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Hang It Up, Rudy

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There’s nothing more mortifying than for a presidential hopeful to generate press by attacking the patriotism of a sitting president. Rudy Giuliani’s comments about President Obama “not loving” his country are just terribly pathetic.

The Republican Party, with it’s Neo-conservative economic policies (what Reagan extolled as “trickle-down” economics) has presided over a huge transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich (what I decry as “tinkle-down” economics). Now, the only way that I have been able to make sense of “love” is as an investment in creating power in people. Taking their money is exactly the opposite of that.

Contrast this with the centerpiece of Obama’s domestic policy: the Affordable Health Care Act. This is an investment in the people of America. It ensures that individuals can get medical care before their ailments become debilitating, and thus that they can remain active contributors to our economy. It lessens health care costs because it keeps people out of the emergency room, and thus will lower rates for everyone over the long term.

Now that – that is loving.

So why isn’t that perspective shared by Giuliani and his cronies?

There are two kinds of people: those that project themselves upon the world (narcissists) and those that allow the world into themselves (empaths). The Republican Party is beholden to the former: people that believe that whatever works for them is what is right for the country. The Affordable Health Care Act created some losers – very wealthy people that made their money by ensuring that they minimized the number of sick people on their plans. This left a back-log that has to be paid down as coverage is extended without regard for preexisting conditions. This means that, in the short term, rates will go up – particularly for those people that were on preferred coverage plans.

Giuliani represents those people, and all I have to offer is that it is un-Christian to ensure that sick people cannot rely upon society to invest in their healing. When Giuliani has the courage to recognize the inherent selfishness of that attitude, then I might have some confidence that, if elected president, he might actually love the people of this nation. And I don’t mean just the rich cronies that line his campaign coffers. I mean all of the people.

Shedding Light on Light Mysteries

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In the last post, I identified correspondences between superfluid motion and the phenomenon that are described by the equations of quantum mechanics and special relativity. The discussion leads to the assumption that light is a disturbance in a cold – and therefore highly ordered (“crystal-like”) – sea of dark energy.

The illustration in that post showed a perfect lattice, but given what we know about the universe, we’d expect the dark energy lattice to be a little less regular. For example, we know from the Michelson-Morley experiment that dark energy is entrained with massive objects, which tend to be round. There’s an old adage about “pounding a round peg into a square hole” (or was it the other way around) that fits here: the distortion created by the spherical Earth requires accommodation from the rectangular lattice, which will introduce defects.

And then we have the early history of the universe: unless the universe was unfolded from a single location, dark energy will organize itself locally, just as we see in crystals formed in solution. Here’s a picture of insulin crystals:

Insulin crystals grown in solution
Now obviously as these crystals grow to fill in the volume, there’s going to be some places where they don’t fit together nicely, which is going to leave defects in the final mass. So it would happen with the dark energy lattice.

What would we expect to happen when light encounters such a defect? Well, a reasonable analogy is what happens when a water wave encounters a rock. While most of the wave will continue around the rock, ripples will be cast off all around.

Do we see evidence of this in our study of the universe? Well, yes we do. First of all is the cosmic microwave background. But there’s more than than. Recent studies reveal that there is too much light coming from the empty space between galaxies (see Galaxies Aren’t Bright Enough). Astronomers originally assumed that the light had to come from early sources (back around the “Big Bang”, which I think is hokum), but that early light should should be “stretched”, and therefore redder than it is. So the light must be coming from modern sources. Without any other proof, astronomers suppose that there must be many stars between galaxies.

In the lattice model, the cosmic microwave background and extra light between galaxies actually go together: if light is scattered by dark energy, it will lose a little bit of its energy (perhaps into microwaves) and change its direction. Therefore, some of the light coming from a distant galaxy will appear to have originated from empty space, and space will seem to be filled with microwaves.

Finally, the loss of energy from scattering in the lattice explains why light emitted from distant galaxies appears redder than light from nearer galaxies. In current theory, this is explained as due to the relativistic Doppler effect (similar to what we experience when a car passes us with its horn blaring, the pitch drops after the car passes us). But with the discovery of Dark Energy, other mechanisms may exist to explain this effect.

I will admit that the last two paragraphs are a “have you cake and eat it too” situation. If light from distant galaxies loses energy to scattering, it would be diffused as it passes, which would make the galaxies indistinct. But remember that the volume around galaxies is expected to have many more defects in the lattice than the intergalactic medium, which would cause stronger scattering in their vicinity. And when defects exist, radiation may also be emitted when the lattice reorganizes itself to close the defect. The point is that there is a whole set of new phenomena to consider when explaining astrophysical observations.

