Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

So the first debate is in the history book being written by the Faux News Network. And I understand that Bill O’Reilly is writing another book, entitled “Who Killed America”, in which he blames the political campaign season for the demise of America the Beautiful. I understand that he and Jon Stewart collaborated on the book (well technically, they each wrote half, and O’Reilly is still arguing about whose half gets to go first).

I know that some people think that it wasn’t POTUS who showed up at the debate but his body double, supplied by the Secret Service (SS). Others argue that he was out drinking champagne with Michelle to celebrate his victory over the Mittster, since he was certain that his pet rock might have been able to beat Romney.

But No, everyone insists that Romney won.  But what they don’t say, or perhaps don’t agree on is, just exactly what he won. Liar of the Year???

Let’s see, he came on stage, played the part of the Village Liberal by lying about his proposals to make them look like a far lefty had written his answers. Obama was so taken aback by Romney’s absurdist replies to questions that he was unable to respond himself.  In her Sunday column, Maureen Dowd nailed the whole thing, when she made Obama sit down with President  Bartlett (even better than Clint arguing with an empty chair) who posed as Romney, while coaching POTUS on how he should have replied.

Dowd goes on . . .

“BARTLET “I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare.”

OBAMA The $716 billion I’ve cut is from the providers, not the beneficiaries. I think that’s a better idea than cutting the exact same $716 billion and replacing it with a gift certificate, which is what’s contained in the plan that’s named for your running mate.

BARTLET “Pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.”

OBAMA Not unless you’ve come up with a new plan since this afternoon.

BARTLET “You doubled the deficit.”

OBAMA When I took office in 2009, the deficit was 1.4 trillion. According to the C.B.O., the deficit for 2012 will be 1.1 trillion. Either you have the mathematics aptitude of a Shetland pony or, much more likely, you’re lying.

BARTLET “All of the increase in natural gas has happened on private land, not on government land. On government land, your administration has cut the number of permits and licenses in half.”

OBAMA Maybe your difficulty is with the words “half” and “double.” Oil production on federal land is higher, not lower. And the oil and gas industry are currently sitting on 7,000 approved permits to drill on government land that they’ve not yet begun developing.

BARTLET “I think about half the green firms you’ve invested in have gone out of business.”

OBAMA Yeah, your problem’s definitely with the word “half.” As of this moment there have been 26 recipients of loan guarantees — 23 of which are very much in business. What was Bain’s bankruptcy record again?

BARTLET And finally?

OBAMA Governor, if your ideas are the right ideas for our country, if you have a plan and it’s the best plan for our future, if your vision is the best vision for all of us and not 53 percent of us, why aren’t you able to make that case in the same ZIP code as the truth?

BARTLET And?

OBAMA Tell John Sununu anytime he wants to teach me how to be more American he knows my address for the next four years. He used to have an office there before he was fired. “

So, maybe Maureen Dowd should be POTUS’ coach for the next session. She knows how to speak truth to inanity.

 

Reality & Perception

"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to perceive it, does it make a sound?"

Philosopher George Berkeley, in his work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), proposes, "But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park [...] and nobody by to perceive them. [...] The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden [...] no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them."^[1] Nevertheless, Berkeley never actually wrote about the question.

Berkeley's example is referred to by William Fossett twenty years later in a consideration of the emergence of meaning: "[T]ease apart the threads [of the natural world] and the pattern vanishes. The design is in how the cloth-maker arranges the threads: this way and that, as fashion dictates. [...] To say something is meaningful is to say that that is how we arrange it so; how we comprehend it to be, and what is comprehended by you or I may not be by a cat, for example. If a tree falls in a park and there is no-one to hand, it is silent and invisible and nameless. And if we were to vanish, there would be no tree at all; any meaning would vanish along with us. Other than what the cats make of it all, of course."^[2]

Some years later, a similar question is posed. It is unknown whether the source of this question is Berkeley or not. In June 1883 in the magazine The Chautauquan, the question was put, "If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?" They then went on to answer the query with, "No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion."^[3] This seems to imply that the question is posed not from a philosophical viewpoint, but from a purely scientific one. The magazine Scientific American corroborated the technical aspect of this question, while leaving out the philosophic side, a year later when they asked the question slightly reworded, "If a tree were to fall on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound?" And gave a more technical answer, "Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound."^[4]

There is a well-known story of Hui-neng, a well-respected Buddhist monk who later became known as the founder of the Zen school, who one day happened to be passing by two monks.

"Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, "The flag moves." The other said, "The wind moves." They argued back and forth but could not agree.

The Sixth Ancestor said, "Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves." The two monks were struck with awe."

- The Mumonkan Case 29, translation by Robert Aitken

 

And if humankind becomes extinct, and no one is around to pray,

Does God still exist?

On the Zen of the Big Bang and Nothingness

My good friend George commented on my Zen of Nothingness posting, to wit:
"Your mistakes are too numerous to discuss individually; we will need several hours to do that!
But your basic mistake is straightforward: You're looking at only one side of a two-sided state-of-being. Try thinking about what existed before the Big Bang. How did our "something" come into existence out of "nothing"? When you get a handle on that question you'll have a better understanding of what happens next."
So, I thought it might be useful to share with our readers a few of the lines of thinking about what existed before the Big Bang. There are many, but here are three I recently came across.
Just trying to be helpful here.

The Birth of Time: Quantum Loops Describe the Evolution of the Universe

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2010) — What was the Big Bang and what happened before it? Scientists from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw have attempted to answer the question. Within the framework of loop quantum gravity they have put forward a new theoretical model, which might prove useful for validating hypotheses about events prior to the Big Bang. This achievement is one of the few models describing the full Einstein's theory and not merely its greatly simplified version.

---

Physicists from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw have put forward -- on the pages of Physical Review D -- a new theoretical model of quantum gravity describing the emergence of space-time from the structures of quantum theory. It is not only one of the few models describing the full general theory of relativity advanced by Einstein, but it is also completely mathematically consistent. "The solutions applied allow to trace the evolution of the Universe in a more physically acceptable manner than in the case of previous cosmological models," explains Prof. Jerzy Lewandowski from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw (FUW).

While the general theory of relativity is applied to describe the Universe on a cosmological scale, quantum mechanics is applied to describe reality on an atomic scale. Both theories were developed in the early 20th century. Their validity has since been confirmed by highly sophisticated experiments and observations. The problem lies in the fact that the theories are mutually exclusive.

According to the general theory of relativity, reality is always uniquely determined (as in classical mechanics). However, time and space play an active role in the events and are themselves subject to Einstein's equations. According to quantum physics, on the other hand, one may only gain a rough understanding of nature. A prediction can only be made with a probability; its precision being limited by inherent properties. But the laws of the prevailing quantum theories do not apply to time and space. Such contradictions are irrelevant under standard conditions -- galaxies are not subject to quantum phenomena and quantum gravity plays a minor role in the world of atoms and particles. Nonetheless, gravity and quantum effects need to merge under conditions close to the Big Bang.

Traditional cosmological models describe the evolution of the Universe within the framework of the general theory of relativity itself. The equations at the core of the theory suggest that the Universe is a dynamic, constantly expanding creation. When theorists attempt to discover what the Universe was like in times gone by, they reach the stage where density and temperature in the model become infinite -- in other words, they lose their physical sense. Thus, the infinities may only be indicative of the weaknesses of the former theory and the moment of the Big Bang does not have to signify the birth of the Universe.

In order to gain at least some knowledge of quantum gravity, scientists construct simplified quantum models, known as quantum cosmological models, in which space-time and matter are expressed in a single value or a few values alone. For example, the model developed by Ashtekar, Bojowald, Lewandowski, Pawłowski and Singh predicts that quantum gravity prevents the increase of matter energy density from exceeding a certain critical value (of the order of the Planck density). Consequently, there must have been a contracting universe prior to the Big Bang. When matter density had reached the critical value, there followed a rapid expansion -- the Big Bang, known as the Big Bounce. However, the model is a highly simplified toy model.

The real answer to the mystery of the Big Bang lies in a unified quantum theory of matter and gravity. One attempt at developing such a theory is loop quantum gravity (LQG). The theory holds that space is weaved from one-dimensional threads. "It is just like in the case of a fabric -- although it is seemingly smooth from a distance, it becomes evident at close quarters that it consists of a network of fibres," describes Wojciech Kamiński, MSc from FUW. Such space would constitute a fine fabric -- an area of a square centimetre would consists of 10⁶⁶ threads.

Physicists Marcin Domagała, Wojciech Kamiński and Jerzy Lewandowski, together with Kristina Giesel from the Louisiana State University (guest), developed their model within the framework of loop quantum gravity. The starting points for the model are two fields, one of which is a gravitational field. "Thanks to the general theory of relativity we know that gravity is the very geometry of space-time. We may, therefore, say that our point of departure is three-dimensional space," explains Marcin Domagała, PhD (FUW).

