Astrophysics

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Blog post for 4-10-2024 Wednesday

I’m not writing any fiction again today, it seems.  I just don’t have any urge to do it.  The very prospect of it feels almost entirely pointless, though that could be at least partly due to the fact that I’ve felt so gormy these last few days.

I’m not as nauseated as I was yesterday (though I’m probably just as nauseous, ha ha ha), since I took two omeprazole tablets last night, and also I didn’t take any aspirin or naproxen yesterday.  I did take a few acetaminophen, though those don’t tend to work as well on their own as they do in combination with aspirin and so on.  Still, I hate the feeling of nausea*, and would rather have at least a little pain than be nauseated.  It would have been one thing if I were sick enough just to throw up and get it over with, but all I had was just general gastro-intestinal distress and discomfort throughout the day, which really sapped my energy.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my fiction.  This week I just haven’t had any enthusiasm for it (nor for any other positive thing in life, really).  Maybe I should try to reignite my energy by sharing more of the links to my pre-existing fiction on Twitter and Facebook and the like.  Maybe if I got any feedback of any kind on any of those posts or shares it might stoke the fire of creativity a bit.

Of course, it’s hard to see why anyone other than the people who already read my stuff would respond to my posts, but who knows?  It’s difficult for me to predict what might motivate other people to do something, at least some of the time.

I feel slightly awkward sharing my links and stuff on the various anti-social media, particularly because I’m currently reading Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, about the detriments of social media and smartphones to younger people.  On the other hand, unless you’re asking an elf or a vampire, I probably would not be considered a younger person.  Also, I developed my neuro-psychiatric issues long before smartphones and even before the Worldwide Web—I come by them naturally, so to speak—so I shouldn’t have to worry too much about them twisting me in some negative way.  My personality, such as it is, is already formed.  Though, as I discussed yesterday, I do seem to be reasonably good at learning new things even though I’m an old geezer.

I guess maybe I will share my stuff on at least X** and Facebook, and maybe even LinkedIn, though I have less interest in the latter, since I don’t do the whole networking thing.  I might as well make those old posts in which I “advertised” my new stories and such work for me.  And I might as well make Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s endeavors serve some useful purpose, since it’s not as though they pay much in taxes or anything.

I don’t knew where I’m going with this today, otherwise.  At least I’m not going off on weird tangents about playing with infinite series that have obvious outcomes once you work them through.  I mean, yes, it’s rather fun to fiddle with such things in the moment, particularly when one has nothing better to do, and it’s even good when it comes back around and you realize it’s revealed something that should have been obvious with much less work***.  That’s okay.  There’s nothing too wrong with coming at something in a complicated way and finally realizing how simple the answer is.  As I mentioned yesterday, at the very least, it’s good mental exercise.

Still, I shouldn’t go off on too many tangents like that too often.  I don’t think people like those posts very much.  Though, for all I know, they might think they’re the greatest thing anyone’s ever done, they’re just too shy to say anything about it.  I simply don’t know.  It’s like firing a photon off in the direction of an intergalactic super-void:  I’m not ever going to get any feedback about what happened to that photon if it doesn’t interact with something relatively nearby very soon****, and even if it does, unless it reflects back, or unless some intelligence sends a signal in response, it’s still going to be lost.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I expect to write my usual Thursday post tomorrow, so if you look forward to such things, you can look forward to that.  If I don’t write it, it will be either because I’m not feeling well (more so than is typically the case) or I’m dead, or perhaps that some other, unpredicted alternative possibility has interfered.  I’d give well over 50% odds that I’ll write a post tomorrow.  But for today, this post is already too long and is almost entirely without substance (and I don’t mean that just because it’s written on a word processor and shared online).

I really do hope that you all have a good day.

*I know, how unusual, right?

**Does Mr. Musk realize that by calling his platform “X” and putting its symbol in the upper right corner of the various X-cretions, he makes it look as though one is supposed to click on that symbol to make a “tweet” go away?  I know that’s the way I feel, and I’ve even tried to do it once or twice when I was distracted.

