TOP TWEETS

twitter 1Last month we published tweets from my first thirty days on Twitter. This month, we publish a sampling of my best tweets ever, gleaned from the three years I tweeted regularly. A lot of thought went into each tweet when it was composed, and more thought has gone into selecting the “finalists” which made it into this new collection.  I hope readers find them entertaining and thought provoking. 

I’ve come to regret tweeting some of my original tweets, which, in retrospect, seemed to me too emotional and extreme. My son once told me my tweets were dumb. After reviewing all of them, it’s clear he was right about at least some of them. I no longer tweet regularly on Twitter. 

Anyway, get ready for a controversial ride. These tweets are hot.  If you disagree or have doubts or if you’re simply curious, click on the many embedded links to learn more.  

Note: links have been added to some of the original tweets to provide readers with background and context. A few tweets have been edited for clarity. 


If acorns tasted better, there’d be no need for farming.

The squirrels in our neighborhood have opposable thumbs & sometimes stand upright.

An airline CEO told a friend that 24 Al-Qaeda crews were active on 911.  I know, sounds crazy.

Where’d daddy go? He died, momma.  When’d he die?  Two months ago, momma.  Oh, did I kill him?  Alzheimer’s 101 

In the old days cigarette butts were everywhere.  Now you rarely see one.

Living forever, or just one day, feels the same.  We live in the present.

Going for a walk.  Hope the packs of wolf-coyote hybrids NatGeo says are out there don’t eat me.

Has it occurred to anyone else that the Restasis lady may, in fact, be an alien?

We have freedom of speech as long as nobody listens.

If USA GNP was divided equally, every family of four would get $200,000 per year.  [($15.2 T/309 M) * 4 ].

Clean coal is only clean before you dig it up and actually touch it.

During the next 25,000 years, containment structures for nuclear weapons will corrode & release plutonium killing all life on earth.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 40 – Son: Dad!  Stop Twitter now!  You sound loopy!  Me: You don’t understand, son.  I’m free.

What we learned during the past 10 years: throwing an election has consequences.

Have waited 50 years to vacation on a Cuban beach.  Still waiting.

Love this animation showing how DNA/RNA works…  http://t.co/rYaG8cau

Michigan has thousands of clear-water lakes.  Fish got there from geese and ducks carrying sticky fish-eggs on their webbed feet.

Solar bottle-bulbs provide free light to folks in dark houses.   http://t.co/1Hk01AA1

Only a nation asleep would allow individuals to accumulate billions of dollars.  Are you kidding me?!?

Permitting the wealthy to go into the prison business presents incredible dangers to our freedoms.

If aliens are the size of grasshoppers, we might not notice an invasion until it’s too late.

Ayn Rand destroyed America.

Nuclear plant meltdowns are almost certain during earthquakes above 8.0.  Since 1900, 100 have occurred, none in the USA.   http://t.co/KUhuFw88

tend to lie about the effectiveness of their drugs.

USA GNP is 7% of its accumulated wealth.  It’s why small changes in GNP don’t affect us much.  http://t.co/PmHlp5xL

Billionaires harm democracies.  You know they do.  Set max. worth at $150 million.  Those who have more must divest.

During slavery, plantation owners were the job creators. They created millions of jobs.

Research seems to show that brains decide seconds before humans are aware they’ve decided… http://t.co/1yngCw7b

The only threat to our freedom greater than billionaires is a government controlled by billionaires.

How differential gears work is hard to grasp.  This video can help. http://t.co/GyR0ht6z

No such thing as trace amounts of plutonium.  It gets passed around in wind & rain forever.  You will never see the speck that kills you.

All drones are piloted by somebody.

I’m old and cold and not very bold; my teeth are inlaid with gold. My chin has a fold; I’m covered with mold; when I go, my nose I must hold.

We don’t need a revolution.  We just need to limit how much people can steal before they have to divest.  No more billionaires.   http://www.theguardian.com/video

Pre-Civil War plantation owners were some of the most effective job-creators in our nation’s history.

Ayn Rand Objectivism is a modern day Divine Right of Kings written to convince the gullible that billionaires have a moral right to rule.

Squirrels have developed agriculture.  They plant trees and store walnuts which they eat out-of-season.

Favorite Spartacus video clip…  http://t.co/IsedM4xD

Copyrights that last years after an author’s death are un-American.  People get money for what they didn’t write?

I love the smell of marijuana in the morning. It smells like freedom.

Capitalism is the plantation system of the old South renamed & repackaged for modern wage earners.

This explanation of ozone is very good…  http://t.co/cwRrYIQo

Chances of being eaten by a mountain lion are 1 in ten million — unless the lion is 100 feet away & hungry.

This notion that somehow people are entitled to unlimited wealth is destroying civilization.  Soon, we’ll be serfs again.

Big Tobacco — when they advertised in the 1950s — talked 70% of men into smoking. We can be brainwashed. https://watch?v=sxrCjmqRTz0

Advocates of nuclear energy are like the people of Easter Island who destroyed their civilization for a few more hours of campfire.

America has a permanent over-class. Until we deal with it, we are serfs.

Atheists would rob me of any hope against death.

Incandescent bulbs — now banned — are hot.  We need them in winter.

40% of electricity bill is wasted charging AC/DC electronic devices.  This fix is cool.  http://t.co/8gWRO1l6

Plutonium escaped at Fukushima.  How dangerous is it?   http://uploads/1997/07/no-3.pdf

At the heart of every fortune lies a dark secret.

The wealthy have divested the middle-class & limited our incomes.  It’s time to turn the tables.

USA politics consists of arguing about how aggressive the financial shake-down of the middle-class should be.

It’s the redistribution of wealth to a permanent over-class that we’re fighting against. #occupywallstreet

Fantasy-nightmare vision of Ayn Rand was a poison apple.  It ushered in a facist USA, where billionaires now rule us.  #ows

Gated communities are another form of segregation.

Homework in elementary school demoralizes students, short circuits passive processing, dampens creativity & makes kids dumb.

RT @pdjmoo: THE LIONESS AND THE CALF: Lovely Watch.  A short documentary that will open your eyes. –  http://t.co/S8okiyJ2

Baby Boomers are the Greatest Generation. They ended racial segregation & the Vietnam War.  They started the high-tech revolution.

Rage and old age make a sage.

If humans were the size of squirrels and lived in people’s yards, could they survive?

RT @nytimesscience: Bursts of Fission Detected at Fukushima Reactor in Japan http://t.co/lZsThJNT

JFK fired the CIA Director who later sat on the Warren Commission.

It’s easier to control un-informed people.  Education will never be cool while billionaires rule.

Nice one-minute explanation of GPS & effects of special & general relativity
http://t.co/T1z6gUm4

Twenty-three million government workers in the USA.  No way private sector can provide full employment.  See pg 30.  http://t.co/2Btdfbjs

Tea Party types don’t get that government is all that stands between them & tyranny by billionaires.  Divest billionaires.  #ows

Billionaires build their power by corrupting our representative government.  Divest them.  #ows

Well, Gitmo prison is going strong & we’re killing Americans with drones.  What good is Obama besides not being a Republican?  Just asking.

That country singer who used to crow, wanna watch some football?  & called Obama Hitler was on CMA tonight.  He got a standing ovation.

Billionaires seduce consumers into supporting “free markets” which they rule as personal fiefdoms. #ows

Billionaires used the tax cuts we gave them to solidify their vice-grip on our “democratic” institutions. #ows

Cults of personality never work out well.  #Paterno

MSNBC reporting that the District Attorney in the #Paterno sex crime scandal went missing in 2005.

How many of those who laughed at Howard Hughes for using Kleenex boxes as shoes ever tried it themselves?

USA psycho-terror:  Bahgram, Gitmo, SuperMax, rampant solitary.  Sick minds created these nightmares.

Many billionaires are tied to drugs (legal/illegal) & the military.

Earth is broadcasting itself on all EM frequencies.  If aliens are out there they will find us.

After Vietnam, anti-war activists were black-listed from top jobs.  The consequences for the USA have been devastating.

If billionaires won’t agree to tax fairness, what other reasonable requests will they crush?

TWITTER-LOG: Day 117 – been following some celebs like Vonnegut & Von Braun.  Even tweeted them.  Wife just informed me, they’re both dead.

Portraying oppressor as victim is as old as human tyranny. #ows #OccupyEarth

Quantum physicists & priests approach absurdity in different ways: one through reason; one through faith.

Am passing by hundreds of hyperactive squirrels on my walks.  Thus far, none have mindlessly attacked me.

Successful revolutions never have popular support until they’re won.

Rupert Murdoch of Fox News bought the Wall Street Journal.  It’s Fox propaganda now.  Don’t read it.

You treat us like dirt & live safe behind gates.  The least you could do is pay some taxes. #ows

The Bush tax cuts gave more money to the average millionaire than a lifetime of social security checks.

Cuba has one of the best health care systems in the world.  Our sick can’t go there.

Bell’s theorem is irrelevant if entangled particles are single wave-particle objects (like oscillating bubbles).  http://t.co/qzWRDLqx

Carbon dioxide is heavy, so the little there is stays close to the earth where plants can breath it.

The notion — main-streamed by Ayn Rand — that taxation is theft ruined all that was fair & good about the USA.

If life is distributed over the widest range of temperatures then typical civilizations might be cryogenic & radio-wave sensitive.

The dilemma of the rich is they can only live in one place at a time, operate one transport at a time, make love to one person at a time.

People understand the Universe the way smart goldfish might understand the Earth.

Earth’s neighbors are small with little gravity. We can visit & come back.  We have the perfect spaces to learn.

First thing women did after getting the vote was enact Prohibition — because their husbands drank & beat them.

This could be huge — esp. regarding intelligence & learning.   http://t.co/8OEbNOtd

How did paper planes launched from a small number of boats & dropping unguided munitions sink so many ships at Pearl Harbor?

GOP repealed Michigan unit-pricing.  At check out, we can’t tell if stuff rang up right.  At home, we can’t review what we paid.

No black man has ever led a major world power until Barack Obama.

Kirk Douglas reflects on life in letter to Christopher Hitchens…  http:/?2011/09/kirk-douglas-201109

Billionaires will be passing 30 trillion dollars to their kids in coming decades.

Somewhere in the oceans are a few genius dolphins.  We should find them.

When looking into the eyes of war-dogs returning from Iraq, one can’t help feeling that some have seen too much.

Christopher Hitchens said his biggest fear was — near certain death & in pain — he might cry-out to Christ Jesus to save him.

North Koreans fake-cry better than citizens of any other country.  http://t.co/qg3LFCWz

If private companies could create full employment, they would have to hire 13M unemployed & 23M govt workers: 36M people.

Government should provide free basic-food to anyone who wants it: potatoes, rice, beans, oil, corn.  It would cost almost nothing.

Drew USA flag billowing in the wind. Teacher said: you can’t draw straight lines?  Art career died that day.  In kindergarten.

You never hear about good marriages, because the people in them aren’t talking.

All trees fall down, yet few people have ever seen one fall.

We could put direct-current fuel cells in every neighborhood in the USA for the cost of a few nuclear power plants.

People who make sure they eat at least three balanced meals per day are usually fat.

25 dimensionless constants make our universe work the way it does.

Nothing smells better to me than my own armpits.

If the current Social Security tax rate was applied to all income, it would provide $25,000 per year to every old person.

Genes, like those for intelligence, can be passed between species by viruses.

Didn’t watch GOP debate but am certain it was the stupid-est thing on television tonight.

RT @cracked: 5 Absurd Solutions to Huge Problems (That Actually Worked): http://t.co/RpJpSWYL

Einstein’s statement that God does not play at dice flies in the face of Proverbs 16:33.

Billionaire propaganda station, NBC News, is reporting Romney family origin was in Mexican poverty.  That should work.

The Siberian wilderness in Russia has 35% more land mass than the contiguous USA.

