Einstein, a pillar of modern physics made of Papier-mâché (5) (6) (7) (8)

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The existence of a phenomenon, be it small or big, is relative to its physical composition. There are phenomena whose existence lasts a moment – a neutron and an antineutron that collide at birth, for example – and others that last billions of years. Their atomic composition and structure decide the duration of their existence.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Einstein attacked the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, arguing that science knew it better than philosophy, just as Newton had done a couple of centuries earlier with the German philosopher Leibniz. However, if time doesn’t exist, the “duration” of Bergson does exist. In fact, physical and biological bodies, including the body of Einstein, must deal, not with time understood in an Einsteinian way, but with the durée of Bergson. Every phenomenon composed of atoms, in the entire universe, must deal with Bergson’s duration and not with the time of Einstein. Perhaps the philosophical intuition of Bergson was lacking in the touchy scientist. Even his twin paradox is a question mark, of course.

In physics, the twin paradox is an thought experiment in special relativity involving identical twins: one of them makes a journey into the space in a high-speed rocket and returns back home after a short time to find out that his twin brother, who remained on Earth, has aged much more then him. What does all this relativity business mean? Only this. One thing is to walk down from Mont Blanc and another to do it with a hang glider: in the first case it takes 10 hours, in the second only 10 minutes. The same example, even if mine is less sophisticated than Einstein’s, applies with the twin brothers.

The main problem in this matter is that we haven’t been able until today, as far as I know, to understand correctly how time works on one hand and phenomena on the other. Time, however, was born with us, human beings, and with us it will die. It shares our own fate.

We are time because we are conscious of the duration of our life. What we need to study and understand thoroughly, is the true structure and function of the phenomena. For example, what they are composed of, which category they belong to, how long they could exist, and so on. Many scholars think that time is intrinsically connected with the material world, but it is not so.

The same can be said of space. Space, understood in an Einsteinian way, doesn’t exist. Aristotle knew space better than Einstein when he said that space was the limit of an object. What scientists call space, in reality, is a void, an infinite void, but a void is a void and in a void there is only emptiness, because it is devoid of elements. Space is the space that takes an object in its location. The space that the Milky Way takes in the universe, the space that the Earth takes in the solar system, the space that a painting occupies on a wall. Einstein’s space is not this. His space is a concrete space, but, in reality, space is emptiness, doesn’t exist, because it is devoid of elements. Space, if we see it in a wide prospective, means an infinite spaceless, limitless phenomenon where the entire universe, in comparison with the space, is only a soap bubble that floats in it.

Space and time are useful as inventions and only to those species, anywhere they appear in the universe, who develop intelligence and consciousness. For my goat, for my olive tree and for the tiles on the roof of my house, what sort of sense could time and space have for them?

Beliefs, time, space, energy, special and general relativity, the quantum theory, “God doesn’t play dice”, riding on a ray of light, among other things, are Einstein’s ideas, concepts, but surely not science, as we are demonstrating in this article.

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Regarding the end of the phenomenal world, this will be caused by radioactive decay, not by time. This means that the phenomena, together with the universe that contains them, don’t have an existence based on time; they have an existence based on duration, this they do have, une durée as Bergson would say. What we call time is the resistance of the phenomenal world and this resistance is relative to each single object. This is what we call time, but time doesn’t exist, because, in reality, this is duration. Each phenomenon that appears in the universe, including Einstein, has a label attached to itself with a number of years on it, and this applies also for the whole cosmos.

I wonder, if Einstein had known that space and time didn’t exist, could he have proposed his theory of relativity? In fact, what will happen to special and general relativity if space and time don’t exist?

Einstein, in his famous equation E=mc2 (energy equals mass times and the speed of light squared), says that energy is mass and mass energy. This is correct only if we see first the mass and then the energy, not the other way around. Differently said, energy doesn’t exist without mass. The existence of energy depends on the mass. No mass, no energy. The equation should have been written M=ec2 (mass equals energy) and no viceversa. Now, time and space don’t exist, if so, what is left of Einstein’s special and general relativity?

