Space & Time - Who Has the Energy to Know If It Matters?

Yes. I’m being oh so clever. My philosopher’s heart has turned to stone but an object in motion remains in motion until acted upon by an external force. That forced change of momentum has definitely not allowed me to remain at rest and my equally opposing reaction must be seen as the consequence of disturbing my inertia.

The terminology is so woven into our culture without any real understanding of the expressions - matter, energy, inertia, gravity, relativism, quanta. The men responsible for making these concepts common to our ears but not to our understanding were such polar opposites in temperament, personality, approach to their studies, abilities and philosophies.

I am not going to claim parity with Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein but I’m not going to deny fundamental similarities, either. The real differences between their lives and accomplishments and the order of things to date in my life is simple choices and actions. It is not that I don’t have the faculties and cerebral acumen to engage intelligently in a dialog of their work – it is that I have not been engaged and they were. Newton elected to pursue the motions of heavenly bodies and to ignore the motions of earthly ones. He elected early in his studies to distract himself from the pursuit of women by engaging his mind in the study of nature. He understood his own nature well enough to know that if he dwelt on abstaining from the pleasures of female company that would be all he would think on. He knew he would fixate on that which he was denying himself. That is failure one on my part. I not only dismissed anything as being more or equally important to the company of women but then I became equally fixated after their departure. I have frittered away decades on the fleeting pleasure of a woman’s company. I could have invested myself in something with perhaps less promise but more substance of thrill, discovery and satisfaction in the exploration. The universe is measurable, predictable, and reliable and demonstrates behaviors that hold constant. None of that can be applied to women. I have squandered energy on creatures where the investment never matters. Just as Newton was frustrated in his pursuits of alchemy I have been frustrated in turning the love of women from lead to gold. I’m left with only the weight and toxicity of the attempt.

Einstein was a great visual scientist but not a mathematician of the caliber of Newton. I am similarly wired. I understand advanced mathematical concepts with far greater ease than I do the rules of exponents. My right hemisphere dominance allows me to see trigonometric relationships in three dimensional space. I see sinusoidal motion as a helix, for example. It’s simply a matter of phase to represent it as either a two dimensional wave or as a circle. But, I struggled through my math studies because I had no application for the knowledge. Now, I am going in reverse. I have the application and am going back to study the math relevant to describe phenomena. It is in dispute whether or not Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, was his scribe for translating his conceptual thoughts into mathematical language. When they divorced, he latched onto a doctoral student in Mathematics at Princeton where he was installed. What is important to take away is that recognizing personal weaknesses is the means to act to overcome them, and; the women may leave but the work remains.

Everything measured about matter is applicable only in the context of an environment defined by space and time. The infinitesimally small is used to describe the incredibly large. The forces acting on the fundamentals apply to the complex. Newton and Einstein were scientists but they were also philosophers. Their pursuit of the relevance of mankind in the universe recognized a design and purpose to it all established by a supreme designer. The laws of motion and the measure of energy are also related to the conduct of human beings. Newton and Einstein devoted their time and allocated space to pursue understanding of the behavior of the natural worlds. I find myself compelled to follow. I have not been as wise as Newton to make the choice voluntarily which revealed the nature of light. I am not the visionary that was Einstein to quantify the light. However, it is possible that I may have as little as 40 seconds or another 40 years on this planet. There is still time for me to experience the light.