Episode 071 - Back To The Beginning - The Beginning of Our Corner of the Universe
Date: 05/20/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2001-episode-seventy-one-the-formation-of-the-world-our-part-of-the-universe/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads Book Five lines ~416–508 on the formation of our local cosmos: from a chaotic mass of seeds, heavier particles sank to form the earth at the center, lighter particles rose as the ether/firmament carrying the stars, and intermediate particles (sun and moon) orbit between. Key point: none of this required counsel or divine design — it happened by atomic processes alone. Discussion includes the geocentric model, whether Epicurus was a flat-earther, the cosmos/universe distinction (cosmos = ordered local world, to pan = the infinite all), and the swerve — no surviving text gives a mechanism; it is derived logically to avoid determinism.
A lengthy tangent explores cosmic rays: high-energy particles flipping computer bits (a Radiolab-cited election case), astronauts seeing cosmic ray flashes on the ISS, and homemade cloud chambers. The episode closes with Cassius arguing that an infinite universe is not strictly necessary for Epicurean physics (a very long time would suffice) but eliminates any need for a creator, and that Epicurus sincerely followed his philosophy wherever it led rather than engineering convenient conclusions.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 71 of Lucretius Today. I am your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’s poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this Episode 71 we’ll read approximately Latin lines 416–508 from Book Five and we’ll talk about the formation of our world, which is our part of the universe, from the fundamental elements. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
For surely the principles of things could never fall into so regular a disposition by counsel or design, nor could they by agreement resolve what motions they should take among themselves. But as yet there was no chariot of the sun to be seen, driving with his large stock of light through the sky, no sea, no heavens, no air, nothing like any beings of this world of ours to be seen, but a strange confusion, a mass of rude and undigested seeds. From this heap the various parts retired to their proper place, and seeds of like nature joined together and formed this world. Then were its mighty parts divided and disposed in order, though produced from this confused mass and from seeds of every kind. For the disagreeing powers of those seeds so disturbed their several courses, intervals, connections, weights, strokes, unions, and motions, and kept them so continually at war, that they could never reunite nor agree upon any regular motions among themselves.
Thus the heavens separated and raised their bodies on high above the earth, and the sea with its vast extent of collected waters retired apart, and the pure and bright fires of the sky fled upwards and divided from the rest. And first, the particles of earth, being heavy and entangled, met and sunk downwards towards the middle place of the mass, and the more closely twined the parts of it were, the more they squeezed out those seeds that composed the sea, the stars, the sun, and that formed the moon and the heavens, the walls of this great world. For these consist of seeds much more smooth and round, and of much less bulk than the earth, and therefore the heavens, the abode of the stars, first got free through the subtle force of the earth, and ascended upwards, and being light, drew many seeds of fire along with them, much in the same manner with what we frequently observe when the golden rays of the bright morning sun first shine upon the grass decked with pearly dew, and the standing lakes and running rivers exhale a mist into the air, and the earth sometimes seems to smoke. These vapors, when they are raised upwards and united, become clouds, and with their condensed bodies darken the whole sky. And so the light and spreading ether, being condensed, stretches widely over every place, and being diffused on all sides abroad, embraces everything with its large circumference and encloses it above.
The beginnings of the sun and moon follow next, whose orbs are rolled in the air between the ether and the earth, and whose principles would unite neither with those of the earth nor the sky. They had not weight enough to sink so low as the one, nor were they sufficiently light to rise so high as the other. Yet they are so placed between both that they constantly turn about their bodies, and so become part of the whole world. As in these bodies of ours, some members are continually at rest while others are always in motion.
These things being separated, a great part of the earth sunk suddenly and made a channel where the tides of the sea now flow and formed a cavern for the salt waters. And the more the heat of the sky and the beams of the sun pressed every way with frequent strokes upon the earth, full of pores on the outside, that so its particles being driven towards the middle might be more firm and condensed, the more the salt water, like sweat, was squeezed out and flowed along the surface of the sea and spread wider abroad. And the more the many parcels of fire and air disentangled themselves and flew off from the earth and formed themselves above at a great distance into the shining frame of the heavens. The valleys subsided, the mountains raised their lofty heads, nor could the rocks sink down, nor all parts of the earth fall equally low. And thus the weight of the earth with its heavy bodies stood firm, and its whole mass settled to the bottom and formed the lowest foundation of all.
