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Cartoon: Trump Has Designed A New Twitter Emoji
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Alan: The following is a verbatim quote from Chicago's Mayor Daley during the Democratic National Convention protests in 1968.
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Charlie King's Lament: "One In Six (Have Disappeared)"
"One In Six"
(Have Disappeared)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ5VGmRWhss&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1sEG_RJ_yus6zh6q6NjifwyZoRCkSJ5FjEvjmUWaQqkxqa_qCExd-Ks6E
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Alan: Many thanks to friend Josie McNeil for sending me Charlie King's song.
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A Rap On Race: Margaret Mead And James Baldwin on Forgiveness, Guilt And Responsibility
NOTE: I wrote this essay five years ago, about a conversation that took place fifty years ago – both important timestamps in reflecting on how the ideas therein speak perfectly to the present moment, and how they speak imperfectly but importantly as historical counterweights in a continually evolving context. This essay was the first installment in a multi-part series covering Mead and Baldwin’s historic conversation. Part 2 focuses on identity, race, and the immigrant experience; part 3 on changing one’s destiny; part 4 on reimagining democracy for a post-consumerist culture.
On the evening of August 25, 1970, Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901–November 15, 1978) and James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) sat together on a stage in New York City for a remarkable public conversation about such enduring concerns as identity, power and privilege, race and gender, beauty, religion, justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination. By that point, Baldwin, forty-six and living in Paris, was arguably the world’s most famous living poet, and an enormously influential voice in the civil rights dialogue; Mead, who was about to turn seventy, had become the world’s first celebrity academic — a visionary anthropologist with groundbreaking field experience under her belt, who lectured at some of the best cultural institutions and had a popular advice column in Redbook magazine.
Art by Wendy MacNaughton for Brain Pickings
They talked for seven and a half hours of brilliance and bravery over the course of the weekend, bringing to the dialogue the perfect balance of similarity and difference to make it immensely simulating and deeply respectful. On the one hand, as a white woman and black man in the first half of the twentieth century, they had come of age through experiences worlds apart. On the other, they had worlds in common as intellectual titans, avid antidotes to the era’s cultural stereotypes, queer people half a century before marriage equality, and unflinching celebrators of the human spirit.
Besides being a remarkable and prescient piece of the cultural record, their conversation, the transcript of which was eventually published as A Rap on Race (public library), is also a bittersweet testament to one of the recurring themes in their dialogue — our tendency to sideline the past as impertinent to the present, only to rediscover how central it is in understanding the driving forces of our world and harnessing them toward a better future. This forgotten treasure, which I dusted off shortly after Ferguson and the Eric Garner tragedy, instantly stopped my breath with its extraordinary timeliness — the ideas with which these two remarkable minds tussled in 1970 had emerged, unsolved and unresolved, to haunt and taunt us four decades later with urgency that can no longer be evaded or denied.
Although some of what is said is so succinctly brilliant that it encapsulates the essence of the issue — at one point, Baldwin remarks: “We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.” — this is nonetheless a conversation so complex, so dimensional, so wide-ranging, that to synthesize it in a single article or highlight a single dominant theme would be to instantly flatten it and strip it of power. Instead, I am going to do something I’ve never done in nearly a decade of Brain Pickings — explore this immensely valuable cultural artifact in a multi-part series examining a specific viewpoint from this zoetrope of genius in each installment, beginning with Mead and Baldwin’s tapestry of perspectives on forgiveness, the difference between guilt and responsibility, and the role of the past in understanding the present and building a more dignified future.
As they bring up their shared heartbreak over the bombing in Birmingham that killed four black girls at Sunday school a month after Martin Luther King’s famous letter on justice and nonviolent resistance, Mead and Baldwin arrive at one of the most profound ongoing threads of this long conversation — the question of guilt, responsibility, and the crucial difference between the two in assuring a constructive rather than destructive path forward:
MEAD: There are different ways of looking at guilt. In the Eastern Orthodox faith, everybody shares the guilt of creatureliness and the guilt for anything they ever thought. Now, the Western Northern-European position and the North American position on the whole is that you’re guilty for things that you did yourself and not for things that other people did.
