Do some math and find the answer!

OBAMA OSAMA
OBAM OSAM
OBA OSA
BA SA
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D-DAY

by OldBob on Monday, June 6, 2011 at 1:08am

0108 hours 6 June 1944. The greatest amphibious force in history sails slowly across a treacherous Channel to begin, in Normandy, the final assault on Hitler's "Fortress Europe." Paratroopers of the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne, and British glider troops, have already landed well behind the enemy lines on the coast. Years of planning and preparation, including a massive and detailed campaign of deception, have led up to this hour. Many brave men will die or be shattered so that we, sixty-seven years later, can live free. Salute them!

Personal side note: my Pop might have been there but for a fluke. Here is the way he told the story. He was at the docks with his rifle company, who were embarking on the ships that would carry them to Europe. He was called aside by his company commander, Captain Cohen (for whom Pop could do no wrong since the time Pop, called to lead grace in mess hall, said Catholic grace and then called for silence, put his cap back on, and recited the Shema Yisrael.)

Captain Cohen said to Pop, "Sergeant, we need men to stay behind as weapons instructors, and since you shot expert with almost every weapon you touched, we need you. You may wish to go overseas with your company. You have twenty minutes to make up your mind." Pop said, "Sir, I don't need twenty minutes, I have a wife and two little boys at home." (Guess who the four-month-old baby was.)

Pop said it came out later that his company was attached to the 4th Division, which was in the center of the front line in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944, and took 30% casualties. So Pop might never have come home -- and there would have been no Cecilia, no Mary, no Joe, no Ray, no Margaret.

God writes straight with crooked lines.

E = m * c^2 and all that

I was thinking lately (a thing that some of my friends say I should not do too much) and it occurred to me that if God possesses infinite energy -- and I can't see any reason why not -- then creating a universe, even a very large one, out of nothing is no big deal.

Now since E = m * c^2, where c is the speed of light (about 186400), then m = E / c^2. This means that to create one kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of matter, God used up 9 * 10^16 joules of energy, or about 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules.

So what's a joule? One joule is the amount of work done when a mass of one kilogram is moved against a force of one newton. And one newton is that force which will give a mass of one kilogram an acceleration of 1 meter per second per second (or 1 m / s^2). In "English" units, 1 m / s^2 is about 1/10 the normal acceleration of gravity on Earth.

Matter and energy are interchangeable. Force, mass, work, acceleration -- all these terms, and the phenomena they name, are interrelated. (God is pretty smart.)

So some smart-aleck may ask: even if God possesses infinite energy, if God created an infinite universe, would that use up all His energy? The answer is no, because there are orders of infinities, some are bigger than others, and you can take away infinity from infinity and still have infinity. For instance, from the infinitely large set of ordinary counting numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) you can take away the infinite large set of even numbers, and still have an infinitely large set of odd numbers. And since every number has a double, which is an even number, there are as many even numbers as there are numbers.

(Don't blame me, I didn't make this up!)

Anyway, God said "Let there be light!" And there was light. And I can't see why that wasn't the same as the Big Bang.

That was the first Big Bang.

When I was at Adoration the other night, a line from a French Christmas carol ("He is Born, the Holy Child") ran through my head: "Depuis plus de quatre mille ans, nous le promettait les prophètes." -- "For more than four thousand years, the prophets promised us Him."

It doesn't make any difference to me if there were four thousand or unpteen bazillion years between creation and the birth of Christ. Let's just say it was a very long time. Dinosaurs came and went, continents shifted, seas rose and fell, glaciers advanced and retreated, and then at some imprecise time, God breathed life into the clay of the earth and made Man. (This does not seem to me to be necessarily inconsistent with the physical evolution of the human body.)

Then sometime about 1900 years before Christ, there was Abraham. After 1900 years, Christ was born and lived about 30 years, before He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It was about four or five days between that and the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood at the Last Supper. It was about 12 hours after that, that Christ was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and put on trial. It was about three hours He hung in horrible torment on the Cross. It took maybe one minute for Him to utter His very last words -- and then time sort of stops.

