The Man in the Moon is struck by a spacecraft in the 1902 fantasy film Le Voyage dans la Lune
The Man in the Moon refers to any of several pareidolic images of a human face, head or body that certain traditions recognize in the disc of the full moon. The images are composed of the dark areas of the lunar maria, or "seas" and the lighter highlands of the lunar surface.
Origin
Germanic woodcutter
There are various explanations for how the Man in the Moon came to be.
A longstanding European tradition holds that the man was banished
to the Moon for some crime. Christian lore commonly held that he is the
man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath and sentenced by God to
death by stoning in the book of Numbers XV.32–36. Some Germanic cultures thought he was a woodcutter found working on the Sabbath. There is a Roman legend that he is a sheep-thief.
One medieval Christian tradition claims him to be Cain, the Wanderer, forever doomed to circle the Earth. Dante's Inferno alludes to this:
For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
On either hemisphere, touching the wave
Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight
The moon was round.
But tell, I pray thee, whence the gloomy spots
Upon this body, which below on earth
Give rise to talk of Cain in fabling quaint?
There is also a Mediaeval Jewish tradition that the image of Jacob is engraved on the Moon.
John Lyly says in the prologue to his Endymion (1591), "There liveth none under the sunne, that knows what to make of the man in the moone."
In Norse mythology, Máni
is the male personification of the Moon who crosses the sky in a
horse-drawn carriage. He is continually pursued by the Great Wolf Hati who catches him at Ragnarök. Máni simply means "Moon".
In Haida mythology,
the figure represents a boy gathering sticks. The boy's father had told
him the Moon's light would brighten the night, allowing the chore to be
completed. Not wanting to gather sticks, the boy complained and
ridiculed the Moon. As punishment for his disrespect, the boy was taken
from Earth and trapped on the Moon.
There is a traditional European belief that the Man in the Moon enjoyed drinking, especially claret. An old ballad runs (original spelling):
Our man in the moon drinks clarret,
With powder-beef, turnep, and carret.
If he doth so, why should not you
Drink until the sky looks blew?
In the English Middle Ages and renaissance, the Moon was held to be
the god of drunkards, and at least three London taverns were named "The
Man in the Moone".
The man in the Moon is named in an early dated English nursery rhyme:
The man in the moon came tumbling down
And asked his way to Norwich;
He went by the south and burnt his mouth
With supping cold pease porridge.
Examples and occurrence globally
One tradition sees a figure of a man carrying a wide burden on his back. He is sometimes seen as accompanied by a small dog. Various cultures recognise other examples of lunar pareidolia, such as the Moon rabbit.
In the Northern Hemisphere, a common Western perception of the face has it that the figure's eyes are Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, its nose is Sinus Aestuum, and its open mouth is Mare Nubium and Mare Cognitum. This particular human face can also be seen in tropical regions on both sides of the equator.
However, the Moon orientation associated with the face is observed less
frequently—and eventually not at all—as one moves toward the South Pole.
Conventionalized illustrations of the Man in the Moon seen in
Western art often show a very simple face in the full moon, or a human
profile in the crescent moon, corresponding to no actual markings. Some
depict a man with a face turned away from the viewer on the ground, for
example when viewed from North America, with Jesus Christ's crown shown as the lighter ring around Mare Imbrium. Another common one is a cowled Death's head
looking down at Earth, with the black lava rock 'hood' around the white
dust bone of the skull, and also forming the eye sockets.
"The Man in the Moon" can also refer to a mythological character
said to live on or in the Moon, but who is not necessarily represented
by the markings on the face of the Moon. An example is Yue-Laou, from Chinese tradition; another is Aiken Drum from Scotland.
The
Man in the Moon is made up of various lunar maria (which ones depend on
the pareidolic image seen). These vast, flat spots on the Moon are
called "maria" or "seas" because, for a long time, astronomers believed
they were large bodies of water. They are large areas formed by lava
that covered up old craters and then cooled, becoming smooth, basalt rock.
