Thursday, August 20, 2026

Introduction To This Blog System

                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Image used by permission

Posting is usually done once a week, on Thursday.

Postings may be later combined into a compound posting on this blog. Many of the postings concern my observations in various branches of science, but there are also many on technology, religion, economics and, general world issues.

I would really like to thank everyone who reads any of these blogs for your interest.
 
SCIENCE WRITING
 
Most of the postings on this blog are visits to various places around the world, and articles about such topics as history and religion. But much of the writing is about science. I do not write about what is already known but only if I can write something new, or at least a new way of looking at things.
 
If you would like a quick background in the science and mathematics that everyone should really know in the 21st Century, the posting "Scientific Literacy" provides this in about a hundred paragraphs. Similarly, "The Way Things Work" provides a quick background in everyday technology.
 
I am a Christian and I want to show that belief in God is not unscientific at all. I was interested in science long before I was interested in religion, and have never had any trouble believing that God created everything.
 
There are six major scientific theories, each arranged in the form of a textbook. The first five of the following six are on this blog.
 
"The Theory Of Stationary Space" is my cosmological theory of how so much revolves around time being explained by us being in four-dimensional space, with the dimension that we cannot access being perceived as time. This is my version of string theory, with matter actually being strings in four dimensions rather than particles in three dimensions. Everything is ultimately based on negative and positive electric charges, with energy being able to overcome the laws of attraction and repulsion of electric charges. No one has ever explained exactly what time is, and a myriad of explanations of other things fall right into place around it.
 
"The Flow Of Information Through The Universe" is about how so much can be explained by seeing how there is a limited amount of information, and it must be the same information that constructs the highest levels as the lowest levels. A ready example is how the orbits of planets around the sun is based on the orbitals of electrons around the nucleus, in the atoms of which the sun and planets are composed. This concept is extremely useful because, understanding this, we can study things that we cannot directly see by analyzing things that we can see because all must be built on the same information.
 
"The Theory Of Complexity" is about what information actually is, how energy and information is really the same thing, and how we see the universe as we do because of our perspective of being at a higher level of information than our inanimate surroundings.
 
"The Lowest Information Point" is about how, since information and energy is really the same thing and the universe always seeks the lowest energy state, it also always seeks the "Lowest Information Point". So much is explained by how the universe prefers equalities to inequalities and related ratios where the numerator of one ratio is also the denominator of the other. This explains so much from why dust particles are as big as they to why the planets and stars are the scale that they are.

"The Theory Of Infinite Dimensions" is the most recent scientific theory. It is the second cosmological theory, after"The Theory Of Stationary Space". We see the universe as an infinity of distance in three spatial dimensions and light as always moving in straight lines. But this is another example of how we see the universe as we do not only because of what it is but also because of what we are. It is more logical that the universe has an infinite number of dimensions. We can see in all of the dimensions because light actually can turn corners but it requires energy. We can only see it as three dimensions because of our limited dimensional order. Light consists of two-dimensional waves and we perceive space as being three-dimensional. This means that we can see light as coming from different directions but can only perceive it as moving in a straight line.
 
"The Story Of Planet Earth", on the geology blog, is about how virtually every major feature of the earth's surface, both on land and seafloor, can be explained by lines of magma emergence from below that were affected by the landing of three Continental Asteroids. Many people believe that land originated from a past "super-continent", but there is no explanation of where it came from.
 
There are a few of what we could call "minor" theories, where there is not as much written as with the major theories. On this blog, there is "How Biology And Human Life Fits Into Cosmology". On the meteorology and biology blog, there is my theory of the nature of water, "Water Made Really Simple".
 
There are compound postings about science which are groupings of writing about a certain topic.
 
Scientific compound postings include, "Computer Science", "Atomic Science", "Measurement", "A Celebration Of The Inverse Square Law", "Our Solar System", "Mind-Bending Cosmology", "The Configuration Of The Solar System Made Really Simple", "In Appreciation Of Electrons", "The Science Of Human Society " and "Orbital And Escape Velocities And Impacts from Space".
 
