questions and answers Archives - The Billy Lee Pontificator

April 3, 2021June 8, 2023

GENERAL & SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Since Einstein said that E=mc² , why does a massless photon have energy?

Someone asked a similar question on Quora. My answer garnered nearly a million views and many dozens of comments. It gave me an opportunity to gather thoughts on a subject that has puzzled folks for decades.

Of course, I’m a pontificator, not a scientist. I got advice from working physicists and incorporated what they taught me.

One thing I learned from science writer Jim Baggott is that Einstein first published his famous equation in this form:

M = $\frac{E }{ C^2}$

When written this way, it becomes clear that anyone who knows the total energy of anything can calculate in principle its total mass.

Einstein knew nothing at all about the Higgs field but today physicists agree that the mass it creates is less than 5% of what mass they have discovered.

In fact, nearly 99% of the mass of a single proton is derived from the energy of “massless” gluons that constrain its two up-quarks and one down-quark. Gluons are bosons which don’t interact with the Higgs field; quarks, which are fermions, do.

In the end, it’s all about energy, which it turns out is equivalent to mass, which according to Baggott is what quantum fields do. Quantum fields like the Higgs field make mass. Perhaps the electromagnetic field — which makes photons — does the same.

Here is Einstein’s equation for energy:

$E^{2}=\left ( mc^{2} \right )^{2} +\left (pc \right )^{2}$

Since

$p=\frac{hf}{c}$

and

$m=\frac{hf}{c^2}$

it follows that it might be reasonable to imagine that photons have both internal mass and inertial mass, which causes Einstein’s equation for energy to give the following result:

$E=\sqrt2 ({hf})$

All that is left is to divide by c² to get mass, right?

$m=\sqrt2 (\frac{hf}{c^2})$

Most folks think the internal mass of a photon is zero. Period. End of story. They use the two mass and momentum terms in Einstein’s equation to calculate total energy of massive objects, yes, but photons, they insist, lack internal mass. They lack the internal fermionic structures associated with all massive particles.

Photons do have inertial energy proportional to their critical frequency though, which suggests that they possess perhaps equivalent inertial mass, which drives the photoelectric effect.

When physicists take the energy measure of photons, they drop the mass term in Einstein’s equation. They set mass to zero and cancel out the first term, mc². It leaves the second term — pc— which for photons simplifies to hf, inertial energy correlated to frequency, right? Energy can be measured in eVs, electron-volts, which are also units of mass.

If photons have internal energy, their total energy in the universe is undervalued by 1.414 (the square root of 2). Accounting for this added mass reduces the Cosmic energy deficit to near zero.

PHOTON MASS

I should add that overestimating mass and disrupting popular models of the Cosmos is something most scientists think is a bad idea.

The gluon is the only other massless particle currently in the standard model, but it has never been observed as a free particle. All gluons are buried inside hadrons. It is their binding energy in quarks that makes as much as 99% of the measured mass of protons and neutrons.

So, there is precedent to possibly reevaluate mass equivalence of photons.

Some readers might wonder about the massless graviton. This particle is theorized to exist, yes, but has not been observed or added to the Standard Model. The same is true for dark matter and dark energy — no physical evidence; not added to the Model.

It doesn’t mean dark energy and matter don’t exist. Cosmologists see way too much gravity everywhere they look. The problem is they can’t explain exactly what is causing it.

As for my answer to the original question published on Quora, it was as accurate as my limited experience could make at the time, but the subject is controversial and several issues are not yet settled, even by experts. Some disputes might never be settled.

Who knows?

Not me. I’m a pontificator, right?

What follows is a version of the answer:

You might be mistaken about energy.

According to the complete statement of Einstein’s most well-known equation, energy content is a combination of a particle’s mass and its momentum. The equation you cite is abbreviated. It is a simplified version that is missing a term.

Einstein’s complete equation is strangely analogous to Pythagoras’s geometry of right-triangles. When anyone thinks about it though, aren’t the frequencies of light at right angles to its propagation? Light waves are transverse, right?

Here is a more complete version of Einstein’s equation:

$E^{2}=+\left ( mc^{2} \right )^{2} + \left (pc \right )^{2}$

—where m is internal mass and ρ is momentum. Internal mass is often referred to as “rest mass” because it is invariant in all reference frames and unchanged by velocity or acceleration. Momentum is inertial energy measured in equivalent mass units called electron volts (eVs).

Massless particles like photons have momentum that is correlated to their wavelengths (or frequencies). It’s their frequencies that give massless particles like photons their energy content. So without (rest) internal mass the equation becomes:

E=ρc

—where $p=\frac{hf}{c}$ for massless photons.

So, E = hf

[“h” is Planck’s constant. “f” is frequency. “c” is light speed.]

Of course, in classical Newtonian physics ρ = mc. The mass term is critical.

Screen shot from Khan Academy showing derivation of photon momentum. Typed mark-ups by me show mass equivalence when ρ is set equal to mc. When mc = hf/c, then m = hf/c*c, right? Click the pic for a better view in a new window.

On the other hand, in quantum mechanics the total mass of photons cannot be zero either—photon internal mass is set equal to zero and eliminated. Inertial energy based on the photon’s critical frequency (the 2nd term in Einstein’s equation) becomes its equivalent mass. I’m not sure everyone agrees.

The beauty created by setting photon rest-mass (internal energy) to zero is it transforms the maths of relativity and quantum mechanics into structures that seem to be consistent and complete — able, one hopes, to meld into theories of everything; TOEs, if you like. The problem, of course, is that the convention of setting to zero leaves thrashing in its wake 95% of the mass and energy which “other” stories claim is hidden unseen “out there” within and around galaxies to move them faster than they ought.

The Abraham-Minkowski controversy seems to touch the argument. Click the link and scroll to the end of the article to learn how many things are disputed, not known, or unexplained. The science is not settled, although several physicists claim that the controversy is resolved by postulating an interaction inside dielectrics (like glass) of photons with electron-generated polaritons.

NOTE BY EDITORS: On 18 April 2021 a writer massively abbreviated and modified the article in Wikipedia on the A-M controversy. The writer deleted the entire list of disputed claims. Please click the link in this sentence to review a list of unsolved problems in modern physics. Photon mass inside dielectrics isn’t on the list.

The permittivity of “empty“ space (called the electric constant) qualifies as a dielectric, does it not? Isn’t space itself—with its Maxwell-assigned permeability (the magnetic constant) and permittivity (electric constant)—a dielectric?

Arthur Eddington wrote in chapter 6 of his book Space Time and Gravitation (read pages 107-109) that the dielectrics of space around the Sun increase proportionally with the intensity of the gravitational field. Light waves closest to the sun slow down more, which pulls the wavefront that lies farther out to deflect still more to catch up. Like glass, gravity refracts light.

Light falls into the Sun like any solid rock, but refraction adds to light’s “Newtonian” deflection to give Einstein’s predicted result. Unlike slow rocks, light travels fast enough to avoid capture by the sun.

It’s not clear to me how many physicists agree with Eddington, but then again, it’s not obvious whether humanoids are able to visualize reality. It’s one thing to write equations and symbolic algorithms that match well with observations. It’s quite another to acquire a natural intuition for what might be true.

Empty space isn’t empty, right?

As for the Abraham-Minkowski dispute: how important might it be to decisively resolve ambiguities concerning photon mass?

Perhaps the dispute is swept under a rug because disagreements about something as fundamental as photon mass mean that physicists might know less than they let on. The controversy seems to me at least to have the potential to crash the tidy physics of light and mass built by hard work and much history.

Isn’t it better to pretend everything is just fine until physicists finally agree that everything really is?

Maybe the subject involves some aspect of national security which requires obfuscation. It wouldn’t be the first time.

What I think can be safely said is that momentum and mass of quantum objects seem to have no meaning until they are brought into existence by measurements. The math looks like nothing we know; sometimes physicists use the results as mathematical operators that don’t commute the way some might think they should.

PHOTONS AND GRAVITY

I reviewed the math. I saw the term that makes the deflection difference (it’s really there) but did not understand enough at the time to tease out a satisfying reason why photons seem to bend nearly twice more in a gravitational field than early acolytes of Newton conjectured. I guess I like Eddington’s explanation best.

According to Wikipedia, Einstein’s theory approximates the deflection to be:

$\frac{4GM}{(c^2)b}$

“b” is the distance of a photon’s closest approach to a gravitational object like our Sun.

Here’s some guesses I made before reading Eddington:

Maybe light deeply buried in a gravity field near a star like the Sun will experience the flow of time more slowly—it’s an effect common to all objects in a gravity field; it affects all objects the same way and is unaffected by their mass or lack of it.

It might have something to do with Schwarzchild geodesics. The geodesics of spacetime paths are longer and more curved in a gravity field than what anyone might expect from a simple application of Newton’s force law, which is oblivious to the spacetime metrics of Einstein.

Schwarzchild metrics help to explain the “gravitational lensing” of faraway objects when their light approaches Earth from behind massive gravitational structures in the far reaches of space. Light careens around the structures so that astronomers can see what would otherwise remain forever hidden from them.

Here is another guess:

It might be that light spends more time in a gravitational field than it should due to special-relativity-induced time dilations so that photons have more time to fall toward the star than they otherwise would. This guess is certainly wrong because the time differential would be governed by a Lorentz transformation.

Photons of light don’t undergo Lorentz transformations because, unlike massive objects that travel near the speed of light, they don’t have inertial frames of reference. Any line of reasoning that ties Lorentz transformations to photons leads folks into rabbit holes that contradict the current consensus about the nature of light. Light speed is a constant in all reference frames. Space and time expand and shrink to accommodate it.

Electron-like muons (which have rest masses 205 times that of electrons) are short-lived, but their relativistic speeds increase their lifetimes so that some of those that get their start in the upper atmosphere are able to reach Earth’s surface where they can be observed. Their increased lifespan is described by a Lorentz transformation. It’s tempting to apply this transform to photons, but theorists say, no. It doesn’t work that way.

Time contractions and dilations are Special Relativity effects that apply to objects with inertial mass that move in some specified reference frame at velocities less than the speed of light, yes, but never at the speed of light, right?

Nearly every physicist will insist that photons have no internal mass; they travel in vacuum at exactly the speed of light—from the point of view of all observers in every reference frame. Photons don’t have inertial reference frames in the same way as muons or electrons.

Changes in time and position caused by a photon’s location in a gravity field are completely different; they are described by a vastly more complicated theory of Einstein’s called General Relativity.

Here is one way to write his formula:

The terms in this expression are tensors, most of them. Click the link, anyone who doesn’t think tensors are difficult to write and manipulate.

Here is another way to think about photon energy and behavior:

Light follows the geodesics of spacetime near a massive object—like the sun. Gravity is the geodesic.

The difference for massive objects traveling at relativistic speeds is that their momentum and inertia enable them to skip off the geodesic tracks, so to speak.

Because massive objects always travel at speeds less than light, their “clocks” slow down through an additional dynamic (a Lorentz transformation) that works at cross-purposes to gravity. Massive objects lock onto the gravity geodesics for a shorter period of time. They undergo less gravitational time dilation than does light because they spend less time constrained on its geodesics. They jump the geodesic tracks to become constrained by the dynamics of the Lorentz transformations.

The result is that massive objects traveling at relativistic velocities less than light deflect less toward the star (Sun) than does light.

What makes General Relativity unique is it’s view that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. Acceleration is a change in the velocity and/or the direction of motion. Massive bodies such as stars curve and elongate the pathways that shape the space and time around them.

Photons traveling on these longer spacetime paths accelerate by their change in direction, but their velocity doesn’t change in any reference frame. Something has to give. What gives, what changes is the expected value of deflection. The light from distant stars bends more than it should.

SOME HISTORY

No one who lived before 1900 could know that the geodesics of space-time elongate (or curve) in the presence of mass and energy, which are equivalent, correct? No one in bygone eras could have known that time slows down for massive objects that approach light-speed, either.

A man named Joann Georg Soldner did a calculation to show how much a Newtonian “corpuscle” of light would bend in the Sun’s gravity, which he published in 1804. He assumed that photons had mass and fell toward the Sun like any other object.

When Arthur Eddington’s observations showed that starlight deflected more than Soldner had calculated, Einstein’s theories of relativity got a boost in credibility that lives on into modern times.

I should add that Eddington knew about Einstein’s predictions when he made his experimental observations in 1919 because Einstein had already published his general theory.

EXPLANATIONS

I would very much like to read a coherent, verbal (non-mathematical) explanation of exactly why and how Einstein’s general theory can lead to an accurate and reasonable prediction at odds with Newton about the angle of deflection of photons near a star.

