Natural Philosophy.

On Saturday night I attended with friends the open-air Robert Plant concert at Glastonbury Abbey. This event seemed a thousand miles away from the big annual Glastonbury pop festival, no mud, few twentysomethings, mainly nine thousand senior folk with their own portable chairs, picnic tables, hampers and champers, and sometimes their kids.

The Maestro gave a spellbinding performance, the elder god of rock looks like Odin now but he still sings like Apollo. He covered a number of old Led Zeppelin songs but gave them all an upgrade with fresh twists and subtleties and some new ethnic inputs from his band which included a very talented guy from the Cameroons. By the end of it he had all of us oldies up out of our portable chairs.  A master of his craft finessing his career.

I note that the Hypersphere Cosmology in a Nutshell paper here has already notched up eighty thousand reads. A new more powerful equation has replaced the redshift equation given in The Octavo. Either the world’s physicists must have started passing the joke around to all their mates or they have started scribbling furiously on their blackboards.

I suspect that the flurry of interest may have arisen because of the ‘axis of evil’ that the WMAP probe recently revealed as an embarrassing anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation could bear interpretation as some sort of rotation of the entire universe.

To forestall the possible headline ‘Mad Occultist Cracks Secret of Universe’ I’m redefining myself as a Natural Philosopher. Natural Philosophy was what we used to have before science and magic parted company after Newton. Somewhat paradoxically Newton himself researched alchemy and esoterics and science and maths with equal vigour, but we only tend to remember the old sorcerer-scientist for his science and maths. Me, I like to look at the bigger picture too.

So I’ve decided to try and pass the Bardic Review and apply to become an Ovate.