Part one.

I started reading the book of the American astronomer Harlow Shapley “Stars and People” (“On stars and men”) in the first days of April. Graduated on June 20th. The brochure is only 152 pages. But it’s written very unevenly. There are interesting thoughts and, say, “Claim-requests” like the gold diggers in Klondike who marked the territory of “their claim.”

On April fifth, I tried to share my feelings with the readers.: “Cold fires and the stigma of insignificance.” But all the time, flashes of intellectual and emotional irritation prevented calm and consistent reading. Therefore, he gave up this activity (to calm down) and, when the severity of these feelings softened, he took up reading again. Even now, it can be seen from the dates that I could not take up the review — analysis of this essay. It aroused too many different and contradictory feelings.

On the one hand, this seems to be a good thing: After all, he filled 21 pages with his comments in the form of an “afterword” to the brochure. (Usually, I glue an envelope to the inside of the books I read, to the covers, and put notes in it. In some it turns out to be a little, in others – a lot). It means “CAUGHT”. On the other hand, I got hooked on the whole against the background of irritation at some kind of cowardice of the author. Occasionally he declares something interesting, original, and sensible, and then, looking around fearfully at the negative reaction of readers, he hurries back to stupid and ordinary herd dogmas.

Like in the scene, when Polonius sends Reynaldo to watch over his son while he is away.

“See you now: Your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth”

If the author had written in the Soviet Union, this fear would have been understandable – the CENSORS are ON THE CHARGE, but the author wrote in democratic America and on topics not political or military in any way. And the book was written by a man who, BEFORE the popular slogan “It’s better to be dead than red” in America in the fifties of the twentieth century, said something similar:

Before the anti-communist phrase “Better Dead Than Red” became popular during McCarthyism in the 1950s, Shapley said in a 1947 speech entitled “Peace or Pieces” that:

“A slave world is not worth preserving. Better be lifeless like the cold Moon, or primitively vegetal like desolate Mars, than be a planet populated by social robots.”[2] Harlow Shapley

Therefore, I decided not to write a review in the usual style for such a genre, but simply to give a quote or an extract from the book and immediately – my comment. And let the readers decide for themselves whether they should also read the book or, with a sweet yawn, forget about it.

Although I am very disappointed, I am too much hooked by it and I will not be able to forget.

(I remember reading Rober Merle’s novel “The Island” many years ago about the mutineers from the Bounty who landed in Tahiti or somewhere nearby. I read and was constantly “boiling over” with irritation at the behavior of one self-styled “Christian” who constantly calls for non-resistance to EVIL! And because of this “good guy”, a continuous bloody drama is being played out. I never reread it again, but it still fell to the bottom of my memory.)

So, I’m starting.

First, a quotation or extract of the contents from the book is given, and then my comment, marked with the letters M.C.

I repeat the beautiful quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s letters about the stars:
“These cold fires, which, however, are still capable of burning the stigma of insignificance on people.”

M.C. BRILLIANCE!

This quote from Shepley fascinated me so much that I hastily decided that the whole book would be in the spirit of Nietzsche’s thought.

ALAS! The first and not the last disappointment.

But even in the “Preface” the author already declares his kind of non-western, original and extraordinary approach to the topic:

“If this book had been preceded by a dedication, it would probably have been primarily addressed to the light of stars, insects, galaxies, as well as to fossil plants and animals, as they inspired the author to write this book.”

M.C. Isn’t that right, it’s A VERY PROMISING start!

“We still have to get rid of a significant part of human vanity and many arguments in favor of anthropocentrism. But we, in turn, must be prepared for the fact that in the near future the building we have erected may require renovation.”

M.C. Two phrases.

The first is again an application for sanity and a rejection of stupid, maniacally inflated anthropocentrism.

The second is the repetition of a stupid herd dogma, common in its monotony and dullness – comparing the process of building a new theory as the construction of a building. How many such “buildings” and “temples” have already been built by humanoid cannibals and how many have been turned into piles of ruins mixed with the crushed flesh of those who fervently believe in another “unshakable truth of construction”, from one random core of EXPERIMENT or COMMON SENSE???

The task of scientists is not the dull, painstaking construction of another temple – just a target for another upcoming shot, but the improvement of the design of the BIRD’s WING of OUR THINKING, so that it can correctly capture the newly discovered, ascending stream of new knowledge with its tip feathers and immediately skillfully enter it in order to rise even higher in understanding nature!

(See the long-ago note “Wings instead of a mason’s trowel” on 21 XI 2010)

“This world is good for most of us. Nature is merciful in moderation, and benevolence is a universal human trait.”

M.C. Here is a mixture of the stupid dogma of Leibniz that we live “in the best of all worlds” and flattering, brazen, shameless lies about the essence of man.

The stupidity of Leibniz should be contrasted with the really accurate and witty aphorism of George Bernard Shaw:

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.

The unreasonable ones persist in their attempts to adapt it to themselves.

Therefore, progress depends on the UNWISE.”

The world is good as long as we are the DEVOURERS OF ALL OTHERS, and when, with inescapable personal inevitability, OTHERS BEGIN TO DEVOUR US, all this worldly goodness disappears instantly!

