The Billy Lee Pontificator

Wisdom can be condensed and gurgitated easily by anyone who has experienced a lifetime of learning, experimentation, and the testing of limits. No one understands America who has not spent time in its ghettos and prisons; in its jails and colleges; in its military and its resorts; in its paradises and hells. 

No one who’s never been both rich and poor knows what either is like; rich and poor is what the majority of Americans are. The ten percent who consider themselves middle-class know almost nothing about either — rich and poor is how ninety percent of the population lives –with ninety percent of the ninety percent living poor. 

I know things — amazing things that most people believe are not true. I’ve lived all over the world; worked for over a dozen companies; attended a dozen schools; trimmed gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery and invented products everyone uses — like milk carton safety caps and tear-spout coffee lids. I developed products of war — like the run-flat wheel that enables military vehicles with shot-out tires to keep rolling. 

My truth is not reflected in media or in the faces of my family and friends. I have secrets, which many want kept until I sleep in the grave. When speaking truth, they tell me to stop; when I continue, some walk away. 

So be it. 

People on Quora.com ask me (and others) for answers to questions. What follows is a small sample of questions I’ve answered.  Readers can scan to find something they like. Find something interesting and read a flash card answer, which is my version of what might be true. Copy answers onto index cards. Who will stop you?

I admit: some answers are not true.

Who will find what’s fake?

If objects in the universe are moving away from us in all directions, are we the center according to the Big Bang theory?   
It’s not true that all objects are moving away from us. The Andromeda Galaxy is heading toward us (the Milky Way); the collision is due in a few billion years; it’s likely that the black holes at the center of both galaxies will interact with unpredictable results.

The material in the universe can be compared to the dust in a household vacuum cleaner that is shaken loose into a large room. Over time the individual particles will separate to fill the space, but what an individual particle will do is not knowable, at least not right away.

That said, we know for certain that the metrics of space are changing; it is an expansion that is increasing with time.

Currently the rate of expansion is 14 miles per second for every million light years (a distance of nearly six-million-trillion miles). It seems like a small number until you do the calculation for the size of the universe. Past the “event horizon” of 14 billion light years the expansion exceeds the speed-of-light.

Do the math.

What is the future of a universe that is undergoing a runaway expansion?

A conjecture has been proposed by mathematician Sir Roger Penrose called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). Data gathered by recent satellites seems likely to strengthen his view.

What is wrong with the question “What existed before the Big Bang?” I have been told that this question doesn’t make sense, but I have never heard a decent layman’s explanation as to why. 
The question is sensibly answered by the theory proposed by Roger Penrose: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology or CCC, sometimes referred to as Eon Theory.

The conjecture was proposed around 2004, I think, but collaborating evidence is only now becoming available through data collected by the WMAP and Planck satellites, and by LIGO.

The premise is that in both the singularity and a maximally expanded universe the degrees of freedom of gravity, which is associated with “mass”, drop out of the metrics. Without mass it is not possible to differentiate the initial and terminal states of the universe by scaling; the two states are in fact conformally equivalent.

The Big Bang emerges from a maximally expanded universe; the cycle repeats endlessly like a chugging choo-choo train whose next puff seems to emerge from the dispersion of the last puff; time has no beginning and no end.

If or when the universe ends someday and ceases to exist, could it be created again as it was in the beginning? 
The idea by Roger Penrose, retired mathematician and cosmologist, that the universe is conformally equivalent at its beginning and end is gathering evidence from the WMAP and Planck satellites that acolytes who do the math claim might be confirmational.

Evidence may also be buried in the data collected by LIGO, according to Penrose. He’s urging folks to dig through the data to find it.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) — some call it Eon Theory — has been exciting for the past 15 years, but only in the past few years has data been available to help validate what at first seemed to some like a crackpot idea.

Is it safe to have a nuclear reactor in a submarine?

Of course not.

Of the 82 nuclear submarines deployed or under construction by the US Navy, two have sunk (the Scorpion and Thresher).

It’s 2.5%, which for me is too high.

In war, all USA subs will be destroyed at sea by enemy fire during a first strike surprise attack.

The USA will destroy all adversary nuclear subs with a coordinated and long-planned after-strike.

Large numbers of nuclear reactors and their poisons boiling at the bottom of oceans are a threat to every living creature on Earth.

The nuclear genie needs to be put back in its bottle. It should be the highest priority of the international community if humans are to have any chance at all to continue as a species for more than a few hundred years.

