The British Ambassador Resigns

By Glenn N. Holliman

David Collingwood, British educator and keen observer of the human race, emailed the following from his holiday villa in southern France with permission to post.   

"If you feel that you’d like to publish this, you have my full authority.  Here, in la Vaucluse, it is a comfortable 30 degrees Celsius: I write in the shade of olive trees at the table in our Provençal garden; ahead is the unmistakeable outline of Mont Ventoux; around, thousands of cicada chirrup merrily; above is the cornflower-blue sky beloved of Cézanne; and by my right arm is a glass of chilled rosé. What could be better? No wonder I wax lyrical today.  Warmest good wishes and bisous." - David

The high profile story here, as, one would hope it is over there, is the maliciously-leaked (confidential) correspondence of Kim Darroch, the British Ambassador to the USA.

Left, David, wordsmith and 
intellectual of the Midlands, shares an insight.

He did what all ambassadors do: he assessed state and actions of foreign governments and advised his government accordingly. As an ambassador quite rightly expects his correspondence with his government to be confidential, he must be blunt and honest, rather than diplomatic.

Right, Ambassador Kim Darroch. 

That a potential British Prime Minister - Boris Johnson - would refuse to give his full support to a British ambassador, beggars belief. 

Right, the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson?

That a nation’s leader - President Trump - would lower himself by resorting to social media to question the judgement of any ambassador is shocking. 

No gentleman would admit to reading another’s correspondence: he would distance himself from such behaviour. Thus, the best, and correct, response to Sir Kim’s (leaked) reports would have been not to respond at all. The alternative would have been for Mr Trump to have condemned the criminal and treacherous behaviour of the perpetrator of the leak.

Without naming specific prime ministers and presidents, I look back with nostalgia to times when the leaders of both our nations at least made a pretense of dignity and courtesy, behaving in a manner befitting their high office. - David Collingwood

Turning 70

by Glenn N. Holliman

Recently I traveled to Israel and met a new Jewish-American friend, a few years older than me, and a person who has lived a large life.  As I sometimes do in a wonkish way after several glasses of the local beverage, I asked Ken what the word 'time' means.  Being socratically minded, he immediately asked me what I thought the word meant. 

Left, Ken, a scholar of Israeli history, and my cousin, Karen Holliman at Caesaria January 2018

Quoting another wise friend, David, a retired science teacher in England, I replied, 'Time is continued existence."  And Ken being a thoughtful theologian (although he would never admit it) asked pointedly, "Then what was time before existence?"  

Well, he had me there and still does, so this column in today's local web media caught my eye and spurred this Sunday morning increased reflections.  Especially so, since I now see 70 in a rear view mirror and realize my 'sell-by' date has arrived.

 No, I am no closer than this writer in knowing the unknowable, although my daughter is challenging my existential thinking these days.   Sigh....GNH

Right, David of the Midlands from England, a deep thinker and an inveterate traveler of the world.

 A Few Thoughts on Turning 70
by Bob Quarteroni of Pennsylvania

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten." Psalm 90:10

So there you have it.  According to the Bible the warranty on this puckered-up meat package is about to expire.

On Feb. 6, a birthday I share with horror with Ronald Reagan, I will turn 70, when the Bible says it's time to turn into a subterranean sandwich for the eyeless hungry.

It seems just yesterday I was making mud pies with Joanie Ondish under our grapevine and now look at me: Told by Scripture that my ticket is ready to be punched.

So, how do I feel about this?  Should I expound on some profundities, state some nuggets of wisdom that I've learned over the decades, impart important truths to those you younger than me?

The truth is I feel no wiser - no less ignorant about everything - now than I did when I was a freshman at Central Catholic High school shooting spitballs though straws at my friends.

Which is beyond frustrating, since my entire life has been focused on the one and only truly important question we all face: What does it all mean?

Why are we here?  Why were we born? What is life?  Is there a God? Is the universe entirely random?  Is this all a dream?  Is there even such a thing as reality?

All part and parcel of the same question, the ur-why, the meaning of the whole damn thing. 

I was born reflective and I've stayed that way.

