Bits

I’m trying to include here some things that help me be positive – even when times are really tough.

It might, possibly, help someone who’s struggling with life’s challenges. ^{_{(Also, please do let me know what helps you … it might help me :-))}}

It’s strangely, really hard to identify what helps me maintain a positive attitude, because to do that I need to:

(a) imagine that I’m totally alone … with no support network, and

(b) transport myself to a worrying, frightening and scary time.

The second part (b) is fairly easy for me at the moment.

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

The first thing that comes to mind is music … fairly deep soul moving music, that puts me in touch with humanity.

Here I hope (if the technology works) is an example of the sort of music that helps me:

The second positivity support thing that came to mind was writing. Back in May 2021 I wrote a bit for a competition, and was amazed at the words that came out of me, and even more amazed that I was shortlisted! 😎

It was almost as though someone else had written it.

But the words (the whole thing) definitely help me be positive.

Maybe what I wrote helps only me, but I’d really love it to help others.

Here it is …

Our Space

Something deep inside causes us to gaze at the stars, and our space, and wonder at the universe, its limits, its size, life on other planets, how and why does any of it exist, where did it all come from, and how does it function? It’s a bit like waking up in a lifeboat in the middle of an ocean, and wondering where you are, how did you get there, where are you going, and who gave you the boat?

There are many theories, but the current favourite is called “The Big Bang”. Briefly, the Big Bang theory is based on the idea that 13.8 billion years ago there was a massive event which caused all of the universal galaxies to move away from each other rapidly. Some say that, in a General Relativistic way, space is expanding, rather than galaxies flying off like the remnants of an explosion in a fireworks factory.

We are given clues, in the world around us, about how things work in our universe and our space, and at the same time we must be aware of the dangers of becoming Ptolemaic.

Ptolemy was the Alexandrian astronomer who developed the geocentric theory that our sun and planets revolved about us, here on Earth, meaning that we were the centre of everything. It seems to me that sometimes we have a similar approach to physical phenomena, along the lines of ‘if we humans can’t see it and measure it, then it does not exist’. We always need to remember our small size and precarious position in the vast distances and time scales of our universe. We also need to recognise our limited knowledge … we really don’t know everything.

Examples of earthly things that may help us hypothesise about our universe and space, include:

• When we stand in sunlight we feel heat – so we know that something is travelling to us from the sun.
• When we drop a stone in a lake we see waves travelling out from the point where the stone hit the water.
• When something travels towards us the noise it makes is higher pitch than when it travels away.
• Things fall towards the centre of our planet.
• Magnets exert force at a distance.
• Magnets can make electricity, and vice versa.
• Light can be polarised by reflection.
• Energy changes its form, but is never destroyed.

What is space? How is space defined? We know that space is a three dimensional, largely evacuated volume that starts at about 100km above earth, and is a volume where systems can move freely, based on their momentum and the influence of gravitational forces.

One way to try to explain the weird invisible distant attraction of gravity is through Einstein’s General Relativity, which states that bodies (anything floating about in space), bend space (which is also weird), so that they fall towards each other, and is equivalent to saying that bodies attract each other.

The most distant galaxies in our universe are 30 billion light years away at the moment, and moving away from us at steadily increasing velocities. Our universal horizon is calculated to be 46.1 billion light years away. But because we can’t see further than 46.1 billion light years, it doesn’t mean that the we have a boundary at our universe’s horizon.

How could space be limited? If our space is not infinite, then our space is bounded. If space is bounded, then it must have a boundary. Any boundary would have an inside and an outside, and the outside would be outside the inside, so the inside would not be the dimensional end of our universe. Lucretius, over 2000 years ago, used this same argument.

With any of the theories about our space and universe, it would be useful to have a way to test validity, but the scales of time and distance make testing almost impossible.

In the unlikely event that space is finite, then as stated, there would be some sort of boundary enclosing our space, and that would result in some galactic radiation reflection. No such reflected radiation has been reported. Where are the echoes? There are no echoes. Our space must be infinite.