All this without needing to suppose a Big Bang at all.

Way Beyond Teflon

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In imagining a universe filled with an invisible substance, it is natural to use air as an analogy. We then run immediately into trouble with Newton’s first law of motion, which is also an assumption in Einstein’s theories:

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state unless acted upon by an external force.

We know that air actively slows the movement of objects passing through it. Why aren’t moving objects slowed as they pass through Dark Energy?

One way around the problem is to assert that Dark Energy is a wall-flower: it doesn’t interact with anything else. That’s a prevalent assumption, and it causes me to remember the early history of thermodynamics. In building a theory of heat, early investigators, noticing that heat moved from place to place without changing the substance it occupied, conceived of caloric, an invisible field that permeated the spaces between atoms. That didn’t have much explanatory power, and was rapidly replaced by theories that explained heat as disordered motion of atoms.

Astrophysicists tell us that the universe is a pretty cold place – only a few degrees centigrade away from the coldest temperatures possible. Study of systems at these temperatures have revealed some amazing behaviors. For purposes of our discussion, liquid helium is an interesting example because it exhibits superfluidity, which allows objects to move through it without resistance. But superconductivity – materials that pass electricity without resistance – is another consequence of the basic principles that determine the behavior of really cold systems. Both liquid helium and superconductivity, by the way, are extremely important technologies in building facilities such as CERN.

Liquid helium is particularly simple because it bonds only very weakly, which is why it is liquid at temperatures that cause almost every other element to freeze. For illustration, I’m going to show a model system that shows atoms in a square two-dimensional lattice. The details may not apply to liquid helium, but I have reason to believe that they might to dark energy.

Imagine that we have a tank filled with liquid helium. At very cold temperatures, the atoms stack uniformly in the tank.
Super Fluid Lattice
Such arrangements are said to have high order. They are typical of crystalline materials, including many solids. One of the upshots is that it’s difficult to move a single atom without moving the entire collection. That’s because gravity presses the volume into a compact mass, which means that that atoms are compacted slightly, and therefore repelling each other. So moving one helium atom causes the atom it’s moving towards to move away. The cold here is important: if the lattice were vibrating somewhat, there would be little gaps that could absorb some of the distortion, and so the parts of the lattice could change independently. It’s the lack of such vibrations that forces the lattice as a whole to respond to changes.

Now let’s imagine that we place an impurity into the lattice.
Impurity in Super Fluid
This time a slight distortion of the arrangement will occur. The atoms nearest the impurity will indeed shift their positions slightly. Since the atoms at the walls of the container can’t move, they will tend to remain in place. So the distortion will be localized. What’s interesting to consider is what might happen if two defects are created. Will the disturbance to the lattice be minimized if the defects are brought together, or if the lattice acts to separate them? The astute student of physics will see that this thought leads to a model for gravity.

Now let’s propose that somehow our impurity begins to move.
Slow Impurity
How will the lattice react? Well, again, the atoms at the walls can’t move. The impurity will push against the atom in front of it, and leave a gap behind it. So long as the speed of the impurity is much less than the speed of the sound in the lattice, it is only the nearest atoms that will be disturbed. Obviously, the solution to restoring the order of the lattice is for the forward atoms to migrate to the sides as the impurity passes, displacing the atoms already on the side so that they fill the gap left by the passing impurity. When they reach the back, the atoms will come to rest by giving their energy back to the impurity. This is the essence of superfluidity: the impurity loses energy to the lattice only temporarily.

What is interesting to note is that in quantum mechanics, when calculating collisions between two charged particles, we have to assume that the particles are constantly emitting and re-absorbing photons. This is analogous to the situation in the superfluid: the impurity is constantly losing energy and then regaining it.

Finally, let’s consider an impurity moving closer to the speed of sound in the lattice. In this case, the distortions affect more than the nearest atoms, and the circulation becomes more widespread.
Fast Impurity
It’s important to note that energy is stored in the circulatory motion of the helium atoms. They are moving, just as the impurity is moving – but in the opposite direction, of course. The closer to the speed of sound, the more energy is stored in the circulation. This means that it becomes harder and harder to make the impurity move faster as it moves more and more nearly at the speed of sound.

In Special Relativity, Einstein showed that particles become harder and harder to accelerate as they come closer and closer to the speed of light. The relationship is (m0 is the mass of the particle at rest):

m = m0/(1-v2/c2)1/2

Again, we see some strong correspondence between superfluidity and the behavior of particles in both special relativity and quantum mechanics. The big difference is that, while Richard Feynman famously stated that quantum mechanics was merely a mathematical procedure without any explanation, when applying the superfluid analogy to dark energy, it seems that at least some previously mysterious quantum and relativistic phenomena are simple to understand.

