In a few days a baby named Immanuelwill be born in a refugee camp north of the Syrian border in southern Turkey. Another named Jesus will be born in the desert south of the Texas border-crossing in northern Mexico.
In the next two weeks babies will be born in every impoverished backwater over all the Earth, and some of them will be named after Jesus of the Bible — the ”savior of the world” prophesied by the ancients — a man tortured and executed because he enraged the religious leaders of his time.
Why did some of the most powerful rabbis in Jerusalem turn against Jesus and convince their Roman administrators to execute him? Wasn’t it because he told them they didn’t know what they were doing; that they didn’t know what they were talking about?
Two thousand years ago people living in the Roman territories of the Middle East didn’t challenge authorities, at least not to their faces. Brazen confrontation was something leaders weren’t used to and didn’t like.
Jesus claimed that despite impressive learning and years of study and prayer, some religious scholars knew less than they thought about Scripture and what it meant. They knew almost nothing about the nature of God and His plans for humankind. A few acted like instruments of Satan, he said. They lorded their power over common people and demanded respect, even as they supplicated themselves before their Roman rulers.
Billy Lee has offered a gold star to anyone who can find the word Jesus on a Christmas card sold at their local grocery. The Editorial Board
Anyway, one place where babies named Jesus won’t be born on Christmas day 2015 will likely be the Trump Towers. Folks who frequent locations like these have access to private rooms in the best hospitals. Some might choose to birth their children at home, yes, but their homes are palaces and luxury-suites — many with 24 hour on-site medical services, including doctors and nurses.
The homes and suites of billionaires can be busy places, probably, but they never smell like refugee camps. And it’s unusual inside the USA for billionaires to name their children Jesus.
Let’s not sugar-coat. The United States has a sordid history of doing bad things to good people. It has a record of murdering its best people: prophets like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, for example. It has a record of ”bombing the s*** “ out of people (a.k.a. Donald Trump) — as the history of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the bloody highway of death out of Kuwait reminds those who have been paying attention.
By remote control the USA recently unleashed Hellfire missiles on 700 occasions; sometimes on innocents — people with whom we are not at war — which have cooked by-standers alive with their ungodly heat.
Some modern, right-wing evangelical ”religious leaders” — if anyone can say the words with a straight face — enrich themselves with lucrative book deals. Some write crap to capitalize on the fears of common people who don’t have the sense to know they are being played.
Some fill their mega-churches with armed goons to protect their lucrative fiefdoms and the absurd sums of tax-free money they scam from congregants every single week.
Please note: I said, some.
Why go on?
Everyone knows it’s true.
Some who claim to be Christians have become almost useless to the building of a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Do Christians live in America? Of course. Tens of thousands do; maybe hundreds of thousands. But not millions. No way. Not by the way we behave; not by the way we display our culture and values to the angels of the world who watch our every move; or to God who knows our hearts.
Did anyone watch the GOP debate last night? Did anyone watch that pantheon of the gods (as CNN visually-hyped it in their relentless and — can we admit? — ludicrous lead-up advertising) who fought each other tooth and nail to prove which of them would be the most heartless leader of them all?
It’s not insanity, people. It’s evil.
What does America require, an exorcism?
Because it seems to me as if our nation behaves at times like it’s possessed.
If you were Jesus, would you permit your name to appear on Christmas cards in a mega-store that treats Christmas as just another opportunity to make a lot of money? I don’t know if anyone would. During my Christmas shopping yesterday, I couldn’t find a single card with Jesus’s name on it. It surprised me.
Fortunately for us, God’s ways are not our ways, the Bible says. God is love. He has made a really simple request: love all people, including our enemies, as we love ourselves.
It’s a hard truth — that Jesus expects everyone to love unlovable people. I admit, I’m not good at it. No one is. But it’s something we can do to make a better world.
The Holy Spirit of Christ Jesus will help us to love others, Scripture promises. Together we can love others, especially at Christmas, when we try.
People assume they see nothing, but in every case, when they look closely — when they investigate — they find something… air, quantum fluctuations, vacuum energy, etc.
QUESTION: Is this a large-scale view of the universe or a sub-microscopic view of vacuum energy and quantum fluctuations? Can anyone tell? The universe is not empty. Everywhere anyone looks, at all scales, it seems like there is no such thing as nothing.
Everyone finds no evidence that a state of nothing exists in nature or is even possible.
Physicists know this for sure: there can be no state of absolute zero in nature — not for temperature; not for energy; not for matter. All three are equivalent in important ways and are never zero — at all scales and at all time intervals. Quantum theory — the most successful theory in science some will argue — claims that absolute zero is impossible; it can’t exist in nature.
