Sciences

Speculations

I should mention that I am not a scientist by trade and not attending any classes related to the following subjects. I am merely interested in the subject material and am using this space to air a few of my thoughts. Rather than regurgitating scientific articles it is more like just thinking out loud. This is not a blog or discussion group, however, if you have an interest in any of the following subjects and would like to comment feel free to email me at jg @ thegreatvoid.net (Notice I added spaces to the email address to defeat web crawlers).


We can be certain the past did exist. We can remember what we had for breakfast yesterday. Does it only exist now as a record in my mind or does the universe of yesterday still exist? Science considers time as being a measure of movement. A three dimensional object can move through three dimensional space but it cannot be in more than one place at a time.   

But time does affect us in more ways that just being able to move about freely in three dimensional space. It is the record of our past and hopes for the future. Perhaps we are really talkling about separate concepts and there is more to the past, present, and future than just plot points along the t[] axis.

[JG]




Gravity:
Gravity is a natural phenomenon where all objects with mass attract each other. The mystery is understanding the connection between physical objects separated by space.

Galileo is famed for his dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa to to demonstrate that objects of varying weights accellerate at the same rate.

Newtons brilliant theory of Universal Gravitation quantified the effects of gravity and tied it to the motion of the planets but did not explain what gravity was or why it was.  He even warned against using his theories to view the universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."

Einstein viewed gravity as the warping of space-time explaining why inertially moving objects accellerate towards each other. Einsteins theory is very imaginative. A description I'm sure he would have appreciated. Imagine the moon in it's orbit is really following a straight line through space that has been curved by the presence of three dimentional matter. That concept has lead to the idea that perhaps scientists of the future can intentionally warp space in order to travel at faster than light speeds. In science fiction that is known as warp-speed and the engine to accomplish this travel is called a warp drive. Very cool stuff. What doesn't work for me, and perhaps I just need to do some more reading, is what about objects that have no innertia? I hold an object in the air. I let go and it accelerates towards the ground. Certainly a force (gravity) acted upon it.

There are a number of field theories which view gravity being caused by a field of sub atomic particles called gravitons surrounding all objects with mass. Kind of like the effects of magnetism.

I will admit that the field theory concept works best for me although I don't see gravity working quite like magnetism. As near as we can tell, there are no poles with gravity. No point at which objects are repelled from each other. Otherwise you would flip an object over and it would fly into space or more likely immedeately flip itself back over. It may be possible for particles to be "charged" one way or another and we are not aware of them due to anti-gravity charged objects being repelled far from our ability to detect them. In this case, assuming at some point we engineer a way to move freely about space, it might be difficult to catch anti-gravity charged objects for scientific or industrial use as they would forever be moving away from us. That leaves the question of whether or not it's possible to generate an anti-gravity field or to manipulate the properties of an object to give it an opposite gravitational charge. There is no reason I know of that this would be possible, and I tend to think it is unlikely, but it would greatly simplify problems of flight and especially space flight. 

The most difficult thing to conceptualize with the field theory is how can the sun be energizing enough graviton sub atomic particles to hold Pluto in it's orbit? Certainly it would mean that space is not a vaccuum. It would really be more like a gas. We do know that space is not empty. It is full of dust, rocks, comets, moons, planets, stars. Space must also be filled with enough sub-atomic particles to apply significant force on very large objects at great distances.

Gravity is strong enough to hold the earth together with such force the center is molten and it's atmosphere clings to it as it hurtles through space. Thankfully we are engineered with a low enough mass to allow us to live on it's surface. We are neither crushed nor cast into orbit. Knowbody really knows what gravity is. As technologically advanced as we think we are gravity remains a mystery. That should keep us humble...but does it?

[JG]




Evolution:
I recently had a friend say to me "You cannot compare me to a monkey but you can compare me to an ape." It was a response to a monkey on your back joke and has nothing to do with this subject but it got me thinking about evolution and the idea that man evolved from the ape vs the idea that in the midst of all the life on the planet man was uniquely created vs the idea that God used an ape as a starting template for a man and just endowed him with intelligence and sent him off on a separate evolutionary path.

I do believe that my body is a physical one constructed of the same physical elements as all living things. I also believe that living things do change over time but for all life to have come from a single microbe ancestor would necessitate a chain of ancestry leading all the way back to the microbe and before. Elements swished around by ocean waves and zapped by lightning spontaneously created a living cell. The cell became a microbe, the microbe became a fish, the fish became a lizard, the lizard became a rodent, the rodent became an ape, the ape became a human.  

I can't really know how life evolved. All I can do, like everybody else (scientists included), is speculate. I can, however, compare humans to apes and see how like or different we are. I will admit I see very little resemblance but I will expound...

I will start with a basic physical comparison. While I have four limbs and so does the ape. That construct is common to almost all mammals. That's basic engineering. Four limbs are more stable than three. The ape does have hands on it's two fore limbs but it also has them on it's hind limbs as well. It's fore limbs are longer than it's hind limbs. An ape spends more time on all fours than it does standing upright. The apes structure is clearly designed to facilitate climbing trees. An ape is covered in hair from head to toe. These differences could be explained by evolutionary changes but this is really just scratching the surface.

