Science

Looking Through the Glass

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OK, look out of the window and tell me what you see.

I see some fields and trees and a couple of cows.

Think carefully. Tell me what is the first thing you see.

The fields.

Wrong. The first thing you see when you look out of any window is glass.

This little exchange may sound pedantic but it crudely illustrates how we ignore the way we perceive the world. Sweeping short cuts are made during the process of perception in order to to establish some sort of certainty of what is out there, for our deaf and blind brains.

The next logical step in this line of thought, is to consider how many other things we do not see, whether they be ideas or physical things.

I would argue that there are many more than we believe.

Take technological ‘evolution’. I avoid the word progress because there are examples of new technologies that were a step backwards rather than forward. The release of energy from matter in nuclear fission for instance, creates as many horrors as quick fixes for warfare or the provision of electrical power.

Nobody votes for new technology. One day you are sitting on the sofa eating your dinner when, on the news, they are demonstrating a car that drives itself. Or you are a farmer in nineteenth century England and suddenly you hear you neighbour starting up his new tractor.

These changes to our lives come about as if by stealth. Generally they are considered benign – that is the benefits out weigh the problems. The fact that all new technology is by definition ‘untried’ is something that neither proves nor denies a problem exists, in the present or future. So it is allowed to be produced.

The mobile phone, for instance, has revolutionised many people’s lives. Even children as young as three are given them. And yet there remains a question mark over the emission of microwave energy and the effect it has on young and adult brains. At present the young are thought to be particularly at risk because their brains are developing. Making a phone call in a car for instance, is the same as putting food in a microwave cooker, only it’s not food being cooked – it’s you and your family. Because this background energy has been with us for over a generation, it is not possible to establish a ‘control group’ to measure the development of brains. There are no humans alive now, who have lived without a constant background of microwave energy.

Of course there are checks and balances at work in various committees in Universities where research is done. Also government organisations monitor and grant licences to new technologies. The ethical concerns, the effect on other systems such as the environment, sustainability, disposability, carbon footprint etc. are just a few of the concerns applied to new technological developments.

The problem is not all countries judge new technology in the same way. If there is a political, monetary or social ‘quick gain’ to be made through say, shale gas fracking, then some country somewhere is going to do it.

And if in the eighteenth century what happened on the other side of the world didn’t matter because it was too far away; this century has no choice but to think global.

The trails of diesel exhaust from ships crossing oceans can be seen from space. Imported goods do not arrive without an environmental price tag.

It is as if technology has a mind of it’s own – and in the next few decades it will quite literally– using 5G and the ‘internet of things’.

But without innovative technologies, the planet would not be supporting the present human population. The number of people pre-industrial revolution, was small. England had about four million citizens when horses ploughed fields. Now there are over seventy million.

But new technology is not the only object seen in the window. Remember the glass.

Glass in Wroclaw

And it might not be a new technology that is about to alter the course of your life fundamentally. There are numerous ‘low balls’ that could change everything tomorrow. For instance there might be a series of powerful solar mass ejections, bombarding earth with cosmic rays so strong that the earth’s protective magnetosphere gives way. Computer systems go down, power grids and machinery of all kinds are cooked.

Solar Super Storm

Trusted technologies, reveal that they have been trusted too much. The impossible or ‘once in a thousand year event’, happens. Then mankind realises it had not seen the glass in the window.

The earth is a space craft and like all complex systems they are fine until they break down. Then back up systems have to be activated and emergency plans initiated…if they exist.

In the case of planet earth they do not. A ‘survivalist’ shelter designed for two weeks, two months or even two years, will eventually either be discovered or run out of supplies before the re-population even begins. Mad Max doesn’t even come close to the post apocalypse chaos.

The question for the present generation and for those yet to be born is;

‘what are the blind spots in our modern lifestyle that could leave human population exposed to near elimination and what is the back up plan to each eventuality?’

Governments, committees,  industrialists, academics  scientific researchers and technological inventors and innovators are our modern day ‘dictators’. You won’t be voting whether to survive disaster or not. Your trusted leaders just won’t have seen it coming because they too were looking through the glass, like Alice.

