Hello.  Good morning.

I really wished that this would be the Thursday blog post that I would title with the unaltered Shakespeare quote, “The rest is silence”, which is Prince Hamlet’s last line before he dies.  Then maybe I would share a brief clip from the video for the Radiohead song No Surprises, the part where Thom Yorke sings, “I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide, and no alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  Silent.  Silent.”

Unfortunately, this will probably not be my final fit nor my final bellyache.  I certainly still feel compelled to write this today.  I woke up quite early, as usual, and lay in my room just staring about, wondering if there was any excuse I could give for not going to the office, and whether staying at the house would be in any way better than just going in.  Neither seemed to be the case.  So, finally, I got up, showered, and decided to take an Uber to the train very early.  In fact, I arrived just as the first train of the day was pulling into the station, though I made no attempt to catch that one, since it was functionally impossible.

And now, here I am, sitting and sweating and writing.

A weird thing did happen as I was getting ready to go this morning.  I put in my earphones and pulled up YouTube Music and chose my playlist “Favorite Songs”, with YouTube doing its little self-promotion about some new, unrequested service it now provides or something, in which I had no interest.  Anyway, I tapped the “shuffle playlist” option, and the song/video that came up first was my own song, Schrodinger’s Head.  But the song that began playing was none other than the aforementioned No Surprises.  It continued to play, overtop of my own song’s logo and screen, even when I backed up to the beginning of the song.  It didn’t correct itself until I’d skipped to the next song and then came back, at which point it was my own song that started playing.

That’s a strange glitch.  Does it mean that the program loads “video” and “sound”, at least in YouTube Music, as two separate processes?  I usually just go for the song rather than the video option (when that’s available), but I have always guessed that doing so simply involved the suppression of the video portion of the file in some sense.  But I’ve not ever seen a mixed song and video from different sources.

Not that I’m bothered.  It’s far from insulting if a Radiohead song presents as if it were my own.  Well, it might be insulting to Radiohead, but not to me.

Anyway, I didn’t actually listen to either song at the time.  I realized that what I really wanted was actual silence, and just leaving the earphones in but not playing anything is the closest I can come to that.  Of course, tinnitus means I haven’t experienced full silence for about 15 years, at least not in my right ear, but I can try to come as close as possible.

My pain wasn’t as bad yesterday during the day as it had been on the previous two days, and that’s definitely a good thing, though now it’s acting up more severely again.  That’s not really anything new.

As I stood outside waiting for the Uber, the air was as usual in the morning lately:  stagnant and still in addition to being hot and humid.  But far up and away to the east and south were high clouds, and there was rather frequent lightning to be seen, then and when I was riding to the train.

We used to call that “heat lightning” and I think people imagined it was something different than usual lightning, but my current understanding is that it is the same electrostatic phenomenon, merely much higher in the air (where I suspect the resistivity is lower, though I may be wrong about that…in any case, there would be more cosmic ray bombardment to seed ionization paths for lightning to follow).

Of course, one never hears thunder from heat lightning.  Maybe that’s because it’s so high and far that the sound is thin even to begin with, since sound travels more slowly and less effectively through less dense media.  And then, of course, as it hits the lower atmosphere, trying to enter a denser medium (with faster propagation speeds) it might be unable to penetrate.  Indeed, there might* be a phenomenon analogous to total internal reflection, the process that, among other things, allows fiber optic cables to work with essentially no signal loss.

When light is traveling through a dense medium, like glass or diamond, in which it moves much more slowly relative to its speed through air or vacuum, and it comes to an interface where it would pass out into a much less dense medium‒where it would travel much more quickly‒if it strikes at too shallow an angle, it will not exit its current medium at all, but will instead fully reflect, effectively without any loss.

My first thought was that it was the opposite situation for sound traveling from high, thin air to lower, much denser air.  But then it occurred to me that it’s not the density of the medium that directly causes total internal reflection, or any refraction, really.  It’s the differential speed of propagation that causes refraction and total internal reflection**.  And sound travels more quickly through a denser medium, not less quickly, whereas light does the opposite.  So, comparatively slow sound in thinner, upper air, coming to denser, lower air, might reflect if it arrives at a shallow enough angle.

It’s somewhat like being below the surface of a pool.  We know that sound travels much better and farther in water than air, but if your head is underwater, you may not be able at all to hear people talking who are standing near the pool, and you might not even be able to hear loud ambient music (unless a subwoofer is in contact with the ground/floor and thence to the pool).

I think I’m more or less on track with this as at least part of the explanation for the fact that one never hears the thunder that accompanies very, very high lightning.  Of course, some of it could simply be ordinary attenuation, since the intensity of sound falls off as the square of the distance (as with light, also…this is one of those physical facts of reality that is directly caused by the geometry of three-dimensional space, nothing more esoteric and nothing less profound).  But that doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for why one never hears the sound of “heat lightning”.

Well, that’s enough ado about nothing for today.  It’s more than I expected or wanted to write.  I mostly just wanted to write some form of goodbye.  But the horrible, terrible, inexorable pressure of habit and routine in someone with a particular type of nervous system can be nearly as potent and irresistible as the laws of reflection and refraction and geometry.  I can only seem to escape such habits when I am forced by external circumstances to do so, but then new habits and routines‒compulsions, really‒take the place of the old ones.  I try to procure useful habits when I can, but one cannot entirely pick and choose such things.

I fear my only escape will happen when I actually die.  Of course, if time and space are fixed and super-deterministic, then even that might not actually be an escape.  As far as my experience goes, it might just lead to me starting over at the beginning, like a video being played on a loop.

Nietzsche actually used that notion (obviously not based in Einsteinian concepts, but it doesn’t have to be) as the basis for a thought-provoking question:  if you knew for certain that, once you die, you would then live your life over and over again exactly as it happened this time around, how would you change your current and future behavior?  Is your life now one that would horrify you to repeat infinitely, or would it be okay?

Inquiring minds want to know, I guess.  Or maybe not.

TTFN

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*This is just me speculating in real time.  If anyone knows the correct answer, please let me know.

**Thus the frequent demonstrative analogy used to teach about refraction:  a row of soldiers marching side by side coming at an angle to a place where they leave hard, firm ground and enter deep mud, which will tend to change the angle of their movement.  Alternately, one often encounters the story of a lifeguard running across the beach to save someone drowning, needing to judge the best place to enter the ocean to minimize the overall time taken to reach the swimmer.  Too much time in the water slows the lifeguard too much, too much time on land makes the path longer, and thus also slows the lifeguard.  The lifeguard’s path of least time turns out to be exactly analogous to what light does when refracting through differing media.  A brilliant, “for-the-layperson” account of the quantum mechanics behind this is given in Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.