All personnel engaged in warfare preparation involving nuclear weapons are subject to sophisticated arguments in training fashioned by psychologists to ensure their enthusiastic support of nuclear weapons and a solid belief in their own personal safety.

I beg these trained individuals to use their common sense.

      Don’t we live under a nuclear reactor called the Sun? It does no harm. 
We would die, everyone of us, if Earth didn’t have a magnetosphere to deflect the solar wind; the field works with nitrogen and oxygen to make Earth’s atmosphere opaque to high energy radiation from the Sun. It doesn’t work the same way for Earth-generated radiation.

Nuclear power is not safe; on so many levels, it never will be. A world with 10,000 nuclear reactors and 50,000 nuclear warheads is a planet doomed to extinction, if not in the near future, then in the long, for sure.

     Scrap nuclear deterrence? What?
We need to learn to work with people who have different ideas about what life is and how it should be lived. We don’t have much time to learn. The danger is imminent; the need is urgent.

Even without war, the poisons of rotting reactors and weapons will percolate into the environment over time. We’ve already destroyed the planet.

If humans survive, people will someday forget about the weapons; they will rot unattended and unremembered. A few thousand years from now people might wonder why everyone they know is sick and dying.

In hindsight, was going to Iraq justifiable?
Was killing a million human beings and destabilizing the Middle East justifiable?

What does an enemy of the United States have to do to suffer such consequences? Almost all the “facts” the Bush family “shared” with Americans and the rest of the watching world about Saddam and the Iraqis were bald-face lies.

The damage is that people believe these lies to this day. Their misunderstanding of what happened distorts everything they believe and do.

We will never get it right when Americans’ views are twisted out of all proportion to realities.

Is the situation dangerous in the Middle East?

After all the blood-letting, are things better or worse?

How was the first cell created? Can we replicate those circumstances?
No one knows how the first cells were created. It is a mystery of science likely never to be solved.

What is known is that cellular life began on Earth almost immediately after it cooled sufficiently to be safe for life, which unravels at temperatures above 300 degrees or so Fahrenheit.

The first cells were thousands of times smaller than the cells that make the plants and animals of today. These tiny prokaryotes persisted for a few billion years until the larger eukaryotes evolved.

Once eukaryotes developed the ability to convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis, they produced huge volumes of a byproduct called oxygen, which poisoned most prokaryotic life on Earth during that time.

Prokaryotes able to adjust to the presence of oxygen survive today, mostly as bacteria and archaea.

Does socialism only work in small countries?
Any system that is supported by the people who live under it works well — especially socialism.

The problem for socialism is interference by the United States. It is the policy of the USA to disrupt and prevent — to the point of war if need be — the success of socialism anywhere.

The reasoning is simple. When socialism succeeds, billionaires are at risk. They don’t share well, and some are willing to kill anyone who tries to undercut their power.

Read the news: what wealthy people do is disgusting. Don’t make me explain. Get your head out of the sand, anyone who doesn’t believe it.

The pharaohs made the Egyptian system work. They built pyramids. The Russians were first into space and first to the moon. The Germans produced the scientists who propelled civilization into the future after WWII.

Slavery inside the USA clothed the world in cotton.

Pick a system, any system, and it can be made to work as well as any other.

If billionaires can convince cotton-pickers that life is good, who will challenge them?

What was the real reason why the USA lost the war against Vietnam?
The USA killed two-million Vietnamese. The Vietnamese killed fifty-eight thousand Americans. The USA thoroughly trashed Vietnam and poisoned the country-side with Agent Orange defoliants. The Vietnamese didn’t knock down a single structure inside the United States.

The USA deployed a program to assassinate over one-hundred-thousand South Vietnamese men and women it suspected of siding with the North. No such program of civilian murders was carried out by the North.

The Americans and their allies napalmed entire villages and executed both civilian and animal survivors. Not a single village was ever cremated by the North.

The USA carpet-bombed huge swaths of Vietnam daily for twelve years. The North didn’t have an effective air force.

It was a one-sided fight from the beginning. The USA killed and murdered until its leaders’ lust for blood was satiated. When nothing was left to prove and the thrill of the kill faded, the United States pulled out its troops and went home.

The whole world knows what we did. The reason the international community of nations doesn’t confront us for doing bad things is because we scare them.

The families of tens-of-millions of the dead cry out to God to settle scores; they pray for justice.

Americans trust — as the Germans, the Japanese, and the Romans before them trusted — that justice never comes.

Who is Donald Trump’s base? Why is he popular? Why are people voting for him? Why do people like and support him?
Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly eleven million votes. Three million went to Hillary; eight million to third party candidates. It was the biggest loss by popular vote in the history of USA elections.

