To be or not to be — 3017amen

Being or becoming: that is the question
That haunts existence’s investigation:

Whether ’tis simpler for the All to offer
The slings and vectors of a told fortune
All at once, as a marble monument,
Or to perform in the sea of actions,
And by disposing ever create them?

In other words, are you thinking that is some sort of a metaphysical necessity? Or a conscious necessity of sorts... — 3017amen

A metaphysical necessity since there can't be 'Nothing'.

My question is, what is the metaphysical will to exist (both for Man, and Universe)? — 3017amen

To be is mandatory, since there can be no opposite; so, will is not required.

Nowhere Man

Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light ‘eternal’ of all time to be known.

We are the beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again, by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though draughts of time that quench life’s thirst.

We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.

Hence, Real Reality is 2D, and Virtual Reality is 3D. — Gnomon

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

When a tree falls in the forest
And there’s no one around to hear it,
Does it make a sound?

No, for there is no ear to turn
The sound waves into sound.

Nor is there a smell, for there is no nose
For the odorous molecules to attach to,
Nor has it any color, for there is
No retina to decode the light frequencies.

What does it look like, then?

It doesn’t look like anything,
For there is no brain to put it all together
By detecting form, color, texture,
Size, taste, smell, or vision.

Since the entropy of a black hole is known
To depend on the surface area of
The event horizon and NOT on its volume,
Then our third dimension MIGHT BE a projection.

A projected illusion, as in a hologram,
May still be used as it were really there
Since we can make sense of it, so to speak,
But, in truth, the third dimension may not exist.

Thus, apparently separate particles,
Like created photon pairs,
Copy the other when one is changed,
Because, in truth, they are still
The same thing in the projector room.

If the universe is holographic,
Then the tree in the forest,
Whether seen or not,
Is, at heart, an interference pattern
Brought to life only when we tune it in.

This is the mystery of the realness
Of sleeping dreams revealed:
We tune in to the interference patterns,
Whether awake or asleep,
To bring alive the reality projected.

Everything connects to everything else
Through overlapping interference patterns,
And so nothing is so separate at all, as it seems,
But is one large all-encompassing whole.

Memory, too, seems to be holographic,
Residing everywhere in the brain,
Every piece associated with others related,
Instantly broadcasting all the connections.

Every part of a hologram contains the whole,
The whole universe contained within
A grain of sand, all eternity within a moment,
The universe rumbling when an electron vibrates.

We are part and parcel of everything—
We are the cosmos; we are life; we are love;
We are all that is; we are the creator
Of the dance as well as the dancer.

Whether the past is recorded and accessible
As part of the holographic whole is not known
Or whether the other two dimensions are
Projected, as well, but perhaps we shall see.

This then is the secret of the universe,
Knowing of that which underlies all reality:
Fundamental, absolute, indestructible,
Omnipresent, indeterminate, but all pervasive.

Why absolute and fundamental?

Because it is made of one piece—itself,
And therefore indestructible, and eternal, too,
And makes up all that there is, everywhere.

(The Infinite may radiate through a matrix,
Using Information or Energy to create
The Cosmic Background antenna which broadcasts
Interference patterns of virtual reality.)

131
Though hewn for study of the stars I am,
And philosophy too, hear Old Khayyam:
Let her tangled tresses attract your view,
And enjoy wine, verse, and a leg of lamb.

I run my hand through Ruby's hair.



Bodleian

33
The universe’s mantle binds us worn—
Tears feeding the river on which we’re borne.
Hell’s but an ember of our senseless fears;
Heaven’s the rose-breath of opening morn.

105
Relate my good deeds o’er and o’er again,
And forgive each fault, sin, and crime times ten.
Let’s not kindle, stir, blow, or fan the flame;
Grace is Divine; no need to ink the pen.

110
Oh, meddling thoughts that harp on reason’s plea,
My cheeks glow red from the loved one’s grape tree,
So to your face I throw my other hand,
And drop you into sleep, oh fantasy. 

Ruby says, “It would be refreshing to act silly, after all that seriousness and considering the  effects of our drinking.”

“Good idea!”

“What is this on the menu?” she asks, pointing to something odd.

“That’s escargot—land snails.”

“Ah, good to have some slow food instead of fast McDonald’s.”

“It’s Lent; one must have fast food!”

“No, it isn’t; nor is it Ramadon.”

“This is a formal dining room for the creme de la creme, the imagined elite of the old Omar Khayyam Club of over a hundred years ago!”

“Hey, the snail, it’s moving!”

“Oh, it’s on the menu, and walking across it!”

“I must be from someone else’s dinner; they really should have cooked it more.”

“Look at that ‘little car go’!”

“It’s solar powered.”

“So are bacteria, via photosynthesis.”

“Are bacteria the back doors of a cafeteria?”

“We are getting our humor languages mixed up.”

“Oh, OK, then, ‘Souhaitez-vous embrasser un chameau?’”

“That’s not quite right. You just asked me if I wanted to kiss a camel.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Let’s stick to English and get our dinner going onward somewhat more romantically.”

“To you, my dear: You are the bubbling froth that stirs and excites the drink.”

“And to you, my sparking spirit friend: may the bubbles burst across your pallet, and also upon your tongue, the drips of that juicy flood watering your taste buds.”

We leaned across the table and met in a kiss.

“Such a tasty appetizer upon my lips.”

“Soul meets soul in a kiss, like an eclipse.”

“To the ends of the galaxy we will go!”

“And beyond the edge of space.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“OK, then to the new dimensional directions of outward and inward.”

“I can’t figure out who’s talking in this scene.”

“Doesn’t matter, for we are one now.”

“Shall we have the ‘les frites francois’?

“French fries!”

“Do they have eskimo pie?”

“Nope; they don’t serve cannibals here.”

“I ordered the leg of mutton.”

“I’m having Pieds de porc, Foie gras, Tripe, Langue de boeuf, Tête de veau, Ris de veau, Andouillette, Couilles de mouton, and Oursins, for starters.”

“Ugh.”

Your wine, my persona radiata,
Fills my golden chalice. Oh, Sultana,
I’m intoxicated by your love-stream
Flowing freely; oh dear, amorata!

Purgatory’s on Venus, where sulfurs rain.
Hell’s found in the sun’s heart—hot burning pain!
Of Heaven’s site, no one has an idea;
It’s the world’s best kept secret: Earth’s its name!

:smile: :razz: :grin: :blush: :cool: — Gnomon

Bohm, too, suggested that the whole universe could be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in the same finite space.

In reality, time is an illusion. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for the illusions of subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing. So, our reality dissolves and reforms in a constant dance that, like moving pictures, cannot be perceived by the mind’s eye.

We knew that this same type of stunning virtual reality was likely, for it is presented to us in our night dreams for our amusement or self-improvement, or some such reason.

