A bizarre event in the Pacific Ocean can have devastating effects on the climate: ''The strangest meteorological event in decades'

American Geophysical Union

A vast patch of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean - nicknamed the blob - resulted in increased levels of ozone above the Western US, researchers have found.

The blob - which at its peak covered roughly 9 million square kilometres (3.5 million square miles) from Mexico to Alaska - was assumed to be mainly messing with conditions in the ocean, but a new study has shown that it had a lasting affect on air quality too.

Ultimately, it all links back to the blob, which was the most unusual meteorological event we've had in decades," says one of the team, Dan Jaffe from the University of Washington Bothell.

The blob of warm water in the Pacific was first detected back in 2013, and it continued to spread throughout 2014 and 2015. While it was less obvious in 2016, there were some indications that it persisted well into last year too.


The vast, warm patch has been linked to several mass die-offs in the ocean during 2015, including thousands of California sea lions starving to death in waters more than 3 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Farenheit) above average, and an "unprecedented" mass death of seabirds in the Western US. 

In April 2015, the effects could also be seen on land, with a bout of strange weather in the US being linked to the higher ocean temperatures, and the increased temperatures saw a massive toxic algal bloom stretch along the entire US West Coast. 


"I can't truly give an explanation of what is going on right now," marine ecologist Jaime Jahncke from conservation group, Point Blue, said in late 2015.

Jaffe and his team have been monitoring ozone levels over the US since 2004, and happened to noticed a bizarre spike in 2015. They wondered if the crazy events linked to the blob that year could also have been driving this massive boost in ozone.

"At first we were like 'Whoa, maybe we made a mistake.' We looked at our sensors to see if we made an error in the calibration. But we couldn't find any mistakes," Jaffe says in a press statement.


"Then I looked at other ozone data from around the Pacific Northwest, and everybody was high that year."

To see if there was a connection, the team mapped the lifespan of the blob in unprecedented detail, using multiple satellites positioned all over the globe to track temperature fluctuations on the Pacific Ocean's surface between 2014 and 2016.

American Geophysical Union

They then went back and compared the events to sea-surface temperature records dating back to 1910, and what they found was unlike any natural phenomenon ever seen in recorded history.

"This phenomenon is something new," one of the team, Chelle Gentemann from Earth and Space Research in Seattle, told National Geographic. 

"From that entire record, this event is unprecedented in magnitude and duration. There's just nothing like it in our historical record."

They found that the effects of the blob on land - warmer temperatures, low cloud cover, and calmer air - actually combined to produce extra ozone, and by June 2015, this had pushed ozone levels to between 3 and 13 parts per billion higher than average over the northwestern US.

Certain areas with already high ozone levels, such as Salt Lake City and Sacramento, saw their ozone pushed above federally allowed limits.

"Washington and Oregon was really the bullseye for the whole thing, because of the location of the winds," Jaffe explains.

"Salt Lake City and Sacramento were on the edge of this event, but because their ozone is typically higher, those cities felt some of the more acute effects."

So how does something in the ocean affect our ozone levels?  

Under normal conditions, winds along the West Coast run along the surface of the ocean, and push the top layer away from the coast. This allows the colder water below to take its place, bringing vital nutrients with it, and balancing out the temperature.

But the team found that during the blob's peak, the increased temperatures on the surface of the ocean had caused the air above heat up and stagnate. This weakened the coastal winds so much, they were no longer able to push the warm top layer of the Pacific away from the shoreline.

And with no upwelling of cool water, the high temperatures remained, and together with a lack of clouds, this allowed the chemical reaction that produces ozone - solar ultraviolet radiation (sunlight) breaking down oxygen molecules - to kick things up a notch.

"Temperatures were high, and it was much less cloudy than normal, both of which trigger ozone production," says Jaffe.

"And because of that high-pressure system off the coast, the winds were much lower than normal. Winds blow pollution away, but when they don't blow, you get stagnation and the pollution is higher."

While the ozone spike was only temporary, the team says we should take this as a warning for the future - researchers already knew there was a connection between higher atmospheric temperatures and ozone production, but now we know that sea-surface temperatures can affect it too.


And with ozone pollution known to cause serious respiratory dysfunction, including aggravating pneumonia, asthma, and bronchitis, we'd better be prepared for when something like the blob rears its head once more.


Other articles on the same theme:

• Bizarre phenomenon in California! 'Giant Rivers' in the sky are causing chaos among residents

• Europe floods: why has the rain been so intense?

