People don’t want to believe it, but Russia can win a conventional war against Ukraine without nuclear weapons. It doesn’t mean they will.
Outcomes of conventional wars are simply not predictable… too many variables, too many unknowns. Another problem is that all sides of a conflict tend to lie—both to themselves and others. During war, it’s hard to know what’s true.
One thing thinking people seem to know for sure: war always turns into a mess, which ruins the lives of people who experience it up close and personal. People who fight on the ground in war say that combat is loud, remote, confused, and incomprehensible. They are unlikely to meet anyone on the other side until they drive over their corpses.
And that is on a good day.
War wears folks down, weakens physical and mental health, and imprints on warrior-minds vivid sights, smells, and sounds they don’t forget.
A cousin who fought in Vietnam shakes like a leaf when in public spaces. He is unable to stand in lines, even to buy a sandwich. Somehow, crowds, and people standing in lines, trigger bad memories he can’t set aside.
Of course, he’s stone deaf as well—his ears ring like bell towers. The constant roar doesn’t stop until he sleeps. A Marine helicopter gunner, he blew out his ears with the sound of his own fires.
As for nuclear war, the most important rumor I’ve heard is that the USA modernized its nuclear fleet during the Obama years. Though classified, reliable people have published reports, I’m told, that money spent on upgrades soared to as high as two-trillion dollars. If true, Americans can be assured that the USA nuclear fleet is modernized and probably works damn good. It’s a staggering state of affairs, which adversaries are wise to take to account.
Maintaining nukes is not cheap or easy, right? It requires frequent replenishing of triggering elements which, unfortunately for war-planners, possess half-lives which last months, not years. It is why nuclear power plants are essential.
As for power plants, do readers know that neutron-emitting elements tend to poison fuel rods? After rods expend a mere 5% or so of their fuel, neutron-generating elements called poisons gum-up fuel rods to make them useless for power generation. Spent fuel rods typically are stored on-site in cooling ponds until their poisons can be extracted to boost quickly decaying trigger elements essential for bomb detonation.
Need for neutron-emitting trigger materials is why every country that builds nuclear bombs builds nuclear power plants. The secret keys to success hide in spent fuel rods.
It’s obvious, right?
Why would any right-minded country risk building future Chernobyls and Fukishimas unless it had really good reasons? One good reason is trigger materials. Isn’t it true that almost anyone can make cheap electricity from almost anything? — water, coal, sun, oil, natural gas, wind, or whatever, right?
Why nuclear?
Yes, plutonium lasts for millennia, but triggers don’t. To keep nuclear weapons viable for years and decades, not weeks or months, bombs must be continuously resupplied with reliable sources of neutron-emitting elements, which can be harvested most easily from fuel rod poisons.
It is easy to understand.
Most Americans assume USA concentrates its intelligence resources to keep up to date on the status of others’ nuclear inventories. What do they have, where is it hidden, how well is it maintained? Some understand that USA super-computers connect with hi-tech surveillance systems to track every piece of nuclear hardware and every kilogram of plutonium and bomb-grade uranium anywhere on planet Earth.
It’s true.
The technology is not new.
Here is a video from 2017 that lays it out. No excuses to anyone for choosing ignorance. Try to understand.
Some don’t believe blanket surveillance is possible. Listen folks. The system is already built. Artificial intelligence assesses threats and then tells leaders who it will be who prevails after a nuclear exchange on any given day.
Hint: most days, it doesn’t seem to be Russia or China.
Prolly not the USA, either.
Joe Biden insists that winning nuclear war is simply impossible. I have no way to know; neither does any civilian or any other person who lacks access to the super AI technologies of the United States.
Is there anyone out there who believes delusional dictators can be trusted to safely possess weapons of mass destruction? These strongmen threaten to unleash hell, presumably, using anything from viruses to chemical poisons to nuclear fires to cyber implosions that collapse civilizations. Who’s going to tell them, no…
Shouldn’t humanity be working to outlaw dictatorships? Individuals who have accumulated enough wealth and unchecked power to make war are a clear and present danger to humanity and all non-human life on Earth as well.
A line needs to be established; anyone who crosses becomes a felon — subject to arrest by the international community. The line divides those who have seized unlawful wealth and excessive power. The line must be defined and defended by international courts established by free nations. How hard can it be?
Limits are necessary or humanity is destined to be driven to extinction by a handful of folks driven mad by reckless power.
Can we face some unpleasant facts? Russian and Chinese elites hold at least 1.2 billion people under some kind of house arrest inside their territories, right? It’s a style of living that seems alien to Americans. Doesn’t everyone long to live free and unafraid? Doesn’t everyone want to shout whatever they think is true without fear of prison or worse?
If Putin and his ilk continue down the path they are on—threatening others with nuclear terror on their Fox-equivalent state media—maybe those who oppose their catastrophic ambitions might, with a little luck and a lot of bravery, prevail to someday see dreams of freedom and peaceful living come true at last.
It’s gotta be possible, right?
Who disagrees?
Does anyone want to live in a post-apocalyptic world—especially one where one side “wins bigly?”
Some folks say nuclear Armageddon is impossible. One side wins, and life goes on as it always does.
My problem with such views is fear that survivors of nuclear war might look like jellyfish and live at the bottom of oceans.
It’s why monsters who possess WMDs should be given no quarter in a world where folks plan to live free someday without fear.
Update: 7 February 2023 Tonight, President Joseph Biden established himself, at last, leader of the Free World. He serves at the hour of Earth’s greatest danger, its greatest need. Pray, those inclined, he gets everyone through unharmed. Speech starts at minute 26.
