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DJ Hairy Larry Presents Hairy Larry Playing Noumenology
From The Archives Of Something Blue 2025-01-12

Thanks Marty, today I’m going to improvise jazz piano on a song inspired by Immanuel Kant.

Now Immanuel Kant was an influential philosopher back in the 18th century and he remains influential today. Kant created a dichotomy between phenomenon and noumena where phenomenon applies to things we can perceive with the senses and noumena are things that cannot be perceived. So I wrote this song called “Noumenolgy” about the study of things that cannot be perceived.

At first I thought this would be an ideal academic tenure, I mean, who could prove you wrong? But further thought led me to many scientists who deal with noumena on a daily basis.

Take cosmology for instance, the study of the origins of the universe. Cosmologists have come up with the idea of the big bang, something that happened about 14 billion years ago. They check how fast the universe is expanding to come up with a number like that. And they keep building bigger and bigger telescopes because the farther away something is the longer it took for it’s light to get to us which means we’re really looking back into the past when we look at distant galaxies.

Well, the big bang is noumenal. I mean, nobody’s going to actually perceive it. So you could say that some cosmologists are, in fact, noumenologists.

Or take particle physics. String theory, where we look at the stuff that makes protons and electrons, started as a mathematical exercise without proof in the real world. Definitely noumenologically inclined.

But those particle physicists kept building bigger and bigger cyclotrons banging atoms together to see what escaped and they started detecting the mathematically predicted sub-particles. I read last week that they discovered a particle that has mass going in one direction and no mass going in the other. Now, how does that work?

Moving on from philosophy, cosmology, and physics to noumena that actually affect ordinary people. Songwriters have written more songs about it than any other subject. Stories about it finance the publishing industry allowing them to publish books on philosophy and cosmology. And Jesus preached about it as his core message. Of course, I’m talking about love, something everyone experiences that has no phenomenal existence.

You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. What is love? remains a valid philosophical question. So there we are. Back to Kant.

On the song “Noumenology” I scat sing with a bebop and a doowop replacing actual words. So I got to thinking this morning, maybe I should write a lyric? Maybe about a cosmologist and a physicist who fall in love. Or even better a cosmologist and a physicist who bond over their shared their love for noumenology.

Which brings us to the big question. Just what is up with Hairy Larry’s brain and how does he come up with this stuff? I’m going to reveal my secret. Sometimes it’s dreams. And sometimes, in the morning, when I’m not ready to get out of bed, you know what I mean, you’ve been there, my mind just goes tick tick tick and the next thing you know I’ve written another podcast.

So now, from my “Hairy Larry Livestreams” album, here I am scat singing to “Noumenology”.

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