• China currently uses the technology of weather modification

• After this year floods in all Europe. Louisiana may be the second evidence of weather modification technology?

Story source: 

 

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Bizarre phenomenon in California ! 'Giant Rivers' in the sky causing chaos among residents

Credit : NASA

This month, the percentage of California still stuck in a drought dropped by 22 percent in a single week, as the wettest winter in decades saw an onslaught of storms deliver record-breaking rains across the state.

Now, researchers have connected the chaos to a strange phenomenon known as atmospheric rivers - narrow corridors of concentrated moisture suspended in the atmosphere, which can hold up to 15 times more water than the amount that flows through the Mississippi River.

If you're unfamiliar with atmospheric rivers, or are wondering if that's just a fancy name for "rain", they're actually a unique movement of moisture through Earth's atmosphere, responsible for most of the horizontal transport of water vapour outside the tropics.

Credit: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory

These suspended moisture plumes, which can stretch 400 to 600 km wide (250 to 370 miles), have been linked to all seven floods on California's Russian River between 1996 and 2007, and likely played a role in the 'Snowmageddon' event that blanketed the East Coast in 2010.

All 10 of Britain's largest floods since the 1970s have also been attributed to atmospheric rivers, and late last year, researchers linked them to their first ever mass die-off event, when nearly 100 percent of wild oysters in northern San Francisco Bay mysteriously disappeared in 2011.


Now, scientists led by Duane Waliser, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have found that massive atmospheric rivers are responsible for up to 75 percent of all extreme wind and rainfall events on the world's coasts, and half of the strongest wind gusts recorded in nearly two decades.

Credit: Scientific American Blogs

The team also linked them to up to 65 percent of the extreme rain and snow events in the Western United States - such as the storm that hit Northern California on Monday - and say they could also be the cause of 80 percent of major floods in the state.


Last month, a state of emergency was called in various California countries due to devastating storms linked to atmospheric rivers, and just recently, the five-year drought dropped to less than a quarter of the state in a single week, with rainfall hitting almost 200 percent above average in certain parts of the Bay Area.

And the phenomenon is showing no signs of slowing down, with a flood warning affecting 14 million people in California to remain in place until at least Thursday.

The US National Weather Service (NWS) is now saying that storms to come could cause floods in areas that have not been flooded in decades, and are warning locals in Northern California to be ready to evacuate at 15 minutes notice.


"This has been a very active winter, atmospheric river-wise," Jeff Zimmerman from the NWS, who wasn't involved in the study, told NPR. "We've probably had 10 or more ... this winter."

To put that into perspective, an average year will usually only have five to seven atmospheric rivers.


Waliser and his team measured the influence of atmospheric rivers by analysing data from storms around the globe in regions outside the tropics from 1997 to 2014.

Credit: Curbed SF

When they focussed on the top 2 percent windiest storms, they found that "atmospheric rivers are typically associated with 30, and even up to 50 percent, of those very extreme cases", and almost the same amount of the wettest storms, Christopher Joyce reports for NPR.


And perhaps even more worrying, winds associated with atmospheric rivers were found to be twice the speed of the average storm - strong enough to topple even the great Pioneer Cabin Tree - a 1,000-year-old Californian sequoia that finally fell last month.

"Not only do [atmospheric rivers] come with this potential for flooding hazards," Waliser told NPR, "they also come with potential for high impact winds and extremes that can produce hazardous conditions."


While atmospheric rivers are naturally occurring phenomena, climate change is expected to intensify the severe precipitation events caused by atmospheric rivers in the future, because of increased evaporation rates and greater atmospheric water-holding capacity.

So as the state recovers from fighting a five-year drought - that's still not over, despite the record rains - it now has to deal with oppressive storms, and scientists are saying this crazy winter is likely a sign of things to come.


"The current situation in California - specifically, the dramatic swing from extreme drought to water overabundance and flooding - is indeed a preview of California's likely climate future," one of the team, climate scientist Daniel Swain from UCLA, told Mashable.

"There is now quite a bit of evidence that future droughts here will be warmer and more intense, yet will be interrupted by increasingly powerful 'atmospheric river' storms capable of causing destructive flooding.

Other articles on the same theme:

• After this year floods in all Europe. Louisiana may be the second evidence of weather modification technology?

• China currently uses the technology of weather modification

• Europe floods: why has the rain been so intense?