Billionaires destroy democracies.

Assume reality is an [n x n] matrix.  Then the least expensive # of dimensions is when (n^3 / 3) = n^2 .  So n=3.   http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Romney said his speaking fee ($375,000) wasn’t much.  It’s about what the President is paid per year.

RT @QuotesByArtists: There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love. — Christopher Morley

The Romney Flat Tax (15%) works out to a 300% increase on low wagers; 50% decrease on the 1%.  Typical GOP idea.

Obama can sing like Al Green.  Makes me feel happy.  http://t.co/GspEqOEd

Never understood why anyone would put themselves on a boat with thousands of people they don’t know.   http://www.cnn.com/travel/carnival

We don’t know the names of the billionaires who rule us.

Until we get it — that billionaires we don’t know rule us — nothing political will  make sense.  It not about us.  It’s about them.

Insiders who killed Kennedy want us to know he was a monster.

The conspirators sat on the Warren Commission.  They put a Secret Service agent on the grassy knoll.  Oswald was a patsy.

Workers need a Bill of Rights.  Take away employers’ power to fire “at will.”  Due process required.

The public lives inside an information bubble created to entertain, not inform.

Politicians are not the best people to teach us about Jesus.

20% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth.  Kudos, USA.   http://t.co/wWdEmDNv

Ronald Reagan accepted a $2M gift from the Japanese after his final term. Why?  Auto imports?

Iran can get a nuclear bomb anytime by buying one from another country.  What they can’t do is buy hundreds.

Expansion of space means our current vehicle technology — given unlimited fuel & time — can take us no further than 1B light years from Earth.

All cars in Iran run on natural gas.  All cars in Brazil run on sugar cane flex-fuel.  Why?  The oil is running out.

Don’t kid yourself.  If you are worth less than $20 million, you are one of the little people.

Most of USA’s best food is exported to wealthy nations.  We import from poor countries to make up shortfall.

12% of voters who earn less than $25K/ yr have no photo ID.  GOP says they shouldn’t vote.

RT @thequotemaster: Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves. -Abraham Lincoln http://t.co/J1mB7Eoa  #quotes

The Bible is written for the wretched.  It gives hope to the powerless, the exploited, the poor, the despised, the unloved.

Billionaires have the USA in a vice-grip. They control the media, courts & Congress.  Everyone works for them.

In case you didn’t notice, Florida is still segregated.  They have gated (segregated) neighborhoods everywhere.

The space between Earth & 1B light/yrs from Earth is expanding faster than our fastest spacecraft can travel.

Many Americans seem oblivious to the huge sums spent on ads to get them to accept the agenda of billionaires.

USA police forces are increasingly being manned by Iraq/Afganistan vets.  Caution: these men are “militarized” and “weaponized.”

When someone says they totally agree with you, odds are they totally don’t.

The Bush family unleashed more hell on Earth than any family in recent memory.  Kuwait, Iraq, Afganistan, 2000 election, 2008 crash; etc.

Anyone still remember when Enron & GOP drove Calif Dem Governor out & put Arnold in?  Enron bankrupt & Calif a mess.  Thanks GOP.

Enron’s Ken Lay sat next to Bush at 2000 Inaugural.  Jack-boots in street, protesters on sidewalks.  Anyone remember?   https://www.youtube.com/

Anyone who can donate $100,000 to a politician is, in all  probability, a crook.

Hunger Games shows a world where the wealthy use government to torment the common people for fun. Sounds like the USA.

USA is run by permanent over-class who inherited money, reputation and power from their parents.  Divest billionaires.  Tax them.

If everyone drove cars with Chevy Volt style power plants, we could dismantle pipelines.

Tea Party “christians” let negative ads manipulate them into nominating a Mormon billionaire.

President Obama’s statement about Jesus this AM… http://t.co/NX2ZYha8

Let’s calm down.  No Court worth its salt is going to overturn health-care.  That would be insane.

All wars are wasteful. When we left Vietnam we left billions in air-conditioners, office furniture, vehicles, buildings, etc.

Fibonacci series in music with astronomy graphics in case you missed it…  http://t.co/JbsSsBuO

Either tax twillionaires 92% like Eisenhower did or divest them.  Otherwise lose the country to a permanent over-class.

Even in the contest between beast & man, the outcome is not certain.  No Country for Old Men.

RT @keepingitraw: Radiation from Fukushima Disaster Found in California Kelp http://t.co/E9qNMokO

Earthlings: your puny brains have created a simplified approximation of reality you call “mathematics.”  Free yourselves.

Revolutions never have popular support until they’re won.

What did Castro do?  He threw the Mafia out of Cuba & set up an egalitarian society.  No wonder billionaires hate him.

The Coal Cartel is right about one thing. They have a lot of coal to sell.  They are wrong about this: coal is not clean.

Can’t we all just stop eating bacon…?   http://t.co/HwOCP3gL

Imagine a 28 yr old black man with a gun on neighborhood-watch picking a fight with your son & killing him.  Manslaughter?

Hannity is reporting a Fox News poll that shows Romney beating Obama 46% to 44%.  Might as well forget about truth telling for a while.

RT @Art_Guy1: FACT: Obama’s tax plan raises his tax rate. Mitt Romney’s plan cuts his own taxes in half.

Churchill: I like pigs.  Dogs look up to you.  Cats look down on you.  Pigs treat you like an equal.

We had a leader of the NY Stock Exchange who made more money in one day than Obama makes in a year.

Rush said Secret Service hooker scandal is Obama’s fault, because he overworks agents & keeps them from their wives.

According to Gallup & Fox polls, the election is over.  Romney will be President.

Are we going to throw out a sitting President to satisfy the lunatics…?  Ted Nugent threatens Obama… http://t.co/TeBX54wE

USA has been war-ing Stone-Age peoples since Vietnam.  It never tires.

Make it a felony to possess more than, say, $150M, in cash, property & assets.  Limit yearly incomes to $15M.

RT @JeffDauler: RT @CassandraYoung: Just remember, kids: every time you make a typo, the errorists win.

Communism, Socialism, Capitalism are utopian fantasies that don’t exist & never will in the real world.  The USA is what it is.

The problem with the USA space program was lethality to employees. At least 82 died during its tenure.  http://List_of_spaceflight-accidents

Obama doesn’t look American.  You know.  Fat.

Most prosecutors in the South don’t bring charges against whites in racial cases due to chance of being disbarred.  Like the Duke rape case.

RT @YourAuntDiane: I like to talk to everyone like they’re dying of a dreadful disease. It makes me a better listener.

One thing to remember about the BP screw-up: there are thousands of wells in the Gulf.  They all leak.

Taxes on the one-percenters are one-third of 1960; one-half of 1980.  https://www.yhoutube.com/watch

Mexicans are beautiful people.  Why can’t we open the border & let folks drive back & forth freely?

If we divested billionaires & divided their wealth equally to every citizen, a family-of-four would get $1,250,000.

The price of two wars & tax cuts for the rich has been $60,000 per family.  Could use the money right now.

Does anyone find this explanation of consciousness compelling?  It is certainly fascinating in the extreme.  http://t.co/OqWiKSz4

It would be nice if the equation for the Theory of Everything was found to be less than 140 characters, so it can be tweeted.

Money loses its promise at the point of dying.

Have been hearing that Social Security is going bust for 50 years now.  It’s like a broken record.  The 1% don’t pay Social Security taxes.

Most gazelles in nature never get eaten by lions.  They never even see one.  https://www.youtube.com/

We never hear anyone on television talk about divesting billionaires.  Why is that?

One of the good things Bush did as President was to popularize the now famous lexicon, Mission Accomplishedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?    https://www.youtube.com/watch

There is always some new disease to worry about and a drug dealer on TV eager to sell a solution.  Only in America.

Americans don’t know the names of the billionaires who rule them.  Who will tell them?

How do they keep black folks out of the Derby?

GM makes the best cars.

There’s this CIA guy named Rodriquez who is going on right-wing television slamming our elected officials.  Weird.

When the wealthy push down wages, skilled labor evaporates.

Safety regulations, which auto firms once fought tooth and nail, have saved over 200,000 lives.

Leonard Susskind said it will take an accelerator the size of our galaxy to see the smallest particles.  We aren’t there yet.

We had hamburgers tonight with no pink slime in them.  What a difference.  So good!  https://www.youtube.com/watch

The game of pushing black men until they finally stand their ground and get killed or imprisoned is as old as America. #trayvonmartin

Honest people who have integrity and are not greedy cannot be cheated.  They can be robbed and sometimes are.

It should be a felony for a private citizen to possess a billion dollars.

#ThoughtsLiberalsHaveAroundConservatives  This guy’s a lunatic.  Hope he doesn’t shoot me.

RT @therightblue: Antibiotic residue in seafood purchased at US grocery stores, experts say:   http://t.co/mIPRDzFX

USA dropped equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb per day for 25 years on Bikini atoll.  Ruined tourism.    http://www.youtube.com/watch

Do you self-censor tweets, because your employer is watching?  That’s not freedom.

God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Jesus.

Should we be fishing from the same pond we drill our oil and dump our garbage?

Long after humans, and all we’ve built, have vanished, alien visitors will know we were here from the plutonium we left behind.

Thirty-seven old nuclear plants on the Great Lakes with no place to store high level waste.  http://t.co/Iasqrjn3

A country like the USA comes along once in ten-thousand years.

First Silent Majority, then Moral Majority, now New Majority.  The GOP is always trying to start a bandwagon.

Still remember nuclear engineers telling me in 1977 that nuclear power was safe, and waste storage was no problem.

Seems like China is going to own the moon, it’s helium and rare-earth metals.

This Colbert quote about Christian Nation is pretty good. http://t.co/lZIMNw7j

Yes, it’s hot.  But look at the bright side.  In the next few years, it’s going to get a lot hotter.

RT @QuoteRevolution: The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. ~John Hay

If you can discourage 1 out of 100 voters from voting by requiring photo ID, you can throw a lot of elections to the GOP.

Are Focus on the Family execs calling the USA to pray for rain at Romney nomination speech like they did for Obama 2008?    http://t.co/XIdXcclo

How they hate Obama.  What’s he ever done to them?

We learned how much the GOP wanted America to succeed when they refused to be led by a black man and trashed our country’s credit rating.

Billionaire-owned media portrays a failed President.  But he saved the USA from collapse, killed OBL, passed medical-care.

We knew the Vietnam war was lost when USA soldiers fragged their officers.  Afghan green-on-blue is same thing.

The political dominance of billionaires is USA’s biggest problem.  GOP’s solution?  Make one President.

The only thing not better than four years ago is right-wing media.  Those morons never shut up.

Everyone fights for the middle-class.  But they’re in the top 20% of income earners.  What about the vast under-class?

It feels like the GOP/right wing/media/billionaires are sucking the air out of America.  They are relentlessly negative.

As we age, our bodies become less like prisons and more like torture chambers.

It is disrespectful to bear-hug the President and lift him off his feet.  The man is lucky he wasn’t shot.

USA should pass amendment making anyone who serves as President more than 3 years a natural-born citizen.  Would shut-up birthers.

Tell the truth.  Weren’t you scared of the Axis of Evil and Saddam’s WMD’s?  GOP scared the crap out of us.  No way we let them back in.

Only one person knows what it’s like to be the first black President.

The six Billionaires who own 85% of USA media have convinced most Americans it is a “liberal media.”  Wow.

Romney said he will end estate taxes, which are the last defense the USA has against the establishment of a permanent royal-class.

GOP hack, John Sununu, called Obama “lazy” on Fox News.

Obama said he wasn’t perfect to counter GOP websites that are saying he claims to be Jesus and, therefore, is the anti-Christ.

Can’t remember an election with no GOP bumper stickers.  Haven’t seen a Romney sticker yet.  Anywhere.  Strange.

Ambiguity is a tactic artists and politicians use to attract a mass audience.

