By Tom Kimmel
Even the letters to the editor in the WSJ are full of good advice and so here from the Sept. 12-13 issue: “Today, I have more liquid assets than I ever thought possible. I tell those interested my secret: Never get divorced, and don’t buy a boat.” Every so often I try to perform a public service of offering good advice to the local populace—and when I get tired of that I try to raise their level of consciousness, which will come later in this essay. You will want to note that Jeff Bezos got as much work as possible out of his first wife and made his billions before he spent $50 billion on divorcing her and half a billion on his new yacht, ‘Koru’. His second wife is, if I may be charitable, quite pneumatic while not up to my high standards of beauty. But then, again, no one asked me for my opinion.
That same WSJ issue had asked author Amy Fusselman to write a book review of her top five books in the subject ‘Visions of the Afterlife’ and her first book review was the 1758 book Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, by Emmanuel Swedenborg. You may remember that I am quite enamored with Swedenborg, to the extent of proudly purchasing all six volumes of his posthumous work The Apocalypse Explained, The Apocalypse Explained According to the Spiritual Sense in Which the Arcana There Predicted But Heretofore Concealed Are Revealed. Each book is about five hundred pages long and so whenever I run out of other material for my weekly newspaper epistle, I plan on excerpted pieces and quotes from these books. I acquired these books from Bart’s Books, the world’s largest outdoor bookstore, located in Ojai, California, with over 130,000 new and used books that opened in 1964.
Here from Ms Fusselman: “Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic born in 1688, wasn’t being metaphorical when he subtitled his otherworldly narrative ‘From Things Heard and Seen.’ A gifted scientist who had a long career with the Swedish Royal Board of Mines, he had a cataclysmic religious experience beginning in his early 50s when, as he put it. His ‘spiritual eyes’ were opened by God. From then on, Swedenborg believed he was able to travel to heaven and hell.” I suggest that he probably had what Maslow described in his excellent book: Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences. I have sat through many sermons and Bible classes and on one ever mentioned the mechanics of how one has a religious experience, or even what the intensity of belief has to do with religion. I recommend Maslow.
Francis Butter Murdock of log cabin fame in our little community was of the Swedenborgian faith, and he fathered the first white child born here in Oronoko Township—Mary Eliza Murdock, 13 Oct 1831-15 Dec 1907 who later married Clifton Gardner and lived her entire life in this community. Her mother died quite young of tuberculosis, an affliction of several of her sisters as well. Her father moved on to Illinois and Missouri working as a lawyer and ended up in San Jose, California owning the largest newspaper in that state, marrying and outliving several wives.
We left Part III with Dick Ritland of the local Geo-Science Institute sending one graduate student off to Wisconsin to study the glacial era—Pleistocene Geology to the cognoscenti. Besides there being four distinct glaciations, with their advances and retreats and each one leaving weathered topsoil layers that took a long time to develop, we now have large glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica that have been cored down hundreds of feet, ten thousand I think that included one hundred thousand annual layers. There are several things looked for to determine the annual snow layer, with the main one being the oxygen 18 isotope that increases in the summer when the ocean surface water warms up.
The other student was sent off to Yale to study sedimentation and he looked at the eastern slope of the Andes mountain range. As we all know, the faster a mountain range rises, the amount of erosion increases, and there was a lot of sedimentation. For a mountain to rise, it has to be made of hard rock and it takes some time for sand and mud and silt to lithify to that extent. Therefore, it is not easy to account for that amount of tectonic activity and sedimentation taking place during a cataclysmic flood.
Things did not work out as planned as it was not easy to interpret what one observes in the geological record with a short world chronology. I have met people on all sides of this long and short earth chronology, and as mentioned, I find them all to be nice intelligent and well-meaning people. I also have concluded that many people have wasted their lives attempting to find support for George McCready Price’s theory. I now think that I have exhausted that subject and will go on with what Peter Brannen had to say in the book that I am reviewing as I get the time to study it enough to understand enough to make some kind of a cogent explanation. The book includes a lot about chemistry and how plants use light from the sun to make glucose. It is by far the most comprehensive lecture on life on this earth.
