the Word BigBang

Way, way back in time, before all this stuff was here, even back before the Big Bang, something very amazing happened.


I was wondering about our universal origin, so I took a chance on a Wikipedia entry about it. This is what I found:

“ The (Big Bang) model describes how the universe expanded from a very high-density and high-temperature state.”

Scientists and dreamers like me have, for many and many a year, puzzled about what that “very high-density and high-temperature state” might have been.
I was pondering this development. My irrational dreamer self was wrestling with Reason as I attempted to figure out what that very high-density pre-Bang substance might have been. Being the 20th-century educated baby boomer that I am, my mind stumbled into an idea that I must have discovered in a science classroom somewhere along the line. Therefore, E=mc² banged into my big (bigger than a chimpanzee’s) brain.
Energy = mass x the speed of light squared.
Which means something like: When a very small chunk of (mass) material stuff gets its atomic parts whirling around at a certain extremely high speed, and when that speed is zipping along at a rate of that same velocity multiplied by itself (faster than I can imagine), the whole baleewick crosses some kind of transformational threshold and suddenly that mass of nuclear stuff gets changed Presto Chango! into something fundamentally different— Energy!
Waves and waves of energy . . .
Energy. . . hmm. . . whataboudit . . . Now I do know that there are many different forms of energy. There’s kinetic energy, like a bat hitting a ball, which then suddenly propels that ball to an absolutely reverse direction from the direction in which the pitcher had pitched it. Pretty amazing thing for a batter to do, when you think about it.
Amazing. Lots of amazing in this universe. Moving right along. . . don't blink or you'll miss something.
And then there’s potential energy, like Mr, Newton’s apple, which was, naturally, connected to an apple tree until, all of a sudden, something gave way and the apple dropped to the ground, which provoked Mr. Newton to ask:
Say what?
Which translates from 17th-century English to: what the heck is going on here? Or, if you’re an out-of-the-box kind of thinker . . . what the hell is going on here?
Potential energy instantaneously being converted to kinetic energy! That's what.
Perhaps it’s a little microcosm of the Big Bang, but on an exponentially smaller scale. The apple does make, you know, a kind of thud when it hits the ground, and then it transforms into a treat for an itinerant traveler to partake thereof.
Meanwhile, back at the tranche,  back to the the case of the macrocosm, the, as it were,  Big Bang, which was hypothesized as high-density matter being converted suddenly into kinetic energy, and subsequently expanding outward . . . (as John Lennon sang back in the day) across the universe . . .
and then, along the way, settling into a reverse of the mass-to-energy scenario, back into the energy-to-mass state of being, which brought forth . . . mass, stuff . . .
a Universe, duh . . .
I can only wonder, well, it is what it is, or . . . or it is what it has a become, as a result of all that instantaneous transformation, which has been transforming itself over 14.5 billion years to ravel as what we call “the Cosmos," and everything therein.
14.5 billion years of unfolding Universe.
Wow!
Francis Collins’, in his book The Language of God, described the beginning of the phenom, this way:

“For the first million years after the Big Bang, the universe expanded, the temperature dropped, and nuclei and atoms began to form. Matter began to coalesce into galaxies under the force of gravity. It acquired rotational motion as it did so, ultimately resulting in the spiral shape of galaxies such as our own. Within those galaxies local collections of hydrogen and helium were drawn together, and their density and temperature rose. Ultimately nuclear fusion commenced.”

All of this posited data reverberates in my 21st-century brain, settling into my born-again spirit, and restates itself as an expanded statement of Moses’ ancient, pre-science explanation:

“Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light; God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”

Makes sense to me. You?
 
Glass half-Full

Shifting Sands Sublime

Beneath the appearance of things
behind the wonder that contemplation brings
there lies a universe of joy and pain
entrained upon whatever relics still remain
of a world colored by some eternal stain;
and wherever that stain remains
things are not and will never be the same
provoking some to surmise it’s just a game
that they can play and then refrain
from any effort to name
or explain.
And yet,
so many live for what they can get;
they allow no time to pause and let
life just happen along the way
so they can soon look back and say
what a joy it is to pause and stay
in the lingering light of a well-lived day
while the world just turns on come what may.
Oh, history breaks on sands far away
while here we enter into the fray;
we laugh or cry along the way
tomorrow and today,
I say, I say:
If I could comprehend this troubled world
so creative, yet destructively unfurled
I’d grasp the mystery, so sublime
that slaps between the sands of time
on this ever-shifting, long shoreline—

this consciousness of mine,
maybe it’s in or out of line
and maybe with a little sip of wine,
yes, I’d dream up some silly little rhyme,
and whether it be sublime and fine
or not worth a dime,
it nevertheless is mine,
and yet it can be thine
if you take the time.