Sixteen years of Catholic schooling (even as I rejected that religion's silly rote mumbo-jumbo) early fueled my obsession with understanding a universe so unknowable, so seemingly random, so inexplicably composed of fantastic beauty and evil beyond understanding.

And the following decades were quests for knowledge in a myriad of ways, from mysticism to Zen, from meditation to Thomas Merton, from existentialism to magic mushrooms, from Paracelsus to St. John of the Cross, from the Kabballah to Buddhism, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum.

The result? Nada. I feel I know less now then when I was making the mud pies.

I feel exactly like the woman in Annie Dillard's transformational - for me - "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."

"We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty violence.....'Seems like we're just set down here,' a woman said to me recently, 'and don't nobody know why.'"

Amen to that, sister.

After a lifetime of trying to understand, it's no clearer to me now if, in the terms of one of my King's College theology courses, there is an "unmoved mover" behind it all. Or if it's just random chaos, noise, interference, indifference.

As "2001" author Arthur C. Clarke put it: "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

Anyhow, thanks to my limited intelligence I'll obviously never know the answer. I almost hate to trot it out because I use it so often but it's so perfect: Alfred North Whitehead's "The universe is not only stranger than you imagine but stranger than you can imagine."

And I think that would be the case. Whatever's going on is going to be so fantastically weird and complex, we wouldn't understand it even if it was served up in tiny slices for our tiny brains.

It would be like trying to teach the theory of relativity to a flatworm. Not gonna happen.

So, leaving the great profundities aside, what have I learned in my 25,550 days?

I've learned that life is both sweet and sour. I've lived a thoroughly messy life and I wouldn't change a minute of it, not even when I screwed up the most or was most heartsick.

It's been an enjoyable, sloppy mess, full of loves and hates, likes and dislikes, adventures and misadventures; a roller coaster of loud, hard, intense living that is getting to the end so fast that it takes my breath away.

Did it have any great meaning? I would think not, though its memories and illuminations are priceless to me and will be until I blink out.

While the jury is out on the cosmic riddle, I strongly believe there is no afterlife, no personal Bobby Q floating around in the ether for eternity doing - what exactly?

That seems so silly to me to not even be worth serious consideration. No, as the ancient Easter Island proverb goes: We are born, we eat sweet potatoes, and we die.

When the rough beast I am slouches to a stop, that will be it for me. Nothing will be left but other people's memories of me and a room-temperature husk, devoid of life and meaning.

But I don't find that depressing at all. It's been a good run for a little dust mote like me, one helluva ride.

Even though I've never found any answers, I've never stopped looking and questioning, wondering and hoping, seeking and probing.  And that, for me, has given meaning to my life.

On his deathbed Rabelais said, "I go to see a great perhaps."

Soon, perhaps, so will I.

Bob Quarteroni, a frequent PennLive Opinion contributor, is a former columnist and editor at the Centre Daily Times. He lives in Swoyersville, Pa. Readers may email him at bobqsix@verizon.net. 

Time - What is It?

by Glenn N. Holliman

According to the western calendar, it is a new year - 2017, my 70th new year, and counting down toward my final such occasion (as are we all).  This holiday season my wife, Barb, and I are hosting friends from the Midlands of England, David and Mary Collingwood.  Both retired educators, I have for several years of friendship been pestering David, a learned scientist and all around renaissance person, with questions about life, liberty and the pursuit of meaning.  David before a winter's fire....

During one of our conversations, lingering over a bottle of red wine, he explained to me how reality and life are structured.  Let me try to quote him.  "One begins with sub-atomic particles, then atoms, then atoms attracted to each other by magnetic force which become molecules.  Then more complex molecules, and along the way become the building blocks of cells, and delightfully we have a cell, and what we call life.

These cells connect, enzymes and tissue appear, and soon organs and at the end of this evolutionary and building block chart, we have the most complex of life forms, the human being."

Golly, I don't remember my high school biology teacher explaining it that way, or perhaps I was not listening.  Now in my aged DNA format, I find myself listening more and still wondering.

Right, David in Newport, Pennsylvania having studied a village map of the borough as it was so structured in 1895, another moment in time.

So I popped a large question to David - "What is time?"