It’s hard to believe that the land of the free and home of the brave would let 400 people sequester 1/8 of our national treasure.

Imagine Obama losing 241 Marines to a terrorist attack; losing an entire Shuttle crew; flooding the USA with Japanese cars…that was Reagan.

If the tax rate was at Kennedy levels, the USA would be awash with surplus cash.

To put things in perspective, Romney will get $4,566 from his annuity during the debate.  Obama will get $91 from his salary.

Romney says his dad was born in Mexico.  I remember when his dad ran for President.  He said he was born in the USA, I think.  https://www.youtube.com/

Today, Federal investigtors revealed more Secret Service agents using prostitutes while on duty overseas.

I don’t want to believe the GOP is strong enough to overthrow a President who hasn’t done anything wrong.

Many Christians turned on Jimmy Carter with a vengence.  Now they rally around a Mormon to destroy Obama who is a convert to Christianity.

I keep waiting for conservatives to come to their senses about Obama — a brilliant and decent man.  They never do.

What good is democracy if the billionaires always win?

Employers threatening to shut-down if Obama re-elected reminds me of  threats to close shop if Civil Rights Act passed in 1964.

Today my pastor preached that Obamacare forces church organizations to participate in abortion or go out of business due to fines.

People think taxes will go down on the middle-class if Romney is elected.  No, taxes will go down on the billionaires.

No one on television or radio or in newspapers or magazines will ever tell us to tax or divest billionaires.  No one.  Never.

How can anyone say USA is free when 400 families have sequestered 1/8 of our national treasure?  Our country is a plantation.

Obama, a born-again Christian, must feel like Jesus himself as Christian leaders desert him for Mormon Romney, a compulsive liar.

Christian leaders showed their true colors this election.  They took sides with the rich and powerful.

Put a Mormon missionary billionaire with strong ties to Mexico who won’t financially disclose in the White’s House?

Romney/GOP convention disrupted by hurricane.  God making statement?  http://thecolbertreport — hurricane-isaac

Seems like during every storm we find hospitals that put their back up generators in the basement where they are disabled by floods.

Four more days until Romney goes away.  Can’t wait.

Female CNN announcer just said “atta boy” to Don Lemon.  Young people don’t get how racist that sounds.

Do white people in Florida stand in four-hour lines to vote, like they make their colored folks do?  Just asking.   https://www.youtube.com/

On C-Span, just heard South Carolina woman say, Obama is the best candidate; and, yes, I am white.

#LieLikeMitt   Jesus is Satan’s brother. Look it up.  And thank you to all Christians who are voting for me.

Hope Romney and Ryan have a sense of humor, because the election tomorrow is going to be a joke.

Romney just lost in NH and Mass. where he has homes; MI where he grew up; and Wisc. where Ryan is from.

Thank you, Jesus.

Christian leaders hate Obama, because “sinners” love him.

Evangelical leaders sided with southern racists and the rich and powerful.  https://www.youtube.com/watch

Romney was going to do a fireworks show in Boston Harbor after being declared winner.  Thank God, it didn’t happen.

RT @A_ThinkingGirl: Boehner and McConnell Dissed Obama on Election Night; Refused Phone Calls from the President   http://t.co/Pw4JkhpE

Thomas Ricks just told CNN that if you haven’t had an affair your not a player in the CIA.  That is disturbing to me.

Getting old.  Tweeted “your” instead of  “you’re.”  Sorry.  Please forgive me.

Officers serve subject to the Code of Military Conduct.  It prohibits adultery.

People who are good at maximizing their personal advantages over others often consider themselves worthy of further advantages.

Any business owner who lays off his workers because Obama won is mean-spirited.  We need a bill of rights for workers.

Always thought embracing Bush holdovers like Betray-us was a mistake. Imagine if he’d been Romney’s VP choice.

Romney thought he was the savior on a white horse foretold by .  Maybe next time.

RT @MariaLiaCalvo: Obama cries as he thanks his volunteers and campaign staff; Romney fires his staff and leaves them stranded.

From our adversaries point of view, Petraeus — who led the fight against them on behalf of the “great satan”  —  is an adulterer.  Ouch.

Paula Broadwell might want to apologize to the nation and to her children and to her lover’s wife.

Never admired Petraeus, because Cheney and Bush pushed him into top leadership.  Obama should have cleaned house, but GOP prevented it.

Got my skills going to school while on unemployment.  Kids can’t do that today.  GOP regulations destroyed this option in Michigan long ago.

Of all the top biographers Petraeus could have picked, he chose Paula Broadwell.  It was a clue.

Would like to know if the Muslim militia got their prisoners back during Benghazi attack.

People love to go to war.  Years later they complain about how it ruined them.

General Allen of Afganistan is now under investigation for links to Lebanese-American, Jill Kelly.  Wow.

What we are witnessing is a high level purge of Bush protégés as Obama finally takes control of USA military and intelligence agencies.

RT @keepingitraw: Sky-high levels of radioactivity in fish from Fukushima means inedible seafood for at least a decade.  http://t.co/vM3IyCbH

The Monica-Benghazi scandal is in full swing on the Hannity show.

Dear God, Barack Obama is in the belly of the beast fighting for what is right.  Thank you for your holy angels who guard him.

Friend of my sister went back to her New Jersey apartment a week after Hurricane Sandy to find it ruined, not by water, but by rats.  Everything lost.

I hate war because you have to choose sides, everyone suffers and, in the end, you compromise anyway.

GOP Generals underestimated Obama.

We need to help our Conservatives heal.  They came within four-million votes of electing a lunatic.  What is the cure?

John McCain, under torture, signed a confession and attempted suicide.  No one blames him, but that’s what happened.

Limiting doctor salaries to $400K/year would discourage greedy people from becoming doctors.  It would help everyone.

Obama cried after election, just before news broke on Petraeus.  It may be an indicator he really was just finding out and dealing with it.

Am hearing that Hostess execs looted the company before firing the 18,500 folks who created the wealth they took.

Letting individuals keep unlimited wealth and field private armies is a bad idea unworthy of a free people.

You’d think Obama would have carried more southern states, since large black populations voted 90% for him.  He didn’t carry any.

Surprising to learn that people who couldn’t say who ran for President in the last election knew all about the Hostess Twinkie crisis.

Billionaire media owners drone endless negativity until they get the President they want.  Then messaging gets positive.  Remember Reagan.

The big problem for America is the voracious appetite of our billionaires and the vast underclass they have created in their wake.

What DNA actually looks like.  http://t.co/msEjIPEG

In the 40’s and 50’s most white people saw nothing wrong with segregation.  Today, they see nothing wrong with gated communities.

Executive gangs who pay themselves huge salaries are not creating value.  They are looting.

Billionaire owners of NFL teams don’t get traumatic brain injuries.

NBC reported that Boehner avoided receiving-line at holiday party last night, so he wouldn’t have to shake Obama’s hand.

At the root of our fiscal-cliff crisis is the belief by the GOP that the country is not worth saving as long as Obama remains President.

RT @ReformedBroker: “If Buffett didn’t exist, the rich would have to invent him.” http://t.co/Xz3HHVCj

Billionaire media owners want Americans to think there is something cute and innocent about British-royalty.

The GOP is fighting a war, not for freedom or fairness, but for the idea that a handful of families are entitled to own everything.

All the good jobs go to the children of the wealthy.

Want to limit corruption?  Make it a felony to keep more than $15M per year or own an estate larger than $150M.

Billionaires are every bit as wicked as anyone else.  The difference is, they have a billion dollars.  That’s scary, or it should be.

GOP named Right to Work law to hide its intent to weaken/wreck unions and drive down wages and benefits.

If athletes and actors make millions, what do you think the people who pay them make?

Michigan GOP exempted cops and fire fighters from Right to Work law.   Cops won’t get the “benefits” of working for less money.

Hundreds of cops are standing guard around Michigan State Capitol through Thursday.  Cops exempted from Right to Work by GOP bill.  https://www.youtube.com/watch

Someone said boxing is morally wrong, because one human has to inflict injury on another human to win.

Billionaire advertisers in Michigan are calling RTW “Freedom to Work.”  Yet they won’t free cops and firefighters.  They need them on their side.

Can we please raise taxes on the wealthy to stop the looting?  If you are greedy, go to Russia or Mexico and loot there.

I remember that in the 1960s most Americans thought Nelson Mandela was a black communist thug who should rot in prison.  Times change.

If America was free, most companies would be employee-owned and most companies would have unions.

Lack of limits on the personal wealth of its rulers is what wrecks Capitalism for the vast underclass who must endure it.

GOP leaders are charging protestors who crossed police-lines with felonies.  So, now we have political prisoners in Michigan.

If Right to Work is so great, why did the GOP exempt police and fire unions?  GOP is not interested in fair play, apparently.

The way to balance our budget is to spend more money on the poor, elderly and disabled.  It’s counter-intuitive but always works.

If it weren’t for six billionaires who own 85% of the media, we would be arguing about how much to increase Medicare and Social Security.

GOP deficits are always the result of looting.  Think of all the money wealthy families stole from the USA during Bush years.

Since the Reagan era the wealthy have had no limits on what they can make and keep.  It’s why they loot.

Unless limits are placed on personal incomes and estate size, capitalism always devolves into a kind of feudalism.

GOP advertisers are flooding Michigan with this message: Protect collective bargaining.  Support Freedom to Work.  Right out of Orwell’s 1984.

Amazing how Michigan GOP sprung Right to Work on us at the very moment a mega-million dollar ad campaign for its passage appeared.

It’s already impossible to start a Union in Michigan.  Right to Work will enable business owners to kill off the few that still exist.  https://www.youtube.com/watch

Surprise attack on Unions by Rick Snyder and GOP was well-planned and executed. Felony charges against protestors is the frosting on their cake.

The wealthy work overtime to undermine confidence in elected government.

Billionaires, some tied to drugs and guns, know how to get their way.  It’s not easy to speak truth to them.

People think unlimited wealth is an incentive for innovation.  Not true.  It enables looting and the suppression of competition.

Regular viewers of Fox News don’t get that the joke is on them.  Sad.

It’s un-American to let kids inherit vast wealth they didn’t work for.  It threatens our freedom.  http://t.co/8tsf3aPj

There isn’t a gun made that can defend against a government-sponsored SWAT team.  Get real, NRA.

More Guns = Less Crime; Clean Coal; Right to Work; Virtue of Selfishness; Gated Community; Genetically Modified Food; all wrong.

MI GOP passed a law to allow concealed guns in church, schools, stadiums and daycares.

Am told the shooter was draped in Kevlar.  Teacher with a gun would have been helpless.

Was doing good until the President mentioned a six year old who knew karate and wanted to lead everyone to safety.

Reagan closed the mental hospitals.   http://t.co/D2E9mZ5Z

The Lord sides with the oppressed; feeds the hungry; sets prisoners free; gives sight to the blind; lifts up those who are beaten down…

Jesus was born a baby, so as not to frighten us.

Old age has ruined me, physically and mentally.  But #Jesus renews my spirit, and somehow, I feel better.

Will someone invent an iPhone that can be charged by body heat?  #goodIdea

Would NASA position some colored lights in the sky so everybody can navigate by sight?   #goodIdea

The right to accumulate unlimited wealth has brought corruption and looting on a massive international scale to all areas of human endeavor.

An NRA family member murdered 20 six-year-olds, and they threaten the President’s kids?

It’s time to amend the Second Amendment.

Obama tries to protect kids from gun violence, so the NRA vilifies him and drags his kids into it.

Make a list of legal guns.  Guns not on the approved-list are illegal.  Will prevent work-arounds by gun sellers.

Am reading Oliver Stone’s Untold History, a Christmas gift.  Have yet to read a single page where he hasn’t blown my mind.

Gun makers should be required to get a license to sell each gun-model they manufacture.  If it’s a weapon of war, no license.

