Why Wasn't Gay Marriage Invented Thousands of Years Ago?

It seems true that people have always been gay, but I'm not aware of any society that has recognized that as a good thing that needs to be encouraged and protected until recently.  If you look at ideas like evolution and the survival of the fittest, homosexuality does not look like a good think in animals or humans, since it leads to the elimination of the race rather than its improvement.

The best article I have found on how homosexuality might fit with modern scientific theories of evolution and genetics is the following: "New Ideas about the Evolution of Homosexuality."  But I don't find even this article convincing from a scientific point of view.  Furthermore, it doesn't address the moral and social aspect of homosexuality, i.e., if it is good for society, society should protect and promote it, as society protects and promotes traditional marriage.  You would think that anthropologists would have found some tribe in New Guinea or Brazil that does so, or some ancient civilization that did so.  On the contrary, homosexuality seems to be almost universally reviled, although all modern and ancient societies seem to be aware that it exists, e.g., Sodom and Gomorrah in Jewish biblical history.

One exception might be ancient Greece, where relations between males were common, but Wikipedia says the most common relationship was between older men and young boys, a relationship that would not be encouraged in present day America.  This type of relationship is not uncommon in America today, although it tends not to be discussed in the current gay-loving environment.  Furthermore, older male-young boy relationships may be more common among permissive, dominant bisexuals than homosexuals who want to get married.  But because it is an unappealing element of homosexuality that does not get discussed, it is hard to know how prevalent it is, and under what circumstances.  There is some indication that Bangkok is a favorite travel destination of gay men because of the availability of young boys.

I think at a minimum there should be more discussion of the social implications of encouraging gay marriage.

Legally, the main emphasis has been on the economic consequences of not allowing gay partners to marry.  But by making marriage the test for the economic benefits, the law basically says you have to have homosexual sex, because otherwise you would not have to get married.  I think a better solution would be to allow a single person to select someone to be his "best friend," who would be entitled to the economic benefits, would be able to visit him the hospital, etc., without declaring that they want to get married so that they can have sex.  Up until recently, homosexuals often portrayed themselves as friends, rather than lovers.  I would like that to continue to be an option.  It's said that today, if you see two people of the same sex living together, they are assumed to be gay and having sex.  I think we need to restore the ability of men to be friends with men and women with women.  Separating marriage from the economic benefits would help with this.

Of course this highlights the fact that most of the economic benefits were meant to encourage traditional families and the raising of children.  Taking children out of the equation is a very big change.  There is not much discussion of the fact that traditional marriage is dying out, with more single women having children outside of traditional families, while gay marriage is increasing exponentially.

Higgs Field and Relativity

I think that Einstein said that as matter accelerates it increases in mass, it shortens in length, and time slows down.  That would seem to correspond to matter containing Higgs bosons (which give it mass) passing through the Higgs field, which slows it down, like moving through molasses.  As speed increases it becomes more and more difficult for the matter to move through the Higgs field.  The field offers more and more resistance, thus having the effect of increasing mass and requiring more and more energy to accelerate.  Meanwhile the pressure of the Higgs field might tend to compress the matter in the direction of motion, like pushing a balloon through water; it would become more and more deformed, becoming flatter and flatter the harder and faster you push it through the water.  Finally the increased resistance of the Higgs field might slow everything down; because of the increasing resistance of the Higgs field everything would move in slow motion, compared to something not moving so quickly through the field; thus making time slow down.

The problem with this theory is that in the theory of relativity, everything is relative, while the Higgs field would appear to be static.  Thus if you launched a rocket from earth, things would appear to be compressed, slow down, etc., on the rocket as viewed from earth.  However, as views from the rocket, the earth would appear to be compressed, slow down, etc.  These are effects of relative motion, not absolute motion; so the Higgs field could not be some static field measuring absolute motion.  The Higgs field would have to be relative to the observer, just as the relativity effects are.

Tolstoy on God

Toward the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy gives his protagonist, Pierre, who has been through terrible hardships as a prisoner of the French during the War of 1812, the following thoughts on God:

He could not see an aim, for he now had faith -- not faith in any kind of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-loving, ever-manifest God.  Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself.  That search for an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity he had learnt, not by words or reasoning but by direct feelings what his nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere.  In his captivity he had learn that in Karataev [an uneducated but naturally pure man] God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe the Freemasons acknowledged.  He felt like man who, after straining his eyes to see into the far distance, finds what he sought at his very feet.  All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes. 

... That dreadful question, What for? which had formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him.  To that question, What for? a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: 'Because there is a God, that God without who will not one hair falls from a man's head.'

