I Officially Blew My Own Mind This Week

Gosh, where do I begin? Sometimes I think too much. Every now and again you start thinking about something and it just balloons out of control until very fabric of your reality is challenged. This week has been such a week.

First I started thinking about the orbit of the moon. No problem there - right? The moon spins around in a circle around the Earth about once a month. Well, actually it's kind of an ellipse because of inertia. But then I removed my vantage point from Earth and started to look at the moon's motion relative to the sun. What I found astounded me and led to even bigger discoveries. (I'm not the first to realize these thing - I found plenty of Internet data to support my findings). Picture this: a bicycle wheel at night with a reflector at the tire end of the spoke. The reflector is the moon and the hub of the wheel the Earth. Say the bicycle is travelling over a large arc, like a hill. This is the Earth's orbit around the sun (also elliptical). As the hub moves through space, the reflector is sometimes nearest the ground and sometimes highest above it. It's high position corresponds to a full moon, when the sun is shining on the face toward us. The low position would be a new moon, when its face is in shadow. If you were 100 feet away from the bicycle shining a light at it from the side, you would see the reflector appear to jump in a series of arcs because as the reflector orbited around the hub, it would hit its low point and then come up the back of the wheel as it went forward through space. So the moon, relative to the sun is jumping in similar arcs, not going around in circles but bulging out in a flower petal pattern. The effect is not that dramatic because of the largeness of the Earth's orbit. But it does not move the way we always imagined it did.

Still with me? I haven't got to the good part yet.

So this got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects - Relativity. Everything in the universe is in relative motion to everything else. There is no center from which all motion is measured - at least we haven't found it. Since we are always moving (we are never really still till death) and our planet is rotating and revolving around the sun (which it's not - but I'll get to that) And the sun is moving in a spiral galaxy that itself is moving, then at any given moment, the space we are taking up is different. You can look at an "unmoving" object like a rock and say that it is never at the same place twice because in spacetime it will always have new coordinates every time you measured it, if you had anything to measure spacetime against. So every moment, the universe is created anew.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had an idea that actual entites, as he called them (the smallest bits of the stuff of reality), are alway in a state of becoming. And their becoming is also their demise as they pass on their qualities to the next actual entity. It's as if an atom does not exist through time, but passes on its qualities to a new atom with each move through spacetime.

So now the fun part. Since the sun is not just sitting still at the center of our solar system, but in actuality is also moving through space, then instead of having elliptical orbits and coming back to the same place every year (one revolution around the sun), the planets are actually following the sun in a helical motion, corkscrewing their way through spacetime. We see the sun in the same place every solstice, but it is not the same place at all, and we are many miles from where we started. Once you see the sun as being in motion, you start to get a little dizzy. Picture the solar system on its side, the planets spinning clockwise around the sun. This is the view you would have if you were to see it from Polaris, the north star. Now imagine that the sun is speeding away from you and the planets, while orbiting, are caught up in its gravity and are spiraling in a giant corkscrew through space, the moons in even tinier corkscrews.

So forget everything you thought you knew about planetary motion. It's not that what you were taught was wrong, per se, it's just that it doesn't take Relativity into account. The fabric of reality is dynamic and every moment everything changes. We have the illusion of constancy because our minds are only capable of registering images that are at least 1/24th of a second long. This is why movie frames (before digital) moved at the speed of 24 frames per second. Because that looks like reality to us. It is the illusion of motion. Who knows at what speed we would have to go to see reality as it really is instead of the illusion of motion that   we are used to seeing. Obviously we can examine a still frame from a film. Imagine a movie camera that could capture a billion frames a second. Would the still frames show us the pulses of matter moving through spacetime? Would we see the actual entites passing on their data to the next? What is the nature of reality? We think we are the same person from birth to death, but we are never the same in any two moments. Was it Zeno who said, "You can never step in the same river twice?" Life is like that. Constantly new.