Expert: Jayendra Upadhye - 9/24/2006

Question
Hi Jayendra,
I thank you. I will contact you. I totally agree with you, except for a little matter of "creation": Photons are not "created" in light bulbs, but "emitted" from matter organized by our consciousness to do so. I'll come back to you on this.
I am an agnostic Buddhist. Paramahansa Yogananda, my beloved Guru, is the one who transforms my Western way of thinking, thirty five years ago, by introducing me to the Oneness of the Universe.

"To name GOD is to lose IT" has been my own spiritual motto. The present circumstances of the world are proving me right: Humanity is indeed presently "losing  IT," in the name of GOD!

Regards
Andre Gaudwin
Knowledge for the sake of survival
(I thank you for your maxim, which I will transform and use for my own sake.)
PS I am a meduse (jellyfish), wondering in the ocean of knowledge. See http://terresacree.org/images/jellyfish.jpg
NB I am French

I originally wanted to be a physicist. But my life circumstances made me acquired, instead, two general Baccalaureates of Arts and one unspecialized Master of Arts, gained in a department of Sociology and Anthropology, while working with a Zoologists. This made me a "Certified Ignorant" working in absentia on a PhD dissertation about everything and nothing. I have long ago dismissed the Credo of “normal science”: the “postulate of objectivity,” as presented by Jacques Monod in “Chance and Necessity.”

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Followup To

Question -
HI Jayen
Hi didn't see your answer when I received your last email. I thought there was no answer.
I just saw it today, a week later.
I'll come back to you
Gaudwin
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Followup To

Question -
Jayen

I thank you for your elaborate answer, but, unfortunately, it does not suffice to relieve me of my “angst” about the  “background radiation.” I would be relieved, though, if some scientists would find ways to relate this background radiation to the "universal gravitation" that is also radiation.
 
You are telling me that:

“All subsequent light [radiation] is light generated anew [sic] by various means. The photon starting out of a flash bulb certainly did not originate at the time of the bang!!”

Yes, of course, but this photon is not generated out of nothing, it comes from particles of matter (“chemical energy”), themselves originating from the bang, as you say: “maybe the energy that is locked up as chemical energy in the cells powering the flash light can be ultimately ascribed thru a long chain of events, to the bang!!”

This is exactly my point: Everything that exists today  (you, I, and the chemical energy composing the atoms of the telescope through which “we are looking into our past”)  ultimately and  “thru a long chain of events,” mind you, but still, come from the bang!! Again, I am asking you, How is it possible for the energy composing our human consciousness to be aware of its own past? This is why I have an  existential angst every time I hear scientists mentioning the  background radiation as “evidence for the big bang.”

E = mc2 .  All matter is made of energy, and all radiation (energy) is the result of the conversion of some matter. This is why the sun loses some mass while emanating its radiation.
If so, can’t we say that this radiation (these photons) come from the bang? Since it comes from the conversion of matter, itself synthesized in supernovae, a “few million years” after the bang and from the initial energy that it produced.

Again, if it is true that “ the first supernovas seeded the universe with higher elements of the periodic table. [a few million years after the bang.]
Making you and me possible”
It is also true that these “seeds” were not created out of nothing, but were synthesized from the initial energetic opposition (+ and – ) already potentially present in the bang.

Hegel would have say, if he had known about modern physics: “Everything that exists today come from an Absolute Opposite Principle that dialectically sprang out from the event of an Initial Bang.” (Excuse my English translation of his German, I am French)


Thank you for your attention,
gaudwin
Knowledge for the sake of survival!

PS What we presently need to do is to scientifically resolve this initial contradiction of ours. See: http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/ezine/archive2/homo_novus.html

I would appreciate your comments, as negative they may be.
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Followup To

Question -
How can we see in our own past?

If all energy was created at the Big Bang, and all matter, shortly after, and none has been created or destroyed but only transformed, after that, how come this matter (which is now composing my body) can come in contact with photons emitted contemporarily to it. Wouldn’t these photons had passed by the matter that is now composing my body, long time ago, since it was already present when these photon were emitted?
AG

Answer -
Hi Gaudwin,
Hey!!
You are getting all mixed up!
THAT radiation, the original one...the flash of the bang..is now pervading all of space as the cosmic background radiation. it's temperature (black body radiation corresponding to a temperature) is about 3 deg kelvin!

For all practical purposes, it is LOST to you. it is in the radio frequency range now.

All subsequent light is light generated anew by various means. The photon starting out of a flsah bulb certainly did not originate at the time of the bang!!

May be the energy that is locked up as chemical energy in the cells powering the flash light can be ultimately ascribed thru a long chain of events, to the bang!!

The matter making your body did not come with the bang!
The bang was ultra hot and for a quite some time, matter and energy could not decouple. it was all pure energy.
At one point, vast quantities of pure hydrogen were separated out from the cooling radiant energy.
this matter formed the first stars and galaxies.
in a few million years the first supernovas seeded the universe with higher elements of the periodic table.
Making you and me possible.
It came from the supernova in the region from which the sun was formed.
Our own sun will never progress to the stage where iron , and trans iron elements found on earth are made. That happens in the supernova shockwave.

So most elements in your body will be of extra solar origin!! because any elements still being made in the sun are still locked away inside it, and will remain so for another 5 billion years.

