People used to think Earth was flat. Since flat things have edges, Earth had edges, which meant Earth was likely finite. If someone walked in one direction far enuf, they would fall off an edge or hit a wall, one or the other.
People now know Earth is a ball moving thru space. Walk far enough on a ball, get back where you started, right? Does this simple fact imply Earth is infinite? Of course not. We know it isn’t. Earth has finite area, which can be roughly calculated.
Today, no one understands enough about space to know how much of it there might be. Some think space goes on forever. Regardless of direction, spacecraft can never reach the end because space is all there is and must therefore be infinite.
The problem with this view comes from what folks think they know about gravity. Massive objects seem to bend and twist space in ways that make time slow down and light bend. It’s mysterious, because if you think about it, why should they?
Isn’t it crazy that massive objects have profound effects on things they don’t touch? They change path and timelines of whatever travels nearby. Something unseeable transforms invisible oceans of spacetime putty, which pushes about whatever lies buried inside.
Einstein showed how to calculate power of massive objects like stars and (then unknown) black holes to warp space in ways that forced changes to direction and speed of anything at all that moved by, but he didn’t explain why or how. It seems puzzle pieces are missing which found would at long last reveal what this malleable stuff might be.
It’s nothing we measure. Many have tried but space seems to be entirely empty. Virtual particles pop in & out of existence, yes, but taken together their measurable qualities add to zero.
What answer makes sense? —infinite space or not?
Einstein’s answer was that spacetime makes no sense apart from existence of mass & energy, which are two sides of a coin, like light, which measured becomes point-like momentum or spreading energy undulation. Apart from mass & energy, space & time cannot, do not exist.
Isn’t non-existence the meaning of the word “space”? Under any scenario that can be imagined, space & time have no meaning except to help thinking people describe peculiar relationships between objects we observe & measure. In this sense, every massive thing is connected to every other.
Energy saturates the universe. It’s everywhere we look. It fills gaps between objects with 3 dimensional ripples of undulating something or other. It means that we—tiny neural networks that we are—live trapped in cosmic amber, like prehistoric insects.
At the scale of stars and galaxies we are truly constrained; frozen in time; unable to move in any way that can be noticed—were anyone out there at scales able to observe & take notes. It is impossible for any living thing to secure vantage points in spacetime where it might observe the entire universe.
In this sense, the Universe is a single, solid object, which is imagined by something conscious trapped inside. Perhaps, somewhere far away beyond our vision an event horizon emerges beyond which mass & energy have no place.
The universe ends not with a wall or wail but instead a whisper, a whimper, a last desperate gasp. Light fades to embers, then into dark night where imagination does not go and black birds no longer sing.
Billy Lee Note: a version of this essay was first published by Billy Lee on Quora in January 2025
Since Einstein said that E=mc2 , why does a massless photon have energy?
Someone asked a similar question on Quora. My answer garnered nearly a million views and many dozens of comments. It gave me an opportunity to gather thoughts on a subject that has puzzled folks for decades.
Of course, I’m a pontificator, not a scientist. I got advice from working physicists and incorporated what they taught me.
One thing I learned from science writer Jim Baggott is that Einstein first published his famous equation in this form:
M =
When written this way, it becomes clear that anyone who knows the total energy of anything can calculate in principle its total mass.
Einstein knew nothing at all about the Higgs field but today physicists agree that the mass it creates is less than 5% of what mass they have discovered.
In fact, nearly 99% of the mass of a single proton is derived from the energy of “massless” gluons that constrain its two up-quarks and one down-quark. Gluons are bosons which don’t interact with the Higgs field; quarks, which are fermions, do.
In the end, it’s all about energy, which it turns out is equivalent to mass, which according to Baggott is what quantum fields do. Quantum fields like the Higgs field make mass. Perhaps the electromagnetic field — which makes photons — does the same.
Here is Einstein’s equation for energy:
Since
and
it follows that it might be reasonable to imagine that photons have both internal mass and inertial mass, which causes Einstein’s equation for energy to give the following result:
All that is left is to divide by c2 to get mass, right?
Most folks think the internal mass of a photon is zero. Period. End of story. They use the two mass and momentum terms in Einstein’s equation to calculate total energy of massive objects, yes, but photons, they insist, lack internal mass. They lack the internal fermionic structures associated with all massive particles.
Photons do have inertial energy proportional to their critical frequency though, which suggests that they possess perhaps equivalent inertial mass, which drives the photoelectric effect.
When physicists take the energy measure of photons, they drop the mass term in Einstein’s equation. They set mass to zero and cancel out the first term, mc2. It leaves the second term — pc— which for photons simplifies to hf, inertial energy correlated to frequency, right? Energy can be measured in eVs, electron-volts, which are also units of mass.
If photons have internal energy, their total energy in the universe is undervalued by 1.414 (the square root of 2). Accounting for this added mass reduces the Cosmic energy deficit to near zero.
I should add that overestimating mass and disrupting popular models of the Cosmos is something most scientists think is a bad idea.
The gluon is the only other massless particle currently in the standard model, but it has never been observed as a free particle. All gluons are buried inside hadrons. It is their binding energy in quarks that makes as much as 99% of the measured mass of protons and neutrons.
So, there is precedent to possibly reevaluate mass equivalence of photons.
Some readers might wonder about the massless graviton. This particle is theorized to exist, yes, but has not been observed or added to the Standard Model. The same is true for dark matter and dark energy — no physical evidence; not added to the Model.
It doesn’t mean dark energy and matter don’t exist. Cosmologists see way too much gravity everywhere they look. The problem is they can’t explain exactly what is causing it.
As for my answer to the original question published on Quora, it was as accurate as my limited experience could make at the time, but the subject is controversial and several issues are not yet settled, even by experts. Some disputes might never be settled.
Who knows?
Not me. I’m a pontificator, right?
Added March 25, 2025:
ATTENTION READERS: Recently, FloatHeadPhysics, the YouTube channel, added best intuitive visualizations for General Relativity we’ve yet seen.
Enjoy! THE EDITORS
What follows is a version of my Quora answer:
You might be mistaken about energy.
According to the complete statement of Einstein’s most well-known equation, energy content is a combination of a particle’s mass and its momentum. The equation you cite is abbreviated. It is a simplified version that is missing a term.
Einstein’s complete equation is strangely analogous to Pythagoras’s geometry of right-triangles. When anyone thinks about it though, aren’t the frequencies of light at right angles to its propagation? Light waves are transverse, right?
Here is a more complete version of Einstein’s equation:
—where m is internalmass and ρ is momentum.Internal mass is often referred to as “rest mass” because it is invariant in all reference frames and unchanged by velocity or acceleration. Momentum is inertial energy measured in equivalent mass units called electron volts (eVs).
Massless particles like photons have momentum that is correlated to their wavelengths (or frequencies). It’s their frequencies that give massless particles like photons their energy content. So without (rest) internal mass the equation becomes:
E=ρc
—where for massless photons.
So, E = hf
[“h” is Planck’s constant. “f” is frequency. “c” is light speed.]
Of course, in classical Newtonian physics ρ = mc. The mass term is critical.
Screen shot from Khan Academy showing derivation of photon momentum. Typed mark-ups by me show mass equivalence when ρ is set equal to mc. When mc = hf/c, then m = hf/c*c, right? Click the pic for a better view in a new window.
On the other hand, in quantum mechanics the total mass of photons cannot be zero either—photon internal mass is set equal to zero and eliminated. Inertial energy based on the photon’s critical frequency (the 2nd term in Einstein’s equation) becomes its equivalent mass. I’m not sure everyone agrees.
The beauty created by setting photon rest-mass (internal energy) to zero is it transforms the maths of relativity and quantum mechanics into structures that seem to be consistent and complete — able, one hopes, to meld into theories of everything; TOEs, if you like. The problem, of course, is that the convention of setting to zero leaves thrashing in its wake 95% of the mass and energy which “other” stories claim is hidden unseen “out there” within and around galaxies to move them faster than they ought.
The Abraham-Minkowski controversy seems to touch the argument. Click the link and scroll to the end of the article to learn how many things are disputed, not known, or unexplained. The science is not settled, although several physicists claim that the controversy is resolved by postulating an interaction inside dielectrics (like glass) of photons with electron-generated polaritons.
NOTE BY EDITORS: On 18 April 2021 a writer massively abbreviated and modified the article in Wikipedia on the A-M controversy. The writer deleted the entire list of disputed claims. Please click the link in this sentence to review a list of unsolved problems in modern physics. Photon mass inside dielectrics isn’t on the list.
The permittivity of “empty“ space (called the electric constant) qualifies as a dielectric, does it not? Isn’t space itself—with its Maxwell-assigned permeability (the magnetic constant) and permittivity (electric constant)—a dielectric?
Arthur Eddington wrote in chapter 6 of his book Space Time and Gravitation (read pages 107-109) that the dielectrics of space around the Sun increase proportionally with the intensity of the gravitational field. Light waves closest to the sun slow down more, which pulls the wavefront that lies farther out to deflect still more to catch up. Like glass, gravity refracts light.
Light falls into the Sun like any solid rock, but refraction adds to light’s “Newtonian” deflection to give Einstein’s predicted result. Unlike slow rocks, light travels fast enough to avoid capture by the sun.
It’s not clear to me how many physicists agree with Eddington, but then again, it’s not obvious whether humanoids are able to visualize reality. It’s one thing to write equations and symbolic algorithms that match well with observations. It’s quite another to acquire a natural intuition for what might be true.
Empty space isn’t empty, right?
As for the Abraham-Minkowski dispute: how important might it be to decisively resolve ambiguities concerning photon mass?
Perhaps the dispute is swept under a rug because disagreements about something as fundamental as photon mass mean that physicists might know less than they let on. The controversy seems to me at least to have the potential to crash the tidy physics of light and mass built by hard work and much history.
Isn’t it better to pretend everything is just fine until physicists finally agree that everything really is?
Maybe the subject involves some aspect of national security which requires obfuscation. It wouldn’t be the first time.
What I think can be safely said is that momentum and mass of quantum objects seem to have no meaning until they are brought into existence by measurements. The math looks like nothing we know; sometimes physicists use the results as mathematical operators that don’t commute the way some might think they should.
I reviewed the math. I saw the term that makes the deflection difference (it’s really there) but did not understand enough at the time to tease out a satisfying reason why photons seem to bend nearly twice more in a gravitational field than early acolytes of Newton conjectured. I guess I like Eddington’s explanation best.
According to Wikipedia, Einstein’s theory approximates the deflection to be:
“b” is the distance of a photon’s closest approach to a gravitational object like our Sun.
Here’s some guesses I made before reading Eddington:
Maybe light deeply buried in a gravity field near a star like the Sun will experience the flow of time more slowly—it’s an effect common to all objects in a gravity field; it affects all objects the same way and is unaffected by their mass or lack of it.
It might have something to do with Schwarzchild geodesics. The geodesics of spacetime paths are longer and more curved in a gravity field than what anyone might expect from a simple application of Newton’s force law, which is oblivious to the spacetime metrics of Einstein.
Schwarzchild metrics help to explain the “gravitational lensing” of faraway objects when their light approaches Earth from behind massive gravitational structures in the far reaches of space. Light careens around the structures so that astronomers can see what would otherwise remain forever hidden from them.
Here is another guess:
It might be that light spends more time in a gravitational field than it should due to special-relativity-induced time dilations so that photons have more time to fall toward the star than they otherwise would. This guess is certainly wrong because the time differential would be governed by a Lorentz transformation.
Photons of light don’t undergo Lorentz transformations because, unlike massive objects that travel near the speed of light, they don’t have inertial frames of reference. Any line of reasoning that ties Lorentz transformations to photons leads folks into rabbit holes that contradict the current consensus about the nature of light. Light speed is a constant in all reference frames. Space and time expand and shrink to accommodate it.
Electron-like muons (which have rest masses 205 times that of electrons) are short-lived, but their relativistic speeds increase their lifetimes so that some of those that get their start in the upper atmosphere are able to reach Earth’s surface where they can be observed. Their increased lifespan is described by a Lorentz transformation. It’s tempting to apply this transform to photons, but theorists say, no. It doesn’t work that way.