The near side of the Moon, containing these maria that make up the man, is always facing Earth. This is due to a tidal locking
or synchronous orbit. Thought to have occurred because of the
gravitational forces partially caused by the Moon's oblong shape, its
rotation has slowed to the point where it rotates exactly once on each
trip around the Earth. This causes the near side of the Moon to always
turn its face toward Earth.
Gallery
Near full moon over Berlin, Germany, in December 2015, approximately 30 minutes after moonrise
Common interpretation of the Man in the Moon as seen from the Northern Hemisphere
Modeled appearance for same longitude 30 minutes after moonrise
Astral configurations in astrology
represent for Jung an example of synchronicity, that is, of a parallel,
non-causal relationship between the development of celestial phenomena
and those marked by terrestrial time.
Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologistCarl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.
During his career, Jung furnished several different definitions of the term, defining synchronicity as an "acausal connecting (togetherness) principle;" "meaningful coincidence;" "acausal parallelism;" and as a "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved."
Jung's belief was that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning. Events connected by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of causality, which does not generally contradict the Axiom of Causality but in specific cases can lead to prematurely giving up causal explanation.
Carl Gustav Jung
Though introducing the concept as early as the 1920s, Jung gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture. In 1952, Jung published a paper titled "Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge" ('Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle') in a volume which also contained a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was sometimes critical of Jung's ideas.
Jung used the concept in arguing for the existence of the paranormal. Also a believer in the paranormal, Arthur Koestler wrote extensively on synchronicity in his 1972 book The Roots of Coincidence. Moreover, considering that multiple synchronic experiences contribute to the early formation of schizophrenicdelusions, distinguishing which of these synchronicities are morbid, according to Jung, is a matter of interpretation.
How
are we to recognize acausal combinations of events, since it is
obviously impossible to examine all chance happenings for their
causality? The answer to this is that acausal events may be expected
most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to
be inconceivable.…
It is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP [extrasensory perception],
or the fact of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy. This
makes an end of the causal explanation as well, for "effect" cannot be
understood as anything except a phenomenon of energy. Therefore it
cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in
time, a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I
have picked on the term "synchronicity" to designate a hypothetical
factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation.
Roderick Main, in the introduction to his 1997 book Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, wrote:
The culmination of Jung's
lifelong engagement with the paranormal is his theory of synchronicity,
the view that the structure of reality includes a principle of acausal
connection which manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of
meaningful coincidences. Difficult, flawed, prone to misrepresentation,
this theory none the less remains one of the most suggestive attempts
yet made to bring the paranormal
within the bounds of intelligibility. It has been found relevant by
psychotherapists, parapsychologists, researchers of spiritual experience
and a growing number of non-specialists. Indeed, Jung's writings in
this area form an excellent general introduction to the whole field of
the paranormal.
Jung felt synchronicity to be a principle that had explanatory power towards his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. It described a governing dynamic which underlies the whole of human experience and history—social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. The emergence of the synchronistic paradigm was a significant move away from Cartesian dualism towards an underlying philosophy of double-aspect theory. Some argue this shift was essential in bringing theoretical coherence to Jung's earlier work.
Even at Jung's presentation of his work on synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture, his ideas on synchronicity were evolving. On Feb. 25, 1953, in a letter to Swiss author and journalist Carl Seelig, who wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, Jung wrote:
Professor
Einstein was my guest on several occasions at dinner.… These were very
early days when Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity
[and] It was he who first started me on thinking about a possible
relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.
More than 30 years later the stimulus led to my relation with the
physicist professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.
Jung
believed life was not a series of random events but rather an
expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus.
This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded
in a universal wholeness and that the realisation of this was more than
just an intellectual exercise, but also had elements of a spiritual
awakening.
From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar
characteristics of an "intervention of grace." Jung also believed that
in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of
dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious
thinking to greater wholeness.