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading that today. Lots of physics here for us to discuss about the formation of our corner of the universe. Before we start talking, maybe I should emphasize that point that I think we all agree on — when he talks about “the world” in this and other sections, he’s not talking about the universe as a whole, but the earth and the parts of the sky that we can see above us. With that as a beginning, who would like to start with our opening paragraph?
Martin:
Yeah. It is again as usual — he has his basic physics and tries to explain everything from there, and then it gets quite speculative. But of course it’s still quite interesting that he gets something out which is in its logic consistent. And in some cases we may be able to dig up some analogies of what we think today, but of course in total, a lot of the details he comes up with don’t really have a reasonable analogy. They’re best taken as the best explanation available at his time, and nothing that would be useful as an actual model today.
Don:
Yeah, I fully agree with Martin. The thought that kept running through my head as I read this was how much he could get right and still get so much wrong.
Martin:
The thing is, if you want to explain everything, you need to know a lot.
Don:
That’s right. That’s a good motto. I like that.
Cassius:
It is a very good phrase there. Yeah, and he just didn’t have that knowledge. So many things were simply not yet discovered. How things come together — you can’t expect him to get things right if he doesn’t have some of the basics we know today. That’s exactly right. And he was definitely explaining a geocentric version of the cosmos — the earth at the center, the firmament above, the sun and moon floating between the earth and the firmament with the stars. So he definitely had a geocentric model of the universe in mind when he was describing all this. But still, the idea of atoms coalescing and bodies coming together — that’s pretty much a basic level of an understanding of how we understand the solar system and stars and planets to form now.
Don:
Now see, Cassius, there’s an example. You use the word “universe,” but I would say the proper word to use there would be “world,” which would be, as you’re describing, the earth and the solar system. The big distinction seems to be that he seemed to think that the stars we see in the sky are included with “our world,” but not as the full universe. It was as if the gods in the intermundia and then the rest of the universe live on the other side of the stars, it sounds like.
Cassius:
Correct. And he talks about the ether being light and floating up and forming the firmament and taking the fires with it, and that’s what makes the stars — and that’s what surrounds the earth.
Martin:
Right. I mean, there’s one thing I still couldn’t figure out throughout what we have read so far. There are some claims that Epicurus was a flat-earther and I still cannot find either evidence to clearly state yes, but also not evidence clearly to the contrary. Even in this explanation, I just don’t see it clearly enough spelled out.
Charles:
It was somewhere back in like Book Two, and it was like a sentence. There’s a reference that it would be possible to fall off the other side — that you shouldn’t think that the animals were walking upside down. There’s something to that effect.
Cassius:
Yeah, but on the other hand, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the world was flat. And also, it doesn’t mean that he thought the world was the center of the universe. He was thinking that you would fall off the other side because there’s an infinite direction. Again, there’s the issue of “down” — there really should be no up and down in the universe, and it’s pretty clear that he didn’t think that there was, but he thought that everything was falling in a particular direction, so he didn’t see any reason why you wouldn’t fall off the other side. I think there may be one more reference to it, Charles, but I think you’re right. We’ve already covered the issue of the animals walking upside down. That goes back into this same issue about whether our world is the whole universe or not. He’s very clear — maybe this is the time to just go over a couple of the points that are made in the Letter to Herodotus that are Epicurus himself and are very clear at a high level. He clearly says the universe is boundless and so therefore it’s going to be infinite on all sides, so there’s not going to be really a “down” other than that you observe things falling in a particular direction. The point I wanted to read about is the agglomeration — “in addition to what we have said, we must believe that worlds and indeed every limited compound body which continuously exhibits a similar appearance to the things we see were created from the infinite and that all such things, greater and lesser, were separated off from individual agglomerations of matter. And further, we must believe that these worlds were created of necessity with one configuration or of every shape.” But there’s a series of statements in the Letter to Herodotus that I think are even clearer. Maybe it’s not so much that they’re clearer as that Lucretius is getting into so much detail here that he doesn’t cover in the Letter to Herodotus, so you see the overall picture maybe a little more clearly there.
