Boomer News

… those who have no doubts

In researching “the end” on the Internet as it relates to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, I found there seems to be  a hot debate between scientifically oriented thinking and spiritually oriented thinking.

Which forces me to ask myself,  how well is my 50 year prediction doing now that 10 years have passed?

The prediction: “By 2050 there will be a convergence of scientific thinking and spiritual thinking”. This does not mean a merger. It means the recognition by each, that there are two separate and important ways of  approaching life. Hopefully most people can acknowledge that both ideologies are separate, necessary, and important.

Our knowledge in cosmology has put us face to face with the physical interfaces between things that are proveable and things that are not provable. The black hole event horizon is a good example.

Presently there is a heightened fascination  how it all ends. The Scientific American September issue “The End” and Chris Impey’s new book “How it Ends” give the subject full coverage.

Astronomer Martin Rees in his book “Our Final Hour” lists the doomsday issues of the 21st century as a wake up call. It seems to me that scientific thinking & spiritual thinking need to peacefully converge as separate important paths by 2050 to avoid “The End” in the 21st century.

A closed system & random decay?

Picking up from where we left off on our last blog , we said we would test our nested universe against The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. But 1st lets settle  on whether our system is closed, flat or open. Nikodem Powlawski says; If our universe lies within another universe “the prediction would be that our universe is closed.”  We look at our 3 universe nested system, that has a repeating life cycle, as closed.

We do not ask what is beyond our 3 nested universes system. That merely opens up all the philosophical questions  that we have been dealing for centuries with on our own universe. (At some point kids, with all the multi verse ideas going around these days, we are going to have to give our universe a name.)

Meanwhile, is the 2nd law of  thermodynamics happy with our 3 nested universes system? I think we have Roger Penrose in our corner, who has argued that a cyclic model maybe necessary to explain how the universe is compatible with the second law of thermodynamics, one of the most fundamental laws of physics. According to the second law, entropy (the amount of disorder), always increases. It is our assumption that the black hole life cycles described in our concept are always unique and random.

Our nested universes, now the fun begins

Okay kids, grandpa has been playing with my Nested Universes concept on and off for over 10 years and we have been writing blogs to you kids for 4 years about the concept off and on. So far, one of our ground rules is not to bother the experts in astronomy/cosmology with our questions. The project has been a learning process for me and hopefully for you kids that are interested in science.

We have had two huge hurtles; One we needed a mathematician to make the leap from a black hole that is approaching an infinite singularity to becoming a big bang and 2nd, we still need the math and model to show that our universe is jettisoned out of a black hole simultaneously with the rapid increase in the black hole spin rate, which initiates another active phase collapse … and a new universe in the black hole. 

Right from the beginning we knew we couldn’t do the math, experimenting, or modeling … so we have to wait and see what the people who work in this field are doing.  I told you kids that we would likely hit a “show stopper” to end our little project, but the fun is always in the imaginative  trip along the way. So far nothing has shown up to stop us from going forward, so now we will be looking for what might be wrong with our concept.

Our 3 nested universes system package of our ideas is essentially complete. Now we have to go back and see what is wrong  with the concept. We knew early on, when we adopted a oscillating universe concept, that it has been abandoned by many scientist.

In the next blog we will look and see how we hold up against 2nd law of Thermodynamics.

Sticks & stones will break my bones …

But names and words won’t hurt me. The US has a strong security force that keeps violence in check and the two political parties from literally throwing stones at each other. However, negative names and words seem to be the most effective way to win a hard fought political campaign.

And as Walter Cronkite use to say: “And that’s the way it is”. Well kids, if you are a problem solver, you look at the way things are, and then see if you can turn that negative into something positive. Maybe we can kill two negatives with one stone.

Newspapers are having a tough time holding onto their readers these days. What if the papers could do something that digital book readers or the Internet would have trouble doing with the news? A full newspaper page with the left column for the liberals, the right column for the conservatives, and the middle colunm for the moderates. The whole complex political picture in view on one page!

