CONFORMAL EQUIVALENCE

Infinities and singularities are equivalent when mass is absent and entropy (that is, randomness) is maximum, because in both states the ability of the universe to scale itself is lost.

It is called conformal equivalence. It means that the shape of everything in two systems is the same; the scale is indeterminate or irrelevant. Size can’t be measured. 

Warning to the faint of heart: this essay will reveal ideas that might change the way some readers think about the universe. Keep an open mind.  

What is the fate of the cosmos?  Almost everyone agrees that it will expand exponentially, possibly forever. As it does, all matter will be sucked into black holes like water into bathtub drains where — perhaps over trillions of years — it will evaporate by a mechanism believed to produce Hawking radiation; mass converts into massless photons and radiates outward until every black hole evaporates and disappears. 

Sir Roger Penrose, the brilliant mathematical physicist, has said that new satellite data might support his theory of Eons, which asserts among other things that the universe expands while black holes collect and evaporate away all matter; entropy (or randomness) increases to maximum.

At the termination of the Eon the universe cannot tell whether it is at its beginning or its end because it doesn’t know what size it is; all its metrics become equivalent to those found in the singularity that many speculate preceded the emergence of the Universe humans find themselves in today. 

In the unimaginable heat of a singularity, the concept of mass also disappears; it becomes irrelevant. Energy dwarfs mass to overwhelm it; runaway entropy (randomness) goes to maximum. 

With no mass the concept of scale disappears.  Without mass all the gravitational degrees of freedom vanish. The universe doesn’t know what size it is or if it is any size at all.

Entropy (or randomness) of “the singularity” initiates the Big Bang in the same way as a maximally expanded and evaporated universe; the two states — infinity and singularity — are equivalent.  They are not distinguishable; one is like the other and emerges from the other. 

Both the singularity and the infinitely expanded universe are unable to determine how big they are because both lose the ability to scale themselves when matter is no longer present; both states have maximum entropy; the distribution of energy becomes infinitely random

The result is that the expansion of a maximally expanded universe starts anew as if it were a singularity. A new “eon” begins at the end of each expansion; the universe expands in stages with the beginning of each stage indistinguishable from a singularity. 

The universe seems to chug along like a smoking choo-choo train — almost like a perpetual motion machine that generates a brand new universe on the fading gasp of its last puff.

A contraction of mass into a singularity is a popular idea, but it never happens — not in this theory — except in black holes where all matter evaporates over time into the pure energy of Hawking radiation.  In Penrose’s theory, only an infinite series of expansions following one upon the other from singularities indistinguishable by their metrics from maximally-expanded-universes will emerge. 

It’s like a woman who gives birth to a daughter.  The process repeats forever in the history of humans. Daughter buds from mother. Mother doesn’t contract to the size of a baby who then grows to become a new mother.

No, the process is continuous — one mother gives birth to a baby who grows to become a mother who births a new baby and on and on into an infinity of mothers that progress in a line of succession to the end of a time that has no end. 

The universe expands until it becomes a singularity that expands into a new universe. The process never ends. There is no beginning and no end.

Roger Penrose at a conference. Photo by Biswarup Ganguly.

Does this idea by Roger Penrose resonate with the ring of truth to anyone?  Roger has said that his idea is having some trouble catching on with bona-fide cosmologists.

For me, Roger Penrose’s idea feels like truth.  His truth sets me free; everything falls into place; a weight is lifted from my shoulders when I think about what it means and why things might be the way they are.  

Roger says that he is retired; the mathematics of his theory are worked out by his acolytes; they make predictions that are testable. One thing they predict are “Hawking points” or spots.

Hawking points are places where massive black holes have evaporated away every bit of the matter of the galaxies that fell into them. This radiation is concentrated; it will emerge to imprint the cosmic background of the universe that follows. The points or regions will spread to cover a circle in the sky that is four degrees across — close to eight times that of the Moon.  Hawking points, if verified, will emit an energy that is ten to fifteen times more intense than the cosmic background radiation.    

Hawking “spots” should  be findable by humans. The radiation they represent bled into our universe from the universe that preceded and spawned them. Identifying Hawking spots will lend credence to the idea that a universe preceded ours and that another will follow in the far distant future — perhaps trillions of years from now. 

Perhaps thirty candidates have been identified by recent satellite observations. The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite — illustrated above — and the newer Planck satellite have identified in the microwave background radiation (CMB) areas in space where the predictions of the Eon theory seem likely to be confirmed.

Roger claims that — absent mass —  big and cold is equivalent to small and hot. The laws of thermodynamics hold in both worlds and are conformally equivalent. The mathematics are the same. 

Roger Penrose has won 17 major awards in science; he has made major contributions in at least 30 areas of science and mathematics. The implications of his theory of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), if accepted by mainstream science, are worthy of a Nobel Prize.

I hope he lives long enough to receive it. 

The video above, at 23:23, explains a consequence of the theory that dark matter (called erebons by Penrose) is required to make it work. Erebons are hugely massive compared to other atomic particles; they possess the mass equivalent of the eyeball of a flea. Sir Roger predicts that they decay and leave behind signals that will be confirmed by a focused analysis of data collected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory LIGO

Another interesting and rather strange consequence of the theory addresses the Fermi Paradox.  From Wikipedia is the following reference:

”In 2015 Gurzadyan and Penrose discussed the Fermi paradox, the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence but high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. Within conformal cyclic cosmology, the cosmic microwave background provides the possibility of information transfer from one Eon to another, including of intelligent signals within the information panspermia concept.”

Billy Lee

2020 ELECTION BOYCOTT

Only once in modern times has an American election drawn fewer than half of eligible voters to the polls: Bill Clinton verses Robert Dole in 1996. Turnout was 49%.

Way back in the olden days it happened twice.

In 1920 Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox with 49.2% participating.

In 1924 Calvin Coolidge defeated John W. Davis and Robert M. La Follette in a three-way race with a 48.9% turnout.

The largest voter turnout occurred during the Rutherford B. Hayes verses Samuel J. Tilden contest in 1876. It was America’s 100th birthday year. Hayes won the election in the electoral college by one vote. He lost the popular count by a quarter-million.

81.8% of qualified men turned out to vote — women wouldn’t be permitted to vote for another 45 years. Most historians say the presidential election of 1876 was the biggest vote-mess in US history.

From Wikipedia: On November 11, three days after election day … results … were rendered uncertain because of fraud by both parties. 

To make a long story short, Southern Democrats agreed to award all disputed electoral votes to Republican Hayes if he promised to put an end to Reconstruction.  

The verbal (non-written) Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in the South. Freed slaves were left at the mercy of whites who did not intend to preserve their rights.

Whites forced the overwhelming majority of blacks (who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line) to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before permitting them to grasp the gold ring of enfranchisement. 

The election of 1876 became an inflection point in the history of the United States. Termination of Reconstruction enabled the now united country to inject its military might into the Indian Wars. There was a genocide to wage; besides, a decade or more of help from the Ku Klux Klan had neatly terrorized the genie of racial equality back into its bottle.

The military was no longer needed to defend desperate Negroes. The Klan was more than eager to take over the job. As this essay is written, many historians continue to argue that segregation and inequality remain endemic in vast swaths of America. 

From 1877 onward, KKK castrations and hangings convinced most Negroes that pursuing voting rights wasn’t worth the price: it would be 90 years before whites let blacks get anything close to an even break in the contest for survival in capitalist, racist America.


Whites once suppressed the black vote by killing black voters. Later, they charged blacks with felonies and convicted them before all-white juries. Felons lost their right to vote for life. Today, 26% of the black population in Kentucky are felons who can’t vote. In Florida, nearly two million black citizens are felons.

After 1877, whites decided to move past their ugly divide over slavery to neutralize instead the native Americans whose lands the Europeans had seized. If whites felt compelled to kill hundreds-of-thousands of “redskins” (and break dozens of treaties) to make the wilderness safe for whites, so what? Universal suffrage could wait, right? Voting hardly seemed relevant when so much killing needed done.

Decades of injustice and indifference marched forward into the 21st century before at long last the election of Barack Obama garnered anything close to a large majority turnout. 66.2% showed-up in 2008 to flip history on its head, according to the Washington Post. 

The first black president — a valid Hawaiian birth-certificate enabled him to run — gathered the largest popular vote ever – 69.5 million. It’s a record not likely to be broken anytime soon. Donald Trump, eight years later in a country more densely populated, acquired a paltry 63 million.

[Note from Editors: President Biden received 81.3 million votes in 2020. 66.8% of eligible voters participated in the election.]

Obama served two terms for eight years despite strong and persistent protestations by Donald Trump and his lily-white supporters that Barry was a Kenyan Muslim — a hater of all things American — a wannabe wrecker of white privilege.

The attacks have never really ended. Donald is threatening to charge Obama with treason for ordering spooks to “spy” on his campaign; for orchestrating an attempted “coup”.  Perhaps a death sentence by hanging is the appropriate punishment.

In 2016 Trump with help from Russian, Israeli, and evangelical elites seized control of the United States despite one of the most lopsided popular defeats of any candidate in the history of USA elections. DT lost the popular vote by 8%, which in that low-turnout environment amounted to almost eleven-million votes. Hillary beat the Donald by nearly three-million. Third-party candidates took close to eight-million more. 

Think about it.

Trump is president?  Does anyone believe an injustice was done that ought to be set right? 

Well, I do, for one. 

According to some folks who once counted themselves among his closest friends (Michael Cohen and Tony Schwarz), Donald Trump will never relinquish power.