Here is the real difference...
While apes spend most thier day sitting butt naked in the woods eating leaves and picking bugs out of each others fur I get up each morning and drive a car to a job designing computer systems. While an ape eats just about anything it can pluck off a branch, pick up off the ground, or pull out of another apes fur I go to a restaurant or the grocery store where I consume carfully packaged, seasoned, and cooked foods. I use toilet paper and take showers. I wear clothing. I read books and compose music. I am able to not only speak but conceive, understand, and convey complex ideas. While an ape could be trained to put on clothing and you could take an ape to a school and you could teach the ape some simple tricks the ape would never be able to understand why. An ape acts mostly on instinct rather than intellect and has no concept of morality. An ape has little or no ability to alter its environment to improve it's living conditions. We have houses and cars and skyscrapers and trains and airplanes and spaceships and television and computers.

To me the ape has a great deal in common with a monkey but very little in common with a human. I have no problem believing the concept that living organisms change over time and may even change dramatically. I do not see evolution as being able to reasonbly explain all things. Starting with origins. The incredible complexity required for even the most simplistic of life forms makes random generation very unlikely. Even over millions of years. I'm talking about DNA, RNA, Ribosomes, Mitochondria, semi-permiable membranes, metabolic pathways, vesicles, cytoplasm, and mitosis. It is more conceivable to randomly generate a toaster oven than a living cell. The toaster being a much more simplistic structure.

Evolution doesn't explain the development of complex structures very well either. For example look at flagellum, which is a simple hair like appendage that a single cell organism is able to move for propultion. There is no logical evolutionary path for the creation of such an appendage. As simple as it is compaired to other organs it still requires very complex biological engineering to produce and doesn't even come close to the complexity of brains and eyes and livers and vocal chords.

I am convinced that without design of great intellect, and tremendous skill to implement, creation of life and it's reproduction and development would be impossible. In the past I have been somewhat of the opinion that God gave the "spark" to an ape like creature and the result of that spark was the emergence of man. Now I can't shake the thought of how unneccessary that would be for a God who already populuated the planet with life. And while I think the question of mans evolution is much less important than recognizing we are much different than any other life form in the now I think the explanation of God creating man is the most reasonable.

Addendum...

I have recently heard an alternate evolution theory that I felt was interesting and compelling. I do not recall the official name of the theory so I will name it the multiple branch theory. If life evolved from multiple origins instead of a singular origin that would be much more rational. If many creatures evolved into a greater diversity of species and likewise plants then it would solve many problems. To start there is no way to tie plant and animal life together and it is a great stretch to say they came from the same origin. It also eliminates the problem of time. In order for there to be even the remotest possibility for the current populist evolutionary theory to work you have to build in vast periods of time. It is impossible to know anything, beyond theory, about the earth 650 million years ago or to determine a thing has existed for that long. But with multiple branch evolution great diversity in life can occur in thousands instead of millions of years.

This just brought a thought to mind. There are many among us who are pompus and think our theories are so smart they uphold them as fact and smother intellectual discource and use these theories as an excuse for religious intolerance. I believe someday people will look back at evolution and other theories and laugh at how primitive and goofy we were. Like we do looking back into our own history, as recent as two hundred years, when we thought leaches and blood draining could cure sickness. In case you weren't aware they used leaching on George Washington just prior to his death. While it didn't ease his illness reports have it the leaches felt lunch was fabulous.

[JG]




Cosmology:
There is in fact great consistency in nature. Physics is the science of understanding the laws of the physical universe (or the laws of nature) which is only possible because of this consistency. In nature we see all things seek equlibrium. So it is logical to assume that the universe would also instead of infinately expanding. This has lead to many theories like an ever expanding and contracting universe or a universe that resembles a spinning bubble and the age old infinite universe.
 
When we observe galaxies we see they spiral. They have a denser center with arms of disapating solar systems. Actually there are four different galaxy types. I think they are spiral, eliptical, elongated, and irregular. One of the premises of the big bang is that we see the variance in frequencies of radio waves, light rays, x rays, gama rays & ect emitted from distant galaxies seem to be elongated (blue shifted) relatively proportional to our estimate of thier distance to the earth. It was Hubble who first announced this observation. This seems to apply except in the case of closer galaxies which would appear to be (red shifted) moving towards us. The explanation for this is gravitational pull.
 
What we really know is that all objects in space are moving in relation to all others. (A rule from relativity, the speed of a moving object can only be measured relative to another object.) Notice the formation of galixies. It's not just a static blob with no form and it's not just expanding out. It's spinning. We are in one of the arms of solar systems being spun off from our Galaxy. The Big Bang theory suggests space stretching and all objects in space being stuck in space like flies in a web. As the web of space expands all the flies move apart from each other. From the center out. But that doesn't seem to jive with the spinning motion we observe in galaxies. So we speculate that all galaxies are flying away from a central point but gravity is pulling objects together so that they orbit but there doesn't seem to be any consistency related to thier axis.
 
