.: Background
A few years back I began writing short web pages on topics I had been wondering about. I called these "observations". They appeared more or less in the order in which I thought of them. Each pretty much stood on its own but after a while I found that many of them would fall under the heading of "Life on Earth" and would be a lot more coherent if I reorganized them and added some transitions from one to another. I have done that, so if you are a return visitor to these observations you will find the order of the pages has changed a bit and most have been slightly modified.
In thinking about when and how people can take action to change their futures, I had to think about the nature of "now", that boundary between past and future. These thoughts are collected under "The Nature of Now" heading. These pages are a bit more technical than those in "Life on Earth". I had to invoke some strange results from Einstein's relativity theories. Generally I have tried to express my thoughts without wandering too far into the swamp of math and physics. To help the reader keep his feet dry, so to speak, I have hidden some of the details behind hyperlinks where the sense of the story allows.
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.: Disclosure Statement
The ideas expressed in these pages represent my best understanding of the topics addressed. It is very likely that there are errors and certainly there are omissions, not surprising since the pages are written by a retired sailor dabbling in mathematics and physics. See the bio. My object in writing these pages is not so much to instruct anyone as to encourage thinking about large questions and ideally to prompt some discussion of these ideas.
I come to this work with certain biases. I am a Christian and learned faith before I learned much science. As a person who loves understanding, I am still comforted that I can know things that I do not understand. Although I find comfort in the Christian faith, I do not believe that people of other faiths are any less entitled to their beliefs than I am. Such science as I do know reinforces the notion that this universe was not an accident. The odds against that are huge. I have no problem with the theory of evolution. After all, what humans perceive as visible light is exactly that portion of the spectrum that happens to penetrates sea water. Still I would not be surprised to learn that evolution may have been given a few tweaks along the way by a creator who knows what she is doing. I do try to keep an open mind on the subjects and look at things from different angles.
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