Nothing is ever the same

Take a look at fire. No flame in the entire history of earth, is likely to have ever looked exactly the same as one single other flame. There is always a bigger or smaller variation to be discovered in its size, shape, colour, hotness or movement dynamics. The same goes for a portion of water that falls off a waterfall, for the swing of a chain or the falling down of a leaf from a tree. Now one may argue that these things are subject to relatively large amounts of matter, and a rather larger number of interplaying factors. In case of the fire and the flame, there are many interacting factors, such as the air and its movement, outside temperature, the composition of the atmosphere, the type of material that burns etc. OK, yes, but let’s examine something much smaller, let’s examine an atom. There was a time that science has held the atom for the absolute smallest existing particle. However, when we realized that so many different types of atoms (e.g. Barium, Aurum, Xenon, Fluor) have so many different properties, it was understood that something else must be causing all these differences and variations. Then the sub-atomic particles were discovered: protons, neutrons and electrons, and it was found that the negatively charged electrons are circling the positively charged nucleus of protons and neutrons. So, for longer time it was believed that those few particles were the very smallest, and their numbers in an atom explained all the different properties. Yet – of course – so many details were unclear and variations remained unexplained. Until scientists, once the technology was available to see on an even smaller scale, started to get a ‘scent’ of even smaller particles. It was the transition into our understanding of quantum dynamics and quantum particles that were making up the ‘matter’ of the already tiny sub-atomic particles. And even now, with each answer found, at least equal numbers of questions are raised, because there are always unexpected variations. It is in fact the core of quantum physics – as I understand it – that says that unexpected variation is the key to ‘everything’. That may be key, indeed. But yet still, science remains searching for the smallest unit, the unit that will describe and predict everything that is and happens.

Unexpected variation…. It seems to me that NO MATTER AT WHAT LEVEL, WE CAN ALWAYS, UNTIL ENDLESSNESS, DISCOVER VARIATION. Nothing is ever the same.

Every single thing we know around us, every tree, human, car, rock, quantity of gas, of water, everything is unique. It is strange to say the least, but maybe it is rather better to say foolhardy, to believe that there is one particle, so small, that it is always predictable and the same, and that by knowing this unit, we can understand and predict everything. But science is after it. So far science has been trying to capture our environment in theories and formulas in the hope to predict everything. Whereas our environment seems to somewhat satisfactory levels indeed predictable if we look and study long enough, for as long as we are thinking humans, we know also that there is always an exception to the rule that we invented to describe our environment. So maybe something is wrong about the way science approaches our trying to understand the universe.

How come nothing is ever the same, actually? It must mean that there are so incredibly many variations available that there is no chance that the same configuration ever occurs twice. Maybe even the notion of using the words ‘incredibly many’ is already a fallacy. It implies limited numbers. It implies that we can apply numbers and sizes to our universe. Classical statistics teaches us that however small the chance is of an event happening twice, as long as there are enough instances of the sort-event happening, eventually it is statistically possible the exact event actually happens twice. Two possibilities arise: 1) We have not witnessed enough sort-events to observe two flames that are exactly the same, or 2) it actually never happens because the universe is in itself an endless variation. Option one is unlikely, at least to me purely by feeling alone. But even if there were two instances of the same flame occurring in material sense, it can never be the same flame because it occurs at different points in time. Option two leaves us the implication of endlessness (and beginninglessness). In endlessness, statistics is useless, or, a better word would be non-existent, because in endlessness numbers have no meaning. Time has no meaning. If there is no time, this would be the only situation in which an event can be the same: it never happens. Or, it always happens!

If there is endless variation, than all the words I am using here, then all our theories and laws of nature including statistics, are useless. It does maybe not mean that we cannot use them. It does maybe not mean that I cannot utter these words. Maybe it simply means that it leads nowhere. I do wish to believe in science, and I do believe in it. However, I see it as a possibility that science leads us nowhere.

And then the only thing closer than anything we have tried out in science to coming to understand our universe, is manifestation and the existence of God.

I’m not a theist, I’m not an atheist, I believe in science, I doubt science.