The introduction begins with a photon that was produced by the sun and travelled through space to earth and slammed into a tree leaf—this was during the Carboniferous Period—and “instantly found itself recruited into a frenetic, impossible labyrinth of electrochemical nanomachinery—a whirring, buzzing tangle of life. The sunlight had found itself, in other words, recruited into photosynthesis” which meant that CO2 was combined with water to make oxygen and glucose, both of which are the staff of life. The metabolism of life, which is animals breathing and plants decomposed, acts the same as fire sending CO2 back into the atmosphere, which is a good idea because otherwise plant growth would deplete that important gas and freeze the planet to death.
The book goes into more detail and includes this sentence: “This cycle of carbon around the Earth and throughout time is a pulsing planetary web of self-amplifying positive feedback on the one hand (where small pushes can drive much larger, extraordinary changes to the planet) and dampening negative feedbacks on the other (that rein in this system when it threatens to careen out of control) all working at the microscopic, local, and global scales.” Thus, all of the complexities of life are explained including what happens when stored carbon, in the form of coal, is dug up and burned to make electricity. One even gets a lesson about the history of science starting with Lavoisier working in his chemical laboratory in Paris just before the French Revolution that ended up beheading him. Besides a lesson in the history of science, we get a lesson in the history of revolutions—it is an interesting book. Air contains presently .04% carbon dioxide, which goes to show that a small amount of a critical chemical can matter a great deal.
Of course the book has to through in the rate of industrialization and listing all of the bad things that have resulted from the steam engine and coal burning and how that created unequal distribution of wealth which, while lifting the standard of living of many people ended up doing many other bad things such as unleashing a torrent of food, extending the human lifespan and literacy the world over. Somehow it got blamed for imperialism. At least life itself is defined—“even in its simplest forms, it is fundamentally, shockingly electric. It is a kind of electric current as in the electric field across the membrane of a mitochondria that is a bolt of lightning. A typical cell uses a million electrons a second. Your brain runs on 20 watts.”
The author went on field trips with geologists in Nevada and thus we learn about continental drift and the formation of supercontinents: “Here in Death Valley we were on the shores of a supercontinent from almost a half-billion years before Pangea, called Rodinia. To put this in perspective, it would still be a half-billion years until the first dinosaur evolved. And 650 million years until they would succumb to their fatal asteroid strike.” Then snowball earth was described, “after over a billion years of equable weather, the planet flipped in a geologic instant. Shimmering white ice sheets raced to the equator in a catastrophic positive feedback loop.” The ice sheets were almost four miles thick and so much water was used to make that ice that sea level dropped by a kilometer. Eventually there was enough volcanic activity to put enough CO2 into the air to melt the ice and things returned to normal.
Today the CO2 level, 0.042 %, the highest since the Pliocene epoch over 3 million years ago when evergreen forests stretched all the way to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. When it was two and a half times more than that, 50 million years ago, there were crocodiles and palm trees in the Arctic Circle and the tropics would have been so hot as to be totally unlivable for mammals.
As if we have not had enough mind-numbing detail we now get a long explanation of why oxygen in the atmosphere does not come from plants breathing it out, as we were taught, but by burying as much carbon as possible deep underground so that it does not burn (oxidize) which is what uses up oxygen in the atmosphere. Here is the long quote. You will wonder why I just do not scan and OCR this book and present it in serial form in the newspaper, copyright law ignored. I am presenting enough information for you, gentle readers, to be able to make a decision if this book is interesting enough to buy and read at your leisure. It is also to bring to your attention the fact that the young people these days will find out this information and find it to be difficult to reconcile with certain religious views. Somehow that has to be dealt with, and hopefully without alienating the young people from their parents and their community. As I have suggested, keeping this information a secret from the young people is not easily done. Now that you ask me what I recommend, my response is that I am not a person who is paid to answer that problem.
I have suggested that many people can get through life quite nicely without understanding all of these things and worrying about them. I have also suggested that an understanding of the concept of climate change, the emissions of greenhouse gases being something to be regulated by governments, really needs to be understood by an informed voting citizenry as it would take a dictatorship to control that much human behavior. I am not in favor of a dictatorship. We will attempt to continue with this study of scientific principles without dwelling on either politics or religious beliefs. Although I think that political beliefs and religious beliefs have some overlap in the real world. This discussing complexities has almost worn me out. Hopefully the future will be better.
