Category Archives: Science

On the Confusing Nature of Contextualized Instants and Other Anomalies

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According to one system used to measure the passage of “time” (whatever that is) and to identify events that occurred during that particular stream, one among many events once stood out.  Well in truth almost an infinity of events stood out at least with respect to the entities with which this reflection deals but, for the nonce (another sort of vaguely defined unit of “time”) we intend to deal with some specific events that they somehow deemed crystalized.  The author uses the plural first person pronoun, not in the royal sense, but rather, as a means of including both the author and the readers in the assertion.  Anyway, we will attempt to reflect on an undefined, perhaps undefinable specific series of related events, albeit only after we engage in an effort to place them in a somewhat coherent temporal context (again, a concept related to “time”) albeit using the limited form of communication available to our protagonists.

Diverse series of somewhat related events have seemed interesting to the strange carbon based biological composites which, at the “time” about which we are reflecting, inhabited a satellite revolving around another satellite and with a satellite of its own (as will be explained below) who considered themselves the pinnacle of natural evolution as well as the beneficiaries of particular attention from beings ironically superior to themselves, or at least of one such being which some among them believe to be a deity.  They believe themselves to be sentient and, not just sentient, but special, although, to be honest, they subdivide themselves into a myriad of subgroups and each subgroup considers that only it is special and that all the other virtually identical subgroups, at least with respect to their biological composition, are inferior.  Incoherent, we agree, but we are just doing our best to describe related contextualizing phenomena.  

One of the units of “time” (a concept they cannot quite define but which they use all of the, well, time), is a period they refer to as a year; i.e., the “time” it takes the satellite of a “star” (a “star” being a very large spherical continuous nuclear explosion) inhabited by them (the satellite), the “star being known to them as “Sol”, among other names, and the satellite they inhabit being referred to by many of them as “Terra”, among other names, “among other names” because they have apparently (despite ancient legends concerning a time prior to the destruction of a great tower) never been quite been able to agree on appropriate nomenclature …. 

Oh my, we’ve digressed so much in an effort at contextualization that we’ve assuredly confused the reader’s train of thought, so, we’ll sort of “reboot”: … “a year” is the term they use to refer to the approximate amount of “time” it takes their Terra to complete one circumnavigation of their Sol.

These peculiar and extremely conceited beings further subdivide the “year” into days, the time it took Terra, the satellite they inhabit, to complete one revolution around its axis, and then further subdivide their perception of times into units smaller than days known to them as hours and seconds and milliseconds and nanoseconds, etc., as well as into units larger than days which they refer to as weeks and months and seasons.  Months and seasons are related to the orbits of a satellite of Terra, which these entities, who believe themselves to be sentient, sometimes refer to as Luna (among other names).  Weeks?  Well, they really have no logical basis (but they could if the “year” were divided into thirteen, rather than twelve months, and each month further divided into four, seven day weeks instead of into a variable number of days ranging from twenty-eight to thirty-one). In that case, a day or two would be left over and would be deemed outside of the normal calendar designations of months and weeks, perhaps being designated holidays, for example, New Year’s Day and, every four years, Leap Day. Why months are arranged as they currently are is difficult to say which is not the same as saying that such somewhat irrational albeit purportedly sentient beings do not have myriads of rationalizations to explain their incoherence.  Oh my, a double negative, … confusing.

At this point, it probably makes sense to identify the author of this reflection.  Not exactly an easy thing to do but essential if we’re ever to get to the point.

The author is a confused member of the protagonists in this reflection but knows that “he” is confused.  What, the reader may now wonder is a “he”?  Well, these entities subdivide themselves into two major biological categories, male and female, although lately (another concept related to time involving proximity, “proximity” being a concept related to something referred to as “space” but which could, by analogy, also refer to “time”), a number of these entities have been refusing to acknowledge such categories and refer to themselves as, among other things, non-binary, or else, just somewhat arbitrarily switch their biological characterization to a variant of the other category to which they refer as “their culturally perceived gender”.

Perhaps the foregoing will lead the reader to understand why the author perceives of himself as confused.  So confused in fact that he has completely lost track of the nature of this reflection and as to why he has been writing it and as to just what series of events he had hoped to memorialize when he started writing this reflection.

Contextualization can be so confusing!  It seems that the author has lost himself amidst shifting eddies of time and space flowing somewhere hidden deep within what passes for his mind.

