Physical vs. Spiritual and the Structure of the Universe

I ran into this today. I often ponder the connections that exist between the seen and unseen world. One might say "between the physical and spiritual," but I no longer make that distinction since everything is "spiritual" in that both the tangible and intangible are "spiritual." Obviously we must make that distinction in order to distinguish between that measurable through empirical means and that which is intuitive or revealed. In other words, the body is physical, or distinguishable in this world with our eyes and instruments, but it has it's spiritual counterpart, a spirit body, or energy body, which is resides within in and animates it.

In that article from wired.com about the singularity there was a blurb about the brain and how scientists are being set back at this point because the brain is far more powerful than it was previously assumed to be AND it's workings are far more mysterious than was thought. Now ideas from quantum mechanics are being applied to its study in order to try to make sense of it.

I found the following article on the web which is, at the very least, an interesting read and provides some food for thought:

From:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/brain-universe.html

"Physicists discover that the structure of a brain cell is the same as the entire universe.

" 'Oh God, guide me, protect me; make of me a shining lamp and a brilliant star.' -- Abdu’l-Bahá"

Click to enlarge



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Another article that I found interesting related to the universe:

Timeline of the universe

Scientists can now tell us what happened in nearly every millisecond of the big bang. Robert Matthews takes us through the first crucial moments [please note, superscript numbers in this article are represented with the prefix ^]

• Robert Matthews

This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday April 26 2008 on p6 of the Part I: The universe section. It was last updated at 10:20 on April 26 2008.

Artist's impression of how the very early universe might have looked as star formation began. Photograph: Adolf Schaller/AP

Using observatories on the earth and in space, astronomers have been able to study the nature of the cosmos in unprecedented detail. By analysing the motion of distant galaxies, they have discovered that the whole cosmos is expanding under the influence of forces unleashed at its birth in the big bang. Combined with studies of the radiation left over from that primordial explosion, they have found that the universe was born 13.7bn years ago, give or take 200m years.

Pinning down the date of creation with such precision is impressive, but scientists have gone much further. They have begun to piece together the whole history of the universe, from the big bang to the present day. The very earliest moments are still the focus of intense research, and the final word is not yet in. Even so, the timeline of events now emerging is every bit as astounding as the creation myths of the world's religions.

10^-43 seconds

Known as the Planck Era, this is the closest that current physics can get to the absolute beginning of time. At this moment, the universe is thought to be incredibly hot, dense and turbulent, with the very fabric of space and time turned into a roiling morass. All the fundamental forces currently at work in the universe - gravity, electromagnetism and the so-called strong and weak nuclear forces - are thought to have been unified during this stage into a single "superforce".

10^-35 seconds

The so-called Grand Unification Era, at the end of which the superforce begins to break apart into the constituent forces we see today. Around this time so-called inflationary energy triggers a dramatic burst of expansion, expanding the universe from far smaller than a subatomic particle to far larger than the cosmic volume we can see today. In the process, the primordial wrinkles in space-time are smoothed out.

10^-32 seconds

The energy dumped into the universe by the end of inflation leads to the appearance of particles of matter via Einstein's celebrated equation E=mc^2. Initially a mix of matter and antimatter, most of the particles annihilate each other in a burst of radiation, leaving behind randomly scattered pockets of matter.

10^-11 seconds

The so-called Electroweak Era, when the last two fundamental forces still unified with one another - electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force - finally split, leaving the universe with the four separate forces we observe today.

10^-6 seconds

As the universe continues to expand, it becomes cool enough to allow the familiar particles of today's matter, protons and neutrons, to form from their constituents, known as quarks.

200 seconds

At a temperature of one billion degrees celsius, protons and neutrons start to come together to form nuclei, the charged cores of atoms. Within 20 minutes, the temperature of the universe has become too cold to drive the process, which ceases with the formation of the nuclei of hydrogen and helium, the simplest and most common chemical elements in the universe. The formation of all the other elements - including the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen needed for life - will emerge with the first massive stars millions of years later.

