There's Nothing There - Part 5

I was reading this article in Scientific American the other day all about Reality and how we don't know what it is. The conclusion reached - we can only understand anything in the universe by understanding how it is related to other things. That is, ultimately and finally, it is not just that everything interacts with everything else, but we can't understand the things themselves, which don't actually exist, mostly. We can only understand the interactions.


And the word they used in the article was ... "relations". Relationship.

Here's the link: http://www.tokseminars.org/Science_Articles/Entries/2015/12/3_New_Physics_Questions_the_Very_Nature_of_Reality.html. The link to the actual magazine is there, but (paywall).

Here's what they said:

"A growing number of people think that what really matters are not things but the relations in which those things stand. Such a view breaks with traditional ... conceptions of the material world in a more radical way ...

"... It runs as follows: we may never know the real natures of things but only how they are related to one another ...

"Now a question arises: What is the reason that we can know only the relations among things and not the things themselves."

"The straightforward answer is that relations are all there is."

All that there are, is relationships. It is not a universe that happens to have relationships in it. It is a universe that is defined by the relationships that are in it. It began with a relational act of observation that brought it into being, it proceeded by acts of observation that brought reality into being within it, and every action is part of a series of interactions - there are no actions in isolation, there are just interactions.

So you do not live or breathe or act in isolation. You are not alone. You are part of a series of relationships that started at the beginning of time and surround you like a cloud of angels and demons.

You might be caught up in your own existence, feeling isolated and lonely, abandoned and lost, unable to find your way, maybe in part because we have been indoctrinated to believe in fierce individualism, to believe that we must make it on our own without help or aid.

But we are caught up in relationships. They define us. They surround us. They are our curse and our salvation. They drive us to despair, they exalt us into glory. They are not just the answer.

They are all that there is.

You do not, cannot, will not exist in isolation. You exist only through and because of relationships. Richard Dawkins speaks of "The God Delusion". He is wrong. The greatest delusion may be that we are individuals.

I wish then to make a proposition.

Observer God. Relational God.

The highest form of relationship is love.

There is no love greater than to give your life for others.

All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.

And maybe dark chocolate. Which is the finest sign in the universe that God exists and loves you wildly.

There's Nothing There - Part 4

Interaction.

The universe is a place defined by interaction between things that aren't really there.

That is, the forces of nature, and what are forces, anyway?, and a handful of particles that only do anything because of the forces and according to Quantum Theory's godfather, Niels Bohr, aren't really there in the way that we think things ought to be there. Or anywhere. Which is another option - they not only aren't there, they could be anywhere or everywhere. Or not.

In fact, it seems likely that the universe began with an interaction. General Relativity tells us that the universe began from an infinitely small point called the Singularity, and Quantum Mechanics tells us that if the Singularity is small (as it was, since it had no size at all), then Big Bang had to start with an interaction. In this case, an observation of the Singularity by something capable of observing. An observer.

An observer. Since Big Bang produced Space and Time, an observer outside of Space and Time. Outside of four dimensions of Space and Time. Outside of the Laws of Physics. An observer.

Because in Quantum Mechanics, nothing ever happens without an observation or a measurement. Nothing. Ever. Not even a universe.

I read the following the other day on Aeon.com, written by Margaret Wertheim (https://aeon.co/users/margaret-wertheim):

"Such a view appalled many physicists, who fought desperately to find a way out, and for much of the 20th century it still seemed possible to imagine that, somehow, subjectivity could be squeezed out of the frame, leaving a purely objective description of the world. Albert Einstein was in this camp, but his position hasn’t panned out. 

"Forty years ago, the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler proposed a series of thought experiments to test if an observer could affect whether light behaved as a particle or a wave and, in 2007, the French physicist Alain Aspect proved that they could. 

"Just this April, Nature Physics reported on a set of experiments showing a similar effect using helium atoms. 

"Andrew Truscott, the Australian scientist who spearheaded the helium work, noted in Physics Today that ‘99.999 per cent of physicists would say that the measurement… brings the observable into reality’. 

"In other words, human subjectivity is drawing forth the world." 