For more on models of particle mass, see That’s the Spirit.

Becoming a Man in a Woman’s World

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On my fist visit to the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, I was consciously assessing the state of a community that I expected to be seized by fear. The priestly child-abuse scandal that had been papered over in the ‘70s had re-ignited. Attorneys revealed that many of the perpetrators had been hidden in the church hierarchy, and some had been allowed to resume children’s ministry. Cardinal Mahoney himself was accused of complicity, and huge financial claims were leveled against the Church.

What I discovered, as I wandered around the periphery of the celebration, was that it was infected by a subtle competition for dominance. Every member of the worship team wanted to lift the pall, to re-establish the connection to Christ, and no longer trusted the authority of the prelate. So I listened carefully, echoing back what I heard, and tried to celebrate harmony when it appeared. The cantor went and sat with the choir, and when he came back down to the podium, the competition surrendered to glorious praise.

As I wandered in the space, I got a few disturbed glances from the ushers and deacons. But the confrontation came from a middle-aged woman who, as I stood in the back enjoying the music, approached me and hissed “Say the words!”

I experienced this again when I went down to Orange County to the enormous campus of a renowned evangelist. This time I sat in the fourth row from the stage, and as I probed the spirit of the congregation, he stared pointedly at me. I stayed for a second service, this time sitting in the back rows, and he announced that he had been talking to Jesus every day of his adult life. A little non-plussed, I poked around and discovered that it was his wife and her girlfriends that were presenting the counterfeit.

I won’t assert that these incidents are typical of the “male-dominated” religions, but neither are they rare. They illustrate the temptations of maternal power. If a man and his wife become “one flesh” through intercourse, how much deeper are the bonds that link a mother and the child growing in her womb? The sin that exists in abortion is that the two spirits, rather than separating through birth, remain bound up together. Inevitably a struggle for dominance develops. Even if a normal delivery occurs, male children remain buried in a feminine psychology. This is untenable. While a woman can tell a man whether he satisfies her physical and psychological needs, she cannot connect him to the sources of spiritual strength that make it possible for those needs to be met.

Particularly in affluent communities, where housewives often find their worth measured by the strength of their children, boys face enormous challenges in becoming men. Mothers have difficulty letting their children go. I saw this manifested when I volunteered as a teacher’s aide in elementary school. I was the only father to so participate in kindergarten. I was involved in a divisive custody struggle at the time, and faced a prejudice that I was simply there for legal reasons. That was not true – I really wanted my sons to have a concrete sense of how important their education was to me. But the teachers and mothers struggled with my presence.

In my younger son’s class, lessons were tutored at tables marked by pictures. I was never assigned to the teacher’s table until I took my sons to a swim party. One of the activities was water volleyball with a huge bouncy ball. The event facilitators stood at the back of the court and, though trying to be as gentle as possible, served the ball with force that simply overpowered the kids. I finally got my hands on the thing and walked it up to the net, asking “Who wants to serve it?” Holding the ball over the child’s head, they knocked it up into the air, and the children on the other side clustered under the ball. No longer having to absorb its momentum, they knocked it back over the net. Laughter and shouting replaced the bored frustration.

When I next went in to class, the children embraced me with their hearts while the teacher read a story. The birthday girl turned around and smiled at me, and the little community of children finally overwhelmed the resistance to my presence that had been established by the mothers and teachers. I was allowed that day to tutor at the “red heart table.” But consider: only because one of the daughters let me in.

So when feminists decry the disempowering psychology of “male-dominated” religions, I get a little frustrated. Given their powerful psychological influence on little boys, maternal projections of anger towards men are a destructive burden. I would prefer that women celebrate the strength that they gain from participating in Earth- or Goddess-centered religions, thus advertising what men are missing. And I would also prefer that they celebrate the teachings of the avatars, none of whom rejected the participation of women. Even in the Hebrew tradition, a woman’s spiritual power is recognized: inheritance of the tradition is through the mother.

But the only way to make sense of the story of Abraham’s lineage is to realize that Joseph, the child left without a protector in his father’s harem, became a glorious man because his father took him under his wing. Boys need fathers, and women need to be cautious against using their children as leverage in their relationships. It leaves them with weak sons that attain independence only through rebellion, and the problems of managing the predatory women that they attract. When that consequence is recognized, it seems unfair to castigate men because husbands, spun up by sex and greed, go out into the world to plunder and pillage for the satisfaction of their wives.