It would be interesting to know more of how the holographic reality operates, of course, so we could get to the next step, maybe even build our own virtual reality. Mr. Spielberg would surely buy into that.

Perhaps, instead of building VR, though, we could tap into the one that already exists within us and is flexible enough to produce great movies: again, our own night dreams. If we could only record them, keeping the ones with movie quality film and exciting story lines, we could make and sell movies without paying millions of dollars to writers, directors, actors, and filmers.

But who or what is the source of these night dream movies? Who is the producer, the director, etc.—for night dreams seem to contain surprises, a production capacity way beyond that of ourselves, of people acting in character modes that we as individuals might not even possess, say, that of being singers or comedians or whatever. I don’t see us putting Spielberg out of business soon, but I have many lucid dreams and I like to observe them closely; they are really quite spectacular. Sometimes, I just watch; other times I amaze the onlookers with my ability to fly and hover.

One time, some music kept playing for a minute or so after I awoke. Other times, I am just amused by the viewpoint: I was in a plane that was crashing through a jungle, but the viewpoint suddenly switched to one that was from outside the plane, just as real movies do. So, dreams, their mere happening, should be telling us something remarkable about reality, and these kinds of clues are what I try to make significance of.

The nobody that is necessary to understand our universe — Gnomon

Nowhere Man

Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light ‘eternal’ of all time to be known.

We are the beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again, by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though draughts of time that quench life’s thirst.

We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.

Like the light from a star already spent,
Our ‘get up and go’ has long gone and went.
We all birthed, lived, and died right away;
There’s nothing left but the slo-mo replay.

Our parentheses in eternity
Flashes as a twinkling, but’s extended
By ‘time’ into a phantasmic life dream
That’s existent the same as if it were.

A life dream’s like a rainbow, not really there,
A false phenomenon become tangible
Through relativism, this faux true,
Molding temporary significance.

PU, I would really like to have some of what you're smoking/vaping. — uncanni

Smoking in the desert near Timbuktu:
(Click.)

"what will happen if . . ." — Gnomon

Yogi Berra suddenly came out with “The future isn’t what it used to be.”

Fredrick smiled. Although Yogi’s typical observation sounded like it had a negative connotation, Fredrick knew better, for many negatives had been developed into positives during his days of study that were numbered as the dates of his calendar. Also, although all the pluses and minuses added up to zero, Fredrick had the wisdom to know the difference, as well.

“He’s alive!” reported Fredrick. “He’s out there somewhere! …where no man has gone before. And I don’t mean the ladies room!”

Profpat posted, “I knew he wouldn’t depart, pass on, leave us, expire, perish, pass away, decease, or go to a better place.”

Graybeard hinted, “You mean die?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s the last thing he’s going to do.”

‘Lifts’ in the UK soon became ‘elevators’ in the US; car ‘bonnets’ turned into ‘hoods’, and the ‘muzzies’ of Australia still stung as American ‘mosquitos’, but luckily nothing much else of any serious nature in this vein of language had diverged in any harmful way other than “apples of the ground” now being referred to as ‘potatoes’. Meat Loaf recorded his greatest song of “I’ll Do Anything for Love, But I Won’t Do That.” Let’s not get into country music song titles.

Time was like a river, so Nobody followed the currents through all their twists and turns, not even stopping to ask directions, for there weren’t any (unlike Moses, who didn’t, and got lost for 40 years), swimming the butterfly stroke all the way back to the safety of Earth, 2019, almost taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque. All applauded his return, giving a great reception to the improver of reception, and told him of Earth’s many new marvels, for the tin foil had beat the odds, accomplishing some fantastic things:

Color had arrived in the world, along with color TV, in the late 1950’s (just look at the black and white TV shows made before then for proof). High Definition and 4K had arrived, as well, which allowed us to examine in detail the pimples on a person’s face.

Three types of “heavenly” things had become permanent features of the world: flowers, night dreams, and elfin creatures, the latter of which were the long sought missing link between man and angel (unfortunately some angels had gone bad, although many had remained good, and thus many leprechauns couldn’t be trusted).

The Dark Ages had gotten brighter sooner (the Y1K problem), the printing press had been invented a century earlier, a book of Omar Khayyàm’s thousand year old quatrains was “discovered” in the Bodleian library by a janitor, not having been noticed there before, along with Plato’s new book of the month, ‘Beyond Metaphysics’, and Apple computers and products were ever improving and catching on to let us tune out reality (of all things) with the ipod, iphone, and the ipad.

Someone named Shakespeare had gotten over his writer’s block of trying to open a lock with a fish and so had written some of the greatest stuff ever. Blondes began to prefer gentlemen. James the Lesser was shown to really have less, actually being Mary Magdelane. 10 years had been added to the human life span, meaning that 60 was not old anymore!

However, we were stuck with cartoons, but, hey, they keep kids busy! Ernie Kovak’s saying of “Television is a medium because anything well done is rare” still stood firm, but we could better see what was worthless. People still told others to “have a nice day” even though they probably had other plans. Everyone still talked with their hands, even while on the phone. However, men now had nipples, but no matter.

Enlightenment grew bright, consciousness becoming more that just “that boring time between naps”, but some still didn’t know and didn’t care one way or the other to know the difference between ignorance, apathy, and ambivalence. As for why a ‘building; was called that after it was built, no one knew. And why wasn’t a thesaurus a type of dinosaur?

A new and useful color had appeared that was not even in the rainbow: “brown”. Humor was now more widespread, due to expanded and duplicate word meanings. The price of penny candy went up to a nickel; cigarettes now cost $1000 a pack. (I insured all of my packs, but they were eventually consumed by a series of small fires. My insurance company wouldn’t pay, so I took them to court, where I was convicted of arson.) However, all in all, the world was a better place, in that the worst times were now only the “worser”.

Everyone on ThePhilosophyForum was awarded a free annual trip around the sun and one special trip to Poughkeepsie, NY. Second place was two trips to Poughkeepsie; third place, three trips to Poughkeepsie.

‘Everything’, at least locally, had indeed turned out to be a single whole in the space of “=” by MJA, but only in that every part of a hologram contained the whole. Quantum entanglement had always suggested this, as well, and now it was could be seen that we all have access to the entire universe at every point of the holographic interference pattern, the many more fractional points that were added by Nobody the better for its resolution. Everything connecting to everything proved to be a kind of perception in and of itself and so it begat a forum thread called “The Waving Grains of Sand”, for

Every part of a hologram contains the whole,
The whole universe contained within a
Grain of sand, all eternity within a moment,
The universe rumbling when an electron vibrates.

Another missed hint of our 3D projection had been that the entropy of black holes depends on the surface area of its event horizon, not on its volume. Could something like the rippled CMBR microwaves be that esoteric radiant interference pattern? Yes, indeed.

