Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor & the latest discoveries in physics r-10-120

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Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard University train neuroanatomist who is currently a professor at the University of Indiana school of medicine. Jill survived her massive, left brain stroke, and lived to write about it in her book, My Stroke of Insight (New York: Penguin Group, 2006).

It is interesting to compare her own account and experience to that of  author Carlos Castaneda is an author who wrote a series of books in the late 1960s and early 1970s about his experiences with a particular Yaqui Native American named don Juen Matsu.

Taylor and Castaneda may, at first, seem to be a very strange combination to include in the same sentence. However,  if one examines the experiences their which they write about in their respective books, one is struck by the totally amazing similarity in the observations and descriptions.  Taylor's experiences were the result of a massive left brain hemorrhage, or stroke where Castaneda's experiences were intentionally, if reluctantly at first, sought out.

Here is Taylor's account of her experience



View complete series on these two pages:
http://livingintentionallives.blogspot.com/2009/01/dr-jill-bolte-taylor-video-parts-1-6.html and  http://livingintentionallives.blogspot.com/2009/11/dr-jill-bolte-taylor-video-parts-7-12.html


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How Big Is Life? Lesson 80

We have already established that there was life existing at the level of a single cell, and the possibility of life, or quasi – life below the cellular level. We have established that dogs, cats, people, trees and rose bushes are all alive, and all composed of groups of cells thbat work together in concert to produce a living thing. We have also established that those living things are composed of differentiated cells, which when combined in a particular format, give us that life. It is interesting that the hundreds of different cell types -- bone, muscle, brain, heart -- all differentiate themselves from two simple original cells, the sperm and the egg. Two cells combine into one, only to later differentiate into thousands! Life it self, at the cellular level, in some respects is similar to the atom! All atoms are composed of protons and electrons. It is only the number of protons that distinguishes hydrogen gas from liquid mercury to solid aluminum!

What is it that causes something to be a live? What separates the healthy baby from the cluster of tissue which represents an early miscarriage? The baby is alive. It reacts to its environment, one learns and grows. It is a wondrous thing. However, occasionally something goes wrong in the division of the cells. What we are left with is tissue that has not formed into a human. It may have no brain. It has no thought. It may have none of the systems that we normally associate with a living being. It certainly is not human, by our definition. However, it's cellular structure may resemble any of several types of human tissue. Certainly, the individual cells may be alive at the time of birth! They have no way to sustain life after birth, so in that sense they are something like a virus. However, put into the right culture, many of these cells can multiply.

So what is it that separates living from nonliving? Sentient from non-sentient? A very interesting question.

There are two things that we should observe about living things.

First, they all come from a source. They are, if you will, born. They may be borne by cell division, they may be borne by budding, they may be borne by sexual reproduction, but a new living thing comes into being from the existence of one or more prior living things.

Second, living things metabolize. They produce energy, usually from some sort of matter. People eat food and drink water and produce energy to work and play. Withholds the food and water and the cells of the human eventually die. This is true of virtually every living thing. Now viruses and prions have no way to produce this fuel on their own. That is, perhaps, what separates them from truly living things. However, they absorb the energy of living things capable of producing it, and metabolize that energy that they receive from others.

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZ1nweotz-8MZGNiNHB6YzhfNjBnazRnbndodA&hl=en this

Plants, Animals and Immortality. Lesson 90

Let's begin at the beginning. As recently as 2000, children were taught that everything in the universe was animal, vegetable, mineral or energy. There are only four kinds of stuff in the universe. Everything other than energy was born in stars.  We also learned from Albert Einstein that matter (animals vegetables and minerals) can be converted to energy, and theoretically, the reverse is true. Animals, vegetables and minerals, according to Einstein, can be constructed from energy.

Certain living things seem to be immortal. It also seems as though the simpler  the life form, the longer it can live. Think about the single celled amoeba or its cousin, the euglena (another one celled creature). They multiply through cell division -- mitosis. A cell reaches a certain point in size or age, and then splits into two cells. Those two cells reach a certain point in age or time, and split into two more cells each. This process continues indefinitely. When you see an amoeba under a microscope in a drop of pond water, that amoeba is the product of countless cell divisions over the course of millennia.

When you see a sponge on the seafloor, it is the product of budding, asexual reproduction. It is an extension of some animal which has lived for centuries, even millennia. It is as though a human could cut off an arm and growing a new person from it! Is the second person who grew from a cut off arm a new person, or an extension of the same person?

