Letter to Dan about Bible 2008

Thanks for your letter. I am amazed by the unlabored approach and fluidity of your writing. A computer would probably encumber your talent with the inevitable second drafts and double thinking.

You remember years ago ‘exchange of ideas’ was the basis of our friendship, and that’s good to resume. I enjoy your ‘California’ ideas as much as ever and hope my liberal, irreverent, anti-geocentric, pro-evolution stance doesn’t offend you.


Your knowledge of the bible is far beyond my experience and to the lay eye appears complete and studied.

Since I personally feel the bible was the ‘explanation of the world up to that point,’ it’s natural for me to doubt some things … especially since it claimed the sun revolved around the earth. However I concede there is an immense amount of truth concerning human interactions. And too, applaud the hedge-room allowed for many viewpoints … perfectly reflecting human nature.

Having said this:
Doesn’t the story of Adam and Eve mention ‘others’ outside the garden? Who are these people? Is the bible paying homage to earlier man? Talk to me here … what does this reference mean?
________________________________________________________

Evolution: feel free to respond or ignore the following foam:

Why does organized religion attack evolution? Does the bible’s eugenic purity oppose a commonality with those that wallow in the mud and pick fleas? Or does the idea of evolution reduce man as the latest omnivore leaving its scratch?
_________________________________________________________

Missing links: an argument against ancestor?

When evolution is discredited why is there a focus on ‘missing links’ when there is clear evidence of multiple species of hominids the past 3-4 million years, each more like modern man than the bones of their predecessor? Is this not a tableau of missing links?

Or is the ‘missing link’ issue just a controversy of ape versus man? Does this mean evolution isn’t plausible unless we find the missing man dinosaur monkey with feathers? See illustration.

We have no missing links between dinosaurs and the age of flightless land birds … so did the epoch of 6’ birds come without ancestor, merely by the wave of god’s hand?

If the age of land birds arrived solely by the wave of god’s hand, how can the bible argue humans are the penultimate apex of the universe? Why would god take 13 billion years to piss out a human?
_______________________________________________________

Geological record shows change on earth is radical at times. (And human experience has not encountered enormous events like this.)

The planet has long periods of environmental stability followed by short bursts of rapid change. These quantum periods of change give insight into new species ‘suddenly’ appearing … and evidence of rapid change is visible at the grand canyon: look at the layers of sedimented rock and you see the red layer doesn’t slowly blend into the yellow layer … no, instead the red layer suddenly stops and the yellow layer begins.
 
Additionally, we have evidence of rapid change in animals … look at humans growing measurably taller over 400 years … a mere 20 generations. (I might add that it happened because of abundance and not strictly from ‘survival of the fittest’)
 
Given this much change in 20 generations, imagine how much change was engineered in hominid-like creatures over 200,000+ generations; each a chance to improve nutrition, kama-sutra positions, eyesight etc.

But there are periods of time on earth that have induced radical change in animals, beyond their just getting tall and fat.

And what causes these colossal events that radically change things on earth? Is this the sweeping hand of god? Or the physics of the universe pulsing over an electrically-charged spinning nickel planet? No one can say for sure, but animals do change abruptly.
__________________________________________________________

My general theory of evolution is not entirely ‘survival of the fittest,’ (but really just evolutionist manifesto, with an olive).

The greatest change in animals takes place during low stress when there is abundant food and species flourish in large number…. and when the inevitable return of fierce hardship suddenly arrives, the specie has countless genetic variants to meet the newest challenge … at this point ‘survival of the fittest’ determines which genetics will continue, and the result pushes out different brands of the same specie.

(You see I liken the flow of change in the world to how market economies create new products: supply, demand, competition, war … the big eating the small and the small working to topple the big in a never-ending confluence of change … in my opinion, everything across the universe operates from this same dynamic, just repeated in different ways)

Sometimes I worry man is causing a similar catastrophic environment for living things on earth…
… But then I look down at the carpet of grass and laugh, realizing somewhere in that vast jungle, in my back yard or on a mountain slope somewhere, are species waiting for their moment of abundance, when they will become the large dominate omnivore.
My general theory of life:
Life is a natural product of Earth’s specific chemistry interacting with the physics of the universe.

