We Made It Up

                       ...almost all of it…we really did. First (maybe) there was the Big Bang. Our universe (and maybe others) was born. After billions of years humans evolved on this planet we call Earth. At some point, some members of our species developed the ability to reason. As this ability developed we simply began to “make things up”. We developed labels for the things we encountered. We developed systems for labeling things and communicating information about these things. We called this language. We discovered ways to account for things and we called this math. We pretty much built from there.

Nothing we have created (made up) has changed any essential truth about our universe (or has it). The fundamental building blocks of our “reality” are still the same, no matter how much our labels tend to obscure this reality or how much we try to delude ourselves that we can alter these fundamentals to suit our desires. (or can we) The mission of this conversation, as I see it, is to keep digging,to keep thinking, to keep asking ‘Why?’. Keep cross-referencing the things we think we know, with other things we think we know. Why? So we can test the validity of our knowledge, spark new ideas, leading to new knowledge, leading to new testing and so on… Why? So we can make new things up! 

This site is a celebration of thinkers, of doers, of explorers and adventurers.  It is a place for those who are not afraid to ask the questions, for those who are not afraid of the answers, for those who are not afraid of the myriad new questions that the answers inevitably bring.  It is a place for those who are completely unafraid to live!  It is a place for the open-minded and the non-judgmental.  It is a place for those who are completely unafraid to fail...in fact...for those who understand that there is really no such thing as failure...only learning.

Join us as we explore the ‘facts’ of our existence and perhaps make life a bit more ‘real’. Maybe we can help some people understand life more clearly, perhaps leading to acceptance of the human condition in this realm. Our goal is to cut through all the man-made labels to reveal the actual essence of the many things and experiences we encounter in this realm. The universe is perfect as it is. It’s the things WE make up that are making us crazy.

Before we proceed...

Let’s talk about science for a moment. There are people who still contest some of the revelations brought to us by science. There are those who dislike technological advances. There are others who adhere to religions or faiths, which may have teachings that are at odds with scientifically derived evidence. I’ll just be clear about where I’m coming from:

Since we can’t yet explain the ‘before the Big Bang’ realm and we can’t scienticially explain the first few nano-moments of the Big Bang we have to leave open the possibility of some unknown physical force or some ‘extra-physical’ force. From that point forward, I’m sticking with the science…and the lengthy history of our realm.

We have tools that we use every day, upon which we rely heavily. We have lessons we have learned that prove to be accurate when applied in our daily lives. These mundane, universally accepted facts are not even denied by the most zealous of relgious adherents. Here’s an example of what I mean. We have all been taught about the geometric properties of triangles. When we are given the base length of a triangle and the 2 angles for the adjacent sides we can accurately calculate the length of those sides. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have our eyesight intact also have the gift of parallax. This is the intake of light by two receptors (our eyes) that allow us to gauge the distance and speed of objects in our field of vision. We know parallax works because it keeps us from walking into walls and it helps us determine the distance and speed of oncoming vehicle traffic. Parallax is our own built-in version of triangle geometric calculation.

At interstellar scales our parallax fails us because the objects we are viewing are simply too far away for us to discern their size, speed and direction of motion. This is when we lean on our geometry education. We know how long it takes the earth to revolve around the sun AND we know how far the Earth is from the Sun at any given time.. So, if on a given day, we measure the angle formed by the alignment of the Sun and the Earth, relative to any star, THEN, precisely 6 months later (on the direct opposite side of the Sun), we measure the other Earth-Sun baseline angle to the same star, then accurately determine how far away that star is from Earth,

We also know precisely how fast light travels. Thousands of experiments have verified the accuracy of light speed at 186,000 miles per second. So, if we know the distance from our Earth to the star and we know the speed at which the light is traveling from that star we can calculate the time required for that light to reach earth. Once we know this quantity of time we can deduce that the star emitting the light must be at least that old. And my point is? For those who continue to insist things like, ‘The Earth is only about 4,200 years old’, based on religious texts….this assertion is easily disproven with simple, everyday geometry, based on our own inherent parallax abilities. We have identified stars as far away as 13.4 Billion light years. If you still don’t believe, then go ahead, step off that curb, I’m sure the oncoming bus isn’t as close as your eyes tell you it is.

