Deciphering the Dark

Dark energy’s role in propelling the universe’s accelerated expansion presents a pivotal challenge in astrophysics, driving ongoing research and space missions dedicated to uncovering the nature of this mysterious force.

Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began with a rapid expansion we call the Big Bang. After this initial expansion, which lasted a fraction of a second, gravity started to slow the universe down. But the cosmos wouldn’t stay this way. Nine billion years after the universe began, its expansion started to speed up, driven by an unknown force that scientists have named dark energy.

But what exactly is dark energy?  The short answer is: We don’t know. But we do know that it exists, it’s making the universe expand at an accelerating rate, and approximately 68.3 to 70% of the universe is dark energy.     READ MORE...

Einstein Was Wrong About Gravity

Einstein's theory of gravity—general relativity—has been very successful for more than a century. However, it has theoretical shortcomings. This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities inside black holes—and the Big Bang itself.

Unlike physical theories describing the other three fundamental forces in physics—the electromagnetic and the strong and weak nuclear interactions—the general theory of relativity has only been tested in weak gravity.

Deviations of gravity from general relativity are by no means excluded nor tested everywhere in the universe. And, according to theoretical physicists, deviation must happen.

Deviations and quantum mechanics
According to a theory initially proposed by Georges Lemaître and widely accepted by the astronomical community, our universe originated in a Big Bang. 

Other singularities hide inside black holes: Space and time cease to have meaning there, while quantities such as energy density and pressure become infinite. These signal that Einstein's theory is failing there and must be replaced with a more fundamental one.

Naively, spacetime singularities should be resolved by quantum mechanics, which apply at very small scales.

Quantum physics relies on two simple ideas: point particles make no sense; and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that one can never know the value of certain pairs of quantities with absolute precision—for example, the position and velocity of a particle. 

This is because particles should not be thought of as points but as waves; at small scales they behave as waves of matter.  READ MORE...

Star Older Then Universe

The star HD 140283 has been called the "Methuselah star" for its extreme age. At an estimated over 14 billion years old, it’s the oldest star we know, at least within our galaxy. A star that old is certainly interesting, particularly when it is so close to us it can be seen with binoculars, however, that appears to put it older than the universe. How that can be? A closer examination reveals the star is special, but not that special.


The standard estimate of the time since the Big Bang is 13.79 billion years. The figure is derived from the rate of expansion of the universe using Einstein's relativity but has been validated through a variety of methods. However, that number is now facing at least three distinct challenges. As evidence, proponents point to the existence of stars estimated to be either older than 13.8 billion years, or so close to that age that there shouldn’t have been time for them to form.


Not surprisingly HD 140283 gets prime billing (helped by its catchy nickname derived from a Biblical ancestor of Noah said to have lived to 969) due to a 2013 study using Hubble data that estimated it is 14.46 billion years old, plus or minus 800 million years. That would make it potentially older than the universe.


The biggest claim regarding HD 140283 is that it disproves the Big Bang. After all, if there is even one star 14.5 billion years old then the explosion that started the universe couldn’t have happened less than 14 billion years ago. The Big Bang is now so central to our cosmology that were it to be disproved it would create a scientific revolution the like of which we have not seen for a long time.


A smaller, but still dramatic, change would be required to adapt to the recent claim that the Big Bang happened, but almost twice as long ago as most estimates put it, at 26.7 billion years ago.


Neither of these views has much support among astrophysicists, but some do suspect we’ve got our estimates of the timing of the Big Bang more modestly wrong, and the universe is really around 15 billion years old. Although such an estimate would raise a few questions about why our estimates for the universe’s expansion rate are out, if proven, accompanying changes to our thinking would be evolutionary not revolutionary.

In that context, it’s worth asking: if the universe was 26 billion years old, wouldn’t we expect to find 20 billion-year-old stars? It’s true we’ve only really looked across a small portion of the galaxy, but if the universe is that old, Methuselah looks suspiciously young. Then take that question a step further and ask what we might expect to see if the universe had no beginning and has always been here.  READ MORE...

Coldest Matter in The Universe

An illustration shows trapped ytterbium atoms cooled to temperatures about 3 billion times 

colder than deep space (Image credit: Ella Maru Studio/Courtesy of K. Hazzard/Rice University)

A team of researchers has cooled matter to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero, colder than even the deepest depths of space ,  far away from any stars.


