Rovelli 6: It's all about information.

This is my sixth and final post on Carlo Rovelli's new book, Reality Is Not What It Seems. The first three posts were:

• From Democritus to Relativity to Quantum Mechanics
• Spacetime is Quantum
• Quanta of Space
• Time Does Not Exist
• Fundamental Constants of the Universe

1. Finished the book a few days ago. Chapters 12-13 look somewhat vaguely to the future. I frankly didn't get much out of them. In chapter 12 he tries to give a general sense of what he means by a "relational" interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM). He references this Stanford article. "The notion of the 'state' of a system refers, explicitly or implicitly, to another system" (253).

So he boils QM to two postulates: 1) The relevant information in any physical system is finite and 2) You can always obtain new information on a physical system. John Wheeler, the father of quantum gravity once said, "everything is information."

2. The main thing of interest is the question of time. He gives a "thermal" interpretation of time. All the processes of the universe are reversible (and thus time irrelevant) except for those that involve heat and entropy. "There is no preferred direction of time without heat" (251). "The origin of time may be similar to that of heat: it comes from averages of many microscopic variables" (250).

I did gain from this book, but it did leave me hanging. So I move on to more books...

Gen Eds, Language and Cultures: Pause

I have a half baked post on Spanish Language and Cultures. Where I'm stuck are the fundamental stories, practices, and rituals of other cultures. I'm sure there's a book out there to fill in that gap. The idea was to provide:

• some basic language phrases in these languages
• some basic cultural characteristics, using Erin Meyer's The Culture Map
• and some basic cultural identity markers like I mentioned above

Since I do not have a ready made source for those stories, since the fall semester is approaching rapidly, and since it will take quite some energy to proceed. I'm going to pause the series here for now. Perhaps I will return to it.

On a personal note, Joanne Solis-Walker told me about Duolingo a week ago Tuesday and I have been eating it up with Spanish. Why didn't I know this resource existed 7 years ago when I needed it??! I'm blazing a trail on it. I'm sure I'm more than 37%, but that's what it is telling me right now. Onward!

So I will continue this series privately, moving forward to learn the languages I was going to cover. Here is the probable order: 1) Spanish (now), 2) French (next), 3) German (gap-filler), 4) Russian, 5) Chinese, 6) Arabic, 7) then maybe Hindi.

In the meantime, I may do philosophy classics on Wednesdays. We'll see.

22 Getting His Nazis in Line

"Hitler Versus National Socialism" is the title of chapter 25 of Konrad Heiden's 1944 book, Der Fuehrer.  See the bottom for previous posts.

1. "Up till then the National Socialists had 'behaved like fools, overthrowing everything' -- and stolen and blackmailed in the process... This must stop; and such methods were no longer needed because the party had already won uncontested power: 'The party has now become the state'" (651).

After the power of Hitler was secured, some of his strongest and most forceful allies, because of their extremism, became liabilities. Rudolf Hess had predicted this phase: "to attain the goal the Leader would 'trample his closest friends'" (631).

"At the height of his victory, the victor retreated in many places, seemingly of his own free will, changed his plans, disappointed his own followers, adapted himself to necessity. And the secret of political victory is contained in this Hegelian necessity: to know what one wants, and to want what the people want, but do not yet know" (653).

2. What were these reversals of course? One was a kind of temporary reconciliation with religion. To many of Hitler's followers, "only faith in their fatherland had retained any meaning, their own nation had become God" (631). Some insisted that German religion must free itself from Jewish Biblical tradition. In 1922, Hitler had called the Old Testament, "Satan's Bible." Hitler had once been convinced that Jesus himself was not a Jew but the son of a Greek soldier in the Roman army.

Yet some Nazi's thought that Hitler still had some sentiment for the Catholic church. For the Catholic Church's part, it increasingly withdrew from politics, hoping to keep its spiritual power intact. "Step by step, the Catholic Church abandoned political resistance to National Socialism" (633).

The Catholic Church and Hitler reach an agreement. German clergy would be forbidden to engage in political activity, and the Church would be taken under the "Protection" of National Socialism. "Many German Catholics felt more humiliated than protected by this treaty," the Concordat. But at least the Church would keep cloisters, schools, hospitals, and clergy.

There was some initial resistance in mid-1933. At first the Catholic Church refused to agree that non-Aryans were not German. At first the Protestant church elected someone abhorrent to the Nazis--a man who ran a home for the mentally ill. Hitler thought these should be exterminated for the purity of the race.

But by July a Nazi was in charge and swastika flags were raised over the Protestant churches of Germany.

Yet when Hindenberg protested the way Goring was treating the Protestant Church in Prussia, Hitler had him back off. "To the pious Christians it seemed a victory that the Holy Scriptures and writings of the reformers would remain the foundation of the Protestant faith" (648).

Hitler seemed to know just when to retreat. "As a born politician, he had recognized the decisive instant between stubborn persistance and inevitable retreat more clearly than had his co-workers" (648). Of course he would eventually have his way.

As this flood of victory was taking place, "it still seemed uncertain how far National Socialism would go in the breaking of resistance... Hitler himself was not clear how far he could go and how far he wanted to go" (638). He zig-zagged and felt his way around, back and forth, here a little, there a little.

3. Hitler had a sense that at some point revolution would have to stop and they would have to rule. Goebbels was already speaking of a "third Reich," after the Holy Roman Empire and the Bismarck Empire.

So after having had so much "socialist" rhetoric, Hitler would keep capitalism intact for the moment. So many had wanted a "second revolution," one that would be economic in nature.

Competency now seemed more important than loyalty to those who put him in control. "A businessman must not be deposed if he is a good businessman but not yet a National Socialist; and especially if the National Socialist who is put in his place understands nothing of economic affairs" (650). So much for the socialist revolution.

Hitler believed in private property for the true German. He changed the meaning of the words. Socialism for him meant that one man's property would be equal in importance and dignity to another's. What was held in common was the common good, and having some businesses was for the common good.

Most of all, he was lost if he did not make the workers workers again. Hitler rebuffed the armed bohemians in the name of competency and then he betrayed the middle class to keep the loyalty of the workers. "With all the strength of his changeable nature, Hitler led the campaign for the economic age he had so despised" (649).

"The important thing is not programs and ideas," Hitler now said, "but daily bread for seventy million people" (650).

4. Hitler was far more interested in shaping the Weltanschauung or "worldview" of the people. He wanted to shape a common mental attitude among the people, a commitment to the German ideal, the German race, and the German nation. Others could handle the details.

And of course there were the Hitler youth. He aimed to uproot the youth and tear them away from their families. "And so we shall take the children away from you and educate them to be what is necessary for the German people" (644). His opponents would eventually pass away, "and after you will come the youth which knows nothing else."