Compound postings about history and the world include "The House Of Holy Wisdom, Where The Modern World Began", "Niagara Stories", "Economics", "How History Repeats Itself", "The Meaning Of Freedom", "The Western Hemisphere", "Our Language" and, "America And The Modern World Explained By Way Of Paris".
 
There are two compound postings about prophecies and the Bible. There is "The Aztec Prophecy" than, for prophecies that are directly made in the Bible there is "New Insight Into Bible Prophecy".
 
"Investigations" is the compound posting that is a collection of any posting about an investigation.
 
The rest of the postings are individual postings. For more detailed information about this blog, see the posting "Thanks To Readers". For general topics of conversation, see "Thoughts And Observations", on the world and economics blog.  
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Other Blogs And Books

                                                                                                                                                               

Lights at night 

Here is a quick look at my other blogs before you start this one.

On this blog, you can see a list of all postings by clicking on the year or month to the right. But on the topical blogs, that is not the case. If you click on a year or month on those blogs, it will display the postings themselves, but the list on the right will still only show those postings that were added most recently.

To access a list of all postings on those blogs, it is necessary to click on the arrow in front of the year or month in question.

http://www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com/ is about economics, history and, general human issues.

http://www.markmeekprogress.blogspot.com/ concerns progress in technology and ideas.

http://www.markmeekearth.blogspot.com/ is my geology and global natural history blog for topics other than glaciers. My natural history blogs concerning the impact of glaciers is http://www.markmeekworld.blogspot.com/ .

http://www.markmeekniagara.blogspot.com/ is about new discoveries concerning natural history in the general area of Niagara Falls.

http://www.markmeeklife.blogspot.com/ is my observations concerning meteorology and biology.

http://www.markmeekphysics.blogspot.com/ is my blog about physics and astronomy.

http://www.markmeekcosmology.blogspot.com/ is my version of string theory that solves many unsolved mysteries about the underlying structure and beginning of the universe.

http://www.markmeekpatterns.blogspot.com/ details my work with the fundamental patterns and complexity that underlies everything in existence.

 http://www.markmeekreligion.blogspot.com/ is my religion blog.

 http://www.markmeekcreation.blogspot.com/ is proof that there must be a god.

http://www.markmeekphotos.blogspot.com/ is my travel photos of Europe.

On my photo blogs, Blogspot will not hold all of the photos in each blog in a straight line. To see all of the photos, you must click on the bottom posting listed on the right at the top of the blog after seeing all that there are in the initial showing. The last posting in the North America blog should be "Tijuana, Mexico" and the last posting in the Europe blog should be "Notre Dame Cathedral Door And Arc De Triomphe, Paris". Each photo in the photo blogs can be clicked on to enlarge it to full screen.

My autobiography is http://www.mark-meek.blogspot.com/

My books can be seen at http://www.bn.com/ http://www.amazon.com/ or, http://www.iuniverse.com/ just do an author search for "Mark Meek".   

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Scotland

We have already visited Scotland's two major cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, this is a look at the rest of Scotland.

ALL PRECEDING IMAGES ARE FROM GOOGLE EARTH OR STREET VIEW UNLESS OTHERWISE SPECIFIED.

When leaving Scotland once, the incongruity occurred to me that I had not seen a McDonald's. There are McDonald's restaurants in Scotland but I had not seen one. This is by far the best-known Scottish name yet it has nothing to do with Scotland. The founders of McDonald's were not even named McDonald, Ray Kroc bought a food stand that had been owned by the McDonald brothers and kept the name because people were familiar with it.

In medieval times, Scotland won independence from England but the "Union of the Crowns" took place in 1603 when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England, by inheriting it's crown. This was a so-called "personal union" where a king rules more than one country. But that does not necessarily mean that the two countries are fully united.