Forms
The occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time can take three forms:
a) the coincidence of a certain
psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is
perceived to take place simultaneously.
b) the coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm
(dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful
reflection of a "synchronistic," objective event that took place more or
less simultaneously, but at a distance.
c) the same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future
and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to
it.
— Carl Jung, "Résumé", Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960)
Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event in his book Synchronicity:
My example concerns a young woman
patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be
psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she
always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had
provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a
highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical"
idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her
rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine
myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn
up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she
had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my
back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an
impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a
golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling
me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the
window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect
that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious
effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I
opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it
flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata),
whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I
handed the beetle to my patient with the words, "Here is your scarab."
This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke
the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be
continued with satisfactory results.
French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated to some plum pudding
by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer
encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to
order some, but the waiter told him that the last dish had already been
served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fontgibu. Many
years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered
plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that
only de Fontgibu was missing to make the setting complete—and in the
same instant, the now-senile de Fontgibu entered the room, having got the wrong address.
Wolfgang Pauli
After describing some examples, Jung wrote: "When coincidences pile
up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them – for the
greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its
character, the more improbable it becomes."
In his book Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), George Gamow writes about Wolfgang Pauli, who was apparently considered a person particularly associated with synchronicity events. Gamow whimsically refers to the "Pauli effect," a mysterious phenomenon which is not understood on a purely materialistic basis, and probably never will be. The following anecdote is told:
It is well known that theoretical
physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they
touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something
usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the
threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected
with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory
in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a
complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed.
Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and,
after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp.
Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the
mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at
the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not,
but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the
Pauli Effect!
Relationship with causality
Causality, when defined expansively (as, for instance, in the "mystic psychology" book The Kybalion, or in the platonicKantianAxiom of Causality),
states that "nothing can happen without being caused." Such an
understanding of causality may be incompatible with synchronicity. In
contrast, other definitions of causality (e.g., the neo-Humean definition) are concerned only with the relation of cause to effect, and are thus compatible with synchronicity. There are also opinions that hold cause to be internal when there is no external observable cause.
It is also pointed out that, since Jung took into consideration only the narrow definition of causality—only the efficient cause—his notion of acausality is also narrow and so is not applicable to final and formal causes as understood in Aristotelian or Thomist systems. Either the final causality is inherent in synchronicity, as it leads to individuation; or synchronicity can be a kind of replacement for final causality. However, such finalism or teleology is considered to be outside the domain of modern science.
Explanations
Jung's theory of synchronicity is nowadays regarded as pseudoscientific, as it is not based on experimental evidence, and its explananda are easily accounted for by our current understanding of probability theory and human psychology.
Mathematics
Jung and his followers (e.g., Marie-Louise von Franz) share in common the belief that numbers are the archetypes of order, and the major participants in synchronicity creation. This hypothesis has implications that are relevant to some of the “chaotic” phenomena in nonlinear dynamics. Dynamical systems theory
has provided a new context from which to speculate about synchronicity
because it gives predictions about the transitions between emergent
states of order and nonlocality. This view, however, is not part of mainstream mathematical thought.
Statistics and probability theory
Mainstream mathematics argues that statistics and probability theory (exemplified in, e.g., Littlewood's law or the law of truly large numbers) suffice to explain any purported synchronistic events as mere coincidences.
The law of truly large numbers, for instance, states that in large
enough populations, any strange event is arbitrarily likely to happen by
mere chance. However, some proponents of synchronicity question whether
it is even sensible in principle to try to evaluate synchronicity
statistically. Jung himself and von Franz argued that statistics work
precisely by ignoring what is unique about the individual case, whereas
synchronicity tries to investigate that uniqueness.
Social and behavioural science
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias
is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that
confirms one's preconceptions, and avoids information and
interpretations that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or is a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study, or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking,
as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only
to evidence that challenges a preconceived idea, but not to evidence
that supports it.