This is an impressive crowd — the haves and the have-mores.  Some people call you the elite.  I call you my base.  Bush, 2000.

In 2006, the 25 top US hedge-fund managers earned an ave. $570M each. In 2007, it jumped to $900M.  Oliver Stone, Untold History.

GOP says they are against tax increases, but in Michigan the GOP raised taxes on seniors by $1,000s / year.

Everything written or broadcast is recorded, stored and analyzed.  It’s been going on since the 1950s.  It’s raison d’etre for the NSA.

RT @MiaFarrow: JFK Report to the American People on Civil Rights, 11 June 1963
http://t.co/jZNo5UgYMz

Google has pics of the outside of our homes. The government has pics of the inside — taken through our computer camera-lenses.

Obama taught us, unwittingly, that bad people with ugly thoughts and hate-filled hearts really do live in America.

twitter 1Seems like CNN covers the weather while FOX covers Obama-Care.  Who covers the news?

Christians bearing false witness against a President who says he belongs to Christ makes no sense to me.

Billy Lee

 

TWITTER – MY FIRST THIRTY DAYS


tweeter 4

I started tweeting during the summer of 2011.  It was the summer after the Fukushima nuclear disaster; the Blackberry Riots in England raged; Hurricane Irene ravaged our east coast; the launch of the Endeavour marked the end of the USA space shuttle program; Libyan citizens overthrew and assassinated Muammar Gaddafi; Navy Seals killed Osama Bin-laden; the Tea Party rocketed to prominence in the 2010 elections; Obama-Care ignited its roll-out and a ramp-up of a GOP war of opposition; etc., etc.; on and on. There was a lot to tweet about.

twitter 2In the first thirty days, my follower base grew from zero to over one-hundred. This fast start made such an impression on me that I ended up tweeting for almost three years, trying pretty much everything I could think of to enlarge my follower base even more. But, try as I did, my followers never numbered more than 275. What was most discouraging: three-fourths of them, on closer inspection, didn’t seem to be real people. They were organizations, or marketers, selling things like books and self-improvement programs. 

Today I use twitter to follow lists of people and organizations I’ve collected to help me keep-up in subjects that interest me like science, politics, religion, government and French language. The enthusiasm of the early days has faded. It no longer matters if anyone follows me or not. I rarely tweet anything anymore. 

Twitter announced they would send a complete list of a tweeter’s tweets to any tweeter who requested them. I took them up on it. The following tweets are a sample from the first 30-days of my twitter history. I tweeted a lot of interesting tweets back in the day, it now seems, mostly to bots.


TWITTER-LOG: Day 1 – My first tweet, everybody. Let me know if it worked.

I’m tweeting in bed. Have signed-up to follow lots of cool people & organizations. Seems to be working good.

I think the rich thought they would recoup Iraq war costs thru mineral/oil acquisitions. Oops!

I’m loving Twitter!

Immersed in fields and waves, we create the material world by observing them.

The old Confederacy (the New Tea Party) won’t be led by a colored man.

After WW2, the rich rewarded our young soldiers by loaning money for college and homes. They built the middle class their grandkids forgot.

Khan Academy is brain candy.

People who hate, hate Obama.

If we live long enough, we will lose everything.

Nuclear power plants must be monitored until the end of time — especially important after we shut them down.

Republicans axed unit pricing in Michigan. We can’t tell what something costs after buying it and tossing the receipt!

Fox is nasty!  Surprised they didn’t run a pic of the President eating watermelon.

Africa, if you build it you will own it until the end of time. A nuke plant can be shut down but never abandoned.

Michigan is an oasis on a warming planet.

If life started on Mars and transplanted to earth on debris from an asteroid hit, it might take two planets to advance complex life.

A long time ago the atmosphere was so thick and oxygenated that dragonflies with three-foot wingspans flourished.

When you are ready to retire, lowering the retirement age will seem right to you.

Are tea-bag staples made from heavy-metals? My tea tastes funny.

Do people eat Vanilla Wafers in Britain? There’d be fewer riots.

Five Guys fries, yellow mustard and an ice-cold beer…come on!

Have been tweeting for 8 days and have 35 followers already. If I wasn’t blocking hookers, I would have a hundred!

If Japan could start over, would they build plants to recycle plutonium from NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

Aroint thee, thou rump-fed ronyons!” Shakespeare.

Michigan is a clean water refuge on a warming dirty planet. Come to Michigan!

Ducks and geese spread sticky fish eggs from lake to lake with their feet sometimes.

Save yourselves from global warming. Come to Michigan!

I’ve tweeted 9 days now. I have 51 followers, and not one of them is a hooker or a relative. Wow!

Eliminate disease and old age. Eliminate birth. In 50,000 years everyone will be dead due to accidents. We can’t keep ourselves alive.

All I want for you, my son, is to be satisfied. And be a simple kind of man, someone you can love and understand. Good lyric.

For 1,000th time: where’d daddy go? He died, momma. Why’d he do that? He got old, momma.

Manual labor can be euphoric. I mowed my lawn today. My neighbors are euphoric.

Mmmmm….who is this girl with ‘slut’ in her domain-name & no tweets?

Tonight, in CIV5, I will use nuclear weapons to destroy Genghis Khan. Ha!Ha! Ha!Ha! (burp!).

In the 10 days since I started tweeting, I’ve learned there are some wonderful beautiful people in Twitterville.

Rupert Murdoch of Fox News conspired to throw a USA presidential election, it’s alleged.

I am luckier than most men. My wife loves me.

My kids are kind of stupid and kind of rich. It’s not right.

Greenpeace: Our monitoring team in Japan is finding high levels of radiation in Japanese seafood.

Why would you spray mosquitoes when you have an army of frog volunteers eager to eat them? No spray!

This is my 10th tweeter day. Amazed by what I see & learn.

All I want in this life is to be heard. I love twitter!

If we can’t have intelligent conversations with dolphins, how are we going to have them with aliens?

Chimps fight. They have their reasons.

If you become very wise, people stop listening. By then you are insane anyway.

Je n’ai pas confiance des hommes puissantes qui me disent le socialisme est pour les perdants.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 11 – a favorite unfollowed me. Don’t know why.

Accidentally discharged ‘safe for humans & pets’  bug spray into my face, mouth, and eyes.

Corporations, like insects, lack empathy and are constantly feeding.

USA opinion makers hate baby-boomers. Why? They know too much.

RT @YourAuntDiane: I’m walking around taking trash out of public garbage cans, painting the trash, then putting it back in the garbage…

When an ex-girl friend called to say she was pregnant I thought, worse news ever.  25 years later I know it was one of my best days, ever.

I’m the only old person I know who has nice toenails.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 12 – wife complains about possible twitter addiction. Can’t worry about that now. 5 new followers!!

My nightmare: eating fish heads and dirty rice while watching Fox News on 60″ plasma TV.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 12.5 – despite tasteless tweets and mindless prattle with celebrities, follower base is growing.

Frog to his mistress: I want to know you. I want to know every slimy wart-covered part of you…

Romney says corporations are people. Demand to see the birth certificates.

Love letter from a frog: I love your bulging eyes, your fat puffy body…the feel of your webbed feet caressing my warts…

TWITTER-LOG: Day 13.5 – feeling remorse for vulgar tasteless stupid tweets.

We cling to the hallucinations of our brains and see particles instead of waves…

We focus on integers when it’s irrational numbers who rule us…

The only best way to observe a field is to move through it…

Tomorrow might be a better day!

TWITTER-LOG: Day 13.75 – Discovered the tweeter “delete” button, finally! Now, I don’t have to kill myself.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 14 – suffering from TBO [twitter burn-out]. Didn’t tweet today but collected 4 more followers.

My son hasn’t changed the oil in his Camaro for over a year. Commodus, your faults as a son is my failure as a father.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 15 – sometimes wonder if people self-disclose too much.

When Cepheids dim, is it because they become more opaque or more transparent?

In a bubble-chamber, how much larger is the bubble than the “particle” that generated it?

Feynman talks about living in a wave pervasive space… http://t.co/yo443O1

You can describe green by math to a blind person who will then know everything & nothing about it. Feynman http://t.co/yZQRR5J

TWITTER-LOG: Day 16 – where are the sad places in twitter-world? …find the voices…who in this valley sheds the poison tears…?

The less you pay “the help” the harder they work & the more efficient your business. It’s a win/win all around.

Eliminating social security/Medicare helps elderly be more self-reliant & lowers the tax burden. It’s a win/win all around.

GOP leaders know when they smite their enemies on the “other cheek” they not only hurt them, but it’s in the Bible.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 17 – tossed out some “political” tweets. Lost a few, gained a few (followers, that is).

Obama is gracious toward adversaries; works hard; sincere; informed, smart, educated. These are virtues, GOP!

Obama took out Bin-laden, and you didn’t. So shut up! Obama isn’t “the worst danger facing the USA.” You are, GOP.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 17.5 – seems like copious tweeters & celebrities have the most followers.

Lagrangian method to discover differential equations is magic… here’s why it works.    http://t.co/oRlpYc0

TWITTER-LOG: Day 19 – posted a math instructional video… lost followers…

Grand-daughters refuse McDonalds for lunch. Say it makes you fat. What?

@profbriancox   Are there any subatomic particles that can be detected twice?

@profbriancox   In Young experiment, if emitter is moved off-center to one side, do detectors behind slits see changed hit ratios?

@ProfBrianCox   Is it not true that a soap-bubble, passing a phalanx of bubble detectors, will be detected only once by only one detector?

TWITTER-LOG: Day 19.5 – picked up 11 followers today, 7 tweeter-marketers…no hookers, no relatives…

During Depression, USA had 25% unemployed, but women weren’t counted. Otherwise, rate would have been closer to 75%.

Quantum intuition: imagine particles as soap bubbles with oscillating surface waves. Bubble stretches to fill space but can “pop” only once on only one detector. Some paradoxes resolve.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 20 – Sometimes tweeting feels like tossing into the vast ocean a little message in a bottle. Who will find? Who will read?

TWITTER-LOG: Day 20.5 – am thinking there might be a point where twitter peeps reach a critical mass & start multiplying geometrically.

Planck length defined at 35 decimal places. Irrational Pi forces a quantum bubble (that wants to be round) to oscillate.

Genes can spread among species by viruses. Expect hi-level intelligence to become pervasive over next million years or so.

Starving Columbian missionary wakes up to find tape worm crawling out of his throat seeking food, wife just told me.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 21 – seems like tweeters use weekends to cull follower herds. Those culled never told why.

Qaddafi needs to pursue a new career but unfortunately for him, his views aren’t extreme enough to become a Fox News commentator.

Lied to get away to tweet for an hour…oops! Just got caught.

Let’s do a “maximum wage.”  Set it to 1,000 times minimum wage. Then watch Congress raise minimum wage fast.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 22 – feeling like my tweeter legs are finally beneath me, planted firmly in the twitter air!

Military school used to be where parents sent their sons to avoid desegregation.

To celebrate Bin-laden kill, blocked Fox. Quit Xanax. I feel good!

TWITTER-LOG: Day 23 – Incredible. After 23 days of idiotic tweeting, 84 people I’ve never met follow me. In a year they could be millions!

After USSR collapsed in the 80’s, recall reading USA bought their earthquake weapon to keep it out of terrorist hands. Maybe there were 2.

Tesla earthquake machine… http://t.co/5bfrGJW

Pravda article about HAARP geophysical weapon… http://t.co/VKHFbQb

TWITTER-LOG: Day 24 – sometimes someone follows me who has thousands of followers but no tweets. Who are these people? What do they want?

Y U NO FORROW ME?   CUZ I NO TREET RIKE U?

One of the best non-math explanations of light to be found… http://t.co/2DwMAtm

Cheney said his book would make “heads explode.” He wrote the book to blow up people’s heads! How cruel.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 26 – tweeted about lost dog & fawn. Now receive tweets from animal lovers who don’t follow me. How does Twitter do it?

