Pile on!
That is all.
All right, friends, we are rolling today! We are defining MOF and the origin of the universe…
by CJ | Aug 14, 2012 | Journal | 35 comments
35 Comments
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I’d like to give you my theory, but I wasn’t there at the time, so I missed the grand event. BTW, what is “MOF”, I’m racking my poor brain, and can’t come up with a suitable meaning.
Never mind, I saw your response in Alliance-Union spoilerverse. “O” being for officer, and M-F exactly what I thought it was…….although I never recall calling officers by that acronym in the Navy, they were either “O’s” or “Zeroes”, because the pay scale for their rank begins with “O”, e.g., O-1, O-2, O-10, whereas enlisted grades are designated by “E”, e.g., E-1, E-9. I still prefer the “zero” to the “o”.
I’m neither E nor O, but a confirmed non-reg, i.e., a civvy in Aggie parlance. That one derives from “non-regulation uniform,” as in, civvies wear civvies, not uniforms. Though you could certainly call a business suit or a company or school uniform, uniforms. Then there are naturists….
I gave my universe theory in the prior blog entry, so I’m…as content as I can be these days. 🙂
I’m sure my cats must have opinions on the subject. I have a feeling sometimes they’re just shy or very circumspect, or they’d likely type up their theory themselves. If only humans could be pleased so simply/easily.
Currently listening to the audiobook of Cuckoo’s Egg. 🙂
Oh, dear; this is irresistible. No knowledgeable scientific persons have offered a theory. I am not knowledgeable nor scientific, but I have several very fine, if incomplete, theories:
1. The Creator god tossed a handful of dust into the air and from this created all of the infinite number of universes and their inhabitants. (This does not, of course, explain the origin of the Creator god, or the dust, or the air. But it is probably at the basis of many creation myths. Or it ought to be!)
2. Someone in the macro universe struck a match and lit a candle; our universe results from the light/heat/chemical reaction of this event. The time, which seems like eternity to us, is barely an instant in the macro universe. We should think of this when we light matches. We may be creating micro universes. (This does not account for the origin of the macro universe, or the persons and matches therein. Details, details.)
3. Speaking of the macro universe, our universe is simply part of a system in a leaf or a flower or a toe nail, an atom, less than an atom. (Again, this doesn’t say where the macro universe came from.)
4. There is the Big Bang theory, which doesn’t tell us what exploded or why. Maybe the universe(s) expand and contract; in the contraction phase, matter is so densely compacted that this creates forces that eventually explode, driving matter out to form more stars/planets/galaxies./universes. (Only we don’t know where the matter comes from in the first place.)
(Maybe the matter was Just There, eternally, floating around waiting for something to happen to it. Not an answer I really like.)
I love the idea of the dark matter and dark energy as the manifestation of another universe, but is there no other sign or meeting point? The nexus, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower, connecting all the universes, offering, for those who are technologically or psychically or magically able, a point at which all universes may be accessed?
Truth may not lie here, but stories certainly do.
BCS, cats know ALL the secrets of this and any other universe. They don’t tell us because they know we are not intelligent enough to understand.
What I see in the racial/collective unconscious is that the ‘big bang’ aka the creation of a new universe is something that is done by a ‘super consciousness’ comprised of a group of individuals who’ve made it into a ‘spirit/light’ body, which we, the human race, is on track for doing aka full enlightenment.
That’s what all this suffering and such as been about; that we’d not get all comfy and unmotivated, but instead be driven to be ready to make full enlightenment in this time frame (although the greedy 1% never really did get that part of why we needed them here), while our planet is moving thru a strip of much higher frequency energy. Without that extra boost, we aren’t able to make it—not even the supremely spiritually competent. They can get there, but can’t stay. But with the extra high energy field, it’s becoming possible for anyone to make it and stay.
We, like many groups before us, will then push thru into a universe that comes into existence as we do so, although since there isn’t time out there, it will have always been… one of those head trip things we can’t really wrap our minds around, while we’re still in just plain old bodies. I do see alternate future reality lines though—how the future will show up has many different possibilities, although most are unlikely. They’re all vibrating, some hardly at all and some so jiggly that I can’t even see what’s going on really.