In the state of Oregon, in the United States, there is a giant mushroom. This mushroom covers nearly 800 acres of land! As it expands it kills off trees in the surrounding vicinity. Testing has shown this giant mushroom to be over 2500 years old! It may, in fact, be old.

Here is a question. What constitutes a plant or animal? What is the difference between a one celled animal and a multi-cell animal? Consider human. We die. But do we? When I die my heart, lung, eyes, skin and more can be medically transplanted to other people. Those pieces and parts are alive! How can that be, if I am no longer alive?

This brings up a very interesting question: who am I? Am I a collection of cells, or something else? Do my cell just constitute a vehicle, like an automobile, that carries around this thing called me? In that case, who is the real me? Where do I go when the vehicle, my body, which operate? Does some part of me survive to be reincarnated into a new body?

Animal, vegetable, mineral.

It used to be thought that everything on Earth fell into one of three categories. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground we walk on and the rocks in our flower garden fall into the category of mineral. Things that have roots, grow out of the ground and perform photosynthesis, using sunlight to convert minerals to energy make up the plant world. Animals move about in search of food, and generally exhibit characteristics that are neither plantlike nor mineral like. Well, this was the view of the world for the last century or so. Now we have figured out that it isn't true.

Consider the Venus fly trap. It has roots, it can conduct photosynthesis, but it also can trap and digest insects! The sea sponge is considered to be an animal but it is anchored to the sea floor and doesn't move. It traps its food l and digests it. It reproduces by budding.


We have now realized the amazing complexity of living things. We now realize that there are considerably more living things than animals and plants.

Currently, textbooks from the United States use a system of six kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea, and Eubacteria), while British and Australian textbooks describe five kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, and Prokaryota or Monera).  Fungi, Protista, Archaea, and Eubacteria are now considered living things that are neither plans nor animals.

On top of these categories let's also consider viruses and prions,  those nasty little things that cause mad cow disease and spongiform encephalopathy in humans. Are they alive? They reproduce. They grow. They changed their host cells. What are they?

See also: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080514060929AALIJiA



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The road to Hades

There is a saying. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The implication is that by intending to do good, we cause harm. The implication is also that when we do something, there are often unintended consequences, side effects that we are incapable of predicting, evil spreading from good. When you think about it, it is a rather fatalistic point of view. Also, the saying in itself implies that we are not in control of our own destiny. Some power, good or malevolent, is actually in control of our fate. That is a very disconcerting thought. All this time I thought I had free will. Free will is nice when things are going well. Free will stinks when events turn against us. She

21st Century scientific mysteries. Lesson 100

A mystery is any result which our current level of knowledge cannot explain -- the cause of the result is unknown, but performing certain actions can scientifically determine that certain proscribed results will occur.

Thus far we have established that there are atoms made up of subatomic particles, elements which consist of a single type of atoms, and compounds (molecules) such as water that exist because we "glued together" certain types of atoms by sharing their electrons. These molecules combine in certain ways to form, simply described, animals, vegetables and minerals as well as things that are perhaps less than alive such as viruses and prions. This leaves several unanswered questions.

First, what is life? Is it an emergent property of a certain combination of elements or matter? Or, is life something separate from matter which can manifest itself in our four dimensional space by using matter, which is inherently inert? In other words, is my personality, my thought process, my mind, separate and distinct from my body? Is my body merely a biological mechanism that my mind is capable of inhabiting?

Second, we know that there is something which we have classified as quasi-life, incapable of supporting itself without another living being his presence. We know there was life which exists, consumes matter and energy and produces matter and energy. What we don't know is whether there is a form of life beyond what we have described, of which the highest form we can envision, is human life.

Let us conduct some thought experiments, as Albert Einstein called them. Let us expand our thought process to consider some older alternatives.

Thought experiment number 1. Body and mind unified. In this first experiment, we envision a living entity, let's say a person. That person is a living organism. It has a brain. All thought, all emotions, all feeling, occurs within the brain through its neural connections. Unless a thought is written on paper, told to another person, recorded on video, or saved for posterity by some other extra biological means, the thought exists only in the brain. An unrecorded thoughts ceases to exist when the engine, the person, ceases to be alive. The notion of passing knowledge from one person to another, across time and space, where the timeframe is longer than a human life span, is implausible. For example, if someone in ancient Egypt had a thought, it would be impossible, unless that thought were recorded somewhere, to transmit the install to another, modern day person, or to handle that modern day person perceive that thought that was in the mind of the ancient Egyptian. When the Egyptian dies, his thoughts, his knowledge, dies with him. In this model, unless an idea is transmitted to another person through the senses of sight, sound, taste, touch or smell, either directly (from person to person) or indirectly (a diary, let's say) the knowledge is lost.