Here is a synopsis of an explanation that I heard from a working physicist:

Soldner used Newton’s view to calculate deflection using only the time the photon spent in the gravitational field. Einstein did the same but then modified his calculation to account for the bending of space in the gravitational field. The space component nearly doubled the expected deflection.

The theorist’s explanation satisfied me. It sounded right.

Notice the speed of the hands on the clocks and how they vary in space-time. Clocks slow down when they are accelerated or when they are immersed in the gravity of a massive object like the star at the center of this GIF. Stronger gravity makes clocks run slower. Under General Relativity, gravity and acceleration do the same thing. Click on the pic for a better view.

On the other hand, I believe (secretly and in agreement with Newton’s acolytes) that photons must have a mass equivalence that for some reason is being discounted, but no one I’ve read believes the idea makes sense beneath the shadow of a relativity theory that has the reputation for being fundamental, flawless, and complete.

After all, the mass of any object in a gravitational field is irrelevant to its trajectory because the mathematics cancels it, right?

$F=ma=\frac{GMm}{r^2}$

Little “m” appears on both sides of the equation so it can be divided away.

The problem is that the equations for gravity—especially over cosmological distances—are not necessarily settled. These are serious anomalies that are not yet resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Some have direct consequences on the ability of organizations like NASA to conduct accurate landings on Mars and the Moon. Click the link in this paragraph to review six of the biggest puzzles followed by seventeen alternative theories designed to bring the discrepancies to account.

Anyway, mass-energy equivalence of photons might permit Lorentz transforms on light to help to resolve certain problems in cosmology and the transmission of light through medias where gravity is not a factor. It might also simplify understanding of annoying Shapiro effects, which slow down communications with explorer craft inside our solar system.

ANOTHER EXPLANATION

Since I haven’t yet found a good explanation—and with a promise to avoid nonsensical personal predispositions—here is my attempt to explain:

In GPS (Global Positioning Systems), dilations of time—in both the velocity of satellites in one frame and their acceleration in another frame (gravity)—must add to provide accurate information to vehicles located in another frame.

These time dilations can work at cross-purposes. It requires expensive infrastructure on the ground to coordinate the information so that drivers of vehicles don’t get lost.

A massless object moving at the speed of light is going to follow the geodesics of the gravity field. This field is a distortion of space and time induced by the presence of the mass of something big like the Sun.

If massless energy does not obey the laws of Special Relativity (like GPS satellites do), then its velocity must necessarily have no influence whatever in the deflection of light near a star. It might seem like all the deflection comes from the distortion of spacetime, which is gravity.

Photons ride gravity geodesics like cars on a roller coaster. According to appendix III in Einstein’s 3rd edition of his book, Relativity, the Special and General Theory—published in English by Henry Holt & Company in 1921—it’s only half the story.

The other half of the measured deflection comes from the Newtonian gravitational “field”, which accelerates all objects in the same way. This field further deflects light across the spacetime geodesics toward the sun to double the expected angle.

I’m not entirely convinced that modern 21st century physicists believe it’s quite that way or quite that simple.

CONCLUSION

The theory of general relativity helps theorists to describe the distortion of metrics in spacetime near massive bodies to predict the deflection angle of passing photons of light. What we know is that predictions based on the theory don’t fail.

It’s like the theory of quantum mechanics. It never fails. It’s foundational. No one has yet been able to explain why.

Somebody, please, tell me I’m wrong.

Here is a link that addresses the math concerning the deflection disparity between Newton and Einstein.

Billy Lee

Link to comments on Quora

Readers interested in this subject will learn things from the material in these comments, I promise.

Billy Lee

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January 3, 2020June 16, 2023

LAST GASPS

As my Quora readership inches closer to 500,000 views, more admins are asking me to become a contributor to their spaces.

On Quora, a half-million views is almost nothing, but for me personally it seems like a lot. I’ve had answers throttled and in some cases pulled-down for violating rules that no one can explain. Fortunately, I’ve successfully appealed every take-down.

I live in fear that Quora will one day “disappear me” as so often happens to controversial people on other social sites. Whatever sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Quora are about, freedom of speech does not seem to be one of their core values, at least to my way of thinking.

Isn’t it obvious?

Social media is run in the main by faceless administrators who have hidden agendas; they don’t abide by any First Amendment in any Constitution anywhere in the world.

Because pontificators have an expectation that they will be allowed to express themselves freely on the internet, we play along while the sites we promote use us in ways we don’t understand. Admins don’t seem to want to come clean. When was the last time any administrators explained themselves when not under threat of subpoena?

Some observers of social media say it’s about money; others say it’s about political persuasion to the far right or to the middle or away from the far left; others say it’s service to intelligence agencies who experiment to throw elections.

Who really knows?

The following questions are among the several dozen I addressed on Quora.com during the last of the 2019 winter holidays. The questions and answers are mostly about science and politics. I threw in a couple about Jane Fonda; she’s controversial in some spaces.

Billy Lee

Disclaimer: Billy Lee is a pontificator, not an expert. The people who read, upvote, and share his answers don’t care. The Editorial Board

1 – From the point of view of those who live on planets at the “edge” of the observable universe, would the diameter of their observable universe differ from how we on Earth view the diameter?

If the Big Bang theory is right and we are living in the only universe, it must be true at the periphery that some observers will look to the center to see many stars and galaxies while others will look away to see nothing at all.

If we live in a multiverse, the folks at the periphery who look away will likely see universes like ours that emit EM radiation. Those universes that don’t broadcast electromagnetically will be as invisible as dark matter, which many believe makes 85% of the stuff that lies all around.

Presumably, universes look different than stars or galaxies; observers at the periphery might be able to tell the difference.

Some conjecture that universes are nothing more than black holes, which together form an infinite foam that flows perhaps to infinity.

Inside each black universe are more black holes which house black holes that contain more black holes and on and on in a progression that pushes holes to infinity like the reflections in funhouse mirrors.

Black holes emit Hawking radiation, which means they glow in the dark of space. Perhaps it is Hawking radiation observers at the peripheries will learn to detect, measure, and catalogue as they study a multiverse humans will never see.

Sadly, Earthlings are buried somewhere inside an enormous place at least 93 billion light years across. The periphery of this vast expanse is pushing outward at 7 times the speed of light.

We can’t see to the edge of our own universe; we have no way to observe universes that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes—should more than one be “out there.”

Observers at the periphery should know things about the nature of reality that Earthlings can only guess. They see beyond our peripheries.

But isn’t it also true that we know things they don’t? Because of our more “central” location we understand better than those at the peripheries what the size and age of the universe must be.

Maybe.

If we could only collaborate with the Peripherans to share what we’ve learned. Laws of physics make a forever prison that walls away the truth of all that goes lost beyond the boundaries of human sensors.

2 – Do all EM waves travel at the speed of light?

All electromagnetic waves travel at lightspeed in the medium of space where the nearest mass is too far away to have any effect.

Notice I said the medium of space, not the vacuum.

It’s not entirely clear that what astrophysicists call vacuum is in fact empty.

The conjecture that 95% of the universe is not electromagnetically active but is active gravitationally should be kept in mind because light bends and decelerates in the presence of gravity. The best known example is black holes, which divert and trap photons.

Are there volumes of space inside the Universe where the conjectured dark energy and dark matter don’t reside? If so, does the speed of light increase or decrease inside these volumes?

Light slows as it passes through materials like glass. Some kinds of glass slow photons by as much as 40%.

One explanation is that photons excite electrons as they pass over and through the molecules and atoms that make glass. Because photons passing through are not necessarily at frequencies resonant with the electrons in the glass, electrons are unable to absorb enough energy to jump from one energy state to another. Instead, they vibrate just enough to emit polaritons, which impede photons like a pool of molasses impedes dropped pebbles.

The photons of light seem to acquire mass as their velocity decreases. When the photons exit glass they again go “massless” and resume lightspeed instantly.

Could a phenomenon similar to that of glass be typical of the space inside the Milky Way Galaxy where planet Earth resides? If so, what everyone thinks they know about EM waves and the isotropic nature of the Universe might need some tweaking.

If it turns out that despite the consensus of science, photons do indeed contain a small amount of mass, they might have enough in aggregate to account for the curious behavior of galaxies. Conjectures about the invisible dark no one can see might not be necessary.

EM Mass?

3 – If the universe is expanding faster than light, how can we currently withstand that kind of speed but we can’t if we replicate it under our current conditions? Is it a matter of relativity? Am I misunderstanding something?

The space in the universe is expanding by 14 miles-per-second for every million light-years of distance.

If this distance is scaled down to equal the circumference of Earth, the expansion will measure about one-tenth of a mile per year. Over a human lifetime the expansion will measure 8 miles. No ordinary non-scientist will notice the difference at this scale.

The universe is at least 93 billion light-years across. Do the math to see that space is expanding from one side of the universe to the other at 7 times the speed of light.

But some perspective is in order. Inside the Milky Way Galaxy, which is roughly 100,000 light years across, the expansion is a mere 1.4 miles-per-second. Remember: a light year is almost 6 trillion miles. The Milky Way is almost 600,000 trillion miles across. 1.4 miles-per-second is practically nothing.

The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.5 light years away—26 trillion miles. In one year the space between us and it expands by less than 2,000 miles. Meanwhile, the star itself is moving away from our Sun 200,000 times faster—about 12 miles-per-second. The expansion of space accounts for almost none of the separation.

Force is a measure of mass accelerating, right? Mass is not really accelerating due to the expansion of space. Space is puffing up like a loaf of raisin-bread in an oven. The raisins (galaxies) get carried along by the expansion.

The light that travels between stars and galaxies stretches into redder wavelengths as the loaf grows. But forces accelerating galaxies and stars are almost entirely due to masses acting over distances too short for the expansion of space to have any more than a statistically negligible effect.

The expansion of space adds up over larger and larger distances to become enormous, yes, but in the much smaller volumes of space where a few dozen or so galaxies live the gravity-induced distortion of spacetime by mass overwhelms it, at least for now.

4 – What existed before the Big Bang? Was there always something? How did the universe come into being from nothingness? Is God a possibility?

No one knows the answers to these questions one way or the other, but smart, popular people have published opinions based on their prejudices and what little they think they know for sure.

Currently, I favor the idea by Roger Penrose and others called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). The basic idea is that a sufficiently old and expanded universe will lose all its mass through evaporation out of black holes; the metrics of spacetime become indistinguishable from a singularity, because without mass, spacetime is meaningless.

The universe puffs along like smoke from a choo-choo train—each universe emerges in a kind of “big bang” from the dying gasp of the last.

In this scenario, the universe is eternal backward and forward in time. It has no beginning or end; it has EONS that last trillions of years and endlessly repeat. The universe never collapses; it expands. When its mass evaporates into energy, it triggers a new expansion that generates in its wake new matter and gravity to provide the metrics necessary for spacetime to once again emerge.

This idea does not rule out the possibility of God, but it doesn’t support the idea either.

It also doesn’t rule out the possibility that humans live inside a simulation.

Smart thinkers like Nick Bostrom have argued that the statistical probability of a simulated universe approaches certainty. If so, humans can’t know what the underlying reality is that enables a simulation like ours to be created and sustained.

Such a state of affairs opens the possibility that we are created and accountable to a creator of worlds who has its own reasons for doing things, which aren’t necessarily ones we can understand.

The hard problem of consciousness is a clue for those who believe the universe comes first and consciousness second that they might have the order reversed. The possibility that conscious life is fundamental and foundational is something folks might want to keep in mind.

FAKED LIFE

CONSCIOUS LIFE

5 – Does Lawrence Krauss believe in an infinite number of universes?

I don’t know.

Alan Guth is the most prominent voice for this conjecture.

Evidence for B-Mode polarization of gravity waves would support the idea that cosmic inflation is likely to be unstoppable; some think that runaway inflation creates matter and gravity in its wake. The process forms universes that bud and break off into new universes as the expansion of space foams along.

E polarized waves in the cosmic background radiation can be transformed into B polarized modes by either gravitational lensing or cosmic inflation. Determining which is which is difficult because space dust can and does mess with the data to give misleading results.

The problem is that no one has been able to prove that anyone has detected B-mode waves that aren’t the result of either gravitational lensing of E-modes or their interaction with space dust.

EDITORS NOTE: 2019-02-05
Some readers have complained that E & B mode waves are incomprehensible. To help, we have added a video followed by an excerpt from Wikipedia about the Cosmic Microwave Background:

From Wikipedia: The cosmic microwave background is polarized at the level of a few microkelvin.

There are two types of polarization, called E-modes and B-modes. This is in analogy to electrostatics, in which the electric field (E-field) has a vanishing curl and the magnetic field (B-field) has a vanishing divergence.

The E-modes arise naturally from Thomson scattering in a heterogeneous plasma.