Are we going to believe them?

What if they’re right?

The slow-train-coming election of 2020 is an excuse that both Democrats and Republicans are using for inaction and delay. Isn’t it obvious?

No one wants to take on the bosses. Oligarchs can get to anyone; they can get to families. It’s amazing what doors can close on people who choose not to cooperate with those who have shown that they are capable of anything at all.

Legislators and judges, prosecutors and bureaucrats are dragging their feet refusing to make the decisions that will save the republic. They want to ride out the clock hoping that DT will die of old-age; by some miracle, citizens will be set free perhaps to — someday, somehow — stand-up for their wonderful country.

Pipe dream?

As this essay is written, the Trump family makes their plans to rule America into perpetuity. Jerry Falwell Junior of Liberty University floated the absurd idea on Twitter that Trump be given an extra two years to make up for time lost during the “Witch Hunt.”

The pictures that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, seized from Falwell’s “pool-boy” had nothing whatever to do with Junior’s overly-supportive tweet anyhow. Everyone knows at least that part of the salacious story is true, right?


NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure. 


Seriously.

Jerry and Donald are soul-mates. Falwell admonishes his acolytes to conceal, carry, and train to kill Muslim attackers. What right-minded follower of Christ Jesus wouldn’t? Donald bears false witness by proving daily that slander, name-calling, and hitting back hardest is the way to win. With Jesus standing behind to egg them both, how can they not get their way in this world? On the way to the future they envision, they don’t lose.

The German Trump family intends to rule the world until the end of time, because the United States now stands at an historic threshold; it is perilously close to conquering the nearly 200 countries that make the community of nation-states. The Trumps intend to take advantage of an opportunity provided not even to Hitler; they will sit on a golden throne at the top of the world.

Who wants their kids admitted to a prestigious college?

Cooperate.

Who wants their kids to land big jobs?

Collaborate.

Who wants to live disease-free to the very end of a most pleasant retirement?

Capitulate.

These are the choices.

Is it possible to gain the whole world while keeping the nation’s soul safe and sound? Every Trump lunatic believes it is. Keep America First while undermining its constitution, its institutions, and its values; everything will fall into place like it should. 

Folks who care about right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, fair-play and corruption must now make choices that will bring down a wall of concrete on themselves and the children they love.

The time is now.

The time is come.

It’s time for parents to eat their children.

It’s time to worship the Fuhrer.

Our ancestors fought a revolution so that their progeny wouldn’t be bullied — not by drug lords; nor by malignant kings who torture for kicks; nor by bubble-encapsulated queens who tell their starving subjects to eat cake whenever they are truly hungry; nor by heartless thugs who cage thousands of family-separated orphans to make the point that they won’t be disobeyed.

Our national heroes fought a revolution so that people might someday choose their leaders and through them their way of living. When the people finally got their chance, most stayed home. Those who chose — those who made an effort to choose — chose leaders who wanted only to rule in the cruelest ways imaginable.

Call people stupid while smiling down at them when they praise every crazy thing you do and say — it’s a living hell for the powerless; the irony is that the powerless come to love their supreme leader in time; abused people, like domesticated pets, learn to love and trust their masters, eventually.

The world is sliding into an abyss of unfairness and worse. It’s the way of history. Every generation of humans fails to make the world a place they would gladly take the chance to be born into a second time.

Only fools would choose to be born into a world of ten-billion suffering souls. What are the chances that anyone will be born into a happy place with safe food and water, loving friends, and fun things to do?

What are the chances?

A case can be made — I won’t make it — that the odds are near zero. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a weird irony if the wealthy and the cruel were born again strictly by chance not into Hell but rather into a second life on Earth — the same Earth they built and looted in their first life.

The catch is that they will not be allowed to choose their parents or on which continent they will live. The selection of their circumstances will be made by chance alone. A lottery determines their start in life, their potential, their possibilities. 

It seems fair, doesn’t it?

Reasonable demographic analyses show that the prospects for a happy second-life are weighted heavily against them. A second-life lottery will ruin most of those unfortunates who are forced by their success to play it. 

The situation in America today is one where most people are in blind denial of the calamity that has befallen them. No one wants to believe that the president is a dictator who they are powerless to resist. He is enabled by terrible people — cowards, most of them — who enjoy hurting people. Many aren’t Americans. 

Some deluded folks have embraced the president. They, like the Germans of the 1930s, are oblivious to his evil ways. Many believe they themselves are good — blessed by a higher power — but they lust after evil as if it were as harmless as a whore. They embrace and cling, pant and sweat to divert their minds from a raging venereal assault that will surely overwhelm them on the day they finally understand that they have lost everything.

To vote in 2020 for or against the monster who torments us is as futile as it is dangerous. With help from the bad people, Donald Trump is going to crush America out of existence.

Even if everyone stays home, Donald Trump will say that the largest turnout in history gave him the greatest electoral victory ever.

Should he lose, he will deny the result and claim the election was rigged. He will not step down until he dies, no matter how many “traitors” step forward to question his version of the facts.

Most folks know on some level that the president is a liar and a father of lies. Will people allow themselves to be fooled again?

Boycotting the 2020 election means that “we the people” are choosing not to validate the politicians who refused to secure our elections; who redistricted away our ability to fix roads and other infrastructure; who trampled health care, food quality, and earning potential.

Boycotting the 2020 election will show the oligarchs that we have given up on the idea that things can be set right. Some folks, yes, refuse to believe they are victims; that they are chattel who lost the freedom to change society when Trump seized power.

We have to embrace realism. Billionaires are not our friends. Oligarchs are the enemy. We can’t challenge them, but we can puncture their collective illusion that the rest of us enjoy playing gladiator games in their stadiums.

Some might wonder why anyone would advocate boycott when the election is one-and-a-half years away. Well, the election is what the talking heads on billionaire-media obsess over.

No one talks about impeachment (except that it’s a bad idea), because Israeli, Russian, and the evangelical mob-bosses want Trump. It seems like an unlikely menage de trois until folks understand that bullies have a common interest — to exercise a humiliating power over little people.

Guess what?

If you are reading this essay, the chances are good that you are one of the little ones. The bosses who laugh at your antics don’t care about you or me at all.

Yes, we should let them speak for themselves — who can stop them? They advertise their warped values on every channel, station, and website! — but trust me, everyday folks like you and me share a dilemma: we are adrift in rowboats on a big ocean where unruly warships stream.

The battleships are not going to rescue anyone in a rowboat no matter how desperate their cries for help.

Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who once worked for the CIA, told anyone who would listen, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

Dissent. Resist. Boycott.

In the face of a smothering totalitarianism paid for by the monied and the powerful, we have no other choice. Cooperation, capitulation, and collaboration will bring ordinary folks nothing but loathing and loss of self-respect.

Until “outlaws” who have paid their debt to society are allowed to vote free and fair, no one votes. A forgotten prophet once said: we are all outlaws in the eyes of America.

The wealthy live behind gates for a reason.

I am asking Americans to work hard between now and Election 2020 to make voter turnout low.

Set a record.

35% or less might become, maybe, someday, a distress-beacon that the historians of democracies do not ignore.

Everyone stands for something. Why not stand for what’s right? Or take a knee. In the fresh, clean air of freedom, every powerless person can make that choice. 

Billy Lee

WHAT’S GOING ON?

What’s Going On?

UPDATE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: On 26 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolas Maduro on charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism, and the Department of State offered a $15 million reward for information that helps ”bring him to justice”.



It’s an album title – prophetic in its way — by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his own father on April Fools Day, 1984. Marvin would have celebrated his 45th birthday the next day, April 2.

Spring was on its way; no one saw winter coming.

It seemed at first that a fight between his parents went terribly wrong. Relatives tell different versions. In the end, it went down like this: Marvin’s father, a Pentecostal Minister and Healer, shot Marvin in his heart with a .38 caliber pistol Marvin gave him for Christmas.

Left behind were an adopted son, two bio-children, two brothers, two sisters, a half-brother, and his parents.

What’s Going On?

His father, it turned out, suffered from an undiagnosed brain tumor located on his pituitary gland. It made him violent; it drove him crazy. He felt scared. He feared his son. He shot the boy-man that he told everyone who would listen he truly loved.

What’s Going On?

Marvin Gaye propelled the Motown sound into the stratosphere of American popular music during the 1960s. Like most gifted black men in those years, he was a traumatized human being. He made the best of it.

Albums like What’s Going On and songs like Sexual Healing brought reassurance and comfort to millions of folks who suffered the emotional stress of living inside but apart in apartheid and militarized America.

In those days, like today, America itched for a fight. It found a good fight in Vietnam; it would soon find many others – all pointless and needlessly wasteful of both national treasure and human life. Like Marvin’s dad, America shot its sons in their hearts. America wasted a generation, which it forced to choose between fighting war and fighting against war.

Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, oh oh oh
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on…

A few souls managed to tightrope between the chasms of violence on both sides, but not many. Today, the United States is a couple of countries short of conquering the entire world.

Venezuela is one country among a dozen or so that sit at the top of a hit-list.

What will come next?

What’s Going On?

I’ve answered a lot of questions about Venezuela on Quora. I’ve never visited the country. I know almost nothing about it except what I’ve read in books and on Twitter by people who live there. Still, I have opinions. I’m not afraid to pontificate about the situation, because I’ve seen these coup-scenarios playout my entire life – seven decades and counting.

It’s like listening to a scratched record that constantly skips to play the same musical phrase; it’s like watching reruns of familiar shows like Leave it to Beaver and even the Twilight Zone. I can tell anyone how a show will end, because in their way all the old shows have the same predictable endings.

