13.) Thanks and Apologies

• Thanks

It's time to give credit where credit is due. Einstein's theory of General Relativity and how we think about time were presented and explored beautifully in a television show I saw recently. It was an episode of Horizon called "Do You Know What Time It Is ?", presented by Dr. Brian Cox. It presented very complex concepts and ideas in a way that even a simple donkey like myself could understand. The world seems full of erudite experts expounding useless rubbish. Great teachers and communicators are able to "put the cookies on the bottom shelf". That's just what this show did. It wasn't terribly clear in the credits who wrote the episode, so I'll thank Dr. Cox at the University of Manchester, his wife and whomever else may have assisted in the creation and production of the program.

In the same program Dr. Fay Dowker at Imperial College in England spoke of the "granularity of time", which I found very intriguing. She said that time may be "bitty" and therefore could "grow". I have a lot more to learn before I could present a hypothesis on "Quantum Time", but my donkey instincts tell me she's on the right track. For some strange reason I also believe that further clues to a clear understanding of time lie in music and the concept of beats per measure. The same piece of music can easily be played in 3/4 time or 3/8 time. This somehow relates in my mind to the Doppler Effect and time. Alas, my slow donkey brain has not quite put it all together. Hopefully some thought and a lot more knowledge of physics will help.

• More thanks

To Carl Sagan, Robert Zemeckis, Jodie Foster and her fellow cast members for the movie Contact. This lead me to the writings of Carl Sagan, which encouraged my interest in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

To Julie Powell, Nora Ephron, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and their fellow cast members for the movie Julie and Julia, which taught me how a blog might be useful.

To Dr. Michio Kaku for the way he enumerates, explains and explores the questions of science and the universe which remain unanswered.

And finally to Dr. Amy Mainzer whose enthusiasm, warmth and humor on episodes of The Universe demonstrated that scientists are people too.

• Two Apologies

The media in America, (everything I see and hear that is synthetic), is owned and controlled by a group of corporations that I can count on my fingers without using them all. Their goal sometimes seems to be to enslave rather than to inform. As modern American life becomes more and more adverse, (more and more like slavery), we are constantly bombarded with images of people "overcoming adversity" and, (my favorite), "doing more with less". Unfortunately my awareness of and distaste for this kind of propaganda has led me to commit an error in judgement.

About ten years ago I was talking with a very smart man, the late Dr. Dennis Ramsey. We were just idly chatting one day when the subject of aliens and UFO's came up. He asked me if I believed we had ever been visited by aliens from other planets. I said I did not and explained why. I asked him to picture what follows.

Imagine time and space on two lines. 200,000 years of human history occupy about ten centimeters on the time line. The volume of the Earth, (approximately 1,097,509,500,000,000,000 cubic kilometers), occupies about a meter on the space line. Now picture these two lines extending in both directions out of the room you're in, across the town you're in, across the country you're in, across our solar system, across our galaxy and beyond. Try to imagine these two infinite lines. Anybody who knows statistics would say that the chances of two sets of intelligent beings somehow ending up on the same point on both lines is virtually impossible. Even if, defying astronomical odds, they happened to appear on part of the same meter on the space line, they might miss on the time line by a few meters or kilometers, (millions or billions of years). We may be unique in spacetime.

I went on to discuss the odds against other life forms being enough like us for us to even recognise them as alive, let alone communicate with them. Our planet is unique in our solar system. It appears to be fairly unique in the space we can see beyond our solar system. Even if, against all reasonable odds, there were beings almost exactly like us, there could be many things preventing any kind of contact.

There could be beings that:

1. Don't see visible light or don't see at all and are simply unaware of anything beyond what they can sense
2. Never developed technology
3. Don't imagine
4. Are microscopic
5. Are pure energy
6. Move too quickly for us to see them and visa-versa
7. Live on a planet like Venus, which is covered by clouds, making them unaware of anything beyond.
8. Live on a planet where curiosity and exploration are fatal, causing them to evolve into the ultimate "homebodies"
   
9. Are too complex to be interested in us
10. Are too simple to be aware of us
11. Live on a planet where it is so difficult to survive they are too busy to care
12. Are so different we would not recognize them as alive and visa-versa
    

I could go on and on. The number of variables is infinite. Odds are very great against us being visited by little green men, little green women or even rainbow colored hermaphrodites.

The source of my apologies relates to the way that Dr. Ramsey concluded our discussion. "Are you familiar with a scientist by the name of Stephen Hawking? I think you would find some of his work interesting.", he said. I told him that I didn't know who he was, but that I'd check him out.

Unfortunately, finding out that Hawking was a disabled man who'd written some very popular best-selling books led me to mistakenly prejudge him. I dismissed him as a product of the media, a poster-boy for "overcoming obstacles" and "doing more with less". If I have learned anything in my brief four months on this journey, it's that I was greatly mistaken.

I offer my humble apologies to both Doctor Ramsey and Doctor Hawking. It just proves that "mules are fools". I started my journey with the desire to become familiar with and conversant in the work of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. I've quickly learned that if I am to make any progress at all I will also become very familiar with and conversant in the work of Stephen Hawking. Fay Dowker, whom I mentioned earlier, was a student of his. At present, the road to solving the Riddle of Gravitation clearly leads to and through Einstein and Hawking along with many others. I anticipate with relish a time when I will read and analyze their work in depth.

Next blog entry: "What's Happened So Far (Two)"