Einstein, a pillar of modern physics made of Papier-mâché * (1) (2) (3) (4)

 

Einstein, a pillar of modern physics made of Papier-mâché *

1

Sometimes I would have liked to be lazy and spend the rest of my days peacefully and in anonymity. Instead it’s impossible. In this last time I also have nightmares. I see myself sucked into a cosmic crater, in one of those craters that Einstein theorized about in his special or perhaps in his general relativity. Of course, he doesn’t call them cosmic craters, but objects trapped in the curvature of space-time. I can understand a bit about curvatures, but I don’t understand anything about space-time.

If you don’t understand anything about space-time, where’s the problem?

It’s not exactly so. I don’t understand anything in the way Einstein intends them, not in the way I understand space and time.

Well, demonstrate that Einstein’s theory is wrong.

It’s not easy.

There’s no other way.

I wonder, since, honestly, nowadays everybody knows that neither time nor space exists, now, if so, how could he create the theory of special or general relativity based in the existence of space-time? A real block. I can’t follow him.

You are not the first, my friend, nor the last.

Please, Mr. X, don’t attack my intelligence, just show me a little patience and a little understanding. I know, I touched a hot iron and now I’m burning, but, I only hope, before becoming ash, if I don’t have you on my side, at least sympathizing with me a bit. What I want to say, and keep in mind that I’m not a physicist or mathematician or an astronomer and not even a philosopher, I am a free thinker, one of those who feeds his brain on the universal source of ideas.

Come to the point.

There is something wrong in Einstein’s relativity.

Prove it!

Space and time don’t exist, not like kangaroos and Everest do. Not even like molecules and atoms exist. Space and time don’t exist at all. They are an invention. Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, would have defined them as postulates. Necessary concepts and nothing else. And this is true, time and space are necessary concepts. We have been using them for so long that now they are in our DNA. Try to take away space and time from our mind and you’ll see what happens to our neurological cells. In any case, neither space nor time exist. Now, if so, how could Einstein, without the existence of space-time, support his theory of special and general relativity?

It’s not me, it’s you who has to demonstrate he’s wrong.

* I propose, in 8 posts, the essay I wrote on Einstein for the International Meetings held in Singapore 2018. The title is: “Einstein, a pillar of modern physics made of papier mache”.

The Biellese artist, Gabriella Balocco, at the publication of my novel “Fiori di sierra”, in 1993, portrayed me in a sculpture entitled “Francis” that you will see in this post, a sculpture that has always fascinated me and I always considered it one of the most beautiful and most realistic work that has been created on me and on my ’93 novel. We still have to discover and evaluate art and artists of all times. However, I wouldn’t trade “Francis” with the “Guernica” of Picasso. Thanks Gabriella!

 

 

Einstein, a pillar of modern physics made of Papier-mâché

2

Okay, now I take an apple from the basket that I have here next to me and I show it to you. You see it and you can even touch it and eat it if you so wanted. If, instead, I wanted to show you time and space, how could I do it if they have neither body nor life nor form or spirit or property or substance? They have nothing at all. How could I then demonstrate their existence to you? I could show you the air by making a gesture with my hand, but it wouldn’t be any help, because in the air there are particles, but time and space are lacking. There is nothing in them, because they don’t exist. You can shoot all the particles of the world you want in the Large Hadron Collider of the CERN, but not those of space and time. At all. They don’t have a paternity among the elements, they are mental products and nothing else.

What do you mean by “paternity”?

I mean, and this is very important for our discussion, I mean that at the beginning of the beginning of our universe space and time didn’t exist and they didn’t exist because at the beginning of the beginning of our universe there was only the nothingness of nothingness and in this nothingness of nothingness there was nothing, only the nullity of the nullity. Clear?

No, but continue.

At a certain point, from this nothingness of nothingness, the primordial universe arose spontaneously. Just like that: spontaneously, naturally, freely, as you like. Not all at once, of course, but it all started with a Lilliputian particle of matter. Voilà how it all began, with an embryonic speck of physical substance. The magic of this primal particle, which we will call the first element, is just like in the embryo. In the embryo there is the whole human being, so in the first element there is the whole universe. This primordial event is essential if we want to understand the world in which we live and give a reasonable sense to it. In fact, without a beginning, the universe makes no sense. It is absurd, inconceivable. Do you understand?