Ahhh, fortunately, perhaps, or perhaps not, clarity, or something akin to clarity seems to engulf him and he recalls that when he started writing this reflection he had been speculating on the nature of what some among his contemporaries referred to as divinity, and on how different perspectives were with respect to that strange but seemingly transcendental concept, and then, that he had been wondering about the nature of “surety”, not in the sense of one who stands for the obligations of another, but in the sense of certainty, acknowledging that his interpretation of that term was based on linguistic analysis rather than custom and that language was utterly inefficient in that respect, as opposed, perhaps, to numbers.  And that as he started writing, he had started to reflect on the nature of “knowledge” which, in terms of absolute accuracy, seemed as unattainable as infinity, and he considered the probability that all we had, really, were opinions, some of which we held very strongly, and then he had recalled a philosopher, David Hume, who had wrestled with related speculations and had concluded that absolute truths might or might not exist, and that as humans we could at best approximate the practical semblance of truths by developing what he called “conventions”, useful vehicles which we could, for a time, treat as “truths” but knowing that at some point, their seeming verity might well prove an illusion but how, over time, “conventions” became calcified so that, to most people, they became unassailable truths for which they were prepared to fight and to kill and to die, although “to kill for” was certainly favored over “to die over”.  And then, he had become distracted with the concept of prepositions, wondering how a “convention” had evolved in the English language, really a hodgepodge combination of diverse linguistic traditions, to the effect that it was improper to end a sentence with a preposition.  Certainly a much safer “convention” than the diverse religious “conventions” among the fratricidal Abrahamic religions which declared any failure to firmly consider related “conventions” absolute truths were what they referred to as “heresies”, and that heretics had to be eliminated, justifying genocide regardless of commandments that abjured homicide.  And then he recalled how, as a very young teacher, he had taught a course on comparative religions which he had expanded to include comparative mythologies as neither he nor his students could establish clear boundaries between the two concepts and how, after decades of research, he had come to perceive all organized religions, especially the Abrahamic variants, as more mythic than those belief systems that he and his students had once considered ancient superstitions.  Not a comforting thought, so he had returned to speculating on the nature of time and space which had doubled back to the concept of “conventions” and thence, to this strange reflection.

And the author wonders, first, whether anyone will ever read this reflection and, if so, what the reader or readers will make of it.  And what they will make of him.  And whether or not he will be embarrassed if anyone who knows him will attribute it to him.

Then he decides that perhaps it’s “time” to end this strange reflection.

“Time” he wonders, just what is it?  Not just how it’s measured.  And then he speculates on whether time can exist without motion and then, finally (another concept related to time), while wondering whether syllogisms had anything to do with silliness, he seemingly stops writing ….

At least for the nonce.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

An Interlocking Spherical Introspection

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It seems interesting and perhaps even meaningful in some way that I am so much more drawn to interlocking identical serial spheres which share a common center at their edges than I am to concentric circles which seem less interesting to me, perhaps even boring; the former sacred and magical while the latter merely organizationally utilitarian, a means of describing concentrating priorities.  I’m not sure why I feel as I do, indeed, the reality is that I haven’t a clue.  But I do.

Perhaps there is an egalitarian element in interlocking serial spheres which share a common center at their edges, something wholly lacking in concentric circles, and perhaps in the shared centers of the former there exists a focused form of synergy.  Not a dominant focus but rather, a sort of distillation which, for some reason puts me in mind of the brandy that one can make from the liquid residue of frozen mead.  A strange sort of simile but perhaps one that, with reflection and introspection, might yield a primordial sort of sacred meaning.  Perhaps a sort of key to something we should know but which has, for some reason, perhaps a very good reason, been withheld.

For some reason, I sense that my preference discloses something important about me, something that I should know and perhaps even more, something those who, for some reason or other, rely on me or care for me or fear me, with or without cause, should know.  Perhaps it’s a clue to a secret pathway towards my soul or even, an echo hidden in shadows cast by a source of distant wisdom that enjoys teasing me with hints of who I am or who I should be, or perhaps of who I once was.

Or perhaps, at their shared core, there’s a hint of what divinity might be.  Or of what divinity is not.

Or perhaps it’s just a silly, meaningless predilection.