A more recent personal union in Europe was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by emperor Franz Joseph, although the two countries were still separate with a citizen being either Austrian or Hungarian, but not both. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was preceded by a personal union between the two countries.

James I was the beginning of the House of Stuart in England. James I, king James VI of Scotland, had acceded to the throne of England also when his cousin, Elizabeth I of England, died childless. That was the end of the House of Tudor, the most famous king of which was Henry VIII and who was the father of Elizabeth I. The main event during the House of Tudor was the Reformation. The main events of the House of Stuart would be the inter-Protestant English Civil War between the Anglicans and the Puritans and then finally the actual union between England and Scotland in 1707.

James I of England is the king that is best-known today for having commissioned the King James Bible, which we saw in the posting on this blog "Hampton Court Palace And The King James Bible".

Unity between England and Scotland was driven by ending up on the same side of the Reformation. But independent Scotland had been an ally of France. The French crown was held by the House of Bourbon. There were also active junior lines. The final French monarchy had actually been the House of Orleans, which was deposed for good in the series of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. This was even after the House of Bourbon had been reinstated after the time of Napoleon.

Another junior French royal line was the House of Guise. It never held power in France but is best-known for the fact that one of it's would-be princesses, Mary of Guise, would reign in Scotland by marriage to James V. Mary of Guise wanted to keep Scotland Catholic and separate from Protestant England but it would be her grandson, James VI of Scotland, that would become a Protestant and also reign as James I of England, and would commission the King James Bible. Image from the Wikipedia article "Mary Of Guise".


Before joining England to form Britain, Scotland had it's own colony in what is now Panama and the name of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia means "New Scotland".

The area around Falkirk, south of the Firth of Forth and between Edinburgh and Glasgow, used to be Scotland's center of steel production. Scotland had both the iron ore and coal necessary for the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. Scotland's James Watt improved the steam engine that had earlier been invented in England and today the unit of electrical power is named for him. But the town has a long history dating back to the Middle Ages. The great steel mills are gone and here is a look at Falkirk now.

There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >. After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.




It has mostly been forgotten by history but the Romans controlled the southern part of Scotland for a while. The Romans built Hadrian's Wall along their northern extent, and it later defined the border between England and Scotland. But they also built the Antonine Wall to define their temporary northern extent in Scotland. The following image is a memorial of the Antonine Wall.



The Firth of Forth is the water inlet that separates the northern (Highland) and southern parts of Scotland. In this photo of Edinburgh, from when the travel photos of Europe were on a separate blog, the stretch of water seen in the background is the Firth of Forth.


Here is a residential area of Dunfermline, which is just north of the Firth of Forth. This was the hometown of Andrew Carnegie, the American steel magnate. There is a well-known old abbey in Dunfermline that was the burial place of Scottish kings. An abbey was the church of a monastery, some of which were on the scale of cathedrals. The preaching of John Knox changed Scotland from a bastion of Catholicism into one of the most Protestant of nations, but the churches of former Catholic monasteries are still called abbeys.

Dunfermline was once the capital of Scotland and the first of the following images is of the ruins of the palace and abbey.






(Note-Some abbeys that were in locations that were not suitable for active churches were simply abandoned after the Reformation. The ruins of such abbeys are seen in many places in Britain. Monasteries were a Catholic practice that was not used by Protestants. Remember that we saw Tintern Abbey in the posting on this blog, "The Reformation At 500").

Kirkcaldy is also on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, and is known as the birthplace of Adam Smith who was the developer of the modern economic theory of capitalism.






Dundee is about a thousand years old and was formerly known for textile production.




On New Year's Eve remember that Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, wrote Auld Lang Syne.



Aberdeen is a medieval city that is now Britain's center of oil production from the North Sea.






Iverness is Scotland's city of the far north and the Highlands. It is a medieval city but the castle is only from the Nineteenth Century, although it is on the site of previous castles.






