Astrophysics

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I had a good headline idea, but it slipped my mind

I was surprised by how much response I’ve received to yesterday’s blog (and that of the day before) as well as the number of comments.  It’s very gratifying, and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.

As for today, well, I am really not sure what to write, because yesterday’s blog was‒from my viewpoint, anyway‒about as free-form and chaotic and tangential and stochastic (not to say redundant) as anything I’ve written.  But maybe that’s just the experience I had while writing it; maybe it doesn’t actually come across that way to the reader(s).  It’s difficult for me to know, because even more than reading, writing is a solitary thing.

That’s not to say that people can’t write together.  Back when I was a teenager, I co-wrote some partial stories with one of my best friends, and we did it sitting next to each other and talking things through aloud as we typed.  That was a pretty active and interactive collaboration.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we got very far with it.  We made much more progress writing silly computer programs in Basic on the Apple II+ my father had bought.  This was in the days before there were any ISPs as far as I know, though we did dial onto a couple of local “billboard” services from time to time with my dad’s old modem (I think it was 600 baud*, but it may be some even divisor or even a very small multiple of that number).

One time, I even had a conversation with a girl (!) who was helping run one of the billboards.  She was (supposedly) about my age, and obviously she was much more into computers than I was for the time.  There was never (in my regretful mind) any possibility of an ongoing interaction, let alone a physical meetup or anything, however.  Even then, though I was reasonably confident when within my local group of friends and teachers, I was painfully shy and awkward, and could never make conversation other than about specific topics.

Goal-directed interactions are okay, as they tend to flow naturally from the process involved.  This is why I’ve made nearly all my friends at school or at work.  Purely social interactions were never really an option for me, except with people I already knew quite well.  And having a successful romantic relationship was unfortunately not in the cards for me.

It still isn’t, as far as I can tell.  I suspect the problem is that there’s no other member of my true species on this planet.  I did come reasonably close, or so I thought for a long time, but I’ve been divorced now about five years longer than I was married, so I apparently wasn’t all that successful.

Okay, well, sorry about the weird, ancient info-dump.  It’s not nearly as cool as the data that’s coming in from the recently-activated Vera Rubin observatory.  That, at least, is the sort of thing that helps restore my faith in humanity.  Or, well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that it shifts my Bayesian credence slightly away from the “humans are without net redeeming value” end and toward the “humans may not be all that bad in the end” end.

The credence is still quite low, though.  By which I mean I’m closer to the first end than the second most of the time.

Things might be a little bit better if the sort of people who do things like setting up the Vera Rubin telescope, and who set up and launched and now use the James Webb telescope, and the members of the former human genome project, and the people who study cognitive neuroscience, were the sort of people working in government, writing and administering laws.  Generally speaking, though, the first type of people don’t tend to want to do the governing nonsense, probably not least because a lot of that business is not about everyone trying to do the best they can for the people they represent.

The people who want to do astronomy and mathematics and biology and geology and neuroscience and meteorology and so on are probably some of the best people to do those things‒not just from their point of view but also from the viewpoint of civilizational benefit.  Unfortunately, many of the people who want to go into government and politics tend to be some of the worst people for those jobs, from the point of view of civilization.

I can’t say they are the worst possible group for the job.  The truly disaffected and uninterested or the misanthropic and nihilistic might well do a worse job even than the lot who do it now.  This is despite the fact that most of those latter people act on shallow and immediate self-interest.  Self-interest can do the job adequately when the incentives are structured such that one’s self-interest is served by serving the interests of the people of one’s community/city/nation/species.

Those incentives are very tricky to manage, unfortunately.  It would be much better if we could find people who had real enthusiasm and curiosity and an actually somewhat scientific approach to government.  If only we could find a group as committed to seeing a truly and objectively well-run society‒in which everyone was better off than they would have been in nearly any other‒as the group who set up the Vera Rubin observatory was committed to actually getting the observatory done so they and we could learn ever more about the universe on the largest scales, things might be quite a bit better than they are.  Maybe not, but my credence leans more toward the “maybe so” end.

Alas, politics and government were not born of human curiosity and creativity‒the things almost entirely unique to the species‒but of the old, stupid primate dominance hierarchy/mating drives, which are evolutionarily understandable, but which don’t make for pretty, let alone beneficial, government.  Think about it.  Would you want to put a bunch of self-serving apes doing the jobs of government?

Oh, wait!  That is the group doing the jobs of the government!  Of course, it’s also the group being governed.  Uh-oh.  This could be boding better**.

Not that being recognized as an ape is an insult per se; apes are all that we’ve had available, and they’re the best that’s come along so far.  Some of them are really not so bad.  Some of them figure out ways to launch immense telescopes into space, not so very long after one of them first created the telescope.  Some of them figure out ways to cure and even prevent unnecessary disease.  Some of them figure out ways to turn simple manipulations of base-two arithmetic into information processing that can be scaled up to any kind of logic and information that can be codified.

Some of them just write blogs and sometimes write stories and songs and such***.  But hopefully, that’s not too detrimental an endeavor.