Therefore life is a natural property of physics and will arise within every exploitable environment, and these environments are infinitely interlaced across the universe.

I liken the happenings on Earth to an electromagnetic fire gently pulsing and flaring across the surface (just like the sun’s surface), the results of which are reflected back into space in wavelengths of light (in the full electromagnetic spectrum: visible, microwave, radio, etc.) that carry our story across the universe… and this is the same mechanic operating on every star and planet.

Furthermore I see no star or planet is an exact replica of any other, nor is changing in the same way as any other, and conclude that life across the universe must be a similar zoo as earth where the most unbelievable is commonplace.

Subnote:
As implausible as it sounds, the infinite probability of physics has actually created a planet where the electromagnetic spectrum has excited the carbon atoms, causing them to enter steel and glass capsules and furiously race around in circles on cementitious roadways.


Culture is a model for understanding the universe.

My most recent insight into life says it results from light, in all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, bombarding over time the specific chemistry of this spinning mud and nickel ball … and it came from what existed before and will continue onward in unstoppable change until the universe weakens and is overrun by foreign hordes that will introduce a different system …

… This means the patterns we see in human culture, history and economics are the same physics that operate the universe. (Isn’t this similar to what the bible says? Except my theory excludes a single omnipresent in favor of constant flux where the whole universe affects each outcome on earth, and paradoxically each outcome on Earth returns to affect what makes up the whole universe … and since this process mirrors how culture changes, it leads me to conclude culture makes a perfect model for understanding the universe).

I see continual change as the operative vigor of the universe … and what we perceive as ‘life’ is subject to abrupt alteration for myriads of reasons, just like changes in culture: there is no one thing causing it, it’s just everything spilling together in a mix of political balance and competition ... and the inevitable march of changing culture is a miniature model of the changing universe, and this volatile change will forge new things whether humans pray or pick their toes. (I obviously diverge from the bible on that point).


Life in space: a question of how time affects us

I think physics uniquely involves every piece of matter in space, creating an infinite array of overlapping patterns of exploitable chemistry.

My work concludes life is a natural physics of the universe and arises everywhere, and the fact we don’t see it is a function of human boundaries … (doesn’t the bible mention this limitation?)

To reduce mental wanderings to poorly written science fiction, I offer an imaginary example: we can’t see a repetitious exploitable chemistry on Mars because the ‘cycle of rain’ may not be water at all, but instead a flow of charged ions that skims low to the surface at high speed creating a rarified, renewable abundance on Mars … thus Mars’ ‘electromagnetic fire’ of life burns close to the surface and puffs out less rapidly than on the Earth (or the sun). Since this environment would be chemically unique to Mars, we wouldn’t readily see it or define its strange results as ‘life.’

Back to reality: Our limitation for finding life is partially because the cycle of renewal on Mars, (or any planet, or any place), may be at intervals of time unlike the rhythm of earth … on Mars, an ordinary day may last thousands of years, but this is valid everywhere, meaning the multiplicity of probabilities within time is staggering. The actual problem is we can’t find life that shares the same time in which we exist on earth.

The fact that time is not linear or constant is a major impediment for understanding anything in the universe, especially for finding life that parallels our experience, after all even the most simple scientific understanding such as measuring temperature, on Mars or anywhere in space, uses ‘time’ as a component factor.

For this I wrote a chapter in my book titled the ‘accelerated world.’
 