Since bees are attracted by UV light, would spreading sunscreen on flowers make them invisible to bees? Someone do the experiment & get back to me.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 26.25 – tweeting a complex idea is not so hard if you leave stuff out & simplify.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 26.5 – Tweeters cull their follower herds on weekends.

Michigan has clean water, clean air and lakes you can drink from. It does not have hurricanes and 100-degree weather.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 26.75 – My greatest fear is that someone might un-follow me.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 26.8 – Too immersed in Twitter, wife says. Can’t worry about that now. Finding new ways to enhance follower base.

NBC, CBS, NBC, etc. love to cover weather, because all they have to do is look at satellite pics & make up stuff. Maybe look outside once in a while.

You might be rich if you always take steaks and lobsters to potlucks.

You might be rich if the local swim club holds swim-meets in your family pool.

You might be rich if it takes six guys with moving van a week to steal enough stuff for you to notice.

You might be rich if the only way to your house is by helicopter.

A small piece of light with just the right color can dislodge an electron. Does that make it a particle? No.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 27 – no one in my family follows me. They don’t want to encourage my twitter obsession. Who needs family? 98 followers!

One of the most controversial & censored movies ever. Oliver Reed & Vanessa Redgrave. 1971; Devils. http://t.co/szuL64C

Have contracted either dengue fever, West Nile virus, bacterial meningitis, esophageal cancer, or swimmer’s ear.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 27.5 – got my 100th follower today. Feel serene & deeply comforted.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 28 – added twitter traffic makes hurricane, earthquake, & nuclear meltdown “venues of opportunity” to harvest additional followers.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 28.5 – changing profile pic entails a risk to my follower base I’m unwilling to take at this time.

Anyone who hasn’t figured out that Fox News is a brainwashing mental institution wants to be lied to.

Saw mentally challenged woman splashing at the beach. She kept saying to no one in particular, “I’m having fun! I’m having fun!” Don’t know why I started crying.

When we tweet, though we be infested by lice and every sundry sort of squirmin’ vermin, we become beautiful, like birds.

Wife accuses me of being deaf. What she can’t see is, I’m also blind.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 28.75 – having mastered follower and blocking tools, I am now more confident than ever that only beautiful people will live within my twitter sphere.

If geometry is quantum — that is, granular — then no irrational numbers can exist in physics. They round to 35 places.  Imagine the implications.  http://t.co/AWXKIIE

Objects that want to be round can’t do it in quantum (granular) space. Due to a forced round-off of PI, they must oscillate between two real boundaries.

Quantum oscillations are incredibly small compared to anything we know. But a granular quantum geometry demands them.

We love billionaires, because their PR bureaucracy brainwashes us.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 29 – tweeters keep tweeting me profile pics of people I follow saying they found a hilarious pic of me. I don’t get it.

TWITTER-LOG: Day 29.5 – am finding that tweeters are kind and gentle sorts who encourage my creativity right up to the very moment they block me.

tweeter 6TWITTER-LOG: Day 30 – have gained new respect for what it really means to have two or three hundred followers.

Tweet! Tweet! TWEET!! TWEET!! TWEET!!!  HaHa! HaHa! Tweet! Tweet! TWEET! TWEET! AGAIN, AGAIN!  TWEET. Ha! All done.

Billy Lee

BELL’S INEQUALITY

UPDATE: 18 December 2022:  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 4 October 2022 awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to: 

Alain Aspect
Institut d’Optique Graduate School – Université Paris-
Saclay and École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France


Alain Aspect, winner of 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics

John F. Clauser
J.F. Clauser & Assoc., Walnut Creek, CA, USA

Anton Zeilinger
University of Vienna, Austria

“for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”


UPDATE: September 5, 2019:  I stumbled across this research published in NATURE during December 2011, where scientists reported entanglement of vibrational patterns in separated diamond crystals large enough to be viewed without magnification. Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2011.9532


UPDATE: May 8, 2018: This video from PBS Digital Studios is the best yet. Click the PBS link to view the latest experimental results involving quantum mechanics, entanglement, and their non-intuitive mysteries. The video is a little advanced and fast paced; beginners might want to start with this link.


UPDATE: June 17, 2016:   Ali Sundermier published a description of quantum entanglement for non-scientists. Here is the link.

Another beginner’s overview of quantum mechanics by Cathal O’Connell is in this link.

UPDATE: February 4, 2016:  Here is a link to the August 2015 article in Nature, which makes the claim that the last testable loophole in Bell’s Theorem has been closed by experiments conducted by Dutch scientists. Conclusion: quantum entanglement is real.

UPDATE: Nov. 14, 2014:    David Kaiser proposed an experiment to determine Is Quantum Entanglement Real?  Click the link to redirect to the Sunday Review, New York Times article. It’s a non-technical explanation of some of the science related to Bell’s Theorem. 


Someone nominated Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell, (1928-1990) for a Nobel Prize during the year he died from a sudden brain hemorrhage. Nobel rules prevent the awarding of prizes to people who have died. Bell never learned of his nomination.

John Stewart Bell‘s Theorem of 1964 followed naturally from the proof of an inequality he fashioned (now named after him), which showed that quantum particle behavior violated logic.

It is the most profound discovery in all science, ever, according to Henry Stapp—retired from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and former associate of Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. Other physicists like Richard Feynman said Bell simply stated the obvious.


Beta Barium Borate crystals can be used to ”down-convert” photons into entangled pairs.

Here is an analogy I hope gives some idea of what is observed in quantum experiments that violate Bell’s Inequality: Imagine two black tennis balls—let them represent atomic particles like electrons or photons or molecules as big as buckyballs.



The tennis balls are created in such a way that they become entangled—they share properties and destinies. They share identical color and shape.  [Entangled particles called fermions display opposite properties, as required by the Pauli exclusion principle.]

Imagine that whatever one tennis ball does, so does the other; whatever happens to one tennis ball happens to the other, instantly it turns out. The two tennis balls (the quantum particles) are entangled.

[For now, don’t worry about how particles get entangled in nature or how scientists produce them.  Entanglement is pervasive in nature and easily performed in labs.]


According to optical and quantum experimentalist Mark John Fernee of Queensland, Australia, ”Entanglement is ubiquitous. In fact, it’s the primary problem with quantum computers. The natural tendency of a qubit in a quantum computer is to entangle with the environment. Unwanted entanglement represents information loss, or decoherence. Everything naturally becomes entangled. The goal of various quantum technologies is to isolate entangled states and control their evolution, rather than let them do their own thing.”

In nature, all atoms that have electron shells with more than one electron have entangled electrons. Entangled atomic particles are now thought to play important roles in many previously not understood biological processes like photosynthesis, cell enzyme metabolism, animal migration, metamorphosis, and olfactory sensing. There are several ways to entangle more than a half-dozen atomic particles in experiments.



Imagine particles shot like tennis balls from cannons in opposite directions. Any measurement (or disturbance) made on a ball going left will have the same effect on an entangled ball traveling to the right.

So, if a test on a left-side ball allows it to pass through a color-detector, then its entangled twin can be thought to have passed through a color-detector on the right with the same result. If a ball on the left goes through the color-detector, then so will the entangled ball on the right, whether or not the color test is performed on it. If the ball on the left doesn’t go through, then neither did the ball on the right. It’s what it means to be entangled.

Now imagine that cannons shoot thousands of pairs of entangled tennis balls in opposite directions, to the left and right. The black detector on the left is calibrated to pass half of the black balls. When looking for tennis balls coming through, observers always see black balls but only the half that get through. 


Spin is one of the characteristics of a quantum object, much like yellow is a characteristic of a tennis ball.

Spin describes a particle property of quantum objects like electrons — in the same way color or roundness describe tennis balls. The property is confusing, because no one believes electrons (or any other quantum objects) actually spin. The math of spin is underpinned by the complex-mathematics of spinors, which transform spin arrows into multi-dimensional objects not easy to visualize or illustrate. Look for an explanation of how spin is observed in the laboratory later in the essay. Click links for more insight.


Now, imagine performing a test for roundness on the balls shot to the right. The test is performed after the black test on the left, but before any signal or light has time to travel to the balls on the right. The balls going right don’t (and can’t) learn what the detector on the left observed. The roundness-detector is set to allow three-fourths of all round tennis balls through.

When round balls on the right are counted, three-eighths of them are passing through the roundness-detector, not three-fourths. Folks might speculate that the roundness-detector is acting on only the half of the balls that passed through the color-detector on the left. And they would be right.

These balls share the same destinies, right? Apparently, the balls on the right learned instantly which of their entangled twins the color-detector on the left allowed to pass through, despite all efforts to prevent it.

So now do the math. One-half (the fraction of the black balls that passed through the left-side color-detector) multiplied by three-fourths (the fraction calibrated to pass through the right-side roundness-detector) equals three-eighths. That’s what is seen on the right — three-eighths of the round, black tennis balls pass through the right-side roundness-detector during this fictionalized and simplified experiment.


Polarization is another characteristic of a quantum particle, much like roundness is for a tennis ball.
Polarization is a term used to describe a wave property of quantum objects like photons.  Polarizing filters are rotated in experiments to determine some of the properties of atomic particles, like spin.

According to Bell’s Inequality, twice as many balls should pass through the right-side detector (three-fourths instead of three-eighths). Under the rules of classical physics (which includes relativity), communication between particles cannot exceed the speed of light.

There is no way the balls on the right can know if their entangled twins made it through the color detector on the left. The experiment is set up so that the right-side balls do not have time to receive a signal from the left-side. The same limitation applies to the detectors.

The question scientists have asked is: how can these balls (quantum particles) — separated by large distances — know and react instantaneously to what is happening to their entangled twins? What about the speed limit of light? Instantaneous exchange of information is not possible, according to Einstein.

The French quantum physicist, Alain Aspect, suggested his way of thinking about it in the science journal, Nature (March 19, 1999).


Alain Aspect
Alain Aspect, French physicist, is best known for his work on quantum entanglement.

He wrote: The experimental violation of Bell’s inequalities confirms that a pair of entangled photons separated by hundreds of meters must be considered a single non-separable object — it is impossible to assign local physical reality to each photon.

Of course, the single non-separable object can’t have a length of hundreds of meters, either. It must have zero length for instantaneous communication between its endpoints. But it is well established by the distant separation of detectors in experiments done in labs around the world that the length of this non-separable quantum object can be arbitrarily long; it can span the universe.

When calculating experimental results, it’s as if a dimension (in this case, distance or length) has gone missing. It’s eerily similar to the holographic effect of a black hole where the three-dimensional information that lives inside the event-horizon is carried on its two-dimensional surface. (See the technical comment included at the end of the essay.)


Schematic of physicist Alan Aspect's experimental apparatus which verified that the act of measurement influenced distant entangled calcium electrons instantaneously.
Here is a drawing of an apparatus the French physicist, Alain Aspect, designed to quickly change the angle of polarity-measurements for emitted photons. In experiments, he used the logic of Bell’s Inequalities and the speed of his switches to show that it was not possible for photons to carry specific (or unique) polarity-angles until after they were measured by the polarization detectors.  Once measured, Alain showed that the new, narrowly defined polarity states of his photons always propagated to their distant entangled twins, instantly.  


Another way physicists have wrestled with the violations of Bell’s Inequality is by postulating the concept of superposition. Superposition is a concept that flows naturally from the linear algebra used to do the calculations, which suggests that quantum particles exist in all their possible states and locations at the same time until they are measured.

Measurement forces wave-particles to “collapse” into one particular state, like a definite position. But some physicists, like Roger Penrose, have asked: how do all the super-positioned particles and states that weren’t measured know instantaneously to disappear?

Superposition, a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, has become yet another topic physicists puzzle over. They agree on the math of superposition and the wave-particle collapse during measurement but don’t agree on what a measurement is or the nature of the underlying reality. Many, like Richard Feynman, believe the underlying reality is probably unknowable.

