Comfortable Universe: The Song of Everything (Part 1)

 

INTRODUCTION: 

Here begins a long story. This is the first in a series of posts that might stretch on for years.

Presented in the pages under this title you will find my always-evolving best current working version of our collective Origin Story—how we came to be, the context in which we find ourselves, what it means, and what holds it all together. But it doesn’t stop there. It is a complete story, making a projection of how humans and life might evolve far into the future—we’re talking about trillions of years here, at least. Our sun won’t be around. Our universe won’t even be around by then. But we will—a ‘collective we’ in the form of living structures that … wait … no spoilers here!

Always this Song of Everything strives to be a balanced mix of three elements of a dynamic trinity of our ‘way of understanding’ the world:

1.) Science: the scientist’s gleaned knowledge—repeatable, as objective as possible, meaning that it is supposed to be independent of the biases of any individual,

2.) Sense: the intuitive stories our physical senses tell us, generally filtered through our life experience and cultural ‘common sense.’ This is the kind of story that an average person who could be your neighbor might tell, and

3.) Spirit: a far-reaching vision …

Wait ... What?

Be patient. Let me double-down on this and explain.

In modern parlance, it’s called a hypothesis, which distinguishes it from the mysticism associated with, say, the visions that are thickly strewn throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible and most other religious faiths going back to Shamanic traditions.

In today’s world, a good ‘vision’ uses Imagination and Creativity in conjunction with the best known ‘facts’ about a particular matter to build a structure (a mental model) that describes some extension of the facts that is not yet known or recognized. Einstein could be said to have had such vision—viewing the world in a new way that led to his theories of Relativity—Special Relativity in 1905, then General Relativity ten years later.

In ancient times such people were deemed ‘Prophets;’ and the ones that got it right (or the ones that had good PR—Public Relations) are the ones that are remembered.

The old way of talking about this process of developing hypotheses, which are truly nothing but ‘visions,’ has value.

The stories/theories/hypotheses – the ‘Songs’ that I offer in this series of posts present ideas beyond the limits of current knowledge, both on the smallest and largest spatial scales and on the distant past and distant future time scales. It’s really an attempt to cover Everything.

That is the Spirit part of this ‘trinity,’ and it is, of course personal to the teller. That’s the part that that makes any story robust and complete—the telling, with a speaker and an audience—the part that gives life to words and information—puts it on a living substrate!

Think of a closed book sitting on a dusty shelf high in the stacks of some forgotten library. What does that book say? Nothing … until somebody takes it off the shelf, dusts it off, and reads it. Suddenly, an inert collection of atoms organized in the form of symbols becomes a ‘vision,’ simply because of a choice to ‘observe’ the atoms made by a person who has had some training in the interpretation of those symbols. Sounds a lot like magic. Or quantum mechanics.

Taking the magic and turning it inside out: that ‘training in the interpretation of those symbols’ exists in another library—the observer’s mind—and in this story I aim to use the term ‘mind’ in the broadest sense. Every mind is, itself, like that dusty library full of stacks and stacks of closed books.

Open your books, people! Share them! As the prophet Mohammed was told (three times) by the Archangel Gabriel in his seminal vision in the cave of Hira in 610AD:

“Iqra”

“Read!” “Recite!” “Proclaim!”

The Malian scholar, writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991) tells us:

“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns, an entire library disappears, without the need for the flames to destroy the paper.”

Amadou Hampâté Bâ, staunch advocate of the oral tradition, member of UNESCO’s executive Council, 1962-1970.

If we keep our stories to ourselves—if we never tell them—what value can they possibly have?

Song 1:

Let it begin with a trilogy of notable quotes.

1.) Science: Physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll coined the term Poetic Naturalism about fifteen years ago. It was a brilliant creation. It invites all of us—the average Jane, John, or Jo—to participate in the big-picture dialogue about the meaning of existence:

“I like to talk about a particular approach to Naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world. ‘Ways of talking’ shouldn't be underestimated; they can otherwise be labeled ‘theories’ or ‘models’ or ‘vocabularies’ or ‘stories,’ and if a particular way of talking turns out to be sufficiently accurate and useful, the elements in its corresponding vocabulary deserve to be called real.”

Yet, it seems to me that Sean maintains a radically biased perception of the natural world. He confidently points to the ‘unbroken patterns’ in nature that have allowed physicists to make astounding progress over the last 400 years or so, particularly in the last century; and he seems to globalize that view, as if it could (even should?) apply to Everything.

Fine. That’s his story, and he’s certainly entitled to it.

2.) Sense: Long before Sean Carroll, in 1887, Professor Thomas H. Huxley (grandfather of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley) chose to offer a much more “Big-Picture” story that I find exquisitely ‘accurate and useful’:

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, …”

Think of the space scales of things we know about. There’s a biggest (the whole observable universe) and there is a smallest (individual particles such as the electron, the quark, and the photon). The range of scales between them covers everything we can talk about—Huxley’s Islet. Yet beyond those limits, in both directions, the scales are illimitable, inexhaustible, and utterly inexplicable. That’s Huxley’s great mysterious ocean—roiling, chaotic, feral.