[…]BALDWIN: The police in this country make no distinction between a Black Panther or a black lawyer or my brother or me. The cops aren’t going to ask me my name before they pull the trigger. I’m part of this society and I’m in exactly the same situation as anybody else — any other black person — in it. If I don’t know that, then I’m fairly self-deluded… What I’m trying to get at is the question of responsibility. I didn’t drop the bomb [that killed four black school girls in Birmingham]. And I never lynched anybody. Yet I am responsible not for what has happened but for what can happen.MEAD: Yes, that’s different. I think the responsibility for what can happen, which in a sense is good guilt — which is sort of a nonsensical term —BALDWIN: Yes, but I know what you mean. It’s useful guilt.MEAD: Responsibility. It is saying I am going to make an effort to have things changed. But to take the responsibility for something that was done by others —BALDWIN: Well, you can’t do that.
MEAD: There are different ways of looking at guilt. In the Eastern Orthodox faith, everybody shares the guilt of creatureliness and the guilt for anything they ever thought. Now, the Western Northern-European position and the North American position on the whole is that you’re guilty for things that you did yourself and not for things that other people did.Mead illustrates the perils of confusing responsibility and guilt with an exquisite example from her own life as a mother, from the time in the mid-1940s when she was heading a university initiative to foster cross-racial and cross-ethnic relationships:
MEAD: I was walking across the Wellesley campus with my four-year-old, who was climbing pine trees instead of keeping up with me.
I said, “You come down out of that pine tree. You don’t have to eat pine needles like an Indian.” So she came down and she asked, “Why do the Indians have to eat pine needles?” I said, “To get their Vitamin C, because they don’t have any oranges.” She asked, “Why don’t they have any oranges?” Then I made a perfectly clear technical error; I said, “Because the white man took their land away from them.” She looked at me and she said, “Am I white?” I said, “Yes, you are white.” “But I didn’t took their land away from them, and I don’t like it to be tooken!” she shouted.Now if I had said, “The early settlers took their land away,” she would have said, “Am I an early settler?” But I had made a blanket racial category: the white man. It was a noble sentiment, but it was still racial sentiment.
With an eye to this demand for responsibility in the present rather than guilt over the past, the conversation once again reveals its contemporary poignancy:
MEAD: The kids say — and they’re pretty clear about it — that the future is now. It’s no use predicting about the year 2000.
BALDWIN: No.MEAD: It’s what we do this week that matters.BALDWIN: Exactly.MEAD: That’s the only thing there is; there isn’t any other time.
A 1573 painting by Portuguese artist, historian, and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s, from Michael Benson’s book Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time.
They revisit the subject of guilt, with its perilous religious roots, and the complexities of forgiveness in discussing the crime of slavery:
BALDWIN: I, at the risk of being entirely romantic, think that is the crime which is spoken in the Bible, the sin against the Holy Ghost which cannot be forgiven. And if that is true —
MEAD: Then we’ve nowhere to go.BALDWIN: No, we have atonement.MEAD: Not for the sin against the Holy Ghost.BALDWIN: No?MEAD: I mean, after all, you were once a theologian.BALDWIN: I was once a preacher, yes indeed.MEAD: And the point about the sin against the Holy Ghost is that —BALDWIN: It is that it cannot be forgiven.MEAD: So if you state a crime impossible of forgiveness you’ve doomed everyone.[…]Look, there have been millions of crimes committed against humanity. Millions! Now, why is one crime more important than another?BALDWIN: No, my point precisely is that one crime is not more important than another and that all crimes must be atoned for.MEAD: All right, all crimes… But when you talk about atonement you’re talking about people who weren’t born when this was committed.BALDWIN: No, I mean the recognition of where one finds one’s self in time or history or now. I mean the recognition. After all, I’m not guiltless, either. I sold my brothers for my sisters —[…]MEAD: I will not accept any guilt for what anybody else did. I will accept guilt for what I did myself.[…]BALDWIN: We both have produced, all of us have produced, a system of reality which we cannot in any way whatever control; what we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, is happening, in time.