Quantum behavior is non-intuitive and mysterious. It violates the traditional ideas of what makes sense. As soon as certainty is established for one measurement, other measurements, made earlier, become uncertain.

It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The location of the mole whacked with a mallet becomes certain as soon as it is struck, but the other moles scurry away only to pop up and down in random holes so fast that no one is sure where or when they really are.

Physicists have yet to explain the many quantum phenomena encountered in their labs except to throw-up their hands to say — paraphrasing Feynman — it is the way it is, and the way it is, well, the experiments make it obvious.


Feynman
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) downplayed Bell’s Inequality because, he said, it simply pointed out what was already obvious from experiments.

But it’s not obvious, at least not to me and, apparently, many others more knowledgeable than myself. Violations of Bell’s Inequality confound people’s understanding of quantum mechanics and the world in which it lives. A consequence has been that at least a few scientists seem ready to believe that one, perhaps two, or maybe all four, of the following statements are false:

1) logic is reliable and enables clear thinking about all physical phenomenon;

2) the universe exists independently of any conscious observer;

3) information does not travel faster than light.

4) a model can be imagined to explain quantum phenomenon.

I feel wonder whenever the idea sinks into my mind that at least one of these four seemingly self-evident and presumably true statements could be false — possibly all four — because repeated quantum experiments suggest they must be. Why isn’t more said about it on TV and radio?


Quantum mechanics (1)
Some scientists think non-physicists cannot grasp quantum mechanics. This little girl disagrees.

The reason could be that the terrain of quantum physics is unfamiliar territory for a lot of folks. Unless one is a graduate student in physics — well, many scientists don’t think non-physicists can even grasp the concepts. They might be right.

So, a lot is being said, all right, but it’s being said behind the closed doors of physics labs around the world. It is being written about in opaque professional journals with expensive subscription fees.

The subtleties of quantum theory don’t seem to suit the aesthetics of contemporary public media, so little information gets shared with ordinary people. Despite the efforts of enthusiastic scientists — like Brian CoxSean M. CarrollNeil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene — to serve up tasty, digestible, bite-size chunks of quantum mechanics to the public, viewer ratings sometimes fall flat.

When physicists say something strange is happening in quantum experiments that can’t be explained by traditional methods, doesn’t it deserve people’s attention? Doesn’t everyone want to try to understand what is going on and strive for insights?  I’m not a physicist and never will be, but I want to know.

Even me — a mere science-hobbyist who designed machinery back in the day — wants to know. I want to understand. What is it that will make sense of the universe and the quantum realm in which it rests?  It seems, sometimes, that a satisfying answer is always just outside my grasp.

Here is a concise statement of Bell’s Theorem from the article in Wikipedia — modified to make it easier to understand: No physical theory about the nature of quantum particles which ignores instantaneous action-at-a-distance can ever reproduce all the predictions about quantum behavior discovered in experiments.


laser-controlled-polarization
Familiarity with concepts like wave polarization and particle-spin can help demystify some aspects of quantum mechanics. One aspect that can’t be demystified: in experiments quantum objects display the properties of both waves and particles.

To understand the experiments that led to the unsettling knowledge that quantum mechanics — as useful and predictive as it is — does indeed violate Bell’s proven Inequality, it is helpful not only to have a solid background in mathematics but also to understand ideas involving the polarization of light and — when applied to quantum objects like electrons and other sub-atomic particles — the idea of spin.  Taken together, these concepts are somewhat analogous to the properties of color and roundness in the imaginary experiment described above.

This essay is probably not the best place to explain wave polarization and particle spin, because the explanation takes up space, and I don’t understand the concepts all that well, anyway.  (No one does.)

But, basically, it’s like this: if a beam of electrons, for example, is split into two and then recombined on a display screen, an interference pattern presents itself. If one of the beams was first passed through a polarizer, and if experimenters then rotate the polarizer a full turn (that is, 360°), the interference pattern on the screen will reverse itself.  If the polarizer-filter is rotated another full turn, the interference pattern will reverse again to what it was at the start of the experiment.

So, it takes two spins of the polarizer-filter to get back the original interference pattern on the display screen — which means the electrons themselves must have an intrinsic “one-half” spin. All so-called matter particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons (called fermions) have one-half spin.

Yes, it’s weird. Anyway, people can read-up on the latest ideas by clicking this link. It’s fun. For people familiar with QM (quantum mechanics), a technical note is included in the comments section below.

Otherwise, my analogy is useful enough, probably. In actual experiments, physicists measure more than two properties, I’m told. Most common are angular momentum vectors, which are called spin orientations. Think of these properties as color, shape, and hardness to make them seem more familiar — as long as no one forgets that each quality is binary; color is white or black; shape is round or square; hardness is soft or hard.


Crystals can be used to “down-convert” photons into  entangled pairs.

Spin orientations are binary too — the vectors point in one of two possible directions. It should be remembered that each entangled particle in a pair of fermions always has at least one property that measures opposite to that of its entangled partner.

The earlier analogy might be improved by imagining pairs of entangled tennis balls where one ball is black, the other white; one is round, the other square; add a third quality where one ball is hard, the other soft. Most important, the shape and color and hardness of the balls are imparted by the detectors themselves during measurement, not before.

Before measurement, concepts like color or shape (or spin or polarity) can have no meaning; the balls carry every possible color and shape (and hardness) but don’t take on and display any of these qualities until a measurement is made. Experimental verification of these realities keep some quantum physicists awake at night wondering, they say.

Anyway, my earlier, simpler analogy gets the main ideas across, hopefully. And a couple of the nuances of entanglement can be found within it. I’ve added an easy to understand description of Bell’s Inequality and what it means to the end of the essay.

Here are two additional links with more depth: CHSH Inequality; Bell Test Experiments.


A carbord cut-out of a cat imaged by photons that never went through the cut-out itself. Credit: Gabriela Barreto Lemos
This cardboard cut-out of a cat was imaged by entangled photons. Lower energy photons interacted with the cut-out while their higher energy entangled twins interacted with the camera to create the picture.
Credit: Gabriela Barreto Lemos

In the meantime, scientists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna recently demonstrated that entanglement can be used as a tool to photograph delicate objects that would otherwise be disturbed or damaged by high energy photons (light). They entangled photons of different energies (different colors).

They took photographs of objects using low energy photons but sent their higher energy entangled twins to the camera where their higher energies enabled them to be recorded. New technologies involving the strange behavior of quantum particles are in development and promise to transform the world in coming decades.

Perhaps entanglement will provide a path to faster-than-light communication, which is necessary to signal distant space-craft in real time. Most scientists say, no, it can’t be done, but ways to engineer around the difficulties are likely to be developed; technology may soon become available to create an illusion of instantaneous communication that is actually useful. Click on the link in this paragraph to learn more.

Non-scientists don’t have to know everything about the individual trees to know they are walking in a quantum forest. One reason for writing this essay is to encourage people to think and wonder about the forest and what it means to live in and experience it.

The truth is, the trees (particles at atomic scales) in the quantum forest seem to violate some of the rules of the forest (classical physics). They have a spooky quality, as Einstein famously put it.


remu warrior night scene 3
The quantum forest is a spooky place, Einstein said. 

Trees that aren’t there when no one is looking suddenly appear when someone is looking. Trees growing in one place seem to be growing in other places no one expected. A tree blows one way in the wind, and someone notices a tree at the other end of the forest — where there is no wind — blowing in the opposite direction. As of right now, no one has offered an explanation that doesn’t seem to lead to paradoxes and contradictions when examined by specialists.


Henry Stapp, Amazon.com
Henry Stapp, Amazon.com

John Stewart Bell proved that trees in the quantum forest violate laws of nature and logic. It makes me wonder whether anyone will ever know anything at all they can fully trust about fundamental, underlying essence of reality.

Some scientists, like Henry Stapp (now retired), have proposed that brains enable processes like choice and experiences like consciousness through the mechanism of quantum interactions. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have proposed a quantum mechanism for consciousness they call Orch Or.

Others, like Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung, have gone further — asking, when they were alive, if the non-causal coordination of some process resembling what is today called entanglement might provide an explanation for the seeming synchronicity of some psychic processes — an arena of inquiry a few governments are rumored to have incorporated (to great effect) into their intelligence gathering tool kits.

In a future essay I hope to speculate about how quantum processes like entanglement might or might not influence human thought, intuition, and consciousness.

Billy Lee

P.S.  A simplified version of Bell’s Inequality might say that for things described by traits A, B, and C, it is always true that A, not B; plus B, not C; is greater than or equal to: A, not C.  

When applied to a room full of people, the inequality might read as follows: tall, not male; plus male, not blonde; is greater than or equal to: tall, not blonde.

Said more simply: tall females and dark haired men will always number more than or equal to the number of tall people with dark hair. 

People have tried every collection of traits and quantities imaginable. The inequality is always true, never false; except for quantum objects.


wave equation schrodinger
Schrödinger’s Wave Equation describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time. It can be used to calculate quantized properties and probability distributions of quantum objects.

One way to think about it: all the ”not” quantities are, in some sense, uncertain in quantum experiments, which wrecks the inequality. That is to say, as soon as ”A” is measured (for example) ,”not B” becomes uncertain. When ”not B” is measured, ”A” becomes uncertain.

The introduction of uncertainties into quantities that were — before measurement — seemingly fixed and certain doesn’t occur in non-quantum collections where individual objects are big enough to make uncertainties not noticeable. The inability to measure both the position and velocity of small things with high precision is called the uncertainty principle and is fundamental to physics. No advancement in the technology of measurement will ever overcome it.

Uncertainty is believed to be an underlying reality of nature. It runs counter to the desire humans have for complete and certain knowledge; it is a thirst that can never be quenched.

But what’s really strange: when working with entangled particles, certainty about one particle implies certainty about its entangled twin; predicted experimental results are precise and never fail.

Stranger still, once entangled quantum particles are measured, the results, though certain, change from those expected by classical theory to those predicted by quantum mechanics. They violate Bell’s Inequality and the common sense of humans about how things should work. 

Worse: Bell’s Theorem seems to imply that no one will ever be able to construct a physical model of quantum mechanics to explain the results of quantum experiments.  No ”hidden variables” exist which, if anyone knew them, would explain everything. 

Another way to say it is this: the underlying reality of quantum mechanics is unknowable.  [A technical comment about the mystery of QM is included in the comments section.]

Billy Lee

FINDING LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

Twelve launch-capable space agencies  (having as members about thirty countries) are, among other tasks, looking for alien life inside the solar system. They are exploring the four planets closest to the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, which have three moons among them, and the five outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which have one-hundred-and-sixty-three

With so many moons and planets, the hope is that one of them will harbor life. 


(Click pic to enlarge in new window.) Some recommend the Drake Equation to calculate odds that intelligent life which can communicate across space might exist elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy where our solar system is located.

Of the 166 moons and nine planets in the solar system, probes have managed to land on only five: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Earth’s moon, and Titan (a moon of Saturn).

Just three moons are located in the Goldilocks zone where most scientists believe life has the best chance to take hold. Two orbit Mars at the outer edge of the habitable zone and are probably too cold and irradiated for life. The third moon orbits Earth.


solar system moons 1
(Click pic to enlarge.) Each column contains the orbiting moons of each planet (and a few other objects) inside the solar system.

Six moons in the solar system are comparable in size to the moon of Earth: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Europa and Triton.  All the rest are tiny with very little gravity — the force that can hold an atmosphere. 

The twelfth largest rocky object in the solar system after Earth is Titania of Uranus, named for the Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The moon is nearly a thousand miles in diameter. A 175 pound person on Titania takes on the weight of a newborn baby — a mere six pounds twelve ounces. 

Few places in the solar system have enough gravity to hold a human securely, let alone an atmosphere. 

No life has been found on any moon — or on any planet (except Earth) thus far. During the next several hundred years, humans will continue to look for life in the solar system should technology and civilization survive and  advance.