3.) Spirit: Here’s where Martial Artist, poet and actor Bruce Lee comes to our aid. In about 1970 he said:

“If you want to learn to swim, jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.”

He also said

“Be the water, my friend”

and this adds profound depth to his story. It is not enough to leave the comfortable Islet and jump into the water. To truly experience the full truth of the unknown, we must strive to become it.

One may begin with pure mysticism, seeking some sort of paranormal experience. Poetic Naturalism permits this, and I believe it is vital. But it is also essential to regain the focus on Naturalism at the end of the day.

This is the art of returning to the realm of the “accurate and useful” (i.e., to Huxley’s dry land) carrying the newly gleaned understanding with you—this is the art that I have been striving to master for 77 years. This is the product that I hope to offer in this series of posts.

Song 2:

To that end: here is a prime example of, or elaboration on, the idea of ‘Learning to Swim the illimitable ocean of inexplicability.’

You will hear authors, when asked where their novel plots come from, explain that the stories sometimes seem to “write themselves.” The flow almost feels organic, as if emerging from some external source. This, in my view, is a completely subjective claim—it’s not that the ideas are coming from some greater ‘cosmic consciousness’ or something metaphysical. It’s more likely that our brain’s amazingly sophisticated mental “Chat GPT” is just working on auto-pilot—roughly working the way Large Language Models work but drawing not just on simple prompts and applying the most likely next words, but by sub-consciously adapting experiences and ideas stored in our memories to the current story being told. I’ve had that reaction to my own writing, and I think every one of us, whether we are writing or just recounting an anecdote orally to a friend, have this built-in ability. Not everything has to pass through the processing center we call ‘consciousness’ before it spills out into words.

(I believe this is how the language, quoted in the next section, from three ancient faith traditions came about.)

In my case, the focus has been on improving upon all the origin stories via my own world-building project—putting my own twist on things where I think there’s a ‘better way,’ trying to blend and merge them into a single coherent tale (or song).

I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. It has always been more than a ‘Mythopoeia’ such as fantasy and science fiction writers develop for their novels. I’ve always strived to keep it consistent with everything I have learned about the way the real-world functions. Yet I also strive to take the story far beyond the bounds of other stories, building projections far into the future and reflecting the deep unobserved past—both time and space scales that extend beyond what we have observed. Loosely described, it is a balanced model of our real world that takes the form of another trinity:

1.) The found path: a big-picture model of the multiverse and ‘beyond,’ strongly rooted in science—both in what has been established as ‘fact,’ but also considering diverse and subtle clues based on careful observation of the assumptions and simplifications and presently unsolved problems that science has encountered, weaving the known and unknown together using big-picture “unbounded-by-any-box” thinking,

2.) The way forward: Speculating about where the path could lead using best-guess extrapolations of modern theory

3.) The path behind: Speculating about where the path came from, beyond memory and record. Here again, we invoke the basic trinity:

A.) Science: The deep roots of physics, beyond what has thus far been observed: i.) Quantum Mechanics, ii.) General Relativity, and iii.) The unappreciated or underappreciated importance of the unknown and the unknowable. Neither quantum mechanics nor general relativity are described by equations that can be solved, except for highly simplified situations. Most importantly, science still provides no consensus on how quantum fields translate into the picture of the world that our senses detect …

B.) Sense—the deep roots of chemistry and biology, which contains its own trilogy: i.) The origin of the natural elements, ii.) The origin of interaction of life and its ongoing interactions with the inorganic environment, iii) The myriad things that we, as a species, know and feel in our heart of hearts, as coded in the DNA of every cell in our being.

C.) Spirit: The deep roots of thought. This includes its own trilogy: i.) The Science of thought: Philosophy and logic as practiced from antiquity right up to the present. ii.) The Senses that interrogate the abstract realm—mathematics! iii.) Spirit inspired thought: Traditional models of our world that very often contain deep insights into reality, yet come to us couched in supernatural language. A large part of this rich resource is found in our religious traditions.

All three of these trinities of foundational paths are going to get plenty of attention here. But, for reasons that will quickly become clear, we’ll begin at the very end: with item 3.) C.) iii.) (Spirit-Spirit-Spirit) and introduce yet another trinity: three of the most ancient texts: Hindu, Taoist, and Judeo-Christian …

Song 3:

In ancient times it was the role of religion to sort and explain the mysteries that confronted us. So many things in our daily lives seemed to be driven by supernatural forces—the rising and setting of the sun, the wind and rain, illnesses and suffering.

Science did not yet exist, with its rigorous, organized approach to understanding cause and effect. In human pre-history our tribes and communities relied instead on Sages, Shamans, and Oral Traditions. The first efforts to organize and codify the mysteries of our origin and place in the world were naturally Spiritual in their approach. Here are three of the best early efforts:

First, from the Rig Veda, 10:129, from about 1000 BCE, here is the Nāsadīya Sūkta—the Hymn of the ‘Not Non-Existent,’ more loosely translated in English as the Hymn of Creation:

“There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?

There was neither death nor immortality then; 
No distinguishing sign of night nor of day;
“The One” breathed, windless, by its own impulse;
Other than that, there was nothing.

