When Light Was Made

The moment before time,
there was nothing
and there was everything.
All that was and all that is,
and all that ever will be was contained
in that pre-eternal moment.

Physicists call it singularity.
The one moment when all was one.

It was a massive yet infinitely small
black hole with gravity so great that nothing,
not even light,
could escape.

Then it was spoken,
"Let there be light!"
And there was.
From the All in One,
the Nothing and Everything,
Energy became visible,
containing and spreading the Essence of Life.

The Physics of the Universe

I have always had a strong interest in science and its relationship to life. When I started college some decades (!) ago, I started out as an engineer. In the mid-1960s any student who showed any aptitude at all was directed that way. Well, it didn't work out so well for me, but I never lost my interest in science. In these past 50 years the world of science- and particularly physics- has exploded in all kinds of directions and insights that are nothing more than mind-twisting. Quantum physics and everything related to in has made the universe so much more complicated and interesting.

Sometimes things come together to pique my interest even more.

1. This particular tweaking of my thoughts started about a month ago when I came across the book, The Jazz of Physics by Stephon Alexander. I had just finished the "biography" of physicist extraordinaire, Richard Feynman by James Gleick. When you begin combine jazz and physics I knew it had to be interesting, even if it did look a little more in-depth than I could begin to understand at times.
2. I hadn't had a chance to start it when I was visiting with an old friend. We were talking about all kinds of topics, including religion when he said, "Try this one on for size. What if Einstein's theory of relativity was a way of describing creation?" I no direct answer and kind of filed it away since supper was ready anyway. (Eating and heavy thinking don't often go together. Something about doing two important things at once.) With this question in mind, I picked up the Jazz of Physics book that evening where I found out that Alexander was using jazz as an analogy for physics as a way of coming to an understanding of how the structure of our universe was created. Alexander wrote:

   It had never occurred to me, he wrote, that galaxies and superclusters of galaxies were organized structures, let alone that they could tell us something profound about the nature of the universe, including what it is made of and how it came into being.

3. Next came the fun day in New York City last week with a young friend we have known since he was a young child. One of the things he is working on in his own mind has to do with music, physics, and how humans have "musical sounds." Which is exactly what Alexander does in his book.

Such a confluence of events and thoughts amazes me. Call it serendipity, synchronicity, or plain old coincidence, it usually gets my attention. I have now worked my way through the rest of Alexander's book, often scratching my head at the physics, but understanding the basics he was trying to describe in both physics and jazz. I would describe it in my own very non-technical and
very unscientific way like this:

We are all made of music! And music made us all.

Way back at the beginning of creation when all was infinitely small and of an infinite mass it was the very quantum vibrations of the smallest of particles and anti-particles that began the movement into the universe beginning. Sound, music, is simply vibrations and that early vibrating energy had a tone, a type of "music." Photons and electrons and positrons and whatever else I don't understand, kept the vibrations moving at that quantum level. Somehow or other the building blocks of modern physics including Einstein's work on relativity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty play into this.

Beyond that, I am lost. In fact all I wrote in and of itself is probably so wrong as to be an embarrassment to anyone who knows physics. But that's okay for me. I'm just learning. I may take some time to do some digging into the physics Alexander writes about. In some mystical and marvelous way this relates to improvisation and an understanding of how knowing your next note in a line opens up the possibility for ALL notes.

Underneath it all for me is the idea that we are music. We are energy vibrating, perhaps at our own unique wavelengths. Who knows but that we are finely tuned instruments who respond at our quantum level to the music and vibrations, the energy and pulsing rhythm always surrounding us.

Or, I may be all wet. But I feel the music, I hear the sounds, and something in me responds. Whatever it is, I am grateful.

Stardust At the Center of the Universe

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,

And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

-Joni Mitchell

I have been watching the PBS series, Genius with Stephen Hawking (Link) the past few weeks. It is an intriguing series exploring BIG QUESTIONS with Hawking as the narrator and guide. He directs 3 everyday people volunteers to come up with answers to these questions in interesting ways. It is all fairly straight-forward science but explained in different ways

Episode 4 the other evening was looking at the question, "Where did the universe come from?" He began by helping them get a good guesstimate of how many galaxies (not just stars) there are in the universe. (At least 250,000,000,000!) He then introduced them to the Doppler Effect and red-shift which discovered that all galaxies (in all directions) are "moving away" from us. With an ingenious use of hockey players and expanding balloons he had them illustrate how and why the galaxies that are farther away are "moving" away faster than those close to us. It also showed that, in essence the galaxies are not "moving away" but rather the space between galaxies is expanding. (Don't even try to wrap your head around that one. There's more....)

Finally with the use of tiny lights on two screens he blew my mind.

In summary he showed that depending on how you moved the screens to show the direction from which we have come, whatever galaxy you used to line it up became the center of the Big Bang. Let me state that a little differently:

• Everything is the center of the universe.
• Everything is the origin of where we came from.

Huh?

My first thought was simply,

So! I really am the center of the universe!

Which morphed into,

And so is every person, place, and thing in the universe!

Whoa!

All of us started in that infinitely small and infinitely dense singularity that became the Big Bang. Every molecule, atom, whatever, was contained in that moment. All the matter and energy that exists today has existed since the beginning of the universe and was present at the beginning of the universe.

Everything, Hawking led us to understand therefore, is the center of where everything began.

More metaphorically, as Joni Mitchell wrote in 1969, we are stardust. Literally!

The "stardust" and "billion-year old carbon" that was and is the center of the universe.

No, I cannot grasp that concept very well. I can accept it, knowing that in another 50 years (or less) someone may come up with a completely new description of it. For today I simply sit in awe of the thinkers who can formulate these ideas as well as the infinite wonder, beauty, complexity, and simplicity of the universe.

