3 Monotheistic Religions and 3 Components of the Cosmos

Correlated coincidences

Jan 08, 2024

Published: 2024-01-09

Re-issued under ‘YesXorNo’ to try and invoke the notification mechanism.

Introduction

I intend to deliver a rather scathing attack on modern church leadership. To do this it seems proper, in the style of debating, to lay out my position such that others can identify where my arguments are poor, or I'm just plain being full of shit.

What follows is a meander into modern physics as a background to my position as a committed agnostic with extreme atheist tendencies. I declare myself an agnostic for I find no use for a monotheistic God, an anthropomorphized creator who supposedly loves me and will save me from my inherent evil. I do not yet possess the hubris to declare that such a thing does not or cannot exist. Accordingly, should others wish to believe in such a thing on faith, I'm good with it.

What follows is a riff off of the efforts of modern scientists in their disciplines and those a decade and a half ago by Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchins who lead a public discussion on atheism.

A Note On Diagrams

Included are some crude visual relief from the text. Please avoid the tendency to read them, or to take them seriously. They are works of “art”. They may be useful or inspirational, but I advise against relying upon them. Such is art.

Although the images are pairs of elements, the choice of the components of each pair is as much aesthetic as thematic. Each element is given its place at the end in Sources.

The Structure of the Cosmos

Those who cannot appreciate the glory of the Cosmos as viewed through the eyes of modern particle physics and cosmology have, I believe, received a disservice from their science teachers. Those teachers, adhering to a modern rather mechanized view of public education would perhaps have been trying to help their students remember that the mass of a proton is the almost the same as the mass of a neutron, these being the most massive of the three sub-atomic "particles". Given a different curricular focus and a little freedom the science teachers may have been more motivated to encourage their students to ask a far more fascinating question, what is mass?

To slide into one half of two most fascinating present, gorgeous cosmological conundra I like to characterize the cosmos as follows. The Universe (or Cosmos) is composed of three bits. (As a quick aside, there will be lots of quoted terms like "particle" and wishy-washy ones like 'bits', for we little, advanced apes are still very much struggling for metaphor which embraces the complexities sitting on the plate of modern physics).

Those three cosmological bits are:

a collection of things which have mass
a collection of things which have no mass and intrinsic energy
a field or space in which these things can interact

Everybody should have heard of the three things which are the matter version of the 'things with mass': the proton, neutron and electron. These are the three sub-atomic particles which one should meet in high school physics, and hopefully early enough that a little time remains to learn a bit more about them.

These three have equivalent particles which have identical masses, but inverted electrical charges, and are anti-matter. Don't panic! This is true and also simple.

The proton has a positive charge of one. Its anti-matter counterpart, the anti-proton, has the same mass and a charge of negative one. The neutron has no charge, as does its anti-matter anti-neutron. Like the proton and anti-proton pair, the neutron and anti-neutron pair have the same mass. The electron, having a mass about a two-thousandth of a proton or neutron, has a charge of negative one, and its anti-matter counterpart, the positron, has the opposite charge (positive one) and the same mass.

To re-state: we have two families of three particles with identical masses and inverted charges, if they have a charge.

When a particle meets its anti-particle something so significant occurs that it is literally existential. It is called annihilation.

Most people have seen or heard of the equation E equals M C squared.

This Einsteinian equation tells us about mass to energy conversion, and this is exactly what happens when a particle meets is anti-particle, a pure mass to energy conversion.

So outrageously powerful is this annihilation interaction that Dan Brown wrote a rather fun novel about it. Basically, a gram with half anti-matter and half matter when allowed to combine would level the largest of cities. This is because C, the speed of light, is a lot. A lot squared is a very lot. When one releases a very lot of energy in a place, all at once, it does a very lot of nasty to all of the things with mass which are nearby. Cities are made of mass, and thus suffer rather horribly. We are mostly made of mass too, so we suffer with the cities.