*A baud is a bit per second being sent over the phone lines.  Not a meg, not a K, not even a byte, but rather a bit‒a binary digit, a one versus a zero, on or off.  If you listened to the sound of the modem, you could imagine you could almost hear the individual bits.

**Tip of the hat to Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”.

***Though I have done my very small part in advancing human scientific knowledge, in that I am a co-author and co-investigator on an actual published scientific paper.

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If you can look into the seeds of time, and blog which grain will grow and which will not

Hello, and also, good morning.

What to write about, what to write about‒that is the question today.  Of course, “to be or not to be” is always the question as well, as was recognized by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.  If I recall, he arrives at the conclusion that the titular rock-rolling protagonist must be “happy” despite the patent and constant pointlessness and absurdity of his existence.

That goes along with the whole recognition of the absurdity of life itself that is central to the existentialism movement.  Still, it’s hard for me to “imagine Sisyphus happy”, unless he was a true Bodhisattva or had been thoroughly lobotomized by Zeus (or whoever it was that had doomed him to his…well, his doom).

It can help, I guess, to think about the vast scale of the cosmos in space and time (and any other dimensionality that might apply) and also about the incredibly minute scale of the cosmos, the fundamental quantum fields (and whatever gravity ultimately is) interacting from the Planck scale on up.  It helps keep things in perspective.

Of course, even given the scales of the cosmos*, there’s another, almost sort of Buddhist/Taoist notion that notes that each individual‒each particle even‒always exists at the nexus of two “light cones”, existing in an ever-moving now.  These are 4-dimensional cones, by the way, but it’s okay to reduce things by one dimension if you will.  It makes them easier to visualize.

Your (or anyone’s) past light cone is the outer boundary of all influences that can possibly have had any effect upon you at the present moment‒those influences that could have reached you at the speed of light or more slowly.  Similarly, one’s future light cone encompasses all those things that could possibly be influenced by things at the present location at or below the speed of light.

Any motion within the light cones‒the only motion that anything within spacetime can execute, as far as we know‒is called timelike motion.  Any motion that would require going outside a light cone is considered “spacelike” motion, and is not allowed by relativity.  This is not merely because of the speed of light, it’s because the speed of light is defined by the speed of causality.  Causes cannot travel faster or have effects beyond the speed of causality.  This is a bit tautological, I know, but it nevertheless simply must be true.

So each individual’s experience, each individual process, sits at the moving balance point of a future light cone and a past light cone, crossing at the moving present, tracing out a “timelike” path in spacetime.  Of course, individual creatures are not individual particles, and so their overall spacetime path would resemble the final line produced by a sketcher going over and over a particular path to make the curve the artist desires.

If one could look at the structure of a human in spacetime, like the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse Five, but one could also trace even the spacetime paths of individual “particles”**, a human life would be a sort of higher-dimensional braid in spacetime, surrounded by a haze of incoming and outgoing quantum entities, most of which will be locally bound and interacting, and so will be moving at a net velocity lower than the speed of light.

I’m assuming you don’t eat your food or drink your water or breathe your air or (shudder) sweat or excrete at near light speed.

Imagine what the inside of a mere proton or neutron might look like if one were able to see it as a rendered, four-dimensional model in fine detail!  If you think it wouldn’t be that interesting because it’s so wee, think again.

Remember, only the tiniest fraction of the “rest mass” of a nucleon comes from the mass of the three “net” quarks in it (two up, one down or two down, one up depending on whether it’s a proton or neutron).  Almost all the rest of its mass is the energy of the interactions between these three quarks:  all the gluons exchanged, all the virtual quark/anti-quark pairs popping into existence, mediated by that famous strong force and its weird*** “asymptotic freedom”.

Bringing this back around, I guess my point was merely to note that everyone and everything is pointless from the perspective of the laws of nature and the spacetime scale of the cosmos, but when you learn about those things‒the cosmos at large and small levels‒you are at least familiarizing yourself with those vast workings, and you are in a sense taking part of them into yourself.  That’s kind of a cool thought.

But don’t take too much of it into yourself!  For, much as would happen to someone who stuffed all the information about Graham’s number into one head, if you do you will become a black hole.  Now, it may be possible to survive becoming a black hole, but I don’t recommend betting on that pony.

TTFN

*I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero about how it might be useful for people to consider the cosmic perspective as contrasting with their prosaic concerns.  I don’t remember how good it was, but here’s the link, in case you want to read it and give any feedback you like.

**I use this word for want of a better term that everyone would recognize and that would be succinct.  I think we need such a different term, because a lot of the perceived so-called weirdness and mystery of quantum mechanics comes from trying to use inaccurate terms that originated in times before we understood things as well as we now do.  Quanta are not little “particles” that sometimes act like waves, nor are they little waves that sometimes act like particles (though that’s slightly more accurate).  They are entities unto themselves, and the ways they behave are all always consistent with that nature.  They don’t sometimes act like one thing and at other times act like another.  They all, always, act like what they are.

***Except it’s not weird, really.  Those of us who are surprised by it?  We are the weird ones.  Quantum chromodynamics has always done exactly what it still does, since long before any life at all existed in this universe.  To quote Yudkowsky again, “Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened.”