Don:
And I would say with Lucretius using the books On Nature — volume after volume after volume — I’m sure that Epicurus had detail after detail in those. And so since Lucretius is using those as his model, there’s going to be a lot more detail than in the Letter to Herodotus, which was meant as a summary.
Cassius:
Yeah. And that’s the difficulty because it’s so hard for us to deal with the issue that when we say “world” we just mean basically the earth, I think. And clearly he is not including just the earth when he uses the word “world” because he’s talking about the sky and then he’s talking about the stars even, the moon and the sun, as part of the world. And that’s, I think, one of the problems that comes in with translation — one of my hobby horses that I tend to get on — is that I think the word that is usually translated as “world,” at least in the Greek, is cosmos. And so it’s the ordered part of the universe. And when he talks about the universe, he talks about “the all” — in Greek, to pan. So that the cosmos is a subset of the all, or the universe. So we have little pockets of cosmos, and that’s why he can say that the Epicurean gods live between the cosmoses.
Don:
Yeah. And to relate that to what Martin said — I do see the same thing you’re seeing. When Lucretius starts talking about how the different components separate out, he does make it sound like they’re separating out according to weight to some extent and that they’re falling almost towards the center of the earth. So I see a geocentric aspect of that, but again, within a wider picture that he knows that the earth is not the center of the universe.
Cassius:
Correct. Correct. It’s the center of its own cosmos, but it’s not the center of the universe. It’s the center of its own ordered little pocket of the universe. And with the firmament — I’ve seen examples — there are sort of biblical allusions here too. It’s basically: if you imagine that he’s talking about a flat earth, you consider the firmament as like a bowl that’s over top of the flat earth and that includes the stars and the things we see in the sky. And if you think of it as a spherical geocentric cosmos, then it’s another sphere enclosing the sphere of the earth in the middle. You know, another general comment we need to be making in this context is that when you go to the Letter to Pythocles — where he talks the most about the stars and such — that’s where he emphasizes his position that we don’t know for sure what we’re talking about, so we have to take into account that there are multiple possibilities that are correct explanations. So you’ve got that multiple possibility situation to account for when you talk about the universe as well.
But I certainly don’t want to go past the first paragraph without making what I think is one of the most important things for us to remember there — the second sentence: “For surely the principles of things could never fall into so regular a disposition by counsel or design.” That would be another statement that our overall understanding is that we’re coming up with a system that does not require an omnipotent God or a supernatural force to arrange everything. That’s still our central organizing principle here.
Don:
Exactly. And I think one of the things that struck me as I read this was that I suspect this goes back to the story about Epicurus and his first schoolmaster — talking about chaos, and Epicurus asking the schoolteacher about where chaos came from, and the schoolteacher not being able to give him a reply. And this is Epicurus’s response: well, here’s where chaos came from.
Cassius:
Yeah. And I stopped reading that second sentence in the middle, but the last part of it says “nor could they by agreement resolve what motions they should take among themselves” — which you could probably even read as a statement that the earth and the sun and the stars are not intelligent life forms or gods themselves. So he’s eliminated there being a supernatural creator to determine how everything fell into so regular a disposition. And he’s also eliminating the fact that these stars and planets are themselves intelligent or implicitly part of some divine fire that would make the universe itself God. Exactly. And he needs both an infinitely large universe and an eternally existing universe because you need the time for these things to shake out, basically.
Don:
Yeah. And you want to foreclose the possibility that there was something different at one time in the past if you can. Exactly. Yeah. So that was the part that I thought really echoes what we think of as modern physics — the way that the solar systems and the stars and everything come together, just through random chance and the interactions of atoms and like atoms coming together. That’s the part I found really surprising in a modern sensibility.
Cassius:
I’ve got one more comment on that first section. When he says “but the seeds of things being from eternity beaten by outward blows, met every way, tried all motions that might at last by their uniting end in the production of things” — I suppose that Epicurus would say that there’s no end to the mechanism that he’s talking about. We are today experiencing the same forces of blows and creation and destruction that have existed from eternity under this model.
Don:
Exactly. And that just echoes the first part that we were talking about in the previous weeks about destruction and creation, and love and strife, and creation and destruction, and all that sort of thing.
Cassius:
Anything else on the opening section there? Okay, what about the second of our four passages today?
Don:
I got nothing this time.
