I do not exist - Cosmos

It has been a while since I wrote about existence...  does being too tired and frazzled support that I exist or that I do not exist???  (Theo... I know I can not be a figment of my own imagination... but maybe I am a figment of someone else's imagination... they think, therefore I am...)

I started this train of thought by demonstrating that I am not sane... I do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result - I expect hot water when I turn on the hot water spigot... are you sane?  Then I said that I would give 4 simple arguments that I do not exist... and neither do you...

The first argument had to do with physical perception.  Our perception of the environment is a remote sensing scam!  Our brains could be hooked up to synthetic sensors and we would not even know it!  (Matrix movie stuff!)  The second argument had to do with a microscopic view of our bodies.  We never think about the fact that we are mostly water, Hydrogen, CO2, and Nitrogen.  When we die, we basically drift away - literally!  Moreover, while we are alive we are a huge collection of "stuff" that is not us (like little eyebrow worms) and the fact that all of the molecules in our bodies, including our bones are totally replaced at least every 3 years!!!

OK, so I do not exist in the way that I think I do when I look in the mirror - eh?  So, now let's look farther.  The 3rd argument I promised was Cosmology.  You know, Carl Sagan's star stuff. "The cosmos is all the stuff that ever was or ever will be."  Really?  Let's think about how empty the cosmos is.  They say that the best vacuum producible on earth barely approaches the vacuum of space.  Yet, since 1960 Robert Bussard and other dreamers have been looking at an ionic propulsion system that carries energy (nuclear), but no "fuel" to eject to propel the space craft.  Instead, the craft would use an electrostatic field to suck in ionized interstellar hydrogen molecules (2 per cm³).  The engine would use another strong electromagnetic system to eject the ions out the back or form a fusion reaction and eject the hot, heavier combinants.  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A600436, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Bussard-ramjet) Wow!  They are counting on there being a lot of "stuff" out there!

Another blogger posted a few weeks ago about black holes from "badastronomy.com" (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/30/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-black-holes/ (I was sure it was Stapler, but search and Google can't find the post!)).  If you were to fill a sphere as big as the orbit of Pluto with air, there would be enough mass to be a black hole!  So, while black holes are the densest thing we know, if we look at them as being everything inside the event horizon, then they are very non-dense!  We think of air as being light and with no substance, yet air holds up a super-cargo plane!

We think of space as "empty", but is it?.  We visited the Mount Palomar observatory in California.  We sat on a half-room sized bench which we later found out was a replica of the mirror!  We looked at an amazing series of photos taken by the telescope.  They surveyed the sky with low magnification and picked the dimmest frame, say f1.  Then, they bumped the magnification up and surveyed that frame to select the dimmest sub-frame f2.  They bumped the magnification again and surveyed f2 to find it's dimmest sub-frame, f3... etc.  through an amazing series of, as I remember, 12 frames.  The amazing-est thing is that once they were "blown up" each frame was just as "busy" with "stuff" as the original!  The sky is a dense soup of stars !!!  Yet it is empty...   The last frames showed mostly far away galaxies and quasars!

Did you see the amazing photos that made the email rounds last year showing the relative size of the various planets and stars?  It showed our tiny sun was a single pixel on Antares (http://www.webxact.co.uk/2008/08/these-pictures-will-humble-anyone.html).  Even though we think of the earth as huge and the sun as very huge, there is so much empty space between us and the moon that it takes days to travel there!  Even at the speed of light it takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth!  It would take 4 years to get to our nearest neighbor star.  Our solar system, our galaxy, our cosmos is just a bunch of specs held together by gravity.

So now, lets look closer.  How about that table in front of you?  It is solid - right?  It is probably strong enough that you would sit or even stand on it... but, does it exist?  I mean in the way you perceive it?  Take a microscope and bump up the magnification.  At not very high magnification, the surface is no longer flat, but is a rough landscape of knotted strings!  Bump up the focus more, and the strings become coils of connected dots.  Further, and the strings are only specs connected by strong electric fields.   Actually, the molecular particles are even smaller, relative to the "orbits" of the electrons than the vast separation of the planets in the solar system! (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/nuclear/nucuni.html)  What??? that table is like empty space!  It is just a bunch of specs held together by electrical attraction!!!  When did you think of that last?  You have know that since elementary school, but do you see that when you perceive that table?  Nope.  But really, that table does not exist!

The first time I realized this was when I was about 12.  I was on one of the very few, long driving trips I took with my parents.  I was reading Jules Vern's "Around the world in 80 days", a great science fiction story, which got me into the mood to think... OK, so I was dozing off... We had been studying molecular structure at school (No one told me it was a lie!  Next argument about waves...) I remember looking at the plastic cover on the back of my dad's seat and imagining it being a sea of vibrating, spinning, crashing atomic particles... quite an impression!  If you know me, think about me growing up "knowing" that the chair I sat in did not exist!  Now I make more sense to you - eh?  Feel the vibes???

It is actually amazing that we do not just slip through each other, drift right through the earth, or fly apart!  Then, there is the issue that the protons, neutrons, and electrons don't exist either... but that is another day, and another post.  I do not exist - Condensate.