But I rather think not.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Afterword

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Mists stream slowly towards the end of time at the end of space but still, it seems something exists, something beyond the haze, deep in the dark of bygone nights but composed only of shadows and echoes and perhaps, the residue of pale dry rainbows.  A place where eternity goes to pass away and infinity, exhausted, goes to remember and weep.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Phantasmagorical Reflections on the Nature of Time, Light, Luminous Sentience and the Higgs Boson

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Theoretically, time doesn’t exist for photons.  That was recently explained to me and I found that hypothesis, or perhaps, theory, fascinating.  It’s something I’d never considered although traveling back in time by exceeding the speed of light has been a popular theme in science fiction for many decades, especially in the Star Trek franchise and, before that, in Superman films and comics.  I guess that if such literary devices had even a scintilla of possible accuracy a corollary would be that a balance attained at the speed of light would involve generation of the absence of time and hence, the phenomenon of which I was recently made aware.

Be that as it may, time certainly exists for anything with mass impacted by photons or other massless particles traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum.  As I understand it, other massless field perturbations (whatever they may be) may apparently also travel at the speed of light.  However, purportedly, notwithstanding warp drives and such, nothing with any mass at all can attain that speed as, after a certain speed, instead of increasing speed with the addition of otherwise accelerative energy, such additional energy would eventually merely expand the size of the mass it sought to accelerate as it approximated the speed of light. Thus, whatever residue of mass remained would never attain the speed of light unless the totality of mass was converted to energy, hence, the famous e = mc2, or more responsive to the foregoing, m = e/c2 or something like that.  Put more verbally, time decreases for objects as they accelerate towards the speed of light but, being unable to ever attain it, time for anything not traveling at the speed of light (or containing mass) never ceases to exist.

I wonder why the media through which photons, etc., travel makes a difference, or the speed, but apparently they do.  In another sense of the term “media” (as that term is applied to the transmission of subjective information through the press, or television “news”, etc.), I also wonder why, given its non-objective nature, a nature all too frequently infected by a desire to distort reality rather than present it, it has any relevance, but, unfortunately, for reasons inexplicable to some of us, it seems to.

Anyway, based on the foregoing, at least as I understand it right now, the light we are receiving from the furthest reaches of our universe (there may be more than one) is comprised of photons which, if they were sentient, would not have perceived that any time at all had passed during their journey, a temporal period which, to us, would have spanned almost fifteen billion years.  A corollary concept, at least as I perceive it, is that without relational motion, time, whether it is only an illusion or something independently real and tangible, would not exist.

As I reflect on the foregoing I’m struck by a paradox, the kind of paradox of which both religious and quantum “hypothetists”[1] seem enamored: i.e., that to the extent that time can exist only where there is motion, given that a photon is constantly in motion at the greatest theoretical velocity attainable, it is concurrently both intuitively and counterintuitively (and thus irreconcilably) probable that photons and related massless particles (to the extent that they exist) create time wherever they pass but never experience it.

Interesting.  Interesting also that speculation on the nature of divinity has led numerous theologians to believe that for the divine time does not exist either but rather, everything that would ever happen occurred concurrently and spontaneously, thus explaining omniscience, eternity and perhaps omnipresence, although not omnibenevolence or omnipotence but that, nonetheless, divinity creates and impacts time as perceived by us.  Hmmm, does that imply a photonic origin for divinity?  I’ll leave that for another day’s reflections.

But, back to our primary reflection: what about quantum phenomena as they relate to photons, etc.  Many of us are familiar with the inexplicable incongruities involving electrons and their variable perception oriented states and, at least in thought experiments, a similar situation with respect to cats cruelly trapped in boxes with a tempting dose of poison.  But what about photons and other massless objects capable of travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum?

Photons are purportedly massless, chargeless, and always travel at the speed of light (at least until recently) whilst carrying electromagnetic energy. Electrons, on the other hand, are, by comparison at least, massive, negatively charged particles that are a component of matter and are responsible for electricity but are incapable of attaining light speed.  One might then ask, shouldn’t electromagnetic energy be somehow related to electrons?  Apparently not.

Anyway, about the questions that occurred to me concerning the relationship, if any, between quantum phenomena and photons and other massless objects:  First, do quantum phenomena apply to them?  Apparently they do.  Photons are considered a type of quantum, i.e., fundamental units of physical particles such as light and matter.  Then, if that is so, can massless objects (photons for example) be quantically entangled so that what happens to one happens to its paired partner?  The answer is apparently yes as well.  Then, what about the phenomenon concerning the role of the observer in forcing a quantum particle to decide on its immediate future?  Hmmm.