Cassius:
Okay, when he says “as yet no chariot of the sun” — this is that chaos period that Don was talking about previously. It’s almost like the biblical version of what was going on before the sun was created.
Don:
The Phaeton story.
Cassius:
Yeah. Right. What order was light created in, in the biblical version of the creation story? Was light pretty early, or what was first?
Don:
I think light was always depicted as first.
Cassius:
First? Fiat Lux — let there be light. And it always struck me too that light exists before the sun. So that’s yeah, that’s an interesting way to look at things. You know, this is not a particularly interesting comment maybe, but when you get into the middle of this paragraph and you get to that section where he strings together “courses, intervals, connections, weights, strokes, unions, and motions” — aside from making that kind of sentence almost impossible for me as an amateur Latin scholar to translate when you’ve got just a series of nouns like that — what comes back to my mind is that it seems like a lot of times in Lucretius and maybe sometimes in the letters of Epicurus they will list a series of things together as examples of what they’re talking about as a means of explaining their point, as opposed to just describing the point. They seem to like to show examples as part of a list as a means of conveying it.
Don:
I find that sort of interesting, because what he’s doing there, at least in my mind, is laying out the principles that the seeds — the atoms — have. Those are all the different ways that the seeds can interact. They have their own weights and so forth, but among them they have different strokes and unions and motions and ways to make connections. He’s laying out the physical mechanisms that were used to bring them together and finally make the cosmos. And I think somewhere there came up a list — I think the commentators certainly have one — of attributes that the fundamental particles are supposed to have, and weight is one of them. Size was one?
Cassius:
Yeah, I don’t know. I think size was one, which is one I do not see listed in this passage. I was obviously thinking in terms of whether you guys thought that this was a list of attributes of the fundamental particles, but it’s not exactly that. I think it’s both the individual particles and how they interact. And I would have to look at the original Latin to see what the difference is, because some of these sound like almost synonyms in English. And I think it’s interesting that the line right after that list says “and kept them so continually at war” — because we’re back to the love and strife idea of Empedocles.
Don:
Right. I was looking at Munro to see his translation, and he has “by reason of their unlike forms and varied shapes, they could not all remain thus joined together nor fall into mutually harmonious motions.” So they couldn’t remain joined together or mutually harmonious because of their natures. I guess that’s strife.
Cassius:
And I think it’s so important again — the line “and thus the heaven separated” — we’re not talking about supernatural heaven, we’re just talking about the firmament with the stars and all of that. So just to reiterate, we’re not talking about any sort of heavenly abode or anything like that. It’s just the poetic word for the firmament and where the stars live.
Don:
Yeah. And I guess we can move to the third of our passages and see that again he sort of emphasizes that the stars are not gods. It sounds like he’s describing the stars as rising from out of this mass of particles because they’re perhaps smoother and rounder.
Cassius:
And the lightest.
Don:
And the lightest. Okay.
Cassius:
Then we have in this third passage the analogy of this process resembling what we see when we see the mists of the morning — that he’s analogizing that in this initial formation period, the different elements were escaping upward almost like we see a mist around the ground that then lifts and becomes clouds. I guess that’s an interesting point. Is there any accuracy in saying that the mists become clouds?
Martin:
Yes, actually. You can see pictures of clouds forming above forest. This is also another important thing to avoid deforestation, because you would get less rain then. The forest holds the moisture and then it moves up in the course of the day sometimes. Depending on the time of day, it will facilitate the formation of cloud.
Cassius:
It goes back to that whole water cycle that he talked about a couple of weeks ago.
Don:
And with the mention of the flat earth versus the spherical earth — the one line at the beginning of that paragraph about “the particles of the earth being heavy and entangled met and sunk downwards towards the middle place of the mass” — so towards the middle would imply a sphere as opposed to just settling “down,” which would imply a flat earth.
