Notes

         You and Carol arrived home this evening and relaxed catching up on a couple of TV shows. Busy, family filled days and one more on Sunday at the Cook reunion in Westerville. Doug sent you another science-oriented note which leaves you humbled because it seems that most everyday you discover something you have never considered before. You think you would have to live a thousand lifetimes, and even then, you would know even less ‘for sure’. This leads you to think that with such overwhelming evidence of lack of knowledge that it is no wonder, that if G---D doesn’t exist, human beings would have to create one out of thin air, as a bumper to what is not known, hoping that a Creator, can construct and deconstruct and understand all that is in both the visible and invisible worlds.

         This is true but I did not know whether to think it or not. It turns out the ‘thinking’ is involuntary. I don’t have free will when it comes to thinking something. Perhaps no one does. This is very odd and unreasonable because thinking first leads to consideration, even then I don’t believe there is any free will. We are built to absorb information and use it to survive life as long as we care to do so. Here is Doug’s note as a reminder to myself so I don’t have to look it up.

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Dick, Saw a special on these very rare stars.

Little is known about the physical structure of a magnetar because none is close to Eart. Magnetars are around 20 kilometres (12 mi) in diameter but are more massive than our Sun. The density of a magnetar is such that a thimbleful of its substance, sometimes referred to as neutronium, would have a mass of over 100 million tons. Magnetars also rotate rapidly, with most magnetars completing a rotation once every one to ten seconds. The active life of a magnetar is short. Their strong magnetic fields decay after about 10,000 years, after which activity and strong X-ray emission cease. Given the number of magnetars observable today, one estimate puts the number of inactive magnetars in the Milky Way at 30 million or more.

Quakes triggered on the surface of the magnetar cause great volatility in the star and the magnetic field which encompasses it, often leading to extremely powerful gamma ray flare emissions which have been recorded on Earth in 1979, 1998 and 2004.

Doug

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         Doug has the notations in his note but I took them out because they interfere when I place them in the blog. Have I heard of ‘neutronium’? Perhaps, but I do not remember it. I may easily have read the word somewhere.  How does one imagine such a structure as a magnetar? Connections with the gamma rays which was in an earlier note and ‘space quakes’. It is so very much interesting. Somehow I think we do not have a container that can hold all of these observations. The mind can only absorb so much. That which it absorbs has to sort through and deconstruct and/or construct some type of theoretical ‘placement’ for such information. Again I am back to Toffler’s old book, Future Shock.

         Yet, when I pick up my iPad and read from Twain’s Autobiography I can easily relate his assignments of character to myself and others in today’s world. This morning while reading at McDonalds waiting on the ladies to shop at Easton in Columbus I laughed aloud several times because I could easily see and identify with what Mr. Clemens was ‘talking’ about in his dictations. It leads me to belief that human nature has little to do with knowledge as such other than gathering useful tidbits along the way to help one survive the world better. What use would all this earthly knowledge have to do for the Dead who have, as it were, survived on their own knowing much less than we don’t know today?