The cognitive dissonance of the aetheist astrophysicist

Some things are just funny per se, some things become funny through the human addition of elements like linguisitic irony, vicious satire and an unexpected twist in a gag….and some things are meant seriously, but remain unconsciously hilarious thanks to the pomposity of the person giving some kind of response to a simple question.

Type into a search engine “Why is the Universe so complex and contradictory?” and a stream of egg-heads will provide an answer that begins, “Oh actually, it’s really quite simple” – the unspoken part of the answer there being, “but then that simply reflects the obvious fact that you’re thick, whereas I’m mega-bright”.

There’s a site called Quora which is, I have to say, very good and often useful…but ask it anything about the Universe/Metaverse thang, and the physics guys and gals will appear from nowhere in profuse numbers. It could well be, in fact, that the collective noun for egg-heads should be “a quantum”…or perhaps the congregation as a whole should be called “the meta-physics complex”.

Most of the ‘answers’ to queries like the one with which I began this essay start off by referring to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is what the Law posits:

‘The state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time, and those changes in the entropy in the universe can never be negative’

But just when you thought something was sounding reasonably stratightforward, note that link in the middle there baldly stating that our Universe is isolated. At the linked page, we read

‘In thermodynamics, it is imperative to define a system and its surroundings because that concept becomes the basis for many types of descriptions and calculations’.

So that’s it, then. Ze orders muss be obeyt at all timess because zey are ze basis of everzink vee sink, nicht?

Entropy, by the way, means in this context ‘a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system’.

In the real world of normal people, entropy means chaotic and by definition random disorder.

So the Universe is a sort of unguided missile as developed by Kim Jong Un, and it’s getting more disordered as Time passes.

Although Time, of course, is an illusion.

I’m glad we’ve cleared that one up. This is one of the Quora site’s more honest answers to the question I posed:

It’s a mystery, really, but we might say that gravity and a funny property of the laws of physics under a small window of conditions hold the key.

As others have pointed, the fact that the very early universe contained tiny quantum fluctuations in its energy distribution can be considered the “seed” of all the complex structures which arose afterwards. But they would not lead to anything much interesting by themselves.

Regardless of the omnipotent famous 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which ensures that entropy in a closed system tends to increase, gravity is the main engine which can produce islands of lower entropy in the greater entropy-increasing environment. Gravity has the power of taking a diffuse cloud of gas and dust and eventually re-arrange it into a complex solar system like ours, with highly organised structures like our planet, with land masses, oceans, volcanoes, weather, and all sorts of interesting stuff happening.
This can only be achieved by releasing a lot of thermal energy into the environment in the process (so the total entropy of the solar system and its galactic environment still increases).

The next level engine capable of reducing the local entropy is a curious property of the laws of physics. Under a small window of initial conditions, what is called “far from equilibrium dynamics” and a certain continuous supply of energy, they have the power to produce spontaneous self-organized complexity, forming an island of further entropy reduction where the constituent matter gets arranged into a more complex structure.
Some chemical reactions, when supplied with a precise steady supply of energy, can produce complex structures and patterns which sustain themselves in time and can even reproduce or develop into ever more complex arrangements. The formation of crystals and lattices, chemical clocks, weather patterns or the behaviour of cellular automata are examples.

It appears that given a complex system, there is always a small window of conditions plus supply of energy which has potential of lowering the system’s entropy even further, creating even more complex order and releasing thermal energy in the process.

It is believed that under some very precise conditions, this kind of behaviour resulted in the first self-replicating molecules, and from there the steady supply of energy from the sun has been finding those small windows of conditions where the matter system would develop into an even more complex arrangement, slowly but gradually, up to modern day upper organisms like we find today on earth.

However, note that gem four paragraphs from the end there: ‘The next level engine capable of reducing the local entropy is a curious property of the laws of physics. Under a small window of initial conditions, what is called “far from equilibrium dynamics” and a certain continuous supply of energy, they have the power to produce spontaneous self-organized complexity, forming an island of further entropy reduction where the constituent matter gets arranged into a more complex structure.’

Soooo….there are exceptions to the Second Thermodynamics Law, then?

---

OK, here’s the central kernel of my problem with the physics of the Universe: it contradicts itself all the time.

I posed the question clearly enough….but interestingly, only the lady’s answer above addressed my overwhelming problem with pretty much everything since Planck in the early 1900s and Albrecht Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: it’s all so contradictory.

Many are the egg-heads who have devoted their lives to a unified theory of everything in the Universe from the sub-atomic Quantum realm to the outer limits of the Cosmos.

They have all failed, and the reason for a lack of unified explanation is very simple: there isn’t one.

Now, another kop-out put forward at times is “Yeh, wull, seefingislike, that’s your entropy for yer, innit? ‘e’s a slippery sorta cove, yer entropy. Known for it, ‘e is.”

Well I’m sorry peeps, but that just doesn’t wash.

From my pov, the Universe is not random at all: it is in fact very cleverly planned.

For example, I return to the knotty challenge of E=mc2 debated in these columns recently and during which I opined as follows:

‘Albrecht Einstein’s most famous output during his lengthy attempt to decode what the Universe might be about was E= mc2, whereby the increased relativistic mass (m) of a body times the speed of light squared (c 2 ) is equal to the kinetic energy (E) of that body.