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Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown; Our blogs are ours, their ends none of our own.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 26th of February in 2026, a date that’s only very slightly interesting whether you write it as 2-26-2026 or 26-2-2026.  The fact that you have repeated 2s and repeated 26s is somewhat entertaining, but the zero throws potential symmetries off, making it not nearly as much fun as it could conceivably be.  It’s a shame, really.  I suppose you could write it as 26-02-2026 and rescue a bit of symmetry, but that feels like reaching.  It’s not quite symmetrical anyway, unless one is writing in base-26 or higher.  No, wait, even that wouldn’t work.

I don’t know about what I’m going to write this morning.  That in itself, of course, is nothing unusual.  But I don’t feel that I have much to say about anything at the moment.  I don’t want to get into my depression and ASD and anxiety and chronic pain and insomnia and just general moribund state, because I’m sure no one wants to hear about it anymore, and in any case, there seems to be no way anyone can do anything about it that’s useful, which makes it all the more frustrating.  Writing about it certainly hasn’t cured or even improved my state much, if at all.

Anyway, as I said the other day, you have been put on notice.  Unless you just started reading my blog for the first time yesterday, you’ve no right to act fucking surprised no matter what happens.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.

Now, let’s see, what should I write today?  I could discuss some topics in science, especially physics, though I also have literal, legally recognized expertise in biology, and I know a lot about quite a few other branches of science as well.  This is because I have always been curious about how the world, the universe, actually and literally works on the largest and on the most fundamental scales.

I mean, yes, humans also have their rules and laws and social mores and antisocial morays and all that nonsense, but if you step back even a bit, you can see nearly all human behavior encapsulated by basic primatology.  If you know how the various monkeys and gibbons and gorillas and chimpanzees behave‒especially their commonalities‒human behavior almost always fits right in.  It’s usually not even very atypical.

That doesn’t make the specifics of behavior very easily predictable in any given case, necessarily; then again, we understand an awful lot about the weather and the climate, but the specifics of tomorrow’s weather are tough to predict precisely and accurately, let alone next week’s weather.  Nevertheless, the physics of longer term climate effects of certain kinds of atmospheric gases is almost trivial.

Anyway, humans are too annoying to be very interesting, except in special circumstances.  In this, they are perhaps a bit like cockroaches.  From the point of view of a scientist who studies them, they can be interesting, and from just the right angle and with the right detachment, they can even be beautiful (or some of them can).  But overall, they are merely large masses of highly redundant little skitterers, just doing their shit-eating and reproducing and infesting almost every possible location.

Which type of creature did I mean to describe just now?  See if you can figure it out.

Of course, on closer scales, cognitive neuroscience and neurodevelopment and related stuff, such as “neural” networks, “deep” learning, and other such areas are fascinating.  One thing interesting about them is how all the things that brains and computers and so on are and do are implicit in the laws of physics‒clearly they are some of the things that stuff in the universe can do‒and yet, for all we know, they have only ever happened here, just this once in all the vast and possibly infinite cosmos*.

And for all we can tell, given the human proclivity to plan about 20 Planck units ahead and then after that trust to luck, this could be the only place they occur, and their time will not continue much longer, certainly not on a cosmic scale.

I could be wrong about that…except in the sense that, since I am stating it merely as one of the possibilities, I am not actually wrong at all.  Even if humans do survive into cosmic time scales and become cosmically significant, it will still not be easily debatable that it could have happened that humans would go extinct and would fail to go anywhere but Earth.

Of course, depending on the question of determinism, I suppose one could say that if humans (or their descendants) become cosmically significant then there literally was nothing else that could have happened, at least as seen from outside, at the “end”.

On the other hand, if Everettian quantum mechanics is the best description of the fundamental nature of reality, then in some sense, every quantum possibility actually happens “somewhere” in the universal quantum wave function, though those variations may not include all conceivably possible human outcomes.

Some things that seem as though they should be possible may simply never happen to occur (or occur to happen?) anywhere in the possible states of the universe.  That feels as though it should be unlikely, given how many possible states can be locally evolved in the quantum wave function, but I don’t think we know enough to be sure.

Okay, well, I vaguely hope that this has been mildly interesting and perhaps thought provoking.  It would be enjoyable to get more feedback and thoughts, but I don’t have a very large readership, and only a certain small percentage of people ever seem to interact with written material in any case, so I’m probably lucky to get the feedback that I get.

TTFN

*With the inescapable caveat that, if the universe is spatially and/or temporally infinite, and if as it seems there are only a finite number of differentiable quantum states in any given region of spacetime (the upper limit of which is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of the given region) then every local thing that happens, and all possible variations thereof, “happen” an infinite number of times.  But given that all these regions are more or less absolutely physically distinct and incapable of “communicating” one with another, they can be considered isolated instances in a “multiverse” rather than parts of the same “local universe”.

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Are gravity and frivolity truly opposites?

It’s Wednesday morning (not quite five o’clock yet) and it is February 25th.  There are only ten more shopping months until Newtonmas*.

For those of you who don’t know (and as a reminder for those of you who do know) Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, 1642 (AD**).  Now, there is a parenthetical here:  Newton was born on December 25th by the Julian*** calendar, which was the one used in England at the time of his birth.  By the Gregorian**** calendar, Newton would have been born in early January of 1643.

