Dick Surman

Some of you may remember that the poem cited about Richard Cory formed the lyrics to a Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name.  '65-'66 time frame...

Tom Chavez

I missed Simon and Garfunkel's Richard Cory song. And I just found out about the unicorns! It's sad.

Tom Chavez

For those of us who were inattentive—Richard Cory, the song: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAGKpoVFbmw

Gregg Wilson

Tom Chavez

Transcendental Definitions

Real modesty is to be disgusted with improper activities, and beauty is to possess good qualities such as detachment. Detachment is total disinterest in sense gratification. Real happiness is to transcend material happiness and unhappiness, and real misery is to be implicated in searching for sex pleasure.

A sage is one who knows the process of freedom from bondage, and a fool is one who identifies with his material body and mind. The greatest charity is to give up all aggression toward others, and renunciation of lust is real austerity. The greatest strength is the prāṇāyāma system of breath control.

A wretch is one who cannot control his senses, whereas one who is not attached to sense gratification is a real controller. One who is addicted to sense gratification is a slave. Reality is seeing the Supreme Personality of Godhead everywhere.

There is no need for a more elaborate description of good and bad qualities, since to constantly see good and bad is itself a bad quality. The best quality is to transcend material good and evil.

~ Spoken by Kṛṣṇa to his friend, Uddhava, in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Eleventh Canto, Chapter 19.

Ann Lally (Keane)

eing used for a pulpit.  Sad to see my friends not show up on our class of 64 sight because it is being used as a pulpit to recruit Hindu religion. I like Hindues as I have an Inn a block away from the only Hindue Monestary in the wesrern hemisphere. The Bramma there asked me to host guests fron India ,Singapore United Kingdom France, Rusia, all very interesting.

I was inspired by the chatter about computers  My Dad was an airline pilot and has been computer assisted since I was 6 years old and he no longer needed to be starioned on Oahu for three month crew swaps because the prop passenger flights could only fly half way to Tokyo. 

When I bought my business in 1978 I remember doing all the traffic by hand on a big tablet on my desk mixing and placing commercials for Radio Broadcasting 24 hours a day by hand wishing for a computer who could do the same by pushing a button.I often worked till 3a.m.

I just viewed a 60 minutes TV story about a fleet of trucks in Texas on their own with an occasional engineer overseeing. The show estimated the numberd of unimployed truck drivers a year ferlowed from their livlihood.

More personal for me Queens Hospital removed my husbands left lung via a robot. It took 5 hours. I wondered if the computer could visualize if they cut only the cancerous cells.That was 10 years and he died shortly after.

There are good applications to ease our lives. Artificial Intelligene scares me. At the last International techknowledge fair China cornered the market in mastering and selling Artificeal Intelligence. That takes war out of the field and into the web where values and erhics may vary. War might just be shooting down the right satalite.

Blessings to you all with health and happiness Our kindness is like a seed in a beautiful garden. I cannot change the world but I can love the ones I am with. Lucky to be alive Ann Keane

I am hoping our children have outgrown us as we are giving them a very complicated world. My three have already surpassed my wisdom.They will change the world positively

Linda Pompeo (Worden)

Ann..

Good to hear from you and that you are well and that your children are too.  That's what kids are for....to keep us moving and keep us up to date on what is going on in the world. I read and listen to news,, but there are things like new words or phrases that I have never heard before.   Sure is easy to isolate a bit as we age and not keep up with everything else.  I know I am grateful for all of the computer and cell phone knowledge that my grandkids have. Whenever I am stuck...I can call on one of them.

I wonder how our classmates are and am hopeful that everyone gets through this present virus ok.  This has been difficult year in many respects.....makes me long for the 'good old days'.

Hope to hear from you again soon.

Linda Johnson (Martin)

I say No Politics and No Religion.  We should have learned that by now.

We should be talking about the great job the Sea Hawks did playing Dallas!  What a great game!!  Also a great way to lift sprits right now in the midst of wildfires, people losing homes, rioting, and the virus.