    To talk more specifically about the math of the universe, let’s speed things up and accelerate the world.
    Imagine watching a 5 second film clip showing a flower bud opening into a full blossom; or a 10 second clip showing the movement of clouds across the sky for a full day.  This is the premise behind our new accelerated world.
    In our new world, we take all the events from 100 years and condense them into one day.  So now 100 years is a single day.  After a full week, we’ve been able to see 700 years of Earth’s history.  Or for each second, we would see approximately one half day.  Obviously at this speed, events on Earth would pass by so quickly that our world would no longer contain an ordinary day.
    So let’s walk around the globe and see what’s changed.  We’d see for the first time the migration of plants and trees as they grow and move before your eyes.  And at last we’d be able to see patterns in the movements of stars that would give us a better sense of what the galaxy is doing.
    Erosion of mountains would become visible, volcanoes would be puffing and erupting each day, and sand dunes would ripple like water. Meteorites would rain from the sky and big meteors would divot the earth every other week, with the effects disappearing as if they hit a viscous fluid. Even the driest rivers would pulse continually with water. Snow and ice would move to and fro across the face of the planet, and the land would be positively shuffling from earthquakes.
    Sound waves would now travel 9000 mps, and these vibrations would cause never-before seen phenomenon in the environment and induce frequencies of electromagnetism unlike anything we’ve seen before.  The resulting interactions between sound vibrations and other chemistries of the planet would create environmental niches and opportunities unique to the accelerated world. 
Seemingly unrelated phenomenon would become connected and explain mysteries about life that baffle science today.  Many new patterns and sequences would emerge and each would require new scientific study and mathematical explanation.
    In the accelerated world, time would be passing so quickly that waves, tides, and currents would make water appear as a dense fog, totally devoid of the living things we understand.  In fact, no animals would be visible in our new world because their movement would blur all trace …there would be no insects, or birds, or microbes, or termites, or seeds, or the balance of nature as we see it.  These things would still exist and their math would be worked out somewhere in the planets’ formula, but their actual existence would have to be inferred, meaning that observable things like ‘pollination by insects’ would become an invisible mystery.
    New relationships would emerge in the accelerated world that cannot exist here simply because of time.  There are things that happen over thousands of years that profoundly affect life but remain invisible to our own everyday world.  For example, in the accelerated world, mathematical patterns arising from migrating trees might let us see interspecie genetics.  But in regular time, these events occur so slowly the information is beyond the reach of our math and science, and thus we can’t gain agricultural or scientific advantage from this genetic knowledge. The factor of time limits what chemistries are available for human manipulation.
The accelerated world would be moving so quickly that human existence would be all but invisible on Earth until culture and sheer numbers of people began to build permanent structures and cities. Prior to this, the human specie would have been as elusive as all other animal life. In accelerated time, human life would not appear as a series of individual actions, but instead cultural structures would appear as an entity of its own, a single organism fed by a flow of charged metallic cells following roadways and rivers into and around ever-changing cities. To a scientist in the accelerated world, human existence would have no apparent ancestor, seeming to have emerged out of the infinity of time itself, and this would appear as such because the factor of time creates hard boundaries beyond which there is no glimpse. We simply cannot see beyond certain parameters set by time, and despite work in geology, mathematics, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and anthropology, there still exists a curtain that conceals a vast unknown.
     The accelerated world has a mathematical reality different from our regular day, and in reverse, today’s math has a reality invisible to the accelerated world.  Both mathematic exist simultaneously and both are correct, but each explains such a different world, there may not be mathematical correlation, meaning that causality of events such as ‘evolution’ may not exist in a neat linear progression across time. There may not be an entirely logical explanation of how dinosaurs became birds. Things on Earth may be like the probability of quantum physics, where change occurs for no known reason and only a random range of possible events exists.
The real point for inventing the accelerated world is to illustrate how multiple mathematics are needed simultaneously to weave the overall fabric of the world.
This example shows what mathematicians have discovered about the Universe…that multiple mathematics exist simultaneously.  And if everything we know and see, all the stars, planets, cars, and people, were taken away, 90% of the universe would still remain right here…unseen yet necessary to make the universe what it is. The mathematics of the Universe is layered, complex, and ever changing, and our lives are perfect illustration of how time hides this complexity.


Gene Haynes