There can be no time interval exactly equal to zero.
Time exists; as does space (which is never empty); both depend for their existence on matter and energy (which are equivalent).
Einstein said that without energy and matter, time and space have no meaning. They are relative; they vary and change according to the General Theory of Relativity, according to the distribution and density of energy and matter. As long as matter and energy exist, time can never be zero; space can never be empty.
People can search until their faces turn blue for a physical and temporal place where there is nothing at all, but they will never find it, because a geometric null-space (a physical place with nothing in it) does not exist. It never has and never will. Everywhere scientists look, at every scale, they find something.
We ask the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?
Physicists say that nothing is but one state of the universe out of a google-plex of other possibilities. The odds against a state of nothingness are infinite.
Another glib answer is that the state of nothing is unstable. The uncertainty principle says it must be so. Time and space do not exist in a place where nothing exists. Once the instability of nothing forces something, time and space start rolling. A universe cascades out of the abyss, which has always existed and always will. Right?
Think about it. It’s not complicated.
People seem to ignore the plain fact that no one has ever observed even a little piece of nothing in nature. There is no evidence for nothing.
Could it be that the oft-asked question — Why is there something rather than nothing? — is based on a false impression, which is not supported by any evidence?
Cosmic microwave background radiation is a good example. It’s a humming sound that fills all space. Eons ago CMB was visible light — photons packed like the molecules of a thick syrup — but space has expanded for billions of years; expansion stretched the ancient visible light into invisible wavelengths called microwaves. Engineers have built sensors to hear them. Everywhere and at every distance microwave light hums in their sensors like a cosmic tinnitus.
Until someone finds evidence for the existence of nothing in nature, shouldn’t people conclude that something exists everywhere they look and that the state of nothing does not exist? Could we not go further and say that, indeed, nothing cannot exist? If it could, it would, but it can’t, so it doesn’t.
Why do people find it difficult, even disturbing, to believe that no alternative to something is possible? Folks can, after all, imagine a place with nothing in it. Is that the reason?
Is it human imagination that explains why, in the complete absence of any evidence, people continue to believe in the possibility of null-spaces — and null-states — and empty voids?
Photons are mysterious quantities of light which have both wave and particle properties. The odd thing: physicists say they have zero rest mass. All their energy comes from their frequencies, which are invisible fields of electricity and magnetism that oscillate in a symbiotic dance of orthogonality.
A physical packet (quantum) of vibrating light (a photon) can be said to have zero mass (despite having momentum, which is usually described as a manifestation of mass), because it doesn’t interact with a field now known to fill the so-called vacuum of space — the Higgs Field.
Odder still: massive bodies distort the shape of space and the duration of time in their vicinities; packets of vibrating light (photons), which have no mass, actually change their direction of travel when passing through the distorted spacetime near massive bodies like planets and suns.
Maybe people cling to their belief in the concept of nothingness because of something related to their sense of vision — their sense of sight and the way their eyes and brains work to make sense of the world. Only a tiny interval of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is called visible light, is viewable. Most of the light-spectrum is invisible, so in the past no one thought it was there.
The photons people see have a peculiar way of interacting with each other and with sense organs, which has the effect of enabling folks to sort out from the vast mess of information streaming into their heads only just enough to allow them to make the decisions necessary for survival. They are able to see only those photons that enter their eyes. Were it otherwise humans and other life-forms might be overwhelmed by too much information and become confused.
Folks don’t see a lot of the extraneous stuff which, if they did observe it, would immediately disavow them of any fantasies they might have had about a state of nothingness in nature.
If we were not blind to 99.999% of what’s out there, we wouldn’t believe in the concept of nothing. Such a state, never observed, would seem inconceivable.
The reason there is something rather than nothing is because there is no such thing as nothing. Deluded by their own blindness, humans invented the concept of ZERO in mathematics. Its power as a place holder convinced them that it must possess other magical properties; that it could represent not just the absence of things that they could count, but also an absolute certainty in measurement that we now know is not possible.
ZERO, we have learned, can be an approximation when it’s used to describe quantum phenomenon.
When the number ZERO is taken too seriously, when folks refuse to acknowledge the quantum nature of some of the stuff it purports to measure, they run into that most vexing problem in mathematics (and physics), which deconstructs the best ideas: dividing by zero, which is said to be undefined and leads to infinities that blow-up the most promising formulas. Stymied by infinities, physicists have invented work-arounds like renormalization to make progress with their computations.