Some things in this model of existence are clearly impossible. For example, speaking in tongues by a person never exposed to the language/tongue is clearly impossible. To sit in New York, and, in the mind, perceive a scene or action in, let's say for argument's sake, London, is clearly impossible. Those who think they experience such things are either delusional or misguided.

Thought experiment number 2. Body and mind separate. This situation presents us with some interesting opportunities and explanations of things which may have, and I stress the word may because we are unable to test them at this time, occur in the real world.

Test case A. There is anecdotal evidence that people have been known to speak in foreign languages to which, according to anyone's knowledge or recollection, they have never been exposed. The speaker, in such situations, may or may not understand the message. This is most typically associated with a religious experience, where it is called speaking in tongues. However, in rare circumstances, this phenomenon has been observed in secular settings. In many cases, this has been attributed to a reincarnations experience. The scientific explanation is still a mystery.


Test case B. A person, sitting in a laboratory in Houston, accurately describes a number of cards dealt by an astronaut in space, whizzing around the globe. The number of correct "guesses" by the person locked up in Houston far exceeds the number of correct guesses that would be due to statistical probability. Other people are asked at the same time, to randomly select the same number of cards in the same period of time and end up with a far lower number of correct answers, well within the range of statistical probability.

These two anecdotes are merely a couple of stories culled from countless stories of events that cannot, by today's technological standards, be explained. However, as scientist and science-fiction writer, Arthur C. Clark once wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Are these stories examples of sufficiently advanced technology or sufficiently advanced biological and physical processes which we cannot currently explain, such that they appear to be magical? We, as a Western society, are highly reluctant to accept things that defy logical and rational explanation, within our defined boundaries of logical and rational.

Test case C. Many insurance companies, which operate within stringent mathematical, actuarial data, now routinely pay for hypnosis and acupuncture to solve a variety of behavioral problems, most notably, smoking cessation, for which it has been observed to be quite successful. There is more scientific study of the processes related to hypnosis than the processes related to acupuncture. But there is no doubt that when Anton Mesmer first began hypnotizing people, and the biological and neurological processes were not at all understood, hypnosis, as recently as the early to mid 20th century, appeared to be magical. Today, more of the processes of hypnosis are better, if not completely, understood. It is an accepted scientific fact in the medical, and other scientific communities, that hypnosis for smoking cessation and a variety of other mental and physical conditions is an accepted therapy.

Acupuncture is today, where hypnosis was in the prior century. Acupuncturists believe that the insertion of needles at certain points on the human body, with or without electrical stimulation, redirects the body's internal energy fields, resulting in a change in mental and/or physical processes. Current allopathic (M.D.) and osteopathic (D. O.) Medicine currently have no explanation whatsoever for why acupuncture works. There are no observable biological processes that emits energies that can be routinely measured in any meaningful way. What makes acupuncture work? Are there energies and processes which we as humans have not learned to observe? Is it really our own belief in the process that causes us to heal or influence ourselves?


Immortality 90

Think about it. Certain living things seem to be immortal. It also seems as though the simple learn the life for, the longer it can live. Think about the amoeba or the euglena (another one celled creature). They multiply through cell division -- mitosis. A cell reaches a certain point in size or age, and then splits into two cells. Those two cells reach a certain point in age or time, and split into two more cells each. This process continues indefinitely. When you see an amoeba under a microscope in a drop of pond water, that amoeba is the product of countless cell divisions over the course of millennia. When you see a sponge on the seafloor, it is the product of budding, a sexual reproduction. It is an extension of some animal which has lived for centuries, even millennia. It is as though the human could cut off an arm and growing a new person from that arm, while at the same time we growing the arm on the original person! Is the second person who grew from a cut off arm a new to person, or an extension of the same person?

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZ1nweotz-8MZGNiNHB6YzhfNjJkN3IzOXJkeA&hl=en

The difference between science, theology and philosophy. Lesson 110

We digress, momentarily, from our inquiries to recognize some definitional differences.

