The Energy, Market, And Political Page, T+71 -- October 23, 2018

A side-by-side picture: worth a thousand words.

The link for the photo above: https://www.infowars.com/photos-numbers-at-trump-rally-dwarf-those-at-obama-event/.

Note how the media cropped the photo on the left. If the photos were taken from the same "vantage" point, it would have been even more startling. The photo on the left reminds me of a political gathering that I attended as editor of the college newspaper in Sioux Falls with George McGovern in attendance on the eve of the presidential election, back in 1972.

**************************************

The Physics Page

From Howard Bloom's 2016 The God Problem. I have read the book once. It's a hard book to read. I am now going back and re-reading it, with special attention on certain sections.

It wasn't until I was a sophomore or junior in college that I learned about the second law of thermodynamics -- at least as far as I recall. I assume it was introduced to me in high school physics in my senior year, if not in chemistry in my junior year, but if so, I wasn't paying attention.

The second law has to do with entropy. I remember it only too well in my first year at college. I never understood it; I could never do the equations; and in the qualitative sense, I could never accept it. I was relieved that it was never mentioned again (as far as I can recall) after the first year of college.

It's interesting that Howard Bloom, pages 40 - 44, argues the same thing. He says the second law of thermodynamics was based on the "steam engine," and that the cosmos is not a steam engine.

In the next section, pages 45 - 49, he questions the randomness of the universe. He seems to question for example, how DNA could have just "happened randomly." The six-monkeys-at-six-typewriters-typing-all-of-Shakespeare-if-given-enough-time paradox.

It sounds like he doesn't "believe it." Whether he accepts it or not (and I don't think he accepts it), he certainly questions it. After the Big Bang, only three atoms were formed: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Every atom after that was created from stellar nucleosynthesis -- atoms made by the stars.

The author finds that incredible and feels it was not random. He feels there were basic "rules" at the time of the Big Bang that set everything in motion. And the "rules" resulted in only three atoms as a direct result of the "explosion." He implies that if the universe really was random, there would have been an infinite number of species of atoms following the Big Bang as the elementary particles banged into each other. As he says,

Our universe [did not] blat out more than a zillion to the zillionth power new forms of atoms, as the probabilistic equations of randomness would imply. Far from it. [The universe produced] just three rigidly constrained species of atoms. Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Only three atoms, in a universe of zillions of particles? And all of these atoms appearing pretty much at the same time? With astonishing supersynchrony? That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't follow the rules of randomness.

Reading this section a section time, I finally understood where the author was going in this 563-page book. 

It's a hard book to read, but I think he could have made it easier to follow by moving some of the chapters on John Conway and Steve Wolfram to the front of the book (in easy-to-understand English) and then repeated and expanded that information in the latter chapters as he brings things to conclusion. He needed to explain in clear English in the introduction or the first chapter where he was headed and how he planned to get there.

This is another one of those books that high school seniors planning to major in the sciences in college should read during the summer before entering college.

Speaking of college. One of the most ridiculous "insights" a journalist has pointed out in the past 24 hours: the ratio of rich students to poor students at Harvard University is 23 - 1. I did not read any farther, so I don't know if he's talking about the entire university or of just the undergraduates. I'm surprise the ratio is that low, 23 to 1. What should the ratio be? By the way, I believe I read somewhere that if one is accepted to Harvard University, tuition is not an insurmountable problem.