The B-modes are not produced by standard scalar type perturbations. Instead they can be created by two mechanisms: the first one is by gravitational lensing of E-modes, which has been measured by the South Pole Telescope in 2013; the second one is from gravitational waves arising from cosmic inflation.

Detecting the B-modes is extremely difficult, particularly as the degree of foreground contamination is unknown, and the weak gravitational lensing signal mixes the relatively strong E-mode signal with the B-mode signal.

Scientists like Brian Keating have claimed in the past that they detected B-Mode polarization in gravity waves only to have to retract later when others offered alternative explanations. Nevertheless, Keating is involved in an effort in Chile to gather new evidence that he hopes will be incontrovertible and lead to a Nobel Prize.

If gravity waves with B-style polarization are not found, an argument will be made that cosmic inflation is not creating alternative universes. The proposals for ekpyrotic and other cyclic models of cosmology by folks like Steinhardt and Penrose will be strengthened.

The statistical certainty required to qualify a discovery is at minimum 99.9994% (5σ). In the best data so far, 97.2% is the closest to 5 sigma that anyone has reached.

The statistical metric that proves B-style gravity waves is formidable but within our grasp should it turn out that cosmic inflation really is generating universes.

So far, the evidence for alternative universes is not sufficiently robust.

6 – Is Jane Fonda correct to say that Trump’s actions are criminal?

I don’t know what actions by Trump Fonda says are criminal.

Trump and his thugs slander a lot of people; they lie continuously about the smallest things; they undermine our Constitution and public institutions. Somewhere in their mess of cruelty and paranoia are crimes against America and the voting rights of the public.

Only morons and deplorables would defend a man as depraved as our president has proven himself to be over decades. People are afraid of the president and his Russian/Israeli mob connections.

Jane seems to feel that seeing something wrong obligates her to speak up to point it out. With any luck at all, exposure can disinfect bad deeds.

One of the worst atrocities the United States has committed in modern times was its conduct of the Vietnam War. Jane Fonda was among the first of prominent Americans to say our country was doing bad things for no good reason.

People who visit Vietnam today say it is an amazing place. Communism and reunification have been good to the people who live there, which includes thousands of ex-pats.

Remember, we killed and wounded millions for nothing but the thrill of the kill. We poisoned vast areas of the country with cancer inducing defoliants like Agent Orange. When we tired of cruelty, we left.

Everyone knows what we did was wrong. Jane Fonda showed courage to say so and try in the most creative way she knew how to stop it. We owe apologies to Vietnam and reparations to fix what we broke.

It’s not going to happen, right?

I resigned an officer’s commission rather than fight this vile war. It makes me sick at heart that many of the people who did bad things have not yet asked God to forgive them.

Time is running out.

I believe everyone answers to God someday for the wicked things they’ve done. Pointing a finger at Jane and calling her “traitor” isn’t going to cut it with the Christ, because Jane belongs to Him; he defends her now as he defends us all.

Jesus said peacemakers are children of God. Does anyone believe it?

CHRIST

7 – What caused the universe to exist?

No one can say for sure you’ve asked the right question.

It’s likely humans live inside a simulation where reality is dumbed down in the same way video games are dumbed down to imitate a fantasy version of “real” life.

In a simulation, the simulants won’t necessarily see other life; their “science” is likely to be nonsense, which explains nothing and satisfies no one. Their history will be fabricated and make no sense to any simulant who takes time to examine origins.

Such is the state of human affairs. Humans continuously wage war, which our hosts might find endlessly entertaining. We search the heavens for companions but find none. The pinholes of light in the canvas tarp that entraps us—humanoids call them stars and galaxies, right? It’s illusion. Everything simulants believe is lies.

Who knows?

If humans live inside a simulation, reality outside the simulation might be foreign to the sensibilities of any simulant “genius” who tries to decipher and make sense of the rules.

In the reality that exists beyond, stuff other than mass and energy might be fundamental and foundational. Conscious life might not be troubled by the mysteries of existence, because outside the simulation there are no mysteries.

Is it possible that somewhere “out there” beyond the walls of the simulation, everything makes perfect sense?

FAKED LIFE

8 – Why hasn’t the mass of the Earth increased from the dust of everything that ever lived on it over the last 4.5 billion years?

You are overestimating the weight of the biomass.

Almost everything that lives is mostly water, right? Water evaporates, falls as rain, freezes and so on, but the amount of water inside life-forms is a tiny fraction of the water that makes the oceans, lakes, rivers and clouds.

Shrink Earth to the size of a basketball made of polished metal like aluminum or steel. Breathe on the surface. At that scale, the mist of your breath will form a film that is deeper than the deepest oceans.

There is a lot of life in the oceans, but it is a tiny fraction compared to the amount of ocean water, which is itself a tiny fraction of the mass of Earth.

In the oceans formed by the moisture in your breath, the mass of life is unmeasurable compared to the weight of the mist of your breath and the weight of the polished basketball.

It is likely that more mass falls to Earth from space in a year than all the bio-mass that has lived and died on our planet during the past 4 billion years. I haven’t worked out the numbers, but it seems to me that there might be a reader “out there” who will enjoy doing the calculation.

9 – Would impeachment be beneficial to Trump’s reelection campaign?

Deplorable people develop ravenous appetites for scum. The more evidence presented that Trump is scum, the more his followers love him.

Trump lost the popular election by 11 million votes—3M to Hillary; 8M to independent candidates.

As long as votes are flipped in certain strategic counties, he will win the electoral college even if he loses the popular count by 20M or more.

It’s not possible to defeat a cult where everyone cheats to get the results they all want.

I know evangelical Christians who volunteered for the first time to work at polling stations in 2016 to make sure Trump’s votes were counted.

My question is whether these cult followers took as much care to make sure the votes of Trump’s opponents were counted fairly.

We’ll never know.

10 -What happens if we cannot guarantee a fair election in 2020?

People have trouble accepting the mathematically provable fact (look it up or take a college course) that fair elections are not possible. It is not possible to set up an equitable system to select a slate of candidates from which voters are able to fairly pick a single winner.

Nevertheless, we do the best we can, right?

In the USA, fair results are further disrupted by state election boards who flat out cheat, and we have the problem of the electoral college.

The current president claims he won by a landslide in the electoral college, but the truth is that he lost by the largest popular margin in the history of elections—11 million votes, which were 8% of the ballots. Clinton got 3 million more than Trump; third party candidates gathered in another 8 million.

Trump proved that he could win in the electoral college by tweaking the results in a few counties in three states. Confirmational recounts and challenges were squelched by GOP state courts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Even in Michigan where state-wide election results favored Democrats by 20 points, no recount was permitted Hillary Clinton who lost by 10 thousand votes.

Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA specialist. She offered NSA documents to prove the Russian military gained access to USA voting machines in 2016. ***Editor’s Note 5 December 2021:*** The information Reality released was used to help harden the 2020 presidential election against foreign interference according to CBS News. The USA holds Winner incommunicado — as they hold other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.

NSA analyst, Reality Winner, is currently serving an 8 year sentence of incarceration and media censure for trying to alert the public to voting machine tampering that executives at the National Security Agency know occurred.

Everyone remembers (or should remember) the fiasco in Florida that elected Bush Junior in 2000. The consequences were a disaster from which the USA is yet to recover. Twin Towers, Iraq War, financial collapse, and Great Recession are trigger words to help people remember the nightmare some may have repressed to stay sane. The USA came close to becoming a third-world country almost overnight.

In 2016 Americans shoved their way onto the Titanic one more time—the captain of the ship doesn’t even know how to swim. There is no way most Americans will survive the catastrophe that is on its way. We are going to hit an iceberg in the middle of the night. The water that we die in will be cold. In this movie, no one is coming to the rescue.

TRUMP

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

11 – Why has it been so hard to recreate the brain? It’s billions of years old, and still more complicated than any machines we have ever made.

Multi-celled life with neuron based brains came on line less than 400 million years ago.

One celled organisms like amoebas and protozoa are incredibly intelligent and agile yet they lack neurons, which seem to be the foundational units of modern brains. Fossils of amoebas have been found in rocks that are older than 400 million years.

To mechanically recreate a modern brain requires much more than simply wiring-up in three dimensions a hundred billion or so logic gates. Actually, such a building project would be prohibitively expensive and impossible to accomplish using current fabrication capabilities.

Even if it were possible to create the neuronic architecture of a brain, other mechanical structures such as nanoscale microtubules are probably essential to bring the brain into a conscious state such as the one experienced by humans.

Microtubules are the bones of cells—a sort of scaffolding to hold everything together. They play an essential role in meiosis and mitosis to keep DNA from becoming an entangled mess during cell divisions. They have a quantum nature that adds a probably essential complexity to neuronal activity inside brains.

Brains also have a chemical nature that enables them to interact with the complicated hormonal chemistries of the body to drive emotional intelligence—an intelligence essential to survival that depends on feelings to work properly.

The point is that before anyone can build a working brain, they will need to understand what a working brain is and how it actually functions. This knowledge may lie hundreds of years into the future. It might require super-computers to figure out how brains work; artificial super-intelligence is what might be required to create the schematics, blueprints, and production protocols to build living brains.

It’s possible that the artificial intelligence of a distant future will be what is finally able to recreate brains by deploying strategies that humans can never hope to understand, because sadly homo-sapiens may not be smart enough.

Super Intelligence

Faked Life

12 – Is light the most significant thing in the universe?

Light is electromagnetic radiation. We can feel some frequencies as heat, some we can see, but most frequencies we don’t see or feel. Humans evolved to see and feel frequencies of light that are prevalent at the surface of Earth and are able to penetrate into a few feet of saltwater in the oceans.

Earth’s magnetosphere and its atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen deflect or block high frequencies of light that pack a lot of energy. Life on Earth didn’t evolve to sense light frequencies that don’t get here.

Astronauts in space encounter these higher frequencies of light. Excursions into space are carefully choreographed to avoid solar flares and other known sources of high energy light. So far we’ve been lucky. No space traveler has yet been cooked by light they can’t see. On Earth people have learned not to stick their hand into an invisible beam of microwave light. They heat their coffee with microwaves instead.

If humans were the size of galaxies and lived in space, they would sense less than one percent of the energy and mass that is out there. 95% of the mass and energy in the universe is not electromagnetic according to the latest conjectures by astrophysicists. Space people will sense only a small fraction of the 5% that is electromagnetic—what everyone calls light and matter.

In the large scales of space, humans are tadpoles in the desert. Nothing in space makes survival easy for lifeforms accustomed to living under a blanket of heavy gases inside the comfort of a massive magnetic field that is generated by a planet unlike any other that astronomers have yet seen.

Finding Life in Space

13 – What will happen to the Earth in three billion years?

It’s impossible to know, but the most probable scenario is that it will be swallowed by the Sun. Earth is likely to be struck by an asteroid that will break it into pieces; many will fall Sunward.

Solar systems have the reputation of being unstable over long periods. A popular conjecture of some cosmologists is that one or more of the giant outer planets might have moved inside the orbit of Mars during the distant past. Were this event to play out again, Earth’s orbit would be disrupted; it might be flung out to the faraway depths of the solar system or into the Sun.

If Earth drifts to the outer reaches of the Solar System it will—over many millions of years—freeze solid. It will generate its own heat only by radioactive decay of the uranium and thorium in the material beneath its crust. Radioactive heating seems to be typical in objects like Pluto and several of the moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn. They have, some of them, warm oceans many miles below the frozen crust and ice that make their surfaces.

The moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt and rotation on its axis. The moon is receding at 1 to 1.5 inches per year. In 3B years, the moon will be 60,000 miles farther from Earth. Its gravitational pull will drop to almost half of what it is today. Computer simulations show that Earth is likely to start wobbling chaotically, even tip over onto its side. Such a scenario will disrupt climate and seasons to spark extinctions of plant and animal life.

A more urgent crisis is the production by humans of many thousands of tons of radioactive poisons, chemical toxins, and biological agents that can induce disease. These materials must be secured and protected for many tens-of-thousands of years to prevent breaches of containment structures, which will rust and rot after the humans who maintain them no longer can.

Risk analysts like Nick Bostrom have speculated that humans are likely to suffer an extinction event during the next few thousand years. Without human caretakers it might take less than 500 years for the poisons to break out to soak the earth like vinegar in a sponge.

Huge die-offs of life-forms might occur.

RISK

14 – Where does the universe begin?

People have a lot of ideas; the one that seems most reasonable to my mind is Conformal Cyclic Cosmology introduced by Sir Roger Penrose about 15 years ago where he proposed that the Universe is eternal into both the past and future; it has no beginning and no end.

CCC produces EONS in an infinite progression of puffs—much like a steam locomotive emits a series of puffs from its smokestack as it chugs along on its tracks.

