Thursday thoughts: Cosmology

I did not choose this topic. I have about 80 or 90 of them to address for reasons I will spill at a later date. Maybe next week.

Cosmology

Well... according to Oxford:

noun

1. the science of the origin and development of the universe. Modern astronomy is dominated by the Big Bang theory, which brings together observational astronomy and particle physics.

Is the bang theory really a theory? Perhaps it is rather an observation. It seems that we are observing the expansion of the universe; that we are still banging; not quite done exploding. To surmise that the objects in the universe came from the place at the rear of their direction of travel... seems fairly obvious? Are we not still experiencing the big bang as we speak? 

Do I personally witness this motion; this travel? I'm not sure I do. I would have to rely on the testimony of the astrophysics community, along with their other conjectures.

Or do I? I know for sure that something is "true" if I consistently experience it, or if I very carefully, without error or omission, assemble logic built from guaranteed (personally experienced) truths and/or other items of assembled unerring logic, which we can collectively call dogma.

Testimony: noun

1. a formal written or spoken statement, especially one given in a court of law.

I'm defining testimony as anything I've heard which I have not personally verified through experience. In other words, the above definition but without formal/informal differentiation. Is there some other word for that which I should be using instead?

Dogma: noun

1. a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.

I'm defining dogma as any assembled truths which we can, going forward, rely upon without re-analyzing or re-proving, because we have completed all the work. In other words, our own clean database is the only authority, which is infinitely more reliable than the words of priests and politicians, who make the newspapers every day for their scandals, and whose unreliability is in fact inconvertible for their failure to agree with one another on what the clean facts are.

I'm suggesting that these Thursday articles represent a clean new database of information, unlike the internal databases which most of us carry around, full of the "dogma" which we inherited through church and parents and teachers and everyone else of influence, and of course the dreaded media, much of whom, are extremely suspect, and owned and operated by power-mongers with known agendas.

So the big bang must remain testimony, and shall not be filed as truth, but rather as useful testimony, because the sources which provide it are those possessing a very good reputation all around, and provide much other testimony or dogma which we can, and have, consistently verified in our living experience. Concepts such as gravity for instance.

So we have spilled that most dreaded word here, the one I try to never use if possible: truth. There are always ways of questioning truths, no matter how reliably; how integrally; how courageously formed, because one can always find ways to question reality.

And I propose to define truth as the unvarnished facts which exist in reality.

And reality is the bonified state of things, as applies to our living experience. Meaning this: one can question such things as time for instance. Physicists might say that time is an illusion; that spacetime is something different than what we perceive, but here is what's important to me:

The reason we need truth is to fix the problems which riddle our living experience, and hear this testimony from me: that their are solutions for everything, but don't believe that yet. We are many steps away from turning that into dogma! Now, in my living experience there is a proven consistent perception of time: a linear inertia from which there is no known escape. In order to solve problems relating to our living experience, the truths will be those "proven" to be consistent in our living experience. Thus time is exactly what we all know it as. Time is true for all intents and purposes (at least so far).

Understanding the physicist's view of spacetime is not going to help you get to work early enough to placate your boss.

In order for the most basic general cosmological testimony to be untrue, meaning the reliability of scientists' own reliable personal experience, rather than our own, there would have to be a very wide-scale conspiracy at work, one too large and too long-running to be logically plausible. So such basic cosmology as the accretion of stars and moons and planets, all the same thing really, different in size and composition, is not truth, not proven to me, but reliable enough to me as unproven testimony to be useful (ah useful. Such a useful word!) because of the earned reputation of science, because of the support of my own observations through my own senses in all applicable matters of physical science, and also because of the lack, at least so far, of importance. The origin of the cosmos is not necessarily, as yet, critical to our solving the great problems of society here on Earth, and making our lives better.

And that is what it's all about for me. Why I write, research, contemplate, discuss... in order to pursue better lives.

Now Eckart Tolle might ultimately disagree with that; the relevance of the cosmos, but we are not there yet. One step at a time!