This might seem to imply that December 25th nowadays shouldn’t be considered Newtonmas, but of course, it’s a closer fit than celebrating the birth of Jesus on that day; supposedly, biblical scholars have found that Jesus was probably born in the summer or something.  As with many things, “The Church” appropriated the popular holidays celebrating the winter solstice and grafted Christian religious significance onto it.

There’s nothing particularly bad about that.  All these holidays and divisions of the year are fairly arbitrary (though celebrating solstices and equinoxes is common enough in multiple cultures, which makes sense because these are objective events in any given year that can be noticed by any culture that is paying attention).

The length of a year is a concrete, empirical fact, as is the length of a day and the length of a lunar orbit around the Earth.  None of them are straightforward multiples of each other, unfortunately‒they are waves that are not harmonically associated with each other.

I don’t know how long it would take for their “waves” to come back into some primordial alignment and “start over”, but it’s probably moot, because the length of a day and of a lunar orbit and of the orbit of the Earth are changing slowly.  The moon, for instance, is moving steadily (but very slowly) away from the Earth over time, and so its time of orbit is increasing (since things that orbit farther away orbit more slowly).

I think Kepler’s third law was/is that the period of a planet’s orbit around the sun is proportional to the 3/2 power of the length of the semimajor axis of its orbit.  I’m not sure if that exact power holds up on the scale of, say, the lunar orbit, but the laws of gravity are as universal as anything we know.  Indeed, there are materials that are opaque to light, but as far as we know, there are none that are opaque to gravity.  Gravity is nevertheless constrained by the geometry of spacetime, so orbits will always slow down at a faster rate than the distance from the center around which a mass orbits increases.

The inability of anything we know of to block gravity is one thing that makes me take seriously the notion that, at some level, there could be more than three spatial dimensions.  If gravity is not confined to three dimensions then nothing that is so confined could stop it; it would merely flow around any obstacle (maybe gravity waves, for instance, can even diffract around matter and energy, though that might not imply higher dimensions).

This is related, indirectly, to the fact that it is impossible to tie a knot in a string in 4 or higher spatial dimensions.

By the way, having those extra spatial dimensions curled up tiny, as is usually presented in depictions of the notions of string theory, is not the only way for them to exist and be undetected.  If most of the forces in the world we know‒the electromagnetic, the strong force, the weak force, and the various matter-related quantum fields‒are constrained to a 3-brane because their strings are “open-ended”, then we could live in a 3-brane (in which all other forces, including matter, are confined) nested in a higher-dimensional “bulk”.  Gravity could be conveyed by a “looped” string, which could pass through the 3-brane, interacting but not being confined to it.  This could also explain the comparative weakness of the gravitational force and might even explain dark matter (and why it is so difficult to detect).

This sounds extremely promising, maybe, but there are issues and hurdles, not the least that strings and higher spatial dimensions are very difficult to detect, if they exist.  Also, it’s very hard to pin down all the implications mathematically in a useful way.

I remember one lunch break when I was still in medical practice when I tried to see if I could work out mathematically if “dark matter” could be explained by a relatively nearby, parallel brane-universe (it would probably be more than one, but one was difficult enough) whose gravity spills over into and overlaps the gravity of our brane-universe.

Here’s a sort of reproduction of some of the scribbling I did then:

Unfortunately, though I could visualize what I was considering and get an intuitive feel for what the math would be like, my precise mathematical skills were just not up to the task of sorting it out rigorously.  Also, of course, lunch was not long enough, and I had many other things on my mind.  Anyway, findings like the “bullet cluster” provide some fairly strong evidence that “dark matter” is something physical within our three dimensions of space.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  I’ve managed not to talk about my depression and stress and self-destructive urges/wishes (except just now, of course), so I hope you’re pleased to have had those things cloaked from you today.

Take care.

*Working out the exact number of days, I think I figured that it was 302.  December 25th is 7 days before New Years, so it’s day number 358 in the (non-leap) year.  And today is the 25th day of the second month, and January has 31 days, so today is day 56 of the year.  And, of course, 358 – 56 = 302.

**Why not my usual “AD or CE?”  Because at the time, in England, it was just “anno domini”.

***Named for Julius Caesar, though as far as I know, he had no more to do with actually formulating that calendar than he had with the invention of the 7th month.  As far as we know, he wasn’t even born by the then-existing version of Cesarian section, which was more or less always fatal to the mother, and his mother lived well beyond his birth.

****Named after Pope Gregory XIII, also known (by me) as Pope Gregory Peccary*****.  He did not formulate the newer calendar, but supposedly he at least commissioned the Vatican astronomers to create it when it had become obvious that the Julian calendar was not quite tracking the actual year but was overshooting over a long period of time.  So, the Gregorian calendar is better named than the Julian calendar, or so it seems to me.

*****The nocturnal, gregarious wild swine.

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Man overboard

As the real weekends go, it was better than most, to paraphrase The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  By this, I’m referring to this last weekend, the two days before this day, of course.

I did not work on Saturday, which is good, because that would have been the third time in a row.  I also got to hang out with my youngest on Saturday, and we watched about four episodes of Doctor Who together, which was good, good fun.  I cannot complain about that in any way.