These eons last trillions of years. At the end of an eon all matter has been sucked into black holes where it evaporates by the mechanism of Hawking Radiation. The Universe ends devoid of matter, which is necessary to establish the metrics of space and time.

A universe without matter is conformally equivalent to a singularity. The process by which a universe emerges from a singularity will be the same process that pushes a universe devoid of mass into becoming a new universe.

Under the CCC scenario “big bangs” create new universes on the ashes of the old to eventually introduce the matter necessary to establish the spacetime metrics of relativity and the foundational realities of the quantum world.

If CCC is valid, evidence of Hawking Points left behind from prior universes should be able to be identified in the cosmic background radiation. The search for these points has already begun.

Conformal Equivalence

15 – How did the earth get far enough away from the first photons of the cosmic background radiation that they are only now, 13 billion years later, arriving at our observatories?

You are referring to the surface of last scattering, which isn’t a thing but is instead an estimated location.

The cosmic background radiation is a thing—1E90 photons released in the great photon decoupling event that occurred, I don’t know, maybe a half million years after the origin of the Universe we live in now.

These photons are still here; they saturate all space like vinegar in a sponge.

The surface of last scattering is the place where astronomers look to get an idea of how uniform was the decoupling of photons when the Universe turned on the lights.

The location of the decoupling event is a long way away (13.7B light-years maybe), but the distance to the edge of the universe on the other side of the surface of last scattering is a lot farther.

One reason is that space is currently expanding at 14 miles-per-second for every million light-years of distance. The edge of the Universe beyond the surface of last scattering is at least an additional 32B light-years; at its edge the Universe is expanding outward from the perspective of Earth at 3.5 times the speed of light.

We live at the center of a sphere of celestial objects we can detect that is 27.6 billion light-years across. Our physics predicts that the universe we can’t see is 93B light-years across at minimum. Across 93B light years, the expansion of space adds to 7 times the speed of light.

Because it is almost certain that Earthlings don’t live at the center of the Universe, most scientists familiar with the matter think that the actual universe is bigger than 93B light-years—perhaps a lot bigger.

16 – How did Jane Fonda betray Vietnam American POW’s during the Vietnam War? Were there repercussions after her visit to North Vietnam?

If I’m a prisoner, I want visitors. Celebrity visitors are even better.

Jane provided a first-hand account—a picture—of the captivity that helped war planners set up the conditions for an eventual release. We got almost all the POWs back.

Jane Fonda doesn’t get credit for the good she did. Probably the most important thing she accomplished was to remind Americans that we were attacking a primitive people thousands of miles from home for no good reason.

Had Vietnam been a nation of puppies and kittens, the atrocities of war would have affected more people whose hearts became stone as they continued to fight for too many years.

Many veterans have hearts that have yet to melt. Many are unable to apologize for their gullibility even now in their golden years as they prepare to meet God and account for their lives. Their leaders lied; soldiers believed the lies then; some continue to believe.

History has proved that those who protested the war were right. We owe Jane Fonda big time for having the courage to speak truth to racists and killers.

How many civilians display courage in the face of evil?

The United States killed over two-million souls during that depraved debacle. How is the world better? We have bitter people on all sides who won’t look into the mirror and take responsibility for what they did.

Blaming Jane Fonda for our moral failings is a mistake we must fix in order to heal.

Is Something Wrong?

17 – Is it possible that an object has weight but no mass?

Remember the formula that says force equals mass times acceleration.

F=m*a

Force is weight, right?

Mass accelerated by a gravitational field is what gives an object its weight (or force).

So it seems reasonable to believe that if mass is zero, force must also be zero. But that idea would be wrong. Another concept in physics is momentum. It is mass multiplied by its own velocity. Momentum is energy that can be used to do work.

Massless objects like photons have energy too. Photons have the ability to do work. The energy of light is related to its color (or frequency). The higher a photon’s frequency the more work it can do. Gamma photons have the highest frequencies. Some have energies equivalent to baseballs thrown by professional pitchers.

So it seems that both massless photons and massive matter have energy that can do work. Energy is energy so momentum must have some kind of equivalence to the frequency of massless photons.

What is work? It is force multiplied by the distance through which it moves. Since both massless photons and massive matter can do work they both must have some kind of equivalence related to force.

Therefore it is true that a massless photon can exert a force, which when measured can be thought of as its weight. The wave-particle duality of photons is another way of saying that an object with no mass can have weight (or force).

The idea that an object with no mass can exert a force which can be measured as “weight” has puzzled folks for a very long time. However, a string of formulas can be constructed to show that it is true.

The energy of photons goes up in tiny increments called quanta as their frequencies increase. When the energy gets high enough it gets difficult to force a photon to step up to the next highest energy level. It is something to keep in mind when pondering the physics of quantum phenomenon like black-body radiation or the photo-electric effect that Einstein described to win his Nobel Prize.

It’s been a long time since most Americans challenged the powerful elites who rule America. I would say the last serious challenges came during the Civil Rights and Vietnam war eras.

Since then, people have gotten lost in their personal lives; first responders have not fire-hosed too many black people; the Feds haven’t forced kids to fight in senseless wars. Everything is voluntary except that business owners are not permitted to exclude minorities from participating in the American way of life.

Some complain. Christians don’t want to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, but most eventually submit to the rule of law and do what’s right. Chick-Fil-A recently announced that it pulled back its financial support of organizations opposed to human rights for homosexuals.

Unless someone is poor (or sick or handicapped), they don’t understand what disadvantaged people go through. 75% of America is low-income, but the oligarchs have wrecked education for the marginalized by reducing funding for public schools while advocating for private education and the voucher-funding of home-schooling. Without good public education, most poor people and disadvantaged minorities don’t learn what they are missing or why.

Without a media that cares about inequality and highlights it, the 10% who live in the suburbs remain oblivious.

Some will pass by a gated community and wonder why they aren’t allowed in, but most keep on trucking, because they are powerless and ignorant. Companies hire conservatives, because they want docile employees who support capitalism — a form of slavery under which the slaves sometimes get to choose the plantation where they work.

The rewards for submission are good. A docile employee who does what they’re told and doesn’t complain can go a long way in America; sycophants make up a large percentage of the population. The risk of being kicked out of this fraternity of cowards keep almost all from telling anyone with power how they really feel.

Recently, angry people voted for a rich fool to even their score with liberals who annoy them with unintelligible warnings about fascism and its endless wars that only those with direct experience fully understand.

With no one in media to explain why oligarchs always create a colossal mess for regular folks, ordinary people will continue to tread water until they are overwhelmed by scarcity and danger. Only after will some learn through suffering the hard life-lessons that liberals try to help them avoid.

A felony arrest for protesting injustice is the most direct route to the truths that make one a progressive liberal. I look around and don’t see anyone willing to take righteous risks that lead to knowledge about what it is to be attacked by one’s own country for standing up for what is fair and good.

People pretend everything is fine until they no longer can. When that happens, they go in one of two directions – left or right.

Inequality

19 – What do you think will happen to our democracy if Donald Trump is re-elected?

We lost our country when the Russians took the executive branch of the USA government in 2016.

Trump works for Russian oligarchs who make the mafia look like a class of unruly kindergarten children.

People on the front lines of this war against America are scared, but many are brave.

Republican leaders are the most scared, not of impeachment but of retaliation if they don’t do what they’re told. They embrace their abusers to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is a painful psychological condition that humans expend a lot of mental effort to avoid.

Impeachment poses no threat to Trump, because he isn’t leaving even if convicted by the Senate.

Americans are in denial that their institutions are failing; the protections of checks and balances in the three branches of government are in meltdown.

The executive branch feels no constitutional responsibility to honor the powers of the people’s house, which is conducting an inquiry into the illegal activity by the president and his cult followers.

The coming election is going to be a joke.

Americans have a sense of humor but this joke will be on them. After the shock of Trump’s contrived landslide election victory, many Americans will go into denial and embrace their tormentors. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome. It’s how Hitler became popular in Germany.

Caesar became popular after he ended representative government in Rome centuries ago. The story is as old as history.

Some men are not afraid to do bad things to get power. Power permits those who hold it to do unspeakable things to those they despise.

It’s simple really.

It’s why America was created in the way it was. Its founders hoped to prevent tyranny from raising its ugly head inside the United States.

They failed, obviously. This rise of the Trump family promises to be a mess of catastrophic proportions involving suffering by tens-of-millions of people who get caught in its cross-hairs.

BAD THINGS

SURRENDER

20 – Where did Earth’s water come from?

The hydrogen and oxygen that make water are the first and third most abundant elements in the universe. Both elements are found in stars.

Water saturates almost all the debris in space like water saturates a sponge. The water is frozen solid and trapped by silicates in space rocks.

The debris that made Earth brought water with it. At first, Earth was hot; any water at the surface boiled away to escape into space. Earth was in fact bone dry at its surface for hundreds of millions of years.

Eventually Earth cooled and became gravitationally strong enough that steam was able to escape from its interior, condense, and fall back to Earth as rain. The process continues to the present day.

How much water are we talking about? It turns out that despite what we think we know about how deep the oceans are, the amount of water compared to the mass of Earth is minuscule.

Think of Earth as a polished metal basketball. Breathe on the basketball to form a film of moisture. At this scale the mist from your breath is deeper than Earth’s deepest ocean.

It’s not much water at all; almost all of it migrated upward as vapor from materials many hundreds of miles beneath Earth’s surface. The process took billions of years to make the raging oceans we experience today.

Billy Lee

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December 18, 2017April 25, 2024

25 ANSWERS

Two months ago, I discovered QUORA. It’s been around since 2009.

Since 2010, Quora has enabled people to ask experts questions about topics they like; even to answer questions on subjects they claim to know something about.

Quora is a site for geeks and nerds, and so far I like it. The people who hang out in the areas I hang out tend to be polite, kind, and smart. If they like someone, they follow them and are notified when they post. So far, ten people have signed on to follow me. It’s a start. I think most are from India.

During the first six weeks, 150 or so of my answers were viewed 35,000 times; I got nearly 175 “upvotes”, which enabled many of the answers to move to the head of the line. I wrote most answers in the wee hours between 2 AM and 7 AM when I couldn’t sleep. Insomnia inspired me.

What follows are 25 of the most popular answers I posted to the first 150 or so questions that caught my interest. They are sequenced by popularity — the most read first .

Why not read a few? How many questions can anyone answer? Not many, I’m thinking.

Who knows what you might learn?

What?

Someone thinks they know better than a pontificator with no bonafides?

I don’t think so.

No way! 😉

1) What are some of the most popular “mathematically impossible questions“?

Freeman Dyson — one of the longest-lived and most influential physicists and mathematicians of all time — argued that it is impossible to find a whole (or exact) number that is a power of two where someone can reverse its digits to create a whole number that becomes a power of 5.

In other words, $2^{11} = 2048$ , right? Reversing the digits to make 8402 does not result in an exact number that is a power of 5.

In this case, $8402^{1/5} = 6.09363$ plus a lot more decimals. It’s not a whole (or exact) number. Not only that, no matter how many decimal places anyone rounds-off 6.09363… , the rounded number raised to the power of 5 will never return 8402 exactly.

Dyson claimed that this conjecture must be true, but there is nothing in mathematics that enables anyone to write a proof. He claimed that there must be an infinite number of similar statements—-each one true, none provable.

Click the link below to learn more.

TRUTH

The Snowplow Problem is another “impossible” problem. My differential equations professor assigned it with the promise that anyone who solved it would receive a 4.0 grade, regardless of their performance on tests. I was the only student he ever taught who actually managed it.

The problem goes like this: It is snowing at a constant rate. A snowplow starts plowing snow at noon. By one o’clock the plow has traveled one mile. By two o’clock the plow travels an additional half mile. At what time did it start snowing?

It took me 3 days and two pages of calculations, but I got my 4.0.

Note from the Editorial Board: Over 50 people on Quora submitted answers to Billy Lee’s Snow Plow problem. One person had the right answer, but would not produce his proof. He did point out an unusual feature of the solution that Billy Lee had not noticed before. Billy Lee characterized the feature as ”very surprising.” When pressed Billy Lee refused to reveal the secret.

2) How much force is one Newton?

A newton is the force that an average sized apple makes on your hand when you hold it. No matter where in the universe you are; no matter on what planet you stand or how strong the gravitational field, a newton of force always feels the same.

A newton is one kilogram of mass that is accelerating at one meter per second per second. Gravity on Earth accelerates everything at nearly 10 meters per second per second. A kilogram of mass feels like 2.2 pounds on earth. One tenth of 2.2 pounds is 0.22 pounds or 3.5 ounces, which is the weight of a typical apple. The weight is the force that you feel against your hand. It is one newton.

On the moon, an object with the mass of a large brick would feel as light as an apple on earth due to the moon’s lower gravity. The force of the brick in your hand would feel like one newton.

