How on earth can time not exist?

 

There’s even a famous song about it existing, from the movie Casablanca, and everyone knows the movie Casablanca.

We humans know that ‘time goes by’, time moves on, and space is where we park the car and hang our clothes. We see time and space as separate ‘things’. Always did.

Modern Physics suggests there is no such thing as Time and no such thing as Space separately like that, but only the-two-together as spacetime.

Can we really understand spacetime without getting into other mysteries of maths and geometry? Perhaps, if we don’t make the same mistake twice.

We need to think of spacetime as not some thing ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ something else, something we call the Universe, but of Time-and-Space together as a property of the Universe.

Now instead of getting all technical (as if I would or could!), Einstein is said to have got the idea for Special Relativity while going down in a lift somewhere.

Inside the lift, he intuited that if you were falling inside a lift that was falling, there would be no Space and Time anymore. Can we all imagine that happening? Just going on and on? Maybe we can, but not on Earth. Where then could it happen?

Only where there is no up and down, no left and right, no backwards and forwards. In spacetime infinite Universe. Where there is no Space and there is no Time.

 

How to understand why you're here, instead of making something up

 

Around 1620, a genius called Rene Descartes reasoned, 'I think, therefore I am'. He may have said it in French, 'Je pense, donc Je suis'. We know it famously in Latin, 'Cogito ergo sum'. But M Descartes would not say that today. Today, he would say, 'I am, therefore I think'.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" - Sherlock Holmes, 1890

*****

You can actually figure out the answer to this biggest question of all, from this simple experiment at home. 

Imagine you have 50 coins. You lay them all down 'heads'. (Easy enough to imagine. You don't actually have to do it.)

Now, toss each coin, one by one, carefully, in your mind. They won't all come down heads again, will they? You know that. You don't know how you know it, and you don't know how many will come down heads again. Or tails. But you know they won't all be heads again.

Now instead of with 50, you could do that experiment with 500 or 500,000 or 5 million coins. Imagine you do. You know the answer will be the same: not all heads (or tails), but of course not the actual numbers.

Okay. Now. After many, many experiments, experiment gives you not a definite number or 'answer' but a statistical probability. It's not a definite figure and it's definitely not 'true'. A statistical probability, by definition, is never certain.

And the really extraordinary thing that you know is that you know, in spite of however many experiments you do, it's still possible all the coins could come down heads again. You simply can't deny it. Whether 50 or 50 million. You know. You know that it's not absolutely and completely out of all possibility. You understand that it's not impossible.

That's Science. It's not certain. It's not the truth. But it's not making things up.

And it shows how and why you are here. There was some probability you’d be, in the Universe.

"In heaven's name, why on earth are we here?"

It's our call. There it is. If Heaven isn't the answer, we've got to find it on Earth. What have we got?

Three things are clear. The first is that you have a body and are 'here'. 

The second is we don't know how we got 'here'. No one does for sure.

The third is that we make things up. Ideas, theories and prophecies are what we come up with because we don't know something for sure. When we don't know something for sure, we make something up. Like we eat and breathe and walk and talk, we try to understand.

It's one of the things being here means. Trying to understand.

Then there's the deeply puzzling fourth thing: the 'here' outside our body. We'll never understand that. The best guess is that there's always been a 'here' outside our body, simply because no other idea, theory or prophecy is ever for sure. 

Here must have always been there.

It was just us that was missing.

From Here to Eternity: Science v Religion

"God doesn't exist."

"Yes, He does. He created everything."

"Watch your pronouns!  No, she didn't. Evolution did."

"Evolution's not true. Evolution doesn't explain how life started."

"Nor does God. Just saying God did it doesn't prove it."

"There's no proof of evolution - it's just a theory! Theories aren't facts." 

"The fact is religion's just a belief."

"So's your atheism - that's a religion."

You'll recognise some of that: the Science versus Religion argument. (Note the capitals: Science and Religion as different ways of knowing - not of any particular versions of each.) 

There you were, thinking that was over, that it was done and done with, and it's not over or done with at all. It's back. 

It's back because people have two different ways of explaining the same thing: the mystery of existence. That includes all of us. There's no getting away from it. The argument goes on and on as everyone argues that one of the other, Science or Religion, must be right, must be true.