Given recent experiments that have purportedly managed to slow photons to speeds as slow as thirty-eight miles per hour by changing the media through which they travel or by using electromagnetically induced transparency[2], a whole series of questions assail me.  Do such decelerated photons experience time?  If so (which I assume to be the case), then, if they were in any sense sentient, I assume that that they would be terribly shocked by their introduction into the temporal realms.  Or perhaps, if they had not prior to their deceleration been sentient (since time would appear essential to sentience), might they somehow evolve a sense of sentience when introduced to temporal phenomena?  And what would happen if photons subjected to quantic pairing where subjected to different temporal conditions, for example, if one of the pair was slowed down?  I assume its partner, wherever it was, would slow down as well.  What if that became infectious resulting in a cascading effect on light?  How might that impact us?  How might it impact time?

Sort of finally, I wonder at the relationship of the Higgs Boson and time.  Without it, mass would not exist and perhaps everything that moved, if anything moved, might well be travelling at the speed of light.  Yet, if everything were travelling at that speed, relatively speaking, nothing would be traveling at all (absent the concept of direction).  And I wonder if someday we’ll find that time itself is composed of massless particles.  What if such particles are somehow related to dark energy and dark matter?

Might Neil Gaiman or Christopher Moore, two of my favorite offbeat authors, turn the foregoing into a novel?  Might I?  Of course, theirs would probably be published while mine would probably tend to languish, literary agents interested in my work being even more rare than answers to the foregoing.

Something meaningful seems to be stirring at the edge of my imaginative perception but won’t permit me to grasp it. 

Perhaps it exists outside of temporal space and moves too quickly.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] I use “hypothetists as a neologism for speculative researchers who, given the absence of proof, are not really theorists.

[2] Apparently, electromagnetically induced transparency is a phenomenon where normally opaque media becomes transparent to light within a specific spectral range due to the effects of quantum interference. It is generated through us of a strong “control” light beam to create “dressed states” in a multi-level atom or molecule, allowing a weaker “probe” light beam to pass through the medium, thus ripping aside its attempt at obfuscation.

Strange, Senryū-Like Pseudo-Scientific Observations

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Memes and genes and photons, speed and time and space, dark matter and dark energy:

Is the transportation and reassembling of information, as is the case with memes and genes, a principle photonic function?

Does the purported reality that time bears an inverse relationship to speed and thus to space perhaps imply that it may flow in more than one direction?

Are dark matter and dark energy, in a sense, a reflection of the foregoing?
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Recalling Teddy’s Wisdom and Optimism

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“Great Ones we are grateful” was an expression my younger brother Teddy used to shout to the sky above Venice Beach in California during early mornings and late evenings many decades ago, at a time when his intuition insisted that we were not alone in the universe, and that we had benign mentors watching over us.

Times seemed bad to Teddy back then, back in the seventies and early eighties of the last century during another millennium when the Age of Aquarius was purportedly about to dawn. Of course, now, those times seem like a golden age, at least in comparison to the present. And now, even to Teddy, the Great Ones, if they exist or ever existed, seem as distant from us, and as disinterested in us, as do our own divinities, leaving us abandoned to our own devices, led through illusions and delusions and deceit by the very worst among us.

So while my brother’s optimism and hope were beautiful in their way, they were more than anything a symptom of the reality that we’d lost our way and that we seemed congenitally incapable of finding our way back.

Although back towards what, given our history as a species, seems a depressing thought.

And our path forward, unfortunately, now seems even worse.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Humans: The Aberrant Species

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Of all the species that share our planet, humans may well be the most aberrant. Aberrant in the willful rejection of nature’s guideposts. In part that’s because we’ve developed ethical and moral imperatives at odds with nature’s survival and improvement mechanisms. Thus, rather than discard the weak as inefficient, we protect and cherish them, at least on some level. Rather than propagation through biological natural selection so that the human race is constantly physically improving, our breeding selection criteria have become largely incoherent. No other life form that we know of does that on a consistent basis. We have counterintuitive dominant emotional motivational instincts such as love and mercy which lead us to react in manners different from other biological variants.

On the other hand, no other life form is as compulsively selfish and greedy as are humans who seem to have developed a manic addiction to accumulation, thus the majority of humans are deprived so that a very few can, not only gorge themselves, but hoard even what they cannot ever use. Mere survival has become inadequate to quench our thirst for things and power. We are perhaps the only species that values individualism above the collective good and we have moved from instinctively acting to assure our survival as a species and from survival of our diverse personal biological lines towards immediate gratification of whims. In that light, we are the only species that places a “moral” value on the ability to terminate the gestative life of healthy progeny. However, like many species, we have ingrained territorial instincts that make us as aggressive as any other species in the waging of war, something we do from tiny individual battles through battles between huge groups of states seeking hegemony.