(https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem)

Let's define what that says and means. It means that human interaction with the universe actually creates the reality that we live in. Without human interaction, there is no universe, no space and time, no laws of physics. No reality.

So the universe starts with an interaction. And then it becomes defined by interactions. Gravity is an interaction between matter and space-time. Matter is a quantum interaction between forces and particles, between the Higgs boson and energy. Stars are a gravitational interaction between matter and space-time. The elements you need for life come from that interaction, cooked up in the interior of stars or in the death of stars.

Everything in the universe, including the universe itself, is bound up and defined by interactions. You are made of stardust, made of space-time, made of particles and forces, all interactions.

Even humans and human relationships. You interact with the Strong Force and the Electromagnetic Force in order to exist. That is, your atoms do. You are made of space-time, sitting in space-time, affected by space-time, interacting with space-time. You interact with the universe - gravitationally, quantum mechanically.

And you interact with the biosphere, with plants and animals and air and water and bacteria and parasites and ecosystems and weather, as everything interacts with everything else.

And you interact with humanity. Love, hate, friendships, adversaries, random people on subways and buses and trains and planes and automobiles. With family. Loved ones. Lovers, wives, husbands, children.

All of life is an interaction. It starts with sperm and egg interacting, preceded of course by a certain interaction between mother- and father-to-be. Embryo with mother. Newborn with mother, father, doctors, nurses, midwives. Family. Friends. All of life is an interaction, starts with an interaction, proceeds via interactions, ends with an interaction.

Some interactions are infinite. Gravity, the weakest of the universe's interactions, is infinite in its reach. The Strong Force, clearly the strongest, is limited to the size of an atomic nucleus.

At the human level, the word "interaction" is analogous to "relationship". In fact, it could be said that this is true at every level. It is an interactional universe. It is a relational universe.

At the human level, that relationship ideally starts in an act of love.

Now we make a tiny little philosophical leap. Maybe ... theological. To wit:

The highest form of relationship is love.

All of our human relationships are defined by love in its varying levels. Indifference, hatred, fondness, disgust, dislike, lust, ignorance, passion, anger; a bell curve of love. We each hate a few, we are ignorant of most, we tolerate many, we like some, we love a few. What we want most in life seems to be two things, one of which is to be loved, to belong, to be accepted, and in its purest form, this love is unconditional.

The other is that we want to matter, to have made a difference, to have left the world in a better place, to have been a part of something greater than ourselves. It is probably just a variation on love - we want to be loved and admired for what we did as much as who we were.

That is, we want our interaction with the universe and our own personal version of the universe to have mattered. And we want to have loved and to have been loved along the way.

Watch this space.

There's Nothing There - Part 3

So here's what we resolved - everything came from nothing. So nothing actually matters. That is, the nothingness that gave birth to the somethingness is a nothingness that matters.

So if we blithely say that there's nothing in the universe, that nothing might actually be something.

But we need to redefine our terms. Big Bang will do that for us, since it has already shown the everything can come from nothing, since everything did in fact come from nothing.

So let's look at our questions - why is there something rather than nothing in the universe?

The first answer is, the nothing is actually something.

Here's what the universe did.

It arrived with nothing it in. No energy, no matter, no laws of physics. Just space and time. Space-time.

So it took no energy at all and turned it into two types of energy - positive and negative. Positive energy will quickly become matter (e=mc**2), negative energy even more quickly became gravity. And they exactly cancel it each other out. The energy that produces matter, by the way, is light. Photons. Light becomes matter. All the matter of the universe comes from light.

So now we have space-time, gravity and matter.

Let's define gravity. Gravity is an interaction between space-time and matter. Matter bends space-time. Bent space-time tells matter how to move. Matter tells space-time how to bend. John Wheeler said that. He was right.

Interaction. Remember that word.

Just before the universe produced any matter, it gave us the laws of physics, the forces of nature - Strong Force, Electromagnetic Force, and Weak Force.

But as it turns out, the Forces are not with us if there are no particles for them to interact with.

So the universe gave us particles - quarks, electrons, and a sticky little particle called a gluon. It glues stuff on.