Time contractions and dilations are Special Relativity effects that apply to objects with inertial mass that move in some specified reference frame at velocities less than the speed of light, yes, but never at the speed of light, right?
Nearly every physicist will insist that photons have no internal mass; they travel in vacuum at exactly the speed of light—from the point of view of all observers in every reference frame. Photons don’t have inertial reference frames in the same way as muons or electrons.
Changes in time and position caused by a photon’s location in a gravity field are completely different; they are described by a vastly more complicated theory of Einstein’s called General Relativity.
Here is one way to write his formula:
The terms in this expression are tensors, most of them. Click the link, anyone who doesn’t think tensors are difficult to write and manipulate.
Here is another way to think about photon energy and behavior:
Light follows the geodesics of spacetime near a massive object—like the sun. Gravity is the geodesic.
The difference for massive objects traveling at relativistic speeds is that their momentum and inertia enable them to skip off the geodesic tracks, so to speak.
Because massive objects always travel at speeds less than light, their “clocks” slow down through an additional dynamic (a Lorentz transformation) that works at cross-purposes to gravity. Massive objects lock onto the gravity geodesics for a shorter period of time. They undergo less gravitational time dilation than does light because they spend less time constrained on its geodesics. They jump the geodesic tracks to become constrained by the dynamics of the Lorentz transformations.
The result is that massive objects traveling at relativistic velocities less than light deflect less toward the star (Sun) than does light.
What makes General Relativity unique is it’s view that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. Acceleration is a change in the velocity and/or the direction of motion. Massive bodies such as stars curve and elongate the pathways that shape the space and time around them.
Photons traveling on these longer spacetime paths accelerate by their change in direction, but their velocity doesn’t change in any reference frame. Something has to give. What gives, what changes is the expected value of deflection. The light from distant stars bends more than it should.
SOME HISTORY
No one who lived before 1900 could know that the geodesics of space-time elongate (or curve) in the presence of mass and energy, which are equivalent, correct? No one in bygone eras could have known that time slows down for massive objects that approach light-speed, either.
A man named Joann Georg Soldner did a calculation to show how much a Newtonian “corpuscle” of light would bend in the Sun’s gravity, which he published in 1804. He assumed that photons had mass and fell toward the Sun like any other object.
I should add that Eddington knew about Einstein’s predictions when he made his experimental observations in 1919 because Einstein had already published his general theory.
EXPLANATIONS
I would very much like to read a coherent, verbal (non-mathematical) explanation of exactly why and how Einstein’s general theory can lead to an accurate and reasonable prediction at odds with Newton about the angle of deflection of photons near a star.
Here is a synopsis of an explanation that I heard from a working physicist:
Soldner used Newton’s view to calculate deflection using only the time the photon spent in the gravitational field. Einstein did the same but then modified his calculation to account for the bending of space in the gravitational field. The space component nearly doubled the expected deflection.
The theorist’s explanation satisfied me. It sounded right.
Notice the speed of the hands on the clocks and how they vary in space-time. Clocks slow down when they are accelerated or when they are immersed in the gravity of a massive object like the star at the center of this GIF. Stronger gravity makes clocks run slower. Under General Relativity, gravity and acceleration do the same thing. Click on the pic for a better view.
On the other hand, I believe (secretly and in agreement with Newton’s acolytes) that photons must have a mass equivalence that for some reason is being discounted, but no one I’ve read believes the idea makes sense beneath the shadow of a relativity theory that has the reputation for being fundamental, flawless, and complete.
After all, the mass of any object in a gravitational field is irrelevant to its trajectory because the mathematics cancels it, right?
Little “m” appears on both sides of the equation so it can be divided away.
The problem is that the equations for gravity—especially over cosmological distances—are not necessarily settled. These are serious anomalies that are not yet resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Some have direct consequences on the ability of organizations like NASA to conduct accurate landings on Mars and the Moon. Click the link in this paragraph to review six of the biggest puzzles followed by seventeen alternative theories designed to bring the discrepancies to account.
Anyway, mass-energy equivalence of photons might permit Lorentz transforms on light to help to resolve certain problems in cosmology and the transmission of light through medias where gravity is not a factor. It might also simplify understanding of annoying Shapiro effects, which slow down communications with explorer craft inside our solar system.
ANOTHER EXPLANATION
Since I haven’t yet found a good explanation—and with a promise to avoid nonsensical personal predispositions—here is my attempt to explain:
In GPS (Global Positioning Systems), dilations of time—in both the velocity of satellites in one frame and their acceleration in another frame (gravity)—must add to provide accurate information to vehicles located in another frame.
These time dilations can work at cross-purposes. It requires expensive infrastructure on the ground to coordinate the information so that drivers of vehicles don’t get lost.
A massless object moving at the speed of light is going to follow the geodesics of the gravity field. This field is a distortion of space and time induced by the presence of the mass of something big like the Sun.
If massless energy does not obey the laws of Special Relativity (like GPS satellites do), then its velocity must necessarily have no influence whatever in the deflection of light near a star. It might seem like all the deflection comes from the distortion of spacetime, which is gravity.
Photons ride gravity geodesics like cars on a roller coaster. According to appendix III in Einstein’s 3rd edition of his book, Relativity, the Special and General Theory—published in English by Henry Holt & Company in 1921—it’s only half the story.
The other half of the measured deflection comes from the Newtonian gravitational “field”, which accelerates all objects in the same way. This field further deflects light across the spacetime geodesics toward the sun to double the expected angle.
I’m not entirely convinced that modern 21st century physicists believe it’s quite that way or quite that simple.
CONCLUSION
The theory of general relativity helps theorists to describe the distortion of metrics in spacetime near massive bodies to predict the deflection angle of passing photons of light. What we know is that predictions based on the theory don’t fail.
It’s like the theory of quantum mechanics. It never fails. It’s foundational. No one has yet been able to explain why.
Somebody, please, tell me I’m wrong.
Here is a link that addresses the math concerning the deflection disparity between Newton and Einstein.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It’s been a long time since most Americans challenged the powerful elites who rule America. I would say the last serious challenges came during the Civil Rights and Vietnam war eras.
Since then, people have gotten lost in their personal lives; first responders have not fire-hosed too many black people; the Feds haven’t forced kids to fight in senseless wars. Everything is voluntary except that business owners are not permitted to exclude minorities from participating in the American way of life.
Some complain. Christians don’t want to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, but most eventually submit to the rule of law and do what’s right. Chick-Fil-A recently announced that it pulled back its financial support of organizations opposed to human rights for homosexuals.
Unless someone is poor (or sick or handicapped), they don’t understand what disadvantaged people go through. 75% of America is low-income, but the oligarchs have wrecked education for the marginalized by reducing funding for public schools while advocating for private education and the voucher-funding of home-schooling. Without good public education, most poor people and disadvantaged minorities don’t learn what they are missing or why.
Without a media that cares about inequality and highlights it, the 10% who live in the suburbs remain oblivious.
Some will pass by a gated community and wonder why they aren’t allowed in, but most keep on trucking, because they are powerless and ignorant. Companies hire conservatives, because they want docile employees who support capitalism — a form of slavery under which the slaves sometimes get to choose the plantation where they work.
The rewards for submission are good. A docile employee who does what they’re told and doesn’t complain can go a long way in America; sycophants make up a large percentage of the population. The risk of being kicked out of this fraternity of cowards keep almost all from telling anyone with power how they really feel.
Recently, angry people voted for a rich fool to even their score with liberals who annoy them with unintelligible warnings about fascism and its endless wars that only those with direct experience fully understand.
With no one in media to explain why oligarchs always create a colossal mess for regular folks, ordinary people will continue to tread water until they are overwhelmed by scarcity and danger. Only after will some learn through suffering the hard life-lessons that liberals try to help them avoid.
A felony arrest for protesting injustice is the most direct route to the truths that make one a progressive liberal. I look around and don’t see anyone willing to take righteous risks that lead to knowledge about what it is to be attacked by one’s own country for standing up for what is fair and good.
People pretend everything is fine until they no longer can. When that happens, they go in one of two directions – left or right.
19 – What do you think will happen to our democracy if Donald Trump is re-elected?
We lost our country when the Russians took the executive branch of the USA government in 2016.
Trump works for Russian oligarchs who make the mafia look like a class of unruly kindergarten children.
People on the front lines of this war against America are scared, but many are brave.
Republican leaders are the most scared, not of impeachment but of retaliation if they don’t do what they’re told. They embrace their abusers to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is a painful psychological condition that humans expend a lot of mental effort to avoid.
Impeachment poses no threat to Trump, because he isn’t leaving even if convicted by the Senate.
Americans are in denial that their institutions are failing; the protections of checks and balances in the three branches of government are in meltdown.
The executive branch feels no constitutional responsibility to honor the powers of the people’s house, which is conducting an inquiry into the illegal activity by the president and his cult followers.
The coming election is going to be a joke.
Americans have a sense of humor but this joke will be on them. After the shock of Trump’s contrived landslide election victory, many Americans will go into denial and embrace their tormentors. It’s called the Stockholm Syndrome. It’s how Hitler became popular in Germany.
Caesar became popular after he ended representative government in Rome centuries ago. The story is as old as history.
Some men are not afraid to do bad things to get power. Power permits those who hold it to do unspeakable things to those they despise.
It’s simple really.
It’s why America was created in the way it was. Its founders hoped to prevent tyranny from raising its ugly head inside the United States.
They failed, obviously. This rise of the Trump family promises to be a mess of catastrophic proportions involving suffering by tens-of-millions of people who get caught in its cross-hairs.
The hydrogen and oxygen that make water are the first and third most abundant elements in the universe. Both elements are found in stars.
Water saturates almost all the debris in space like water saturates a sponge. The water is frozen solid and trapped by silicates in space rocks.
The debris that made Earth brought water with it. At first, Earth was hot; any water at the surface boiled away to escape into space. Earth was in fact bone dry at its surface for hundreds of millions of years.
Eventually Earth cooled and became gravitationally strong enough that steam was able to escape from its interior, condense, and fall back to Earth as rain. The process continues to the present day.
How much water are we talking about? It turns out that despite what we think we know about how deep the oceans are, the amount of water compared to the mass of Earth is minuscule.
Think of Earth as a polished metal basketball. Breathe on the basketball to form a film of moisture. At this scale the mist from your breath is deeper than Earth’s deepest ocean.
It’s not much water at all; almost all of it migrated upward as vapor from materials many hundreds of miles beneath Earth’s surface. The process took billions of years to make the raging oceans we experience today.
Wisdom can be condensed and gurgitated easily by anyone who has experienced a lifetime of learning, experimentation, and the testing of limits. No one understands America who has not spent time in its ghettos and prisons; in its jails and colleges; in its military and its resorts; in its paradises and hells.
No one who’s never been both rich and poor knows what either is like; rich and poor is what the majority of Americans are. The ten percent who consider themselves middle-class know almost nothing about either — rich and poor is how ninety percent of the population lives –with ninety percent of the ninety percent living poor.
I know things — amazing things that most people believe are not true. I’ve lived all over the world; worked for over a dozen companies; attended a dozen schools; trimmed gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery and invented products everyone uses — like milk carton safety caps and tear-spout coffee lids. I developed products of war — like the run-flat wheel that enables military vehicles with shot-out tires to keep rolling.
My truth is not reflected in media or in the faces of my family and friends. I have secrets, which many want kept until I sleep in the grave. When speaking truth, they tell me to stop; when I continue, some walk away.
So be it.
People on Quora.com ask me (and others) for answers to questions. What follows is a small sample of questions I’ve answered. Readers can scan to find something they like. Find something interesting and read a flash card answer, which is my version of what might be true. Copy answers onto index cards. Who will stop you?
I admit: some answers are not true.
Who will find what’s fake?
If objects in the universe are moving away from us in all directions, are we the center according to the Big Bang theory?