I have though a weird, disquieting, sinking sort of feeling that it may have been the last time I will see my youngest, or maybe anyone else that I love.  It’s is not one of those reliable sorts of feelings, like those that lead one to new insights in science or mathematics or what have you.  It’s probably more a product of depression and anxiety, the feeling that anything good in my life is sure not to last, if it happens at all, because I do not and cannot possibly be worthy of anything good happening to me.

Is that irrational?  Of course it is irrational.  It cannot be expressed in any sense as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how many digits they may have.

Wait, wait, let me think about that.  My thought, my feeling, was expressed above finitely.  That is, of course, a shorthand for what is really happening, but even if one were to codify those processes down to the level of each molecular interaction that affects any neural/hormonal process that contributes to my feeling, we know that must be a finite description (though it could, in principle, be quite large).

Even if we’re taking the full spectrum of quantum mechanics into account when describing my mental state, we know that quantum mechanics demands a minimum resolvable distance and time (the Planck length and the Planck time) below which any differentiation is physically meaningless.

A finite amount of information can describe the events and structures and processes in any given finite region of spacetime.  In fact, the maximum amount of information in any given region of spacetime is measured by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of an event horizon that would span exactly that region, as seen from the outside*.

Any finite amount of information can be encoded as a finite number of bits, which can of course be “translated” to any other equivalent code or number system.  So, really, though the contents of my mind are, in principle, from a certain point of view, unlimited, they are finite in their actual, instantiated content, and can therefore certainly be expressed as an integer, and thus also as a ratio (since any integer could be considered a ratio of itself over one, or twice itself over two, etc.).

So, in that sense, my thoughts are not irrational.  Neener, neener, neener.

In many other senses—maybe not the literal, original sense, but in the horrified, cannot accept that not all numbers can be expressed as ratios of integers because that makes the universe too inconceivable, sense, among others—I can be quite irrational.

It’s very difficult to fight one’s irrationality from the inside, alone.  Even John Nash didn’t really beat his schizophrenia from within as shown in the movie version of A Beautiful Mind.  Also, his delusions in real life were far more extravagant and bizarre than those which appear in the sanitized version that made a good Hollywood story.

If one escapes from mental illness from within, one has to consider it largely a matter of luck, like a young child who doesn’t know anything about math getting a right answer on a graduate level, high order differential equation problem.  It’s physically possible; heck, if it were a multiple choice question, it might even be relatively common***.  But it’s not a matter of being able to choose to do it right and to know how it was done.

Severe mental health issues are going to need to receive assistance from outside, almost always.  This is not an indictment of them or of the need for help.

Surely, someone who has been swept off the deck of a ship by a rogue wave cannot be faulted for needing help from those still on the ship of they are to survive.  It would certainly seem foolish and almost inevitably fruitless if such a person tried to claw his way up the side of the ship to get back on board when there is no ladder and no handholds.  He should certainly not be ashamed that he cannot swim hard enough to launch himself bodily from the water and back onto the surface of the vessel.

One cannot reasonably fault such a person for trying to do the superhuman.  A person might try to do practically anything rather than drown or be eaten alive by some marine predator.  But, of course, barring an astonishing concatenation of events such as the time-reverse of the splashing entry into the ocean happening and sending the person out of the sea just as it was entered, such efforts will not succeed.

And though it might be heartening or at least positive for one to receive encouragement from those still on the deck—don’t drown, keep treading water, you can do it, you’ll make people sad if you drown, you deserve to stay afloat, I’m proud of you for treading water yet another day, it’ll get better, this won’t last forever, you’ve made it this far so you know you can keep going, you don’t want the people who know you to feel sad because you drowned, etc.—in the end it might as well come from the seagulls waiting to pick at one’s floating corpse.

Mind you, certain kinds of words can be more useful than others.  Words like, “Hey, around the other side of the ship there’s a built-in ladder; if you can get over there and time things right, you might be able to grab the lowest rung when the waves lift you, and then climb up,” might be useful because they are directions for using real, tangible resources that we know can make a difference.  Also, words like, “Hang on just a bit longer, we’re throwing down a life preserver on a rope so we can haul you up” would be useful, obviously, unless they were mere “comforting” lies.

Alas, though one could reasonably expect such literal assistance if one were washed overboard—the “laws” of the sea are deeply rooted in the hearts of those who work there, and they include a general tendency to help anyone adrift to the best of one’s abilities—when it comes to mental illness, the distress and the problems are difficult for others to discern and easy to ignore.  Calls of distress are often experienced as annoyances, and even treated with contempt, since those hearing them cannot readily perceive that they themselves might be similarly washed overboard at any time.

But, of course, they might be.

I don’t know how I got on this tangent, but I guess I never really do.  I just go where my mind takes me, and my mind is not a reliable driver.  It is, though, a reliable narrator.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  Nothing does.

Anyway, here we go again into another work week, because that was what we did last week.  I wish I could offer you better reasons, but I’m really only good at breaking things down, destroying things, not at lifting anyone or anything up.  That comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers.