Darkness there was at first, but it was hidden by darkness;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water;
That which, becoming, was covered by the void;
“The One,” by some force of heat, came into being;

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
The Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence “The One” has arisen?

Whether the will of God created it, or whether S/He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, perhaps it did not;
The Supreme Brahman of the world—all pervasive and all knowing—that indeed knows.
. . .
Or if not, no one knows.

A personification of Brahman, which is actually not a being, let alone a person, with the Om symbol in upper left.  That symbol is representative of the Brahman concept, which is the diverse and ancient Hindu faith’s manifestation of ‘God.’

Brahman is described as the ultimate, unchanging, all-pervasive cosmic principle—the source and essence of all existence— formless, infinite, and beyond human comprehension; and yet it is the goal of spiritual seekers to achieve unity between their individual soul (Atman) and the universal spirit or absolute truth that is Brahman.

The second quote is from the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25, by Lao Tzu, ca. 600BCE.

“Before the universe came to be,
There was something formless
yet mysteriously complete—
Silent, without substance,
Depending on nothing, unchanging
Yet ever-present, ever in motion, unfailing,
And capable of being the mother of universes.

“Its true name is not knowable.
‘The Tao’ is the name that we give it;
And we can describe it as 大(ta)
which means ‘Great,’
But it also means ‘far-reaching;’
And having gone far, it returns.
…
Thus the way of the Tao follows what is natural.” 

 

Lao Tzu riding his ox through the Han Valley Pass. 

The legend tells that he was a curator of the imperial archives for the Zhou Dynasty and a contemporary of Confucius.  Over the years of his service, he grew increasingly weary of the political corruption and declining morality of the time.

One day he resolved to leave it all behind.  He climbed on his ox (or water buffalo) and left civilization behind, heading west.  When he reached the Han-ku Pass, he met a Gatekeeper named Yin Xi, who recognized him and begged him to write down his teachings so that they would not be lost.

This, he agreed to do, and that is the origin of famous Tao-Te Ching.

Lao Tzu then continued on west and disappeared from history, never to be seen again.

Lastly, we have the quick and simple version from the Judeo-Christian Bible—the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, verses 1 and 2, from about 500 BCE:

“In the beginning … the universe was without form, and void: darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit (also translated Wind) of God was moving over the face of the waters.”

The Six Days of Creation
by Hildegard of Bingen, 1152 CE.

With their very common themes and enduring philosophical stance, these three most ancient wisdom traditions are as good a place as any to start prying open that “mysterious gateway into the streaming wonder of existence,” as it is called in the Tao Te Ching (from Chapter 1).

I have styled this gateway in three ways (of course).

First, I style it as a part of a greater “Big P Paradox” and there is a long post on this site covering that broader scope in great depth.

In the second rendering, I’ve called it the “Portal to the 0^th dimension”—a gateway that requires no mystical key or supernatural conjuring to enter. It is accessible from Everywhere and Anywhere at any Time.  Because it requires no key, it is the easiest way through.  Simply “Speak, Friend, and enter.”  Eminently comfortable!  More on this in a little while.

The Doors of Durin - the entrance to the Mines of Moria from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring.  Art by Ted Nasmith via the Tolkien Gateway.  The wizard Gandalf tried every incantation he knew, failing to open the gateway, despite the fact that the inscription emblazoned clearly on the door provided the instructions in Elvish Sindarin.  The scene shows a despondent Gandalf, having failed to recognize the simple translation of the phrase “Speak, Friend, and enter”. Moments later, the Hobbit Meriadoc Brandybuck prompted him to realize the correct translation.  The key to entry was simply to speak the word “friend” (“Mellon” in Sindarin language).

Lastly, I style it the “Great Empty Everything”—the lawless virtual realm that straddles the boundary between being and not being. Because emptiness could not possibly have any rules, there is the chance for any sort of random spark to spontaneously ignite.  Philosophers endlessly debate this.  Ultimately, it's a personal choice.  My guidance for the rigorous thinkers is that the Great Empty Everything is NOT an absolute because it cannot possibly obey such a restriction (requiring it to be pristine and perfect).  True unrestricted emptiness must naturally be free to give rise to “function” in any way that it is possible to function. Of course, this includes a way capable of engendering the actualization of the stuff all around us, and the simple proof is our existence.

Philosophers can settle on the other broad options that deny any gateway from non-being into being (which I cover in Song 8 in Part 2 ... stay tuned). They are exploring valuable territory, because an initial actualization out of emptiness is optional.  No law demands it.  However, I see great power in the idea that from any ‘Great Empty Everything’ stuff naturally forms simply because no law exists to prevent it.  And, inevitably, by trial and error, some actualizations stumble upon ways to persist (as experienced within their built-in internal reference frames).  Existence has a strange property.  It is favored over non-existence by the simplest of statistical tests—definitions really:  Existence > 0.  Non-existence = 0.

Voila! The pathway that our Song of Everything will take comes into focus.

You are cordially invited to walk with me! Let’s Go!