Previously on Hitler:

• How to Take Over the World
• Bands of Restless Men
• Hitler was a Loser
• Rallies with the Rabid
• Waging War against His People
• The Art of Propaganda
• His Brand Is Crisis
• Big Words for a Coward
• Prophecies of the Antichrist
• Germany's Return from Despair
• Fatherland Security
• Hitler's Philosophy
• Destroying Democracy with Democracy
• He's Horrible to Work With
• Putting on a Show
• Maneuvering Toward Power
• Narrow Misses With Hitler
• Hitler Becomes Chancellor (chap 21)
• The Reichstag Fire (chap 22)
• Step by Step Coup (chap 23)
• Manipulating Peace (chap 24)

Paul Novel 5.1: Letter from Jerusalem

Finished chapter 4 last week. I usually take previous chapters down after a few days.
_________________________
The next weeks were tense among the Christians at Antioch. The Christian Jews met and ate together with the Christian Jews, and the Gentile believers met and ate with other Gentile believers. Peter and the messengers from James did not stay long. Peter felt especially awkward. Had he done the right thing? It didn't feel right.

Paul of course met with the Gentile believers. He tried to convince Barnabas and Menaen to stop what he considered not only nonsense but a trick of Satan to divide God's people. Barnabas agreed that the situation could not continue as it was but insisted they needed to wait on word from Jerusalem. He had talked to Peter and made some suggestions. He was convinced James would agree with them.

Paul finally stopped meeting with them because he lost his temper every time. Barnabas finally told him that he was only polarizing the community against himself more and more.

Barnabas did meet with the Gentile believers outside of the evening meal. He tried to make it clear that he was only submitting to authority. Menander and the others understood, but it still hurt.

The church at Antioch would never return to the kind of innocent unity it had before the blow-up. There would be forgiveness to be sure. There would be fellowship again. But tracks of separation were set down that never completely merged together again.

And Paul pretty much determined that he would not stay in a place where the powers that be did not see what was so obvious to him about the gospel. He felt like God was using the situation to push him to his true calling. God was calling him to be an apostle to the Gentiles, just as Peter was to the Jews. He did not say anything to anyone at first. He wanted to see what word would come back from Jerusalem.

And God had used the conflict to clarify to him that these sorts of works of the Jewish Law were irrelevant to the justification both of Jew and Gentile. God had already provided the atonement for sins through the faithful death of Jesus Christ. It was trust in the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead that secured believers a right standing with God. It was allegiance to Jesus as Lord that made you a part of his kingdom. This fact put Jew and Gentile on an equal footing before God.

Word arrived back two weeks later with two men named Barsabbas and Silas. They brought a letter from James with the solution that Barnabas had proposed. Certainly the Gentile believers would need to refrain from sexual immorality. That one was obvious. Shouldn't even have been brought up--although Paul was quick to point out that Jesus had eaten with prostitutes, something that had steamed James at the time when he did not yet believe.

The other instructions had to do with how meat was prepared. The blood had to be drained--the animal could not have been strangled. And they needed to make sure that any meat that was consumed had not previously been offered to a god at one of the nearby temples.

"Wonderful!" Barnabas said. They planned a great love feast in Menaen's house for all the believers in the city, Jew and Gentile. Menaen was rather wealthy and so had a very large house. But they planned for eating outside the house if necessary. There was much rejoicing and great fellowship. The food was prepared appropriately and no meat was used to spare expense. Some Jews in the city already abstained from meat as a matter of conscience, so that they would not accidentally consume meat that had been sacrificed.

"It didn't have to be this way," Paul said to Barnabas. "Damage has been done." But at least fellowship had now been restored and the church was again at peace.

Rovelli 5: Fundamental Constants of the Universe

This is my fifth post on Carlo Rovelli's new book, Reality Is Not What It Seems. The first three posts were:

• From Democritus to Relativity to Quantum Mechanics
• Spacetime is Quantum
• Quanta of Space
• Time Does Not Exist

1. Chapters 8-11 are fairly short. Some of it covers basic material from cosmology but there are some helpful synthetic thoughts too.

Chapter 8 fills in some gaps with regard to the Big Bang. He gives high praise to Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest, for supporting the idea of a "primordial atom" even though Einstein strongly disagreed. Einstein's equations seemed to suggest that the universe was expanding, but he didn't want to believe it. In fact he added a "cosmological constant" to his equations to fix it (Λ). Lemaître turned out to be right about expansion.

Then Einstein lamented adding the cosmological constant and wanted to remove it. Again, Lemaître suggested he should leave it. Lemaître proved to be right again over Einstein. So in both cases Rovelli writes, "It doesn't fall to everyone to disprove Einstein" (204).

Then Lemaître stopped the Pope, apparently, from making the Big Bang official church belief. Again Rovelli says, "It is not given to everyone to disprove the pope" (205). This falls under the principle of not inserting God too dogmatically into your scientific theories, because theories change.

2. Rovelli favors something he calls "the Big Bounce." The idea here is that "our universe could be the collapse of a previous contracting universe passing across a quantum phase, where space and time are dissolved into probabilities" (208). This seems to me to be a form of the oscillating Big Bang theory.

I thought that the current sense of things was that there was not enough matter in the universe to pull everything back together and thus that the universe was headed for a "Big Rip" at the end of things. This is also different from the multiverse idea that other books I've read have suggested, namely, that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universe bubbles.

Meanwhile, Rovelli nicely, I think, counters Lee Smolin's sense that the universe is all there is by definition. Rovelli, much more soundly says, "The word 'universe' has assumed another meaning in cosmology: it refers to the spacetime continuum that we see directly around us, filled with galaxies and history of which we observe. There is no reason to be certain that, in this sense, this universe is the only one in existence" (208).

Take that Smolin, who says in the first chapter of Quantum Gravity, "By definition the universe is all there is" (17). Let's just say Rovelli is a much better philosopher, although I don't always agree with him.

The dissolution of spacetime into a cloud of possibilities when you have that much mass at a quantum size is an intriguing idea.

3. Chapter 9 asks if we have any experimental evidence for loop quantum gravity. A number of times he pushes back both against those who say you cannot talk about anything that you cannot now experimentally show and those who wildly speculate detached from current trajectories. To me this positioning makes perfect sense.

On the one hand, a theory should proceed to experimentation. "A theory lacking empirical confirmation is a theory that has not yet passed its exams" (212). On the other hand, he disagrees with wild hypotheses. "Many theoretical physicists are today looking for new theories by picking arbitrary hypotheses... I don't think that this way of doing science has ever produced good results" (215-16).

Rather, all the experimental evidence has been confirming the three cornerstones of modern physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model within quantum mechanics. The new findings have brought a complete absence of surprise. Hawking was disappointed.

The three big findings of this decade are 1) the confirmation of the Higgs boson, 2) the cosmic measurements of the Planck satellite, and 3) the detection of gravitational waves.

Also, the fact that CERN has not discovered supersymmetry is a blow to string theorists, which is why Sheldon on Big Bang Theory went looking for something else to study. :-)

4. Mapping of the cosmos has given us a sense of the lay of the background radiation left not too long after the so called Big Bang. The idea here is that it took some time for the universe to cool down enough for the light (photons) of creation to be released.

The remnants of this release are called "cosmic background radiation" (CBR), alleged to have happened some 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Apparently, if LQG is correct (loop quantum gravity), then there should also be a gravitational background radiation. An experiment called LISA involving three satellites around the sun, might be able to test for these.

5. Chapter 10 looks at quantum black holes. There are black holes at the centers of most galaxies and, in at least one theory, they may account for what it otherwise called dark matter.

