Tag: The Universe

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DETERMINISM

I’m happy to publish this essay because it is filled with insights about how the Universe might work. Physicist Mark John Fernee spent his career thinking about and doing experiments to work out some answers that ring true, at least to me. I learned about him on Quora. 

Since humans first grasped the idea that stars are not tiny holes in a tarp that shades Earth from Heaven, scientists have made progress toward resolution of questions both fundamental and mysterious which can finally be defended with logic and evidence. 

Think about it.

Is a creator necessarily constrained by laws of physics to initiate the cosmos people see?  Is a first cause necessary to start any Universe? What underlying reality hidden from science permits God to evade any concept of law to become the essential, fundamental, irreducible first cause of all that has ever been or ever will be? 

People, a few of them, continue to believe that stars are pin-holes; Earth is flat, disease is demon-caused, and on and so on. These speculations are obviously false to anyone who tests them against dispassionate observation, which is the process called science.  

Is the Universe deterministic? The answer to this question—should anyone know—might help answer whether anyone is truly free to decide. Can people make decisions unconnected to events that go back to some conjectured beginning or are they instead prisoners of delusions of freewill peculiar to all conscious life-forms like us? 

What follows is an answer, first posted on Quora. I let it percolate on the site for months to absorb whatever reaction it might garner from interested folks. I wrote not only to learn from others but to make the idea of determinism comprehensible to the curious who can read.  

Of course, I’m a Pontificator, not a credentialed scientist nor theologian nor philosopher. What I’ve learned—what I write—remains unvalidated by any expert or guild. 

Added at the end of the essay is a link to one of many posts on Quora by Mark John Fernee about some of the science of determinism.

For the interested, click the link at the end of my essay to review some of Fernee’s thoughts on the physics of determinism. After reading, login to Quora to access readers’ comments and Fernee’s responses.

(Note: It will be necessary to visit several spaces on Quora to find every comment.)

Unusual insights hide in plain sight like Easter eggs.

Here goes my essay:

It might be difficult for intelligent, science-indoctrinated people to accept but the universe at all scales is most likely not deterministic and never has been.

Before folks who “know better” wander off to search for something more confirmational of their biases, I hope to convince a few of the more open-minded to reflect on a couple of stomach-churning examples.

After all, simple statistics suggest that some preordained percentage of readers will read on; a well-defined subset of those readers are certain to agree with my arguments, which might take any arbitrary form at all—depending on the vagaries of my imagination and what I ate for dinner, perhaps.

Sounds deterministic, doesn’t it?

Not really.

The truth is I have no idea what I will write before I write it. I’ve staked a position, which I intend to defend until I convince myself of its truth. Some predictable number will read and be likewise convinced.

Let me admit right now that I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic. I don’t know if my will is my own or someone else’s.

I don’t know who I am, where I am, what I am, or why I am. I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t remember where I’ve been. I have no clue what 99% of me looks like because it’s inside a place I can’t see. It’s never been photographed. I’ve seen no reflection or picture of almost all of me.

I don’t know how my brain works or why I’m conscious. I haven’t seen my brain. Doctors tell me I have one. They gave me some films from an MRI and told me the grey smears were it. I took their word. It’s puzzling because the universe inside my head seems larger—infinitely more vast than plate smudge.

I have ideas but 99% of them are likely to be mostly wrong. Why? Because my ideas come from somewhere else, and I alter them. I channel ideas but if you ask where they come from, I can’t say. I don’t know why I think and say and write the things I do.

Well, most of the time I think I know. It’s called being well-grounded. Yeah, that’s me. I’m grounded to a reality that makes no sense during those times when I think deeply about what reality might be.

Take blue for instance—the color. It’s a hallucination, right? It tells me nothing about the wavelength of light that triggers blue in my brain. I’ve never seen a photon, have you? When stripped of color, what might a photon be? I have no idea. Some say it’s an electromagnetic corpuscle with wave-like properties.

What the hell is that?

Who knows that galaxies are fragile? So are orbits of planets and moons. As are universes.

The Higgs field is unstable, right? It can undergo phase transitions. Scientists say it’s true. It’s like flushing a toilet. One moment the toilet is a stinky mess; phase transition is the sound of swirling water—a whirlpool that dumps all into the abyss. What returns is blue water and clean porcelain.

What will all that went before mean? Trillions of lifeforms found comfort in the mess. What kind of determination pushed the handle to upend the destinies of trillions of tiny creatures no human will meet or see?

Why do humanoids feel free to make arbitrary decisions if it isn’t true that they make them? Does it mean that everything they believe is a lie?

Has the Universe made us its fools?

I will tell you this: the thought has occurred to me that the Universe might be my fool. Without me to tell its stories it’s nothing but a dead thing with no past and no future.

Apart from conscious-life—in particular, my life—the Universe is simply impossible.

I don’t believe the consciousness we experience dies. It’s something foundational that everyone plugs into when they live. Somehow, we all live inside each other, and conscious life lives inside us. When we die our bodies abandon consciousness and decay away, but conscious life lives on into the past and future as it always has and always will.

Our bodies count for nothing. It’s why none have seen themselves. A quick, confirmational glimpse of this or that part of us is all we can hope for—then it’s gone.

Billy Lee

SENSING THE UNIVERSE

 

 

Determinism and Free Will 
Quora essay by physicist Mark John Fernee

 

 

 

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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.

18 – Where do the ideas for the left/progressivism in the U.S. come from?

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