What accounts for such anomalous tendencies?

I posit that it may involve a phenomenon described by atheist advocate Richard Dawkins as “memes” and, in operative combinations, as “memeplexes”.  Memes are akin to biological “genes”. Genes are the primary blueprints and building blocks for life based on the information they carry, perpetuate and share and through which they provide other genes and enzymes, etc., with orders that are usually carried out. When they are not, mutations occur with mutation also being an evolutionary tool seeking, through trial and error, to accomplish biological improvements. Memes perform similar functions but in a less direct biological context and, apparently, without an exterior guiding principal. They are the most basic units serving as a carriers of non-biological information.  While combinations of genes result in biological lifeforms ranging from amoeba to humans, combinations of memes form cultural quasi-life forms such as belief systems, philosophies, religions, nations, perhaps even history, etc., all of which share common elements associated with life forms such as birth, evolution, growth, instincts towards self-preservation, mutation, propagation, self-defense and aggression.

What seems to have occurred is that memeplexes have mutated into nature’s antagonists, into opponents of nature’s tendencies within us and, currently, memes and memeplexes seem to have proven dominant over genes, perhaps even reprograming genes and complexes of genes. In a fascinating albeit disturbing manner, memes and memeplexes use the human brain as their primary operational echanisms, both on an individual basis and collectively. In essence, memes hijack our brains and direct, or at least significantly impact our conduct through manipulation of our emotional reactions including our disposition and predisposition towards accepting things as accurate and true notwithstanding contrary physical and biological realities. Thus memes have converted truth from an absolute to a relative concept. They operate as a cancer infecting reality.

As we enter the age of what is termed “artificial intelligence”, really a complex series of programmed reactions used for both evaluative purposes and as mechanisms to impact our responses to diverse stimula, memeplexes become more and more controlling over the “rules” established through trial and error by evolutive nature and we become less and less a compound complex part of nature’s scheme seeking instead to bend nature to our memetic will.

If the religious concept of an antichrist or malevolent satanic figure applied to nature, then it seems reasonable to at least hypothesize that such “force” would be memetic based. Memes first conquered humans and then, using humans, memes have evolved as the antithesis to nature.

One wonders if a synthesis between nature and the bizarrely cancerous virtual world evolved through memes is possible, and if so, what it would be like.

It seems fascinating that Richard Dawkins, a bitter rival of anything associated with religion, was so prominent in sensing the basis for the subversion of nature.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Shadowy Echoes of Immortality

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Purportedly, according to the current understanding of the “conventions” governing mainstream physics, “energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another”.  It appears that matter in its various states is treated, for purposes of such convention as merely a form of energy, a very concentrated form of energy.  Thus there has, for some time, been a pragmatic agreement in physics to treat the universal sum of energy and matter as a constant, at least until evidence to the contrary becomes available and is demonstrably more probable than the converse.

“Convention” is the term crafted by philosopher David Hume to describe the pragmatic agreements we arrive at to treat unproven or unprovable concepts as accurate, because they work, or seem to work, or have worked so far. That is the nature of knowledge to which we humans are privy, an agreement to treat things which function as true, until a more efficient truth appears to us.  That is why the conventions we treat as truths are relative, which is not to state that truth, absolute truth is inexistent.  We just have no way to establish it, at least not yet.  At least not permanently.  Given that nothing yet appears ultimately provable, but according to the so called “scientific method”, only disprovable, “conventions are all we have.  But we treat them so emphatically as truths that we are willing to kill and die to defend them.  We humans are a strange, illogical and incoherent lot.

Still, within the context of “conventions” in modern physics, concepts consistently being challenged and modified, as they should be, there are interesting questions that straddle the spheres of science and parascience.  One may involve the above referenced convention concerning the permanent nature of the energy-matter continuum.  The convention concerning the conservation of energy, including mass as a concentrated form of energy, raises for me a question as to the nature of life at all levels.  Life seems to involve a form of energy, at least in the form of temporarily self-perpetuating and constantly mutating electrical impulses which generate motion as well as: (1) reaction, (2) perception and (3), at least the illusion of creation.  My question, questions really, involve what happens to those electrical impulses that manifest as life.  Where do they go?  How do they dissipate or to what other forms of energy do they convert.

