Saturday 8 August 2009

1274 Matter, Time, Space God

I do not understand the true nature of matter, or the nature of our ability to measure, quantify, and define matter, and which in turn raises issues such as what is reality and do we only exist in one dimension at any one time, as well of course what do we mean by time and place?

I was stimulated to write this after staying up to watch a BBC 2 programme on the nature of the atom, its discovery, with that of anti matter, and the implication if matter and anti matter come into contact, the subsequent discovery of the composition of the atom into particles and the subsequent understanding of the existence of sub particles and the attempt to provide one unifying and coherent construction of the nature of matter, with what we know about the apparent absence of matter in terns of endless space and the concept of black holes, of gravity and light, in others words to understand the universe and therefore God. The main point of the programme was to make the case for the existence of different dimensions in which different versions of each of us exist.

There were three subjects arising from the programme that fitted in with my own thinking and understanding but also much which I need to study more and attempt to grasp the concepts.

This will be impossible without grasping, learning the language of mathematics and physics, and of philosophy and language itself and where I know that time has run out for me because of the difficulties I have in sustained learning. There have been subjects where I learnt the theory, the knowledge and the practical application, of psychology and psychoanalysis, of criminology, of child care social work, generic social work, local authority social services management, local authority management, general management and more recently art. I also know something of the histories, of logic and philosophy, of religions, of literature, drama, music and dance and I know that I can move from ignorance to understanding and enlightenment quickly if I have the interest and give my time and attention.

However there are some things which I have always find difficult to impossible and on of these is language, There was a brief period when at school I grasped the concept mathematics whereas now I cannot explain what algebra and trigonometry are. At the time the maths teacher spoke of me as having great potential as I had moved from the C to the B and to the A stream and became friends with a small group who were the brains of the class. I was handicapped in a way I or others did not fully appreciate or understand. I had been kept back at St Elphege to repeat the penultimate year and when I moved to the John Fisher School I had been placed in the third stream of the year for my actual age thus missing out all the basic learning of what should have been my introduction year, from playing cricket and football, to physics and chemistry, Latin and Greek, and French and not having been given the basics I was never able to catch up but managed to proceed with religious instruction, history, English Language and Literature and Mathematics and it was on the basis of these subjects that I was awarded the B form annual prize. Whether my experience would have been different had not lost that year and had reached the grammar school, I strongly doubt because of the way I had been brought up and the problem I had with learning the language of things and then remembering quickly enough, especially at examinations.


So I struggled with half baked questions and half baked knowledge until in my first year at Ruskin, we were invited to attend a series of weekly lectures at the college building in the centre of Oxford which attempted to explain the level of knowledge and understanding of man and he university in the early sixties. The lectures were a revelation as they answered so many of the questions, as well as identifying the issues where the questions remained to be answered. I became aware of what there was to know as well of what I did not know. I wanted to go on and take a degree in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford where the college had a special arrangement which meant we could bypass the first public examination and which then involved a paper in Latin, if I remember accurately, but I could not grasp economic theory to my satisfaction although I obtained Alphas and Beta's double pluses from my tutor who was the deputy of the college much to the disbelief of the main economics tutor who knew that I had failed to work at the language and the building blocks to the subject and was hopeless when it came to quantification and statistics. So I opted for psychology and criminology and had the good fortune to be able to do this by stating I intended to become a social worker, a probation officer which seemed rational although the idea of being involved with prisons and adult criminals had little appeal, and it was again fortunate that that practical work involvement with the Family service units, which in turn resulted in my spending a long weekend with a group of young adolescents and I found I could communicate and this led to placements involving child care and the switch from probation to child care. Meanwhile I had been allocated a leading experimental behavioural psychologist as my tutor for psychology and he was to influence me to two very different ways. It was he who invited me to be a guest at a small university dining club of those who were not members of colleges and therefore were unable to enjoy the top table dining with influential guests and who created their own monthly occasions of several course quality meals with a variety of wines. Into days terms I am talking of £100 plus per participant. This opened up one doorway. The other was his attempt to persuade me to abandon the idea of social work and be considered for the other Oxford degree course where if selected one went straight on to the studying for the second public examination honours degree, philosophy and psychology. However I found incomprehensible the books which he game me to read and which required an understanding of the basic language, and this only reinforced my sense of limitation and the rightness of the course I was set on following.