The horizon of a black hole is the point where you might stay out. Past that, nothing can get out. Time stops at the horizon. Stephen Hawking's claim to fame was his discovery that black holes slowly evaporate. Eugenio Bianchi showed that loop quantum gravity can also demonstrate Hawking's formula for the heat of a black hole.

What LQG would show is that, since spacetime is not infinitely divisible--since it never can reach a singularity--at some point a black hole should explode in a miniature version of the Big Bang. From our perspective outside a black hole, this would take billions years, even if it is only moments inside the black hole. Since the universe is allegedly 14 billion years old, we might find some of these. Rovelli suggests that some "fast radio bursts" detected by radio telescopes could be such.

6. Chapter 11 is called the end of infinity. The common sense of the suggestion here is so obvious I've thought of it for some time now and I'm not even a scientist. Why didn't Dirac and Feynman? Quantum mechanics and relativity are plagued with infinities. Feynman the pragmatist simply substituted the experimental values for certain infinities to get his equations to work.

But LQG, because it sees space as quantized, eliminates the infinities. This seems so obvious to me that it is surprising it is not a fundamental working assumption of modern physics.

"Putting a limit to infinity is a recurrent theme in modern physics. Special relativity may be summarized as the discovery that there exists a maximum velocity for all physical systems. Quantum mechanics can be summarized as the discovery that there exists a maximum of information for each physical system. The minimum length is the Planck length L_P, the maximum velocity is the speed of light c, and the total information is determined by the Planck constant h" (232).

Now we are getting somewhere. This is what I've been thinking and looking for someone to put succinctly like this. "The existence of these minimum and maximum values for length, velocity, and action fixes a natural system of units. Instead of measuring speed in kilometers per hour... we can measure it in fractions of the speed of light.. In the same way, we can posit L_P = 1 by definition and measure length in multiples of Planck's length. And we can posit h = 1 and measure actions in multiples of Planck's constant. In this way, we have a natural system of fundamental unities from which the others follow" (233).

One more seems to complete Rovelli's set, namely, the cosmological constant (Λ) used in relativity. I have a book called Just Six Numbers that is also on my reading list. I'm hoping it will help me understand the importance of the ratio between the cosmological constant and the Planck length.

My next post should finish the book.

Sermon Starters: Hitting the Mark

Preached at the SAGE service tonight at College Wesleyan.

Text: Romans 14:19-23

I. Introduction

• Common to hear that sin is "missing the mark." Not really mentioned this way in the Bible.
• In older Greek literature, a spear might "wander" from its target.
• In the NT, there are four verses that give us pictures of sin--the one we just read in Romans 14 (whatever is not of faith), 1 John has two (sin is wrongdoing, sin is lawlessness), and James 4 has one (if you know good to do and don't do it).
• The last one is similar to Wesley's definition: "willful transgression against known law of God."
• Gave outline

II. Sermon Body
Point 1: It's more about us as archers than it is about the target.
A. Romans 14

• Background - an issue where different Christians had different convictions (so Paul's not talking about murder or adultery here)
• Two people can do the same thing and it be sin for the one but not sin for the other.
• Because sin is primarily a matter of intention ("faith")
• Be sure of your convictions (without being hyper-sensitive).
• You can deceive yourself.
• The impact on others is a key consideration.

B. Matthew 5

• It is a mistake to see this chapter as Jesus upping the standard. It is Jesus getting to the heart of the person.
• What Jesus says about killing and adultery is not about hitting a narrower target. It's about what kind of archer you are.
• So it is not about keeping oaths; it about being truthful. And the eye for an eye thing is completely out the window.

C. "Standards"

• This skewed sense of sin as missing the target even distorts our sense of what holiness is. Holiness becomes a matter of hitting a higher standard, either doing more things or not doing more things.
• We talk about the things we don't do rather than the fact that we have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Well, we might talk about the self-control part.
• Mark 7 suggests cleanness is a heart thing, not a "what you don't do" thing.

D. Good news!

• Sin is not about the performance of the rules.
• Bad news, of course, if you have the mindset of a biblical Pharisee. They started out well, right? How can I be sure to keep the Sabbath? Reminds me of some holiness thinking in the past. Can I eat out on Sunday? Can I watch TV on Sunday? Can I work if my boss tells me to?

Point 2: God's target is not a bulls-eye.
A. Mistakes are not sins.

• That is, God's standard is not faultlessness or absolute perfection.
• We should probably retire the word perfect as a translation of the NT, except maybe James 3:2, which is not talking about sins but about the fact that nobody's perfect.
• But this is not the normal way the NT talks about sins. There is only one place in the NT that talks about sins of ignorance (Hebrews 9:7), and it is probably alluding to sins they had done before coming to Christ.

B. Common misinterpretations

• Romans 3:23 is not about falling short of God's glorious standard. It is about "lacking the glory of God," as in Hebrews 2:6-10. Humanity was created for glory, but lacks it because of Adam's sin.
• Matthew 5:48 is not about perfection but about being complete in our love of others the way God is. It is the climax of the chapter. "You have heard, 'love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' I say, love your enemy too... be complete like your heavenly father is complete."
• Apart from James 3:2, the Greek word often translated "perfect" either means to be mature or to be complete/whole in some way.

C. Good News!

• It's about the quality of our relationship with God, not the quantity of our performance.
• Like in marriage. It's (hopefully) not so much about how much you spend or whether you've checked the box. It's about the quality of the relationship.
• Bad news, of course, if you're a lawyer of the bad sort. This is the lawyer Jesus of Mark 7:11 who gets out of supporting his parents by invoking "corban." 
• Reminds me of a scene from the movie, "Liar, Liar." The lawyer has to tell the truth. He beats himself up hoping to get out of the trial, goes to great extremes to make it look like he cannot proceed. But the judge asks him a simple question, "Are you able to proceed?" And he has to answer yes. 
• When it's about my intent, all my rationalizations and machinations fall away. Am I doing this with a heart for glorifying God? That's the question of sin.

Point 3: Some misses are worse than others.
A. All sin is not the same.

• This has never been true of the consequences of sin. The sins of Hitler had way worse consequences than any sin I've ever done.
• There is a sense in which it is true of our sins before we come to Christ. All sins show our need for Christ's atonement, so there is truth there.
• But the idea that "all sin is sin" is not biblical of our sins after forgiveness. For one, not all sins fully break our relationship with Christ. Hebrews 6, 10, and 12 make this clear. 1 John 5 speaks of sins to death and sins not to death.
• Certainly Paul does not treat the discipline of sin the same. The Corinthians are arrogant, divisive, and unloving, but he only kicks one man out--the one sleeping with his father's wife.

B. James 2:8-11 is often misinterpreted.

• The point is that you cannot pick and choose between core commandments like murdering, committing adultery, and stealing. If you are really good and not murdering but commit adultery all the time, you are still a law-breaker. The point is not that if you commit one kind of sin you've done them all. That's not what James is saying.

C. Good news!

• The divine love of our life is very forgiving. He won't let us accidentally fall out of relationship with him. He is eager to forgive if we forget our "anniversary" with him.
• But it's bad news if we are looking to get by on excuses or technicalities.