The evolutionary program will eventually run its course, — Gnomon

Time to take more control…

Just about then, the moth-eaten walkway began its collapse, and all the cell-phoners quickly warned Nobody, for they could see the whole scene unfolding before their eyes knew about it.

“Run!” they all said in unison, and with text messages, as well. “Run for your life. Get out of there. The bridge…” All contact was lost, for Nobody’s cell phone roaming charges had become astronomical and overdue, causing his account to be canceled.

There was now nothing but nothing under Nobody’s feet, an impossibility, of course, for nothing can’t exist, but it was there, never the less; however, Nobody didn’t begin to fall right away, as in cartoons when no one falls until they realize through consciousness that there is nothing holding them up, and so he gained a precious second and leapt, just in time, back onto the falling bridge, having had the presence of mind during that split second of warning to attach a piece of tin foil to the antenna, a last ditch attempt to help humanity progress beyond TV sitcoms, Lindsey Lohan, Donald Trump, and Paris Hilton.

He moved quickly and soon accelerated to the speed of light, which was a lot faster back then, on the bridge that was literally (or virtually) crumbling as he ran across it.

No one knew where Nobody was or if he did nothing or didn’t do nothing. Concern set in. Worry followed. Despair appeared. Woe rang the doorbell. Grimness sat on the front steps. A bill collector drove up.

Rascal saddened, but kept Googling to keep his mind busy, while Graybeard stopped ogling the virgin super clusters of Virgo with both of his naked eyes, although noting, “chaste makes waste”, keeping one eye open, and even put off the opening off a beer. Fredrick, getting all teary eyed, tried to remember the good times with Nobody. Well, that was easy; they were all good times. RascalPuff checked all of his copyrights. “Darn, they’re still there. Why is there no sign of Nobody and why is Nobody not home, and what is the meaning of what I am saying? Or not.”

Well, although we are all supposed to know “everything”, or at least the theory of, we might as well just ask our teen-age offspring, for they know it all.

Michael even left his lounge chair and put down his laptop. Austin, although silently alarmed, fed french fries to a thousand seagulls, his step-kids laughing and taking a video of it… until he ran towards the kids, throwing more fries to lead the flapping flock onward toward them. He thought that Nobody might never make it, and began preparing a remembrance:

The Possibility of Being

This is the creature there has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
They loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
Its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it,
It behaved as though it were.
They always left some space.

And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
It lightly reared its head,
With scarce a trace of not being there.

They fed it, not with corn,
But only with the possibility of being.
And that was able to confer such strength,
Its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitely it stole up to a maid —
To be within the silver mirror and in her.

(from Sonnets To Orpheus Second Part,
R. M. Rilke 1923)


IN HONOR OF NOBODY,

Who can under-stand the universe,
Not even needing a place to stand,
That is nowhere and everywhere,
A wizard creating something of nothing,
Whose imagination reaches the edge
Of forever, beyond, and before.


The Edge of the Universe

Existence extends its electromagnetic preach
As far as its atomic influences can reach;
Beyond all of that there is nothing there
But the naught of very thin ‘air’. (nothing)


Profpat, sidelined by so many recent TOE readings and contributions, had gotten back on his feet by missing two car payments. His career now in ruins, he switched to archeology.

MJA said, “Nobody was the most equal man I ever knew.”

Lloyd pondered the linguistics of “Time flies like a bird and fruit flies like a banana”.

Steven Wright said, “I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.”

Meat Loaf sang “Some days it don’t come easy… and these are the days that never end… and some nights are breathing fire… and some night are nothing I felt or seen before… or will again… no one else can save you now but you…”

Baden finally asked for one minute of silence on ThePhilosophy Forum.

The Procession of the Constituents of Reality

Sad Yesteryear, Forever, and Everywhere,
They all came, to weep for Nobody Nowhere,
With Why and How, Then, Now, When, & What and Where,
Led but by their tears and sorrow. Your posts zing
With things that ‘none’ can bring: Everything.

More time passed, as the minutes went by like slugs and snails slowed down by older slugs and snails in their way, like when we get stuck walking behind old people in Florida.

G_d had to create a space in which to allow matter to exist, so It inhaled. This is called the tsimtsum, G_d's contraction or limitation, or even an internal exile. This contraction was catastrophic, there was a shattering of divine vessels of light and for bits of evil were trapped in the material world. — uncanni

A Massive Big Bang explosion hardly seems to be a good way of intelligently designing a universe, but rather appears as if something really got out of hand.

Perhaps some opposite quantum fields, although having a great lightness of being nevertheless piled up so much that they reached the limit of density, infinite density not being possible, and then blew all to hell, with elementary particles as centers of oscillation.

The wave lengths make for extension into dimension; the wave frequencies make for energy; the opposite wave amplitudes made for positive and negative charge defining matter from antimatter; the waves becoming protons or quarks; the wave envelopes becoming electrons…

Or Somebody spilled something or had an accident or inhaled too much.

Segno (Sign) # 0

“There’s the aether”, replied the other, apace,
“The 5th state, one that pervades all of space,
Yet there are no signposts of it up ahead,
Or anywhere, since it’s of every stead.

“We regard it as the stuff of which Gods are made,
That lively spirit of elixir that their nature bade,
For, just as all mortal creatures inhale the air,
So do immortal and divine natures inhale the aether.”

“The intimation is the mark of their manifestation,
A demonstration and a token of the evidencention—
The aetheric and Heavenly sign of things to come,
Both the portent of the miracle and its omen.

“It is of the warning and the notice let,
Presaging both the promise and the threat.
Of this sign the aether follows, the gesture beckons;
‘Tis the signal, the wave and gesticulation reckoned.

“We can read the writing in the sky, the marquee,
Daubed with symbols marking the cipher free,
With characters, figures, and hieroglyphs of time,
The ideogram of the rune, the emblem of the Divine.”





Yet only a hair (like an Alef) divides the false from the true…

Segno (Sign) # 1

“There is the ‘vacuum’”, replied the other,
“A base state, one pervading all of space,
There being no signposts within it,
Or anywhere, since it moves in no direction.

“We must regard it the stuff of which things are made;
For just as all living creatures inhale the air,
So do all the real natures inhale the vacuum.”

“This intimation is the mark of manifestation,
A demonstration that’s the token of the evidence;
The aetheric and heavenly sign of things to become,
Both the portent and the omen of so much possibility.

“It is both the warning and the present notice,
Presaging both the promise and the threat.

“Aft this sign, that the vacuum ‘indirects’,
Then the real gestures ever beckon;
They of an unsignal faint,
The wave and gesticulation of you.