So we’re just a speck of something on a speck of something else, surrounded by a potentially infinite number of specks of other things. This must surely be the case. It follows that our universe has no boundaries, is unlimited in size, and must be infinite in time, having no beginning and no end. That’s quite a difficult notion for us earthlings to accept!

If it had an end, what’ll happen after that? If it had a beginning, what happened before that? Was there an infinity of nothing before and after our universe?

Our universe must therefore have an infinite amount of mass and energy, and exist in some form, forever.

Most texts state that the mass of the observable universe is 3 x 10^52 kilograms. Note the word ‘observable’; we have absolutely no idea how much we can’t see.

If the universe has not existed forever, isn’t it a bizarre coincidence that it is what it is right now? … unless it somehow renews itself. Particularly if, as some theories have it, it’ll eventually turn into space dust, as it expands faster and faster? The dangers of Ptolemaic thinking are everywhere.

A more likely theory is that our Universe will eventually stop expanding and start contracting under gravitational, and other forces.

Going back to waves, suppose our universe has expanded from the time of a Big Bang into some vast volume, and all of the kinetic (motion) energy at that time is slowly (in our terms) converting to potential (gravitational) energy. Then as movement ceases all of the specks in our universe will be pulled together by gravity, and a limitless black hole.

At some time intense gravity and space-time warping will probably cause another Big Bang, and off we will go again, with our universe renewed. So we, or our atoms, are all be completing a form of wave motion, and being recycled.

Some of our universe has almost almost certainly started contracting, and as we continue to ‘fly’ out, sitting on our planet in our galaxy, other parts of our universe may already be ‘flying’ back past us, (possibly faster than the speed of light, as we know it) in the form of dark undetectable matter.

In a very simplistic analogy, if our universe were contracting and expanding in a type of wave motion then the rate of expansion would be expected to increase and decrease. The velocity of such a body cycles from zero to a maximum and back to zero.

There’s also no reason to assume that ours is the only universe. We would have Ptolemaic limitations, if we we didn’t consider that there must be matter and events outside our universe … the Extra Universe.

And so the conclusion is that our universe occupies unlimited space, and is therefore infinite, with infinite energy and infinitely recycling … and that there is an infinite amount of matter outside our Universe, and Our Space.

The main obstacle presented by the model of a universe that cycles from birth to exhaustion, and back to rebirth is our Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy (disorder, chaos and lack of useable energy) always increases within an isolated system, and never decreases.

An infinite universe is not an isolated system, and therefore the second law of thermodynamics does not apply.

Because Our Space, Universe and Extra Universe are infinite, it is unlikely, or to put it more strongly, totally beyond any possible hope or expectation, that we can or will ever know or understand what’s out there, or going on.

It’s clear that there’s an infinite amount of stuff that we don’t know, and will never know or understand. (That’s a good thing because we humans really enjoy steadily discovering our universe’s secrets). We can happily carry on chipping away at the picture, and finding new knowledge.

It’s also clear that we’re permanently being recycled. I quite like that, because my family, friends and I will be around (in bits) forever. I’m really not sure why that pleases me, but it does.

It may also be, that the universe has infinite smallness, and that there is, in a sense, infinite space inside the matter that surrounds us, i.e. inside an atom.

We don’t have much ‘infinite’ in our normal lives, and many find it difficult to accept the concept of an infinite space containing our, and other Universes – or the idea that we’re recycled, for eternity.

It can be even harder to accept the notion of our space as a finite space with a boundary.

And the question remains … ’Who gave us the boat?’

Well done, if you managed to read it to the end! 🤣

My third positivity support are flowers, and trees, and nature.

Try this.

Look at a garden and in your imagination, strip it of flowers, trees, grass and leaves

Can you feel the way that energy has disappeared, and the space now drains energy from you.

Now put everything back, and feel the way that energy surges from the flowers, trees, grass and leaves … and positivity.

This is one way that I charged up my store of positivity.

I hope that it works for you.