A Massive Mystery

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Quantum Mechanics describes particles as vibrations in time and space. The intensity of the vibration in time (i.e. – when it is) reflects the particle’s energy; the intensity of the vibration in space (i.e. – where it is) reflects its momentum.

In large-scale reality, such as baseballs and buildings, those vibrations are way too small to influence the results of experiments. In studying these “classical” systems, physicists discovered certain mathematical laws that govern the relationship between momentum (p) and energy (E). Believing that these rules should still be manifested in the quantum realm, they were used as guidelines in building theories of vibration.

In Special Relativity, that relationship is (m is the mass of the particle):

m2 = E2 – p2

In the case of electromagnetic waves, we have m = 0. Using a fairly simple mathematical analogy, the equation above becomes a wave equation for the electromagnetic potential, A. An electric field (that drives electricity down a wire) arises from the gradient of the potential; a magnetic field (that causes the electricity to want to turn) arises from the twisting of the potential.

The contribution of P.A.M. Dirac was to find a mathematical analogy that would describe the massive particles that interact with the electromagnetic potential. When the meaning of the symbols is understood, that equation is not hard to write down, but explaining the symbols is the subject of advanced courses in physics. So here I’ll focus on describing the nature of the equation. Let’s pick an electron for this discussion. The electron is a wave, and so is represented by a distribution ψ.

Physically, the electron is like a little top: it behaves as though it is spinning. When it is moving, it is convenient to describe the spin with respect to the motion. If we point our right thumb in the direction of motion, a “right-handed” electron spins in the direction of our fingers; a “left-handed” electron spins in the opposite direction. To accommodate this, the distribution ψ has four components: one each for right- and left-handed motion propagating forward in time, and two more for propagation backwards in time.

Dirac’s equation describes the self-interaction of the particle as it moves freely through space (without interacting with anything else). Now from the last post, we know that nothing moves freely through space, because space is filled with Dark Energy. But when Dirac wrote his equation, Einstein’s axiom that space was empty still ruled the day, so it was thought of as “self-interaction”. That self-interaction causes the components of the electron to mix according to m, E and p. When the self-interaction is applied twice, we get Einstein’s equation, relating the squares of those terms.

So what does the mass term do? Well, it causes right-hand and left-hand components to mix. But here’s the funny thing: imagine watching the electron move in a mirror. If you hold up your hands in a mirror the thumbs pointed to the right, you’ll notice that the reflection of the right hand looks like your left hand. This “mirror inversion” operation causes right and left to switch. In physics, this is known as “parity inversion”. The problem in the Dirac equation is that when this is applied mathematically to the interaction, the effect of the mass term changes sign. That means that physics is different in the mirror world than it is in the normal world. Since there is no fundamental reason to prefer left and right in a universe built on empty space, the theorists were upset by this conclusion, which they call “parity violation”.

Should they have been? For the universe indeed manifests handedness. This is seen in the orientation of the magnetic field created by a moving charged particle, and also in the interactions that cause fusion in the stars and radioactive decay of uranium and other heavy elements.

But in purely mathematical terms, parity violation is a little ugly. So how did the theorists make it go away? Well, by making the mass change sign in the mirror world. It wasn’t really that simple: they invented another field, called the Higgs field (named after its inventor), and arbitrarily decided that it would change sign under parity inversion. Why would it do this? Well, there’s really no explanation – it’s just an arbitrary decision that Higgs made in order to prevent the problem in the Dirac equation. The mass was taken away and replaced with the Higgs density and a random number (a below) that characterized its interaction with the electron: m ψ was replaced with a H ψ.

Now here’s a second problem: if space was empty, why would the Higgs be expected to have a non-zero strength so that it could create mass for the electron? To make this happen, the theory holds that empty space would like to create the Higgs field out of nothingness. This creation process was described by a “vacuum” potential with says that when the Higgs density is zero, some energy is available to generate a density, until a limit is reached, and then increasing the density consumes energy. So space has a preferred density for the Higgs field. Why should this happen? No reason, except to get rid of the problem in the Dirac equation.

And what about the other spinning particles? Along with the electron, we have the muon, tau, up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top and three neutrinos, all with their own masses. Does each particle have its own Higgs field? Or do they each have their own random number? Well, having one field spewing out of nothingness is bad enough, so the theory holds that each particle has its own random number. But that begs the question: where do the random numbers come from?

So now you understand the concept of the Higgs, and its theoretical motivations.