“We read the noise of the quantum theater—no marquee;
All is daubed without symbols, to mark no cipher, bare,
No letters, characters, figures, or hieroglyphs there,
No ideogram of the rune of order,
No emblem of the Divine.”

end-to-end without even skipping parts — god must be atheist

Nobody Nowhere is well on his way to repairing God's universe.

A test of good reading or speed reading?

And did anyone watch the 'Programming the Universe' video?

Some 'fortunate' accidents of nature to support either a design or a multiverse:

"Modern thought has realised considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it." — NilsArnold

This is saying that appearances in the mind are all that we ever 'see'.

Humans' endless task is tikkun olam--repair of the world. — uncanni

Well, truth is more of a stranger in this story than fiction, so Nobody was well on his way to the early days of oblivion…

“How’s it going,” asked Rascal of Nobody.

“It’s raining,” answered Nobody.

“Hardly?” inquired Puff, the better side of the plurality of he and himself.

“It’s hardly raining hardly,” answered Nobody.

“What does that mean exactly?” asked Rascal, along with many others.

“Never mind,” said Nobody. “I have an umbrella!”

Austin piped in that the English language was becoming slightly affected, via the interruptions in past, but encouraged that the journey go on, and so it continued as it progressed and went on.

“By the way, what’s the antecedent of ‘it’ in “It’s raining?” posted WiseGuy, thinking he had posed quite a tough question.

“Nothing,” said Nobody, “in the form of reverse gravity and forward light, the ultimate antecedent, of our time dilation called reality. I’m getting damp.”

Rascal added that “A little rain never hurt Nobody,” a new and original saying that suddenly appeared in the book of the 2501 greatest sayings ever.

“I hope the rain keeps up,” said Nobody.

“Why?” inquired Profpat.

“So then it won’t come down!”

“How’s it going, Nobody?” asked Rascal again, figuring that Nobody’s watch was fast from relativity and that some hours had passed.

Nobody replied, “I heard that the universe was a free lunch, so I’m having it in a restaurant on an asteroid.”

“How is it?”

“The food is great, but there’s no atmosphere.”

Now, there’s always someone who interrupts threads with off the wall stuff, so ChickenMan tried to catch Rascal unawares with “Why did the chicken fly across the road?” and “Did the egg cross into God’s universe before the chicken?”

Rascal, taking all this in stride during a lull, replied, “As allowed by Einstein’s relativity, the road moved to the other side of the chicken, then, the chicken didn’t land so much as the road rose to meet the chicken, as it extended in 4D, much like the baseball field rises to meet the pop up, since All is expanding. Furthermore, chickens can’t fly! Also, the chicken came first, for I can’t really picture ‘God’ sitting on an egg to hatch it. Now, we’re trying to better tune in the universal DNA here, so no more chicken shit posts please!”

“Hold it,” warned Graybeard. “Some critical atoms must have been disturbed by Nobody’s journey. Now the “Ace”, a new name for the formerly bottommost playing card, the lowly “one”, is now higher than the King in many kinds of card games; this is a sacrilege and a travesty! Wait until London hears about this.”

Mkirkpatrick somehow got into the conference call and said, “Just heard, but relax. The All is the One; the “A” on the card really stands for “All”, for this is what gave rise to the monarchy. And of course the one is the One.”

“It’s okay,” Fredrick said calmly, being an expert on numbers and on playing them, “the play and strategy of all affected card games has not been altered in any way. Keep on going, Nobody.”

While some old times passed, Graybeard stood around looking at the man in the moon and watching the grass grow. Fredrick checked his watch to see if he was wearing it and then counted to five on his left hand. Fine. On the other hand, he still had five fingers, so, all was still going well in the good old days. Profpat sharpened his pencil until it got down to the eraser.

Rascal interjected, “Some sort of high stakes poker mania called “Texas Hold ‘em” has broken out in some countries. Googling now. It’s even replacing baseball on many TV channels!”

“It’s okay,” reassured Fredrick, “No harm done. We’ll pass it off as another fad.”

Nobody was heading billions of years into the past, having left the asteroid before he got a polaroid from sitting on it too long, and was passing many frolicking Dodo birds, along with the beginnings of such ancient notions as alchemy and astrology. (Hey, why are hemorrhoids not called asteroids?)



A rickety old rope bridge of rotting planks finally led Nobody past many antiquities such as one-cent stamps and on to the control panel of the ancient broadcasting station of CBS—the Cosmic Broadcast Station.

“Be careful,” advised Profpat. “Be so very delicate with any adjustments. Remember, on Earth, how the tiniest minute adjustment of a shower knob of even a millionth of an inch causes the shower water to become totally steaming hot! No plumber in the universe has ever been able to resolve this problem. It has something to do with quarks, quicks, and quacks.”

“Don’t worry,” answered Nobody. “I’ll be gentle; I’ll just breathe on it slightly. We want clarity in the universe’s DNA and ours, as in improving the reception of a TV set, not unproving it back into the stone age of three channels, all of them baseball games, and the weather, with snow and static on the others. I’ll do my best, come hell or hot water.”

Nobody sprayed a few atoms toward the antenna and waited. His data/video link soon improved but then overloaded from the high transfer speed and burned out. Nobody’s cell phone soon rang, but it was only a solicitor trying to sell him some time-share condos; however, Graybeard finally got through and said “Great, the stars are becoming clearer and I can even see some galaxies with the naked eye, but take it slow; we don’t want to upset the balance of nature by making it too bright at night. It’s good to tighten a screw, but if we tighten it too much and we’re screwed.

“Wait, hold it! I can see Venus, the goddess of love and passion all too well. Yikes, I didn’t know she was that old! Plus, I now have x-ray vision and can see into all the apartments, but the worst thing is that I can hear everything they are saying. Some things should be obscene and not heard! Also, I’m getting something called ‘cartoons’ on my TV set, and they’re really weird, very unreal looking and everyone in them is doing silly things.”

Nobody took out a hand held ‘vacuum’ cleaner and brought a few atoms back in as a fine adjustment.

“Good,” cheered Graybeard, “that’s a good balance. Try something a little higher up and let’s see what happens. I am reading some fluctuations out of kilter around there.”

Notions of up and down were useless in space, so Nobody picked a direction at random.

“No,” said Graybeard. “Not that way; use your other ‘up’.”

“Okay, I’m switching. Back in kilter?”

Graybeard answered, “I don’t know; I’m seeing another goddess.”

Suddenly, the Chicago Cubs, which had finally made it to the World Series of baseball, were swept in four straight games, while the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and other unbelievables in attendance looked on in horror.

Then Michael Jordan gave up basketball for baseball and then switched back to basketball again. Global warming picked up and then an ice age began. Jesus, born a Christian, became Jewish, then converted back again. Hell froze over and then thawed out. The same with the River of Forgetfulness; everyone was walking on water for a while and running like Hell from Hades.