The Democratic party selects their columnist, The Republican party theirs, and the respected research polling companies select the moderate columnist. Then let them go at it on one single newspaper page. My guess is that the columnist with the largest readership of potential voters would be selected by the left and the right. I would hope that the selection of the moderate columnist would be a round robin of the most unbiased, introspective, critical thinkers available.

The biggest problem. Who will print this page to be available for all the generally biased newspapers to run? Could the respected polling companies do it?

M82 mystery object-nested universes cross talk?

Well kids, Nikodem Powlawski’s Physics Letter B has created a huge interest in our little Nested Universes project we have been fooling around with for years. I told you at the beginning, that the nested universes concept would be a fun way to learn about the cosmos, fully expecting a mathematician would come up with a “show stopper” to end our project. Instead there is now more interest in our concept.

With a lot of astronomers involved in nested universes, new possibilities will arise. We have suggested several times in the past that there ought to be electromagnetic & particle “cross talk” between our three nested universes system. Tom Muxlow, PhD from U.K. Jodrell Centre for Astrophysics asks the question whether the M82 mystery radio wave might be a black hole dragging material from one universe into yet another universe?

Our concept suggests there is a  complete space/time transition at the worm hole, (event horizon), which includes the electromagnetic spectrum. We suggested the shortest wavelength gamma ray of the larger universe is adjacent to the longest radio wave of the smaller universe at the event horizon. Could a violent short wave gamma burst in the larger universe somehow make an appearance as a long wavelength radio wave in the smaller universe?

This is what they want!

If your mad as hell and your not going to take it anymore … maybe you, and the rest of us ought to look in the mirror. The direction America is going … is strongly influenced by “we the people”.  Commercial enterprises have done their home work and know how to addict us to what they have to sell and our social leaders & politicians know how to play with our minds & ideologies so that we agree with their policies.

The polls, in this downward spinning cycle to mediocracy, keep confirming to those who carefully study the Amercian public  …”This is what they want!” 

Or is it?

Woe to us, regardless of what our special interests might be, who are lulled into following & taking the path of easy solutions.

nested Russian dolls & our nested universes

Back over a dozen years ago, as I neared retirement, I thought exploring the cosmos and human thought would be great hobbies. Lacking a mathematician’s credentials and armed with just curiosity & imagination … my 1st concept was … “our universe could very well be in a black hole.” I thought it was an original concept. But, once I began reading about cosmology, I found that Lee Smolin had written about that possibility some 3 years early.

At was soon after that that I came up with the nested universes concept, with our universe being the “central observing universe” in a nest of three universes. To explain the concept to my family, friends, and you grand kids, I pointed out that  my nested universes concept was like nested Russian Dolls.

During the past 4 years of writing blogs to 0ur grand kids I told them that we needed a mathematician to step up & make the mathematical leap from a black hole singularity to a big bang & the birth of a universe in a black hole. Well, recently Nikodem Poplawski has made the leap for us. In an article by Ker Than of National Geographic News about Nikodem’s equations he wrote: “Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.”

For anyone out there on the Internet that wants a short outline of our nested universes concept, go to www.georgedugdale.com and read the July 2, 2010 blog in the July archives.

We have already thought about, and considered  that the event horizon, (wormhole) inter connection between the 3 universes opens up a great deal of new thinking about some great cosmology questions. Newton’s famous  universe in a the bucket experiment, New thoughts on the horizon/flatness problem, and of course the source of dark energy as we point out in our July 2nd blog.. There has to be all sorts of “cross talk” between the universes with each of the 3 spheres having stars generating an electromagnetic spectrum proportional to their size.

We think that the concept of a birth and death cycle of our universe  is a unique concept. That dust & stars that reside in our parent universe are sucked into a black hole, then the debris from the universe within in the black hole returns back the smaller universe to our parent universe as dust to make new stars. 