The universal human traits are stupid malice, thirst for blood and murder, total parasitism on everything and everyone, including ourselves, the thirst to breed mindlessly without measure.

This is a truly universal human tendency.

In the next passage, which I won’t quote because of its tedious length, Shepley ponders the idiotic question: What does the universe exist for? Here the herd teleology, which is common to human thinking and is generated by the same anthropocentrism, stands out:

The whole world exists for us, for our convenience and well-being!

This stupidity has long-standing millennial roots (Idiot Protagoras: “Man is the measure of EVERYTHING!”) and does not fade at all from scientific and technological progress. (Again, the eternal mania of pseudo-grandeur: We, pieces of easily decomposing meat, in reality, in our usual megalomania, are THE MOST!!!

That’s what Hegel thought, and Engels, who quoted his stupidity with reverence. And who doesn’t?

(It is explicitly written in Hegel that the Sun exists in order to warm the Earth with its light! And Engels totally agrees with him! We humans are at THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING!!! (See Dialectics of Nature, 1953, p. 190.)

A little further on, there was another dull howl on the topic of “construction”, now not just a building or a temple, but a “space castle”. Empty verbiage.

Here the author begins to operate with numbers in order to suppress criticality by their greatness and convince the reader of the possibility of the impossible.

The number of stars known to us is ten to the twentieth power, which is one hundred million trillion stars. The time of the Universe’s existence is also immeasurable. From these two logical premises, it is concluded that with such an abundance of matter and time, amino acid molecules MUST NECESSARILY arise, and from them everything else, and certainly the “crown of creation.”

The famous English astronomer Arthur Eddington parodied such a stupid conclusion with a good deal of irony:

“If you give a large enough number of monkeys a large enough number of typewriters, then we can get Shakespeare. Sooner OR LATER!”

Stanislav Lem, although he lived and wrote in heavily Sovietized Poland, was bolder than Shapley and clearly expressed his disbelief that “purely by chance” biochemical catalysts could arise – ENZYMES, of which there are as many as thirty thousand in the human body alone and each is “tuned” to just one biochemical reaction. And how many do other animals and plants have? Millions! (“The Sum of Technology”, chapter two, paragraph “Differences”)

I omit Shapley’s flattering raptures about the steadily growing list of elementary particles. I have already written about this more than once, as about the complete idiocy of physicists who are still unable to figure out what chemists ingeniously thought of centuries ago: TO DIVIDE all chemicals into ELEMENTS (there are just over a hundred of them) and distinguish this from the many millions of their COMPOUNDS.

The same thing should have been done a long time ago with “elementary particles” – to determine where the MAIN ones are. FUNDAMENTAL ONES. STABLE PARTICLES, and where there are only some “corpuscular fragments”, short–lived products of their reactions! If the lifetime of the “particles” is micro-nano-picoseconds or less, then HOW can they be ELEMENTS of a WORLD that has existed steadily for many billions of years???

This is followed again by an example of the author’s stupid herd thinking, which contradicts his own stated goals of combating human vanity and the overblown megalomania of anthropocentrism. Shapley provides a table of geological epochs, starting with a certain “cosmic” epoch – the era of the formation of the Sun and planets – and ending with … WHAT???

Well, of course, the PSYCHOZOIC era, that is, the emergence of man!

Of course, none of the millions of animal species that have existed and still exist HAVE any psyche! Just a two-legged creature, descended from cannibals. endowed with it. the “psyche” of the species, mainly: Deceit, meanness, venality, hypocrisy, betrayal, Satanic cruelty and perversion of sadism, an unquenchable thirst for murder and blood. Indeed, no living being other than humans, the “crowns of creation,” possesses SUCH A MENTAL SET OF OUTSTANDING QUALITIES!

Animals, on the other hand, do not feel anything, do not live, do not love, nor suffer.

Only MAN!

And here the author is also not original, but repeats the vile and no less idiotic slander of the pathological sadist Descartes, that animals are just machines IMITATING the semblance of life!!! Descartes, having put forward this vile idea four hundred years ago, (for the moral “justification” of his insatiable sadism) somehow, due to his natural deceit and stupidity, did not think about its complete absurdity and internal inconsistency:

If animals are dead machines that do not feel anything and are unable to think, compare, or analyze, then HOW CAN SUCH MACHINES IMITATE ANYTHING AT ALL, let alone the complex and multifaceted manifestations of life!

And if the American astronomer Harlow Shanley had read at least one paragraph from the book “Behavior of Lower Organisms” by the American microbiologist G.S. Jennings, published at the beginning of the last century, he probably would not have so narcissistically described the “Psychozoic Era” lasting for the last million years or two!

