Absolutes, Relations, and Survival

Absolutes, Relations, and Survival

A letter emailed to a group of physicists, Catholic Church officials, government leaders, and other thought leaders
on April 24, 2026, Day 56 of the Iran War 

Greetings to all,

After I share with you my letter to the editor in yesterday’s Albany, New York, USA, Times Union, I’d like to tell you how my ideas about quantum mechanics and spacetime relate to why folk might do well to attend public worship services or hang out in bars or walk/roll in public places or ride the bus, how these ideas imply the need for more non-men in physics and religion, how these ideas provide insight to the USISIR (United States-Israel-Iran) War, and how these ideas explain apathy in the face of the rapidly coalescing specter of global famine from fertilizer scarcity and of fuel shock-inspired civil strife and systemic financial risk. Here’s a version of the letter:

Many thanks to Paul Grondahl for his article on Eunice Newton Foote (Forgotten scientist Foote gets her due as climate science pioneer, 4/15). As a physicist who knew of Foote, who has been promoting awareness of scientists with strong ties to Albany, and who suspects that gender-distorted reasoning about cause and effect is hobbling theoretical physics, I really should have been ahead of the Times Union on this story. Here’s why this man would like to see more physicists who aren’t men.

Marie Curie’s name is not the first I think of among women in physics history. Emmy Noether ranks with the top mathematicians of all time and explained the connection between two profound physics concepts, symmetry and conservation laws. Many other names occur to me, but for some reason, I’ve never bothered to learn the one I’d like to highlight.

Albert Einstein married a fellow physics student, who left school to bear their first child. They separated years after he published much of his greatest work, and he gave her his Nobel Prize money. Her name was [checks Wikipedia] Mileva Marić.

People argue about whether Marić contributed to Einstein’s work, but I’ve seen years-long effort pivot into a new direction on an offhand comment. How could Marić have failed to influence Einstein?

I think male domination and imperialism inspire what my (female) astrophysics professor called the “peculiar” worldview of physics. The more we differ from each other, the more we can teach each other.

James Lyons Walsh, PhD
Schenectady

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Rather than go into issues of cause and effect directly, I’ll focus on spacetime. Back in 1925, there was a brief, shining moment when Heisenberg et al. threw away assumptions about space and time to construct matrix mechanics, the original form of quantum mechanics, as I interpret Carlo Rovelli’s account in Helgoland. Rovelli goes on to relate Schrödinger’s entry to the scene at a ski resort where, accompanied by a girl of unreported age, he wrote down his eponymous equation, which assumed the applicability of space and time, superficially resembled familiar physics, and has since so confused people that a few physicists even imagine vast numbers of universes to quell the intellectual vertigo they suffer when contemplating the implications of that equation.

In other words, a monster well known to have fed that monster’s appetite for domination by raping girls enabled physics to proceed as if its assumptions concerning space and time had been correct, at least since Einstein had modified those assumptions a generation earlier, not that the monster's work took those modifications into account.

Incidentally, this video is an AI impersonation of Leonard Susskind, right? I’m pretty sure another channel is impersonating Feynman’s voice. What religion might untrained physics enthusiasts form? How will it compare to the belief systems extant among physicists working on fundamental issues?

If Schrödinger had not entered the picture, what conceptual understanding might have arisen? Over in France, de Broglie was talking about electron clock time, which certainly sounds compatible with the simulation hypothesis or the picture of everything as thoughts in the mind of God, ideas suddenly plausible to more people in the current era of generative AI.

If time is a relationship between a thing and itself, perhaps space encodes relationships between distinct things, and quantum mechanics describes situations in which there exist insufficient relationships for spacetime to exist in the classical sense. Doesn’t that make good sense? Isn’t it simple to understand?

Think of this in terms of people. Here’s a letter that I wrote to the editor of the Times Union and that appeared online two years ago this week, immediately preceding the first download of my dissertation from the UAlbany online repository:

Quantum computer’s debut offers moment to ponder big questions

The casing of the new quantum computer at RPI looks like a statue of the concept “science” as envisaged by Bauhaus-inspired marketers at IBM. It’s watched over by stained-glass images of saints in a repurposed chapel. As a repurposed physicist working to promote human survival prospects, I’m inspired by the picture to discuss one reason for respecting each other and, indeed, all life.