Cassius:
But again, I don’t think there’s anything that gives us really good hard evidence either way in his particular model. This would seem to imply that he would recognize there being gravity pulling things towards the center of the sphere, but I don’t know if he carries that through and integrates it with the issue of everything falling downward. I seem to remember seeing an article recently about the whole “down and up” question, but I can’t remember how they explained that, so I probably should not have brought that up. Right, right. Well, except — there’s certainly up and down in relation to a particular point, like up and down in relation to us. But as far as all the material of the universe, or even all the material of this “world,” it seems that he was implying that he thought all of the material was initially going in the same direction, and that it needed the swerve. That’s another point where in my mind I get confused. Sometimes I think I remember that the swerve was part of what led to the initial interaction of the atoms. And then sometimes I question myself as to whether he says that in Book Two of Lucretius or not. But that would tie into the issue of whatever direction the atoms were moving — you could consider that to be “down” if you thought they were being driven by weight. And that’s the thing that’s always struck me about moving in the same direction, because really all you need is one swerve and it’s going to throw everything into helter-skelter anyway.
Don:
I thought exactly that question, Cassius — it was not clear to me that he would say that all atoms or that the swerve had to continue from infinity through the end of the universe. Because like you said, it would seem like all you really needed was one deviation.
Martin:
Yeah, the thing is that if we had only, say, one event, then after that event things would be deterministic again. So in order to avoid determinism, it has to be ongoing.
Cassius:
What Don is implying — and what I can also see implied — would be that once you have just one collision, isn’t that your butterfly wing that moves the air across the world and eventually makes a hurricane?
Martin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think we’ve previously discussed, Martin — that a single collision as it spreads out loses its force or something like that, right? That makes sense. I need the context of what I actually said, because there will be a little attenuation effect, but it could be depending on the context that eventually it will no more matter. So for example, if a swerving particle hits a small solid body, then this small body will not be that much affected and the scattering will just increase the temperature of that small body a bit. And the total motion of that small body will not be that much affected.
Don:
That’s a good point. And I think an analogy is throwing a rock into a pond. If you throw a rock into a pond, it’s going to create ripples and it’s going to agitate the surface, and there’s going to be some chaos going on. And then eventually it’s going to return to equilibrium. And then in that analogy, the atoms are eventually going to move in the same direction again once it dissipates out.
Cassius:
Yeah, the ripples eventually fade away was the point that I thought I remembered you making. It’d be months and months ago now. I still think the question is interesting to consider: when you talk about the swerve, does every fundamental particle have the ability to swerve or is it just a certain type of fundamental particle that has the ability to swerve? And again, do these swerves have to continuously happen? Ultimately, I guess it comes down to: did Epicurus say that every fundamental particle has the capacity to swerve and is continuously swerving at no fixed time and no fixed place? And obviously I don’t know that we know the answer to that.
Martin:
It’s certainly not continuous. It happens from time to time. But there is no mechanism to turn it either on or off. So once a particle has this characteristic, it will keep doing that from time to time. This is not talked about in what we can reconstruct. If we go to the quantum mechanical principle of how we see today, there are quite some differences. There it’s interaction which gives rise to the swerve. So just a single particle separated from everything else will not swerve.
Cassius:
Before I move on — did you just say a single particle separated from everything else would not swerve?
Martin:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, with the exception of unstable ones, because decay is also kind of swerve. But a stable elementary particle separate from everything else will not swerve. Okay, now you’re talking about modern science.
Martin:
Yes, yes. So I wanted to make this distinction so that normally when I say “swerve” I mean this ancient concept. And if I refer to modern science, I rather refer to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. But of course when I just talk verbally I may sometimes still mix it up.
Cassius:
Okay. I had no intention of this episode becoming a dissertation on the swerve, but that just continues to take me back in that direction. You guys correct me if I’m wrong, but in Book Two of Lucretius and in every other material that we have from Epicurus, there’s no attempt to explain a mechanism for the swerve. It simply is something that he derives from the fact that it must be there because otherwise you would have total absolute determinism. Does anybody have a suggestion that that’s not a correct statement? Because I’m thinking again that this is going to be one of those examples of where Epicurus has made a logical deduction. It’s obviously grounded — it’s consistent with his observation of the real world, because he wouldn’t be even discussing it if it were not. But he clearly is making a speculative deduction that he’s not even suggesting a mechanism for. These other times he suggests a mechanism — in fact, that’s what we’re discussing today completely, is a suggested potential mechanism for the formation of the earth. But as far as I know, there is not even a suggestion of a mechanism for the swerve in any of the surviving texts. Do you guys remember that differently?