King of Soul

A Big Bangin' Good Time It Was!

 In the beginning Yahoweh banged out the big universe, E=mc², and while doing so he set aside one particular chunk of it to form the earth.

The earth was initially formless and void of life, and darkness occluded all the deep stuff that, really, when you get right down to it, had some great potentiality, but it needed a little help, and some serious diversity, so the impressively energetic activating Spirit Yahoweh began activating the elements and he was lol at the emergence of helium so he got into into mating the hydrogen with  oxygen and before you knew it Yahoweh was, like, skimming all over the surface of the waters.

Its true what’s been reported on both MSBNB and Foxxy that Yahoweh did in fact tame the electromagnetic energy that had begun banging around wildly: Let there be light, he said and guess what, yo, there it was: light. Things were brightening up.

And yo, check it out, y’all: wherever the light struck earth— Yahoveh called it day, and wherever the darkness prevailed on earth he called night. Nice little back and forth thing going on—in and out of the bright spot—from the very start. Some great possibilities here.

Now it just so happened that  the way the earth popped out—it had this little spinning action going on, which would in the long run make things really interesting for us homo sapiens later. And so the  revolving motion of the earth brought forth a very cool  morning-morphing-into-evening scenario.

Therefore, since it would be easier for us to see what was happening in the daytime part of this developing arrangement, we call that whole once-around-the-axis revolution a “day,” meaning, you know, the whole 24-hour deal. . . as in, another day in the life, eh? You trackin’ with me?

But hey! Creator was just getting started, y’all.

Yahoweh spoke: Let there be a, like, an atmosphere in the midst of the waters, and let it get intimately involved with the waters and separate some waters from other waters.

And so Yahoweh breathed out this very expansive atmosphere, which retained some waters as hanging together and staying in the flow, while other waters drifted on up into the troposphere to do their rarified atmospheric thing. You can’t keep a good molecule down, and they’re gettin’ high just thinking about it.

Anyway, Yahoveh knew that, on down the road, folks would gaze up into that airy firmament and be inspired by the amazing expanse of it, so he gave it an impressive name: heaven. Meanwhile, back at  what would later become the ranch, that revolving day/night configuration was shifting into second gear. Therefore, by ’n by the second day was just as incredible as the first had been, if not more-so.

Yahoweh spoke: Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear. And hey! It was good! Pangaea, baby, that’s what I’m talking about!

Yahoweh called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas, and he saw that it was good.

It’s all good!

Pickin’ up steam, Yahoweh kept a-goin’. Let the earth sprout vegetation, he declared. We’ll be needin’ some flora for these folks, y’all:  plants yielding their seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit with their stamens and carpels and fruit chromosomes and stranded DNA embedded in their seeds; and so on and so on.

And so on Pangaea was brought forth vegetation, plants yielding their genetic progeny

and trees bearing seeds with tree-deoxyribonucleic coding so that all subsequent tree-cells would get the message that God had spoke and he said it was good, y’all!  Propogate!

Meanwhile, down at the axis, that earth just kept spinnin’ along and there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

Then Yahoweh said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and even years!

And let them lights light up the earth. And it was so.

And within all this arrangement, Yehoweh set up two special lights: the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night.

That lesser  light is the one by which Tony Bennett or some ole crooner croons the tune: when the moon’s in your eye like a big pizza pie—that’s amoré!

Oh, and btw, while Yehoweh was doing all this, he also, like, got a creative handle on all them whizzing chunks of big bang detritus that were barreling through space and he, like, made the stars, maybe as an afterthought, I dunno.

He did very generously open up the heavens so that later organismic developmentals (see trailer) would get a little light on the subject, and make adjustments in their routine for the night phase because nights would be a cool change-of-pace from the day-to-day routine, because we could look up at the stars and be inspired by them and make up stories about Orion and the BiG Dipper and the Big Bang and whatnot.

There was evening and there was morning and that’s the way it is, fourth day, hey hey hey! Stay tuned for a fabulous 3-day weekend!