The Kuiper Belt — which starts at Neptune and extends past Pluto — is a region that is home to an estimated 100,000 bodies of frozen methane, ammonia, and water.

Editors’ Note: (August 2016) The explorer spacecraft, New Horizonsflew by Pluto on July 14, 2016; it will fly by a Kuiper Belt object in January 2019.  

Freeman Dyson — physicist, mathematician, and astronomer — has suggested that life might be pervasive in the Kuiper Belt and be easily detected once spacecraft get there. People wait and wonder.

Editors’ Note: (December 2018) Current analyses of data from the Pluto flyby describe a living, dynamic planet with a nitrogen atmosphere and a subsurface ocean. Portions of the surface are smooth with no signs of meteor impacts. Water-gushing volcanoes are  common. 

The solar system lies within a large disc-shaped galaxy called the Milky Way, which folks can see edge-on in the night sky should they travel out into the countryside away from well-lit cities, which tend to wash out vision.

It might surprise some readers to learn that no one really knows how many stars are in our galaxy. Credible astronomers believe the number to be somewhere between one-hundred and four-hundred billion — a huge range of uncertainty.

No one knows how many stars are similar to the sun. No one knows how many planets there are, or how many moons. Despite a lot of reporting and speculation, humans know almost nothing about the Milky Way.  

Space is vast, and astronomers have few telescopes and satellites to accomplish the enormous job of taking it all in and cataloguing what they discover.


galaxy 4 Earth's night sky 3.75 billion years from now
3.75 billion years from now, the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own Milky Way. In this artist’s conception, Andromeda Galaxy is on the left; the Milky Way Galaxy is to the right.

Lack of knowledge about the details of our own galaxy helps to explain why it is difficult to understand the universe as a whole. When I first published this essay in late summer 2014, astronomers estimated that between a hundred and two-hundred billion galaxies populated the visible universe (the estimate is now known to be wrong).

Editor’s Note: On October 1, 2017 CBS News was among the first to report to the public that the Hubble space telescope had detected as many as two trillion galaxies — ten times more than previous estimates.

Two-trillion galaxies — and all the other objects in the universe that lie outside the local area of our own galaxy —are far away and too fuzzy for astronomers to know almost anything about them. The galaxies are out there, true, but the numbers are staggering. The small amount of data astronomers have already gathered is overwhelming scientists’ abilities to process and make sense of it all. And they are just getting started.


The Webb Telescope is scheduled for launch on 30 March 2021. Image is an artist’s rendition featured on Wikipedia. 

Civilization is in the very first stages of placing sensors into space which eventually will help astronomers to learn more. One — the James Webb space telescope — is scheduled to launch sometime during the 2020s. Its purpose? — to tear down the 400-million-light-years-after-the-Big-Bang limit of the Hubble telescope.

Humans are going to be able to look back to the beginning of time, at long last. Understanding the process that brought us here is going to expand dramatically. Until then, the Drake equation (see illustration at beginning of the essay) and other speculative tools remain not much more than intriguing diversions.

New sensors like the Webb telescope will upgrade human understanding and bring a new realism that promises to sweep away much of the science-fiction people drink to satiate their thirst for ultimate knowledge.

Most articles, television shows, and movies that purport to portray the universe are (to risk overstating it) kind-of scammy. They seduce a gullible and curious public, which is hungry for answers about the universe that no one yet has.  

The science community has a vested interest in public funding; they tend to go-along with dubious depictions to pander popular support. Claims that astronomers today understand fully the nature of the universe are ludicrous. The universe is vast.  Much of its matter and energy that  scientists believe is “out there” can’t be found — not yet anyway.

Most stars are too faint to see with unaided eyes. The closest star system to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is too faint to see without a telescope.

Three out of four stars in the galaxy are probably red dwarfs.  Red dwarfs burn essentially forever but are smaller and much cooler than the Sun, which makes them impossible to observe without special infrared detectors.

These infrared detectors are launched into outer space beyond Earth’s atmosphere to avoid being blinded by the infrared heat radiating off Earth’s surface.


Proxima Centauri main star.  Image by Hubble Telescope.


Red dwarfs seem to be emitting solar flares that are a thousand times more energetic and frequent than those generated by stars like the Sun. They emit light in frequencies not useful for plant photosynthesis — the basic life-support process on Earth.

Worse, red dwarfs are often found in pairs gravitationally bound and rotating around each other. They make stable orbits for third body objects like planets nearly impossible. Without stable orbits lasting billions of years, odds that life evolves to civilization on planets in two-star solar systems is probably zero, some argue.  

It’s difficult to see how Earth-style life could get started and survive to civilization inside red dwarf planetary systems. No one knows what percentage, if any, of red dwarf stars have planets suitable for life.


Canon 85mm photo of Proxima Centauri three-star system by Skatebiker on English Wikipedia.

Red dwarfs live for thousands-of-billions of years. The Sun’s lifespan is eight to ten billion years — a tiny fraction of a red dwarf’s.  

The Sun is similar to — who knows? — maybe one in five stars in the galaxy. It’s an optimistic guess, based on sampling and wishful hoping. Astronomers seem to agree that the Sun ranks as one of the largest stars in the Milky Way.

Statistical sampling of two-trillion galaxies argues that the Milky Way galaxy is also among the largest. A full 90% of all galaxies are smaller.

Calculations involving galaxy-motion and gravity suggest that when astronomers look at the cosmos, they aren’t seeing ninety-five percent of what’s out there. Physicists call the missing stuff dark energy and dark matter. Something that no one has yet been able to detect seems to be distorting the rotation of galaxies and disrupting the metrics of space-time.

The universe seems to be expanding, and the expansion is accelerating. Where is the missing mass and energy that drives the expansion? No one knows.

Perhaps parallel universes are stacked on every side against our own. They might swarm like bees around a hive. The gravitational pull of their enormous masses might be pulling our own universe apart. Galaxies inside our universe might be falling toward massive structures that lie outside our field of vision beyond a kind of event horizon. 

Again, no one knows. It’s speculation. Today the expansion is described by a simple constant added into Einstein’s equation for General Relativity. A constant seems too simple, at least for me. It describes but doesn’t explain.


Einstein’s equation accounts for the accelerating expansion of the universe by including a term called the ”cosmological constant”. It is the Greek letter lambda ( Λ), which is multiplied against every member of the metric tensor, ”g” and then added to the left side of the equals sign, which is the side of the equation that describes the shape (curvature) of spacetime. The right side describes the distribution of mass / energy in spacetime.

Many of the galaxies that are visible from Earth are tens-of-thousands of times farther away than the farthest stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which astronomers say is at least 100,000 light years across — a distance of six-hundred-thousand trillion miles. The galaxy is perhaps 200 light years thick, but its center is thicker still — about 10,000 light years.

If the Milky Way was shrunk to the diameter of a ten-inch plate, the plate would assume a thickness of a few human hairs but at the center it would thicken to the size of an egg-yolk.

To put these distances into perspective, the latest space probes, which travel at roughly twelve miles-per-second, are not capable of escaping the gravity of our solar system until they are mechanically slung by multiple encounters with planets to a velocity greater than 27 miles per second.  At that speed, crossing the Milky Way takes nearly 700 million years.


What the Milky Way might look like if photographed by an extremely powerful telescope from the galaxy Andromeda, which is two-and-a-half million light-years from Earth.

The Milky Way is one galaxy in what astronomers have learned is a universe of two trillion.

Until scientists know more — and it could be decades or even centuries from now — prudence and the scientific method advise odds-makers to use the most conservative estimates, not the most optimistic, to speculate about intelligent life in the cosmos.

Until evidence accumulates that is more compelling than what is available today, plugging conservative numbers into the Drake equation, or any other speculative tool, always seems to give the same discouraging result — a number so small it might as well be zero.

No intelligent life that can communicate across space should exist in our galaxy or anywhere else in the universe. None. Yet, here we all are. It’s kind of mysterious, at least to me.

Substituting less conservative numbers yields a different result. Intelligent civilizations could number in the thousands or even millions. No empirical evidence supports such optimism, at least not yet.


Solar System with Sun to scale
Planets and Sun are shown to scale in this model. Distances are not. From left to right, largest to smallest: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Pluto.  Pluto — recently demoted to the status of a ‘’dwarf planet” —  has been re-argued for planet-hood by some cosmologists because the recent NASA fly-by showed Pluto slightly larger and more planet-like than previously thought. 

Looking closer to home within our own galaxy, astronomers in 2003 discovered Sedna, which some think is another dwarf-sized planet orbiting far beyond Pluto.

Astronomers seem to discover new planet candidates every other month — Eris and Makemake are two more Pluto-sized objects out of hundreds that come to mind.  

In 2014 Caltech astronomers presented evidence for another planet they called the ninth planet, which might be an object ten times the mass of Earth orbiting in a highly elliptical orbit at the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Regardless of what astronomers continue to discover, it seems likely that the Sun will always contain at least 99% of the mass in the solar system.

Earth is fortunate to orbit a star that is located in a less active region of space than many other stars in the Milky Way. The Sun lies safely between two spiral arms that are bright because of ongoing birthing of new stars. The location lies halfway from the center of the galaxy to its outer edge.


Click pic for better view of Earth’s position inside Milky Way galaxy.

Although stars are spread more or less evenly throughout the Milky Way, life-destroying cosmic events are less likely in regions where stars aren’t being born. Earth lives between bright spirals in a zone of relative inactivity, which has enabled the evolution of eukaryotic one-celled life to progress to intelligence, then civilization, and finally to space exploration over the past billion-and-a-half years.

Earth has a number of unusual features that make it a good candidate for highly evolved life. One important feature is its nearly circular orbit around the Sun, which helps Earth avoid the catastrophic temperature variations characteristic of the more egg-shaped (elliptical) paths of some of the other planets, like Mars.

Only the orbits of Venus and Neptune are more round than Earth’s. Mar’s orbit is five times less round. Of all the solar objects, only Neptune’s moon Triton is known to have for all practical purposes a perfectly circular orbit.

Another advantage for Earth is its 300-mile thick atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen, 80% of which lies within 10 miles of its surface. Nitrogen and oxygen make up 99% of Earth’s atmosphere. These gases are opaque to non-electrically-charged, high-frequency light.

Nitrogen molecules block high-frequency, ultra-violet light while oxygen molecules, slightly smaller, block higher-frequency (shorter wave-length) x-rays and gamma-rays, which can be lethal to living organisms.

A three-atom form of oxygen molecule known as ozone helps to absorb in the upper atmosphere a dangerous-to-life, lower-frequency-band of ultra-violet light that nitrogen can’t block.

In the distant past — during the Carboniferous Period 300 to 360 million years ago — Earth’s atmosphere held 60% more oxygen than it does now, which provided more shade against damaging high-energy light. Dinosaurs and large insects — like dragonflies with three-foot wing-spans — thrived in the highly-oxygenated air they breathed.

It is one of the wonderful ironies of our planet that the oxygen which empowers the biology of life also defends it against the physics of life-destroying high-energy light and cosmic rays that are always raining down from outer space.


atmosphere
Without atmospheric moisture and greenhouse gases, Earth’s average temperature would fall to 100°F below zero.

In contrast to nitrogen and oxygen, which block high-frequency light from reaching Earth’s surface, carbon-dioxide, methane, and water vapor trap low-frequency light (infra-red light, or heat) and prevent it from radiating (or escaping) into space.

These green-house gases work like a blanket to help keep Earth at a constant temperature. Carbon dioxide, though rare, is heavy compared to oxygen and nitrogen. It tends to cling close to Earth’s surface where it is respirated by plants. Without atmospheric moisture, methane, and carbon dioxide the temperature of Earth would average 100°F below zero and vary widely between day and night as it does on the Moon.

