What We Believe

I saw a fascinating video while surfing Facebook, which got me to thinking about personal belief systems. We don’t have the option of saying that 1+1 does not equal 2, or that the letter ‘a’ has been removed from the English alphabet. We can’t declare that Washington, DC is no longer the capital of the United States, or question whether Shakespeare and Dickens ever existed.

Yet in so many other instances, we choose what we wish to believe even as facts lie before us. We do not question whether World War II actually occurred, and yet some choose to belief the Holocaust never happened. We don’t claim film footage from the War was falsified and yet some claim the filming of concentration camps were.

As scientists confirm global warming and we witness ever-strengthening hurricanes fueled by warmer waters, many in power state flatly that global warming does not exist.

One individual—or a group of individuals—cannot state that the earth is flat and make it so. Yet they believe they can state that global warming does not exist and like waving a magic wand, it will disappear.

Instead, they are like the ostrich, sticking their heads in the sand so they cannot see the predator lurking nearby. The ostrich is not made invisible by their action, and believing they are does not make it so.

The United States has been a world leader since World War II. Yet if we decide we no longer believe in mathematics, literature, history—or science—it does not mean that the rest of the world will believe as we do. Instead, it means that we are giving up our position as a world leader, stepping aside so someone else can fill the gap. And there are many willing and ready to step in—from Japanese robotics to China’s space exploration to India’s renewable energy.

The United States can insist on maintaining fossil fuel dependence; driving vehicles requiring gasoline or diesel, renewing dependence on coal and expanding oil exploration.

But The Netherlands is already planning to phase out gasoline/petrol and diesel vehicles by 2025—and China is leading the world in electric vehicle (EV) design. China is also leading the world in solar energy, followed by Japan and Germany. China has also installed roughly half of the world’s wind energy, followed distantly by the United States.

If the United States wishes to remain a superpower, they must lead the way. They can’t step aside and allow someone else to lead and then insist with puffed chest that they are number one. Saying it doesn’t make it so. Facts will determine who the leaders are, and right now the US is slipping—sometimes badly.

Sometimes believing in something else takes vision and a quantum leap of faith. Consider when John F. Kennedy declared that we would put a man on the moon—only 58 years after the Wright Brothers took their first flight. Yet this country made it happen. And if we hadn’t, Russia would not have abandoned their space exploration; instead, they would have left us sitting literally in the dust.

In writing my books, I often abandon what we’ve been taught to believe and study the cutting edge of science and technology. I was fortunate to be a contractor with the Secret Service in the 1980’s when they were developing the first facial recognition program to assist with presidential and dignitary protection. Now we have smartphones with facial recognition; Facebook has instituted a new facial recognition step in establishing an account—and China is even using it in public restrooms to prevent toilet paper theft. (Yes, really!)

What we once believed was the stuff of science fiction is here and it’s real.

Some thought my use of a psychic spy in the Black Swamp Mysteries Series was science fiction, a storyline fueled by an overactive imagination. But declassified information on the CIA’s own website detail a number of missions in which psychic spies—also known as remote viewers, to prevent public bias—is used to spy on our enemies. The United States isn’t alone. Russia, China, India, Japan, Israel and many others employ psychic spies. When a country blasts it as hocus-pocus and refuses to use it, it doesn’t mean it goes away or fails for the rest of the world. It means the disbelieving country has become like the ostrich with its head in the sand.

The 7^th book in the Black Swamp Mysteries Series (as yet unnamed) has psychic spy Vicki Boyd—now married to CIA operative Dylan Maguire—on an island off the coast of Ireland as a massive hurricane cuts them off from the mainland. Think hurricanes are impossible that far north? The weather services thought them so improbable that their software couldn’t even calculate the path—and then Hurricane Ophelia struck on October 16, 2017.

I’ve written about Irish hurricanes as well, including The Tempest Murders, which detailed The Night of the Big Wind in January, 1839. It struck before the massive storms were called hurricanes in Ireland and there was no forewarning. It stands today as one of the worst storms to ever hit the island.