In science, one formulate a hypothesis and then evaluates the data to refine, modify or disapprove that hypothesis based on observable mathematical or scientific data. Science seeks to document provable facts.

Theology is the study of one or more organized religions. A theology represents the belief systems of one religion. One of the basic tenants of most, if not all theologies is that at some point, humanity reaches a point where we must believe on faith. We must believe because God, or the gods, command us to believe without understanding. Theology/religion is often at odds with scientific inquiry and loath to modify its belief system based on science.

There is a difference between pure theology and religion. Theology is a study of the nature of God, and usually his (or, if multiple, there) interaction with humanity. Religion is a temporal/man made construct. A religion as a person or Council at its head followed by serious casts of preachers/teachers. A religion is evidenced by an organization of people who believed in a theology. Theology can be thought of as one fairly narrow branch of philosophy.

Philosophy is the inquiry into the thought processes and ideas. One can think of it as the search for truth on many levels. Philosophy is the study of that which occurs largely in ideas and processes of the human mind.

Our objective is to delve into science and philosophy, and maybe theology, but to avoid purely religious systems because they rely upon accepting something on faith.

Carlos Castaneda, don Juan Matus and the latest discoveries in physics (Lesson 110)

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Light has always been described as made up of photons that sometimes behave as particles and sometimes behave as waves. Recently, scientists have discovered that quarks, subatomic particles, the smallest granules that make up the protons and neutrons of an atom, the elemental building blocks of matter, exhibit the same behavior as photons. They exist as both particles and waves. This finding is very new to science.

Now let's flashback to the 1960s and a series of books written by Carlos Castaneda. These books describe his relationship with a Yaqui Native American who called himself don Juan Matus [1].

The actual existence of don Juan has long been disputed; his practices and beliefs are inconsistent with his alleged identification as a Yaqui shaman. The old man, in fact, never professes that to be his original name. He merely says that for Castaneda, at least, he is Juan Matus.

--Wikipedia reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castenada)

The books were very popular and are still in print. What is remarkable about these books is they were written as autobiographical pieces. However, as there was a great deal of criticism of the book's contents. The stories seemed too fantastic, too surreal to have been true accounts. Many who read these accounts insisted they were psychotropic drug induced hallucinations, as the use and ingestion of psilocybin containing mushrooms was a common practice of both native North and Central American populations.

The amazing fact is that the account is experience the same as the experience of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Harvard University train neuroanatomist and professor at the University of Indiana school of medicine, is her account of her cerebral vascula accident, or stroke.

[1]. Carlos Castaneda's Chronicles begin in the 60s and then in the 70s. They are published in New York City by Simon &Schuster.






See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subatomic_particle
http://www.heretical.com/science/quantum1.html
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec01.html

An interesting philosophy. Lesson 120

Most of us have some understanding of one or more organized belief systems. Often, we referred to these belief systems as religions. There are the large organized religions of the Protestant faiths, Roman and Orthodox Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, etc. They all have in common a belief in a single deity or creator. They also have in common the belief that we as mere mortals cannot possibly comprehend the motivations of the divinity.

I digress however, into this religious discussion, because of the belief system of one, uniquely American religion -- the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints also know to its members as the LDS church and to the rest of us as the Mormons. I do not espouse any particular religious belief, for a lot of reasons. And, I am certainly not a Mormon. They do however have one believe that is particularly interesting.

The Mormons are best known for their missionary pursuits, young men and women in white shirts and dark pants and knocking on doors. They are also known for their belief that Jesus Christ visited the New World after visiting the Middle East. Those beliefs, however, are not nearly the most academically interesting portion of their belief system.

They believe in one God that we must worship and pray to, as do most of today's monotheistic religions. They believe in the Christian Trinity -- God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit. However, they also have the belief that God, our God, the God worshiped by earthly humans, may be but one of many number of gods! God, by their definition, is at the top of the human pyramid! If there is life on a planet circling the sun Alpha Centauri, and that planet is populated by living beings, the Mormons could absolutely believe that those beings have their own God who created and nurtured them! They believe that every population of living, intelligent beings has its own Creator/God! This is definitely not classical Eastern or Western belief.