Although water vapor and carbon dioxide make but a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, they have a significant impact on the planet’s ability to retain heat when their concentrations increase in the atmosphere. Exhaust from commercial jet aircraft, believe it or not, contributes greatly to the concentration of carbon dioxide and water vapor in the eight-mile highs of the atmosphere where these jets fly.

After the terrorist attack on 911, the government suspended all flights over the United States — including those by commercial aircraft — for four days. The skies over America cleared themselves of clouds and turned deep blue. Temperatures dropped.

I was amazed to observe these changes develop so quickly after all flying was suspended. It took about two weeks for aviation to return to pre-attack intensity. With the return of aviation, familiar weather patterns followed.

Unlike Earth, the planet Venus has so much carbon dioxide that its surface broils with heat. An explorer would have to hover thirty-seven miles above its surface to experience atmospheric pressures and temperatures similar to those on Earth.

By contrast, the atmosphere of Mars, though almost entirely carbon dioxide, is thin — only 1% as thick as Earth’s. Even so, near their surfaces the density of carbon dioxide is 15 times higher on Mars than on Earth — enough to grow plants and — if poisons in the soil can be avoided — terraform the surface should humans decide.

Although Mars is cold, especially at night, its carbon dioxide atmosphere enables daytime temperatures to sometimes reach 85° F during summer in its southern latitudes. The problem is that any plants that might grow in Martian soil must endure bombardment by dangerous-to-life high-frequency light and cosmic particles.  Also, Martian soils are poisoned by perchlorates. The soil is useless for agriculture though perchlorates could be broken down to provide a source of oxygen. 

I should mention argon, which is 1% of Earth’s atmosphere. It is formed by the radioactive decay of a rare isotope of potassium in Earth’s crust. It is transparent to infra-red heat, so it has no effect on global warming. It is heavy — like carbon dioxide — so it clings to the surface, but its small atoms, widely spaced, do little to prevent the escape of infra-red radiation.

Another asset that gives Earth an advantage for life is its large moon whose gravitational field acts like a vacuum cleaner to suck up cosmic-debris like asteroids and comets that might threaten to strike. Only Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune are similarly equipped.


Image courtesy of NASA

The moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt as it orbits the sun.  The tilt is about 23.4°, which is why Earth has seasons. The tilt swings back and forth a few degrees over periods of 41,000 years. This variation is stable enough to permit life to survive and evolve despite the periodic generation of ice-ages.

Computer simulations of a moonless Earth show that with no moon to stabilize it, tilt variations could approach 90°. Dramatic destabilization has emerged in some simulations that make it difficult to imagine how advanced life could evolve and survive the climate extremes that might result from chaotic wobbling.

The Moon is receding away from Earth at a rate of almost two inches per year. It will take at least a billion years for the motion of Earth to destabilize. It seems that humans have time to figure something out.

Sadly, the sun gets brighter and less massive with each passing day. Over the course of a billion years, Earth will move farther from the sun to conserve its angular momentum. Meanwhile, the warming sun will overtake Earth’s great escape to evaporate its oceans and make the planet uninhabitable. 

Looking at coming events from a more optimistic perspective, people can probably agree that a billion years is a long time. The species-human is likely to be extinct by then anyhow. So why worry?! 

Another life-enhancing feature of Earth is its large, open, ice-free, salt-water oceans. Most scientists believe salt-water oceans provide safe habitat for evolving life.

Earth’s oceans make up three-fourths of the planet’s surface. In addition to providing a vast incubator for life, oceans reduce the probability that space-debris will fall onto land.

Odds are that debris will fall into the oceans where it is rapidly cooled and rendered harmless. Should debris strike land and throw up clouds of dust and ash to block the sun, the oceans provide a safety-blanket of thermal protection.


Titan surface photo Huygens_surface_color_sr
This photo of Titan’s surface is the only picture taken at the surface of a moon or planet that is farther away than Mars.

Besides Earth, only Titan — one of Saturn’s many moons — has open oceans (of liquid methane and ethane) on its surface. These oceans are more like shallow seas or lakes, estimated to be about five-hundred feet deep. Scientists think Titan has a salty sub-surface water ocean, as well.

NASA reported this year that another moon of Saturn, tiny Enceladus (310 miles in diameter), holds a six mile deep subsurface ocean — confirmed from Cassini fly-bys. Its over one-hundred geysers are what is populating Saturn’s E-ring. Data from the geysers indicate that the ocean is warm and salty and saturated with organic molecules. Analysis by Cassini instruments is on-going.

Of the moons of Jupiter, only Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto are thought to harbor salt-water oceans.

Europa is known to have a salt-water ocean, but it is covered by miles-thick ice.

Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is believed to have a 500 mile deep salt-water ocean that lies beneath a crust 125 miles thick. The crust is thought to be a rock and ice mixture.

Scientists suspect that Callisto has a salt-water ocean, but it might be sandwiched between ice layers sixty or more miles beneath its surface.

Only the oceans of Earth are open, un-frozen, and deep enough (averaging three miles) to protect Earth against most encounters with meteors and other space-debris.

Fortunately for Earth, the solar system itself contains a massive structure that helps to protect and shield it from danger. It is Jupiter, the large and strongly gravitational planet, which like the moon pulls away space-debris that might otherwise zoom toward Earth to imperil all life. Observations suggest that comets strike Jupiter every couple of years. Comets that don’t strike are gravitationally deflected out of the solar system more often than not.

Another fortunate feature: Earth has, geologists say, a molten iron-core that emits a strong magnetic field to deflect life-destroying, electrically-charged cosmic particles, that have energies, some of them, approaching those of baseballs traveling sixty miles-per-hour.  Cosmic particles accelerated  the process of ripping away Mar’s atmosphere. Without a magnetic field the Mars atmosphere is defenseless against cosmic erosion. 

As for Earth, high energy particles that do manage to blast through it’s magnetic shield (magnetosphere) are often scattered and rendered harmless — fortunately — by collisions with the oxygen molecules in Earth’s dense atmosphere.

One exception is muons, which are byproducts of particle collisions high in Earth’s atmosphere that are energetic enough to burrow down to hundreds of yards beneath Earth’s land surfaces and oceans. In rare heavy bombardments at high altitudes, muons can increase risks of cancer and cataracts to pilots and their passengers. Muons are like electrons except that they are 207 times heavier and much shorter-lived.


Sun’s solar wind deflected by Earth’s magnetosphere. NASA art. 

The magnetosphere is strong enough to deflect the solar wind, which can strip away all or part of the atmosphere of any planet that lacks one (like Mars).

The magnetosphere is effective and strong, because it is huge and surrounds Earth out to five Earth-diameters on the side facing the sun; one-hundred Earth-diameters on the side opposite. In any small area of space, though, a simple bar-magnet is fifty times stronger.

The solar wind isn’t all bad. As it radiates outward from our Sun, it forms a huge magnetic bubble called the heliosphere that extends 3.5 billion miles past the Kuiper Belt

Inside this Sun Bubble the rest of the solar system is protected from massive cosmic particles that pour in from the two trillion galaxies of stars that make the universe. The Sun bubble deflects to shade our solar system in relative safety.

The heliosphere of the Sun works together with the magnetosphere of Earth and its oxygenated atmosphere to break up and knock away the vast majority of cosmic particles (high-speed protons and atomic nuclei) that would otherwise rip Earth-life to shreds.

Absent the magnetosphere, life could evolve safely only in the deep oceans or far below the surface of Earth. Stated differently: a strong, protective magnetic field is essential for the survival of surface life on any planet.

Large solar flares are known to have enough energy to kill exposed astronauts. It’s one of many reasons NASA doesn’t send people to Mars, which lacks a magnetosphere. Mars is under relentless bombardment of atomic particles that can damage the atoms and molecules in the cells of a human body.

All planets have magnetic fields of various strengths except Venus and Mars. The iron in the core of Mars is believed to have frozen solid, or nearly so, hundreds of millions of years ago, which helped force its protective magnetic field to collapse.

Venus retains its molten iron-nickel core, but the planet lacks tectonic action in its crust. The heat of its core can’t escape through its surface, which prevents in its molten center the emergence of the turbulence essential to make a planetary dynamo of sufficient power to rev-up a magnetosphere.  

It’s a shame that both Mars and Venus lack magnetospheres, because both planets have attributes that might otherwise make them good candidates for life.

Earth’s core is huge — it rivals the entire planet of Mars in size. The inner third of the core — the center — is already frozen solid. It is believed to be pure iron. The core is freezing itself solid from the inside out.

The rest of the core is hot liquid iron and nickle, mostly, with some sulfur and other impurities mixed in. It circulates in complex eddies, which generate the magnetic fields that protect Earth by deflecting the solar wind.

The flow of currents in the molten metal is made stable and more reliable by the unusual plate tectonics peculiar to Earth. Gaps in Earth’s crustal plates allow heat to escape from volcanic valves, which help to maintain a controlled  roil in the eddy currents to produce the dynamo that drives its magnetosphere. 

The only moon known to have a magnetic field is Jupiter’s Ganymede. Jupiter itself harbors a field fourteen times more powerful than Earth’s. The giant planet’s four largest moons orbit inside it, where they are protected from the solar-wind and low frequency (low-energy) cosmic particles. By contrast, Mercury’s magnetic field is one-hundred times less powerful than Earth’s.


ice age earth
 Artist’s rendering of an ice age.

Despite these several advantages for sustained evolution of life, Earth has the apparent disadvantage of a volatile climate which, scientists believe, has turned cold and icy during several extended periods. I mention this volatility to remind people that the circumstances that have enabled life to advance to the technological civilization of today are complex and not obvious.

Until scientists are able to tease out of history what is actually important and significant for the development of advanced life, no one can know what the rest of the universe may have in store — unless we travel out into space and explore it.


I want to believe: we will find the way.
I want to believe: we will find the way.

Here’s the problem. The closest stars to the Sun are twenty-five trillion miles away. To escape the solar system, engineers must build spacecraft that can accelerate to 27 miles per second. At that speed the nearest stars, Proxima Centauri, and the binary star system, Alpha Centauri, are 30,000 years distant.

How are humans going to explore the universe? How are we going to answer the questions about our place in the cosmos, when we can’t travel to the nearest stars?

There are trillions of stars, most of them many millions of times farther away than these, our closest neighbors. It seems hopeless that anyone will ever know the answers to the basic questions about the universe that so many are asking.

Still, in my heart of hearts, I want to believe we will find a way.

Billy Lee


Editors Note: November 2017; NASA announced that the latest count of galaxies might be as high as two trillion. The velocity required by spacecraft to escape the Milky Way galaxy from Earth (our planet is 25,000 light years from the galaxy center) is 342 miles-per-second. At this velocity the nearest galaxy — Andromeda — is a flight of 2.28 billion years. There are two-trillion galaxies more!

It doesn’t really matter. Here’s why:



The Parker Solar Probe scheduled for launch in 2018 will require seven gravity-assists from Venus over a period of six years to reach a velocity of 120 miles-per-second before it embarks on a 2024 suicide mission into the outer atmosphere of the Sun.

Venus and the Sun combined can’t accelerate the Parker Solar Probe to the galaxy-escape velocity of 342 miles-per-second. 

Minus gravity-assists, the fastest vehicles in development today by space-flight engineers will accelerate to speeds less than 27 miles-per-second — the escape velocity required to exit the solar-system. Without gravity assists that take years to rev-up, we humans can’t leave our own solar system, which is arguably the tiniest imaginable fraction of the Milky Way galaxy.

The good news is that life-forms in far-away solar systems face the same obstacles. If they are hostile, humans can be assured that they will have a difficult time getting here.  

The bad news is that humans are trapped. The Milky Way Galaxy is a prison. We can’t escape, at least not yet; most likely, not ever.  The escape velocity of the Milky Way Galaxy from Earth exceeds 340 miles-per-second — nearly three times the velocity that the Parker Solar Probe will be traveling when it is finally able to bury itself inside the Sun.