Point 4: Love is the target.

• Love God and love neighbor--that sums up what sin is. Sin is not loving God or not loving our neighbor as ourselves.
• These don't contradict. As Steve Deneff said this morning, "You only love God to the degree than you love people. The rest is deception."
• Some people try to justify not loving others in the name of loving God. Some people try to redefine love in order to justify themselves.
• It's all pretty straightforward though. Is there anything you do that contradicts your desire to glorify God in all you do? That would be sin. Do you ever act toward others in a way that is uncaring and that you would not want someone to act toward you? That would be sin.

III. Conclusion
Sin is ultimately about the relationship we have with God. Our spouse would not divorce us for one wrong, nor will God. But there is a point where you can break the relationship. But God is not looking for performance. He is looking at what we are aiming at.

Seminary CM8: Global Christianity

This is the eighth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series,The Pastor as Leader.
___________________
1. When we founded Wesley Seminary in 2009, one of the books students read in the second class at that time, Cultural Contexts of Ministry, was Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom. The purpose of this reading was to give students a sense of the shifting demographics of Christianity in the world. In particular, it was to give these ministers a strong sense of the shift of Christianity from what used to be called the "first world," the so called "Western" world, to what we might now call the "two-thirds" world.

Perhaps we should not assume that the background of our current situation is known to any degree among ministers in training. Beginning in the late 1400s, Europe began colonizing the rest of the world, looking for gold and other items of value that they might then sell back in Europe. The "New World" was discovered by Europe as Christopher Columbus sought to find a shorter route to the East Indies.

Some of the precious goods that were imported from Africa were slaves. The slave trade begins and black as a race is born. Before that point, you had distinct African people groups. Now, Europeans come to dub all Africans as black and, thus by contrast, dominant Europeans become "white," another new category.

2. Spain will conquer what becomes known as Latin America, from present day Mexico down to the tip of South America. The Portuguese will take what is now Brazil. The French, Spanish, British, and Dutch will fight over North America until first the British prevail. Then the French will eventually sell out. Finally the new States will push Mexico to its current boundaries.

In Sub-Saharan Africa the French, the Dutch, and the British will parcel up the land. After World War I, the British will watch over the Middle East, as they had already what is now India and Pakistan. The French, Spanish, and British will dabble in Asia, with the British taking the continent of Australia, the French being in Vietnam, and the Spanish in the Philippines.

3. In the twentieth century, these European powers, these "colonial powers" will slowly withdraw from these lands. They have left their traces in the languages that remain. All of Latin America speaks primarily Spanish or Portuguese. English is a predominant language in India and its surrounding countries. Various countries in Africa speak either French or English.

The relationship these European colonizers took to the peoples of these lands was that of master to subservient, superior to inferior. This colonization brought missionaries to these lands as well. Many of them will become Christian lands at least in name. These missionaries had little or no training. No doubt they came largely unable to distinguish the cultural aspects of their faith from its kingdom core. No doubt many if not most of them came with the same sense of superiority than the political colonizers brought with them.

So these missionaries also served to colonize these lands with Western culture, this term itself a sort of construct for the culture of Europe. They came with "benevolent" intent but probably did not, for the most part, view the indigenous peoples as equals in the sight of God. For most of them, these peoples were "poor," "unfortunate" types. Even in the United States in the days before and after the Civil War, few of those in the North actually viewed the slaves as equal individuals created in the image of God. They might "help" those poor folk but most were not looking to make them equal.

4. The language of these days found itself in a time when the industrialized world was called the "first world." Then these largely unindustrialized, colonized lands, including pretty much all of the southern hemisphere, were called the "third" world (cf. Bandung conference of 1955, p.69). The shift to refer to these lands as the "two-thirds world" shows the dawning awareness that the vast majority of the world is not Europe, North America, or Russia.

In the 1970s, my own church, The Wesleyan Church, made a move that I thought at the time was the right move to make morally. Rather than have the rest of the Wesleyan church world be subservient to North America in our general conference, why not empower them to have their own general conferences? Then all of these general conferences would come as equals to the table in a Wesleyan World Fellowship.

The first such conference to break away from North America was the Caribbean, then the Philippines. Canada began the process of breaking away this past year (2016) and Australia has been at least partially separate for five years, I believe. These last two seem to indicate that the principle is sound and in good faith. I will not try to parse the moral complexities of the sense that other general conferences should be financially self-supporting and that this should be the goal of all domains outside North America.

If the motives of The Wesleyan Church (TWC) were mostly pure in making this distinction, the situation is now much more complex in relation to a church like the United Methodists. The UM church never made the kind of separation that TWC made in the 70s. When TWC made the distinction, there seemed to be a genuine sense of empowerment and enabling.

But the situation has changed, as Jenkins' book indicates. Christianity is rising in the two-thirds world much more quickly than in North America. The "global south," as it is sometimes referred to, will eventually have more voting power in the UM church than the North American church. Already in the Episcopal fellowship, Anglicans from Africa are increasingly marginalizing American Episcopal congregations that support the ordination and appointment of practicing gay ministers.

The UM church has been facing the same struggle this decade. If I read the situation correctly, the bishops of the UM church in general seem to support the ordination of practicing gay ministers. The majority of US congregations probably favor unity over schism over this issue. A sizable minority of US ministers view this issue as a "make or break" one. That is to say, if the church in the end ordains and appoints practicing gay ministers, then they will break away from the church.

Until this most recent general conference (2016), I had assumed that a split would involve the conservatives leaving. But the rise of the two-thirds world within the UM church suggests that, if a split delays long enough, the conservatives will eventually have the majority and it would be those in favor of practicing gay ministers who would more likely be forced to leave.

An attempt to separate global Methodism administratively from the North American church, much as the Wesleyans did in the 70s, failed this past UM general conference.

5. So what insights might we gain from Jenkins' book? Let me give quotes and comments from the book that have stood out to me:

Demographics

• "In 2050, 72 percent of Christians will live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and a sizable share of the remainder will have roots in one or more of those continents" (xi).
• "Over the last century, the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably away from Europe, southward, to Africa and Latin America, and eastward, toward Asia" (1).
• "By 2050 only about one-fifth of the world's 3.2 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites" (3).
• "Far from Islam being the world's largest religion by 2020... Christianity should still have a substantial lead and will maintain its position for the foreseeable future" (6).
• "Members of a Southern-dominated church are likely to be among the poorer people on the planet" (7).
• "There is no single Southern Christianity" (8).
• "Liberal Protestantism has never represented a mainstream of Christianity, or even a majority, and as time goes on, the relative significance of that tradition will decline even further" (11).
• "Conservative theological or moral stances often accompany quite progressive or radical economic views" (19)
• Christianity in the global south often has a strongly charismatic flavor and sometimes focuses on the potential economic prosperity of believers.
• "Almost one Christian in five worldwide is neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Anglican, nor Orthodox" (76). Note--he is not including Pentecostal under Protestant.
• The number of Chinese Christians is currently 65-70 million, about 5% of the population (88).
• India has more Christians than most European nations (91).
• "By 2050, six of the world's twenty most populous nations will be on the African continent" (107)
• By 2050, eight nations could each have a hundred million Christians or more... only the United States is from what is presently considered the advanced industrial world. 
• These countries are USA (estimated to have 350 million Christians in 2050), Brazil (234 million), Philippines (162), Ethiopia (160), Congo (150), Mexico (130), Nigeria (127), Uganda (106), China (85), Russia (70), Germany (52). See p.113.
• "The number of African Christians in 2050 will be almost twice as large as the total figure for all the Christians who were alive anywhere on the planet back in 1900" (113).
• "Most of the global population growth in the coming decades will be urban" (116).
• Most of the growth in Christianity that will take place in the United States and Europe in the coming decades will be a function of global Christianity. That is to say, it will not be among "white" American Christians. 
• "Perhaps three-quarters of Arab Americans are in fact Christian" (133).

