11 Years Ago Today: Spiritual jocularity

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 22, 2010.]

Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
    “Morris,” he said, “do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?”
    “No, Mert, I don’t believe any of that.”
    Even though [Mert] then said, “Ha! I don’t believe that!,” it’s true. I don’t believe it.

But Mert’s question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
    In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were “signs from UIE,” or Universal Intelligent Energy¹ (pronounced YOU-ie [“or YAH-weh?” my son suggested], and aka “God”). Now, I don’t believe that; now, I can just “be spiritual” naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I’m able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
    I liked to say “Praise Youie!” If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
    But in not very long, it won’t make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we’ve been dead a while.
_______________

1. In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein’s famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens’s Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:

   ...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc², relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.

Boldt Words & Images: On the 71st anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A meditation in five acts

By Bob Boldt

“My God, what have we done?”
–Bob Lewis, the Enola Gay co-pilot

Act One: Video selections from Alain Resnais’ 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (French), with music by Giovanni Fusco and George Delerue 

Third Monday Musing

Que sera, sera

By Rolf Dumke

“That mysterious flow,” wrote Paul Davies about time in the February 2006 Scientific American. We all experience it as an unstoppable flow from a given past to a flighty present, onwards to an unknown future. But, he argues, for physicists this is a mere illusion: time does not fly or flow. It merely exists. See Davies’s book, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1995, Simon & Schuster).

Third Monday Musing: On an irony of the creation of something from nothing

Its paradoxical aesthetic asymmetry

By Rolf Dumke

What fun to read your philosophical-historical query on why is there something rather than nothing!
    Modern physicists have indeed analyzed why there is something. According to the latest theories, the initial Big Bang should have created exactly the same amount of matter and anti-matter – i.e., in symmetry – at the first moment of explosion. And these should have immediately combined to eliminate each other, eliminating everything that had been created in the first tenzillionth squared of a second.

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

People who like to beat, torture, and sexually abuse cows now have yet another safe haven in which to do so. Idaho has passed an "ag gag" law that makes it illegal for those concerned with animal welfare to take any of the logical undercover steps to expose abuse. Similar laws were previously enacted in Iowa, Utah, and Missouri. By the way, yes, you did read that correctly: some people who work on dairy farms apparently enjoy sexually abusing cows, as documented in an undercover operation in Idaho in 2012. Under the new Idaho law, anyone convicted of working undercover to expose people sexually abusing cows is now in more legal trouble than the abusers. Got milk? Excerpt:

Spiritual jocularity

Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
    "Morris," he said, "do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?"
    "No, Mert, I don't believe any of that."
    Even though he then said, "Ha! I don't believe that!," it's true. I don't believe it.

But Mert's question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
    In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were "signs from UIE," or Universal Intelligent Energy¹(pronounced YOU-ie ["or YAH-weh?" my son suggested], and aka "God"). Now, I don't believe that; now, I can just "be spiritual" naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I'm able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
    I liked to say "Praise Youie!" If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
    But in not very long, it won't make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we've been dead a while.
_______________

1. In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein's famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens's Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:

   ...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call "Einstein's famous equation," E=mc², relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.

Still trying to figure it out

For the week preceding his birthday on Friday, my friend Jim was a week younger than I. His daugher's birthday gift to him was the book Why Does E=mc²: And Why Should We Care?, by Brian Cox (the physicist, not the Scottish actor). Jim says that his daughter remembered that he's "still trying to figure out relativity."
    One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is sort of related to relativity: What did physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) contribute to our understanding of reality? I've seen references to Bohm for decades, prominently in books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979).
    Being told of Jim's birthday present, I rushed to tell him about the Rebecca Goldstein novel that I said the other day I'd asked my local library to hold for me: Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics.
    I had picked the book up from the library on Jim's birthday and started reading immediately. Trying to comprehend what I'd gotten myself into as I read the first chapter—whose opening sentence is, "The essential fact is that I hate her"—I'd skipped ahead to Goldstein's afterword [pp. 243-44]. I wrote to Jim:

Did you see my post about Rebecca Goldstein? I've started reading her novel, and it has a character based on David Bohm. In the afterword, Goldstein says that,

though Einstein himself had early on declared Bohm his successor, Bohm spent the great bulk of his life in embittered obscurity, in his last years residing in England and teaching at a night college in London.

Had you ever heard of David Bohm? I've seen many references to him over the years.
    She says that in 1952 he'd presented a "hidden variables" formulation of quantum mechanics, but his former mentor, J. Robert Oppenheimer (they'd both worked on the Manhattan Project),

perhaps more than any other physicist, was responsible for Bohm's being buried alive. He was quoted as suggesting that "if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him."

    Goldstein quotes from a personal letter of Bohm:

"I have only one strong emotion left, and that is hatred for the forces that have destroyed so many human beings, including myself. For relative to what I could have become, I regard myself as destroyed."

    But Bohm's ideas are still alive, Jim. Goldstein concludes the afterword:

Only relatively recently have a growing number of "respectable" physicists begun working with what they have taken to calling "Bohmian mechanics."
    The formidable problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity theory still awaits a solution.

Maybe learning something about Bohm can help you figure out relativity?

Einstein hero

Toward the end of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens acknowledges the modesty of his own contribution to the history of free thought:

When accused of scientific plagiarism, of which he was quite probably guilty, Sir Isaac Newton made the guarded admission—which was itself plagiarized—that he had in his work had the advantage of "standing on the shoulders of giants." It would seem only minimally gracious, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, to concede the same. As and when I wish, I can use a simple laptop to acquaint myself with the life and work of Anaxagoras and Erasmus, Epicurus and Wittgenstein. Not for me the poring in the library by candlelight, the shortage of texts, or the difficulties of contact with like-minded persons in other ages or societies. And not for me (except when the telephone sometimes rings and I hear hoarse voices condemning me to death, or hell, or both) the persistent fear that something I write will lead to the extinction of my work, the exile or worse of my family, the eternal blackening of my name by religious frauds and liars, and the painful choice between recantation or death by torture. I enjoy a freedom and an access to knowledge that would have been unimaginable to the pioneers. Looking back down the perspective of time, I therefore cannot help but notice that the giants upon whom I depend, and upon whose massive shoulders I perch, were all of them forced to their knees. Only one member of the giant and genius category ever truly spoke his mind without any apparent fear or excess of caution. I therefore cite Albert Einstein, so much misrepresented, once again.

He is addressing a correspondent who is troubled by yet another of those many misinterpretations:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Years later he answered another query by stating:

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

      These words stem from a mind, or a man, who was rightly famed for his care and measure and scruple, and whose sheer genius had laid bare a theory that might, in the wrong hands, have obliterated not only this world but also its whole past and the very possibility of its future.

He devoted the greater part of his life to a grand refusal of the role of a punitive prophet, preferring to spread the message of enlightenment and humanism. Decidedly Jewish, and exiled and defamed and persecuted as a consequence, he preserved what he could of ethical Judaism and rejected the barbaric mythology of the Pentateuch. We have more reason to be grateful to him than to all the rabbis who have ever wailed, or who ever will.... [pp.270-272]