references.html

<h2>Random references</h2>

<blockquote>
"I don’t believe in I Ching."
- John Winston Ono Lennon (1940-1980)
</blockquote>

<p>I Ching is a fundamental classic text of the Eastern Chinese
culture, and as such it has exercises a powerful fascination on
  several key figures of the Western culture.

<p>
  As noted by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716), one of the
  first European sinophile, I Ching is the first text in the human
  history which developed the concept of binary notation. Leibniz was
  the founder of the modern binary calculus and did not fail to
  observe that the very idea at the base of hexagrams is that of a
  binary sequence (read for
  example <a href="http://www.its.caltech.edu/~sdoroudi/LeibChi.pdf">this
  paper</a>).
</p>

<p><img src="images/leibniz.jpeg" alt="Leibniz portrait"
        align="center">Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz portrait</p>

<p>While I Ching authors seem to possess the idea of binary sequence,
  it is quite sure that they didn't devise a way of using binary
  sequences for performing computations.

<p>Back to our days, the first time I heard about I Ching was in a
  short novel by Frederick Pohl which was named "Gold at the Starbow's
  End" and was published in 1972, where a crew of super-clever eight
  men and women was sent to a planet in the Alpha Centauri solar
  system to discover that the planet actually doesn't exist, and in
  the travel they develop advanced mathematics and technology based on
  the discovery of interpretation of I Ching, which they play by using
  the bones of their own toes, surpassing by far normal human
  knowledge and achieving a state of semi-gods.
</p>

<p>
  I Ching is used as plotting device in the novel "The man in the high
  castle" by P. H. Dick (1928 - 1982) in 1963. In this novel the I
  Ching is used repeatedly by the various characters as a divination
  device. The novel is located in a post second war world where the
  German Nazists won the war and managed to gain overall control. San
  Francisco, where the novel plot is mostly based, is controlled by
  Japanese which brought with them the influence of the Eastern
  culture, and in particular of the I Ching (which is quite diffused
  in Japan as well as in China.
</p>

<p>
  <img src="images/phdick.jpeg" align="center" alt="P.H. Dick
  photo">P. H. Dick
</p>

<p>
  I Ching exercised a deep influence on Alistair Crowley (1875 -
  1947), the famous occultist. He was impressed by the I Ching system
  that at some point he wrote his own translation (which seems a short
  reinterpreted version of the Wilhelm/Bayes translation) as libri 216
  of his own so-called "sacri libri".
</p>

<p><img src="images/crowley.jpeg" alt="Aleister Crowley"
        align="center">A photo of young Aleister Crowley</p>

<p>Finally I Ching has a predominant role in Terence McKenna (1946 -
  2000) <a href="http://www.fractal-timewave.com/">Timewave zero
  theory</a>, where he links I Ching to a computation system which
  should be able to compute the novelty elements emerging in the
  evolution of the Universe (which should culminate in 2012 according
  to his mathematics). The theory was elaborated in 1975 under the
  effect of psychedelic drugs, and used the I Ching hexagram sequence:
  <blockquote>
    the principal device of the Timewave Zero theory is a fractal function
    (constructed using numerical values derived from the King Wen Sequence
    of I Ching hexagrams) which maps time onto 'novelty'
  </blockquote>
</p>

<p>For a more detailed report of the relationships between I Ching and
  the Timewave zero theory check
  also <a href="http://www.december212012.com/articles/I-Ching/Time-Wave-Zero.htm">this
  article</a>.
</p>