Interstellar space never gets this cold due to the fact that it is evenly filled with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a form of radiation left over from an event that occurred shortly after the Big Bang when the universe was in its infancy. 

The chilled matter is even colder than the coldest known region of space, the Boomerang Nebula, located 3,000 light-years from Earth, which has a temperature of just one degree above absolute zero.

The experiment, run at the University of Kyoto in Japan and used fermions, which is what particle physicists call any particle that makes up matter, including electrons, protons and neutrons. 

The team cooled their fermions — atoms of the element ytterbium — to around a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the hypothetical temperature at which all atomic movement would cease.

"Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe," Rice University researcher Kaden Hazzard, who took part in the study, said in a statement(opens in new tab).  READ MORE...

New Webb Telescope Observations

Let’s start with the rumors. What about the new Webb data would suggest the big bang is wrong? 

The same type of data Hubble gave us years ago. We generally think of evidence for the big bang being centered around two facts: first, that more distant galaxies have a higher redshift than closer ones; and second, that the universe is filled with a cosmic background of microwave radiation.

The first suggests that the universe is expanding in all directions, while the second suggests that it was once in a very hot and dense state. 

These are two of the Three Pillars of data supporting the big bang, the third being the relative abundance of elements in the early universe.

But these observations are just the foundation of the big bang model. We have long since expanded on these to create the standard model of cosmology, also known as the LCDM model. 

That is a universe that began with the big bang and is filled with matter, dark matter, and dark energy. Everything from the acceleration of cosmic expansion to the clustering of galaxies supports this standard model. 

And the standard model makes predictions about other observational tests, so we can further prove its validity. That’s where the latest claims of the “big bust” come into play.  READ MORE...

The Big Bang Means Something Different Now

If there’s one hallmark inherent to science, it’s that our understanding of how the Universe works is always open to revision in the face of new evidence. 

Whenever our prevailing picture of reality — including the rules it plays by, the physical contents of a system, and how it evolved from its initial conditions to the present time — gets challenged by new experimental or observational data, we must open our minds to changing our conceptual picture of the cosmos. 

This has happened many times since the dawn of the 20th century, and the words we use to describe our Universe have shifted in meaning as our understanding has evolved.

Yet, there are always those who cling to the old definitions, much like linguistic prescriptivists, who refuse to acknowledge that these changes have occurred. 

But unlike the evolution of colloquial language, which is largely arbitrary, the evolution of scientific terms must reflect our current understanding of reality. 

Whenever we talk about the origin of our Universe, the term “the Big Bang” comes to mind, but our understanding of our cosmic origins have evolved tremendously since the idea that our Universe even had an origin, scientifically, was first put forth. 

Here’s how to resolve the confusion and bring you up to speed on what the Big Bang originally meant versus what it means today.  READ MORE...

Webb Telescope Shatters Records

The very first results from the James Webb Space Telescope seem to indicate that massive, luminous galaxies had already formed within the first 250 million years after the Big Bang. If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking. For now, however, that’s still a big “if.”

Shortly after NASA published Webb’s first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe’s composition and evolution.

“It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images,” says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London).

Young, massive stars in newborn galaxies emit vast amounts of energetic ultraviolet radiation. As this light moves through expanding space for billions of years, the wavelengths stretch (redshift) all the way into the infrared – radiation that Webb’s instruments are sensitive to.

It takes careful spectroscopic measurements – either by Webb’s spectrometers or by the ground-based ALMA observatory that operates at even longer wavelengths – to precisely determine the redshifts, which tells you how far out into space — and thus how far back in time — you’re looking. But there’s a quick (albeit less reliable) workaround that gives a rough idea.

Neutral hydrogen atoms in intergalactic space absorb ultraviolet radiation at wavelengths shorter than 91.2 nanometers. For remote objects, this threshold also redshifts to longer wavelengths, into the infrared for the most distant galaxies. 

Since Webb’s near-infrared camera NIRCam takes measurements through a large number of filters, each covering a different wavelength band, a galaxy may be visible in some channels but not in others. The wavelength band in which the galaxy disappears roughly indicates its redshift, and the corresponding look-back time.  READ MORE...

A Galaxy Deeper Back in Time

Data from the Webb Space Telescope has only gotten into the hands of astronomers over the last few weeks, but they've been waiting for years for this, and apparently had analyses set to go. The result has been something like a race back in time, as new discoveries find objects that formed ever closer to the Big Bang that produced our Universe. 