The Evolution of the Body and Soul

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You might be excused for being confused. Why is there so much diversity in nature? How have humans evolved? Who invented pussy cats?

These are questions that have fascinated me for decades, simply because science offers no clear answers. Charles Darwin springs immediately to mind as being one of the first to study nature and how species adopt new characteristics and shed old ones, over time. He also noticed how ‘unnatural selection’ – that is breeding artificially – can evolve a species.

After you have finished studying barnacles in the finest detail over long periods of time (as Darwin did) you have to pause and take several hundred steps back. There is an overview and to me, the speculation it offers is fascinating.

I start with the mystery of pussy cats. I use this term to distinguish our door mat variety of lion from lions. The puzzling piece in the jig saw picture of all domesticated animals is, who created them? Domesticated cats appear in the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt, so indisputably they were around in pre-history.

The usual story around how wolves became dogs, for instance, is that wolves hung around early species of the genus Homo smelling meat dripping over camp fires. A piece of meat was flung to a salivating wolf and a bond was created. The wolf became half tame and a symbiotic relationship maintained that bond through generations of wolves. What morphed a wolf into a Dachshund has always bothered me. Was early man involved in choosing small wolves from the pack and breeding them to make miniature wolves, that became more like…well, dogs?

And if the wolf / dog domestication is hard to picture, consider how the mighty Aurochs (bos primigenius) ceased to be large wild cattle and became mild mannered, spotty cows. Who was in control of that transition, arguably over hundreds of generations?

When we list the present domesticated animals, there is a longer list of wild animals that were never domesticated. Why are there no miniature giraffe’s for instance, keeping the bushes in our gardens trim?

Most scary of all is the question that no one dare ask. Are we some thing’s pets? That is, the story of human evolution is partial at best. There have been several genus of ape-like creatures before Homo and it’s variations. Were the Neanderthals sweet natured creatures that laid flowers on graves and Sapiens Sapiens the bad guys who wiped them out? In which case why would you want to prefer a violent species?

There is a suggestion that modern men were created by a race of being from another star system. They needed slaves to work the gold and precious metals from the earth. Manipulating DNA to create a new species was something they did in their spare time. We are probably all aware that our genome is just a few genes different from our ape cousins. There is no ‘missing link’ because there is no missing link. Homo Sapiens Sapiens were created in a laboratory. In other words we are the product of unatural selection.

That is an interesting theory but it is the only one based on the present evidence and the Bible stories of interbreeding between angels and men. When we have indisputable evidence of ‘angels’ or beings from other stellar systems, our origin may become clear.

Until then, we are left with the conundrum of Us. For we have an enormous distinction from other life forms. We have a soul. This soul is common to every human and is described in multiple ways in our myths, legends, religions and mystical traditions. Mystics have declared a personal unity with the Almighty, for which some have been ritually murdered. Beings sent to convince man to be loving and compassionate such as Jesus the Christ, Buddha, Krishna were only partially successful. How many generations will it take for us to evolve into compassionate beings?

If you wonder whether animals have a divine potential then the answer is, in my view, no. They are locked into the evolution of not only their physical bodies but their souls. And their souls do not have the same quality as humans to become Divine. They are further down the evolutionary ladder and being reborn as animals is their precursor to being born as human. As animals they live mainly in their instincts and emotions and intelligence. At the intuitive (or soul level) then they act as a collective. Birds swoop in a flock and change direction as if they were one. Fish do the same as do most animals with the herd instinct.

The animals have souls that are evolving, just as they evolve physically. The cat that adorns your fire side mat, or the dog that trots along in front of you on your walks, is in training mode for becoming human in a next life. As humans we evolve domestic animals physically, socially and spiritually. We remove them from their herd instinct and place them in safe shelter, where, through interaction with us, they become individual, with a name.

This individuality is the last step on the process of animal evolution. Perhaps the Ancient Egyptians knew this, which is why they mummified their domestic cats.