I had to, in order not to send readers to search in my notes, again, for the umpteenth time. I quote this wonderful passage:

“Moving in its drop of water, the amoeba collides with another, smaller amoeba, and begins to surround it, extending its pseudopods. The smaller amoeba makes attempts to escape, but the aggressor holds the captured part tightly. The victim’s body begins to elongate until it breaks into two parts. One part of the escaped amoeba begins to move away with reasonable acceleration, and the aggressor fills with plasma what it has swallowed and goes home. Meanwhile, the part of the victim that was “eaten” begins to move quickly. Floating inside the protoplasm of the “predator”, it suddenly reaches the outer shell, breaks through it and gets out! “Caught off guard,” the aggressor first lets the “trophy” slip away, but then rushes in pursuit. And here we witness a number of downright grotesque situations. The aggressor catches up with the victim several times, but each time she eludes him. After many futile attempts, the “desperate” amoeba stops chasing and slowly retreats in the hope of a more successful hunt.”

This is a detailed description of the FACT OF LIFE OF AMOEBAS!!!

WHERE WAS THE CENTER OF THOUGHT in the above-described nuclear-free amoeba? Moreover, not one, but several: The “hunter”, one victim, who “thought of splitting” in half, and the swallowed part, who “INGENIOUSLY thought of piercing the membrane of the “hunter” and escaped from and from him!!!

I tried to explain this completely “reasonable” and situation-appropriate behavior of amoebas using two hypothetical factors: the Superconsciousness in the form of “behavioral thinking” and the information generating such behavior received by the Superconsciousness from Temporal Waves.

In this case, the Superconsciousness is the multiple biochemical processes in the body of the amoeba. Their condition and the relationship between them is something comfortable or uncomfortable for her. Moreover, while maintaining a certain constancy of the internal environment, these processes provide it precisely by flexibly responding to any changes from the outside. Not a frozen dead balance, but a dynamic one, constantly changing. Temporal Waves, reflecting exactly the process that gave rise to them, CHANGE the CHEMISTRY of these processes in the amoeba’s body and thereby “command” its behavior.

Next, the author devotes his review to the achievements of humans, in particular, the Periodic Table of Elements, mentioning its creators Newlands, Meyer, Mendeleev, “forgetting” to mention Lavoisier and Dalton, among others.

But the previously mentioned idea of the need for physicists to make a PRELIMINARY SEPARATION of “elementary particles” and the products of numerous reactions and transmutations does not occur to his highly intelligent mind!

“The inclinations of the orbits of most planets in the modern solar system are close to the inclinations of the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, which, according to this hypothesis, is a consequence of particle collisions and the action of gravitational forces – a long process of transition from chaos to order that took place in ancient times.”

The footnote:

“It would be better to talk about the “time of transition from apparent chaos to order,” since in the physical world chaos as such does not exist, in fact, everything is ordered, as everything is determined by physical laws. Chaos is

an unconscious order; this word indicates the limitation of the human mind and the lack of observational data. The words “chaos”, “random”, “chance”, “unpredictable” are convenient concepts behind which we hide our ignorance.”

M.C. A brilliant footnote!!! I agree with every word, because I have been saying for years that the concepts of “order and disorder”, “randomness and probability” are our inventions and there is no order, disorder, probability, or randomness in nature. That’s what WE call certain phenomena and processes, nothing more! That’s how we perceive it, classify it, and that’s all!

Therefore, the “Second Law of Thermodynamics” is nothing more than the “First Law of Thermodynamics.”

(The discoverer of this “Beginning”, R. Clausius, was right when he said that heat CANNOT SPONTANEOUSLY transfer from a colder body to a hotter one! But this has nothing to do with order or disorder!)

“The entropy (degree of disorder) of any closed system, left to itself, increases or remains unchanged (for reversible processes).”

The most fundamental Law about the impossibility of a “Perpetual Motion Machine of the Second Kind”.

Let’s take a saturated solution of table salt or copper sulfate and leave them to “themselves”.

What will happen?

As they cool down, VERY ORDERED crystal structures will begin to form in them, which initially did NOT exist, which means that the overall degree of disorder, entropy, DECREASES!

The emergence of stars, galaxies, planets, ordered planetary systems around stars, life, all this happened “by itself” from chaotic, “disorderly” clouds of dust and gas! Closed systems, left to themselves, self-ordered and entropy, the degree of disorder in them, FELL! But it didn’t grow or stay the same!

Moreover, these self-ordering processes are mutually directed, both cooling and heating.

As the cloud of gas and dust contracts (chaos, the highest degree of disorder), it already acquires a certain order, heats up, then a star flashes, the system is quite orderly, then the planets and the system of rotating planets itself.

A SELF-ORDERED SYSTEM!

A comet, a chaotically, randomly frozen lump of gases, ice and dust, as it approaches the sun, begins to warm up and turns into a kind of ordered structure with a core – the head and a “tail” of evaporated particles thrown away from the head by radiation pressure.

Conversely, when a living and highly ordered warm-blooded creature freezes, it DIES, and a lump with complete DISORDERING arises from millions of strictly ordered biochemical processes. Here, the degree of disorder increases, unlike the example with saturated solutions or solidification of a mass of molten metal or water, when strictly ordered crystalline structures arise from randomly moving atoms and molecules.

The answer exposing the stupidity of this pseudo–principle is higher. We have attributed to inanimate nature certain NON–EXISTENT physical entities – our inventions and ideas about “order-disorder”, “probability-randomness”. We have made delusional or non-delusional assumptions of our brain, real physical phenomena!

End of the first part.

27 VII 2025