“... when we trace back the origin of the inevitable idea where we landed, we become aware that many avenues did indeed take us there simultaneously. The concept of polarization, that I am just starting to work on, is a case in point. It comes from a dream where the name L.P. Rosen is signaled to me by an index finder on a book, and later from the discovery that a person by that name is one of the collaborators in multiple essays on radio astronomy. It also comes from a concept of the Yanomami indians, where the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground is tantamount to invoking spirits from the past: the DNA from a distant, buried origin of Mother Earth. It comes from a perceptual experience drawn from living in constant relationship with noise, through which the experience of apophenia is activated—which entails reading the world as an infinite code, or capturing weak signals from the universe to scan their meanings. It also comes from a child’s fascination with the rainbow effect of gasoline on water; or from a navigation technique used both by the Vikings and by beetles; or from Carl Sagan’s novel Contact and its multiple clues about the moment when cutting-edge developments in the science of radio astronomy would turn cosmology into a precision science. It also comes from a desire to reach the ground zero of perception... part of the curriculum I have gone through with Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum in Mexico or with the Taitas (shamans) of the lower Putumayo region of Colombia. This University sets forth a question about how images and objects are formed in our consciousness.

All avenues were leading to the same place".

In the novel Contact, the intelligent pattern captured by SETI’s (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) network of radio antennas and processors first reveals a pulse. From the pulse to the recognition of an intelligent sequence of prime numbers that confirm contact with a form of Intelligence; from there to the realization that there is a compressed audiovisual which ends up being Adolf Hitler’s speech during the Olympic Games in Munich; and from there to the discovery of a binary code which once unraveled reveals an architectural blueprint for the construction of a machine that will open a portal for time travel. Carl Sagan’s clue about polarization in the novel when it is itself decoded—is the fact that within that very “quality of light” we would eventually be able to create an apparatus to travel through time, beyond any science fictional imagination. The images of the Big Bang that have been achieved in recent years are exactly that: proof that we have traveled through time, all the way to the minutes after the Big Bang. Now we only need to realize to what extent this is not just an exercise of representation.