Profpat warned “Watch that shower knob, Nobody; the River Styx just boiled away and a bunch of dead people drowned after many more escaped!”

“Where are they going?” inquired Nobody.

Profpat replied, “They don’t know; they say they have CRS disease.”

“What’s CRS stand for?”

“Can’t Remember Shit.”

“OK guys. A little upper, Nobody” requested Graybeard. “That other direction was a downer.”

Nobody reached up and out, but the bridge creaked and groaned, causing Nobody to slip a bit as a rope frayed, and all the TOE researchers feared that his adjustment time was now quite limited.

Meanwhile, Barry Bonds had broken the home run record, but, of course, steroids would be blamed for it. Mount Rushmore had briefly turned into Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, but just as soon returned back. However, the Boston Red Sox still won a World Series for the first time in 100 years.

Also, it turned out that someone named Yogi Berra had said many sayings that seemed to make sense, but really didn’t, like “That restaurant is so crowded that no one goes there anymore”, “It gets dark early out here”, “If people don’t want to come out to the ball park, nobody’s going to stop them”, “It’s deja vu all over again”, “I didn’t really say all of the things I said”, and many more unsayings.

Silly signs appeared on highways, like “Road Works” (it doesn’t work well during construction), and “Speed Zone” (meaning slow down). Something called rap music had become ever-present, as well as a new word, “oxymoron”, which was probably a related event. A funny thing happened to President Clinton, but he wasn’t impeached for it. He neither inhales nor does he have sex.

“This one may be hard to explain,” lamented Fredrick, “but we’ll chalk it up to human nature.”

Nobody did some fiddling of some knobs that he wasn’t supposed to touch, twiddling “More of This-ness”, and, as a result some people on Krypton started to make every shot in basketball games, even from 50 miles away, being really IN THE ZONE, plus doing many other superhuman things. All the TOE viewers from Earth were cheering this, but Fredrick warned them that total perfection might take all the fun out of life.

“Better hold off,” Graybeard suggested.

Nobody dialed the knobs back a little.

RascalPuff interjected, “Some people are now reporting that they can fly like superman in some new event called ‘sleeping hallucinations’ or ‘night dreams’.”

Also, zeroes began to look like the alphabetic letter ‘oh’, causing much confusion, along with ‘one’ looking like ‘el’, and some words began to have the same sound, as called a ‘homonym’ but not a ‘homonim’, and some with similar meanings; as called a ‘synonym’, although it had none itself, and some words now had multiple meanings. And how come ‘monosyllabic’ wasn’t? Nor was ‘phonetic’ spelled the way it sounded. And why was ‘abbreviation’ such a long word without any? Also, ‘love’ was reduced to having only the two good rhymes of ‘dove’ and ‘above’, which soon became overused and stale, frustrating many poets and their readers.

Austin reported that a part of Hawaii had sprung up in Wildwood, NJ, named ‘Sunset Bay’ and that it had had big fat singers, torches, palm trees, waterfalls, tropical flowers, a half-ship at the end of a pier that served as a bar, good food (ordering raw oysters well done), although it consisted of only waves and fields (lucky that his brain turned the noumena into phenomena), and sand all around as a floor. Also, he said that many more ‘o’s had appeared in the word ‘Goo…ooogle’.

Fredrick suggested that the sleeping visions were harmless and probably helped us in some way, that homonyms gave poets even more rhymes, that synonyms and words with multiple meanings would enrich the language, that zeroes could have a slash added through them for differentiation, that typewriters were obsolete, that we could get used to the odd words, perhaps some day getting even with them, that the word ‘of’ now rhymed with ‘love’, that ‘Hawaii in New Jersey’ would be seen as a planned tourist attraction, and that Google’s extra “o’s” would probably get used in a marketing ploy as denoting the internet page ranges of interest.

My question is: does Schamesh exist? — frank

Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord Forlorn;
Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal’d
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.

— FitzOmar

But if all things are possible, given unlimited time & space, then G*D could make room internally, so to speak, for a finite bubble universe that is free to start from nothing (Singularity) and develop into something (Seity). — Gnomon

In the Experiment, Practice makes Perfect… Maybe in the next Big Bubble…

New Baby, New Big Bang. — uncanni

The Eternal Return

Behind the Veil, being that which e’er thrives,
The Eternal IS has ever been alive,
For that which hath no onset cannot die,
Nor a point from which to impart a Why.

Some time it needed to learn Everything for,
And now well knows how these bubbles to pour,
Of existence, in some like universe,
As those that wrote your poem and mine, every verse.

So, as thus, thou lives on yester’s credit line
In nowhere’s midst, now in this life of thine,
As of its bowl your cup of brew was mixed
Into the state of being that’s called “mine”.

Yet worry you that this Cosmos is the last,
That the likes of us will become the past,
Space wondering whither whence we went
After the last of us her life has spent?

The Eternal Saki has thus formed
Trillions of baubles like ours, and will form,
Forevermore—the comings and passings
Of which it ever emits to immerse
Of those universal bubbles blown and burst.

So fear not that a debit close your
Account and mine, knowing the like no more;
The Eternal Cycle from its pot has pour’d
Zillions of bubbles like ours, and will pour.

When You and I behind the cloak are past
But the long while the next universe shall last,
Which of one’s approach and departure the All grasps
As might the sea’s self heed a pebble cast.

A spacetime, then, is a kind of 4-dimensional geometrical object that exists timelessly and this object has a certain structure that constitutes objects in spacetime and has regularities that we know as laws of physics. — litewave

I've been trying resolve presentism versus eternalism without complete success, but the indication of permanence is a great clue for eternalism and the relativity of simultaneity is a downfall to presentism.

The experience of memories and anticipations together with the overall experience of the self that contains them seems to constitute the experience of the passage of time. — litewave

Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone;
Sensation savors what is presently known;
Imagination anticipates coming sounds;
The delight is such that none could produce alone.

You may agree that anything that exists must be identical to itself and still disagree that anything that is identical to itself exists. — litewave

Yes, for while there isn't anything as temporary that is identical to itself over time, there needs to be a Permanence to make the events possible.

I have to go to lunch.

The mutant entities that don't meet the criteria of fitness for G*D's purpose are abandoned (extinction). — Gnomon

'God' seems to be restricted to using evolution by natural selection and the laws of nature.

Inspired by Bill Bryson:

MASTODONS AND EXTINCTIONS

In the late 1700’s, Cuvier could take heaps of bones
And whip them into shapely forms not in the stones.
After describing and naming the fossil elephant the mastodon,
He put forward for the first time a theory on extinction.

He said that from time to time there were global catastrophes
In which some groups of creatures “became history”.
This raised uncomfortable implications at the time,
For why would God create and destroy eithout reason or rhyme?

This suggested an unaccountable casualness by someone unseeing
And greatly troubled the belief in The Great Chain of Being,
Which held that the world was carefully ordered for us—
And that every living thing thus had a place and purpose.