This is a conversation underpinned by a profound baseline mutual respect and punctuated by wonderfully sweet in-the-moment manifestations of it — Mead and Baldwin frequently repeat each other’s words in a gesture of validation, and even bicker amicably about not letting the other be too self-effacing (“If I’m bright at all, and that’s debatable,” Baldwin says in one aside, and Mead quickly interjects, “It’s not very debatable.” “It’s very debatable to me,” Baldwin counters. “Well, permit somebody else to do the debating,” she quips affably.) But they have no reservations about voicing, if courteously, ideological disagreement — which is what makes the conversation so rich, stimulating, and full of wisdom. One of the most moving instances of this dynamic emerges when they return to their divergent views on guilt and responsibility, only to discover under the surface divergence profound common ground:
MEAD: Did you bomb those little girls in Birmingham?
BALDWIN: I’m responsible for it. I didn’t stop it.MEAD: Why are you responsible? Didn’t you try to stop it? Hadn’t you been working?BALDWIN: It doesn’t make any difference what one’s tried.MEAD: Of course it makes a difference what one’s tried.BALDWIN: No, not really.MEAD: This is the fundamental difference. You are talking like a member of the Russian Orthodox Church… “We are all guilty. Because some man suffers, we are all murderers.”BALDWIN: No, no, no. We are all responsible.MEAD: Look, you are not responsible.BALDWIN: That blood is also on my hands.MEAD: Why?BALDWIN: Because I didn’t stop it.MEAD: Is the blood of somebody who is dying in Burma today on your hands?BALDWIN: Yes, yes.MEAD: Because you didn’t stop that? That’s what I mean by the Russian Orthodox position, that all of us are guilty of all that has been done or thought —BALDWIN: Yes.MEAD: And I will not accept it. I will not.BALDWIN: “For whom the bell tolls.” … It means everybody’s suffering is mine.MEAD: Everybody’s suffering is mine but not everybody’s murdering, and that is a very different point. I would accept everybody’s sufferings. I do not distinguish for one moment whether my child is in danger or a child in Central Asia. But I will not accept responsibility for what other people do because I happen to belong to that nation or that race or that religion. I do not believe in guilt by association.BALDWIN: But, Margaret, I have to accept it. I have to accept it because I am a black man in the world and I am not only in America… I have a green passport and I am an American citizen, and the crimes of this Republic, whether or not I am guilty of them, I am responsible for.MEAD: But you see, I think there is a difference. I am glad I am an American because I think we can do more harm than any other country on this earth at the moment, so I would rather be inside the country that could do the most harm.BALDWIN: In the eye of the hurricane.MEAD: In the eye of the hurricane, because I think I may be able to do more good there.[…]We are responsible for that. That we are responsible for those unborn children, black, white, yellow, red-green, as the Seventh-Day Adventists say — all of them. We agree completely on that.Now, is it necessary at this moment in history … for someone who is black to take a different stance in relation to the past although we take the same stance in relation to the future? Now it may be. You see, the question I was raising earlier is that maybe in order to act one has to take a different stance.BALDWIN: … Now, a thousand years from now it will not matter; that is perfectly true. A thousand years ago it was worse; that is perfectly true. I am not responsible for that. I am responsible for now.MEAD: Now.
Discus chronologicus, a German depiction of time from the early 1720s; found in Cartographies of Time.
Reflecting on “that peculiar chemistry which we call time,” Baldwin stresses “the necessity of the long view” — something triply necessary today, amid our epidemic of short-termism — and considers the relationship between the past and the present in making sense of responsibility:
BALDWIN: A man’s life doesn’t encompass even half a thousand years. And whether or not I like it, I am responsible for something which is happening now and fight as hard as I can for the life of everybody on this planet now.
[…]MEAD: The more one wants to be an activist the narrower the time is.BALDWIN: Precisely! Precisely!MEAD: What the kids say … if you cut out all the past —BALDWIN: You can’t.[…]They are acting in the past. They don’t know it. It takes a long time to realize that there is a past… It takes a long time to understand anything at all about what we call the past — and begin to be liberated from it. Those kids are romantic, not even revolutionaries. At least not yet. They don’t know what revolution entails. They think everything is happening in the present. They think they are the present. They think that nothing ever happened before in the whole history of the world.
They return to this dance between past and present a few hours later:
BALDWIN: We are responsible —
MEAD: For the future. For the present and the future.BALDWIN: If we don’t manage the present there will be no future.