The questions about space, time, energy and special or general relativity don’t end here. Einstein almost silenced Newton’s gravity and in its place placed Maxwell’s electromagnetism and his space-time. The Earth no longer revolves around the Sun, like in the old days, but it shoots straight ahead. The theory of general relativity imposes this concept. Let’s suppose now for an instant that the Sun is no longer there, what will happen to the Earth? Will it continue to go around and around even without the Sun or it will start darting into deep space?

Another rule of general relativity is the cosmic net. Space, according to this theory, is flat, just like the base of our bed. So, when an object as big as the Sun arrives above it, it doesn’t create a depression, at all, even if, in reality, it does, it creates a hole relative to its weight, but not for general relativity. For general relativity the straight line continues. It’s true, at least that’s what experts say, in physics everything is upside down, it is not intuitive, but counterintuitive. But, I ask myself, if everything is so upside down and counterintuitive, how come that the universe is still there?

The puzzle of the universe doesn’t finish here. It seems that the universe is kept together by four forces. The first, the weakest, is gravity, the one that keeps us with our feet on the ground and when we jump from a rock it pulls us down. The second, stronger than the first, is electromagnetism. This is composed of electricity, magnetism and light. The third, the strongest of the four forces, is the nuclear force. It holds together the electrons, the protons and all that subatomic stuff that is in the atom. The last, the fourth, the weak nuclear force, so called because it has to do with radioactivity and the decay of the elements. With the passing of time they wear out, become a half and then, the remaining half, in its turn, is halved, and so on until there’s nothing left.

Here there’s another question, and since we are serious about all this universe business, we have to ask it. It seems that we know only 4 percent of the whole universe. If so, what happens to the 96 percent we don’t know? Are these 4 percent enough to hold together the rest of the universe? These 4 percent allow us to speak as if we knew the whole universe? If not, what do we mean then by universe? We mean only the 4 percent that we know or are the 96 percent we don’t know also included?

At this point, we could bring out another pillar of our scholarly knowledge made up of papier-mâché. If I said, for example, that nature, like time and space, doesn’t exist, what else would happen to our poor brain? Because, indeed, nature, as a phenomenon, doesn’t exist, just as space and time don’t exist. Nature, as a matter of fact, has no property, no quality, no weight, no form, no substance, has nothing at all because it doesn’t exist as a physical object. Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher, said that God is Nature and Nature is God, therefore an invention.

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Let’s now imagine, for one second, all the phenomena that make up the whole universe without time, space, energy, nature and science, let’s, imagine them just naked, bare objects, how would they appear to us? They would appear as bodies, big and small, strong and weak, bare and barren bodies, of long and short duration, bodies and nothing else. The universe, in fact, when we want to see it as it is and not AS WE WANT IT TO BE, is a mixture of bodies, bodies of all imaginable and unimaginable dimensions, structures, properties, bodies and bodies ourselves, e voilà its naked and raw reality, and this is also what we must try to understand of our universe. There’s nothing else. The universe is only a mass of objects, of phenomena, of wonders and nightmares, nothing more, nothing less than a mass of physical elements that roar chaotically in an infinite void and clash blindly against one another and, in the end, they destroy themselves by losing themselves and disintegrating in the immensity they find themselves in. This is our universe and this is also its ultimate truth and reality.

It’s time to admit that there is only one dominating force in the whole universe, and this force is gravity, attraction, pull, call it what you wish, but there isn’t another one, only this. Now, all these bodies that rush and race chaotically and blindly about the universe, attract one another according to their mass, so the big ones become bigger and the small ones smaller. That’s it. All the rest is secondary or learned blah blah.

We human beings are good for inventing things, things that are missing from existing phenomena. In fact, space, time, energy and nature don’t exist physically, they are our inventions and they are also very useful inventions we must say, useful to us and easy to conceive. So, real or not real, we adopt them as if they were real. What will happen then if they, in reality, are not real?