*From within an event horizon, the volume could be much larger than the spacetime that seems to be enclosed from the outside, because spacetime inside the horizon is massively curved and stretched.  It’s conceivable (at least to me) that there could be infinite space** within, at least along the dimension(s) of maximum stretch, just as there is infinite surface area to a Gabriel’s Horn, but only finite volume.

**See, mathematically, one can stuff infinite space inside a nutshell.  Hamlet was right.  He often was.

***Perhaps this explains why certain types of mental health problems can respond well to relatively straightforward interventions, and even to more than one kind of intervention with roughly comparable success, e.g., CBT and/or basic antidepressants and such.  These relatively tractable forms of depression are the “multiple choice problem” versions of mental illness.  This does not make them any less important.

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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, blogs in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, in case you didn’t already know.  Though, if you’re reading this on some day other than Thursday, then I guess it’s not Thursday for you.

You could think of it as us being on sort of parallel time streams—and indeed, we each carry our own “proper time” around with us, according to Relativity.  And while communication is possible between those timelines, it is communication in one direction only.  I can send messages to you, where and when you are now reading this, but you cannot send messages back to me.

Wait, wait, I hear you say*, you can communicate back to me in my parallel time, because you can comment on the post below (there’s only one person who does this with any regularity, but sure, it’s possible for you to comment, in principle).  So it’s not one-directional communication.

Ah, but that’s where I’m being esoterically precise here.  You cannot communicate back to me where and when I am now.  You can only communicate with some “future” point, something quite a bit down the line from where and when I am as I write this.  And I cannot then communicate with the you that is writing back to me, but only to some future state of you.

Okay, well, duh, you say**, that’s just how time works.

That only seems unremarkable to you because it’s all you’ve ever known, and you’re adapted to it—personally and evolutionarily.  But if you step back, so to speak, it can seem quite remarkable.

Special Relativity demonstrates that space and time are not separate but are intertwined, and space and time bleed into one another depending upon relative motion—indeed, within the event horizon of a black hole, it appears that space and time are flipped ninety degrees (as though along an axis at 45 degrees to those of space and time) so to speak, so that space becomes time, which is part of why you can never get out of the black hole—you cannot reverse time, but must move forward to its end at the singularity, if such a thing exists, which is probably not the case.

So, why does time work differently than space?  After all, If I live on a street parallel to yours, I can cross to your street by any of a number of cross-streets, cut through back yards, follow alleyways, etc., in more or less any direction, and I can return in a similar fashion.

Imagine, though, if it worked the following way.  I start at my address—let’s imagine it’s number 13*** for the moment—and want to go to your street.  But I can only go by routes that are at higher address numbers than my address.  And then, when I want to return to my street I have to go down (or would that be up?) the numbers on your street, to take a cross-street (or whatever) that’s even farther from my house.

So, say I crossed to your street right after number 17, where a cross-street exists.  And say the numbers on your street line up with those on my street, just for simplicity’s sake****.  Luckily, your house is at number 19 on your street, so I can reach it.  I could never go back to number 17 on your street, let alone number 13.

But when I want to leave your place, I can only head toward higher numbers, so I can’t go back to the cross street near 17.  I have to go down to, say, the street past number 23.  But even once I get to my street, I can’t go back to my house!  I must head in the direction of higher numbers.

I can only get back to my house if my street goes all the way around the world and comes back to my house from the other direction, and I suspect that it doesn’t do that.  I’m stuck farther down my own street, homeless now, because I cannot reach my address.  And it’s not as though you can take me in, because I cannot go back to your address, either, and if you leave your house to meet me, you will be in the same predicament in which I languish.

That’s sort of how time seems to work.  Unlike the three spatial dimensions, we cannot simply choose our direction, change our mind and our course, go back to where we came from or even just go around and around the block (which may or may not be a stupid thing to do—see yesterday’s post).  Why is time different?  The laws of physics appear to be locally time symmetric as they are space symmetric.  In other words, they work the same backwards and forwards.  But macroscopically, time is directional.

I’ve speculated a bit on this over at Iterations of Zero.  I’ll try to link to the pertinent blog post(s).  Some of that speculation compares the directionality of time that we all experience to the directionality of space that exists here on the surface of the Earth.

Wait, you say, what do you mean “the directionality of space”?  (You do love to interrupt, it seems.)  Well, think about it.  When you’re on the Earth, the directions forward/backward and left/right (or any other non-parallel axes you might choose along the surface, such as north/south and east/west) are freely navigable.  You can go in any direction or combination of directions along them, barring local obstacles.  But the same cannot be said for up/down.  It’s much harder to go up than to go left or forward.  And if you lose support beneath your feet, you will be unable to avoid going down.

Perhaps, as has been speculated by others with greater expertise than mine, the “Big Bang” provides or entails a local state that creates a local directionality to time, but far enough away from that “event”, time will become just as non-directional as any spatial dimension.

This is the way it works with the dimensions of 3D space:  when you’re far enough away from a local “event”, such as the surface of the Earth, the dimensions are all freely navigable.  But there’s not too much to do there, and it seems that life and complexity are likely to emerge only where these local gradients—whether in space or in time or both—exist, doing their part to provide the “free energy” which is required by things like life.

