Category: Science

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Physics Science

A brief overview of how the Universe began according to OCR A-level Physics.

1) At the start of the Universe, it was very hot/ extremely dense/ singularity.
2) All forces were unified (my thoughts: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear). (my thoughts: Force is a component of energy as energy in the form of work is force applied to a particular direction/ distance like a person pushing a heavy object to a location).
3) Expansion led to cooling. (my thoughts: As the further particles go, the less they collide so their kinetic energy decreases and the pressure they exert decreases so temperature decreases).
4) Quarks/ leptons soup form (my thoughts: I don’t know why, perhaps the Scientists at Large Hadron Collider may discover how this came about).
5) More matter than anti-matter (my thoughts: possibly because of quarks and leptons combining into protons, neutrons and electrons).
6) Quarks combine to form hadrons/ protons/ neutrons.
7) Imbalance of neutrons and protons creates primordial Helium.
8) Atoms are formed (my thoughts: as Helium nuclei fuse to heavier nuclei).
9) Gravitational force is responsible for formation of stars/ galaxies.
10) Temperature becomes 2.7 K/ 3 K or the universe is saturated with cosmic microwave background radiation (my thoughts: as that leftover energy is not being used or converted into matter so it stays as background radiation).

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Philosophy Physics Science

The Planes of Reality

We are living in one plane of Reality, living in another one while we sleep. Madness and delusion are another plane of Reality. A plane of Reality is a 3-Dimensional domain you are in and conscious of as far as your five senses can detect. A plane of Reality is built on the foundation of Truth but Truth isn’t really absolute as it is a product of your own Perception. Perception originates from your brain-Mind.

An example to highlight the above is, how do you know the table, chair, window, computer screen etc. is in front of you? It’s because you can taste, touch, smell, see it i.e. those senses are your Perception. So what you sense is what your brain is telling you, otherwise if you had no brain, you would be unable to sense things and you would be just an inanimate object. Your senses are telling you that you are living in this world or “Plane of reality” as what I would like to call it and so your senses dictate what is the Truth for you. But what if you or someone else became mad or delusional, surely if you or that other person had a different perception of things, surely you can agree they or you exist in a Plane of Reality which they believe to be true even though it may be entirely different to your perception and Plane of Reality?

Or how about a Dream you experience where you can smell, taste, see things even though it does not last when you awake, surely even in those moments they were real and part of the Truth, yes? Thus the Dream is another world/ Plane of Reality you enter occasionally.
Science can verify the Truth about the world through experiments and repetition but there will be anomalies that don’t totally agree with the Science experiment’s hypothesis, hence Science isn’t 100% true.
When it comes to Politics, Religion, Art, Wars etc, because we have an individual brain-Mind, we can only see or focus on one aspect of the world/ Plane of Reality and this starts to become tricky when it comes to the Truth as these topics are about belief and opinions which is where the concept of Truth being a product of your perception applies to.

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Philosophy Physics Science

The Interconnectedness of things

When you imagine how the animal/plant cell is held together by intermolecular forces and how it is formed from elementary particles like Quarks, then you will see the value of learning Physics and it will motivate you.

Quarks form protons and neutrons. Neutrons and protons form nucleuses. Leptons are electrons. They combine to form atoms. Atoms make cells and other biological structure.

Atoms, compounds and molecules all interact with each other in the body or outside the body.

Atoms, compounds and molecules all interact with each other in the body or outside the body. 2 “up” Quarks and 1 “down” quark make a proton. 1 “up” quark and 2 “down” quarks make a neutron.

Alpha, beta particles and gamma rays released from an unstable nucleus interact with the human body or the atomic structure of a material. When I see the beautifully geometrical and coloured shapes of the alpha helix DNA, I think of mathematics, angles and Art. When a musician plays an instrument, they are manipulating sound waves and how they pass through a medium such as air particles such as the frequency, pitch etc. In effect, the musician is transferring energy.

It’s all interlinked.

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Philosophy Physics Science

Infinity/ Paradox

Infinity is Paradox and Paradox is Infinity. Yes, zero divided x times proves that statement. Fascinating.

If I split “Nothing” into x times, then it wouldn’t be nothing but something, they would be parts of “Nothing” but “Nothing” can’t have any parts as it is nothing. So, paradox.

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Science

History

It’s interesting that you are an example of living History with your surname, a bunch of symbols. Those sequence of symbols belonged to your ancestors and their ancestors before them, changing in appearance or completely along the way, through the passage of time.

It’s all Information transmission. Your DNA from your ancestors are like 0 and 1 digits on a computer screen that has copied and changed over time with each great grand parent and grand parent you had. The surname you have was known in an entirely different form but has over the years undergone many variations and changes because the passing of the name to the next generation was due to the environment/ culture at the time.

