"After a family meal one night, three generations are sitting around chatting. Four-year-old granddaughter is sitting on her grandfather's knee. She asks sweetly, 'Grandpa, can you make a noise like a frog?'Granddad replied, 'What?'The granddaughter again asked, 'Can you make a noise like a frog?'Granddad said, 'Why do you want me to make a noise like a frog?'The granddaughter replied, 'Well, last night Daddy said that when you croak we can all go to Disneyland,'" the Lotus started the talk, after saying Basmalah and Salaam."Well, here I am," said Lotus, "sitting on the pond waiting for Wulandari, the Moon. Currently it is 'Sanja', the Balinese say, the half-dark time after the sunset. I can see clearly from here, there, Pura Tanah Lot, home to the ancient Hindu, the Sanja is starting to change. But where is Wulandari, she hasn't been seen yet? Has something happened to her?Anything can happen. 'Lightning could strike!' said Brad Pitt when he met that fascinating doctor. 'Everything that can happen, does happen, said Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw when talking about 'the Quantum Universe'. 'Many problems are far too difficult to solve in a single mental leap, and deep understanding rarely emerges in 'eureka' moments,' they say again.Cox and Forshaw suggest—when reviewing why E=mc2—that distances in spacetime are invariant, which means that there is consensus throughout the universe as to the lengths of paths through spacetime. Physicists are very demanding of their fundamental equations, for they insist that everyone in the universe should agree upon them. As good scientists, however, we must always acknowledge that nature has no qualms about shocking us, and reality is what it is. Anything that exists presumably exists in spacetime, and so when we come to write down an equation—for example, one that describes how an object interacts with its environment—then we should find a way to express this mathematically using invariant quantities. Only then will everyone in the universe agree.Cox and Forshaw further say, 'A good example might be to consider the length of a piece of string. We can see that although the piece of string is a meaningful object, we should avoid writing down an equation that deals only with its length in space. Rather, we should be more ambitious and talk about its length in spacetime, for that is the spacetime way. Of course, for earthbound physicists it might be convenient to use equations that express relationships between lengths in space and other such things—certainly engineers find that way of going about things very useful. The correct way to view an equation that uses only lengths in space or the time measured by a clock is that it is a valid approximation if we are dealing with objects that move very slowly relative to the cosmic speed limit, which is usually (but not always) true for everyday engineering problems. An example we have already met where this is not true is a particle accelerator, where subatomic particles whiz around in circles at very close to the speed of light, and live longer as a result. If the effects of Einstein’s theory are not taken into account, particle accelerators simply stop working properly. Fundamental physics is all about the quest for fundamental equations, and that means working only with mathematical representations of objects that have a universal meaning in spacetime. The old view of space and time as distinct leads to a way of viewing the world that is something akin to trying to watch a stage play by looking only at the shadows cast by the spotlights onto the stage. The real business involves three-dimensional actors moving around and the shadows capture a two-dimensional projection of the play. With the arrival of the concept of spacetime, we are finally able to lift our eyes from the shadows. All of this talk of objects in spacetime may sound rather abstract but there is a point to it. 'And now, Sanja has left, the Night comes to accompany me. And passing through the spacetime with the Night, I don't need to use Cox and Forshaw's explanations, because in the end, all the conclusions come down to 'Sunnatullah', even though they explain it in 'scientific explanation'.I don't really know about the spacetime, but all I know that seeing the Night, is like squinting at a painting: why, when, how, what and for what. Going through the Night, I'll find three things: Noise, Silence and Value. That's why, the Night fixes up what happened during the Day. Then the next day, there will be something new, something changed.Walking with the Night, fist thigs first, fear will arise. The fears are varied. Some are afraid of losing, some are afraid of reality, some are afraid of ghosts, and many more. All of this, will produce 'Noise'. Noise is usually unwanted, perhaps, a rejection. We may be spending 99.9 percent of our time worrying about these daily concerns—material comforts and affective concerns—and that is understandable, because we need to have our basic needs met to feel safe. But many of us worry far, far beyond having our needs met. We are physically safe, our hunger is satisfied, we have a roof over our heads, and we have a loving family; and still we can worry constantly.It is said that Noise is another word for sound. And Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, says that 'Everything begins with the sound.' Further he says that Avalokiteshvara has the capacity to listen to all kinds of sounds. He can also utter five different kinds of sounds that can heal the world.The first is the