It’s not true that all objects are moving away from us. The Andromeda Galaxy is heading toward us (the Milky Way); the collision is due in a few billion years; it’s likely that the black holes at the center of both galaxies will interact with unpredictable results.
The material in the universe can be compared to the dust in a household vacuum cleaner that is shaken loose into a large room. Over time the individual particles will separate to fill the space, but what an individual particle will do is not knowable, at least not right away.
That said, we know for certain that the metrics of space are changing; it is an expansion that is increasing with time.
Currently the rate of expansion is 14 miles per second for every million light years (a distance of nearly six-million-trillion miles). It seems like a small number until you do the calculation for the size of the universe. Past the “event horizon” of 14 billion light years the expansion exceeds the speed-of-light.
Do the math.
What is the future of a universe that is undergoing a runaway expansion?
A conjecture has been proposed by mathematician Sir Roger Penrose called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). Data gathered by recent satellites seems likely to strengthen his view.
What is wrong with the question “What existed before the Big Bang?” I have been told that this question doesn’t make sense, but I have never heard a decent layman’s explanation as to why. The question is sensibly answered by the theory proposed by Roger Penrose: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology or CCC, sometimes referred to as Eon Theory.
The conjecture was proposed around 2004, I think, but collaborating evidence is only now becoming available through data collected by the WMAP and Planck satellites, and by LIGO.
The premise is that in both the singularity and a maximally expanded universe the degrees of freedom of gravity, which is associated with “mass”, drop out of the metrics. Without mass it is not possible to differentiate the initial and terminal states of the universe by scaling; the two states are in fact conformally equivalent.
The Big Bang emerges from a maximally expanded universe; the cycle repeats endlessly like a chugging choo-choo train whose next puff seems to emerge from the dispersion of the last puff; time has no beginning and no end.
If or when the universe ends someday and ceases to exist, could it be created again as it was in the beginning? The idea by Roger Penrose, retired mathematician and cosmologist, that the universe is conformally equivalent at its beginning and end is gathering evidence from the WMAP and Planck satellites that acolytes who do the math claim might be confirmational.
Evidence may also be buried in the data collected by LIGO, according to Penrose. He’s urging folks to dig through the data to find it.
Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) — some call it Eon Theory — has been exciting for the past 15 years, but only in the past few years has data been available to help validate what at first seemed to some like a crackpot idea.
Is it safe to have a nuclear reactor in a submarine?
Of course not.
Of the 82 nuclear submarines deployed or under construction by the US Navy, two have sunk (the Scorpion and Thresher).
It’s 2.5%, which for me is too high.
In war, all USA subs will be destroyed at sea by enemy fire during a first strike surprise attack.
The USA will destroy all adversary nuclear subs with a coordinated and long-planned after-strike.
Large numbers of nuclear reactors and their poisons boiling at the bottom of oceans are a threat to every living creature on Earth.
The nuclear genie needs to be put back in its bottle. It should be the highest priority of the international community if humans are to have any chance at all to continue as a species for more than a few hundred years.
All personnel engaged in warfare preparation involving nuclear weapons are subject to sophisticated arguments in training fashioned by psychologists to ensure their enthusiastic support of nuclear weapons and a solid belief in their own personal safety.
I beg these trained individuals to use their common sense.
Don’t we live under a nuclear reactor called the Sun? It does no harm. We would die, everyone of us, if Earth didn’t have a magnetosphere to deflect the solar wind; the field works with nitrogen and oxygen to make Earth’s atmosphere opaque to high energy radiation from the Sun. It doesn’t work the same way for Earth-generated radiation.
Nuclear power is not safe; on so many levels, it never will be. A world with 10,000 nuclear reactors and 50,000 nuclear warheads is a planet doomed to extinction, if not in the near future, then in the long, for sure.
Scrap nuclear deterrence? What? We need to learn to work with people who have different ideas about what life is and how it should be lived. We don’t have much time to learn. The danger is imminent; the need is urgent.
Even without war, the poisons of rotting reactors and weapons will percolate into the environment over time. We’ve already destroyed the planet.
If humans survive, people will someday forget about the weapons; they will rot unattended and unremembered. A few thousand years from now people might wonder why everyone they know is sick and dying.
In hindsight, was going to Iraq justifiable? Was killing a million human beings and destabilizing the Middle East justifiable?
What does an enemy of the United States have to do to suffer such consequences? Almost all the “facts” the Bush family “shared” with Americans and the rest of the watching world about Saddam and the Iraqis were bald-face lies.
The damage is that people believe these lies to this day. Their misunderstanding of what happened distorts everything they believe and do.
We will never get it right when Americans’ views are twisted out of all proportion to realities.
Is the situation dangerous in the Middle East?
After all the blood-letting, are things better or worse?
How was the first cell created? Can we replicate those circumstances? No one knows how the first cells were created. It is a mystery of science likely never to be solved.
What is known is that cellular life began on Earth almost immediately after it cooled sufficiently to be safe for life, which unravels at temperatures above 300 degrees or so Fahrenheit.
The first cells were thousands of times smaller than the cells that make the plants and animals of today. These tiny prokaryotes persisted for a few billion years until the larger eukaryotes evolved.
Once eukaryotes developed the ability to convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis, they produced huge volumes of a byproduct called oxygen, which poisoned most prokaryotic life on Earth during that time.
Prokaryotes able to adjust to the presence of oxygen survive today, mostly as bacteria and archaea.
Does socialism only work in small countries? Any system that is supported by the people who live under it works well — especially socialism.
The problem for socialism is interference by the United States. It is the policy of the USA to disrupt and prevent — to the point of war if need be — the success of socialism anywhere.
The reasoning is simple. When socialism succeeds, billionaires are at risk. They don’t share well, and some are willing to kill anyone who tries to undercut their power.
Read the news: what wealthy people do is disgusting. Don’t make me explain. Get your head out of the sand, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
The pharaohs made the Egyptian system work. They built pyramids. The Russians were first into space and first to the moon. The Germans produced the scientists who propelled civilization into the future after WWII.
Slavery inside the USA clothed the world in cotton.
Pick a system, any system, and it can be made to work as well as any other.
If billionaires can convince cotton-pickers that life is good, who will challenge them?
What was the real reason why the USA lost the war against Vietnam? The USA killed two-million Vietnamese. The Vietnamese killed fifty-eight thousand Americans. The USA thoroughly trashed Vietnam and poisoned the country-side with Agent Orange defoliants. The Vietnamese didn’t knock down a single structure inside the United States.
The USA deployed a program to assassinate over one-hundred-thousand South Vietnamese men and women it suspected of siding with the North. No such program of civilian murders was carried out by the North.
The Americans and their allies napalmed entire villages and executed both civilian and animal survivors. Not a single village was ever cremated by the North.
The USA carpet-bombed huge swaths of Vietnam daily for twelve years. The North didn’t have an effective air force.
It was a one-sided fight from the beginning. The USA killed and murdered until its leaders’ lust for blood was satiated. When nothing was left to prove and the thrill of the kill faded, the United States pulled out its troops and went home.
The whole world knows what we did. The reason the international community of nations doesn’t confront us for doing bad things is because we scare them.
The families of tens-of-millions of the dead cry out to God to settle scores; they pray for justice.
Americans trust — as the Germans, the Japanese, and the Romans before them trusted — that justice never comes.
Who is Donald Trump’s base? Why is he popular? Why are people voting for him? Why do people like and support him? Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly eleven million votes. Three million went to Hillary; eight million to third party candidates. It was the biggest loss by popular vote in the history of USA elections.
Losing the popular vote by 8% yet securing the electoral college is a result that will live in infamy.
The first election after his “victory” was in 2018 when the largest swing of Republican districts to Democrats occurred in the history of the contests between Republicans and Democrats.
Trump is the most unpopular man to hold the presidency in my lifetime.
Why do his supporters love him?
My view is that in every country people exist who are attracted to bad things like moths are to flames. History shows that in Germany, people loved Hitler. The allies forced the German population to tour the concentration camps, because otherwise no one in Germany would believe their government committed genocide.
Trump is doing bad things to powerless people — not only to mothers and children at our southern border but in the middle east, far east, and around the world. His decisions are making a more dangerous world; it’s possible that tens-of-millions of innocents will die should he continue to trash the edifice that has enabled Earth to avoid nuclear war during the past 75 years.
We must avoid nuclear catastrophe for thousands of years more if we are to become the great space-faring civilization many people seek. We can’t go to the stars if Earth is poisoned by plutonium.
People have a dark side. Philosophers, psychologists, and priests have argued this point for millennia. Evidence is solidly on their side. Political campaigns are waged using “hidden persuaders” that appeal to the reptilian nature of human conscious thought. These persuaders are built from the bricks of fear, sexuality, aggression, and cruelty. They work.
Until people learn to turn away from the dark side, survival of civilization is at risk.
Leaders like Hitler and Trump are inevitable and unavoidable. It will be interesting to learn whether America’s great experiment in divided government will survive Trump’s attempt to undermine it so that he can become a king of sorts whose family members will succeed him in their quest for ultimate power.
What do you find interesting about physics?
The science of physics is all about explaining what is happening but not why. It’s interesting to me that the smartest scientists in the world can’t tell anyone why anything works the way it does.
The universe is governed so far as anyone knows by forces and constants that are unknowable, underivable, and unexplainable. All anyone can know is what happens; no one understands why.
Billions of dollars are spent to determine that gravity behaves according to certain rules. Experiments to discover the measure of forces and constants are always being done and refined. But where do the rules come from that make the forces and constants? What principles underlie the formation of the Universe?
Good luck to anyone who finds someone who knows why. Scientists laugh at the philosophers who try to provide clues to the why of things; it’s because some scientists are arrogant and ignorant. They don’t believe that what little they know is almost nothing at all.
Even animals as dumb as cats, goats, and birds calculate distances in their heads to make survival decisions based on their answers. Like humans they have no clue about the why of things, either.
What must happen for all Americans to accept the same truths?
Reduce the number of television and radio channels to one. Restrict diversity of content on the internet. Reduce the number of people who think “outside the box.” Put them into prisons or execute them, whichever is cheaper.
Torture people who refuse to think like everyone else. Others will “get the message” and adjust their thinking to conform to the American Way.
Eliminate elections — they stir-up people unnecessarily.
Reduce the wages of the 99% to subsistence; pay the 1% as much as possible to encourage them to embrace conformity.
Build impenetrable walls on all borders. Malcontents must not be allowed to leave; they might spread anti-American ideas abroad.
Do these things and Americans will accept the same truths. They will present a united front against anyone who might dare to challenge them.
What shocked you the most from the Mueller report?
The most shocking aspect of the report is the absence of any mention of or investigation into the president’s wife who is the daughter of a former member of the communist party of Yugoslavia back in the day.
She was born when DT was 24 years old. Was she groomed for the job she currently holds? Can America rule out with confidence that she is not a sleeper agent? She immigrated to the USA not too many years ago. It would be nice to hear that she is trustworthy.
It is clear from the report that DT is working for the other side. No one will say that the emperor has no clothes. Is it fear of the Russian-Israeli mob bosses, or is it something else?
Why is everyone in denial when the truth is obvious? How can Mueller say there was no conspiracy when the report screams that there was?
As for obstruction of the investigation, no sensible person needs a report to understand the extraordinary lengths that the president and his team traveled to discredit the people who defend Americans against despots and liars like the ones we currently endure.
The president has the power to hurt a lot of people should he go postal, which he seems in his tweets to threaten from time to time.
What are volcano eruptions good for?
Volcanism permits the release of heat generated by the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s interior. The release of heat permits convection currents in the liquid part of Earth’s core — without these currents the magnetosphere collapses, which puts the survival of all life at risk due to dramatically increased exposure to charged particles from solar and cosmic radiation.
When will the earth’s core cool down enough to make the magnetic field too weak to counter the suns solar storms?
Earth’s magnetic field depends more on convection currents in its molten metallic core than on its temperature. If the core gets too hot, it cannot sustain a magnetic field.
For convection currents to circulate, heat must be generated, but it must be able to escape so that it doesn’t build up.
