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Scientists are supposed to be perfectly rational beings that can explain the most intricate phenomena of any scientific realm with total rationality and clear thinking. When it comes to the Universes origin, surprisingly, they seem to hide behind something intractable.
Physicists who defend the Big Bang theory proclaim that, in the beginning, all matter and energy, all time and space, were contained into something the size of a tennis ball and that there the commonly known laws of Physics did not apply. That phenomenon was called a singularity.
So, our meaningful, purposeful, orderly, progressive and logical Universe was born of something which does not share in its nature, more precisely a singularity, since this one rejects the laws of Physics. Does this, dear reader, seem to offend your intelligence as much as it offends mine?
Lets look into reason: Jesus long time ago proclaimed that you know a tree by its fruit. and that a bad tree does not give good fruits. If the singularity that preceded the Big Bang had no relationship with the laws of Physics, how can the then generated universe be ruled by the laws of Physics? How can a freak produce order and purpose? It does not make sense to me.
On the other hand, if the singularity does not have a relationship with the laws of Physics, our then generated universe must also share in that nature and have no bearing in the laws of Physics. This is only logical, even though false.
So, why did scientists came up with such an idea as a singularity? Because, the truth is, scientists are agog to understand the nature and origin of our universe which seems to elude their imagination. The idea of a singularity conveniently hides their ignorance while they tell everyone to stop thinking and, blindfolded believe in them. But thats the same medieval witches used to do. The difference is that these used to be burned at the stake.
More than likely, the whole energy of the universe is already there, fully, but in different expressions. When the universe explodes (Big Bang) as well as when it crunches (Big Crunch), this energy merely reshapes and channels itself.
But in total its the same. No such thing as one nature the singularity un-ruled by Physics producing an unrelated nature our universe ruled by the laws of Physics. The universe probably is just a re-composition of this original energy into different shapes and forms in continuous manifestation.
Fernando Monteiro
Sunday, 29 August 2010
The problem of time travelling puts up the difficulty that our biological bodies may not be able to retrocede, neither advance ahead of time, in their physical nature. As a matter of fact, all biological beings are born, grow and progress in age, then die, in a regular and predictable route. Its unthinkable to consider our age going backwards making us younger or us dying first and being born last. Based on our daily experience of the world we live in, this is all absurd.
Yet, if you accept the possibility of time travelling, you would probably have to accept such absurd propositions above. If you get into a time machine just out of the latest sci-fi movie and travel twenty years backwards, assuming that you are now forty, wouldnt you have to be twenty by the time you arrive in the past scene? Why would everything change around you as you travel into the past and why would your biological age not change as well. After all, twenty years ago your age was twenty, wasnt it?
The question then becomes whether our biology can be twisted and pushed around so as to possibilitate this kind of time travelling gymnastics. But it makes to me sense to consider that if we travel in time our biology should participate in that travelling as well as everything else. This brings up the question of whether time is an agent, something that can act over something else and make it younger or older, progress to death or progress to birth.
If time is an agent and if our biology is apt to be stretched in any direction, then time is like a cinema film: it can be rolled forwards or backwards and each moment in our biological life is recorded in that film which we can just project. If time is an agent, something actually existing, then it must cause things around to act according to its laws. One of the problems that this idea brings could be that the only time we know is the time we live in the now; we do not know the future which is ahead of us and we lost the past which ceased to be lived. How can we then move into something, future or past, which does not exist now?
As shocking as it may sound, I believe that time simply does not exist. I think that time, as we ordinarily think of it, is just a realisation that something has changed. If we look into our watch and it shows 14:00 hours and later 14:25 hours, its this conscience of change in the physical world that leads us to say that time advanced by 25 minutes. If you clap your hands two times you can achieve the same conscience of what time is: the conscience of a sequence of at least two events: the first hand clap and then the second. Its an illusion to say then that time elapsed between them. Truly, all we have is only the conscience that something changed or that a pattern was made.
But if we choose to think that time exists, that it is an agent and can cause the present to move both into the future or into the past, then we will have also to accept that time would be like a film already made, a work with a beginning and an end, and everything would evolve according to that master script. This brings a problem, which is whether you believe in pre-destination or else in free-will. If you believe in pre-destination then time is a film and its entire story is already written in it and we, though being able to move ahead and backwards in it, cannot do anything to change the story. We would then be stuck with time.
But if you think that we fundamentally have free-will and so we build our now and our tomorrow by the actions we take today, then time is not a told story but is something open, something we can build and change freely. Then time travelling would become a lot more complicated. For some of the problems that would bring you can read my other post The Problem with Time Travelling.