The second starting point is a scalar field -- a mathematical object in which a particular value is attributed to every point in space. In the proposed model, scalar fields are interpreted as the simplest form of matter. Scalar fields have been known in physics for years, they are applied, among others, to describe temperature and pressure distribution in space. "We have opted for a scalar field as it is the typical feature of contemporary cosmological models and our aim is to develop a model that would constitute another step forward in quantum gravity research," observes Prof. Lewandowski.

In the model developed by physicists from Warsaw, time emerges as the relation between the gravitational field (space) and the scalar field -- a moment in time is given by the value of the scalar field. "We pose the question about the shape of space at a given value of the scalar field and Einstein's quantum equations provide the answer," explains Prof. Lewandowski. Thus, the phenomenon of the passage of time emerges as the property of the state of the gravitational and scalar fields and the appearance of such a state corresponds to the birth of the well-known space-time. "It is worthy of note that time is nonexistent at the beginning of the model. Nothing happens. Action and dynamics appear as the interrelation between the fields when we begin to pose questions about how one object relates to another," explains Prof. Lewandowski.

Physicist from FUW have made it possible to provide a more accurate description of the evolution of the Universe. Whereas models based on the general theory of relativity are simplified and assume the gravitational field at every point of the Universe to be identical or subject to minor changes, the gravitational field in the proposed model may differ at different points in space.

The proposed theoretical construction is the first such highly advanced model characterized by internal mathematical consistency. It comes as the natural continuation of research into quantization of gravity, where each new theory is derived from classical theories. To that end, physicists apply certain algorithms, known as quantizations. "Unfortunately for physicists, the algorithms are far from precise. For example, it may follow from an algorithm that a Hilbert space needs to be constructed, but no details are provided," explains Marcin Domagała, MSc. "We have succeeded in performing a full quantization and obtained one of the possible models."

There is still a long way to go, according to Prof. Lewandowski: "We have developed a certain theoretical machinery. We may begin to ply it with questions and it will provide the answers." Theorists from FUW intend, among others, to inquire whether the Big Bounce actually occurs in their model. "In the future, we will try to include in the model further fields of the Standard Model of elementary particles. We are curious ourselves to find out what will happen," says Prof. Lewandowski. 

 

 

 

And for those of you not already hopelessly lost in the mists of time and QuantumTalk, here is yet another discussion of this same basic question. 

What happened before the Big Bang?

We spend a lot of time thinking about futurism, but the past is pretty interesting, too. In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we get extra speculative and think about what things may have been like before the beginning of time. What was there before the Big Bang? Did anything exist before our current universe? Here's what we know.

For the most part, I try to keep these columns as by-the-numbers as possible. I generally want to focus on the consensus view of physics, and only like to veer off into the realm of crackpot science and speculation every so often.

But sometimes people have burning questions that they need answered that physics doesn't have an authoritative answer to. Discussion section, here's your lucky day! Step into your time cube and consider a question put to me by Dave Ranautta and several others. They ask:

What was there before the big bang? I appreciate that there are no facts concerning what existed prior (if anything) but are there popular theories?

Standard Answer: Nothing. So please don't ask.

I've talked a lot about the expanding universe in this column. The standard picture comes from general relativity, which describes a sort of stretching of space-time. The normal analogy is to think of us as ants on a balloon. In the past, the universe (aka "the balloon") was smaller than it is now, and, taken far enough back, the universe, presumably, was a single point. That was the moment of the big bang.

In the normal general relativity picture of things, the moment of creation produced not only space, but time; the two are incredibly intermixed, after all. To Einstein, talking about what happened before the Big Bang is just as nonsensical as asking what happens if you travel north of the North Pole. There just isn't just a place, or consequently such a time.

This is likely to make people squeamish. After all, if there was no time before the Big Bang (or no space, for that matter) where did we come from? Shouldn't there be something resembling causality in the universe?

What are our options?

We have some wiggle room, however. As I've discussed previously (and far less speculatively) not only don't we know what happened before the Big Bang, we don't even know what happened in the instant immediately following the Big Bang.

Our knowledge of physics in the first 10^-44 seconds after the beginning (which, admittedly, is a pretty damn short time) is virtually non-existent. This instant is known as the Planck Time, and since we don't know what happened before the Planck time with anything even remotely resembling certainty, we absolutely don't know what happened before the Big Bang. Regardless, logic dictates that we're left with one of two possibilities:

§  The universe had some sort of beginning, in which case we're left with the very unsettling problem of what caused the universe in the first place.