Some believe that people possess fixed attributes from which they sometimes deviate. Others say that people incorporate opposite attributes that coexist simultaneously. For particles, quantum mechanics concerns mixtures, or “superpositions,” of coexisting mutually exclusive attributes.

People often expect to understand each other as simple lists of fixed attributes. Spending time away from these expectations helps a person to embrace ambiguity in their sense of self. Returning to society can push them back into a persona. Likewise, particles that interact enough become less quantum mechanical in nature. Physicists speak of “quantum decoherence,” the loss of superposition.

I hope physics seems relatable, but physics can’t tell us what this universe is. By definition, everything science can tell us is information. There are many ways to store and process information, including via minds. Scientifically speaking, we and everything else could be thoughts in the mind (s) of God (s). Panpsychism, the principle of ubiquitous mentality, is again gaining academic credence.

Do you willingly dwell on painful thoughts? Nature mightn’t. Long-term survival may require human decency.

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I enjoy the editor’s phrase “ponder big questions” in the headline, which seems a little tongue-in-cheek to me, as did the numerous photos the Times Union had run online of the empty space where the quantum computer was eventually to be installed. I think we’re spending way too much time coming up with whiz-bang physics instead of promoting the survival prospects of our species and of the two million other species endangered by us. I’m writing about physics in service of the more urgent and humane cause, for my physics helps me to understand people, and vice versa.

If you want to come up with new ideas, you wander in the wilderness. You go to Heligoland. You get away from human interaction, which makes your mind decohere into conformity.

Now, thinking independently is a dangerous process, but we really should encourage folks to try it from time to time, without any more than the minimum necessary pearl clutching but with a little monitoring, to keep everybody nice and cool, like good little Fonzies, right Yolanda?

Most of the time, however, most people value strong community, which, by analogy to my model of space, emerges from sufficiently numerous interactions with others, as we experience in large groups, at mass or other worship services or in bars or on buses or in the public square. Grooving to civilization, enjoying the feeling of safety amidst many other human animals capable of badly hurting us, with or without talking or other formal interaction, tends to perpetuate civilization, as I wrote in the Times Union June 18, 2023:

Commentary: Missed connections, on the bus and off of it

To heal our crippling social isolation, what if we tried…getting together?

I ride the bus as much as possible, partly because I like the comfort and security of being driven by a trained professional. I credit freedom from driving with helping me see why our society is threadbare and how to mend it.

Recently, I walked from the Goodwill store in Guilderland to shop at the nearby Market 32. Don’t try this dangerous trek yourself. At 5:17, I found I’d missed the last bus headed east. Because I’m lucky enough to be capable of it, I walked to Crossgates to catch the bus home.

It was raining. I had one sock wet and felt a keen, worrisome sense of isolation from the many automobile-encased people speeding by. Still, I was enjoying myself. Gorgeous light effects eventually filtered through, contrasting with the apocalyptic cloudscape.

I passed a shop selling pool supplies and a hardware store that offered pool testing. I was reminded that many humans in this region prefer not only to work hard enough to own personal transportation and drive it themselves but also, in some special cases, to work hard enough to own a personal swimming facility and maintain it themselves.

There are people unwilling to rub elbows with certain other people. They like those people not to be around as they shop. They apparently wouldn’t even want their children immersed in the same water as the children of those people.

One joy of civilization lies in feeling safe among strangers. The joy provides the safety, because it keeps everyone calm. The less we avail ourselves of the joy, the more tenuous and expensive the safety becomes. Scotia was ready to cancel its fireworks display this year over security concerns, until it decided to use pandemic funds to pay for patrols. What happens next year?

In scant bus service paired with gleaming new electric car chargers, I see a squandered opportunity to heal apartness. Apartness requires more resource consumption, creating scarcity, begetting strife, driving people to crave apartness. It’s a vicious cycle.