Glass Chimera

The Bookends of Experience

As far as East is from the West,

and near to worst as to the best,

I have wandered lonely as a cloud

as we travel from some swaddle to the shroud.

Once we drove a stake in the ground and called it home;

now this morning wakes me here as sun is shone.

Situated now on continental sunrise heights

while recalling vivid island sunset sights,

and noticing here our stark and spindly leaves, these trees,

I recollect the wide and warm of ocean breeze.

Experience goes as far as mountains are from sand,

then circles back around to water, air and land.

Sometimes life is hard, you know;

at other times it's soft as autumn leaves make show.

As days turn dark,

so light doth continually toss out some spark

of hope or happiness or flexibility

that is yet assailed by despair or dearth or rigidity.

Experience comes as vividly as rising sun;

then memory renders it precious when day is done.

Doors of perception

open into windows of reflection

as present slips into the past

and future finds a fleeting foothold fast.

We amble here and there and everywhere;

we ramble now and then without care.

When reality and reflection mingle in the sands of time

imagination splurges into rhythm, sometimes in rhyme

when myself is beached upon the rock of time,

and our family finds itself with God and universe in line.

Glass half-Full

A Strand of Providence

One of my favorite things to do in this life is visiting the sea strand. The beach. While growing up in Louisiana and Mississippi, our family had many excursions with fond memories to the Gulf Coast at Mississippi and Florida.

After graduation from LSU in 1973, I took a job in Florida and moved to St. Petersburg.

In my year-and-a half stay there I spent many days and hours at the beach, becoming intimately familiar with that setting--that expression of nature's wonders.

Through many hours of studying the interaction of tidal water and surf-sand, I noticed a few things about the cycles of our life existence.

In the forty years since that Florida time I have visited many beaches throughout the world, from Calabash to Rockaway to Dover and Calais, from Hawaii to China, from Tel Aviv to Cayman to California and Carolina. I love experiencing beaches. Doesn't everyone?

Today is our first morning in Costa Rica. We got into Liberia airport, then drove to Tamarindo, on the Pacific. So of course I got up early and walked a few hundred yards to the beach. Perfect beach: wide, flat, smooth with very pacific waves, arranged in a classic half-moon arc with nearby low mountains in the distance. Clear morning, not yet hot.

As has happened on may beaches before, the first thing I notice while approaching the surf is that cycle of dark and light bands of sand at the water's edge, where the waves roll in gently and do their artwork in the sand. My favorite beach characteristic to notice and contemplate.

I consider these waves, their perpetual rearrangement of the sand grains, and it takes me back to the time when I first began to notice this universal cycle, back in St. Petersburg. A meditation on nature to revisit. I think I'll linger for awhile.

Being a civilized animal, I prefer to sit in a chair while thinking. So I go back to the condo and get one.

A few minutes later I am sitting in the chair at the water's edge, considering the ocean, the sand, the wave motions and their visual record of rearranging dark and light bands of sand, the cycles they indicate or perhaps represent, the universe, God, and ignorant armies clashing by night and Dover Beach and all that stuff.

I think the first level of such thought/meditation is analytical. Is that natural to me as a man, or is it an acquired habit? just something I was taught to do in school? I don't know. Put that layer of analysis back in a file somewhere in my head and wait for the deeper, experiential level. I am looking at the Pacific beach, which is right in front of me now.

Wait a minute. What about all the stuff of my life that came before?

Now I am a Christian, have been since 1979, or maybe even before that when I was raised Catholic. So, to base my analyses and judgements about life, its consequences, priorities and outcomes, etc on an ancient Revelation, the Bible, the church--what is that? How does that affect any objective analysis I may attempt? Well, sure it does.

Hey, It's what I am. I was born into a specific place and time, with all the cultural baggage thereof.But let's not get too analytical. By grounding my judgements on my own experience as well as ancient Revelation that was handed down to me through the ages, I am utilizing the best of both worlds-- the experience of those prophets of old, primarily Jesus himself, as well as my own experience.

Now, back to the here and now. Over here in the sand, dark bands are alternating with light. There is some kind of cycle going on here, some kind of process. Been going on a long time, seems to be universal. Seeing that cycle of sand bands with my eyes is objective. Relating them to other life cycles is subjective. Can I do otherwise? No matter what theses, hypotheses, or conclusions I come to, I am a subjective man, and I will make use, in this life, of both the objective truth that is really out there, the cumulative wisdom of other men/women, and my subjective experience and evaluation of it. I'm going for the best of them all. Do I have any other choice? My options are limited.