§  The universe has been around forever, in which case there's literally an infinite amount of history, both before and after us.

Neither of these is satisfying. Take the Old Testament view, for instance. We're to understand that God created the world. In that case our universe has a definite beginning. However, God himself is supposed to be eternal. What was he doing before he created our universe? It's no more satisfying to assert that the universe has been here all along. Is there literally an infinite amount of history? That doesn't make sense.

As a particularly clever cheat (or theory, if you prefer), in 1982 Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University showed how what we've learned from quantum mechanics might shed light on the how the universe popped into being.

Model #1: The Universe out of Nothing

Vilenkin noted that if we were to somehow start with a small bubble of a universe, two things could happen. If it were large enough, it would undergo exponential growth — just like our universe did in the first instants. If it were small, it would collapse.

Here's where things get weird. Quantum mechanics predicts all sorts of strange things, including half-dead/half-alive cats, or the possibility of teleportation. It also predicts the possibility that apparently impossible things are really just improbable. Image by CottonIJoe/Flickr.

For instance, it's possible (but brain-bendingly unlikely) that you could spontaneously find yourself teleported to Alpha Centauri (readers: please insert obligatory Hitchiker's reference here). More commonly radioactive decay can be thought of as a small piece of an atomic nucleus that shouldn't really be able to escape from the rest somehow randomly tunneling away. The universe is just like that sometimes.

In the same way, a small universe can randomly tunnel into a larger one. The amazing thing about Vilenkin's model is that even if you make the "little" universe as small as you like, this tunneling still can occur. It even works if the little universe has no size at all. You know what we call something with no size?

Nothing.

Prior to the Big Bang, the state of the universe was something that possessed (no fooling) zero size and for which time was essentially undefined. The universe then tunneled out of nothing into the expanding universe we know and love.

The problem is that the "nothing" that the universe popped out of wasn't really nothing. It had to know about quantum mechanics somehow, and we've always been taught to think that the physics is a property of the universe. It's troubling to think that the physics existed before the universe did, or, for that matter, before time did.

Of course, this is the basic problem with any definite origin for the universe. Somehow all of the complexity had to be created from nothing, and it's difficult to reconcile that.

The other possibility seems equally troubling. The universe might literally be eternal — or at least have an infinite history. While it's not clear what the theological implications of an infinite universe, we can at least try to figure out how an infinite universe might work.

Model #2: The Universe gave birth to itself

In 1998, J. Richard Gott and Li Xin Li, both then at Princeton, proposed a model in which the universe arose from what can only be described as a time machine. Gott and Li showed that it was possible to solve Einstein's equations of general relativity in such a way that a universe started off going around and around in a continuous loop, and that that loop could serve as the "trunk" of a tree that sprouted, giving rise to our own universe. Since a picture says a thousand words, let's illustrate with their own figure.Credit J.R. Gott and L.-X. Li
The way to read this image is that for the most part, time travels from bottom to top, and that everything begins with the little loop at the bottom. That is the origin of the universe. This means that the universe has no beginning, since the loop goes around and around infinitely.

We can talk about the "time after the Big Bang" as the time after the loop sprouted off into the future and a universe was born. You'll also notice that there isn't just a single horn coming out of the initial time loop, but many. This is totally consistent with the concept of a multiverse, just to add another level of speculative awesomeness to the discussion.

Model #3: This Is Not the First Universe

For a long time, cosmologists played around with the idea that the universe might ultimately collapse on itself. Then, in 1998, two teams discovered that the universe was accelerating, essentially demonstrating that we were way off base. You may also recall that these folks won the Nobel prize this year for their discovery.

Even though on the surface it doesn't look as though our universe will ultimately collapse under its own weight, there is still a great deal of allure to this picture. If the universe were somehow to end in a big crunch, then maybe what's really happening is that we'll eternally undergo a series of expansions and contractions, on and on for infinity. Our universe, in this case, is just one in an infinite series.

The problem with this (besides the fact that there is too little stuff in our universe to make it collapse again) is one of disorder. As we've discussed previously, the universe loves disorder. If you've ever stacked soda cans, there's only one way to stack them, and that's straight up. But if you knock them over, they go everywhere. There are more ways to destroy a soda can tower then there are to build one, and as time goes on, the universe finds ways of destroying all other forms of order, too.