Martin:
No, actually there’s very little on the swerve, so definitely not. There’s some acknowledgment that it happens and others not, but nothing at all on the mechanism — but it’s clear enough it’s something that particles do, and it’s something that randomly happens.
Cassius:
Don, do you remember that differently?
Don:
No. I concur with how you’re remembering it.
Cassius:
And Charles, do you remember anything differently?
Charles:
I mean, I think so. Okay. Still a little tired. I haven’t been talking much.
Cassius:
Yeah, no problem, no problem. In my mind, this is in that shelf of issues such as when he talks about the universe — he obviously can’t see whatever is above our world, and yet he’s making a statement that he’s confident the universe is infinite in size. He’s not able to see it. And the swerve seems to me to be sort of in that same category. He’s not able to see the fundamental particles. He’s not able to even speculate on a possible mechanism for why it’s happening. And yet he is taking the position that we should be confident that it is there. So I just think that’s an interesting aspect of the philosophy. And the reason that he needs an infinite universe and infinite time is that it’s built into his model because he needs that time for the atoms to try all the various combinations and finally come together into the cosmos that we know.
Don:
Well, okay. Does he really need an infinite amount of time? Because as we said earlier today, isn’t this process still ongoing even under his own theory? And so it’s going to continue infinitely on into the future from where we are.
Cassius:
I think your mic may have switched. I think we’re getting static again. Okay, let me… does that sound better now?
Don:
That does.
Cassius:
I have no suggestion of a mechanism other than my own user error and incompetence on this side. This is a little bit of an aside, but have you heard about the whole idea of cosmic rays changing bits in computers and actually making changes in readings and things like that?
Don:
Well, now — if I had heard that, I would have been hitting Martin with that for weeks and weeks about the images from the gods if I had heard that. Is that a theory that will allow us to incorporate that into the images from the gods?
Cassius:
I don’t know whether it would do that, but I’ve actually heard some legal cases that have been decided on that. I think it was an election case that it changed a bit.
Don:
Cosmic rays resulted in an election?
Cassius:
Okay, let’s go back to Martin. Let’s go back to Martin and discuss cosmic rays changing bits in computers.
Martin:
I think in the past they could do it, but of course as the semiconductor industry figured it out that these sudden unexplainable changes of memory states were caused by — they’re not only cosmic rays, but also surrounding radioactive decay — they hardened the circuitry against it. So only the very rare event of an extremely high-energy particle really from far away in the cosmos, which normally does not make it to the surface of the earth — if it hits it, it could theoretically still do something. So that means if this was the recent case, I would question the rationale against this unless it can be proven that the circuit was analyzed in a lab and was already damaged — and then, if it’s already weakened, one additional strike might push it open.
Cassius:
Whenever you post — if you leave this in — I will post the link. I believe it was a Radiolab episode where they talked about this, and that was the only explanation they finally had for this one change and the number that showed up in the results. I’ll definitely leave this in. Are the space stations shielded against cosmic rays for this type of purpose? Or if there were examples of it available, maybe you’d see it in the orbiting astronaut realm?
Martin:
The electronics in the space station are particularly hardened against this. And the space station is not perfectly shielded — so the people can see this. Their own eyes act as scintillators, so they can see quite often the flashes of light that come from a cosmic ray particle colliding with the mass in their eye.
Don:
And I’ve seen that you can build a little cloud chamber — a homemade cloud chamber — and see cosmic rays make paths in it with dry ice and alcohol vapors.
Martin:
Yes, with radioactive rays we cannot easily tell just from looking at it whether it’s cosmic or from the surroundings. But what we can do is, if we do some experiments with selective shielding and orienting it, then you can eventually make a guess. So if you orient it towards a known source, if you have a very good collimation and you orient it to a known source and get a higher count, then this would be proof that you got actual cosmic rays.
Cassius:
Okay, and so Martin — you’re talking about cosmic rays where you can identify a source from outside of our solar system?
Martin:
Yes.
Cassius:
Well, if you keep talking I’m going to have to go back and pull out of all of our old discussions about images of the gods from the intermundia then, if we’re going to talk about that. These are the kinds of things that I have to think that Epicurus would just be fascinated by today — he was all about observation and seeing things, and if you can actually demonstrate this is what’s happening and this is where they’re coming from, I think he would be fascinated.
Don:
I think he certainly would be.