Calendar of Saints: James Weldon Johnson (2)

Twice a week I post a quote from a saint from the Episcopal Calendar of Saints that week. They are to be meditative and mindful, playful and thought inducing. I hope they are helpful in your spiritual journeys.


James Weldon Johnson
Poet
June 25

In the fall of 1916, because Johnson excelled as a reconciler of differences among those whose ideological agendas seemed to preclude unified, cooperative action, he was asked to become the national organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Opposing race riots in northern cities and the lynchings that pervaded the South during and immediately after the end of World War I, Johnson engaged the NAACP in mass tactics, such as a silent protest parade down New York's Fifth Avenue in which ten thousand African Americans took part on July 28, 1917. In 1920 Johnson was elected to manage the NAACP, the first African American to hold this position. While serving the NAACP from 1914 through 1930 Johnson started as an organizer and eventually became the first black male secretary in the organization's history. Throughout the 1920s he was one of the major inspirations and promoters of the Harlem Renaissance trying to refute condescending white criticism and helping young black authors to get published. While serving in the NAACP Johnson was involved in sparking the drive behind the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1921.

By the 1930's, he had tired of politics, and "retired" as Professor of Creative Literature and Writing at Fisk University. He died in an automobile accident in Maine in 1938.


-Link

Calendar of Saints: James Weldon Johnson (1)

Twice a week I post a quote from a saint from the Episcopal Calendar of Saints that week. They are to be meditative and mindful, playful and thought inducing. I hope they are helpful in your spiritual journeys.

James Weldon Johnson
Poet
June 25

James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.

He was born in Jacksonville, Florida, into a middle-class black family of Bahamian ancestry. He graduated from Atlanta University and became the first African-American admitted to the Florida bar. From 1906 to 1913 he was Consul in Venezuela and then Nicaragua; during this period he wrote the fictional Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

In 1913 he returned to the U. S., lived in New York, and engaged initially in songwriting and the theater with his brother, but then became involved in political activism.

-Link

Toward Pentecost (48): Creator

Older Than Dirt

A headline yesterday on the Google news feed from NBC News certainly grabbed my attention:

Study Finds Solar System's Water Is Older Than the Sun

The lead paragraph explained:

Water found in Earth’s oceans, in meteorites and frozen in lunar craters predates the birth of the solar system, a study published in this week's issue of the journal Science shows. The finding has implications for the search for life on other planets: Scientists have long debated whether the solar system’s water came from ice ionized during the formation of the solar system, or if it predated the solar system and originated in the cold interstellar cloud of gas from which the sun itself was formed.

It brought me up short. The frozen water in places on our very planet or our moon is older, repeat, OLDER than the sun. It existed prior to the existence of the planet where it now resides.

Wow!

Actually, double WOW! and WOW!

These are the kinds of things that force my poor human mind to stretch to its limits. Water is old. It has been around longer than the very core of our solar system. This is all conjecture based on extrapolation of information. It will probably prove to be a short-sighted observation and far more nuanced than a simple NBC News headline. But the idea that we can even begin to postulate such a thing is incredible.

It took me back to a thought I wrote in my journal a number of years ago. I was reflecting on the "young earth" and "intelligent design" views out there. They postulate that much of what we see as "old" (older than 6000 years) was put there as a kind of puzzle from God to keep us off-base. They are all red herrings since the world, solar system and universe is not billions of years old. God did all that creating in 4004 BC, or so.

That causes me to shake my head in dismay and wonder why a Creator God would even think of doing that. It is more about making sure that what they take as "truth" must remain "true." All other "truths" must then be "lies."

Anyway, what is even more awe-inspiring and downright miraculous is how the universe is put together, with all the intricacies, chaos, repeating fractal-design and on and on. The Creator God who did THIS is, in my mind far more powerful and far more transcendent than an "intelligent design-god" playing mind games with the creation. The world IS a miracle.

Each morning is another one.

Did you see the sunrise this morning or the sunset last night?

Did you see the pictures of the Northern Lights from last week?

How about those exploding colors those of us in the northern latitudes are experiencing?

And I've only just begun.

And we are all made of the same substances, created at the beginning of time and consistently being recycled into what is right in front of us today.

We truly are stardust!


So, as a sidelight, here is a wonderful video to ponder along with the billion year-old frozen stardust water.

A Primeval Place

The park, Ravensburg State Park, was one of many Civilian Conservation Corps projects of the late depression-era. As if the waterway and rocks were not enough, the CCC architecture has earned the park a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

The park sits in the gorge created over the millennia by Rauchtown Creek. The creek along with the freezing and thawing in the sandstone created the spires known as Castle Rocks. They are back there, behind the picnic area and the CCC dam-created swimming hole. I never remember exploring them when young. Dry, dull sandstone doesn’t have the attraction of the water and rocks of the run.


But there was something about The Rocks that made them more than a babbling book. I remember standing by the falls made by the dam and listening. I had no words for it. I couldn’t describe it. It just felt real. True. Something to depend on; something that would always be there.



Odd, isn’t it, to speak of water in those terms? Maybe it was the ancient mountains and rocks that helped. Maybe it was the primal knowledge that these rocks and this water path had been around for a long time. The Rocks is green and mossy and alive. It provides life and food and sustenance. It is off the beaten path- alive only briefly- but what an explosion of life. There are dense stands of trees along the Run. Only the dam area is in the “open,” a necessity of construction no doubt. A few yards up- or down-stream the sun is shaded, the temperature drops noticeably and the sound of the water increases.



Some places are holy for various reasons for various people. What draws some of us to parched deserts and others to the prodigal wildness of places like The Rocks? Why do some have a constant irresistible pull from an invisible God in a visible universe while others look at you like you’re speaking a foreign language?