My own work, etched in sandstone: Wyoming, USA, 11 July 1971

Song 4:

Out of the Great Empty Everything, a seed formed, a current stirred, the raw fibers of being twisted together into the first coherent thread. Gathering, gathering, growing, growing, blending and weaving—hard at work for far longer than we know—the tiny seed has grown to a sturdy oak; the currents have merged into a mighty river; a vast and elaborate tapestry has been woven.

Here is the core of our story. The oak sheds its leaves in due season, and the unneeded branches fall away. A multitude of backwater eddies and side-currents have been left behind and fallen still, until now a mighty central current—a smooth-functioning system with built-in direction (meaning, and purpose for those who choose to embrace the flow)—carries us forward swift and sure. All the kinks and knots have been shaken out of the weave-work.

So much has been prepared for our arrival, you and me! As a result: We do not need to sweat the small stuff hidden beneath. We are free to tend to our affairs.

170 years ago, the American poet Walt Whitman, in his life-work epic poem ‘Song of Myself’ put it wonderfully:

“We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.
…

“Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
…

“Long was I hugged close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.

“Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid; nothing could overlay it.”

 

Walt Whitman, age 68, George Collins Cox photo from 1887.

Song 5:

Look up! Nine Thousand Stars we can see across the nighttime heavens using the eyes that nature gave us. The faint dust of the Milky Way hints at millions more. Three other Galaxies also show themselves to the naked eye—great giant Andromeda, twice our size, with a trillion stars, and two little cousins of our galaxy—the star-clusters called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

These days, with science’s best glasses on, we know of 100 to 400 billion stars in our home galaxy, and we can recognize at least 2 trillion, perhaps as many as 20 trillion other galaxies in the great beyond.

Looking yet deeper into the far reaches of the cosmos, putting on our microwave-sensitive glasses, we see the primordial flood of light from the great cataclysm that begat the stars and galaxies—the Cosmic Microwave Background (the CMB). Here is literally the ‘smoking gun’ that explains much about how we came to be; and it was not discovered until I was in the tenth grade (in 1964)!

The CMB is a window into deep time. When our sun gathered out of a swirl of dust and fired up its thermonuclear furnace, when our planet Earth was just settling into its orbit, the light of the CMB had already been traversing the universe for ten billion years. Its glow is now so distended and time-shifted that if a copy of me had been born out there at that cosmic frontier 85,000 years ago during the time of the earliest migration of homo sapiens out of Africa, the real me here on Earth would just now be seeing that alter-ego reaching the real me’s present age (77 as of this writing)!

Imagine that this doppelganger of me has just sat down with his friend Zaphod Beeblebrox for a relaxed lunch at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

(This is a reference to the 1980 Douglas Adams novel, where Adams describes the universe’s last moments as a hot dense ‘Big Crunch’ that is a time-reversed Big Bang. Of course, the Restaurant is protected from the final catastrophe by “Temporal relastatics” and a “Time Turbine.” A pretty nice “physics techno-babble” passage describes it all in the first paragraph of Chapter 20. Adams gets high marks here for his lucid penetration of the mysterious frontier at the boundary between existence and non-existence. Maybe he thought it was just employing paradox for its humorous effect, but that’s actually the point. It is not very hard for a humorist to unveil fresh truths that the stone-faced “experts” on a subject could/would never achieve).

But back to the story. Don’t wait up to see what I order for dessert. It won’t happen for another ten years! It’s not that the service is particularly slow. It’s something called ‘time dilation’. What is happening out there on the frontier reveals itself to us in extreme slow-motion.

And worse, what is happening to the real me here on Earth today will never be seen by that dubious alter-ego out there at the frontier. Not even close. All the news from Earth just sort of stalls out before it gets there because of the universe’s relentless expansion. It is just one of the many weird stories that science tells us about the great cosmic dance.

And that, finally, is the point I’m trying to get to here:

How does any of this cosmic dance, even the original 9000 stars that you and I can see on a clear night, affect how any of us go about our daily lives? 

Yes, a small minority of people make their living studying these far-away wonders, and their earnings trickle into the general economy. But how many pennies do we gain? No, if not for some of the great epic imaginary stories in our heads—from Olaf Stapeldon’s visionary novels First and Last Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) through Douglas Adam’s Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, to Hollywood’s CGI-infused science fiction sagas from Star Wars to Avatar—how else does such knowledge actually affect us? There is, perhaps, another rule here: The big stuff is for our “Spirit-lives” (our “muses”—our dreams and imagination) and gains its significance entirely from the unique perspective of our individual minds.

Song 6:

What, then, of the stuff in the middle—between the expanse of the cosmos and the invisible microscopic world?

How cozy! How comfortable! 

Not by accident do we find ourselves secure beneath a warm blanket of restless atmosphere, bathed by a balance of incoming sunlight and Earth’s radiation escaping in a controlled stream outward into the bitter chasm of empty space.

Beneath our feet, great forces gently stir the scalding cauldron of Earth’s fire, keeping the crust overturning. The restless ocean floor is everywhere less than 300 million years old, and averages just 64 million years old—barely 1.5% of the age of our planet.

The ocean above stirs and churns, maintaining a balance of heat between equator and poles.

This vastly under-appreciated trinity of dynamic states—solid, liquid, gas—each in constant motion, are what assure the equanimity and balance of the essential elements necessary to sustain us (the collective living ecosystem) in ways that science has barely begun to understand.

