They do the same kind of stuff at OSU with phenomenally gifted athletes in several disciplines—track and field, football and so on. They have unbelievably advanced scanning and simulation technology here (big surprise, eh?) and one of the most advanced sport physiology labs in the world, probably. The thing is, extraordinary athletes
all perform at what look like the extreme limits of possible action. The folks at the Stanford lab don't sound as though they're looking at some external force, or source or anything like that. They are just trying to see what particular combination of factors enables off-the-charts performances like that... and given time, they'll find them, just as our computational physiologists do here with athletic prodigies.
I'm glad you brought up this kind of example, because it raises an issue that seems to me entirely parallel. Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician, an amateur, who had a gift for computing surrealistically difficult integrals to yield analytic solutions that most mathematicians would take one look at and say, time for a numerical approximation, there's no way you can figure out a simple algebraic solution for something like that. The story is
here, if you're interested. He was taken under the wing of the great English mathematician Hardy, encouraged and ultimately vindicated in his most daring work. No one has come close to Ramanujan in this regard except may for John von Neumann. Do we have reason to assume that there is some particular quality xhu out there that we need to explain what Ramanujan did, defying as it seems to do normal human possibilities? Or what the great American chess player Pillsbury did in the 19th century, playing a hundred simultaneous games, winning them all, and then, a month later, able to play
backwards from the final mate position any of the games he had played in the exhibition? Or the mind of Freeman Dyson, the greatest physicist never to win the Nobel Prize, who, confronted with a completely fresh problem by a colleague—is there a number which, if you write it down, take the rightmost digit making it up, and move it to the left end of the original, will yield a number exactly twice the original?—paused briefly and said, in the presence of a number of his colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 'Of course there is, but the smallest such number is eighteen digits long', and proceeded to write that number down on the spot? Are we going to account for these seemingly supernatural abilities of the human mind by actually appealing to the supernatural, or metaphysical, and so on? When you're performing particularly well, effortlessly, flawlessly, is it because there's something 'out there' you're tapping into, some
entity... or is there simply some combination of factors which every so often produces that 'state of grace' feeling that rewards every one of your movements and actions? I've had that happen to me a few times when I was a ski racer, and a few times skiing in wicked mogul fields when everyone else was crashing and burning on the 30% grade, and I was just
gliding down. Was it because of some external
force, or
mind force, or similar bit of obfuscation? No, it was just because, for that little bit of time, I was doing everything right, without trying. Someone wants to call
that ki—fine, though I don't see the need. But there wasn't anything
out there that I was controlling, or working, or training. It was just me and my skis.
by itself simply means energy however if we put another Hanzi in front of it like:
