Posted inScience Universe

The big bang shows the limits of human intuition

Almost everybody has heard about the big bang. That marked the beginning of our universe some 13.8 billion years ago, which has been expanding ever since. But it is very difficult for most of us, me certainly included, to get a solid understanding of what the big bang really was. That's because our common sense intuitions of reality, which are founded in everyday experience, aren't of much help in domains of science such as quantum mechanics and big bang cosmology. Religions appeal to those intuitions by making the creation of the universe into something our minds can easily grasp. Like,…
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Posted inReality Universe

Likely we don’t even know the questions to ask of the cosmos

We all have questions. About all kinds of stuff. What's wrong with my computer? Who will win the next presidential election? Is that lump on my chest anything to be concerned about? Almost always, our questions are presumed to have answers. Maybe not right now, but eventually. The winner of the 2024 presidential election will be known after the votes are counted, not before. Until then all we can do is wait. And hope. That's when I turn a bit religious, even though I'm an atheist: Dear God, please don't let Donald Trump win a second term! But the questions…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Religion hates mystery. Science loves mystery.

Recently there's been a comment conversation on this blog about the religious philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Christian. I've never been interested in his theology, since like most avid religious believers, Aquinas wants to use philosophy to defend his faith, not to engage in a search for truth. Wikipedia has a cogent criticism of Aquinas by Bertrand Russell. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

New Scientist story by Heinrich Päs about quantum oneness

I got excited when I saw the cover of the most recent issue of New Scientist that appeared in our mailbox a few days ago. Ooh! "A bold new way to think about how the universe fits together" Bring it on! When I turned to the cover story, which is called Reality Reconstructed in the print edition, I saw that the author was Heinrich Päs, the theoretical physicist who wrote The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, which I've written previous blog posts about here, here, and here.  As noted in the third post, Päs devotes…
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Posted inUniverse

The universe has a plan for me. It’s what’s happening right now.

Religious people often say, "God has a plan for me." People who fall into the spiritual-but-not-religious camp often say, "The universe has a plan for me." Deepak Chopra assures us this is the case. Some Googling revealed lots of examples of the second variety of planning. I looked at a few.  In The Universe Always Has A Plan, I read:  You aren’t sad because you are an unhappy person. You are experiencing sadness as part of your healing journey, to create space for more light to be embodied. You will receive everything you desire at exactly the moment in time…
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Posted inScience Universe

Science says about dark energy: “So the mystery continues”

One of the most amazing scientific facts is how much of the universe is unknown to science. About 95%. As discussed in the NASA article below (I copied it from a NASA web site), currently about 68% of all the stuff in the universe is considered to be dark energy, and nobody knows what it is. Another 27% is dark matter, and nobody knows what it is. That leaves 5% normal matter, and we do know what that is.  Except the article says, Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is…
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Posted inUniverse

The universe is mind-blowingly huge

In my current atheist state of mind, I find thoughts about God thoroughly uninspiring. After all, how is it possible to be inspired or awestruck by an entity that almost certainly doesn't exist? Or at the very least, has no demonstrable evidence in support of its existence. But the universe... Ah, that's something which obviously exists, and science knows enough about it for awe to be an entirely reasonable reaction to the immensity that not only surrounds us, but is us. The July 30 issue of New Scientist features a cover story called Your Brief Guide to Everything Ever: An…
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Posted inScience Universe

In science, intuition arises from facts, not facts from intuition

I found a column by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein in the July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist interesting for several reasons.  This professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire has a take on the expanding universe that I hadn't come across before. As she says in the column, the simplest way to describe this is a familiar one: just as the distance between dots on a balloon that fills with air will increase as the balloon expands, so do galaxies within our universe. But this image is misleading, because a balloon exists in a larger reality, like…
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Posted inReality Universe

Mystery of existence is a chill up the spine, not a concept

For many years I've gotten a thrill out of the mystery of existence.  This has nothing to do with what exists. It's all about the brute fact that something exists. Now, that something might well be infinite. For sure it's huge -- countless billions of light years huge. And it's old -- at least 13.8 billion years old and possibly infinitely old. All that is irrelevant when talking about the mystery of existence.  What blows my mind with marvelous regularity is the chill-up-the-spine realization that all this, no matter what it consists of -- is equally present at the tips…
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Posted inReality Universe

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed

Recently I got this email from a fellow marveler at the inescapable fact that existence must always have existed in some form, or the universe we are a part of couldn't have come to be.  Hello Brian, I recently read this article of yours and was amazed how precisely it described the issue that's been on my mind for a long time. It seems inescapable to posit that something has always existed, something that never had a beginning. And as you point out in the article, trying to conceive and imagine that seems impossible: "the very possibility of cognizing an answer vanishes". And I…
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Posted inMorality Universe

Rejoice in the glorious indifference of the universe

I'm no Carl Sagan, but after coming up with the thought expressed in the title of this blog post I did some Googling to find an image to share which expressed that sentiment. So Carl Sagan and I are on the same indifferent wavelength, the difference regarding our realization of indifference perhaps being that I find this worthy of rejoicing in the gloriousness of it. Which is a decidedly minority opinion, because most people fall into these Belief Camps, which are not mutually exclusive: (1) Believing in a God who loves us, cares for us, watches out for us. Usually…
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Posted inUniverse

