Status Updates From Humble before the Void: A W...

“…The message is that learning is a labor of love and joy. Students need to be actively engaged and encouraged to roam outside the box. In the US, where problems in the educational system seem intractable, the solutions are actually simple: honor teachers, train them in their discipline, pay them properly, give them the resources to succeed, and hold them and their students to high standards of commitment & app.

“Our rocket travel into space is actually quite primitive when compared to our own digital technology, in which information - and therefore a coded form of life -can transmit from A to B in seconds.”

Hawking’s quantum creation theory: in the very early universe, the Big Bang started due to a quantum fluctuation, the smallest of jolts, at a subatomic level. It triggered the creation of energy and matter. The universe expanded suddenly and rapidly by borrowing energy from the vacuum of space, essentially from the void. From this energy, matter arose.

“When we rap our knuckles on a table we feel and hear a pleasing solidity, but it’s really an illusion created by the electric force. What we call ‘stuff’ is really empty space. Buddhists might well be satisfied that physicists too were deconstructing reality.”

Correction: “there’s nothing outside.”

“The Big Bang was an event where space unfolded like a lotus flower. Space is the flower - there’s nothing inside.”

“We are limited in our view by the time it takes distant light to reach us, so the universe has an edge in time not space.”

“And the true size of the physical universe? We don’t really know. It might be vastly larger, trillions upon trillions of light-years in size. There might be many more galaxies and stars and planets (and living beings) in regions we can’t see and may never see.”

“For 5B years the expansion rate of the physical universe was faster than light. Gravity slowed matter down. Thus, the physical universe must be larger than we can see, since ‘seeing’ requires light. From some regions of space, light has never been able to reach us. Meanwhile, light crossed slower regions of expansion, and they are what we see.”

Interesting discussion about Time.
Makes me think that Time is like the Earth seen from space - all the borders and demarcations disappear because they are manmade….

“We live in a world where no phenomena exists independent of the act of observation.”

“‘The core of Buddhist thought is that nothing has independent, permanent, or absolute existence.’ The universe is a limitless web of interconnections and undergoes a continual process of transformation. Everything affects everything else. This law of mutual causation, so complex that it remains elusive to our human apprehension, is what Buddhism falls karma. And it sounds a lot like quantum mechanics….”

Just started the book. Was prompted by an excellent presentation, available on YouTube, entitled Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. The author, Chris Impey, is a renown University of Arizona Astronomy professor, has much written material to his credit, including many books. This one is based on his experience teaching science to Buddhist monks in Tibet. The book is quite engaging so far!