The Strong Force interacts via gluons and quarks, and glues quarks together into protons and neutrons.

Now we've got protons, neutrons and electrons. The Electromagnetic Force interacts via electrons.

Interaction. Remember that word.

That's all in about 3-4 minutes after Big Bang.

Then we wait about 378,000 years for the universe to cool down a bit. After which, it produces atomic nuclei from protons and neutrons and simple atoms from atomic nuclei and electrons. This is all because of the Strong Force via quarks and gluons and the Electromagnetic Force via electrons.

Interaction.

Gravity kicks in, and all those simple hydrogen gas molecules roll down a gravitational well or two (gravity, the interaction of space-time and matter) until things get really hot and pressured, and lo and behold, a star is born out of the interaction of space-time, matter, gravity, and a little smidge of both the Electromagnetic Force and the Weak Force (which has it own particles, the W and Z boson).

Here's what stars do. Stars make all the elements that you need for life and planets out of hydrogen. Which is made from a proton and an electron. Which come from light. Which comes from the universe making something out of nothing. That is, matter and energy out of no energy at all. And this all happens because the universe conjured up forces.

And what is a force, anyway?

It's apparently something that makes particles do things. Or, the force is the particles, and the particles are the force.

And it all comes from nothing, except for one thing.

Interaction. Remember that word.

There's Nothing There - Part 2

In a previous Blog, "There's Nothing There - Part 1", we finished by noting that according to one way of looking at the universe, there's really nothing in it. And that's pretty much right. At the smallest level of "something", on the level of electrons, quarks and gluons (which make up protons and neutrons and atoms and hence all the matter in the cosmos), electrons, quarks and gluons aren't really there. It's a Quantum thing. And as far as everything bigger than little things goes, it's all mostly empty space, the parts that aren't empty being occupied by things (matter) made up of things (smaller matter) that aren't really there.

Clearly, that needs fixin'.

OK, then. Here we go.

First, Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory says that the universe is radically unpredictable (think "Jurassic Park"), and the reason that it's unpredictable is because there are too many tiny little things that we can't know about that make bigger things happen. The Butterfly Effect. A butterfly flaps its wings off the coast of South American and you get a hurricane (instead of not a hurricane) in the Atlantic.

Like, a fruit vendor in Tunisia gets hacked off at his government, sets himself on fire, the dominoes that became Arab Spring start falling over, and still nobody knows what the end result will be.

Or, a tiny rubber ring on the space shuttle gets a bit cold, loses a bit of its elasticity, and the Challenger blows up 72 seconds into its launch. Or a 1 kg bit of insulating foam hits the wing in the wrong way, makes a tiny little crack, and the Columbia disintegrates on reentry into the earth's atmosphere.

 One tree branch falls on one power line in Ohio and causes the largest black-out in North American history, hundreds of miles away in New York and eastern Canada. Another falls on a power line in Switzerland and blacks out all of ... Italy.

Tiny things can and do have a huge impact on the way universe does its business.

So, second. Big Bang.

Big Bang came from a Singularity. This Singularity was an infinitely compressed point of pure energy potential.

It had no size. It had no substance. Nothing was in it. Not matter, not energy. Nothing. It was the tiniest of all possible things, since it wasn't even there in any sense that we understand about "being there", especially since there was no there for it to be there in. Time and space didn't exist yet. The potential for them was in the Singularity.

And in the tiniest of all possible times, the universe blew itself into existence. One theory suggests that in a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the universe went from a nanometer square to 250 million light years across. Our own Milky Way is a puny 100,000 light years across, an embarrassingly small 1000 light years thick.

In .000000000000000000000000000000000001 of a second.

1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across.

Everything coming from nothing in as close to no time as it's possible to imagine.

Time and space and energy and matter and the potential for everything that became everything that is. From nothing.

Tiny things seem to be able to do very, very large.

Now we have a cool question to deal with.

Since the universe arrived, that is, since it used to not be here, and now it is, where did everything inside the universe come from? Why did the universe do anything? Why is there something instead of nothing?

