Dear Friends,

I’ve been pondering a couple of perhaps related notions, poking round in their crooks and crannies, for the past few days. One is the seemingly farfetched idea proposed by a contemporary cosmologist and mathematician, Max Tegmark, that our Universe is made of numbers.

Now, nobody ever bumps into the numeral One or π when walking through the park, of course. But we do know that everything in nature, everything from the smallest scale to the greatest, everything from very basic physics to the most complex chemistry, even the the paths of individual fish in a school or children meandering in a gaggle across the schoolhouse playground can be described in algorithms composed of chains of numbers and mathematical notations. Four digits describe all of the genetic code in every life form we know of. Might the reason for these obvious and real facts be that the Universe is actually made of nothing but numbers?

Maybe.

So, where do numbers come from? It’s not like Pythagoras invented the numbers in his theorem. If he hadn’t come along, somebody else would have soon discovered the same mathematical expression for the theorem that became synonymous with his ancient moniker. Triangles would exist without he, Plato and Euclid ever pondering their perfect forms.

What else do we know in our Universe that is composed out of ethereal digits? Computer code, more or less rigorous math and logic, is one answer. Might all that we know be merely an elaborate string of code written by some extra-universal teenager frittering away a the billion-year nighttime while shrugging off his homework assignment for the next morning’s class in Cosmic Engineering and Applied Creation?

Maybe.

Like all computer code, of course, the one that might lie at the foundation of our perceived Universe, has bugs. Take Infinity, as an example. Math hates infinities. There are an infinite number of them, for one thing. Yes, that was a pun.

There is also the problem that physics has with infinities. Everything we might understand about what happens at the birth of our Universe is blown to smithereens by our best equations arriving at the numbers of Infinity. Likewise, we cannot use our mathematical tools to peer into the heart of a black hole, for therein lie infinities. Oh, and we get back to π! What is the deal with such a sublime number that perfectly describes what we observe but has no end? Sounds like a bug in the code to me.

What do you think?

Looking Forward and Beyond,

S

More Whimsey From Across the Heavens

Dear Friends,

This little bit of fiddling from a public domain image continues a recent theme. Look to the sky. Be bewildered and question. Why have THEY not yet arrived, or have they? Are they too small to see? Do THEY live in a timeframe out of our own?

Is a moment to we Humans comparable to eons for such creatures. Perhaps they are in no hurry to deal with such an infant civilization as our own. Perhaps they know that we are trouble brewing for them, and want to stay hidden. Perhaps THEY are so big that we actually live inside their beings, as bacteria and viri live in our own Human bodies. There are so many possibilities. The questions are fascinating.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Spiritual and Cranky!

Dear Friends,

I got pretty cranky yesterday morning when I encountered a commentary by this yutz, Alan Miller, on CNN calling folks who were "spiritual but not religious" lazy and timid. Hey, boss, you take a look at a Universe that stretches from before the beginning of time and all the way to the end of time. See a universe that is one of an infinite variety and multitude but has perfected itself to create Human eyes and Human minds that seek to comprehend it and all the other possible creations in every possible dimension within and without time. Look into the near emptiness of space and see Reality being born out of that emptiness adjacent to dark stars that drink up even the aether of light born out of nothingness.

In this Universe matter is mostly unseen and most light dark, most truth must left be unspoken about the hidden mysteries on worlds beyond our dreams begging to be revealed in a place where Space and Light bend and few so-called facts can be trusted from our vantage. We cannot know where and how fast It becomes new or old or not at all; no more than that cat in a box that has puzzled us since those cats Heisenberg and Schroeder dreamt it up or not. The end of the story of that cat does or does not forever live in a book that has no beginning nor end.

So, stand there at the edge of a sky with new stars birthing new planets and look at them. Stand alone without some old man in a throne above the clouds of our piece of lint in the Cosmos, this pale blue dot, our home world circling an unremarkable star at the tenuous fringe of one galaxy swirling amongst a trillion others. Now, tell me that I am lazy and timid. Brother, what I just described is where I live and it is not a place for the timid. To you I say, welcome home.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Tasting Comets…

Comet Kohoutek Seen from Earth in CE 1973

Dear Friends,

Have you every tasted a comet? I bet you have. When you were a little kid, did you ever stick your tongue out as a snowflake fell in a blizzard? That tiny bit of water melting in an instant upon your tongue was from a comet. Have you ever mopped your brow after an afternoon of playing in the sun? That salty and sweet flavor of sweat came from a comet. Have you been to the sea? All those gazillions of tons and 1.3 sextillion liters of water and much of the stuff of our own beings and every living thing we know came from countless comets falling through ancient winds in an orange sky of nitrogen and methane and ammonia to deliver us water and the chemistry of life. When you inhale that breeze on the surf, you are breathing a comet.