Fernando Monteiro
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
When I was a youth studying philosophy in high school in Portugal I had an intellectual clash with one course colleague. I defended that the universe must be infinite in extension and nature; he opposed and defended that the universe had to be finite. We met in a room at the local public library for the debate and a common friend of us mediated while others witnessed.
I started by saying that it was a necessity that the universe be infinite in extension and every other quality to be considered. He insisted that it ought to be finite. Then I asked him a question: when you get to the edge of your finite universe, what do you see on the other side and what is it? He didnt hesitate, to my surprise, and answered straight away: another universe.
Then the mediator, puzzled, asked him: and when you reach the border of your second finite universe, what do you find on the other side? He answered calmly: another finite universe. I tried to give him good reasons to think that the universe can only be infinite, but he was stubborn and kept his idea.
What happens here is a classical dilemma: an infinite universe, infinite in extension and in everything in it, is something that eludes our intellect and is hard to think about. What can you do? To me it looks necessary to explain life as we know it, but to him it must have looked impossible to picture it clearly, so he went for something he could compare with things he was used to deal with: a finite universe.
As a matter of fact, our intellect works on the principle of duality: positive and negative, yes and no, black and white, solids and liquids, yin and yang and so on. Each of these concepts has in our mind an opposite value and we operate on them to think about anything. Now, when you come up with an idea that incorporates everything you know and can think about, that is going to unsettle you and your assumptions. My debate opponent resolved that anguish by picturing the universe as he pictures most things: he saw it as limited.
It just happens then that the question and what is beyond your finite universe? could then be asked forever, which honestly does not make the point and does not solve the problem. A finite universe must be joining an infinite succession of finite universes so, in the end we are still dealing with the concept of infinite, which my intellectual opponent tried to negate.
Thinking of our universe as infinite is uncomfortable. We cant picture it; it is beyond our understanding and experience and its hard to explain it to others. But if you think about it, you might end up needing to see it as infinite. You might not be able to picture it, but you might feel the need to see it that way, as a premise leads to a conclusion.
A finite universe must be knowable in its full extent. You should be able to make a map of it and draw a border around it, somewhere, and make an inventory of everything that is in it. Because it can be delimited, it can be know in its totality. The problem is only that, if you jump into a space ship and travel to its borders, as in the debate above, what are you going to see there? You might find and see another universe, and then if you travel across it, another and another universe.
What if that original finite universe was the only one standing, not a succession of finite universes, but only one? What would you see on the other side of the border? I suppose it would be nothing. But then you can ask the question: what is nothing? Because our universe is full of empty spaces, areas where there is nothing, and as the reader might agree, these nothings are a part of our universe as much as every other celestial body in it.
So, if over the border of a finite universe you see nothing -- that is something. And, logically, if that is something, then what is it? What is truly there beyond the border? This is the anguish of thinking about the universe: you often come across infinite type concepts. You might realise that the border of the universe, if infinite, must be permanently pushed forward, or it would not be infinite, but you are agog to conceive it, its more than you can think of.
If a finite universe must be knowable in its entirety, what would be the situation for an infinite one? Can it be also knowable to its full extent? I dont honestly think so, because if it could then it would have to have borders. Being borderless and infinite it must be, cannot be anything else, but unknowable. This meaning that we can never know its full extent.
The question that this comes up in my mind is this: is the infinite universe something already there in its entirety, or is it something in constant creation? Because, you see, if you travel across the universe in a space ship, you are going to discover it forever. Is it just like Africa in the nineteen century, already there in its fullness and just waiting for the European explorers to discover it, or is it something in permanent creation, be it mutation or increase?
If it has borders, those borders must be being pushed forward all the time, otherwise you could cross them and prove it non-infinite. If it is of a settled extension, then that should be knowable and would prove it to be finite. If the universe is a settled affair, then that should be measurable, quantifiable, but that then would reveal it as finite.
Why do I say all this? I think its because a static, finished universe looks to me like a finished job, something done and completed. If then the universe is a finished job, it should also be a finite reality. To be infinite it must be in constant change and creation, a totally unfinished job, a job that goes on forever to match the idea that the universe must be unlimited, infinite.
In fact, if you jump straight into a space ship and travel in straight line you must be going to meet with the borders of that universe. But if it is infinite those borders, as you approach them, must be moving forward fast, as fast as you move onto them so that, in the end, you never meet such borders because an infinite universe is borderless.
This brings up the idea that an infinite universe is in constant creation, in constant expansion, in constant mutation and all that surpasses you and your little intelligence. In fact, travelling across the universe, you always come across things you have never seen. Its not the Titanic on the bottom of the sea; its more like the infinite universe is being created right in front of you just as you set yourself to discover it. Moreover, you would be then discovering it forever.