Tom Chavez

Ann,

My wife and I went away for a week to buy a condo in Hot Springs, Arkansas. We will leave the huge city of Houston for modest Hot Springs, which is nestled up against Hot Springs National Forest, full of mountains, lakes, streams, trails and, of course, hot springs. It has an interesting and checkered history. 

I came back from Arkansas to find your feedback to my last posting. You say it’s sad that your friends don’t use the class website “because it is being used as a pulpit to recruit Hindu religion.” It is not my intent to recruit or to discourage others from posting.

One of our class luminaries posted about Dr. Charlie Ward, with his particular brand of Christian philosophy. One sent me privately an invitation to her church website, another commented privately about Buddhism, and another privately expressed their philosophy of physicalism. It is natural to share what we find valuable and inspiring.

Ann, I have good reason to share publicly. Many religions and many empires have risen and fallen over the millennia. Through all that, the Sanskrit language and Vedic civilization have endured. We can learn from that. We needn't give up our own culture and civilization, but we can borrow what is useful.

Here is what others have said about the Vedic culture of India: 

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American transcendentalist writer, poet and philosopher: "In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes, and nationalities, and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge." 

Mark Twain (1835-1910)—aka Samuel Clemens—American author: “This is indeed India; the land of a thousand nations and a hundred tongues…cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition…"

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum mechanics: “After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of quantum physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense."

Will Durant (1885-1981), American historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Story of Civilization: "India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics… mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy…"

William James (1842-1910), American philosopher-psychologist: "From the Vedas, we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house-building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology."

Sir William Jones (1746-1794), who discovered a relationship among European and Indian languages, eventually known as Indo-European: “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.”

Max Müller(1823-1900), responsible for the 50-volume set Sacred Books of the East: “If I were  asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions… I should point to India.”

Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), British author of the 12-volume A Study of History, which chronicles the rise and fall of 26 civilizations: “It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in history, the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way." 

Laurel Hoefer (Gerla)

Tom,   

I agree with Ann. I have pretty much stopped looking at these posts.

At this point in life my faith/philosophy is well established. I find your posts long and uninteresting and one of the reasons our alumni site is not what I expected.  I prefer to see what is happening in the lives of our classmates. I am not trying to be snarky, just expressing my personal opinion.          

Bob Beveridge

I came to the Highline class of 1964 late.  We moved to Burien in 1959, so the kids I grew up with went to Franklin H.S. in Seattle.  I have checked to see if they have a site like this, to no avail.  The older I get, the more I appreciate what I see here:  people sharing memories of their growing up together in interesting times and talking about their shared experiences as younsters (and aldults!).

I believe that we "Live in Interesting times" (the American literal version, not the historical Chinese curse meaning!). The older I get, the more I contemplate events in those interesting times.  It would be interesting to see what those events might be for our group.  So, here's one to start: 

Knowing someone who travelled across the country in a covered wagon (maternal great-grand mother, in the 1890's, from Ohio to the new state of Washington).  (NB:she died the day she was going to the doctor for the second time in her life...she was one tough lady!).

Tom Chavez

2020 Physics Nobel Prize ~ Prelude

The modern concept of a black hole came from a 1939 paper by atom bomb physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. It asked the question, when a star’s nuclear fuel runs out, what happens? The outward push of energy dwindles and the star’s gravity begins to compress the star into a denser neutron core, or neutron star. Oppenheimer proved that dying stars a few times as massive as our sun must continue to collapse further than a neutron star.

Oppenheimer calculated that in a massive collapsing star, escaping light would suffer increasing gravitational redshift. An observer would see the star become redder and fainter, curving spacetime ever more drastically around itself. “The star thus tends to close itself off from any communication with a distant observer; only its gravitational field persists,” they conclude in 1939 paper. The star would disappear, but its gravity would not.

War had broken out in Europe when his paper appeared in print. Oppenheimer was recruited for the Manhattan Project, where he became known as the “father” of the atomic bomb.