The game of space and life

Endless means without end. If the universe is indeed endlessly big, that means that there is at the same time always something bigger than the last biggest thing and no biggest thing can ever exist. So the notion ‘big’ becomes in fact not only meaningless, but also inexistent. This means that the definition of small goes the same way. Small and big become nonexistent, or, they become mutually neutralizing. Big, in this context, IS the same thing as small. Endlessly big IS the same as endlessly small. This is just the example of big and small, or, size of matter. But in a universe in which endlessness exists – and thus also beginninglessness exists – everything is endless and beginningless. This means as much as everything is nothing, and nothing is everything.

Could it be that if we have to conclude that there is another explanation for the existence of matter and the paradox of where and how big it is, and if we see that endless continuation of matter is senseless (there’d be no reason for space to be there), and that also the division between universe and nothing is an impossibility, that we would need to believe something that comes quite close to the religious principle? Namely, the rise and death of matter as manifestations. It is said in spiritual circles that the unmanifest is the infinite creative field for manifesting things, the so-called field of pure potentiality (ref. for instance Deepak Chopra).

Could it be that everything we conceive is a truth? Does the universe have something to do with that? We have conceived anti-value in mathematics, as in numbers that have a value less than zero. Even though the concept seems useless in a practical natural world, the concept has become integrated in the rules (as we conceptualized) of the universe. Everything we have conceptualized in science fiction has either become reality, or is with reasonable chances thought to become reality in the foreseeable future. Is that because we have somehow conceptualized something that we already knew was possible, or is it because by our conceptualization the unmanifest has by our concept already become material reality and thus part of the universe? Somehow, everything indeed is connected. The fact remains, however, that our consciousness perceives things. We see, hear, smell, feel and taste things. Moreover, we are becoming aware of things and of ourselves. In a universe in which everything is nothing, and big is the same as small, much like an endless fractal both expanding and devouring itself, any consciousness becomes a beacon. The only reality is the element, shape, thing, force that is being perceived. So what in fact is the size, the smell, the taste, the sound of the matter, only depends on the perceiver’s perspective. Is the perceiver on the level of atoms, or is the perceiver on the level of a human on earth, or is the perceiver maybe an entity on the level of the galaxy, or the universe, or the super-universe? But in an endlessness situation, also consciousness is subject to it. Consciousness must also be subject to the perceiver’s perspective. Since everything is nothing, there are endless possibilities and endless outcomes of endless events (or none). It must than also be assumed in this respect that consciousness exists everywhere and nowhere. There is consciousness in me, therefore there is consciousness on the level of the universe, any super-universe, there is consciousness on the level of atoms, quantum particles, and on sub-universes in the quantum particles.

If endlessness exists and everything is nothing – the only rightful complements – then death is the same as life. And atoms – whole universes of sub-quantum and quantum particles – fight for survival, for life, just as plants, animals and humans do. Is this maybe an explanation for the existence of life? Was it inevitable for life to form, with consciousness being the only true beacon in the endlessness and beginninglessness.

The purpose of life…? It starts to become at least a conceivable explanation that life is a predestined vehicle for consciousness. It is quite interesting to see how particles clutter together in patterns, defying the all-surrounding, universal chaos and the supposed expansion of the universe. Could life have something to do with it being the counter weight of universal expansion? Why do quantum particles clutter together? Why do protons, neutrons and electrons clutter together? Why do molecules clutter together to forms cells? Why do cells clutter together to form tissues and organisms. And the current pinnacle of life, consciousness, it arose because of the cluttering together of nerve cells in a complex cluttering together in a complex organism! Why does our consciousness start to clutter together knowledge, and why do we try to understand how everything relates to everything? And why does our consciousness look out for life in our bigger universe? Why are we so desperate to find other life? To clutter together! Life is a symptom of the cluttering together of the matter in the universe, as are atoms, solar-planetary systems, galaxies and so on.