Through its self-interaction, the Higgs also has a mass. In the initial theory, the Higgs field was pretty “squishy”. What does this mean? Well, Einstein’s equation says that mass and energy are interchangeable. Light is pure energy, and we see that light can be converted into particle and anti-particle pairs. Those pairs can be recombined to create pure energy again in the form of a photon. Conversely, to get high-energy photons, we can smash together particles and anti-particles with equal and opposite momentum, so that all of their momentum is also converted to pure energy (this is the essential goal of all particle colliders, such as those at CERN). If the energy is just right, the photons can then convert to massive particles that aren’t moving anywhere, which makes their decay easier to detect. So saying that the Higgs was “squishy” meant that the colliding pairs wouldn’t have to have a specific energy to create a Higgs particle at rest.

Of course, there’s a lot of other stuff going on when high-energy particles collide. So a squishy Higgs is hard to detect at high energies: it gets lost in the noise of other kinds of collisions. When I was in graduate school, a lot of theses were written on computer simulations that said that the “standard” Higgs would be almost impossible to detect if its mass was in the energy range probed by CERN.

So it was with great surprise that I read the reports that the Higgs discovered at CERN had a really sharp energy distribution. My first impression, in fact, was that what CERN had found was another particle like the electron. How can they tell the difference? Well, by looking at the branching rations. All the higher-mass particles decay, and the Higgs should decay into the different particle types based upon their masses (which describe the strength of the interaction between the Higgs field and the particles). The signal detected at CERN was a decay into two photons (which is also allowed in the theory). I am assuming that the researchers at CERN will continue to study the Higgs signal until the branching ratios to other particles are known.

But I have my concerns. You see, after Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize, his predecessor on the podium, Carlo Rubia (leader of the collaboration that reported the top particle discovery) was in front of a funding panel claiming that the Higgs seemed to be a bizarre object – it wasn’t a standard Higgs at all, and the funding nations should come up with money to build another even more powerful machine to study its properties. Imagine the concern of the Nobel committee: was it a Higgs or not? Well, there was first a retraction of Rubia’s claim, but then a recent paper that came out saying that the discovery was not a Higgs, but a “techni-Higgs”.

One of the characteristics of the scientific process is that the human tendency to lie our way to power is managed by the ability of other scientists to expose fraud by checking the facts. Nobody can check the facts at CERN: it is the only facility of its kind in the world. It is staffed by people whose primary interest is not in the physics, but in building and running huge machines. That’s a really dangerous combination, as the world discovered in cleaning up the mess left by Ivan Boesky and his world-wide community of financial supporters.

Always Check with the First Guys First

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I wrote previously about the awe-inspiring intuition of Douglas Adams (see The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything). But today, after posting my blog entry, one of my colleagues pulled the page off his Dilbert desk calendar and came to show me what Scott Adams decided to write about today.

I have this sudden urge to watch that TV show. You know, the one with the lady in the creepy black dress and the groaning butler? Not to mention that cousin with the hair growth problem.

The God Particle

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When I did my undergraduate studies in physics at UC Berkeley, the textbooks (always a generation behind) celebrated the accomplishments of great particle physicists of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The author lists on the papers, typically eight people, offered a picture of personal and meaningful participation in revealing the mysteries of the universe.

When I stood one step down on the stage at Wheeler Hall, giving my thesis adviser a height assist when passing the Ph.D. sash over my head, the realities of research in the field of particle physics had completely changed. While I had worked on an eight-person experiment, the theorists had dismissed the results even before they were published. Many of my peers worked as members of geographically dispersed teams, either national or international in scope. The design and commissioning of apparatus had become major engineering projects requiring a decade or more to complete. Some of them never sat shift to acquire data, but published a thesis based upon computer simulations of what their data would look like when (or in some cases, sadly, if) their experiment was run. They were forgotten cogs in collaborations involving hundreds of scientists.

The sociological side-effects of these changes could be disconcerting. The lead scientist on my post-doctoral research project acquired most of his wealth trading property in the vicinity of Fermilab, sited in bucolic countryside that sprouted suburbs to house the staff of engineers and technicians that kept the facility running. Where once a region could host a cutting-edge experimental facility, eventually the sponsors became states, then nations. The site selection process for the Superconducting Super Collider, the follow-on to Fermilab, was a political circus, eventually falling in favor of Texas during the first Bush administration. The project was cancelled in a budget-cutting exercise during the Clinton Administration. This left CERN, the European competitor to Fermilab, as the only facility in active development in the world, with thousands of researchers dependent upon its survival.

Obviously managing the experimental program at such a facility requires an acute political ear – not just to manage the out-sized egos of the researchers themselves, but in packaging a pitch for politicians approving billion-dollar line-items in their budgets. I watched with trepidation as every year a low-statistics survey was done at the limits of the machine’s operating range, with the expected anomalies in the data held out as evidence that there was “something right around the corner” to be uncovered if the machine was allowed to continue to operate. This happened year-after-year, and that can have bad consequences: the frustration of the funding community creates pressure that causes things like the Challenger disaster to happen.

