Help from the Masters

So far these have been the random jottings of a complete amateur, deliberately untainted by any significant research. The initial contributions were thoughts I have collected over some decades of idleness; and more recently the development of ideas recently occurred as a result of writing this blog. Of most note, and of significance even after a month or two of cogitation, are 1) that the force of gravity experienced between masses is tiny compared to the force with which all masses are being dragged along by (or decelerated by?) dynamic and elastic space; and 2) the mystery of refraction - the fundamental speed of light is reduced by 20% or so when travelling through transparent material. I have not yet found adequate explanations of either pheonomenon on the web.

The ancients had little opportunity for experimentation and 'thought-out' the meaning of what they were seeing. But it was the work of Galileo, Newton and many others who used experimentation and mathemantics to demonstrate and prove, and thereby develop, their findings, and move from philosophy and occult into science.

My ideas are that there are elements of pure thinking that still have merit. There is something about our awareness and analytic capability that is missing - we can have vivid dreams but have barely no recollection of the details just seconds after awakening from them. We all took gravity for granted until just a few hundred years ago, just as we still take for granted the properties of our molecules - and of the fact of the existence of the Universe, which is impossible to exist and impossible not to exist (for what is non-existence?). In my naivity I am happy to call this the The Ultimate Paradox.

It is as if science claims a monopoly of truth, but if there areas it cannot deal with, like asking fundamental questions, it forces us to ignore them - true ignorance. My experience on a recent holiday, chatting about the origin of the universe with an ordinary guy met at random, suggest that lots of people secretly think and even worry about this, but realise it is too big a subject to deal with. We need a channel to ask and expound the problems without the constraints of formal science, but also without recourse to astrology, sacred science, demons or total anarchy.

An example of a free process is my "proof" that the universe is finite but unbounded - the intuitive statistical impossibility of another world exactly like ours. It is confused, but not dis"proved" by the other reason for the impossibility - quantum mechanics, which says that there cannot even be two billiard balls identical to each other.

I want to use this "obviology" to tackle fundamental questions too hard for science. How can a world exist with laws and physical constants so exact not have been designed, yet if it was, who designed and built the designer? How arrogant for atheists to say it happened by accident from nothing, and for theologists to say it is God's creation, and he was always here. It's turtles all the way down!

Traditional paradoxes pale in comparison, yet serve to illustrate. The 17th century battles between Newton and Hooke about whether light was a wave or a particle - and turned out to be both. In fact, it depends on how you look at it. We realise that the ultra small (and the ultra large) are outside our intuitive experience or understanding, and accept the experiments and wave equations (ie of wave-particle duality) to build the model we cannot really see.

So a brief review - we should ask the difficult questions and think about them, and structure a free-form scaffolding for the solution model around possibilities like: - creation joins the three elements of 1) the physical universe, 2) God, and 3) our awareness of those two; - just as our earth's surface is finite but unbounded, so is the volume of the universe; - our understanding of time is key, and we need to manage somehow that the beginning and end of time are (like the East and West edges of the Earth and the "Up" and "Down" edges of the universe), the same thing.

The main point of this post is to say that I need to do some research, and am reading first the biography of Sir Isaac Newton - thinker, recluse, philosopher, mathematician, alchemist, physicist, theologeon, practical scientist - in my view the father of science. He questioned everything, took nothing for granted, shied away from no problem, he worked out for himself what he was seeing from first principles and with his own practical and mathematical tools. But it is as if by opening the door to analytical proof, he helped close the door to free uncluttered thinking. Even in my naivity I know this is trivial, so just for fun I'll call this the Paradox of Newton. The serious point is that Newton thought outside his box; his successors like Stephen Hawking also have to show us outside theirs.