Last week, one of these searches turned up a galaxy that was present less than 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis has picked out a galaxy as it appeared only 233 million years after the Universe popped into existence.

The discovery is a happy byproduct of work that was designed to answer a more general question: How many galaxies should we expect to see at different time points after the Big Bang?

Back in time
As we mentioned last week, the early Universe was opaque to light at any wavelengths that carry more energy than is needed to ionize hydrogen. That energy is in the UV portion of the spectrum, but the red shift caused by 13 billion years of an expanding Universe has shifted that cutoff point into the infrared portion of the spectrum. 

To find galaxies from this time, we have to look for objects that aren't visible at shorter infrared wavelengths (meaning that light was once above the hydrogen cutoff), but do appear at lower-energy wavelengths.

The deeper into the infrared the boundary between invisible and visible is, the stronger the redshift, and the more distant the object is. The more distant the object, the closer in time it is to the Big Bang.  READ MORE...

Backwards in Time

If the universe has a twin and on that twin time runs backward, then scientists could explain dark matter. (Image credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images)

A wild new theory suggests there may be another "anti-universe," running backward in time prior to the Big Bang.

The idea assumes that the early universe was small, hot and dense — and so uniform that time looks symmetric going backward and forward.

If true, the new theory means that dark matter isn't so mysterious; it's just a new flavor of a ghostly particle called a neutrino that can only exist in this kind of universe. And the theory implies there would be no need for a period of "inflation" that rapidly expanded the size of the young cosmos soon after the Big Bang.

If true, then future experiments to hunt for gravitational waves, or to pin down the mass of neutrinos, could answer once and for all whether this mirror anti-universe exists.

Preserving symmetry
Physicists have identified a set of fundamental symmetries in nature. The three most important symmetries are: charge (if you flip the charges of all the particles involved in an interaction to their opposite charge, you'll get the same interaction); parity (if you look at the mirror image of an interaction, you get the same result); and time (if you run an interaction backward in time, it looks the same).

Physical interactions obey most of these symmetries most of the time, which means that there are sometimes violations. But physicists have never observed a violation of a combination of all three symmetries at the same time. If you take every single interaction observed in nature and flip the charges, take the mirror image, and run it backward in time, those interactions behave exactly the same.

This fundamental symmetry is given a name: CPT symmetry, for charge (C), parity (P) and time (T).  READ MORE...

From the Dawn of Time

The particle was produced inside the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Physicists at the world's largest atom smasher have detected a mysterious, primordial particle from the dawn of time.

About 100 of the short-lived "X" particles — so named because of their unknown structures — were spotted for the first time amid trillions of other particles inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, located near Geneva at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research).

These X particles, which likely existed in the tiniest fractions of a second after the Big Bang, were detected inside a roiling broth of elementary particles called a quark-gluon plasma, formed in the LHC by smashing together lead ions. By studying the primordial X particles in more detail, scientists hope to build the most accurate picture yet of the origins of the universe. They published their findings Jan. 19 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
wie X particle's internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce."

Scientists trace the origins of X particles to just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, back when the universe was a superheated trillion-degree plasma soup teeming with quarks and gluons — elementary particles that soon cooled and combined into the more stable protons and neutrons we know today.

Just before this rapid cooling, a tiny fraction of the gluons and the quarks collided, sticking together to form very short-lived X particles. The researchers don't know how elementary particles configure themselves to form the X particle's structure. But if the scientists can figure that out, they will have a much better understanding of the types of particles that were abundant during the universe's earliest moments.  READ MORE...

Laniakea Destroyed by Dark Energy

On the largest cosmic scales, planet Earth appears to be anything but special. Like hundreds of billions of other planets in our galaxy, we orbit our parent star; like hundreds of billions of solar systems, we revolve around the galaxy; like the majority of galaxies in the Universe, we’re bound together in either a group or cluster of galaxies. 

And, like most galactic groups and clusters, we’re a small part of a larger structure containing over 100,000 galaxies: a supercluster. Ours is named Laniakea: the Hawaiian word for “immense heaven.”

Superclusters have been found and charted throughout our observable Universe, where they’re more than 10 times as rich as the largest known clusters of galaxies. Unfortunately, owing to the presence of dark energy in the Universe, these superclusters ⁠— including our own ⁠— are only apparent structures. In reality, they’re mere phantasms, in the process of dissolving before our very eyes.