Jacob’s little blue light

… From the backseat of the car, Jacob felt the observer of the world. But he wasn’t very objective. Everything he saw, heard, smelled or touched was valued with emotions, branded, and remembered as such. It is not that he was very opinionated about things, no, he was far too easy-going for that. In fact, he didn’t think that much about things at all. At least, not in the way most of his friends seemed to do. Jacob was mostly concerned about how things felt. Well, concern was not really Jacob’s motive. Assessing how things felt was basically just the way he did things, by nature. Father was driving, as usual, and mother, she was her quiet self as usual. Both were quiet most of the time, an occasional break of silence mostly coming from a loose, observant remark from either of them, about something they saw or heard. The fact that they didn’t speak much to each other felt odd, but familiar since it had always been so. Jacob wasn’t concerned about it. He had his own world, always close by. It was actually very cosy, Jacob felt, being alone with his thoughts on the backseat of the car, with father and mother up front. He didn’t need to share his attention at too many moments in this way, and yet he was there with them. That felt comfortable. Now they were driving, but the same went for any other moment with his parents, whether it was a dinner at home, a walk out in the forest, or an afternoon in the garden on a summer’s day.

The night had stolen the daylight away, already a few hours ago. It had been a long trip. Jacob loved to travel with his parents. The travelling part itself, maybe even more so than the actual vacation time gave him a strange, slightly tense, but quite lovely feeling in his underbelly. The road was full of unexpected situations, many things he had never seen or experienced before. And even though Jacob was never comfortable with changes, he seemed to be attracted to this. Always seated on the right side of the backseat, he had lowered his body to the left, laying his head down on a pillow he had formed from two jackets that had been put aside. The fabric wasn’t exactly soft, but once he had warmed it with his skin, it felt quite good.  Laying down, Jacob could feel the movement of the car better, up and down on slight bumps or holes, and the sideward force on his body when the car went into a bend. A sharp right could sometimes be a bit uncomfortable, as his blood and weight would shift left, to his head. But a left bend on the other hand was a great feeling. Now the road was pretty much straight, it was a highway. Jacob noticed the regular, repetitive beams of light flashing into the car, from the lights above the highway. Sometimes they were yellow, and sometimes white. Father said that the yellow ones were new, and better, as they gave more light. Jacob just found them cosier. Not really able to sleep or even drowse, he sat up straight again and stared out into the dense black landscape at the side of the highway. Every few seconds a highway light flashed by. They gave the car shadows. A shadow car would come up from the back, overtake the car somewhat slowly, and then quickly rush off frontward, by which time a new shadow was trying to catch up with the car from the back. Jacob watched the spectacle closely for a good while, until he finally noticed it actually started to bore him. ‘In two hours we will be home, I think, not?’, father said to mother. Father was the soft type, even though he would sometimes like to make believe he wasn’t. His statements often ended as questions, as to get some kind of approval or confirmation. Notwithstanding that he was often right about things. ‘Hmhm’, mother sufficed with a simple confirmatory hum. Two hours! That was still a long time, Jacob found. Almost infinitely long. And his eyes drifted along the highway, the dark lands behind the road at the sides, the lights above the highway, the inside of the car, father and mother, and back outside. There were only very few cars on the road at this hour. When they overtook one of the few other cars on the road, Jacob peeked inside it and observed two people sitting on both the front seats. The inside of the car was dimly lit with a cosy yellow-orange colour. He was wondering what kind of people they were, and how they felt in their car. Would they notice how cosy it was in their car? Sometimes Jacob wished that he could be the other person, to be able to live in that perfect world. But he corrected his own thoughts. He wished he could be in the same place as the other person. He was actually quite happy being himself. A little while later they passed a highway exit. He had started to notice some time ago that he liked the highway exit points for some reason, and now he would always try to look at them a little harder. This particular one looked quite good. Where the highway and the highway exit roads actually split, at the point you could no longer switch lanes, and a railing started between the two, there was a little plot of grass under and around the railing, just a meter wide and a few meters long. A small yellow-green light on top of a half a meter or so high, plastic marker indicated the exit, and lit the grass below it in a yellowish hue. There was some higher grass further away, towards where the highway continued, but the grass at the indicator was mowed short. It attracted Jacob. How would it be to sit there in the night? Alone, and people driving by in their cars. It looked cosy. Strangely cosy.

The exit had passed very quickly, but Jacob had the picture burnt into his memory, and his thoughts made it seem they had passed the place at walking speed, and he had plenty of time to look at it. Yes, it looked like a nice place to be. At least to try. ‘To do what?’, Jacob thought in a particular way, without asking himself with those exact words. He didn’t know. Quietly, his mind rested back into observance again.