When I left the field in 1995 (yes, 1995! And it’s still relevant!), two specific problems were held out as motivations for continued funding. First, the equations used to calculate reaction probabilities developed a serious anomaly at the energies targeted by the next set of improvements: the values were greater than unity. Since an experiment can have only one outcome, this was held out as proof that something new would be discovered. The other problem was the existence of the Higgs boson, known popularly as the god particle.

There are many explanations for that soubriquet: “God Particle”. Some attribute it to Stephen Weinberg, a theorist whose frustration with the difficulty of proving or disproving its existence led him to call it “that god-damned particle.” I had a personal view, which was that every time theoretical physics ran into a difficulty, it seemed to be resolved by introducing another Higgs-like particle. But the cynic might also be forgiven if he claimed that the Higgs had become a magic mantra that induced compliance in mystified politicians, and spirited money out of public coffers – pretty much as atheists like to claim religions do.

So what is the Higgs particle?

Einstein is So 20th Century

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In the two centuries between Newton and Einstein, arguably the greatest physicist of the 19th century was the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell made fundamental contributions to thermodynamics, the study of how gases, liquids and solids change when ambient conditions (such as temperature and pressure) change, and how to convert heat to work. One of the results was an understanding of the propagation of sound waves through the air. But Maxwell also applied the new mathematics of differential calculus to create a unified theory of electricity and magnetism. These are the famous “Maxwell’s Equations” that predict the existence of electromagnetic waves, which we see as “light”.

Maxwell saw the relationship between electromagnetic waves and water and sound waves. Being steeped in a mechanical analysis of the world, he was unsatisfied with his abstract mathematical theory, and invested time in building a mechanical model of the “aluminiferous ether” – the medium in which light waves traveled. Having spent years studying his equations and their predictions, I am fascinated by claims of his success. It’s a magical world in which the linear motion of charges creates rotary magnetic effects. My understanding is that the model was not simple, but contained complex systems of interlocking gears.

Now Maxwell’s work was not merely a curiosity – it was the basis for the design of communication networks that broke down distances with the enormous speed of light. More than anything else, this has brought us into each other’s lives and helped to create the sense that we are one human family. (The social and psychological reaction to that reality is complex, and we’re still growing into our responsibilities as neighbors. In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin offers a hopeful analysis of the transition.)

So the world of scientific inquiry hung on Maxwell’s words, and in America, two of them, Michelson and Morley, designed an experiment to detect the presence of the ether. If the ether filled all of space, the Earth must be moving through it. Therefore the speed of light should change depending upon the motion of the observer through it. The analogy was with water waves: an observer moving along with a water wave doesn’t experience its disturbance – while one moving against it feels its disturbance enhanced. This is an example of Newton’s laws concerning the change of reference frames.

Since the Earth rotates around the sun, light emitted from the Earth in a specific direction relative to the sun should have a different speed at different times of the year. To test this hypothesis, Michelson and Morley built a sensitive instrument that compared the speed of light travelling in two perpendicular directions. As the Earth varied its motion through the ether, the pattern of dark and light on a screen was expected to shift slowly. Strangely, the result was negative: the image did not change.

The conclusion was that there was no ether. This was a real crisis, because Maxwell’s Equations don’t behave very well when trying to predict the relationship between observations made by people moving at different speeds. To understand how really terrible this is, consider: in Maxwell’s theory, charges moving through empty space creates a rotary magnetic field. But what if the observer is moving along with the charge? The charge no longer appears to move, so the magnetic field disappears. How can that be possible?

This was the challenge taken up by the Dutch physicist Henrik Lorenz. He analyzed the mechanical properties of rulers and clocks, which are of course held together by electromagnetic forces, and discovered a magical world in which rulers change length and clocks speed up and slow down when the speed of the observer changes.

This was the context in which Einstein introduced his theory of Special Relativity. He did not really add to the results of Lorenz, but he simplified their derivation by proposing two simple principles: First, since the vacuum is empty, we have no way of determining whether we are moving or not. All motion is relative to an observer (thus the title: Special Theory of Relativity), and so no observer should have a preferred view of the universe. The second was that the speed of light is the same to every observer. Einstein’s mathematical elaboration of these principles unified our understanding of space and time, and matter and energy. Eventually, General Relativity extended his ideas to include accelerating observers, who can’t determine whether they are actually accelerating or rather standing on the surface of a planet.