At this point I might mention that Jenkins is not asking whether or not these are truly Christians. That is to say, he is counting what we might call nominal Christians. For example, he would count a Mormon as a Christian in his statistics. Who is truly a Christian is of course a matter for God to decide (also see next post).

It may be uncomfortable for American Christians to come to grips with the approaching loss of power within the trajectory of Christendom. The election of Trump was arguably just one sign, at least in part, of one section of white America having difficulty coming to grips with a dominance slowly and inevitably slipping away (think Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin). This struggle will likely continue for the next few decades in the US until we reach some kind of racial equilibrium.

Another observation is that these shifts are not necessarily about truth. The seemingly inevitable cycle of "liberal" Christianity's demise says nothing of whether it is right or wrong on this or that point. In the same way, the coming dominance of two-thirds world Christianity only speaks of numbers and power, not of correctness. One of the observations Jenkins makes repeatedly is that many of the theologies emerging from Africa and South America are not entirely "orthodox" in the historic sense (e.g., "African Independent Churches" or AICs--66-68).

So North American Christian conservatives are happy to have the southern hemisphere support them on a number of theological struggles, but they may be uncomfortable with the progressive social stances that may also come in force. For example, "liberation theology" has had a significant foothold in Latin America, which advocates at the very least economic liberation and at times political revolution. These socialist and at times communist flavored values will be as distasteful to American conservatives as the southern position is appealing on the ordination of practicing gay ministers.

One take-away I have is that the current shift in dominance is likely to make all of us from the former hegemony uncomfortable.

6. The Situation Past and Present

• "The whole idea of 'Western Christianity' distorts the true pattern of the religion's development over time" (22).
• The church of Ethiopia today claims some 25 million members, after lengthy conflicts with Muslims and Marxists, roughly the number of all the Methodist related denominations in North America (26).
• Had the Mongul invaders, with a Christian queen, have defeated the Turks in Palestine in the 1260s, much of the Middle East might be Christian today (34).
• Christians have until recently had a significant presence in the Middle East despite Muslim dominance. Ironically, a large percentage of Palestinians have historically been Christian (as opposed to Jews). There has been a significant minority of Syrian Christians in Syria and Chaldean Christians in Iraq. Coptic Christians have been a significant presence in Egypt. 
• British and American actions in the Middle East over the last century have inadvertently resulted in forces that have brought persecution and diaspora to these groups. In Palestine, for example, American Christians have strongly supported the Israeli dominance over the Palestinians, even though far more Palestinians have been Christian.
• During the colonial era, Westerners tried to impose their own ideas of Christianity as it should be to the world. Gradually, indigenous peoples moved beyond the colonial matrix. Finally they adapt and incorporate native ways and form wholly new churches (70). This of course is what happened when Christianity came to northern Europe as well.

A central take-away from these insights is the way evangelical Christians have often blindly participated in political forces that have, unintentionally, had harmful repercussions to Christians in the Middle East. America's blind support of Israel has hurt Christianity among Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqis. The blind assumption that all Arabs or Middle Easterners are Muslim has only made things more difficult for Arab and Middle Eastern Christians, whose Christianity is far more ancient than American Christianity.

Another potentially sobering possibility is that what we consider orthodoxy may have elements of European (as opposed to the pre-Constantinian Christian) culture. A theological construct of which I am very fond--consensus Christianity--is vulnerable to the charge that the consensus of which we speak significantly involves the culture of the European Middle Ages. Are there elements that are similar to when holiness missionaries to Native Americans had them wear buns and skirts, while stopping all forms of dancing?

7. Looking to the Future
Some final quotes:

• "As Christianity becomes increasingly Southern, it cannot fail to absorb the habits and thought-worlds of the regions in which it is strongest" (140). It has always done this, and that is okay. "London's St. Paul's Cathedral almost certainly stands on the site of an ancient pagan structure" (138).
• "Hispanic theology is acutely concerned with issues of liberation, suffering, and social justice, while matters of race are also paramount" (144).
• "A black or brown Mary would be a powerfully appropriate symbol for the emerging Southern Christendom" (147).
• "The practice of healing is one of the strongest themes unifying the newer Southern churches, both mainstream and independent, and perhaps their strongest selling point for their congregations" (157).
• Many Southern churches appropriate the OT more directly and literally than the West has come to do (this was also true of frontier churches in the US in the 1800s, as we see in traditions about the Sabbath, circumcision, tithing, and verses relating to appearance).
• Churches are fundamentalist and charismatic by nature (169).
• "The greatest change from present assumptions is likely to involve the Enlightenment-derived assumption that religion should be segregated into a separate sphere of life, distinct from everyday reality" (171).
• Politics and religion tend to align in the two-thirds world. Of course this happens in the US as well.
• "Religious loyalties are at the root of many of the world's ongoing civil wars" (201).
• Catholicism is not so much waning in the southern hemisphere as changing. For example, charismatic and Pentecostal elements are on the rise.
• Immigrant churches are on the rise in the US and Europe, and two-thirds world countries are increasingly sending missionaries to Western lands. 
• By 2050, it seems likely that "whites" will make up less than half of Americans. Over half may be Hispanic, a quarter black. Asians not quite a quarter.

Jenkins is a sociologist of religion. He is not saying what should happen, only what he thinks has and is going to happen. What this means is that we who are in the church need to engage a dialog with "the other" as equal participants. This must not be a dialog of a supposedly "superior" Western Christian "schooling" the "inferior" global Christian. It should be a dialectic. Each side raises concerns and makes points. A synthesis will emerge over time. I believe this is also the most profitable way to move forward whenever any two or or more groups are in tension or conflict.

The alignment of political party with religion is something that European Christianity and indeed world Christianity has born the scars. History has emphatically shown the need to align Christianity with principles rather than political party. When Christians persecute Christians, something is wrong. Similarly, we can debate whether the strong alignment of American evangelical Christianity with the Republican party is in the end a healthy situation for American Christianity in general.

8. For the moment, he notes that Christianity is alive and well among the poor and persecuted (275), and the truly persecuted do not live in the white portions of North America.

No doubt the future will throw some wrenches in these prognostications. As G. K. Chesterton once said, future humanity listens respectfully to prophets and prognosticators, then goes on to do something different after they are nicely buried. Jenkins is convinced that the shift of Christianity to the southern hemisphere is taking place. He is less willing to commit to what that will end up looking like.