The Editors
The New York Times surprised some readers by refusing to include the name of Joe Biden (current president of the United States) even once in the first and second sections of its Sunday issue (24 April 2022).
38 silent pages.
Think.
On the second-to-last page of another section—the Sunday Review—Ross Douthat stepped up. He wrote an editorial with the word “Biden” in it.
Joe Biden doesn’t like oligarchs, and they don’t like him. They called him Communist when he first ran for elected office. Who remembers? It wasn’t true then and isn’t now. To my mind it had more to do with his Irish roots and connections to other prominent, unpopular Irish Americans like the Kennedy’s.
How about that?
Is hatred why Americans see Trump in their daily media feeds more than Biden?
Oligarchs own media, right? A half-dozen men, give or take, hold ultimate control over 90% of what Americans see and read. Billionaires have problems with Biden because they don’t control him. It’s why they ignore everything he says and does—when they can.
Jimmy Carter had the same problem. Who is old enough to remember? Carter holds historical honor for being the only U.S. president who served his term without murdering anyone. But that was then. This is now.
Is Joe benevolent?
I really don’t know.
The entitled rich hope Biden will go away and that others more favorable to wealth and its privileges will take his place. Media announced today that a rich man bought Twitter for 50 billion dollars, give or take. The man claims to be acting in good faith to bring freedoms of speech inspired by public forums of ancient Greece.
He calls it digital town square.
Everyone knows he will unleash dogs of Trump on vulnerable Americans who lack protections afforded by wealth and gated living. Who wants to argue loud in public spaces where monsters lurk to harm their families and friends off-line?
Does anyone believe free speech emanates from the enterprise of unstable manic-depressives accountable to no one?
Not to pick on any particular oligarch—all pose dangers—but Elon Musk didn’t become a U.S. citizen until age 30—a short 20 years ago. Despite tenuous ties to America, he manages to gather popular support. He plays Congress like a fiddle. Congressional appropriations flow like water. Clearly, he keeps more than a few Benjamins for himself.
It’s not right.
Our founding fathersbelieved that power corrupts those who wield it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s why we govern ourselves with three co-equal branches of government.
Checks and balances are fundamental to prevent fallible humans—whose success blinds them to their own flawed visions—from overwhelming the Constitutional freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
Who disagrees?
To cut to the chase, it is insane for civilized society to permit private individuals to accumulate the wealth and power of governments. What is the point of civilization if not to limit the horrors of jungle living?—to stanch suffering, which always follows when might makes right in those arenas where the strong disrespect and eat the weak.
Proud people create elected governance to protect their rights; they don’t hide behind private cartels who don’t really care about us,Michael Jackson warned.
Sergei Lavrov is one of Russia’s wealthiest men. Yesterday, this privileged strongman threatened nuclear war. He said, “…we must not underestimate it.”
It is never good to permit dictatorial power and nuclear weapons to mean-spirited bullies who intend to destroy civilization should they not get their way. The USA put leaders of Russia on notice that they will not outlive Ukraine.
Who is brave enough to acknowledge what everyone knows? Ordinary people are fed-up with oligarchs and dictators. People want to breathe free without fear.
Secretary of State Blinken said, “But we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.“
The most notorious terrorist threatened by the USA was Osama Bin Laden. They fed him to sharks. Later, they killed unrepentant members of his family. Putin might be wise to apologize now and start nuclear disarmament talks. Then again, it might be too late.
Who believes he will take the opportunity? The chance to survive Hell is better, some advisors might argue.
The Russian “president” seems to think that because Bin Laden didn’t possess nuclear missiles or hypersonic technologies of war, he couldn’t win. Is it really possible that Bin Laden could have conquered Earth had he mastered the alchemies of the current crop of Russian leaders?
Who knows?
The international scene requires x-ray vision. One in five sanctioned oligarchs seem to be Israeli citizens—according to a recent analysis published in the Jerusalem Post. Say it isn’t true, Joe. Apparently, USA’s closest ally and friend is protecting powerful people who are entangled with Russian wise guys. It’s not a good look.
I’d say it’s terrifying. Who wouldn’t?
Kentucky politicians—readers, some of them, know who they are—sleep in the same bed as Russian oligarchs who control much of the world’s aluminum supply. Reports say they operate a manufacturing plant in Kentucky which employs thousands. Is there anyone who understands how difficult the situation becomes for countries where international thugs accumulate vast monies and political powers?
The mighty must know that with age comes loss. Everyone they love and know will die before them should they enjoy long life. What good does wealth and power do anyone who is confined to a wheel-chair unable to control even the beating of their own heart?
What chance is there that the powerful will give all they have to the poor to serve the cause of love for the unlovable, which is what most of 8 billion humans are. Will anyone say it out loud? Most people are unloved and uncared for by those who together have the resources to make a better world for everyone now living and for those who will come after.
It is incomprehensible to me that advantaged people would shell the shit out of people simply because they are in the way—through no fault of their own. Apart from the love of God, I don’t see how human civilization as we know it today will survive.
Perhaps the powerful have made a calculation that Earth is better off when humans are reduced to a few hundred million souls, not billions. They have the ability to minimize us all—to zero, I suppose.
The United States has the power and skills to get everyone through the current crisis unharmed.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
I want to believe it’s true. I don’t know for sure.
Who will save us?
Joe Biden walks in the gap between civilization and Armageddon. He’s the last man standing able to rescue humanity from the slavery that follows the victory of totalitarianism.
