Who Stirred The Pot?

Who stirred the pot?

By Vern A. Westfall

For a very long time we, (mankind), assumed that we were living on a static flat surface and the sun, the moon and the stars were moving through the sky and then diving into the underworld only to reappear on the other side. For a very long time we envisioned the sky as a dome with the sun dominant during the day and the stars dominant at night. It was a grand show made especially for us and we accepted it in much the same way we later accepted the video game, asteroids. When the little space ship disappeared when it reached the edge of the screen and reappeared on the opposite side, still moving at the same pace, I doubt if anyone ever turned the game over to see if the little space ship was racing across the back of the game to get to the other side. But curiosity finally got the better of us and, like my dog occasionally trying to squeeze behind the TV to see where Lassie had gone, we took a closer look and started to track the motions above us. It took a lot of stone monuments to get the intervals right, and I wonder if we were trying to measure the heavenly movements or capture and control them by trapping them between bigger and bigger stones. My dog still hasn’t figured out where Lassie goes when she walks off the TV screen, but we humans have figured out why and how the sun, moon and stars move, and that we don’t live on a flat fixed earth. Explaining to the general public and to the church, how a round earth orbits the sun with the moon orbiting the earth, in the early renaissance was almost as difficult as me trying to explain Lassies TV disappearance to my dog. Eventually most of humanity got the new concept and now we throw ourselves into orbit, try to measure everything, and have found that everything in space seems to be going in circles.

I am getting older and occasionally I feel a bit dizzy, especially after a martini. I attribute these periods of dizziness to having spun around on the earth 27,375 times since I was born and I suppose being a bit dizzy is to be expected, but why all this circling and spinning. Planets spin on their axis and circle stars that are spinning and ride around in circles inside galaxies that are circling each other. I understand the concept that an ice skater turning slowly will spin faster when her arms are drawn in, but if she wasn’t turning at all when she pulled her arms in nothing would happen. So what started all this rotating and orbiting? Who, or what, stirred the pot, and when? Was the singularity spinning just before the big bang, did it blow out on opposite sides like a fourth of July fireworks pinwheel, or was the initial angular momentum built up from the inside as a natural consequence of attractive forces as energy condensed into atoms, atoms were gathered into a stellar dust by electrostatic attractions and dust particles were gathered by gravity to form stars, planets, comets, asteroids and galaxies? Even black holes spin. There is an enormous amount of angular momentum in the universe and as Einstein pointed out, angular momentum affects time the same way gravity affects time, it makes it run slower. It would seem that as gravity creates great centers of mass and causes them to spin ever faster it also slows all natural processes. Radioactive elements decay at a slower pace, I age slower, and as a fortunate consequence, I have time for one more martini. But all this is occurring at macro scales. What about at micro scales? According to our atomic physicists every thing is spinning in their world as well, and angular momentum is at the core of quantum mechanics where things don’t need time to move about or change conditions. Whoa!

I think I’ll have that martini now.