Skip to main content

All you need is gravity, Love!


"All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need."

That's what the Beatles sang.
Stephen Hawking says that all you need is gravity,
and you will get a whole universe;
maybe a lot of them.
You don't need a god.

I suppose that if I were religious,
I would ask where gravity came from,
and I would smile like a Cheshire cat and say
that only God can explain gravity.

That might be partly right,
at least the part that suggests that
explanations are a bit of a mystery.

It has long been the case that,
when people walked down to the end
of the cul-du-sac that is their understanding,
they gave up and said that only God
knew where the cul-du-sac came from.
God is our name for what
we don't (yet) understand.
We gradually come to understand.

I like the earlier answers for the cul-du-sac,
or more appropriately, where the mountains
and the sea and coyote and turtle came from:
"It is a mystery!"

Unless we pretend that we are all-knowing,
the most normal thing in the world
is to say that we don't know yet.
Maybe it makes some sense to give the name
to what we don't know, and call it God, but
that is a god on a severe weight-reduction program.

One of my favorite office-door notices
was put up at the U. of Chicago to notify
that a meeting was being cancelled.
To give heart to those who wanted to meet,
it said that the cancellation was not a void:
it was the Nothingness!"

Giving grand names to our ignorance
makes them something profound.

What came before gravity?

God?  A void?  Nothingness?
Is it the same?
Until we figure it out?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w