***In this case, for instance, if you add some (single) fraction of an original number to that starting total, the amount that you added is now one integer step smaller fraction of the new total.  In other words, if you start with some number, then add a ninth, say, of the original number, you now have ten of those ninths in your new total, i.e., 1 and 1/9.  But that 1/9 is now 1/10 of your new  total, trivially.  So, if you want to tip, for instance, 20% of the new total (including the tip) then you need to tip 25% of the original amount before the tip.  In other words, to tip one fifth of the total including the tip, you tip one fourth of the original, pre-tip total, since then you will have five fourths.  Anyway, let me stop this now.

****Unless, I suppose, the universe if both closed—i.e., it loops around on itself like a torus or a sphere—and smaller than anyone has any reason to suspect.  It would have to be small because, based on the expansion rate of the universe as currently measured, any photon of reasonable wavelength would probably have red-shifted into undetectability long before the time I could receive it from the other direction if it circumnavigated a closed universe on anything like the minimum scale we think the universe is.  A photon of too tiny a wavelength, i.e., of high enough energy, would have too high a chance to spontaneously decompose into some particle-antiparticle pair somewhere along the way…I think.

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The moon may be a harsh mistress, but her eyes are nothing like the sun

I was going to write this post on my laptop computer, since I had brought it with me back from the office on Friday, thinking to write fiction this morning.  However, I am waiting for fares to go down to normal levels for Uber or Lyft this morning, so while I wait, I figured I might as well write this post on my smartphone.  It’s inconvenient to write on the laptop computer while waiting at the house, because to do so I need to set up a TV tray table type thing.  That’s not hard, of course, but it’s still more effort than I mean to put forth for something that will hopefully only entail a few minutes’ delay.

I should just have gotten up when I was awake‒well, okay, not when I was first awake.  There would be no point in going to the office in the literal middle of the night.  But if I had gone to the Tri-Rail station early enough, I might have gotten on the 4:20 train.  Still, who knows?  Maybe Uber rates were twice as high as usual even then.  I don’t know why the ride services are so busy at this hour on a Monday morning.

Whatever it is, I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the eclipse that will be coming today.  That phenomenon is cutting a line from the southwest to the northeast across the country, including up by my sister’s house.  I won’t be seeing it, of course, since I’m down here in south Florida, and there won’t be another opportunity to watch one in my lifetime from anywhere readily accessible to me.

I could have gone; I was invited to visit by my sister.  The people at work thought I should go.  But when I started looking into booking either buses or trains or planes‒even though I did renew my state ID to make things easier‒I felt tension bordering on dread at the prospect of traveling in any of those ways.  So I didn’t go.  And here I am.

***

Ride rates have now dropped to normal, and I’m outside waiting for my Uber.  I was hoping to be able to ride my bike to the train station; I changed up my upper body workout a bit last week, and it felt different enough that I thought I might be able to use the bike without issue.  I rode it a decent distance on Saturday, with minimal trouble, though I felt a bit stiff overnight.  Then I rode it some more yesterday, and while riding I felt fine.  I even felt rather good, if slightly breathless.  But then, overnight, the stiffness and splinting and spasms started up again, so I fear that’s just not going to work.  I also have soreness in my right Achilles tendon and significant pain in my left knee, and my left side feels like it’s been infused with hot metal.

***

I’m at the train station now, still in pain (of course) and seated on the ground because I was too late because of the Uber delays to get a good seat where I prefer to sit.  It’s annoying, but I guess I would have been even later if I had ridden my bicycle.  Then again, at least I would have had the good feeling of having gotten some exercise.

Oh, well.  I don’t know whom I think I’m fooling.  I don’t expect to get back in good shape any time before I die.  Every time I try to exercise (so far) it screws me up with worsening of my chronic pain.  I wish I could just shut the pain off, but biology is not readily amenable to compromises in that area.  Pain, like fear, is too essential.  All things that suppress either of them‒even when the pain and/or fear have become thoroughly dysfunctional‒cause terrible side effects.

I can’t go on much longer like this.  It’s almost too bad that the solar eclipse is not some harbinger of disaster, but of course, it is not.  It’s merely a consequence of the geometry of three bodies whose mutual orbits lie nearly in the same plane.  If the moon’s orbital plane were identical to the Earth’s around the sun, there would be a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse with each orbit of the moon, and predicting such things would have been far less impressive to the native peoples of Hispaniola when Columbus used his knowledge thereof to dupe them into going along with his plans.

