Process and Magnitude

This spring I took a Cognitive Psychology class entitled 'Cognition in the Wild', which dealt with human attitudes of the wilderness and how perception changes when placed in the wild. A large focus of the class was on Southern Utah and the Anasazi peoples. It encompassed a wide variety of topics like anthropology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, politics, and art. But no psychology, which initially bothered me. Whether by coincidence or purpose, the cognitive processes elicited by the class were as informative and influential as any discussion could have been - and it was one of the better classes I have taken during my University career.

Earlier in the year I had taken a class on Systems Theory entitled 'Chaos and Change', which primed my mind for the experiences and changes I have encountered in the past 6 months. I've always felt that everything is interconnected if one looks hard enough, but a rigorous scientific viewpoint has always forced me to view the causal schemata of life without teasing out the relationships. The two operative words I gained from this class are, as the title suggests, Process and Magnitude.

Life rarely is in stasis, and if it is, it usually is dead or inert. It is not dynamic. Science for the most part takes slices of living, such as the model cell or the Bohr model of the atom, and presents them as life itself. Certainly these models provide a framework for how life operates in simple, generalized terms. But no cell has perfectly shaped mitochondria with evenly spaced cristae, no atom has little red electrons with minus signs whizzing around the nucleus in perfect orbits. These are symbols of structure, static images of ideal existence. The reality however, is that all structures in life, from the quark to the galaxy filament, are interconnected through a web of relationships, a multitude of dynamic systems.

Southern Utah demonstrates the ideas of process and magnitude in a beautiful and elegant way that no other place or subject can. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to share a couple of my favourite places in the San Rafael Swell with Lauryn.

We went to Horseshoe Canyon, which houses the Great Gallery, a collection of Anasazi and Fremont rock art (both petroglyphs and petrographs) adorning the canyon walls. The tall, oblong figures are the product of a lost and unknown people who managed to create a grand civilization in the middle of a harsh and unforgiving land. Horseshoe Canyon itself is beautiful, with the tangible feeling that you are in the midst of watching geological processes unfold. The multihued banded rocks give me the feeling of looking at the swirling gasses of distant planets, the organic shapes carved into rock by the ebb of water and wind over eons playfully tantalize my imagination. Everywhere around is manifest of organic process.

This greeted us as we descended into the canyon.

There was this old pipe in the ground in the middle of the desert. Where did it lead to and why was it there?

One of my favourite places in Horseshoe Canyon, an enormous cavernous opening with a red rock beach, made better by one of my favourite people, Lauryn. We enjoyed the mesmerizing dance of a dust devil as we ate our lunch, then lay on our backs looking at the fractal tendrils of the clouds creep over the lip of the canyon.

A section of the Great Gallery panel. The guy at the left leaning over seems like he would be fun at a party.

One of the most well known sections of the Great Gallery, the middle figure maybe has a big beard or has a skull for a head?

At the end of the hike. Triumph!

The next day we hiked Little Wild Horse Canyon, a slot canyon with really narrow walls.

The most wonderful thing about science, in my opinion, is it allows us to expand our experience of magnitude. Imagine, for a second, the biggest thing that you can concretely picture in your mind. On good days, I can realistically imagine the space of the solar system, maybe just past the Oort Cloud. That's fucking huge - 1 light year. Almost 10^16 metres. Now imagine the smallest thing you can think of. For me it's a nucleotide, maybe I can imagine some of the electron clouds of the atoms in the nucleotide interacting. But that's on the scale of 10^-8 metres. Daily human experience, on the other hand, is about on the range of 10^-3 meters (a millimetre) to 10^3 metres (a kilometer). Huge range of magnitudes.

The problem that science currently faces, in my opinion, is helping to establish and understand the relationships between levels of magnitude, giving it meaning and connection, showing the process. Personally, I hate the way molecular and cellular biology shows only diagrams, little loops of molecules in a neat cycle, dead organelles and macromolecules locked in a deathly stasis for our perverse voyeuristic pursuits. The higher up I get into biology, the more it starts to make sense in a dynamic way, I can see the parts interacting, and maybe that is the well kept secret that is bequeathed to you in grad school.

Side Note: I also got to ride on a giant gila monster - giddyup!