Special and General Relativity were not the only great theories to evolve in the course of the 20th century. Quantum Mechanics (the world of the microscopic) and Particle Physics (describing the fundamental forces and how they affect the simplest forms of matter) were also developed, but ultimately Einstein’s principles permeated those theories as criteria for acceptance.

Then, in 1998, studies of light emitted from distant supernovae seemed to indicate that something is pushing galaxies apart from each other, working against the general tendency of gravity to pull them back together. The explanation for this is Dark Energy, a field that fills all of space. This field has gravitational effects, and its effects in distorting the images of distant galaxies have been observed. However, this field cannot be moving in all possible directions at all possible speeds. Therefore, it establishes a preferred reference frame, invalidating Einstein’s assumptions.

Working physicists resist this conclusion, because they have a means of accommodating these effects in their theories, which is to introduce additional mathematical terms. But science is not about fitting data – it is about explaining it. Einstein used his principles as an explanation to justify the mathematics of his theories. When those principles are disproven, the door opens to completely new methods for describing the universe. We can travel as far back as Maxwell in reconstructing our theories of physics. While for some that would seem to discard a lot of hard work done over the years between (and undermine funding for their research), for others it liberates the imagination (see Generative Orders as an illustration).

So, for example, why didn’t Michelson and Morley detect the ether? Maybe ether is more like air than water. Air is carried along with the Earth, and so the speed of sound doesn’t vary as the Earth moves about the sun. Maybe dark energy, which Maxwell knew as the ether, is also carried along with the Earth. Maybe, in fact, gravitation is caused by distortion in the Dark Energy field when it is bound to massive objects.

The Writing of The Soul Comes First

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In Catholic terminology, thaumaturgy is the working of miracles through love. Raised by a skeptical father and steeped in science that disproved the possibility of such experiences, for most of my life I disbelieved.

That changed with the millennium, when personal and political crises brought fear into my life. I began to read widely on spiritual and religious experience. Then one Sunday I entered the sanctuary at St. Kolbe’s in Oak Park, CA. A thirty-foot statue of Christ hangs from the ceiling, not nailed to the cross, but suspended before it. Confronted with this powerful image of human suffering, I instinctively put my hand over my heart, held it out to him, and thought, “Use this for healing.”

In the intervening years, I have learned a great deal about healing through divine love. I learned that many “evil” people are simply doing what was done to them, and desperately looking for someone with the strength to show them how to get over it. I learned that people used to being in control find the sensations that come with being loved to be frightening, almost a betrayal by the thirst of their hearts. I learned that many intellectual atheists are “spiritual”, and those that are not do not realize how frightening others find the strength of their minds. I realized that Biblical literalists use their dogmatism to hold those minds at bay.

As I sought for answers, the astrophysicists announced the discovery of Dark Energy. To those that remember the philosophical roots of modern physics, this discovery was shattering. Einstein’s theories of relativity are based upon the assumption that space is empty. Dark Energy demolishes that assumption. With that called into doubt, we might notice another oddity in the history of physics: where from Ancient Greece to 1950 the complexity of nature was always understood by positing structure inside the smallest objects we could observe, in the modern era physicists assumed that no additional structure was needed. Taking away relativity and adding additional structure reveals a whole new class of theories that have the potential to reconcile science and spirituality (see Generative Orders (GO) and GO Cosmology).

I began to share these insights in 2005 with the web site at http://www.everdeepening.org, in which, as a Greek philosopher might have, I try to prove that love works. Realizing that the material was really difficult, I wrote a “layman’s” treatment back in 2008, the unpublished “Love Works.” Unfortunately, attempts to teach others demonstrated that the ideas were still difficult to grasp.

Then, in 2013, I was moved to re-read the Bible cover-to-cover, and saw it in a completely new light. I realized that what Darwin and paleontology had revealed about natural history was written right into the Bible. No conflict existed, and in fact the consistency of science with the Bible served to substantiate everything else written within.

Reading through the book in such a short time, I also saw the greater work on human nature, and the majesty and brilliance of God’s efforts to prepare us for the manifestation of Christ.

So I sat down at my computer and wrote The Soul Comes First in three weeks. In it is contained all the hopes that I pray I share with Christ: the unification of reason and faith, the hidden strength that will give humanity victory over fear, and the healing of the world through the power of love.

The message may be frightening to some. The job that we forsook in Eden is a big job, and difficult. All I ask is that you remember that it is not in human hands that the work is held. We all do our part, and the farm hand that plants a sustainable crop is no less essential than the ecologist that plans the restoration of a forest. The housewife serving in the soup kitchen is no less essential than the CEO commissioning a new factory. The counsellor that saves a marriage is no less essential than that politician that negotiates a peace treaty. With love, the strength of Christ, and the unifying wisdom of the Holy Spirit, all things are possible.