Some modern people seem barely less credulous, despite being avid users of the Internet and World Wide Web.  Why, the leading independent candidate for president is full of ideas so absurd that they would have been rejected as plot points in the later seasons of the X-files.  If you caught him at the right time, you could probably convince him that early vaccines had been used to mind-control him and that he had assassinated both his uncle and his father.

Sorry.  I’m grumpy.  My apologies.  I’m in a lot of pain‒more so than usual‒and of course my sleep has been horrible, though at least I napped some over the weekend.  I also replaced the shower-head in the bathroom, but that’s not very impressive, and I had the cable people out to replace the modem for the Wi-Fi, but though that was absurdly nerve-wracking, it’s hardly a big accomplishment.

I feel horrible and rotten and disgusting.  I wouldn’t give myself 5 stars even on an Uber or Lyft scale (in which, if someone doesn’t get 5 stars the app asks you what went wrong, but only gives you pre-programmed, simplistic options for explanation, eliminating the whole point of a 5 star rating system‒3 stars should be the average, but instead it’s something like 4.9).  I wouldn’t give myself an A even on the Yale grading scale (in which, it seems, the vast majority of students get As in the vast majority of their classes‒again, destroying the whole point of the grading system and eliminating any incentives to excel).

Maybe I should write a whole post about that issue, how (among other things) grade inflation makes the prestige of elite educational institutions evaporate, since in the real world, business is competitive, and a 4.0 from a school where everyone gets a 4.0 and there is no merit-based admission will gradually (but not necessarily slowly) come to be not worth the virtual paper on which it is written.

Again, I’m sorry.  I really don’t feel well at all, and I don’t feel good at all, either*.  I hope you all feel significantly better than I do, physically, emotionally, morally and otherwise.  I’m sure you all deserve it more than I do, though “deserves” is for the most part a vacuous term.

I hope you all have a very good day.  If you get a chance, and are in its path, observe the eclipse (but don’t do it directly, not with unprotected eyes).  It’s not an especially impressive cosmic phenomenon, but it’s still pretty cool.  It’s particularly cool that the human race understands the universe well enough that these phenomena, which confused our ancestors so mightily, are almost banal to us, and we can predict and plot them out centuries in advance.

It’s particularly uncool that despite how much is known and understood, there are people who live in the modern world and who constantly use devices that rely on quantum field theory and general relativity yet still think a solar eclipse might be some supernatural sign.

Heavy sigh.  What can you do?  The world is tragically comical and comically tragic.  It’s probably not worth the effort.  And I’m darn near sure that I am not.

*Yes, I mean two different things by those two words.

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Would YOU eat Zel’dovich pancakes for breakfast?

It’s Tuesday, and I’m writing another blog post rather than throwing some kind of curve ball and doing my fiction writing today, since I wrote a blog post yesterday, when I had scheduled myself to write some fiction.  I don’t know if that counts as a double curve ball or as a capitulation to a simple, over-the-plate, none-too-fast soft pitch.  It’s probably the latter, but I suppose there is no absolute right answer, and the judgment would depend upon one’s point of view.

I’ve realized that, contrary to what I wrote yesterday‒to what I honestly thought was the case‒I did not bring my small laptop computer with me when I left the office on Thursday.  I had unplugged it with the intention to pack it, but then I had left without it.  I can’t recall ever having done that before.  It goes to show just how crappy I felt on Thursday, I guess.

I really want to keep writing fiction.  It would be a shame to take this new story that I’ve well begun, with over 10,000 words written so far, and let it just fall by the wayside.  Then again, I’ve left The Dark Fairy and the Desperado hanging, and more egregiously, I’ve left Outlaw’s Mind hanging, so it’s not as though there is no precedent.  And, of course, in the past I’ve left stories incomplete many, many times.  But it seems particularly sad, now that I’ve published 5 novels and 2 collections of “short” stories, to fall back into that pattern.