One way out is to ignore it, but that's no answer. A better way is not to bother about what's true or not true and to think how the argument came about in the first place.

When did people start disagreeing like this? That is the question, because once upon a time the disagreement wasn't there on anything like the scale it is today. People argued all the time, but they argued about which religion was true, not whether Religion or Science was.

In the west, you can say it started around the beginning of the seventeenth century - 1600 and something. There's no firm or agreed date for it, and there was certainly not the remotest possibility of seeing how it would develop into what it is now. It was the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, of something that had not happened before.

People argue about the Scientific Revolution, of course, Nevertheless, that time period can be seen as the start of a fundamental change in thinking. Not sudden, not general; sporadic, scattered - not involving anything like the majority of people, who went on thinking as usual. (Just like today really. For heavens sake, what is a computer?) 

The coming of Science was the start of people thinking that there is another way of thinking.

They started thinking about and studying the natural world as the natural world; and slowly learned, to their confusion and unease, that the inquiry led inevitably to themselves; to what and who they were as a part of it. They had different answers.

"It leads back to God Who gave us everlasting life."

"That's a lovely story. But it looks like the Universe itself is just infinite and eternal."

And so on and so on. There's no end to Eternity.

Trump, his tariffs, the law and the Supreme Court

 

The law can 'decide' the question of whether POTUS has the 'power' to impose tariffs but cannot settle the issue. 

That is because it is, finally, a political, not a legal dispute; it puts democracy and the law - that is, the existence of legal restraints on democracy - at odds.

Trump and his legal advisers are well aware of this but will continue to press their case because they do not believe in liberal democracy and accept the spirit of the law (or to be exact about Trump's attorneys, because they are commissioned to challenge those concepts). They are advocating together a form of fascism: elective dictatorship.

The only way the Supreme Court - if the matter gets that far - seems to have round this is to take the Constitutional view of the separation of the powers and decline to hear the case.

Whether Trump has the power to impose tariffs, or the power to do anything else he likes, can only be settled by whether American voters continue to support him. That is, whether they let him.

That's the reality. That's democracy. What other choice is there?

Ein Heldenleben

As you'll remember (I wrote to a friend who'd asked if I knew Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben), I first heard the usual pairing of the Wagner Prelude and Liebestod on May 4 1954. 

One of the clearest things I've written is about that first time. It changed my life, and not so much changed as expanded beyond all expectation what music had been to me till then: traditional jazz, bop - the trumpet starring because I played one myself - Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton. 

But after that experience, I couldn't get enough of what people oddly call 'classical' music, graduating to Mahler, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Shoenberg, Vaughan Williams, Debussy and all sorts of things by Delius and Nielsen and Richard Strauss, who had been widely considered the most brilliant composer in the world around the turn of the twentieth century but tarnished his reputation by staying on in Hitler’s Germany. 

The connection between the Wagner family and the Nazis no doubt accounts for much of the antagonism to that Richard too, not to mention his deeply unpleasant writing about Jews. Knowing nothing of all that at the time, I held Wagner in awe, thrilled and moved also by Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan, the Four Last Songs, Metamorphosen, Salome, the glorious Der Rosenkavalier.

I can never quite get down in words what all this great music meant to me. It was somehow or other about everything, mixing, and mixing up, beauty, love, hopelessness, all the confused yearnings of youth. I don’t sit now to listen to it like I did then because the memories that come with it sadden, though I find myself listening on YouTube often enough. Ravel's Sheherazade there is as ravishing as ever.

It is still Wagner most. After all the years, as the productions move with the times, I see more than ever his remarkable intelligence and unique vision and feel more intensely his feeling for people, life and love. 

Then I imagine him working in some room in Switzerland, or in the villa in Venice now a casino, hearing, getting it down, re-thinking, hearing again; in the middle of everybody else's ordinary day actualising Tristan and Isolde; to be free of the unearthly demand inside him alone in all the world.

Unintelligible, amoral: is that how the Universe is?

 

Why do humans have morals, a sense of right and wrong? Humans have at least three explanations. Leave out the one that says there is no right and wrong and consider two others.