Charles Tart
sees danger in synchronistic thinking: "This danger is the temptation
to mental laziness.… [I]t would be very tempting to say, 'Well, it's
synchronistic, it's forever beyond my understanding,' and so
(prematurely) give up trying to find a causal explanation."
Upon initial publication, the work of Jung, such as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, were received as problematic by his fellow psychologists. Fritz Levi, in his 1952 Neue Schweizer Rundschau
(New Swiss Observations) review, critiqued Jung's theory of
synchronicity as vague in determinability of synchronistic events,
saying that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of "magic
causality" to which such an acausal principle as synchronicity would be
related. He also questioned the theory's usefulness.
Apophenia
In psychology and sociology, the term apophenia is used for the mistaken detection of a pattern or meaning in random or meaningless data. Skeptics, such as Robert Todd Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary, argue that the perception of synchronicity is better explained as apophenia. Primates use pattern detection in their form of intelligence, and this can lead to erroneous identification of non-existent patterns.
A famous example of this is the fact that human-face
recognition is so robust, and based on such a basic archetype (i.e.,
two dots and a line contained in a circle), that human beings are very
prone to identify faces in random data all through their environment,
like the "man in the moon," or faces in wood grain, an example of the visual form of apophenia known as pareidolia.
Religion
Many
people believe that the Universe, angels, other spirits, or God cause
synchronicity. Among the general public, divine intervention is the most
widely accepted explanation for these meaningful coincidences.
Even some scientists see spiritual or mystical forces behind
synchronicities and are asking if it has anything in common with
pathology.
Research
Research on the processes and effects of synchronicity is a subfield of psychological study. Modern scientific techniques, such as mathematical modeling, were used to observe chance correlations of synchronicities with Fibonacci time patterns.
As far as methodology is concerned, all empirical methods can be used to study synchronicity scientifically: quantitative, qualitative,
and combination methods. Most studies of synchronicity, however, have
been limited to qualitative approaches, which tend to collect data
expressed in non-mathematical representations such as descriptions,
placing less focus on estimating the strength and form of relationships.
On
the other hand, skeptics (e.g. most psychologists) tend to dismiss the
psychological experience of coincidences as just yet one more
demonstration of how irrational people can be. Irrationality in this
context means an association between the experience of coincidences and
biased cognition in terms of poor probabilistic reasoning and a
propensity for paranormal beliefs.
A 2016 survey (with 226 respondents) of the frequency
of synchronicity in clinical settings found that 44% of therapists
reported synchronicity experiences in the therapeutic setting; and 67%
felt that synchronicity experiences could be useful for therapy.
Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".
He described the early stages of delusional thought as
self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as
opposed to hallucinations.
Apophenia has come to imply a human propensity to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds in random stimuli.
A common example is the perception of a face within an inanimate object—the headlights and grill of an automobile may appear to be "grinning". People around the world see the "Man in the Moon". People sometimes see the face of a religious figure in a piece of toast or in the grain of a piece of wood. There is strong evidence that the use of psychedelic drugs tends to induce or enhance pareidolia.
Pareidolia usually occurs as a result of the fusiform face area—which
is the part of the human brain responsible for seeing faces—mistakenly
interpreting an object, shape or configuration with some kind of
perceived "face-like" features as being a face.
In statistics, apophenia is an example of a type I error – the false identification of patterns in data. It may be compared with a so-called false positive in other test situations.
Finance
The problem of apophenia in finance has been addressed in academic journals.
More specifically, within the world of finance itself, the examples
most prone to apophenia are trading, structuring, sales and
compensation.
Related terms
In contrast to an epiphany, an apophany (i.e., an instance of apophenia) does not provide insight into the nature of reality
nor its interconnectedness, but is a "process of repetitively and
monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding
experiential field". Such meanings are entirely self-referential,
solipsistic, and paranoid—"being observed, spoken about, the object of
eavesdropping, followed by strangers".
