Ageless in Spirit: Discussions and interests for our times

 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"...

 December 13, 2021 Reflection and writing about my inner self is complicated but revealing to me since I'm never sure what I'll discover during my foreighs into writing this blog. Many issues come to mind but I shall begin with Vanity of Vanities.  Please forgive my copying the following article since I am not a scholar of the bible but I'm intrigued by Ecclesiastes. https://interestingliterature.com/2021/07/bible-vanity-of-vanities-all-is-vanity-meaning-analysis/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bible-vanity-of-vanities-all-is-vanity-meaning-analysis Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ These words, along with ‘to everything there is a season’, are among the most famous in the Book of Ecclesiastes, part of the Old Testament. The Bible is full of well-known quotations which are often cited in a way that floats quite free of their original context; so what does ‘Vanity of vanities’ and ‘all is vanity’ actually mean? Th...

 November 26, 2021 Love is blind! The Iliad describes how Paris son of King Priam of Troy fell in love with Helen the most beautiful woman married to Menelaus King of Sparta. He abducted her to Troy. Achilles fell in love with Briseus after she was awarded to him by Argamemnon king of Sparta after he killed her husband and children. Argamemnon then took her back but then Archilles refused to fight at the battle of Troy to get Helen back until Briseus was returned by Argamemnon. In the Iliad there are more plots and complications concerning betrayals and love including homoerotic love but the tale describes how love is blind.  On Thanksgiving Day our repairman came to fix our dryer. He told us that the reason we had such a hard time in contacting him was related to his divorce and move back to his mother's home. He had married a woman who managed to take all of his money to herself and her family so he was greatly in debt. Now divorced he's happier and has money in his wallet. ...

 November 9, 2021 What has been on my mind regarding this blog changes as the days go by so today it's just this. I do interact with others in the few social settings I enjoy. On the telephone, I talked with my friend who I rarely see in person who called me for a change letting me know that he appreciates me because my son Joshua has befriended his nineteen year old grandson who just started at Gonzaga University and gets relief visiting Joshua and his wife at their home outside of Spokane. On this phone call this friend is upbeat with more timbre and force in his voice about his plans to move to his country home outside of Reno with his partner who he greatly values. His health disabilities and past health near death experiences had gotten him in a terrible funk which concerned us bystanders since his past communications of doom and gloom were interspersed with hateful opinions towards various groups in our society so that I felt powerless as he but hesitant to interact further w...

 October 18, 2021 Saturdays and Wednesdays are my hiking days with a small group of adventurers in the mountains, valleys, streams, and sometimes top of the mountains traverses. This Saturday we took some offshoot trails off of the main Ohana Trail on windward Oahu. The ascent was a good workout on an uncleared but very navitagable trial to our usual lunch spot at the crest of the main Ohana trail. Since I was the organizer of today's hike we went down Iron Maiden a mostly steep winding bike route off the mountain. Just as we started along the narrower but not steeper part it poured (Mauka shower) so the bike dirt packed narrow trail was now slick and muddy. We all had spikes on our boots but quickly they became ineffective so sliding and imbalance down the steeper switchbacks led some of us to just sit down and mud slide to more level areas. Slowly we descended with some of us squealing with delight and trepidation whenever we did our mudslide maneuver. I know one our group was ve...

 October 7, 2021 I've been busy with my usual activities but recently concentrating on understanding quantum physics (the physics of the very very very tiny) by reading articles (esp.  Suskind wormhole theory of black hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_%3D_EPR ), Katie Mack's The End Of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), Lee Smolin  and loop gravity theory in Einstein's Unfinished Revolution The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum, and finally Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math book rant on theory making, math beauty, quantum theory, and the scientific communities problems in getting stuck in outdated unproven theories and the short changing of progress in new research and  new theories.  For example, in quantum mechanics once you measure something very very very small (i.e. position or momentum) you have by your measurement found one or the other measurements (decoherence) and influenced the particles characteristics to influence the other paired pa...