Earth’s crust or mantle is cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg.
Crustal pieces called tectonic plates move about to permit volcanism and venting faults, which release the heat that is generated by the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s interior.
Earth’s core is the size of the planet Mars. It is solid at the center with a liquid (but highly viscous) outer layer. The solid center stays solid because of the pressure it is under; it is too hot to be magnetic. The outer liquid center is also under pressure; it must circulate to generate Earth’s magnetic field; otherwise the field will collapse; the protection it offers Earth against the solar wind will die.
Venus has a solid-liquid core like Earth’s but no tectonic plate activity to release heat and permit convection currents. As a result, Venus lacks a magnetosphere to shield it from cosmic radiation and solar flares.
The core of Mars froze solid millions of years ago. With no magnetosphere and little gravity, over time the solar wind has been able strip away a sizable portion of the Martian atmosphere. Only the heaviest gas is left in more than trace amounts: carbon dioxide.
I’ve read that geologists believe that the dynamics which generate the magnetosphere of Earth are robust and will last as long as the planet. Let’s hope they are right.
I have heard from Conservatives that Communism killed millions of people. Leftists claim that Capitalism killed the same. Which economic system has killed more people, and how are these numbers figured?
Since the start of the first World War until today two countries have killed the majority of people who have died in fights between nations: Germany and the United States.
During their killing sprees, oligarchs in both countries built and nurtured vast military-industrial alliances that automated mayhem and suffering. The rapid killing of humans began with chemicals, advanced to automated machine gunnery, and culminated in the deployment of atomic bombs and massive aerial bombardment of cities with fire-jellies known today as napalm.
During WWII, Germany attempted a partially successful ethnic-cleansing of Jewish populations in Europe and the Middle East. After the war against Germany was won, the United States and Russia worked together to orchestrate the execution of 100,000 German citizens for war-crimes. It was a small fraction of the numbers killed during that war, which some analysts believe approached 100 million souls.
It occurred to me that your question might be asking about which system, Capitalism or Communism, killed the largest number of its own subjects as it struggled to stand itself up and establish itself.
My view is that Capitalism is a euphemism for slavery. The word was invented to put a positive spin on the system in the USA where everyone works to enrich a privileged few. USA oligarchs needed an attractive term for their system when it came under popular challenge around the world by Communists during the twentieth century.
Communists believed that people should cooperate to create wealth, which they then shared. This kind of thinking was anathema to those who believed that only the people who risked their fortunes were entitled to the wealth created by their subjects (workers or slaves).
Through this lens, it is clear that Capitalism (or slavery) in the USA — the one country in the modern world able to preserve its slave system — decimated its indigenous populations and oppressed the Negro population under the cruelest form of slavery that has yet existed on Earth.
Oligarchs known as robber barons permitted the killing of thousands of ordinary workers during the building of the nation’s infrastructure, not only in mines, on road and railway systems, and on dams but also in unregulated sweat shops hidden behind the invisible walls of poverty in overcrowded cities.
The United States has a media system owned by a handful of families that sustains itself on advertising revenue. The practice of advertising in the USA is sophisticated. Psychologists help oligarchs maximize their advantages by crafting messages to modify the attitudes and behaviors of ordinary people.
Billionaires (most of whom are well-dressed thieves) hold themselves up as pillars of virtue and civic service in the media they control. They fight wars to secure the resources of countries like Venezuela, Brazil, Vietnam, Japan, etc. etc. They explain these wars to the public as righteous acts against evil powers.
It’s sickening.
If something is 40 million light years away, how long will it take for the light to reach us?
A light-year is a distance, which is 5.8786 trillion miles. 40 million light-years is a distance of 235 trillion miles.
Space expands at 14 miles-per-second per million light-years. For objects separated by a distance of 40 million light years, space expands at 560 miles per second.
Every million years, as the light from an object approaches Earth, the expansion of space will decrease by 14 miles per second, because the distance between the incoming light and Earth will be decreasing.
Therefore, it is certain that the time it takes light that started its journey 40 million light-years distant from Earth will take more than 40 million years to reach us. Right?
The first million light-years will take close to an additional 3,006 years due to the expansion of space. Each million light years of reduced distance will add less travel time until the added time becomes insignificant, because as the distance between the incoming light and Earth falls to zero so does the expansion of space.
If we take half of 3,006 years to be the average added time per million light-years, a simple calculation that doesn’t involve calculus will be a close approximation of the additional time traveled.
Do the math to learn that the added time of travel is 60,120 years due to the expansion of space alone.
Light 40 million light-years away takes 40,060,120 years to reach Earth.
The answer to whether or not our own consciousness has anything to do with how a wave or a particle manifests in physics seems to change completely with whoever answers it. Is there any real way to prove this?
Richard Feynman said once that he believed the underlying nature of reality is unknowable. Violations of Bell’s inequality in quantum entanglement cannot be visualized by models or any sort of mental imagery.
Something that can be described by mathematics but not explained by words or imagery is probably 95% of reality for the species-human. We are tadpoles in a muddy pond who struggle in vain to understand a world we will never see.
It has been known for a hundred years that when humans conduct an experiment on nanoscale particles they affect the results during their observation of both the process and the outcomes. Every kid who does the several variations of the double-slit experiment learns that it is true.
Engineers take what works and turn it into miracles that no one understands — the digital device folks use to view my answer is incomprehensible to most. Some understand parts, but it takes a team to understand the whole.
People crave certainty. Quantum observations prove that certainty is a quixotic quest doomed from the start. People want to believe that what they think “must be true” is provable by both logic and experimental verification.
Unfortunately for those who don’t tolerate cognitive dissonance well, everything and nothing is both provable and falsifiable depending on which axioms are chosen as starting points.
What elements do scientists use to estimate the age of the Earth? They use isotope ratios. Although 118 elements make up the periodic table, the elements have thousands of isotopes, right?
For example, lead can be separated into eleven groups — each group has a different weight. The weight differences are the result of the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The more neutrons, the heavier the isotope. Four of the isotopes of lead are stable — they don’t decay into other isotopes or other elements.
All chemical properties of the 118 elements in the periodic table are determined by their electrical structure, which is the number of electrons they carry. Neutrons add weight carried in the nucleus but otherwise are irrelevant to the simple chemical behaviors of the elements.
To estimate the age of Earth, scientists study the composition of zircon, a common silicate element in Earth’s crust. Zircon is lead averse. Any lead found in zircon must be the result of radioactive decay of either uranium or thorium, which are common impurities. These impurities are radioactive and can over time change the color of zircon as they break down its crystal structure.
One of the isotopes of uranium has a half-life of 4.47 billion years; another isotope has a half-life of 710 million years. Both isotopes decay to stable isotopes of lead.
So the process is to measure how much of each isotope of uranium is contaminating the zircon sample and how much of that uranium has decayed into the two isotopes of lead that are stable; that don’t decay any further. This method can measure the age of the earth to a precision of 50 million years.
Earth’s age is believed to be 4.543 billion years.
Does it seem odd that such a useful trait like high level cognitive function is not more common in Earth’s life-forms? Once a species (humans) reaches a certain level of intelligence, other intelligent creatures become a source of fear and loathing.
Imagine raccoons or squirrels equipped with human intelligence. They are able to out-game us, work their way into living spaces, even sneak up in the night to kill us with their imaginative weapons.
After the kill, they sneak into refrigerators by deploying ingenious levers and pulleys to take and eat cold pizza and left-over wiener-schnitzel.
How long will people put up with such behavior before they go on an extermination campaign?
In New York City extermination campaigns against intelligent rats have already begun. It might take a hundred years, but eventually rats with sense will refuse to live in NYC.
Over hundreds-of-thousands of years collections of intelligent creatures have devolved to fear and mistrust other collections of intelligent creatures. The lust for war has entered human DNA to the point that people search for differences among themselves to justify mass-slaughter and genocides.
What is less subtle than skin color or religion or immigration-status? All these “superficialities” have been used as an excuse to attack and kill “others” no matter how similar or different — some of whom, as I write, are watching from their burrows in horror as they plan their assaults on the species human.
The Kingdom of Animals does not distinguish between our physical and moral differences. Humans deserve to die for their cruelties. With every squashed bug, fear and loathing intensifies. Even now legions of mosquitoes and Japanese beetles plan their revenge.
This summer they will extract it — even as most humans occupy themselves with arguments pro-and-con about what a hair-ball the president has turned out to be.
Only when humans destroy themselves and go extinct will intelligence get its chance to bloom within the diversity of species that occupy the planet. By then extra-terrestrials will have found Earth and enslaved it.
It is in this sense that the species-human will achieve its revenge against the intelligent squirrel and raccoon; against the mosquito and beetle who so often drove people to distraction when they dominated Earth.
I have hope that someday readers will visit Quora.com to look up me — Billy Lee — to read my answers to hundreds — perhaps one day thousands — of questions asked by every kind of curious person from every part of the world.
I love to read and think about questions from unmet others — to encounter oddities that have never occurred to me to ask or answer.
It’s humbling to be confronted by the knowledge that not only do I not know the answers to thousands of questions, but I lack the breadth of mind to even imagine such questions; I am convicted by my own lack of curiosity and inability to think deeply about an almost infinite number of mysteries that other people of all types and backgrounds wonder about and seek to understand.
Hundreds of years ago, polymaths — the smartest and most energetic of them, anyway — could know and understand all that humankind ever dreamed. Today, the world is too complex; the depth of knowledge required to understand a narrow subject — like juice-carton safety-caps (I hold a patent) — takes years, maybe decades, to acquire.
Is it any wonder that smart people give up and go stupid?
No matter how much a Doctor of Philosophy knows about the rules of logic, he’s a dummy to every certified automobile mechanic he will ever meet — and vice-versa, right?
A way out of the dilemma is to practice the art of pontification. I pontificate based on a lifetime of experience; and reading; and wandering the world; and poking around in my backyard — to ponder why things are the way they seem to be.
Je connais beaucoup demerde, and I know a lot of nothing. When I write it down, well, magic happens. Resonate rings of truth rise which when later read render me reeling.
I’m unsure where-from the magic comes. It seems to fall from heaven to light the world. I’m driven to share with souls known only to God, because I have no way to know who reads my blog. I know only that some folks make the time, because WordPress stats say it’s so.
One of the things on Quora.com that seems to confuse a lot of people is the difference between momentum — a measure of the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity in a particular direction — and kinetic energy, which is a measure of the energy of an object that has been accelerated for a period of time in a particular direction, which enables it to do work.
Momentum is an object’s mass times its velocity; it is a measure of its inertia along a defined direction. It is measured in newton-seconds.
Kinetic energy is released by an object in units of acceleration that were initially induced by newtons of force. It is equal to half the quantity that is calculated by multiplying an object’s mass by its velocity squared. It is measured in units called joules, which are newton-meters.
Of course, spinning objects that aren’t moving in any direction have momentum and kinetic energy, too. The two are wrapped together in a concept called, torque.
Dear God, help me.
Now, I’m confused. Somebody, please, explain to me. I thought I understood until I started writing. I did. Really.
Another source of confusion concerns the nature of photons, which are tiny packets of oscillating electric and magnetic energy — from which light is made, right?
Photons seem to have no mass in the vacuum of space. When they pass through a material like glass, they leave a wake of disrupted electrons in the glass which belch out polaritons. These particles add mass to the photons and slow them down by as much as forty percent.
When photons exit the glass and enter the vacuum of space they leave the polaritons behind, lose their acquired mass, and jump to light speed, instantaneously.
Who knows for sure that it’s true?
Who understands why?
Here is an interesting thought: if humans — limited in understanding by language and mathematics — are unable to ever know why photons exist and behave as they appear to do, then who can? Who does understand?
Is all the complexity of the universe understood by no one? Is it possible that an unlikely universe can exist forever whose fundamentals cannot be articulated and which lies outside the experience and ability to comprehend of any sentient life-form whatever, whenever, wherever?
What kind of place do we live in, anyway?
Calm down. Take a breath.