And tradition tells us that forty hours after that was the second Big Bang -- Christ's resurrection!

And just as the universe expanded and formed itself after the first Big Bang, the Church has expanded and formed Herself after the second Big Bang.

The first was physical, the second spiritual; the second depended on the first (without a universe, no Earth, no people, no need for redemption). But the second is infinitely more important.

Take care and God bless!

Gettysburg Address

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- this this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Christopher Dawson and Western History

I don't remember when I first read any of Christopher Dawson's work, but I have read six of his works --

The Dynamics of World History

The Making of Europe

Medieval Essays

Religion and the Rise of Western Culture

Progress and Religion

The Dividing of Christendom --

and now I have a seventh -- The Formation of Christendom (fascinating so far).

I would recommend him to anyone seriously interested in the history of Western civilization and culture.

As far as I know, Dawson is far from being the only historian who argued that Roman Catholic Christianity was one of the indispensable elements in the formation of Western Civilization.

My professor of Medieval History, at the University of Minnesota 1968-69, Robert S. Hoyt, the author of Europe in the Middle Ages, says in that book: "The Christian contribution to the transformation from late antique to early medieval culture was the controlling force that dominated the assimilation of the Germanic, classical, and distinctively Christian elements." (p. 74)

And long before him, G. K. Chesterton quipped that the Church is accused of trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages, when in fact it was the Church that got us out of them. (Sorry I don't have the exact quote or the book title.)

The point of course is that which so many good bloggers have said over and over -- in so far as the West repudiates its Judeo-Christian heritage, it will die. We in the United States are seeing religion being "marginalized," shoved out of the public square where, in my opinion, it has every right to be. And we're seeing our beloved nation going under.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

God bless you all!

Philip Trower's Books

I consider myself learned, not necessarily wise, because most, very likely all, of my good ideas came from somewhere or someone else, or from thinking about things that I learned from somewhere or someone else. (Wasn't it our favorite fat friar who said that anything in the intellect is first in the senses?)

A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Philip Trower's book The Catholic Church and the Counter-Faith, and I found it really good, and I like it a lot, because Trower manages to pull together lots of scattered scraps I picked up over the years, make a coherent whole out of them, and point me toward a need for more study and better understanding of the scraps.

For instance, one of my favorite sentences from that book is this:
"After Descartes had philosophically shut men up inside their minds, the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) redecorated the prison's interior, the Scot David Hume (1711-1776) locked the door and the Prussian Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) threw away the key." (p.73)

I read a little Descartes in college (philosophy, not math; how could such a great mathematician be such a lousy philosopher?) and I think I've dabbled a bit in Locke, Hume, and Kant (getting old, can't really remember); but the thing is that if I want to really understand Trower's statement, all I have to do is pick up these men's books and read them.

So the other day in the mail I finally got my hands on a copy of Trower's book Turmoil and Truth, and just a few minutes ago stumbled across another of his gems which exactly describes my experience with the world of learning (whether it's higher mathematics or growing flowers):

"One of the chief hazards for scholars of every kind is 'not being able to see the forest for the trees.'
"When we look at any of the things God has created, perhaps the most striking thing about them is the contrast between their simplicity and intelligibility when taken as a whole, and their complexity and obscurity when examined in detail. That is why there are biologists who cannot see any essential difference between men and animals, and ordinary folk who can. Peering at the details produces a kind of myopia about the whole." (p.54)

Regina Caeli

Regina Caeli laetare, alleluia

Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia

Resurrexit sicut dixit, alleluia

Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia

Gaude et laetare Virgo Maria alleluia

Quia surrexit Dominus vere alleluia!

Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia,

For He Whom thou wast made worthy to bear, alleluia

Has risen as He said, alleluia

Pray for us to God, alleluia

Rejoice and be glad O Virgin Mary, alleluia

For the Lord is truly risen alleluia!