 The day after they had arrived back home, Jacob had felt somewhat confused about some image that stuck in his head. ‘Daddy, what was that blue traffic light for?’ ‘What do you mean? There are no blue traffic lights.’ ‘There at that viaduct, when we came back from vacation.’ ‘Where?’ The blue traffic signal. What was it meant for?, Jacob was contemplating. For which cars was the traffic light meant? And what did you have to do when the light was blue? As a déjà vu that re-established its own existence, Jacob got lost in-between a dream and reality. ‘Have I dreamt about this before?’, he asked himself. ‘No, I am awake now. But I just know that I have dreamt about the blue traffic light before. And that’s just because I have been there and saw it. But where is it then?’ ‘It doesn’t matter, because I will take it with me. I just have to place a blue piece in front of the light.’ The air of the living room was still in the middle of the night. Jacob was searching around in a big sack that contained all the Lego pieces he had collected over time. Much to his own surprise, he managed to construct a little blue traffic light, and for a moment he was intensely happy, even though he couldn’t grasp exactly why. ‘Oh that fantastic space travel Lego! Blue windows in wagons and spaceships that will land on a distant planet. Alone in the deep dark space. Far away, wheels ride over extraterrestrial dunes. The spaceman is sitting behind the blue glass of his wagon. Oh how much I’d like to be that spaceman. Just for a little while, not really there, but just here now for a while to be there. The blue traffic light is there as well, just behind the top of a sand dune. What do you have to do when the traffic light shines on a distant planet? Calm, blue light, under which men in spacesuits are working. What are they doing then? Building? What are they building? They are building things under the blue light on a distant planet. It’s so cosy there. No, it’s thrilling and attractive. It seems so cosy.’

‘My blue traffic light, with the little blue piece in front of the lamp. It’s standing there at the crossroads under the viaduct. It is casting its calm, blue light, and it’s so cosy. No, it’s thrilling and attractive. There are no men at the viaduct. My traffic light is there all alone. What do you have to do when the light is blue? I want to sleep there at the traffic light, at the edge of its light’s reach, against a cosy little bush, at a small grassy part of the ground, where I can watch the world. Where I can watch people. Where there’s not a person passing by.’

It was still dark in his room when Jacob woke up. His small room upstairs on the second floor. It was silent, and outside, the night ruled the world. Snow that had fallen during the night was laying softly on roofs and trees, on all topsides of all things. It was lighter outside than otherwise, with a faint, hardly detectable hue. It was beautiful. It was an orange hue. Jacob noticed his mind stirring around on that observation. ‘Did I dream something about blue light? A blue traffic light. A traffic light on a cosy, lonely spot near a viaduct. My traffic light.’ Jacob now observed the walls of his room, and the window sill that offered a look into the outside scenery. The wall was covered with new wallpaper with white, foamy bubbles that made it feel warm when a hand would touch it. Jacob’s father had put it himself. There was a cupboard with green doors in dark brown, painted wood. On the window sill the model steam loc that Jacob’s grandfather had given Jacob last year. Jacob got enthusiastic. ‘It would be lovely to ride the loc tomorrow. But the little fuel cubes that look like sugar cubes are poisonous, said daddy. Ask tomorrow. Tomorrow.’

Of fractals

We see all around us repetitive patterns of interaction of matter and energy, both in the direction of the smaller and in the direction of the bigger. Quantum particles interact and become subatomic particles. Subatomic particles spin around each other and form larger universes of atoms. Atoms interact and become molecules. Molecules interact and become larger molecules. Smaller and larger molecules interact and become larger universes of cells and organisms. Or they become planets and other objects of space. Objects of space spin around each other and form star systems. Star systems interact with each other and become galaxies. Galaxies interact and become supergalaxies. Galaxies and supergalaxies interact in a larger universe. It almost looks like the (super)universe is a fractal, endlessly reproducing it’s own structures.

