All Possible Worlds

7/28/2019 Niles Leave a comment

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your Philosophy. –Hamlet

The Bottom Line

After many years of thought, here is what I think is really going on:

All Possible Universes Exist, and You are in Many of Them.

I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for some time now, and it seems like the simplest explanation for everything we see, and most mysteries of the universe and life.

What Exactly Does This Mean?

Let’s explain the picture in detail. Many ancient philosophers such as Plato and Socrates claimed that some mathematical concepts such as “circle”, “line”, “three”, “truth”, and so on have an existence which do not depend on the particular “kind” of universe we happen to be in, and that those mathematical “objects” are valid in all possible worlds, such as ours. At the same time, over centuries we have seen how our particular universe obeys mathematical laws, and the deeper we look, the more fundamental the mathematics seems to become.

But in no case do we see any of the mathematical laws being logically inconsistent with each other. Nor do we see any particular reason for some of the laws and constants (such as the fine-structure constant) to be the particular laws and constants that they are. Why not some other laws? Why not inverse-cube law for gravity? Why not?

So let’s define a “Possible Universe” to be any universe, governed by laws, which are not self-contradictory. We already know that — logically — contradictions cannot exist within consistent systems. It is quite easy to make up simple universes in which the laws are very simple. In fact, these days, many people spend much of their time playing in simulations of worlds in computer games, which operate by various strange yet logical rules, and in some ways those games become very “real” to them.

What I am claiming is that all possible universes of all types exist. And that following the “weak anthropic principle“, the only ones of which we humans are aware of are the ones whose laws have allowed humans to come into existence. All of the other universes also exist, it is just that we do not live in them, because we cannot emerge from them.

So What?

There are some interesting, some very strange and even some disturbing consequences of this theory.

Let’s take one of the really strange and extreme ones first, and lay it out as another story:

The reason You exist is that there exists a Universe in which you eventually came to be in it.

This is a statement that goes beyond the weak (and even the strong) Anthropic Principle, and says that, almost certainly, the Universe that You see around you, including not just its laws, and its physics, and its cosmology, but its peculiar chain of events which resulted in the Milky Way Galaxy, the formation of our Solar System, the complex interplay over several billion years of Jupiter and Saturn to permit the formation of a life-sustaining Earth, the Extinction of the Dinosaurs permitting the rise of the mammals, the evolution of Primates, the development of the powers of speech and language, the splitting of the supercontinents into the continents, the recorded history of all the wars, philosophies, saints, martyrs, attrocities, art, science, and even the rise of modern western civilization, is all part of one very specific collection of universes whose flows of time closely parallel each other, and which still remain in a superposition now, as a small yet vastly uncountable number of universes in which You

— and I mean YOU, not me, and not your kids —

came to be conceived by your parents, and still be alive now to read this paragraph, as we speak.

The “So What” is exactly that. This universe in which we live (including You) has your name all over it. At the moment it also has my name all over it, but when I’m gone, if you are still here, this is most certainly only yours.

Everyone is George Bailey

Now here is where it goes from strange to downright disturbing. Think of any awful historical event, whether the Holocaust in World War II, or the Black Plague in the dark ages, or any other person or event in the past that you would have wished never happened. Let’s assume that any one of these things could have turned out different, had only slight changes years previous happened.

It could have happened, for example, that just a slight change in breeze could have caused Adolph Hitler’s parents to not marry and have a child, and the whole middle of the 20th Century played out differently. Life in America now would certainly be different, and quite possibly the disruption to America and Europe and Japan and Africa would not have occurred (at least the same way). Would your parents have still met, and had the same life ? Probably not, but if my theory is correct, that whole collection of universes not only was possible, but they exist now, but elsewhere, and — the main point — you are not in those universes.

In other words, all of those awful things that happened in your past, are there because they are there in every single universe in which You exist. You are not to blame for those things happening, but I am afraid that the theory presented says that those awful things are a necessary part of the universes in which you live.

So this is kind of like “It’s a Wonderful Life”, but it plays out for practically everybody that was in the world’s history that allowed you to become possible. So even with Hitler, if he never existed, then almost certainly, neither would YOU. Hitler gets no credit for you, it is just that he is one of the awful things that are probably in the superposition of every single Universe in which you have found yourself.

You Have Probably Already Died, Many Times

Think back in your own past. Have you had near-misses? Maybe you were on a narrow hiking trail and almost slipped, but didn’t. Or maybe somebody shot at you, but missed. Or the lab report came back and surprise, you don’t have cancer. Many of those things may have been close calls, or even cases where you made a choice, and it just turned out that going down this alley in a small village in war-torn Afghanistan was not the one with the IED bomb.

It is quite possible that — like Schrödinger’s cat — you could have made the other choice, and that a universe existed (and still does) where you made that choice.

But you didn’t — Miraculously — and you are still alive to tell the tale. But here’s the thing: you are here and still alive, because this is the other possible universe, where you survived. I am sorry to say, you didn’t make it in the other one. And it’s not over, either. If you are still alive there will eventually be something that will get you, and many other choices to make.

The good news is, you will live as long as you (and specifically you) possibly can, making just the right choice at each step. I am sorry to say, it may come at the cost of everybody else you have ever known, and you will only die — for good, when there are no longer any possible universes where you will have survived, and all universes thereafter will be home to all the rest of humanity, who whom those universes are places where they can live.

This at least is what the “All Possible Universes Exist” theory means.

A Simple Example

Let’s consider my life, for example. In 1937, my mother was five years old, and living with her older sister Pat and her parents Nick and Lennye Edwards in Paducah Kentucky. That year, there was a terrible flood of the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi rivers which flooded all of Paducah. Nick decided to pack up the family and leave, but had to run the car past a police roadblock and drive right through a raging stream. If things went badly, which was quite possible, the whole family would have been swept away and so Lucille (my mom) would never have grown up, and I would never have been born.

But that didn’t happen. At least in the universe I live in. Perhaps in another one they didn’t make it, but I can’t see it from here.

So anyway, that’s what I’ve got so far.

An Anti-Christmas Carol

6/24/2017 Niles One comment

Another useless parasite.

Tomorrow will be June 25, the orbital opposite of December 25, and making us nearly as far as possible astronomically from the spirit of Christmas as we can be. Seems appropriate then, with the current sentiment pervading our leadership these days regarding the poor, the young, the sick and the elderly, and the changes proposed to the way our society treats these people. It therefore seems appropriate to publish here an excerpt from Dicken’s classic story, reflecting what seems to be the mood of the times, which is to tell Tiny Tim that he is a freeloader, and needs to pull himself up by his bootstraps and get a job. Or just go away and die.

Merry Christmas, Everyone.

A Christmas Carol – Marley’s Ghost

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

The Seven Billion Species of Man

6/4/2017 Niles Leave a comment

As of the moment of this writing, there were currently 7,509,287,532 people alive on the planet. (source: World Odometer). Each of these people include themselves as members of various subgroups, such as Men, Women, Caucasian, Native American, Bipolar, Russian, Spectrum Autistic Syndrome, LGBTQ, Republican, Democratic, Episcopalian, Atheist, USC Alumni, Rotary Club, ISIS, Down’s Syndrome, and others.

Each of these groups has their own collection of stories, which include origin stories (how they came to be), membership stories (who is qualified to be a member), enemy stories (with whom they have fights and why), and stories about why their group is so much better than all the others.

All of these stories are important to the members of those groups. Some stories are so important to those members that they are willing to fight and die for that story. Even those whose stories are to anybody outside the group clearly arbitrary (such as Professional Football Team fans), people get into mortal combat over a bad referee call, with another human being whose only difference is the color of the shirt favored by that team over the other.