The currents of history are always alterable, especially through violence. For all we know, God could let the world destroy itself before the next election.

Next Sunday: Culture 9: The Rise of the Nones

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture
• A Culture Map

Rovelli 4: Time Does Not Exist

This is my fourth post on Carlo Rovelli's new book, Reality Is Not What It Seems. The first three posts were:

• From Democritus to Relativity to Quantum Mechanics
• Spacetime is Quantum
• Quanta of Space

1. Chapter 7 is getting closer to theology. I have always been sympathetic to the medieval view that God is outside time. God immanent goes through time with us. God transcendent sees all of time in an eternal now. This construct provides a helpful way around the "Does omniscience imply determinism" debate.

I had the thought while reading this chapter, "God is quantumly entangled with the entirety of his creation." Quantum entanglement is the sense that when two paired particles go their separate way, their states remain connected. In Quantum Gravity, Smolin suggests that this connection can apply to particles inside and outside a black hole.

So I was playfully musing of God knowing every quanta of the universe from its connectness with him at the moment of creation. It's not a suggestion or completely satisfying. After all, this musing does not clearly relate to the future. It would only suggest an exhaustive knowledge of the present and the past.

2. One of the implications of general relativity is that "every object has its own time, running at a pace determined by the local gravitational field" (178). If I am traveling close to the speed of light and you are not, I will age much slower than you will. If you live on a planet with a much greater gravitational field than earth, you will age more slowly than me back on earth. In fact, someone who spends their whole life in Tibet will be a fraction of a second older than me, living my whole life at the Dead Sea, even if we were born at the same exact moment somewhere.

"Time" does not pass at the same rate everywhere.

One thing Rovelli has already mentioned is that, in some of the fundamental quantum gravity equations (e.g., Wheeler-DeWitt), there is no time variable. How is that possible? It gets back to a principle he has stated in his chapter on quantum mechanics. Reality is relational.

Quanta of gravity do not change "in time." Time is simply a counting of the interactions of quanta of gravity. The world is not something that changes "in time," for time does not exist. There is only process after process. "There is no longer space that 'contains' the world, and no longer time 'during the course of which' events occur" (183).

I am hoping I will have a better sense of what I am saying by the end of the book. :-)

3. So an event does not take place in spacetime. Rather, spacetime is part of the event. The event is a process with an initial and final state. And there is a boundary for the event.

"If quantum space has the structure of a spin network, what structure will spacetime have?" (186). Spacetime is the history of a spin network. This history of a spin network is apparently what Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) physicists call "spinfoam."

I don't really like this word. The idea seems to be that the area of the node foams up to the beach of the line between nodes. And that beach is a spin line. I'm sure I'm massacring it.

"To compute the probability of a process, one must sum up over all the possible spinfoams within the box that have the same boundary in the process. The boundary of a spinfoam is a spin network and the matter on it" (187). This is what Feynman did to calculate the probability of a particle's trajectory.

4. So to sum up the chapter. "Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains [of gravity], and whose links describe their proximity relations" (192). What we call spacetime is the transformation of these spin networks into and apart from one another, and the history of these spin networks is called "spinfoam."

So all reality is variations on quantum fields, fields one on top of the other. Another name for these are "covariant" quantum fields. These are, in Rovelli's mind, the fundamental reality that connects spacetime with quantum fields.

More to come...

Rovelli 3: Quanta of Space

This is my third post on Carlo Rovelli's new book, Reality Is Not What It Seems. The first two posts were:

• From Democritus to Relativity to Quantum Mechanics
• Spacetime is Quantum

1. This chapter is not long but it is getting at the things I am interested in right now. I re-skimed chapter 10 of Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity to cross-reference their material. That chapter is called "Knots, Links, and Kinks." I see Smolin's coming out with a new edition.

Because I don't know the math, because they don't fully give the math, it's hard to get more than just an impression from these chapters. But I like the basic theses.

2. We already have the first key truth. Both space and time reduce to quanta. Space is not infinitesimally continuous. Time is not infinitesimally continuous. I like it.

Now here's another biggie. Gravity reduces to quanta, discrete units of gravity. The quanta of gravity are not in space. "They are themselves space" (172). "Quanta of gravity constitute space itself."

Using another picture, space reduces to discrete packets of volume, which we might call "nodes." "Volume is a property of the gravitational field, expressing 'how much gravitational field' there is" (163-64). The imaginary lines between these nodes are called "links," and a whole set of such intersecting lines is called a "graph."

Nodes, Links, and Graph (Rovelli)

3. There is an area associated with the lines between nodes, which is roughly the square of the Planck length mentioned in the previous post (8πL² times the square root of the spin times one plus the spin, with the spin coming in half integers). When we think of a larger three dimensional volume, the volume is the sum of the volumes of the nodes. Such a volume is a "spin network."

4. After writing all that, there is a danger of thinking that these nodes are space. But Rovelli and Smolin would both want to clarify that, like the electron, it is in the interaction of these gravitational quanta that space exists. Space is not in the node nor is the node space. Space is what happens when the nodes interact, if I understand correctly.

Adam and the Genome 8: 12 Theses about Genesis

I'm reading the book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, by Scot McKnight and Dennis Venema.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
1. Evolution as a Scientific Theory
2. Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books
3. Adam's Last Stand?
4. Intelligent Design?
5. Four Principles for Bible Reading

Chapter 6
1. Chapter 6 is titled, "Adam and Eve of Genesis in Their Context: Twelve Theses." You find different angles on things out there, sometimes they come at things from different angles, but they are working toward the same destination. McKnight's angle in this chapter is:

"The Bible's opening chapter is an ancient Near Eastern form of science" (111). But his point is not thereby to dismiss it. His point is to understand it in dialog with other ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) creation stories. This approach, he argues, is most respectful of the text because this is the way of reading the Genesis text that reads it for what it actually meant in context. "These [ANE] texts express the kinds of ideas 'in the air' when Genesis 1 and 2 were drafted" (113).

McKnight has a hermeneutic that says, we read biblical texts both within and as critiques of cultural context. Or as I have put it, revelation begins with where a culture is, but it doesn't stay there. God meets us where we are, but he doesn't leave us there. So we should expect the biblical creation stories both to resemble and yet to push against the other ANE creation stories.

2. What are these ANE creation stories:

• Enuma Elish -- Marduk creates humanity so that the gods can rest and stop working
• Gilgamesh -- the Babylonian flood story
• Atrahasis -- A god creates humans from clay and his own flesh and blood, so that humanity can work for the gods
• Assur story -- Sumerian story, gods give birth from the blood of gods

McKnight discusses both similarities between these stories and Genesis but, more importantly, he notes key differences. For example, God is the unopposed creator in Genesis, while none of the gods in the other creation stories are completely in control.  It is here that we get his "twelve theses" in this chapter.

I might add that he is bracketing in this chapter concerns about whether Adam and Eve are "historical" or "fictional." He is treating them as they appear in the text of Genesis without addressing these questions now. He is exploring the "literary Adam and Eve" (118).

The Twelve Theses (in my words)
1. There is one God, the creator who is outside the cosmos.

