How we all followed Einstein into the Rabbit Hole.
Albert Einstein is as smart as they come. Yet being smart incorporates a rather specific problem of its own, of how to control oneself after finding the answer everyone was looking for, particularly when this discovery gets recognized across the scientific community as being correct.
- It is not difficult to see it. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.
In this article, the rabbit hole we all walked into is exposed. This means that the information itself is correct and will not get undermined, though the overall setting in which we placed the correct information is recognized as warped and therefore as imprecise.
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Einstein’s best buddy was Kurt Gödel.
When Gödel provided Einstein an alternative to his spacetime solution that elucidated the anomalies seen among the behavior of matter, Einstein had no choice but to agree.
What are we talking about here? An alternative to Einstein’s spacetime?
It all boils down to seeing the separate parts in their own light, and not making the mistake of melding all as if all fits into one big picture.
That is fairly simple, right? If not, then here we go!
Join me into this rabbit hole ! ! ! ! ! !
For some reason, the human brain is not cooperating well when trying to understand the big picture. It is like the needle does indeed stick to the groove as expected. And so, the big picture is viewed as a rather long roadway of our inching closer and closer to the right answer. With each approach, we are getting closer and closer, and things are put more tightly in place. Yet… never reaching the center of the record.
- In the last groove, the one groove that repeats and repeats, we tell ourselves how there are somethings we simply cannot know. It’s the way it is, right?
Yet few view the record as the entire setting for the needle. Few see the record player as the part that helps us repeat and repeat the information of the record.
So, what did Einstein not do right?
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Albert Einstein showed exactly and precisely how Mercury’s precession required 43 arc-seconds per century more than what Newton calculated.
- Einstein showed the system. Yet he did not show us the why.
Meanwhile (much later on), Gödel proposed a spatial rotating motion for the larger environment of the Milky Way, and with that proposal Einstein simply had no choice but to admit that this was indeed a possible alternative.
Einstein recognized there was an alternative.
- Today, Gödel’s solution is recognized as artificial.
For some reason, most folks do not recognize Einstein’s spacetime as artificial. Somehow, Einstein’s outcome is declared as natural, and Gödel’s alternative as artificial.
And that is kind of funny (I am not using the word hilarious here).
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The human brain is the main player in explaining why we are not-getting the big picture answers right away.
For some reason, folks have problems staying on track with the following realities:
- Earth is the planet we live on.
- The Solar System is the setting for planet Earth.
- The Milky Way is the larger setting in which the Solar System exists.
- The Universe is the overall setting in which the Milky Way is traveling.
I put all this information out here as a list, so you can check for yourself if your brain was doing what it was supposed to do. Check what you were experiencing from the inside of your brain, compare it with the next set that is portraying the same four settings.
- Our feet are on planet Earth.
- Our feet are on planet Earth.
- Our feet are on planet Earth.
- Our feet are on planet Earth.
Did you, or did you not, stay on our planet inside your brain while you were following the four settings of planet Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, and Universe?
- If you did? Congratulations, you are a rarity.
It is more likely that with the Solar System, we all took a big step backward, like viewing the bigger picture from a distance, and then seeing what we are seeing with Sun in the center, planets revolving around it (and the likes).
Did you stick with the actual view of us (always) being on planet Earth?
Let’s not stop here.
With the Milky Way, next, we would likely all have taken a real big step back, viewing our galaxy from an enormous distance. Like seeing a distant galaxy with the JWS. Nothing wrong here at all. This is what most people would do, see the bigger picture from a bigger distance.
With the Universe, however, there was likely a jump toward the abstract. Ordinarily, it is not possible to wrap our heads around the biggest reality in which we exist, one that is infinite in essence, and that contains lots and lots of other galaxies.
Of course, we grasp the word Universe itself. Universe, the whole of everything there is, seen and not seen. There, that was easy enough.
Yet, while envisioning the Universe, once again, did you indeed keep your feet on planet Earth?
Or were you looking ‘from the outside in’ at our universe, which is itself an impossibility? Did your brain ‘help’ you out there?
On planet Earth, we are trained to see reality mostly as ‘looking at’ our reality. At the universal level, however, we are not given that option. We are part of the picture and cannot be looking in. Nevertheless, the human brain pretends how that option of looking in is there for us to entertain.
That is the essence of this article: recognizing that the largest of levels does not allow us that perspective of looking in. So, when Einstein did that, and when Gödel did that, and we followed them into the rabbit hole, then we have a problem.
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The brain desires to understand, even when it has a hard time understanding what is going on. The brain guides us out of our confusion, and picks the most normal, the most strategic route to understand what is going on. It has helped us well surviving our Earthly environment.
- Our brain was trained in an Earthly environment.
Even though some of us have gone to places no other mammals have gone before, our brain was not trained to think at this universal level. We are, truly, babes in the Universal wood.
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What would you say if I said that, because human beings can sing, how therefore we have the evidence that the Universe sings?