Recently there have been many arguments (especially in academic circles) around the questions of ethnicity, sensitivity to other cultures, and offenses (real or imagined) taken by somebody when someone else “appropriates” the others culture, tribe, race, religion, or other group membership. This includes such things as “whitewashing” a dramatic or historical role (e.g. by a person associated with one “race” portraying an historical character of another “race”). These controversies become especially heated when one of the groups has historically been oppressed, attacked, targeted for genocide etc by another group in power.

The tragedy of all these stories, both of the oppression, the suffering, and of the later push-back by the oppressed groups, is that they are all based on stories, as as stories, they are fiction, and as fiction, they are far from the actual reality on the ground, at least to the best that science can discern.

Here is the story that evolutionary science suggests may be a more accurate story about the species we call Man:

Every single 'Human' born is a mutation, and may even be a brand new species.

In other words, none of us are the same, and any allegiance to a particular group, religion, ethnicity or other collection of humans is arbitrary, and made up only of stories, nothing more. The earth is not populated with over seven billion humans. It is populated with over seven billion individuals, each a unique experiment of Nature, bearing only incidental similarities in physical, sexual, psychological or other features with others which whom they may share social or familial descendancy.

This is the general perspective I have been gradually coming to embrace. Perhaps it is easier for me, because I have never particularly felt like I belonged to any group, race, or religion. Almost certainly it is also due to what others call “privilege,” in that because of my outward appearance of whiteness, the dominant ethnic group of society in America does not constantly harass or subdue me because of my differences. It is quite possible that I would tell a different story if my skin were a different shade. When under assault, groups of people unite out of self-defense, and have only their shared oppression to bind them together.

And yet, regardless of that fact, the evidence remains that the only story that truly seems to be the case is one, not of races and ethnicities, but of radical individualism, that we are each a member of groups which have only one member in them, and that all other associations are pure fictions, what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called “Granfalloons“, which are arbitrary and pointless associations that bind people together. To be aware of this absurd situation may seem depressing, but over the years, I have found it to be liberating, and ironically joins me in brotherhood with all other humans, with the great Granfalloon, based on the fact that we are all utterly alone.

And now at the end of this piece, the population has risen to 7,509,296,070 people. I would like to welcome these new 8538 creatures to the earth, and wish them each well in their unique journey through life, and to remind them not to take the stories told to them too seriously.

On Leadership and the President as CEO

4/9/2017 Niles Leave a comment

Editor Comment: I wrote this piece as a draft way back in 2012, during which time the Presidential CEO contender was Mitt Romney, and some had advocated for him (as for Ross Perot) because of his business experience. I never published this piece then, but the words seem even more salient, now that we are in this dubious boat. I therefore present and publish it today, in its original form. You be the judge. -NR

There has been some discussion in the course of the recent [2012] presidential campaign, with the general implication being that the President of the United states is (or should be evaluated as) the CEO of the country, and at any rate must provide leadership in how the country is run.

We are all story tellers. And the archetype of a “Leader” is a profound story, and not always a healthy one in a civilized world. In another essay, I hope sometime to discuss the two metaphorical and psychological ways I observe groups of people organize themselves and others, called Vertical (top-dog, hierarchical, canine, Yang), and Horizontal (egalitarian, all equal, “it takes a village”, feline, Yin). A Leader is a character in the “Vertical” view of the world. I’m not saying either view is entirely good, but each has its hazards.

I tend to agree with the founders of this country who had grown sick of Old World countries that were “run” by somebody, whether their name be King George or Putin or Berlusconi…or Obama if power ever goes to his head. Regardless of how my philosophy has evolved, to this day I remain a profound admirer of Ayn Rand, whose supreme heroes John Galt and Hank Rearden were brilliant, rational and secular men who did not seek leaders and did not seek to be a leader — and all they asked of the government was for it to Get The Hell Out of Their Way and let them pursue their work and happiness, to the best of their ability.

Galt and Rearden are heroes for (as Obama recently said in Rolling Stone) smart 17 year old intravert misfit teenagers, who feel the world does not understand them. And remain so for those who grow up to be smart adult emotionally integrated intravert misfits who name their houses “Anthem” for more reason than one.

Regarding CEO’s, an article from Thomson Reuters’s archives indicates that the three top skills for an entrepreneurial CEO are:

Financial Management
Communication
Motivation of Others

Good god, I must waste half my time at work convincing whoever is my current boss not to promote me to some “leadership” or “management” role involving people skills and such. Communication I can handle, preferably by email and preferably from far away here in Zion Canyon; if they really want eye-contact we can Skype. I’m Scotty in the engine room and dilithium crystals are fragile, let Kirk deal with the damn aliens. I have no interest in learning motivational psychology or finance professionally. But I know myself. I remain a shy but bright mathematician and software architect, who solves difficult problems in the structure of programs and languages that make it possible for those who write the higher-level business logic to express it coherently, and execute it fast and effectively. For me to be promoted to an executive or managerial role would be tragic for all involved, and I state as much explicitly in my annual employee performance review. Just get the hell out of my way and let me do work that makes me happy and makes you a profit. Everybody wins!

The genius of our country is that it was the first on the planet to be designed based on principles, predicated on the idea that its purpose was to establish ground rules preserving the rights of man, and as men are prone to abrogate power, the founders split the government and its powers into three separate branches. Of these three, only congress is charged with the formulation and passage of laws and its leadership role is composed of many men and women to prevent a single ambitious man dominating. The executive branch was originally intended to be purely executive and the president was intentionally weak, and though he has veto power, certainly not a leadership role. Indeed, George Washington refused proposals that he be made King.

The “leaders” of our country were always reluctant ones, and rightfully so.

Alas, as time has passed, the nature of humanity seems to be that some segment who leans toward “The Vertical” will always seek a strong powerful figurehead to guide them and save them, whether in the form of an all powerful deity, or as a testosterone laden bully/hero such as Mussolini or Stalin (or even FDR, when he tried to pack the Supreme Court). And unfortunately, with a strong powerful leader, you also wind up with a large, powerful government.

I still agree with fiscal conservatives that the proportion of GDP consumed by the current government is far too large, and poses an existential threat to the country. One place of many where I disagree with Ayn Rand and Libertarians now is on the minimal “ground rules” established by a morally defensible government: For example, I would expand the Libertarian “national defense” segment to include defense against natural disasters and disease, from which an argument for a universal baseline healthcare system can be derived, and by my thinking should come directly out of the Defense Budget.

Getting back to leadership, I can only think of a few times where the person in the role of the President has stood up and used the “bully pulpit” to deliver helpful words crafted in thought and grace, to speak to the American people in a way that either united them all as a people, or brought a modicum of closure. FDR’s fireside chats, JFK’s moon speech, and yes Reagan’s address following the Challenger disaster. But there were others such as Martin Luther King Jr, who also served that role, armed only with the power of their own spiritual substance and the confidence in their cause, with no need of elected office.

If we are talking about the president leading the country by putting in place dramatic changes in the economic and regulator power of the state as well as its size, then there are only a few examples of this, one with FDR (who dramatically increased the size and scope) and Reagan (who dramatically decreased it). As president, however, both remained powerless to implement their goal without the fact that congress also had to be in the same party in order to propose and pass those laws, as well as approve members of the Supreme Court to interpret and not strike down those laws. In general, however, it has been observed that Americans seem to be more comfortable when the two branches that pass and sign bills are split. Americans don’t seem to care so much who is in which branch, just so long as they are at odds, in line with the “checks and balances” concept.

We are Americans, where each person is the owner of their own destiny, and who seem to mistrust any one man or party to claim power over them, even if we may agree with them. The president’s activities by rights and by the founder’s intent should be as much in the daily news as the day to day activities of the school janitor. The fact that some have come to seek a President to act as a a leader and CEO of the country is a disturbing state of affairs, in my opinion.