There is an absolute Right and Wrong, as Plato had us believe before Christianity, and later the Christian God implanted a sense of both in every one of us. 

The other, secular explanation is we are social beings and our sense of right and wrong, and moral conduct, are evolved adaptations that enable us to survive. Without them, there would be no restraints. Living together, society, everything we do, would be impossible.

While everyone argued the two, Edwin Hubble showed a century ago that our vast galaxy of the Milky Way was not the entire Universe. And one hundred years later, we find the Milky Way is not vast but tiny, just one of billions of galaxies in a Universe expanding in all directions faster than the speed of light.

To many people, our arguments seem as nothing in the circumstances. The Universe races further and further beyond the furthest reach of our imagination, as our morality falls further and further short of an explanation for it. 

We only know science will never give up trying to understand and religion will never give up insisting on right and wrong. Otherwise we humans are alone with what the Universe is telling us.

How toothpaste caps explain science

Just so everyone's clear, science is talking probabilities, not preaching the 'truth'. You hear only about the scientific 'theory' of this or that.

A scientific theory may refer to some feature of the natural world observed and established by experiment. It is not 'proof', but it is more than 'belief', and it is definitely not 'final'.

It is perfectly possible to replace one scientific theory with another, but you cannot replace a scientific proof by another proof. The first proof was wrong. Or maybe the other one isn't right.

Confusing. But the confusion can easily be cleared up by a little trial and error at home. 

If you twist the top of the toothpaste anticlockwise, it almost certainly will not come off and you will very probably not do that again.

However, that does not 'prove' that the tops of all toothpastes cannot be removed anticlockwise. You can never be absolutely certain after one hundred or one thousand tests. And you don't have time for that.

You can then of course start to believe the tops of toothpastes always come off clockwise and say to others it's a fact.

And that's what causes all the trouble.

You can even say it's a scientific law and been proved. Though the fact is science has proved no such thing.

Neverthsless two nice things encourage you to stick with the belief. First is if you refuse to believe science and its methods, you can believe anything you like. Second, should the top of a toothpaste open anticlockwise anywhere ever, you can say that proves science is wrong. 

Does God exist? A straightforward answer Part II

Although I thought I'd been clear in the first part of this, someone who read it suggested I wanted to 'sit on the fence' ... 

"On reflection, I think you are right that I want to 'sit on the fence'. I sit there from what I know as me, from who I am, not from what religion or science are alleged to have me believe on the subject.

I believe in evolution because it can make sense to me more than a Creator God. But that does not mean I have 'proved', even to myself, that God does not exist, or that I have some solution to why we and everything are here. 

You and I disagree on many points, but I do agree that religion and science are irreconcilable. In everyday language, they are entirely different ways of explaining what it's all about. 

There are of course scientists who know. And there are scientists who do not know. Without being a scientist myself, I am in the latter camp. No one knows. I don't believe anyone will ever know.

As far as I am able to tell, the Universe is eternal and infinite and meaningless. But though I definitely do not get that from religion, I also do not get it from science.

Thank you for the civilised exchange." 

 

Understanding why people don't believe in science

 

Some suggest it's a low IQ. But what's a high IQ? Ability to do IQ tests, or to have doubts about IQ tests and skip them to do something practical? 

Isn't it more absence of science? Not of brains to grasp quantum mechanics or relativity, but of a popular understanding of it and of the thinking that questions, is curious, doesn't settle for what passes as common knowledge.

After thousands of years of not inquiring, getting by on magic and authority, it's no surprise we can see science as an upstart bent on destroying everything of value, tried and trusted

Long past is the inspiration of some Ancient Greeks and Chinese and the bits they worked out. There's no comparison to be made anymore. In just 400 years or so science has utterly transformed Reality, racing on now to who-knows-where for who-knows-what.

That's not what we learned at school or thought until quite recently. Science got things right; we could take what it says for sure; it would make people wise and the world a better place. That was the truth. 

For science, that was never the truth. It isn't the truth for anyone who thinks for themselves. Especially those who also believe in magic.

 

Does God exist? A straightforward answer at last

The question does not require a discussion of particle physics or materiality. And let us not start by saying God does not exist because science 'proves' or cannot 'prove' it. It is not a question for science.