Maybe it’s time to climb aboard his peace train while all sides still can.
Billy Lee
EDITORS NOTE: Added 8 May 2022: NYT Joe Biden blackout blooms. No mention of Joe Biden & family in Sunday Edition. In fairness, the Friday May 6 online newsletter published a briefing on page 10 titled, “Biden’s Unpopularity.”
I’m happy to publish this essay because it is filled with insights about how the Universe might work. Physicist Mark John Fernee spent his career thinking about and doing experiments to work out some answers that ring true, at least to me. I learned about him on Quora.
Since humans first grasped the idea that stars are not tiny holes in a tarp that shades Earth from Heaven, scientists have made progress toward resolution of questions both fundamental and mysterious which can finally be defended with logic and evidence.
Think about it.
Is a creator necessarily constrained by laws of physics to initiate the cosmos people see? Is a first cause necessary to start any Universe? What underlying reality hidden from science permits God to evade any concept of law to become the essential, fundamental, irreducible first cause of all that has ever been or ever will be?
People, a few of them, continue to believe that stars are pin-holes; Earth is flat, disease is demon-caused, and on and so on. These speculations are obviously false to anyone who tests them against dispassionate observation, which is the process called science.
Is the Universe deterministic? The answer to this question—should anyone know—might help answer whether anyone is truly free to decide. Can people make decisions unconnected to events that go back to some conjectured beginning or are they instead prisoners of delusions of freewill peculiar to all conscious life-forms like us?
What follows is an answer, first posted on Quora. I let it percolate on the site for months to absorb whatever reaction it might garner from interested folks. I wrote not only to learn from others but to make the idea of determinism comprehensible to the curious who can read.
Of course, I’m a Pontificator, not a credentialed scientist nor theologian nor philosopher. What I’ve learned—what I write—remains unvalidated by any expert or guild.
Added at the end of the essay is a link to one of many posts on Quora by Mark John Fernee about some of the science of determinism.
For the interested, click the link at the end of my essay to review some of Fernee’s thoughts on the physics of determinism. After reading, login to Quora to access readers’ comments and Fernee’s responses.
(Note: It will be necessary to visit several spaces on Quora to find every comment.)
Unusual insights hide in plain sight like Easter eggs.
Here goes my essay:
It might be difficult for intelligent, science-indoctrinated people to accept but the universe at all scales is most likely not deterministic and never has been.
Before folks who “know better” wander off to search for something more confirmational of their biases, I hope to convince a few of the more open-minded to reflect on a couple of stomach-churning examples.
After all, simple statistics suggest that some preordained percentage of readers will read on; a well-defined subset of those readers are certain to agree with my arguments, which might take any arbitrary form at all—depending on the vagaries of my imagination and what I ate for dinner, perhaps.
Sounds deterministic, doesn’t it?
Not really.
The truth is I have no idea what I will write before I write it. I’ve staked a position, which I intend to defend until I convince myself of its truth. Some predictable number will read and be likewise convinced.
Let me admit right now that I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic. I don’t know if my will is my own or someone else’s.
I don’t know who I am, where I am, what I am, or why I am. I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t remember where I’ve been. I have no clue what 99% of me looks like because it’s inside a place I can’t see. It’s never been photographed. I’ve seen no reflection or picture of almost all of me.
I don’t know how my brain works or why I’m conscious. I haven’t seen my brain. Doctors tell me I have one. They gave me some films from an MRI and told me the grey smears were it. I took their word. It’s puzzling because the universe inside my head seems larger—infinitely more vast than plate smudge.
I have ideas but 99% of them are likely to be mostly wrong. Why? Because my ideas come from somewhere else, and I alter them. I channel ideas but if you ask where they come from, I can’t say. I don’t know why I think and say and write the things I do.
Well, most of the time I think I know. It’s called being well-grounded. Yeah, that’s me. I’m grounded to a reality that makes no sense during those times when I think deeply about what reality might be.
Take blue for instance—the color. It’s a hallucination, right? It tells me nothing about the wavelength of light that triggers blue in my brain. I’ve never seen a photon, have you? When stripped of color, what might a photon be? I have no idea. Some say it’s an electromagnetic corpuscle with wave-like properties.
What the hell is that?
Who knows that galaxies are fragile? So are orbits of planets and moons. As are universes.
The Higgs field is unstable, right? It can undergo phase transitions. Scientists say it’s true. It’s like flushing a toilet. One moment the toilet is a stinky mess; phase transition is the sound of swirling water—a whirlpool that dumps all into the abyss. What returns is blue water and clean porcelain.
What will all that went before mean? Trillions of lifeforms found comfort in the mess. What kind of determination pushed the handle to upend the destinies of trillions of tiny creatures no human will meet or see?
Why do humanoids feel free to make arbitrary decisions if it isn’t true that they make them? Does it mean that everything they believe is a lie?
Has the Universe made us its fools?
I will tell you this: the thought has occurred to me that the Universe might be my fool. Without me to tell its stories it’s nothing but a dead thing with no past and no future.
Apart from conscious-life—in particular, my life—the Universe is simply impossible.
I don’t believe the consciousness we experience dies. It’s something foundational that everyone plugs into when they live. Somehow, we all live inside each other, and conscious life lives inside us. When we die our bodies abandon consciousness and decay away, but conscious life lives on into the past and future as it always has and always will.
Our bodies count for nothing. It’s why none have seen themselves. A quick, confirmational glimpse of this or that part of us is all we can hope for—then it’s gone.