What’s happening in Venezuela and how it will end is both predictable and depressing. My standard of living and yours depend on what happens next. The security and safety of our Union depend on it.

The Russians and Cubans must lose. America must win.

Why?

We take the spoils, because if we miss our chance to seize the oil of Venezuela, over time the United States will slide into economic decline. Prosperity and the power of USA billionaires depend not only on free-trade and favorable trade agreements, but also on the resources they sequester; how much of the bounty of others they can steal.

It’s true.

What’s Going On?


TheBillyLeePontificator.com is now open for questions. What follows are answers. The most recent questions are first; the oldest are last.

1 – What’s happening in Venezuela right now?

Over the past several years the United States has been reestablishing its control over the countries of the western hemisphere, right? Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is a prominent example. Anyone who doesn’t know who she is — or her story — isn’t paying attention.

It won’t help to name others. People who know Ms. Rousseff need no explanation. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.

It’s easy for Americans to claim ignorance about what their country does to maintain its control over the resources and people of South and Central America. It’s not pretty. People are imprisoned and shot (murdered) to assert USA sovereignty.

Does anyone want to watch the processes by which the sausage they eat is manufactured? Of course not. No one wants to even think about it. The process is brutal and inhumane. It’s better not to know. All anyone really wants is for the sausage to taste good and not make them sick. No one prays for the safety of the pigs who give their lives so that people can enjoy their breakfasts.

It’s the same in Venezuela. The country has massive oil reserves. The leadership is allied with countries who exert their powers on the other side of the world. These countries are always making moves to gain a foothold on American turf. The result is turf wars, which is what Venezuela is.

The United States will kill and imprison as few Venezuelans as possible, hopefully, but it will prevail; it will secure Venezuela’s natural resources, including its oil, for the USA to use and buy from the billionaires who shape its vision.

2 – Considering that every superpower had its rise and fall, do you think that the US will ever drastically fall, and how far into the future do you think that will be?

Since World War II the USA has militarily attacked one-fourth of the world’s nation-states. Of the 195 countries in the world, the USA controls or “unduly influences” all but twenty-five, give or take — through treaties, alliances, trade agreements, and so on. The United Nations is located inside the United States for a reason.

The USA controls the entire western hemisphere and exercises its military dominance without much interference anytime it decides. The Pentagon is a big place. People underestimate its power, because the majority of its structure is not viewable — most of it is below-ground. The vast scale of US power is necessary to operate 800 military bases, which are located in every region of the world.

The financial system of the USA is a force-multiplier that enables the USA to quarantine with knee-bending sanctions both individuals and countries who oppose its goals. American financial leverage is legendary.

The United States is on a trajectory toward world domination that would make the Third Reich stand up and take notice. It is remarkable how US power has grown during my lifetime. The USA is always at war with somebody.

Except for the four years of the Carter administration, the killing and dying doesn’t stop. The numbers of murders has reached into the tens of millions since the end of the last world war.

I believe that the American empire will collapse when the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. It might be 500 years from now or next Tuesday. There is no way to know for sure.

3 – Are the recurring power outages in Venezuela due to US interference in their country?

The United States could easily send in technical experts to stand up Venezuela’s power grid. It chooses not to. Not only that, it refuses to provide any kind of aid at all by refusing to work with the elected representatives of that oil-rich country.

Worse, the United States is plotting to isolate and embargo Venezuela. The US president wants their oil; USA oligarchs are at war with socialism; the State Department is at war with Russia who is providing aid to the beleaguered President Maduro.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the United States cares nothing for the ordinary people of Venezuela; it instead is destabilizing the country to secure its resources.

Securing resources in the western hemisphere is something the United States has done repeatedly since the end of World War II. Ask any bona-fide historian if I’m right. Its success is one reason why the United States has the highest standard of living of all other countries in its half of the world.

4 – Russia sends troops to Venezuela to give the United States a ”red line”. Should the United States be worried, and do you think this could start a war between the United States and Russia?

My answer is a guess based on no knowledge or evidence; here it is: the USA will not challenge Russia militarily as long as Trump is president. It’s not collusion; Mueller proved that our president is the most patriotic president that the USA has ever had (and will ever have since he is likely to be the last).

Every red-blooded gun-toting Christian in America knows that Russian oligarchs with the help of almighty God put Trump into power to kill us all for allowing gays to marry. It’s not hard to understand.

5 – What is Venezuela’s national anthem?




Glory to the Brave People


6 – Is it technically possible to sabotage a country’s electricity infrastructure using an electromagnetic attack, as Venezuelan president Maduro has claimed, as the cause of his country’s power failure?

Where were you during the Iraq War? Taking down Saddam Hussein’s electrical grid was a point of pride during that war. Our leaders bragged about it on the evening news.

USA’s ability to attack infra-structure is vastly improved today. Venezuela is the perfect place to conduct diabolical tests of new war-fighting techniques and coup protocols.

Why?

It’s the oil, stupid. (I’m using a popular expression for emphasis. It’s not meant to insult anyone’s point of view.)

Anyone who is knowledgeable about the post-world-war history of the western hemisphere knows that the USA has been or now is at war with every country. The United States runs things or makes those who oppose it miserable with sanctions, sabotage, and subversion.

It’s not something a reasonable person can argue against.

Said another way, only an ideologue or an apologist will deny the culpability of the USA for waging war against Venezuela. If the United States cared about Venezuela, it would help Maduro, not undercut him.

7 – Why do you think there is a nationwide power outage in Venezuela going on right now?

During the Iraq war, the USA took down Baghdad’s power grid. It’s something our country is good at. That this power outage occurred during destabilization efforts to install a new president doesn’t look good for the prime suspects.

8 – Where in the world is the next international war likely to break out?

First, it’s important for everyone to understand that major international conflicts are potential species-extinction events. Enough nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are available to enough countries to threaten the survival of humankind — should humankind fall into the abyss of a conflagration like it did during the two previous world wars.

It’s true that the last world war ended almost 75 years ago, but insufficient time has passed to be convincing that another world war won’t occur, perhaps sooner than anyone imagines.

One important reason why world-war has not occurred is because the United States has spent the post-world-war years consolidating its grip on empire. The USA knows the names, phone numbers, and addresses of every world leader and their relatives. It has cruise missiles and bunker-busters with each leader and family member’s name on at least one of them.

It’s personal. The number of individuals we don’t like and have removed from power is large and growing yearly. Maduro of Venezuela is the latest name on the USA Naughty List, but so, recently, was Dilma Rousseff of Brazil as well as countless others around the world — especially in the Middle East.

According to who counts, 195 countries exist in the world. The USA has conducted military operations against one-fourth of them since the end of World War II. Many conflicts are state secrets not shared with the public.

Expect major changes in Africa soon, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
To my way of reasoning, the best way to determine where the next lit-match will ignite is to look to past conflagrations. Countries with a history of warlike behavior are more likely than countries that lack such a history to start the next major international conflict.

What countries might these be? I’m not going to name them, because why make enemies unnecessarily who might have reformed their ways? But anyone with a knowledge of history and current events can create their own list. It’s not hard to do.

9 – How much worse can it look for Maduro? Denying hungry and sick Venezuelans from free food and medicine with guns. Isn’t Maduro’s time up?

Anyone with any sense knows that the USA engineered this debacle, because it is at war with socialism.

We invaded Cuba after they threw out the mafia, for crying out loud. We preferred organized crime to socialism.

10 – What should everyone know about the current political crisis in Venezuela?

Venezuela lives and dies on the price of oil. Low oil prices brought Venezuela to the brink of collapse in the late 1990s and made Hugo Chavez’s rise possible. Maduro, his successor, is falling on the sword of collapsing oil prices.

What confuses people is why.

Is the USA manipulating the oil markets to take down Maduro? The US has a consistent record of overthrow attempts against leftist governments. With a billionaire oligarch leading the USA, it seems possible.

Why doesn’t the United States help Maduro stabilize his country, which would be the humanitarian path? No one is sure. Common sense seems to suggest that our leaders are looking for a way to make a socialist system fail. Why else back a 35-year-old nobody to run the country? Wouldn’t aid to the elected government be an easier way to bring relief?

The Russians are involved, which further complicates. It’s possible that DT works for their side — so this coup that’s been in the making by our side during the past five years or so is sure to fail now that DT is aware and getting involved.

Time will tell.

It’s a sad state of affairs, what’s going on right now.

11 – Will a civil war happen in Venezuela?

The US has been at war with Venezuela for a long time now. Hundreds of America’s brightest have been working in their Pentagon offices for years to make sure socialism doesn’t succeed in South America.

Our wealthy oligarchs don’t want anyone to believe that a system might work where they aren’t allowed to steal as much as they possibly can and still call it “free enterprise.”

It simple, really. They are looking for allies inside Venezuela who are willing to blame Maduro for what America is doing to undercut them behind the scenes.

This crap started in Guatemala in 1954; it never ends.

12 – Why is Venezuela’s military backing Maduro recently? Is it worth it?

Maduro is the elected president of Venezuela in the same way that Trump is the elected president of the United States. Was the US election fair? Ask Reality Winner who is serving a five-year prison term incommunicado, because she disclosed NSA info on voting fraud. You will find that you can’t interview her.


Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA whistle-blower who exposed voter fraud and tampering in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five-year prison sentence — incommunicado as are other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.

So good luck figuring out what the truth is.