Technically, that's three questions. Tant pis, as they say in France.

Part 3, coming up. Watch this space.

I lost my underwear in Cairo - dateline 1999

It is nearly ten thirty on Monday evening and I am still flying, having left CS at 2:00 Sunday afternoon. CS to Denver to Chicago to Frankfurt to Munich to Cairo. I had no time at all to make a connection in Frankfurt that had left before we arrived. It is a first world airport, most of the time. Except for those times when an airline from a third world country (that would be Egypt in this case) sets up shop. Having missed my lovely Lufthansa flight to Cairo, it was off to Egypt Air, whose motto is (as Dave Barry might say)  “No Crashes Since the Last One”.

I got to the gate about five minutes before departure to find this situation: there was no plane, half the crew and all of the passengers were locked out of the departure area, nobody was checking anybody in, the clocks were all broken, and one of the Egyptian pilots looked more like Moses than an airline pilot. Long white beard, the whole bit. No robes and staff, but I didn’t know but what they all had to change into robes when they got into the cockpit. Heck, maybe they had to fly towards Mecca at prayer times, so we all wouldn’t have to get up and find east.

Plus, as I said, the clocks were all broken. You need to know that when Germany got rid of God a few generations back, for some reason they got really uptight about being on time for things. You know, being pretty precise about things and all, without God to sort of oversee everything, I think they got so they thought the world would fall apart if they were a few minutes late for a train or something.

 (By the way, I am writing this on the flight to Cairo – I’m glad I watched the movie coming into Frankfurt. It’s the same movie on this flight, but with Arabic subtitles all over the bottom. I don’t want to sound like the total Arabic illiterate person that I am, but it looks like some taggers with spray paint got into the editing room and thought the movie was a bridge. It's actually quite lovely, apart from getting in the way of the actual movie.)

Flash forward to Bahrain. Did I mention that my suitcase didn’t arrive in Cairo? Well, that wouldn’t be strictly true – I arrived at about 2:00 am Tuesday morning, and the bag arrived sometime Tuesday evening. But, the Egyptian authorities wouldn’t let anyone deliver it to me, so I next saw my bag as I was leaving Cairo. It showed up behind the counter as I was checking in, but I couldn’t touch it since it hadn’t been through Customs. Bear in mind that what I didn’t have was underwear, plus socks, clothes, toothbrush, deodorant – the bare essentials of life. What I did have was clothes that I had been wearing for a 31-hour plane trip and two days of conferencing in Cairo. Plus my own personal cloud of smog.

So I watched my bag leave again as I took off for Manama, Bahrain, via Dubai.

Cairo – I saw the Pyramids. I also saw the Pyramids Pizza Hut right outside the entrance. KFC was next door, I think.

Then I went to Bahrain.

Did I mention that my suitcase didn’t? It went somewhere else. It’s Wednesday night, and I am wearing the same clothes I put on at home Sunday morning in Colorado. The nice little man promised me it would come on Thursday. I tried to stand close enough to him so that the smell would make him more helpful, but smell is pretty common in this part of the world where many folks wear full body-armor-style robes all day long in 140 degree heat. They make the women wear black. They go with the men to the beach, and the men get to swim, and the women get to sit and watch in the sand, covered completely down to their eyeballs in black.

So what I’m saying is, he didn’t notice my body odor, because the main air quality problem they have out here is all from body odor.

Thursday I got desperate and bought some clothes. Socks. Underwear. A couple of shirts. Some deodorant. That was key, deodorant.

I saw Bahrain. Bahrain could generously be described as flat, hot, and dusty. Sunny, though. Really sunny. All the time. This would be the Sahara desert, I think. An easy job would be weather reporter. I was told that the reason that all the flights leave in the middle of the night is that it is too hot for them to sit outside during the daytime – the fuel might explode. Exploding planes are bad for tourism. Plus the air is too hot for the planes to get any lift on take-off. They'd have to drive through the desert to get anywhere. No lift - not a good thing for a plane.