Well, we both agreed we knew what it was but had the darnest time defining it.  Being with an Englishman, I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, 1957 edition (just happened to have one hanging around the house) and yes, a decent definition appeared.

"A stretch of continued existence"

We both agreed that seemed to be one of the better descriptions possible. Certainly one that worked for a New Year's Eve Day 2016.   I held back until January 1, 2017, because my next big question is this:

"Well, why does existence, exist?!!" 

Ah ha, I will give you David's answer in a later article.  But for the moment let me share an article on time taken from Wire.com.  A bit complicated and head scratching but perhaps it will get your New Year off in a heady way.  Happy New Year everyone!

What is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory

from Wired.com

SAN DIEGO — One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time?

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech where he focuses on theories of cosmology, field theory and gravitation by studying the evolution of the universe. Carroll’s latest book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, is an attempt to bring his theory of time and the universe to physicists and nonphysicists alike.

Here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he gave a presentation on the arrow of time, scientists stopped him in the hallway to tell him what big fans they were of his work.

Carroll sat down with Wired.com at AAAS to explain his theories and why Marty McFly’s adventure could never exist in the real world, where time only goes forward and never back.

Wired.com: Can you explain your theory of time in layman’s terms?

Sean Carroll: I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.

And we sort of understand that halfway. The arrow of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you’re not surprised they turn into a mess. You’d be very surprised if a mess turned into neatly stacked papers. That’s entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy goes up as it becomes messier.

So, Boltzmann understood that and he explained how entropy is related to the arrow of time. But there’s a missing piece to his explanation, which is, why was the entropy ever low to begin with? Why were the papers neatly stacked in the universe? Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy. It’s like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?

That is what I’m trying to tackle. I’m trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it’s interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It’s all because of entropy increasing. It’s all because of conditions of the Big Bang.

Wired.com: So the Big Bang starts it all. But you theorize that there’s something before the Big Bang. Something that makes it happen. What’s that?

Carroll: If you find an egg in your refrigerator, you’re not surprised. You don’t say, “Wow, that’s a low-entropy configuration. That’s unusual,” because you know that the egg is not alone in the universe. It came out of a chicken, which is part of a farm, which is part of the biosphere, etc., etc. But with the universe, we don’t have that appeal to make. We can’t say that the universe is part of something else. But that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m fitting in with a line of thought in modern cosmology that says that the observable universe is not all there is. It’s part of a bigger multiverse. The Big Bang was not the beginning.

And if that’s true, it changes the question you’re trying to ask. It’s not, “Why did the universe begin with low entropy?” It’s, “Why did part of the universe go through a phase with low entropy?” And that might be easier to answer.

Wired.com: In this multiverse theory, you have a static universe in the middle. From that, smaller universes pop off and travel in different directions, or arrows of time. So does that mean that the universe at the center has no time?

Carroll: So that’s a distinction that is worth drawing. There’s different moments in the history of the universe and time tells you which moment you’re talking about. And then there’s the arrow of time, which give us the feeling of progress, the feeling of flowing or moving through time. So that static universe in the middle has time as a coordinate but there’s no arrow of time. There’s no future versus past, everything is equal to each other.

Wired.com: So it’s a time that we don’t understand and can’t perceive?

Carroll: We can measure it, but you wouldn’t feel it. You wouldn’t experience it. Because objects like us wouldn’t exist in that environment. Because we depend on the arrow of time just for our existence.

Wired.com: So then, what is time in that universe?

Carroll: Even in empty space, time and space still exist. Physicists have no problem answering the question of “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” They say, “Yes! Of course it makes a sound!” Likewise, if time flows without entropy and there’s no one there to experience it, is there still time? Yes. There’s still time. It’s still part of the fundamental laws of nature even in that part of the universe. It’s just that events that happen in that empty universe don’t have causality, don’t have memory, don’t have progress and don’t have aging or metabolism or anything like that. It’s just random fluctuations.

Wired.com: So if this universe in the middle is just sitting and nothing’s happening there, then how exactly are these universes with arrows of time popping off of it? Because that seems like a measurable event.

