MOSTLY HARMLESS

In “My God is Bigger Than Your God”, I introduced a number of difficult concepts.  The potentially infinite nature of the Universe, the unity of space and time, and my explanation that the Creator must, of necessity, not be of this Universe.   

But here is the most mind-boggling idea of all.  We are surrounded by millions of humans who firmly believe that this unimaginably vast and wondrous Universe was created solely for the benefit of the inhabitants of this one tiny planet.  And more than that, they believe that we have to behave in certain ways because the Creator told us we must, that the Creator will from time to time bend the rules by which the Universe operates if we ask and have abided by the rules, and that the Creator will reward or punish us in some sort of continued existence once we have died based on how well we have behaved.  I haven’t the word skills to describe just how preposterous this appears to me.  It’s as if a colony of bacteria, living by chance in the gut of a performing dolphin at Sea World, had decided that the dolphin had created Sea World for their benefit.

This notion is, of course, the last and most insidious manifestation of our belief that the world is the center of the Universe.  Early man had no understanding of the reasons for phenomena he observed around him, and so assumed that there was some person or persons with powers greater than his own arranging the events of his life.  He had no understanding of the lights in the night sky and formed the theory that these were lamps placed in a bowl over his head.  When he came to a large body of water he could not see anything over the horizon and so assumed that there was nothing there.  Once he had observed the movement of the sun and moon over time he saw that they seemed to be the items in motion while the earth beneath his feet was obviously fixed, and so they must be orbiting him.  In addition, he saw that things did not move unless pushed, and so postulated the motions in the heavens must also be the handiwork of those invisible beings with greater power.  He originally believed they lived on high mountains, but moved them to a place in the sky once his explorations failed to find them on the physical planet.  Now of course, we nod sagely to ourselves, we know better these days.  The Earth orbits the Sun and the lights in the sky are other planets and other suns.  Things move in accordance with Einstein’s refinement of Newton’s laws, and we humans no longer believe in those invisible powerful beings. 

Except we do.  We’re nowhere nearly as evolved as we like to imagine.  Nearly all humans believe in a creator that can be experienced, who continues to order and affect our lives on a daily basis, who requires our adulation and in return will grant special favors and some sort of extension of life beyond death.  Beyond an insistence that the deity looks something like us (since we were ‘created in his image’) there is no agreement among humans regarding the name and form of this deity nor the specifics of the rules by which we are to live in order to be pleasing to him.  Even between adherents of a specific deity there are disagreements regarding proper procedures.  Do you baptize infants or adults?  Do you make images of the deity or is this forbidden?  Do you give praise five times a day or once a week, and is that on Saturday or Sunday?  The list of ways we are divided by our religions would (and has) filled many a book.  The adherents of each religion display, moreover, a considerable range in commitment regarding their religion’s beliefs and practices.  The most dangerous level of commitment among the adherents of any religion may be referred to as the fundamentalists.  Each of these groups believes that theirs is the only true belief; that they possess the only accurate text(s) as dictated by their deity in some manner, and that these texts are true, complete, and unassailable, admitting to no interpretation and completely sacred.  Anything that contradicts these sacred texts, whether any other religion’s sacred texts or the knowledge gained though centuries of scientific thought, is wrong, blasphemous, and dangerous.  More on these people later.  Suffice it to say that there are large sections of the population of this planet who are mentally the same as the Catholic Church elders made war on Muslims in the Middle East and who prosecuted Galileo nearly four centuries ago when he had the temerity to announce that the earth moved.

In any event, I made it clear that the Creator I referred to in my earlier article is not the same as Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Jove, or any other of these anthropomorphic creations.  All of these deities, whether ancient or current, exist within the Universe and therefore cannot have created it.  In my view, ancient humans created their gods to give rational form to the world they observed, and have morphed them from time to time but never let them go.  Thus most no longer believe in Zeus or Odin, but a direct line can be drawn from them to the current officeholders.  I further believe that once formed, all religions contain an invested bureaucracy (the priesthood), which is self-perpetuating as are all bureaucracies.  So, for example, as pagan druids converted to Christianity, the uniforms changed but the underlying structure of the keepers of belief changed not at all.  The priesthood has, after all, a vested interest in maintaining their position and so continues the fiction that belief must be continued in whatever deity currently occupies the top spot.