Scotland has four "Ancient Universities". An amazing time was the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland has contributed to the world far and away out of proportion to it's population.

Seven universities were founded in Britain and Ireland in the Sixteenth Century or before that remain today. No other universities that remain today were founded until the Nineteenth Century. The seven original universities are called "Ancient Universities". Four of these are in Scotland. Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin's Trinity College are the other Ancient Universities.

One story that must not be forgotten is that of Encyclopedia Britannica. This is the predominant encyclopedia in the English-speaking world in the days before Wikipedia. It was founded in Edinburgh as a way to categorize Scotland's relentless quest for knowledge.

The oldest of the Ancient Universities is St. Andrews University, which was founded in 1413. It is the Scottish version of Oxford or Cambridge. William and Kate met while studying here.






The second oldest is the University of Glasgow. It was founded in 1451 but has been at it's present location since the Nineteenth Century. The papal bull that founded the university is famously missing, having been taken to Paris by a Catholic sympathizer when Scotland joined the Reformation, and it has never been found.






Remember that we saw the tower at the University of Glasgow on the posting "Travel Photos of Europe".


The next is the University of Aberdeen, founded in 1495. Notice the steeple in the shape of a crown, in the third of the following images, that is reminiscent of that on St. Giles Cathedral that we saw in our visit to "Edinburgh". St. Giles is the central church of Presbyterianism, which is Scotland's particular brand of Protestantism.







The final one of the "Ancient Universities" of Scotland is Edinburgh University. Unlike the other three, it was founded after Scotland joined the Reformation so that it began with a royal charter rather than a papal bull.






Scotland is also known for it's mountains. It is much more mountainous than England. The summit of Ben Nevis is the highest elevation point in Britain.


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The Ironies Of Britain And Economic Theories

Since Adam Smith was from Kirkcaldy, let's review how ironic is the relationship between Britain and economic theories. The doctrines of both Marxism and capitalism originated in Britain.

Modern capitalism began with the economic theory of Scotland's Adam Smith, which was a part of the "Scottish Renaissance".

The theories of Karl Marx, which was the beginning of modern Communism was a reaction against the destructive effects of that capitalism, primarily the few rich using their great wealth to oppress the many poor. Marx was a German Jew, living in exile in London, who did most of his writing in the Reading Room at the British Museum, with Britain as the intended audience.

But the first land to accept Marxist theory was Russia, which I am sure that Marx never would have imagined. Marx's homeland of Germany, which was at war with Russia, inadvertently helped to facilitate the implementation of his theories. A Russian agitator, by the name of Lenin, was in exile in Switzerland. The Germans transported him in a rail car to Russia to help bring about a political revolution that was brewing there, which they hoped would hamper the Czar's ability to continue the war against them.

Marxism was based on atheism and joined with evolution, considering religion as "the opiate of the masses" and for collectivism to be the next step in human social evolution. Evolutionary theory, like the theories of Adam Smith and Marx, began in Britain with the writings of Charles Darwin. The irony here is that evolution very much resembled capitalism in it's operation. Capitalism is the economic manifestation, and evolution is the biological manifestation. But the two are the same thing, progressive adaptation to the environment by way of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.

It was the crash of extreme capitalism, based on the theory of Adam Smith, which boosted Marxist theory, and made it into a global ideology. In the 1920s, following the First World War, assembly line industrial production had been perfected and factories in America turned out vast quantities of manufactured goods, from cars to radios. The trouble was that the workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy all of those goods, and they were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, which meant that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into a devastating crash.

The Crash of 1929 really devastated Germany, Marx's homeland, which had joined the global economic order after the war. Along came a party called the Nazis, which had a solution to the economic catastrophe. The military was drastically increased, to absorb unemployment, and factories were brought back to full production making military equipment for them. Their economic system, supposedly neither capitalism nor Communism but between the two, was called National Socialism. Production was undertaken by business, not by the government as in Communism, but business worked for the government.