Thus the English term "apophenia" has a somewhat different meaning than
that which Conrad defined when he coined the term "Apophänie".
"Patternicity"
In 2008, Michael Shermer coined the word "patternicity", defining it as "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise".
"Agenticity"
In The Believing Brain
(2011), Shermer wrote that humans have "the tendency to infuse patterns
with meaning, intention, and agency", which he called "agenticity".
Clustering illusion
A clustering illusion
is a type of cognitive bias in which a person sees a pattern in a
random sequence of numbers or events. Many theories have been disproved
as a result of this bias being brought up.
In 1985, a study of the "hot-hand fallacy"
by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallon and Amos Tversky found that the idea
of basketball players possessing a "hot hand" (tending to shoot better
in streaks) was false, their analysis providing "no evidence for a
positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots."
Another case, during the early 2000s, involved the occurrence of
breast cancer amongst the female employees at ABC Studios in Queensland.
A study found that the incidence of breast cancer at the studios was
six times higher than the rate in the rest of Queensland. However, an
examination found no correlation between the heightened incidence and
any factors related to the site, genetic or lifestyle factors of the
employees.
Causes
Apophenia
is commonly referred to as an error in perception. Although there is no
confirmed reason as to why it occurs, there are some respected
theories.
Models of pattern recognition
Pattern recognition
is a cognitive process that involves retrieving information either from
long-term, short-term or working memory and matching it with
information from stimuli. However, there are three different ways in
which this may happen and go wrong, resulting in apophenia.
Template matching
The
stimulus is compared to templates or copies in the long-term memory.
These templates are often stored as a result of past learning or
educational experiences. For example, D, d, D and d are all recognized as the same letter.
These detection routines, when applied on more complex data sets
(such as, for example, a painting or clusters of data) can result in the
wrong template being matched. A false positive detection will result in
apophenia.
Prototype matching
This is similar to template matching, except for the fact that an exact match is not needed.
An example of this would be to look at an animal such as a tiger and
instead of recognizing that it was a tiger (template matching) knowing
that it was a cat (prototype matching) based on the known information
about the characteristics of a cat.
This type of pattern recognition
can result in apophenia based on the fact that since the brain is not
looking for exact matches, it can pick up some characteristics of a
match and assume it fits. This is more common with pareidolia than data
collection.
Feature analysis
The stimulus is broken down into its features and allowed to process the information. This model of pattern recognition comes from the result of four stages, which are: detection, pattern dissection, feature comparison in memory, and recognition.
Evolution
One
of the explanations put forth by evolutionary psychologists for
apophenia is that it is not a flaw in the cognition of human brains but
rather something that has come about through years of need. The study of
this topic is referred to as error management theory. One of the most accredited studies in this field is Skinner's box and superstition.
This experiment involved taking a hungry pigeon, placing it in a box
and releasing a food pellet at a random time. The pigeon received a
food pellet while performing some action; and so, rather than
attributing the arrival of the pellet to randomness, it repeated its
action, and continued to do so until another pellet fell. As the pigeon
increased the number of times it performed the action, it gained the
impression that it also increased the times it was "rewarded" with a
pellet, although the release in fact remained entirely random.
Isaac Newton arrived at his theory of gravitation by an epiphany when he saw an apple fall to the ground.
An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphanea,
"manifestation, striking appearance") is an experience of a sudden and
striking realization. Generally the term is used to describe scientific
breakthrough, religious or philosophical discoveries, but it can apply
in any situation in which an enlightening realization allows a problem
or situation to be understood from a new and deeper perspective.
Epiphanies are studied by psychologists and other scholars, particularly those attempting to study the process of innovation.
Epiphanies are relatively rare occurrences and generally follow a
process of significant thought about a problem. Often they are
triggered by a new and key piece of information, but importantly, a
depth of prior knowledge is required to allow the leap of understanding. Famous epiphanies include Archimedes's discovery of a method to determine the volume of an irregular object ("Eureka!") and Isaac Newton's realization that a falling apple and the orbiting moon are both pulled by the same force.