A fabric with strands pulled apart is called “threadbare.” If you question the wisdom of coming together but value the example of Jesus, please ask yourself, “WWJD?” Where would Jesus dwell? Why would Jesus drive? Whom would Jesus deny?

There may be a simple first step to mending our society: Just ride the bus as much as you can.

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Greed and the fear of disease and the fear of covetousness drive people apart, but insufficient interaction makes civilization vanish, just as I suggest space ceases to exist for things that don’t interact, because civilization and space emerge, in my hypothesis, from relationships established via interaction.

The USISIR War threatens mass death from starvation if disruption of the fertilizer supply, by closure of the Strait of Hormuz, during the Northern Hemisphere’s planting season isn’t addressed promptly, from civil strife if fuel supplies aren’t secured everywhere, and from collapse of the financial system if fear and other economic stressors aren’t curbed soon. Creating catastrophe could be the intent behind maneuvers deemed merely stupid by some sophisticated observers, though evil intent does not imply competence, let alone intelligence—quite the opposite, in fact. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, there are many who would be glad to see mass death of poor folk, when our problems would be solved if rich folk were raptured.

But I digress!

The problem, of course, is that people reason so as to get what they want, and what they frequently want is their neighbor’s land or other possessions. People are egged on in their covetousness by demagogues, who strengthen one community by inflaming its hatred of another. Turning to the Iran War, let’s recall that after World War II, not everyone who survived the Nazi death camps was welcomed when they returned to their communities, where, in some cases, their former neighbors had decided to seize their property, now that the Nazis had been driven out. Zionism abetted this theft.

Ponder the filthy Christian souls writhing in hell for racist crimes! Remember Luke’s Lazarus and the teaching that sins of omission can be hell-worthy! Don’t court eternal death in exchange for the illusion of current safety! I suggest speaking publicly to demand that Vice President Vance and a majority of the cabinet use the 25th Amendment to remove the unmistakably and perilously incompetent United States president.

To see how the drive for a Jewish homeland was perverted, look at the Jewish population in Europe immediately before World War II and in the generations after: Europe’s Jewish population | Pew Research Center. We see that in 1939, there were 9.5 million Jewish people in Europe, or 57% of the world population of Jewish people; in 1945, 3.8 million, or 35%; in 1960, 3.2 million, or 27%; in 1991, 2 million, or 16%; and in 2010, 1.4 million, or 10%.

I’m reminded that some people oppose granting gravely ill folk access to suicide assistance from fear of the slippery slope, the possibility that people who are unwelcome will feel pressure to take their lives if any kind of suicide is normalized. I see that Zionism encouraged Jewish emigration from Europe, thereby advancing Hitler’s project of eliminating the European Jewish population.

Ah, but the Jewish people got security, in the form of their own state, right? Not so much: Jewish people in Israel have their backs to the sea in a postage stamp-sized, badly water-stressed land that was stolen from the prior inhabitants, creating endless strife, to which Jewish Israelis have responded, as many in their position would, by turning villainous in a fashion reminiscent of Nazism.

Why? They want to have children and material prosperity, like most, but definitely not all, people. Consumption pressure, owing to population growth and rising living standards, triggers war and the appearance of the other horsemen of the apocalypse. European antisemites couldn’t have served their evil intentions better if they’d tried.

Hmmm.

Seizing land by killing people is an ancient strategy that never went away. Racism and other generic hatreds are the intellectual pretext and smoldering form of this strategy, always waiting to erupt in flame when not actively burning. I’m watching The Borgias, which supports my idea that racism against Spanish and Portuguese people derives from the conquest of most of the Iberian Peninsula by people from Africa long ago. I also see this racism among Irish people, who intermarried with Spanish folk.

Some people clearly want to bring back the Angel of Death as a cure for consumption pressure, but the stable, sustainable cure is the Kingdom of Heaven: moderation in pursuit of material prosperity and in the creation of children, this moderation encouraged, but not enforced, by respect for the rights of women, nonbinary folk, and children and, if you can spare it, respect for the contributions of childfree men with modest tastes who just want to do good work in materially secure circumstances.