Wonderful Sound, the sound of the wonders of life that are calling you. This is the sound of the birds, of the rain, and so on.The second sound is the Sound of the One Who Observes the World. This is the sound of listening, the sound of silence.The third sound is the transcendental sound, which has a long history in Indian spiritual thought. The tradition is that the sound om has the innate power to create the world. The story goes that the cosmos, the world, the universe was created by that sound. The Christian Gospel of John has the same idea, 'In the beginning there was the word' (John 1:1). According to the Vedas, the oldest Hindu texts, that world-creating word, a mystic syllable, sacred mantra 'om.' In Indian Vedic tradition, this sound is the ultimate reality, or God. In an Islamic perspective, when Allah created Al-Qalam (the pen), He, Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, said, 'Write everything that will happen!'Many modern astronomers have come to believe something similar. They have been looking for the beginning of time, the beginning of the cosmos, and they hypothesize that the very beginning of the universe was 'the big bang.'The fourth sound is the Sound of the Rising Tide. This is a symbolic sound. The sound that can clear away misunderstanding, remove affliction, and transform everything. It’s penetrating and effective.The fifth sound is the Sound That Transcends All Sounds of the World. This is the sound of impermanence, a reminder not to get caught up in or too attached to particular words or sounds.If you can find silence within yourself, you can hear these five sounds.Well, that's Thich Nhat Hanh's perspective. Another perspective suggests by Cecile Malaspina. She writes that it has become commonplace to use the word noise, almost with inverted comas, in a host of contexts unrelated to sound, often in opposition to information. It is thus not the din of the trading floor that interests us when we talk about noise in finance, but the uncertainty related to random variations in the stock exchange. Noise has become a concept intrinsic to the statistical analysis of the variability of data in almost every domain of empirical enquiry. Even acoustics can be argued to have fully emerged only during the 1950s, when noise could be represented as graphs of the frequencies and amplitudes of transitory signal changes over time. That these two dimensions of the conceptualizations of noise, as sound and as random variation, speak to each other without being reducible to one another.Noise always, says Malaspina, appears to occupy the negative place of a dichotomy, be it in that of order and disorder, of physical work and the dispersion of energy in the state of entropy, or of the norm and the abnormal. In other words, noise is at best associated with the absence of order, of work or of the norm—be it the statistical, moral or aesthetic norm—and at worst, noise is identified as a threat to the norm and subversive of work and order: a perturbation, a loss of energy available for work, a parasite. Noise is thus a word that implicitly plays on the whole register of notion, idea and concept and does so by mobilizing linguistic, historical, sociopolitical and not least of all epistemological registers.Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein suggest that noise is a flaw in our 'judgment'. Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise. A general property of noise is that you can recognize and measure it while knowing nothing about the target or bias. When physicians offer different diagnoses for the same patient, we can study their disagreement without knowing what ails the patient. When film executives estimate the market for a movie, we can study the variability of their answers without knowing how much the film eventually made or even if it was produced at all. Bias is the star of the show. Noise is a bit player, usually offstage. We don’t need to know who is right to measure how much the judgments of the same case vary. All we have to do to measure noise is look at the back of the target. In real-world decisions, the amount of noise is often scandalously high.So, what is the right level of noise? The right level is not zero. In some areas, it just isn’t feasible to eliminate noise. In other areas, it is too expensive to do so. In still other areas, efforts to reduce noise would compromise important competing values.Then, exploring the Night, I'll get into the 'Nightlife'. Various activities exist here. But, why should we care about the night, least of all nightlife? Jordi Nofre and Adam Eldridge suggest that fears about the loss of the night sky due to excessive illumination, the loss of nightlife venues or the muddying of the boundaries that separate night and day, have become common subjects of debate and tell us as a good deal about what it is we think the night should be and for whom: a time of play, rest, work or darkness are all equally competing discourses about cities after dark. At the very least, there is little evidence that nightlife even exists beyond a few central streets in most cities, and his own research has found surprisingly little evidence for a clear expansion in night-time employment.There is little evidence that nightlife even exists beyond a few central streets in most cities, and there is little evidence for a clear expansion in night-time employment. We have perhaps been guilty of assuming that town and city centres in so-called developed Western economies are uniformly open and buzzing twenty-four hours a