This could lead me to the amazing conclusion that, as we discover the infinite universe, we cause it to be created. Consider a man in darkness but with an electric torch in his hand. He cant see anything, but the torch, when aimed around, reveals bodies, things, whatever. Its as if they are being created by the fact of being illuminated.
This is the position of the space traveller: things get created in front of his eyes as he challenges the extremes of the infinite universe. So, in the end, the observer is causing the observed to be created, a bizarre but necessary conclusion. Its also like saying that, every time we look around in the infinite universe, God makes a miracle for us.
Fernando Monteiro
Monday, 18 January 2010
The problem with time travelling is to know what is now, yesterday and tomorrow. Now could be defined as the present time, but the past at some stage was also now and the future will one day be now also.
But lets think of the practical problem posed to movie figurants when they travel into a past time, specifically, a historical time when something happened. Suppose that you, Mr Time Traveller, enter into a time machine, press a button or pull a lever and, zap! you travel to some time in the past. Now, you are a cowboy movie watcher so you chose to go to the far west and land on the scene of an historical photograph: two famous bandits take a shot to the posterity and you, recognising the potential of the situation, move just behind then and, flash, you get pictured in the photograph
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What is space? The reader might think this to be a funny question, which it probably is. Space is the readers large and comfortable lounge, the spacious family car, but also, when gazing at the night sky, all the vast distances between the various stars, constellations and variegated celestial bodies. When we look at the universal space this way, a question can fairly be asked: what is space?
I see space in two ways: (a) the space occupied by a body and (b) the space between bodies. No doubt other ways to look into space could be found, but these will get us started. So, what is the space occupied by a body
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In the last four decades Australia has been, under governments on both sides of politics, a world champion of free-trade. Yet, what has been achieved with that is nothing short of shame and misery. And still today some free-trade thinkers propose that we take the single stand of opening up our borders completely and unilaterally to foreign trade. Madness never so much disguised itself as a sensible thing as in this matter.
There is something that must be said upfront: free-trade, as well as its related neo-liberalism, free-market economics or economic rationalism is an ideology its not science, not even economics is a science, but its a political inclination. This means that the people that propose free-trade at all costs do not answer to reason but just obsessively hammer the same key all the time
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We all hear from time to time about protecting our industries and our jobs from foreign competition, but we also hear about liberalising our external trade so that only the fit, competitive industries remain in place while the fat ones disappear to give way to more productive ones.
Its funny that when I went to university, the economics lecturer did not just expose the topic, he also pushed his credo. With regards to free-trade, he told us that the way to go was about removing all tariffs, even though none of us could envisage how that would save thousands of jobs in our Australian car industry, together with the taxes paid by these businesses to our government which expends them with the general community
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Do you, dear reader, have a habit of looking into businesses as you travel around daily? When I go through Marrickville in my bus back from work I always observe the businesses around. Most of them seem to be quite profitable and well run. Interestingly enough, some rare ones dont.
I am thinking of the second-hand furniture and electrical business in Victoria Road. If they sell a couple of items they probably make the day, but they dont seem to be busy
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Four strange things happened this week in the mining industry in Australia: Xtrata cancelled an investment in a Queensland mine worth $30 million and Peabody, in its bid for Macarthur Coal decreased the amount by one dollar to $15. Values of major Australian mining companies fell on the London Stock Exchange. And, finally, just last night the Federal Government announced, as part of its budget, a super-tax on mining and energy companies, which admittedly will increase their total tax burden. All this requires some consideration.
What consequences would result from this super-profits tax to the mining industry? One and immediate would be that projects already started would have to be recalculated for profitability. In this sense Marius Kloppers, BHP Billitons CEO, appealed for it to apply only to new projects
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Most of us have a herd mentality and nature put it there for a purpose but did you, dear reader, ever wonder what it does to you when it comes to investing?
Consider this news: testifying before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Charles Prince and Robert Rubin, respectively Citigroups ex-chief executive and ex-head of executive committee, said, according to a Bloomberg report that almost none of their peers on Wall Street predicted that sub-prime securities would bring on a credit crisis
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Comment by Fernando Monteiro
on Will Qantas be Sold?
Australian Business News
The Measurement of Infinite Realities
Market Gladiator
This amazing Universe
If Qantas can keep the attributes that made it successfull, such as service and safety, then appart from onership nothing should change. Notice that Qantas management, including its MD, will take a part of it (up to $100 million).
I just wonder whether the bid will be acceptable given the restrictions on foreign ownershipt of Qantas.
Bye,
FM