Reality may not be as hopelessly inaccessible as it seems. Can it?
Here are some questions, which I’ve answered as truthfully as I know how. The answers are assertions of truth.
1 – How did a single cell organism eventually lead to complex life on earth, and does that mean that all life has a common ancestor (the single cell)?
This one is the 64-million-dollar question that no one has ever answered convincingly. Prokaryotic cells were established 3.5 billion years ago on the early Earth. They evolved to become the bacteria and archaea branches in the tree of life that exist to this day.
Here is the amazing part, at least for me: Eukaryotic cells, which are the much larger and more tightly organized cells of all animals and plants, did not emerge until two billion years after prokaryotes. It took a long time to evolve cells capable of conjugating into more complex life.
For the past 1.5 billion years eukaryotic cells have evolved into life forms capable of civilization and space exploration. The time frame is amazingly long.
The thought that a lunatic could in a moment of bad judgment start a cascade of events that extinguishes all life is troubling.
When astronomers look into space they see no signatures of life as advanced as ours. Again, this is troubling, because it might be an indicator that the knowledge possessed by advanced life-forms may approach some asymptotic limit where self-annihilation becomes inevitable.
2 -What evidence would falsify the theory of evolution?
No one knows all the myriad ways that life evolves, only that it does. That life evolved from cells that were fully functional 3.5 billion years ago is an established fact, because of evidence found in rocks.
Scientists know that it took two billion years for these ancient cells to evolve into the much larger and more tightly organized eukaryotic cells that today are the foundational structures of all animals and plants.
No one knows how life as complex as cells was established on a hostile planet like the early Earth, but everyone has an opinion; these opinions are called conjectures and theories.
One scientist might say that life started on Mars and was transferred to Earth on space debris uplifted by a cataclysm on Mars. Another says no; all the stuff necessary to make prokaryotic (primitive) cells existed in abundance on a young Earth — perhaps near hot vents in the ocean floor. Other geologists say the earth was bone dry at one billion years. Oceans came later, so just what the heck does anyone know for sure, anyway?
Many conjectures purport to explain how life changed from unicellular eukaryotic forms 1.5 billion years ago into the space-exploring civilizations of today. Every conjecture thus far has already been falsified either by evidence or by competing conjectures that make as much sense but are different.
For example: some say mutations in DNA drive evolution. The problem is that mutations are too rare. Some say an eco-sphere of processes driven by a halo of molecules that cling to DNA drives evolution. They call it epigenetics. Others say, no. RNA drives evolution like colonies of intelligent ants who build hives. There are other explanations.
None are verifiable or generally accepted due to an insufficient body of proof that is able to overcome alternative ideas that are equally compelling.
Another problem is that no one knows if DNA life is all there is. DNA is a molecule that cannot be seen or worked with until it is amplified into a viewable goo.
Are there other undiscovered molecules no one knows how to amplify?
Understanding of the parameters and limits of life is incomplete and may perhaps mislead researchers. Humans might not yet know enough to figure out the dynamics of genomes. More needs to be discovered and understood.
Is there a shadow biosphere that is in a symbiotic relationship with DNA? Where is the dark DNA that biologists can’t find that is necessary to code for many of the proteins they know exist?
How were cells themselves established so quickly on Earth? It’s a question whose answer is discussed by countless experts and non-experts; no answer fully satisfies.
Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and survival of the fittest have their place. But he was just getting started, and he died a long time ago. Scientists have a lot of work left to do.
3 – Which Bible story is most objectionable when looked at in the context of modern morality?
All Scripture is God-breathed. To love and be loved by both God and people is why we were born; it’s what makes life precious and worth living. No one wants to die; no one wants to be hated.
The sad part is that everyone suffers; everyone is hated by someone; everyone hates someone; everyone dies after a life of blunders and sin. Christ Jesus came to save the lost, which by the looks of this thread is pretty much everyone.
We have hope. It’s something to hold onto as we grow weak and find ourselves ruined at the end of our minutes in the sun on our beloved Earth.
Jesus made a path for us. It cost him everything a human can pay. He somehow survived the Roman crucifixion that killed him to show the poor and overly burdened that in his power is the way, the truth, and the life.
There is a path to paradise; we — everyone of us — can find it by surrendering to the God who loved us, gave us life, and suffered to set right what we put wrong.
4 – People say Newton’s third law, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” is not accurate. Is it true?
Einstein said that only mass and energy exist; they are in fact equivalent; they are the same thing; two sides of the same coin. Energy gives rise to all other phenomenon and forces that scientists observe.
Stephen Hawking said that when mass (or energy) comes into existence a negative energy must emerge to balance it so that when added up everything in the universe sums to zero. It appears that Newton’s third law, equal and opposite, is not only accurate — it is a fundamental balancing principle that undergirds existence.
Mass is matter, which can be positive or negative and is referred to as matter or anti-matter.
The Billy Lee Conjecture claims that mass is pixelated (quantized) such that in the contest of emergence within the smallest spherical volume, matter or anti-matter (one or the other) will prevail due to a natural truncation of π in the putative spherical volume of the creation space.
An evenly divided ratio of matter and anti-matter within a spherical creation-space is physically impossible if π is truncated by pixelization. Matter and anti-matter will annihilate until a single piece of either matter or anti-matter remains after the creation event.
To maintain a zero-sum, balancing counter-energy will emerge according to speculation by the late Stephen Hawking.
Over long periods it seems that an extraordinary amount of matter has accumulated inside our own universe by surviving the natural annihilation of matter by anti-matter. This matter seems to have generated an enormous amount of counter-balancing energy — some of which Newton called gravity. Most of the energy remains undiscovered and is referred to as “dark.”
In our own universe, π seems to “round-off” near the precision of the Planck constant.
In universes outside our own — some of which seem to be pulling our universe apart in an accelerating expansion caused, perhaps, by their own gravitational forces — π may truncate to different values to generate in some cases a prevailing anti-matter and opposing energies that manifest qualities different from the energies found in our own universe.
If parallel universes disrupt the zero-sum strategy of our own, it may still be true that the principle of zero-sum or equal but opposite is operational, but humans are too small and the distances are too far for anyone to ever know for sure that it is true.
5 – What are the major foreign policy issues that the United States of America is working on in 2018?
I’m writing this answer just after the meeting in Singapore between North Korea and the United States involving the Korean nuclear arsenal.
The Secretary of State, Pompeo, said yesterday that NK has two years to de-nuke. This delay might tempt the Japanese to convert their stockpile of 47 tons of plutonium into bombs. Japan and North Korea have issues related to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.
It takes ten pounds to make one bomb. The Japanese can make as many bombs as they want in as little as 24 hours.
A Japan armed with 10,000 nuclear bombs (they already have the missiles to launch them) is a clear and present danger to China, Russia, and Korea — not to mention the United States with whom Japan has a beef that goes all the way back to World War Two when the USA destroyed 67 of their cities with napalm; two cities by atomic bombs.
The USA has occupied Japan ever since. Some of the Japanese probably hate us — who knows for sure?
6 – Can a photon’s speed be slowed down? I have heard that it can be slowed by a medium, but I have also heard that it is just the velocity being slowed as it “bounces” from particle to particle? I am not talking about Bose-Einstein condensation.
The current thinking is this: when a photon leaves the vacuum to enter a material object, it leaves a wake in its path that vibrates electrons in the medium. These oscillating (or disturbed) electrons generate polaritons, which are photon-like objects that can catch and add mass to the photon. With mass added, the photon slows down — as much as 40% in glass, for example, which enables more polaritons to pile on.
When the photon exits into the vacuum of space, it disentangles from the polaritons, and instantly resumes light speed.
I didn’t make this up.
It’s what some physicists are saying, and it explains a lot and leaves a lot unexplained — like all things physics when folks go just a little deeper into the abyss of understanding.
7 – What is the relation between light and darkness? Can one exist without the other?
Light is the action of certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation on structures in the eye, which trigger hallucinations in the brain that humans report as “light.”
An infinite range of frequencies are “out there.” Humans are blind to almost all of them. People who are unable to trigger hallucinations induced by electromagnetic radiation say that they are experiencing “darkness.”
Some frequencies of light are experienced as “heat.” Because the sensation is not accompanied by visual cues, people in hot rooms with no windows believe they are experiencing “darkness.”
The experience of heat is caused by the same electromagnetic waves that induce visual experience, but they are a tiny bit longer in length than those which induce the experience of the color “red” in humans.
The longer waves carry less energy and are invisible to people unless they view the ”infra-red” light through high-tech sensors. Local fire-departments use these sensors to identify ”hotspots” where fires might reignite.
8 – Given an opportunity to pass through one or two slits with no detection, will a quantum object always pass through both?
If the slits are in the right position and are cut to the right size and are at the right distance from the source, a pattern on a detector screen will evolve over time to look as if waves are passing through the slits and interfering in a predictable way with each other.
Of course, it’s not true, because the particles are shot one at a time and the duration of the experiment can be hours to weeks long. The shots land one dot at a time. After thousands of shots, a pattern that resembles what one would expect of waves interfering is formed by the particles as they accumulate on the detector backstop.
9 – Is Jesus a hoax? Jesus has not walked on Earth in 2,000 years. How can a man 2,000 years ago save anyone?
I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.
The righteous will say, ‘Lord when did we do these things?’
My answer will be, ‘Everything you did to help suffering people, you did for me.’
The preceding is a paraphrase of part of Matthew 25, a book in the Bible.
Read it. Why not?
The answer is in the sense that it is not a hoax that the “least of these” walk the earth when we do. How we treat unfortunates is, in the view of Jesus, the way we treat him. He will return to us the same courtesies when finally we give GOD an account of our lives.
RNA, in its many forms, behaves like ant colonies which swarm over the DNA pile to do a number of tasks that seem to involve a lot of decision making.
RNA selects out of billions of bases a few thousand which it strings together to make “genes” that it transfers to ribosomes — which are made almost entirely of RNA and are among the oldest structures in cells.
At a ribosome, the genes are coupled to RNA that carries amino acids; the amino acids are then ejected from the ribosome to be strung together like necklace beads; they are transported to Golgi structures where they are folded into proteins.
A process this complex — and it’s actually far more complex than this summary implies — can be orchestrated without intelligence; it’s possible, but without intelligence of some form, the process seems, at least to me, to border on the miraculous.
After all, what is the result?
It is a conscious thinking life-form who can, in cooperation with others, figure out its own origins.
11 – How do Quantum spins get affected by Quantum entanglement?
All atoms with electron shells that are home to more than one electron have entangled electrons. The spins tend to oppose each other. With bosonic particles, down conversion techniques produce photons that have opposite polarization.
Most physicists think that spin is induced during measurement; the spin is transmitted oppositely to the entangled partner instantly — no matter how far separated.
For this reason, a pair of entangled particles can be envisioned as a single particle that behaves as if one of its dimensions (the distance between its endpoints) is missing.
The distance between the entangled pair behaves as if it is zero — when it is known to be non-zero.
12 – What is the viability of colonies on other planets?
The two planets closest to Earth are the most viable places for colonies simply because they are the easiest to resupply. They are Mars and Venus.
Neither can sustain colonies, because they lack magnetospheres, which are essential for deflecting high energy particles emitted by the Sun (called the solar wind). These particles are deadly to life. The molten iron-nickel cores of Mars and Venus froze millions of years ago on both planets, which collapsed their magnetospheres.
Venus has a highly toxic atmosphere, which is another reason to rule out colonization there.
Beyond Mars are gas giants. Only their rocky moons are candidates for human colonies. All the moons appear to be too cold to operate the machinery necessary to sustain human life. Most lack protection from the solar wind.
Bonus Assertion – Does a photon consist of (f) quantized energy packets each of (h) joules?
A photon seems to be a packet of vibrating electric and magnetic energy, each part of which exerts its energy at a right angle to the other. The energy in the packet is proportional to vibrational frequency alone. A photon has no mass or acceleration. It travels along at a constant speed in space-time. The electric portion of the energy is about seven times the energy of the magnetic portion.