But I need to find a way to be able to work fiction writing into my daily routines without messing up habits that have become somewhat compulsory for me.  I’ve tried to find ways to block out the noise in the office, so far without much success.  Yesterday I bought a rather inexpensive pair of noise-canceling headphones.  They didn’t do that good a job at the noise canceling; they reduced it a bit, but it was still there, though if I put in earplugs as well and then also played a YouTube video about field theories and similar stuff, if helped, but that is certainly not a combination of measures I could take while trying to write fiction.

I’m of two minds (at least) about the headphones.  I’m glad I didn’t spend very much on them, since they don’t turn out to be as effective as my more old-fashioned, gun-range and airport style ear defenders (when combined with ear plugs).  They can also play music or the sound from videos, but I didn’t get them for that.  I already have things that can do that.  But I wonder if more expensive ones would do any better.

It’s a shame that no high-powered movie executive has read any of my books or stories and approached me to option them for movies or shows or anything, but it’s obviously not surprising.  I’m terrible at self-promotion, more by temperament than merely due to lack of skill.  This blog is my closest approach to self-promotion, and I spend most of my time here spewing my random and often depressed and depressing thoughts in some wishful, pseudo-Freudian free association kind of exercise.

Of course, it’s about as useful to me as Freudian psychoanalysis* ever has been clinically demonstrated to be for anyone, which is to say, very little, if at all.  Nevertheless‒and also like psychoanalysis for many of its patients‒it has been habit forming, and I feel awkward and disjointed without it.

Also, as I noted yesterday, it’s the only means by which I keep contact with anyone other than my sister in the world outside of the office.  I’ve really become a shell of my former self, and the fact that there is physically more of me now than there has ever been before only makes that more biting, the irony enhancing the contrast with the past, when I used to relieve suffering and save lives and be beneficial to the world.

Ah, well.  From a cosmic perspective, all such benefits will probably be transitory, or effectively be nonexistent.

Which reminds me:  yesterday I was looking at the abstracts of some recent papers on “quantum cosmology” uploaded onto arXiv, the preprint server.  Obviously, most of these subjects were well beyond my expertise truly to be able to follow, but I get the concepts involved in most of them.  Also, exposure to the mathematical formalism when I don’t know how to manipulate it often makes it easier to understand later, as there is familiarity and applicability that helps add to the more complete picture I gradually build in my mind about such things.

This has happened to me more than once in the past.  I don’t learn by rote, I learn by building mental models and maps and structures that link areas of knowledge and understanding together.  So, I don’t learn quickly, but I learn deeply and durably.  I think this is a much better way to go.

Anyway, that’s tangential.  What was amusing is, I read about a paper involving some deSitter** models of inflation in a universe which (if I recall the abstract correctly) was matter-dominated in early moments and so had no uniform pressure (unlike radiation-dominated situations, which, if I’m remembering correctly, is pressure intensive and homogeneous, and is how our early universe probably was).  In such models, if I understood the point correctly, you could find more noteworthy inhomogeneities than seen in radiation-dominated phases, which makes sense, since the radiation pressure works against gravitational collapse.

So, the model discussed would be unlike our universe, in which the CMB demonstrates extreme homogeneity, down to a few parts in a hundred thousand, even from one edge of the cosmic horizon to the opposite edge, encompassing regions that could never possibly have been in any form of direct causal contact at least since the hypothetical time of inflation.  The light from each side has only just now reached us, and so is only halfway across to the other side, and may well never reach it if the universe expands quickly enough.  Yet the temperatures are the same to a few parts in a hundred thousand, which is probably more than can be said about the room you’re sitting in now.

One type of this theoretical homogeneity in the model in the abstract had apparently been previously described as a “Zel’dovich pancake”.  This is apparently nothing new (first described in the 1970s), but is a really amusing way to think of a cosmic structure, and I kind of want to look into it and see what it describes, to see if I can understand, at least superficially, the math behind it.

Wow, that was a whole ‘nother tangent of much greater departure than before.  I think I’ll call that good for now for this day’s blog.  I’m kind of all over the place, and if I’m not too careful, I might undergo decoherence and split into multiple versions of myself.  That seems all too possible, since I’ve never been naturally inclined to very impressive coherence in the first place.

I will probably be writing here tomorrow.

*Not to be confused with the more general term “psychotherapy”, which can be useful depending on the type of therapy and the person receiving it.  CBT is one of the most effective of these; it didn’t work all that well for me, but I’m annoying and perverse, so that’s no surprise.