Top people charged with responsibility to protect and defend the United States know with certainty two facts, which the American people can only guess.
Who knows what they might be?
Think long and hard.
Maybe destinies of powerful persons, their families and friends, collaborators and enablers, hang in the balance.
Does anyone know?
Lives and legacies might depend on what Team USA believes it knows for certain.
Are we in a bio-war or not? If so, with whom?
Did someone throw the 2016 election and install a Manchurian Imposter?
Well… ??
Who is destabilizing America? Are legions loyal to foreign oligarchs and who intend us harm infiltrating Parties, paramilitaries, social media, and talk radio?
What about television news shows?
Believe it or not, people exist who know with certainty the answers to these questions. They possess power to set things right. They work for Team USA.
America’s defenders know which answers are yes and which are no. They are able to distinguish between threats that are crazy-talk and those which are dead serious. They possess data bases filled with names, phone numbers, and addresses of people who plot mayhem.
If they choose, they can put stealth missiles through the bedroom windows of those who have the wherewithal and intent to start World War Three. No one believes it, but it’s true.
The United States rules Earth. It isn’t going to change—not ever.
Folks who aren’t American, some of them, don’t understand. The USA rules because it knows how to identify threats and neutralize them. A lot of wannabe dictators could testify in the affirmative but unfortunately for them they are dead.
Why does power concentrated for long in the hands of solitary sociopaths drive some insane? Power-trippers, most of them, learn too late that their inevitable screw-ups suck like quicksand to extinguish their ambitions. History is filled with such stories.
It might be better for some folks to have never been born. They suffer in this life and maybe the next. Their goal?—to make their subjects as miserable as they can. It’s not right.
My dad worked for the National Security Agency when he wasn’t flying jet-helicopters to defend our eastern borders from adversarial submarines. I met and knew his friends. In their world, right made might, not the other way around.
I can assure readers that those I knew who served to defend American freedom were the good-guys. The world has no hope of living free absent the United States.
Yes, some of our oligarchs are depraved and crazy. Americans will deal with them eventually, right? For now, we face another decision, which is whether to settle scores with oligarchs who live elsewhere who may have tried to hurt us.
No ordinary person who lacks security clearances can say which threats are real and which are conspiracy theories told to divert attention from terrors most folks are not well-trained to handle.
People today deny it, but truth is—80 years ago—the Japanese people, some of them, wanted to be conquered by America. They longed for freedom, prosperity, and most of all for our collective sense that right and wrong mattered.
It’s why they obeyed their emperor and attacked Hawaii. Some generals knew full-well defeat was sure to follow, because they were sophisticated and well-traveled. They understood America. Being undone by Americans meant those in their families who survived war would soon live free and proud. When annihilation finally came it would bring fresh wind; they and everyone left alive would be delivered from evil.
There was no other way.
I lived in Japan for two years following the Korean War. The Japanese people, many of them, worshipped the righteous ground we walked on. We were heroes.
Today, America is led by loving people (Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) who care about doing what is right and fair. Unfortunately for our adversaries, we might have scores to settle. I have no way to know for sure. What some adversaries don’t seem to understand is that whatever are the stakes, events which will shape the future are already well-planned and underway as I write.
Underestimating capabilities of the USA to protect its secrets and war-making technologies is a trap the foolhardy step into from time to time. Adversaries should know by now that the USA does not bluff. For the United States, freedom is not a chess match; it’s not a game of Pong or Checkers.
We don’t fuck around.
If it’s true that scores will soon be settled, then the lives of powerful people, their families and friends, their collaborators and enablers in lands faraway are at this moment in grave danger.
America goes for the jugular of those who fuck with us. We hit leaders first if we can, last if we must.
When conflict comes, the takedown of foreign oligarchs who have messed with our democracy will be ruthless and total.
Who disagrees?
When it’s over the world will be a better place.
Yes, a few bad people will end-up missing. The best part is no one will miss them because everyone they know will disappear. It’s how civilization advances against barbarism when options vanish.
My advice to people who have done wrong is to write notes of apology to America and its friends. Tell us what you did wrong and what you regret. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Americans love apologies and are eager to forgive with open hearts any who are contrite and filled with remorse.
Leaders of the World:
Bring freedom to your peoples by dividing your governments into co-equal branches where no one person or like-minded group can seize power; where consent of the governed determines the course of history.
Some find their voices late in life. I learned late that art plays best when authentic and fearless.
The problem for artists like me is humiliation. It sulks in corners—the nasty spirit-clown who plots to pounce whenever someone dares delirium-dance with luminant dervishes of light and truth.
Malevolent forces slash folks like us with scalpels. One person wrote to inform me I was a “moron.” A girl wrote, “You’re aNarcissist!” after other readers engaged with clever and affirming words. Her hiss rings in my ears where it’s echoed for days. It drives me mad. Who knows except her why words, my words, offend?
She won’t say. Towers of wonderful words written by lovers to lift us higher collapse to ruins. Adulation falls hard.
Bad words.
Moron.
Narcissist.
Zingers, that’s sure. Controversial persons speaking their minds are morons and narcissists, it seems.
The word that cut deepest during my most sensitive time was “Incompetent”. A teen, I cringed to hear the word or see it in print. Of course I knew in my heart it was true.
I couldn’t do anything right. Dad made plain I lacked common sense. He marveled aloud how an intelligent son could be so damned dumb about the simplest things.