I went to the airport to leave that same day. I arrived at about 1:30 in the morning. Did I mention that my suitcase didn’t? Yes, well, I went back to the airport for a 6:40 p.m. flight, only to find that my bag was scheduled to arrive at (go ahead, guess) 7:00 p.m. You can imagine my joy.

The good news was that my flight was delayed two hours, so once again I saw my bag. In fact, this time I got to touch it, if only to roll it from customs downstairs to the check-in desk upstairs. I couldn’t exactly open it or anything, but at least I had felt it with my fingers briefly.  I longed for clean jeans with a longing that could only come from five days in the same pair.

In Kuwait, my bag arrived. It’s a miracle. I burned my jeans. Wasn’t hard, just threw them out on the pavement and they caught fire almost immediately. It was over 100 again in Kuwait.

Kuwait could generously be described as flat, hot, and dusty. Sunny, though. Really sunny. All the time. It has been my favorite place so far, because I got my underwear back in Kuwait.

That’ll about do it for Kuwait. Apart from the gold Lincoln Continental with the really large gold fist punching up through the roof. I think it's a war memorial. Not really getting the symbolism.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the UAE. The UAE could generously be described as flat, hot, and dusty. Sunny, though. Really sunny. All the time.

Flying on Emirates Air (this year’s best airline in the world – this is true) is great. Not only do we have touch sensitive TV screens at every seat, and remote control units with a phone on the flip side, the cabin TV screen periodically shows us how far we are from Mecca, and what direction it is from us. So that we can orient ourselves in the right direction when it’s time for prayers. First class get their own VCR at every seat, with a choice of videos personally delivered by lovely air hostesses.

I don’t want you to have to worry, so I’ll tell you now that my bag made it the rest of the trip with me. It would have been funnier if it had continued to follow me, meeting me briefly in airports as I pick it up from customs and carry up to check it in again, but not funnier enough for me to have been happy about it.

Random trip stories : I was told of an African man who recently got drunk and fell asleep by the side of the road late one night. He woke up to find that a python had swallowed him feet-first up to the chest. He got out somehow – a black man, he was bleached white from the chest down to his toes;

Leaving Bahrain (where Muslims go to sin), we had to stand in a long line to be searched by the Booze and Porno Police, who were checking to see if any of us were trying to smuggle liquor or dirty videos into more strict and fundamentalist Kuwait;

Some fishermen on Lake Victoria from Uganda got tired of actually fishing, so they decided that  it wold be lots easier to just throw poison in the water and  scoop the dead fish up in nets. They sorta forgot that what is poison for the fish is poison for the fish-eaters, so after a few dozen people died from the fish, they had to ban eating any fish from the lake. Bad idea.

We saw giraffes driving home from the airport in Nairobi. Well, giraffe heads. The rest of them was hidden below the trees.

Actually, that first sentence was bad. We did not see any giraffes driving home – it’s illegal for wild animals to drive in Kenya. The actual human drivers are wild enough. First, the roads have apparently been bombed. Your basic path weaves through the potholes like a drunken sailor, and that’s if the roads used to be paved at some point in the past. Most of the roads are dirt, with ruts big enough to swallow aircraft carriers. Add to that two opposing lanes of traffic, and the whole enterprise gets pretty exciting as everybody weaves and bobs through the potholes and ruts and cars coming from the other direction and donkey carts, plus jaywalkers and the occasional elephant. OK, I lied about the elephant.

Plus there are these vans called “mutations” or “matatus” or something which are driven by crazy people who jam as many people into the van as possible and then drive like suicide bombers. I think they kill a lot of people on the roads in Kenya.

We did get to go to the Nairobi Game Park, which is sorta like a city park only it’s 625 square miles of stunning African plains with animals that can stomp or eat you, instead of squirrels and pigeons. We were hoping to see lions, so don’t ask me why we were sitting on the roof of the jeep. We maybe saw a cheetah. We did see elands and impalas and cape buffalo and a rhinoceros and baboons and giraffes (more than just heads), but no zebras, and hartebeests and cool birds that I don’t know what they’re called. 

