It IS, of course, absurd to think that any of us really knows anything, but it seems that humans have an inborn urge to form  a systematic view of things.

So to begin, I don’t know anything either.  However, like all who play the “Cosmology Game”, I am documenting how I see the universe.  Like all the others, that means I have my own set of filters, biases, stereotypes, etc. throughwhich I view the world; not a cop out, just a fact.

As a journalist, my obligation is to tell what I see as fairly and objectively as possible.  As an amateur cosmologist  I am free to re-interpret the data in more interesting ways to form a hypothesis about “what and how things are”.

That’s the gist of the cosmology game, to make a guess at the ultimate definition of the universe, write it down and see if  it holds up over time.

Einstein’s views, first expressed about a hundred years ago now, have done pretty well.  Much of the rest of the formal  physical view of the universe (conventional wisdom of the day) has had to be continually adjusted over that last 100 years, both at a micro and a macro level.

Whether mine will remains to be seen.  Time is at least an impartial, if somewhat brutal, reducer of us all to whatever  is true and worthy of remembrance..

The  first cut at the  hypothesis game, done more or less at the end of my undergraduate student days, A  Metaphysical Cosmology (1977), was somewhat of a paraphrase of something I heard in Prof. Frank Bash’s Astronomy class at UT Austin, essentially that at some point science leaves off and religion kicks in.

My general restatement was along the lines that there IS a scientific sort of statement possible, but that some of the  mechanisms have to be assumed to be invisible, functions of pure thought. Somewhat like the mathematical idea of imaginary numbers, which still somehow obey arithmetical rules,

like dimensions beyond the familiar ones, (three plus time), a little difficult to envision, and difficult to grasp.

I’m very cleverly not trying to define exactly what that scientific statement is, just that it exists, by inference.  I’ve decided to show it as the original first draft, just as a snapshot of how I thought in those days.

The journalistic pieces at the end are for context, just some samples of my current at the time view of contemporary issues  of import.  I also DO very strongly believe in the concept of “think globally, act locally”, so to me it seems altogether logical to place such huge macro ideas side by side with discussions of today’s  political hot potatoes.

The ones I chose are still issues of some prominence almost 25 years later; I’ll be publishing them in the context of my set  of writings while at the student paper at UT, the Daily Texan, elsewhere on this site (someday).

The second try, coming from a more  mature point of view perhaps (older anyway 8), is a work in progress, entitled “A Personal Belief System”, essentially, a rationale for what and how I believe what I believe.  More or less what they used to call an apology I suppose.

The general idea here is that as a technologist, a rationalist, I have pretty clear ideas about cause and effect.  How  can I as a practicing Christian not have all kinds of inherent conflict with my scientific side?

The basic answer is that I posit certain mechanisms in the universe, such that it all DOES make sense; it’s NOT just random.  There IS a plan; it’s just inscrutable (as Paul Simon put it, “the information’s not available to the mortal man”).

An effort, a setting out, to draw a “big picture” of the universe as large as I can conceive it; at least it’s a goal.

Just that thought (I vs thou, id vs ego, etc) gets to some pretty interesting