**DeSitter spacetimes are just spacetimes with positive cosmological constants‒like our universe, with its apparent “dark energy”‒which will tend to drive accelerating expansion.  The whole “holographic universe” concept was motivated, or perhaps inspired, partly by the Bekenstein-Hawking recognition that the maximal entropy of any region of spacetime is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of that region.  Any greater entropy in the region would add to the mass of the black hole associated with that horizon, and so would make the horizon larger; thus that is the maximal entropy for that initial region.  QED (Quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics) if you will.  The holographic principle regarding a universe has only ever been worked out for anti-deSitter spaces, with negative cosmological constants, which we know is not the case for the universe in which we live because…well, because we’re alive, and those spacetimes tend to collapse rapidly.

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Whither one goes affects whether the effects of the weather are noteworthy

It’s a bit chilly this morning, at least for south Florida.  As I looked at the weather app when I was getting up, it reported that the temperature near me was about 51 degrees Fahrenheit.  We can take 32 away from that then multiply by 5/9‒so that’s 19 x 5, which is 95, divided by 9‒which gives just over 10 degrees Centigrade (or Celsius, depending upon whom one asks).

I guess that’s pretty cool, though certainly there are many places north of here where people would welcome it as a relatively balmy day for this time of year.  Alternatively, in parts of the southern hemisphere, where it is summer, it would seem aberrantly cold, even more noteworthy than it is in my neck of the subtropical woods.  Going farther afield, on Mars it would be truly a record-setting heat wave, whereas on Venus, such a temperature would be impossibly, unfathomably cold.

The surface temperature of Venus is, if memory serves, around 900º Fahrenheit, or nearly 500º Centigrade, or nearly 800 Kelvin (I am rounding the Kelvin “273” addition to Centigrade because I only have one significant figure in my recalled estimate of Venus’s average temperature in Fahrenheit, and adding other specific digits would be misleading and unjustified).

It’s interesting that Venus, the planet named for the goddess of sexual and romantic love, is the most hellish planet in the solar system.  It’s hot enough at the surface to melt lead.  The atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth and largely consists of carbon dioxide.  The cloud cover is constant and it rains sulfuric acid.

Perhaps Venus, the morning “star” (and the evening “star” too, depending on which side of the sun it’s currently on from Earth’s point of view) is more appropriately given one of its other names, which is:  Lucifer, the light-bearer, herald of the dawn, who in later mythology was associated with the Devil (at least before his fall).

Of course, it’s hard to reconcile Lucifer’s supposed fall with the fact that the planet is still conspicuously up there in the sky.  And I do mean “conspicuously”.  Apart from the sun and the moon, Venus is easily the brightest thing in the night sky.  Sometimes one can still see it even as the sun is beginning to rise; the cloud cover of Venus makes it highly reflective of visible light.

Anyway, I find it sardonically and cynically amusing that the goddess of love is associated with a nightmarish hellscape, but I have a personal history that makes me look askance at romance.  I am, in other words, biased.

Venus is a good object lesson in the potent effects of carbon dioxide’s tendency to allow visible but not infrared light to pass easily through it, and so to create a “greenhouse effect” even in the modest concentration it achieves on Earth.

The physics of this is well understood, relating largely to the resonant frequency of the bonds in the molecule as well as its size and shape.  Smaller, tighter molecules like molecular nitrogen and molecular oxygen, the two gasses that make up the vast majority of Earth’s atmosphere, don’t interact much with infrared light, and are more prone to scatter shorter, bluer wavelengths of visible light‒this is a rough explanation of why the sky is blue (and why the sunrise and sunset are much redder, as that sunlight is going through more of the atmosphere due to the angle at which we see the sun at those times of day, and the blue is partly scattered out of it, leaving relatively more redder light behind).

Anyway, the broad physics of the greenhouse effect is almost elementary, and has been understood for a long time.  The specifics of what precisely will happen in any given set of circumstances can be tricky to tease out, given the complexity of reality‒you might say that Venus is in the details‒but the specifics are often less important than the broad strokes.