I had these two experiences very much in mind last night when very tired I listened with an increasing of wow to the issues raised in the programme The first issue was that of the possibility that we exist in more than one dimension at any single moment. The following notes will only demonstrate to those with the knowledge and its language how much I have to learn and understand but I write it down as a means of seeing in the future where I was to when I have then reached

First the theoretical conceptual point that if everything, me, the rock beneath me and the plants and stars above me at this moment are all made of the same substance which exists as matter and anti matter but in combinations which result in the human form that can ask the question of why does one collection of the same material result in me and another as rock and more still as a planet and a star, and that each and every collection of matter exists with its anti matter but inhabits dimensions which if brought together would release all destroying energy that we exist in at least two dimensions at the same time, something explored in programmes such as Dr Who and Lost, the X files and the Star Trek series. What one leading British Physicist and philosopher attempted to explain last night is that the issues which have emerged through the find of sub particles to the particles of the atom and the discovery of a subsequent series of presently unconnected particles is the theoretical possibility of existing in an unlimited number of dimensions and which in turn raises important issues about the nature of reality. I have previously written about my mother and those with severe memory loss and clinical psychosis in which they believe in the reality of where they are and the time they are, so that parents, childhoods, and past experiences are as real to them as writing this at my desk is to me now. . One of my favourite dreams is when I can fly by propelling myself off my feet into the air. I am in my bed when this happens, and although I fall asleep on the settee or at this desk, I cannot remember ever dreaming, except when I am in my bed. However in the dream I am elsewhere and this is reality to me so I exist in two places at the same time and often in several places more comparable to travelling at the speed of light that than by conventional means or through my ability to fly without any energy as a propellant other than my will. Who needs substances Baby? (I use the Baby in salute to Mr Savalas whose comedy film with James Mason and Robert Culp entertained me over lunch).However the point of the programme was not to argue that we exist as one entity in different dimensions, as clones, but that different version of us exist in each dimension although we do not necessarily exist in every dimension. I hope that was he point being made.

Until tonight I have often speculated about the relationship between the emptiness of parts of space as well as the concept of its limitlessness. Brought upon the Catholic concept everything having a beginning and end, the concept of endless space has always been mind boggling, The concept of space has also been of emptiness as much as of matter, helped by the concept of the black hole and of the vacuum

What I learnt last night is that it is not correct to imply that at any point between measurable matter, including in the creation of a vacuum there are no particles of matter with their energy and the programme explained how this theory kept quite because the individual thought it would lead to ridicule was subsequently proved through experiment which if I understand involved two inanimate plates suspended motionless in space but where over time there is measurable movement.
In those lectures of 1961/1962 the one concept which lingered in temporary was the concept of number as a fixed reality based on what happened when you divided one by 3, 6 7 or 9. At one point the programme explained the ability to experimentally prove a definitive measurement but then went onto argue the limitations of all measurement, even through formulae, as this is only an approximation of the substance in its ever changing forms and to demonstrate the point went through a mock up what happens to a cat in a special box contained with internal apparatus which releases a lethal substance in such a way that in theory the cat is alive and dead at the same time but we can never know this because one the box is opened the cat is dead, a bit like trying to work out what happens to human beings before human being immediate before and after death from their perspective and experience rather than objectively monitoring what happens to them before and after death.