For those who want to see a version of this life cycle see the March 2007 Scientific article, Black Hole Blow Back.

Duh & Hello!

I’m nearly 80. This is to our grand kids who probably get my drift. The news media has again made race great copy to put before the American public … and yes, the public eats it up.

Archaeologist are pretty certain our species … Homo sapiens nearly became extinct. A bay near Mosel South Africa, sheltered humans between 164,00 and 35,000 years ago at a time when Homo sapien was in danger of dying out. These people may have been the ancestors of all of us. My DNA points back to that group that moved out of Africa 50,000 years ago.

Duh … Are ancestors had black skin. We, and the media, seem to have a problem with that. (Duh definition: Duh is an  expression of  disdain for something deemed stupid or obvious.)

There are no new cultures to be found today. About 1,500 cultures have evolved since the first Africans began to settle the Earth. These cultures have developed there own different ideologies and theologies regardless of their race or ethnicity.

Hello! We are still focusing on race. (Definition: “Hello! is a quick short burst response to an  obvious and  erroneous inconsequential piece of information.”)

Instead of the media making copy for their advertisers and public, a public that loves social controversy, how about the media doing a good job of investigating and teaching us our  ideology & theology differences? Differences that we acquired from the experiences of our ancestors?

Nested Universes project summarized

Okay grand kids, here is our 4 year old Nested Universes Concept summarized in a bullet format:

• Time & space are the only natural entities that are absolutely endless.
• If space & time are endless, it opens the door to the possibility that all things are possible … including a multitude of universes.
• Our concept … is our universe is in a black hole.
• We consider only 3 universes in our nested universe concept.
• We have arbitrarily placed our universe in the middle of the three.
• There are 22 orders of magnitude between the shortest length Gamma ray and the longest length radio wave. We suggest that the size factor between the 3 universes needs to be greater the 22 orders of magnitude.
• Like Nested Russian Dolls, we arbitrarily say the larger universe & the smaller one we investigate are essentially the same as ours.
• We call the largest universe our “parent” universe.
• In our universe there are billions of black holes that are assumed to be at the center of every spiral galaxy. We assume the possibility that there will be many other universes within these black holes.
• From our universe we can observe what events are occurring in and around the super-massive black hole, that we feel contains a universe like ours. 
• Black hole event horizons are the energy interconnections between the 3 universes. (“wormholes”)
• We can speculate that the mysterious “dark energy” is caused by the cycles in the gravitational pull, which in turn is caused by changes in the black hole spin rate.
• We feel the gravitational force of a collapsed star does not continue forever. The collapsed star is not reduced to an infinitely dense point … called a singularity. 
• The final result of a collapsed star & formation of a black hole is not a singularity … but a big bang resulting in a new universe.
• We subscribe to the standard model as the history of our universe since the big bang. However, we do not believe that the universe will expand forever.
• The overwhelmingly vast majority of super massive black holes, that appear at the center of spiral galaxies, are in the dormant phase. Only a few percent are in the active “eating phase”
• The existence of our universe will come to an end during the active phase of the black hole in which we reside.
• We speculate that a tipping point will be reached where the spin rate of the black hole increases suddenly near the speed of light, sucking the accretion ring into the “equator” of the spherical event horizon with such a crushing force that the debris from our now pencil shaped universe is shot out as jets from the “north & south” poles by a magnetic field that creates an outward spinning motion …  at the same time the parent universe accretion ring material continues to get sucked into the black hole.

Yeah I know, kids this last step is hard to swallow. In conclusion;

• We believe the super massive black holes that are at the center of galaxies were created by the collapse of the initial huge bright stars that “turned on” some 388 million years after the big bang.
• Since then there has been a “black hole life cycle”, which consists of  an “eating & expelling of dust & gas phase”,  followed by a long “dormant phase”, followed by the next eating & expelling phase, which is now the repeating life cycle of super massive black holes.

Our Government … getting too big to succeed?