Valid Religion

4/21/2016 Niles 5 comments

This monastery was just down the street from us when we lived in Long Beach ten years ago. It has a beautiful view of the ocean and we’d often pass it while out for a walk along the beach. To the left you can see a white shrine in which the Virgin Mary is standing. It is a very pretty installation though we sometimes would call it “Virgin Mary on the Half-shell.” About half the time we’d pass by, there would be someone there, praying to the virgin, or lighting candles or incense.

The monastery used to be a convent owned by the Catholic Church, but was long ago sold to a Vietnamese Buddhist sect, and they have converted the building into a monastery for their monks. Every so often you would see one of the monks leave the building in their saffron robes, but for the most part they keep to themselves and maintain a quiet life of contemplation.

Now here’s the thing: not only did the monks not tear down the Virgin Mary shrine, but they actively keep it intact, tending to the plants around it, the benches were people come to pray, and bring fresh flowers. I have never asked the monks about why they do this, or if it was a condition of the sale, but they never seem to mind. The Buddhist tradition maintains a very ecumenical respect for the beliefs of others, and maintains that there are many paths to enlightenment.

In my personal system of philosophy, I have a name for religions of this type: VALID.

I have to explain what I mean by this. With the possible exception of mathematics, I doubt that any statements of a philosophical nature will or ever can be determined to be TRUE. Thus, it is in my opinion foolish for any religion to declare itself True, as it is the height of arrogance, and proclaims that all of the other fifty thousand religions in the world are False. So, what I mean by a VALID religion is one in which the religion makes an admission of the following things:

Fallibility, that this religion may have made some mistakes
That absolute Truth is unknowable by man,
That other religions may have important and valid points, and be a legitimate source of hope and inspiration in the lives of its believers, and rightfully so,

A VALID religion is therefore one in which it recognizes other religions as potentially equally valid, and there is no Law of Excluded Middle (as with True/False) that gets in the way.

Any religion which declares itself to be the sole possessor of this elusive thing called The Truth, is by my definition INVALID. Alas, this includes almost all religions of the world, including many brands of atheism.

This monastery is, then, to me a triple-shrine. First, to the Virgin Mary herself, secondly to the buddhist monks that respect people’s belief in her, and third to the possibility that a religion could if it so chooses become VALID — a thing which seems to me to be the only hope for peace among humans who choose to believe in the wildest of fairy tales. And to date, this monastery represents the only example to my knowledge of a valid religion.

The Ancestor’s Tale

6/2/2015 Niles Leave a comment

Summary

If you are not in the mood for my idle chatter to follow, here is the bottom line: I love this book. Whether you buy into evolution or not, everyone should read “The Ancestor’s Tale” because it is a marvelous bit of writing which will challenge you to think and rethink the surprising realities and consequences of your own position. Even if you completely buy into evolution, this book dares you to accept its disturbing implications, as unnerving as they may be. And that is always a good thing.

But First, a Story

In the Gene Kelly movie “Singing in the Rain”, Don Lockwood (played by Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (played by Jean Hagen) are silent-era movie stars about to make their break into the “talkies” with a musical. The only catch is, Lina can’t sing and has an awful accent. So they invent the idea of “dubbing,” and have Kathy Selden (played by Debbie Reynolds) to do Lina’s parts while Lina is lip-syncing. So, in the movie, what you see is Kathy talking and singing in a beautiful deep voice behind the stage, while Lina is mouthing in front of the camera.

Now here’s the lesser-known fact: in reality, Debbie Reynolds did not sing in any of those parts — she has a midwestern twang. So they needed to find somebody who could do the voice-overs for Debbie Reynolds doing voice-overs for Jean Hagen’s character.

And here’s the best part: you know who they used to do the talking voice overs for Debbie Reynolds doing voice-overs for Jean Hagen?

Jean Hagen. Turns out that the awful Bronx accent Lina Lamont has is a fake accent, and that actually Jean Hagen has a great voice.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

The Writer’s Tale

No matter how wild and interesting a story a writer may concoct, it seems, Reality has a way to come up with something far more strange than the writer could ever invent. Indeed, if you were to take an insanely crazy true story and try to sell it as fiction, you would have trouble: it would be too weird to be believable. Nobody would buy it.

Irony: although men of great faith are held in high esteem when they hold fast to their beliefs, in spite of all opposing forces (including the hard evidence of scientific experiment), in fact this is one of easiest things for humans to do. In fact, all evidence appears to indicate that when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that negates a strongly-held belief, most people’s response to this is to double-down and hold even stronger to their now-disproven positions.

The scientist, in contrast, has if anything a more difficult and heroic task: and that is to be willing at a moment’s notice to discard their most cherished theories, beliefs, ideas and standards, if it is shown by the findings of experiment, peer-review, and the evidence before their own eyes, that their precious stories — however “reasonable” sounding in their ears — do not describe the real world around them and cannot be used as a guide to how the world works, and they must now embrace their opponent’s creed — the one that they had branded heresy.

The history of science is one of a never-ending series of discoveries which suggest stories that are not only stranger than anyone every imagined, they have become stranger than anyone ever could have imagined. Quantum mechanics. Relativity. Big Bangs. Black Holes. Continental Drift. And among the strangest of tales is Evolution — this latter being a story that is even more difficult to accept because of what is says about ourselves, what we are and how we think about ourselves.

The year 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Oxford professor Richard Dawkin’s magnum opus “The Ancestor’s Tale,” and it has since its publication joined my short list of books to which I have found myself returning again and again. Whether you “buy” the story of Evolution or not, this book will challenge you, all the way down to the core of your most firmly held beliefs.

Pilgrimage

Dawkin’s idea for the book is based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which pilgrims on their way to Canterbury each tell their own stories. But now, you are the pilgrim, and your trail is your family tree, which you must follow back in time. And as you travel further and further back, you will begin to meet up with friend and neighbors, at the crossroads where you find that you both have common ancestors.

And part of the motivation for using Chaucer’s book is the remarkable calculation that implies that for any two people now living on the planet, their personal paths of pilgrimage will meet at or sooner than the 1400’s — the time during which the Canterbury Tales was written.

The name that Dawkins gives to a “common ancestor” is Concestor, and the Rendezvous or crossroads is for Concestor Zero — which is his name for a single common ancestor of All Human Kind alive today. In other words, on your personal family tree, Concestor 0 is the first ancestor you find who is also in the family tree of every single human being alive on earth today. The fact that there is such a person in your tree is in itself one of the first remarkable facts that you are challenged with. And yet, Dawkins presents a clever proof, using only math and logic, and unarmed with the story of Adam and Eve, to argue that at least one such couple must exist in your tree that unites all of humanity. And this is what makes this book great, is that Dawkins doesn’t just claim things, he proves them. To see the proof, you will just have to read the book.

Genesis-Revised

1/4/2015 Niles One comment

In the beginning, the universe was void and null, consisting of the empty set denoted Ø — whose slash line meant “not even zero”.

To count the things in itself, the universe removed the slash and the number 0 was born.

The universe now contained 0 and so to count it, 1 was born. The ancients called this number α (alpha) or in English A. It goes by many names. Others called it One God. But it was simply One.

The universe now contained {0,1} and so to count them 2 was born, which was called β (beta) or in English B. Others called it Man or Two-Man, for Man was born in two, male and female, always trying to merge and become One. Still others call it 2-B (or not 2-B).

The universe now contained {0,1,2} and so to count them 3 was born, also called Γ (gamma) which would be G, but in English is C. Sometimes 3 is called Trinity, for there is often a three-ness about the world.

Man saw that in counting from β to Γ there would then have to be a 4, and so on forever. This was called BeGatting, and soon the universe was filled with numbers that added and then fruitfully multiplied.