The billionaires who milk America don’t like socialism, because it is a system where people cooperate to create wealth, which they then share. Sharing wealth is anathema to oligarchs and mob bosses.

So, the USA is pulling out a well-worn playbook to guide itself through the process of replacing the experienced and elected leaders of Venezuela with a 35-year-old kid who knows just enough to do what he’s told. The USA promises to make him president. He promises to serve. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat.

To increase urgency and hysteria the USA manipulates currency and oil prices while it builds a right-wing cartel of nations to do its bidding. All the leaders will get rich under the plan. No one seriously gives a hoot about what happens to the poor.

The biggest danger is civil war, which happens to be exactly the same danger facing the United States. What goes around comes around.

The USA would be doing the world a big favor by helping Maduro get his country on its feet. Low oil prices have been catastrophic for Venezuela. Why don’t we help instead of using a bad situation as an opportunity to set up a bunch of oligarchs who will march to our drumbeat instead of their own?

Why is economic diversity such a bad thing? Ted Kennedy said in his last book that tycoons like his legendary dad were afraid that if socialism succeeds anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, it might become a prairie fire that takes down their edifice of privileges.

No tycoon wants a prairie fire. Every wealthy person believes they are self-made and entitled to all the advantages that their money can buy.

Ordinary people have about the same power to control the circumstances of their lives as farm animals.

It’s pathetic, really.

13 – With a regime change impending, within the next 30-50 years, will Venezuela consider socialistic influences for governmental structure again?

The pending regime change that is coming will take place in the United States. Americans are sick of boorish elites who — under a GOP led by pig Trump — won’t be electable in 2020.

One-party-rule by progressive democrats will bring relief to average people — something they haven’t experienced since the early 1970s. Many young people have no idea what it’s like to live in country that limits what the wealthy can steal and works overtime to bring equity to working people.

14 – Do you agree that reducing imports from Venezuela by the United States is an adequate short-term answer for helping that country and its citizens?

The best thing the USA can do to help Venezuela is to end sanctions, embargos, destabilization by our intelligence forces, and the policy of strategic strangulation, which is killing people — especially the weak.

The next best thing is to organize an international effort to airdrop food aid into the country. Flood the country with rice, powdered milk, clean water, potatoes, corn, etc. Inexpensive food is easy to collect and distribute and will help to strengthen the elderly, children, the pregnant, and the sick.

Flood the country with medical supplies and doctors to help the sick. Start talks with Maduro to offer him all the assistance he needs to get his country on its feet again.

15 – Is the newly accepted Venezuelan government by the United States backed by the majority of people in Venezuela? Or is it propaganda?

Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, ships 500,000 barrels of heavy crude into Texas refineries every day. The crude is used to make diesel fuel for trucks. Without cheap diesel America’s goods and services get expensive real fast.

America’s oligarchs hate socialist countries. Most people can understand why. The foreign policy of the United States is to destabilize and overthrow all socialist countries whenever possible. Venezuela is an easy mark, because their leaders do not seem to be sophisticated.

Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor, John R. Bolton, are leading a coalition of nations to inflict strategic strangulation on the Maduro administration. The government cannot access its gold reserves (held in British banks) and is fighting to maintain control of Citgo, which adds 10 billion dollars to the nation’s coffers each year.

The USA plans to divert as many assets as it can to the puppet government it is setting up under the auspices of a 35-year-old kid who no one ever heard of before about three days ago.

The process of destabilization has been accelerated under Trump, and the USA is now making its move.

The USA is hoping for military defections combined with public demonstrations to force a sham election in the next 30 days to oust the socialist government in Venezuela and legitimize a new government, which they will control behind the scenes. They hope to assassinate Maduro if they get the opportunity. The Russians are sending in a large security detail to protect the lives of the current group of leaders and help them hold onto power.

The country of Venezuela is polarized much like the USA. The elites want the USA to intervene; the poor want Madura and socialism. All sides want the USA led embargo, destabilization protocols, and strategic strangulation to stop ASAP.

16 – Will the Venezuelan military switch sides if they see the US military lining up for an invasion? Don’t they care mostly about how much they are paid? What good is an ousted Maduro?

Overthrowing elected socialist governments is a specialty of US foreign policy. The USA is good at it, but it doesn’t always work.

Even an intense strategic strangulation of Cuba (and an invasion to boot) was unable to break down the Cuban revolution.

The USA killed two million Vietnamese but failed miserably to prevent the unification of North and South.

Early successful overthrows such as those in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) have convinced policy makers that the odds are in their favor when they decide to decimate a particular country. They have a better than even chance to prevail, so why not take it?

The problem is that everyone now knows — after 79 years of messing with governments — that the USA cares almost exclusively about itself and the protection of its tycoons. Democracy, equality, and basic fairness mean nothing to the United States in its conduct of foreign policy.

Many policy makers disagree with my point of view, but they are in the habit of giving in to self-deception to make it possible for them to live inside themselves.

17 – What is the likelihood that the US will at some time become entangled in a coup in South America?

The USA has a history of involvement in the politics of South and Central American countries. Coups are part of the history. Where have you been?

Seriously.

Destabilizing socialist countries in our hemisphere is an important component of the foreign policy of the United States. Everyone knows. It’s not a well-kept secret.

The USA keeps track of what’s going on through agricultural programs, aid, and assistance. When it desires change, the USA generally tries diplomacy first. If it doesn’t work, more violent methods have been used, including assassinations, disappearances, and coups.

Under certain circumstances, it can be illegal to talk about what exactly our intelligence services do to keep the Americas safe for exploitation by our companies. The most famous company that the USA went to war for was the United Fruit Company during the Eisenhower years. The president’s secretary held a lot of the company’s stock.

Some countries have raw materials that are considered strategic assets. The USA or its surrogates operate mines and other facilities to secure these assets and to keep other competitor countries from access. Right?

The instability in South and Central America that has arisen since President Obama stepped down is probably the result of activities encouraged by the newest president. He has lots of precedents to justify himself, correct?

18 – Are Russia and China’s recent provocative military maneuvers a prelude to war with the United States?

My belief — based on no evidence I can recite — is that our president is a pacifist. He enjoys pretend violence, like pro-wrestling, but is repulsed by real violence. He likes to threaten, yell, call people names, sue people in court, etc., but he is uninterested in physically hurting someone. For him fake violence is a kind of game. Often, he forgives and makes up later.

His mistresses have all said, as far as I know, that he treated them with kindness; something that many philanderers are not known to do.

When he bombed an airstrip to retaliate against a Syrian chemical attack, he set up the targeting so that no one on-site would get hurt. Yes, an attack on another target killed a hundred or so Russian soldiers, but it was an unintended screw-up he’d probably like to have back.

Our president likes to huff and puff and make deals; it’s a harmless game for him that has no meaning except for the fun he gets each day trying to outwit his opponents who he calls “rats” or “crooked” or “lyin” or whatever fits. Hillary Clinton, in real life, is one of his best friends, for crying out loud.

Trump is a liberal at heart, but he pretends to be a racist monster to hold onto his base, which is, let’s face facts, hold-overs from the Confederacy of the Old South. Southern racists are dangerous when angry; otherwise, they are the dumbest, easiest-to-manipulate voters in the country. They are like lemmings — if Trump says, “run off a cliff”, they’ll do it and praise Jesus for the opportunity.

Trump will not go to war against China or Russia as long as he can play monopoly with their oligarchs. He’ll bluster and threaten. He won’t pull any triggers.

One very interesting thing happened the day he became president. A prominent drug lord from Mexico was arrested and disappeared into the New York City penal system. Within a few days the man’s family was rounded up. They haven’t been heard from since.

So, the president has power. His problem is that a component of his power comes from sympathetic mob bosses, often with dual-citizenship — almost always from Russia and Israel. These “friends” aren’t shy about taking care of business, so the president won’t have to.

19 – The US could lose a future war against Russia or China, a new report to Congress has suggested. Do you agree?

The United States completed a two-trillion-dollar upgrade to our nuclear missile inventories during the Obama administration. The USA built a doomsday matrix.

I’ve heard rumors that a certain country has built a doomsday bomb capable of destroying Earth were it ever detonated. Folks should know that there is no upper limit to the destructive power of hydrogen bombs. Countries can build them as big as they want. They can blow up Earth itself.

The USA might not be able to win a hot war, but we won’t lose it to others, either. A war to the death against Russia or China is a war to the death of the planet. If recovery is possible, it will take thousands of years, but climate changes and the loss of resources will mean that Earth will never be what it once was; humans will never be what they once were.

War by major powers against each other (a world-war) is something that can never be allowed to happen again. The next world-war will kill billions of people and unleash a pandora’s box of suffering on the few unfortunates who survive. Rich and poor alike who live will be traumatized to the end of their natural lives.

Hot war is suicide. The leaders of every nation-state must give their last ounce of courage to preserve the one place in the universe where people have the hope to survive and thrive.

20 – Why is Russia’s military so powerful despite the fact that they spend less on defense than the USA?

1 – The Russians pay lower salaries and have fewer military bases. (The USA maintains 800 bases in 70 countries.)

2 – Russia is more than twice the size of the United States.

3 – Russia has the world’s largest reserves of oil.

4 – Russians are more literate in science and engineering than Americans.

5 – Russia has developed dangerous (to us) technological advantages in missile technology. They have air-to-surface missiles that are stealthy and reach velocities close to three miles per second. The USA has nothing in its arsenal that can track and shoot them down, which means that we risk losing our entire fleet of navy ships in a hot war.

6 – Russia has a fleet of drone subs deployed off our coasts.