Starting to. Go on.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. It is unthinkable that something doesn’t have a beginning and this also applies to the universe, especially to the universe. The beginning is the basis of everything. No beginning, no base, no matter, no existence. The stationary universe? This, in order to exist without a beginning, requires a cause, therefore a creator, an intelligent design, an architect. And, the question is, who created the architect? In two words, the stationary universe, only a head strongly confused naturally and ideologically can imagine it. A story, to have a chance, must have a beginning and, once its beginning has been confirmed, then it also has an end. There is no discourse, no talk, speech that takes place with the universe if it doesn’t start from the very beginning. A story that describes the universe, to have credibility, must have a beginning.

I see your point.

 

Einstein, a pillar of modern physics made of Papier-mâché

3

Thank you. It’s encouraging: I continue. The history of the universe has many endings – big crunch, big rip, big freeze, big bounce, etc., – but not a single beginning. No one dares to go beyond Planck’s wall or point zero or the Big Bang. Everything started at this moment. But the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe. In no way. Absolutely not. When this event happened, between 13 and 14 billion years ago, the universe was already halfway through its journey. Once this primordial beginning has been conceived, we realize that the Big Bang is not the true beginning of the universe, but only an event caused by the first proto-element. So, as there was the proto-element, so there was also the first spark, the first nuclear fusion and the first big bang.

Is ours the first big bang or were there others before it?

We don’t know. It could be, but then it couldn’t or could be the trillionth trillionth Big Bang.

How did it all happen?

In this regard, I want to tell you two stories. The first talks about the second half of the life of the universe and the second story talks about the first half of its existence.

Let’s start with the second half. It’s easier and more credible. It speaks of facts, of true things as we ourselves are. Now, starting from us, if we go backwards along our cosmic evolution, we find that our homo species already existed two and a half million years ago. Before our homo species came the dinosaurs and before the dinosaurs came the Cambrian period 540 million years back on time, and before the Cambrian period came the formation of the Earth four and a half billion years back on time. Going still backwards in this way, next we meet the sun, then the supernova that gave birth to it and with the supernova we are already in our Milky Way, therefore in our first star. Going still back on time we’ll arrive at the beginning of the Big Bang and in doing so, we can also demonstrate that our universe has its own history as we human beings have our own history. Okay?

Okay.

Now let’s go to the first half. With the first half of the universe, we cannot proceed as we have done with the second half. Here, in the first half of its life, we must proceed as paleontologists do: with science, induction and deduction, logical thought and rationality, but not, unfortunately, with the empirical facts. These are missing. What I mean is this. For paleontologists it’s enough to come in the possession of only one proof – limb, bone, skull – of the missing animal and then they are able to construct the whole body of the species in question. We can’t do the same with the first half of the universe. We have no reports, no existing proofs, we have nothing of this period of its life. Starting from what we know of our present universe, we must build the life of the first half we don’t know. And that’s what we’ll do. We proceed, in a logical way and step by step starting from the very beginning.

From the first element to the first Big Bang, things went somehow like this. When an enormous amount of mass and energy was formed with the accumulation of light elements first, and after with heavy elements. This ever-increasing and accumulating volume, at a certain stage, when it reached the equivalent quantity of matter of our actual universe, the first nuclear reaction started. From this moment onwards, we don’t know how long it took before the nuclear fusion unleashed the first Big Bang, the bang of all bangs. Of this instant of our universe everybody is free to think the time he wants. Personally I say between 13 and 14 billion years before the Big Bang we know. If my estimate is correct, the universe, from the very beginning till today, is about 28 billion years old.

Do you mean, if I understood you correctly, that from the proto-element to the Big Bang took, more or less, 14 billion years?

Exactly, that’s what I mean.

