A homage to the work of Dr. Ibrahim Karim

The Physics of Quality

A colour and a sound seem to have nothing in common. Dr. Karim teaches that they can have the same effect on the person who meets them, and that effect is what he means by quality. An angle, a number, a form and a place carry qualities too, and quality, he proposes, has a physics of its own.

Ten hands-on stations take you through his idea, from the question it answers to the test that would give it its first direct evidence. Allow 20 to 30 minutes. Sound is optional.

One quality1 2 3SoundColourAngleNumberFormPlace
Dr. Karim's teaching One quality at the centre, read six ways.

What is a quality?

Quantity

How much.

The size of a thing, its length, its frequency. An instrument reads it.

Quality

What kind.

What a thing is like to the one who meets it: its colour, its sound, its smell, its taste, its touch. It takes a person to register it.

So quality here does not mean how good a thing is, and it is not personal taste. It means the kind of effect a thing has on the one who perceives it. In Dr. Karim's words, “an effect needs somebody to be affected”, and he describes the way the nerves register it as “abstract, objective to all human beings”.

One quality, two senses

Dr. Karim teaches that a colour and a sound can produce the same quality in you. The eye takes in one range of vibration and the ear another, but in his account “all nerves are the same”, and the scales of colour and of sound “express the same type of nerve reactions”. So the red you see and the note Do you hear can be one quality, reaching you by two senses.

Angle, number and form join them: in his teaching the nerves respond to these as well. The colour names then serve as common labels, so a quality called red can be met in a note, an angle or a form, with no red light present.

Try it

To the eye, a colour

To the ear, a note

Red to the eye, Do to the ear: one quality.

Dr. Karim's teachinga figure in Gin

Caption · sound offPress a column to see its pair. Turn sound on to hear the note as well.

Demonstrated

Each sense takes in a narrow band, and people “consistently match high-pitched sounds with small, bright objects”.

Dr. Karim's teachingas Gin reports

That one quality is common to colour, sound, angle, number and form. This has not yet been tested by controlled experiment.

The idea in one view

“Quality and quantity are actually two faces of the same coin.”

Dr. Ibrahim Karim

For four centuries physics has measured quantity and left quality to the perceiver. Dr. Karim brings quality back, and his Physics of Quality gives it laws of its own.

Three older streams of thought meet in his work: harmonics, French radiesthesia, and the study of form and earth field. The steps that join them are his own.

The hypothesis, in four statements

  1. One quality, many scales

    A note, a colour, an angle and a number are scales for the same qualities, and one scale can be converted into another.

    Stations 03 and 04

  2. Shape carries quality

    What carries a quality is the shape of a wave, “regardless of frequency”. A form at rest holds one too: “shapes are actually frozen qualities”.

    Stations 05 and 06

  3. Like resonates with like

    Things that share a quality answer one another, as a string answers its match. This resonance “is not limited to any range or dimension”, and the same qualities return on every plane of nature, as a note returns in every octave.

    Station 07

  4. One quality at the centre

    At the centre Dr. Karim places BG3, the “One Harmonizing Subtle Energy Quality”, and from it he derives the numbers, angles and proportions that share it.

    Station 09
Dr. Karim's teachingThese four statements are Dr. Karim's teaching. They have not yet been tested by controlled experiment. The exhibit marks them as his at every station, and station 10 sets out the test that would give them their first direct evidence.

The journey ahead

Ten stations in four parts, about two minutes each. Every station gives you something to handle before anything to read. Follow them in order, or start anywhere: each station stands alone.

Part one

The question

Why should physics care about quality? You sort the world as Galileo did, then see how narrow a window the senses open on it.

Part two

The bridge

How a number becomes a quality. A string turns a ratio into an interval the ear knows at once, and one quality is read on four scales.

Part three

Dr. Karim’s answer

The heart of the theory, one idea to a bench: the shape of a wave, the quality of a form, and resonance between like and like.

Part four

The whole picture

Where the ideas come from, the One Quality that Dr. Karim places at the centre, and the test still to come.

Journey's end

What you will take away

By the last station you will be able to say, in your own words:

  1. what the Physics of Quality teaches;
  2. where its ideas come from;
  3. how it crosses from sound to colour, number, angle, form and place;
  4. which parts are established physics, and which are Dr. Karim's teaching.

Station 10 closes the journey with these four questions, so you can check your own summary against them.

Handle first

Each station has one idea and one thing to move: a bridge, a plate, a pendulum. Allow about two minutes for each.

Choose your depth

Experience is the interaction and one sentence. Understand adds the idea and its history. The math gives the equations and sources. Switch at any time.

Sound is optional

Audio starts off and stays gentle. Every sound also has a picture and a caption, so the exhibit works fully in silence.

How to read the marks

The exhibit presents Dr. Karim's ideas in his own terms, and it is open about where each one stands. His teachings have not yet been tested by controlled experiment, so they are marked as his. Four kinds of statement are kept apart at every station, and the mark beside a statement tells you which kind you are reading, by its shape and its word as well as its tint.

Documented

History that a dated source supports: a publication year, a patent filing, a death record.

Dr. Karim's teaching

What Dr. Karim teaches, in his own words where possible. Where a teaching belongs to an earlier author, the mark reads Teaching and names them.

Demonstrated

Results obtained under controls that rule out the observer's expectation: established physics and controlled tests. Dr. Karim's teachings do not carry this mark yet. The studies are still to be done, and station 10 sets one out.

Reconstruction

The review's own working, added to make a teaching concrete: the shape number σ = A/λ, the grid Q × P, and the values and readings computed for it. It is not Dr. Karim's.

Not yet confirmedA flag, not a fifth kind. It marks five proportions from the working brief that have not yet been confirmed in a published source.
Label, not lightColour names such as negative green are labels for detector settings. They do not denote light.

Dr. Karim and his work

Documented

Dr. Ibrahim Karim was born in Cairo in 1942 and trained as an architect at the ETH in Zurich, where he took his doctorate in 1975. He set out BG3 and BioGeometry harmonics in Back to a Future for Mankind (2010) and presented the Physics of Quality as a paradigm in Hidden Reality (2022).

This exhibit is an introduction. Dr. Karim sets out the Physics of Quality in his own words in his books, on BioGeometry's own pages and in recorded interviews.