The question poses an idea and needs answering as an idea.

The straightforward answer runs like this. 

If God created Herself/Himself, then two things must follow: 1] there is/was some power or event of creation once that we humans cannot comprehend; or 2] God did not create Herself/Himself and is eternal and infinite. That is also incomprehensible to humans but may be agreed by all those willing to accept the idea of God on those terms.

What is clear is that you can replace the word God in the above with the word Universe and neither point 1 nor point 2 needs to change. That is to say that if God could have created God by some mystery, or could be eternal and infinite, something we call the Universe could have done, or be, the same.

The Universe is what a scientist and anyone else who does not follow a religion speak and speculate about in a wide variety of ways. A scientist and anyone else who does follow a religion will also speak of God.

In short, these are personal explanations, arising inevitably from our consciousness and individual cognition, not a confirmation of one thing or another existing ‘out there’.

It may help if I mention that I believe the Universe is eternal and infinite because nothing else makes sense to me. But that is not science. And definitely not faith.

The Catcher in the Rye

"You're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them-if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."

~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

What's all this Donald Trump business about, in the end?

It's not just about policy, is it - about tariffs, about insisting the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America and annexing Canada? That's like saying banditry is just about deception or stealing.

And it's about more than politics and doing deals. While we all take sides and fight to win, we also develop laws and democracy that make for some balance, for keeping things roughly fair.

The political idea of 'His Majesty's Loyal Opposition' in the UK and of two competing but legitimate and loyal parties in the US was a key advance in government but appears under threat. Why?

It's normal for politicians to blame problems on political opponents, but Trump needs to suggest anyone with a different view is the enemy.

Not only the 'extreme right' agree. Many in the centre, left and right, accept populist alarms that 'they' have allowed things to go too far. Who are 'they'? Anyone not MAGA. What things? Everything. 

Perhaps we can have too much freedom, too much democracy, and then there's a swing back, a cycle. That's the usual answer.

But that History goes in cycles seems a superficial explanation. Why would History have cycles and what on earth are they? 

Much of the talk now is about how Trump will end. In the end, that must depend on us and our values.

On Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Mr Hyde has to come out sometime simply because he's there, tired of hiding? 

And now, after some time, so must Doctor Jekyll?

 

Why people don't trust science

They never did.

People want certainty, which is why we have habits and rituals, why there are schedules and insurance companies and more conservatives than liberals.

And why there's always a turning away from doubting to religion and magic, which share the warm assurance of permanence.

People resent the rigour of science, fear its innovations, and have no time for its restless searching. It may be confusion after everything we learned about it at school, but more likely it's the way we grow up to be.

There's no certainty in Nature, or in life. It leads a chosen few to be happy questioning, while others come to see the point, or somehow knew it from the first, from a sense of history.

"How do you know that a reality exists 'out there', independent of any consciousness?"

.

It was a challenge to me on an internet site.

One answer is that if a reality 'out there' is only speculation, then that there is no reality out there is also speculation.

Consciousness does not confirm either case and seems to lack a clear connection to the subject. 

Knowledge and judgment are the answers here. They tell us that our experience of what may or may not be out there broadly coincides with the experience of entities all around us; and that those entities are clearly not us but otherwise appear to act like us. 

 

What's more, our cat acts in response to our surroundings. As two or three of those entities might jump at a sudden noise or walk round something in the way, so does our cat.

Bertrand Russell was useful on this. He said if a thing is not certain or is unprovable, it’s best to go for what is probable. 

It’s at least probable that ‘our’ world is ‘out there’ as a cat’s is. It’s just that we are able to speculate that it isn’t. No cat has been known to do this.

Well, has the Trump magic changed History?

A proper understanding of history must begin with human psychology, mustn't it, with understanding the minds of those involved in it?

So President Trump diverts us. He talks of making History with a capital H, as if History exists apart yet can be made to perform to order - Trump's. 

And so the wizardry of tariffs will make all trade fair and every American rich, a dazzling illusion Donald Trump doubtless sees as real - at least until the next sleight of hand gets us baffled and taking sides. Trump magic pulls trick after trick.