That surf you feel vibrating at about one and a half cycles per second is the vibration of our Home World’s Moon bouncing around Terra as it wobbles about old Sol. It is also a cerebral sound; it is the frequency of our Human minds at rest and in meditation. It is no wonder that we can sit for hours or lie with our eyes closed under the Sun listening to that beat. Listen long enough without distraction and your own pulse cleaves to that rhythm. It slows. You are at Home under the arc of a heaven that once rained down comets.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Thank You, Turing!

Dear Friends,


If the sun rises tomorrow, it will herald what would have been the 100th birthday of Alan Turing. He was a hero and an enigma, a gift to humanity who gave us all of his own gifts, but was scorned and persecuted by the men to whom he gave those treasures in his own brief time. His best efforts were bequeathed to the future.

He saved millions of lives and helped end the most horrible war that our species has ever waged. I could not now be touching so many folks' thoughts nor their hearts with the flicks on the keys of this little computer that has at its basis an invention of his mind. For billions of us, without Turing, we would never know each other through this seemingly magical medium of expanded mind.

Yes, this fellow had a fine mind, strange but a very generous one. I think I'll go buy an apple tomorrow, take one bite out of it and put a little candle by the core, wishing the too long gone hero a happy birthday.


Hic Finis Est,


SS

A Trip to a Far Away Moon…

Dear Friends,

1,216 billion kilometers, about a billion miles away from the pale blue dot that is our home-world, is a very small world that we humans call Enceladus. It is a moon of Saturn, and it circles and swims amidst the most dense portion of the gaseous, ringed and giant planet’s E-ring. Enceladus is so tiny that its entire diameter could be nestled in the distance between Montreal and Washington, D.C.

Something interesting is happening out there. On a patch of dust where ice serves as the fifty-mile thick rocky mantle and crust of a deep frozen speck of creation, there are geysers. How can this be? Perhaps, we thought, under that frigid presentation to early robots visiting from Earth, there is an ocean. The founts that emerge from this world’s surface are rich in water and the chemicals sodium and potassium. Nitrogen makes up a good portion of the ice that cloaks the roiling, hidden ocean that is bubbling in the massage of Saturn’s titanic gravity. Beneath that ocean lies a core of iron, silicates, and carbon. On Eceladus there is the chemistry of life.

We wonder, what sort of life might be bubbling in that dark ocean that has never seen even the dim light of a distant sun? The clever machine, Aldrin II, completed its seven year voyage to the Saturnian system in 2028. It threaded its way through the debris of the great rings to orbit Enceladus and then descended to its surface. There it deployed Aldrin’s cryobot, Armstrong. It took six months (in Earth time) to bore down to the ocean through the mantle of ice. Eventually, however, there the great question was answered; at least in part.

The briny deep was a soup of pre-biotic and biotic materials, detectable to the robot’s “senses.” Amino acids complexed into RNA, DNA and proteins, flakes of what could have passed for earthly flesh and weird bits of what seemed to be vegetation but contained no chlorophyl were abundant near the ocean floor where sulfurous fumaroles vomited out the substances of the ancient world’s core. Peering into the murk, Armstrong detected in this exobiology what appeared, at first, to be bacteria to any doctor born of our terran orb. On closer examination, this first judgement was precisely wrong.

The bugs of Enceladus were all inside out. Exterior to their lipid cellular membranes was their genetic material. It makes sense that nature might direct such an evolution. In a cozy but constrained womb such as this weird ocean, evolution had opted to make the exchange of genes as convenient and speedy as possible. Higher up the food chain were similarly constructed creatures. Their bodies had the appearance of flattened eels that squiggled through the waters. Their guts secreted their gastric juices through a slimy skin that was covered with long cilia that captured their digested food and swept it into pores and thence, apparently to an alimentary canal that had no mouth but the being’s surface. It did, however have an anus, from whence the rich broth of the Enceladan biosphere was, in part, derived.

There was more. That plant like detritus was revealed to be the dissolved remains of plankton-like beings that had evolved to bio-fluoresce to signal each other in the otherwise impenetrable darkness of their home in an encapsulated deep. With this talent they gained the ability to form jelly-fish-like colonies, massive creatures that captured and consumed the eel-creatures. They lived on top of the alien food-chain, died and just fell to pieces.

Twenty years after his arrival in the alien deep, Armstrong still swims this strange ocean. It continues to report back. Alas, almost nobody is listening but kids who are strange, have never kissed a girl, and have time on their hands. The governments of The Allies have cut back budgets for space exploration. There are wars to pay for. Meanwhile, the people of our gloom benighted orb may yet hear news of a species that might want to speak to us through a piece of our technology made from junk made from stuff we dug from this Earth, and flung toward the stars.

Hic Finis Est,

S