History
The word epiphany originally referred to insight through the divine. Today, this concept is more often used without such connotations, but a popular implication remains that the epiphany is supernatural, as the discovery seems to come suddenly from the outside.
The word's secular usage may owe much of its popularity to Irish novelist James Joyce.
The Joycean epiphany has been defined as "a sudden spiritual
manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable
phase of the mind — the manifestation being out of proportion to the
significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it." The author used epiphany as a literary device within each entry of his short story collection Dubliners
(1914); his protagonists came to sudden recognitions that changed their
view of themselves and/or their social conditions. Joyce had first
expounded on epiphany's meaning in the fragment Stephen Hero, although this was only published posthumously in 1944. For the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, epiphany or a manifestation of the divine is seen in another's face.
In traditional and pre-modern cultures, initiation rites and mystery religions have served as vehicles of epiphany, as well as the arts. The Greek dramatists and poets would, in the ideal, induct the audience into states of catharsis or kenosis, respectively. In modern times an epiphany lies behind the title of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch,
a drug-influenced state, as Burroughs explained, "a frozen moment when
everyone sees what is at the end of the fork." Both the DadaistMarcel Duchamp and the Pop ArtistAndy Warhol would invert expectations by presenting commonplace objects or graphics as works of fine art (for example a urinal as a fountain),
simply by presenting them in a way no one had thought to do before; the
result was intended to induce an epiphany of "what art is" or is not.
Process
Epiphanies
can come in many different forms, and are often generated by a complex
combination of experience, memory, knowledge, predisposition and
context. A contemporary example of an epiphany in education might
involve the process by which a student arrives at some form of new
insight or clarifying thought.
Despite this popular image, epiphany is the result of significant work
on the part of the discoverer, and is only the satisfying result of a
long process.
The surprising and fulfilling feeling of epiphany is so surprising
because one cannot predict when one's labor will bear fruit, and our
subconscious can play a significant part in delivering the solution; and
is fulfilling because it is a reward for a long period of effort.
Myth
A common myth predicts that most, if not all, innovations occur through epiphanies.
Not all innovations occur through epiphanies; Scott Berkun notes that
"the most useful way to think of an epiphany is as an occasional bonus
of working on tough problems". Most innovations occur without epiphany, and epiphanies often contribute little towards finding the next one. Crucially, epiphany cannot be predicted, or controlled.
Although epiphanies are only a rare occurrence, crowning a
process of significant labor, there is a common myth that epiphanies of
sudden comprehension are commonly responsible for leaps in technology
and the sciences. Famous epiphanies include Archimedes' realization of how to estimate the volume of a given mass, which inspired him to shout "Eureka!" ("I have found it!").
The biographies of many mathematicians and scientists include an
epiphanic episode early in the career, the ramifications of which were
worked out in detail over the following years. For example, allegedly Albert Einstein
was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realizing
that some unseen force in space was making it move. Another, perhaps
better, example from Einstein's life occurred in 1905 after he had spent
an evening unsuccessfully trying to reconcile Newtonian physics and
Maxwell's equations. While taking a streetcar home, he looked behind him
at the receding clocktower in Bern
and realized that if the car sped up close to the speed of light, he
would see the clock slow down; with this thought, he later remarked, "a
storm broke loose in my mind," which would allow him to understand
special relativity. Einstein had a second epiphany two years later in
1907 which he called "the happiest thought of my life" when he imagined
an elevator falling, and realized that a passenger would not be able to
tell the difference between the weightlessness of falling, and the
weightlessness of space - a thought which allowed him to generalize his
theory of relativity to include gravity as a curvature in spacetime. A
similar flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was said to give Charles Darwin his "hunch" (about natural selection),
and Darwin later stated that he always remembered the spot in the road
where his carriage was when the epiphany struck. Another famous epiphany
myth is associated with Isaac Newton's apple story,
and yet another with Nikola Tesla's discovery of a workable alternating
current induction motor. Though such epiphanies might have occurred,
they were almost certainly the result of long and intensive periods of
study those individuals had undertaken, rather than an out-of-the-blue
flash of inspiration about an issue they had not thought about
previously.