The Big Bang we are talking about today could be the quadrillionth of the quadrillionth, but the one I’m talking about here is the very first. It could make people laugh, the way and the simplicity I have adopted to describe this primordial event, but things, from my point of view, went, more or less, like this.

To speak then of the first universe, the first of all the imaginable and unimaginable universes, and say that it doesn’t have a beginning, is a foolish talk. More. These cosmic happenings, like the first element and the first Big Bang, neither have a date nor a location in the immensity of nothingness of nothingness, they are unlocalized, timeless and universal. Do you start to understand how it all began, now?

I’m beginning to follow you.

Einstein, a pillar of modern physics made of Papier-mâché

4

Good. Continue to follow me. In any case, keep in mind that quantum mechanics or the theory of the subatomic world, starts exactly from here, from nothingness of nothingness. And so we have the little nothingness, the proto-element, the first particle, etc. In the world of nothingness of nothingness, obviously, there isn’t a deterministic process, a finalized objective, there is nothing at all. The first element must be considered as a spontaneous act that came (could also have not came) from the very heart of nothingness.

We cannot say the same thing about space and time that depended totally and entirely on the first phenomenon that is the first particle and only then come matter, space, time, energy, nature or what you want.

It seems that Einstein stopped his thought right here, here between nothingness of nothingness on one side and the subatomic world on the other. He didn’t want to go beyond the subatomic world, beyond the quark, electrons, protons. Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, used to say to Einstein: “Albert, stop talking about ‘God doesn’t play dice’. When its enough its enough!”. In fact, when Einstein used to say “God doesn’t play dice,” he meant exactly that, that the universe didn’t depend on chance, on casuality, on the unpredictable. At all. He believed that the universe was created by God. Einstein was a believer.

We have pulled down the wall that Einstein placed in front of us, the wall he put between nothingness of nothingness and the subatomic world and we went to the very heart of the beginning.

Interesting, very interesting what you just said.

Good. Now, keeping in mind what has been said so far, at the beginning of the beginning, of course, space and time didn’t exist and since they didn’t exist, they don’t have a paternity among the phenomena that make up the universe. They are only culture, concepts, empty ideas, itch of the brain. Clear?

Yes, I think so, thank you.

I’ll try now to widen the argument.

It’s a good idea.

It is said that Augustine of Hippo said that he knew what time was, but he was incapable of explaining it; it seems that Galileo Galilei weighed time by passing water through a small hole; the hourglass, the sand clock, measures the time; even my grandmother’s alarm clock did it. In these examples, it is not time that is in question, it is the amount of water and the size of the hole through which the water passes that decides the weight of the time or the exhaustion of the water. The same for the sand that passes through the hole of the hourglass. Finally comes the cogs of my grandmother’s alarm clock, and it is they that decide the time according to its speed. A day, with this system, can be 24, 12 or 48 hours, depending on the speed of the cogs. Differently said, what is in question here is the above objects and the mind of Augustine, not time. Time and space can be conceived, not as existing, concrete, real phenomena, but only as abstract concepts and nothing more.

Besides, time is not a verb, it’s a noun. We can easily say: time, as we say dog, house, car, but time as a noun is wrong. Since we have appeared on this planet, we haven’t done anything else, but only fill it with names of every kind. Names like gods, divinities, ghosts, world spirits, totems, demons, etc., all invented, of course. Different is for the names like the moon, the stones, etc.

The moon, for example, at the beginning, we could have called it Merilyn and the stones roses and today we would call the moon Merilyn – Merilyn is having a solar eclipse today – and the stones roses. You can go into a flower shop and ask – A bouquet of stones for my love, please! – The moon and the stones correspond to real existing objects, but not gods, divinities, ghosts, world spirits, totems, demons, etc., they do not correspond to existing phenomena. They are only invented names, like time and space.

I can’t say, for example, “A sequoia is temporalizing two thousand years,” I cannot. Correct is: “A sequoia is a hardwood tree that lives two thousand years”.And why does it live two thousand years? Because it is composed of physical elements (atoms) that allow it to live two thousand years. A seasonal insect lives a season, a star like the sun lasts ten billion years and it doesn’t “temporalize” ten billion years.

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