Photons can become more intense (that is, brighter) when they pile up. Pile ups don’t happen to electrons, protons, and neutrons because they obey an exclusion principle that forbids them from occupying the same space at the same time.
Photons can pile up, but their intensity (or energy) can only be transferred into electrons that are in an energy state that resonates with the frequency of the incoming photons. Non-resonate electrons ignore un-matched photons, so photons pass through non-resonate electrons unimpeded.
The energy of an individual photon can be expressed as its kinetic energy and shown to equal Planck’s constant times the photon’s frequency, which always results in a very small number.
When expressed in terms of its wavelength (λ), photon energy equals the Planck constant (h) times the speed of light (c) divided by the wavelength (λ) of the photon. Notice that the mass term is missing due to a simple manipulation of the relevant equations — which anyone who is interested can find in the following link.
Momentum might not be an appropriate metric for a force carrying boson like a photon, because momentum is based on mass, which many physicists say photons in a vacuum don’t possess.
Another reason momentum could be an inappropriate metric is that the velocity of photons in a vacuum is independent of any reference frame, right? Momentum is a vector quantity that is always measured in relationship to a particular reference frame or the momentum of another particle.
There is a theory that claims that photons pick up mass when they pass through materials like glass. They seem to leave a wake that shakes up electrons in the material. The vibrating electrons release polaritons, which by a mechanism analogous to superposition add mass to the photon and slow it down. When the photon exits and returns to vacuum, it sheds the polaritons, becomes massless, and returns to light speed instantly.
Perhaps photons in the vacuum of space acquire mass by interacting with virtual particles that emit virtual polaritons. Notions about the nature of the universe would be changed radically if such a notion were confirmed by evidence.
Because h and c are constants, they can be multiplied together to give a constant that is very close to 2E-25. Dividing 2E-25 by the wavelength of a photon will give its energy in joules. Of course, all units are SI, which stands for standard international units, correct?
Since E = hf or (hc / λ) , the energy is always a multiple of h, which is the Planck constant. The word “multiple” is a simple way to say “quantized”.
So, the energy of a photon bunch or pile can be expressed as a multiple of the number of photons of a certain wavelength in that bunch. The energy in each individual photon is its wavelength (or frequency, if you like) multiplied by the Planck number — a constant equal to 6.626E-34.
It takes a pile-up — or bunch — of about 7 photons with wavelengths close to 2.5 one-hundred-thousandths of an inch long (635 nanometers) to carry enough energy to light up the sensors in a human eye.
How much energy is in those seven photons? It is seven times 2E-25 / 635E-9 — in joules, right?
It’s 2.2E-18 joules. Converted to an easier metric befitting its scale, the energy is nearly 14 electron volts, which is equivalent to the energy held in 14 electrons.
People say that photons with wavelengths that measure 635 nanometers create the color yellow-orange in their minds.
All writers know the column, By the Book, published every Sunday in the New York Times Book Review section. Each week the editors pick a popular writer and ask him or her a fairly standard set of questions that would be impossible for normal people to answer off the top of their heads.
The authors rattle off the names of all kinds of titles and writers and say smart things designed to dazzle the little people who are always starved for an entertaining read.
I’m a pontificator who has never sold a book and never will, most likely. Authors sell their souls to write for money; they do exhausting tours where they answer stupid questions asked by stupid people day after stupid day. From these gatherings of stupidity they hope to sell a few books. It’s stupid.
Through books and other media, the public is exposed to a version of truth filtered by the most powerful people on Earth — to paraphrase Pulitzer Prize winner, Ronan Farrow.
Yes, it’s sickening. People are reading crap; they are immersed literarily in fibs and fabrications, which are shaped to make the world seem less evil, more friendly.
The truth that no wants to hear — I’m screaming it from cell towers to swarming people who seem to lack ears — billionaires have enslaved us. We are living in a gilded prison.
Totalitarianism has already won — not through governments but by supremely advantaged individuals who have no limits on the money they can make and keep — no limits on their power or their reach.
It’s true.
The rest of this essay is a parody of By the Book. The imagined interviewee is Billy Lee, the Pontificator. That’s me.
Billy Lee, the Pontificator
What books are on your nightstand?
I honestly don’t know. Can you give me a minute to run upstairs and look on the floor and my wife’s dresser? I keep current reads close to bed where I do most of my reading. It won’t take long… …
Ok. Thanks for waiting.
“The Periodic Table in Minutes,” by Dan Green; “Genetics in Minutes,” by Tom Jackson; “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Any favorites?
“The Poky Little Puppy,” by Janette Sebring Lowrey and Gustaf Tenggren was my all time favorite. Mother read it hundreds of times.
I remember being amazed to learn that anyone can dig a hole under a fence to open a world of naughty possibilities. It cost a serving of strawberry shortcake to get caught; it seemed worth it to my little mind.
Your nightstand doesn’t seem to include fiction. What genres do you avoid and which are you drawn to?
I’ve read a lot of good fiction, but most are classics like “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy and “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I would say that Fyodor ruined my interest in fiction. His book was a nightmare that threw me into depression.
War and Peace was different; it taught me how the world works; Leo laid bare the fallacy of the great man theory of history.
But yes, I avoid fiction. As a teenager I read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand a couple times. The book ruined my life more than any other work of fiction, because it claimed to be truth. Living life proved it wrong, but its view of the nature of humans derailed me for decades.
I am drawn to books about science and math. Enough said, I hope.
I enjoy history.
“Retribution” by Max Hastings is a block buster about World War II — as is “Devil’s Voyage” by Jack L. Chalker. “This Kind of War” by T. R. Ferenbach is a history of the Korean War that knocked my socks off.
You like history. Is there any history you learned from reading that isn’t taught in school? Anything you learned that’s shocking?
During the 150 years before America became a constitutional republic, two-thirds of all white people immigrated as slaves, who in those former times were called indentured servants. Amazing, right?
They came unchained on boats voluntarily, because life was brutal in Europe for poor people. Their term of slavery lasted seven years and ended with emancipation.
Africans came in chains. They served until they became too frail to work; they were set free to die of starvation. The term used was manumission. Ten percent of African slaves were set free this way by the time America became a republic in the late 1700s.
From before the beginning, America was a slave state. The privileges of freedom were extended to white men who owned property. Only they could vote, but not for Senators. State legislators with approval from their Governors appointed Senators.
The founders enshrined slavery in the constitution. Eighty-five years after its signing, half of all Americans went to war against the other half to preserve slavery, but they lost.
After the Civil War, it took the Confederates twenty-five years to terrorize blacks back into submission. At the same time, northern whites committed a genocide against the native peoples they called redskins.
In the 1900s, slavery was renamed capitalism by industry titans to help them make a more appealing counter argument against a system that was catching fire in Europe called communism.
Communists believed wealth should be produced cooperatively and then shared. The idea of sharing was anathema to slave holders (business owners) who referred to their slaves as workers.
Owners abrogated their obligation to care for their slaves by forcing them to provide for their own food, housing, and medical care out of a tiny stipend they bestowed, which today people refer to as a minimumwage. The owners somewhat derisively called the new rules freedom.
After WWII, the wealthy created what they liked to call a middle class (which included about ten percent of the population) to reward the mostly poor farm boys who had risked their lives to protect them.
After 1980, the entitled kids and grandkids of the aristocracy began to disassemble the system their fathers and grandfathers had built, because they felt that the little people weren’t grateful enough. They called it the Reagan Revolution.
Today, leaders promise to make America great again. No more Negro presidents. No more subsidized health care. No more regulations to protect the disadvantaged. Everyone will stand on their own two feet or perish.
It’s the way it’s always been. The escape to America, it turned out, was an escape from freedom.
The USA is now the most merciless police state in world history. The country is demoralized by a military occupation punctuated by non-judicial executions and excessive displays of military force against civilians.
The occupation of America is undergirded by a nightmarish penal system that locks up millions in high-tech prisons where tens-of-thousands are tortured with solitary confinement.
What is the worst part? The USA is building a wall to lock people in. Soon everyone in the USA will be a prisoner unable to leave. That’s the future.
America is going to create a society that reflects the values of its billionaires and the cartel of foreign oligarchs they call friends.
Guess what? There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Take the pills they give you and pretend life is great.
Try hard to cope, and you just might.
Wow, Billy Lee. Glad you got that off your chest. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The Bible.
Does he have time? It’s close to 800,000 words — twenty novels. It’s a lot of reading for a man in his seventies who golfs and is known for not reading much.
Who knows how much time any of us have? I don’t.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville. I own the book and have read through the first half at least twice. It’s going to sound strange, but I honestly think the book is about homosexuality. There is a scene in one of the first chapters where two men sleep together in the bowels of a boat. They seem to have an affection for each other that, frankly, I find touching.
The title is a little suspicious. Try screaming it three times in a church without offending anyone. Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! It’s hard. It’s a bit of a tongue-twister to boot.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which of three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Well, first, I have to get a buy-in from my wife, Bevy Mae. Beverly isn’t going to throw a dinner party just because I say so. But assuming she agrees, I’d invite Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, and Richard Rhodes.
All three lived on the edge of knowledge where uncertainty rages; where fear can overwhelm the unprepared. Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle is one of the best science books about candle flames that I’ve ever read. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is a joy that anyone can imbibe in a few short hours if they skip the math and physics. And Richard Rhodes proves in his tomes that any idiot can build and store thermonuclear bombs in their basement.
If you would be gracious enough to permit me a fourth invitee, it would be Che Guevara — probably the best read and most informed writer of all time according to declassified CIA assessments. John Kennedy organized the original Green Berets based on one of his books.
Much of Che’s work is unpublished. His published work is under a suppression protocol inside the USA. Expect releases now that new leadership has risen in Cuba and the United States.
Who would you want to write your life story?
Jesus of Nazareth. People say that he never wrote anything, but he was literate and knew things most folks can only wonder about. Of all public figures past and present, Jesus seems to be the one who understood people best and loved enough to be tender. I don’t think he would humiliate me.
Paul Newman. (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008)
What do you plan to read next?
Something I’ve written, probably. I’m the greatest pontificator there’s ever been. Why go out for hamburger when there’s steak at home?
Paul Newman said the same when someone asked why he stayed faithful to his wife, Joanne Woodward. For those who understand what love is, no explanation is necessary.
A few months ago, I published 25 Answers to questions readers of Quora.com took time to ask me, because they trusted I knew what I was writing about. Yes, the world is easily fooled by pontificators posing as experts. I confess, I am one of them.
I am a bona-fide pontificator and intend to continue pontificating until I can no longer remember my name. For me, it’s art. My promise is truth, accuracy, and to fix screw-ups when someone points them out.
The response to my blog-bag of answers was underwhelming to the point where I wondered whether I should ever inflict another anthology of eclectic curiosities on any group of readers anywhere in the world.
Yes! I decided. Of course, I will. I love to read what I write!
When I forget what I once knew, I read the posts and remember how smart I was when I could remember stuff. It’s a good feeling. Someday I hope my grandchildren will understand why I don’t remember their names or how old they are. Someday I hope they will get what I’m talking about.
Brain-dead and happy is a wonderful combination, and I have it. Yes, I do. It is wonderful. I feel happy and content most of the time.
My mother had Alzheimer’s for years. It was a peculiar variation where she could remember twenty-five quips and jokes, which she repeated to anyone who would listen. Sometimes she wondered what was wrong with her. She asked about it, sometimes.
She always forgot the answer, but to the end she never forgot her repertoire of sure-fire laugh lines. Mom delighted us to the very end of her life, God bless her.
Anyway, I know stuff, and I’m no longer afraid to share. I would say I am becoming fearless.
This essay is a collection of 25 more questions that people from around the world have asked, and I have dared answer. My last Quora compilation was mostly math and physics. Not this time. Here answers focus more on politics, philosophy, religion, and other esotery.
Oh, I might slip a science or math question in here or there for nerds I know are out there who read my stuff and cling to every word.
Here goes.
1 – How is it “just” for jails to be privately owned in the U.S.?
Allowing private citizens to own the means-of-incarceration is as insane as it is unjust and undemocratic.
