Reality is amazing
Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year
Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
Fees: None (Free)
Volume Numbering: 11
Issue Numbering: 3
Section: B
Theme Type: Idea
Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”
Theme Part: 28
Formal Sub-Theme: None.
Individual Publication Date: July 22, 2023
Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2023
Author(s): James Haught
Author(s) Bio: James A. Haught was the longtime editor at the Charleston Gazette and has been the editor emeritus since 2015. He also is a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine and was writer-in-residence for the United Coalition of Reason.
Word Count: 558
Image Credit: None
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*
Keywords: Buckminster Fuller, DNA, Einstein, James Haught, reality, science, scientific method, subatomic, Ted Webb.
Reality is Amazing
If you follow science, you perhaps have gotten an eerie sense that daily reality — people, houses, cars, trees, air, earth and all the rest — is just a shred amid a hugely greater array of existence.
The European Southern Observatory — a 15-nation consortium that operates telescopes in Chile — released a photo of two galaxies colliding. Here’s the stunner: It happened 7 billion years ago. It took that much time for fast-traveling light to reach Planet Earth just now. To look at the image today is looking backward in time through incredible eons.
Philosopher-engineer R. Buckminster Fuller has put it this way: “Up to the 20th century, ‘reality’ was everything humans could touch, smell, see and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.”
Here are some random examples:
Each cell of your body (except red blood cells) has about 6 feet of DNA tightly coiled into 46 chromosomes in its nucleus. Since the human body has an estimated 37 trillion cells, each person contains perhaps 30 billion miles of DNA.
When you sit perfectly “still,” you’re traveling vastly faster than a bullet — 1,000 miles per hour with Earth’s rotation (at the equator), 67,000 mph with the planet’s orbit around the sun, 486,000 mph with the solar system’s whirl around the Milky Way galaxy, and an estimated 1.3 million mph with the galaxy’s travel through the universe. (A bullet goes about 3,000 mph.)
Einstein’s theory of relativity is fully accepted today. But ask yourself: Can time really slow down and dimensions shorten as speed increases? Einstein’s famed E=MC2 equation showed that matter and energy are interchangeable. Less matter than a dime turned into energy at Hiroshima in 1945.
And nobody really knows what subatomic particles are. Sometimes they’re objects; sometimes they’re waves. They seemingly exist in several places at once. They’re “the dreams that stuff is made of,” one physicist said. Some “virtual particles” appear and vanish in pure vacuum.
Here’s a grabber: Nearly all the weight, or mass, of matter comes from protons and neutrons, which are composed of three quarks each. Yet the masses of three quarks add up to just 1 percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. New Scientist magazine says theorists think that actions of the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks together, creates 99 percent of the mass.
Atoms are as empty as the night sky. Yet these voids form solid-seeming matter, because their negative outer electrons repel each other. When emptiness is squeezed from atoms — when intense gravity compresses a collapsing star into a pulsar, a solid mass of neutrons — the substance weighs 10 million tons per thimbleful. Astounding.
To demonstrate the mysteries of existence, California Unitarian minister Ted Webb has cited statistics like these: “Your body and mine make 300 million new cells every minute.” And “the information in the DNA molecule in every cell would fill a thousand 600-page books.”
What conclusion can be drawn from all this? Here’s mine: Science shows that reality is amazing, baffling, incredible, bizarre, seemingly miraculous. I can’t imagine why anyone would need supernatural gods, devils, heavens and hells of religion — purely fictitious, as far as any honest observer can tell — when science reveals greater enigmas.
This piece is adapted from the December-January 2014-15 issue of Free Inquiry.
Bibliography
None
Footnotes
None
Citations
American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Haught J. Reality is Amazing. July 2023; 11(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing
American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Haught, J. (2023, July 22). Reality is Amazing. In-Sight Publishing. 11(3). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing.
Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): HAUGHT, J. Reality is Amazing. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 11, n. 3, 2023.
Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Haught, James. 2023. “Reality is Amazing.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 11, no. 3 (Summer). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing.
Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Haught, J “Reality is Amazing.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 11, no. 3 (July 2023). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing.
Harvard: Haught, J. (2023) ‘Reality is Amazing’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 11(3). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing>.
Harvard (Australian): Haught, J 2023, ‘Reality is Amazing’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 11, no. 3, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing>.
Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Haught, James. “Reality is Amazing.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.11, no. 3, 2023, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing.
Vancouver/ICMJE: James H. Reality is Amazing [Internet]. 2023 July; 11(3). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/reality-amazing.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, or the author(s), and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors copyright their material, as well, and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 