Attractive women especially learn very early the importance of eye contact with men, and they learn not to make such eye contact with men in whom they have no interest and wish to avoid. They know the truth of Anthony Hopkins telling Jodi Foster in “The Silence of the Lambs” just as her eyes are drawn to and move over the things she covets in like manner she feels the eyes of men moving over her own body, knowing these men want her. But an attractive woman knows how to let a man know simply by her eyes how to tell him she is interested in him.

While expressions such as “If looks could kill” are well known, there is no denying looks do lead to killing in some instances. There is a very dangerous element involved with eye contact in some circumstances, and one would be far more guarded about such a thing while walking in a dangerous area of the inner cities of America rather than some civilized cocktail party or art gallery, and there is “The Look of Love” which is more than the title of a song.

These “wells and windows of the soul” are the stuff of the supernatural defying all scientific efforts to explain. Someone may say, “Hey, I know that look;” and while they may find the words to describe such a look they cannot explain the look. We may see marked intelligence in the eyes of some while seeing the lack of intelligence in some others. We can distinguish between eyes warm with a kindly disposition and eyes that seem cold, flat and dead, or filled with anger and hatred, and most of us are aware of the meaning “Poker face.” Our eyes often betray our very thoughts, known and read by others; but the “how” of this remains a deep mystery.

Those of us willing to credit the supernatural particularly enjoy the scene in “Phenomenon” where John Travolta makes that pen move across the desk. And we understand Robert Duvall asking John, “Hey, would you do that again.” While stories of telekinesis are popular SciFi fare and though most of us are skeptical of such claims, we still enjoy the titillation of imagining such a thing being possible. And while our sensibilities are jaded in this “modern age,” many of us still enjoy the feats of legerdemain performed on stage. However, the most successful of “magicians” have capitalized on being able to deceive the eyes of those watching; of knowing how to manipulate the way what we see is communicated to our brains, taking advantage of “smoke and mirrors.”

As a pilot I understand how dangerous it is to trust our eyes rather than our instruments while flying, especially in marginal or bad weather. But what of the accident not long ago where a very experienced pilot died because the controls of his plane had been incorrectly rigged in reverse to what they should have been? While doing his run-up prior to taking off I don’t doubt he looked at his control surfaces to see if they were performing properly, but after doing so a thousand times without a problem, a thousand times seeing what he expected to see his eyes did not communicate the difference in this instance to his brain. In other words, he “saw” what he expected to see, not what was actually happening.

The stories are legion of witnesses to various events describing them in different ways, sometimes even contradictory. And we are all familiar with the expression “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” a maxim recognized from the very earliest of human history; what has always been beyond our science to explain is understanding why this is so. And despite the many advances in understanding the structure of our eyes and brain function, the deeper mysteries of what we see and how our eyes communicate to ourselves and others remain.

“Look at me straight in the eye and tell me that” has long been a means of attempting to discern the truthfulness of what someone has said, especially parents of their children. But how some become accomplished liars, controlling what their eyes convey is a mystery.

While the “peeping Tom” is a person despised, we are all familiar with that “All Seeing Eye” on our currency, but just what exactly is it? Theories including those of the occult abound, but the actual beginning and meaning have been long lost and no amount of scholarship has been able to trace these despite the many books and learned treatises on the subject.

But one of the more intriguing questions concerning the power of our eyes to change things has been broached in a new theory of the universe:

Mankind ‘shortening the universe’s life,’ by Roger Highfield, Science Editor UK Telegraph. November 21, 2007. Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too. The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang. But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years. They often illustrate their concerns about what the theory means with mind-boggling experiments, notably Schrodinger’s cat in which, thanks to a fancy experimental set up, the moggy is both alive and dead until someone decides to look, when it either carries on living, or dies. That is, by one interpretation (by another, the universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead one.) New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos. The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe,” Prof Krauss tells New Scientist. The team came to this depressing conclusion by calculating how the energy state of our universe - a kind of summation of all its particles and all their energies - has evolved since the big bang of creation 13.7 billion years ago. Some mathematical theories suggest that, in the very beginning, there was a void that possessed energy but was devoid of substance. Then the void changed, converting energy into the hot matter of the big bang. But the team suggests that the void did not convert as much energy to matter as it could, retaining some, in the form of what we now call dark energy, which now accelerates the expansion of the cosmos…

One should read the entire article to appreciate its full significance, but the gist of it is that scientists continue to make discoveries that contradict long held beliefs about our universe. And much like religion, there is no one size fits all when it comes to interpreting the data.

Trying to make my way through so much of facts and mythologies I concluded a few years ago that any theory of “everything” would have to include life itself. To date we have no way of defining life, no knowledge of its origin or its impact on the several theories including the one just mentioned.

While scientists are as a group committed to facts, they remain human beings plagued by the very same questions as most religious people, but not as inclined to make their questions public. But the universe remains not only a place of mystery, but also a place of great and unimaginable terror for the most part, a place very inimical to life and most especially human life. Our planet evolved through tremendously horrifying and brutal processes that led me to believe it is indeed a “demon-haunted world” given its birth and history; a history conducive to the many grotesque and demonic portrayals in stone and writings along with the many reports of various ghosts and spirits by the various human cultures.

The very unimaginable, cruel brutality through which our own species has come to reach our present state of civilization is a testimony to our brutal beginnings. And as Emerson pointed out it took savagery and brutality on the part of some to found the great families eventually dedicated to the arts and sciences. But who doubts that should world conditions become so terrible our species would once again revert to the state of savagery and brutality that was once the norm for survival? But a demon haunted universe; ah, that is a subject for even greater speculation.

As to changing things by peering closely into them, perhaps those like Newton did so. We know what a look can do, but some seem to have a peculiar gift of looking more closely into things and people than others. And while charlatans abound in making extravagant claims, nevertheless it is my belief many of those who are actually “seers” are extraordinarily careful about revealing what they see ever as much as a beautiful woman knows the inherent dangers of making eye contact with men.