By now you kids should be aware that your grandfather champions the middle position  … on many subjects. One of the titles I had in mind in the 80s for my family book was; “The Pickle in the middle”. I drew a cover for the book with grandpa stradling the center of a see saw with the “ties” (management) on one side of the fulcrum and the “grunts” (worker bees) on the other side. I felt that shifting  my weight away from the side with too much control was a way to achieve a better balance.

First, I think you all realize that almost all unsustainable issues are merely subsets of over population. It’s a very comlicated world. We do need more government expertize to provide services to get ahead of the unsustainable issues curves. However we don’t need to “double dip” the amount of government people and contractors to cover all the same bases.

David Brooks has two recent columns that hint … that maybe government is getting too big to succeed. Here are excerpts from The Technocracy Boom. ” When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it …  they will see it as another progressive era. However, It is not a liberal era, and It’s not a conservative era … It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in public & private government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems”. (How much public sector/private sector double dipping the same problem is needed?)

I believe must people recognize that it’s those wonderfully imaginative smart people, (private sector …and yes public sector), who come up with the ideas and products, who are going create jobs and pull us out of this recession. … if we let them. Here are excerpts from Brook’s column “An Economy of Grinds”;

“The upshot is that we have an economy that is not creating much in the way of new innovations and new jobs … it’ just that very few Grinds are bringing new ideas to scale and hiring workers to enact their us-against-the-world schemes. For jobs to recover, the Grinds have to recover.” (The  public/private sector Technocrats should have figured that one out by now.)

Like the Wormholes of Your Mind

While I’m writing my book “Balanceology” I will sneak in a blog to you grandchildren every so often. While I’m writing the chapter on “Human Thought”, Cosmologists are into thinking about multi-verses these days, and they refer to the connection between universes as “wormholes”. In our Nested Universes concept we refer to a black hole “event horizon” as a wormhole, where the exchange of energy between universes occurs. It came to me, that there is an event horizon between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. There is an energy exchange … but no thoughtful understandable communication exchange occurs. 

We can connect with our sub-conscious mind with our “self talk”. It seems to me our subconscious mind tries to communicate back to us through our dreams … & our “gut reactions.” To me the human brain is as complex as the cosmos. Imagining that there is a quantum scaled wormhole connection between our conscious and subconscious minds … where meaningful communication can occur  … is not too far fetched. 

Our mind is;

 “Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning, on an ever spinning wheel

Like a tunnel that you follow, to a tunnel of it’s own

Like the circles that you find in the wormholes of your mind”

The Larger Struggle-Getting attention on long term issues

Sorry kids, I know I said I would stop writing blogs while I write a book called “Balanceology”, that summarizes the nearly 300 blogs I’ve written in the past 4 years to you grandchildren and family members. When news pops up that speaks to one of the subjects in our blog & book … I can’t resist not commenting.

A David Brooks article, & his TV comments on the Obama speech, on the oil spill speaks to is a segment in my book called “Projecting long term problems” in the chapter on “Survival & Adaptability”. Ever since the group of Rome in 1972 came out with the book “The Limits of Growth”, I’ve wondered how could we get the attention of the American public on long term issues?

If David Brooks had a chart to go with; ” A generation ago, the biggest multinationals produced more than half the world’s oil & gas. But now, … they produce just 10% of the world’s oil and hold only about 3 % of the world’s reserve”.  Wouldn’t a visual bar chart comparison make a more lasting impact?

Then that evening on PBS News Hour, Brooks pointed for the need of a detailed plan like Roosevelt used in 1942 when he asked the public to get out a map, put it on the floor, and follow him as he laid out the war plan … on the radio! For me, the map was the key to presenting visual information to the public.

In our blog,  we’ve been pushing for an Internet web site where the public can go and get factual “unbiased as possible” information on long term issues updated daily … (like the stock market) … on the most pressing long term issues. It would be a great tool for columnist like David Brooks to compliment his verbal presentations … in the press … and on TV.