If our universe was the result of a series of expansions and collapses, then our Big Bang occurred billions or trillions of years after some beginning (and what caused that?), so it would have had a very long time to get disordered. But it isn't. Looking back, our universe was very smooth, and in a very high state of order. This wouldn't solve the problem at all.

But in recent years, there have been a number of new cyclic models that allow an eternal universe to exist. In 2002, Paul Steinhardt, of Princeton University, and Neil Turok, of Cambridge, devised a model that exploits the extra dimensions found in string theory. String theory supposes that our universe might not be three-dimensional at all, but might have as many as ten spatial dimensions. Our own universe might simply live on a three-dimensional membrane (or "brane" for short) that is floating through the universe, barely interacting with the other universes.

However, the different branes (universes) could interact gravitationally. In this model, the dark energy that accelerates the universe isn't a real thing at all, but just a remnant of the gravitational attraction between branes, and the dark matter is just ordinary matter on the other, nearby brane. Occasionally the branes collide with one another, which would set off "Big Bangs" within the different branes and then everything would proceed as we've already seen.

These models are extremely elegant and deal with the whole "increase of disorder" problem in a really novel way. In cycle after cycle, the branes get more and more stretchy, which means that the disorder gets spread out over a larger and larger volume. The local patch that we call our universe, however, is just a small patch of the brane, so we seem to start nearly from scratch at each go-round. It sounds great, but a big problem is that these models require string theory to be correct, and on that the jury is definitely still out.

And there are even more models, some including extra dimensions, some include concepts like "loop quantum gravity," some infinite in time, and some with a definite duration. At the end of the day, the Big Bang theory has the same basic problem as evolutionary theory. Both do a nearly perfect job in explaining how the universe (or life) changed when it first came about, but neither can explain how things really got started in the first place.

This column was adapted from parts of Chapter 7 of A User's Guide to the Universe.

Dave Goldberg is the author, with Jeff Blomquist, of "A User's Guide to the Universe." (follow us on twitter, facebook, twitter or our blog.) He is an Associate Professor of Physics at Drexel University and is currently working on "The Universe in the Rearview Mirror," a new book all about symmetry that will be published by Dutton in 2013. Please send email to askaphysicist@io9.com with any questions about the universe.

 

Now, for those of you who like to obtain "all the news that's fit to print" from our very own NY Times, here is their interpretation of the question.

What Happened Before the Big Bang?

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: November 11, 2003

Like baseball, in which three strikes make an out, three outs on a side make an inning, nine innings make a regular game, the universe makes its own time. There is no outside timekeeper. Space and time are part of the universe, not the other way around, thinkers since Augustine have said, and that is one of the central and haunting lessons of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

In explaining gravity as the ''bending'' of space-time geometry, Einstein's theory predicted the expansion of the universe, the primal fact of 20th-century astronomy. By imagining the expansion going backward, like a film in reverse, cosmologists have traced the history of the universe credibly back to a millionth of a second after the Big Bang that began it all.

But to ask what happened before the Big Bang is a little bit like asking who was on base before the first pitch was thrown out in a game, say between the Yankees and the Red Sox. There was no ''then'' then.

Still, this has not stopped some theorists with infinity in their eyes from trying to imagine how the universe made its ''quantum leap from eternity into time,'' as the physicist Dr. Sidney Coleman of Harvard once put it.

Some physicists speculate that on the other side of the looking glass of Time Zero is another universe going backward in time. Others suggest that creation as we know it is punctuated by an eternal dance of clashing island universes.

In their so-called quantum cosmology, Dr. Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and author, and his collaborators envision the universe as a kind of self-contained entity, a crystalline melt of all possibilities existing in ''imaginary time.''

All these will remain just fancy ideas until physicists have married Einstein's gravity to the paradoxical quantum laws that describe behavior of subatomic particles. Such a theory of quantum gravity, scientists agree, is needed to describe the universe when it was so small and dense that even space and time become fuzzy and discontinuous. ''Our clocks and our rulers break,'' as Dr. Andrei Linde, a Stanford cosmologist likes to put it.

At the moment there are two pretenders to the throne of that ultimate theory. One is string theory, the putative ''theory of everything,'' which posits that the ultimate constituents of nature are tiny vibrating strings rather than points. String theorists have scored some striking successes in the study of black holes, in which matter has been compressed to catastrophic densities similar to the Big Bang, but they have made little progress with the Big Bang itself.

String's lesser-known rival, called loop quantum gravity, is the result of applying quantum strictures directly to Einstein's equations. This theory makes no pretensions to explaining anything but gravity and space-time. But recently Dr. Martin Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, found that using the theory he could follow the evolution of the universe back past the alleged beginning point. Instead of having a ''zero moment'' of infinite density -- a so-called singularity -- the universe instead behaved as if it were contracting from an earlier phase, according to the theory, he said. As if the Big Bang were a big bounce.

 

Oh, there's one minor problem I have noted in all of the material I have read on Quantum Physics. None of it seems to shed any light on what happens to us after our filament burns out and we go dark. Maybe we need to consult one of our Quantum Physicists about that minor omission in their papers. Dr. Hawking . . .??? Dr. Einstein . . .Hello??? Anyone there???

The Zen of Nothingness

It must be a Zen thing.  How to think about . . . nothing.  No really. Try thinking about . . . nothing.  I think we can’t do it.  The best you can do is to think about thinking about nothing.

But imagine for a second that Jesus Christ, Mohamed, Buddha and Krishna were all real, but just, well, guys. You know, dudes who were born, grew up, said a lot of interesting things, hung out with some other interesting dudes, and then, at some stage, died, that is, ceased to exist.  And that was it.  They didn’t rise to heaven, or wherever it is a Buddha or Mohamed might go (into the energy ether, I suppose). No, they simply ceased functioning and their earthly shells gradually deteriorated, like everyone else.

And the reason? Well, one possibility would be that, there is nothing that follows life. And that’s why you might want to imagine/think about nothing. Because, some day, that just might happen. That is, you’re alive at one second, and not the next. And you don’t wake up in a bus that is carrying you to heaven, along with a bunch of other passengers. Neither do you emerge into a fairy land in which all of your close friends and family are awaiting your arrival. Instead, your mind simply ceases to function. It all goes blank—dark I suppose, except that dark always implies light somewhere. Instead, there is . . . nothing.  And you don’t know it. Because you are no longer here, there, or anywhere. What would that be like? Well, I imagine it wouldn’t be “like” anything.

Suppose, just suppose that it’s true. Nothing follows being.  See, that’s what I have trouble conceiving. That nothing thing.

And, I imagine, that was one of several reasons that early people, dudes mainly, invented God and heaven and all that fairy tale stuff.  People couldn’t look around them, see all of the world’s wonders and imagine that there wasn’t some big guy somewhere who  invented all that stuff.  And like everything else that develops slowly over a long time, the fairy tale just kept getting larger and more elaborate over that very long time. Then someone invented writing and guys began writing down what they had been told by other guys. And guys in different parts of the world invented different versions of this fairy tale, much as plants and animals emerge differently over very long time periods in different parts of the world.  If plants become very complicated as they develop over eons, surely the fairy tale would become very complicated.

Now, the fairy tale was invented for more than one reason surely. First and foremost is this notion that we can’t really grasp this concept of living one second and not living the next. I mean, we know it happens, because we see it routinely. But what we don’t see is the possible reality that nothing follows something. We needed to invent a continuum of somethings that follow the dying bit. But, the more clever dudes who were writing this all down, or maybe the ones who were dictating the tale, began thinking that they might become relatively more influential with this crowd of dummies if they could pretend to knowledge that they didn’t have, I.e., the knowledge of what happens after the dying thing.

Because if they have some special knowledge, then the dummies—ordinary folks like you and me—might go to them for advice. And soon, people would be lined up at the door, asking questions. And the more questions the smart dude answered, the more elaborate would become his “understanding” of the fairy tale. And he would continue elaborating the fairy tale, until it spilled over into multiple chapters and then the chapters into “books”.

Soon, the dude would begin dressing differently, so that he would be recognized whenever he left his house. And the ordinary folks might begin deferring to him, clearing a path, bowing.

Thus beginneth the lesson about priests.

And think for a moment, how elaborate that tale could become over, say a thousand years.  And how the fairy tale would become multiple fairy tales, depending on where you live. So, a fairy tale in India might include stories about the different strata of people, and how some types of people are better than other types of people.

But the biggie in all these tales would be what happens after the dying thing.  Each culture would invent something different, including that oldie but goodie-- the  return to a new life thing that Hindu’s prefer. I have never really understood the appeal of that one, if you never realize you are in a subsequent life. I mean, wouldn’t it have been better to portray a follow-on life as a state of being in which you get smarter?