How special is our situation? All that can be said is that we have yet to find another example in all the vast expanse of the cosmos. Is this not worthy of a hymn of profoundest joy and wonderment!?!

Song 7:

We have had a quick look at the size scales and settled into our cozy center. Now let us begin the journey through time. We start by revisiting the Great Empty Everything where time was not even a thing!

I’ll begin by quoting myself from my 2023 Appalachian Trail hike memoir (I know, shameless plug):

[Referring to the Appalachian Mountain chain]: “It all began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Well, actually everything we know began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Why the Big Bang produced a blob of hot quarks and gluons, nobody knows. It could have just as easily produced a horde of pink Easter Bunnies streaming out of a rabbit hole, but it didn’t. Scientists can’t explain it.

“One proposed explanation is that the physics of our universe came from a parent universe. Alan Guth, MIT professor and cosmologist, first showed back in the 1990’s that it is possible to create a child universe ‘in a test tube.’ The baby universe would inherit the properties of its parent universe, subject to quantum mutations, but would disappear from the parent universe and be entirely separate and autonomous once formed. Such an ‘evolution of universes’ would neatly explain why our universe is so specialized and conducive to life. Yes, boys and girls, deep down in the rabbit hole, there is a Mama Easter Bunny.”

Here in our Song of Everything we are going to elaborate on the Mama and her babies in much more detail and delve far more deeply, exploring that “huge first Nothing” and where the Mama came from. Metaphorically, we will ask (adding new lines to the 1961 Barry Mann doo-wop rock and roll classic):

Who put the Bop in the Bop-she-Bop-she-Bop?
Who put the Ram in the Ramma-lamma-Ding-Dong?
Who popped the cork to the World’s Champagne, and …
Who put the Bang in its Big, Bad BANG?

To be continued in Part 2 and beyond.

25,000+ miles! Recap of a Hiking Life (so far)

Onward and upward!  Don't look back and never give up.

This is no melodramatic 'I'm getting old, and this might be the last you'll hear from me' post.  It's just a quick summary of an ordinary person with a love of walking, keeping on and keeping on, until the result seems pretty extraordinary.

It was and it wasn't.  It's been one-step-at-a-time ordinary while being punctuated with the joy and wonder of so very many extraordinary places.

Map of my Personal Continuous Footpath across America (with two disconnected bits in Viginia Beach and the Eastern Shore of MD and Delaware.)

The motivation for this post is the passing of a big milestone. As of April of 2025, I've completed my (almost) fully-GPS-recorded virtual hike around the world (the equivalent of walking around the world at the equator—25,000 miles).

Lately, I've been hiking around my current home in the Blue Ridge of Virginia, near and on the Appalachian Trail.  I've walked one section of the AT 250 times now!  I have a new goal of trying to do this 0.067-mile piece of trail (with exactly one white blaze in each direction, both on the same tree) once for every reported completion of the AT (as reported to the AT Conservancy office in Harper's Ferry).  As of this July 15, 2025, the ATC reports that there have been 25,429 officially reported completions.  Hiking that small piece of trail that many times would add up to nearly the length of the entire trail—a very do-able goal.  Maybe a little monotonous, though!  When I hike something over and over, I use the time to turn my mind inward, to some of my philosophy and cosmology/science projects, which the reader will find liberally sprinkled among the hiking posts here on this blog.

The map above shows the track of my completed 'Hiking Home' project.  In about 2010, I established the goal of connecting a continuous string of footsteps between the front doors of every one of the roughly two dozen places where I've hung my hat and received mail (places I've called home).  I reached the last front door in the Colorado Foothills in early November of 2019.  Included in this continuous footpath are connections to 27 states.

The Appalachian Trail is the 'backbone' of that track.

I hiked it both ways in 2012, documented it meticulously (with a GPS and here on this blog), and as of this writing, I'm still the nominal (only documented) holder of the Fastest Known Time doing an AT 'yo-yo' or double thru-hike.  My time was a very ordinary 307 days.  Others have done the yo-yo much faster.  Brian 'yo-yo' Doble reports on Trail Journals that he did a yo-yo in 2008 in 181 days, and Ward 'Spooky Boy' Leonard probably did a yo-yo in the early 1990s, perhaps in less time than that.  AT hall-of-famer Warren Doyle vouches for this.  Problem is that neither of these two provided any documentation, so their 'records' can't be proven.  I certainly hope that someday before I do take those last steps up to the great footpath in the sky, that somebody will legitimately beat my FKT.  It certainly is there for the taking.

But back to the bigger picture.  My 25,000-mile trek has included many other small, disconnected walks that I've done in some really exotic places.  Here, I'm going to list some of the highlights and include a few photos.  The list is the core of this post, and I'll be adding to it over the next few weeks (or longer), so stay tuned.

Seventeen special walking destinations on six continents:

• Switzerland, specifically the Bernese Oberland, including the amazing Eiger Trail and the freakishly scary trail to Bäregg Hut.  That's where the headline photo was taken.

  

  The gang enjoying a stunning sunset with the iconic Eiger in the background.