Without a Viable Centrist

David Brooks is my favorite columnist. As a moderate  and a centrist, I applaud his effort to point out the need for a strong centrist voice. Kids, your grandpa is not a writer. I do my best to make my thoughts to you kids understandable. I have supported Mr. Brook’s efforts in recent columns on the importance of sensible compromise.

My comment on Mr. Brook’s article “The Story of an Angry Voter” was deemed as “inappropriate”. I thought my comment was satirical wit. I do share  his frustration with passive moderates.

Having been an engineer, I understand engineers are not generally considered great communicators. Here was my comment  to Mr. Brooks and you let me know what you think kids.

“You think it’s all about you Dave! All you want to do is write about sensible compromise and solve problems. What’s the matter with you Dave? It’s the people at the two extremes who have opposing ideologies that will get America on the right course again!”

One of my extreme right wing friends says this about me being a moderate; “You are not going to change or influence things for the better unless you are willing to take a position … (obviously his position). When you play the middle of the road you not only hurt yourself, you hurt others …(meaning my grandchildren).”

This will be my last blog until I finish a book for the family, which I have just started. It’s called “Balanceology”. It’s about being moderate in all things. I don’t think that being a “passionate moderate” is an oxymoron.

And I’ll leave you my final  thoughts on Boomer News until I finish the book. It is from a Billy Joel song called “Shades of Grey”.

“And the only people I fear are those who never have doubts”

A Black Hole Recycle in the Perseus Cluster

Black hole blow back

Above is a black hole cycle described in an article in the Scientific American in March of 2007  by Tucker, Tananbaum and Fabian. It is a  black hole cycle that we would like to factor into our Nested Universe concept.

In this article “The infalling material transfers its spin to the hole, causing the outer boundary to move near the speed of light. The  magnetic field of the hole funnels some of the in falling material into outward jets. A rapidly spinning hole can shoot out one unit of gas for every three it swallows.”

This sort of suggests that the black hole is inhaling and exhaling  simultanously. Unfortunately for our concept the material being exhaled and forming the jets is coming from the accretion ring and not from within the black hole.

For our recycling scheme to be feasible, we need the “fully expanded” universe within the black hole to be crushed into thin pencil shape  and forced out the “north and south poles”  into the parent universe as jets. Forced out by huge forces generated by the rapidly spinning accretion ring. A ring whose material is material falling into the equator and toward the black hole center … simultaneously with the exiting  jets. Exhaling and swallowing at the same time. 

That’s an off the wall attempt to make our recycling scheme to fit… but that is all we have for now.

What can we observe?

“I recall being stumped as a child on the question of the extent of the universe. It seemed absurd that the universe be infinite, how could it go on and on forever? It also seemed absurd that it be finite, for then there would be a wall, and one could wonder about what was beyond it.” That is a quote from Lee Smolin’s book ” The Life of the Cosmos”

At about age 12, I had the same experience. I had to conclude the cosmos are infinite. There is no other possibility. Of all the physical truths … this had be the cornerstone of all truths.  The paradox is that science is about experimental proof and an  infinite cosmos … cannot be experimental proven.

Kids, grandpa feels we don’t need to stretch the multi-verse thinking beyond our three universe system. As the central universe in this multi-verse system, we can observe and measure the impact the larger and smaller universes are having on our universe by the energy and particle exchanges through the event horizons/conduits/worm holes.

Our system is natural recycling system like the seasons we experience. When I started thinking about this concept over a decade ago I realized there are many “show stoppers”. The collapse of a star that is infinitely increasing in density and decreasing in size to form a mathematical singularity would not work for our concept. At the other end of our universes cycle cosmologist have recently concluded that our universe expands forever. This also does not work for our concept.  

Nikodem Poplawski has shown that the formation of a black hole does not have to become a singularity. That agrees with our concept. However, our suggestion that  material of our universe will return to our parent universe is a huge hurtle for our concept to overcome.

