2001: The Crystal Monolith

Abstract

In the famous movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke claim that an extraterrestrial civilization catalyzed the evolution of hominids on our planet. To represent such a powerful civilization, they use a crystal. To date, it seems that we have not been contacted by advanced civilizations and that we are alone to manage our own future. Yet Kubrick and Clarke perhaps intuitively touched a truth about the power of crystals. An argument is developed here that genuine crystals, mainly quartz single crystals, were the earliest catalysts of the abstract thinking, symbolism, and consciousness.

Keywords

• Crystals
• crystallography
• abstract thinking
• paleoneurobiology
• Kubrick
• 2001: A Space Odissey