Losing the popular vote by 8% yet securing the electoral college is a result that will live in infamy.

The first election after his “victory” was in 2018 when the largest swing of Republican districts to Democrats occurred in the history of the contests between Republicans and Democrats.

Trump is the most unpopular man to hold the presidency in my lifetime.

Why do his supporters love him?

My view is that in every country people exist who are attracted to bad things like moths are to flames. History shows that in Germany, people loved Hitler. The allies forced the German population to tour the concentration camps, because otherwise no one in Germany would believe their government committed genocide.

Trump is doing bad things to powerless people — not only to mothers and children at our southern border but in the middle east, far east, and around the world.  His decisions are making a more dangerous world; it’s possible that tens-of-millions of innocents will die should he continue to trash the edifice that has enabled Earth to avoid nuclear war during the past 75 years.

We must avoid nuclear catastrophe for thousands of years more if we are to become the great space-faring civilization many people seek. We can’t go to the stars if Earth is poisoned by plutonium.

People have a dark side. Philosophers, psychologists, and priests have argued this point for millennia. Evidence is solidly on their side. Political campaigns are waged using “hidden persuaders” that appeal to the reptilian nature of human conscious thought. These persuaders are built from the bricks of fear, sexuality, aggression, and cruelty. They work.

Until people learn to turn away from the dark side, survival of civilization is at risk.

Leaders like Hitler and Trump are inevitable and unavoidable. It will be interesting to learn whether America’s great experiment in divided government will survive Trump’s attempt to undermine it so that he can become a king of sorts whose family members will succeed him in their quest for ultimate power.

What do you find interesting about physics?
The science of physics is all about explaining what is happening but not why. It’s interesting to me that the smartest scientists in the world can’t tell anyone why anything works the way it does.

The universe is governed so far as anyone knows by forces and constants that are unknowable, underivable, and unexplainable. All anyone can know is what happens; no one understands why.

Billions of dollars are spent to determine that gravity behaves according to certain rules. Experiments to discover the measure of forces and constants are always being done and refined. But where do the rules come from that make the forces and constants? What principles underlie the formation of the Universe?

Good luck to anyone who finds someone who knows why. Scientists laugh at the philosophers who try to provide clues to the why of things; it’s because some scientists are arrogant and ignorant. They don’t believe that what little they know is almost nothing at all.

Even animals as dumb as cats, goats, and birds calculate distances in their heads to make survival decisions based on their answers. Like humans they have no clue about the why of things, either.

What must happen for all Americans to accept the same truths?
Reduce the number of television and radio channels to one. Restrict diversity of content on the internet. Reduce the number of people who think “outside the box.” Put them into prisons or execute them, whichever is cheaper.

Torture people who refuse to think like everyone else. Others will “get the message” and adjust their thinking to conform to the American Way.

Eliminate elections — they stir-up people unnecessarily.

Reduce the wages of the 99% to subsistence; pay the 1% as much as possible to encourage them to embrace conformity.

Build impenetrable walls on all borders. Malcontents must not be allowed to leave; they might spread anti-American ideas abroad.

Do these things and Americans will accept the same truths. They will present a united front against anyone who might dare to challenge them.

What shocked you the most from the Mueller report?
The most shocking aspect of the report is the absence of any mention of or investigation into the president’s wife who is the daughter of a former member of the communist party of Yugoslavia back in the day.

She was born when DT was 24 years old. Was she groomed for the job she currently holds? Can America rule out with confidence that she is not a sleeper agent? She immigrated to the USA not too many years ago. It would be nice to hear that she is trustworthy.

It is clear from the report that DT is working for the other side. No one will say that the emperor has no clothes. Is it fear of the Russian-Israeli mob bosses, or is it something else?

Why is everyone in denial when the truth is obvious? How can Mueller say there was no conspiracy when the report screams that there was?

As for obstruction of the investigation, no sensible person needs a report to understand the extraordinary lengths that the president and his team traveled to discredit the people who defend Americans against despots and liars like the ones we currently endure.

The president has the power to hurt a lot of people should he go postal, which he seems in his tweets to threaten from time to time.

What are volcano eruptions good for?
Volcanism permits the release of heat generated by the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s interior. The release of heat permits convection currents in the liquid part of Earth’s core — without these currents the magnetosphere collapses, which puts the survival of all life at risk due to dramatically increased exposure to charged particles from solar and cosmic radiation.

When will the earth’s core cool down enough to make the magnetic field too weak to counter the suns solar storms?
Earth’s magnetic field depends more on convection currents in its molten metallic core than on its temperature. If the core gets too hot, it cannot sustain a magnetic field.