The Universe as we know it began some 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. It was filled with matter, antimatter, radiation, etc.; all the particles and fields that we know of today, and possibly even more. 

From the earliest instants of the hot Big Bang, however, it wasn’t simply a uniform sea of these energetic quanta. Instead, there were tiny imperfections ⁠— at about the 0.003% level ⁠— on all scales, where some regions had slightly more or slightly less matter and energy than average.

In each one of these regions, a great cosmic race ensued. The race was between two competing phenomena:

1. the expansion of the Universe, which works to drive all the matter and energy apart
2. gravitation, which works to pull all forms of energy together, causing massive material to clump and cluster together

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Violating Speed of Light

Just 13.8 billion years after the hot Big Bang, we can see 46.1 billion light-years away in all directions. Doesn't that violate...something?

A visual history of the expanding Universe includes the hot, dense state known as the Big Bang and the growth and formation of structure subsequently. The full suite of data, including the observations of the light elements and the cosmic microwave background, leaves only the Big Bang as a valid explanation for all we see. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

The cardinal rule of relativity is that there's a speed limit to the Universe, the speed of light, that nothing can break.And yet, when we look at the most distant of objects, their light has been traveling for no more than 13.8 billion years, but appears much farther away.Here's how that doesn't break the speed of light; it only breaks our outdated, intuitive notions of how reality ought to behave.

If there’s one rule that most people know about the Universe, it’s that there’s an ultimate speed limit that nothing can exceed: the speed of light in a vacuum. If you’re a massive particle, not only can’t you exceed that speed, but you’ll never reach it; you can only approach the speed of light. If you’re massless, you have no choice; you can only move at one speed through spacetime: the speed of light if you’re in a vacuum, or some slower speed if you’re in a medium. The faster your motion through space, the slower your motion through time, and vice versa. There’s no way around these facts, as they’re the fundamental principle on which relativity is based.

And yet, when we look out at distant objects in the Universe, they seem to defy our common-sense approach to logic. Through a series of precise observations, we’re confident that the Universe is precisely 13.8 billion years old. The most distant galaxy we’ve seen so far is presently 32 billion light-years away; the most distant light we see corresponds to a point presently 46.1 billion light-years away; and galaxies beyond about 18 billion light-years away can never be reached by us, even if we sent a signal at the speed of light today.

Still, none of this breaks the speed of light or the laws of relativity; it only breaks our intuitive notions of how things ought to behave. Here’s what everyone should know about the expanding Universe and the speed of light.  READ MORE...

Big Bang Isn't the Beginning

The modern cosmic picture of our universe’s history begins not with a singularity, the Big Bang, 

but rather with a period of cosmic inflation that stretches a flat, uniform universe. The end of 

inflation is the onset of Hot Big Bang., Nicole Rager Fuller/National Science Foundation)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The Big Bang teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past.
• However, extrapolating all the way back to a singularity leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe.
• Instead, cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever.

Where did all this come from? In every direction we care to observe, we find stars, galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, tenuous plasmas, and radiation spanning the gamut of wavelengths: from radio to infrared to visible light to gamma rays. No matter where or how we look at the universe, it’s full of matter and energy absolutely everywhere and at all times. 

And yet, it’s only natural to assume that it all came from somewhere. If you want to know the answer to the biggest question of all — the question of our cosmic origins — you have to pose the question to the universe itself, and listen to what it tells you.

Today, the universe as we see it is expanding, rarifying (getting less dense), and cooling. Although it’s tempting to simply extrapolate forward in time, when things will be even larger, less dense, and cooler, the laws of physics allow us to extrapolate backward just as easily. Long ago, the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter. 

How far back can we take this extrapolation? Mathematically, it’s tempting to go as far as possible: all the way back to infinitesimal sizes and infinite densities and temperatures, or what we know as a singularity. This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang.

But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story. Here’s how we know the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore.  READ MORE...

The Big Band IS NOT the Beginning

The Big Bang teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past...

However, extrapolating all the way back to a singularity leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe...

Instead, cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever...

Where did all this come from? In every direction we care to observe, we find stars, galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, tenuous plasmas, and radiation spanning the gamut of wavelengths: from radio to infrared to visible light to gamma rays. No matter where or how we look at the universe, it’s full of matter and energy absolutely everywhere and at all times. 

And yet, it’s only natural to assume that it all came from somewhere. If you want to know the answer to the biggest question of all — the question of our cosmic origins — you have to pose the question to the universe itself, and listen to what it tells you.