7 – Russia does not seem to the have rampant corruption and cost overruns in its manufacturing sector that the United States is known for and which drive up the price of everything the Pentagon buys.

8 – Russians build their vehicles, artillery, and guns to perform in off-road bad weather conditions. They design their equipment to be simple, reliable, and easy to fix.

9 – The USA is paying unreliable private companies to administer a big part of its military space program. The temptations that lead to profiteering and unrealistic assessments of effectiveness might rot the foundations of military readiness. It is a risk the Russians don’t take.

Having said all this, the fact is that the militaries of both countries are nightmarishly lethal. The side that attacks first in the next war will accrue big initial advantages that could make a counter-punch ineffective. An immediate imbalance of power could easily become permanent and lead to catastrophe for the country that takes the first hit.

Technologies of modern warfare are making the world less safe for war-makers.

Hope is when the generals and civilian leaders don’t feel safe that they will avoid all-out war.

Terror-in-the-gut starts when military planners understand that the other side will strike first.

Billy Lee

CONTRADICTIONS

The Bible says that all who call on the name of the LORD will be saved. Jesus said not so fast, that’s not quite right. Not everyone who says LORD, LORD will be saved, but only those who do the will of GOD.

Despite what 40,000 Christian denominations (and counting) teach their congregations, the Bible is full of contradictions. Worse for modern readers, it is full of scientific and historical nonsense.

The most compelling contradiction involves the subject of divorce. The Bible both forbids and permits it. Jesus said that the contradiction was intentional to accommodate the hardness of people’s hearts.

When Jesus says the Bible harbors contradictions, that kind of settles the matter, does it not?

It seems that for some, it doesn’t.

One New Testament writer asserts that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching and instruction.  He doesn’t assert that everything written is contradiction-free.

For one thing, the Bible wasn’t anywhere near complete when he wrote his tract. There are other reasons. The ancients didn’t have the same ideas about evidence, science, proof, and logic that western modernity has. It’s not easy to accept, but almost everything that matters to us was different in the ancient world.

My experience with members of congregations from dozens of churches has taught me that many folks are drawn to religion because they want certainty.

The uncertainties of life scare them. They hate ambiguity and want their stupid notions about life confirmed. The easiest way is to group-think with like-minded believers.

All congregations teeter on the brink of madness. Cult culture is always lurking beneath the shadows of human weakness and fallibility.

It’s not difficult to understand that Jesus had a serious problem that could not easily be overcome. By modern standards, the brightest people of first-century Israel were hopelessly ignorant. A huge number suffered from illness, both physical and mental. They had no realistic understanding about why.

They knew not where the wind came nor what the stars were. Some thought, according to the screenwriters of the 1964 classic movie, Spartacus, that a giant lived in a cave with a young girl. He looked at her and sighed. From his breath the wind stirred.

As for stars, some thought they were the light of Heaven shining through tiny holes in a tarp that covered Earth at night like a tent.

If you were Jesus and encountered such ignorance, where would you start?  In those days, almost everything people believed was a lie.

A truth teller has no chance in the modern world. What chance would such a person have two-thousand years ago?

It is one of the great miracles of Jesus’s life that he was able to reach his mid-thirties before the leaders he challenged killed him.

Think about it. Life was cheap when the Romans used the cross to teach wayward people the lesson that rebels die hard. When wood was scarce, Romans nailed people to the sides of their houses. Non-citizens in occupied territories didn’t even get the benefit of a hearing more often than not.

From Jesus’s point of view, the most important problem people faced was not physical suffering or oppression but separation from God caused by their propensity to sin. Evil was the result of not knowing God and living life apart.

For Jesus, God is love. People who live outside the will and protection of love are certain to traumatize those they care about most — starting with themselves first, their own families, and moving inevitably outward like cancer into the organs of the people they hate, which for most people is everyone they meet.

The problem of hate and senseless cruelty is that it is not a respecter of persons, knowledge, wealth, or power. Hate and cruelty destroy lives whether people believe stars are pinholes or distant suns.

Jesus didn’t address the problem of human ignorance, because it is a problem that is always with us. Even the smartest people today can’t explain to anyone in a way that makes sense how it is that people got here. The best educated from the best schools talk crazy most of the time.

Instead of worrying about the minutiae of hermeneutics, Jesus said that Scripture is best summarized by two simple actions: loving God who gave us life, and loving the others who God also created and loves.

We do the will of God when we love and forgive. It’s simple. A child can understand.

Major portions of the Christian Bible weren’t written when Jesus walked the earth. It was hundreds of years after Christ’s death before a compilation of tracts were collected that were sensible and consistent enough that the scholars of the time felt confident to publish.

They published a handful of Bibles, because the printing press wouldn’t be invented for a thousand years more. Even then, the text wasn’t partitioned into chapters or verse; chapters and verses would be added later — hundreds of years into the future.

Jesus was well aware that most people wouldn’t be taught to read for a long, long time after he was gone. He knew that language and cultures change with time. No one has to be God to understand that translations of ancient languages are always a little unreliable — open to interpretation —  no matter how much scholarship is brought to bear.

It’s why Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would write the Words of God on human hearts; the words of God would guide believers until he returned to rescue the world someday.

Which day?

Jesus said he had no idea. All he knew was that he would return when humankind needed him most. It would be during a catastrophe; an extinction event the likes of which no one has ever seen; a time when the moon and stars disappear from view.

In a time of existential danger — a day that might never come — he promised to rescue us one last time.

Preachers have created a cottage industry out of the promise of a Second Coming.  Writers make a ton of money cashing in on people’s insatiable curiosity to understand the “end times.”

Who will be saved? Who will be thrown into the fires of Hell? 

Who will be awarded movie rights? Who will hold the copyrights to the greatest story ever told?

People demand that God be perfect. They insist that everything created by God be perfect. If things can’t be made perfect, they want nothing to do with God. Who needs a God who doesn’t live up to my high standards? some dare to reason.

God disagrees, of course. God said that he saw that the things he created were good, not perfect. A lot of people get that simple truth from the first book of the Bible completely wrong.

The first humans sinned and found themselves separated from God. The world they entered wasn’t good. It was bad. The reason, sadly, was because they made it bad.

It’s a subtle thought, but good versus bad is qualitatively different from perfect verses flawed. It has a different flavor that can make a difference in the way people view the wonder of God and what he has done.  It changes the texture of the relationship with our Maker in a way that when correctly understood is able to rekindle the embers of love that Jesus warned will (for most folks) grow cold.

We don’t want that, do we?  I don’t want it, and neither does God. God doesn’t demand perfection; he’s asking us to love and be good to ourselves and each other. We will make mistakes; we are not and never will be perfect; we can love and forgive each other our trespasses, as the oldest of Christ’s prayers says.

Forgiving each other erases the bad and releases the good in every person who is abundantly loved.  It’s a perfect system to restore wholesomeness; perfection itself is irrelevant — does anyone know? — and, anyway, it’s unachievable by both people and God.

Everything that was made was good; it wasn’t necessarily perfect. Let that sink in. Perfection turns us into automata; into machines of steel and hardened hearts; into measurers and comparators; into judges and executioners.

Only love is made perfect through the shed blood of Christ Jesus alone. It is the central mystery of the Bible — a stumbling block for many.

We are flesh and blood made in the image of God. Jesus commanded every person under Heaven to live life unafraid. We don’t fret if a hair is grey or out of place; we don’t worry about wrinkles or crooked teeth or brains that don’t function like we think they should.

We don’t worry about the clothes we wear or the food we eat. We don’t obsess on our health or our popularity. We don’t carry guns or live behind walls or fly drones over our neighbors’ yards; we don’t fear strangers; we love them and take them in.

Most of all we trust God to meet our needs — like the sparrow and the fox who God feeds and shelters and knows as intimately as ourselves, the people who worship the LORD with grateful hearts — because without God with us we are lost in a universe we will never understand.

Billy Lee

MESSAGE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD:  Once again Billy Lee has pontificated about religion without offering readers anything to back it up. We demanded that he quote something from Scripture.

He picked  1 John 4: 7-12:

”Dear friends: Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  […]  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

NOTES:

  1. τελεος – having reached its end; finished; complete —  Matthew 5: 48
  2. τετελεσται – it has been finished — John 19: 30

“C”

NOTE:  The members of the EDITORIAL BOARD are aware that many readers may not have studied physics or astronomy. They might be under the false impression that an article like the one that follows is going to be incomprehensible. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Yes, those who have studied Maxwell’s Equations and Einstein’s theories will find his essay a kind of cakewalk. No doubt, eggheads will have issues with some assertions. Submit objections in comments — your head does not have to look like an egg.

WE, THE EDITORS wish to reassure readers — especially those who have yet to study math and science — that they have intelligence and imagination enuf to understand Billy Lee’s basic arguments.

We know Billy Lee. We work with him every day. He talks and tweets a lot but what does he really know? 

Billy Lee likes to share notions with folks who can read. He claims it does no harm. For those who get “high” on science, Billy Lee included videos to make rabbit-hole hopping fun. Don’t be afraid to watch some.

THE EDITORIAL BOARD
 


UPDATE BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD:  May 15, 2019; Victor T. Toth, the Hungarian software developer, author, and Quora guru of quantum physics wrote, “a photon has no rest mass, but it carries plenty of energy, and it has momentum.  Its stress-energy-momentum tensor is certainly not zero.  So it can be a source of gravity, it has inertia, and it responds to gravity.  […] relativity theory predicts … twice the deflection angle for a photon in a gravitational field than the deflection of a Newtonian particle.”