Book 4, Part IV, Chapter 12

Ether Is Back

I sounds to me as if the discovery of the Higgs boson means that ether is back.  A hundred years ago, scientists believed that there was something that permeated the universe and served as a medium of transmission.  They thought that light waves, for example, propagated through the ether.  The famous Michelson-Morley experiment determining the speed of light, disproved that hypothesis.  It found that the speed of light did not change with the movement of its source, unlike the propagation of sound waves through air, for example. 

So there is not ether, but there appears to be a Higgs field.  I'm not sure, but it appears that only Higgs bosons interact with the Higgs field.  Thus, a photon, which has no mass, has no Higgs boson, and thus is not affected by, and does not interact with the Higgs field.  Particles with mass, like protons and neutrons and the various sub-particles that have mass, such as quarks, would contain Higgs bosons and thus would interact with the Higgs field. 

Presumable, everything with mass is attracted to every other thing with mass through gravity.  Thus gravity would somehow seem to be connected to the Higgs field.  Intuitively, it would seem that the interaction of gravity is instantaneous, unlike light.  Thus, it might be that all of these interactions between masses through the Higgs field date back to the Big Bang and have been carried within that field as the universe expanded.  Thus the Higgs field would carry information about every Higgs boson in the universe. 

That idea may contradict some aspect of quantum theory, which says that you can't know everything about everything.  I'm also not sure what it says about "dark matter," which would appear to contain Higgs bosons, since it has mass, although we can't see it.  We can only detect its effects. 

Temper

I was very unphilosophic recently, and I'm just noting why.  Our next door neighbor has been having lots of work done on his house lately, and the construction workers have been parking in our driveway.  In an effort to be neighborly, we didn't object, although it would seem to make more sense to park on the street.  Yesterday I was backing out of our garage, and all I could see in my rear view mirror was the truck parked at the bottom of our driveway.  As I tried to get around it, I turned too sharply and ran into the trees lining the driveway.  One of the workmen was standing ten feet away talking on his cell phone.  I was furious, although turning too sharply was my mistake.  He could have said, "Is my truck blocking you?  Let me move it."  But he didn't.  He did yell to warn me as I hit the tree, but it was too late.

I was so mad that I cussed him out, which is somewhat unlike me.  So much for being neighborly.

Plato's Cave of Shadows

After writing the previous post, something called my attention to Plato's allegory of the cave of shadows.  It make me think how similar his example of shadows was to the two-dimensional world visualized in the Scientific American article, although he was interested in a completely different issue. The Scientific American article was concerned with the external, physical world, while Plato was concerned with the internal, mental world.  For Plato, the two-dimensional world of shadows represented the unenlightened world in which most men live.  As they improve themselves they exit the cave of shadows and see the bright, three-dimensional world, but then, I think, Plato argues that after seeing the bright world, leaders have to re-enter the cave of shadows to lead those poor souls with the knowledge they have gained from the outside world.  If they stay in the light, they are no benefit to their fellow men.

Although their points are different, it's interesting that thinkers thousands of years apart resorted to the same type of thought experiment, although in one case (Plato's) what is learned in the three-dimensional world benefits the two-dimensional, while in the other (the Scientific American's) what is learned in the two-dimensional world helps explain the three-dimensional.  One is concerned with the physical world, while the other is concerned with the metaphysical.

Two Dimensional Gravity

The April Scientific American has an article on two-dimensional gravity, "Quantum Gravity in Flatland."  It shows how you can simulate gravity to some extent in two dimensions by changing the topology of the two dimensions. 

For me, the main interest is in seeing how an n-1 environment can help us understand an environment with n dimensions.  We think that we live in an environment of three spacial dimensions, plus time.  What if we live in an environment of more dimensions, which we cannot sense.  We have five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste.  Most of what we know about our universe comes from just two of those, sight and touch.  Microscopes, telescopes, machines and tools help us extend these senses to very large and very small things, but we are still basically depending on sight and touch.  What if the things we sense are only part of the universe; they might be just part of, or effects of, things which we cannot sense directly. 

That is what is interesting to me about two-dimensional simulations of a three dimensional world.  Suppose you lived in a two dimensional world where you could only see the flat shadows of three-dimensional objects.  As the sun rose and set, shadows would go from being infinitely long to small, and back to being infinitely long again.  What could you figure out about the object; would you think it changed size or shape, when only the light source was moving? 

Or what if there is some other dimension, like time, that is not a physical dimension.  Could we even conceive of what it is?  Basically what makes a dimension is our ability to measure it.  We measure time with clock.  Einstein found that the measurable dimensions are not absolute, but vary relative to each other.  Could it be that we are looking at the moving "shadows" and that there is something out there that is constant?