Hence I take it to mean that the most likely future is the one that has the least vibration. And it is that reality that has us making full enlightenment which entails not only spiritual awareness but also physical transformation. Plus, the contract we made with the greedy 1% back at the beginning of our species’s sentience (made by the overarching sentience of humanity aka ‘god’) is about done.
That is the biggest part of the change coming in 2012 that you’ll never hear about. But their presence here was essential for us to be ready, even though the overarching sentience knew how much pain and suffering those criminals would cause us in the process. It had to be done though, and since the overarching sentience of humanity is all of our higher selves connected and combined all together, each and every one of us at that level agreed to it, for the higher good we would be able to achieve once the time of enlightenment arrived. FYI: It’s gonna be AWESOME!
That’s similar to my thoughts. Once or twice I’ve wondered if it might be possible to beat the light speed limit by ‘re-imagining’ the universe into a more favourable configuration. I also wonder – if it’s true – to what extent we can manipulate the universe. Are scientific discoveries really discoveries or are they creations?
Co-incidentally I’m reading Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood series. I only found out last month that he had sadly passed and had written another book (obviously not in that order, lol).
If you haven’t read the series I can highly recommend it. I don’t normally like fantasy (sorry, CJ 🙂 ) but these are what I’d call science-fantasy. Especially the first one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythago_Wood
So (coming back to the blog) maybe we can do something like that 🙂
We actually are able to access another universe… it is the one the demon types and crystalline entities come from. The basis of life seems to be silica instead of carbon. That’s why ‘demons’ aka aliens can stand around in fire. They are essentially made of rock and it doesn’t hurt them at all.
Anyway, what I’ve been able to see about that universe recently, is that it is just one really really big world with a sun in the middle, sort of like ‘ring world’. But that is ALL there is. NO space, no other galaxies and so on. The world totally encompasses the sun; and that is where the energy pathways of the elder races are located.
The wormhole portals aka ‘stargates’ only connect this universe to the other. Since that universe is so small comparatively, points that align with this universe are much closer together, hence a 250,000 year journey by ship here is only a couple days stroll there. The trip to the next galaxy is about a week and a half.
See, that will be the fun of making the new universe. WE will get to decide what kind of place it will be! And what kind of rules apply and so on. 🙂
Sorry about the grammar goobers.. it’s 1 am here and I confess to hurrying so I can head off to bed. 🙂
It’s so nice to have readers who think about things.
Oh, I spent a lot of time in my lower-division college time thinking about the surface of 4-D spheres. I about wrapped my head around it. Upper-division I was way too busy getting graduated, because my Uncle Sugar demanded it (’67). Then I was trying to wrap my head around General/Special Relatvity–about made it, but it was slippery enough it mostly slipped away.
String Theory wants 11 dimensions, which is somewhat gratifying because I’ve always been partial to the idea of the Universe existing as the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere. “We don’t need no dark-energy!”
Oops, shoulda been: “We don’t need no steenking dark-energy!” (Wish we could edit!)
I haz a sad: Harry Harrison just passed away.
http://www.harryharrison.com/
I favor the Terry Pratchett theory: “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” Ties it all up pretty neatly.
By the way, how close are you to the fires I’ve been hearing about out in Washington state? Not very, I hope…
42
Of topic but equally mind blowing is this:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/08/on-our-radar-impressive-velociraptor-cosplay?utm_source=Feedburner%3A+Frontpage+Partial+RSS+Feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torcom%2FFrontpage_Partial+%28Tor.com+Frontpage+Partial+-+Blog+and+Stories%29
WOL, thank you for sharing that. WANT, WANT!!!
Lol—that’s one of the Walking With Dinosaurs dinos, I’d almost bet.
Amazing how well and naturally balanced that body becomes when the tail is in the right position (those of you who remember the old ‘tail-dragger’ t-rex pose).
And how interestingly those eyes are positioned: this is a hunter.
I made the acquaintance of Dr. Phil Currie, of the Royal Tyrell museum, and as we discussed the calcium demand of birds, dino skeletons, muscle-action, and eggshells…which was very exciting, trust me, he opened a desk drawer and showed me one of his particular treasures, a little trodon skull, about the size of a human child’s, with a really impressive braincase. If that asteroid hadn’t hit, my friends, we’d have all had natural leather and laid eggs. This fellow, about our size, had a brain larger and possibly more complex in visual tracking, than our human ancestors. He was on his way to a developed cerebrum, and you want to know what would have brought an end to some species of dinos—he was potential bad news for the slow-moving and stupid.