3) $x + y = 4$ . and . $x^x + y^y = 64$ . What are x and y?

The simplest way to solve is to make y = (4-x) and create an equation in terms of x.

An easy version to create and solve is

${x^x + (4-x)^{4-x} = 64}$

You can solve it by hand using iteration or throw it into an app like Wolfram Alpha and let them solve it in a few seconds.

Either way, one value for x is .606098…. The other is 3.393901… , which you can assign to y. The two numbers add to 4.000… and when substituted into both initial equations return the right results.

4) If I had 1,000,000,000,000,000 times 1,000,000,000,000,000 hamsters floating in space in close proximity, would gravity turn them into a hamster planet?

Assuming the question is serious, it deserves a serious answer.

A typically fat hamster weighs around one ounce, which is about 0.03 kilograms of mass. The number of hamsters in your question is 10E30.

Multiplying the mass of a single hamster by this large number gives the result of 3E28 kilograms.

To compare, the mass of planet Earth is 6E24 kilograms. The mass of the proposed population of hamsters is 5,000 times the mass of the earth.

The sun contains 67 times more mass than the hamster population. If the hamsters are close enough together to hold paws, a hamster planet is almost certain. I haven’t worked out how long the process to congeal would take, but I can estimate that the hamsters would probably die of starvation before the inexorable forces of gravity completed their work.

The hamster planet would be formed mostly from three elements: hydrogen (64%), oxygen (33%), and carbon (10%). 3% would be trace elements like calcium and maybe lithium.

The most likely outcome, given enough time, is a planet-like object. The hamsters have only one-fifth of the mass to make the smallest of the smallest suns — red dwarfs, which populate 67 to 80 percent of the Milky Way Galaxy.

There are way too many hamsters to make a reasonably sized moon.

Their mass (3E28 kg) happens to fall on the border between the range of masses that are required to form celestial objects known as brown dwarfs and the less massive sub-brown dwarfs — sometimes referred to as free-floating planets.

Brown dwarfs don’t have enough mass to ignite like a star, but they do produce heat and can accept small orbiting planets. The chemistry of brown dwarfs is not well-understood and is a bit controversial.

It’s a toss-up, but my vote goes to the notion that the hamsters will eventually form a very large but ordinary planet — a free-floating planet — which I referred to earlier as a sub-brown dwarf. This hamster planet might wander through space for millions (or even billions) of years before being captured by a massive-enough star to begin to orbit.

Because the elements of hydrogen and oxygen are likely to become the constituents of frozen moisture (or water ice), there is the risk that the ice might melt into oceans and perhaps boil away if the hamster planet approaches too close to a star (or sun). In the case where the planet loses its water, a carbon planet with 50 times the mass of earth would form.

Otherwise, should the planet find itself in a far-distant future orbiting in the “goldilocks” zone around a sufficiently massive star, the water would not evaporate. Life could arise in the planet’s oceans. It’s possible.

Life-forms might very well crawl up out of the water and onto land someday where — over the eons and under ideal conditions — they will evolve into hamsters.

5) Why is evolution a valid scientific theory despite the fact that it can’t be conclusively proven due to the impossibility of simulating the millions-of-years processes that it entails?

Evolution is a fact that is thoroughly established by observations made in many disciplines of science. Changes in species happen fast or slow; in the lab and in the field.

The mystery is how one-celled life got established so quickly — it was solidly established within one billion years of earth’s formation. It’s taken 3.5 billion years to go from one-celled life to what we have now.

Why so fast to get life started; why so slow to get to human intelligence and civilization?

People have a lot of ideas, but no one is sure. Some life forms have orders of magnitude more DNA than humans. Only 2% of human DNA is used to make the proteins that shape us.

So, yes, there are lots of questions.

NO CODE

6) Why do cosmologists think a multiverse might exist?

Many high-level, theoretical physicists have written about the obvious problem our universe seems to have, which is that it has too many arbitrary constants that are too tightly constrained to be explained by any theory so far. No natural cause has been found for so many constants, so it’s fertile ground for theorists.

Stephen Hawking, among others, has said that the odds of one universe having the physics that ours has is 1E500 against. He is joking in his English way, because such a large number is essentially an infinity. It’s not possible to constrain a universe like ours by chance unless there are an infinity of choices, and we happen to be in the one that supports intelligent, conscious life.

Two ways of getting to infinity are the concepts of multi-verse and the new one proposed by Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton University in 2013, which is based on data supplied by the Planck Satellite launched in 2003. Paul is the Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton, so his opinion holds a lot of weight.

Steinhardt has proposed that the universe is ekpyrotic, or cyclic. He has asserted that the universe beats like a heart, expanding and contracting in cycles, with each cycle lasting perhaps a trillion years and repeating, on and on, forever. Each cycle produces conditions — some which are ideal for life. This heart has been beating forever and will continue to do so, forever.

Conscious Life

7) How will we visit distant galaxies if we cannot travel faster than light?

We will never visit distant galaxies, because they are too far away; most are moving away from us faster than our current technologies can overtake. At huge distances space itself is expanding, which adds to our problems.

The expansion of space is gradually accelerating. Any increase in performance by space vehicles over the next few thousand years is certain to be overwhelmed by the accelerating expansion of the universe.

As time goes on the amount of objects that are reachable (or even viewable) by earthlings will shrink.

On the happy side, our own solar system has at least 165 interesting places to visit that should keep folks fascinated for many thousands of years. A huge cavern has been discovered on Mars, for example, that might make a safe habitat against some forms of radiation dangers; it seems to be a place where a colony of humans might be able to live, work, and survive — perhaps even flourish.

Elon Musk is planning a mission to Mars soon.

8) What is the mathematical proof for a+a = 2a ?

Some things that are true can’t be proved. All math systems are based on axioms, which are statements believed to be true but which, in themselves, are not provable.

This link provides a list of axioms for addition: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~hart/m524/realprop.pdf

A lot of interesting philosophical and mathematical work has been done on conjectures that are believed to be true, but can’t be proved.

TRUTH

9) Can you explain renormalization in physics in simple words?

There is a problem in physics that has to do with the huge variation in scales between the very large and the very small. This problem of scales involves not only the size and mass of things, but also forces and interactions.

Philosopher Robert Pirsig believed that the number of possible explanations that scientists could invent for phenomenon were, in actual fact, unlimited.

Despite all the math and all the convolutions of math, Pirsig believed that something mysterious and intangible like quality or morality guided our explanations of the world. It drove him insane, at least in the years before he wrote his classic book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Anyway, the newest generation of scientists aren’t embarrassed by anomalies. They have taught themselves to “shut up and calculate.” The digital somersaults they must perform to validate their work are impossible for average people to understand, much less perform. Researchers determine scales, introduce “cut-offs“, and extract the appropriate physics to make suitable matches to their experimental results.

The tricks used by physicists to zero in on pieces of a problem where sensible answers can be found have many names, but renormalization is one of the best known.

When physicists renormalize an equation, they cut away infinities and other annoying problems (like dividing by zero). They focus the range of their attention to smaller spaces where the vast differences in scales and forces don’t blow up their formulas and disrupt putative pairings of their carefully crafted mathematics to the world of actual observations.

It’s possible that the brains of humans, which use language and mathematics to ponder and explain the world, are insufficiently structured to model the complexities of the universe. We aren’t hard wired with enough power to create the algorithms for ultimate understanding.

RENORMALIZATION

10) If a propeller rotates at the speed of light at half of its length, what happens to the outer parts?

Only the ends of the propeller can rotate at near light speed (in theory). At half lengths the speed of the propellers will be half the speed of their ends, because the circumference of a circle is 2πr. (There is no squared term.)

So the question is: will the propellers deform according to the rules of the Lorentz transformation along their lengths due to the difference in velocity along their lengths?

The answer is, yes.

As you move outward along the propeller, it will become thinner in the direction of rotation, and it will get more massive. A watch will tick more slowly at the end than at the middle.

I am not sure how it would look to an outside observer. Maybe such a propeller would resemble in some ways the spiral galaxies, which don’t rotate the way we think they should. Dark matter and energy are the usual postulates for their anomalous rotations. Maybe their shape and motion is related to relativity in some way. I really don’t know.

In reality, no propeller can be constructed that would survive the experiment you describe. But in theory (and ignoring the physical limitations of materials) there would be consequences.

However, no part of the propeller will move at light speed or higher. Such speeds for objects with mass are impossible.

11) What is the fundamental concept behind logarithms?

The first thing that anyone might try to understand is that the word logarithm means exponent.

Example 1:

log 100 = 2 . What does this expression say? It says that the exponent that makes 100 is 2. What confuses people is this: exponent acting on what number?

The exponent acts on a number called the base. Unfortunately, the base is not written down in the two most common logarithm systems, which are log and ln.

The base for the log system is 10. In the example above, the exponent 2 acts on the base 10, which is not shown. In other words, $10^2 = 100$ , right? The exponent that makes 100 from the base 10 (not shown) is (equals) 2.

Example 2:

ln 10 = 2.302585… . What does this expression say? It says that the exponent that makes 10 is 2.302585… . Again, exponent acting on what number?

The base used in the ln system is 2.7182818… ,which is an irrational number that has an infinite number of decimal places. It happens to be a useful number in all branches of science and math including statistics, so mathematicians have decided to represent this difficult-to-write-down number with the letter “e”, which is known as Euler’s number.

The base for the ln system is e . In the example above, the exponent 2.302585… acts on the base e , which is not shown.

In other words, $e^{2.302585...} = 10$ , right?

The exponent on e ( which is 2.7182818… and not shown in the original equation above) that makes 10 is (equals) 2.302585… .

All other logarithmic systems express the base as a subscript to the right of the word log.

Example 3:

$log_{7}49 = 2$

This expression says: The exponent on seven that makes 49 equals 2.

12) Why do so many spiritual types have mental blocks about science and mathematics?

Everyone has mental blocks about science and math including scientists and mathematicians. Like the lyrics to the old song — people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest — Einstein, to cite just one example, never accepted most of quantum physics even after it was well established and no longer controversial.

People don’t like the feeling of “cognitive dissonance”. The tension between strongly held beliefs and objective facts can bring unbearable psychological pain to most people. Someone once said that genius is the ability to hold contradictory ideas inside the mind. Most people don’t do that well; they don’t like contradictions.

Here is a link to an essay called Truth that some will find interesting:

TRUTH

13) Is time infinitely divisible?

Einstein said that time and space (i.e. space-time) depends on mass and energy, which are equivalent. In the absence of mass and energy, space and time are meaningless.

The most recent experiments by NASA have found no evidence that time is anything but continuous. However, the shortest time possible is the length of time it takes light to move the shortest distance possible, which is called Planck time. It is thought to be 5.39E-44 seconds.

Time can be divided into as many smaller increments as anyone wants, but nothing can happen in fewer than the number of intervals that add to 5.39E-44 seconds. Time is a variable that isn’t fundamental. It expands and shrinks in the presence of mass and energy.

Some physicists of the past suggested that the “chronon” might be the shortest interval of time. It is the time light travels past the radius of a classical (at rest) electron — an interval of 6.27E-24 seconds. Its calculation depends only on mass and charge, which can change if a particle other than an “at rest” electron is measured.

It seems to me that time is probably best thought of as being continuous. That said, it doesn’t mean that mass-energy interplay isn’t pixelated — much like a digital camera image. Pixelation is critical to a conjecture concerning the preponderance of matter over anti-matter — a conjecture described in the essay CONSCIOUS LIFE.

14) Which is bigger: $\frac{3}{5}\;$ or $\;\frac{1}{9}$ ?

Think of fractions as pies, which are all the same size. The bottom number is the total number of pieces into which each pie is cut. The first pie was cut into 5 pieces, which are all the same size. The second pie was cut into 9 pieces, which again are all the same size.

The second pie is cut into smaller pieces than the first pie, because there are more pieces. Right?

Mice come along and eat pieces from both pies. The top number is the number of pieces they left behind; the top number is the number of pieces the mice didn’t eat.

So which pie plate has more pie on it? Is it the 5 piece pie that has 3 pieces left or the 9 piece pie that has 1 piece left?

If you think hard you will figure out that it must be the first plate that has the most pie on it. Right?

15) Why is a third of 30 equal to 10 and not 9.999999999, as a third of 10 is 3.33333333?

You can make three piles of ten objects in each pile. When you count the total, it adds to exactly 30 objects. So the answer of “10” is demonstrably true, right? Three piles of ten adds to thirty.

There is no way to make three piles of any identical objects that adds to 10. Three piles of three adds to nine. Four piles of three objects adds to twelve.

We are required to make three piles of three objects and then add a piece of a fourth object to each pile that is smaller than a whole piece.