The really scary bit is, if we develop the technology to contain anti-matter in a compact way, then people could basically carry around a fusion warhead in a matchbox.

But, lets move from the destructive back to the fascinating. Of all the stuff that has mass in the Cosmos, it is made of two families of three things each. Of these, it is the family of the matter things (rather than anti-matter) which dominate. A large and interesting puzzle in physics is why? Why doesn't the anti-matter version dominate, or why aren't they more closely balanced?

A pragmatic answer could be, well if they were balanced, most of the mass in the universe would probably have been converted to energy and there'd not be much of interest to look at or people to do the looking. So, you sorta need the imbalance. And then, whichever side is dominant is the 'matter' side and the other is the 'anti' side and that's that. "The question is not that interesting" is one conclusion which could be reached.

But what about those mass-less things which have inherent energy? Well, thank you for asking! You already know about them too.

The most commonly known is the photon, AKA light. Recall, light is just a narrow range, the visible part, of the extremely wide range of types of photons known collectively as electromagnetic radiation. The names given to different parts of the "spectrum" are because its nice to have names for things.

We have radio waves, microwaves (as in the oven of the same name), infra-red, light, ultraviolet (UV), X-rays (as of the medical imaging technology), Gamma rays and Cosmic rays, amongst others. All of these are "just" photons with different amounts of energy. That energy is often expressed as a wavelength because photons display "wave-ish" behaviour. That wavish behaviour occurs "often, but not always", which touches on the "metaphor" problem.

There is another type of mass-less "particle" which is "wave-ish", the neutrinos. They are bit strange because they don't like very much to interact with the things which have mass. This makes them rather hard to observe. But, our local star, the sun, is pumping them out at a gargantuan rate. We just don't feel them because of their reluctance to interact.

Now, just to make things nice and balanced, there are anti-photons and anti-neutrinos too. But, ignore them for the time being.

Then there is the "space" in which the interactions between these things happen. It is called, quite deliberately, "spacetime". This is where Einstein comes in (again) and people start running for the door or closing the book. Before you do that, see if you can hang for just a bit.

Firstly, spacetime is not like space. When people think of space they tend to think of a nice space where things are all straight. There are three axes, up and down, front and back, and left and right, at right angles to each other. This is not what the space of spacetime is like. It is curved, just a bit, but curved nonetheless.

“What does the curving?”, you ask cleverly. The stuff with mass. Yep. All of the things with mass, be they matter or anti-matter, bend the space. The more mass there is in a place (or volume) the more it bends the space around it. Weird, right?

Now get this, the things which don't have mass travel through the space at the speed of light (very, very fast) and they have to follow the bending which is caused by the massy things. Astronomers see this when they look at the stars and galaxies.

You have almost certainly heard of a black hole, each of which contains the mass of several to hundreds or thousands of stars in one place. This seriously bends the space and this means that when we look at things which are behind the black hole we see a halo around the black hole instead of the spot or small blur of light which the thing (star or galaxy) is emitting.

Personally, I think this is extremely cool. Black holes have haloes because they're bending the space of spacetime. There's nothing "magical" going on here. Its just geometry with spacetime and mass and stars and galaxies.

Now we get to the bit where people really want to leave the room or close the book. But, you've got your brave hat on, right?

Time is not straight either.

Yep. You and I experience the world, meaning Cosmos, on our world, meaning Earth.

Earth is a pretty special place, cosmologically speaking. Most of the Cosmos is "empty space", meaning there's nothing long lasting in it. It is actually fully of extremely short lived sub-atomic particles, but they're around for such a short period of time that it is impossible to know what they're doing, or measure them. And science is all about measurement. If you can't measure something, then scientists are pretty much not interested in it, or more accurately have trouble speaking about it accurately. Physics slides into meta-physics when the measurement becomes extremely difficult.