Meanwhile, William Smith noted a correlation in fossils
In rocks to find the relative rock ages that were possible.
At every change in rock strata, certain fossils vanished,
While in others they carried on into subsequent levels.

Now it was seen that God
Had wiped out creatures extinct
Not only occasionally but repeatedly—
Which made us think Him not only careless
But having an outright hostile distinction.

There had been more than
The Biblical Noachian deluge extinction.


WAY WAY BACK

In 1909, in British Columbia, near the town of Field,
Walcott and wife were riding horses
Along a mountain trail, beneath the Burgess Ridge
When his wife’s horse slipped a stone,
Tipping and turning over a slab of shale.

He got down and looked;
There were fossil crustaceans unknown.

The next summer he climbed up the mountain’s side,
Having traced the presumed route of the rock’s slide,
And there he found a shale outcrop as long as a block,
Imprinted with Earth’s ancient and tiny livestock.

‘Twas from the dawn
Of life’s great and complex profusion
From so very long ago—
It was the famous Cambrian explosion.

Butter flies like a banana, so Nobody Nowhere quickly prepared to step into the past, through the ‘Guardian of Forever’, a means of getting closer to the workings of the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMBR), in order to fine tune it at the very source.

This was not a total attempt to revise human history, per say, for that mess was but a fairly typical happening that had way too much dumbness in it to be salvageable. The whims of fate would only create new fools, for wild and uncontrolled emotions had proved to be all that there was to say about all the miseries and follies that had been sadly written into the human chronicle.

Yet, there was always a danger of even more negatively affecting the past, and so Nobody Nowhere wore a light-bending suit that made him invisible, and furthermore contained most of his emanations. This would minimize most of his effects on the past and on the future that arose through interaction with the past, even that eventually magnifying of merely being seen with name brand clothes on.

The microwave background radiation was the source interference pattern of the Holograph in which our reality exists. Behind it, a light radiance passed through a very complex matrix looking somewhat like DNA.

Graybeard, RascalPuff, Profpat, Fredrick, and others were in contact with Nobody through a video phone that was hooked up to the Hubble telescope that was in turn trained on the display screen of the ‘Guardian of Forever’.

Austin was on a secondary line from New Jersey while surfing on the ethereal waves, though sometimes he was merely scraping along on the particulate matter of the beach. Crowds logged onto ThePhilosophyForum, ready to view the latest posts from everywhere and nowhere.

Nobody, knowing very well that time was Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once, took one small step for man into the past and found himself back standing right back in front of the ‘Guardian’ again, and so he took a giant leap for mankind.

Nobody stood in noplace during nowhen in the middle of nowhere, although space really has no center, as he navigated solely by the landmarks of his imagination towards the control panel of the CMBR antenna. He had butterflies in his stomach and flew like a bee.

It was like taking the chance of betting the entire company on either red or black in roulette, but more like Russian roulette in that really bad things could happen; however, the human race was quite desperate for clearer thinking, having really had enough of pettiness and silliness. Not to mention (which I will) that the angels of insight didn’t appear as often anymore, and that many humans even dozed off while good fortune passed right on by, nor had they recognized Lady Luck except in lotteries. Furthermore, as Flip Wilson once said, “The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down”. In addition, many were living a TV sitcom life. True, genius has its limits, but stupidity… (unknown author)

Many people even wasted no time reading forum posts. Even more said that some things, like ESP, had to be believed to be seen. Others, the types who quickly became bored on rainy Sunday afternoons, invented gods to grant them eternal immortality. Even worse, after all was said and done, more was always said than was done. Signs in subways said, “There is no gravity. The earth sucks.” Everyone was only looking out for #1, not realizing that this often caused them to step in #2.

And Ghandi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, said, “I think it would be a good idea.” And lots of people said “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet, since the waist was a terrible thing to mind.” Yes, there were more horse’s asses than horses. Some even put Horace before Descartes (Donald O. Rickter).

" Interference patterns of virtual reality" are ideological misconceptions, mystfications of authentic reality. They consist of consumerism, global capitalism, corporate sodom-and-gomorrahism, post-imperialism, etc. — uncanni

We will soon be heading back in time to better tune the Cosmic DNA antenna. It's do or die!!!

I want to go!!!!!!! — uncanni

We need you; look for a flying camel on your lawn. Don't mention this at your job. Many governments and others are after our TOE information; our refuge is tenuous; eventually, we're going to have to join up with a decent and suitable paramilitary organization of martial artists.

Multiverse would wander blindly forever before stumbling on the magic formula for the initial conditions plus matter, energy, life & mind that we find in our world. — Gnomon

It has all the time in the World, and more, ha, ha.

When you have plenty of time, I have an explanation for how an eternal Whole can have parts of the system. — Gnomon

I have the time in the Cosmos since I'm retired.

the light at the end of the teleological tunnel — uncanni

Hope it's not a White Hole coming at us!

Our world, according to quantum physics, is essentially mathematical information, and the permutations of that cosmic code (analogous to DNA) have resulted, not just in quantitative physical things, but qualitative metaphysical forms of Life, Mind, and Love. — Gnomon

This is one of the TOEs being developed at our research center in Timbuktu (we'll send a camel for you) and it has a repair attempt going forth, too, since the universe is not doing so well:

Butterflies On the Edge of Forever

The Great Extinguisher Problem

Our planet is very good at promoting life,
But it is much better at extinguishing it.
Of the billions upon billions of living things,
99.99% are no longer around here living.

The human race had been degenerating, for the CMBR antenna that broadcasts our universal reality show had long been out of whack, as had been discovered in ThePhilosophyForum as part of the true Theory of Everything.

So, some funding was obtained from a top-secret government organization, and a poll was held. Member Nobody Nowhere was chosen as the “no one” most likely to succeed in whacking the transmitter back into adjustment, for he could operate with scarce a trace of not being there.

Background:
The corrupted DNA of the Universe:

No one yet fully understands the irreducible complexity of the DNA double helix, which is the template for all carbon based life. It is so complex that the slightest change along the myriad of interrelated ladder of events causes the total collapse of the organism. DNA is made of four nucleotides arranged in such a way that a large number of perfectly cascading events form a living thinking life form.

Now, what about the DNA at the universal level?

*** TOP SECRET *** EYES ONLY *** TOP SECRET ***

Likewise, a much more complex universal DNA template is the common thread of a much greater type of exponentially encrypted digital code of Everything which forms our entire universe, generating it in a virtual holographic way, that is:

The Infinite radiates through a DNA matrix,
Using Information or Energy to create
The Cosmic Microwave antenna, which broadcasts
Interference patterns of virtual reality.

The problem was that the celestial music of the spheres had fallen out of tune.