I wasted years learning how automobiles and packaging machinery worked so that no fool would ever again accuse me of incompetence. I designed tooling to make run-flat wheels for military vehicles, developed the first tear-spout coffee lids, designed machines to scour the lumen areas of laparoscopic medical instruments, invented machinery to place seal-caps on orange-juice cartons to keep people safe from tampering lunatics….
None of it mattered. I fought to bring life to every idea I had. It seems now like millions (billions?) around the world have used derivatives of my designs. Is the world a better place?
The people I worked with never stopped calling me incompetent. Dull designers second-guessed the details of daring ideas. My strategy collapsed. Dad was right all along—no common sense.
I learned life-changing lessons from therapists. A woman named Jane taught me that humiliation destroys authenticity. It forces victims to submit to hostiles. It damages souls by changing the way life is experienced. Humiliation is cruelty cast by cretins to crush the craft of those they hate.
Artists who endure humiliation are ripped apart. The choice is to embrace the uniqueness humiliation imposes or be made miserable by it forever. It’s a bad choice but survivors must choose.
Fear of humiliation drives people to suppress self-discovery and throw away authenticity. To fight back degrades art. Resistance is futile, isn’t it? The damage is done, right? It’s better to rescue ruined souls by rendering art that crawls however wretchedly toward redemption as best it can.
According to Jane, fear of humiliation traps sensitive souls in bubble-prisons of fear where some choose to meet life’s challenges with magical thinking divorced from whatever resonates with who they really are.
Besides crippling humiliation, artists sometimes stumble because they are confused about the difference between who and what they are. Confusion leads some to critical crossroads where they choose the one path that leads to the unraveling of their art and the artistry of others.
It’s true.
What is Who?
Who is the soulful essence of anything that lives. It’s an emotional place where feelings run free. It circulates inside the stomach, the heart, and under the skin where no one can see.
The who-self, Jane explained, doesn’t change except slowly—pushed along and shape-shifted by experience and suffering (especially suffering), but also by peak experiences, which empower the happy memories humans hold for hope in hard times.
What is What?
What is a little word that stands for the big things others use to judge us, right?
What is your job? What do you do? What clothes do you wear? What cars do you drive? What people do you hang out with?
CEOs of corporations are defined by others according to their role; what they do; by their title. Any CEO who looks into a mirror and sees a CEO staring back is looking at their what-self, right?
Everyone kind of knows what they are and what they do. If not, others will tell them. It’s not hard.
Knowing what they are is not going to help artists who want to know who they are. It is difficult to know who one is. It requires self-knowledge to create art that is true to oneself. I don’t know how anyone accomplishes it without counselors to guide them.
Creating authentic art that flows from the hidden, inner places of the heart happens when people understand who they are and are able to love enough to embrace without shame the emotions they feel at their core about anything at all.
It’s amazing to discover how many artists are miserable because they tie themselves into knots to believe and behave and feel whatever is the way they think others will accept. Some fight for money and power to enhance what they are—perhaps to elevate their status relative to others.
Only slaves, cynics, the brainwashed, and politicians say and do every stupid thing pushed on them by churches, schools, governments, families, focus groups, and voters.
Art manufactured by business-people who don’t know who they are is a blight on culture, especially American culture. Music, movies, and books published in the USA are sometimes formula-pieces designed to comfort, not challenge, as many paying customers as possible. Art can be inauthentic and mind-blurring—created by cynics.
Art, much of it, is created for money and what it can buy. Whatever it is, commercial art seems to rob many Americans of their intelligence, their judgement, their history, culture, and soul. It plays the public for suckers. Fake art seems powerful enough to destroy, at least right now, people’s ability to understand and value life as it is lived, especially in the faraway places where strangers wander.
Has wicked art wrecked desire for something better? Does it gall good judgement? Extinguishing love and the sensuality of living diminishes creativity and the craving that pushes explorers forward into uncharted waters where floating terrors hide beneath the waves.
Commercial art separates some from God. It kills the thrill of running at the edge of what we know—away from safe places where boredom rots everyone from within. Sometimes it masquerades as avant-garde but delivers diversions from authenticity because no one who understands gives it birth.
What is my art?
Well, I think people know by now.
I’m a pontificator.
(The canvasses in this essay are paintings by Bevy Mae, my love, life; wife of 30 years who crafted them during classes by the late, great, gentle painter Bob Ross who died on 4 July 1995 at age 52—before he became famous—just so readers know.)
Billy Lee
For me, pontificating is an art form that frees me to say things, important things, that would otherwise go unsaid. I create compelling explanations for phenomena and subjects, which experts might say I know almost nothing about.
Credentialed people say I write about subjects I know nothing about.
My question to skeptics: What does anyone really know?
We hear experts implore the ignorant to follow the science.
It’s kind of self-serving, is it not?
Scientists are Guilds of Gods & Goddesses of the Universe. Atheism is the price of admission to an exclusive club—a cabal of proud, hard-driven, group-thinking science-idolaters, who risk Hell if mythologies of the ignorant turn true.
Science is populated by elites who speak the language of mathematics—an impossible way to reason for 95% of the 7.8 billion people alive today.
How will any disadvantaged person be heard? What chance is there that wisdom buried deep inside the mud-pile of humanity will catch the attention of anyone able to amplify it?
Who can express anything they know at their core if the price of being heard is a PhD in physics, mathematics, economics, history, or military science? —accolades beyond the reach of nearly every person alive no matter how intelligent.
What chance do the acolytes of Donald Trump have against the “Evil Empire,” which occupied for 20 years an Afghanistan some Americans assumed was forever lost inside a simulation of 9th century A.D.?