Carroll: Right. That’s an excellent point. And the answer is, almost nothing happens there. So the whole point of this idea that I’m trying to develop is that the answer to the question, “Why do we see the universe around us changing?” is that there is no way for the universe to truly be static once and for all. There is no state the universe could be in that would just stay put for ever and ever and ever. If there were, we should settle into that state and sit there forever.

It’s like a ball rolling down the hill, but there’s no bottom to the hill. The ball will always be rolling both in the future and in the past. So, that center part is locally static — that little region there where there seems to be nothing happening. But, according to quantum mechanics, things can happen occasionally. Things can fluctuate into existence. There’s a probability of change occurring.

So, what I’m thinking of is the universe is kind of like an atomic nucleus. It’s not completely stable. It has a half-life. It will decay. If you look at it, it looks perfectly stable, there’s nothing happening … there’s nothing happening … and then, boom! Suddenly there’s an alpha particle coming out of it, except the alpha particle is another universe.

Wired.com: So inside those new universes, which move forward with the arrow of time, there are places where the laws of physics are different — anomalies in spacetime. Does the arrow of time still exist there?

Carroll: It could. The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it’s not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It’s not there. So it’s a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

Wired.com: So if the arrow of time is based on our consciousness and our ability to perceive it, then do people like you who understand it more fully experience time differently then the rest of us?

Carroll: Not really. The way it works is that the perception comes first and then the understanding comes later. So the understanding doesn’t change the perception, it just helps you put that perception into a wider context. It’s a famous quote that’s in my book from St. Augustine, where he says something along the lines of, “I know what time is until you ask me for a definition about it, and then I can’t give it to you.” So I think we all perceive the passage of time in very similar ways. But then trying to understand it doesn’t change our perceptions.

Wired.com: So what happens to the arrow in places like a black hole or at high speeds where our perception of it changes?

Carroll: This goes back to relativity and Einstein. For anyone moving through spacetime, them and the clocks they bring along with them — including their biological clocks like their heart and their mental perceptions — no one ever feels time to be passing more quickly or more slowly. Or, at least, if you have accurate clocks with you, your clock always ticks one second per second. That’s true if you’re inside a black hole, here on Earth, in the middle of nowhere, it doesn’t matter. But what Einstein tells us is that path you take through space and time can dramatically affect the time that you feel elapsing.

The arrow of time is about a direction, but it’s not about a speed. The important thing is that there’s a consistent direction. That everywhere through space and time, this is the past and this is the future.

Wired.com: So you would tell Michael J. Fox that it’s impossible for him to go back to the past and save his family?

Carroll: The simplest way out of the puzzle of time travel is to say that it can’t be done. That’s very likely the right answer. However, we don’t know for sure. We’re not absolutely proving that it can’t be done.

Wired.com: At the very least, you can’t go back.

Carroll: Yeah, no. You can easily go to the future, that’s not a problem.

Wired.com: We’re going there right now!

Carroll: Yesterday, I went to the future and here I am!

One of things I point out in the book is that if we do imagine that it was possible, hypothetically, to go into the past, all the paradoxes that tend to arise are ultimately traced to the fact that you can’t define a consistent arrow of time if you can go into the past. Because what you think of as your future is in the universe’s past. So it can’t be one in the same everywhere. And that’s not incompatible with the laws of physics, but it’s very incompatible with our everyday experience, where we can make choices that affect the future, but we cannot make choices that affect the past.

Wired.com: So, one part of the multiverse theory is that eventually our own universe will become empty and static. Does that mean we’ll eventually pop out another universe of our own?

Carroll: The arrow of time doesn’t move forward forever. There’s a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there’s no more arrow of time. It’s just like this room. If you take all the air in this room and put it in the corner, that’s low entropy. And then you let it go and it eventually fills the room and then it stops. And then the air’s not doing anything. In that time when it’s changing, there’s an arrow of time, but once you reach equilibrium, then the arrow ceases to exist. And then, in theory, new universes pop off.

Wired.com: So there’s an infinite number of universes behind us and an infinite number of universes coming ahead of us. Does that mean we can go forward to visit those universes ahead of us?