The perhaps over-simplified bottom line of the equation is that the greater your mass, the more enormous is the the energy required to get up a head of steam in terms of speed.

Indeed, the faster you try to go in a 3D Universe, the more exponential the mass drag-effect gets. Thus, in that “level” of the Metaverse where all the matter stuff is 3D, it is impossible to reach the spead of Light. So utterly unthinkably impossible, in fact, because the speed of Light is 299,792,458 metres per second – and that speed squared is 8.98755179 × 10¹⁶ m² / s² – or put another way, unfeasibly bloody fast.

However, the key variable here is mass, not speed.

All known matter has mass. A thought, however, in theory has no mass because it isn’t matter: it’s a creation of the mind. Only the act of putting the thought down on paper gives it the semblance of matter….in fact, the matter is the pen, the ink and the paper, while the hand expends energy during the process.

In terms of Divinity, however, a spirit has no mass….a spirit being defined, if you like, as a Holy thought. And remember – in the sub-atomic quantum realm, any thought of a participant in an experiment is now widely believed in scientific circles to have an effect on the experiment’s findings.

The key to travelling many Light Years of “distance” is to reduce the element of mass in E = mc2 to zero. Distance, by the way, is just another word for Space…which the spooky electrons experiment finally seems to have proved is also an illusion.

I spent some time about thirty years ago during lunch hours researching what human aircraft pilots who have reported UFOs tend to have in common when it comes to describing their encounter.

The two most common observations they make are:

1. The craft they saw had the ability to accelerate at a level theoretically impossible to achieve; and/or

2.The UFO seemed able to disappear at will.

If the UFOs were in fact alien craft, then the encounter records above point up the reason why they had been been able to travel billions of miles through Space to get here without the journey taking centuries: because the travellers had craked the problem of reducing the m in E=mc2 to zero. Thus respectively, they lacked amy mass to make them burn up while hyper-accelerating in the Earth’s atmosphere; and being by definition two-dimensional, they can flip sideways and give the naked eye the impression of not being there any more’.

---

This is the hypothesis I continue to raise: so elegant is Einstein’s universally applicable conundrum, it cannot possibly be married to a totally random Universe where expanding entropy is the only rule in a Casino with no rules. To suggest such matrimony is expect any time soon an injudiciously arranged marriage between Simone de Beauvoire and the Pope.

E=mc2 is pure intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without – at some point – there being a life-force. E=mc2 has about it the very quintessence of organised planning….as a result of it, we won’t be able to travel beyond our constellation until such time as our intelligence as Thinking Man has evolved enough to stop us from being a fucking nuisance wherever we might travel to in the Cosmos.

Asteroids, by contrast, don’t think: they just arrive. They kill diplodicus dinosaurs of little brain….but those large dinosaurs turn themselves into birds, while small hibernatory mammals cope with asteroid-created nuclear winters and turn themselves into larger mammals. These species eventually evolve into Homo Erectus (designed to see savanna predators before they see us) and then Homo sapiens and its perhaps dangerously enlarged brain designed to pump oxygen and thus outrun those same predators.

Within all this lies the process of evolution fuelled largely by amino acids analysing what temperatures predominate and what diet a species is digesting.

But amino acids don’t have brains..so who or what is observing and guiding all this?

The answer is Godness.

What the open-minded members of our species observe in everything is a mélange of the random and the planned. We reject the random versus planned lockstep as nothing more than an arid desert of unthinking analysis developed by Godless followers of material power. On the other hand, we embrace the life-force that both recognises the influence of lifeless events….and yet still somehow bestows the divine adaptation that nurtures life on one small planet.

---

Much of this boils down to how we define he/her/those involved in creation.

For myself, I ask one question above all: HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?

I mean what was there before the Universe?

It simply isn’t good enough to answer with the nonsensical word “Nothing”.

Nothing cannot create something, folks: get real here – it really can’t.

So: what was there before the Universe?

Let’s examine further. Here’s the standard astrophysics “answer”:

‘The Universe materialised literally out of nothing, at a tiny but finite size, and expanded thereafter. There were no moments before the moment of smallest size because there was no “before.” Likewise, there was no “creation” of the universe, since that concept implies action in time’.

Er, right. It materialised out of nothing. The way you do.

But physics also tells us that “matter cannot be created or destroyed”.

This time, the ideological assertion involved is so ridiculous, it borders on infantile – as in, the school pupil who fails to hand in his homework, “explaining” to the teacher “Please sir, a big boy stole my satchel and ran away”. As I keep on observing, the physics of the Universe is little more than a stream of contradiction.

Time is a continuum, but it’s also an illusion. Really?

Clearly, some of the starting assumptions are wrong. But the main problem with what most astrophysicists write, postulate and even insist upon is their outright rejection of a higher intelligence keeping order, because it smacks to them of religion: they prefer the random entropy Universe, despite the cognitive dissonance involved in such a belief.

They are, on the whole, just another mob of ideologues.

As there are no scandals, assassination attempts, tits, Kamala gaffes, banking crimes or blocist fanatics in this attempt at a wide-eyed metaphysical satire, the chances are it will disappear without trace.

---

Source: https://therealslog.com/2024/10/28/the-cognitive-dissonance-of-the-aetheist-astrophysicist/