or The Injustice of Scales
Dedicated to Kenneth G. Wilson
The scales tip heavily
Under the weight so heavy of
The day-to-day
Nay, -- nay
The second-to-second's heaviness
For it's clear in the scale of seconds
How one moment leads to the second
So regularly
Almost as if regulated
Causality's in sight from second to second
This petty scale belies the higher symmetries
Those symmetries that come neither from order nor disorder
The permutability of minds
The permeability of skulls
The symmetric interchangeability of abstraction and intuition belied
Renormalize!
Decimate!
Flow upscale!
Let me teach you how:
Start at the scale of second-to-second
Then consider the two seconds combined
Lose track of the crud (Don't sweat the small stuff)
Keep track of the crux (Keep your eye on the ball)
And as the seconds consolidate -- reiterate
As you escalate, consolidate longer periods systematically
But don't consolidate them mechanically
Deliberate studiously
Intuit sensitively
And when you've consolidates your findings -- reiterate (to reiterate)
When you've scaled the critical height and observe
Observe critically, and the differences vanish
Between the hour-to-hour
And the day-to-day
And the year-to-year
And the generation-to-generation
Then you will have reached the critical point of understanding
The nominal scales that keep the epochs apart come apart
You will become scale-free
You will take on a scaling form
With the injustice of scales you will expose the identity
Of the city and the block
Of the dollar and the cent
Of the epic and the haiku
Of the rise of humanity in history and the rise of humanity in the child
And more profound symmetries emerge from the flow
And as you swim down the flow, your symmetries glisten like scales
And in relating the symmetries you become the exponent
The exponent of scale-freed thought
Critical to the scaling form
The critical exponent