 When the accretion crushes in on the black hole during onset of the active phase,  it rotates at a huge speed. Black holes do not emit light, but the accretion ring emits very hot radiation … visible, ultraviolet, X-rays,  and Gamma rays. Our suggestion is that it forces out the remnants of our universe in the form of jets as the accretion  ring material gets sucked into the black hole starting a whole new cycle. (See www.georgedugdale.com archive June 2009 blog “Nested Universes  [pg. 6 of 6]“.

Next blog we will observe the Perseus Cluster and review the “Black hole Blow Back” article.

Our observation point from habitable zones

Let’s start our Nested Universes update from our observation place in the cosmos. In our solar system we are in a habitable zone that lies between Venus and Mars.  In our Milky Way we are also live in a narrow habitable zone with respect to our galaxies central black hole. Since we are suggesting our universe is in a black, we also suggest our universe is in a habitable zone. We are in a dormant habitable zone phase of the black hole cycle.

Our central location between the Parent universe and the black holes that are within our universe, provides us with an observational advantage of making correlations and determining ratios with respect the three universes.

The transfer of material and energy cycling through the  event horizon conduits … (Nikodem calls them worm holes) … between the universes may shed some light on the dark energy and maybe dark matter that cosmologist/mathematicians/physists are trying to figure out. 

I’ve been telling the grandchildren that we will continue with our little adventure of the nested universe concept until some mathematician proves it is not possible. However, instead as each year goes by our concept becomes more viable. If you want to read the last update of our concept go  to www.georgedugdale.com  and click on the June 2009 archive. You will find our concept there covering  six blogs.

For us this is a fun adventure and is a work in progress. With the Neutrino Telescope we can conjure up images at the event horizons of black holes. I mostly follow Nikodem’s logical steps but get lost in the equations. I told the kids we don’t have to be a math whiz in astronomy. Many great astronomical experimental findings have been made using just correlations and ratios. But, in the final analysis it will be someone like Nikodem to convince the scientific community that our nested universes makes sense.

Welcome to the Club Nikodem Poplawski!

Well kids, we finally have a mathematician independently working on our Nested Universes concept. In the Physics Letter B journal Vol. 687 pp. 110-113 in an article called “Radial Motion into an Einstein-Rosen Bridge” Nikodem Poplawski suggests, “our own universe may be the interior of a black hole existing inside another universe”  …  like “Nested Russian Dolls.” 

Finding this article, along with the things that will open up with the Neutrino Telescope, presents us with a good segue into our updating our Nested Universes concept.

Back in the late 1990s I came up with the concept of a universe in a black hole as something I could have fun with as a hobby when I retired. When I got to investigating the idea I found that Lee Smolin had written about a universe in a black hole in his book, The Life of the Cosmos earlier  than I had.

The inside of a black hole is beyond scientific proof … beyond experimentation. The Nested Universes concept puts our universe as the central universe … in this three universe multi universe scheme. We are in the position of observing the exterior of our “parent” universe and all the black holes in our universe. We can observe, amongs other things, the particle transfer occurring between each universe at the circular event horizons.

Without experimental proof, I knew this concept would languish for many years. And so, I brought you grandchildren into my little hobby about 4 years ago to get you curious about science. As a motivational incentive to get your attention, I said we could get the Nobel prize for solving the source of the “dark energy” using our Nested Universes concept.

Now, we have a mathematician to help us help by following his work.

Updating our Nested Universes Concept

As grandpa has pointed out to you grandchildren in the past … I have more questions than answers. All the blogs I have written to you grandchildren are about  taking you with me on a journey  into areas of science still being explored. For example, when we try to see beyond the black hole event horizon into the black hole, we are investigating that grey interface region that lies between what science can prove … and what science cannot prove.

When I asked a noted cosmologist and mathematician, “is our universe in a black hole  possible?”, he politely and correctly said, “We just don’t know”  That kids, was an honest answer. But that doesn’t stop us from examining what is happening around the entrance of a  black hole for details that would suggest our nested Universe concept is viable.