Photons hitting your body if you are in sunlight were made a million years ago in the cenral core of the sun as gamma rays. The core is so dense, they could only make a painful outward journey thru the dark core (dark as all light is gamma rays there), by diffusion / multiple internal scattering. After a million years in 8 minutes the photon reached you as visible light.
as it emerged, it lost energy (heated the sun's matter), and reduced its frequency till it emerged as visible light in the photosphere.

These are all new photons, that help keep the sun in thermodynamic / gravitational equilibrium.

hope that suffices.
jayen

Answer -
Hi,
Gaudwin,
i think you have basically two issues.
Do say so if i am wrong..
1 - All energy / matter we see today can be traced to the bang.
2 - How is it possible for the energy composing our human consciousness to be aware of its own past?

But Gaudwin, i am in agreement with you on count (1)!
My difference on that count is only subtle.
What i mean is that the "ENERGY" in the photon emitted by the bulb can be traced to the bang, but NOT the photon itself! It is a creation of a few microseconds age, before it gets absorbed in your retina and percieved as "light from such and such a flash light"!
No point in mixing these 2 things.

Regarding background radiation however, (i am still referring to point 1), what the scuientists say is that
a) - The temperature of space itself (the average temperature of the universe), is NOW 3 deg kelvin approx.
By inference, it MUST have been very very HOT 15 billion years ago. Why this is considered as proof is that considering the expansion rate of the universe "post hubble", and extrapolating it backwards in time, we come to a conclusion that 15 billion years ago, was the starting time.
(b) - Having reached this by using the expansion rate, we cross-check by using another un-related phenomenon pointing to the same thing. (like concluding that a jet is travelling supersonic not by visuals alone, but by listening to the sonic boom which is independent of the visual process, but still confirms the "supersonic" nature of the jet's flight.
People first predicted this "current cooled temperature of the bang" to be 3 deg kelvin, and only later was it confirmed from the uniform radio emission of hydrogen at 3 deg k, to be actually so. Moreover, it was uniform in all direction and "isotropic" to a very great degree. Exactly as was to be expected if it was the property of the universe itself.

The second point of yours is largely philosophical and argued to death either for and against. better let us kep it out of discussion. For its is like asking..the ancient indian philosophical question.."how does one know oneself"?

For "knower" and "known" always HAVE to be two separate entities. by this token, "knowing oneself" is TRULY impossible!! One can only "know oneself" in comparison with some "other template".

Your question part (2) falls in this category.
This would NOT be the right forum for it, and NOR am I (atleast of the two of us), qualified to go into the depths of it.

Hope that suffices!
(if it doesnot, would you mind if i call it quits? For this type of thing tends to go on for ever...)

Saw your site..
I do not know if you have read Indian philosphy..no i am not preaching..(hindus rarely do..unlike the "terrible" monotheistic religions with vengeful patriarchs and crusades and jihads..)..
In it you will find a principle "neti neti" or "not this ..not this".
Whenever one starts describing GOD or TOTAL REALITY (one and the same thing actually, or THE COSMOS..all the "pundit" says is "neti..neti"..meaning TOTAL REALITY / GOD / ABSOLUTE TRUTH..is indescribable, and can be only fully described by negating all ways of description!
Your and mine (if i hold any) viewpoints would be valid in our compartmentalised world views..(frames of reference)..but we would still be like the blind men describing an elephant!

Thus do the wise say..."neti neti"!
Jayen


Answer -
Gaudwin,
I am going to India on a vacation, from 29th sept 2006 to 29th oct 2006.

You could email me your thoughts at jupadhye_99@yahoo.com
regards,
Jayen

Answer
Hi Gaudwin,
You are most welcome to write.
Since you are a buddhist, you must have heard of the vows of the kshiti-garbha bodhisattva.
(strange name..superficially literally means "fallen embryo"! Garbha means embryo, heart, center, core, etc in sanskrit..depending on context. garbha-griha means inner sancrum, garbhit word is used to describe speech pregnant with meaning..Hiranya-garbha means the one who hides the light or golden egg depending on how you look at it.)
Kshitigarbha vowed that he would not attain nirvana until all sensient beings in the universe had themselves attained nirvana!
He was in it for the sake of it!
My motto is also like wise..(though i am no bodhisattva at all!)..knoeledge for the sake of it!
when i saw your line..
"Knowledge for the sake of survival "..it sounded familiar..
Thanks for acknowledging the source!
Few normaly do! (acknowledge their sources that is)!
the 6 Hindu darshanas (ways of life or philosophies) are very advanced and have little or no parallel anywhere else.
I sometimes wonder while reading upanishadas...how could such knowledge have existed in splendid isolation from physical sciences?
But then we find refrerences to the vimanas and astras (planes and missiles) and the descriptions of nuclear weapons (the mahabharata war especially) and i wonder..perhaps the physical sciences were fully developed and NOT considered worthy of note when discussing higher things.

Too bad the foriegn invaders burnt the libraries at Taxshila and Nalanda.

Though i hear that the "Brihad Vaimanik shaastra"..(greater aeronautical treatise by rishi Bharadwaj) exists in manuscript form partially in india somewhere, and has been quoted on the web.
Jayen