All objects we know of are spinning. We think we are standing still but we are really standing on a spinning orb moving at roughly 1000 mph. Thats fast! The spinning earth is rotating in our solar system at a rate of roughly 67,000 mph. Wow, thats really fast! The solar system spins around our galaxy at roughly 486,000 mph. Wow, thats really, really, fast! You get the point. Where does all this spinning come from if all things are stationary reletive to the fabric of space but expanding outward away from each other at a constant rate of speed?
 
There are problems with the big bang thoery which are explained by the theoretical existence of dark matter and dark energy. There is no evidence these things exist. It's just the only way to make the theory work. I'm not opposed to that. Use your minds. Question, explore, theorize. It's all just a lot of immagination and speculation. We cannot truely say how things occur over time because our ability to witness them has been so very recent and a lot of speculation is being drawn from very little actual information. It is like re-constructing the bible with only ten words from each chapter. To say it looks like most galaxies are moving away from us so that means that the universe is not only expanding but that it started as a singularity and expanded out from there in a mega explosion is a huge stretch of the immagination.
 
Why would an unimmaginably dense clump of matter containing all the matter in the universe and being so tightly bound together by that increadible force of gravity, incaculably more dense than the greatest black hole, suddenly exlode creating this peaceful space in it's midst for the formation of heavenly bodies? The molecules in your body are significantly less dense than that yet you don't see them exploding at the speed of light. If one object struck another object head on with such force as to cause them to explode wouldn't they shatter into many fragments that would fly off independant of each other being thusly freed from thier gravitational prison? We have seen what happens when we split the atom. Do you think a universe was created in the wake of it's emition of energy? Maybe, who knows.
 
Cosmology is as much the science of imagination as physical science. Thats what I like about it. The problem I have is when one such theory is taken and hailed as absolute truth. The big bang theory itself was the result of people being willing to think beyond the conventional idea of a static universe.
 
Then of course there is intelligent design. For me there is only one possible reason for there to be such great consistency in the laws of nature. It's no more provable as fact than anything else but is a compelling idea. I'm not suggesting it should replace the big bang or any other theory. It is just worthwhile to note that the existence of unchanging, unbending, unbreakable laws of nature that perfectly allow for the existence of our solar system and our planet and the formation of all life on it would seem to be much more than coincidence. When you look at all the variables you see the odds are for it and the odds against it are great.

An additional thought about the big bang. In a conventional explosion there is a central point in space where the explosion occurs and everything moves out from this center. In such an explosion model it should be possible to observe a varience in the rate of objects moving apart based on which direction of space you are observing. This should point to the center where it all began but our observations appear to be consistent regardless of what direction we look. This would tend to indicate that we are at the center of the expanding universe. This is unlikely since we know that we are not even in the center of our own galaxy. The explanation for this is that it is an expansion of space not matter that is equal to all objects. Think of it as points drawn on the surface of an expanding balloon. As the balloon expands all the dots increase in distance from each other. Of course this is just a two dimensional representation.
 
It actually gives us no real concept of the actual three dimensional "shape" of the universe. To say that the universe has a shape is to indicate it has a boundary and raises the question of what is beyond that boundary. There are some theories that suggest that our four observable dimensions, height, width, depth, and time, (time being the measurement of motion within three dimensional space) only exist within the construct of the known universe. Space therefore wraps in on itself. If you were to travel in a perfectly straight line in one direction you eventually would end up where you started.Observations of gravity (we still don't really know what gravity is) are the result of the warping of the spacetime continuum and are an example of that. Thusly orbiting objects are really traveling in a straight line through the curvature of space.
 
There is also the consideration that some of our observations regarding energy rays (are they a wave, are they a stream, are they a physical particle or pure energy or both? We don't know.) are innacurate. Could the blue shift observed from distant galaxies (and red shift of closer ones) with a greater shift observed for more distant galaxies actually be a natural phenomena of distance? Especially knowing that space is not a true vacuum. It is full of dust and debris. That would actually indicate that these galaxies are not in fact moving apart. Just the opposite. It would indicate they are maintaining thier positions relative to us. It is also possible these rays are traveling in anything but a straight line (straight being relative to the curvature of space) as they approach us giving us at best a very distorted view of the observable universe. Like how different frequencies of light can be split in a prism. This could indicate that some rays travel a greater distance to reach us even if they share the same source. What if the speed of light is not if fact a constant and there are minute diffferences in the forward speed (different than frequency) of rays only observable over the course of thousands of light years? Not neccessarily due to velocity but due to the warping of space. This would distort our perception of distance and mass and heat of celestrial bodies. If light follows the rules of all other physical objects (we assume light is drawn into a black hole) and gravity is the warping of physical space shouldn't light follow the same set of rules? Wouldn't that suggest that our planet would be surrounded by an ever increasing halo of energy?

[JG]