Today, the universe as we see it is expanding, rarifying (getting less dense), and cooling. Although it’s tempting to simply extrapolate forward in time, when things will be even larger, less dense, and cooler, the laws of physics allow us to extrapolate backward just as easily. 

Long ago, the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter. How far back can we take this extrapolation? Mathematically, it’s tempting to go as far as possible: all the way back to infinitesimal sizes and infinite densities and temperatures, or what we know as a singularity. 

This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang.

But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story. Here’s how we know the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore.  READ MORE...

Officially Official

AS OF 1:20 PM ON THE THIRTIETH DAY OF OUR LORD TWENTY TWENTY...  I took down, repackaged, and returned to storage all our outside Christmas Decoration...  and I say Christmas because this Holiday Season is more than just a holiday season in which we exchange gifts without a birthday celebration associated with that exchange of gifts...  it is a birthday celebration for one person in particular and that is Jesus of Nazareth.

AND WHILE IT DOES NOT REALLY MATTER IF I AM FOREGIVEN OR NOT, I choose not to attend man's churches that were built as tributes to themselves but worship in my own way, in my own style, and in my own private communications with the one who created it all.

I simply do not believe in the BIG BANG THEORY or in the THEORY OF EVOLUTION (at least for mankind) as the human body is just so friggin complicated that it had to have been designed rather than simply evolving.  Now, that does not rule out Extraterrestrials manipulating our DNA and they might even be our creators...  but, with that idea needing some pondering...  who CREATED THEM so that they could create us?

The BIG BANG just does not do a very good job of answering that question.  Plus, where in the hell did all the ingredients come from that were inside the big bang to begin with?  So...  guess what?  Scientists are now trying to prove that something can really come from nothing because that nothing in the first place was not nothing at all, it was in fact...  something...   we just called it nothing for lack of a better word.

How far up their asses are the heads of these scientists anyway?

AND NOW...

we are playing around with the concept of multiple dimensions that co-exist and are somewhat parallel to our own dimension in which the same thing happens as does happen in ours, it's just a little different and perhaps a little odd ballish.

For example...

for every degree in a circle, assuming our universe is a perfect circle, we could have another universal dimension...   which means that since each circle is composed of 360 degrees, we could have 360 different dimensions...

BUT... WHAT IF...

there were an infinite number of dimensions between each degree of a circle...  then, there is no telling how many dimensions of which our universe might be comprised.

In the sub atomic world...  the three particles of an atom are further broken down into smaller particles and those particles broken down into more particles until there is nothing left but VIBRATING STRINGS OF ENERGY WHOSE MOVEMENTS CANNOT BE PREDICTED...  hence the different dimensions that could be available to us.

NOW...

Let's consider this...

That our Solar System, not our Milky Way Galaxy, is considered to be one of these vibrating strings of energy in comparison to the rest of the universe...  and, its movement while seemingly pretty damn consistent to us, is unpredictable when it comes to the rest of our immense universe...

Mind Boggling...

RIGHT?

BUT...

do you really think that all of this uncertainty is a byproduct of some hypothetical BIG BANG or the byproduct of some sort of hypothetical INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

Beginnings and Endings

 The End of November 2020 ✂ this month began 29 days ago and today is the last day of its existence, and unlike other months, it has one day less to live, and once it dies, it will NEVER be seen again by you or I...  it passes away just like all other aspects of time or any of that which has just happened is now permanently gone and while it has not been erased from our consciousness it is still nonetheless gone forever and ever.

As human beings we deal with these beginnings and endings all the time throughout our lives including our own birth and death and while our lives continue from one day to the next or from one month to the next, we all know that we will eventually end our existence and just like November, we will eventually have only one more day to live.

But, what about our universe?

It had a beginning but so far, there is really no ending in sight, other than what we might conclude that all things have to die...  eventually...  and, when our universe dies eventually does that mean that GOD will die as well?

Of course, this is a question only for those of you who believe in God...

AND YET...

many still believe in the BIG BANG...  or the idea/theory that something (our universe) was created out of nothing (a large void) with the understanding I suppose that even a void of nothingness still had enough inside to create a universe...  which to me means that it was not a void at all but something too.

AND IF...

a void was also something too, then where did this something too come from?

could it have come from another void, and another, and another too?

and, where do all the voids of something begin?