Now 3, which is to say G/C, came to be known as Georg Cantor, who like Man saw how counting was going to continue forever. And so to save the universe from having to count forever, GC discovered a new number called $\scriptstyle {\aleph_0}$ (aleph-null), which would count all of them at once. Some called this infinity, but it is really just aleph, another number.

Once all the number have been counted, GC noted you can add a final number at the end of the infinite list, called ω or omega. And so on.

And then, at some point in the past, nobody knows when, there was a Great Confusion. For Alpha in Greek was the same letter as Aleph in Hebrew, and so Alpha, the One God, was sometimes also called Aleph. And since both Aleph and Omega were infinite numbers, the confusion was compounded and One God was sometimes called the Alpha and sometimes the Omega, and sometimes was known in later ages as both the Alpha and the Omega.

Now just as “Science” has the same root as “scissors” and means to sort and distinguish, the word “confusion” means “to fuse together”, and is synonymous with “re-ligion”, which means “to join together”.

And thus it was that Religion was born, which was the con-fusion between the lowly and simple One (alpha) born at the beginning of time, and the complicated infinite (omega) that emerged over time.

And from this confusion we call Religion, the history of the world unfolded, such as it is.

Ø

A Great Mystery: Taking Genesis Seriously

2/17/2014 Niles Leave a comment

The Debate

I have some great qualms about the recent debate between “Science Guy” Bill Nye and Ken Ham regarding Young Earth Creationism versus Old Earth Evolution/Science. Unlike most of my secular colleagues, however, I don’t feel that the mistake Bill Nye made was in giving further publicity and exposure to Ken Ham and his Answers In Genesis website and movement. Nye did make a strategic mistake, but that wasn’t it.

Indeed, I am providing the link to Ken Ham’s website because — even though I consider his movement to be more a dangerous cult than a religion — I find the site to be a very interesting and infuriating but challenging collection of ideas. I would even go so far as to suggest that a very good way to teach the scientific approach regarding evolution and theories about the age of the universe would be to point students to articles on this website, and ask students to write papers about whether they understand the arguments made, and if they see any flaws or fallacies in them, or if they can provide evidence which refutes claims made, in some cases even pointing out when they got something right. In particular, in one of the “Answers in Genesis” articles they point to this article in Smithsonian Magazine where scientists have found pliable non-fossilized flesh inside dinosaur bones, which — it is argued — challenges the scientific dogma that all dinosaur fossils should be completely mineralized after 60 million years. Guess what? real unfossilized dinosaur!

The Error

In my opinion, the mistake that Bill Nye made was that deep down he does not take the bible seriously, and does not respect the ideas presented by Ken Ham and his associates as absolutely sincere. I cannot prove this, but while Bill Nye did express sympathies for the religious yearning to understand where we came from, and why, it also seemed like he was too dismissive of his opponents viewpoint as self-evidently false.

The reason I feel the debate was flawed was that in a real debate, there is some degree of acknowledgement by each side that the other side may have a point, but that they were going to argue their side for all its worth. And what I didn’t see on either side was an honest respect for the other’s stories, traditions and world view.

To Bill Nye, I would like to say: there have been very smart and intelligent people who take the bible seriously, if not literally. No less a person than Sir Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics and co-inventor of Calculus, investigated the timelines of the bibilical stories, and came up with an age of 6000 years from Day One, closely matching those of Bishop Ussher and others. You really needed to read the bible a lot more than you did, and talk about it with some respect, rather than spend so much debate time with million-year old Antarctic ice cores. — as interesting as that is. People are simply not going to listen to you if they feel you don’t respect them.

To Ken Ham, I would like to say: it is a remarkable bit of work you have been doing, and I take it as a sincere effort to take the word of God (as contrasted by you with the word of man) as the literal truth, and to make sense of the world around you based on the only compass and guide you permit yourself. However, I believe that if anything you are not taking Genesis serious enough, and are glossing over some words that are clear, unambiguous, and right there in front of your face. If you wish to honor your God, and take as a premise that the bible as handed to you has been transcribed and translated without error, then you must go back and read Genesis from page one, verse one, and look at every word.

Every. Single. Word.

Answers In Genesis

Let us begin, shall we? I am using the standard King James version for the moment. In good rabbinical tradition, I will also be adding running commentary and alternative translations when needed.

Genesis, Chapter 1.

1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Comment: Okay so far. This sets the origin, the Zero point of the earth and the universe that surrounds it.

2: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Comment: Pretty clear, we are still at the Zero point, there is the universe, and the formless earth, which includes water, but it is DARK. There is also now the first mention of movement, which means that the clock of time itself may have begun.

3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Comment: This event is a big deal, as we now know how light ties into the deep structure of the universe. Whether Time had started or not before this, it is definitely running now, as without it light cannot travel. It is not clear here whether photons were created at this point, or, simply that the Sun and the stars were created, from which previously-created photons now came to the earth and lit it up. One way or another, we can assume that the Sun now exists, and is illuminating the Earth.

4: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Comment: From what we now understand about astronomy, the division of the light from the dark is the shadow cast by the earth, the shadow now moving because the earth is rotating. So, God has started the earth rotating. It can be safely said that much has happened so far. Note also that it is only at this point that a specific speed has been set for the earth to rotate.

5: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Comment: Okay, now we are naming things. Naming things is a big deal in the bible, and it is important to get the names right. A “Day” is when it is light, and “Night” is when it is dark. And Day and Night only have meaning at the moment when there is light, and the light is divided from darkness.

The most important thing we have to look at is this second sentence, as it defines what is the First Day. But “evening” and “morning” are not defined clearly here. In the evening it is dark, but does the darkness in Verse One before there was light count as part of the first evening? The King James version is not clear. In the Christian Standard Bible the verse reads:

5: God called the light “day,” and He called the darkness “night.” Evening came, and then morning: the first day.

In the Hebrew Torah, the same verse of Genesis (Bereishit) reads:

5: And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, one day.

This is worded slightly different again. The words “it was” are inserted between “and” and “evening”.

The key thing here is the special way the word “and” is used. In the first four verses, there seems to be an implicit “then” in there, as if to say “and then”. In the Christian Standard bible the “then” is explicit. It does not seem to be simultaneous “and”, as in “I like peaches and cream”. First the heavens and earth were created, and *then* the spirit of God moved across the waters, which took some time. God said let there be light, and *then* there was light. And *then* God saw the light, etc.

In the Judaic tradition the rabbinical commentaries by Rashi suggest that the language in which Genesis was written when handed down to Moses did not imply a specific order or sequence of events. But if we are to take the literal view of fundamentalists that the words are both exact and logically consistent, then we have to conclude that the “and” implies an ordering, that day one comes and (then) day two and so on.

One thing that is unambiguous regardless is that a complete day begins and ends with morning; in other words, that the boundary between days is defined by sunrise (the first light), not sunset (the first dark).

The Great Mystery

Let us summarize what we know so far. From the text, the sequence of events goes like this:

Heaven and Earth Created
Spirit of God moves across the waters
Light Created
The Earth begins to Rotate (separating light and dark)
Day and Night named
1. Evening Came
2. (then) Morning Came

So, if a full day begins with sunrise (first light), then it would appear that Day One starts with first light at verse 3, then the earth begins to rotate, evening comes and then morning. End of Day One.

That being the case, what about the time spent in verse one and two? That appears to be a Day Zero that is unaccounted for. Already we see motion as God moves across the waters in verse two, so the clock of time has already begun to tick. How much time passed in Verse One through Verse Three, that was not included in Day One? Was it another Day? A week? Four Billion Years? No answer is given in the bible to help.