And so, in the next series of blogs, we will update our Nested Universes concept armed with a new tool. The Neutrino Telescope.

Particle Cross Talk?

Well kids it’s time to get back to stuff on the cosmos. One interesting aspect of our Nested Universes Concept is the potential exchange of particles between us and a black hole. The Neutrino particles can now be detected giving astronomers Neutrino telescopes which will reveal hidden mysteries.

Our Nested Universes concept suggests that our universe is in a black hole, and that universes are possible within black holes that are in our universe, and we reside within  a “parent universe”. Black holes provide a conduit … a hole between the nested universes … where “particle cross talk” could occur.

Kids, to get up to speed on the Neutrino telescope read the May 2010 Scientific American article called “Through Neutrino Eyes”. The light energy at the core of the sun is self absorbed by the many outer absorbing layers, but the tiny Neutrino can pass through these absorbing layers and produce an image of the core of the sun.

The telescope maybe able to see past the event horizon of black hole. The light sucked into a black hole has blue shifted light beyond our present measurable light detecting ability. The Neutrino telescope  should be able to tell us more about what is happening by viewing the active phase at the event horizon and by viewing the event horizon at the dormant phase.

Our concept suggests that our universe exists in a habitable zone during the dormant phase of a black hole.

In our last update of our Nested Universes concept, we questioned whether dark matter maybe tied to the potential cross talk between the nested universes?

Maybe it’s time for us to update our concept again.

Kids, to refresh your memory, go to Boomer News June 2009 archive for the six blogs on our Nested Universes.

DNA, Fate & Huntington’s Disease

(An email to my wife & 2 daughters)

A whole series of coincidences have occurred in the past 24 hours associated with the National Geographic Genographic kit you gave me to have my DNA tested to define my ancestral history back roughly 60,000 years.  While I was waiting for the DNA to be processed I bought a book called “Genome” to catch a glimpse of the biotech century that is now dawning. The night before last I received the DNA test results through the Internet.

This morning I went with mom to the hospital to be with her when she had her colon checked. While we were waiting for the procedure I was reading a chapter called “Fate” in Genome. Which brought to mind  an email debate I had yesterday with a person about Calvinism & determinism. The  gene that causes Huntington disease is a story of determinism and fate on a scale so precise even Calvin never dreamed  … or of any prophet in the history of mankind, ever dreamed. 

Your genes, of course, have a lot to say about who you are and about your future well being. Knowing more about DNA and genetics opens up information about your future. Which opens up the free will and determinism debate. A debate which has been around since the early philosophers and remains a mystery even today.

The gene, (or missing the missing gene in a repeated series), that causes Huntington’s disease  is a story of determinism. A horrible disease that hits at mid-life and tells you exactly when you will get the disease depending on where the missing gene will occur in the extended repeated series.

In 1993, with the persistence of Nancy Wexler, the missing gene that causes Huntington’s disease was found. In 1993 there was no escape …your awful fate was absolutely determined. Even though the gene was found, finding a cure was a long way off.

Mom was OK and when we got home I turned on the news to hear the announcement that scientist appeared to have found a cure using mice. With a cure  … the fate of a person subject to having the genetic defect  … is no longer predetermined to get the disease.   

After turning off the computer writing this email … I turned on the TV program “24″. In the past 24 hours I had learned the horrific torture of knowing, and then getting this fatal disease. The extreme violence and torture depicted in the TV “24″ story, as awful as it was, pales in comparison. In the space of 24 hours I became aware of the horrors of this deterministic disease and then hearing about a potential cure. Hopefully I have heard the happy beginning of the end to the Huntington’s disease story during my 24 past hour experience.

I’ll be sending Joseph copies of the DNA test data and ancestral information. Tell him to view the Genographic Project disc and send it along to his cousins when he is finished.