July 14, 2022

Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your visit. Permit me to try to articulate more clearly what I was too tired and too depressed to say to you when you were here.

a) Contemporary science is contemporary religion.

b) The Lutheran orthodoxy in which I was brought up identifies faith (Glaube) as the key to salvation and reality, and hence to knowledge.

c) The physicists' assertions that mathematical symbols express the reality of nature, and thus by implication of the Divine, are articles of the contemporarily dominant religious faith, a totemism which exploits and celebrates the circumstance that humans are part of nature. 

d) Mathematics is a set of languages the "truth" of whose sentences is consequence of scholastically, of socially secured agreement among members of a scientific "elite". Mathematical reasoning is largely an extension of the arbitrary invention and definition of mathematical symbols.

e) The frequencies of sound which we are able to hear (and to voice), the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation which we are able to feel (as heat) and to see (as light), the geometric structures and patterns which we are able to identify - are expressions of the circumstance that our eyes, ears and brains are integral to the world with which they interact.

f) Just as in the Middle Ages, men invested ?disproportionate amounts of wealth in building church spires as a physical approach to the deities imagined to be enthroned among the clouds, so today we invest ?disproportionate amounts of wealth ($11,000,000,000.- to position an infrared telescope at a Lagrange point a million miles away, for the purpose of receiving radiation emitted when time, space, energy and matter purportedly hatched from singularity.

g) The singularity whose explosion (in the "Big Bang") created time, must itself have been outside of time, i.e. timeless, timeless as is the present as a dimensionless hyperplane. The beginning and the present mirror each other both mathematically and intuitively, as being outside of the stream of time.

h) The quantum is the epitomy of the atom. It is the repudiation of ultimate indivisibility. The existence - or hypothesis - of quantums defines numerical limits of divisibility. I understand the hypothesis of quantums to be a mirror image of the hypothesis of electromagnetic radiation, defining as it does, the limit of velocity.

i) These musings require no answer.

j) Thank you again for your visit, and stay well.

EJM