The result was war, with the western Allies which practiced the capitalism of Adam Smith on one side of the Nazis, and Russia (as part of the Soviet Union) which practiced the Marxism, which was a reaction against capitalism, on the other side of the Nazis. After that war was over, conflict continued as a Cold War between proponents of the original theories of Smith and Marx. 

Another great irony is the icon of postwar American business, based on the theory of Scotland’s Adam Smith, that became far and away the most prominent Scottish name in the world. It familiarized the world with the Mc that prefixes so many Scottish names. But it had nothing to do with Scotland, or anyone from Scotland. An American milkshake machine salesman, named Ray Kroc, bought a small restaurant that had been owned by the McDonald brothers, and he kept the name because it was familiar to area customers. The global food brand developed from there.

This is the McDonald's in Adam Smith's hometown of Kirkcaldy. Image from Google Street View.


The next irony is how the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher aggravated Scotland with her emphasis on capitalism, all the while carrying a copy of Adam Smith's book in her handbag as if it were a Bible. Scotland, where capitalist theory had originated, had by this time become more socialist. While London, where Marx had written the theory that would lead to communism and Charles Dickens had written extensively of the negatives of daily life under Nineteenth Century capitalism before that, had become essentially Britain's capitalist center.

What we could call the Communist manifestation of Marx ended with the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union split up. But the irony continued. Russia, led by Boris Yeltsin, turned from Communism to the capitalist theory of Adam Smith instead, but proved the validity of Marx by having it end in disaster. Have you ever stopped to ponder that Soviet era Communists were proven to be absolutely right about capitalism, not by the propaganda that they issued but by the disaster that capitalism would turn out to be for their own country after it abandoned Communism?

After the end of Communism a few people in Russia got fantastically rich, referred to as the oligarchs, but most everything else was worse off until Vladimir Putin put the country on a more economically realistic course (and often clashed with the oligarchs). Some of the very rich brought wealth to other countries. So many bought expensive homes in London that it became known as Londongrad.

Just stop and ponder this. The city where Marx had written his theory, London, was flooded with wealth. This flood of wealth was indirectly due to that theory. Marx's theory had supposedly been proven wrong, not in Britain but in Russia, but then the capitalist theory that Marxism was a reaction against had been proven to be even worse. Marx, in writing his theory, was reacting against the capitalist concentration of wealth by a few rich people. But now people who had gained wealth in this way were bringing it into the city where Marx had written his theory.

Could Marx have imagined that it would turn out like this?

The irony continues. After Russian oligarchs, as well as wealthy people from the Middle East, began buying property in London, Britain was brought economically to the right to keep the wealth coming in, which alienated Scotland where Adam Smith had written capitalist theory. The leftward nationalist party in Scotland organized the 2014 referendum on independence.

This means that the referendum in Scotland on the breakup of Britain was due indirectly to wealth coming into London, much of it from Russia, in which some had concentrated wealth after the country had adapted the theory written in Scotland after the supposed failure of the theory written in London but they would find reason to take wealth out of the country after the theory written in Scotland would fail even worse than the one written in London.

Could Adam Smith have imagined that it would turn out like this?

Wealth from outside coming into London drove up prices and rents, making life more difficult for the non-wealthy, possibly creating similar conditions to those which originally inspired Marx. Maybe we can start the whole cycle again, with both sides moving closer to the center until each realizes that it has only half of the complete answer. Neither the nation state, religion nor profit motive have faded away as Marx predicted they would. Even when religion does fade away, ideologies such as that of Marx take their place as secular religions.

However, Marx would be pleased with unions, minimum wage laws, safety and working hours regulations and unemployment and social benefits, and especially mandatory public education. All of which were virtually unheard of in the Nineteenth Century. The ideal of Marxism is very much manifested online, as free applications such as this blog, Wikipedia and Google Earth.
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