It turns out that the fourth object is 1/3 of a whole object. When these three piles of three objects plus 1/3 of an object are added up they equal exactly ten.

The problem in understanding comes from trying to grasp that 1/3 — when written as a decimal — is what mathematicians call a repeating decimal. The rules of arithmetic say that the decimal form of 1/3 is calculated by dividing “1” by “3”.

Following the rules of arithmetic when doing the division forces an answer to the problem that results in a repeating decimal — in this case, 0.333333… .

There is no way around these rules that keeps math working right, consistent, and accurate.

Sorry.

16) Will we be able to have life extension through cloning?

Cloning not only doesn’t work, it can’t work.

That said, the idea of cloning is to make a genetic replicant of an existing life-form. Extending life-span would require changes to the genome through other means involving changes to structures called telomeres, probably, which straddle the ends of chromosomes in eukaryotic cells.

Here is a link: Telomere

A short discussion of cloning is included in the essay at this link: NO CODE

NO CODE is long (11,000 words), but explains in words, pics, graphics, videos, and links some of the complexities, misunderstandings, and dangers of current genetic-engineering at an undergraduate level. It explains basic cell biology, protein production, and much more.

17) Why does time slow down when we are on a massive planet or star like Jupiter?

Gravity is equivalent to acceleration. Accelerating clocks tick slower, according to General Relativity, which has been confirmed by experiments. It has to do with the concept of space-time and the fact that all objects travel through space-time at the same rate.

To understand, it helps to read up on space-time, special relativity, and general relativity. The concepts aren’t easy. The universe is an odd place, but it can be described to a somewhat fair degree by mathematics.

Some of the underlying reasons for why things are the way they are seem to be unknowable.

18) If the ancients had focused on science instead of religion, could we have become immortal by now?

Immortality is not possible due to the odds of accidental death, which at the current rate makes death by age 25,000 a virtual certainty for individuals.

Worse: the odds for extinction of the human species as a whole are much higher — it’s a near statistical certainty for annihilation within the next 10,000 years according to experts. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s true.

RISK

19) How do I solve, if the temperature is given by f(x,y,z) = $3x^2 - 5y^2 + 2z^2$ and you are located at $(\frac{1}{3} , \frac{1}{5} , \frac{1}{2})$ and want to get as cool as possible, in which direction should you set out?

You want to establish what the gradient is, establish its direction, then head in the opposite direction, right?

By partial differentiation the gradient is (6x – 10y + 4z), right? You don’t have to take another partial derivative and set it equal to zero to establish a maximum, because all the second derivatives of the variables are equal to one, right? You can drop the variables out and treat them as unit vectors like i, j, & k, correct?

The resulting vector points in the direction of increasing temperature, right?

Changing the signs makes a vector that points in the opposite direction toward cooler temperatures. That vector is (-6, 10, -4).

The polar angle (θ) is 71.068° and the azimuth angle (Φ) is 120.964°. The length (or magnitude) is 12.3288. Right? (We won’t use this information to solve the problem, but I wanted to write it down should I need to refer to it to respond to any comments or to help check my work graphically.)

These directions are from the origin, and you aren’t located at the origin. To determine the direction to travel to get to (-6, 10, -4), you need to subtract your current position. Again, for reference your location is .6333 from the origin at θ = 37.8636° and Φ = 30.9638°. Right?

After subtracting your position vector from the gradient vector, the resulting vector is (-6.333, 9.8, -4.5). Agree?

This vector tells you to travel 12.506 at a polar angle (θ) of 68.9105° and an azimuth angle (Φ) of 122.873° to intersect the gradient vector. At the intersection you must change direction to follow the gradient vector’s direction to move toward cooler temperatures at the fastest rate.

I haven’t graphed out the solution to double-check its accuracy. You might want to do this and let me know if you agree or not.

20) What is $\sqrt[3]{i} - \sqrt[3]{i}$ equal to?

The answer is zero, of course.

But not really. It only seems that way. Each number has three roots.

Depending on which roots are chosen the result can be one of six different sums (as well as zero if both roots are the same). We have to start somewhere so:

What is $i^\frac{1}{3}$ ?

i = $e^\frac{{i\pi}}{2}$ . Right?

Therefore, a third root of i is $e^\frac{{i\pi}}{6}$ . Right? It’s not the only root.

It’s the principal root. There are three third roots, which are equally spaced around the unit circle. Right?

It’s clear by inspection that to be equally distributed around the unit circle the other two roots must be $e^\frac{{i5\pi}}{6}$ and -i. Right?

Convert the three roots to rectangular coordinates and do the subtractions.

Here are the roots in rectangular form: (.86603 + .50000 i) , (-.86603 + .50000 i) , and (0.00000 -i).

Here are the six answers (in bold type) to the original question with the subtractions shown to the right:

1.7302 = (.86603 + .50000 i) – (-.86603 + .50000 i)

(.86603 +1.5 i) = (.86603 + .50000 i) – (0.00000 -i)

-1.7302 = (-.86603 + .50000 i) – (.86603 + .50000 i)

(-.86603 + 1.5 i) = (-.86603 + .50000 i) – (0.00000 -i)

(-.86603 – 1.5 i) = (0.00000 -i) – (.86603 + .50000 i)

(.86603 – 1.5 i) = (0.00000 -i) – (-.86603 + .50000 i)

These rectangular coordinates can be converted back to the Euler-form ( $e^{i\theta}$ ). It’s easy for anyone who knows how to work with complex variables. In Euler-form the angle in radians sits next to i. The angle directs you to where the result lies on a unit circle. Right?

In fact, the six values lie 60 degrees apart on the circumference of a circle whose radius is the square root of 3. I don’t know what to make of it except to say that the result seems unusual and intriguing, at least to me.

As mentioned earlier, if both roots are chosen to be the same, then in that particular case the result is zero.

21) What is tensor analysis and how is it used in physics?

Understanding tensors is crucial to understanding Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

This question seems to assume that everyone knows what tensors are and how they are represented symbolically. It’s a good bet that some folks reading this question might want some basics to better understand the explanations of how tensors are used for analysis in physics.

If so, here are links to two videos that together will help with the basics:

22) What is the velocity of an electron?

Electrons can move at any speed less than light depending on the strength of the electro-magnetic field that is acting on them. Inside atoms electrons seem to move around at about one-tenth of the speed of light. You might want to check me on this number. The situation is as complicated as your mind is capable of grasping.

When interacting with photons of light electrons inside atoms seem to jump into higher or lower shells or orbits instantaneously. That said, it is impossible to directly observe electrons inside atoms.

On an electrical conductor like a wire, electrons move very slowly, but they bump into one another like billiard balls or dominoes. The speed of falling dominoes can be very high compared to the speed of an individual domino, right?

So, the answer is: it all depends…

23) What exactly is space-time? Is it something we can touch? How does it bend and interact with mass?

Spacetime, according to Einstein, depends on mass and energy for its existence. In the absence of mass and energy (which are equivalent), space-time disappears.

The energy of things like bosons of light — which seem to have no internal (or intrinsic) mass, right? — is proportional to their electric and magnetic fields. Smallest packets of electromagnetic oscillations are called photons.

Many kinds of oscillating fields, like electromagnetic light, permeate (or fill) the universe. In this sense, there is no such thing as nothing anywhere at any scale.

Instruments and tools of science (including mathematics) can give a misleading impression that at very small scales massive particles exist.

According to the late John Wheeler, mass at small scales is an illusion created by interactions with measuring devices and sensors.

Mass is a macroscopic statistical process created by accumulations of whatever it is that exists near the rock bottom of reality where humans have yet to gain access. These accumulations, some of them, are visible to humans; they seem to span 46 billion light years in all directions from the vantage-point of Earth and are displayed for the most part in as many as two-trillion galaxies according to recent satellite data by NASA.

Mass is thought to interact with everything that can be measured (including everything in the Standard Model) by changing its acceleration (that is, its velocity and/or direction), which is equivalent to changing its momentum.

It is in this sense that mass and energy are equivalent. Spacetime depends on mass and energy. Spacetime does not act on mass and energy; it is its result, its consequence.

Spacetime is a concept (or model) that for Einstein helped to quantify how mass and energy behave on large scales. It helped explain why his idea that the universe looks and behaves differently to observers in different reference frames might be the way the universe on large scales works.

His mathematical description of spacetime helped him build a geometric explanation for gravity that can be described for any observer by using tensor style matrices; many find his approach compelling but difficult computationally.

WHY SOMETHING, NOT NOTHING?

24) Hypothetically speaking, if one could travel faster than light, would that mean you would always live in the dark?

The space in which objects in the universe swim does expand faster than light when the expansion is measured over very large distances that are measured in light-years. A light year is six trillion miles.

At distances of billions of light years, the expansion of space between objects becomes dramatic enough that light begins to stretch itself out. This stretching lengthens the distance between the peaks and valleys of the electric and magnetic waves that light is made from, so its frequency appears to drop.

The wave lengths of white light can stretch so dramatically that the light begins to appear red. It’s called red shift.

Measuring the red shift of light is a way to tell how far away an object like a star is. As light stretches over farther distances the ability to see it is lost.

The wavelengths of light stretch toward the longer infra-red lengths (called heat waves) and then at even farther distances stretch to very long waves called radio-waves. Special telescopes must be placed into outer space to see these waves of light, because heat and radio waves radiating from the earth will interfere with instruments placed at the surface.

Eventually the distances across space become so great that the amplitudes (or heights) of the waves flat line. They flat-line because space is expanding faster than light can keep up. Light loses its structure. At this distance the galaxies and stars drop out of the sight of our eyes, sensors, and instruments. It’s a horizon beyond which the universe is not observable.

No one knows how big the universe is, because no one can see to its end. The expansion of space — tiny over short distances — starts to get huge at distances over 10 billion light years or so. The simple, uncomplicated answer is that the lights go out at about 14.3 billion light years.

Because there is no upper limit to how fast the universe can expand, and because the objects we see at 14.3 billion light-years have moved away during the time it has taken for their light to reach Earth, astronomers know that the edge of the universe is at least 46 billion light years away in all directions. Common sense suggests the universe might be much larger. No one has proved it, but it seems likely.

Over the next few billion years the universe that can be seen will get smaller, because the expansion of space is accelerating. The sphere of viewable objects is going to shrink. The expansion of space is speeding up.

The problem will be that the nearby stars that should always be viewable (because they are close) are going to burn out over time, so the night sky is going to get darker.

Most (4 out of 5) stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs that will live pretty much forever, but no one can see them now, so no one will see them billions of years from now, either. Red dwarfs radiate in the infra-red, which can only be seen with special instruments from a vantage point above the atmosphere.

Stars like our sun will live another 4 or 5 billion years and then die. The not-too-distant future of the ageless (it seems) universe is going to fall dark to any species that might survive long enough to witness it.

25) What does “e” mean in a calculator?

There are two “e”s on a calculator: little “e” and big “E”.

Little “e” is a number. The number has a lot of decimals places (it has an infinite number of them), so the number is called “e” to make it quick to write down.

The number is 2.71828… . The number is used a lot in mathematics and in every field of science and statistics. One reason it is useful is because derivatives and integrals of functions formed from its powers are easy to compute.

Big “E” is not a number. It stands for the word “exponent”, but it is used to specify how many places to the right to move the decimal point of the number that comes before it.

5E6 is the number 5,000,000, for example. The way to say the number is, “five times ten raised to the sixth power”. It’s basically a form of shorthand that means 5 multiplied by $10^6$ .

Sometimes the number after E can be negative. 5E-6 would then specify how many places to the left to move the decimal point. In this case the number is 0.000005, which is 5 multiplied by $10^{-6}$ .

Bonus Question 1 – What difficulties lie in finding particles smaller than quarks, and in theory, what are possible solutions?

The Standard Model is complete as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it covers only 5% of the matter and energy believed to exist in the universe.

And humans can only see 10% of the 5% that’s out there. We are blind to 99.5% of the universe. We can’t see energy, and we can’t see most stars, because they radiate in the infra-red, which is invisible to us.

The Standard Model doesn’t explain why anti-matter is missing. It doesn’t explain dark matter and energy, which make up the majority of the material and energy in the universe. It doesn’t explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Probing matter smaller than quarks may require CERN-like facilities the size of our solar system, or if we’re unlucky, larger still.

We are approaching the edge of what we can explore experimentally at the limits of the very small. Some theorists hope that mathematics will somehow lead to knowledge that can be confirmed by theory alone, without experimental confirmation.

I’m not so sure.

The link below will direct readers to an essay about the problem of the very small.

ON THE VERY SMALL

Bonus Question 2 – What if science and wisdom reached a point of absolute knowledge of everything in the universe, how would this affect humanity?