This may seem like a small quibble, but if we start with the premise that we place absolute faith in the exact, literal word of God, as written (and translated), then we have to also believe that the story of Genesis is exact and precise in its accounting of days and time, as written. And so, if the age of the earth is at question, and faith depends upon the infallibility of the word in the book, we need to answer the question, what and how long is Day One?

Elsewhere in the commentaries of the Torah, it is pointed out that unlike the other six days which are called “Second day”, “Third day” and so on, the first day in the original Hebrew is called “One day”, not “First day”. The commentaries also point out that this was because Heaven (not the heavens) in which angels reside wasn’t created until the second day, so “One Day” was the day in which God was by Himself (or themselves if you go with the trinity).

So the first day is special. Let us be charitable then and make the special exception that “One Day” is unlike all other days, consists of an evening (undivided darkness), a day (light), a division between the two (earth spinning at 24 hours / rotation), followed by an extra bonus evening, then morning. One Day.

In that case, which I suspect is the One Day Ken Ham would propose, is indeed very special and unlike any other day. In particular, since the earth does not begin spinning until verse three, there is a span of time of darkness followed by undivided light, whose duration is not measured by the spinning of the earth. The earth during this time is void, formless and also motionless. So, once again, how much time by human measure do these first three verses take up?

We have no word of God on this, only words of Man. And the wisest of men would say on issues for which the Bible has given no exact and explicit answer, that this is “a great mystery”.

And so, the best that the “Answers in Genesis” can tell us about the current age of the earth is that it is:

“6000 years, plus a Great Mystery”.

— an answer to which I believe even Bill Nye would agree.

New Year’s Koan

12/31/2013 Niles Leave a comment

Koan: a paradoxical question or story, used (in Zen Buddhism) as an aide to meditation and as a means to lead one to enlightenment.

The main problem with New Year’s resolutions and the reason they fail, I think, is that they are in the form of commandments. Humans are contrary by nature and any dictate — even one they have given to themselves — is doomed. The thing that motivates people is curiosity, and so in that spirit I offer up the following questions, upon which the reader (including myself) may ponder, and should any insight be gained, I am hopeful that it will lead one to a more fulfilling or meaningful life in the future. As with most Koan, I have no answer to these questions, and have no expectation for you to answer them — just to think about them.

New Year’s Koan for Atheists

Koan A1: The atheist Christopher Hitchens once said “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.” Suppose a close and lifelong friend tells you one day “I have been in love with you for years.” This comes as a complete (though pleasant) surprise to you. Should you dismiss this assertion without proof? Alternatively, do you demand proof or accept the statement on its face? Does Hitchens’ principle not apply in this case? If so why?

Koan A2: There is to date no scientific evidence that Free Will exists. Does it make a difference to you in how you experience the world by assuming that you do or do not have Free Will? In other words, do you live your life “as if” Free Will has been shown to exist and that you possess it? Would it make a difference if you learned that Free Will does not exist but is some kind of illusion? Why?

Koan A3: The atheist Chris Arnade is a former physicist who worked for Wall Street before working with and photographing homeless addicts in South Bronx. He observed that in these squalid homeless places, often empty shells of buildings, bibles were always found and that this bible was all these hopeless people had to carry them through the next day or hour. Suppose your otherwise healthy spouse or child told you they’ve given up and wanted to kill themselves, and by their attitude and mood you are convinced they are sincere and would carry out their threat. As an atheist, what could you tell them that would give them some hope or reason to carry on with their lives ?

New Year’s Koan for Judeo-Christians

Koan B1: In Exodus 32:14, God changes his mind about punishing Moses’s people who had become corrupt, after Moses reminds God about the promises God had made to Abraham, Isaac and Israel. Let us leave aside the puzzle of how an omniscient god could change his mind. Do you have enough faith to talk back to God himself as Moses did, if you believe He has made a terrible mistake? If you were to talk back, what would you say?

Koan B2: If the Judeo-Christian belief is correct, then among those nonbelievers who have not been saved from damnation are Socrates, Buddha, Gandhi, Richard Feynman, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russel, Isaac Asimov, Albert Camus, Bela Bartok, David Hume, Bertolt Brecht, Heraclitus, Anton Chekov, Billy Joel, Joseph Conrad, Sergei Prokofiev, Eric Hofer, Camille Saint-Saens, George Santayana, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Dirac, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Nobel … to name a few. On the other hand, the Emperor Theodosius, who executed children for playing with pagan dolls, and Charlemagne, who beheaded 4500 Saxons that refused to convert, were Christian and therefore saved. There is no question, this is simply something to ponder.

Koan B3: Do you believe that you have a soul, the essence of your spiritual self, and that it is eternal? If so, are the things you are doing in your life really preparing you for an infinite amount of time in which to spend your days? Remember, a billion years is a blink of an eye in the face of infinity. What will you do? And how will you keep from becoming bored beyond all measure? Knowing yourself, do you expect that a day will come in a quadrillion years in which you long for an end to endless wakefulness, in other words to Die? If so, how do you distinguish this place from what most would call Hell ? If you had a choice, would you prefer that your soul was only finite in time, say a thousand or million years ? Three score years and ten ?

New Year’s Koan For Everybody

Koan E1: If the race of man is to advance, either through evolution or divine intervention, in what way could man as a species be improved? Having answered that, is there any way in which you can begin to manifest any of that change in your own life ?

Happy New Year.

Our house, December 2013.

Grow Up!

1/19/2013 Niles Leave a comment

I love a good novel, and the thing that makes a novel good is that it pulls you in, and is so well written that you are willing to suspend disbelief and swim in that world until the last page. And when it is over you wish there were more, because the story was so good.

I don’t buy most of the world’s religions these days because their stories aren’t believable, and I find myself putting down the book on page one. And after all, what is “faith” but another word for the willful suspension of disbelief ?

The world languishes from the lack of a religion for adults, who have had rich and varied life experience, a fully developed cerebral cortex and capacity for reason, complex emotion, and powers of direct observation of phenomena. A religion that has matured to the point that it admits that it does not have all the answers and is as flawed as we are, subject to revision pending new insights and findings as they come along. A story written by an unreliable narrator, who admits as much in the telling of the tale, but you don’t care because the story rings true.

The reason I don’t buy the stories told by the major religions of the world is that they sound like they were written by very small children, to whom their parents are perfect, omniscient, and will always take care of them to their dying days. What I don’t see in any of these stories is the humility of an adult, who has learned that their parents were flawed creatures at best, just like themselves, who didn’t know all the answers but tried their best, and at least has some hope that even if their own lives were screwed up, maybe the children of their creation will learn and do something good with this mangled beautiful mess of a world.

If for the moment, I buy the part of the usual story that we are created in the image of the universe’s creator, I would have to conclude that the creator was a fairly good mathematician and an artist, but like myself also mortal, and painfully limited in foresight about the consequences of one’s work, but hopeful that something good might come of all this after they are gone.

The first steps into adulthood begin when you realize that your parents are gone, and it is time for you to pick up the baton and do something yourself, with the realization that everyone else is in the same boat, and to have compassion for their own struggle with existence. If there ever was a creator, I am sure that they are long gone, but I’d like to say thanks for the good work, we will take it from here — as Ayn Rand would say — In the Name of the Best Within Us.

That is what I would call a religion for adults.

The world, with its undetermined future, is a vast blank canvas, and if there is any meaning in all of this, it reveals itself when you create something on that canvas that is beautiful.

Time to grow up.

There is No Such Word as Have

12/3/2012 Niles One comment

I had a “revelation” of sorts in recent years, which in retrospect many religions would (rightly)claim they thought of first: which is that much needless suffering and misery comes from the use of the meaningless yet toxic word “Have”. The word “Have” is a story, and almost pure fiction, as about the only thing you can truly be said to have is this moment in time, and the choice presented to you in that moment. All else in this saha world is like water, which slips through your fingers no matter how tightly you grasp.

