December 24, 2021

This morning I just read and article How small was the Universe when the hot Big Bang began? The geeky side of me pursuing my interest as a lay person enjoyed reading about our gathering understanding of the beginnings of our universe and I get a kick out of being able to fool myself into thinking I can understand the science and how the hypotheses have been formulated. I started a message to a friend who shares some of this interest and my message to him mushroomed into an idea to continue in this blog. However, in the process of sending the message to a number of potential recipients my iPhone screen froze and then I lost all of what I was writing about. 

The article  https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/small-universe-big-bang Is all about how our scientific explorations of matter, energy, dark matter, dark energy, space, time, radiation, and changes in the dynamics of interactions between theses "things, energy, and time" change as our universe now exponentially expands in space. My message was to share this with my friends and family and then to juxtapose how how science can generate hypotheses from information previously discovered in experiments that explored other hypotheses. How science being a messy human enterprise includes false starts, hubris disguised as hypothesis and fact, and politics that attempt to hide newer more clearer understandings of how things work since reputations may be tarnished or destroyed. Even with that we get to advance in our knowledge and understanding. 

What about our group affiliations and our groups core beliefs and practices? We treat our group affiliation beliefs as facts that are bedrock and unassailable if you want to be a member of the group. Our tendency to endorse group beliefs is related as human Homo Sapiens to how our brains evolved. As a member we endorse the group beliefs which we take at times as facts though they are more group think beliefs that mostly can not be challenged or else your ostracized. An interesting article comes to mind as I write this that is very well written and worth reading https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/21/opinion/2021-essays-opinion.html#mooallem.

For example, let's take the filibuster in congress.  https://sojo.net/articles/moral-case-suspending-filibuster?gclid=Cj0KCQiA_JWOBhDRARIsANymNOYoQ54IxTsfr-2DiNyDI8mYVUzrc6muTqQ52MZccCOC3q8OL0dSfvQaArJaEALw_wcB

The filibuster is not in the constitution but was a rule started in 1806 but used more as the southern senators blocked legislation from dismantling Jim Crow laws. Currently it's a tactic that has stalled legislation promulgated by a Democratic party elected executive branch. Related actions in the Senate include stalling on judicial and executive appointments even road blocking Supreme Court nominees. The proponents argue that the filibuster prevents bad laws from being promulgated while the opponents point out that the voters elected a majority but the filibuster skews governing towards the minority. They even go so far as to point out that recent state voter law changes are attempting to do the same thing while Gerrymandering continues to whittle away majority rule. Depending on your group affiliation the facts change and there is no open debate but instead gut level thinking and feelings are associated with our viewing of our disbelievers as others to be shunned and attacked. The extreme of these human therefore irrational group dynamics is the wild antisocial behaviors of the insurrectionists who responded to their group leaders exhortations that his perch as president was stolen from him by those others which now included his vice president who did not do his bidding. Can we study these issues scientifically (The Big Lie)? I do think so and my previous blogs explores how our cognitive biases, our quick and slow thinking systems, our tendency to create and listen to stories as facts evolving from our very evolutionary beginnings has a bearing on ways to find clarity in the fog of politics and associated group affiliations. 

Well, I surprised myself in writing this far all from an article about how small the universe was at the beginning. Not a singularity but the size of a teenager. Understanding inflation brings to the fore how the different laws of physics predominate at different times.

Since my last blog my wife Rebecca broke her tailbone and has a compression fracture of T 11. In the hospital for five days now at home with a brace and walker she is on the mend.  We have an attic above our second floor and she went up the stepladder into the attack to check out our exhaust fan after the rain and then rearrange boxes. She stepped off the walkway planks onto the wall board separating the attic from a second story room and immediately fell through over ten feet onto the floor. Our sense of security and belief in longevity gets shattered with events like this. So far she's on the mend progressing to more independence every day. We've moved down stairs to the TV room with a twin bed for her and the couch for me. 

Our friend Michael has reread Ecclesiastes (which I wrote about in my previous blog) in the original hebrew and commented yesterday that vanities vanities really reads in the original nothing to nothing. The whole book is nihilist or existentialist. Eat, drink, be merry after life there is nothing. Hafez a Persian lyrical poet and philosopher wrote about these subjects with such force and influence that a few months ago at a friends home I was asked to read one of his poems that set a joyful tone to the evening. Benjamin Labatat's book When We Cease To Understand The World is a good read about geniuses in the field of math and quantum physics. The lives of some of the giants in these fields is described through fact and then fiction to attempt to understand their inner lives is very interesting for me. Most go through some very psychotic states of minds along the path to discovery while some succumb and remain cut off from society living psychotic lives. Related to his subject is the movie on Netflix The Professor and the Madman based on a book by Simon Winchester  The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the First Oxford Dictionary. So well directed and acted the inner life of a psychotic soldier who was aquitted of murder due to insanity and then remanded to an insane asylum in England is played by Sean Penn. The aggrieved wife whose husband was killed changes her opinion of the murderer as does the Professor's wife and guards while the superintendent psychiatrist falls down the rabbit hole of his own group belief system and tortures the poor inmate into cataplexy. I could go on to the dark history of psychiatry and the misguided attempts for treatment of the psychotic patients but another time. The movie also points out the struggle to publish the first Oxford Dictionary with the professor Sir Jame Murray struggling against the political group forces wanting to discredit him to replace him. At so many levels we have these group dynamics! 

Well, back to earth I went hiking with a friend in Waimanalo along a trail somewhat muddy but not difficult to a flume that meandered along a ridge for some while looking at the crawfish in the flume. We looped back after meandering down to the stream over an old iron bridge and on the way back we saw a trail not cleared on our left so we debated and decided to see where it went. Well, quickly I could see some 200 feet below we would end up at the Maunawili golf course but now committed I slowly made my way down once sitting down to slide on the slick muddy steepness. Now at the golf course Simin said she knew how to get back to Maunawili so we walked over one mile along the golf cart road to exit past the abandoned home and down past the Maunawili Falls trail head to the gated exit. Oh Boy! The Maunawili Falls trail was closed and the dirt road we were walking onto the gate had a new gate ten feet tall very secure which we could not scale. I thought we had another few miles to go back to the golf course and exit through the club house but Simin suggest we hike up the ridge above the dirt road and attempt to go past the gate and then come down. We did bushwacking up to find ourselves above a home. Very quietly we came down to the house and found our way finally through the thicket and retaining walls to the road past the gate. Simin's husband was kind enough to get us with his truck and drive us back to our cars in Waimanalo. I am 82 with various insults to my body due to aging. I have peripheral neuropathy but hiking sticks provide me with the sense of up and down and being careful I can go on difficult trails. I have heart condition with atrial fibrillation so I'm on blood thinner so it I get a cut I could get into trouble. My heart rate needs to be below 130-140 so I have an Iwatch which usually tells me my pulse so I can slow down if need be when ascending. I'm slower as a hiker but I can go for some distance (yesterday was 6 miles and 800 feet elevation). Well, I had told Rebecca my injured partner and love that I would stick to the planned hike that day and not hike this trail alone. I did not follow my agreement and she was pissed! I agree with her that I was very remiss and promised to follow our agreements in the future. 

So I'm back to a previous blog that the lessons of life are learnt and scientific progress happens when we are wrong.

Maybe if others also agreed with this important life principle of being human our group dynamics so stubbornly held can be loosened so we can hear each other.  

Leonard