Carroll: I suspect not, but I don’t know. In fact, I have a postdoc at Caltech who’s very interested in the possibility of universes bumping into each other. Now, we call them universes. But really, to be honest, they are regions of space with different local conditions. It’s not like they’re metaphysically distinct from each other. They’re just far away. It’s possible that you could imagine universes bumping into each other and leaving traces, observable effects. It’s also possible that that’s not going to happen. That if they’re there, there’s not going to be any sign of them there. If that’s true, the only way this picture makes sense is if you think of the multiverse not as a theory, but as a prediction of a theory.

If you think you understand the rules of gravity and quantum mechanics really, really well, you can say, “According to the rules, universes pop into existence. Even if I can’t observe them, that’s a prediction of my theory, and I’ve tested that theory using other methods.” We’re not even there yet. We don’t know how to have a good theory, and we don’t know how to test it. But the project that one envisions is coming up with a good theory in quantum gravity, testing it here in our universe, and then taking the predictions seriously for things we don’t observe elsewhere.

Images: 1) Artist’s rendition of the multiverse./Jason Torchinsky. 2) Diagram of the multiverse./Sean Carroll. 3) Ken Weingart.

So that was easy, was it not?  Ha....just a New Year's Day conundrum for us all! - GNH

Comments?

From Steph in Australia

Now, the only big bang I understood after reading this article was the one that exploded in this little wood duck’s head! It made me recall the Winnie the Pooh stories, where Pooh is a bear of little brain. I’m afraid I have enough trouble making a good omelette without asking ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ or, ‘how can I not make this omelette back into an egg?’ Oh dear oh deary me….

Now, here is my big thought for the year, and after offloading this wisdom bomb I might have to lie down and take a headache tablet or undergo brain surgery.

I reckon that the three biggest underlying problems we face in this world are ….

1.       Humans are far too plentiful on this groaning little planet

2.       Humans are way too short-term clever for their own ultimate good

3.       Humans are not clever enough to see the big picture and consequently change their desires and beliefs.

While this does not make for a rosy picture for our grandchildren, I for one intend to seek out and appreciate every happy moment during 2017, and be eternally grateful that I was born in a land of plenty and egalitarianism. 

From Jane in Pennsylvania, both intellectual and spiritual

Well, Glenn, you certainly know how to get me off track for the day.  Reflections While Reading plugs into one of my favorite topics of how all time and space are simply human constructs to help us make sense of unbelievable science and mystery.  From Fields of Compassion by Judy Cannato, I give you a teaser:

And on the subject of time there is no better source than our own scripture and the Cosmic Christ in Colossians 1:15-17.

¹⁵ The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. ¹⁶ For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

So, cosmic time is always the present.  Forms change, but they all exist within the energy of that "vast sea" that David Bohm talks about.  It's what we call eternal life.

Chew on this for a while.  Blessings to you all,

Jane

Accepting the Vote

From our reader in the Midlands of England, David, a retired educator and ardent traveler of the world. He is noodling over the recent and now repeated observation by USA presidential candidate Donald Trump that he believes the campaign is rigged and may not respect the forthcoming election results.  Such comments have caused an uproar in the body politic.- Glenn N. Holliman

Dear Glenn:

In much of the continent of Africa, there has, for many years, been difficulty with understanding the principle and practice of democracy. The problem, as seen by the rulers, is that they can never be sure how the people will vote. 

If they vote the right way, then democracy is good: if they vote the wrong way, it's bad, and the vote is best ignored. The usual excuse for their ignoring the vote is to claim, loudly and often, that the result was 'rigged'. How sad to see the same attitude promoted in the United States of America.

Here, in your mother-country, during the furore over our EU membership, I didn't like the idea of a referendum taking precedence over our more familiar system of representative democracy: I liked the result even less, but, heigh-ho, (just) over half of those who voted, voted for the UK to leave the EU, and so, reluctantly, I must accept the result. 

David, left, with two traveling companions in a more whimsical moment, his normal mood when not contemplating how difficult it is for human beings to govern themselves!

Why can't would-be dictators, the world over, accept the results of their people's democratic decisions? Failure to do so, especially before the election has taken place or the result known, undermines the whole system, which, as a means of government, may not be the most efficient, but it's "the least worst system" available.

Despairingly,
David

Comments?