The conquering of countries by the Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, British etc is all really process of passing information i.e. the death of one culture (which is a collection of ideas/ data) to be replaced or amalgamated by the occupier’s culture (another set of ideas/ data), all on top of the dead bodies of those who fought to keep their culture/ country from being invaded by empowering their leader, who represented those ideas, should they have won. Then those dead bodies decompose and the information they carry (DNA, bones) are stored in the Earth or taken up by bacteria and other decomposers.

History is the study of data/ idea transmission with significant Human variance.

I’m coming from a Science perspective, not the typical Historian’s view.

I wanted to simplify it like how Physicists simplify all the seemingly different Phenomena into one big Theory Of Everything.

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Philosophy Psychology Science

Is morality intrinsic?

I like to do away with vague metaphysical terms like “intrinsic”, especially with the question of if morality is intrinsic. It’s not precise enough.

For people who kill like ISIS and for people like us who feel disgust, it seems to be how our brains and the environment we live in deciding the morality of things.

I haven’t read Friedrich Nietzsche work featuring the “Will to Power” concept yet but he mentioned another concept the “Master – Slave morality” and this is where I see how his idea is true. Perhaps there is no morality, only Power that comes in the form of survival of the fittest for individuals, working together for groups that are weak individually and the Justice system to keep the individuals and slaves in balance. If there is no Justice system in place, then there will be anarchy and the ruling Elites would lose profit/ control. The Masters in the modern context are the company CEOs, Politicians, Aristocrats etc while the Slaves are the working class, the poor, you and me, the soldier sent into the front lines to die for the sake of occupying foreign land for oil/ diamonds/ gold/ land etc.

Monkeys show similar behaviour to us because an experiment was conducted in which two capuchin monkeys were given a type of food; one monkey received a grape every time it cooperated with the Scientist whereas the other monkey only received cucumbers whenever it cooperated. After this experiment was conducted many times, the monkey that only received a cucumber began to realise he/ she was being treated unfairly because he/ she was aware that the other monkey kept receiving the grapes so he/ she responded by throwing the cucumber back at the Scientists. This explains why there are groups like Occupy Wall Street and other groups that are Left wing/ Socialists.

Of course, some philosophers say that morality is an emotional reaction, though I can’t remember the philosopher who said this, which is true because upon reading the first few pages of a book called “Confessions of a sociopath” by M. E. Thomas, she stated that when she found a baby Opossum struggling to swim to safety in the pool, she decided to kill it by submerging it with a net but gave up, letting it die a slow death. She didn’t feel any guilt, no remorse, no empathy for the animal, only that it was an inconvenience and needed to be gotten rid of so that her pool could be disinfected and used for a swimming lesson. She saw no benefit in keeping it alive. The same goes for serial killers like ISIS/ IS, the criminals in the big city etc.

There is also the cultural and environmental element involved as well; some cultures regard certain practices as acceptable while others don’t like Honour killings, marrying cousins etc while children or adult born or conditioned in an environment that is violent are likely to be violent.

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Philosophy Psychology Science

Becoming an Idea/ Ideal.

Radical Islamic Terrorists, French Foreign Legionnaires, Samurai, Crusaders and Japanese World War 2 kamikazes all seem to be very different on the outside and are separated by vast oceans of time but when you look past that, they appear to be fundamentally one and the same.
When I was talking to one of my Facebook friends, Cody Funk, I learned from him that people who dedicate themselves to an Idea/ Ideal destroy their Ego and become more than they really are. That got me thinking, when they undergo the transformation of the Ego destruction to embody an Idea/ Ideal, they tend to override all sense of self-preservation and cannot be swayed so easily with money, Power or other worldly things and instead devote themselves to achieving this new purpose they made which exists as Symbols in the realm of their Minds.

I read from a post on www.psychologytoday.com about “The Power of Symbolism: Why burning the Quran Is Disturbing” and it presented an interesting idea that Symbols are our way, as humans, of coping with our frailty and finite lives and meeting our need of wanting to be part of something larger. It is when those symbols are desecrated e.g. burning a country’s flag, attacking a country, burning a Bible/ Quran/ cross, football team banners, mocking a God etc that we feel insecure , destroys the idea of us wanting to be part of something larger and reminds us of our mortality.

The Symbols that are ingrained in our Minds start to take a life of their own and we begin to feel and express love for it as we do for a lover or family member according to “The Brain Sell” by Dr. David Lewis which explains why most people are fooled to buy branded items like Gucci, Armani, Rolex etc.

It is this love for Symbols that makes us do anything to achieve what these symbols suggest or represent like spending excessive amounts of money on the branded items or maybe even killing other people who don’t represent or support that Symbol. Soldiers and Kamikaze fighters say they die for their country, which in their minds is the flag symbol, when in actual fact, they will kill as a way to express their love for that flag Symbol. The same goes for Radical terrorists who do disgusting things as a way to express their love for their idea of God.