Subjectivity is innate to material reality

Since I'm not privy to the Secret of Ultimate Reality, naturally I don't know whether this letter-writer's thesis is correct: that subjectivity is innate to material reality.But what Godwin says in his letter in the December 10 issue of New Scientist is both provocative and possible. He raises good questions. "What would be the substance of a universe with no subjectivity, unable to experience its own existence? How could such a universe ever be shown to exist, and by and to whom?" At first I thought this sounded unduly anthropomorphic. However, on second thought this letter points at issues raised…
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Posted inReality Universe

“Existence exists” — the cosmic lock to which humans have no key

I'm obsessed, in a pleasing way, with a cosmic notion: existence exists.  (A Google search of my blogs reveals the posts where I've tried to "eff" this ineffable subject. Some are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Seemingly there's not much I could add to what I've said about this ultimate mystery. Except... what I'm going to add right now. Which is another attempt to speak about the unspeakable feeling that comes over me when I contemplate the fact that existence exists. This feeling can't be produced on demand. Right now I'm talking about a memory of it,…
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Posted inScience Universe

The “self” is like a web without a spider

Self... who am I? Will... who controls what I do? Being... do I continue on after death? These are big questions. Humans have struggled to find answers to them from the beginning of recorded history, and surely long before that.  Most people accept a view that is common to most religions: I am something other than my physical body; call it soul or spirit. I have free will; so I am responsible for my actions. I possess, or am, a non-material essence that is unaffected by physical death. Well, maybe.  But these answers go against the grain of modern science.…
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Posted inReality Universe

Wow! Existence has always existed.

I've done a lot of pondering about the primal mystery of existence. As noted in the essay I wrote this month for the Spiritual Naturalist Society, I've gone from being blown away by the classic question Why is there something rather than nothing? to being awestruck at the amazing affirmation, There is something rather than nothing. Read on... --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wow! Existence has always existed. Awe-inspiring. Spine-tingling. Vertigo-inducing. Something frequently produces these feelings in me. It isn’t a theme park ride. In fact, it isn’t even a thing. It is everything. Existence. Just typing that word produced a chill up my spine — a…
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Posted inReligions Science Universe

Given size of the universe, is creation really all about us?

Religious belief involves lots of absurdities. For me, one of the biggest ones is the assumption that humans are the Big Deal of the universe.  Whether it be Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or some other major religion, theologies differ about how people are special in the eye of God, Brahman, or whatever, but they agree that members of a recently evolved species on Earth, Homo sapiens, occupy a central place in the cosmic scheme of things. This is really difficult for me to accept for various reasons. One is our modern understanding of the size of the universe. Consider... (1) Light…
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Posted inReality Universe

Even God can’t explain the mystery of existence

Re-reading the first chapter of Luther Askeland's "Ways in Mystery" this morning (one of my favorite meaning-of-life books), I liked how Askeland addressed The Seemingly Really Big Question of Existence. The Way of Unknowing chapter starts off with a Wittgenstein quote: Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. Now, I've come to doubt that this that mystery is really as mystically mysterious as it appears to be. Maybe the classic question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" simply should be rephrased as a statement: "There is something rather than nothing." Offering support to  this…
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Posted inBooks Science Universe

Here’s a science book with a radical view of reality

Oh, man. I'm so glad I got pulled in by the Book Magnet.  That's how I explained my purchase of two thick, serious books to the cashier at the Book Bin in downtown Salem, Oregon. I'd parked my car in front of the bookstore, gone to my Tai Chi class, and was all set to drive home until, poised to unlock the car door... Go inside and check out the new books, the everpresent voice inside my head told me. Must obey, I happily told myself. "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" stared me in the face almost…
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Posted inMiracles Universe

No, the universe didn’t “have a message for me”

Giving up religiosity doesn't happen all at once. At least, not in my case. I wasn't able to go cold turkey, so to speak, and give up my addiction to unfounded faith-based beliefs all at once. They just have gradually lessened, weakened, become much less powerful.  Yet in subtler forms, my previous attachment to feeling that I'm being watched over by an all-knowing, all-loving transcendental presence still is evident from time to time.  Like, last Thursday.  It was a potentially traumatic day for me. After having my hair cut by the same person for 37 years, Betsy departed for central Oregon. But she…
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Posted inScience Universe

No need for “making” in a mathematical universe. It just “is.”

I've finished Max Tegmark's fascinating "Our Mathematical Universe," a book I blogged about before here. The final chapter was a bit of a letdown. Tegmark ambled off into extraneous subjects, like how Earth might come to its demise and whether other conscious entities exist in the universe. Surprisingly, Tegmark thinks we humans probably are the most intelligent life-form in the universe. If true, and I doubt that it is, that's depressing. Geez, 14 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, and Homo sapiens are the most sapient entities the cosmos could come up with? But I still enjoyed the…
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