As someone who thinks a great deal about the interplay of hope and cynicism, I was particularly moved by Baldwin’s de facto disclaimer to the whole question of demanding responsibility from others:
BALDWIN: A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.
The enactment of this moral optimism, Baldwin argues and Mead agrees, is in the hands of the future generations — those generations to which, half a century later, you and I belong — which lends their conversation extraordinary poignancy:
BALDWIN: The world is scarcely habitable for the conscious young… There is a tremendous national, global, moral waste.
MEAD: I know.BALDWIN: And the question is, How can it be arrested? That’s the enormous question. Look, you and I both are whatever we have become, and whatever happens to us now doesn’t really matter. We’re done. It’s a matter of the curtain coming down eventually. But what should we do about the children? We are responsible; so far as we are responsible at all, our responsibility lies there, toward them. We have to assume that we are responsible for the future of this world.MEAD: That’s right.BALDWIN: What shall we do? How shall we begin it? How can it be accomplished? How can one invest others with some hope?MEAD: Then we come to a point where I would say it matters to know where we came from. That it matters to know the long, long road that we’ve come through. And this is the thing that gives me hope we can go further.
A Rap on Race is spectacular and pause-giving in its entirety — the kind of perspective-normalizing read that reminds us both how far we’ve come and how much further we have yet to go, equipping us with that delicate balance of outrage and hope that translates into the very moral courage necessary for building a more just and noble world. Complement it with Baldwin on the artist’s responsibility to society and Mead on the root of racism.
FORWARD TO A FRIEND/READ ONLINE/ |
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"The Happiest Thought" Of Einstein's Life: "Gravity Is Not A Force But A Curvature"
Einstein discovered that gravity is not a force but a curvature
Albert Einstein called it “the happiest thought” of his life.
It was almost certainly the most revolutionary — and that, in the case of Einstein, is saying a lot.
At the time, the young scientist was struggling to broaden the framework of his special theory of relativity, which explains the behaviour of bodies in constant motion with respect to each other but does not account for acceleration, deceleration or the effects of gravity.
In a burst of intuition that would later yield an extraordinary new insight into the nature of the universe, it occurred to Einstein that the sensation of riding in an ascending elevator is similar to the sensation of gravity.
That was the intuition.
And this, a short while later, was the insight: acceleration and gravity are not just similar.
They are the same thing.
Einstein reached this conclusion in 1909, when he was 30 years old.theory on paper, mathematically — an enterprise of sometimes excruciating complexity.
“You must help me or I’ll go crazy,” he implored a friend during one period of frustration, and there were to be many of those.
Max Planck, himself a leading German physicist, advised Einstein to abandon his quest for this grander theory of relativity, for he was bound to fail.
But by 1916, Einstein had succeeded.
The resulting depiction of gravity was stunningly different from the orthodox view that had prevailed since the time of Sir Isaac Newton, who first devised a coherent explanation of the phenomenon, one that accounted for the behaviour of familiar objects on Earth as well as the interaction of planets and stars.
Up to a point.
The classical theory of gravity had been a huge breakthrough in its time, and it still provides a good means of predicting the motion of objects. But it is wrong, in part because Newton misunderstood what gravity is.
He considered gravity to be a force that objects exert upon each other.
But, in a burst of brilliance, Einstein realized that no such force is required and in fact no such force exists.
He imagined occupying a windowless chest in outer space, a container that was being accelerated at a uniform rate by some propulsion device. At a certain sustained rate of acceleration, it would become impossible for the occupant to tell whether he was stationary on Earth or gaining speed in a distant void, for all physical operations inside the chest would be identical.
He could pour himself a cocktail, juggle several balls, stand up, sit down, dance the bossa nova and even weigh himself on a set of scales. The results, in both situations, would be the same.
Based on this thought experiment, Einstein concluded that gravity is not a force of attraction, for no such force is required. Instead, it is something quite different — a curvature in the fabric of space-time.
We “feel” the force of gravity only because we are perched upon a surface that gives us weight. Remove that surface and gravity would no longer feel like anything at all. We would be weightless.