Because humans are evolved biological creatures who are mostly blind to the things that exist in the universe, they have become hard-wired over the ages to accept the concept of nothingness as a natural state when, it turns out, there is no evidence for it.
Anyone who has witnessed the birth of their own child understands that the child does not emerge from nothing, but is a continuation of life that goes back eons.
The phenomenon of life and death has added to the confusion. We are born and we die, it seems. We were once nothing, and we return to nothing when we die. The concept of non-existence seems so right; the state of non-being; the state of nothingness, so real, so compelling.
But we are fools to think this way — both about ourselves and about nature itself. Anyone who has witnessed the birth of their own child understands that the child does not emerge from nothing but is a continuation of life that goes back eons. And we have no compelling evidence that we die; that we cease to exist; that we return to a state of nothingness.
No one remembers not existing. None of us have ever died. People we know and love seem to have died, physically, for sure. But we, ourselves, never have.
Those who make the claim that we die can’t know for sure if they are right, because they have never experienced a state of non-existence; in fact, they never will. No human being who has ever lived has ever experienced a state of non-existence. One has to exist to experience anything.
Why is there something, not nothing? Because there is no such thing as nothing. There never will be.
A foundation of modern physics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right? If this principle is truly fundamental, then logic seems to demand that nothing can be exactly zero.
Nothing is more certain than zero, right? The Uncertainty Principle says that nothing fundamental about our universe can have the quale of certainty. The concept of nothing is an illusion.
An alternative to nothing, is something. Something doesn’t require an explanation. It doesn’t require properties that are locked down by certainty. Doesn’t burden-of-proof lie with the naysayers?
Find a patch of nothing somewhere in the universe.
It can’t be done.
The properties of things may need to be explained — scientists are always working to figure them out. People want to know how things get their properties and behave the way they do. It’s what science is.
Slowly, surely, science makes progress.
Billy Lee
Afterthought: The number ZERO is a valid place holder for computation but can never be a quantity of any measured thing that isn’t rounded-off. When thought about in this way, ZERO, like Pi (π), can take on the characteristics of an irrational number, which, when used for measurement, is always terminated at some arbitrary decimal place depending on the accuracy desired and the nature of the underlying geometry.
Working with ZERO is tricky. Dividing by ZERO is never allowed, which is what was done in the second-to-last line to give the result: 2 = 1. Remember: (a – b) = 0, because a = b.
The universe might also be pixelated, according to theorists. Experiments are being done right now to help establish evidence for and against some specific proposals by a few of the current pixel-theory advocates. If a pixelated universe turns out to be fact, it will confound the foundations of mathematics and require changes in the way small things are measured.
For now, it seems that Pi and ZERO — indeed, all measurements involving irrational numbers — are probably best used when truncated to reflect the precision of Planck’s constant, which is the starting point for physicists who hope to define what some of the properties of pixels might be, assuming of course that they exist and make up the fabric of the cosmos.
In practice, pixelization would mean that no one needs numbers longer than forty-five or so decimal places to describe at least the one-dimensional properties of the subatomic world. According to theory, quantum stuff measured by a number like ZERO might oscillate around certain very small values at the fortieth decimal place or so in each of the three dimensions of physical space. A number ZERO which contained a digit in the 40th decimal place might even flip between negative and positive values in a random way.
The implications are profound, transcending even quantum physics. Read the Billy Lee Conjecture in the essay Conscious Life, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
One last point: quantum theory contains the concept of superposition, which suggests that an elementary particle is everywhere until after it is measured. This phenomenon — yes, it’s non-intuitive — adds weight to the point of view that space is not only not empty when we look; it’s also not empty when we don’t look.
Billy Lee
Comment by the Editorial Board:
Maybe a little story can help readers understand better what the heck Billy Lee is writing about. So here goes:
A child at night hears a noise in her toy-box and imagines a ghost. She cries out and her parents rush in. They assure her. There are no ghosts.
Later, alone in her room, the child hears another sound, this time in the closet. Her throbbing heart suggests that her parents must be lying.
Until she turns on the light and peeks into her closet, she can’t know for sure.
Then again, maybe ghosts fly away when the lights are on, she reasons.
In this essay, Billy Lee is trying to reassure his readers that there is no such thing as nothing. It’s not real.
Where is the evidence? Or does nothing disappear when we look at it?
Maybe ghosts really do fly away when we turn on the lights.
Disclaimer by the Editorial Board: The following story, No Good Deed… is a work of fiction by Billy Lee. Events and persons depicted in the story exist only in the imagination of the writer and have no connection to living persons or actual events.
