Dennis-Exciting-Times

The key to understanding the structure of the universe comes from understanding how gravity works. It has taken two books to cover the topic so a blog page is only able to give the barest of brief descriptions. Gravity is the force that holds the whole universe together. There are four forces in all, two nuclear forces that only act inside the atom, electromagnetic force that binds atoms together into molecules and various compounds but this comes in both positive and negative and is more or less in balance. Then there is gravity, the weakest but most far reaching of all the forces it draws matter together to form planets and stars and even giant galaxies. Newton’s laws of gravity state, “Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle. With a force whose direction is that of the joining of the two, and whose magnitude is directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance from each other”. Because gravitational force ...

That life even exists on Earth is a miracle; in previous blogs I have written about the fine tuning of nature that makes existence possible. We can extend that further in that each of us represents a chain of miracles that add up to whom we are, and to have been created from the countless ancestors who have each contributed to the DNA sequence that makes us a unique individual being. The chances of an individual living long enough to become a parent is reasonably good in many societies today, but that has not always been the case. Throughout history the chances of not being killed by hunger, a predator or disease as a child has been greater than the chance of surviving. Added to this; as recently as Greek and Roman times unwanted children were simply killed or discarded to the “gods”. In some societies today it is not regarded as a crime to do away with children or those of whom we do not approve. Even in some so called civilised countries “honour killings” are still an accepted way of...