Perhaps into shadowy echoes of immortality resonating in infinity.

Something about which physicists and paraphysicists should perhaps ponder and argue.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution. Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

On Equatorial Solstices and Balancing Harmonics

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The solstices which take place in the arbitrarily denominated months of June and December (at least in what is commonly referred to, for inexplicable reasons given the nature of directions, as “western” culture) generate complex emotional vortexes, emotive textures woven of delight and depression, both inter and intra-personally.  

Topographically, in the northern hemisphere, the December solstice marks the end of lengthening nights and the beginning of longer days, in the south, the opposite is true.  The inverse occurs in each north-south hemisphere in June.  But what happens right on the equator? 

Perhaps a bit of confusion as to what all the fuss is about.  Or perhaps the solstices are at their most unique, most special and most profound on the equator, especially if one were to set one foot in the northern hemisphere and the other in the southern, something possible in southern Colombia and in the other twelve countries which the equator bisects (Ecuador, Brazil, Sao Tome & Principe, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, the Maldives, Indonesia and Kiribati).  The so called Coriolis Effect based on the consequences of the earth’s rotation, makes storms swirl clockwise in the southern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, thus, physically, unlike the arbitrary denominations of east and west as static points, or the arbitrary temporal division into months of varying lengths, the concepts of “north” and “south” have actual physical consequences.  But what happens at the equator, especially during the solstices? 

One would think the equator would be the site of special ceremonies during the two annual solstices in each country through which it passes.  There are, of course, myriad festivals related to the two solstices almost everywhere (other than on the equator itself).  Think, of course, of Christmas, originally celebrated on or about the exact date of the solstice until Pope Gregory XIII shifted dates around and the law of unintended consequences extracted astronomical significance from that festival.  Of course, like east and west and calendar months, the placement of the Christmas season in December was completely arbitrary, counterintuitive and incoherent given available evidence, apparently seeking primarily to obscure the date theretofore assigned to the Zoroastrian god Mithras (born of a virgin on December 25) and perhaps the Roman festival of Saturnalia as well as a plethora of “pagan” solstice related festivals (whatever “pagan” means).  Like the foregoing, other solstice related festivals are generally focused on climactic consequences in one of the two north-south hemispheres.  In Ecuador for example, Inti Raymi (the Fiesta del Sol) has been long celebrated on June 21 to the south of the equator rather than exactly along the border, that exactitude being infinitesimal and difficult to set with exactitude, other than through, for example, striding it.  The Inti Raymi was a traditional religious ceremony of the Inca Empire in honor of the god Inti (Quechua for sun), the most venerated deity in the Inca religion.  It was declared a festival of “intangible cultural heritage” on June 29, 2016, and it is still celebrated throughout the formerly Incan Andean region due to its association with indigenous cosmogony and with the bounty provided by the Pacha Mama (a Gaia-like indigenous deity popular in the Andes). 

Oddly, festivals set exactly adjacent to both sides of the equator during the solstices do not appear to exist, at least not formally, which is surprising.  It would seem a perfect trajectory and day, perhaps a perfect instant, for reflection and introspection, for seeking a perfect balance, for merging the negative and the positive, the ying and the yang, for celebrating the similarities in things that seem opposed.  To acknowledge the harmonics possible in polarization and how they can generate dialectic evolution.  An instant to pray for peace and harmony.

Which, perhaps, explains the dearth of related ceremonies.  The military industrial complex which rules us all the way that Tolkien’s “one ring” ruled the rest would never permit such a festival.

Still, if that impediment could somehow be overcome, what about a semi-annual ceremony along the equator, once for each solstice, where a line of people one person wide, alternating men and women perhaps, is formed along the entire land portion of the equator, with every participant straddling the equator and holding hands with those before and after them, all assembled several minutes before the solstice and disbanded several minutes afterward to assure coincidence with the instant of the solstice, all focusing during that time on a world at peace, one where all opinions respected, one seeking continuing evolution towards harmonious unity and perfection.

Wouldn’t that be something?  Perhaps it’s something to consider.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Apples and Chaos and Time: a metaphysical reflection of sorts

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Keywords: inchoate, cosmogony, cosmology, mythology, religion, metaphysics

Chaos was not incoherent, merely inchoate[1], … and subject to constant change as everything that could happen, happened, and not just the bad things to which Murphy alludes.  Everything!