Story source: 

 

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

A country at the crossroads: how Lincoln's 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil War

An 1860 presidential election campaign banner for Abraham Lincoln and his running partner, Hannibal Hamlin. (Library of Congress)

What was the political prelude to the 1860 election?

Ever since the drafting of America’s federal constitution of 1787, the question of slavery had given rise to political contention and compromise. In the early years of the new American nation, several northern states adopted statutes of emancipation, while new technology and the international demand for cotton gave slave labour deep roots in the south. Plantation agriculture spread from the Atlantic states into the Gulf region. As a result, slave numbers would grow to four million by 1860.

Most Americans deemed that the constitution gave individual slave states alone the right to determine the future of their ‘peculiar institution’. However, the westward movement of settlers and the extension of the nation’s boundaries – through the purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, and the wresting of California and other parts of Mexico by force – prompted periodic crises over the status of slaveholding in the territories and the new states carved out of them. 

In 1820 and again in 1850 threats of civil war between North and South prompted compromise, while the Democrats and Whigs – the dominant national parties during the 1830s and 1840s – worked in the main to keep the issue at bay. But in the 1850s it arose again. By then growing intransigence, and each faction’s sense of its moral and social superiority, put political compromise beyond easy reach.

Why does the presidential election of 1860 matter?

Abraham Lincoln’s victory in November 1860 as the Republican candidate for the White House forever changed the relationship between the American government and the institution of slavery. 

It wasn’t that Lincoln was the first nominee for the presidency to run on an antislavery platform. Minority parties, alarmed by the increasing entrenchment of plantation slavery, had fielded emancipationists in every presidential election since 1840, and in 1856 the newly formed Republican Party had celebrated a powerful showing on a manifesto committed to containing slavery – a “relic of barbarism” – within existing limits. But the real turning-point came four years later when, for the first time in the history of the American republic, an antislavery candidate committed to putting slavery in the way of ultimate extinction triumphed in the electoral college.


Lincoln’s success prompted South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union. At a special secession convention on 20 December the state declared she had taken her place “once again amongst the nations of the world”. Within two months, six other states of the lower South had joined her in forming an independent confederacy. The US constitution dictated that the outgoing president, the Democrat James Buchanan, remain in office between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th president on 4 March 1861. ‘Old Buck’ lacked both the authority and will to defuse the greatest crisis in the nation’s history. Its resolution would depend on the wisdom and courage of his successor.

Abraham Lincoln. The election of a candidate committed to ending a “relic of barbarism” incensed the slave-holding South. (Library of Congress)

Who were the 
Republicans?

Like all political parties, the new Republican organisation was a coalition. Its constituent elements emerged from the fractured politics of the mid-1850s that created a political vacuum by destroying the Whig party and weakening their rivals, the Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska 
Act of 1854, the work of US senator Stephen A Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, opened up to slave-holding settlers a vast trans-Mississippi region previously deemed the preserve of free labour. The immediate explosion of anger in the North prompted state-level ‘anti-Nebraska’ coalitions of 
disaffected Democrats, antislavery Whigs, independent ‘free-soilers’, and out-and-out abolitionists. At the same time an influx of immigrants, many 
of them Catholic, prompted a native-born backlash that further strained political loyalties. 
 

This 1856 map shows slave states (gray), free states (pink), U.S. territories (green), and Kansas in center (white). Credit: wikipedia

The emergent Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery provided the policy glue that bound 
its elements together: radical emancipationists driven by moral purpose, racists determined to found lily-white western settlements, social progressives who deemed the South archaic and stagnant, and opponents of the political influence of southern planters – the so-called ‘Slave Power’ that had allegedly hijacked the federal government. 

By 1860 the party of ‘Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men’ had broadened its platform to embrace homesteads for western settlers, a protective tariff and 
a Pacific railroad. The Massachusetts Springfield Republican located its strength in “the great middling-interest class”, men “who work with their own hands, who live and act independently, who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop, of education and freedom”. Republicans made much of their role as the party 
of conscience, and as such appealed successfully to ‘nativist’ anti-Catholics, while also winning support within influential communities of Protestant and radical immigrants, above all 
the Germans.

Why did the Republican Party choose Lincoln as 
its candidate?

Republican leaders met in Chicago in May 1860 to choose a presidential nominee. Attention focused above all on Senator William H Seward, the former governor of New York, who was widely expected to carry the day. 