I think the Kingdom of Heaven could be established quickly through what Catholics call the descent of the Bride from heaven, by which I mean rapid increase in non-male, and, more to the point, non-masculine leadership, promoting the replacement of domination with cooperation. This happy reform can be expected to proceed from changing how we know the world: Let’s stop seeing people in relation to an absolute standard and start seeing them in relation to each other and their circumstances. Physics can help by considering the possibility that things don’t exist in relation to an absolute background called space but that space emerges from relationships between things.

I’ll break off here, but if the connections among male domination, imperialism, racism, mass murder, ecocide, and the idea of independently existing space on the one hand, and among cooperation, human dignity, ecological responsibility, and relational space on the other, aren’t clear at this point, please know that I hope to keep writing. Next time, perhaps I’ll get to the possibility I see that the educational system undermines theoretical physics, economics, and government planning by encouraging young folk with robust spatial reasoning to pursue mathematical study while discouraging that study among young folk whose math aptitude arises from robust language skills.

Oh, and if we’re thoughts in the mind of God, the object of life is not to win but to keep the game going. Why would God want to dominate God? Maybe alert the United States government and New York’s Gov. Hochul (https://youtu.be/MbuqQXaupfc?t=901, as compared to https://youtu.be/cESBaDHZ2lQ?t=56).

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James

Resources drawn from among my recent LinkedIn posts:

Happy Earth Day! Speaking of leading society, UAlbany could do a tremendous amount of good for the cause of biodiversity if the administration simply allowed a significant part of the green desert of close-cropped monoculture lawn at Collins Circle to grow out a bit in time for graduation. Beat Siena and the Times Union headquarters to the punch! Win praise from critics, in a public relations coup! Celebrate No-mow May with the modern groundskeeping technique of benign neglect:
Mow only where you go,
And let the rest just grow.
You'll make a meadowlawn,
Where you can walk in peace,
And bees can feed with geese
On Mother Earth half shorn.
Mom's Hair - Collins
(2026/04/23)

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Thanks to David Gross for pointing out that the expectation value of our civilization's remaining lifespan is around 35 years, when the calculation is based on the threat of nuclear war considered by itself. I tell you as a physicist that all of the existential threats to our civilization mutually reinforce, making immediate action necessary for survival, while the APS celebrates this or that trivial physics discovery that will mean nothing at all after the collapse of our society. Found Physics Museum, Albany - Iran War and Nuclear Winter
2026/04/23

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“The market is not some harmonious allocating mechanism, but ends up being the law of the jungle,” said Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Rationing by price explosion ends up being fundamentally unjust.”

“Rich countries outbid poor countries,” said Ms. Weber, the University of Massachusetts economist. “Rich people ensure their luxury consumption while the majority of people gets squeezed.”

--from the linked article

The failure of rich countries to promote conservation of fuel during the Iran War is thoroughly immoral. Where is the revival of work-from-home programs? Who's speaking out against pleasure trips?

With the disruption of fertilizer supplies during planting season, caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, we will see a food shock. Poor people will die worldwide unless measures are taken to ensure that everyone gets their daily bread, as the God the aggressors in Washington claim to worship told us to insist upon.

Hoarding Is Driving Energy Prices Higher Everywhere - The New York Times
(2026/04/22)

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The Iran War is interfering, during planting season in the Northern Hemisphere, with fertilizer shipment out of the Persian Gulf, raising the specter of famine. High fuel prices threaten to destabilize Asian societies. Immigration raids have disrupted the supply of farm labor in the United States. Poor compliance with measures to address the climate crisis is costing lives, especially among vulnerable populations, with the United States as the worst offender. If the results were intended, the intention was global mass murder.

Coverage of the Iran War can be found at https://www.fpmalbany.org
(2026/04/22)

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Here's a short video I made recently on parking craters and the connection some see between them and physics: https://youtube.com/shorts/sZv1wBi_J68?si=6TU2Fa7EM4BD2_N3
(2026/04/21)

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This post includes a discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org. Helplines outside the U.S. can be found at https://lnkd.in/esnMQreM. (statement adapted from linked article)

Many thanks to Chris Churchill of the Albany, New York, USA, Times Union for today’s column on investigating suicide (https://lnkd.in/eEQGPu-X). I’ve been trying for years to get the UAlbany Physics Department to discuss the apparent suicide of physics major John Carlos Garcia Mendez. I’ve had two opinion pieces published in the UAlbany student newspaper on this issue, to which I’ll link in the comments, but the only response I had was from two UAlbany-associated people I ran into one day. They gave me strong, negative feedback on the journalistic dimension of my efforts, which I appreciated and weighed carefully before rejecting it, but the conversation ended with what I felt from tone and body language was clearly a threat.