  Stunning vistas were everywhere.  One of my favorites (and also J.R.R. Tolkien's) is the Lauterbrunnen Valley, which Tolkien used as his model for Rivendell in Lord of the Rings.
  
• Easter Island.  Hiking with the moai!  Spent ten days walking halfway around the island.

  

  The 'Travelling Moai' at Tongariki.  Rano Raraku, the quarry where the moai were created, is the mountain in the background.

  
  
• Hawaii.  I lived on the Big Island for two months in 2017, hiked virtually every day.

  

  Ohia blossom with Mauna Kea in the background with its telescope domes gleaming in the sun on the summit.

  
  

  

  Remote pristine beach on the Kona Coast, requires a mile and a half walk to get there

  
  

  

  High on Mauna Kea on the trail to the summit, flanks of Mauna Loa in the background right

  
  
• North of 80ºN latitude in the North Atlantic, walking on the deck of a cruise ship, and many day-hikes on Svalbard, just a tad further south.
  
  

  
  
• Torres del Paine National Park, Chile, South America—four days of hiking much of the "W" trail including the 'Base of the Towers'.

  

  The towers of Paine.  Yep, a tough hike to get up here.  When I arrived, low clouds were completely blocking the view, but as I was leaving, a little patch of blue sky rolled in, so I hurried back to get my mug shot.

  
  
• Iceland.  Land of fire and ice, geysers, glaciers and waterfalls ... and trolls!  
  
  
  Hikes on six days all around the island.
  
  
  
• Mozambique and Tanzania, Africa, multiple day hikes—Baobab trees, giant flying fox bats, and Red Colobus Monkeys.
  
  
  

  

  For 1000 years or more, these sturdy vessels called 'Dhows' have plied the African Indian Ocean coastal waters.

  
  

  

  The ancient, once major trading center of the Arab empire, Kilwa Kisiwani.  It's a UNESCO World Heritage site with no roads, no electric power, no motor vehicles (except three motorcycles), 1150 residents remain, getting by on subsistence agriculture (little garden patches) and the occasional cultural tourist group.  My son and I wandered far from the tourist's usual routes, deep into back stretches of the town, where this fellow had his smart phone charged and wanted a selfie with the old bearded white guy.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Mid-winter walk to the Bush Pilot's memorial, an overlook outside of Yellowknife, NWT, Canada.

  

  Great Slave Lake at 10:30AM on a late December morning
  

• Moorea, French Polynesia, in the South Pacific, three or four connected day hikes in the interior highlands, plus, of course, some amazing beach walks.

  

  View north from Belvedere Overlook, which was actually the trailhead for three different day-hikes.

  
  
• Climbing half a dozen mountains in South America—Peru (climbed Huayna Picchu overlooking Machu Picchu)

  

  Looking down on Machu Picchu from the heights of Huayna Picchu

  
  , Bolivia (Pequeño Alpamayo),

  

  Pequeño Alpamayo

  and the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile (6000+ meter Cerro San Francisco) and adjacent NW Argentina (20,000+-foot Medusa).

  

  Medusa is the peak I'm pointing to, my bucket list 20,000-foot summit.

  
  

  

  Back to Machu Picchu - Huayna Picchu is the prominent spire just behind the ruins

  
  
• Greenland, both the remote east coast at Ittoqqortoormiit and several day hikes on the west coast.

  

  Ittoqqortoormiit girl.  Below is a view of the town on a sunny afternoon.

  
  
  

  

  
  

  The epic icebergs of Ilulissat, formerly known as Jakobshavn, western Greenland.

  
  
• Seychelles—hikes on four different islands in this Indian Ocean tropical island nation.  Tortoises by the hundreds on Assumption and the nearly impossible to visit World Heritage site, Aldabra.  Plus world-class beaches on La Digue.
  
  
  
  
  
• Beechy Island in the remotest part of Canada's Northwest Passage, hiking to the graves of sailors who died in the ill-fated 1845 Franklin Expedition in search of this elusive passage through the Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Also got great video of Beluga whales on this hike.

  

  Beechy Island

  This was part of an ultra-bucket-list NW Passage cruise with other day hikes in Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay, Dundas Harbour, and Resolute in Nunavut, Canada, and Herschel Island in Yukon Territory, and with multiple sightings of Polar Bears.

  

  View of Arctic Ocean from a summit outside Dundas Harbour, Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada

  
  
  

  
  
  
  
• A stroll through Sankei-En Gardens, Yokohama, Japan
• Home villages of my ancestors—Kritzkow and Walkendorf in Mecklenburg, Germany (former East Germany)

  

  Church at Kritzkow, Mecklenburg, Germany, built about 1300, where my great-great-great grandfather was sexton and school master.  Taken on 12 October 1992, exactly 500 years after Columbus began the westernization of the New World.

  
  
• Hiking downtown Sydney, Australia including the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, plus the Blue Mountains, including the Three Sisters from Echo Point Lookout, Katoomba.
• Grand Canyon, South Rim to the Colorado River and back—via the Bright Angel Trail (down) and Kaibab Trails (up).
  
  
  
  
  
  

There you have it.  Hope you've enjoyed!  Happy Trails!