day and that simply because we can drink, dance or shop at all hours we do so.As we advance into the night, the options on offer decrease, and the city shrinks and seems to condense itself into a few clusters of streets where we find concentrations of illumination and animation’. Cities often characterised as 24/7 would be more accurately referred to as 24/2. In many cities, it is perhaps true that the night is a time when most people sleep or conduct domestic tasks. The nigh t is expensive, and any sense of social and generational diversity is illusory’.The urban night remains articulated with fear and risk, but it has equally become articulated with modernity, progress, cosmopolitanism and urbanity. London has had a night-bus service for just over a century, but when the city’s Underground tube network opened throughout the night on weekends in 2016, there was a sense of pride, a feeling that London had finally joined other important modern cities like Tokyo or New York. The ability to shop, visit the gym, attend a night class or have a haircut seems to have become contemporary markers of progress and modernity.Not only in London, Nihad H. Čengić and Jordi Martín-Díaz presents that the evening and night-time economy in post-socialist Sarajevo has expanded and developed since the end of the Bosnian War (1992–1995). This is due to a combined effect of socialist economic practice and liberalisation policies promoted by international actors who have intervened in the peace-building mission. The Bosnian capital hosted the majority of international organisations operating in the country throughout and after the war, and the presence of numerous international soldiers, diplomats, policymakers and other foreign actors has favoured the expansion and commoditisation of nightlife.The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a flourishing of night-time leisure in Sarajevo. While in many western European capitalist cities there was a rapid and intense process of expansion and commoditisation of youth leisure during the Swinging Sixties, socialist cities showed profound differences in the conception, meaning and semiotics of ‘leisure time’.The night is important for reasons beyond whatever market benefits it might entail; there are spaces, places and networks that operate at night to which we feel a sense of belonging, places that are crucial to the formation of our identities, to emerging political movements, to socialising and leisure. Whether referring to the venues associated with minority ethnic communities, or our own local pub, nightlife serves as a context for a range of social, political and cultural movements. When venues or even entire areas are threatened, it feels as if a part of our own biography is being erased. Without wanting to paint an overly romantic picture of the night, maybe there was a time when it did not feel so commodified and so reducible to market-led discourses and rationales.Over the past two decades, much of the research into alcohol consumption has been written in the context of the expanding night-time economy, which itself tends to focus on urban inner-city areas, Samantha Wilson writes. While research has been undertaken into rural drinking geographies, holiday destinations and drinking at home, very little has been said about public drinking practices in suburbia, especially among young people. Specific sensory atmospheres constituted by smell, light and darkness, sound and temperature are very important to young people’s suburban drinking choices. Young people are not passive to such atmospheres; they are active agents with the capacity to craft their own drinkscapes, drinking practices and drinking experiences.Recreational settings such as nightclubs have become, since the 1990s, privileged sites for drug use and experimentation among young people. There is evidence that drug use is higher among particular demographics and that club drugs play an important role in youth socialisation.The economic, social, political, climate and urban facilities influence the way people use cities, both before and after dark. Nightlife has becoming into an industry, as in people who have worked in nightlife—use terms like 'industry night' and ask questions like, 'Are you in the industry?' to negotiate insider or outsider status. 'Civilization has a tendency to repeat its own mistakes,' says Kevin Tucker.Then, passing through the 'Noise', I will come to the stage of the Silence. We'll discuss about Silence in the next session. Bi 'idhnillah."While waiting for the Moon who hadn't been arrived, the Lotus sang,I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain,coming down on a sunny day *)
Citations & References:
- Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw, The Quantum Universe (And Why Anything Can Happen, Does), 2011, DaCapo Press
- Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw, Why E=mc2 (And Why We Should Care?), 2009, DaCapo Press
- Brian Cox & Andrew Cohen, Forces of Nature, 2017, William Collins
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise, 2015, HarperOne
- Cecile Malaspina, An Epistomology of Noise, 2018, Bloomsbury Academic
- Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, 2021, Little, Brown Spark
- Jordi Nofre & Adam Eldridge (Ed.), Exploring Nightlife: Space, Society and Governance, 2018, Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
- Kenneth Sebastian León, Corrupt Capital: Alcohol, Nightlife, and Crimes of the Powerful, 2021, Routledge
*) "Have You Ever Seen the Rain" written by John Cameron Fogerty