To be human means to understand that our options are limited, so we would do well to make the best of them. Rather than dwelling on what we don't understand, consider and act upon what we do find to be true and workable.

By the way, and I didn't tell you this before. Yesterday, I experienced the worst pain I have ever had in my life. This was no small thing for me, although in the big picture it is insignificant. It's over now. That's the main thing. But the pain experience has produced an aftermath.

How did this pain happen? I had had a bout with walking pneumonia or something like it before we left North Carolina. My head was all stopped up with mucous or sinus fluid or whatever that stuff is that's stuck in your head when you've got a cold. While were in the plane descending to Costa Rica, I had the most terrible half-hour of pain in my life, because I had not done the cold medications effectively.

Now this is getting pretty dam subjective, talking about pain and my health condition, like the 62-year-old-geezer that I have become. I hate it, don't want to go that route. I'm not stuck in the wheelchair at the nursing home yet. So fuhgedaboudit.

But I do have to say something about all that physical health report stuff, because there is a lesson in it.

So I'm sitting here on the strand with my old thoughts about the universality of the surf and sand, and my right ear is still clogged with that stuff from yesterday's struggle against walking pneumonia. I've been trying for days now to get rid of that mucous.

I tilt my head to the right. Something--a liquid--shifts inside my head, and suddenly I can hear more clearly.

Thanks be to God!

Maybe you think that crediting God for such deliverance from pain is a naive assumption. Who cares? It's my life, my ear, pain. I will deal with it. I am not only going to thank God for this little relief that came in the tilting of a head,in the blinking of an eye, but I am going to use my God-given hands to begin to solve the problem.

What will happen if I gently put my little finger in my ear and manipulate that ear canal ever-so-slightly while my head is tilted? Could such intervention, perhaps, release some of the fluid from the ear and thus alleviate some pain? I'll try it.

I do it.

It works! Clogged ear now clearer than it was.

Praise be to God. Thank you Jesus!

Pretty subjective response, I know--this burst of grateful praise, but I'll gratefully accept the little strand of divine deliverance, even though I was the one who administered it.

Now, as for conclusions and evaluations about this insignificant event while contemplating sand, waves and the universe:

The cycle of pain and absence of pain--it comes; it goes. When the pain comes, it's hell on earth, but when it's gone--Thank you, God. A man's gotta roll with the tide. I'll take it. Not bad for a Friday morning.

Glass half-Full

Something from Nothing

Today, I am going to expose to you my ignorance of quantum mechanics in the study of physics. Furthermore, you will plainly see that my childish grasp of the physicists' exposition of this phenomenon is woefully inadequate, even naive. But it doesn't matter if you can detect right off the bat how blatantly dense is my take on the matter. You see, I am one of those who short circuits the rational pursuit of truth by inserting faith in a Creator where there should by all hypothetical propositions be an equation, or some hard-earned experimental data.

It all started with this: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201132, wherein Lawrence Krauss is discussing the contents of his new book, A Universe From Nothing, with Ira Flatow, and Lawrence makes such potentially gravitational statements as "Nothing is unstable," meaning that nothingness itself is unstable, insofar as that it has a habit of generating stuff out of itself (nothing) out in space.

"Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them."

Spontaneous generation, we used to call it, and thinking about it is, as Lawrence points out, a little bit "like counting angels on the head of a pin."

But somewhere in the half-life of Lawrence's broadcast/webcast explanations, what really set my neurons hurdling into photonic frenzies is this idea that an electron, which is whirring somewhat orbitally around a proton, cannot be adequately assessed in terms of its position in relation to the proton, or in relation to, for that matter (haha) anything else. This is because, as soon as the analyst, or scientist, casts light on the subject particle(wave) in question, in order to view the electron and make some kind of determinating statement about it, the light (the energetic effect of the light) itself alters the quarky little rascal, rendering its position indeterminable! Imagine that! Like trying to herd cats.

And Lawrence also mentioned:

"Whole universes can pop out of nothing, by the laws of quantum mechanics."

Ha! I was stumped.