It was infinitely inchoate except for a single fleeting reality, a sort of tease really, but the reality of the instant was constantly changing, sometimes repeatedly, other times not.  The multiverse was constantly assembled and disassembled, then reassembled in different patterns.  Memory was ephemeral, whether involving radiation, energy or matter.  Multiverses existed but for what humans would consider a tiny fraction of a zeptosecond[2], but with fully formed recollections going back billions of years, at least so that during that infinitesimal fraction of a zeptosecond, quintillions of beings scattered throughout that multiverse believed they had a present, and had had a past, and had aspirations for a future, and it might be that at some other fraction of a zeptosecond, either in the past or concurrently somewhere else or in some future fraction of a zeptosecond, there might be continuity of sorts, but everything was not random, at least not always.  Nonetheless, discontinuity was the rule, at least usually.  Each zeptosegundic civilization might be interrupted for eternities before one instant there followed another, although time being non-existent, oxymoronically, instants and an eternities both lacked context or meaning, everything occurring concurrently but, simultaneously, not occurring at all.  Chaos was, well, chaotic that way, but interesting, very interesting.

Two beings formed the only continuity in chaos, a sort of husband, who lacked a name (having been the first) and his consort, whom he called Sophia.  He’d willed her into existence, freeing her from the inchoate, or perhaps, he’d merely severed her from himself so that he’d not be alone, or perhaps she was just his echo, as ying would someday be to yang, or alpha to omega, or male to female.

Each had the ability to create chains of existence, something he’d always been able to do but had not considered until she appeared at his side, or within him, or somewhere, somehow perceptible; but they were both rather immature, very fickle, and, like the context in which they existed, with very poorly developed memories, linearity being anathema to them but essential for memory.  You see, memory implied order, and order implied a sort of temporal stability and was thus a heresy to beings born in inchoate chaos, thus they (or at least, he) had no intention of permitting order or time in his (well, now their) realm.  He somehow perceived that it would bring limits to their infinite power and perhaps permit others to pop into existence, … and remain “existent”.  And that would inevitably destroy the unstable stability required to maintain chaos perfectly inchoate.  Inchoate chaos, were everything was equally possible and thus much more than just probable, and where every possibility could coexist concurrently.  Indeed, given the absence of time, every possibility had to coexist concurrently, albeit, as we’ve noted, rather briefly.  Extreme brevity, the most extreme brevity possible, was also an essential and inherent component of inchoate chaos.

The foregoing was, of course, chock full of paradoxes, an infinity of paradoxes running concurrently, like uncontrolled chain reactions of quanta fusing inchoate quarks into whatever inchoate quarks wanted to become.  Perhaps he’d been the result of the first such fusion, and perhaps he’d immediately sought to contain and discontinue the phenomenon.  If so, that would have ended the perfect harmony of inchoate chaos and represented the first quanta of order.  How ironic would that have been?  But, of course, memory being strictly forbidden, he had no memory of anything before him, or with him, at least until Sofia had somehow appeared.  And come to think of it, since she’d joined him, waves seemed to be jostling the infinity of ephemeral multiverses a bit.  He could tell because the waves made a sort of music, and he’d enjoyed the music, unaware of what it might mean.  As he’d enjoyed Sophia’s company, unaware of what that might mean either.  But music and Sophia sort of went together, and Sophia had never been aware of an existence were the music had not been present.

And then, of a sudden, there had been a sudden.  The first “sudden”, sort of.

The first sudden, and inchoatesy had been ruptured and time had appeared from apparently nowhere and everywhere synchronously (knowing that it was anathema it’d been hiding), and order emerged, starting to gather up infinitesimal pieces, linking and organizing them, although to anyone who might have been watching[3] there was a huge blast.  Infinitely hot, but only for a small fraction of a zeptosecond, after which it started to cool and expand.

And the One looked at Sophia, but she just shrugged, the first shrug, and for some reason, she thought of apples.

….
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] Something that will be, with the passage of time, but is not yet, at least not quite, but is perhaps hinted at.

[2] The smallest unit of measurable time, i.e., the time it takes a photon to traverse a proton.

[3] And, of course, everyone was (even an inchoate version of you was there), although unaware of what we were doing, having been inchoate until then, and inchoatesy took a long time to unravel, now that time existed, as well as, well, … motion.