Portrait of William H. Seward, Secretary of State 1861-69 Credit: wikipedia

But his reputation for radicalism, recently heightened by a speech depicting the struggle between slave and free societies as an “irrepressible conflict”, put doubts in the minds of Republican managers. Could he win the support of essential conservative voters in those states of the lower North (Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois) who had previously blocked the party’s route to power?

Seward’s supporters took comfort from the handicaps under which most of his rivals laboured. Edward Bates of Missouri was too conservative, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania too corrupt, Supreme Court justice John McLean too old, Salmon P Chase of Ohio too radical. But Seward had not reckoned on the dark horse, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s seven open-air debates with Stephen Douglas across Illinois in 1858, in pursuit of election to the United States senate, had won him national attention and, by holding his own against the Democratic ‘Little Giant’, the respect of antislavery voters. More recently, his well-crafted Cooper Union speech in New York City alerted easterners to the intellectual sophistication and moral backbone of a westerner they had not before encountered in the flesh. “He’s the greatest man since St Paul,” a newspaperman declared. “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” 

Adamant that to restrict slavery was to sustain the purposes of the nation’s founders and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but insistent on the constitutional rights of the southern states to the protection of their “domestic institutions”, and personally untainted by nativism, Lincoln offered a blend of moral radicalism and legal conservatism that allowed his managers at Chicago to present him as the party’s most reliable hope in the doubtful states. Rational political logic, not luck, secured his nomination.

Why did the Democratic Party split?

Enthusiastic expansionists, the Democrats as a national party had to fashion a policy for the western territories that would minister to the incompatible ambitions of free-soil and pro-slavery settlers. For a time Stephen Douglas’s formula of ‘popular sovereignty’ – leaving the settlers themselves to resolve the issue by a local vote – kept northern and southern Democrats happy. But the doctrine was inherently ambiguous: as a unifying principle it could not survive the civil war between pro-slavery and free-soil settlers in ‘bleeding’ Kansas or President Buchanan’s feeble yielding to supporters of a pro-slavery constitution there. Douglas’s political survival in Illinois and the wider North forced him to turn against the national administration. 


Even so, as the country’s leading Democrat he expected to win his party’s presidential nomination in 1860. By then, however, influential southerners had jettisoned popular sovereignty and, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Dred Scott case (which declared slave-owners’ property rights sacrosanct), had begun to call for federal legal protection of slavery in the territories. The party’s fraught national conventions saw it split over the issue of a federal slave code, leaving Douglas to fight the election as the candidate of the regular Democrats, and the Kentucky slave-owner, John C Breckinridge, to stand as the representative of southern radicals who stood ready to countenance quitting the Union if they did not get their way. 

The leading Democrat, Stephen A Douglas. He failed to prevent his party splitting over the issue of slavery. (Library of Congress)

Why didn’t Lincoln run in the South?

Southern nervousness over the rise of an antislavery party boiled over in the fall of 1859 following the misbegotten attempt of the abolitionist John Brown to spur a slave uprising by seizing the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Horrified southern leaders denounced the ‘Black Republicans’ as fomenters of racial revolution. But the Republicans cast themselves as the genuinely national party, loyal to the intentions of the nation’s founders and true to the interests of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. This was a self-perception reinforced by the polemical writings of a North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, whose Impending Crisis of the South attributed the condition of impoverished southern whites and the backwardness of their economy to slavery’s corrosive effect on enterprise and opportunity. 


The book became a mainstay of Republican propagandists in 1860. Southern authorities banned it, while vigilantes murdered or drove out those who preached its doctrines. Lincoln’s party put up candidates in some of the states of the slave border region, and Lincoln himself earned several thousand votes in border slave states such as Missouri and Delaware, but did not risk life and limb in the lower South, where no Republicans appeared on the ballot.

Slaves in a cotton field near Savannah, Georgia in the c1860s. (Corbis)

Did the Democrats’ schism hand the election to the Republicans?

Lincoln won the presidency with a mere 40 per cent of the popular vote, seven per cent less than the combined ballots of his two Democrat rivals. But the split in the Democratic Party did not itself deliver the Republican victory, for Lincoln secured clear majorities in almost every free state, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts and the other populous states where the presidential electors were concentrated. Even as a combined force, the opposition parties would not have won. 

Lincoln easily dominated the electoral college, with 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72 and Douglas’s 12. 
A fourth candidate for the presidency, John Bell, appealing to conservative voters who had lost their political home with the death of the old Whig party, won just 39. More significant than the Democrats’ schism in opening the door to Lincoln’s victory was the Republicans’ success in putting a squeeze on Bell’s Constitutional Union party in the lower North. 