But his theory about dying stars was not taken seriously, at the time, because it predicted that an object falling into a black hole would eventually reach a singularity and be crushed to zero volume by infinite pressure. Scientists believed that a singularity could not exist in reality. How could you possibly have zero volumn and infinite pressure?!

Event Horizon Telescope photo of the center of galaxy M87. A ring of light bends around a black hole 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. 

Gregg Wilson

Assuminmg gravity is attractive, which it is not.

I quote Isaac Newton:

"That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without mediation of anything else, by and through their action and force may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it."

Except for apples, of course.

Tom Chavez

I agree with you and Newton, Gregg. Gravity is not an attractive force. Rather, Einstein describes gravity as a function of the curvature of space. That makes mathematical sense, and jives with experimental evidence.

During the 1960’s astronomers identified the first quasars. Their enormous energy and small size led to speculation that quasars might be million-solar-mass black holes (the term “black hole” was coined in 1967). 

Albert Einstein did not believe black holes existed, but in 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose published a groundbreaking article describing black holes and their formation. He showed that the theory of relativity accounts for the formation of black holes, despite containing a singularity. 

Penrose used global analysis to show that any object with an event horizon will trap and focus nearby light rays by curvature of space. His work confirmed Oppenheimer: anything entering the event horizon, including light, has only one future: falling farther toward the center until it reaches a singularity.

A singularity is an object with infinite density, where the laws of physics break down. At the singularity, our conceptions of space, time and matter fall apart. This is one of many mysteries in theoretical physics today. The more we know, the more we realize that we don’t know.

The equations that Penrose derived in 1965 have been used by physicists studying black holes ever since. The mathematical proof that black holes may exist in nature energized the search for them in astronomy. Since the 1960s, numerous black holes have been identified.

Now, 55 years later, Roger Penrose has been awarded one-half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for his theoretical mathematical work. Why did he have to wait so long? And what happened to the other half of the prize? (I hope it didn't fall into a black hole!)

Linda Pompeo (Worden)

Bob,

In response to your post, I too have an aunt that traveled by covered wagon....but a bit after your relative.  Juanita came from Missouri to Algona at a time when the car was becoming popular among the more wealthy.  She was a young teen when they left Missouri and was mortally embarrased to be traveling like poor people.  She talked about how, in certain places where roads were better, cars would pass them by  filled with 'fancy' people that would holler out ' why don't you get a car'.  It is still hard for me to imagine both sharing the roads.

I wish I had talked more with past relatives about early life of traveling here and experiences along the way.

Gregg Wilson

Tom,

Is this the rubber sheet analogy?

Tom Chavez

Gregg,

Not analogy, mathematical model involving Minkowski spaces, manifolds, and tensor fields that measure curvature at each point in space. Analogies of rubber, fabric or trampoline lack utility and precision.

Roger Penrose was honored with a Nobel because observational astronomical evidence precisely corroborated the accuracy of his mathematical theory for black holes. 

Penrose shared the Nobel prize with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and Ghez at UC, Los Angeles, helped explicate the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy. With the recent detection of gravitational waves from black hole mergers, the reality of black holes has become inescapable (like their gravity).

Genzel and Ghez used the world’s largest telescopes (Keck Observatory and the Very Large Telescope) to track the movement of stars in a region called Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way. Both independently discovered that an invisible object – 4 million times more massive than our Sun – is pulling those stars in extraordinary orbits.

Over twenty years they made precision tests confirming Penrose’s and Einstein's theories. This work pioneered the use of adaptive optics on the Keck telescope, and led to the understanding that supermassive black holes inhabit the centers of many galaxies. 

Stars' orbits around Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Gregg Wilson

Tom,

Reality is not determined by theories. A theory can at best be a good approximation of Reality. Einstein's theory about curved space and curved time is nonsense. The three ordinates of space and the one ordinate of time are dimensions. They cannot be curved, bent, twisted. There has not been a objective evidence of black holes. This action of finding astronomical results which confirm a mathematical model is literally circular. Which is first, observation or theory?