It is another truth of the human race that religion has spawned more wars and death than any other reason.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been at each other’s throats in ancient and modern times, as well as internecine conflicts between different factions within each of these groups.  Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, Hutus and Tutsis, the list of conflicts spawned by ignorance and intolerance is limited only by the number of religions humans have created.  At the heart of all of these conflicts are each faith’s fundamentalists, the ones who insist that any belief other than their own is blasphemy, curable only by the death of the blasphemer. 

Sadly, the millennia-long toll of death is not the only evil perpetuated at the behest of faith.  Ignorance is another of faith’s evil benefits, as one faith after another has fought tooth-and-nail against any scientific advance seen as contradictory to faith’s tenets.  Remember, our religions arose from mankind’s desire to understand his world, but science is how, as thinking individuals, we work out the details of the truth of the world as it really is.  Science does not rely on belief, only facts.  Scientists do speculate, of course, in order to postulate a theory.  But any theory does not stand unless it survives rigorous experimental examination.  Is the Earth flat and fixed in place?  Let us gather observations in support or refutation of this premise, and if the observations do not agree with the premise, the premise must therefore be wrong, and if wrong, discarded.  It does no good to go on believing in some premise that has not stood up to observation.  This is the opposite of rational thought.  The list of concepts denied by various religions is long, but modern examples include evolution and the warming of the planet.  Both of these trains of thought are the result of observations, and are not beliefs as such, but provable statements.  Every breeder practices evolution in an effort to create an animal that meets his specifications, and planetary warming is measurable by readings on simple thermometers, gathered over decades.

The only thing I can be thankful for is that our level of technological advancement has not led to any understanding of how to leave the planet in any significant way.  We are bound to this solar system by our current understanding of physics.  As a matter of fact, this month we have had an example of how limited our cosmic reach is.  The Voyager spacecraft, first launched in 1977, has finally reached what we feel is the edge of our solar system, as defined by the reach of the Sun’s gravity.  More than one human generation has passed since this spacecraft ventured into interplanetary space.  But the most telling point is the message this craft bears for the use of any civilization which may encounter it in the future.  The message contains images and sounds of the planet, not only of humans but of other species, like whales.  And how are these images and sounds recorded?  On a phonograph record!  Can you imagine the confusion of any species encountering this craft?  An analog recording?  Have these primitives never heard of digital?  Another point is that substantially none of our science fiction even postulated leaving our home galaxy.  Star Trek – Voyager, portrays a spacecraft marooned by a magic spell on the far side of our galaxy, and the marvelous technology imagined by the series can only get them back in a voyage of over seventy-five years!  Seventy years ago the writer Doc Smith imagined a voyage outside our galaxy, to a satellite galaxy known as the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.  In his story line that proposed technology such that our galaxy could be crossed in weeks, this journey was described as taking months.  Even in our fiction the distances facing us are completely beyond our ability to cope.

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Guide describes Earth as ‘Mostly Harmless’.  I am glad that physics confines our peculiar brand of ignorance to our planet because I’m confirmed in Adams’ estimate of humans.

A DEMON'S NEST OF SENTIMENTS

I'd like to recommend some writings by a cartoonist named Brooke McEldowney.  He draws two adult themed strips, not at all pornographic, but occasionally risqué: the reality-themed 9 Chickweed Lane and a fantasy called Pibgorn.  While Chickweed Lane runs all seven days, Pibgorn is a true daily strip with no Saturday or Sunday panels.  Pibgorn is currently, oddly enough, running Romeo & Juliet as set in the 1920s.  I do, you can guess, like his strips.