Another interesting thing I learned, was what fell between the cracks: there were a lot of of little species, including mammals (descended from the nearly-extinct’ed Permian critters) and some little ‘primitive’ critters of that era who, once the dinos were wiped out, crept out of the woods and down from the hills, and continued some very old bloodlines.
I’ve been to Drumheller, AB. (Dad was born at Lethbridge.) The most interesting exhinit I saw was just a photograph of the coulee outside, identifying a dark, black line half-way up the side, the KT boundary! As we left the building I was sure to see it, and imagine myself sitting up there, butt in the Age of Mammals and heels in the Age of Dinosaurs.
I’ve been to the Page in LA, and seen the bubbling tar pits. But it was seeing that black line with my own eyes that impressed me most. 🙂
Or maybe feathers? http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20921-advanced-birds-lived-alongside-hairy-dinosaurs.html
Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to CJ’s ‘natural leather’.
Or we’d have dragons here. That’s all they really are–a sentient flying T-rex and that’s how they developed. 🙂
Yes, that is one of the “Walking with the Dinosaurs” animations. I had my coffee shop next to the Tacoma Dome when they first got here to the US and were setting things up. The crew let me come up and see stuff close up. It was very cool!
And boy, we could sure use some of those trodons nowadays! Turn one loose in Congress and clean up the place; although I’d hate to make the poor little fellow sick, eating all that garbage! *lol*
Lol—feathers, quite possibly. At least a nice warm down.
Don’t know how y’all got off to dinosaurs while I was sleeping.
Back to the multiple universes stuff. This is from the Runner-Up in the Science Fiction category of the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Contest:
The real problem with the “many universes” interpretation of quantum mechanics is that if it’s true, then somewhere, in some universe, anything you can possibly imagine has already happened, which means that somewhere, another version of me has already finished writing the rest of this science-fiction novel, so I’m not feeling real inspired to do it myself. — Steve Lauducci, Bethlehem, PA
And here’s the link to the whole list: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2012win.html
I love Bulwer-Lytton—
Do you know, I never could do my real work in study hall: I did that after I got home in sane quiet. So I squirreled novels away disguised as textbooks, and read, yes, Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii. In the poor old man’s defense, his imagery was quite strong and his characters could be memorable—his wording was just a tad over the top. THe man should have learned to rely on good verbs and precise nouns rather than adjectives and adverbs.
MOF. I gave one answer in A/U spoilerverse, but let’s try to backronym it some more. Given that “fool” is very nearly the worst insult in any Cherryh-verse, that’s a good choice for “F”. Master/Mistress/Minion (depending on role in chain of command) Of Foolishness?
For origin of universe, I will trot out the tale spun out by obscure (and likely never to be published again) author Zohra Greenhalgh, a Sufi-inspired variation of the creation story. In a nutshell: The Great Being, beset by unruly dreams needing expression, created the Real World so that the dreams would have a place to manifest (which they did as angels/demigods), and to realize and understand themselves, and thereby also help the Great Being realize and understand Itself. This needed a bit of a kickstart from one particularily noisy dream, which itself first dreamed up the concept of “individuality”, and became the Trickster, whose deceptions and dissemblings are (mostly) meant to teach…or deliver a boot to the head, as appropriate.
Ah, yes, the “coyote”.
I rather like the Egyptian one:
First came water. Everything was still. But in the sand at the bottom of the water was a lotus seed. A lotus grew, and flowered, and when the lotus opened there sat at its center the god Atum. Atum opened his mouth and spoke a word, and that word was a god, Geb, the earth. Atum opened his mouth and said a word, and that word was a goddess, Nut, the sky. And so with the other firstborn gods.”
Sort of the Egyptian Big Bang.
I freely admit that for it’s time the “Biblical” cosmology, Genesis 1, though it’s clearly much more ancient, is a very logical deconstruction of reality. I think though the limits to what they could have known cuts both ways.