I tried, well into the evening and the nighttime, to wrap my warpish mind around all this, which must resemble a light beam trying to keep up with a neutrino, as the French say in Switzerland. I was getting a little short on the fourth dimension while trying to capture the essence of those quarks in question and fathom their unquantifiable fidgettance. And then, as if that weren't enough produndity to drag my faltering comprehension into a blackhole, Paul Krugman's recent comparison between Austrian economics and the 18th-century theory of phlogiston in chemistry popped out of nowhere, not to mention Higgs-Boson confusion on top of that, and...

while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping. . . and the faith-based short circuit suddenly presented itself, when my friend Dave sent out his daily ditty, http://outdeep.com/2012/01/13/light-in-our-heart , which started with this conveniently accessible concept:

For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6)

to which my friend had also added:

"The sovereign creativity of God to bring forth what to us would have been unthinkable is staggering. This artistic endeavor of the Divine is used to illustrate the similar work of enlightening my heart."

Wherefore, I in my lay-like confusion decided to just go with that, call it a day, and hit the hay, where my wife was so peacefully sleeping in preparation for today's nursing duties. I had found a universal incarnation that I could wrap my weary mind around. Now this morning, the sun shines brightly on snow out in the back .40. Thank God for a beautiful winter day here in the inexplicable universe. Ignorance is, as they say, bliss. Grits is good too, for breakfast, with cheese.

Glass half-Full

Thanks for Frank's perspective

I've been racking my brain all weekend trying to get some more story-line for the new novel, Smoke, after writing only the beginnining of chapter 1 last week.

Then I got this attachment from my friend Frank:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.1&thid=12ecf2c076bc3c1f&mt=application/vnd.ms-powerpoint&url=https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui%3D2%26ik%3D205cde5d1d%26view%3Datt%26th%3D12ecf2c076bc3c1f%26attid%3D0.1%26disp%3Dsafe%26zw&sig=AHIEtbR6Asl7-55bXA582rCKPKbp28sY8w&pli=1

Frank sent this link to me because he is an astronomer. He's also an engineer who has, somewhere along his 95-year orbital path, built a telescope or two after grinding the 6-inch lenses. In addition to being a smart tinkerer, he has spent years of his long life being a great singer from New Jersey, a model-airplane constructor, a sailor, husband (for a while) and father, and inventor. Frank lives at the apartment complex where I work as the maintenance guy.

Sometimes I think if we had more enterprising folks like Frank we wouldn't be in such a dearth of employment opportunities. I wish the problem-solvers of this world could become as busy as Frank has been trying to make things work over his 95 years on our planet.

So don't let the long link address above intimidate you. If you haven't yet had a good view of what the Hubble telescope is scoping up there in earth orbit, check it out. It's definitely a perspective-adjustment.

It certainly diverted my mind from:


...which is the starting point of my novel-in-progress. So far, I've got two characters, neither one of them are in the coronation pic above (Times of London, May 20,1937). But my two characters, Philip Marlowe and Nathan Wachov, are just a mile or two away, and trying to get to Trafalgar Square for a view of the new King's return procession to Buckingham Palace.

Anyway, those Hubble shots from my friend Frank, linked above, changed my perspective on what appears to be the "Smoke" in our universe.

Smoke, the new novel-in-progress

from Relativity to Rock

As the big bang or whatever you want to call it manifested a universe through ever-widening time and space, Logos asserted, in the midst of diverging matter and energy, a creative force to countermand the default entropy. It was good.

So good, in fact, that Logos got excited and wanted to share the exuberance with someone. So Logos arranged a certain solar system so that it would fling out a planet upon which optimum conditions could evolve to produce sentient beings.

After those living entities had developed to an optimum condition, Logos breathed into one chosen specimen a new dimension called Spirit, which enabled the new species to communicate with Logos, which is why Logos referred to homo sapiens as being "in our image."

What that in our image attribute meant was: able to communicate with its creator. This was no small step for mankind.

One day many generations later an important turning point in the history of homo sapiens was reached. On a clear starry night, a certain very sensitive, intelligent man stepped out of his tent, looked up at the heavens and thought: This world, with its accompanying heavens and creatures, is quite impressive. I'd like to write a book about how it all happened, because my people have been wondering about its origins.

And Logos, reading his mind, replied: Good idea. I've been waiting for someone like you to come along. Sit down and start writing; I'll instruct you. I'll give you some material that will help the people understand what's going on in the universe, and will also help them to make a better life for themselves.

From our perspective several thousand years later, the man's opus was quite limited by his place and time. But he did a nice job of it, and managed to produce, with a little divine help, a best seller. You can still get a copy today.

His name was Moses.