He is not part of the universe but created it. Hear Bill Arnold of Asbury fame: "Ancient religion was polytheistic, mythological, and anthropomorphic... while Genesis 1 is monotheistic, scornful of mythology, and engages in anthropomorphism only as figures of speech" (119). Also, McKnight adds, God creates through the Son of God, who is his Wisdom.

2. Adam and Eve are not the result of cosmic battle, but of God's design.

3. God orders creation into a temple.

Jon Levenson writes, "The concern of the creation theology is not creatio ex nihilo, but the establishment of a benevolent and life-sustaining order" (124). McKnight writes, "To 'rest' in that world is to enter into a temple" (126). "The earth is not designed as a scene of conflict but a scene of worship" (127).

I'm not as clear on the temple/worship theme being present myself.

4. All humans are made in God's image.

Humans "are called by God to mediate God's power and authority in the world" (129). I'm less clear about the intention of statement: "Humans are not given the responsibility to rule other humans but to rule creation" (131).

5. Humans are distinct from the rest of creation.

6. Humans are gendered for procreation and are tasked with governing and nurturing the earth.

I wouldn't want to take this statement too far: "They image God whenever each separately or whenever both together rule, subdue, or cause any element of creation to flourish in God's design for it" (133). McKnight warns about both extreme individualism (Thomas Paine) and collectivism (Mao Tse-Tung).

7. Humans are called to work the earth.

8. Humans name creatures, showing understanding of them and how they fit and function.

"To name is to know and understand by observation, and then to assign oneself a relationship to and a responsibility for that which is named" (137). Helper is used of God in the OT, he notes, BTW.

9. God gives humans the freedom to grow as well as to disobey him.

McKnight quotes Brueggemann: "In God's garden, there is mutuality and equity. In God's garden now, permeated by distrust, there is control and distortion" (141). McKnight sees this as descriptive of the consequence of sin, not prescriptive of how it should be.

10. Humans are called to undo the curse.

"All humans, male and female, remain images of God" (142). The mission remains.

11. Adam and Eve  represent both Israel and everyone.

"This text is far more about Adam and Eve as Israel than about the historical, biological, and genetic Adam and Eve" (144). It is a foreshadowing of Israel's entrance into the land in Joshua, by many accounts.

12. Adam and Eve are presented as "genealogical" Adam and Eve.

That is to say, the Bible does present Adam and Eve as the genealogical parents of all the people in the Bible.

Rovelli 2: Spacetime is Quantum

This is my second post on Carlo Rovelli's new book, Reality Is Not What It Seems. The first post was:

• From Democritus to Relativity to Quantum Mechanics

1. My book has now been baptized in coffee, but is still readable. I suppose it was inevitable.

We now hit the problem edge of physics in chapter 5. Quantum mechanics works for things that are very small. General relativity works for things that are very big. They contradict each other.

Relativity says that spacetime is curved and continuous. Quantum mechanics says that space is flat and energy is discontinuous.

This contradiction is not a problem unless you are dealing with something that is both very small and yet has tremendous mass. In other words, black holes and the Big Bang.

2. A favorite scientist of Rovelli is clearly the Russian, Matvei Bronštejn, put to death under Stalin in 1938. He apparently suggested before his death that, following Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the narrowness of location would require great ambiguity in momentum. The energy this would involve at a particular point would be so great as to create a black hole.

The bottom line, Bronštejn suggested that this thought experiment implied a limit to the divisibility of space. The minimum space is around:

This "Planck length" combines the three fundamental constants of nature. "H bar," as it is called, is fundamental to quantum mechanics. C is the speed of light from special relativity. And G is the gravitational constant from general relativity.

3. The next turn in the chapter is to John Wheeler, who coined the phrase black hole. It was not too long ago that many physicists were skeptical about their existence, but now it is overwhelmingly accepted.

Apparently, Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt come up with an equation for the "foaming" of space at the Planck level, the "Wheeler-DeWitt equation." Here I am beyond much acquaintance. What is most curious about the equation is that it does not have a time variable. How do you describe interactions on the most fundamental level of reality without a time component?

There will me more to come on this subject. I have some other sources that I may use to try to triangulate.

4. We are close to the birth of quantum loop gravity, the main contender with string theory for ultimate reality right now. In the late 80s, Abhay Ashtekar simplifies and rewrites the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Lee Smolin tells the same story from his perspective in Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

Smolin and a guy named Ted Jacobson find some solutions to this equation. The equation only has solutions when lines "loop" in space. Thus "loop quantum gravity" is born.

More to come...

A Tale of Two Schencks

One of my Dad's cousins sent me an obit for someone who passed away this week in Clinton County at the age of 80. The person's maiden name was Schenck.

That's quite curious, since my great grandfather Schenck lived in Clinton County when he died in 1930. This person was born in 1936 in Clinton County.

                My tree                                                        Their tree
1. Ken Schenck was born to
↓
2. M. Lee Schenck, who was born in 1924
in Boone County, Indiana to
↓                                                                                    This person was born in 1936
                                                                                      in Clinton County, Indiana to
3. Dorsey Schenck, who was born in 1898                          ↓
in Carroll County, Indiana to
↓                                                                                    Arthur A. Schenck, who was born in 1903
                                                                                      in Lebanon, Indiana to
4. Samuel Schenck, who was born in 1871                          ↓
in Montgomery, Indiana to
↓                                                                                     Ethan A. Schenck, who was born in 1854
                                                                                       in Boone, Indiana to
5. Henry Schenck, who was born in 1833                            ↓
in Butler, Ohio to
↓                                                                                     Daniel Schenck, who was born in 1820
                                                                                       in Butler, Ohio to
6. William S. Schenck, who was born in 1804                     ↓
in Monmouth, New Jersey to
↓                                                                                     Samuel Schenck, who was born in 1786
                                                                                       in Monmouth, New Jersey to
7. Garret Koertse Schenck, who was born in 1777               ↓
in Monmouth, New Jersey to
↓                                                                                     John Roelofse Schenck, who was born in 1766
                                                                                       in Monmouth, New Jersey to
8. Courtenius Schenck, who was born in 1751                     ↓
in Monmouth, New Jersey to
↓                                                                                     Roelof Janse Schenck, who was born in 1742
                                                                                       in Monmouth, New Jersey to
9. Garret Koertse Schenck, who was born in 1725               ↓
in Monmouth, New Jersey to
↓                                                                                     Jan Schenck, who was born in 1721
                                                                                       in Monmouth, New Jersey to
10. Kortenius Schenck, who was born in 1702                     ↓
in Monmouth, New Jersey to                                  
↓                                                                                     Roelof Schenck, who was born in 1692
                                                                                       in Flatlands, New York to
                                                                                           ↓

11. Garret Roelofse Schenck, who was born in 1671         Jan Roelofse Schenck, who was born in 1670
in Flatlands, New York to                                                  in Flatlands, New York to
↓                                                                                       ↓

Roelof Martense Schenck

Who emigrated from the Netherlands in 1650

Rovelli 1: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

1. I only discovered Carlo Rovelli this last month. If you have followed my Brownian motion through science books, you will know that I have read parts of several books that have left me feeling rather empty. In the last few years I have started and not quite finished to varying degrees Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe, Brian Greene's, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Roger Penrose's, The Road to Reality, and most recently, Lee Smolin's, Quantum Gravity. I read all but the last three chapters of Smolin's book last month, and it was he that set me on to Rovelli.