22 August 2021:Taliban fighters raise their flag in a scene reminiscent of Iwo Jima. Equipment, weapons, and uniforms are captured American property. Planners with PhDs are flying commercial jets, helicopters, and cargo planes into Kabul Airfield today, as I write, to evacuate eggheads who war-planned in vain to prevent imaginations floating inside the Dark Ages from outwitting them on the far side of the moon—Afghanistan.
Everyone has heard of at least a few people in history who lived and spoke at the edges of their cultures—Galileo, Jesus, Spartacus, Geronimo, Che Guevara, et.al.— who endured torture and execution, right? Before arrest, legends from the ancient past were pursued, taunted, and slimed by close-minded, biased people who misunderstood most everything they stood for.
Some warriors, like Che Guevara, were themselves writers and poets. Even the Greek warrior Homer wrote epic poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey. It was 750 BC, nearly 3,000 years ago. People continue to read Homer to this day.
Who disagrees?
What is it like for social media writers when random persons confront them with insults, threats, and obscenities? What do unpaid writers and artists on social media go through to express their truth; their vision of right and wrong?
Although trained by the USA, I am not a warrior. I don’t believe in war. I hate everything about it except the thrill of the kill, which first experienced is not easily shaken and sometimes grows to become the living nightmare PTSD.
The video game industry thrives on role-playing kill games. Hunters keep their consciences clear by killing animals. They like it.
I shot a rabbit once. I was nine. Grandpa slipped a deer-slug into the chamber. When the rabbit ran I raised my rifle without thinking and blew the bunny in half, head to tail. Dad hung the remains from the branch of a tree. To this day I don’t know why they did it.
It makes me sick to think about. I haven’t hunted since and never will.
I’ve had the experience of watching people die. It’s a horror no person should experience but nearly everyone who has family is forced to live through at least once. Bevy Mae sopped with towels blood where her father dropped when his heart stopped. Why God put her through it is something I don’t yet understand.
Since my public profile has risen, some have made efforts to insult and intimidate me—presumably to shut me down by making me afraid to publish. I really don’t know why some do what they do.
The USA is a free country with protected speech. On Quora, the rule is BNBR (Be Nice Be Respectful). Many people are not able to restrain themselves to the confines of civility. I am always shocked to learn that some who are educated enough to put sentences together become ignorant, rude, and profane when responding to unfamiliar points of view. It’s a jolt I never get used to.
For me, working toward truth means drilling down into caverns of thought sometimes strange and unfamiliar.
Happily, Quora permits writers to block intimidators and stalkers—necessary sometimes to keep readers from being disturbed by profanities and lies.
I know that some who harass are professional provocateurs. But others might be lunatics with guns. It’s impossible to know for sure. It makes posting on controversial issues a little scary.
I’m timid but being harassed daily by bullies has strengthened me. I’m less afraid now than ever. Maybe it’s because I’m desensitized. I can no longer distinguish serious threats from crazy-talk.
Anyway, for the record, a few comments which disturbed me in the past follow this essay. People who don’t write on public forums like Quora might like to know what folks who do write endure daily.
I took the time to abbreviate obscenities to assuage sensitive eyes. Some comments are edited. The identities of commenters are vaporized to protect them from uninvited embarrassment.
Billy Lee
Note from the Editors: The edited comments listed below are examples of aggressive speech that our leader Billy Lee reads everyday and sometimes deletes to maintain normalcy beneath his Quora posts.
Happily, most people post positive comments.
As readers work their way through this sample of insanities, please keep in mind that nothing in them is true. Some commenters seem to misunderstand what they read in Billy Lee’s posts; others are unwilling or unable to write truthfully when they get worked up by ideas they dislike.
TheBillyLeePontificator Editorial Board
Here we go:
For guys with no parallels you sure use a lot of plurals. Maybe see a shrink and get back to us?
You are one dumb S. O. B. Wrong on all points except one. You sound like you like the Taliban and dislike Israel. Hiroshima is what turned the war for our benefit. To say Israel’s defense experts are no match to ours shows your stupidity. Especially those in charge under the Biden administration. You have no knowledge of history and perhaps should shut your pie-hole. Do you think Biden’s cut and run will be better than Obama’s?
What universe are you in? Have you ever been in any conflict? Not acknowledging a disaster tells everyone your bias.
Literally, Fox News is doing a segment on UAPs and how they violate the laws of physics. While you think you understand the real physics of this simulation. You don’t or you’d understand how the crafts do work.
You are incoherent. Coward.
You support Communism and radical Islamism? Why does socialist Cuba need the big Satan of Communism to thrive?
Afghanistan is similar to Benghazi. Biden ordered US flags at our embassy burned. Some think Biden was on vacation at Camp David. Poppy fields will end up in Chinese hands where it will be sent to America as illicit drugs. America’s days as a freedom loving nation are drawing to a close.
You’re celebrating slaughter and enslavement. Afghanistan is heading back to the 7th century. Al Qaeda will reestablish itself under the protection of Taliban fanatics.
Your answer is fairly ignorant. Afghanistan was taken over by the f***k**g Taliban. The Taliban are terrorists who tried to genocide all Christians and Jews from the middle east during Obama’s campaign.
Your post is about the worst rationalization for the greatest foreign policy debacle in 50 years. The blood of any Americans who fail to get out will hang solely on this administration.
