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

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

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. ...