This is much like Rutherford's experiment. He decided, before hand, that a atom would be a miniature solar system. Then ran a experiment that "proved it". The alpha particle released in his experiment had enough momentum to pass through a gold film with ease. His resultant configuration of an atom, with negative electrons orbiting the positive nucleus would instantaneously result in the electrons collapsing into the nucleus. Neils Bohr "saved the day" by decreeing, ex cathreda, that electrons have fixed orbits.

Minkowski spaces, manifolds, tensors fields are human inventions in mathematics, that measure curvature at each point in space? Really?

Curved geometry does not determine gravity. Gravity is a force. You can show "down" near an object but what would cause another entity to travel "downward"? There has to be a force that moves that entity, which is totally separate from geometry: gravity.

Bill Engelhardt

Does the word "groovy" spring to mind? 

Linda Pompeo (Worden)

Those are some pants!   Not sure if 'groovy' is the right word for that outfit.

Diane Paulson

Going through old photos while clearing out my Mom's condo. My Bluebird troup, from 1954-55. Linda Alderson on the far left. Judy Engel on the far right. I am 4th from the right. You may recognize BJ Bus and Sally Raichle in the middle. Pam Sheets, who befriended me in 5th grade in Mr VanZee's class, at Gregory Heights elementary, when he called me the Displaced Person because I had stopped talking or having friends, next to Linda. (Pam and I would sit at the back of Van Zee's class and read together a book about James Dean that her older brother had given her.) Frances Bruce, who befriended me in sixth grade, next to Judy. Others are very familiar but not names. Some girls are missing who I know belonged: Melissa, Marty Whitmore... Linda befriended me in the 3rd grade when I first moved to Burien. Judy lived next door on 14th SW. Bonnie Klann lived across the street but was in Girl Scouts.

Tom Chavez

Gregg, 

I agree that reality is not determined by theory. Just the opposite.

Language, logic, and math attempt to describe reality. Such attempts are always incomplete and imperfect. The map is never the territory. But the question is, can a theory give useful predictions?

Utility is the principle. If a theory predicts reality accurately, it can be useful. Judge by the result. Relativity theory is useful. Quantum mechanics is useful. That's why they are accepted.

Einstein predicted that light should be bent by gravity. Sir Arthur Eddington photographed the 1919 total solar eclipse. Photos showed that starlight passing the sun was bent exactly as Einstein predicted. 

Light takes the shortest route between two points. The fact that starlight was bent implies that space itself is curved. Einstein’s theory gave useful predictions, so it is accepted and used.

How can singularities exist? How can space be bent? How can electrons quantum jump? Reality is full of mystery. Our ignorance exceeds our understanding.

Material knowledge is useful for survival in this world, but ultimately no one survives. We try to accumulate more knowledge, but something is missing and our civilization is increasingly chaotic.

We are conscious beings. We should try to understand consciousness. Know thyself. What is the goal of life? If we do not develop scientific spiritual knowledge, we miss the true aim of human life.

Virginia Wolfe (Scheffer)

Eh gads! Those pants.  However, we all did think we were cool and groovy.  Thanks for the memories (I think)

Gregg Wilson

Tom,

There is a universal flux of gravitons. They possess mass and velocity - nothing else. There is a universal light carrying medium, consisting of particles called elysons - much like water molecules in the ocean. Waves pass through such a medium. The light carrying medium possesses temperature. Nothing else has temperature.

In far outer space, the observed temperature is about 2 degrees above absolute zero. Elysons are impacted by gravitons, which gives this temperature.

Gravitons push elysons up against any material body - protons, dust, moons, planets, etc. This increases the density of the light carrying medium. Light waves are slowed down in denser light carrying medium. This is why a light wave is bent around a star - very close to it.

There is no curving of space.

Linda Johnson (Martin)

Looks like the girl in the picture thinks so!!