300,000 years

The universe has cooled to about 1,000C - cool enough for electrons to pair up with nuclei to form the first atoms. By the end of this so-called Recombination Era, the universe consists of about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium. With the electrons now bound to atoms, the universe finally becomes transparent to light - making this the earliest epoch observable today.

200m years

Small, dense regions of cosmic gas start to collapse under their own gravity, becoming hot enough to trigger nuclear fusion reactions between hydrogen atoms. These are the very first stars to light up the universe.

0.5bn - 1bn years

The force of gravity starts to pull together huge regions of relatively dense cosmic gas, forming the vast, swirling collections of stars we call galaxies. These in turn start to form clusters, of which one - the so-called Local Group - contains our own Milky Way galaxy.

9bn years

The force of gravity trying to slow the cosmic expansion begins to lose out to the anti-gravitational effect of "dark energy", a mysterious force which has been accelerating the cosmic expansion ever since.

9.1bn years

A region of gas and dust from exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy starts to collapse under its own gravity, forming a small star surrounded by a disk of rocky material and gas. Swarms of giant chunks of debris form within the disc, collide and merge - forming the Earth, moon and other planets.

· Robert Matthews is visiting reader in Science at Aston University, Birmingham

Before the big bang

The big bang is the ultimate extreme event - one where conditions are so intense that even our best theories of physics break down. Yet some theorists now believe they have found ways of pushing back even further, to the ultimate question: what came before the big bang? To do it, they have had to take on one of the greatest challenges in physics: the marriage of Einstein's theory of space, time and gravity, general relativity, with quantum theory, which describes the subatomic world. Only then can they hope to describe conditions at the big bang, when all space and time was compressed into a volume far smaller than a proton.

Early attempts to unify the two theories are starting to reveal some intriguing hints. Recent calculations suggest that close to the big bang, the fabric of space and time was so contorted that it flipped gravity into reverse, producing a repulsive force. If correct, this would mean that the big bang wasn't the start of the universe at all. Instead, it was merely a "big bounce", the latest in an endless series stretching back into the infinite past.

The mechanical nature of sin

*This post was written as is, without any editing, so forgive any mistakes.

Lately I've been constructing a metaphor that compares the nature of evil vs. good to that of machine vs. nature. I've been thinking specifically of how addiction, which we all experience at some point in our lives to some extent, turns our "organic" nature as spiritual beings into something more "mechanical." For example, the addict often speaks of something triggering his or her addiction. "I saw the billboard for Bud Light and it triggered my addiction." It's as if the person no longer has free will, or agency, over his or her being. We know, however, that nothing can take away our agency. Indeed, that was/is the whole crux of the issue. In the bible we read of a war between Lucifer, the son of light, and God the Father. It was Lucifer, the great "dragon," who later fell from his glorious position to become Satan, the father of all lies. He wanted to take away the agency the agency of all the other children of God and force them back into the presence of the Father after tasting mortality. This, of course, was contrary to the will of God and the irrevocable Law of the universe. We know that another being, even more glorious, known as the First Begotten of the Father, even the Lord Christ, stepped up and declared he would provide a way for the children of God to descend and reascend, always retaining their agency or free will, and he would do so by providing an eternal sacrifice, or atonement, so that the bridge between the presence of God and the lower dimensions, or this world, could be bridged.

Somewhere along the way as people choose to make bad, or evil choices, they relinquish their free agency. As contradictory as it sounds, we can choose to not choose. We will our will away. Although hard to describe, I feel that it's our nature to be in control of ourselves, that's the natural order of the way our will, our deepest "I", deals with the exterior elements, from our bodies to our surroundings. As we do things that are contrary to the will of God, and our own true, divine will, we allow something else, our animal or mechanical nature, to take control.

Think about the things people get addicted to. Food. Drugs. Sex. Power. Money. Work. Negative relationships. Sleep. Idleness. None of those things are inherently evil, but can be abused. As people abuse these things, they become addicted, or entrapped, and soon feel there is no way out. It's then that one's nature becomes more mechanical, as if one were simply a puppet instead of the master of his or her own self and the self, as the enlightened ones say, is one's own universe.