Cassius:
Well, we got off on that particular tangent by the issue of whether he needed — emphasis on the word “needed” — to have an infinite time in the past in order to have all the elements come together into their current situations. And I was making the point that I’m not sure he needed an infinite time, because where I’m going to go with that is: it seems to me he could have taken the position — probably like Martin will remind us — that if it’s just an extremely long time, you’d have plenty of time. But he seems to be going further than that and taking an affirmative position that the universe is infinite in time, when he actually did not need to. So the issue of taking a position that you don’t need to — to me, that leads in very interesting directions. Don, if you agree or disagree —
Don:
I can see where you’re coming from. I think that maybe “need” is too strong of a word, but I think the fact that he said that basically they tried every combination before settling on this one — you need a really long time for them to try every available combination before they settle on the one that we happen to be existing in.
Cassius:
Right, right. And you know, when you use the word “need” — there’s a couple of other issues out there where I see commentators say, for example, that Epicurus needed to take a position that the gods exist in the intermundia, otherwise he would be killed for blasphemy. And you know, I think in every case where somebody says that Epicurus is looking for the answer that he wants to find, I think you can make a defensive argument that he’s following the logic of his conclusions to their ultimate end, whether he wants to find it or not. In other words, he didn’t have to — and in fact, some of these other Greek philosophers went in the total atheist direction. It sounds like he didn’t. So I would argue he didn’t have to come up with these gods. And for all we know, he knew some people who would take the position that this is ridiculous and you’re undermining your own credibility by talking about gods in the intermundia. I would say there’s a significant chance that he decided to risk that and say, this is where my philosophy leads, and I’m going to follow it where it leads regardless of whether I look ridiculous or whether it ends up where I personally would like to end up. So when I hear the word “need,” those are the issues that get triggered in my mind sometimes.
Don:
No, I think you raised a good point. But coming back — I think the main reason for having this infinite universe is that it just cuts off the need for a creator right there. There is no need for a supernatural creator.
Cassius:
Right, right. And that plays into just normal people’s psychology, that if you can show them they don’t need something — I guess you could take the position that the truth is not as much of an issue as simply what it is you need personally. Because of your makeup, if you don’t need something, you don’t necessarily need to know whether it’s there. Okay, I’m sorry — I’m rambling strongly today and we’re almost at the end of our allotted time. So anybody have anything, any new topics to raise before we do closing comments?
Don:
The only thing I would bring up — with the last paragraph, we didn’t really get a chance to talk a lot about it, and I think it definitely shows that we’re talking about an earth-centered cosmos (not a universe) when he talks about the beginnings of the sun and the moon following next, whose orbs are rolled in the air between the ether — which is the firmament where the stars live — and the earth. So the sun and the moon are two bodies that exist between the stars and the earth. He’s definitely talking about a geocentric cosmos, and that’s the model that was extant at the time. But keeping in mind that that’s the model he’s working with, and also that he got so much more right about the atoms coalescing and multiple patterns and multiple ways of coming together — I think those two juxtapositions of being so right and so wrong are one of the things that struck me from this section we read today.
Cassius:
Right, that’s a very good summary point. That’s your commentary on the fourth paragraph, so we won’t limit you from having another summary comment on everything we discussed today. Now’s the time to bring back in the summary comment that’s going to incorporate those cosmic rays you introduced. But Martin, on closing comments — let’s start with Martin.
Martin:
Yeah, I just have one more funny thing. I rather think the little men on Mars should be blue, not green.
Cassius:
Why blue?
Martin:
Because it’s complementary to the orange color of Mars.
Cassius:
Those pictures that are coming from those spacecraft are just fascinating — so detailed, and it’s amazing what those pictures look like. And yes, it is presumably orange — it looks like orange to me mostly. Okay. Charles, I know you’ve not been feeling well again for the second week — any comments before we close today?
Charles:
No.
Cassius:
Well, we wish you the best in recovering from your second vaccine injection — hopefully back to normal next week. Don?
Don:
I think I’ll let my summary comment stand from before.
Cassius:
Okay, well I think we had a lively episode today. I think it’ll be one of the better ones, so appreciate everybody’s time, and we will do it again in another week. So thanks everybody.
Don:
Thank you.
Martin:
Thanks and bye.
Charles:
Bye.