Let us still ask ourselves, what will happen if one morning we get up and discover that our old world vision doesn’t exist anymore? All our understanding of the old universe has changed. It is not the first time that it has happened in history. Copernicus’ eliocentrism, Newton’s gravity, Darwin’s evolution of the species, Marx’s Kapital, Freud’s unconscious, etc, revolutionized our vision of the world and of ourselves in no time, and this could happen, of course, again and again.

To understand the universe as it is, NOT AS WE WANT IT TO BE, but as it is, there is no need of a genius of the Einstein calibres, but only of a healthy brain and a little common sense and nothing more. All human beings have these mental properties, because in life and in the immensity there are so many more things than all those that are being taught in the universities. Most of our genii are only good to make out from simple things difficult ones. That’s what they have been doing since they stopped walking on four legs.

Why, I ask myself again and again, why don’t our physicists, scientists, technicians, if they really love and respect mankind, why don’t they, instead of wasting their precious time and life and especially taxpayers’ money in unreal and unconvincing things, why don’t they start to explain real things as they really are and leave the unreal and unconvincing ones alone? Frankly, we are tired of living in a world built of lies, stupidities and abuses of power. Man is not afraid of the fact that he has been thrown into an absurd world, he is afraid when his fellow men terrorize him with grotesque inventions and foolish theories.

Fundamentally, once we are out of our solar system we all grope in the unknown and in fog and vagueness regarding the real knowledge of our universe, and despite this we claim to know it as we know the back of our hands!

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We know, but only a few of us find the courage to say it, we know that one of these days, just like that, ONE OF THESE DAYS, a huge asteroid will pop up from the deep cosmos and point straight towards the Earth. It passes near the Sun, brushes Mercury, then Venus, avoids the Moon and crashes in full might against the Earth.

What about this happening? Well, nothing to say, just one like many others. In our world these happenings are routine, the rule and not the exception.

Now just think about the clash between the huge asteroid and our planet, a clash that destroyed all life and everything else on Earth, do you think that our Sun noticed anything? Venus, Mars and the Moon noticed anything? The sea, the mountains, the islands noticed anything? No, nothing. All deaf, blind and dumb. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody took notice of this happening, not even the last living creature before dying. Everything continues to go on as before, as if nothing had happened. All, in the solar system, continues its way, all is perfect for the world, just as it was before.

Question: Has the Earth ever been inhabited?

Answer: No, never, because nobody will ever find out one way or the other.

That’s our destiny sooner or later, in one way or another, because that’s how things work in the immensity we live in.

When we humbly incline ourselves to the phenomenal world to which we belong, then we’ll discover that no science or philosophy can help us to escape from our loneliness and from our fate. An absurd mass of objects, inanimate and animate, dominate everything from the micro to the macro. And this is not all. The life we must live is situated in an eternal instant that takes place upon an eternal abyss. It is the instant of the eternal here and now. We don’t own anything else, just this here and now. Eternity, for us, means here and now.

In a cosmic prospective we can see ourselves as a tight rope walker who walks on a rope stretched over a bottomless abyss. There is nothing in sight, only the rope, us and the abyss. This is our reality and this reality knows only the present, the eternal present. This present moment has nothing to do with time, but it has something to do with the duration that our body, a phenomenon among other phenomena, manages to achieve by balancing itself over the abyss over which, from birth to death, it is obliged to walk.

This is the reality of the world in which we live. There is no other one. It is from here that we must start if we want to build ourselves a nest and give a real meaning to life, a life that is worth living, even if this means building over an abyss. A life, therefore, without illusions, and total. Living with this awareness and mental lucidity is the maximum that a human being can achieve. This vision is no longer a desperate and absurd vision, it is a healthy and objective vision and this means accepting the universe, not for how we want it to be, BUT FOR WHAT IT IS.