Historically, we categorize religions as monotheistic -- believing in one God, polytheistic -- believing in many gods, or adiestic -- believing in some force, or some transcendence of death, which may not necessarily have the name of God. I think the Mormons represent a new category which we shall call multi-theistic which means that any given population worships or believes in one God, but does not discount the possibility that other beings and other gods may exist. The Mormon belief system holds that God is inherently good.

I raised the point because it is a consideration not often evaluated in the study of either Eastern or Western philosophy. As we shall see, this one particular belief may influence our philosophical inquiry just as much as the classical Eastern and Western belief systems.

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a physics lesson:Absolute Nothingness And ... Lesson 21

a physics lesson:Absolute Nothingness And The Edge Of The Universe.
... continued


Why do we study this?

Have we not all, at one time or another, felt that we were part of something bigger? It may only be and occasional, fleeting, feeling. Or, it may be a more intense believe. We feel driven to accomplish, but without understanding our sense of purpose. It may seem like you have a goal, but you don't know what it is.

Over the timeframe of evolution, we humans have survived countless numbers of species, including human like species, which were apparently intelligent, such as Neanderthal man, which scientists now tell us was alive at the same time that we were -- we, Homo sapiens.

Why have men and women such as us survived?

An equally important question is, why have other species failed? And, why, in their failure, did some become extinct, such as the dinosaurs, and yet others survived to this day, such as crocodiles, turtles, alligators, and countless other land and sea species? We are constantly hearing of scientists who find a species, long thought to be extinct, still living in some remote part of the world.

A pattern emerges when you look at the history. A pattern that started with a hot dense plasma, evolved into the elements, into pre-life matter, into various types of one celled creatures, and then into more complex creatures, ultimately culminating in mankind.

Along the way, species such as the dinosaur, small brained and large bodied carnivores and herbivores that could have become competitive, and possibly even wiped out mankind, became extinct.

It's almost as though life on earth were an experiment. Not the biggest, not the fastest, not the strongest, but the most intelligent survived. Those things that were a threat to our continued existence became extinct. Those things that caused us to flourish survived.

Note. To flourish to grow. Some animals, vegetables and minerals are harmful to our life. However, they all fit somewhere in the food chain. Also, without some adversity, some risk, stagnation ensues.

Is this intentional, or a grand accident?

Everywhere you look around you, you see the hand of intent. You see complexity growing despite the law of entropy. It becomes clear that we have a purpose. The question is, are we currently fulfilling that purpose or still evolving to fulfill a purpose in the future.

Is, in fact, our first task, our first test, to understand that purpose? Of all known living things, man alone on earth is capable of that mission.

Some will say that we mere humans cannot possibly understand. Some will say that it is a mystery and shall remain so, that we are incapable of understanding. Some will search for the answer, and piece the data together bit by bit until they do understand! We have a mission, as yet unrevealed, but we also have a duty to discover the nature of that mission. Humanity was made with an inquiring mind -- for a reason.

We must all crawl before we walk, and walk before we run. While revealing some insights, the objective of these early lessons is to build a base of knowledge in various disciplines, including science and philosophy, so that we all have an equal footing, and equal foundation

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Matter And Energy. Lesson 10

As we begin our investigations, the first thing we must discover is, what is everything made of? This first lesson focuses on the basic building blocks of the universe. Those basic building blocks are matter, solid stuff, and energy such as heat, light, microwaves, x-rays, etc. So this is where we begin our knowledge journey.

The equation of Albert Einstein

We have seen his photo countless times. The while hair, the bushy mustache, the ever present tobacco pipe, are all familiar to us. So is his famous equation E = mc2. That is probably the most famous mathematical equation in all of history. We see it inscribed on T-shirts, written into textbooks, and taught in physics classrooms the world over. Although many have seen it, how many people know what it really means?

E = mc2 can be stated in English as " Energy is equal to mass times the velocity of light squared," but even that is hard for mere mortals to understand.

What does that mean? It means, fundamentally, that all matter can be converted to energy. We do this when we turned gasoline into automobile motion, for example. We put the gas in the automobile engines, light it on fire, and created explosion which drives of piston, in the engine, down which rotates a crankshaft which turns the wheels which moves the car forward. Fundamentally, this is the conversion of matter (gasoline) to energy (motion).