Your response was ridiculous… you never answered the question but instead stated a bunch of crap nonsense that wouldn’t reach anyone. Go ahead and continue spreading crap ideas on here. You suck Billy… truely
People of all walks of life HAVE A RIGHT TO STAY AWAY FROM GROUPS THEY DO NOT WANT TO ASSOCIATE WITH. People with good wages should have gated communities. Your writing shows great naivety. PEOPLE DECIDE WHO THEY ASSOCIATE WITH. THANKFULLY ITS NOT YOU. ALL THIS TALK OF PEOPLE LIVING TOGETHER IN HARMONY THROWS PERSONAL RIGHTS OUT THE DOOR! LOOKS LIKE YOU SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN HAIGHT-ASHBURY. GET SOME SOPHISTICATION Your talk of everyone living together and loving each other SHOWS YOUR BIGOTRY!
The US biggest mistake was being too nice, AND of course electing Biden was a mistake. We should have wiped out the Taliban before we exited. The world is full of people if they went missing the world would be a better for everyone. The Taliban are like Covid.
How many groups are you going to spam today? I get that you’re lonely, but imaginary internet points are not the solution.
No one gives two sheets about Crapistan.
Give me a break! What an asinine answer. That’s the dimmest first line of an answer I’ve read in a while. Laughable really.
The problem are the Generals. They do not take responsibility. Fix the problem or resign.
Seriously, after reading your covid article — you are too far gone. you are not a deep thinker you are a programmed ideologue. You should not pretend to be something you are not.
You are a joke. Now you deflect to gun violence and mysogyny while 12 YEAR OLD GIRLS ARE BEING GANG RAPED. Seriously, what is wrong with you?
You are the typical America hating, big government will solve all your problems, irrational progressive. You have lost all perspective.
Bullshit. You use history to justify gang rapes of 12 year olds. Keep an open mind? Are you serious? We have girls being raped and you want to justify that? we are not going to get everyone out and our ill conceived withdrawal is going to result in the untold suffering of every woman in that country. You have lost all perspective due to political bias.
Are you even reading the links I sent you?
Under this administration America is no more. You should be mourning the country.
You should really rethink your position and delete that utterly ridiculous post.
You are being deliberately blind and obtuse. You are blinded by ideology with your head in the sand.
WTF? Seriously you are going to argue in nonsense hypotheticals? For someone who considers themselves a deep thinker this should be well beneath you.
We are seeing the killing of Christians for having Bible apps on their phones. Allies suffer fates worse than death.
Comon now Donny Downer…
I dare say a refresher in economics is in order. Bezos being rich doesn’t make others poor. If you understood money at all you’d know that.
Your whole screed is a vengeance fantasy. What you call for is a return to mass extreme poverty, just so “the rich” can be thrown in jail.
Constant churning out of spike protein in your organs. You will start to sicken and die and it will be blamed on non-jabbers or some other fairy tale crap by the psychopaths making $$$$. Nuremburg trials are coming to the monsters who have perpetuated this hoax. Congratulations, fearful chumps it has only ever been a Flu (a coronavirus).
Gods Book of Revelation describes how he will level out everything on this planet at the next Great World War.
barbaric? how about we stop cutting the ends of babies penis’s…
The person who wrote the above lines is a deluded paranoid. He/she states that this virus might even eradicate humanity, i.e. in his/her opinion this virus should be worse than both cholera and black plague, as they didn’t eradicate humanity. I could write much more to ridicule this feeble mind, but he/she isn’t worth my time.
Hysterical nonsense. We co-evolve with viruses. What will really happen is that parts of the viral genome will be incorporated into ours, we will develop mass (herd) immunity with and without vaccines, and life goes on.
How do I stop getting “Answers” from this guy?
So really, I don’t understand your point.
This is totally political, not only is it political, but it’s your opinion on politics, not historical in any way either, just your opinion.
I suggest reading our guidelines page before posting again, thanks.
It’s staggering that anyone could believe socialism is an effective system after the death and destruction that it’s caused.
It sounds like you need to learn more about it.
Nothing personal, and I agree with you in principle, but buddy, you are nuts.
New double-blind study from Israel. Ivermectin works. Why are they keeping an effective, cheap and SAFE drug from us? Oh yeah, Big Pharma needs to make billions while we’re dying. Got it.
Amazing but unsurprising that you managed to highlight the Trump administration as guilty of “warping democracies” as you related your idealistic Socialist, cultural-Marxist treatise. Trump was nominated for a Nobel Prize after proctoring multiple peace treaties. Your vision reads like a laundry list of 5th grade desires for equity vs. equality, the idealism tainted by equal doses Greta Thunberg angst and SJW woke preening.
Lord, mercy.
I think that me flapping my arms so fast that I fly is more likely than even half of what you described becoming reality.
Not as prescient as calling yourself a pontificator
I understand your point and can even relate with it.
I, too, have suffered greatly with this feeling of absolute terror, an irrational fear of anything that seems menacing, a paralyzing scare that impedes advancements in life.
Lucky for me, I overcame it when I was a child, about eight years old. Until then, I would spend days in bed, fearing death and even more horrifying destines than death.
May you overcome it soon!
All the best!
OK… I think readers get the idea. Thank you to everyone for reading and commenting.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAPs—UFOs in decades past—burning bushes in ancient eras—angels in the sacred texts of human history—all are real. Navy pilots have film.
The Pentagon is releasing UAP videos, which the public has never before seen. Pilots around the world are speaking. The problem is that no one seems to know what UAPs are or where they come from, right?
Wrong.