I don't know for sure that my hypothetical First Cause exists. — Gnomon

The Eternal/Timeless/Permanent First Cause as Capability/Possibility/Potential/Energy has to be mandatory, given no infinite regress, that there is something, and that 'Nothing' hasn't anything to it for anything to come out of 'it'. Spontaneous is still available but there still needs to be the capability for it.

The Permanent First Cause has no direction able to be put into it, so it really can't know anything. Its supposed nebluous nature, then, being not anything in particular is a superposition of all possible paths, as like towards a multiverse, which seems to be the cleanest solution, not requiring an intelligence that really shouldn't be there since that violates the fundamental art by having parts in a system.

As it took 13 billion years for life to form, the universe seems to be just plodding along slowly and naturally.

mind, soul and spirit, — Gnomon

Life’s entities embrace one another:
Cell, organism, species, and biotope.

Life seems inspired, although not optimal;
All meaning cannot all be discovered
By observation, but by participation.

A living creature is more like a poem,
Revealing its further dimensions and
Expressing new properties/emergences
At every level of its organization:
Letter, word, phrase, sentence and [uni]verse.

In this lost haunt, out on the Orion arm
Of the Milky Way—as safe from the core’s harm;
The philosophers gather in the forum,
As new Sherlocks unweaving the Cosmic yarn.

We search for the start of the Universe,
The End, the Before, the After, the Kinds,
The Measures, and All That Lies Between—
The music of the Spheres’ Magnificat.

We follow every single avenue,
Whether it’s brightly lit or a dark alley,
Exploring one-ways, no-ways, and dead-ends,
Until cornered where the Truth is hiding.

Since we all became of this universe,
Should we not ask who we are, whence we came?
Insight clefts night’s skirt with its radiance—
The Theory of Everything shines through!
…
Forum Eyes Only—Classified:
We’re hiding out in Timbuktu, Mali,
Africa, for we’re close to the Secret
And must protect it from evil doers.

From the hourglass of time, the desert’s grains
Ever blow, grind, and blast the camel trains
Loaded with opium, pot, and red wine,
These being the potions to jog our brains.

A snatch of poem the camel-driver sings,
And paints with sun-beams what his vision brings—
Of the waving veils adorning the tent,
Of the pipe-dreams floating up in smoke rings…

Which fumes are as sighs sent to Heaven far,
For consideration, from his altar
On this bubbled puff of a worldly sphere,
In case Destiny wishes to shake its jar.

Ramadan’s now past, and Shawwál comes back,
So feast, song, and pleasure no more we lack;
Now porters with their loads stand back to back,
‘Here comes the camel with his precious pack.’

Isn't that energy? — uncanni

Time is eternity — 3017amen

Time is of the temporary transmutations of the permanent timeless eternal.

Time is existence — 3017amen

Existence is temporary, as changing in time; the timeless is permanent.

Consider falling objects, we avoid them through our cognitive/perceptive abilities. — 3017amen

And those evolved abilities include knowledge of gravity and math or else we'd get clunked.

Tick tock time continues:

Random 'verses will never reach Life — Gnomon

The Permanent is all that there is,
It’s transmutations the temporary fizz.
It can’t have direction, with no inputs,
So, it multi verses, seeming as a Wiz.

Do all events have a cause? — 3017amen

Temporary events have causes, but the permanent source has no cause.

Clocks ticking:

computing "what-is" from a zillion variables — Gnomon

Or, the superimposed paths that go on the longest are those that have uniqueness and so they may be the workable ones worth real-izing.

It was Programmed — Gnomon

The Eternal has to be everything,
Superimposed, not a certain pathing;
It can’t have inputs, with no beginning;
So, what chose the song our universe sings?

The Eternal is as a multiverse,
Potentially, with no information,
As in Bable’s Library of all books,
Being as useless as Nothing’s zero.

The universes might all spring forth, somehow,
Most inert or not going far enough,
With some reaching life after a long time,
Such as ours, precarious as it is.

Or, a Programmer sets if-then switches,
Like eight-way 3D Rubic Cube intercepts,
After having set the quarks and leptons
And coding stars to generate atoms.

Then more precise tweaks, to dark energy,
To umpteen decimal places so rare,
And the forming of the DNA code
To stir life’s ingredients stirring slow.

Darn, the n-body problem is so tough,
For unforeseen side-effects e’er arise,
Among branches of the would-be life-tree,
A zillion variables overlapping.

The Programmer sat up at his terminal,
Brought up his 1,000,000,000 line program,
And opened the patient for surgery.
Working swiftly from a red inked printout
Marked up during a long coffee hour.

He clamped off the bleeding capillaries,
Redid most of their interfaces,
And bloodlessly sealed them shut again,
Although these were only preparatory
And minor repairs in auxiliary areas.

Next, the main arteries had to be incised,
And therefore it was no longer possible
To open and unblock the incursions in sequence,

Since indirect ramifications and side concerns
Concerns quickly arose and wildly flared,
As fleeting thoughts, when one thing led to another,

Thereby requiring immediate attendance,
Lest, they, in the formless impressionism
Of the art of computer programming,
Fade to vague remembrance, and reappear later,
Always at an inopportune time, as defects known as bugs.

The phone rang while he was juggling
These evaporating images and so he had to ignore it;
But, no matter, for PhoneMail would record the call.

Twenty minutes later,
He had sutured the incisions and readied
A compile and regression test which would
Either attest to the quality of the operation

Or reveal its fatal errors and necessitate
The revitalization of the patient or, at worst,
Require a restoration to
Preoperative health from a backup file.

…

Finally, after some fourteen billion years,
Proto-man and then homo Sapiens
Arrives, after seven million more years
Of tinkering with monkey chromosomes.

Extinctions swept away many a kind;
Chromosomes fused, leaving the chimps behind;
RNA remembered all survivors;
‘Good fortune’ smiled on the Sapiens mind.

Inintelligently prrogrammed, many climbs
Were the off-the-shelf reach of nature’s grimes,
A dickering Rube Goldberg ‘invention’,
Our nervous system now ruled by ancient times.

But yet it worked; here we are!

Oh Man! What a piece of work—the mind;
What noble deeds done and undone in kind.
What coding updates programmed all upon—
In the layers of brains the mind is made upon.

What is this sapiens mammal animal?
Still made from slime but of a higher call!

There are umpteen repetitive redundancies occurring over and over in this thread causing severe deja vu.

cosmic Programmer — Gnomon

Specs from his notes:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/339735

The Eternal has to be everything,
Superimposed, not a certain pathing;
It can’t have inputs, with no beginning;
So, what chose the song our universe sings?

“At 1E-5 seconds, quark confinement comes about when the QCD vacuum becomes superconducting to color magnetic current. Quarks and gluons become confined.”

“Ah, the quarks can never exist independently again.”