I can sort of “get” the afterlife thing in which you join with your family and your buddies, and sit around on clouds playing harps and flapping your angelic wings once in a while. But I have always wondered about the crowds. Do you get your own cloud space? And can you actually converse with your great, great grandfolks, or, better yet, with dudes like John Kennedy, or Napoleon? And does everyone speak English up there?? And what about all the cockroaches?

I really wonder about the 71 virgin thing. Some dude gets killed defending the regime and then, when he arrives in heaven, he is given 71 virgin playthings?  So, what did they do to deserve that fate??

See, lots of questions.

So, for me, the fairy tale is about as plausible as Santa hiding away in some really cold North Pole location, with his factory manned by elves, making toys to be delivered by sleigh to good boys and girls.  Yeah, right . . .

Which brings me right back to square one—the nothing thing. As much as I really, really hate the idea, it seems the most plausible outcome. One second, you’re a living, sentient being. The next your mind is gone. And even “gone” is misleading, because it implies a journey. No, what I think happens is that we simply cease to function and we aren’t anywhere. And we don’t know it, because there is no mind any longer.

So, what does nothing mean?  Unless of course, it means nothing.

But even if we could derive some understanding of this nothing thing, what would it mean, were everyone on earth to awaken tomorrow morning and decide that sometime in their future, they would enter this state of nothing and cease to exist, sort of like a light bulb burning out? Would they act nicer to other people, or would they all turn into schmucks like Mitt Romney, deciding that, since nothing follows, I have to get it all here and now, and nobody better get in my way? Is that what might happen? Would guys still strap dynamite vests on and go out to blow themselves and other to oblivion?  What’s the payoff to doing that? Better, perhaps, to have another cup of wine and dream about a better tomorrow.  Would guys with rifles and bayonets still charge the hill to kill other guys, knowing that they might well get killed--cease to exist-- in the process?

I rather imagine that a lot of things might change, perhaps the biggest being one’s willingness to die for God and Country. I had enough trouble with that one even before the nothing thing entered my brain. But now, I cannot even imagine what would cause someone to join the marines, or the infantry, knowing that you might be told to “win Gallipoli” for the Gipper.  I guess being a flyer, or a navy guy might still look ok, since you have all that hardware between you and the presumed bad guys.

But, I wonder, in the absence of any belief in the hereafter, or any belief in the Big Guy up in the sky, or the Big Guy’s prophets, would there be any point to “Alternate Belief Systems” wars? I mean, what would we fight about then?  I guess we could still decide to fight to give Mitt a larger share of the pie than he already has, but guys with a limited lifespan and nothing to follow, might just tire of trying to make Mitt even richer than he already is.  So greed would work as a warrior theme, only if the guys charging that hill were guaranteed a share of the larger pie that might follow, say their own oil well in Iraq.

Now, I think that everyone would not suddenly turn nice and act reasonable, or even civil. Some people are genetically programmed to act stupidly, or recklessly. I suppose they would continue acting that way. But still, there probably wouldn’t be any more of them than we have now, arguably  fewer I imagine.

Well, this all requires some more imagining, you know, since thinking about nothing is so damned difficult.  We’ll return another day. Perhaps a nice nap would be good . . .

So endeth the first lesson about Nothingness.

 

When Anarchy Matters

There is much discussion now concerning the extent to which various “nations” in the Middle East have functional governments. The latest to be questioned is Tunisia, but Libya, Afghanistan,  Iraq all seem to be candidates for the term anarchic states.  Anarchy exists when the people in a region do not demand the rule of law. This would characterize virtually the entire Arab world, a region in which Israel has been the only nation with a democratically elected government. And why Israel?? Well, what is Israel but a European nation state that has been transplanted into the Middle East? So, a little slice of Europe has been set down in a region of nomadic, vaguely 13^th century peoples, all of whom are ruled by tyrants.  I have often believed that we would have been better off, far better, had we donated Florida to the Jewish people after WW II to found the democratic state of Israel there. Think of the global troubles the world would have avoided. Think of how many people would be alive today had we done that.

With innocents convinced routinely if not daily to strap dynamite around their middle, walk into a crowded marketplace and detonate themselves, this satisfies my definition of anarchy.  Anarchy exists when you cannot count on going outside without running the risk of being shot, or blown up by someone with whom you have no quarrel. It would be like getting into your car, entering the street without the assurance that people will agree to stay on their side of the road.