Someone knows—or did know once. He was a CIA executive who lived down the street in a quiet neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland when I was in third grade. His daughter was a playmate from time to time. Her dad is dead now. Readers are going to have to take my word.
The CIA photo-analyst pioneer was Arthur C. Lundahl. He studied films of unidentified flying objects. Some years before his death he fully explained in a phone call I will never forget the methodology his team at the CIA used to get to truth.
I was a university student at the time calling about an article in the National Inquirer that mentioned his name. The year was 1974. I thought he should know. He admitted that he did an interview. He seemed eager to share what he learned before he died.
To his dismay the tabloid revealed nothing significant. The news rag infamous for supporting the Orange Mango president bought Art’s story, which other “mainstream” media wouldn’t touch. The editors then proceeded to bury it. The words “catch-and-kill” weren’t associated with journalism in those days. Art would never learn why.
Because my dad was a senior NSA officer and a friend of Mr. Lundahl’s, I knew the importance of keeping national security secrets. Retired agents who know too much are sometimes in old age subjected to induced aphasia that degrades their ability to speak and write sensibly about what they know.
It’s a terrible practice but not expensive; the victims are oblivious. It’s considered humane to let senile agents live into their golden years whenever possible until the time comes to take their secrets into the next life.
Until now I have kept Mr. Lundahl’s truth to myself. I’ve carried the knowledge in the hidden places of my heart and brain for a long time.
CIA agents will recognize Arthur Lundahl because he was the analyst who discovered nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba back in the day. The result of what Arthur observed and shared personally with President John F. Kennedy led to a confrontation between the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the USA that brought civilization—as Earthlings have come to know it—to within a hair’s breadth of its end.
Art was a caring man sensitive enough to love film’s spooky ability to reveal what lies beyond the passage of time in the invisible world of frozen nanoseconds. A clash of civilizations was a nightmare scenario that he dedicated his life to help politicians avoid.
Queen Elizabeth II of England “knighted” Art Lundahl on 17 December 1974 for his unpublished breakthroughs in the field of intelligence photo-analysis. The award had nothing to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis or an alien invasion, as far as I know. Nevertheless, the award became the pretext that the National Inquirer used against Lundahl to catch and kill the insights that he alone carried inside his brilliant mind.
I was not able to learn the complete story of the unpublished particulars that led the Brits to “knight” Arthur. Few people were. It wasn’t because English royalty liked his name. King Arthur is a legend in the British Isles, sure, and thus so was Arthur Lundahl—but only to elites who understood what he did and the reasons why.
The public knows little to nothing about the man except what those who did know him have published on Wikipedia. The public has not heard the story about Sir Arthur C. Lundahl—how he saved humanity from extinction, not once but twice.
Nothing in press reports familiar to me comes close to what Mr. Lundahl shared.
I am dropping some information into a blog bottle to cast into the vast cyber ocean of humanity. Perhaps a miracle will occur, and the right sort of human will read the essay. Maybe someone will possess the contacts and raw personal power to do what needs to be done.
Folks want to get to the bottom of the mystery. For them it’s not lunacy; it’s not humor. No one is smart enough to make jokes about films of things that behave outside the limits of physics familiar to science.
Readers, this mystery has a bottom. It’s a deep bottom that ends in a non-material world alien to the reality that occupies the minds of sophisticated scientists. The public won’t believe the answers when first they encounter them.
A little preparation is in order.
It seems reasonable to experts known to me that substratum must be poured into humanoids drop by drop like an IV drip to prevent the hearts of those who truly care from breaking when the reality of everything they think they know is turned upside down. For readers who are fearful, I beg you, stop reading—now.
Billy Lee
EDITORS NOTE: Due to the timeliness and urgency of the UAP issue, the BOARD has recommended that Billy Lee’s introduction be published immediately; conclusions and speculations will be added later— after fact-checking protocols are completed by the Pontificator Staff. We have added Billy Lee’s sub-headers about subjects addressed in the essay, which will remain for now unpublished until verified by reliable, third-party sources.
Sun-life nascency and emergence Deep ocean bases
Upper atmosphere supremacy
UAPs internal to sensors
Access issues
Volcanic habitats High-pressure / high-heat origins & habitats
Prions
Neutrinos
Dark-matter / dark-energy mastery
Sub-microscopic necessity
Amplified nano-technology holograms
Intentions
Conscious processes
Mind & machine controls
Colonization of Enceladus & other water moons
Relationships with Titan
Unusual materials
Isotopic anomalies
USA monetary allocations to FRIBs
Japanese isotopic labs
Captured craft
Creatures & structures
Interrogation methods & results
Interrogation certification & verification
High-resolution sightings
Video encounters
Role of color & heat
Radiation signatures
Incident proximity to defense infrastructure
Communication postures & attitudes
Pursuit / tracking / baiting strategies
Military threats & vulnerability
Microwave induced behavior modification
World views
Variations among species
Evolving relationships
Altered outcomes
Implausibility disinformation consequences…
EDITORS UPDATE, 8 August 2023: After investigation, our position is this: the United States of America is in possession of advanced technologies. These technologies serve Americans best when not revealed.
We learned of an incident that occurred during the time when Soviets controlled an ICBM base inside Ukraine. Flying craft seized control of several missiles and executed their launch codes. After making flagrant maneuvers, the craft disengaged and disappeared. Sometime after, Ukraine dismantled its weapons infrastructure.
The USA seems to have deployed laser weapons within its fleet of warships — presumably to defend against hypersonic ship killers. The power source for these weapons is secret.
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.