But how does that craft make anything an historical certainty, besides confirming Trump and his supporters' belief in his limitless power? And what if the idea of History Repeating Itself is only the failure of leaders to learn from the past - lessons being the one area where Trump definitely gives rather than receives?

Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, convinced of all kinds of truths. Even so, it is hard not to see a foundational difference between the world views of two broad types - conservatives and liberals. And putting the matter broadly again, it is conservatives who worship President Trump as a MAGA magician and liberals who do not. 

The divide between magic and reality is visible everywhere there are people and stoked to extremes in the US today. Given human nature, a way back from mounting political disorder there is nowhere in sight. 

Hence a well-known piece of advice: if you're relying on conjurors like Trump to change their act before they are forced to, don’t hold your breath. And hence the only possible outcome: history alone will show whether Trump magic works wonders now.

The uncomplicated truth about Trump

Is Trump a fascist? Some help with the question

Some years ago I wrote an article suggesting the answer lay with you – and with all of us – personally. Was that reasonable, is it now?

Since then, many Americans have become convinced President Trump is a fascist, as many round the world are convinced. Others still vigorously deny it and ridicule the idea. Their case is Trump simply tells it like it is. He's a patriot, fighting for his country, not running a charity. He drives a hard bargain and so he should. Who’s right? What is the answer?

The difficulty is trying to define the word ‘fascist’ or, let us say, to start by trying to define it by reference to some agreed standard. Hitler? Why not Stalin? Jean-Marie Le Pen? Bashar al-Assad? Nigel Farage? The next-door neighbour? 

Take another word and condition: 'bald'. The average human has between 90,000 and 150,000 hairs on their head. Does that mean you’re balding if you have 149,846? And are you definitely bald already if you have only 89,846? Why do we not seriously argue these points? 

Splitting hairs, getting bogged down in definitions and details, so often loses sight of the issue. Rather decide what democracy is and means to you. Then consider if Trump's way is a better way to organise society.

First off, democracy is a form of government that authorises people - that’s all of us, theoretically - to have a say in our government: the idea of ‘the consent of the governed’. Dispute it as everyone may, it is never clear how that principle can be improved on.

That is because if and when and where democracy is successful, it is evidently the fairest basis for government, even though in other respects fairness means different things to different people and democracy cannot in practice deliver a perfect balance of interests.

But if that sounds like an irredeemable deficiency and good reason to look for an option, it’s important to remember successful democracy is also self-correcting: people can demand fairness and change their minds when any fairness becomes unfair.

Faced with these circumstances, fascism must always insist it has the permanent solution, while democracy is the solution to there being no permanent solution.

That’s the question for the Trumps of the world. In a time when democracy has never been more importunate, they aren’t really democrats; they don’t believe that. Do you?

"Trump started as he means to go on"

                    Newspaper headline after Trump's combative Inaugural Address

Friend and foe know Donald Trump can talk alright. He is media's ideal Controversy, the surefire frightener who, most frighteningly of all, is not on the horizon any longer, but undeniably arrived in person.

Yet you can agree with nearly every word of nearly every hostile article or post, and a reservation still won't go away: an intuition, never quite rising to full confidence, that nevertheless democracy, the 'demos' if you like - but more than that, the vast joined-up context today, the whole shebang - has become far more complex and volatile than all the warnings of its demise would have us believe. Is democracy dead or dying? Is Trump Adolf Hitler reborn in our times? Is he all-powerful? Can anyone have it all his own way anymore? 

And did the Founding Fathers somehow miss the real threat: What if someone just ignores the Constitution? Or does the question miss the point? That all action creates reaction, and reaction, action: that nothing simply stops there.

Trump rejoices in reaction, turning the clock back to the great imagined past he embodies for his conservative supporters. While it’s transparently bogus to many, it makes him friend, hero and Saviour to many more. For the faithful, the water of the Gulf of Mexico is turned into the wine of the Gulf of America, and Mars will miraculously rise again as Mar-a-Lago perhaps, as soon as he can lay hands on it.

But his measured words to another Big Man, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, betray Trump, as well as betray his wonderful promise to put an end to the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. And so, in time, for all the talk?

Reality imposes its own checks and balances. You suspect he's in for big trouble, not today, not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of his life.