For convection currents to circulate, heat must be generated, but it must be able to escape so that it doesn’t build up.

Earth’s crust or mantle is cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg.

Crustal pieces called tectonic plates move about to permit volcanism and venting faults, which release the heat that is generated by the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s interior.

Earth’s core is the size of the planet Mars. It is solid at the center with a liquid (but highly viscous) outer layer. The solid center stays solid because of the pressure it is under; it is too hot to be magnetic. The outer liquid center is also under pressure; it must circulate to generate Earth’s magnetic field; otherwise the field will collapse; the protection it offers Earth against the solar wind will die.

Venus has a solid-liquid core like Earth’s but no tectonic plate activity to release heat and permit convection currents. As a result, Venus lacks a magnetosphere to shield it from cosmic radiation and solar flares.

The core of Mars froze solid millions of years ago. With no magnetosphere and little gravity, over time the solar wind has been able strip away a sizable portion of the Martian atmosphere. Only the heaviest gas is left in more than trace amounts: carbon dioxide.

I’ve read that geologists believe that the dynamics which generate the magnetosphere of Earth are robust and will last as long as the planet. Let’s hope they are right. 

I have heard from Conservatives that Communism killed millions of people. Leftists claim that Capitalism killed the same. Which economic system has killed more people, and how are these numbers figured?
Since the start of the first World War until today two countries have killed the majority of people who have died in fights between nations: Germany and the United States.

During their killing sprees, oligarchs in both countries built and nurtured vast military-industrial alliances that automated mayhem and suffering. The rapid killing of humans began with chemicals, advanced to automated machine gunnery, and culminated in the deployment of atomic bombs and massive aerial bombardment of cities with fire-jellies known today as napalm.

During WWII, Germany attempted a partially successful ethnic-cleansing of Jewish populations in Europe and the Middle East. After the war against Germany was won, the United States and Russia worked together to orchestrate the execution of 100,000 German citizens for war-crimes. It was a small fraction of the numbers killed during that war, which some analysts believe approached 100 million souls.

It occurred to me that your question might be asking about which system, Capitalism or Communism, killed the largest number of its own subjects as it struggled to stand itself up and establish itself.

My view is that Capitalism is a euphemism for slavery. The word was invented to put a positive spin on the system in the USA where everyone works to enrich a privileged few. USA oligarchs needed an attractive term for their system when it came under popular challenge around the world by Communists during the twentieth century.

Communists believed that people should cooperate to create wealth, which they then shared. This kind of thinking was anathema to those who believed that only the people who risked their fortunes were entitled to the wealth created by their subjects (workers or slaves).

Through this lens, it is clear that Capitalism (or slavery) in the USA — the one country in the modern world able to preserve its slave system — decimated its indigenous populations and oppressed the Negro population under the cruelest form of slavery that has yet existed on Earth.

Oligarchs known as robber barons permitted the killing of thousands of ordinary workers during the building of the nation’s infrastructure, not only in mines, on road and railway systems, and on dams but also in unregulated sweat shops hidden behind the invisible walls of poverty in overcrowded cities.

The United States has a media system owned by a handful of families that sustains itself on advertising revenue. The practice of advertising in the USA is sophisticated. Psychologists help oligarchs maximize their advantages by crafting messages to modify the attitudes and behaviors of ordinary people.

Billionaires (most of whom are well-dressed thieves) hold themselves up as pillars of virtue and civic service in the media they control. They fight wars to secure the resources of countries like Venezuela, Brazil, Vietnam, Japan, etc. etc. They explain these wars to the public as righteous acts against evil powers.

It’s sickening.

If something is 40 million light years away, how long will it take for the light to reach us?
A light-year is a distance, which is 5.8786 trillion miles. 40 million light-years is a distance of 235 trillion miles.

Space expands at 14 miles-per-second per million light-years. For objects separated by a distance of 40 million light years, space expands at 560 miles per second.

Every million years, as the light from an object approaches Earth, the expansion of space will decrease by 14 miles per second, because the distance between the incoming light and Earth will be decreasing.

Therefore, it is certain that the time it takes light that started its journey 40 million light-years distant from Earth will take more than 40 million years to reach us. Right?

The first million light-years will take close to an additional 3,006 years due to the expansion of space. Each million light years of reduced distance will add less travel time until the added time becomes insignificant, because as the distance between the incoming light and Earth falls to zero so does the expansion of space.