Then we went to a restaurant called the Carnivore where guys walked around with big haunches of meat on Maasai warrior swords hacking off chunks of zebra, eland, waterbuck (I don’t know what that is either, but it tasted good) and other, more pedestrian meat like pig and stuff. So the whole experience was like one of those restaurants where you choose your own lobster, only we were choosing our own zebra. If we’d seen any.

In a final irony, as I stood in line at Entebbe International Airport, waiting to check in to board a gleaming British Airways 747, all the airport power went out and the computers went down in the terminal, forcing the agents to check us in laboriously by hand.

I flew home Entebbe, Nairobi, London Gatwick, London Heathrow, Newark, Denver, and Colorado Springs, another 32-hour epic. Africa had one final chance to let me know who was in charge – the power outage in Entebbe led to a luggage miscount, so they had to off-load all the bags onto the tarmac in Nairobi, and off-load all of us passengers so that we could identify our bags.

Did I mention that my bag didn’t make it to the USA? I have now lost my underwear on four continents.

Common Sense...

A lot has been written about the loss of common sense in America, particularly by those on the right. On the surface, the observations seem reasonable. Courts make seemingly outrageous civil settlements, or set vicious criminals free on technicalities. Entrenched bureaucracies enforce laws blindly without regard for individual variations or needs.

 But common sense works both ways. To wit:

Common sense says that the more guns a society has, the more violent it is likely to be. Guns do not make a people violent. But they do give a violent people the ability to kill quickly, easily, thoughtlessly, like a mindless bureaucracy might do. Common sense might prompt us to look at other countries with many fewer guns, and much, much lower rates of violent crime.

Common sense will tell us that if there is a death penalty, innocent people will be put to death for crimes they did not commit, along with the guilty who are executed for the crimes they did commit. Common sense will suggest that if the death penalty is the one punishment that cannot be fixed after the fact, then the death penalty should not be an option for punishment.

Common sense will tell us that just because we assume that a fetus is not human, because it is more convenient for us to make that assumption, that does not make a fetus not a human. Our comfort levels do not redefine reality for us.

Common sense will demonstrate that the reason we have laws which restrict the rights of good people and businesses is because bad people and businesses have forced us to write those laws.

Common sense will look at history to realize that capitalism will not work without the checks and balances found in a good dose of socialism, and vice versa. A healthy society will have the vigor of capitalism, and the wisdom to protect its workers via socialism.

Common sense will show that the way to prevent poor people from illegally entering this country looking for better jobs for better pay is to help the countries from whence these people come to provide better jobs for better pay. That may entail some willing sacrifice on our part, else they will continue to come, and the jobs they seek will flee our own borders into lands with cheaper labor.

Common sense says that if a people suffers racial discrimination for generations, the solutions will be complex, and will require sacrifice by those who descend from the discriminators.

Common sense says that the poor are poor for complicated reasons, not only or even primarily laziness and greed. There are many lazy, greedy rich people. Common sense says that demonizing those least able to defend themselves is demonic. Common sense says that if we do not help the poor kids while they are kids, we will have yet another generation of poor adults having poor kids, and that many of us could find ourselves, through a careless decision or an indifferent society, living poor and homeless.

Common sense says that we need to protect both businesses and the environment from each other.

Common sense tells us that most criminals will eventually be released, and that we need to prepare them to re-enter society, to be able to work and earn a living, to be forgiven with wisdom. A subculture of angry, alienated people will make enemies of the rest of us far more successfully than we will make enemies of them.

Common sense tells us all that living in a country which provides for us will have a cost, and that we each should expect to pay what is required. It also tells us that some will not be able to pay, and that, because we are a good people, we should be willing to help.

Common sense tells us that when we are at our best, we desire a society with no poor, no homeless, no victims of violence or discrimination, a place where the innocent do not suffer and the guilty are both punished and offered rehabilitation, a land of communities where people care for each other regardless of differences. We desire a place where no babies are aborted, no one is addicted, no one beats another, and all are given an equal chance to succeed.

Common sense tells us we will never have such a society. Thus, we must not only care for ourselves, but for each other, and we must both stand firm for what we believe, and be willing to compromise. Above all, we must try to love one another, as trite and simplistic as it sounds.