The old woman ahead of me in the checkout lane at the grocery sat in a battery-operated three-wheeler and struggled to move her purse off her wrist into the front basket. She couldn’t do it and gave up. She was grossly overweight; she couldn’t maneuver — her fat arms were black and blue right down to her fingernails. Diabetes, I thought.
I wondered if I should help, but she soon stopped and let the purse dangle where it was, on her wrist. It was a bad angle. It would be awkward for me to reach for it; and besides, it was her purse, a personal item she might try to defend. It was a good bet she fought this fight every time she shopped. No big deal. Let it go.
It was her own cart that she sat in, from the looks of it. She probably had used it for years. Held together by duct tape and bubble gum, it was dirty; a yellowed eggnog color; depressing to look at.
The cashier at the register — a black college-aged girl — finished the tally; the old woman sitting in the beat-up cart fumbled unsuccessfully to open her purse; the line of shoppers behind us continued to grow. It was busy. It was Christmas. I was in a hurry. What the heck… I reached over to the card reader and inserted my card. I’ll get this, I said. Merry Christmas.
The old lady looked up at me and said, thank you.
You look like you have enough to worry about, I said, beaming. We’ll make it one less thing.
Yes, she said. I worry about so many things these days. She fell silent and looked down. Something drippy fell from her mottled face into her lap. The eyes of the young black woman working the cash-register grew large and began to sparkle from tears, which she tried to hold back.
She would tell me later she had just immigrated from Ghana, Africa. She has stories, that girl, I would think to myself. The African regained her composure and gathered the old lady’s items.
As the cashier and myself exchanged a sympathetic look, the old woman with the black and blue arms and drippy face reached for a button on her cart and sped away. She didn’t remember to collect her receipt. I don’t think she felt embarrassed. Maybe she thought I might change my mind; make her pay for her own groceries, or something.
The cashier rang up my stuff. It was all good. I started to get that warm glow one gets when they’ve done something for someone, especially a stranger.
A melodic accent from somewhere out of Africa interrupted my reverie, Oh, look! Here is a bag of things. Are they yours? I think I forgot to give them to that person.
We checked the contents against the old woman’s receipt. Yup, they weren’t mine.
The cashier grabbed the bag and ran down the long aisle of the store to search for an old woman driving a beat-up mobility scooter with a missing bag of groceries. The folks in line behind me started to stir. A few threw unfriendly looks in my direction. My warm feeling turned to heat, then dread.
The cashier returned; she hadn’t found the customer. Since I had the receipt, I decided to take the groceries. If the old lady returned, she would be unable to convince anyone the groceries were hers, I reasoned.
I began to worry. It was Christmas. Undercover cops — temporaries with little training or empathy — lurked pretty much everywhere. They loved to patrol the parking lots, someone once told me.
What if store security decided to stop the old lady in the busy lot? What if they intercepted her before she could rendezvous with whoever was driving her home? Maybe she lived alone nearby, and there was no one to escort her. Minus the receipt, they might arrest her for shoplifting.
They might already have her in a little room somewhere, hidden from the public, to interrogate her. That’s why we couldn’t find her. I loosened my collar as my mind began to race. I felt sweat bead on the top of my head.
She would notice — under the intense pressure of questioning — one bag of groceries was missing. And she couldn’t produce the receipt. He took it, she’d realize. It was the old man! I could hear her screaming. She was cursing me — the old codger who had stood behind her and had the audacity to jump into her business for no good reason.
Of course she had the money to pay for everything, she screamed at the SWAT team as they held her down; as they restrained her. Of course she did. She didn’t need that smelly stranger’s credit card. And he stole a bag of her groceries! Arrest him! It was he, the grey-beard, who robbed her; it was he who took her receipt; it was he who confused her — and the cashier! He got her arrested. It was he, he, he — an old FART! — not her!
I imagined her anguish. By now she must realize that she would spend Christmas in prison; behind bars; isolated; alone; cold; away from family and a warm fire in the hearth — for I just knew she had no money for lawyers or bail.
I thought I could hear her weeping. I could hear her, but I would never be able to find her. No one else could hear her cries for mercy, no one would ever step forward to defend her and confirm her story. Take her out of here, I heard the arresting officer boom. Thief!
My parting words to the cashier were short enough. I hurried to my car and drove out of the busy parking lot, quickly, furtively. I cast a side-long glance into my rear-view mirror. No flashing lights. No siren. An old red van with a tree tied on top pulled up behind me.
It was Christmas; the most wonderful time of the year.