By this way of reckoning, the Earth only seems to be turning in circles around the sun. In fact, it is going straight, but straight along a space-time surface that is itself curved — warped by the mass of the sun.
If this seems to make no sense, imagine driving “straight” from Toronto to Montreal. The truth is, you can’t do it, not even on the 401. The “straightest” route between the two cities — in fact, any route between the two cities — is curved by the surface of the Earth. In fact, if it goes on long enough, any “straight-line” journey along the surface of the Earth will eventually describe a circle.
The same goes for any “straight-line” journey in the vicinity of the sun.
“Newton would have said that an apple fell to Earth because there was a mutual force of gravitational attraction,” writes Simon Singh in his book Big Bang . “But Einstein now felt that he had a deeper understanding of what was driving this attraction: the apple fell to Earth because it was falling into the deep hollow in space-time caused by the mass of the Earth.”
Although it might not seem like it, the Earth is right now falling into the even deeper hollow in space-time caused by the mass of the sun. The only thing preventing a collision is the Earth’s velocity, which is about 107,000 km/h relative to the sun, or just enough to ensure that, in its never-ending downward spiral toward the fiery centre of the planetary system, our fine blue orb keeps missing its target — fortunately for us.
This constant state of free fall, coupled with an appropriate velocity, is what constitutes an orbit.
Astronauts aboard the orbiting International Space Station appear to be weightless — in fact, they are weightless — but not because they have escaped the reach of the Earth’s gravity. Instead, they and their space station are in a state of free fall toward the Earth. They avoid striking the planet for the same reason the Earth doesn’t crash into the sun — because they are going pretty fast. The space station travels at about 19,000 km/h relative to the Earth, or just enough to prevent a collision.
But the important point for relativity theory is that space-time is curved by mass.
“A star or a planet or any hunk of mass warps space and time,” says Robert Mann, a physicist at the University of Waterloo.
This may sound bizarre, but it is really not that difficult to envision.
Think of a child on a swing, alternately plunging into and accelerating out of the depression in space-time created by the mass of the Earth.
Or think of daredevil Nik Wallenda, balancing on a tightrope strung across the Niagara Gorge. From a bird’s-eye perspective, Wallenda walks “straight” to his destination on the other side of the river, just as you may think you can drive “straight” from Toronto to Montreal.
In both cases, this is an illusion. In fact, if you chart Wallenda’s progress from a vantage point on the same horizontal plane, you can see that the acrobat’s tightrope sags significantly as Wallenda is drawn into the hollow in space-time caused by the mass of the Earth. His journey is curved.
We are all drawn into that same hollow — although we’re mostly sane enough not to do it on a tightrope — and this explains why we don’t drift away into space. In effect, we are all in the act of falling toward the centre of the Earth, or we would be if only the planet’s surface didn’t get in the way.
In the decades since Einstein outlined his radical new vision of the universe, general relativity has repeatedly proved itself to be more accurate than Newton’s classical gravitational laws, accounting precisely for certain minute perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, for example, and also showing that beams of light are themselves warped in proximity to massive objects, such as stars.
Here’s another way to think of gravity. Let’s say you jump out of an airplane at 15,000 feet, without a parachute. Now, roll onto your back and look up. You could easily imagine yourself riding through space, at rest. Granted, there’s a fairly stiff wind beating up against you, but it’s the wind that seems to be moving, not you.
Now, roll onto your chest and look down. Uh-oh. Turns out there’s a good-sized planet rushing straight up at you.
Still, it’s the planet that seems to be moving, so it will be the planet’s fault when you collide — if that’s any consolation.
Assuming you survive, you can try a similar experiment while standing on the ground. Normally, if you think about these things at all, you probably think that you, standing on the ground, are “pushing down” against the Earth with your weight and that it’s your weight that keeps you from flying away.
But you could just as accurately turn this perception around and imagine it is the Earth that is “pushing up” against you, giving you the illusion of weight, just as the floor of an upward accelerating elevator pushes up against its occupants.
This realization — that gravity and acceleration are really the same thing — provides the central insight of general relativity. That work was Einstein’s crowning scientific achievement, and it won him international celebrity, not just among scientists but among the wider population, too.