Another myth is that epiphany is simply another word for (usually spiritual) vision.
Actually, realism and psychology make epiphany a different mode as
distinguished from vision, even though both vision and epiphany are
often triggered by (sometimes seemingly) irrelevant incidents or
objects.
In religion
In Christianity, the Epiphany refers to a realization that Christ is the Son of God. Western churches generally celebrate the Visit of the Magi as the revelation of the Incarnation of the infant Christ, and commemorate the Feast of the Epiphany
on January 6. Traditionally, Eastern churches, following the Julian
rather than the Gregorian calendar, have celebrated Epiphany (or Theophany) in conjunction with Christ's baptism by John the Baptist
and celebrated it on January 19; however, other Eastern churches have
adopted the Western Calendar and celebrate it on January 6. Some Protestant churches often celebrate Epiphany as a season, extending from the last day of Christmas until either Ash Wednesday, or the Feast of the Presentation on February 2.
In more general terms, the phrase "religious epiphany" is used
when a person realizes their faith, or when they are convinced that an
event or happening was really caused by a deity or being of their faith.
In Hinduism, for example, epiphany might refer to Arjuna's realization that Krishna (incarnation of God serving as his charioteer in the "Bhagavad Gita") is indeed representing the Universe. The Hindu term for epiphany would be bodhodaya, from Sanskrit bodha 'wisdom' and udaya 'rising'. Or in Buddhism, the term might refer to the Buddha obtaining enlightenment under the bodhi tree, finally realizing the nature of the universe, and thus attaining Nirvana. The Zen term kensho also describes this moment, referring to the feeling attendant on realizing the answer to a koan.
1889: Susan La Flesche Picotte became the first Native American woman to become a physician in the United States.
1893: Florence Bascom became the second woman to earn her Ph.D in geology in the United States, and the first woman to receive a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University. Geologists consider her to be the "first woman geologist in this country [America]."
1901: Florence Bascom became the first female geologist to present a paper before the Geological Survey of Washington.
1903: Marie Curie
became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, awarded in Physics, and
went on to also win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She performed
pioneering research in radioactivity, and discovered two elements (polonium and radium).
1912: Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.
1942: American geologist Marguerite Williams
became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in geology in
the United States. She completed her doctorate, entitled A History of Erosion in the Anacostia Drainage Basin, at Catholic University.
1947: Marie Maynard Daly
became the first Black woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in
Chemistry, and went on to perform research that would define how
cholesterol clogged arteries, paving the way for a broad understanding
that diet affects heart health.
1950: Isabella Abbott became the first Native Hawaiian woman to receive a PhD in any science; hers was in botany.
1950: Esther Lederberg was the first to isolate lambda bacteriophage, a DNA virus, from Escherichia coli K-12.
1952: Grace Hopper
completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that
allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. It
was known as the A-0 compiler.
1956: The Wu experiment was a nuclear physics experiment conducted in 1956 by the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, born in China but having become an American citizen in 1954, in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards. That experiment showed that parity could be violated in weak interaction.
1962: Katherine Johnson performed the calculations for the NASA orbital mission, launching John Glenn as the first person into orbit and returning them safely.
1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns."
1992: Edith M. Flanigen became the first woman awarded the Perkin Medal (widely considered the highest honor in American industrial chemistry) for her outstanding achievements in applied chemistry.
The medal especially recognized her syntheses of aluminophosphate and
silicoaluminophosphate molecular sieves as new classes of materials.
2020: Kathryn D. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, descended 35,810 feet to the Challenger Deep, making her the first person to both walk in space and to reach the deepest known point in the ocean.