I suppose that we must be back to GOD...

and yet...  God is not believed in by many on this earth...  since there are other philosophies and religions that deal with supernatural creators and not a God...  but, have you ever stopped and thought that these supernatural creators might be your God as well?

Of course not...  that would mean your God is not exclusive...

A Time Without Time

Eternal inflation is a hypothetical inflationary universe model, which is itself an outgrowth or extension of the Big Bang theory.  According to this theory, the inflationary phase of the universe's expansion lasts forever throughout most of the universe. Because the regions expand exponentially rapidly, most of the volume of the universe at any given time is inflating. Eternal inflation, therefore, produces a hypothetically infinite multiverse, in which only an insignificant fractal volume ends inflation.

The idea of the inflation of the Universe started in the 1970's when a belief developed that within nanoseconds of the BIG BANG, the universe expanded exponentially.

But Stephen Hawking does not agree with that theory and believes that external inflation does not occur.

Eternal inflation emerges because, in the very early universe, the quantum fluctuations in the field that drives inflation are as big as the field’s average value. But Hawking argues that under those conditions one cannot simply carry on with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but instead must use a maneuver like Maldacena’s to view the entire situation in a space with one less dimension. In that alternative space, things are more tractable, they claim, and the physics does not lead to eternal inflation. Instead, a single, well-behaved universe merges.

In 1997, Argentine-American theorist Juan Maldacena considered a volume of space in which gravity was at work. It’s like saying whatever goes on inside a can of soda can be captured by a theory describing only what’s happening on the can’s surface.

So in Hawking’s through the principle of holography, the very early universe should be described by a theory with just three spatial dimensions and no time.

And, while this author is no theoretical physicist, I wonder quite innocently I would have to say, where does time come from when it finally appears?  And if it does finally appears which we all can agree that it does, then what caused time to be created?  And, can time's creation be attributed to the BIG BANG or to our Creator?

Free Will and Choices

There is a common belief among mankind whether it be from man or from woman and whether you believe in a Creator or not that ALL OF US WERE born with a certain amount of FREE WILL and that this WILL is used on a daily basis to make our CHOICES and it is these CHOICES that determine the direction into which our lives will proceed and it is these CHOICES that determine or predetermine most if not all of our future outcomes.

There is no denial that we make choices and/or that for some of us, our choices are made for us whether these decisions come from our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our bosses, and/or our spouses.  And that these choices do influence in some degree our future outcome and life's directions.  HOWEVER, the concept of free will is a different matter altogether in that free will means the following:  the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.

Consequently, free will has nothing to do with any religious beliefs as it is simply an act of bring born into the world of mankind...  and, we all know that giving birth results from the sexual union of a man and a female...  and, we can make the assumption that this union has nothing to do with the will of a Creator or any such other religious nonsense...  especially since giving birth is as natural as breathing air...  and, we can assume that the properties of our physical body have nothing to do with a Creator either as they are simply the result of millions of years of mutated evolution.

As was evidenced by Jesus and his sayings as recorded in THE BIBLE, if he had FREE WILL then Jesus would not have needed to obey the will of GOD...  but, the will of GOD is necessary and the foundation of most all religion.

So...  therein lies our problem.

NOW...  let's look at the concept of time and the scientific fact that time has a past, present, and a future even though we can neither see our past or our future, yet we know as sure as we are breathing that it is there.

We also know from our space program that astronauts age less in space than they do on earth.  Using this knowledge as a foundation, we can now make the assumption that when we send astronauts further and further out into space and we keep a record of their time relative to earth that their present would be our future.  It is also possible that if these astronauts were the same age as those monitoring their progress that the monitors could die of old age before those astronauts return and still have almost half their lives to live.

Now, let's return to creation and see if it was a Creator that brought it about or some scientific anomaly.  Science believes that our universe was created by the bursting forth and expansion of a black hole.  By definition, a black hole is a compression of matter...  so, what comes out is that which was first inside since a black hole cannot exist with nothing inside.

Yet, science cannot explain where all the stuff that was expelled from that black hole came from...  and so, we must turn to a Creator for the only logical explanation which is a prime example of OCCUM'S RAZOR which states:  Occam's razor is the principle that, of two explanations that account for all the facts, the simpler one is more likely to be correct. It is applied to a wide range of disciplines, including religion, physics, and medicine.