Since 1984, America has allowed people to sequester as much wealth as they can manage. The looting, cheating, and chicanery that followed has turned America into one of the most corrupt, cruel, and unfair countries the world has ever known.
The result is that now we have an associate of a powerful Russian cartel serving as our president. Are we really going to allow his friends to own our prisons?
Are we out of our minds?
The situation is far worse than you can imagine.
Billionaires run the media. You aren’t going to hear about ways of organizing our country that are in opposition to their consensus about how things should be done. What passes as “dissent” on shows like Rachel Maddow, for example, has the backing of some billionaire somewhere.
We don’t know the names of the people who run our country. They don’t run for office. They do buy the services of office holders on both sides of the aisle — GOP and Democrat. It’s disturbing, especially when people finally realize that they are at bottom mere slaves with no real power. If voting made a difference, would billionaires allow it? Would you, if you were rich? I don’t think so.
Even now, confidence in our electoral system is being undermined. Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who exposed Russian tampering with our election results, rots in jail; she can’t obtain bail. The media doesn’t cover her. They want us to forget all about her.
Keeping Reality incarcerated undermines confidence, because it makes it seem like the government has something to hide about our election process.
Elon believes (correctly) that the risk of a future human extinction event approaches certainty over a very short period of time that can be estimated to be in the hundreds of years or less.
Elon believes we are in a race against catastrophe; humans are special and must be protected; one way to reduce extinction probabilities for humans is to establish populations on other planets and moons.
There are 165 or so rocky (solid) bodies in the solar system with enough gravity that humans can walk on them. Places where large populations can survive are fewer than five and could be as few as absolute zero.
Mars has special problems for human survival which must be solved. It has no protection from high energy radiation and cosmic rays. It lacks a magnetosphere and the atmospheric gases like nitrogen and oxygen that are opaque to harmful rays and particles. Elon believes these problems will be solved and that risk of extinction can be reduced if we establish vigorous colonies there.
He has hope where most informed people do not. My hope is that we can avoid extinction on Earth, but volatile climate and frequent ice ages are difficult to overcome.
We also have new and unusual risks associated with our technologies —biological, nuclear, AI, totalitarianism, resource depletion, and runaway climate change.
Natural risks include asteroid strikes, super nova irradiation, and volcanism. These natural risks are likely to be the same (or larger) on other bodies in the solar system as they are on Earth.
Two human-like species are known to have gone extinct in the geological record. (Some anthropologists say it’s three.) Human populations experienced a near extinction event 70,000 years ago when the total population collapsed to less than 4,000.
I do not know what Elon Musk thinks about organized religion.
I see religion as a brake on the tendency of humans to kill each other, which history teaches has sometimes been effective and at other times not. Sometimes, strongly held religious beliefs lead to war.
On one thing humans agree: they love to fight.
3 – What is the greatest achievement in human history?
Blaise Pascal said that civilization advanced when people finally understood that being the son of a Queen did not qualify someone to be a King.
Nepotism kills civilizations and impedes human progress. An example is the president bringing in his family to manage the United States, presumably because loyalty trumps ability.
The cascading catastrophe that is enveloping us will soon teach anyone who is teachable that placing loyalty to a “king” above the ability to serve our country is one of the many roads that leads nations to ruin.
4 – Why is there a lot of woo-woo surrounding the double slit experiment?
If you shot a BB gun once every five minutes for two weeks at a steel plate that had cut into it two quarter-inch slits, you wouldn’t expect to find 25 or so tidy columns of holes in the wall behind when you were done. People who have done this experiment with atomic scale particles always say “woo” after, because the phenomenon makes no sense.
The mathematics to describe the phenomenon is the same as that used to explain wave-behavior. The problem is this: even if you shoot one wave packet at a time (using photons) instead of solid BB-like particles (like Buckyballs), no one expects that over a few weeks tidy columns will form on the back wall that look like wave interference. The reason for the pattern is a total mystery.
5 – What is the origin of geometric shapes (triangle, circle, cube, etc.)? If the universe was governed by different laws, would it be possible that these concepts would also be different?
People speculate about the origins of idealized shapes that don’t occur in nature (except approximately). People seem to crave symmetry. They don’t like cognitive dissonance, uncertainty, or ambiguity.
People who are dissonant-intolerant are easy to manipulate. Politicians prey on people’s discomfort by offering simple solutions in return for votes. The result is always disillusionment, because nothing involving people is simple.
Nothing in nature is simple, either.
Triangles, circles, and cubes seem simple because of their symmetries. They appeal to the simple-minded among us — which is 99% of the population, right? It might be 100% if mathematics and language are insufficient to understand ultimate reality.
Einstein had this theory that only mass and energy exist. They are equivalent; they are two sides of the same coin. Space and time are a consequence, not a cause.
Space-time was described by tensor-metrics, and the metrics show that space-time does not have to be flat.
Lines can be thought of as geodesics, which are “straight” only when the metrics of space-time are “flat”. When the metrics “curve” space-time (as they do near massive objects) parallel lines might be parallel in one place only, as lines of longitude on Earth are parallel in one place only — at the equator.
The laws of physics seem unlikely, because twenty or so constants in nature have been discovered that can’t be derived and seem to make no sense. All these constants have been revealed by experiments and seem to be irrational. One example is the constant “α” (alpha), which is discussed in the first link that follows this answer.
Stephen Hawking says that the odds of a universe configured like ours are 1E500 against, which is close to an infinity. But Stephen Wolfram says that at the heart of the universe is a simple algorithm. In his view the algorithm, should anyone ever discover it, will prove that our universe is the only configuration possible.
6 – What salary in the United States puts you in the top 10%, top 5%, top 2%, and top 1% in terms of salary?
All anyone needs to know about train-wreck America is that half of all black families live on less than $40K per year; half of all non-black families live on less than $75K per year. It’s hard to imagine that families can survive, let alone prevail, on so little income.
The USA is segregated by income and race. Poor people have no idea how easy life is for the wealthy; the wealthy don’t believe America has poverty.
I have five sons and one daughter. Only two of the six are in the top 1%. The most talented one, an assistant professor of kinetic art at a major university, is in the bottom half. His brothers give him money so he can get by.
7 – Modern humans appeared 200,000; civilization 10,000; and advanced technology 500 years ago. Why no advancement for something like 190,000 years?
Technology advances when survival demands it. Wars involving large populations did not become possible until about 3,000 years ago, because human populations were small.
Technology (to wage war) began to advance when population size increased; war technology percolated into the general population during peacetime.
70,000 years ago the human population collapsed to what some anthropologists believe was fewer than 4,000 individuals. The climb back took a long time because the world was in an ice age until 15,000 years ago or so. It has taken time to reach seven billion individuals.
The good news is that advances in technology and science are no longer driven by war, but by the preparation for war. Entertainment, comfort, convenience, and other factors drive inventors to bring clever technologies to peacetime populations.
Avoidance of war should become the highest priority of humankind from here on out, or we might suffer a catastrophic population collapse that would most certainly set back human development for hundreds of thousands of years.
Extinction is another possibility. At least two intelligent hominid species are known to have gone extinct during the past 200,000 years. There may be others.
Sorry for the short answer. The list of technologies and natural catastrophes that can annihilate homo sapiens is long. Click the following link to read about most of them.
8 – Should the USA build a competing Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System (Doomsday) Nuclear warhead?
Enough Pu239 has already been produced in weapons and processed from nuclear fuel rods to sterilize planet Earth of all life.
One country, Japan, has isolated 47 tons of Pu239 from fuel rods, is adding 8 tons per year, and has complained on NHK television that they don’t know what to do with it. Ten pounds is enough to make one atomic bomb.
Plutonium 239 is bomb making material. Japan has 94,000 pounds. It is producing 16,000 pounds per year. Twelve pounds makes one high-yield bomb.
The level of toxicity of Pu239 dust has recently become controversial. My understanding is the traditional one: the speck of brown dust that kills you, you will never see.
The half-life of Pu239 is 24,000 years. Risk studies (which include about a dozen hazards not related to plutonium) have shown that the chance that homo sapiens will survive a catastrophic population collapse during the next 24,000 years is less than one-in-a-million.
Humans cannot baby-sit all the plutonium that exists in facilities on every continent and keep life on earth safe from annihilation by contamination. The warheads and storage facilities are going to rot over time, and the earth will soak up the poisons left behind like vinegar in a sponge.
Doomsday is not a question of whether-or-not but of fast-or-slow. There is no upper limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, so fast is doable. A rogue group with enough resources could construct a bomb powerful enough to obliterate Earth.
No one can undo the poisons that now exist, so slow is inevitable.
9 – What is the evolutionary reason that human beings are superficial and attracted to external appearances more than towards intrinsic qualities such as intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity?
My reading and life experience tell me that humans are attracted to symmetry.
There could be any number of reasons, but it is easy to argue that symmetry seems to create less stress in those who encounter it, which may make them more receptive (and less reluctant) to mate with those who have it.
Reduction of cognitive dissonance is a major driver of conscious-life; symmetry seems to reduce dissonance in sentient beings like humans.
Interest by humans in mathematics and art seems to confirm, at least to my mind, that folks are driven to imbibe “harmonies” and “patterns” in nature; these symmetries provide them with reassurance that the world is not hostile and that happiness and reduction of stress is possible in the face of accidents, disease, and predators.
Intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity are qualities that are not easily perceived and can even be illusory. People are good at feigning all these qualities to manipulate others to satisfy their needs — especially their sexual appetites and their desire for power over others.
Symmetry is not easily disguised (or the lack of it, even with good grooming) and can be an indicator of good mental and physical health, because symmetrical (attractive) people tend to have higher status and are in general less traumatized by mistreatment (on average) than people who do not have this physical quality.
People may mate with high symmetry individuals and later discover than the intangible moral qualities that they value in a life-partner are missing. Such a discovery can lead to separation, but meanwhile offspring have been spawned who have high levels of symmetry, and the process of selection for this quality continues unabated into future generations.
Yes, I have no evidence that this conjecture is correct; it’s not my field, but it seems to be a factor in the world I find myself.
10 – How does Russia stay on par with the USA in many high-tech military systems when their GDP and military budget is so small by comparison? Shouldn’t we be light-years ahead of them by now?
USA military spending is deceptive and classified.
The United States has 800 bases inside 70 countries. It is at war with every country that doesn’t do what it’s told.
Since the end of WW2, the USA has attacked one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth. Depending on who counts, the USA has killed between 10 and 65 million people, most of them civilians. Injured people are uncountable.
The high casualty rates are due to the way it fights. The USA bombs the enemy to rubble, then moves in a few troops supported by large numbers of indigenous mercenaries to deny the rubble to the enemy.
Take two countries the size of the USA and put them side by side. The land area is less than Russia. Russia is huge. Its entire population is technically literate.
In the USA, only elites are educated. The vast majority of Americans are poorly trained, because public education is underfunded and neglected. Under the American system, education doesn’t generate profits for the wealthy, so they won’t support it.
Because America is segregated by race and income, it is difficult for visitors to get a sense of how poor the general population is. Wealthy Americans are in complete denial of the simple truth that their country is a train wreck for 75% of the people who live in it.
People with the money to travel don’t explore urban ghettos or rural wastelands. They don’t know things, nor do they want to know.
The USA has the world’s biggest and cruelest prison system for a reason.
Think about it.
Every country in the world, including Russia, is trying to avoid the wrath of the United States. They say nice things to us, so we won’t hurt them. They build as much deterrence as they can to avoid being attacked or embargoed.
11 – Has anyone considered leaving the USA because of the gun laws?
Anyone who has to carry a gun to feel safe is living in the wrong place. My recommendation is to move to safety ASAP.
The guns that many civilians own today inflict shattering injuries that no one who is shot can recover from. The slugs are high velocity and tumble. They are designed in non-conformance with the Geneva accords and are diabolical workarounds.
I would rather die myself than fire one of these weapons at another human being, no matter what they’ve done.