Now, throughout the Middle East, it has been the case that such rules exist only by virtue of the tyrants who rule the region with an iron fist—police states modeled on the monarchies that used to exist centuries ago. The Emperor Babur would probably feel comfortable wandering around Afghanistan and most of the Middle East today. And, now, with the Arab Spring unleashed on the world, most of the tyrants have been swept away (Iran and Syria excepted of course) leaving behind the detritus of their tyrannies, but lacking all of the social controls. We have vaguely crazed peoples, heavily armed with nary a thought about rules of law.  How else to explain the manic reaction to a stupid video that purports to insult the Islamic prophet?

Really . . . some idiot produces  an insulting and terminally stupid video and the entire Islamic world goes berserk, shooting and killing innocents randomly, including a few people who had befriended and assisted the crazed mobs to regain some semblance of freedom.  That is how you defend your prophet? How pathetic is that?

The problem here is that it has become difficult if not impossible to define rational solutions to this problem which, at its core, is simple anarchy.  It occurs to me that the people in this instance are practically demanding the return of their tyrants, because they refuse to join the civilized world. How would one introduce the concept of a representative democracy to people who seem to think it is ok to convince innocent children to blow themselves up in order to kill other innocents for no reason beyond promoting the concept of anarchy?

So, perhaps our own leaders will need to either label the entire region of Muslim anarchic states as wards of the United Nations, or we will need to recruit new tyrannicals to come in to rule these places in between.   Failing that, perhaps we can convince the Republican Party to take over and invite Mitt Romney to become the leader of these lost tribes. He could surely do no worse than he has been dong as a candidate for President here. And republicans do seem to love their guns. Seems a potentially nice fit.

Honor Code of Blood

Ahhh . . . yet another demonstration of religion at its worst, as though we needed another one. And, yet again, Islamists come through to demonstrate their amazing insecurity about their religion, and their capacity to do monumentally stupid things. Only this time, instead of sending some poor dope to blow himself up in a marketplace, their normal method of protest, they chose the old fashioned way—storming the gates and setting things and people on fire.  One of the people in this case was an ambassador who had supported them during their period of great need.  What a great way to show your gratitude.

And all because of some twinkie who produced a film making fun of Islam. And it wasn’t even the American government making fun of Islam, although heaven knows they have cause. No, it’s just some creative schlunk who decided to make fun, despite all of the evidence that Islamists have no sense of humor.  Now a rational people would have  made fun of the movie and turned its creator into an object of humor and derision. But that approach can only be chosen by people who are basically secure in themselves and in their chosen religion.  This group clearly is neither.  It’s kind of like criticizing a bunch of four year olds, which results in a lot of whining and crying. Except in ArabLand it results in blowing things up and killing as many people as possible.

And these are the people we keep thinking we can help in becoming true democratic societies fit for life in this 21^st century. Instead, apparently, they are bent on maintaining their 12^th centry lifestyle and customs. Stoning anyone???

The Night for which there is no morning

Listening to the NPR report about the young teenager who blew himself up in Afghanistan made me beyond sad.  The Taliban, that corrupt and disgusting bunch who lurk in the shadows of real life, immediately claimed responsibility. Something to do with trying to kill CIA agents. Their motive is always the same. They wish to kill foreign “infidels”. Mainly, they always want to kill someone else. And each and every time, they manage to convince some poor lost soul, often someone quite young, to kill himself while also killing others. It is said that they promise martyrdom, and a place in heaven, hopefully with the ubiquitous 71 virgins. What ever do they promise the young women who kill themselves? And I note, it is never an official of the Taliban who blows himself up in a marketplace, but rather some young innocent who has been corrupted into thinking that something exists once life on earth ceases.

I keep wondering. What if they knew . . . really knew . . . all of them . . . that actually, nothing exists beyond the grave. That, should you choose to end your life—in whatever form—you simply cease to exist. You will not be reborn. You will not enter the kingdom of heaven, or hell.  You will not get your 71 virgins. You will not meet god. You will instead, simply cease to exist and you will never again know anything. You are as a light bulb that burns out.

I wonder. Suppose they knew that. Would they still choose to end their lives? Or would the Taliban monsters who now rule the lives of these innocents suddenly lose their power to recruit suicide bombers? Would they then have to do their own dirty work?

This promise, ever present in most religions is a fraud, the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on humankind.  Maybe someone should tell them. When it’s over, it’s really over. You will feel no pain to be sure, because you will never again feel anything.

They will enter that night, for which there is no morning.

Maybe it’s time they knew.