Humanity has reached a tipping point where more knowledge increases dramatically the odds against species survival. Absolute knowledge will result in absolute assurance of self-destruction.

Astronomers have not yet detected advanced civilizations. The chances are excellent that they never will.

Humans are fast approaching an asymptotic limit to knowledge, which when reached will bring catastrophe — as it apparently has to all life that has gone before in other parts of the universe.

Everywhere we look in the universe the tell-tale signatures of advanced civilizations are missing.

RISK

We hope readers enjoyed the answers to these questions. Follow Billy Lee on Quora where you will find answers to thousands of unusual and interesting questions. The Editorial Board

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Since Einstein said that E=mc2 , why does a massless photon have energy? >>CONTINUE READING»
BOTSAI GARCHY 6
It's OK to surrender to a higher power in some worlds -- but who bows before a super intelligence that is not only artificial, it's not even conscious? >>CONTINUE READING»
HALLOWEEN REVISION
Darkness in a cave hundreds of feet below ground is nothing like what people experience above. >>CONTINUE READING»
BILLIONAIRE BRAWL 2020
Does Kamala Harris have the wisdom, maturity, pedigree, and experience to be president? These questions have to be asked and answered. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
IN THE BEGINNING…
Absent acquired immunity and vaccines, Covid-19 is a species-extinction threat. We risk an apocalypse of biblical proportions. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
NO WAY OUT
When everything is broken, maybe old-man Trump plans to build from the ashes a new country in his own glorious image. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
LAST GASPS
Some conjecture that universes are nothing more than black holes, which form an infinite foam that flows perhaps to infinity. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
MASS STOCKHOLM
Stockholm Syndrome is at the core of Trump’s power. Trump is right that he can kill, and his supporters will stand with him. …>>CONTINUE READING»
FAKED LIFE
In a simulation, which of its fake creatures is able to determine how old is the authentic universe it will never see? …>>CONTINUE READING»
ALIENS
The problem for the aliens is they didn’t bring weapons. Many hundreds of the captured are kept in cages at Area 51. Surely, someone “out there” knows...>>CONTINUE READING»
LAMBERT W FUNCTION
The math behind the Lambert function is mind-bogglingly complicated to most people. …>>CONTINUE READING»
GOOSE LAKE
A music concert with new found friends unschooled in military discipline seemed like a good idea. It was time to learn another way. . . ...>>CONTINUE READING»
FLASH CARD ANSWERS
Find something interesting and read a flash card answer, which is my version of what might be true. …>>CONTINUE READING»
CONFORMAL EQUIVALENCE
At the termination of expansion, the metrics of spacetime become equivalent to a singularity …>>CONTINUE READING»
2020 ELECTION BOYCOTT
Oligarchs can get to anyone; they can get to families. It’s amazing what doors can close on people who choose not to cooperate...>>CONTINUE READING»
WHAT’S GOING ON?
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. …>>CONTINUE READING»
CONTRADICTIONS
When Jesus says the Bible harbors contradictions, that kind of settles the matter, does it not? It seems that for some, it doesn't. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
“C”
To qualify for dark matter means that a typical photon must have close to one ten-millionth of the mass of an electron. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
GOING DOWN
Donald Trump is a modern Jefferson Davis -- the first president of the new Confederacy. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
YOU’RE FIRED!
Companies closed their doors to millions of young Americans whose crime was protesting an undeclared, genocidal war at the end of the world. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
MYSTERIES
I asked myself: what might be in that old safe? Why not take a look? What harm could there be in searching a dusty safe for forgotten objects? ...>>CONTINUE READING»
EMERGENCY
Most people do not remember living in the United States when abortion was against the law. They are too young. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
BALANCE
People who played ball with the Russians to take down the “deep state” might want to consider that they risk being arrested someday for treason...>>CONTINUE READING»
12 ASSERTIONS
If humans are unable to ever know why photons exist and behave as they appear to do, then who can? Who does understand? ...>>CONTINUE READING»
MAKE AMERICA BREAK AGAIN
The time has arrived when everyone must let go of fear and act like the heroes we must become to protect everything and everyone we care about. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
#MKWA
The USA has invested too much treasure on a population that has no way to grasp that everything is fabricated. It's all lies. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
Q & A BY THE BOOK
Authors sell their souls to write for money; they do exhausting tours to answer stupid questions day after stupid day to sell stupid books. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
MANGANISM
People who are sick from toxins do not understand why they suffer from delusional thinking, mood swings, and PTSD-type symptoms. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
25 QUESTIONS
USA is segregated by income and race. People have no idea how easy life is for the wealthy; the wealthy don't believe America has poverty....>>CONTINUE READING»
BILLIONAIRE CHRISTIANS
People driven crazy by religion embed themselves into politics to transform the USA into a twisted vision of what they think God wants.... >>CONTINUE READING»
HATING CHRISTMAS
Churches campaigned for the biggest boob ever to run for the highest office ever in the history of the world ever -- of all human-kind, ever. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
25 ANSWERS
Immortality is not possible. Accidental death makes death by age 25,000 a virtual certainty for individuals. …>>CONTINUE READING»
CHOSEN
People chosen by Jesus don't rule; they give up everything they have to serve and love others. It's simple, really. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
47 TONS
Japan has harvested 47 tons (94,000 pounds) of high-grade plutonium from its nearly one-hundred or so nuclear power and processing plants, ...>>CONTINUE READING»
EYE TO EYE
What does "i" mean, anyway? How can a number be "imaginary"? What does it mean to multiply "i" exactly "i" times? ... >>CONTINUE READING»
WHAT IS e exp (-i π) ?
A radian is the radius of a circle, which can be lifted and bent to fit on the edge of the circle. 3 pieces wrap almost half-way around. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
ILLUSIONS
ISIS was formed by Saddam's family and loyal remnants of his army who are trying to take back what they lost during the Bush presidency. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
BEGGING FOR IT
The North Koreans and Chinese were the first to challenge America after WWII. Our arsenal of atomic weapons didn't intimidate them. .... >>CONTINUE READING»
OCEAN WAR
In the 7 months since the inauguration of President Trump our Navy has suffered 4 accidents killing 17 sailors and injuring scores more. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
DEATH TAX
It's un-American for the wealthy to leave fortunes to their children. It creates a caste system that we fought a revolution to avoid. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
RISK
Everyone wants to live as long as possible, right? Well, maybe not everyone. Far more people kill themselves than are killed by others. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
RENORMALIZATION
There's a problem in science. Observations don't match the mathematics of theories. Math removes ambiguities that underlie all of reality. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
ANNUAL VACATION
Billy Lee and his sycophants go on vacation during June and the first half of July. Click on our VACATION POLICY page-link to learn more. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM
Americans live inside a psychotic bubble of evil. Some have lost the ability to assess realistic threats to the things they hold dear. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
SEPARATION ACCELERATION
Providing parity to people challenged by adversity seems an impossible endeavor --- a pipe-dream of liberals who lack common-sense.... >>CONTINUE READING»
JESUS, THE CHRIST
They all conspire together. The best of them is like a brier, the most upright worse than a thorn hedge. The day God visits you has come. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
AFTERLIFE
Some of the smartest folks who have ever lived believe that we cannot die. No one dies; everyone lives -- forever. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
REASONS
People posturing as patriots hated on a black man who managed to become president of their slave-state. He won a Nobel Prize for it. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
RESURRECTION
Death has a finality to it that seems to rob life of all meaning. Total loss. No redeeming virtues; no comfort. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
NIGHTMARE
War resisters lost every fight; every argument; every skirmish; every battle. People still ridicule the baby boomers who said no to war. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
MERRY CHRISTMAS
The man who saved the world from sin started life as a helpless baby. He slipped into history unnoticed but his anonymity didn't last. ...CONTINUE READING»
FLYING BLIND
Everyone flies blind except the pilot. He's trained. He knows what to do. With any luck at all, the pilot will land the plane -- safely. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
DISARMING CHRISTIANS
I side with tolerant thinkers who are kind to people who are hated because they don't fit stereotypes that certain conservatives favor. ...CONTINUE READING»
BAD THINGS
Dad was fearless to the end of his 91 years. He once ate a half pound of spoiled cheese, because it was a gift. .... >>CONTINUE READING»
FINE-STRUCTURE CONSTANT
What is the fine-structure constant? Many smart physicists wonder about it; some obsess over it; a few have gone mad. ...CONTINUE READING»
TRUMP
These are sad days for Trump. He loves America he says but he’s lived inside a bubble of privilege his entire life. He doesn’t understand.…>>CONTINUE READING»
SATAN SURRENDER
Clout craving Christians like Jerry Falwell Jr. believe they can make a Faustian bargain and come away with the power they covet. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
SEGREGATION TAX
People will soon find that it's going to be way cheaper to hire black people to be their neighbors than pay a segregation tax. ...CONTINUE READING»
FREE TRADE
Who thinks it's strange that the GOP that advocates most for free trade is now promoting a nominee who advocates against it? ...CONTINUE READING»
ON VACATION
The Billy Lee Vacation Policy applies to all our employees -- except for Billy Lee Junior, who no one thinks is a ''team player." ...>>CONTINUE READING»
WHAT HILLARY DID
Bill Clinton appointed his wife to help create a healthcare plan to cover every American -- detractors would come to call it HillaryCare. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
NO CODE
There is no genetic code. Not really. Not in the way most people think. Seasoned, sensible geneticists know it's true. ...CONTINUE READING»
AFTER INDIANA: THE ELECTION SO FAR
Trump is an attractive candidate for an electorate that worships celebrity. He is the poison apple of Eden -- a first bite to ruin America. .... >>CONTINUE READING»
ARMAGEDDON
''Minty" Ross Harriet Tubman will not appear on the $20 bill until 2026. Some say it could be later. The cynical say it will never happen. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
ELEPHANT ON THE ISLAND
USA embargo or quarantine was the elephant on the island. It was in the room at every meeting between Cuba and our 1,200 officials. .... >>CONTINUE READING»
PRIMARY ELECTION SO FAR
In the 4 states where both parties have caucused, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz won them all. They are Kansas, Maine, Idaho, and Utah. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
SUPER TUESDAY GOP MELTDOWN
Hillary Clinton crushed Super Tuesday. She gathered the most votes in Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Trump won AL and TN. …>>CONTINUE READING»
TRUTH
Some hoped truth telling might distinguish natural intelligence from artificial. After all, properly trained AGI would never lie, right? ...CONTINUE READING»
CANARY IN THE COAL MINE: NH 2016
2016 New Hampshire Primary: Sanders and Trump gathered 47% of the total vote. Less than 35% of the vote went to traditional GOP candidates. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
WHY THIS TIME WOMEN WILL WIN
I hate how they hurt Obama; I know they are going to hurt Hillary. It's hard to watch the bullies spew their venom day after day. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
JESUS
In a few days a baby named Jesus will be born in the desert --- south of the Texas border-crossing in northern Mexico. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
WHY SOMETHING, NOT NOTHING?
People assume they see nothing, but in every case when they look closely they find something... air, quantum fluctuations, vacuum energy. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
NO GOOD DEED…
No Good Deed... is a work of fiction by Billy Lee. Events and persons depicted in the story exist in the imagination of the writer. ... >>CONTINUE READING»
DEGENERACY
After slavery ended, whites continued to segregate the races. And they still do. Look at Florida, anyone who doesn't believe it. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
CHRIST IN THE HARBOR
A statue overlooks Havana Bay. In 1956 Marta Fernandez chose to design and build a statue of Christ to overlook the capital city of Cuba. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
KILLING FRENZY
Elites get to be elite through in-fighting, war, intrigue, and politics. They are, for the most part, desensitized to violence. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
CORN MEN
Miguel Angel Asturias won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967. He wrote in a style that critics would later call magic realism. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
ANTARCTICA
Antarctica is weirder and scarier than people think. Something's happening there... what it is ain't exactly clear. ...CONTINUE READING»
HEY, GUEVARA…
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, more than any other two people, were responsible for throwing the Mafia out of Cuba in 1959. ...CONTINUE READING»
ARTIFICIAL SUPER-INTELLIGENCE
Artificial super-intelligence will-- repeat, WILL -- embed itself into systems humans can't live without to ensure that no one disables it. …>>CONTINUE READING»
FASTER THAN LIGHT COMMUNICATION
Communicating with distant spacecraft is cumbersome because the distances are huge; no one can send signals faster than light. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
WHAT WOULD JESUS, JOHN, AND PAUL DO?
My purpose is to challenge modern folks, who claim they are trying to imitate Christ, to soberly examine themselves and make winsome changes. ...CONTINUE READING»
CONSCIOUS QUANTUM
How is it that all conscious humans see the same Universe? How is it that people agree on what some call an "objective" reality? ...CONTINUE READING»
CUBA
People born in the 1960s and later have no easy way to know that U.S. media once portrayed Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as heroes. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
WARRIOR
In his world, right made might. On doing good, Civilization stood. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
YEAR ONE
January 17, 2015 marks the first anniversary of the Billy Lee Pontificator. During the past year we published more than fifty essays. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
LOSING MY RELIGION
The entertainment industry learned a long time ago that the way to appeal to the most people is to embrace ambiguity. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
RACISM
Wesley Brown was the first black American to survive the racial hazing at the Naval Academy and graduate. I knew him. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
ELECTION 2014
GOP takes the power. Kenyan usurper Barack Hussein Obama -- the first president to misplace his birth certificate -- called the vote, idiotic. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
SHAKESPEARE SONNET GEMSTONES
Shakespeare's pen tugs on the corroded wires in our brains to make new schematics. His ink flushes out the rust and lubricates the synapses. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
BEING HATED
People hated on me my whole life but never more than now when I need their love so bad. If they knew how they weaken me they'd hate me more. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
TOP TWEETS
Last month we published tweets from my first thirty days on Twitter. This month, we publish a sampling of my best tweets from the past. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
TWITTER – MY FIRST THIRTY DAYS
In the first 30 days, my follower base grew from zero to 100. It made such an impression on me that I continued to tweet for 3 years. ....>>CONTINUE READING»
BELL’S INEQUALITY
John Stewart Bell's Inequality followed his proof that showed quantum behavior in experiments violated logic. ...CONTINUE READING»
FINDING LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
12 space agencies are looking for alien life inside the solar system. With so many moons and planets, the hope is that one will harbor life. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
BLAISE PASCAL: THOUGHTS
Blaise Pascal was a man who suffered terribly his entire life until he died at age 39 from a metastasized stomach cancer. ...CONTINUE READING»
GAY LOVE AND CHRISTIAN PRIDE
Grace is central. So says Psalm 32 and Romans 4. ''Blessed are those whose sin the Lord will never count against them.'' ...>>CONTINUE READING»
CONSCIOUS LIFE
What could be more unlikely than something dead--like a singularity that goes bang--bringing forth something not only alive but conscious. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
UNDER SURVEILLANCE AT WORK AND PLAY
In America, the caretakers of both private and public spaces have free reign to watch and record everything people do. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
MICROWAVE COFFEE
My wife and I are coffee drinkers. Bevy Mae used to drink 12 cups of caffeinated coffee everyday. By her third cup she could boogie. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
WRITING FREE
I wrote my first big story in fourth grade. I called it, Adventures on the Amazon. It's now lost to history, but I remember organizing it into chapters. Chapters were a big deal. ...CONTINUE READING»
XANAX
Xanax works. If you suffer from panic attacks, Xanax stops them cold. Anxiety? Xanax stops that kind of suffering also. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
DIGITIZING HISTORY
The underground press included not only thousands of community newspapers, but literary gazettes and alternative periodicals as well. ...CONTINUE READING»
PLANES, TRAINS, & AUTOMOBILES; AND OUR FREEDOM
The question is simple: If circumstances conspired to take away cars and licenses so no one could drive again, would anyone feel free? …>>CONTINUE READING»
WHY DO HUMANS LIKE MUSIC?
No one knows why humans like music when we hear certain patterns of sound and tempo. Scientists are conducting research to learn why. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
INERRANCY AND DOCTRINAL PURITY
How did the Christian Bible come to be? It's complicated. I'm sure I don't understand. I think men collected books they liked over millennia. ...CONTINUE READING»
BILLY LEE TWITTER LISTS (X)
Updates to Twitter lists and contributors occur frequently. Anyone who wants to add celebrities, experts, or subjects please ask in comments. ...CONTINUE READING»
IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH AMERICA?
Americans asked before 911 said nothing is wrong. USA is where everyone wants to be. Folks risk everything to get here. Don't like it? Leave. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
CONFESSING UNDER TORTURE
I was tortured. I confessed to everything. The odds seem good I may have actually done some version of the shameful things I confessed. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
OBAMACARE AND THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Opposition to Barack Obama's health care plan began six years ago, before he was elected President. Opposition has continued unabated. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
CIVILIZATION AND INEQUALITY
If the United States reduced the wealth of the 100,000 wealthiest Americans what could it do with the money? ...CONTINUE READING»
ON THE VERY SMALL
No one can know by looking that solid objects are made of tiny molecules separated from each other by tiny gaps. Molecules are too small. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
AIR TRAVEL SAFETY
Airlines spend serious money to convince consumers flying is safe. Not only is flying safe, it is way more safe than driving. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
ON AGING
Mom and Dad lost everything as they aged. It wasn't what they expected. They lost their beauty, their common sense, and their minds. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
SCALE
The visible universe is big. Most scientists believe the invisible universe -- the universe no one can see -- is really big. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
NUCLEAR POWER AND ME
Plant executives predicted that 1,000 nuclear power plants would be built in the USA by the year 2000. The plants would be "fail-safe". ...>>CONTINUE READING»
SENSING THE UNIVERSE
What is the universe? Sensing is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting, right? These qualities don't exist in the universe. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF TELEVISION, PART ONE
A neon sign emitted a glow of colors. I'd never seen anything like it. I asked our Japanese maid what it was. It's television, she said. …>>CONTINUE READING»
WHAT IS MATH?
People think math is special --- a magic language that when tinkered with properly permits mortals to unravel mysteries known only by God. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
SEGREGATION AND THE GATED COMMUNITY
The word "community" sounds egalitarian to people. Gated? No word has a fairer proportion of safety to airy openness in the image it conveys. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
THE PARROT NEXT DOOR
Inside the shadows of the lanai next door lives a loquacious parrot. Bevy Mae and me can't see him, but we know he's in there, because he talks -- a lot. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
SHOULD THIS BOOK BE FINISHED?
Writing "JOURNAL" has inflicted upon me a certain pain and anguish of mind and soul. Yes, I wrote it---secretly, furtively---in the sanatorium....>>CONTINUE READING»
WHAT IS LIFE?
February is the 71st anniversary of the lecture series "What is Life?" presented at Trinity College by quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. ...>>CONTINUE READING»
HEARING LOSS
As many of us approach our "Golden Years" (we never quite get there, if you know what I mean) we begin to experience the annoyances of aging. One annoyance is the way folks around us start to mumble....CONTINUE READING»
CAPITALISM AND INCOME INEQUALITY
Capitalism differs little from Slavery until the legal environment secures certain rights to labor. USA crafted a Bill of Rights. ...CONTINUE READING»
JOINT ISSUE ANNIVERSARY
The history of the underground press in general and of Joint Issue in particular remains largely untold by mainstream media until now. …>>CONTINUE READING»
THE CHURCH AND THE GAY PEOPLE
The PA wore an Archie watch, a purple wristband, and a Batman necklace. You like cartoons? I asked. I love comics, he gushed, don't you? …CONTINUE READING»
HOREMHEB, EXODUS PHARAOH?
The Exodus and Pharaoh Horemheb are connected by archaeology and historical records including the Bible, the only account extant today. ...CONTINUE READING»