The Delusion of a Well-Ordered, Self-Consistent Universe

We live in a world that is, objectively, vastly different from what we think it is.  Here is an example of one of our most common biases.  It's called Pareidolia—the tendency to find meaning where there is none.   Top photo taken by the author on Easter Island, 21 October 2018.  Bottom photo is from NASA, taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter, 25 July 1976.

The human mind is a marvelous thing. Thirty-seven trillion individual single-celled beings have gathered into a massive, complex colony, and assigned the task of executive management and decision making to a hodgepodge of specialized cells in a cobbled-together organ protected inside a bony case.  It's just two percent of the total colony, yet it consumes a full 20% of the available energy supply.  This organ's operating system has been undergoing tuning and refinement for hundreds of millions of years.  It works spectacularly well to gather inputs (observations) and create models regarding what these inputs mean.  Over time, the production of these models got more and more efficient—astoundingly successful at filtering the input data to produce survival strategies—and the resultant species proliferated across the planet.

The key word in the paragraph above is 'models'.

The human brain's operating system is an extremely sophisticated and efficient filter, designed to identify existential threats to the colony, and opportunities as well, with an excellent track record of success using a strategy that assures that very few true instances of threat and opportunity are missed (very few false negatives), but at the expense of a huge number of false positives.  Exhibit A is the image at the top.  If something doesn't 'make sense', the operating system does not just reject it.  It has been tuned to go to desperate, even ridiculous extremes to find any sort of match (to past experience) that it can.

We are hopelessly immersed in this operating system.  It is telling us, over and over, that the world works in a way that it can model (via mental pictures and/or narratives), at least well enough to reliably function.  Repeated successes inevitably prop up the illusion that everything has some order and self-consistency that careful evaluation and repetitive experience can take advantage of.  Even the random and unpredictable extremes can be factored into the model and reliably managed (think insurance policies). It's how we got where we are, dominating the ecosystem of this planet.

But when we move beyond survival and personal success within our community, and the community's success within the planet's ecosystems, the operating system loses its experiential edge and increasingly shows its weaknesses.  As the inputs become more abstract, the observations that can't be found to contribute to a useful model are much more likely to be simply rejected.  Such inputs are judged to be random noise until proven otherwise and must be filtered out to extract the useful signal.  Random noise is, of course, not well ordered and not self-consistent, and in almost every field of study that humans undertake from our own Genome to the make-up of the universe, that noise appears to be prodigious.

To wit, Exhibit B:

What the universe is made of according to the 'Standard Model of Cosmology':  Signal that we understand: 4.6%.  Noise (stuff we cannot explain): 95%.

A similar pie chart describing the Human Genome would show only 1-2% of our DNA as Protein Coding and conserved during reproduction (the actual Genes - the equivalent of the Atoms), 3-8% as functional "machinery" which is non-coding but is conserved during reproduction, and the rest gets biochemically transcribed, and yet contains no describable function beyond what is expected of the null hypothesis (the term science uses to say 'there is no known meaning or purpose applicable to any theory we currently have').

Science is all about using repeatable experiences to discover the order and structure of the presumed self-consistent universe.  Exhibit B shows how much success this approach has had.  Everything that is understood falls in that tiny light-blue wedge labeled 'Atoms'.  All the rest, the stuff called 'Dark' stuff, is understood to exist, but we haven't yet figured out what it actually is.  Even within that 4.6% that we understand (that we can make useful predictive models about), 93% of that is more random noise—free-floating gas in empty space.  Only 7% of it is consolidated into galaxies, stars, planets, pie charts, and you and me.  In our own solar system, the sun contains 99.86% of all the mass, while the Earth contains just 0.0000000003% of the solar system's mass.  Life, of course, is just a thin layer of 'slime' on and around the surface of our planet, and the human species makes up just 0.01% of the mass of living things.  Yet how much of our brain power is devoted to sorting out the complexities of living among our fellow humans?  How much of the machinery of scientific and technological model-building is devoted to things right here on this single planet?

We are making models of the stuff we know about; and it's patently obvious that they've been astoundingly successful.  As a key example, science has developed the 'Standard Model of Particle Physics' that explains how that 4.6% of the universe that is made up of Atoms and their constituents work and how they interact in simple, controlled situations.  That Standard Model has made extraordinarily accurate predictions, sometimes down to the tenth decimal place, that have proven to be correct, including predicting the existence of the Higgs Boson long before its 2012 'discovery'.  Yet I am now going to offer the Standard Model as my Exhibit C, in making my case for the power of Confirmation Bias and for our continuing delusion that the world is Self-Consistent.  At the heart of the formulation of the Standard Model, which is a lot of very difficult math, is a rather esoteric procedure given the name of Renormalization.  Renormalization has been key in unlocking the Standard Model's ability to make those highly accurate predictions.  But to do so, the 'raw math' had to be tweaked—adjusted to fit the observed properties of the particles it describes.  To reinforce that: The model becomes well-ordered and self-consistent only when the observed properties are forced into it manually.  Why the particles have those specific properties is not explained.  Furthermore, those properties only apply to our relatively quiescent corner of Space and Time where gravity can be effectively ignored (it's called 'Minkowski Space'), where the enormous seething activity found in the early universe has all but dissipated, and where the effects of the vacuum (the deep, enigmatic emptiness that our universe is apparently headed toward, and which seems to be related to that vast reservoir of Dark Energy) are also essentially neglected.  Bottom Line: Renormalization only works to reinforce what we experience 'locally'.  The big picture is left as a complete mystery.

