Ben,
“Instead, we should think of heroism as the honorable assertion of will in the present moment. As the sophists argued and as Camus said about Sisyphus’ absurd climb with his boulder, even if the results of our decisions are disastrous or humbling, because of our limited control over the environment, we can still express our virtue or wage real, albeit minuscule rebellion while we can and with our limited resources.”
Yet is it really different than the flower blossoming after a cold winter? Nature certainly pushes the boundaries of confinement, potentially qualifying as an artist, as least to some of us.
Unfortunately, you have bought into the final gasp of universal monism, with the Big Bang cosmology. First off, consider that it cannot be falsified, as whenever there is a gap between prediction and observation, some enormous new force of nature is presumed and the bureaucracy continues on its merry way. What if accountants could just write in a number and call it, “dark money,” whenever they find a gap in the books?
Before Inflation, Dark Energy and somewhat tangentially, Dark Matter, the first patch was when they realized that cosmic redshift increases proportional to distance in all directions, creating the effect that we appear to be at the center of this expansion. So it was changed from an expansion in space, to an expansion of space, because Spacetime!
Which totally ignores the central premise of General Relativity, that the speed of light is measured as a Constant in all frames. If the light is redshifted, than intergalactic light cannot be Constant to intergalactic space. Presumably more lightyears, as the space expands, not lightyears expanding proportionally and remaining Constant.
So two metrics are being derived from the same intergalactic light. One based on its speed and the other based on the shift in its frequency. Since the expansion is relative to the speed, it would seem the speed is still being implicitly treated as the real “ruler.”
We are at the center of our point of view, so an optical cause of redshift would be logical and “packets” of light do redshift over distance, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster, but that would mean we are observing a wave front, not individual photons, traveling billions of lightyears, suggesting such quanta of light are simply the smallest measurable unit, not indivisible. Which would open a much larger can of worms for quantum theory. So it’s best to assume some fantastical cosmology, than commit heresy.
http://worrydream.com/refs/Mead%20-%20American%20Spectator%20Interview.html
The problem with taking humanity’s side against nature, is that humanity prefers delusion over the mortality of beliefs. Just look at the political parties.
Even galaxies are just nodes in an infinite network.