Anyway, that’s my random set of thoughts for this Thursday.  I hope you have a good day.  As for me, I continue to follow the local directionality of my metaphorical space; in other words, I continue to trend downward.  I do not perceive any other available direction for me.

TTFN

*Or I think I do.  I have terrible hearing and persistent tinnitus, so I might have been hearing the sound of rain on the roof or of wind in the trees or of otherworldly, eldritch creatures scratching at the fabric of reality, trying to break through the barriers between their realms and ours.  Probably not, though.

**You’re a bit rude, don’t you think?

***It’s not, unfortunately.

****Simplicity is one high-maintenance person.

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The moving finger writes, and having writ, now must edit

This is it:  my last blog post of 2025 (barring some truly unexpected circumstances).  I will probably be writing a post tomorrow, because I think we’re going to be working tomorrow, despite the fact that it will be New Year’s Day, and a stunningly large fraction of the people of the world will be hung over or otherwise exhausted from ringing in the New Year.

I suspect New Year’s Eve/Day is the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, far surpassing the numbers who celebrate any mere religious holiday.  Since the world in general uses the same “Gregorian”* calendar, it’s a rare commonality for the human race, and worth celebrating.

If only they could work on finding more things in common, since after all, they have almost everything actually in common with each other.  And yet, they focus on trivial cultural or superficial differences and battle viciously over them, as if they were fighting truly alien beings.  Talk about your narcissism of small differences.

Humans are so stupid.  The more of them there are, the stupider, somehow, as though the lowest common denominator tends always to dominate the dynamics.  It’s like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Men In Black:  a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

That isn’t always the case, obviously.  Humans have accomplished great things in large groups, interacting with mutual exchange to mutual benefit (or not so mutual benefit), but that probably only happens in rarefied circumstances, discovered or arranged by luck or by the skill of one or a few who are cleverer than average, and sustained thanks to a form of natural selection.

Because of the sheer power of such organizations of people, those rare few types of interactions can endure for tremendous lengths of time and be astonishingly effective and broadly prevalent.  This can distract one from the fact that the ideas were so singular and ingenious.

Money, for instance, has been invented more than once, but it’s a relatively low-hanging and particularly nutritious fruit, allowing as it does for the far more efficient exchange of goods and services to (ideally) mutual benefit.  Of course, commerce can be cheated and can thereby become nonproductive or even counterproductive, especially if one or a few entities obtain disproportionate wealth and power.  This sort of selection for detrimental equilibria happens in the world of biology as well.

Imagine a football game in which, every time one team scores, that team gains an extra player and the other team loses one.  Once one side takes the lead, they’re likely to keep it and increase it, making them ever more likely to maintain their dominance.  It can make for a pretty boring and not very productive game.  Such a situation is worth avoiding, even if you happen to be on the winning team.

Written language is, of course, the single most important human invention‒more important than even the invention of language itself, though that was a necessary prerequisite, so the argument could be made that it is more important or at least more fundamental.  Thankfully, language is a different type of thing than money, so it’s not as easy to game it to secure an unreasonable advantage for any individual or group.

There is, of course, an often-used attempted strategy of discouraging or preventing literacy in some groups or one sex (always the same one, it seems) to keep them from gaining the power that written language can impart, but it can be harder to keep those systems in place than for a monopoly to maintain its economic advantage.

Still, even written language isn’t automatically self-protective.  It’s possible for misinformation and disinformation to spread and even prosper, at least for a time (such situations tend to self-destruct), and it can do terrible damage, much as mutations in somatic DNA can lead to cell dysfunction, cell death, and sometimes cancer.

Analogous things can happen to whole civilizations as well, and they have happened many times, but that’s no reason to blame language or learning.  One doesn’t prevent cancer by eliminating DNA itself or by killing the host organism (that does eliminate the cancer, but in an unsatisfying way).  Only better, more thorough thinking and language, the equivalent of DNA proofreading, can do that without catastrophe.

And I, by writing this post, try to contribute to the good language, the useful or at least interesting language, in the world.  I suspect I will continue to do so as the next year begins.  I hope you enjoy whatever celebrations you have in store.

*Though Pope Gregory the Whatever Number was merely the one who commissioned it.  Astronomers and mathematicians actually did the work.  We have some scientifically literate Popes nowadays, at least, and a Belgian priest was among the first to do rigorous mathematics using Einstein’s new field equations (though Friedman got there a little earlier, his work was apparently not as convincing) to demonstrate that the universe could not be static** based upon them.

**Leading Einstein to introduce Λ (lambda), the cosmological constant.  He later called this his biggest blunder (supposedly) but it turned out to be a useful and term and concept in describing the apparent evolution of the universe as we know it now.  Like Planck before him, even Einstein’s fudges*** were deeply insightful and useful.

***Speaking of Einstein, I recently got an email from my old med school alumni association with the subject line “You are responsible for Einstein’s success”.  To which I so wanted to reply, “I know, right?  But did he mention me in any of his papers or even throw me a word of thanks (in German or otherwise) in his acceptance speech when he got his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that light comes in ‘packets’ which we now call photons?  No!  Ungrateful bastard.”

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.