If we take half of 3,006 years to be the average added time per million light-years, a simple calculation that doesn’t involve calculus will be a close approximation of the additional time traveled.

Do the math to learn that the added time of travel is 60,120 years due to the expansion of space alone.

Light 40 million light-years away takes 40,060,120 years to reach Earth.

The answer to whether or not our own consciousness has anything to do with how a wave or a particle manifests in physics seems to change completely with whoever answers it. Is there any real way to prove this?
Richard Feynman said once that he believed the underlying nature of reality is unknowable. Violations of Bell’s inequality in quantum entanglement cannot be visualized by models or any sort of mental imagery.

Something that can be described by mathematics but not explained by words or imagery is probably 95% of reality for the species-human. We are tadpoles in a muddy pond who struggle in vain to understand a world we will never see.

It has been known for a hundred years that when humans conduct an experiment on nanoscale particles they affect the results during their observation of both the process and the outcomes. Every kid who does the several variations of the double-slit experiment learns that it is true.

Engineers take what works and turn it into miracles that no one understands — the digital device folks use to view my answer is incomprehensible to most. Some understand parts, but it takes a team to understand the whole.

People crave certainty. Quantum observations prove that certainty is a quixotic quest doomed from the start. People want to believe that what they think “must be true” is provable by both logic and experimental verification.

Unfortunately for those who don’t tolerate cognitive dissonance well, everything and nothing is both provable and falsifiable depending on which axioms are chosen as starting points.

What elements do scientists use to estimate the age of the Earth?
They use isotope ratios. Although 118 elements make up the periodic table, the elements have thousands of isotopes, right?

For example, lead can be separated into eleven groups — each group has a different weight. The weight differences are the result of the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The more neutrons, the heavier the isotope. Four of the isotopes of lead are stable — they don’t decay into other isotopes or other elements.

All chemical properties of the 118 elements in the periodic table are determined by their electrical structure, which is the number of electrons they carry. Neutrons add weight carried in the nucleus but otherwise are irrelevant to the simple chemical behaviors of the elements.

To estimate the age of Earth, scientists study the composition of zircon, a common silicate element in Earth’s crust. Zircon is lead averse. Any lead found in zircon must be the result of radioactive decay of either uranium or thorium, which are common impurities. These impurities are radioactive and can over time change the color of zircon as they break down its crystal structure.

One of the isotopes of uranium has a half-life of 4.47 billion years; another isotope has a half-life of 710 million years. Both isotopes decay to stable isotopes of lead.

So the process is to measure how much of each isotope of uranium is contaminating the zircon sample and how much of that uranium has decayed into the two isotopes of lead that are stable; that don’t decay any further. This method can measure the age of the earth to a precision of 50 million years.

Earth’s age is believed to be 4.543 billion years.

Does it seem odd that such a useful trait like high level cognitive function is not more common in Earth’s life-forms? 
Once a species (humans) reaches a certain level of intelligence, other intelligent creatures become a source of fear and loathing.

Imagine raccoons or squirrels equipped with human intelligence. They are able to out-game us, work their way into living spaces, even sneak up in the night to kill us with their imaginative weapons.

After the kill, they sneak into refrigerators by deploying ingenious levers and pulleys to take and eat cold pizza and left-over wiener-schnitzel.

How long will people put up with such behavior before they go on an extermination campaign?

In New York City extermination campaigns against intelligent rats have already begun. It might take a hundred years, but eventually rats with sense will refuse to live in NYC.

Over hundreds-of-thousands of years collections of intelligent creatures have devolved to fear and mistrust other collections of intelligent creatures. The lust for war has entered human DNA to the point that people search for differences among themselves to justify mass-slaughter and genocides.

What is less subtle than skin color or religion or immigration-status? All these “superficialities” have been used as an excuse to attack and kill “others” no matter how similar or different — some of whom, as I write, are watching from their burrows in horror as they plan their assaults on the species human.

The Kingdom of Animals does not distinguish between our physical and moral differences. Humans deserve to die for their cruelties. With every squashed bug, fear and loathing intensifies. Even now legions of mosquitoes and Japanese beetles plan their revenge.

This summer they will extract it — even as most humans occupy themselves with arguments pro-and-con about what a hair-ball the president has turned out to be.

Only when humans destroy themselves and go extinct will intelligence get its chance to bloom within the diversity of species that occupy the planet. By then extra-terrestrials will have found Earth and enslaved it.

It is in this sense that the species-human will achieve its revenge against the intelligent squirrel and raccoon; against the mosquito and beetle who so often drove people to distraction when they dominated Earth.

Billy Lee