Maybe I'll go back and finish Smolin. He must decrease; Rovelli must increase.

In 2014 over spring break, I discovered The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity. It was fantastic. Since then I've been looking for the silver bullet to bring me up to speed on the edge of physics. I'm hoping to meet up with theology at the end. I did a MOOC that was wonderful, From the Big Bang to Dark Energy.

Since then (maybe even before then... I can't remember) I've had in mind a quasi-novel writing project called, "The First Day of Creation." I've been scrambling to read bits and pieces, trying to learn things I've been trying to learn since I was in high school. I've never gotten so far!! Schroedinger's equation is on the bucket list and is probably only a few hours of study away.

I can tell my mind is 50. I can remember how quick my mind used to be. It's depressing. I had coffee with a physics colleague of mine at IWU this week. He's just a little older than me but agreed that he could feel it.

BUT, I've never gotten this far. I've never understood so much. If only I'd have had someone to explain it to myself then!!!

2. I'm not done with Carlo Rovelli's Reality Is Not What It Seems. It came out this year. It is even better than The Perfect Theory. I don't think I've ever read anything so clear on these topics. Maybe it's just because I'm finally hitting a critical mass. I wanted to jot down notes on the first four chapters. They bring the reader up to speed with relativity and quantum mechanics.

It's so clear!! The rest of the book goes on to quantum gravity, the very edge of where physics is.

3.  I was annoyed with chapter 1. Maybe if I hadn't read so much I wouldn't have minded. He went back to Democritus and the ancient atomists. Epicurus, Lucretius. Yes, yes. Get on with it.

The nugget here was on Einstein and Brownian motion. In 1905 Einstein wrote three groundbreaking papers. One of them was on Brownian motion. It verified that matter was made up of atoms, whose vibrations knock a grain around on the surface of water.

4. Chapter two moved on to Newton in the 1600s and Faraday/Maxwell in the 1800s. Yes, yes. I've read most of this stuff before. Newton looks at space and time as the frameworks in which everything else moves. Rovelli at least likes that he subverts Plato and Aristotle. Well I do too. Half the Christian thinkers of the current age are still bemoaning that one.

Faraday and Maxwell come up with the idea of fields. You can act on things at a distance with electromagnetism. Maxwell's equations--on the bucket list and within striking distance.

5. Chapter 3. Finally. We get to relativity. I've given and continue to give some time to it. Sometime this fall I'm scheduled to do a Friday post on it. The post is already started.

One of Einstein's 1905 articles is the one where he announces special relativity to the world. Einstein solves a contradiction in the physics of his day. Normally, if you are on a train moving 40 miles an hour and throw a baseball forward at 30 miles per hour, it will seem to be going 70 miles an hour to me standing in a nearby field.

But it was discovered that the speed of light is 300,000,000 meters/second no matter where it is. If I shine a flashlight in the field, if you shine a flashlight on top of the train, if an ant on the baseball shines a light. No matter which one of us measures my, yours, the ants light speed, it will come out 300,000,000 meters per second.

Einstein's solution was brilliant. Spacetime appears to contract, depending on where you are standing. If you are moving close to the speed of light, you will seem to have shrunk and slowed down to me. And I will seem to have shrunk and slowed down to you.

6. But Einstein's general relativity has been called "the most beautiful of theories." He came out with it in 1915. I have a hunch David Hilbert really beat Einstein by a week, but as a gentleman he let Einstein take the credit. It is highly debated. Hilbert knew the math Einstein needed to finish the theory. Einstein had great difficulty getting his mind around it.

Hilbert said, "Any youngster on the streets of Goettingen understands geometry in four dimensions better than Einstein. And yet it was Einstein who completed the task" (92).

The main idea is that space curves around objects of great mass. Gravity is not a force. It is the curvature of space near a large object like the earth. So we are really simply moving along the curvature of space, not being pulled by the earth.

Rovelli goes on a fun tangent relating to Dante and the geometry of spheres. I kept telling myself. "He's Italian. Of course he's going to connect the story to its Italian connections." And, "man, this guy knows a lot more than physics." :-)

7. Chapter 4 is the best treatment of quantum mechanics I've ever read, and I've tried a number. Then again, I'm hitting a critical mass so it's bound to make more sense than ever.

Rovelli describes quantum mechanics in terms of three fundamentals. First, reality breaks down into quanta. Reality is granular. Energy breaks down into packets of photons. Matter breaks down into packets of fundamental particles like electrons, quarks, and neutrinos.

Again, I have been filling in gaps on the Standard Model these last five years. I read some in Richard Feynman. The confirmation of the Higgs boson has put the icing on the cake of the standard model. Now Rovelli can assume it.

By the way, Einstein's third paper in 1905 showed that, indeed, energy exists in quanta. Although Max Planck in 1900 is often said to be the father of quantum mechanics, he didn't really believe what he was seeing. Einstein again, showed quanta were real.

8. The second fundamental is that reality is indeterminate. This one has taken some time to convince me (Einstein was never convinced). I have disliked Heisenberg and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics since my teens. I have a thick book by David Bohm I don't understand but hope one day to read. Like Einstein, he rejected indeterminacy.

But Rovelli has sealed the deal for me. Electrons have no positions until an event happens. This is his third point, the one I don't fully appreciate yet but am beginning to understand. Reality is a matter of events. The way he and Smolin put it is that "reality is relational." I'm sure that's better but let me start with what helps me.

"Quantum mechanics does not describe objects; it describes processes and events that are junction points between processes" (136).

The electron is only a possibility until it bumps into something. Rovelli has a great footnote where he says that Schroedinger's equation is not about reality. It only tells you the probability of where the particle will show up once an event happens. And when that happens, it is always at a point.

9. I'm not doing the chapter justice. I have known the players forever. I touched Dirac's door in Tallahassee in 1983, about a year before he died. But this chapter really moved me forward in understanding what these guys were really doing. How has this taken so long???

Heisenberg describes the appearance of electrons at a particular point as someone walking under lamp posts in the dark in Copenhagen, appearing for an instance under one only to disappear into the dark and then to mysteriously appear under another. Brilliant!

Dirac with Asperger's puts together the math, which I've realized is basically linear algebra, a new item on the bucket list. First we calculate the possible values an aspect of a particle can have ("calculation of the spectrum of a variable"). Then we calculate the probability of each possibility ("calculation of the amplitude of transition"). All those orbits we had to learn in chemistry are the possible solutions to Schroedinger's equation.

Dirac succeeds at combining quantum mechanics with special relativity. The challenge, what Rovelli is up to, is still to combine it with general relativity. That is the rest of the book.

10. Feynman also features in this chapter, connecting another strand I have not yet connected. His path to calculating the probability of a particular path is to add up all the possible paths. "It is as if the electron, in order to go from A to B, passed through all possible trajectories" (133).

11. I want to end with this chart, which is a brilliant encapsulation of the paradigm shifts that have taken place to this point in the book:

More to come...