The Oscillating Universe

As a segway from my post about my book on art, here is an introduction I recently wrote for the cosmology chapter in The Search for Hydrino Energy.

In the summer of 2002, I lay on a beach at dawn. The golden sunrise electrified the air, glazing the sand and the tan of my own skin; I felt lost in it. After a swim I trecked back up through narrow streets, passing a wall of stone, and then another, as the pavement became cobble stones beneath my feet, and I entered the heart of the Old Town of Rhodes, once a Medieval fortress. On an overlooked side alley, projecting a little over the road, was a small two-story studio. 

It looked over the old town with a view that captured the gentle sweep of the landscape. On this morning, as others, the many colors and textures of Greece began to awake, with a light that has inspired artists for a millenia. 

The interior of the studio was still twilight. The floor and stucco walls were textured and imperfect like a Rembrandt painting, and on them hung large canvases, from which of light and color emanated even at this early hour, their forms discernable in the morning light. Among the works of my friend and host, was the painting God Releasing Stars into the Universe.

The idea had emerged from a series of charcoal studies engaged to express feelings of loss and mourning. Charcoal is a sensuous medium that gave poetic expression to the inner being of the subjects, with a light that lifted from their hands and caressed their skin; a light of healing. In one study, the figure was on his knees, arms up, with peaceful waves radiating from his hands and open mouth in an act of ultimate release. 

And from the work came the premise for the monumental nude, in which the river of light emanating from the man becomes an explosion of color and texture with depths that carry the eye, and looking into it you can believe that all of this, the nebulae, the stars, the galaxies, their sweeping arms of gas and dust tying them into the luminescent fabric of the world, could have come from an overwhelming act of love and intense desire; a need to fill the void. 

Just as with the charcoal, the light from the man becomes an energy of creativity being released; a powerful expression of self that turns loss into renewal, that consumes death and gives life. Michael Newberry was exploring not a biblical theme, nor even a mythological one, but a human one, perhaps that which gave rise to the mythology, the feelings that inspired the first wanderer who spoke of the creation, of the beginning, and imagined it as hollow emptiness shook by a breath of life that renewed all in its wake.
Perhaps the world was born this way; perhaps it was not a benevolent force but purely the physics of the world, expanding like a tidal wave, leaving the fertile motes that shaped themselves, over thirteen billion years, into all of this. It is a beautiful idea, and not only for the sake of beauty is it believed. But in this chapter we will explore an alternative that has its own beauty; not a violent creation but the calm of a breath that draws in and signs out, the foam of the Aegean washing over the shore of an unending time. I speak of the oscillating universe. 

On the scale of the cosmos, gravitation rules. Yet gravity is owned not by stars or planets, nor even the grains that compose them, but the subatomic particles that compose the atoms of the grain. And here is where mystery lurks. How does a particle produce gravity? How does gravity act on a quantum scale? 

Gravitation has never been understood in quantum mechanics, and the depth of our ignorance was made clear when we discovered that gravity does not rule the heavens unchallenged, that there is another phenomena combating it. And only where there are two forces can oscillation exist.

The Beautiful Soul

Rhodes smelled of dry grass and the sea. A steady lull of air swept quietly over the island from the Aegean. The landscape was sun-swept, tranquil; the light intense and vivid, as if objects were plucked from the world and sharpened with new tones and textures, somehow more real and immediate then those back home. I felt that Michael was in his element there; he was thin, tanned, tall, with wide blue eyes and light brown hair. He was forty-four but athletic in movement and expression. His voice was always on the upswing; it was inquiring, always beckoning a response. His laughter was giddy and free, his attitude joyful and light. Something in his eyes gave me a strong sense of my own presence.

After my freshman year at college, I jumped on a flight to Rhodes, Greece, to stay at the studio of an artist whom I had met online. Michael Newberry is a painter and thoughtful commentator on art, who needed help creating an art foundation to advocate for the cause of innovate representational artists.

"Representational" is something of a clinical word for artists passionate about the world they see around them - people, places, objects, shimmering with beauty and light; those excited by the power of their senses to perceive the world, and challenged by the means and methods required to reproduce it in a complex and unique way.

The summer I spent in Greece inspired me to write a short piece about the experience. The result, which I posted as an introduction to an online archive of Michael's work (that I also assembled), has become the premise for my next book.

The book, tentatively titled The Beautiful Soul: Innovative Artists in a Postmodern World, will be an essay on the struggle of innovative artists in an art culture largely turned off to their work. We will follow Michael's career, college training in expressionist art, and break free into a self-taught representational style. We will follow the struggles of other artists set against the evolution of the postmodern art world. We will digress to understand the history of art, innovative techniques in painting and composition. We will reflect on the philosophical nature of art and the historical origin of the world we see around us.

It will be a biography, a monograph of brilliant work, a polygraph of culture, a personal journey of discovery, and a challenge to open our eyes to the creative output of our time.