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Philosophy Psychology Science

Words, Names and their power on us.

Words and names are really sounds we make from our vocal chords and the movement of our tongues. Doesn’t sound amazing but it is those same words and names that have a significant effect on our minds assuming we do let them affect us.

The name of a place, person, thing etc. conjures up memories in our minds of that person/ place/ thing or anything approximately associated to that utterance from our current schema.

Words can anger or injure another person.

Words can put someone at ease or become happy.

Names can cause people to feel afraid or be happy depending on the memories they have of that name.

Names can cause people to temporarily ignore the present and retrace the residue of the past imprinted in their memories, in effect going back in Time according to their interpretation of the past.

Names sharpen your intent and effort.

Words allow you, to some degree, to get people to do what you want them to do depending on how willing they are to obey you.

Words can be used to bend our Reality and the Reality of others through lies or Truths although the consequences and damage done will be irrevocable.

Since words and names can change our Reality, words and names have Power.

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Philosophy Psychology Science

Prometheus

Prometheus was a godlike being (Titan) who stole the gift of fire from the Greek Gods and gave it to humanity so they could progress. In a way, we are gifted with that “fire” in the form of knowledge and a rare few people are able to use that fire to invent extraordinary things. In a way, we have become the Gods of old and new in that we have found the components to fabricate Reality (in the form of Quarks and leptons), we wield weapons that can level entire cities like the Nuclear bomb, we are trying to harness the power of the Sun on a macro level in the form of Fusion reactors and we can cure most diseases which were at one time incurable and fatal. These are but a few examples of what the “fire” of knowledge imbues us with. One day we may become more than humans, transcending our limits, becoming part-machine, part-human, a new renaissance in the form of the Post-Human. Even as I speak, we are progressing to that point where the Creator (human) and the Created (machines) are becoming one in the form of mechanical hearts, synthetic limbs, artificial nanoparticle “blue blood”, stem cells being used to replace tissues and organs which we normally wouldn’t be able to regenerate like the heart, eyes, arms etc. In the old times, whenever we came to a phenomena we had limited knowledge of, we would tend to say it was “God’s will” or the “Gods were punishing us with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions etc because we have sinned”. As time went on and our knowledge expanded, we would no longer turn to Supernatural causes and turn more to Science. The God or the Gods became “God/ Gods of the Gaps” because we would always push that idea to phenomena which Science couldn’t explain.

Why should we be restricted to an idea of Gods or a God creating us and seeming to not care at all about our affairs? Surely the point of the Singularity or “the Big Bang” ,which is the starting point of creation, is sufficient enough and that is how thing are, no metaphysical creator or creators needed. I am open to the idea of there being no Gods or God but it is not something I completely follow blindly. Gods or God could interpreted to be just ideas in our Minds which represent something like how the old Greek Gods represented a facet about human affairs/ emotions.

Perhaps the idea of God/ Gods is really not for explaining phenomena but a need which humans have to sate. As the French philosopher Voltaire put it, “if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

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Philosophy Physics Psychology Science

Selfishness, selflessness and other random thoughts.

Herein lies the paradox. Consider the Golden Rule made by the great Sage Confucius. Confucius stated, “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself” and that is a very nice rule indeed, a rule that I generally live by and which mostly in others is lacking much to my annoyance. When you read that Law, take note on the latter part “you would not choose for yourself” and see that despite trying to be selfless and good by treating others well, you first have to think about yourself and the actions done to yourself before you can begin to treat others ethically. Hence by being good and helping others, you in fact are helping or thinking about yourself in the first instance. When you were born, you weren’t born because you chose to be born, that decision was made because your parents wanted you to be born so they could feel good about themselves and because of the continuation of Mankind; at once, the needs of the community and the needs of the individuals are met, much like a legal contract. When person “A” goes to do a charity event to “feel good about himself” and help the charity in question, he has himself aimed to get a reward which is the release of endorphins and other substances released in the neurons which triggers the feeling of happiness despite helping the charity. Happiness is like a painkiller to help make us at ease with our existence which can be very scary sometimes; the thought that you or I can die at any moment despite the low chances of it happening is still a possibility, the slow but steady progress of the days into months, Seasons and years and how routine your life can be makes you wonder where you are headed in life if there is ever a purpose.

Just thinking about colossal black holes at the Galactic centre in our Universe and possible Multiverses made me feel like my mind wanted to escape my skull, like a feeling of giddiness. With that in mind, it makes you wonder that you are an insignificant germ within the grand scheme of things yet we easily forget that fact because of what’s in front of us which is life, the traffic, going to work, going to school etc. Much like reality in general i.e. my body thinks the furniture around me and the house I live in is solid but it actually isn’t because it’s actually energy with very little disorder or entropy. My eyes don’t see that but Science says it is.