The evolution that Charles Darwin studied so closely in lower life species, is parallel with another evolutionary process on this planet. A soul moves through countless human and non-human life times, each time correcting weaknesses. When we are reborn we have a new set of lessons and corrections to make; a process which follows a natural and unatural evolution. Humans evolve through new knowledge and experience, which can only be obtained in the 4% of the universe which is physical matter. Eventually, the perfect lifestyle that the body adopts will create a perfect human body, as revered by the Ancient Greeks. The noble lifestyle that the soul longs to  adopt, will eventually create a perfect human soul. At this point in it’s evolution the soul leaves the ‘Wheel of Karma’ and  is restored to it’s natural place in Heaven.

The Universe and The Universe and The Universes

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Understanding the Universe has proved difficult for scientists. They have an idea that it started at a single point and expanded, but cannot explain what was there before. This is because their thinking is limited by their logic.

‘If a thing exists then there must have been a time it did not exist.’

This is logical but not true, because logic is limited and changed by the presence of an observer. Quantum physics proves this with such realities as an atom existing in two places at once.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

To describe the universe we need better words, ideas, concepts than we use to describe a four dimensional world.

Mathematicians describes up to eleven dimensions. Universes that exist apart and in the same space / time, something that is ‘not logical Captain’.

To view other dimensions it is necessary to move the position of the observer. We know this because we understand the difference between two and three and four dimensions. Two dimensions is a world on a single plane. It becomes three when we see the dinner plate as a circular object rather than a straight line. When the dinner plate is dropped and breaks into pieces, the plate has an existence in time – that is the space time we have grown to understand.

There are still people who believe in a flat earth. Even though sailors and pilots and astronauts tell of a spherical earth, the Flat Earth Society members prefer to interpret the facts in their own way.

Would it not be interesting to move to the next level of thought about the universe, just as the jump in thought between the Flat Earther’s and the rest of us? The universe is without a boundary according to our astronomical observations. In fact the galaxies are expanding ever outward at this moment in time. It is more likely, in my view, that there will never be a universal boundary discovered. This is because I believe the universe bends around and comes back on itself, as does a sphere. But in my model of the universe I see it as a Toroid shape, like a Polo mint – the ‘mint with a hole in it.’

Matter and energy appear from the Torus shaped centre of the hole as waves of galaxies, stars, gases and dust. It comes from the collapsed version of itself and is in the state of either expanding or contracting depending on in what stage of its life you view it. Time spins around the surface of the Torus as a snake around a tree coming eventually to its own tail, which it swallows. This is the serpent in the garden of Eden. Time introduces the dimension of ‘self awareness’ or ‘knowledge’ which the Creator thought man would be happier without.

There is not one Toroid though, neither is a there a place outside the Universe where the inhabitants of Heavenly Space live out separate lives. This model is Medieval in origin and was created to fit with the concept of Heaven and Hell as places of destination after death.

To my mind there is no heaven or hell other than that which is created by man, respectively through Divine inspiration or not. And before you ask, Divinity is everywhere, not just in Heaven.

There are an infinite number of Toroids. Each larger Toroid is a product of a smaller one, as we may all watch when we watch a programme producing fractal patterns.

Scale, like time, is after all relative to the observer, nothing else. It does not matter what size a Toroid is. There could be a million million in one finger nail, and a million million curving over the horizon. As observers limited to a human scale our logic and our instruments can only conceive and view up to a certain point. After that, our intuitions have to operate as they do in dreams, stories and our inspirational knowledge contained in native traditions and ancient myths.

Just because time appears to move in a straight line it does not mean it does. A car driven along the equator of the earth appears to move in a straight line when viewed from space. From another view it is describing the curvature of the earth and is travelling at over one thousand miles per hour through space as the earth spirals.

These relative ideas were described by Professor Albert Einstein in the twentieth century and it is telling that the ideas of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computing have not begun to be explored by the popular imagination. Many people still live in the tick tock universe conceived by Sir Isaac Newton.

Perhaps intuition and stories will burst our thoughts out of the chains of logic into new worlds. Worlds which expand and contract, which are made of energy and matter, which move through infinite spaces and return every split second to the place they started.

Perhaps.