Unfortunately, we are pretty bad at converting matter to energy. We get heat, light, smoke, and all sort of byproducts from our relatively inefficient conversion. We didn't waste products, exhaust. If we were a little bit smarter, we could convert the gasoline to pure energy, with nothing left over. Theoretically, we could completely convert the gasoline to energy, forward motion, with no loss through friction, tailpipe exhaust, etc. if we mere humans could be that efficient, and automobile could probably travel hundred miles on a teaspoon of gasoline. That is many orders of magnitude more efficient than we are today!



When we burn things, we convert a fraction of the matter to energy. Nuclear fission, the first A-bombs or an example of this, took a handful of radioactive material and turned it into any quibble and explosion of many thousands of tons of TNT (measured in kilotons). When we got smarter, instead of splitting the atom as we did in nuclear fission, we used a different process. We did not split the atom, but rather compacted them together, and that process is called nuclear fusion, whose reaction, from the same level of fuel, was measured in megatons, millions of tons not kilotons, thousands of times.



We even learned to control, to harness, the fission reaction, and it currently powers such devices as electric power plants, submarines and aircraft carriers. However the machinery to do so is very large and cumbersome, but that's okay, because the reaction produces so much energy. It is also important to note that in all the reactors that we use today, the fission reaction produces heat energy which is used to convert water to steam, the rapid expansion of which actually powers the submariners ship. We still don't directly use fission, but rather a secondary byproduct.



What we have not figured out how to do is harness the power of nuclear fusion, which would produce thousands of times the energy of nuclear fission. Perhaps some day we will.



But something we have no idea how to do, is directly convert a piece of matter -- a rock, water, gasoline, anything -- from its current form (matter) into pure energy. This feat, described by Einstein's equation, is spectacular. I'm not sure that we even have the materials to convert such a release of energy to a mechanical form.



Converting energy to matter.



This has only been accomplished in the domains of science-fiction, scientific experiments and mathematical equations. It is theoretically possible, but not practical at today's level of science. but, as Tony Robbins, noted motivational speaker, one said, "anything we believe, we can achieve."



Water, ice and steam.



What this really tells us is that what we perceive as matter -- the rocks, water, birds, people, our clothes, etc. -- and what we consider energy -- turning a car's wheels, flexing our muscles, etc. -- are fundamentally the same thing. For example, I could have liquid water. I can drink it. At colder temperatures, I can convert that what would water to ice. If I keep it up, I turn it into steam, I guess. So one thing, water, can have three forms -- solid, liquid, and gas. There is a fourth thing that water could be, if we know how. Water could turn into pure energy. And the amount of energy in a glass of water would be astronomical.



What are matter and energy?



Matter is made up of things we call atoms. At one time, it was thought that the atom was the smallest unit of matter. We have since learned that atoms are composed of other particles, protons, neutrons, and electrons. And, even those, the physicists tell us, can be broken down into ever smaller components, and ultimately into things called quarks, which at present are purely theoretical.



Energy is composed of the things that we call photons. Photons, as far as we know, are the smallest unit of energy that can exist. The photons travel at the speed of light, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second (abbreviated mi./s).



If you were to completely smashed an atom, the atom would transform into nothing but pure photons. All of the parts of the atom would be completely annihilated, with only photons streaming away from the explosion at 186,000 mi./s. No smoke, no fire, just pure energy. As a civilization, we are not quite capable of this yet.



Note 1. Recent scientific experimentation has identified clear or translucent substances that appear to slow photons down. So it is possible that the universal speed limit might very. However, we are not sure what is really happening, and I would like to stress that point. It is possible that these substances merely bounce photons around until they come out the other side, much as a laser does.



Note 2. it may seem rather strange, but brilliant Physicist and Lucasian Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, Stephen Hawking, has ascertained that a pair of photons springs into existence out of nothingness at the event horizon of a black hole caused by the collapse of a giant star. Will wonders never cease?





Key points.



1. All the universe, as far as we can tell, is composed of two things: matter and energy.



2. Matter can be converted to energy and energy to matter, but, either the matter or energy always exist. Neither can be created from nothing, and neither can be destroyed, turned into nothingness.



3. All matter is composed of atoms which are made up of the electrons and protons, plus some other objects, and they themselves can be broken down further.



4. All energy is composed of photons. Photons vibrating at different speeds give us different types of energy such as light, heat, x-rays, microwaves, gamma rays, etc. There appears to be no bigger or smaller unit of energy than the photons.



5. We have figured out how to convert matter to energy, although less than efficiently. We have not yet learned how to create matter from energy. That, alas, is still a mystery.

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