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“And, to SLEEP, you must slumber in just such a bed.”

Well, it’s f*cking Saturday, and I’m going in the to f*cking office to f*cking work, because it’s not challenging enough for me to recover my limited mental equilibrium when I have two days off, so I should try to do it with one as often as possible.  Oh, and the one day I supposedly still have to take off is the day I have to do all my laundry, which means I have to go into the other part of the house and, more often than not, deal with their overly energetic and poorly trained dog‒and it’s a big dog.

I’m not afraid of dogs.  I like dogs, even very large ones.  But I have little sympathy for dogs that have not been trained, and who act like they’re still teething or something.  If it were my dog, I could rapidly train it out of the habit of putting its moronic jaws around peoples’ forearms, and it and I and others would be happier overall.

Maybe next time I’ll go out with suntan lotion or even pepper spray all over my arms, so it gets an unpleasant mouthful if it tries.

Honestly, sometimes I’m tempted just to slip it a few chunks of the rat bait/poison that I have.  It’s not the neurotoxin one, which is supposedly less harmful to people and pets than to rats.  It’s the super-coumadin, blood “thinning”, anticoagulant one.  To be honest, though, I would probably not be willing under nearly any circumstance to poison a dog, since the agency of such a creature is limited and its poor behavior is largely due to the humans in its life.

And yes, of course I have a big, multi-pound bag of rat poison.  Who knows, I might get peckish at some point and want it as a snack.  The holidays are upon us, after all, and it can be so hard to stay on a diet at this time of year.

Anyway, that’s just one possible nosh that I have for potential last meals.  I even have a couple of emptied out fiber capsules that I’ve refilled with broken glass pieces.  They would actually go nicely with the previously mentioned snack, wouldn’t they?  Like salted caramel, the two components could really enhance each other.  You might even call it synergy.

Enough about such tempting treats.  The point is, I’m going to the office today.  Then I’m heading back to the house.  Then I’ll be trying to rest if I can for the remainder of the weekend, though when I think of my own mind, I am inescapably reminded of Boromir describing Mordor:

That works pretty well to describe my very annoying brain/body.  I cannot seem to sleep very long, and I never feel like I sleep “all the way” if you will.  I am always somehow on yellow alert; I don’t know why.  It’s exhausting.  There are plain few upsides or effective distractions, and almost never any relief.

I don’t even know what I’m writing about right now, really.  I just feel a general, free-floating hostility and even hatred for most things in existence.  Sometimes I just want to wipe out the whole universe.  It can be done rather easily, at least from a certain perspective.

Incidentally, creating a new local source of the hypothetical inflaton field would probably not do the trick, assuming that inflationary cosmology is correct.  Most of the mathematical solutions to that possible situation indicate that, such a field would initiate a new, rapid, inflationarily expanding “universe”, but from the perspective of our universe the created bubble would just plop through and out of spacetime.  I haven’t done the math myself‒I am not adequately trained to do it at this time‒but I have this from more than one fairly reputable and reliable source, including people who actually do have the necessary expertise.

I’ve previously discussed vacuum collapse; if one could figure out how to trigger that‒assuming it is possible‒one could literally wipe out everything in the current universe.  Though, of course, it would take a long time, since it could only happen at the speed of light, so really, you’d only be wiping out everything in your future light cone.  There may be no way to destroy the universe that doesn’t effectively take a limitless time to accomplish.

On the other hand, when I spin around, it’s possible to view that action as the universe spinning around me while I’m stationary.  There are legitimate reasons why we don’t tend to think of it this way, but it’s a perspective that can be taken.

From that sort of perspective, when one dies (from one’s own point of view at least) the entire universe ceases to exist.  It’s very simple and thorough!  Of course, if there is an afterlife, that plan would fail, and one would be forced to go back to the drawing board.  But I’ve never encountered even borderline intriguing evidence or argument that might indicate an afterlife exists, unless you count things like a Poincare recurrence*.

So there is at least one reasonably reliable and plausibly achievable way to destroy the universe, from my point of view.  And the good thing about that is, from other points of view, the universe would still exist, and this would be no more contradictory than the fact that someone falling through the event horizon of a large enough black hole wouldn’t even notice it happening, but those far away would see the faller as never even quite reaching the event horizon.

Anyway, that theoretical stuff isn’t really very interesting for present purposes.  What matters is, at the very least, I can destroy the universe in a sense, if I so desire.  And every day it seems to become more and more tempting to do so.  This world is just so disgusting so often, and it’s not just humans that meet that description.

Ah, well.  Try to have a good day if you can for as long as the universe does exist.  After that, you’re on your own.

*Or the possibility of quantum immortality in the context of Everettian quantum mechanics.  But the various other possible alternate versions of me in such a theoretical quantum multiverse are not “me” even now, from my point of view‒not exactly, anyway, not in any sense that I can experience.  So future possible subsets of the wave function of the universe that contain randomly immortal versions of me are not worth taking into account, and they are vanishingly rare**.

**Though I suppose, as time goes by and all mortal things die, the quantum wavefunction of the universe might come to be dominated by such versions of…well, everyone.  None, however, would be able to interact with each other as far as I can see.

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“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.