Let there Be light

Let there be light.

            Week three of photophoresis starts tomorrow.  I drive to Boston, sit in the comfy chair, take a deep breath and suspend my power of disbelieve for three hours.  No one knows how this procedure works, but the data are encouraging : 80% of those thus treated  markedly  reduce their  prednisone dose.   It must work: Aetna is willing to pay $4000 a treatment.  I am eager to reduce my steroid dose as I battle  skyrocketing blood sugars and dissolving bones. The process doesn’t kill or directly affect all my T cells causing havoc. This suggests the   treated T cells secrete cytokines that instruct the other rogue white cells to lay off the GVHD.

            My willingness to undergo this uncomfortable procedure requires a leap of faith, the acceptance that I will improve, undergoing a procedure that requires  two days a week and leaves my  swollen, sore arms with  livid marks where the IV is placed.

            Light therapy has me thinking of faith, and faith and light reminds of  religion.

             And let there be light. And God saw the light and saw it was good. And then Aetna contested the charges because, after all, there exists three constants in the universe:  Death, Taxes and insurance refusal notices.

            Atheists amuse me.  They are certain of one fact: There is no God. They are people of pure science and can’t believe anything that can’t be explained through logic and observation.   I suspect it’s not God they reject, they reject the notion of    a benign, bearded Santa Claus on high, lurking amidst the clouds.  They don’t believe in the kindergartener’s version of  the Deity,  an all knowing being  who records every detail of our lives,  knows who has been naughty and who nice, who makes sure the  loss of a sparrow feather doesn’t go  unnoticed , unplanned of unmourned.

            They believe in science.  As do I . Up to a point.

            What they don’t realize is that the ANSWER TO EVERYTHING as Steve Hawkins would phrase it,  is so bizarre and incomprehensible that   belief in a benign, throned  deity  would be easier to accept. Or understand.

            We scientists believe the Big Bang, the sudden appearance  of a  universe from an inconceivably dense  source of proto matter, through fluctuations  in the quantum foam.  According to the Big Bang Theory,  something ness  evolves from nothingness  and the suddenly -formed  universe then  flings itself into space -time.  Fourteen billion years later, some guy battling leukemia writes a blog.  And so it goes.

            Here’s the problem.  It couldn’t have occurred like that because of something Einstein called the cosmological   constant.  Einstein realized he had calculated the  existence of the Hand of God but was too much of  scientist to call it the God constant.    He threw in a constant he couldn’t explain but  was needed to make his equations balance.  He had faith that someday someone would understand  the spooky constant.

            Here’s the paradox.  If the   universe flies apart too quickly,  its components disperse too fast, not allowing  the galaxies to coalesce,  not permitting the  formations of  suns and subsequently of  molecules and the heavier elements. 

            If the  universe flies apart too slowly, the  hydrogen atoms will  close back in on themselves, and the universe will collapse long before   the galaxies can form. The Cosmologic constant ensures the universe will evolve as it has, resulting in our world.  

            Who calculated the cosmological constant?  Perhaps universes form every billion years or so, and finally, on the billionth  try,  blind  luck  generated the “correct” constant .

            More likely, Dark matter formed  first.  Dark matter has never been seen  directly.   Its existence is suggested by the  movement of the  galaxies as they pass each other

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-dark-tale-of-colliding-superclusters/

 and by the way  the  galaxies keep spinning .

             Most likely , dark mater formed first, exploded,  and pulled the light matter behind it. When we look into the night sky, we can see only 4% of the universe. We see only the light matter , in the way  we only see the snow  covering a  snow-draped  mountain.  We only see surfaces, not the supporting dark matter scaffold.  Without Dark matter , the universe would collapse, as  the snow layer  would  after the mountain  disappeared.

             This explanation is far more bizarre than any Bible  story. Most of the universe is hidden from us.  But there’s more. Einstein    described entanglement, the conservation of data,   that  seems to ignore the laws of physics.  When two  particles are created, they are entangled, so that if one  changes its rotation, the other particle instantly   changes its rotation as well,   regardless  of its location  in the universe.  The change is instantaneous,  outpacing the speed of light

              Data is always preserved, a force exists that  “knows” that as one particle falls into a black hole, its twin remains to record the event.   This is the basis of Hawking radiation, the universal and instantaneous conservation of data.

            In the beginning was darkness, and god said let there be light. And the light  became divided from the darkness.

Add  “Matter” to Light and Dark and we have just derived   the  “scientific” proposed creation of the universe.  The conservation of data suggests a system in which nothing is forgotten.   Sounds like a cosmic consciousness. This force is not some bearded guy but a force, nonetheless  beyond our understanding,

            The Bible’s  first letter is Bet,  in the word Bresheet, in the beginning.

            Why is Bet the first letter? Because it implies the existence of  Aleph,  the first  letter in the Hebrew Alphabet. The aleph represents the dark universe, the  space time that  existed before  light matter.    Within the Aleph universe, the cosmologic constant was devised.  By whom or how is anyone’s guess.

             Entanglement sounds bizarre, impossible, otherworldly. It can be both predicted and has been observed.  Its implications are staggering.  In another scenario, the two entangled particles are bound close together in space time , suggesting that three dimensional space is an illusion.   The actually universe is somewhere else, where all particles directly and immediately  interact,  making our perceived   universe a  mere  hologram, a projection from a  place else where  all particles are linked.  I   can more readily believe that throne Guy story  than  the possibly that our entire world is an illusion, a matrix.

            What’s the point?  The point is that accepting water into wine,  Mohammed’s moving mountains,  Moses’  red sea antics, or Entanglement, all require some article of faith in events that can’t be explained.            

            Undergoing photopohoresis requires faith. Without it, I would  accept the fact  I will never be better, my mouth will throb  until, the day I die,  and that I will take  prednisone  until  I am asked to play the body double in the re-remake of  “The Blob”   

            Even  the atheist needs faith.  And the good oncologist said, “let there be light, 1.5 joules/cell .”