Am I joking?

Modern cosmology is like a Superman ‘comic’ book without Superman or humour. Wonderful things are happening all around the cosmologists (figuratively), people are being saved miraculously, runaway trains are stopped, doomed airplanes land safely, but they do not know how or why. There is a gap in their knowledge, like someone or something that is missing in a story; they surely are missing something or somebody, but they do not know exactly what or whom.

Cosmology is like Victorian architecture and literature with all its unnecessary mathematical ornateness; its physicalistic gargoyles and curlicue, ornamental, iron work. The test of anything in the Victorian mind was, ‘Does society approve?’ The cosmologist asks, ‘Does physics approve?’  Cosmology is purely intellectual masturbation! Cosmology, like many other sciences, deals only with the abstractions of reality (mental gymnastics) and never with reality itself.

 For example, astronomers in California study the ‘disastrous’ death of the Sun (some 5 billion [5 x 10⁹] years into the future), and the ‘imminent’ collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way (some15 billion [15 x 10⁹] years into the future), and get extremely agitated about it.

 In the meantime, they were sitting on (in California, that is) a real cauldron of earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and the possibility of rising sea levels. Not to mention lesser evils like pollution, inadequate health services, erosion, contamination, et cetera, et cetera.

 A big meteorite, comet, or asteroid could collide with Earth at any time! According to geologists, the land continents on earth are again going to form one huge continent in 200 million years time – a futuristic Pangaea (a hypothetical proto-continent proposed by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener [1880-1930] in 1912 as a part of his theory of continental drift). This mega-continent will change the weather completely and an enormous desert will result in the centre of this new continent.

 I once told a very, rich, and shrewd, mechanical engineer, and owner of a big manufacturing corporation, about the ‘eminent’ demise of the Sun and the Solar System. The engineer turned around in disgust and said, ‘So that is the answer to all my problems, then? Why don’t you spend your time more productively and forget about all this useless ‘.#€%^&*’.’

 That rebuttal made me think back to a time long ago. I was on vacation at a seaside resort. Now, nothing bores me more than the sea. Therefore, after a few days at the sea I was bored out of my mind – I was going totally cuckoo. I then sat down with some clean pages, a laptop with a ‘Matlab’ mathematics program, and started to cook some equations and formulae.

 I started with matrix algebra, added some vectors and Lagrangian transforms, some Bessel formulae, some Laspeyres, Paasche, and Fischer indices, a Jacobian for good measure, I even tried some Dedekind cuts, and of course ‘tensor algebra and Riemannian geometry’ like Einstein used for his general relativity theory. (Elementary Calculus is all that is necessary to understand special relativity.)

 Out of all this, and some more, I could eventually deduce that you should be able to find ‘wormholes’ at the north and south-ends of all worms and caterpillars. This was some real groundbreaking research for me. Nobody else bought it; the timing was possibly wrong!

 In cosmology, a wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical, topological feature (‘tunnel’ or a tube-like connection) of space-time anomaly (or portal) that is essentially a ‘shortcut’ through space and time (permitted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity).

 A wormhole is therefore a theoretical distortion of space-time in a region of the universe that would link one location or time with another, through a path that is shorter in distance or duration than would otherwise be expected by entering one of its two mouths that are connected to a single throat and exiting by the other. It is a thin tube of space-time connecting distant regions of the universe.

 Matter can thus theoretically ‘travel’ from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat. After a body falling into a hypothetical ‘rotating black hole’ is torn apart and reduced to elementary particles by tidal effects, it is proposed to be ‘theoretically’ possible for those particles to miss the singularity, travel through a small hole or tunnel in space-time (called a wormhole) to another universe or another part (or time) of our own universe.

 Wormholes might ‘theoretically’ also provide links to parallel or baby universes and could provide the possibility of time travel according to the English theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking (1942- ).

 And to think that you thought that your cheese (and even your purse) is full of holes – spare a thought for these unfortunate scientists with holes through their heads!

 At this stage of Human development, many of these very weird (mostly mathematical) theories still turns around time, a nonentity. You still live by the cause and effect relationship of day and night, night following day and so on.

 In space, there is no such relationship. Time is not even a relative entity; time is non-existent. Time is neither absolute nor relative – as Einstein wanted you to believe – IT IS non-existent, a non-entity, nothing, but not zero.

 Zero is something useful; the concept of ‘nothing’ is not useful, but the concept of ‘nothingness’ on the contrary is very, very useful. Zero represents nothingness and that is useful. Cause and effect have nothing to do with time, but it has everything to do with change.

 Mathematicians have the distinction of being among the first people in history to recognise the value of nothingness and to understand and express the difference between nothingness and nothing. Even though these may sound like vacuous milestones, they were prodigious events in the development of arithmetic (the study of numbers) as we know it today. Between eleven and fourteen hundred years ago, nothingness found its permanent place in arithmetic as the number zero.

 The Hindus invented a symbol for an empty space on the abacus and the Arabs adopted it and called the symbol sifr (‘empty’). This has come down to us as ‘cipher’ or, in more distorted form, ‘zero’.

 Zero is a very special number with extraordinary characteristics. Zero can also be seen as the number that unites the ‘real’ numbers with the so-called ‘imaginary’ numbers.

 Without the number zero, it is impossible to do arithmetic as we do it today. Zero is a very important number, and is the only number that is a real, as well as an imaginary number. The Hindus apparently invented the concept for nothingness – zero. However, as can be seen, numbers are abstract to the extreme.

 Like Mark McCutcheon in his book The Final Theory, (2002:1-4) I can also only ask, ‘Do we really live in a bizarre, mysterious universe, or is it simply that our human science is needlessly bizarre?’ Is this all a joke?

 The French philosopher Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985) said that the Devil had no sense of humour (zero humour). He also said that this fact was precisely why the Devil hated democracy. Democracy, according to De Rougemont, was founded on a joke, namely: ‘that all people were equal’!

 Our science and mathematics also have no sense of humour. It is valueless (it has value, but does not recognise values as such), objective, rational, and logical, but not humorous. It is also truly rational and logical, but not realistic. As often as not, ideas in mathematics are conceived by playful, imaginative minds whose first concern is to be rational, not realistic….