Observing that until now we find that everything we know has its counterpart, counteraction, counterforce, everything the universe is may very well also have its counterpart. Small and big, cold and hot, light and dark, mass and energy. Let’s extend this with some touch of imagination: time and anti-time (which is different from no time), space and anti-space (also different from no space). Unfortunately though, we humans are limited to detect that which our senses have been built to detect, we cannot detect universes further away -, or observe characteristics other than those we have evolved to be able to sense: the smaller (sub)universe of the atoms and the quantum particles, and the larger (sub)universe of the universe we call the universe. Our senses have grown to detect only those parameters, because they have been developed by the limitations and rules that are valid within our setting. We observe things because one extreme exists in the other. Without dark there is no light, without bad there is no good. The ancient Chinese have already captured this idea in their Yin and Yang vision of the universe, many years ago.

If the universe is indeed an endless fractal of repetitive structures in different levels of subuniverses, it may be an interesting position to say that even endless fractalization has its counterforce, countersize, countertime. This means that the smaller units are at the same time the bigger units, because under infinity there are no measurements possible. So if we would in this scenario look through a powerful nano electron microscope and see atoms, we are actually seeing galaxies, and when we observe subatomic particles like neutrons, protons, electrons, circling around each other, we observe star systems. When we look through a telescope and see a galaxy far away in the universe, we may also look at a complex molecule, and when we see the end of the known universe we really see the membrane of a cell, all in real-time. Then the universe has no end and also no beginning, because the fractal also fractalizes itself. The outside of the fractal, representing the largest structures (the superuniverse) bends back to become the smallest possible unit. The question what the universe is contained in is irrelevant, because the universe is, and it is not.

The size of nothing?

It remains illogical and frustrating to have to accept that the universe, or the larger superuniverse, would finally end somewhere where there will be a line between universe and nothing. This is the ‘What is the universe contained in-paradox’. If we would collect and put together everything we know in the universe (gasses, planets, stars, galaxies, light, radiation particles etc.), with nothing in-between, really clutter everything tightly together, we would have everything surrounded by absolutely nothing. But that situation is incredible. Since we cannot ascribe any size, not one characteristic to nothing (it extends endlessly, or rather, it doesn’t extend at all), it means that the everything in it, of which before we could ascribe a certain size to, also has no detectable or measurable size. This underlines the uselessness of the ‘What is the universe contained in-paradox’. Yet it feels so bad to accept that the universe would just be somewhere, and is not IN something. We are so used to see, in our world and our skies, that everything is always IN something. The chair is standing on the floor, next to the table, the dining set is standing in the room, the room is a room of the house and the house is part of town. The town is in this country and the country is part of the earth’s crust. The earth is in the solar system, which is in the milky way. The milky way is finally in the universe… ah… and now someone says that with a really strong telescope, positioned somewhere in space, they see almost till the edge of the universe. The edge of the universe… now it starts to itch, to hurt even. Our bodies, our minds are aching, crying out, for something to please be harbouring this universe.

Movements of knowledge

Like everything in the universe, also our knowledge moves in two opposite directions; Science expands our knowledge outward until we know everything, and spirituality – or religion – gravitates our knowledge inward until we know the undividable, the self.
The fact that we move along both lines seems to reconfirm that everything in the universe needs to be in balance, that one thing cannot exist without its counterpart, its balancing agent.

Hello readers

Dear readers,

Through this platform, I want to share with you all my ideas and thoughts about the single most mind-boggling puzzle: the mystery of the universe and what it is, and subjects that come to mind as closely related, such as the meaning of life and the existence of God, to name some.

I want to share my ideas and thoughts because I believe they may be useful or meaningful in some manner. But if nothing else, I also write to get my ideas sorted for myself. I truly hope you may enjoy my posts, and hope to receive your useful and sincere comments.

Please bear with me for all my coming posts, I am making no pretentions to be flawless in my thinking. Nor do I claim to always post 100% scientifically justified ideas. I am only certain about my intentions, and my posts may further insight by offering ideas that tread out of the box here and there.
Thanks,

Jasper Buijs

PS, this here below I wrote in my profile

I always believed in the principles of science,
and now I believe in the principles of religion too
- how fortunate, I had been afraid I could never -
Their balance has enriched me
For their truth I am humble.

I am a writer too, and a traveller of outside and inside
To ponder I like, logically, philosophically
I guess I will always be,
the man in the middle.