“At 1E-5 to 1 E-4 seconds, in the hadron era, protons, neutrons, and pions, etc., form. Now our future atoms are on the horizon.”

“What a long road our parts travelled.”

“At 1E-4 seconds, hadron annihilation occurs during a brief period of proton/anti proton and neutron/anti neutron annihilation. A slight favoring of matter over anti matter, possibly locked in by CP violation at reheating allows some very few excess protons and neutrons to survive, with ten billion photons for every matter particle now, which tells us how many annihilations there were, as 10*9, along with how much more there initially was.”

“It’s still a humongous amount of stuff, albeit gone from 2x10*85 particles down to 2x10*76.”

“At 1E-4 to 10 seconds, in the next era, leptons are the dominant energy density, such as electrons. We are up to about one second after the Big Bang now, at neutrino decoupling, when mass energy falls low enough to free neutrinos, creating the neutrino cosmic background.”

“We’ve many hints from the Cosmic Microwave Background, too.”

“At 10 seconds, electrons and positrons annihilate, leaving a tiny fraction of electrons remaining. At this point the total number of electrons equals the total number of protons. This is a beautiful symmetry.”

“Protons are of positive charge, while electrons are negative.”

“From 10 seconds to 57 thousand years is the radiation era, in which photons created from the annihilation of matter and anti-matter dominate the energy density of universe. Light has been let; We will shine.”

“Of course, our shining turns out to be another very slow part, later, in bio evolution, taking four billion years.”

“At 1-5 minutes, nucleosynthesis begins, as fusion of protons creates helium, deuterium and trace amounts of lithium. A few of our basics are there. Hydrogen is already present, it being so simple.”

“From the simple, composites and complexities form, as we ever note, through and through.”

“At 57,000 years, there is matter/radiation equality. The radiation density (photon and neutrino) and matter density (dark and atomic) are equal. This is because radiation density falls more quickly due to the stretching of the relativistic particles’ wavelengths. Dark matter clumps into structures. Atomic matter begins oscillation due to the battle between gravity and photon pressure generating acoustic oscillations. The first sounds of the new universe come forth as the ‘word’.”

“Gravity ever pulls back toward the past but the electromagnetic waves ever pull ahead, toward the future.”

“At 380,000 years, there is recombination, when the temperature falls low enough to allow atoms to form; photons decouple. The true CMB is born, locking in its structure—the story of the earliest times in the universe.”

“The radiation by now has been shifted into the microwave portion of the e/m spectrum.”

“For 5 to 200 million years, there is a dark age, as the photons fall into the infra red energy range. The universe goes dark. The atomic gas continues to fall toward the dark matter clumps, which grow more pronounced. Near to 100 million years, the densest clumps halt their expansion and begin collapsing. By 200 million years, the first mini halos form and within these the atomic cloud cools and collapses to make the very first stars whose light brings to an end the dark era. We are totally the hopes of further stars yet to become. By the way, I forgot that inflation could have been so fast that some virtual particles couldn’t recombine, thus becoming real.”

“It’s auspicious and of good fortune in the Meadows of Heaven. I have a poem of it.”

“At 200 million years, there are the first stars, which are very massive and short lived, but emit some lower atomic elements since this doesn’t require extra energy. They die in violent supernova explosions filling the cosmos with the higher atomic elements that needed energy to be added, building dust for new stars and the planets of solar systems, and the elements for life.”

“The later generation stars are much more metal rich, this needed for solar system life to form.”

“At 200 to 800 million years, there is the epoch of ionization, in which the radiation from the stars and possibly the first quasars, ionizes much of the remaining neutral hydrogen and helium. A thin mist returns and partly obscures the CMB, but future Low Frequency Radio Telescopes may be able to see the epoch of ionization.”

“We’re getting through the first billion years.”

“At 1 to 2 billion years, there become infant galaxies, as star groups merge. There are frequent collisions of galaxies, high star birth rates, and high supernova rates. Heavy element production changes the pattern of star formation, making them lower mass, less luminous and longer lived, like the second generation stars of today. The stage is set for the emergence of life; the cosmos will soon have eyes to see and minds to think, like ours.”

“Um, your ‘soon’ takes another 10 billion years.”

“At 2 to 3 billion years, there is a star birth and quasar peak. In the dense environment of frequent galaxy collisions, the star birth rate reaches it maximum, as does the forming and feeding of supermassive black holes, as horrible darkling beasts. Abandon hope all ye who enter there.”

“Four to five billion years gone, and just as much to go to achieve the very early life of bacteria, who, by the way, took two billion years to make Earth’s atmosphere, by exuding oxygen as a waste product, as it was poisonous to them. Slow indeed.”

“At 6 billion years, there are the first very rich galaxy clusters, since enough time has elapsed for the densest regions to stop expanding and form these clusters. At 7 billion years, there is decelerated acceleration. The effects of dark energy kick in. The universe once again begins to accelerate its expansion rate, but gentler. Gravity has lost the battle.

“At 8 billion years, the first modern spiral galaxies form, although some elliptical galaxies form in the first billion years, but classic spiral galaxies aren’t seen until at about 5 billion years. Let’s skip over the next three billion years. That should be enough time for us to have dinner.”

“Yeah, nothing is near instant but for the Big Bang, and I’m starving.”

(To be continued.)

Have these odes been published in the mundane world? — Gnomon

The video of Flora Symbolica isn't out there yet.

Were the Fae Folk dismissing your quest for a reconciliation of Poetry and Science as a meaningless mission? — Gnomon

No, they loved it; since they are angels and humans combined or an intermediate stage, they know more than we do.

Play those images in succession, and you have the "real" world that we experience one-frame-at-a-time. — Gnomon

Each frame is a whole new 3D universe, with the frame duration being the Planck time and thee frame pixel being thee Plank size. The Programmer made the ultimate DVD video.

But in the hypothetical eternal-state-prior-to-the-Big-Bang all events exist simultaneously (holistically), as in Einstein's Block Universe. — Gnomon

It is that the eternal state was never made and so it has no input and thus it has every possible path in it, but not one special favored path picked out, at least not yet, if we say this using time, and then the Programmer picks a path that becomes our block universe. How's that? More later.

If so, how do we make an exception for the universe? Why does a perfectly normal person infer a designer/occupant from a well-ordered room/space and then contradict him/herself by rejecting a designer for the universe which too is well-ordered? — TheMadFool

You are asking about the regress of how 'God' was ordered, and so on.

He is too busy to attend your boring theist party. Atheists party hard. — Swan

But tonight they're going to act out the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Speaking of half-truths, actually you halfway joined the party already LOL!! — 3017amen

We'll have to send you to a halfway house until you can go all the way.

Storybooks — Swan

Tip your temptation glass at the big Theist party, but be careful not to spill a drop: