Time, The Universe, Reality, And Two Plucky Irish Fighters

Recently I bought these books in the city of Bordeaux, France.

Below are insights harvested from three of these books regarding time, the universe, reality, and applying these insights to the unexpected lives of two defiant Irish fighters.

TIME.

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli reveals a few surprises.

– Time passes faster in the mountains than at sea level.

– Wherever there is a difference between past and future, heat is involved.

– Time passes more slowly for someone moving than for someone resting.

– The smallest unit of time is called Planck time. It is 10 ^{– 44} seconds, or a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

The book notes that time passes “at different rhythms according to place and according to speed. It is not directional: the difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world…The notion of the ‘present’ does not work: in the vast universe there is nothing that we can reasonably call ‘present.’ ”

Author Rovelli explains.

“The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events…things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an ‘event.’ It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.”

“The physics and astronomy that will work, from Ptolemy to Galileo, from Newton to Schrödinger, will be mathematical descriptions of precisely how things change, not of how the are. They will be about events, not things…We therefore describe the world as it happens, not as it is. Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are.”

Ah.

So, time is a changing character, much like a chameleon modifying its colors as it climbs a tree.

THE UNIVERSE.

The first chapter of the book titled The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow states that:

“…philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

And later,

“…we now have a candidate for the ultimate theory of everything, if indeed one exists, called M-theory … According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states…”

REALITY.

From where do we get our impressions of the world? Well, from living in the world, traveling in the world, working in the world, speaking to others about their situations in the world, and reading about the world.

We also get impressions from news outlets. Taking this information too seriously may not be such a wise idea.

In the book Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, he writes first about news, and then about progress. A slice of this context comes from the quotes below.

“The data scientist Kalev Leetaru applied a technique called sentiment mining to every article published in the New York Times between 1945 and 2005, and to an archive of translated articles and broadcasts from 130 countries between 1979 and 2010. Sentiment mining assesses the emotional tone of a text by tallying the number and contexts of words with positive and negative connotations, like good, nice, terrible and horrific. Figure 4-1 [not shown here, but the second figure is shown in this Forbes article]. Putting aside the wiggles and waves that reflect the crises of the day, we see that the impression that the news has become more negative over time is real. The New York Times got steadily more morose from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, lightened up a bit (but just a bit) in the 1980s and 1990s, and then sank into a progressively worse mood in the first decade of the new century. News outlets in the rest of the world, too, became gloomier and gloomier from the late 1970’s to the present day.”

“So, has the world really gone steadily downhill during these decades?

“Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony.”

“All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.

“As it happens, the world does agree on these values.  In the year 2000, all 189 members of the United Nations, together with two dozen international organizations, agreed on the eight Millennium Development Goals for the year 2015 that blend right into this list.

“And here is a shocker. The world has made spectacular progress in ever single measure of  human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.”

CONCLUSIONS.

Let’s consider a few insights from these three books.

If time is not quite the fixed entity we thought it was, if the universe is more bizarre and multi-layered than we could ever imagine, if indices indicate that the living situation on earth appears to be moving in a generally positive direction with regard to increases in living standards, reductions in illnesses, diminishment of war casualties and in several other ways—than two obvious conclusions can be made: First, the world in which we live is neither fixed, static, or hostage to any pre-ordained or predictable trajectory, and, second, often we humans can—through conscious thoughts and actions—modify and potentially improve our own reality as well as possibly the reality that surrounds us.

Those conclusions may sound facile, even simple. Yet they are not.

Every day humans struggle to move forward and to make progress. Often they encounter difficulties not just because of challenges presented by their task (such as becoming a better athlete) but also due to opposition from others who are scared that their actions may change the current reality they are so familiar and comfortable with.

Two examples  are below.

FIGHTING IRISH.

Because the origin of this website relates to Ireland, and because my father went to the University of Notre Dame (whose athletic teams are described by the motto ‘The Fighting Irish’) I’ve selected two stories from Ireland (which I recently found in piles of my past notes) about a determined man and woman who had to fight pre-conceptions of reality to attain their success.

Conor.

I have little interest in televised sports, but read and kept clippings from the August, 2017 edition of The Financial Times Weekend. An article titled A brawler with the gift of the gab, by Murad Ahmed told about an Irish boxer.

In 2017, the fight between Irishman Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather was a huge sporting event (Mayweather won).

I had paid no attention to this event until after it took place.

But the story of McGregor is astounding, and tells how quickly life can change.

Ten years before that fight, McGregor was a plumber’s apprentice. He quit that job to practice boxing and to try to make money at that sport. This action infuriated his parents in the Dublin city region of Lucan.

At his first UFC fight in Stockholm (in April of 2013), McGregor cashed in his final welfare payment of 188 Euros.

Four years later, in 2017, he was worth, according to Forbes, $34 million.

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper in 2015, McGregor said, “I had no love for plumbing. But it’s weird how society works. Rather than allowing you time to find the thing you love and can pursue with complete conviction, we’re told: ‘You must work, no matter how much you dislike it.’ ”

Conor, in other words, disregarded the insinuation from others that the world in which he lived was fixed and that he had to labor at a job he didn’t like. He decided he could, and would, change his life. He did not take reality as fixed, and did not fear changing it.

Katie.

In 2012, I read a story about another Irish boxer. This caught my attention because Katie Taylor comes from the same town in Ireland (Bray) where I had spent years going to school in Ireland when young.

Katie’s father Peter was an Irish boxing champion in 1986, and taught his two sons and daughter Katie how to spar. Katie trained in a gym that was so small that when she had to use the toilet she walked 150 yards up the road to the Harbour Bar (the same bar where my brothers used to knock back pints of Guinness). Because women boxing was not sanctioned in Ireland at the time, she had to pretend to be a boy in order to enter contests. (“When I took the headgear off at the end of a fight, there was uproar,” she said.) In 2011 she participated in the first ever sanctioned women’s boxing fight in Ireland.

Later, the Olympic Committee decided to evaluate Katie’s performance in Chicago to determine if women boxing could become an Olympic sport in the London 2012 games. After they watched Katie, the committee agreed to allow entry of the sport. The 26-year-old, religious, non-alcohol drinking, hard-working Katie won a gold medal at the Olympics, and riveted the nation of Ireland. Modestly, she said afterwards, “I actually think there is great strength in quietness.”

In a country that forbade sanctioned women’s boxing, Katie ignored the ‘contemporary reality’ of limited thinking of her peers. She changed the regulations regarding boxing forever in Ireland. She later helped change the regulations of the Olympic Committee regarding boxing.

Conor and Katie used time as their allay, ignored any concept of a fixed universe and decided and then acted to improve their personal situations.

Time, the nature of the universe and the fate of our planet and personal situations are not fixed and unchangeable. We can all choose to modify our situations, and try to move to focus more on what it  is that we love doing and what interests us.

The Best of the Holiday Season to all of you!

Thanks for reading these posts during 2019.