To put things in perspective, wherever you see the word “Have” replace it with “Take Care Of” (or similar active verb), and the issue will become clear. Here is a short list of examples:

1. You do not Have a baby. The reality is, for the next 18 years you will be Raising an Adult Human Being. You are required to study for years and get a license to be a psychiatrist or teacher or financial planner (skills needed for this task), and yet all you require to be presented with a high-maintenance creature such as a baby is puberty and a poor sense of future consequences.

2. You do not Have a million dollars (when you win the lottery). The reality is, you need to Take Care of Money for it to grow (or even stay the same). The sad thing is, most people do not know what Money is and how it works. If you stuff it in a mattress, inflation will make its magical power vanish. If you buy things with it, and those things do nothing useful, then they will break down and you will again have nothing. If you suddenly are given a million dollars, what you would need to Do is to study finance and accounting, and try to find investments (ie, business verntures people Do) that are productive and profitable.

3. (My recent example) You do not Have a house. The reality is, There are weeds to pull, Adobe bricks to repair, air filters to replace, pool water pH chemistry to maintain, mortgages to pay, and so on. If you do not Do these things and Take Care Of the House, it will break down, burn down, be condemned, and one way or another, it will go away. If you don’t think you would enjoy Taking Care of a House, then don’t buy it.

4. (This one really pisses me off) You do not Have a puppy. You are entrusted with what will soon be a much larger and highly energetic border collie mix, a herder breed, who by her nature needs to be walked several times a day, given her shots, kept active and busy or she will eat and destroy your plants, shoes, blankets etc, and needs to be trained not to herd your other pets and kids. You need to be aware of all of this before you give your kids the cute little puppy, so that later you don’t renege on your promise and one day in frustration drive the dog out to a lonely stretch of highway in the southwest Utah desert, and abandon it on the road to be killed by cars or coyotes. If you do such a thing you also abandon your right to be called a Human(e) being. Only if the animal is very lucky, will she find a home occupied by people who take responsibility for the creatures entrusted to them, because they know there is no such word as Have.

5. You do not have Have a Life. You are Living.

Other examples are left as an exercise to the reader.

We Are All Story Tellers

1/28/2012 Niles Leave a comment

It has taken me some time to formulate how I think about things now. This is part one of a series, in which I describe what I call The Framework. Why should you care? Because it may save the world some day. Or Not. But first, a story:

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, when I was twelve, I rebelled against my church-going parents Republican upbringing and declared myself an atheist and a socialist. Then I read Atlas Shrugged and became a radical free market libertarian atheist who believed man was a rational animal and that there existed an observer-independent objective reality. Then for fifteen years I was a practising Buddhist and my whole world view began to change again, ideas swirling in the air like autumn leaves. Then I joined a writers group and learned that writing is a blood sport, not for the faint of heart. Now I find myself somewhere to the left of center, in a place between a democrat (small d) and a socialist (small s), and spiritually somewhere between agnostic and atheist, yet with a generally Buddhist sensibility informed by scientific discipline, and a relaxed ecumenical acceptance of other’s religious beliefs, to the extent that they accept my own beliefs as equally valid and requiring no conversion. This acceptance extends not only to people whose views differ radically from my own, but even to my earlier selves, with understanding and compassion rather than repudiation. I am at peace, and life is a grand adventure, the world though sometimes dark is a beautiful and interesting place, ready to be explored.

The Conundrum

Well now, that was a good story. It had a definite beginning, middle and end, a few pretty metaphors mixed in for color, and all the strings were tied up with a bow so everyone can leave the theatre satisfied as the credits roll. But is it True with a capital T? I don’t know, but it makes a good story, and most of the bits really happened — as if that mattered.

It has not escaped my notice that most people have not arrived at the level of serenity reached by the hero of the story. Indeed, the tone of discourse throughout the world appears to be quite the opposite, and a day does not pass that some war or other atrocity does not occur, rooted in the firm belief held by one or more people that they are the sole owners of an elusive entity called The Truth, and that stern, even fatal, measures must be taken as the world in their view will never be made Right until everybody else in the world is Just Like Them. Like most other drugs, the idea of The Truth can be highly addictive, and is highly seductive.

Once upon a time, I was myself a subscriber to this mindset, and believed that the world will only be made right when we all become scientific socialists, join communes like Walden Two, grow vegetables and marijuana in geodesic domes and practice free love. And then, once upon a time I believed the world would only be made right when we all accepted Reason as our only absolute, capitalism as the only valid economic system, we all wore black turtle-necks with gold dollar signs on chains around our neck, and strove to be John Galts and Dagny Taggarts and agreed with everything Ayn Rand ever wrote. And then, once upon a time, I believed that the Lotus Sutra was the highest teaching of the Buddha, and that the world would only be made right when we all understand the principle of esho funi, and shiki-shin funi, and how all suffering derives from the illusion that absolute happiness can derive some something outside of oneself.

Three radically different perspectives have come and gone, passing through a single person. What is the common thread? The answer, I realised later, only began to emerge in my years with Cathy Colman’s writer’s group.

The Framework

The title of this piece says it all, and is the essence of what I call The Framework. To be clear, permit me to put an actual Frame around the statement to make it signify that this is the core of how I now view and understand the whole world which has such people in it:

We Are All Story Tellers

This should be put on large signs and placed over every church, synagogue and mosque, every classroom, every scientific laboratory, every research institute, every house, every government building, and on the lapel of every human being on and off the planet, so that every time we encounter such a sign, we need to repeat this, to ourselves and everyone within hearing, to remind ourselves that everything that comes out of a human beings mouth in the form of words is a Story, and nothing more.

Because that is who we are, and it is our nature, our species’ primary tool of survival, and our destiny. We make up stories, and we tell them to each other. The good stories we remember, and repeat them to others, adding a bit here and their to make it a better story or to fit the taste of the audience, or to clear up discrepancies in the narrative. Sometimes the stories just entertain, sometimes they give hope, sometimes they help build suspension bridges. Just a few minutes from our house, the red sandstone canyons are covered with native american petroglyphs carved thousands of years ago. Though their exact meaning may be lost, the story remains: Once upon a time, they still say, there was a man, a woman, and — perhaps — a snake.

We are all story tellers. That is my story, and I’m sticking with it.

The Big Picture

9/9/2011 Niles Leave a comment

Gigi and I live in the high desert of southwest Utah, along the banks of the Virgin River and surrounded by red sandstone mesas whose foundations were set down during the Triassic era, about 230 million years ago. The dinosaurs were just starting to appear on the scene at that time, but they proved to be one of the most successful species known, and dominated the earth for over 160 million years, and were only brought down after the earth collided with a huge meteor or comet that had it been only slightly larger would have destroyed the entire planet for good.

Humans in their current form have only been on the scene for a mere 200 thousand years. If we can somehow manage to keep from killing ourselves off for another equally short period of time, and then repeat that unbelievable feat again four more times, we will have succeeded in surviving one half of one percent of the time that tiny-brained dinosaurs managed to survive.

And yet, here we are for the moment at least, the dominant species on the planet. So, what is the big picture?

In the short term (tens of millions of years), the earth should expect to see another dinosaur-killer sized meteor collide with the earth. This is a regular occurrence on those time scales. The last time this happened, 65 million years ago, most large terrestrial animals were killed off, and only a few tiny shrew-like mammals survived (who later evolved into humans). If we remain bound to this one planet, we are therefore doomed, along with cows, pigs, lions and just about anything larger than a gerbil. Assuming that we as a species want to continue on for a while, we will have to start making permanent homes off-planet, but close enough that after a big meteor hit the folks off-planet can eventually come back and try to clean things up a bit. Mars is about the only planet nearby that we could make habitable and which we can reach in a year or two. So that is the short term goal.

