the the photon exactly so what you what you've done is you've you've managed to stretch the the least time interval into the kind of largest kind of dimension that we can imagine which is the um you know the coming into being of the you know and collapse of the of the universe of our universe so that's it's yeah the bit between one and one is the universe i guess i mean it's an interesting because another way to read it is not as is not as nothing in one but as a kind of binary like um a computer like a computer on off on off and and it describes it as an impulse and a discharge so it's it's actually a switch you know it's it's a kind of basic switch is a basic level of um secondness this person would in process terms you know it's um you know reaction of reaction or something on off that's it's it's binary code it's what computation is is it consists of and it's not um so it's not um it can't be spatialized in that sense it's probably more like purses versus diagrams but you've turned it into this you've stretched it and turned it into an enormous timeline well he does that really it's a spectrum so that the zero to one the least event is you know it's not into scale that's that's not a universe but the one to one as i understand it the h is the universe uh and that's when space is kind of born if you like and then there's a the one to zero i'm suggesting is the bit like um i've drawn inside the universe on the on the penrose level his idea of a black hole and he says that you know the the evaporation there's a kind of pop of a black hole uh he said he called it a pop rather than a bang because it's cosmologically it's not big or not as big as a big bang and then all the the radiation disperses so it's kind of in between u and m that all the action happens or between one and one um so how i don't think i've personally stretched it out i think it's what latham has done but the the interesting thing i was going to say earlier was when you're speaking dean about purse is that uh lee smalling in suggesting that um there's only moments has cause he suggests that you need a new ontology for physics where you're not trying to work out what things are in their substance he's he said there's a question of like where does stuff come from what is it which he sort of implies science won't be able to answer he's suggesting all that you can do is understand things in their relation to each other which is very much like you were saying it's very person yeah but he also says that in entanglement um space disappears so like how you measure one particle from a particle that is meant to be a long way away effects affects this other particle this um this kind of entanglement spooky action is that yeah is that the same as spooky action yeah because and it's spooky because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light which is why newton is wrong so maybe there are kind of different hierarchies that we have to understand so he's i think he says something like uh something is something is identical or something can be counted as something through its relation so a water molecule in where i'm living and a water molecule where you're all living all have the same relation maybe to i don't know something else like some other molecule so he maybe at that level there is you know there's no space and that the relation is very different at another kind of hierarchical level and he goes into all of that he talks about economics and uh like latham he wanted a more kind of inclusive science which he thinks that the the um the relation of things or trying to have an ontology of relation rather than what something is is the way forward unfortunately there's like i don't i've done that i've ever seen a least smalling diagram there are lots of equations which i can't read but um which is kind of curious but i think the latham is is the same thing maybe you know it's it's not about like what something is because he thinks just things are structures of events there's no thing that's me unless you understand that as a structure of events but the the relations of what then becomes important i think or and maybe the relations are kind of um in time rather than space which is something i kind of thought the opposite of well it's always diagrams it yeah exactly well i mean that's the that's person's definition of a diagram isn't it it's an icon of relations yeah so maybe maybe although there's a critique of there's there's a critique that you mentioned uh chevrolet's critique of purse maybe he's on to something by uh by this um icon of relations which is not describing any kind of physical space actually but it's simply describing the way things uh the kind of bare bones of a kind of substance or an object simply in terms of its kind of the relations you know it's kind of skeletal relations you could say that that the um the plane of assertion in perth and most diagrams is taken for granted and it's not seen as latham sees it perhaps or allows it to be a kind of structure of events but whether latham can do the work that pers does is also a question because it's there's a certain kind of forgetting and clearing in the diagram of perth which is not in latham because in latham i guess you know we have to think that the clearing is full of the quantum and uh there it's a kind of not a space but it it's seen in terms of time but i'm not sure you can do the work even though that smalling wants like penrose his diagrams are basically kind of pictures and cartoons and drawings that that communicate thoughts and they need this they need to take the background for granted i mean interestingly penrose um says he's he wasn't that good at maths and he was he was very slow he's very slow kind of um he can do it he's actually he actually is very good at it but he was just very slow um and it does seem to me like that this is a kind this is a way for him to kind of think his way into these problems the actual the actual drawing which is why he he draws it and he he has this beautiful style where he he kind of you know he has this shading doesn't he where he he draws these kind of abstract shapes and their timelines i mean they're pure timelines but they're they're they're and and they're about a kind of exponential growth of the universe including space and time um but he kind of shades them in so so they they become like three-dimensional objects that we can somehow relate to they become kind of more graspable or something you know you know i would say like draw um making the like the making the palace diagram and the chatelaine one and then doing these test strips although it's full of spelling mistakes and it's like a bit brilliant a bit embarrassing to put them out there you i think there's something in doing them where you you're like i don't the thing that latham made me do is like think what is the plan of assertion here you know like here here is the space where there are is a planet and over here there isn't so that that was the first thing that i think latham makes me really aware of the ground and then the least event and but the other thing is it's just you you sort of think through the ideas through the drawing and i you know i can't say i've got i totally understand the purse or i totally got it right but that's that's interesting to me because you thought you start to say oh it could be this or it could be that i guess the difference between that approach and the approach that kip thorne takes now is the guy who said like the universe is like a book and it's all there is that they're using computer modelling um because there's no you know there's no time you're just modeling the universe you're just gonna get this block um so thought is totally in a totally different relation which is the difference between reading a book i guess in time like you were saying about the purse diagrams and having something presented to you as a kind of block um which maybe you know it'll take time to read but it it itself is not made in time in the same way because it's done through a computer i'm not a technophobe and i really you know i really think that they are that you need those uh computer simulations because humans can't do them but there's something really interesting about the kind of analog diagram for the human mind and the imaginary in some way and latham as an artist because he's he knows you know rauschenberg and the ground and abstract expressionism he unders as we'd all say you know i think he understands the plane of assertion as an artist which uh has complicated things i see that as a kind of challenge then to like you know can you make a diagram where the plane of assertion is a kind of looped into the real world or where you are is in that plane of assertion but also as a material thing in the world which i think is what what he does