The Singularity

The following post comes from WIRED magazine, a publication I read cover to cover every month. A subscription only runs about ten dollars per year and it's full of great articles that deal with diverse subjects, mostly science and tech.

I found the following article online today during a break at work. I assume it's in the hard copy I have but I haven't gotten around to that yet. This article explains one of my favorite subjects: the singularity. If you're not familiar with what the singularity is, this article is a great place to start. You can also go to the collective conscious repository (wikipedia) and check out a more formal, straightforward take on this somewhat slippery concept. Here's a direct link.

Essentially this guy Kurzweil wants to immortalize himself via software. Although there is something to be said for continuing our quest to improve the computational power of the machines we call computers, I couldn't help but feel bad for this guy, and all others, who are searching for answers to their most terrible fears, such as death, in man made machines.

The key to overcoming death and every other "challenge" lie within us as a gift from God and have been around since ancient times. The human brain, for example, and our very physiology, are the most advanced "machines" on the earth. Make sure to check out the link at the bottom of this post, after the first page of this article, for some information about how incredibly powerful the brain is. Indeed, the human brain is structure we're still unlocking and it's been around A LOT longer than our microprocessors!

The most wondrous machine (pictured above).

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This is only the first page of the article. The whole article can be found here at wired.com.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

By Gary Wolf 03.24.08 | 6:00 PM

Photo: Rennio Maifredi

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Kurzweil's notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue."

Many years later, this idea was picked up by another mathematician, the professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who added an additional twist. Vinge linked the singularity directly with improvements in computer hardware. This put the future on a schedule. He could look at how quickly computers were improving and make an educated guess about when the singularity would arrive. "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence," Vinge wrote at the beginning of his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. "Shortly after, the human era will be ended." According to Vinge, superintelligent machines will take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors. Humans will become bystanders in history, too dull in comparison with their devices to make any decisions that matter.

Kurzweil transformed the singularity from an interesting speculation into a social movement. His best-selling books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near cover everything from unsolved problems in neuroscience to the question of whether intelligent machines should have legal rights. But the crucial thing that Kurzweil did was to make the end of the human era seem actionable: He argues that while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant. The first AIs will be created, he says, as add-ons to human intelligence, modeled on our actual brains and used to extend our human reach. AIs will help us see and hear better. They will give us better memories and help us fight disease. Eventually, AIs will allow us to conquer death itself. The singularity won't destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immortalize us.

There are singularity conferences now, and singularity journals. There has been a congressional report about confronting the challenges of the singularity, and late last year there was a meeting at the NASA Ames Research Center to explore the establishment of a singularity university. The meeting was called by Peter Diamandis, who established the X Prize. Attendees included senior government researchers from NASA, a noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a pioneer of private space exploration, and two computer scientists from Google.

At this meeting, there was some discussion about whether this university should avoid the provocative term singularity, with its cosmic connotations, and use a more ordinary phrase, like accelerating change. Kurzweil argued strongly against backing off. He is confident that the word will take hold as more and more of his astounding predictions come true.

Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn't have time to organize them all himself. So he's hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

Make sure you check out this link if you found the above interested. It goes into a brief explanation of some of the ways the brain is like a computer...or a super, duper computer rather.

Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science

What is CERN?

From Wikipedia:
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), known as CERN (see Naming), pronounced /ˈsɝːn/ (IPA: [sɛʀn] in French), is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. The convention establishing CERN was signed on 29 September 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 member states. Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them.

The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.

CERN currently has approximately 2600 full-time employees. Some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities), about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.

As an international facility, the CERN sites are not officially under Swiss or French jurisdiction, and some company vehicles have diplomatic number plates. This includes the organization's fleet of fire trucks.

Member states' contributions to CERN for the year 2008 totalled CHF 1,075.863 million (around USD 990 million).