But it's what he prints on Sundays in place of the Pibgorn strip that I want to get you all to pay attention to.

These are great reads, always provocative.  I don't always agree, but I love his wordplay.  Here's this week's entry as an example.

The character in the corner is Drusilla, who is a demon (and a succubus),  I did say the strips were adult.

He often posts these very late, so I often look it up on Monday.

Here is the link to the site where these and other strips are posted every day.

http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn/2013/10/20#.UmWwNr_D_Dc

Check him out.

MY GOD IS BIGGER THAN YOUR GOD

First point – the question of whether there is a Creator and the question of the existence of Jehovah are entirely different from one another.  (In these discussions, I shall use the word Jehovah to stand for the God of Christians, Jews, and Muslims since, to the extent I postulate the existence of this being, I believe there is only one being with various names.)  The God of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammad is not the Creator.

Second point – the question of whether there is a Creator, and whether the Universe was created, can never be answered by any mortal being.  This is entirely a matter of faith.  The reason for this will become clear once one understands what the Universe is.

As scientists now understand it, the Universe came into existence in an event called the ‘Big Bang’.  Prior to this event the Universe did not exist; from our point of view there was no existence.  This was a nothingness that is impossible for us to imagine.  This was not the same as the nothing that is in an empty box, for the reason that the box itself exists. When we try to imagine nothing, in fact, the only nothing we can imagine is the absence of something, since we exist within the Universe, and cannot conceive of a condition where there is ‘nothing’.  In the case of creation the ‘box’ itself did not exist.  It was not a case of matter appearing in otherwise empty space.  Space itself did not exist.  When the Universe began it replaced the ‘nothing’ with a ‘something’.  One minute our entire plane of existence was not there, the next instant it was there.  A tiny ball exploded into existence, containing all the matter and energy that would ever exist, packed into a space the size of a bowling ball at a temperature which would make the raging heart of a star seem like a frigid and quiet spot.  But perhaps more amazing is that it was not just matter and energy that was created, but time as well.  Einstein’s equations tell us that space and time are not separate things at all, but one unified fabric called space-time.  So all of time, all matter and all energy, was created in that instant.  So, not only was there no Universe before the Big Bang, but all of the Universe, from edge to edge and from beginning to end, existed in its entirety from that first instant.  At one point nothing existed, and in the next microsecond everything existed. 

We are part of, and exist within, the Universe and can travel from place to place, and are also traveling through the time dimension, but always in a forward direction.  As far as we understand the physics, we are limited to the forward direction only.  This limit applies, actually, to all four of our dimensions.  We think we can retrace our path through the three ‘physical’ dimensions, but in fact this is not so.  Because space and time do not exist independently of one another, we can never return to the same point in space, because the original point no longer exists!  It has moved forward in what we call the time direction.  Our perception of the Universe is limited to here and now.  It is believed, by the bye, that ‘here and now’, as measured along what we perceive as the time axis from the Big Bang, is about 15 billion years after the creation. 

Having said that, let me point out once again that the Universe was complete when created, having within the fabric of space-time every single bit of matter or energy (which are interchangeable) and all of the possible events and interactions which all of the bits of matter and energy might engage in throughout all of time.  Our minds rebel at the sheer magnitude of the number involved in this concept.  In fact, in an infinite Universe the number of possible occurrences is also infinite, but this is quite possible, and I will address this seeming paradox next.   

Some have trouble understanding how the Universe might be infinite, since from our perspective it had a beginning.  This is based on what we see from the inside, that the Universe is a three dimensional object travelling along the time axis, but this view ignores the unity of space and time.  If infinite, it was infinite, and as explained above, complete in all four dimensions when created.  All of space-time, along with infinity itself, was created at the moment of creation.  Even if it were only finite, the Universe is vast beyond our comprehension.  We can reduce the Universe to numbers, of course, and say that there may be a billion other galaxies, each with billions of suns, but the numbers themselves are so large as to exceed any attempt to grasp the scale.  We can write them down as numbers and exponents, but they have no real meaning to our minds. 