These were wonderful people acting in accord with a flawed system, but as everyone knows, there are psychopaths, sadists, and others with empathy deficiency in positions of power, including some who work as professors. In fact, show me a STEM professor at a research university who isn’t neurodivergent, not that neurodivergent folk necessarily have empathy deficiency. People in academia know who the psychologically dangerous professors are, and the most that students get for warning is a droll comment or a factoid indicating that a certain professor is held in lower regard than one might expect.

I'll link in the comments to an excellent video on sexual harassment, one dimension of unremedied toxicity in physics. I've cued the video to a discussion of the fact that at every level in physics, good people need to be culled. This system is intrinsically psychologically dangerous, given how much of one's life must be dedicated to progressing in it and the idea in society at large that if you don't advance, even if you leave voluntarily, you're a loser.

I think that every suicide in academia should be investigated, to identify lessons for improving the university system. I think every suicide in physics, which is notoriously dysfunctional with respect to women and probably so with respect to members of other minority groups and underrepresented groups, should be investigated, for the same reason.

In fact, let's investigate every suicide. We might wind up improving society for everyone if we treat people who take their lives as canaries in the coal mine.
(2026/04/21)

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The development of carcentric systems reminds me of artificial intelligence. In past years, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt burbled about everyone having a polymath in their pocket, but now it turns out that token computation is expensive, meaning that only the wealthy will wind up getting the full benefit of AI, assuming benefits most people would want eventually materialize. For the rest of us, AI will mostly impose conformity, degrade cognition, and subject us to intensified open-source intelligence gathering. I'll bet this is a common pattern, the promise of advantages for all dissolving into the reality of advantage for the advantaged and suffering for the rest. Thank you, Prof. Norton, for yet another insightful post!
(2026/04/20)

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What lessons does the Iran War teach concerning AI? Ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted for some time, endangering the spring planting in the global North by disrupting shipment of fertilizer. As of now, I haven't heard calls for lawns in the United States to be partly replaced by victory gardens, to alleviate the possible food catastrophe later this year. In fact, not only the United States, but all carbon-intensive economies have been managed with very little regard for the vast number of poor people worldwide who are in the process of being killed in the climate catastrophe. It is as if rich folk actually do care about the fate of poor folk, in the sense of wanting them killed as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, rich folk are creating AI that is intended to be aligned with the values of rich folk. Certainly, this bodes ill for anyone who isn't rich. I think rich folk should be scared, too, since AI following the rule the rich seem to follow, namely to consume everything in sight, wouldn't suffer the rich to live any more eagerly than the rich suffer the rest of us to live. Here is an ecologically centered Christian theology that might help: www.godispoor.org
(circa 2026/04/17)

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Please check out yesterday's report on Democracy Now Headlines about Taiwanese politics. Now that the United States has yet again demonstrated its moral vacuity and unreliability in the Iran War, besides disarming itself to an extent and revealing its unpreparedness for modern warfare, the people of Taiwan will decide that the smart play is to join mainland China. What could the United States do about the free choice of the people of Taiwan? Having absorbed greater diversity of thought, China will evolve toward a more moderate system. In the meantime, China will control advanced chip manufacture for a while, perhaps bringing sanity to the mindless god-building that is AI research and reining in the galloping billionaires that trample decent folk in the West. If I thought in terms of God's plan, I might be able to assign meaning to the slaughter of recent years by casting it as having been necessary to shut the mouth of the United States for once. Watch the linked news report from the beginning to see some of the latest idiotic killing, including of a nine-year-old girl. Top U.S. & World Headlines — April 10, 2026 - YouTube
(2026/04/10)