That special place, Earth, is at the bottom of a gravity well. We sit on the surface, protected from most of the danger around us (the sun) by the planet's magnetic field. Time down here moves in a nice regular "slow" way. Our planet rotates smoothly as we orbit our star. Because of the tilt of the Earth's rotational axis we have seasons and its all nice and regular and lovely. And we are beautifully adapted to exist in this calm, regular, special place in spacetime.

You may have heard that if people traveled to another star system they would age more slowly than us. This is a slightly confusing and convoluted way of saying that time slows down the faster one moves. The change gets extreme the closer to the speed of light one gets, but this is true even at slower speeds.

For example, when you use your mobile phone to see where you are on a map, that is being done by GPS satellites. It is the clocks on those satellites which are doing the important measuring, and those satellites are moving really fast but way, way less than the speed of light. Because they are moving fast, the time dilation comes in and we have to account for that or the location become really wonky, inaccurate. Accurate GPS depends on accounting for time dilation.

Time is not straight.

Now, what if you observe the cosmos on a photon of light?

One of Einstein's thought experiments, which is a hint that its not a bad thing to do, was to ask that exact question.

Time stops.

Yep. Crazy, crazy, crazy. But, you only get to experience this lack of time if you have no mass.

Hang in there.

If one has mass and one accelerates to go faster and faster, as one approaches the speed of light the amount of mass one has increases. What?!!! Yep. Hang in there.

This increase in mass continues "exponentially" as a massive thing approaches the speed of light such that if it ever attained the speed of light it would have an infinite mass. This is impossible as nothing has infinite anything. Alternatively, if a thing had infinite mass it would bend the universe into itself.

!!!

What? Crazy, crazy, crazy. But true.

The Vulnerability of Theories

Before we get to a conclusion of sorts, a little point about science may be of interest. One can divide scientists into experimental scientists and theoretical scientists. (Of course, many scientists are both, depending on what they're doing, and they have all been experimentalists at one time or another.) The experimentalists have a HUGE advantage over the theoreticians. Its takes one, and only one, repeatable experiment which contradicts a theory to invalidate it. Accordingly, it is extremely difficult to be a "successful" theoretician.

This is why the theoreticians whose work has withstood long periods of experimental "scrutiny" are given the highest accolades. It took Einstein, with quiet some help from Maxwell, to supersede Newton. And, I promise you that there is a Nobel Prize in Physics awaiting whoever, or whichever group, describes a repeatable experiment which disproves any aspect of Einstein's General Relativity. A Big Prize awaits. Experimentalists have been trying to describe a repeatable experiment which does exactly this for about a century now, and all have failed.

Summing the Triumvirate

So, there be the three bits, the stuff with mass, and stuff with no mass but inherent energy, and the spacetime in which they interact. The massive stuff bends the space part of the spacetime and the mass-less stuff moving at the speed of light does not experience time.

Is that just Goddamn Gorgeous or what?

And I didn't even get into the bit about massive particles like electrons behaving like waves. If you want to go there, read about the double-split experiment. It'll really do in your noggin'.

Or there is how stars are the factories of the cosmos transmuting simple fundamental things like protons and neutrons into larger atoms like Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen which play the building-block role for organic life, including us. That the stars themselves have an existence, a part of the flow of change in the universe, being born and dying in a quiet cooling or screaming against the dying of the light in a supernova.

I introduced all of the above as a slide into one half to two conundra. That half was going to be Dark Matter, with the other being Dark Energy. But, the wonder of it all had me meandering afar. Perhaps I'll return to engage with those lovely questions anon.

In the next article, I'll have that beef with the moral leadership, of lack thereof, of religious leaders. Maybe after that we can come back the Dark Questions.

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Sources

A Hidden Giant Placed a Beacon, YesXorNo, 2023-02-26

Would We Be Better Off Without Religion? - Christopher Hitchens [2007] ✝️ | Intelligence Squared, Hitchens and Dawkins participate in a debate in 2007, Intelligence Squared, uploaded 2023-02-11