We can see but a small fraction of the Universe.  If one were to travel to one of the increasingly rare places on our planet where the view of the night sky is unimpeded by light pollution, one could see perhaps only six thousand stars.  There are so few, in fact, that early humans imagined patterns of connections between them that do not really exist.  We call these imagined patterns the constellations, but the groupings are an illusion related to our particular viewing point.  In reality, all of these groupings would be unrecognizable if viewed from the side, as the individual stars are often of immensely different distances from our little planet.  Even with our most sophisticated instruments, we can see only a limited selection of the actual Universe.  One reason for this is that we are imbedded in a dust cloud which restricts our view in the visible spectrum.  We have developed instruments with which we can ‘see’ the sky using other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but these often yield nothing but blurry images when used at great distances, so ‘seeing’ is a relative term.  More importantly, we absolutely cannot see anything off our planet as it really exists, because of the time it takes for light to travel from the object to us.  In our solar system, of course, this delay causes us no difficulty in our everyday lives, since the distances are such that the delay is measured in seconds.  But when looking at more distant objects, the speed of light becomes significant, such that we see objects as they were in the past.  The star system we call Alpha Centauri, for example, is some four light years away, which means that we see Alpha Centauri as it was four years ago, not as it is today.  A star in this system could have exploded as a supernova last month, and we simply would not know for another four years.

As noted above, some models of the Universe postulate that it is infinite.  Let’s explore what is meant by infinite.  The first thing to understand is that there is more than one kind of infinity.  As explained by George Gamov in his book, One, Two, Three, Infinity, the type of infinity with which we are familiar is referred to as aleph-0; the infinity of whole numbers.  If our Universe is infinite, it is an aleph-0 infinity, since space-time is made up of discreet units.  However, between each whole number in the infinite aleph-0 string there are an infinite number of whole fractions.  Between 0 & 1, for example, there are ½, ¼, 1/8, and so on, while between 1 & 2 there are 3/2, 5/4, 9/8, etc.  This can be thought of as infinity squared, and is known as aleph-1.  Then, between each and every whole fraction, is an infinite series of irregular decimal fractions (ones that are repeating or unending).  This is infinity cubed, or aleph-2.  In his book, Mr. Gamov explains yet another level of infinity (aleph-3 or infinity to the fourth power) that I do not have the math skill to follow, much less explain here.

So there is the Universe as I understand it.  Vast far beyond my ability to grasp as anything but a meaninglessly large number; so enormous we cannot see or experience even a tiny fraction of it.  As one of the 10 to the trillion to the trillion, etc. possible beings which will ever exist throughout the Universe, we are so ephemeral as to be practically non-existent.  Humans in their current form have been around for perhaps one hundred thousand years.  That’s a little less than 7 millionths of the current age of the Universe.  What’s more, if there was a map of the Universe marked ‘You Are Here’, that spot would be on a miniscule speck of rock circling a rather modestly-sized star in a dusty corner ‘way out near the edge of a fairly insignificant member of a small group of galaxies.  Of course, on a map that included even just our own galaxy the ‘You Are Here’ sign would be far too small to see.  Our little world is less than one tenth of one percent of all the matter in just our small and insignificant solar system.  The proportion between our world and the entire Universe is indistinguishable from zero.  And humans inhabit only the thinnest of habitable skin clinging to the earth’s surface.  And in that thin skin we are hardly the most numerous nor the greatest portion by weight of all of earth’s inhabitants (the insects have us beat both ways).  Relative to the Universe, we hardly can be said to exist at all.

As I implied at the beginning of this article, I choose to believe that the Universe was, in fact, created.  I have absolutely no basis for this belief, and I am further convinced that no one can ever can have any such basis.  More importantly, I also believe that it will never be possible for me or any other being that is a part of this creation to ever know the reason for the creation, to say nothing of being able to prove the act of creation.  This is because the Creator must by necessity exist outside; above, if you will, the Universe, and there is no point of contact between the inside and the outside of the Universe.  The reason for this should have become clear as you read through the explanation of the structure of the Universe.