With this new concept in mind, we can easily explain the notion that if our Creator wanted to, He could see our past, present, and future and if it was His Will He could decide our choices for us by changing facets of our past which would cause us to make different choices in our present, thereby nullifying the fact that we had any free will at all.

Hot Tub Revelations

Tonight, I decided to spend some time in my hot tub after it got dark and sitting in the warm 101 degree temperature water and after turning on the jets, looked up at the stars in the sky...  and noticed that there really wasn't many of them that I could see.

The black sky above my head was loaded with millions perhaps billions of stars even though I could only see  less than 00.00000001% of 99.9999999% of them around our planet earth which is located in our solar system...  and, to expand your mental horizons imagine millions/billions of solar systems in our galaxy and millions/billions of galaxies in our quadrant of our universe.

Now, let's imagine our universe is a dinner plate and our quadrant in this universe represents 1 degree of the 360 degrees that completes the full circle of the universe.  Of course, it is also possible that our quadrant is not 1 degree but 1/10 or 1/100 or 1/1,000 or 1/10,000 of 1 degree.

In short, our universe is incredible vast and in each quadrant there are literally billions of billions of billions of solar systems and galaxies...  so, you can just imagine how many stars there are.

AND, as I look at these stars, I begin to wonder:

1. why am I here?
2. what's my purpose here?

BUT, before we answer those two questions, one must come to terms with the creation of the universe...

• was it created by the BIG BANG?
• was it created by CREATION?

Interestingly, NEITHER BELIEF CAN BE PROVED ABSOLUTELY...  one must have elements of faith that support their belief(s).

If God created the universe...  the big question here is WHY?

And, why did God create Jesus to die for our SINS when it was GOD who gave us those sins in the first place?

The BIG BANG direction does not take us any closer to the truth because we still have to answer the questions:

1. how?
2. why?
3. where did the stuff that created the BIG BANG come from?

BUT...  and more importantly...  why am I thinking about this in the Hot Tub when the whole purpose of the hot tub is to RELAX and not think of anything?

One thing is for sure, mankind on earth relative to the size of the universe is literally INSIGNIFICANT to say the least.  Does belief and faith make mankind on earth more SIGNIFICANT, especially when a member of mankind DIES?

My big question is this:  Does each SOLAR SYSTEM have a God and a HEAVEN?

Just Another Fairy Tale...

I started this BLOG in March 2020 because after writing down my thoughts each day since 2001, I decided what the f _ _ _, I might as well share them with others as I really have nothing to lose and perhaps nothing to gain either but at least it gave me something to do each day now that I was retired...

In just 3 quickly passing months and while my readership is still not as high as readers would like, I have been visited by people from TEN FRIGGING COUNTRIES...  and, for me that is a success...  and, worth my continued writing...  although, if no one had visited this BLOG I still would be writing and posting here because I am still retired and have nothing better to do...  seriously...

I retired 5 years ago after working for 45 years and it was not a day too soon either as I had gotten pretty fed up with the bullshits that exists in the workplace by little people who have acquired a little power...  and, what they have not realized yet is that power is not taken, it is earned and given to that person by the people who are their subordinates.

Similarly, in a DOMINANT/submissive relationship, the POWER given to the DOMINANT has been given willingly and voluntarily by the submissive...  so, who really has the power? 

ALSO similarly, are our lives here on earth and the fact that our lives (none of whom asked for birth) were given to us as a gift by GOD or our CREATOR or by whatever other name you want to use...  our birth did not come because any of us asked for it and our death will not arrive either because any of us asked for it...  OUR LIVES ARE BEING CONTROLLED by HE who some of us worship and in so doing give HIM power and DOMINION over us whether we want it or not...   and, that my friends is TRUE POWER...

Why were YOU in particular given birth by your parents???
And, did your mom really give birth to you in the sense of allowing you to grow in her womb?
Was your birth location predetermined?
Were your parents predetermined?
Was your face predetermined?

OR,

was this some crazy result of SCIENTIFIC EVOLUTION OF SPECIES...  that miraculously took place over millions of years...  starting with the BIG BANG and later a POOL OF LIFE from which the first one celled animal grew which later created animals with millions of cells which later and after numerous cell and DNA mutations created MANKIND and over time, evolution quite unscientifically created white, black, brown, olive, and red creatures all of whom would fight each other for domination...  because that fighting survival GENE had evolved from their original DNA...

JUST HOW MUCH BULLSHIT DO YOU WANT TO BELIEVE PEOPLE???