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR WORLD? by Thomas L. Friedman, NYTimes, 1 January 2024 [Click image to view Friedman's editorial] I dare say, the Israel-Hamas war was not as inevitable as some want you to think. And the choices being made there could be hugely consequential. [...] There is so much to criticize about Israel's occupation of the West Bank, which I have consistently opposed. [...] Benjamin Netanyahu ... made choices ... terrible ones --- for Israel and for Jews all over the world. [...] Netanyahu's greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it's never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel's hands. He and the settlers wore everyone down. When I covered the State Department in the early 1990s, West Bank settlements were routinely described by U.S. officials as "obstacles to peace." But that phrase was gradually dropped. The Trump administration even decided to stop calling the West Bank "occupied" territory. [...] Israel is being surrounded ... . [...] Iran is squeezing Israel into a multifront war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.

Click image to read what one blogger thinks are the 13 worse Supreme Court decisions of all time. Recent decisions to reverse Roe, resegregate universities, and erode gay access to public businesses are not yet added to the list. What is included is Dred Scot v Sanford, where Andrew Jackson lackey Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote words that live today in infamy: "[Negroes are} not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States." DUMB SCOTUS, DUMB! Who keeps nominating racist fools to SCOTUS, anyway? Taney continued to rule the Court for seven more years until his death in 1864 on the day his home state of Maryland passed an amendment abolishing slavery.

IMMIGRANTS' LOVE IS UNREQUITED by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, 21 May 2023. [Click image to view Karla's essay in the New York Times.] If you know nothing else about our immigrants, you should know this: They have survived everything God put in front of them, and then some, in the name of freedom and safety, for themselves and their children. I will never understand why they, why we, were and are so hated. [...] I was a child in Ecuador in the 1990s, a time when Latin America was reeling from the effects of decades of coups, dictatorships, and political repression. My parents passed on to me and my brother their full-blooded hatred of authoritarianism and those who abet it----weak-willed people who value their own careers over their country's constitution, the disengaged and indifferent populace. [...] Immigrants love America in a way that America needs to be loved if it is going to survive. [...] ...we've been treating immigrants very, very badly.

HEY, GUEVARA…

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, more than any other two people, were responsible for throwing the Mafia out of Cuba in 1959. ...
BILLY LEE TWITTER LISTS (X)

Updates to Twitter lists and contributors occur frequently. Anyone who wants to add celebrities, experts, or subjects please ask in comments. ...
XANAX

Xanax works. If you suffer from panic attacks, Xanax stops them cold. Anxiety? Xanax stops that kind of suffering also. ...>>
SEGREGATION TAX

People will soon find that it's going to be way cheaper to hire black people to be their neighbors than pay a segregation tax. ...
BELL’S INEQUALITY

John Stewart Bell's Inequality followed his proof that showed quantum behavior in experiments violated logic. ...
WHAT WOULD JESUS, JOHN, AND PAUL DO?

My purpose is to challenge modern folks, who claim they are trying to imitate Christ, to soberly examine themselves and make winsome changes. ...
THE PARROT NEXT DOOR

Inside the shadows of the lanai next door lives a loquacious parrot. Bevy Mae and me can't see him, but we know he's in there, because he talks -- a lot. ...>>
FINE-STRUCTURE CONSTANT

What is the fine-structure constant? Many smart physicists wonder about it; some obsess over it; a few have gone mad. ...
BLAISE PASCAL: THOUGHTS

Blaise Pascal was a man who suffered terribly his entire life until he died at age 39 from a metastasized stomach cancer. ...
ANTARCTICA

Antarctica is weirder and scarier than people think. Something's happening there... what it is ain't exactly clear. ...
DISARMING CHRISTIANS

I side with tolerant thinkers who are kind to people who are hated because they don't fit stereotypes that certain conservatives favor. ...
NO CODE

There is no genetic code. Not really. Not in the way most people think. Seasoned, sensible geneticists know it's true. ...
DIGITIZING HISTORY

The underground press included not only thousands of community newspapers, but literary gazettes and alternative periodicals as well. ...
CIVILIZATION AND INEQUALITY

If the United States reduced the wealth of the 100,000 wealthiest Americans what could it do with the money? ...
TRUTH

Some hoped truth telling might distinguish natural intelligence from artificial. After all, properly trained AGI would never lie, right? ...
FREE TRADE

Who thinks it's strange that the GOP that advocates most for free trade is now promoting a nominee who advocates against it? ...
MERRY CHRISTMAS

The man who saved the world from sin started life as a helpless baby. He slipped into history unnoticed but his anonymity didn't last. ...
WRITING FREE

I wrote my first big story in fourth grade. I called it, Adventures on the Amazon. It's now lost to history, but I remember organizing it into chapters. Chapters were a big deal. ...
WHAT IS MATH?

People think math is special --- a magic language that when tinkered with properly permits mortals to unravel mysteries known only by God. ...>>
WHY DO HUMANS LIKE MUSIC?

No one knows why humans like music when we hear certain patterns of sound and tempo. Scientists are conducting research to learn why. ...>>
FINDING LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

12 space agencies are looking for alien life inside the solar system. With so many moons and planets, the hope is that one will harbor life. ...>>
FLYING BLIND

Everyone flies blind except the pilot. He's trained. He knows what to do. With any luck at all, the pilot will land the plane -- safely. ...>>
CONSCIOUS LIFE

What could be more unlikely than something dead--like a singularity that goes bang--bringing forth something not only alive but conscious. ...>>
HOREMHEB, EXODUS PHARAOH?

The Exodus and Pharaoh Horemheb are connected by archaeology and historical records including the Bible, the only account extant today. ...
SATAN SURRENDER

Clout craving Christians like Jerry Falwell Jr. believe they can make a Faustian bargain and come away with the power they covet. ... >>

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