To have created the Universe, the Creator must be able to manipulate and create our space-time, which means that the Creator must exist outside the Universe, above it if you will, in another dimension altogether.  By the way, it does not matter whether our Universe is finite or infinite.  The Creator, of necessity, will be of a higher order of infinity than our Universe. 

So my God is bigger than your God.

SPECIAL SENATE ELECTION - CLOUD OF CANDIDATES

I wonder if others of you were as surprised as I to see how many candidates there really are for the Senate seat up for grabs in Wednesday's costly special election.

All through the (thankfully shortened) election season it has been Booker this and Lonegan that, with nary a mention of the SIX other souls who also want the job.  Now, of course, I could understand why there would be little coverage, since politics is driven only by money, and these fellows clearly do not have their own deep pockets.  But there hasn't been any word that I've heard at all.  In a search tonight I found ONE story referenced online, dated from months ago:

Dumont man among 6 to file for N.J. Senate run as third-party candidates
Tuesday August 13, 2013, 8:48 PM
BY  ANTHONY CAMPISI
STATE HOUSE BUREAU
The Record

A Dumont man is one of six people who filed to run as third-party candidates in the race to fill the U.S. Senate seat of the late Frank Lautenberg, according to state elections filings released Tuesday.

Stuart D. Meissner, an investor and New York attorney, has pledged on his campaign website to work to “stop the backroom deals and influence peddling” in Washington and criticized federal regulators for failing to bring criminal charges against former Gov. Jon Corzine for his role in the bankruptcy of the MF Global brokerage firm.
He will be joined by Robert DePasquale of Butler, Eugene Martin Lavergne of West Long Branch, Pablo Olivera of Newark, Antonio Nico Sabas of Irvington, and Edward C. Stackhouse Jr. of Hamilton Township, Mercer County.
Secretary of State Kim Guadagno, the state’s top elections official, must certify their nominating petitions before their names can be put on the ballot.
DePasquale appears to be running on an anti-immigrant platform, filing official slogans that include: No Amnesty Period, American Citizens First and Jobs for Americans.
Sabas has unsuccessfully run for mayor of Irvington before and Stackhouse, in a YouTube video, said that he wants to represent working class New Jerseyans in the Senate.

Email: campisi@northjersey.com

One wonders why these men embarked on such obviously quixotic quests, since it meant spending many thousands of dollars just to get listed on the ballot (the FEC fees alone run nearly $5,000). 

Two of these fellows have campaign websites:

http://meissner2013.com/
http://depasqualeforsenate.com/

The other four must be relying on Facebook or LinkedIn pages.  They are listed on something called Ballotpedia, which I've never before heard of.  But these listings have no bios posted by the candidates.  Perhaps they are as unfamiliar with Ballotpedia as am I.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Eugene_Lavergne

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Pablo_Olivera
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Antonio_Sabas
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Edward_Stackhouse,_Jr.

Anyway, remember to vote Wednesday!

SPECIAL SENATE ELECTION - DON'T FORGET TO VOTE

This is a reminder that Wednesday the 16th is an election day, to fill the Senate seat of the late Frank Lautenberg.

This extra election, at a cost of over twelve million dollars, was scheduled because Governor Christie felt that Mayor Booker would generate a large Democratic turn-out, skewing the count and skewering his chances for re-election.

Be that as it may, our toxic and corrupt primary system has once again not given voters much of a choice.  We have a sleazy and opportunistic Newark political hack versus a right-wingnut tea party darling.

Personally, I am bringing a clothes-pin to the polls with me, and everyone else probably needs to as well. 

I am going with the sleazy hack, since I feel that the Senate should remain in Democratic hands.  Given that both parties are working overtime to perpetuate our divisive political environment, to me it seems best that neither be given they upper hand until the unlikely event they begin to act like pragmatic and rational legislators.