Still, towering intellect though he was, Einstein did not re-imagine the cosmos and their contents alone.
During the past 100 years or so, a succession of physicists and astronomers has brought humankind closer and closer to a complete understanding of the universe.
Granted, huge conundrums remain, and we may never solve them entirely. It may never be possible to comprehend the universe at the moment of its origin, for example, much less at a moment before.
But we keep venturing closer.
In 1911, a New Zealand-born scientist named Ernest Rutherford discovered that the atom — until then considered the smallest object in existence — could be broken down further, into a nucleus circled by an array of orbiting electrons.
The central positive charge, or nucleus, is breathtakingly small, representing only a millionth or so of the volume of the atom, which is composed overwhelmingly of empty space.
The jarring sense of solidity we experience when we walk head first into a lamp post, for example, is really a kind of fallacy produced by our immense size compared to sub-atomic particles, which are mainly emptiness and energy rather than what we think of as impermeable matter.
Even food is composed almost entirely of nothing, which definitely makes you question the merits of dieting.
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Sign Up NowLater, it would turn out that even the nucleus could be broken down further, into protons and neutrons, particles of ridiculously minute mass — 10 to the power of minus-24 grams. That’s a decimal point followed by 23 zeroes and then, finally, a measly “1.”
And yet this seemingly irrelevant amount of next-to-nothingness is nearly all that an atom has got going for it in the mass department: a miniscule nucleus girded at a vast distance by orbiting electrons.
“If we had an atom and wished to see the nucleus, we would have to magnify it until the whole atom was the size of a large room, and then the nucleus would be a bare speck which you could just about make out with the eye,” wrote the late Richard Feynman, a celebrated physicist, in his book about particle physics entitled Six Easy Pieces . “But very nearly all of the weight of the atom is in that infinitesimal nucleus.”
Scientific advances in recent decades have not been restricted to the realm of the extremely small. They have also broached the equally daunting domain of the unimaginably vast.
Around the time of Einstein’s greatest advances, the universe seemed to be a stable and dependable place, consisting of just one configuration of stars — the celestial neighbourhood we know as the Milky Way — an expanse that was static and probably eternal. It had no beginning and apparently no end and had always been the same size. That was what we thought.
Almost all of these assumptions have turned out to be wrong, and we have a U.S. astronomer named Edwin Hubble to thank for reordering our understanding of most of them.
During the early 1930s, working mostly at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, Hubble determined that the universe is vastly larger than previously suspected, composed not of just one galaxy but of hundreds — and even that would turn out to be too modest.
“We now know there are billions,” writes Barry Parker in his book Einstein’s Brainchild .
About 400 billion galaxies, according to the current consensus.
Not stars. Galaxies .
Not only that, but the galaxies are moving away from each other. By 1936, Hubble was convinced that the universe is not static at all. It was, and still is, expanding.
That, of course, means that the universe must once have been smaller than it is now, which suggests that it had a beginning, which caused some scientists to speculate that it was once infinitely small, a view that spawned the theory of creation as a colossal explosion of space and time.
In other words, the Big Bang.
In the 1960s, a pair of U.S. researchers in New Jersey — Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson — inadvertently detected a phenomenon now known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, a series of high-frequency waves that swept through space when the universe was 300,000 years old, an age when it had finally cooled enough so that electromagnetic radiation could pass through it.
Although extremely weak, those same waves still pervade the heavens — an electro-magnetic souvenir of the Big Bang and further proof that the universe really did start out from a very small point, in fact an infinitely small point that’s now referred to as a singularity. It has been expanding ever since.
And not just expanding. We now know that its expansion is accelerating.
“Not only are distant galaxies getting farther and farther away; they are getting farther away faster,” says Mann.
We also know that the universe is about 14 billion years old, that its average temperature is 2.73 degrees centigrade above absolute zero, and that its radius extends for about 78 billion light-years and is getting larger all the time.
The huge disparity between the universe’s age and its size certainly seems contradictory — and it is. After all, a universe that’s 14 billion years old “ought” to have a radius of about 14 billion light-years.
If you peered through a telescope capable of resolving images that far away — technically, it probably isn’t possible — you would expect to observe the beginning of time, because the light you would be seeing departed its source about 14 billion years ago, just when the universe was being born.
