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Muon and Dragon ISSN 1365 7887 P R O B L E M S (formerly: Problems Of Capitalism & Socialism, Problems Of Communism) New Series, Number 28 The Muon and the Green Great Dragon Part One: In a Hole In a Hole Dwelt a Nothingness? by Gwydion M Williams Why Muons were real, even when no one had believed they should exist. Or could explain why they did exist. Why any native English speaker would know that a 'green great dragon' was bad English, but would be unlikely to know why. How the question 'why' is very different for human matters and for the physical universe. How religions came in waves of ideas, and gave us ways to organise our thinking that had not existed before. How religions show their human origin, by always supposing that it was a universe made as a dwelling for humans and similar creatures Printed and Published by Problems Of Communism Committee 33 Athol Street, Belfast BT12 4GX The Muon and the Green Great Dragon Part One: In a Hole In a Hole Dwelt a Nothingness? by Gwydion M Williams Your Life In Two Worlds................................................................................................................. 2 What's God Got To Do With It?....................................................................................................... 3 Fourth-Wave Beliefs ........................................................................................................................ 7 Muons as Miracles.......................................................................................................................... 11 Dragons and Cheshire Cats ............................................................................................................ 12 Holes Within Holes?....................................................................................................................... 14 Moving From Small To Large........................................................................................................ 18 Stars and Constellations ................................................................................................................. 18 When is a Meson not a Meson?...................................................................................................... 21 Atoms – Both Identical and Different? .......................................................................................... 25 Electrons – the Next Generation..................................................................................................... 26 'I Have Twin' .................................................................................................................................. 28 Green Great Dragons and Old Hospitals........................................................................................ 30 A Universe Without 'Why?'............................................................................................................ 31 Appendix A: Humans On A Cosmic Scale .................................................................................... 31 Appendix B: The Naming of Months............................................................................................. 32 Your Life In Two Worlds break them. Whether they can be broken by a On the edge of space, a naked proton that has mere human. Whether even an entire human wandered the universe for hundreds of millions society or civilisation could remould them. of years slams into Earth's atmosphere. It hits And the importance of knowing what can be an atom that is part of our atmosphere: which changed and what can't. atom barely matters. Proton meets proton Why would a typical native English speaker with enough energy to abolish the never talk of a 'green great dragon'? Why unobservable quarks within each proton. can't they explain why this would be wrong? There is a moment of pure undefined energy, Why we talk of dragons at all, since we know similar to the very first moments after the Big they never existed? And why do phenomena Bang. Then it becomes something more like muons forced us to accept them as facts regular: a rare particle called a pion. of life, even though our original world-view The pion rapidly decays into something said that they should not exist? stranger but less unstable; a muon, along with As a human reading this philosophical a neutrino. The neutrino is likely to pass essay, you personally interact with the wider undisturbed through the entire solid Earth and world at two levels. One social: the vastly out into interstellar space, never again complex material and social world that encountering normal matter. The muon will humans have built for themselves, and which pass through the atmosphere; pass through humans collectively can rebuild or revise. you if you happen to be in the way. Mostly it Another that is much more alien and will perish deep underground: not because it surprising: the physical world which human hits anything but because it is unstable. It will understanding has tried to formalise as end its brief existence by becoming an physics, geology, chemistry, biology etc. electron and two more neutrinos. These persist and apply to our lives, whether The existence of muons also refutes the we want to believe in them or not. common notion that we somehow create the This second world includes many more subatomic world by observing it. Muons were possibilities than are expressed in the tiny particles that should not have existed, and yet bubble of biosphere that our lives depend on. are real. People who've not been educated in science In this article, I talk about rules, and how to tend to badly misunderstand it, importing ideas Issue 28, Page 2 of 32 from the human and social world to a domain mean that large gambling wins are likely. where they do not belong. Even biologists will Here indeed the matter is stronger than in the occasionally ask about the purpose of some natural world: casinos are run by clever group of plants or animals, or some biological humans who accept the necessity for winners adaptation. Their own evolutionary science so as to lure in vast numbers of losers. Those tells them it is all down to Natural Selection, losers fund both the exceptional winners and where things that are good at self-preservation the highly profitable operation of the casino. tend to survive, with no reason or purpose They go there and lose, because they believe beyond the fact that they can. A sense of that they are among the few destined to win. purpose exists only among humans, and (In the apparently purposeless natural maybe also some of the most clever animals. world, we might be living in a universe that Inanimate objects exist just because they somehow required life to exist. Or a universe happen to exist. Plants, animals and other make by some powerful but callous living organisms appear clever at self- intelligence, willing to create a universe full of preservation, because biological systems that random suffering. I doubt both these mindlessly show this apparent cleverness viewpoints, but they remain sensible options remain in existence for us to observe. that might turn out to be true.) Evolution in the strict sense is an Below the level of the entire universe and exceptional and lucky outcome of Natural its cosmological mysteries, we can be Selection. The normal product of Natural confident about the truths that science has Selection is change without notably progress, learned since it took off in the 17th century. Organisms slowly becoming better at living the Facts of science remain facts, regardless of type of life they already live. Getting a tighter human opinions. They were facts before grip on their 'ecological niche', in the language humans emerged as the lucky little exception of biology. It would be better to speak of in an otherwise purposeless natural world. Biological History, with 'evolution' in the sense Nature rambles and the moon don't care. of progressive development recognised as a Confusion between the natural world and very small part of it. the human world can also lead to something The particular outbreak of Evolution that led much more serious. Far too many people to humans is a remarkable story. We are think that it is scientific or objective for people naturally more inclined to talk about it, just as to treat each other as if they were objects to an individual would tell their own story if they'd be used. This error gets made by scientists participated in World War Two, or in 1960s and those well educated in science. It is the radicalism, or some other set of events much inverse error to the error of seeing Natural larger than them and largely independent of Selection etc. as purposeful. I'll explain in a them. This is fine so long as we map our future article why such thinking is deeply personal experiences onto wider events. But mistaken. we must also remember that our own story is just one of many. What's God Got To Do With It? World War Two and 1960s radicalism were Two levels for living in the world. Some obviously driven by rival patterns of human people would add a third level, a 'spiritual' or culture and intention. Biological History shows metaphysical level which all else depends on. every sign of being purposeless: something Yet wherever such notions led to claims or that only accidentally let us emerge. The opinions that have been testable, religions same is true of the vastly older history of the have turned out to be wildly wrong. solar system, and the entire universe before Theologians sometimes boast that they had that. There are also
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