Longer-term, alas, the sun and our entire solar system is doomed. The sun, a second generation yellow dwarf star, was born just under five billion years ago and is now middle aged. However, long before it goes into its red-giant phase five billion years from now, in less than a billion years the sun will have become so much hotter that no liquid water will exist on earth, and life will become unsustainable. We have already begun looking around for nearby star systems which may host earth-like planets within the galactic habitable zone and far away from our aging sun. Assuming we have already learned how to terraform planets like Mars, that won’t be the issue. The problem is in very long range transportation, building a craft that can get us to far away systems, and keep alive colonies of people and other creatures for the many generations that it would take to get there.

In the very long range, the entire galaxy is under assault. The Andromeda galaxy is heading straight for us and will collide in about two billion years, ripping the entire spiral structure of our habitable zone apart. I have no idea how to deal with this problem, but a billion years is certainly enough time to think about it.

One way or another, these are really interesting problems, and the process of finding the answers is a very exciting one. And not only do we need the best and brightest minds to be thinking about these things and exploring all other branches of science, but we also need artists, composers, philosophers, writers, actors, doctors, businessmen and all other branches of human endeavor to throw themselves into their craft, whose ultimate product is the creation of meaningfulness out of chaos, of clarity out of confusion, of joy out of misery, health out of sickness.

To do that requires a passionate dedication to life on this planet, to science, to understanding, to dialog, to open mindedness and what Richard Feynman called “the Joy of Finding Things Out”.

And so, in regards to thoughts about September 11, 2001: what an incredibly stupid and pointless question about stupid and pointless acts spawned by stupid and pointless people stuck in the twelfth century, and our stupid and pointless response to those acts. Do you want to know how we should answer such people? Just yesterday (Sept. 8), in Promontory, Utah — A full-scale test of the world’s largest solid rocket motor, which was originally envisioned to power a new NASA rocket, went off without a hitch in Utah’s high desert.

We who choose to think are on our way to the stars. Let those who wish us all to bow our heads mindlessly, live by faith and folktales and worship ghosts in the mud can go to whatever hell their archaic mythology describes.

Holiday Message

12/24/2010 Niles One comment

Funny how people make their gods so small that they will fit neatly inside their tiny little 6000 year-old worlds and even smaller horizons and petty prejudices. Once upon a time long ago I believed in an infinite judeo-christian god, until I discovered mathematics and learned how to count to infinity (aleph-null, the smallest infinity of all), and how to enumerate the stars in the sky. Light traveling a trillion miles a year takes over a hundred thousand years just to cross the diameter of our little galaxy, one of a hundred billion such known galaxies. Likewise, our galaxy consists of half a trillion stars, of which our tiny solar system is only one on a far end of a minor spiral arm, governed by laws we have only recently found the mathematics to describe. Odd that such a vast system of immense complexity and exquisite mathematical perfection would be created by a divine entity of such little intelligence and pathetically low self-esteem that it requires weekly services of ego-boosting and thanks and praise, conducted by nanoscopic creatures on an imperceptibly small portion of its creation. When will people learn that the master creator of all things can take care of herself just fine, thank you very much, so why don’t you all get on with your own lives and take better care of each other on this beautiful little azure planet and stop killing each other in the creator’s name (upon which you cannot and never will agree)?

You would think by now we would have learned to be humble, but with each passing year we further confuse knowledge with wisdom, and show ourselves to be ever more unwise, trapped in ever more clever mazes of our own unwise devising. Only when confronted by a mirror into our own souls, can the truth be seen of our own foolishness — as was the case with mathematicians in the 1930’s, when they discovered proof that they will never have all the answers. Undecidability theorems as they were called, were developed by Kurt Gödel and were rigorous mathematical proofs that no matter how smart and complex a mathematical theory was, you could always find a question which could not be answered by that theory. Radical as it may seem, even if you were allowed to spend all eternity writing postulates and axioms to cover all possible subjects and cases, at the end of time your infinitely-refined system will still have gaps, and there will still be some questions that it does not answer (in fact, an infinite number of them!)

Humility — the awareness of our limitations as finite beings — is apparently the most difficult of all virtues to keep. Even physicists, the close-cousins to mathematicians, have not learned the lessons taught by Gödel, and still cling to arrogant hope that they are soon going to find a mathematical “theory of everything” — a hope which we mathematicians now know is hubris, doomed to failure. All religions proclaim their own infallibility and the heresy of all others, all countries claim to be the envy of the world, all football teams inspire their fans to maniacal chauvinistic loyalty, all parents know what’s best for their children, all people everywhere fail to ask themselves the simplest of questions: what if I’m wrong? Robespierre never asked this question, as he sent hundreds of innocent Frenchmen to the gallows, in the name of the revolution’s infallible truth. Truth, and man’s toxic addiction to the idea of Truth and the dangerous illusion that absolute Truth is knowable to man and is possessed by some prophet or president or economic theory, is the subtle poison that is killing humanity day by day, by robbing it of its heart, of its humility, of its humor, of its — humanity.

Kindly repeat after me, leaders and teachers and parents and preachers of the world, if you wish your people to truly live a healthy and happy life. What if I’m wrong, what if I’m wrong, what oh what if I’m wrong?

The Past Exists

1/1/2010 Niles 8 comments

When some Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door recently and asked about my own faith, I told them that I was a “secular buddhist” — which is to say I considered myself a non-theistic person guided by a scientific preference for direct evidence over dogma, and in grey areas of emotional and spiritual life and issues of teleology am informed by a more or less buddhist sensibility that rejects the split between this floating world and some Platonic ideal.

Whew!

So, the perennial question arises: how does a purely secular person who does not embrace the colorful stories of an infinite, personal God and of an eternal, indestructable soul find Hope or Meaning in this one, small finite life amidst a cold impersonal universe ?

Consider this entry (and its title) to be my own offering to you all, in the spirit of the holidays. It’s a bit long winded and technical in parts, but if you can just suspend disbelief for the moment, I promise that by the end you will, at least, have a glimpse into another way of Looking at Things, that if not as bright and shiny as the stained glass of a church, is still a very good story in its own right, and at least makes the adventure of life seem a good and worthwhile thing, while simultaneously taking the hard and painful edge off of the prospect of inevitable Death. Not only that, but unlike most inspiring stories it may actually turn out to be true.

But First, a Little Astronomy

Here is a picture of the constellation Orion that I took a month ago, while standing outside our house on a cold and freezing midnight, watching the Geminid meteor shower (click to enlarge the photo). I put the camera on a tripod and set it for a 30 second exposure, cranking down the aperture so the stars wouldn’t be such large blobs. There is still a little bit of smearing in the picture due to the rotation of the earth.

There are many stars and nebulae inside this constellation, but the brightest and most noticeable ones consist of the four stars forming the outer corners of Orion, along with the three in the middle forming the “belt”. The orange star in the upper left corner, for example is the red-giant called Betelgeuese, which is approximately 640 light-years from earth. Diagonally opposite, in the lower right corner, is the blue supergiant Rigel, roughly 770 light years away. The other stars in the constellation range in distance from just 26 light years up to 32,000 light years away.

The Orion (Crab) nebula is difficult to discern in this picture, and I would need to go for a very long exposure (with telescope star-tracking mount) to bring it out clearly. It is one of the three “stars” that form a vertical “sword” beneath the belt. Parenthetically, two days after this picture was taken we watched a movie called “The Fountain” with Hugh Jackman, in which Orion and its Crab Nebula were featured prominently. An interesting movie, which reminded me a bit of “Pan’s Labyrinth” — but I digress.

