The Presence of the Past

 The philosophy of history is an interesting topic. There are numerous ways to consider history and the way it relates to the present. Hemingway wrote that the winner take’s nothing, while a cliché  goes that ‘history is written by the victors’. Even if there is a transcending day of judgment that is a greater reality more primary and pre-determined set before the steady-state of entangled waveforms appearing to be three-dimensional particles comprising the evident Universe that negates or makes phenomenal the value of everything in it, people still want to know the history of what went before.

When one looks at photos of the cosmic microwave background one is looking at the distant past- the most distant past that can be seen. The past is in the present. The CMD is an image of how the Universe appeared 380,000 years after the singularity expanded from T=0 and size= 0. A singularity with all  of the mass of the future Universe may have had zero mass because mass is a state of energy. Mass is another word for matter. Matter could be regard as the positive phase of a sine wave and anti-matter as a negative phase; yin and yang are matter and anti-matter. Without entanglement of positive waves with themselves or negative waves (perhaps they are separable in some circumstances) matter doesn’t exist so one can say the singularity had no mass exiting from which one could append a descriptive measure of its size. The singularity was something else-perhaps a probability of potential energy.

For practical purposes in the human present the past is present in all existing things. When one visits the Redwood forest one is viewing the past that has accreted centuries to become as it is now. To view the Roman coliseum is to view the past in the present as a for-others that will exist into the tomorrows of the future indefinitely. History is a great tree in which the present appears in budding leaves on the branches of a central trunk. One knows that scientific knowledge discovers innumerable new interests and techniques yet is aware that cosmology studies were advanced over thousands of years. Philosophy is a quest for truth meaning and knowledge- even if as Socrates said that he knew that he knew nothing.

That which exists is understood by learning of that which was. In many cases one may reason from the materially evident to the past as well as the future shape of things with that understanding.  President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger understood that make friends of enemies is politically desirable therefore sought to open and establish political and economic relations with mainland Communist China. President Ronald Reagan understood the same principle and sought to rid the world of nuclear weapons and establish peaceful social and economic relations with the Soviet Union even with the distant vision of bringing it into the world of free nations with free enterprise. Since the end of the Cold War 1.0 democrat Party leaders sough site of that principle. That is what history informs us.