By conventional reckoning, the radius of the universe shouldn’t be any larger than the distance that light could travel since the beginning of time — and yet it is bigger. Much bigger.
Scientists surmise that the distances travelled by light beams in the past have been “stretched” by the universe’s expansion, and not just by a little but by a lot.
If that seems bizarre, just wait.
“Nature, as we understand it today, behaves in such a way that it is fundamentally impossible to make a precise prediction of exactly what will happen in a given experiment,” Feynman writes in his book on particle physics.
A Nobel laureate who died in 1988, Feynman was referring to a field of scientific reasoning called quantum mechanics, a deeply unsettling realm where an explanation for the behaviour of sub-atomic particles can be achieved only by denying that the behaviour of sub-atomic particles can be explained.
Or, according to an apocryphal remark variously attributed, in one form or another, to any number of different physicists: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
Note: This article has been edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the mass of a proton or neutron is 10 to the power of minus-23 grams.
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Online Discussion Re: "The Relationship Between Donald Trump And Judas Iscariot"
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Cartoon: When Trump Said "Shoot The Looters, For A Split Second They Paused"
"When The Looting Starts, The Shooting Starts": Trump Tweet Flagged For "Glorifying Violence"
Looting Across America: Crime, Punishment, Conservative Christianity And John's First Epistle
Video Of Trump Mocking Murder Victim For Crying Out, "I Can't Breathe"
Christianity: A Compendium Of "What Went Wrong" And Current Worship Of The Wrongness
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Cartoon: America Is Tired Of Winning
"There Is Neither Nobility, Nor Kindness Nor Uplift In Trump's America"
A Critical Mass Of American "Conservatives" Are Stupid, Ignorant, Hateful And Cruel
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-critical-mass-of-american.html
"George Carlin Describes America's Dumbf*ck Quandary"
Video Of Trump Mocking Murder Victim For Crying Out, "I Can't Breathe"
Christianity: A Compendium Of "What Went Wrong" And Current Worship Of The Wrongness
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Concerning Coronavirus Trends In Texas, Florida And Alabama
Cartoon: Revealing Coronavirus Update
Concerning Trends on the Coronavirus Nicolas Kristof, The New York Times |
Spain reported no new deaths from Covid-19 for two days, a sign of progress in a country that had been hard hit. I had hoped that the United States would follow the trajectory of Spain and Italy, but instead America is stuck in something of a plateau of around 20,000 new cases a day. |
Alabama is particularly alarming, and Texas has just reported its highest seven-day figure. Florida reported its highest daily gain in six weeks. With more states opening up, I worry that we may be stuck with a high level of infections and deaths for some time. |
The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage; this newsletter, as well as our Coronavirus Briefing newsletter, are free. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription. |
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"Trump Uses The Military To Prove His Manhood," Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
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It was exactly 31 years ago, if you’re reading this on Wednesday evening, that I stood on Tiananmen Square and watched the People’s Liberation Army open fire on the crowd I was in. I’ll never forget the fear and fury that I felt, and the entire Western world responded with similar outrage — except for a real estate developer in New York named Donald Trump. He was impressed that China showed its “strength.” |
So my column argues that it’s not surprising that today President Trump proposes to use troops to quell domestic unrest, or that his administration used rubber bullets to disperse peaceful, lawful protesters who had as much moral right to be there as he did — so he could get a photo op. |
Trump apparently was embarrassed at the disclosure that he had fled to an underground bunker during the Washington protests, and he seems to be trying to compensate by showing his toughness. Sigh. When you’ve seen the ugliness of war, you try to avoid unnecessary conflict. Summoning heavily armed forces for a civil disturbance is something, I argue in my column, that an old man does when he feels insecure because he claimed heel spurs to dodge the draft and now wants to prove his manhood. Please read. |
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The Surging Pandemic Of "Conservative""Christians" With Brown Back Teeth
Alan: If you profess to be a Christian, and also believe that Donald Trump is a "great Christian,"
please take a close look because you're back teeth are brown - and your mid-molars are next.
Conservative Christianity: A Compendium Of "What Went Wrong" And Current Worship Of The Wrongness
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