Copyright © 2000, Richard J. Hanak

The Universe On Trial takes us on an exciting adventure of rediscovery. It courageously breaks away from the conventional notion of the universe. In the same way that information demolished the idea of a flat earth, the evidence now available shatters our deep-rooted conception of the universe. There cannot be such a thing as the universe. The universe myth, the oldest myth of all, has blinded us since prehistoric times. Of course, the universe idea is so ingrained in us that it may seem impossible that there could not be a universe. However after reading this book you will completely understand this new viewpoint. You do not need a Ph.D., B.Sc., or prior knowledge of cosmology, philosophy, or science history to comprehend everything in this book. There are no formulas, no diagrams, no mathematics, no hard to follow, convoluted chains of reasoning - just easy reading.


This book gets right down to its basic theme in the very first chapter. Definitions of the universe are found, believe it or not, to be meaningless collections of words hiding a flagrant self-contradiction. That is troubling enough, but a bad definition is the least of the problems. There are so many things wrong with the universe idea that it is almost unbelievable.


A brief recounting of the universe idea and cosmology from prehistory to the present shows where we have come from and where we are heading. It seems we are heading up a blind alley. Once we have examined meaning, human mentality, beings, ideas, separation, belief, laws, theories, myths, dogmas, biases, reality, existence, things, and nothingness, we find that all problems of the universe idea disappear with unexpected ease. After that it is amazingly simple to dispel cosmic misconceptions and unravel cosmic mysteries. 

                               CONTENTS

             INTRODUCTION                    14  EXISTENCE
          1  DOUBT                           15  THINGS
          2  THE NAKED EYE                   16  NOTHING
          3  TELESCOPE TO SPECTROSCOPE       17  NO REAL UNIVERSE
          4  THE TWENTIETH CENTURY           18  OUR OWN IMAGE
          5  THE ORIGIN                      19  COLLECTIONS
          6  MANY QUESTIONS                  20  A MENTAL UNIVERSE
          7  MEANING AND HUMAN MENTALITY     21  BEGINNINGS
          8  BEINGS, IDEAS, AND SEPARATION   22  THE TROJAN HORSE
          9  BELIEF                          23  ENTROPY AND TIME
         10  LAWS AND THEORIES               24  PARADOX LOST
         11  MYTHS                           25  CHALLENGES
         12  DOGMAS AND BIASES               26  THE FUTURE
         13  REALITY


                  See excerpt and link to Chapter 1 below


Excerpt:

CHAPTER 13

REALITY

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
James Joyce, Dubliners
Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can know.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Before we can decide if the 'universe' idea represents something real or something unreal we must understand what reality means for us. The first human (or was it a lower animal?) who woke from a bad dream and observed that the frightening threat of an attack by a predator was only a dream, was the first to know the difference between the unreal and reality. Not long after, someone must have noticed the contents of dreams to be personal sights, sounds, events, and feelings that were rather unique for each dreamer. Whenever voluntary imagination first appeared, the imaginer certainly knew that it was an act of his own volition and that the images were not real.
In most of our daily life we have little problem distinguishing the real and the unreal. For example, a real, thirst-quenching glass of cold water is so much more satisfying than the same thing merely imagined. We all seem to be very sure of the difference between real and imagined things; nonetheless, from ancient to modern times some puzzling aspects about the nature of reality have caused philosophers to speculate about it.
Our present ideas about reality have been shaped by 2500 years of Western philosophy as well as by modern science. The greatest influence on our ideas of reality, however, must be the prehistoric idea that the 'universe' is a single thing. The idea that reality consists of a single element such as the 'universe' or a single substance such as water, is called monism. From prehistory to today we have been trying to formulate monistic theories of everything: a single knowable 'universe' with a singular beginning, a single ultimate substance, a single ultimate particle, a single mind with a single consciousness.
Because that singleness we seek is not obvious like the satisfaction of a drink of water, we search for a supreme reality different from the things we know from experience. All the theories about reality have invoked notions lying outside our abilities to test with our senses.
Thales of Miletus, who we met in Chapter 2, was the first person on record to question the nature of reality and to try to describe it. Not only did he think that the earth floats on water, but he thought that the earth and everything on it are some form of water. He was the first known person to cast common sense to the wind and develop his own theory of the nature of reality.
Heraclitus (c.540-c.470 B.C.) considered everything to be made of fire and held that thought was as much a part of the 'universe' as other things. He believed in an eternally unchanging logic underlying an eternally changing world. That notion, that something about ultimate reality is changeless, no matter how changeable things seem to be, is still one of our most important beliefs.
Parmenides (c.450 B.C.) believed that we live in some kind of illusion and not in reality at all. Several later philosophers would elaborate on Parmenides' idea, claiming that observations like the apparent meeting in the distance of the parallel tracks of a train show that the senses cannot be trusted to give us a true account of reality. Is a camera also trying to trick us when a photograph of parallel tracks shows them converging to a point on the horizon? No, our eyes and the camera are faithfully following the principles of optics, the paths of light rays, and the nature of perspective vision.
Some modern philosophers have invoked the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in an attempt to undermine all certainty. They claim that since we cannot even be certain about the simultaneous position and velocity of something as basic as an electron, we can be certain of nothing, can know nothing about reality, and, therefor, all is illusion. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) announced his discovery of the famous principle in 1927.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle relates to the probabilistic uncertainty in simultaneously measuring more than one property of a real particle. That principle is relevant only in measurements where the means of measurement (such as light rays) would alter the properties of the object being measured (such as an electron). Notice that by denying all certainty, those philosophers deny the certainty of the Heisenberg principle and of their own claim as well. There is no stronger contradiction than self-denial.
The notion of reality and its attendant questions arise because we have the physiological capacity to be aware of, and to differentiate between things of the mind and things external to the mind. That capacity is called consciousness. To be fully conscious we must be fully awake, and we do know when we are fully awake. We call the things that are not part of the mind 'reality.' So long as we remain free of certain kinds of psychoses, brain tumors, and brain lesions, we do not experience hallucinations and always know the difference between reality and things of the mind. We clearly recognize as unreal most of our thoughts of the unreal. We can imagine a human with thirty arms and thirty hands; but during the act of imagination we know that the thought cannot correspond to reality.
We cannot detect the unreal with our senses. The unreal can be experienced only mentally, and only after we have chosen to think about something we know to be unreal. Just as we are sure that no one can know what we are thinking if we do not wish to share the thought, we similarly know that we cannot detect the thoughts of others. We can infer from thoughts shared by others that they think as we do; but we cannot sense the thoughts of others. The most distant galaxies of the cosmos can be sensed and described, but not the unshared thoughts of the persons closest to us.
Our inability to sense the thoughts of others led us to consider thought, or the mind, as something that cannot belong to a reality where everything else can be sensed. Our early philosophers, recognizing that problem, hypothesized two worlds: the world of reality and the world of the mind or spirit. Today the seeming mind-reality dichotomy is easily resolved if we realize that the mere fact that we cannot presently sense something does not exclude it from the world of reality. Viruses, for example, were real though undetected before the invention of the electron microscope.
Modern technology allows neurologists to detect the locations in the brain that are participating during various mental activities. We can no longer rule out the possibility of detecting what someone is thinking or of identifying the physiological nature of a single thought. The mind-reality dichotomy will soon be recognized as a supernatural construction invented to explain a natural phenomenon. A single thought is a real process, even though its content may be about the unreal.
The pain of a bee sting is instantly known as a part of reality; we do not consider the pain to be merely a thought. When we are conscious we are aware of our sensory perceptions. Our senses give us information about things outside the mind; and from the mental perceptions, whether we are aware of it or not, we create a mental model of the world that exists external to the mind. In Chapter 4 we found that the correspondence of a model to reality depends on how many relevant factors from reality we include in the model.
To have a better model of our world, we augment our senses with things like telescopes, microscopes, infrared and gamma ray detectors, radar, sonar, and magnetic resonance imagers, to name but a few. Our model of reality continually becomes more inclusive and more elaborate. A frog's model of reality, however, is locked in biologically by its sensory apparatus and its process of perceiving.
A frog does not see the antennae, head, flapping wings, body, and legs of a moving bug; it only sees a spot moving across its field of vision and its tongue automatically goes in that direction to catch its meal. Presented solely with dead, unmoving bugs it can starve to death; it cannot perceive them as food. The model of reality for any living thing is a function of what it can sense and perceive. To the extent that there will always be some things or phenomena that we cannot yet sense, our model of the external world will always be incomplete.
A model is a simplified representation of a system or phenomenon. The natures of our models depend on their purposes. Perceptions from the visual and tactile sensations of chairs and doorways in a room provide a sufficient model to allow us to walk through the room without collisions. However, all of our unaided senses combined cannot provide a model of the moons of Jupiter. Galileo needed his newly constructed telescope to discover those moons.
Even sense augmenters and artificial sensors do not automatically provide us with a model that includes the things being sensed; we must construct a theory to explain what is sensed. Then, and only if that theory does not contradict any of our other relevant knowledge, we can include in our model the theoretical interpretations of the meanings of those sensor outputs. German physicists Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassmann could never have discovered nuclear fission in 1939 with their unaided senses or without a prior model of the nature of atomic structure. Their discovery was made from the examination of a photograph of tracks made by fragments of a single uranium atom in a Wilson cloud chamber. Their starting model had to include the meaning of a photograph and the photographic process, the nature of atoms, and the theory of ionization tracks in a cloud chamber. Even those prerequisites for their starting model would not have been available if they had to rely only on their unaided senses.
What we consider to be reality are our individual versions of reality. To the extent that we construct rational, consistent, noncontradictory models, our models correspond to reality; that is, all features of the models are found in reality. No matter how all inclusive a model we may try to create, it can only be a limited representation of reality because there will always be unknown, existing kinds of things. There will be equalities between your model and mine, but there will also be inequalities because we do not lead the same life at the same time and place.
Certain features of reality are identical for all observers; they are independent of individual observers and particular instances of things or phenomena. We call those features of reality objective reality. A model based on those features is an objective model of reality. The scientific method is based on the presumption that there can be an objective model of reality.
As for an ultimate model of reality - forget it. Our models will seem to get closer to reality, but there may always be that next undiscovered thing over the horizon that might even throw our latest model into a cocked hat. The present model of reality, with its 'universe' and big bang ideas, is destined for the quaint-old-ideas shelf.
Certainly our model of a bug is far superior to the frog's model, but isn't it a little unrealistic to think that our brain structures and mind functions are so unlimited that we can experience and understand all of reality? We can, of course, make satisfying, generalized statements about reality such as: reality is that which exists. If reality relates to the senses and perception, then so should existence; and indeed, that is what we will find when we now examine the nature of existence.

[End of Excerpt]
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