We have police and soldiers who are trained to inflict mayhem when necessary to protect civilians from human predation. Why not let them do their jobs while we civilians throw our war guns away?
Carrying a high-powered weapon into a wild area that is rife with people-eating predators might be a good idea under some circumstances. I don’t have a problem with defense-by-gun against wild animals who might be trying to kill for food or fun.
My recommendation is to travel in wild areas in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily encourage attack by dumb and innocent animals — because, can we face facts? — they don’t know any better.
Animals have a right to live in a natural way and not be provoked. People are smart enough to travel in the wild and avoid unnecessary contacts with carnivores.
12- What would happen to Hitler if he was captured today?
Well, I believe he would be released and featured in the next GOP presidential debates, win the Republican nomination, lose the popular vote by millions in the general election but win the electoral college, and become president.
As a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, he might do very well indeed.
I don’t think he would kill nearly a hundred million people like he did the last time around. It is more likely closer to two billion. But hey, that leaves five billion humans to abase themselves before him, so it would be worth it, right?
13 –Would you consider the USA a noble superpower when compared to other superpowers like Russia and China?
The billionaires who run the USA believe that private ownership is noble and that public ownership is ignoble. They are in a war against any form of socialism or collectivism.
Since the end of WW2, the wealthy have used the military power of the United States to attack one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth to prevent a cascade of civilizations into communism. This war has, with a few exceptions, been enormously successful.
Today, they are fighting to consolidate their power. The billionaires of Russia, China, Israel, and the USA are dividing up the world like the New York City crime families of a few generations ago (watch the Godfather Trilogy or read the book by Mario Puzo).
Private ownership (called Capitalism) is a permutation of slavery that can be corrupting to democratic governance — as is obvious to any observer of U.S. history.
14 – How do you interpret human consciousness? Are you the center of the universe?
Consciousness is the fundamental and foundational principle of the universe. Conscious life plugs into this foundational consciousness in a way analogous to televisions plugging into a cable outlet. A television can be unplugged and replaced. But the cable programming continues. It is eternal. Consciousness is at the center of the universe. Conscious life is at the periphery.
15 – How would slavery have evolved in society if it was not seen as morally wrong?
“Capitalism” is the modern term for slavery. Owners of plantations, factories, and other businesses accrue the benefits of the plantation owners of former times.
Instead of providing slave quarters and food to their slaves, they pay a tiny stipend (called a minimum wage) to their laborers, which frees owners from the additional responsibility of caring for and protecting workers.
Putting the burden of housing, food, health care, and transportation on the backs of low-paid workers is called “freedom.”
The legal system disciplines unruly workers, while the state unemployment system helps dissatisfied owners replace those workers they believe are unfit.
For a small percentage of Americans, it’s a beautiful system.
Because the USA segregates workers both by race and income, most poor people don’t interact with the wealthy. This lack of contact between rich and poor reduces conflict and promotes peaceful living.
17 – Which among these countries is the best to live? Canada, USA or Australia? Why?
My question is, which country is the best place to live if you are poor? Most people are born poor.
If people go on living by being born again after they die, the odds that they will be born impoverished is high regardless of how well they lived in their prior life. That’s why its important to make the world a good place to live for impoverished people.
Does anyone seriously believe that they only live once? Consciousness continues somewhere, and it’s all there is, right? Absent conscious-life the universe can have no meaning.
I believe Cuba is the best place to live if you are poor, because it has a good climate and the government tries to provide services to ordinary people that are available only to the well-to-do in places like Canada, Australia, and the USA.
People might want to go to Cuba to find out how the poor live on that island. Then come back and observe how the poor live in their own countries.
The United States is segregated by income and wealth, so it’s hard to find poor people if you are rich, and if you are poor it is impossible to meet rich people.
18 – Trump wants to develop a lot of smaller, “tactical” nukes. Should the US use these against North Korea?
The USA bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age during the Korean War.
It killed an estimated two million civilians. The bombing was led by General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command who later partnered with George Wallace when he ran for president back in the 1960s and carried several states including Michigan (if I remember it right).
Wallace was a white supremacist. The Air Force’s own official historians have called LeMay’s bombing of North Korea the cruelest use of military power in world history.
This is the same General who destroyed 67 Japanese cities and burned their populations alive with napalm (fire-jelly) during WW2.
North Korea has done nothing to justify a military strike against its territory.
Nuclear weapons of any size or type should never be used in war, especially when there is nothing to be gained but the reputation for being a monster.
What does Korea have that we could possibly want? The answer is, nothing.
We have a choice to make: are we good or evil? Our destiny depends on how we answer that question.
19 – I am terrified of single-payer systems as implemented in socialist countries. Can this happen in the US? Was Obama trying to give everyone healthcare all along?
The USA is based on a slave system (now referred to as capitalism or free-market) where the owners of the plantations have doctors, which they share with their favorite house slaves. The field hands get nothing. The plantation owners are terrified that they might have to share their doctors with “unworthy” people should a slave revolt occur, so they have built the world’s most massive prison system to isolate slaves who might dare challenge the status quo.
In other words, people have to work for the right company and have the right job to get access to free health care. Very few do.
The system is so simple, a child can understand it.
Obama threw a wrench into the system by making it possible for people who work for the wrong companies (or who don’t work at all, for whatever reason) to buy access to health care for a reduced fee. Care is still expensive, but it’s not totally out of reach anymore for about three-quarters of the population.
In Cuba (for example) every neighborhood and apartment complex has a doctor assigned to it. What could be more effective than walking down the hall or across the street to be evaluated? If necessary folks are referred for further treatment to a hospital. Otherwise they get the meds they need, and that’s as complicated and inconvenient as it gets.
I grew up in a Navy family. We had free health care. If you got sick, you just drove to the base hospital and the doctors evaluated you. No paper work, no fees. It was a “single-payer” socialized system of medicine. It was better than what we have today as civilians except that protocols, equipment, and medicines are more effective today than they were sixty years ago when I was in that Navy system.
It’s hard for me to believe that this is a serious question by a serious person, but clueless people in the USA are subject to sophisticated behavioral modification protocols due to the immense amount of money that is involved in medicine and drugs, as well as guns, entertainment, food, and transportation.
So it isn’t surprising that people fear a lot of things that aren’t dangerous and are oblivious to dangers that are serious. It’s all about helping a relatively few families and cartels sequester the lion’s share of our nation’s resources.
Someday, maybe things will become more fair than they are now. I hope so.
20 – Why is it assumed that America invented slavery when slavery has been around for much of human history?
America practiced one of the cruelest forms of slavery. It is the only country in the western hemisphere where slave revolts were successfully suppressed.
Today, slavery has been renamed; it is called capitalism. In the USA, slaves are called workers and are free to live outside the gated communities of the wealthy. Workers are segregated by income to minimize the possibility of unrest.
The USA continues to prevent a successful slave revolt by maintaining the largest prison system by far that the world has ever known.
Two-thirds of white people came to America as slaves, called indentured servants. This practice started 150 years before the country became a constitutional republic and continued for many decades after. Indentured servitude was a seven year term of slavery that ended in freedom.
For Africans slavery was permanent. 100% of Africans came to America as slaves for life. There were notable exceptions. Billy Lee, George Washington’s slave and best friend, was set free when George Washington died; Billy Lee continued to live on GW’s Mount Vernon estate as a free man until his death.
22 – Is it true that until humans become one nation, we will never go further than Mars?
Organizing a human mission to Mars is expensive and dangerous. A coalition of nations might be able to manage the expense and risk.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is planning a Mars mission. I haven’t heard how the company plans to finance it.
Mars has an iron-nickel core like the earth, but it froze solid many millions of years ago. The magnetic field collapsed, which permitted the solar wind to blow away most of the planet’s atmosphere.
Any biological life forms on or near its surface will have to withstand the stress of continuous, high-energy radiation and the bombardment by cosmic particles with the energy of baseballs.
Travel to planets or moons as far as Jupiter and beyond will take many years.
Unless humans are heavily sedated, it is doubtful that they will be able to endure a journey of several years in a cramped space vehicle. They will lose muscle mass and possibly their sanity — certainly their perspectives that help them maintain a sense of normalcy.
Successful functioning by humans on an alien moon or planet after a journey of several years might not be possible no matter who organizes the trip or what precautions are taken.
23 – To Christians: Which scientific claims are incompatible with your faith, and why?
Science confirms my faith, because it seems to be saying that reality is mind-boggling; the odds against a universe constructed like ours with its unusual forces and constants seems to be infinite.
Jesus came to save the ignorant and the despised of the world, which is pretty much everyone. He avoided the subject of science altogether, for good reason.
No reasonable person can believe that the universe started with the big bang of a singularity that then inflated rapidly to create the conditions for conscious life with enough intelligence to understand its origins. That’s cray-cray, but it’s how some astronomers explain the universe.
Even with all we know, the underlying reality of existence remains a complete mystery. If Jesus came to Earth today, would he talk science to humanity?
I seriously doubt it. I don’t believe humans are hard-wired to understand how the universe works or what reality is. We evolved in an unusually safe place and time in the universe and carry with us all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that accompany our unlikely presence.
The Bible says plainly that one day people who have ridiculed God will be asked why they didn’t look up at the night sky and wonder why it is that they are so small and dark while the night sky is so large and bright.
How could serious people have missed such an important clue? How could anyone misunderstand their predicament and not concede the possibility that one day they might realize their hopes and dreams through the love of God who created, cares for, and protects them?
24 – Keeping the knowledge you have today, would you rather travel a thousand years into the future, or a thousand years into the past?
The risks to survival that faced individuals a thousand years ago far exceed the risks that people will face a thousand years from now—if humans survive another thousand years.
The counter-intuitive statistical reality is that the odds against species survival are actually higher than odds against survival of any individual human, should individual humans achieve viability during the next thousand years.
Most analysts of risk are suggesting that homo sapiens do not have much time left before extinction overwhelms them.
The geological record shows that at least two human-like species have already gone extinct. The particular species that thrives today (us) faces risks brought on by its technological expertise, which is certain to destroy it eventually.
I would choose to go forward in time, but I would do so with a great deal of fear knowing the old adage that curiosity kills the cat.
If everything turns out all right, the big question would be, how do uneducated, stupid people do in this new world?
Because uneducated and stupid is exactly what anyone will become who dares travel into a future one-thousand years more advanced than today.
25 – What are ways one can approach a complex idea that we don’t understand?
Complex ideas are of two kinds: ideas that one or more people understand but others don’t; and ideas which no one understands.
In the case where certain humans exist who understand a complex idea, the objective should be to learn what they know either by talking to them or reading what they have published. By this process, maybe folks can gather enough clues to guide them to further inquiries, which will lead eventually to understanding.
Many complex ideas require skills in certain subsets of knowledge like mathematics, languages, logic, philosophy, and the technical arts (such as metallurgy or whatnot) to make progress.
In the case where a complex idea can be demonstrated and stated but no one understands it (an example is “entanglement” in quantum physics), the approach is different. In these cases, it may not be possible to create a model of any kind in anyone’s mind to reduce the annoying dissonance that comes from not understanding.
People waste a lot of time — some go mad — trying to understand ideas no one understands or will ever understand. Most people seem to believe (in error, it seems to me) that everything can be understood if smart people work hard and are clever.
The idea, which I believe, is that complete understanding is not possible; it is a complex idea that no one understands, including me.
BONUS QUESTION 1 – In history, humans have fought and killed each other for every piece of land on the Earth. Why has the massive continent of Antarctica always been out of that conflict?
This absence of conflict may be coming to an end. A National Geographic reporter has been reporting on alarming developments in Antarctica over the past several years that the fake news has all but ignored.
BONUS QUESTION 2 – Why did mankind invent religion?
As far as I can tell, no records of an ancient civilization without religion have been discovered. I think that it is very scary to be suddenly aware that you exist and not know why — especially at night when wild animals roam freely, and the sky is full of lights that should not be there.
Editorial Board Recommendation: We are encouraging readers to visit Quora.com to read responses by Billy Lee (and others) to hundreds of questions asked by curious people from around the globe.