Almost a century of experiments plus hundreds of upvotes on Quora by physicists seem to validate Victor’s argument. 


The photon is known to be the only massless, free-moving particle in the Standard Model of physics. Other massless particles are the gluon, the graviton, and of course the Higgs, discovered in 2012 at CERN. Europeans plan to build a Higgs factory to learn more about them. Gluons mediate the strong force. They don’t propagate through empty space.  No one has yet observed even a single graviton. Higgs give fermions like quarks their mass. 

Photons have an electric and magnetic structure. They are electromagnetic pulses of energy that emerge from atoms when electrons drop from a higher energy state to a lower one. When electrons shed energy, a pulse of electromagnetic radiation is emitted — a photon of light.


Click pic for better view in new tab.

Photons of light can be emitted from atoms at different frequencies — colors when wavelengths fall within the narrow range that humans see. These frequencies depend on the energy of electrons, which exist in many differently configured shells (or orbitals) within both atoms and molecules.

Wavelengths of light felt but not seen are called infrared; other invisible frequencies fall into broad categories such as radio waves, microwaves, x-rays, gamma rays and so on — all require instruments to detect.


Electromagnetic radiation is the medium through which humans observe and interact with everything knowable in the universe. Humans live inside an electromagnetic bubble that they are struggling to understand.

One thing most physicists understand is that a disturbing 95% of the energy and mass of the universe comes from a source no one can see. Physicists observe the effects of invisible (dark) matter and invisible (dark) energy by measuring the unusual dynamics of galaxies and by cataloging the physical organization and expansion of the universe itself.



These measurements make no sense unless folks assume that a lot of gravitationally interacting stuff is out there which no one has yet observationally confirmed. The missing mass is not debris or dark stars. The most exaggerated conjectures about how much mass and energy is scattered among the stars won’t come anywhere near enough to explain forces that make galaxies behave strangely.

Dark matter and energy don’t seem to be electromagnetic. Dark matter, if it exists, interacts with the mass of two-trillion galaxies and seems to refract their emitted light. Humans are blind to all of it.

Scientists postulate matter they call WIMPS, MACHOS, axions, and erebons.  Each has a few properties necessary to make the universe work as observed, but none have all the required properties except perhaps erebons, if Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) is someday verified.

Other candidates for dark matter? — why not sterile neutrinos, GIMPs, and SIMPs

Space-saturating foam of micro-sized black holes is another idea some have proposed. The problem is that theorists believe tiny black holes might be too stable to radiate electromagnetic waves or gravity waves.

Micro-holes lie in a sort of crevice of invisibility — unobservable by LIGO and LISA style gravity-wave sensors, yet too massive for current and future particle-colliders like CERN to create. 

Because micro-holes don’t radiate light at any frequency, light telescopes will never find them. No imagined interaction of micro-holes is able to generate gravity-waves with enough disruptive power in spacetime to be detected. The nature of physics seems to suggest that no technology can be developed to confirm or deny the black-hole foam idea. 

Perhaps the same dilemma faces dark matter detection. We know it exists, but physics says we can never find it. It will always lie just outside our reach doing its work in an invisible universe no one will ever see. 

Worse, not one of the proposed forms of “dark” matter has ever been observed or identified. It is likely that no experiment currently scheduled will detect dark matter, which many physicists believe is “out there” and makes maybe four parts out of five of all the matter in the universe.

It’s an incredible paradox for conscious humans to live in a universe where they are blind to almost every important thing that is happening within and around them.

Humanoids are like fish which spend their lives swimming in streams buried deep inside caves. Spelunkers like me know that certain species of cave fish have no eyes. They lack all ability to see their world — as do we, it seems. As intelligent as people are, they don’t yet build sensors capable of confirming their notions about what the universe might actually be at large scales or small.  

Oh well…  someday maybe new discoveries will make our predicament evaporate away.  The universe will reveal itself to humans, as we knew it would. Our dream to fully understand reality will come true.

Some day.

Scientists have sensible mathematics to show that if electromagnetic particles are massless, they must travel at an upper limit, called c.  Over decades, folks decided that this constant is the speed of a photon in a vacuum; they decided that photons have no internal rest mass and travel in vacuum at a speed limit — the speed of light.

The truth might be more mysterious. No one knows what the upper limit of “c” is, because no one knows with certainty that space is truly empty or that massless particles exist.

When physicists say that certain particles are massless, they sometimes mean that they don’t interact with the Higgs Field, which is known to give mass to fermions, like quarks. They don’t mean they don’t have energy, specifically kinetic energy, which is a form of inertial mass, right? They also aren’t saying photons don’t interact gravitationally. They do, in a special way described by the geodesics of spacetime in Einstein’s General Relativity. 

More on this idea later. 



British physicist Brian Cox wrote in his book  Why Does E = mc2 ?  that the question about whether photons have rest mass is not yet settled.

It’s true that more than a few reasonable people seem to believe that photons traveling freely in the vacuum of space are massless. If they truly are then the permittivity constant “ε” in Maxwell’s equation can be established for electro-magnetic particles (like photons).


The formula below is used to calculate the speed of a massless electromagnetic particle; it is thought to be a maximum speed.


For now, ignore the μ term. It is the permeability (resistance) of vacuum to infusion by a magnetic field, which is determined by experiment. It is sometimes called the magnetic constant.

Epsilon (ε} is the permittivity (resistance) of vacuum to an electric field. It is sometimes called the electric constant.

c” is the so-called ”universal speed limit.” It is called the lightspeed constant

These three numbers — μ, ε, and — help to define the maximum velocity of an electromagnetic wave, which most people believe is the archetypal photon (of light). They assume that the photon packet travels at the maximum allowable speed in a vacuum.

A problem with this view is that no one has proved that space is free; or that space has no weight; or that photons have no rest mass; or that undiscovered particles formed from forces other than electricity and magnetism don’t exist. A few scientists have said that there might be no such things as free space or massless photons. It is also possible that space presents less resistance to other phenomenon yet to be discovered.

The idea that ”dark” matter and energy must exist to make the universe behave the way it does is compelling to many physicists. If true, it is possible — though light travels nearly 300 million meters-per-second — it is not traveling at the maximum speed of a generic, massless particle. The electric constant (ε) might need to be adjusted.

A decrease in the permittivity (resistance) of space (ε) — made obvious by inclusion of vast number of photons in the cosmic microwave background  — drives ”ε” to be smaller and ”c” to be larger, right? 

New particles, dark and as yet undiscovered, might do the same. The consequences could be significant.

Determining the upper speed of a massless particle requires a form of circular reasoning that is currently based on the measurement of the velocity of photons in a vacuum, which is called the speed of light.

The measured velocity of light in a vacuum is now an established constant of nature with a fixed value that doesn’t change regardless of the frame of reference. Modern labs have measured both the frequencies and wavelengths of various colors of light; multiplying the two numbers together always yields the same result — the speed of light.

Knowing the speed of light permits physicists to establish a value for ε by working backwards in the wave equation to solve for the electric permittivity of space. The value of “ε” falls easily from Maxwell’s Equations to a precision of 12 places.

It can’t be any other way. But is it the right way?

Here’s the problem: Physicists have measured mass in photons during experiments at the linear accelerator lab at Stanford University, SLAC.

In superconductors, photon mass has been measured to be as high as 1.2 eV.

Photon mass has been observed in wave guides and in plasmas.

Fact is, photons have inertial mass, which is a measure of their energy as calculated from their wavelengths or frequencies. In relativity theory, energy and mass are measured in the same units, electron-volts, because in the theory, mass and energy are equivalent. 


Click this link to view CLOSER TO TRUTH interview with Raphael Bousso.

Cosmologist, Raphael Bousso, believes that empty space has weight, which is a measure of the cosmological constant, which is a measure of dark energy.

Space seems to be saturated like a sponge with something that gives it energy or force or weight if you will. The weight of empty space determines the size of the universe and some of its fundamental laws. Universes beyond our own with different weights of space can be larger or smaller and obey different rules.

Most physicists agree that photons become massive when they travel through transparent materials like glass, where they slow down by as much as 40%.

The problem is that these observations conflict with both the Heisenberg and the Schrodinger view of quantum mechanics, which is the most tested and confirmed model physicists have. Modern ideas seem to work best when photon mass is placed on the energy side of the mass-energy column. Otherwise, the presence of internal mass suggests that photons can be restrained to a defined size, which drives their momentums to infinity.

The truth is that it is not possible to prove that photons are massless. The stress-energy-momentum tensor in Einstein’s equation of General Relativity implies that photons can be both the source and the object of gravity.  I’m referring to this tensor as “mass” and leaving it there for others to dispute. A rabbit hole for courageous readers to explore is the concept of pseudotensor, which this essay will avoid. 

It is also not true that a photon can never be at rest either.  Lab techs do unusual things with photons during experiments with lasers and superconductors — including slowing photons down and even stopping some (with supercooled helium-4).  Right?

Another problem is the electromagnetic nature of light. The electric part of a light-wave carries enough energy to move an electron up and down. The magnetic part carries the same energy but its motion creates a force that pushes electrons outward in the same direction as the light. It’s why light-sails work in space. Oscillating magnetic fields push light forward. Otherwise, light might stand in one place and simply jiggle. But is light-speed the best magnetic fields can do? 

Electromagnetism could be irrelevant in the search for an upper speed limit “c“, because “c” might prove to be the result of an unknown set of particles with properties outside the current boundaries of the Standard Model. 