Did Lincoln’s election warrant the secession of southern states?

Southern nationalist ‘fire-eaters’ moved quickly to mobilise support for secession from a Union that had elected a ‘Black Republican’ on a purely sectional vote. Jumpy southern whites believed that an abolitionist in the White House would use the levers of government to bring about the revolution that had eluded John Brown. For their part, southern conservatives cautioned against hasty action that smacked of both panic and hubris. 
As South Carolina led the charge towards separation, a dyspeptic realist, James Pettigru, remarked that the state was too small for a republic, yet too large for a lunatic asylum. 


Prudent slave-owners pointed out that the Republicans were no immediate menace to the South: the party controlled neither Congress nor the Supreme Court, and Lincoln was anyway no radical abolitionist. They were correct in judging immediate secession a far riskier course than waiting for an overt act of aggression from the new administration in Washington. Southern radicals, however, confident in the Cotton Kingdom’s capacity to sustain itself at home and abroad, exploited the fevered times and carried the day. Above all, they played on fears that the new president would stock the slave-states with federal post-holders – a nucleus of antislavery fifth-columnists dedicated to effecting a political and racial revolution throughout the region. 

A contemporary oil painting of a US slave market in 1852. By this time, the issue of slavery had already driven America to the brink of civil war on two occasions. (Bridgeman Art Library)

What part did the election outcome play in the coming of civil war?

War followed upon southern secession because Lincoln, supported by a majority of northerners, refused to concede that any of his fellow countrymen had a constitutional right of withdrawal from a ‘perpetual’ Union, and certainly not in response to a democratic election fairly contested and legitimately won. When in early April 1861 Lincoln sent an unarmed vessel to resupply a federal fort in Charleston harbour, the Confederate batteries opened fire. As Lincoln later put it: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.”

The war, then, was about the survival of the nation and, in its early stages at least, not about the survival or death of slavery. But the election of 1860 revealed the huge fissure between North and South over their incompatible understandings of the peculiar institution’s future in the republic. That fissure had grown more profound since the annexation of Texas (1845) and the Mexican cession (1848) had raised fundamental questions about the status of slavery in the new acquisitions. The political contention reached its climax in the election of 1860. 

Whatever the later claims of Confederates and their modern successors, the crisis of the Union of 1861–65 was not about ‘state’s rights’ in the abstract. It was about the apparent threat to the power of the slave states to regulate their ‘domestic institutions’. 


No one explained this better than Lincoln himself, a month before his assassination. The slaves, he said, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” The election of 1860 was at the heart of this story.  

Other articles on the same theme:

• From George. Washington to Donald Trump: All 45 presidents of the United States into a single page of History

• An alternate History: If Martin Luther King had not been killed?

• Theodore Roosevelt ( The War Hero ) who wrote 35 books and made history at the White House

Story source:


The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Historyextra . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

159th anniversary Tagore vs Einstein: One of the most important historical discussion about religion and science

Credit: wikipedia

Updated 11/05/2020

Rabindranath Tagore's 159th anniversary: Why Bengal prays to a poet

For Bengalis, Tagore's birth date in the Western calendar shifts every year, just like it does for holy festivals—the poet is celebrated like a god

Rabindra Jayanti 2020: Know Interesting Facts From Rabindranath 

------------------------------------------------------------------

On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (public library) recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.

The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.

EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?

Rabindranath Tagore Biography & Facts Britannica

TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.

I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.

Rabindranath Tagore: Friendship and love The Economic Times

EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.

Albert Einstein walking on down the street Pinterest

TAGORE: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.

Tagore Translation Deemed Racy Is Pulled From Stores in China The New York Times

EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.



TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.

EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.

TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.

Rabindranath with Einstein in 1930 Credit: wikipedia

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.

TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.consciousness, and philosophy

TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.

TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth – at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion.

EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.

TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.

EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.

TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.

EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.

TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.

EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.

TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.

EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.

Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.

TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.

In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.

It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!

TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.


Other articles on the same theme:

• The top 40 most intelligent people in history PHOTO. Einstein is second. In the list entered and the man who made the perfect crime

• Marie Curie - the most important women in science

• Sigmund Freud, the psychiatrist who scandalized the scientific world.

• How life emerged on Earth? The old theory is removed

Story source:


The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Brainpickings . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.