Yet our real lives beyond the realm of science offer plenty of evidence that the universe is far from self-consistent, and seldom well-ordered.  A simple personal example will serve as Exhibit D:  My best friend, when I was in third grade, suddenly hauled off and sucker-punched me in the gut, as hard as he could.  He never explained it, never apologized, and yet we remained best friends.  The brain's sophisticated management system must leave science behind when there seems to be no model that applies.  How did my eight-year-old mind decide that my friend's overtly hostile act was not grounds for rejecting him as a friend?  It was a unique single event, beyond the realm of repeatable experience, and yet it required an immediate response.  Eye for an eye?  Should I punch him back?  Should I walk away?  As it happens, I did neither.  We were not verbally confronting each other or even having a significant conversation before the event, as I recall it, and what happened afterward seems to have been an effort to discount the event and restore normalcy.  Why?  In hindsight, I've learned that this friend was a serious troublemaker.  (One of his antics cost him his life at the tender age of twelve.)  But at that moment, the subtleties of body language seem to have held sway.  Those cues do not even reach the conscious portion of the operating system, yet they influence it profoundly.  Here we cross into the shady realm of 'instinct' and 'intuition' (hunches and gut feelings [literally]).  The desire for normalcy is one of our strong human biases, and it reveals a deep-seated emotional need for a well-ordered, self-consistent world, even when the evidence of experience points in a contrary direction.

Finally, it is astounding to realize that even in the domain of the purely abstract (mathematics and logic), there is no possibility of self-consistency.  One needs to go no further than the 'Liar Paradox' ("This sentence is false.") to see the problem.  The fact that such self-contradictory statements can exist in 'natural language' is a warning sign.  The discovery that they can be translated into pure math was the death sentence—they become the basis of the well-known Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

If you can't find solid ground here in the simple realm of numbers and reason, how in the world (literally) can you hope to find it anywhere else?  The Foundations of Mathematics (the link is to a Wikipedia article that I'm presenting as Exhibit E) has a long and storied history, but what was never taught to me in my entire science education and career is how the field went through a foundational crisis in the late 19th century that exposed such unresolvable paradoxes and eventually resulted in a 'Standard Model' for mathematics that doesn't pretend to be either complete, consistent, or decidable in all situations.  That Standard Model is called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF), and it limits itself to doing calculations within its specified 'Domain of Discourse'.  Its axioms are set up so as to avoid Russell's Paradox, a conundrum that notes that the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves" is a fundamental contradiction.  Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved that any sufficiently strong mathematical system (model) has to either be inconsistent or incomplete.  ZF is not immune from that.  It can't prove its own consistency.  It is a 'work-around' that declares that not all groups of things can be considered 'sets'.  Instead, there are things that are just excluded (not deemed 'well-founded') or that (in other models) get called 'proper classes'.  There is a very real parallel here to the idea of 'Renormalization' in physics.

One of the axioms in ZF that I find especially bizarre is the Axiom of Infinity, which declares that there is a 'Completed Infinity'—a bulk thing that is called 'countable'.  Now, I'm not about to refute the value of the ZF model, but neither am I alone in questioning this particular axiom.  I was just in 8th grade when I had an epiphany that I understood the nature of infinity, and it hasn't troubled me since.  And it definitely is not countable in any practical real-world sense.  One of the positions taken by some modern mathematicians is that the field is no longer necessarily relevant to or rooted in physical reality.  Hmmm.  I put myself in a different camp, which Exhibit E (the Wikipedia article linked to above) calls 'rough and ready realism'.  It quotes Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman:

"People say to me, 'Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?' No, I'm not ... If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it – that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers ... then that's the way it is. But either way there's Nature and she's going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't predecide what it is we're looking for only to find out more about it."

And with that, I rest my case.  The world is awash in a sea of uncontrollable chaos.  We often go to extremes to protect ourselves from it, both physically, and psychologically.  But the reality is that "shit happens"; and most of it is not 'Renormalizable'.

There is no 'Standard Model'.

Please note that this is not a call to reject science.  Far from it.  Science has an important job to do.  Its process—its ability to endlessly self-correct—is our best hope for a better life.  The 'religion' associated with science is, unfortunately, just as dogmatic as any other religion.  The place of science is not to discover some underlying absolute order, like a nice clean 'Theory of Everything', but to continue to systematically sort through the intrinsic noise of reality to find more hidden 'gems' of useful, standardizable, stuff.  I am confident that future scientists will have access to even more clear understanding of the human brain's biases and limitations and will thus be well-positioned to work at that exciting frontier where the well-ordered, self-consistent realm meets the realm of what I call 'Big P' Paradox.  It has always been at that interface where the 'fantastic' (the fantasies that science calls Hypotheses) becomes the future 'normal' every-day experience.