A Simple Question
Before I go on, I would like to pose a question about your own beliefs: do you believe that those stars and nebulas in the Orion constellation actually exist, in the same way that the upholstered chair you are sitting in exists, and with the same, near-absolute, level of certainty? You don’t have to tell me your answer, just hold on to that thought for a moment.

What We Now Know
You might have noticed that when I listed out the stars in the constellation that I used the traditional unit of “light-year” to indicate how far away those stars were. It seems a bit strange, I’m sure, to have a time-flavored word like “year” involved in a unit of distance, but that is really an essential clue to the modern view of the universe. A light-year is simply the distance that light travels in the vacuum of space in a single year, roughly six trillion miles. It makes really big distances a lot easier to work with. There are twelve light-months in a light-year, for example, and sixty light-minutes in a light-hour. Our own sun is just eight light-minutes from Earth, which sounds a lot less daunting than 93 million miles.

Alas, like a parent with a child nearing puberty, the time has now come for us to sit down and have a mature, frank discussion about Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. There is simply no way around it. Take a deep breath. The childhood days with all those stories you were told to make things simple have now passed. To get along in the world of adults, where Newton’s and Aristotle’s and Plato’s model of the world are quaint toys to be put away, you must unlearn some things you thought to be “True”, and try to accept what has been learned about the Way the World Works. Nobody wanted it to be this way, not even the scientists, not even Einstein, but the results of hundreds of thousands of experiments rejected all other possibilities, and with great humility the scientists had to let go of the old stories that they once held dear, and begin to think differently.

Here is the old story that they once held dear:

The world is all the stuff in space that you see around you, and time is something different, a thing that passes as the stuff moves around in space. The world moves through time.

Here is the new story, as told by Einstein:

Time is made out of the same stuff as space, and the two seemlingly different things are part of a single whole continuum we call the Cosmos.

Like most children who have heard dark rumors about the adult world and what they do behind closed doors, you may have heard things about something called “space-time”. Almost certainly the rumors you have heard have come out mangled, half-truths, with the wrong picture. Most likely, the idea you have gotten is that “space-time” is something where you take the three dimensions of space in which our world exists, and then tack on a time-axis to make it four-dimensional. That is actually the old view, the one that Newton and Lagrange and all the others have always used. Here, for example, is a space-time diagram of the (blue) earth orbiting around the sun over the course of a year.

The new view is that what “space-time” means is there is really only a single substance (what should we call it? Spice?), and if you grab a glob of it near you, you can if you like draw some lines in it and call them “time” and “space”, but those lines are completely arbitrary, and the direction you travel through the “spice” are completely up to you. Space and Time are interchangeable, and the “exchange rate”, expressed as a ratio of space-per-time, just happens to be c, also known as the speed of light.

Thinking Differently
In this new view, there are many words which we have always used, which need to be modified or understood differently. Even the rules of grammar and syntax need to be changed.

For example, as I write this, there is a classical guitar in its case, leaning against the wall of my office, about ten feet from my desk. That is the old way of looking at things. Light travels about a foot in a nanosecond (a billionth of a second), and so the distance between me and my guitar can also be said to be about ten nanoseconds. In both cases I am measuring the same “spice”, using different units. The guitar that I am looking at is actually the one that existed ten nanoseconds ago. There is no difference between separation in space, and separation in time, because they are the same stuff.

As a parenthetical note, there is one old word that anticipated the modern view and which really should be revived: the word “Whence”. It refers to a location, but has the word “when” in it, merging the two ideas of space and time into one.

The thing that sparked the whole Special Relativity thing was the discovery that the speed of light is constant, as it passes through space time. What is not so well known is that this does not just apply to light, but that (according to relativity) every single thing, every single particle of any type in the universe passes through space-time at a fixed, constant speed, which is — surprise! — the speed of light. This speed never changes, ever; the only thing you can control is the direction, which can be more through time or more through space. Even if you are just sitting in your chair, not moving, in space-time you are traveling in an almost 100% “time-like” direction at the speed of light. If you then get in a spaceship and fly off, your motion will now be moving a lot faster through space and, since your speed through space-time is constant, it means you are traveling through time a bit slower. That’s why scientists say that folks who come back from space are a tiny bit younger than they would have been if they had never left. The clocks that they carry with them also appear to verify this.

So, what does all this have to do with life, death, meaning and immortality?

The Past Exists
If you may recall, I had asked you all if you would agree that the stars in the Orion nebula actually exist. The stars that we are talking about are far away, and I had noted that they ranged in distance from 26 light years to over 32 thousand light years away. From the new view of the world, a light year (in distance) is equal to a year (in time), since they both measure the same stuff. So, the star you are looking at that is 26 light years away is the light from that star that left 26 years ago. And the star that is 32 thousand light years away is also 32 thousand years in the past. And yet, you agreed with me that these particular stars exist.

This is true, because the one, difficult to believe, thing that appears to be correct is: The Past Exists.

Let’s be very clear about this: in every sense in which you customarily say something right in front of you exists, the things and events which we think of here and now as being in the Past, actually still exist, as real and as tangible parts of the Cosmos as the classical guitar that rests against the wall of my office, waiting to be played.

This is not an idle speculation, and it has real consequences. Let’s go back to the Orion constellation for a moment. There is a minor star in that constellation called “13 Orionis”, which is 92 light-years away. Let us suppose that you are still having a hard time buying the new idea that the past exists, but that you will grant me the likelihood that the star 13 Orionis has not gone anywhere in the last 92 years and so the same star is still out there, now, as we speak in “the present time”, where you agree that things-that-exist actually live. Suppose that around that star, right now, are orbiting some very powerful telescopes, which can not only see the Earth, but can pick out the people wandering around on it (this is technologically possible with big enough scopes). The light from Earth that they are receiving now left our planet 92 years ago, in 1917.

Why did I choose this particular star? 1917 was the year that my grandparents, Lennye and Norvis (Nick), were graduating from highschool in Kentucky, already dating each other and trading letters. Anyone who is now manning the scopes around 13 Orionis and who decides to focus in on western Kentucky will soon be treated to the view of Lennye and Nick, laughing in the snow. Nick has already fallen to the ground and Lennye is about to pummel him with a snowball. They have their whole lives ahead of them, and the America that they know is young, the idea of World War does not exist yet. And they are alive and happy, now, as seen by those watching from the telescopes orbiting the star called 13 Orionis.

The Past Exists. Now. In this world we call the Cosmos.

Being Finite
Unless you are four years old, the idea that some of your friends now live a thousand miles away probably does not bother you. Nor should it. Sure, you do not have the ability to be both here and a thousand miles away, but as an adult you are able to sleep well, knowing that your friends are still alive and kicking, in their own homes a thousand miles away. If you push this a bit, it should also not bother you if they were instead a billion miles away, or even six trillion miles — which is to say, a light year — which is to say, a year in time. If a friend passed away a year ago, then, it should not bother you too much. If what we know now is true, your friends are still alive and kicking, in a part of space time that is a measurable distance away: twelve trillion miles, which is to say two light years. So, just as it does not bother you that your own life only spans five or six feet vertically and a foot or so horizontally, it should not bother you that your home in space time is roughly half a quadrillion miles in the long direction. That is the size of your home, and it’s where you live.

So Now What?
So what does this mean? What should a person who comes to accept this idea do with it. What should one do?

Here is my own suggestion, humbly submitted: it means that this life, this span of space-time in which we live our days, is a finite canvas on which we are free to paint whatever kind of experience we choose. The canvas, though finite and bounded in both space and time, is eternally part of the fabric of the Cosmos, and will at any moment once more become visible to someone, somewhere, somewhen, who chooses to look in that particular direction at that particular moment. So what it means is, you have only a small canvas on which to paint, so make it good, and to the best of your ability, make it beautiful.

Or, failing that, at least make it entertaining, and throw a few really good snowballs at someone that you like for good measure.