Before the Big Bang (Forever or Nothing)

It’s difficult for the human mind to grasp ‘forever’. The scale of our perception is a single, brief lifetime, that appears to have a beginning and an end. We are wired to understand small, finite things. The bigger and more complex the idea the greater the effort required to fully wrap our minds around it. No idea illustrates this more than the thought that something has ‘always been’.

Current scientific data approximates the age of our universe at 13.72 Billion years. Most of us can barely comprehend 10, let alone Billions, and much less, ‘infinity’.

Go ahead. Try. Try to internalize the idea of something, anything that has no beginning and no end. Occasionally, a small handful of us, may be able to catch a fleeting mental glimpse. But we can never seem to grasp it for more than a moment. The idea is just foreign to the physical world we experience daily.

Why ask about forever? Well, this post is the beginning of a conversation. A chat about what really ‘is’. As with any thorough discussion, we should probably start at the beginning. In this case, before the beginning. What beginning? The '“Big Bang”.

I have a friend who is fond of saying, “There is a way to now things. It’s called science.” As of this writing, our best scentists have developed a theory, with a lot of corroborating evidence, that indicates the universe we live in began to form those 13.72 Billion years ago as the result of a massive explosion. What exploded? Well, only all of the matter in existence, as least the existence we are aware of. All of this matter was packed into the most dense singularity that has ever existed in our realm.

Actually, I guess this wasn’t yet our realm. This singularity was ‘pre-realm’. And, I suppose, that is the point of this post. How did this singularity form? Where did all the matter compressed so densely within it come from? Did ‘our’ universe exist before, only to collapse into this tightly packed mass? Did it just appear from some cosmic sleight-of-hand? How did the matter inside ever come to exist in the first place?

Was there ever a time of ‘nothingness’? Rank this question right up there with infinity. Can you conceive of the existence of ‘nothing’? If so, then how does something, especially something as expansive as our universe simply spring forth…from nothing.

There, it seems, are our two options. The matter that makes up our universe has:

A) always existed (forever)

B) simply appeared from nothing

Your thoughts…because this conversation is about to explode!

Boom!

Even the scientists don’t know for sure what caused the explosion that we call the Big Bang. Theories abound, but all are far from proven. Just for the sake of accuracy, The Big Bang Theory is actually a scientific model for describing the universe. We started in present times, and through many, many years of observation and experimentation, have constructed this model of the history of the universe that leads us back to the point of the ‘creation event’.

In the earliest moments of our universe, the forces at work, energies, densities and temperatures are too great for our current knowledge of physics to parse.

In fact, earlier than 10^-36 seconds, we don’t have a clue of the nature of this realm. At these super-small scales, the quantum nature of our universe takes over, space and time lose meaning and our comfortable day-to-day understanding of physics breaks down. It is the reconciliation of the rules in this bizarre realm with the rules that govern life on the scale we all recognize, that lies at the core of attempts to develop the Grand Unified Theory of Physics. In short, Relativity works great in daily life but it’s not so useful at the quantum scale.

(For future reference in this conversation…’Shit ain’t always as it seems.” We will return to this theme repeatedly.)

What matters for purposes of our conversation is that this event occurred, or at least the data available to us, that we are capable of comprehending, points to this event as the source of our current universe.

From this point forward the universe developed without us for a long, long time. It seems that the universe proceeded quite nicely without humans at the controls. Just think about it, all the matter, energy, zebras, 57 Chevys, and Beyonce tunes emanated from this ball about the size of a grapefruit. It created galaxies, solar systems, stars, dark matter, dark energy and at some point…earth. Then a whole new cycle of evolution began.

Apparently about 5 Billion-ish years ago this ball of ice and dirt and fire started to coalesce. Again, this process moved along nicely with zero human intervention. The planet understands the rules of physics. It knows what the hell it’s doing. Human activity makes up an infinitesimally small fraction of the time our planet has existed. We had to wait for single cell life forms to emerge, then evolve to multi-cell organisms, then progress to a life form that was capable of crawling out of the primordial sea to set up shop on land. After that, it was still a LOT of years before the earliest examples of our species evolved. To summarize, the importance of our species to the evolution of the universe…isn’t even a footnote. Once we fully arrived on Earth, we sure proved capable of fucking things up in hurry, though!