However the aspect which excited me most was the attempt to some to try and unify all the questions and available answers in relation to the atom has its particles with those in relation to gravity, and light and energy thus we have substance and the positioning of everything in relation to each other form of substances, the distance between substances and the ability to travel between substances, especially those at the furthest distances of our present ability to measure and to understand. That is the nature of universe and life and the nature of the reality of God once we jettison the concept of God as a human entity and accept that individual men and women are capable of understanding something of the nature of God and of communicating aspects to others and therefore can be considered to posses characteristics more like God than man, but this is not the same as being God or being especially chosen representative with the power to determine humans should live and not live. I had considerable sympathy with one contributor to the programme who argues that we should not devote time to trying to answer questions where we know we cannot answer and may never be able to answer but use our present knowledge to answer questions which can be resolved and which in turn will help secure and progress the future of humanity. However I also had sympathy with the programme author who reminded of the Spanish Inquisition which attempted to persuade Galileo to modify his position that the earth revolved around the sun into something which would enable the majority of believers to continue with the notion that the sun revolved around the earth with the concept of heaven above and hell below. I will reports on my progress from time to time

For the greater part of yesterday I was with my mother as I looked at the photographs taken during the four and half year she was in residential care, deciding on those to print to complete an album I had started at least a year ago, if not more. Nearly 100 were selected to add those already printed, a total of 116, two a sheet, leaving several pages for a version of the events in her life, which I will write later in the week.

I had planned to go out as the sky was blue and it seemed warmer but I decided to complete wok from yesterday, photographing the work and then a volume which was partially completed of large print descriptions of photographs and large print events in her life which she could read without glasses.

Because of the time needed to print photographs I was able to watch TV and after lunch of a large fulsome soup and a roll a great piece of nonsense in which Telly Savalas joined forces with James Mason and Robert Culp and others to break into a maximum security prison in Berlin holding a former Nazi who had been responsible for hiding gold for Hitler. Take him out for 24 hours while they persuaded him that Hitler was still alive and wanting to know where the gold was hidden and then returning him to the prison, only to find that the gold was hidden in what was East Germany when allied office could travel through the Wall blockade only to find that a new property had been built over the shelter when the gold was hidden, but a small explosion would enable them to reach the treasure and this then required the help of as former Nazi comrade of James Mason who in turn alerts the Communist authorities whose leader is open to corruption for a share arranging the building and neighbourhood to be evacuated to deal with an unexploded bomb, and who then attempts to take all the hoard but is fortunately thwarted and they are able to return to West Berlin, return the imprisoned Nazi and after some other potential disasters, get away with it. Which is unusually for Hollywood. This reminds sometime I must write about James Mason and his some 130 films made between 1935 and 1984 the year of his death, with the last film released in 1985 which is a rate of more than two films a year for half a decade. Amazing, what is also interesting that I appear to have seen at least one hundred of them.

Later in day as I printed pictures I was diverted by a good family film staring Johnboy of the Walton's Richard Thomas Winner for the Wonderboys who had become so preoccupied with his father's business that he had stopped listening to his daughter who was unhappy in college wanting to become song writer missing mother, just as her grandmother approaching the 50th anniversary of her marriage was missing her husband. Grandmother persuades grand daughter accompany her on 2000 miles road trip to the former home built with her husband to retrieve a lucky gold coin (one film flaw as it would have never been left when they moved or retrieved sooner to the church where they had married, arrested en route for skinny dipping in a private pool and then breaking out of the local jail ( also a credibility flaw(then winning at Vegas in the last throw of the dice so to speak, having used the pawned proceeds of the gold coin, then retrieved and handed to her son, who sees the light and rejoins them for the disbursing of ashes at Annie's point where they had hoped to buy land and build their ideal home at one point in their lives together, having shortly before the ending reunited with a brother separated for years because of differences. Despite all the sugar and story flaws it was an important film for me on what proved to be a significant day.

It had opened with a documentary profile on the Estafan's with that incredible moment of one day meeting the US President and the next day involved in an accident which threatened to make her chair bound and which nearly killed their son. They all survived to become influential figures in the music and entertainment business as well as leading Cubans in the USA.

The reality programme of the day was the third episode of Ross Kemp's tour of Afghanistan with the Anglian regiment and which ended with the circumstances of he death of one of their number and an interview with the mother and father, and that memorable moment she explained that he said he wanted her to be proud of him and bring her back a medal, and she had replied that she only wanted him to return unharmed.

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