What would you say if we all agree that 1 + 1 = 2, how we then have the evidence that the Universe is 1 + 1 = 2?
- These questions should show that the answers are not simple answers.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems do come to the rescue, because he showed mathematically how truths (axioms) have their completion at a level that is at minimum one level below the universal level.
At the universal level, all axioms overshoot the natural goal of being complete.
Okay, let’s find a simple example.
- Mustaches can be grown by people.
Obviously, you can see the answer already because not all people can grow mustaches.
The completed box of all people growing mustaches will not contain any children, nor will there be many women in that box either.
The box is complete at a level that is automatically, and at minimum, one level below the overall level.
That is an ordinary example of Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, meaning the axioms themselves cannot reach the top level. Not all people will grow mustaches.
Let’s add another axiom.
- High-pitched voices can be retained throughout life.
Again, one can see immediately that there is a limitation to this truth. A truth, however, it is. We have a real axiom here.
So, a box filled completely with people who have high-pitched voices can be envisioned, yet this will not include all people. The example is a confirmation of the First Incompleteness Theorem, and Gödel used that for his Second Incompleteness Theorem.
Gödel proved that, when using the fact that people can grow mustaches together with the fact that people can retain high-pitched voices throughout life, how we can then still not occupy the highest level and claim we captured everyone with these two specific aspects.
- The overall level does not contain completenesses.
Completenesses are found at levels below the single overall level.
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Let’s have a further look at Einstein and Gödel from this largest perspective.
Gödel believed in a Leibniz God, which is different from Einstein believing in a Spinoza God. As said, both were best buddies despite, or thanks to, their differences.
Yet both incorporated the religious level into science, which is a structural faux pas.
- Never ever should any scientist incorporate a religious step in science.
Personally, one can accept God of course, any which way possible. Yet when being a scientist, the foundation that is accepted, as the only work method allowed, is the scientific foundation. There should not be an additional overarching reality in science that is not scientific in essence.
Einstein applied the truthful information he discovered based on the anomalies of matter moving through space to the entire Universal setting. There is no denying he found the correct mathematical explanation about matter moving through space. But he was not entitled as a scientist to bring this up to the level of the universe, to the level of God.
He said that, in a simple example, because people sing, how it was shown that the Universe sings. He said that because 1 + 1 = 2, how it was shown that the Universe is based on 1 + 1 = 2.
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The strange part is that Gödel figured out the correct answer, yet did not apply this information to his reasoning. Gödel found the correct answer, how there is no completed setting at the overall level, and yet he applied the previous manner of thinking to the information he had. He placed correct data at the highest level where that data did not belong.
Einstein, too, figured out the correct mathematical calculation. Yet it should have been applied to the specifics in which this truth was discovered only.
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When people sing, the Universe is of course a place that contains singing. Sometimes even fantastic music that chills and moves us from top to toe.
Yet the Universe itself is not singing.
So, when Gödel figured this out, then why did he jump these local confirmations to the Universal level, and said that the Universe is doing something rather specific that got proved at the local level only?
Why does a man, who proved to the world that there is no Universal level at which axioms (truths) exist, say that the Universe sings (or spins)?
Gödel and Einstein did their job, yet they made it more important and special than it is. We bought into that paradigm, particularly in our world today that is Einstein’s Spacetime.
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Both friends were religious in a different manner.
While Spinoza’s God should have woken up Einstein to the top level being an (omnipresent) abstraction only, Einstein made the mistake to take a specific truth, he is very much entitled to be proud of, and walked it all the way up to the divine level.
While Gödel realized that the top level is forever incomplete, he nevertheless toyed with the idea that some aspect could indeed rise up all the way to God. He worshipped God beyond the essence of what God could be.
In a way, Gödel did get closer to the truth than Einstein, but he did not end up seeing the big picture any clearer for what it really is.
The Universe is an Incompleteness for sure. Gödel proved the point, but he could not incorporate the known information about the Universe and place it at the correct Universal setting, even though he had discovered the correct Universal setting.
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In science, there is no question whether there is a God or not a God. In science, there is not even a word God. The word does not exist. Believing in God is fine for scientists or anyone else alive. Yet this requires being engaged in a different system than science.
In science, we express ourselves in a scientific system. That system truly cannot ever contain the word God, just like I cannot declare a stone as being male or female; it would be an additional feature that in reality makes no sense. God within science does not exist. Using that level to complete scientific data is non-sensical.
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If our best scientists were just scientists indeed, and nothing else, folks would have figured this out one hundred years ago already.
Yet the human brain does not care if we are scientists, religious in essence, or just looking around for the next best catch in our daily lives.
The brain is not based just on planet Earth. The brain is based particularly on serving us any which way is best.
- The brain is a tool.
If we don’t control our brains, our brains are trained to control us.
Give your brain all the space it needs and it will take you everywhere, including some rabbit holes you may not be able to come out of.