Massless particles, — undiscovered ones anyway — might not be electromagnetic. Humans might be biologically unfit to detect them; unable to measure their properties. 

For those who might be rolling their eyes, remember that physicists claim that 95% of the mass and energy required to make the universe behave the way it does is missing. They call the missing stuff “dark” because they can’t find it. Excuse me should anyone catch me rolling my eyes. 

Some theorists have speculated that “dark photons” might exist to help fill in the gaps. The popular TV show How the Universe Works actually repeated the idea in an episode of its latest series. The writers were probably referring to axions, which some physicists propose are similar to photons except that they have mass and are slower moving.

Photons are bosons. They are force carriers for electrons, correct?

Maybe folks should try to accept the notion that nothing in physics prevents bosons like photons from having mass or from taking on mass when they whiz over and through atoms and molecules (in glass and water, for example) where some physicists conjecture, they stimulate the release of polaritons in their wake. Jiggling electrons that lack the energy to jump states emit polaritons, which seem to add enough equivalent mass to photons to slow them down. Think of polaritons as light-matter wavelets

Massive, gravitationally interacting photons are not required to be “dark.”  If photons are the dark matter, axions are unnecessary to solve certain problems both in cosmology and the Standard Model.  No experiment will find them.

I mentioned that three other particles are presumed to be massless: the gluon, the graviton, and the Higgs boson. 

To review, the gluon is not easily observed except in particle colliders where it lives briefly before decaying into other particles; it is confined among the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms. The graviton, on the other hand, has never been observed. The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. CERN plans to build a Higgs factory someday to explore its properties.

The only particle available to physicists right now that enables them to establish the permittivity of space and compute the velocity of massless particles is the photon.

That’s it.

If the photon has internal mass, i.e., rest mass, everything changes.



Let’s hop into a rabbit hole for a moment and go back a step: What if massless, non-electromagnetic particles mediate entanglement, for example? Wherever paired electrons are found, entanglement rules, right?

Everyone knows that entanglement violates laws of logic and physics. No one can make sense of it.

What if massless non-electromagnetic particles entangle the electromagnetic particles of the subatomic world? If they travel a thousand or ten-thousand times the speed of light, they will present an illusion over short planetary scales that entanglement is instantaneous. No instrument or lab will detect the difference.

What are the consequences if massless non-electromagnetic particles travel at a billion times the speed of light? Maxwell’s equations won’t apply to particles like these. 

Because it seems that speeds of subatomic particles like photons are able to increase as their masses approach zero, it is possible that “c” could be orders of magnitude faster than the speed of a photon — that is, the speed of light — if it turns out that photons harbor tiny but significant rest masses.

I’m not advocating this notion. Let’s crawl out of the rabbit hole. I’m suggesting only that such a state of affairs is possible, because the assumption that photons at rest are massless — that internal mass of photons is always zero — though reasonable and desirable to justify models, is not yet settled according to some physicists.

And there is, of course, the phenomenon of entanglement which no one can explain.

Here’s speculation that should blow the mind of any thinking person: Could photons, if shown to have internal mass, be the stuff that make the galaxies move in the non-intuitive ways they do?

Yes, some physicists argue that the upper limit on the internal (rest mass) of a photon must be less than 10-52 kilograms, which is about 5.6E-17 eV for folks who think that way. (Multiply mass by the speed of light twice to make the conversion and divide by 1.60218E-19 Joules per eV.)

5.6E-17 eV doesn’t seem like much mass at all until folks realize that the minimum number of photons in the universe might be as high as 1090.   This number is ten billion times the number of atoms in the universe. It means that the internal mass contribution from photons alone could easily exceed 1038 kilograms if the upper limit proposed by some is used to perform the calculation.

Do the math, anyone who doesn’t believe it.

Guess what?

Prepare for a letdown.

Based on the conjectured eVs, the mass of all material in the visible universe is in the neighborhood of 1053  kilograms. The video below will help the reader understand how this value and others are calculated. The mass of the visible universe turns out to be 1,000 trillion times more than the conjectured internal mass of all photons.



Think about it.

Is it enough mass to account for the galaxy anomalies seen by astrophysicists?  To any reasonable mind the answer is obviously, no. But this conclusion is not the end of the story. 



Those who study astronomy know that the outer stars in galaxies seem to move at roughly the same speed as the inner. Yet the galaxies aren’t flying apart.

By way of contrast, the planets in solar systems like ours travel slower the farther away they orbit from their sun.  If Neptune orbited as fast as Earth, it would fly away into deep space.

A recalibration to account for the internal mass of photons of light (which seems to always be discounted) does not at first blush offer the gravitational heft that astrophysicists require to make everything on galactic scales fall into place.

The cosmic background radiation — which is nothing more than photons that decoupled close to the beginning of time — saturates the universe like vinegar in a sponge, right?  It is distributed evenly across all space for as far as human-built instruments can see.

The CMB makes an annoying hum in radio telescopes no matter their focus or where they point. Photons with tiny internal masses or no mass at all will have no influence on the understanding by astrophysicists of how the universe behaves.

Neutrinos, which seem to oscillate between three (or perhaps four) as yet undetermined massive states, might at times take on values below the actual mass-value of photons — if photons turn out to be more massive than most believe. The laws of physics require that neutrinos less massive than massive photons, should they exist, must travel superluminally (faster than light).  Agreed?

Several “discredited” observations have reported faster-than-light neutrinos, including the unexpected outcome of the infamous OPERA experiment, which inspectors eventually blamed on a loose fiber-optic cable that was ever-so-slightly longer than it should have been.  

OK.  It seems reasonable.  Who can argue?

Scientists who believe that superluminal neutrinos actually exist don’t speak up, perhaps out of fear for their careers. They probably couldn’t get their opinions published anyway, right?


Click pic for better view in new tab.

Crackpot ideas that later prove valid is how science sometimes works. It’s how science has become the mess that it is — a chaos of observations that can’t make sense out of 95% of what is going on all around; a plethora of experimental results that don’t quite match the work of theorists.

The super-brilliant people who paint the mathematical structures of ultimate reality rely on physicists to smear their masterworks with the muds of perturbation, renormalization, and a half dozen other incomprehensible substrates to get the few phenomenon folks think they understand to look right and make sense. Theory and experiment don’t seem to match-up as well as some folks think they should more times than not.

A minor recalibration based on the acceptance of photons as quantum objects with tiny, almost unmeasurable masses will not change ideas about the nature of the universe and what is possible, because the upper-bound on photon masses might be undervalued — perhaps by a factor of billions.



Theorists like Nima Arkani-Hamed work on abstract geometries called amplituhedrons to salvage notions of massless particles while simplifying calculations of scattering probabilities in quantum mechanics. It seems to me like hopeless adventures doomed to fail. But in fairness so did Columbus’s exploration for new worlds.

To be a serious candidate for dark matter, a typical microwave photon should have an average mass of nearly .05 eV (electron volts), which is about 9 x 10-38 kilograms. If multiplied by the number of photons ( 1090 ), the photon masses add almost miraculously to become 85% of the theoretical mass of the universe.

(1E90)*(9E-38) = 9E52.  (9E52) / .85 = 1E53 kg. 

It’s the same number conjectured by dark-matter advocates. 

To qualify for dark matter means that a typical or average photon must have close to one ten-millionth of the mass of an electron.

Only then does everything fall into place like it should.

Pull out the calculator, anyone who doesn’t believe it.



Einstein, in his famous 1905 paper on special relativity, showed that mass is equivalent to the energy of an object divided twice by a constant, which is “c” squared, right?

Later, he added a second term to the internal energy of a particle which is its inertial energy, pc2 . Simplified, this term equals hf for a massless photon. The total energy of any object is the square root of the sum of its internal energy and its inertial energy. 

E = \sqrt {(mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2}

If Einstein is taken at his word, then the inertial mass of a photon is a function of its characteristic frequency — i.e. the inertial mass of a photon is equal to 

\frac{hf}{c^2}

where “h” is the Planck constant and “c” is the speed of light. The internal mass, should any exist, can be discounted. 

An argument can be made from Einstein’s equations that the mass of a photon might be \sqrt {2} times larger. A factor of 1.414… won’t change the argument. It strengthens the point but is, in the end, not important enough to include in an article that is already overly long. Curious readers can review the reasoning in my essay General & Special Relativity

If the average photon has an inertial mass of .05 eV, it requires that — all else being equal — the combined photon energy in a non-expanding universe would lie in the range of infrared light, a frequency in this case of 12E12 Hz, which is sometimes referred to as far-infrared.

(Set equivalent-mass equal to .05 eV (8.9E-38 kilograms) and solve for frequency.) The frequency approaches the lower energy microwave part of the light spectrum. 

Note:  For perspective, one eV is the energy (or mass equivalent) of a near-infrared photon of frequency 242E12 Hz, which approaches from below the higher-energy visible-light part of the light spectrum. 

The mass equivalence of the inertial energy of 1E90 infrared photons is sufficient to hold the universe together to prevent runaway expansion caused by repulsion due to the gravity constant Λ in Einstein’s equation for General Relativity. 

Do the math.

I know what some people might be thinking: Didn’t the 29 May 1919 solar eclipse, which enabled observers to confirm Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, demonstrate that photons lack internal mass?  Didn’t Eddington’s experiment prove wrong Newton’s idea that photons, which he called corpuscles, were massive objects? 

Maybe. Maybe not.  Maybe internal mass isn’t necessary. There is enough energy in the inertial term of Einstein’s equation to yield the required mass.