One thing I’ve always admired about our pastor-emeritus is the way he brings scholarly examination into his sermons, points usually considered only by seminarians (and not all seminarians at that, due to sectarian biases). He routinely refers to the “three authors of the book of Isaiah”. One such point he made is that Genesis 1 was really formed (“written”, as it were) in the time of Babylonian mastery over Judea, and that certain elements of the story were a deliberate “in-your-face” to their captors. To wit: Babylonians venerated the stars (Zoroastrianism was very strong then), but in Genesis, stars are just “pretty little lights” put in the sky by JHWH, almost as an afterthought.
Another intriguing consideration (from other sources), is that in the original ancient form of Aramaic, the “days” mentioned in Genesis 1 were actually nonspecific periods of time. I’m sure, even without digital watches, the ancients had a pretty solid concept of what a “day” was, and it wasn’t the word they used. If you just happen to substitute “hundreds of millions of years” as the length of each stage, it’s actually a reasonable overview of the process of evolution (until you get to specifics like Adam’s rib).
Some people pin too much on King James’ scholars, who rendered the text into that !!day’s!! English, and rather poetically at that. Unfortunately the very people that are the most adamant about ‘literal interpretation’ (that’s verging on an oxymoron) of the Bible—are those also the most doggedly against studying any other language than the English they daily abuse. When you transit between languages, you have to wrap your mind (flexibly) around other ways of viewing the universe; and when you translate not only between languages, but eras, you have to translate concepts as well as words.
For instance, in Latin, orbis terrarum, or the ‘orb of lands’ does not mean all Romans view the world as a globe, even though Eratosthenes (a Greek, ca 200 BC) had calculated the circumference of the Earth and the distance to the Sun and Aristarchus (ca 300 BC) had demonstrated that the Earth goes around the sun. College-educated Romans with studies in natural science knew this. Most didn’t. The Latin expression refers to the ‘circle of lands’ around the Mediterranean, which literally translates to the Midlands Sea. The orbis saeculorum, or orb of ages, refers to the concept that the world passes through Ages, each dominated by a major god, and that the Saturnian Age, when the world was simple and ruled by old Saturn, has given way to the current Age, dominated by the hot-tempered son and killer of Saturn—Jupiter. And that following him there will be other Ages, which some thought might cycle completely around again in an eternal loop. It has NOTHING to do with eternity in the sense that Christians interpret it, unless they want to admit old Saturn and Jupiter.
It is also remarkable that the Greek language, in which much of the New Testament was natively written (or translated out of Aramaic) has NO word for what the fundamentalists make so very much of—Greek has NO word for ‘sin.’ The word that the Jamesian translators rendered as sin is generally the word ‘hamar-TEE-ah’ or an archery shot that misses. An ‘oops,’ in other words, which is a little less a thunderous event than an error.
I had real trouble with non-flexible minds in my teaching days. I had one 9th grade child melt down in tears of confusion because she had to face the fact that an ocean ‘wave’ is not the same as the word for ‘wave’ a handkerchief or a hand, of all silly things, and that the word describing wavy hair is yet a third one; and no, she could not make one be the other by putting verbal endings on it. It was as if the whole world had decided to go chaotic and nothing she knew made sense. She literally (pardon pun) had to quit the course because she could not grasp the concept of one English word not having an absolute equivalent Latin word. Her world had warped, and I don’t know if she could ever straighten it out. She wasn’t the last such I ever dealt with, but her flood of tears and protests was epic.
Narrow-minded people who want absolute answers, 7 dawn-to-dark ‘days’ of creation and damnation of ‘sin,’ do not like to think in more than one language, unless they are studying their holy text with a very narrowly regulated one-definition dictionary and no appreciation of ancient times. Notably, they are centering their universe-view on a translation done by a committee in an age in which a lot of understanding of Greek culture had been lost or distorted, even destroyed, by cold-country invaders who viewed the Mediterranean tendency toward display of the human form as shocking. Most also have not closely considered the implications of ‘day’ in Genesis, where the Sun is not created until Wednesday…
When the Septuagint translates “sin” as “missing the mark”, that’s actually accurate to the Hebrew. When Judges 20:16 talks about men who “could sling stones at a hair-breadth, and not miss,” the word for “miss” (yachati) shares its root with one of the Hebrew words commonly translated as “sin” (chet).