And that video I mentioned at the start of this blog? Here it is—four minutes of Neil deGrasse Tyson and why we should believe in science:

p.m.terrell is the internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning author of more than 21 books in several genres. She is also the founder of Book 'Em North Carolina and The Novel Business. Find out more about her books at pmterrell.com. 

Science Fiction and Stephen Hawking

Those who have followed my blog know I love this Golden Age of science and technology. So when Stephen Hawking, unarguably the brightest mind of this generation, was interviewed about artificial intelligence and imaginary time, I wanted a front row seat.

One of the things he mentioned is that science fiction writers have not yet used the theory of imaginary time in their plots. When asked why they haven't, he answered, "Because they don't understand it."

Definitely, imaginary time can be difficult to grasp. Imagine a line drawn on a piece of paper. At the far left end of that line is the "past" and at the far right end is the "future". In the middle is the "present". When you began reading this post, you were in the present but by the time you got to this paragraph, the reading of the first paragraph is already in the past. What you haven't yet read is in the future.

Now turn that solid line on the piece of paper into a cross, right down the center. Imaginary time is that vertical line. In positivist philosophy, along that vertical line are things we are present to witness as well as those we have not witnessed but we believe to exist anyway. For example, as you're reading this, you might be aware of your computer or mobile device, the room in which you're sitting or standing, sounds in the background - perhaps a television set, the air conditioner, overhead fans, traffic outside... All of that is time that you are witnessing.

Now consider a loved one - your father, mother, spouse, children, etc. They are not in the room with you at present and yet they are living out their own present elsewhere. That is the vertical line. It is all that is currently happening in the present that we do not witness ourselves and yet we believe that it exists.

Stephen Hawking takes this theory to an entirely new and complex level. In the Big Bang theory, for example, the universe began in an instant so miniscule that it could not be measured. It simply exploded into being. The explosion itself is still causing all matter in the universe - stars, planets, and all else - to move further and further apart. Prior to the Big Bang, there was no time because there was nothing but empty space.

But other physicists theorize that the Big Bang that created our universe is only one of billions - that all stars die and when they do, they first are compressed into an area that perhaps would fit on the tip of a needle - before exploding into something our minds can't even fathom, like thousands or millions of atomic bombs. With each explosion (and they occur every day) new matter is formed, along with dark matter and dark holes.

In quantum physics, if you return to that vertical line on the piece of paper, it theorizes that billions upon billions of things are occurring at this exact moment, even though you can't witness it directly. This could mean that there are countless universes, parallel worlds... even worlds that are just beyond our noses but we can not witness them with our physical bodies and capabilities, just as we can not witness what is going on in a different geographical location but we believe that life carries on there nonetheless.

To a science fiction writer, the theory of imaginary time presents a myriad of possibilities, by leaping through to different worlds or watching events unfold simultaneously. The question would then be if the horizontal line shows the past, the present and the future, how would those simultaneous events along the vertical line impact the future? To write such a science fiction plot would require advanced knowledge of the theory of imaginary time; something Isaac Asimov could do with seeming ease.

If you're interested in an interview with Stephen Hawking where he talks about imaginary time, artificial intelligence and more, here's a video below:

Freaky Friday

This era is considered The Golden Age in Science and Technology.

Having spent a lifetime in technology, I have seen things change more rapidly than I could ever have anticipated. I began my computer career before the Apple was ever invented. I was working at IBM when a prototype came across my desk. It was smaller than any computer I'd ever seen before, had 16KB (yes, KB) of memory and did not have a hard disk. You could do only one thing at a time - which consisted in the early years of word processing, spreadsheets, graphics and databases. The screen was green on black, not high resolution, and capable of displaying only 40 characters on each line - which meant you had to print your work to see how it would look.

Floppy disks were 5 inches - smaller than the 8 inch disks used with word processing machines such as the IBM Displaywriter.

In just the past few decades, I've witnessed computers held in my hand that have far surpassed what we could once do with mainframe computers that cost millions of dollars.

With that technology has come a lot of power - the power to reach people by phone around the world (even from Mt Everest), the power to take our destinies in our own hands and create cyber-corporations, the ability to tap into vast stores of data at our fingertips.

How has technology changed your world?