Unlike massive particles where internal energy far outweighs inertial energy, for photons, inertial energy is dominant. Even if science admits to a small amount of internal mass in photons, it is their inertial energy that dominates.

I found a good mathematical argument for light mass on Quora by Kyle Lochlann, an academic in relativity theory. Here is the link:

PHOTON MASS

Be sure to read comments to his answer — especially those who find math incomprehensible, which might be nearly everyone who reads my blog. 

After all, Newton’s theory of gravity predicted that the light from stars would deflect near the Sun at only half what Eddington’s experiment clearly showed. Eddington’s eclipse proved Einstein’s theory — the geodesics of spacetime bend in the presence of massive objects like stars.

Many concluded that photons followed the geodesics of spacetime, because photons lacked mass equivalence of any kind. Newton erred about pretty much everything involving gravity and light, some said.  

But their conclusion can’t be right, can it? Doesn’t their conclusion ignore what the math of Einstein’s formulas actually says?



Won’t it make more sense to say that the geodesics of spacetime constrain and overwhelm whatever internal and inertial mass photons might possess?  Doesn’t it make more sense to convert the frequency-related inertial energy of photons to mass to better explain their behavior near objects like the Sun? 

Evidence exists that light-mass is a thing and that it matters. Einstein included a mass-equivalence term for light in his tensors for general relativity. Frank Wilczek, MIT Nobel laureate, is famous for insisting that the mass of anything at all is its energy content. The energy of light is in its frequency, its momentum, which is a measure of its mass. 

It’s true that light does not seem to interact with the Higgs field. Nevertheless, the energy of light seems to interact gravitationally with ordinary matter. The interaction is not measurable when photon numbers are small. When photon numbers are huge, perhaps it is.  

A single photon in the presence of the Sun has no chance. When 10E90 photons saturate a space that is almost entirely devoid of matter, photons can shape a universe — especially when their number is 10 billion times the number of atoms. 

It seems possible, at least to me.

According to data gathered by the NASA WMAP satellite, ordinary matter in the observable universe amounts to a little more than 1/4 of a neutron per cubic meter of space. It amounts to 253.33E6 electron-volts of mass. Everything else WMAP observed was “cold dark matter” and “dark energy”.

How many .05 eV photons does it take to flood a cubic meter of space with enough mass-equivalence to reduce the mass-energy of 1/4 of a neutron to 15% of the total? How many photons are required to sum to 85% of the energy WMAP attributed to “cold dark matter”? It turns out that the number is 34 billion photons per cubic meter. 

The question is: how many photons are there? 

The observable universe has an estimated volume in the neighborhood of 1E80 cubic meters, right? Yes, it might be as much as 4 times that number. 

The lower-bound number of photons in the observable universe is 1E90. It might be ten times more.

It turns out that the number photons per cubic meter in the universe must be somewhere close to 25 billion.  25 is pretty darn close to 34. Since all the numbers are estimates with large margins of error, it’s possible that everything will fall into place as it should if and when the statistics of the universe are ever known with precision.

Could photons of light might be the “cold” dark matter everyone is searching for?

A single neutron has no chance when it is bathed in 136 billion .05 eV photons, which surround and envelop it on all sides from every direction. It makes a kind of quantum scale Custer’s Last Stand for random neutrons, right? 

When scientists look at the universe today, they see an accelerating expansion. They see in the cosmic background radiation photons that have slipped from infrared into longer, less energetic microwave wavelengths which no longer have enough mass-equivalence to hold the universe together.

As light stretches into longer and longer wavelengths through interaction mechanisms such as Compton scattering and other processes (like the push of “dark energy” or the less popular gravitational tug of parallel universes), light frequencies and energies diminish.

Eventually, when the total of all light falls below an average frequency of 12E12, the equivalent mass of the 1E90 primordial photons loses its grip; it becomes unable to hold the universe together.

Near the beginning of time when photons were orders-of-magnitude higher in frequency than now, their stronger gravitationally-equivalent-masses pulled together the structures astronomers study today, like stars and galaxies.



But now scientists seem to be witnessing a runaway expansion of the universe. Light has stretched and dimmed into the microwave and radio-wave frequencies where its mass-equivalence is unable to hold together the universe as it once was.

Because we can’t detect it, isn’t it possible that dark energy and dark matter don’t exist? That is to say, the idea that dark matter and energy are necessary to account for observations is no more than a conjecture made necessary by a misbehaving universe of unusual galaxies. But direct observational evidence for dark matter and energy is the part of the conjecture that is missing. No one has ever seen any.

What astronomers are observing instead is faraway galaxies that existed billions of years ago when the mass-equivalent energy of photons was greater than it is now.

The intact universe of galaxies seen in the night sky today, which is photographed with high-resolution space-borne telescopes, is not up to date in any sense at all, except that it is the view of an ancient past that goes back almost to the beginning of time depending on how deep into space anyone looks.

Everyone who cares about astronomy knows it’s true.

To qualify as a candidate for dark matter means that a photon must have close to one ten-millionth of the mass of an electron. It seems like a reasonable ratio, right?

In the Standard Model, only neutrinos are less massive than electrons. No one knows what the mass of each of the three “flavors” of neutrinos is, but when added they are less than 0.12 eV — about 2.4 times the equivalent-mass of infrared photons and about one four-millionth of the mass of electrons. It seems possible to me that the mass of at least one of the flavors of neutrinos will be less than the conjectured equivalent-mass of an infrared photon packet.

Neutrons and protons are, by contrast, 2,000 times “heavier” than electrons.

I am asking working physicists to reexamine estimates that claim the mass of a photon can be no more than trillions of times less than the mass of an electron.

The claim can be found at the back of articles in science journals as well as in blogs across the internet. For me, the idea seems ridiculous on its face. The energy-equivalent mass of photons varies with frequency, but only the lowest energy radio wave photons can hope to approach the low equivalent-mass estimated in the latest publications.

Scientists might want to revisit the mass of a photon and the methodology of its measurement. The stakes are high, and science doesn’t have many options. Hope — like the energy of ancient photons — is fading.



Science would be served best if scientists started from scratch to reexamine every assumption and lab procedure. The search for dark matter has become an expensive and compulsive quest that seems futile, at least to me. Several costly experiments have reached disappointing dead ends, which are reviewed in the “VICE on HBO” video located near the start of this essay.

What if photons of light really are the dark matter, which is hiding in plain sight waiting to be discovered by anyone who dares to look at the problem with fresh eyes?

What if the delay between the observations of the CMB (cosmic microwave background) and the structure of the universe is a natural disconnect in time and space that misleads folks to believe that mass must be “out there”, when it has in fact long since dissipated?

From another perhaps opposite perspective, what if photons are instead stimulating emissions from virtual particles as they travel at fantastic speeds through the vastness of space? What if these emissions add mass to photons sufficient to bring them to the “dark matter” threshold, as they do in materials like glass?

Such a state of affairs would imply that not all photons travel the same speed in the so-called vacuum of “empty” space. It is a heretical idea, for sure — a can of worms, perhaps to some, but hey! — you can catch a lot of fish with a can of worms.

A photon is a packet of electromagnetic oscillations built-up from many frequencies. Superposition of these frequencies adds to give a photon its characteristic frequency from which its equivalent mass can be calculated. Right?

Use imagination to think of the many ways a higher “speed limit” that is mandated by the existence of massive photons might work to stimulate the interest of a space-traveling civilization to explore the universe, which ordinary folks begin to understand is more accessible, more reachable than anyone thought possible.

Consider the number of inexplicable phenomena that would make sense if particles thought to have zero internal mass don’t really exist, and photons, gluons, gravitons, and Higgs bosons aren’t the only ones.

Recalibration might save a lot of time and effort in the search for the putative missing energy and mass of the universe.

Should “dark” particles exist whose internal mass is less than that of photons, they will likely move at superluminal speeds that make them difficult to track. To influence stars, their number would have to dwarf photons. Such an idea strains credulity.

A counterproposal by Roger Penrose speculates that dark matter particles might have the mass of the eye of a flea; he calls them “erebons.” These particles are electromagnetically invisible, but their huge masses relative to other particles in the Standard Model make them gravitationally compelling.

Erebons decay; evidence for their decay should be showing up in data collected by LIGO detectors.

So far persuasive evidence for erebons has not been found.



For scientists and explorers, the access-barrier to a universe shaped and configured by massive photons will most certainly shrink — perhaps thousands to millions of times.

The stars and galaxies that people believed were unreachable might finally fall within our grasp.

Or — perhaps less optimistically and more cynically — the mass-equivalent energy of 1E90 photons might by now be so severely degraded that nothing can save a universe that has already come undone and flown away into an abyss that humans will never see.

The radiation-evidence from a catastrophe of disintegrating galaxies that has already occurred won’t reach Earth-bound viewers for perhaps billions of years.

Should humans survive, our progeny — many millions or billions of years from now — may “see” in the vastness of space a cold and diminished radio-wave radiation that hums in a soul-less vacuum devoid of galaxies and visible light.  Microwave light will by then be nothing more than a higher-pitched, prehistoric memory.

Roger Penrose says that the fluid dynamics of an exhausted universe devoid of matter will become indistinguishable from the singularity that gave its start. A new universe will ignite from the massless, radiation-ashes of the old.

The idea is called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology — or CCC

Human-nature forces us to want to know more; most folks want to search for and find the answers to the questions that will determine the fate of all life on Earth and in the vast stretches of spacetime that remain beyond our reach.

Is the universe within our grasp, or has it already disintegrated?

We search for truth to set ourselves free.

Billy Lee