Why Monotheism?

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When I was in high school in the ‘70s, global politics was dominated by a penis-envy contest called Mutually Assured Destruction. The Soviet Union and the United States amassed huge stock-piles of nuclear weapons that Carl Sagan concluded could wipe out the enemy without even falling on their territory. Simply setting them all off at ground level would raise enough dust in the stratosphere to cause a global winter. The collapse in food supplies would push humanity to the brink of extinction. That the instigator of the war would share the fate of their enemy justified the acronym ‘MAD’. But there were a lot of institutions that spent a lot of money building weapons delivery systems that were faster, more lethal and more accurate – money that might have been better spent improving the educational and living standards.

While Khrushchev threatened that the Warsaw Pact would bury the West under the weight of Soviet armor (pounding his shoe on the table for rhetorical effect), ultimately it was America that buried Russia under a mountain of dollars. Remember – this wasn’t a strategic conflict with concrete goals. It was a penis-envy contest, and letting the other guy get away with more was unacceptable. So Russia bankrupted itself attempting to match the West weapons-system for weapons-system. The United States cynically engaged this policy of “escalation” in many theaters of conflict. Simply introduce more and more sophisticated weapons systems, until the enemy was financially exhausted, then bring them to the table to figure out how to make money together.

We’ve seen this same logic invade our religious arguments over the last hundred years. You know, “My God is greater than yours.” At one point, the Buddhists prided themselves on remaining above the fray, but when I went down to Deer Park Monastery five years back, the speaker was proud to observe that Buddhism had never instigated a war, unlike those Christians and Muslims. I wondered to myself whether Buddhists were running any countries, and now recent events in Myanmar seem to bear out the corrupting influence of political authority.

Religious breast-beating can be traced to theological escalation. Polytheism was accepted practice in the ancient world, and those that cultivated relationships with multiple gods would have been likely to consider themselves shorted in a relationship with a single god. What if the one god doesn’t approve of your goals? Why wouldn’t you want to bargain with another deity? The response from monotheism was often to assert that “Our one God is more powerful than all those other gods put together. In fact, our God is the god of all things seen and unseen, the creator of everything, the ultimate purpose, and look at how our warriors beat you up on the battlefield when we carry his banner!”

I am going to denounce this logic right here and now: monotheism is not the celebration of a god for the purpose of claiming his or her power. Monotheism is, in fact, the original humanism. It was to recognize: “Geez, there’s a lot of spiritual power brought forward from the past, power built up in trees and animals and fish. It’s really hard to be human in this world! Let’s band together and worship a human god, and create a place for ourselves.”

Why was this important? Because our minds are so incredibly powerful. This is recognized in Eden, where after eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are cast out before they can eat of the Tree of Life. Humanity has a dangerous capacity: the capacity to create ideas, which is to reorganize spirit. The serpent tempted Eve because it knew that it could assault heaven itself with that power, and that is evident in the actions of God himself in the aftermath: an angel with flashing swords is set up to prevent our return to the Garden.

It is also evident in the punishments meted out for creating the golden calf, the judgment against the kings of Israel for allowing polytheism to flourish, the scourges suffered by Ezekiel and the passion of Christ. When humanity is polluted by primitive tendencies, God insists that they be purged. This is also the purpose of the Law: animals are opportunistic and instinctual. They don’t apply abstract systems of rules to moderate their actions. Reasoning about the consequences of our actions is a uniquely human capability.

The full glory of human potential is celebrated by Christ when he announces to Peter [Matt. 16:9]:

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

In other words, the Apostles were trained as a corps of spiritual surgeons.

In confronting the power of this capacity, the ancient predators had only one response: keep us from banding together. This is described in Revelation, where John recounts how the dragon (the spiritual avatar of the serpent that appeared in Eden) causes humanity to pursue animal worship, and when we get over that, corrupts our religions from within [Rev. 13:15]:

The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.

Sound like MAD, anyone? Claim that your god is the best, threaten the enemy, and bankrupt yourself spiritually.

The goal that I offer today, thus, is to put away monotheistic escalation. The ultimate nature of God is beyond our understanding. What is important is to use the divine relationship to most fully refine our human capacities. Our unique skills – the skills of understanding, imagination and creativity – must be strengthened. Ultimately, it is intended that those skills should replace the brutal urge for survival and reproductive opportunity that characterize the animal kingdom.

In guiding us to maturity, all of our great religious traditions hold that there will come an avatar who will help us bring peace and justice to the world. Their name or ethnicity is unimportant, for in that era the divine authority will be manifested in all of us.