After all, when a giant asteroid is heading toward the Earth, it isn’t that reassuring to know that only, say, 75% of species will be driven extinct by its impact, and that life will survive and eventually once again thrive.  How much would someone have to pay you for you to be willing to accept a 75% chance that just you will die, let alone everyone like you on the planet?

There might well be a big enough sum for you to be willing to risk your own life, especially if you got to enjoy the money for a while before the dice were thrown, or to leave it to your heirs.  But for your whole species?  Is there a reward big enough to be able to take that chance?  Let’s assume you’re not a raging misanthrope/panantipath like I am for the sake of this question, since depending on my mood, I’d be inclined to negotiate for a higher chance of extinction.

Also, of course, by pretty much every possible form of ethics you might follow, you don’t have the right to roll the dice on all the members of your own species.   You don’t have any right to roll the dice on the members of your own family, unless they unilaterally and spontaneously and freely grant you that right.

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m writing about these topics today.  They are just what spewed out of me, like vomit from the proverbial drunkard or pus from a squeezed abscess.  I wish I could write something more interesting, or write something that helped my mood some.  Writing fiction did at least help fight my depression, but it’s hard when almost no one reads my stuff.

Maybe I should take to writing at least a page of fiction a day by hand, on the notebook paper and clipboard I have at the office, during downtime, instead of watching videos.  Yesterday I mainly watched ones about spontaneous symmetry breaking and the electro-weak era and the Higgs mechanism.  To be fair to me, it’s very interesting stuff, and it actually would have some relevance to my potential comic book turned manga turned science fiction story, HELIOS.

Of course, that’s named for another mythological figure, one that’s even hotter than Venus.  But I don’t know if I can write it.  Motivation is difficult.  Still, as Stephen King reputedly once told Neil Gaiman, if you write just one page a day, by the end of a year you’ll have a decent-sized novel*.

Once I get writing, I have a hard time stopping at only one page.  If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll probably know this implicitly‒my general target for post length is about 800 words, but I almost never am able to keep it that short.

I guess we’ll see what happens.  And, of course, I’ll keep you all…posted.

*He has also noted that, for him‒as I have often found it to be for me‒writing fiction is the best form of therapy.

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Most people are dead, and it will probably always be that way

I sometimes think about historically based films in which tragedies happen and deaths occur.  I know they’re highly fictionalized, but think of Braveheart and of Gladiator* and movies of that sort, where the loss of loved ones makes viewers sad but drives the protagonist to “great” deeds that change the course of local history‒or, well, that make the course of local history.  After all, one only knows history after it happens, and once it’s happened, one cannot change it.  One can be mistaken about it, one can misrecord it, one can lie about it, but one cannot actually change it.

Even if it were possible to time travel, going into the past to alter something, it wouldn’t change the history from which you came‒as even the Marvel movies have pointed out, you’d just have created a new future, a new history, local to you.  It wouldn’t change your previous one‒that would be paradoxical.

Yes, Back to the Future is bullshit.  This really shouldn’t surprise you.  It’s still a fun movie.

Anyway, that’s beside the point I planned to make.  I think of tragic deaths in historical dramas that we see and about which we feel heartbroken, or even about real historical horrors‒human made, like the vast slaughters of Genghis Khan’s hordes or natural, like earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis and the like‒and about all the deaths involved, and sometimes I think:  “They would all be dead now, anyway, no matter what.”

Not one single person who was born before 1900 is alive today, as far as I know.  If there is one, that human is an all-time record holder in longevity, and is unlikely to live much longer.  And I would probably bet my own life** on there being no one alive who was born before 1850.  Indeed, the majority of humans who have ever lived are dead.  It’s not as big a majority as it might be, given how long humanity has existed, but that’s only because of recent exponential population growth.

In principle, of course, with a fast enough exponential population growth, it would be possible for the majority of humans to be presently alive, even with current lifespans.  But that’s not sustainable in the real universe.  For it to be sustainable in the long run, eventually humans would have to expand their empire over matter and space at faster than the speed of light, and reach far beyond the cosmic horizon, which is impossible in principle, as far as we know.

I say “eventually”, but don’t let that mislead you.  It would happen with surprising speed.  There’s a well known fact that, given a typical doubling/generation time of about 20 minutes, and assuming enough resources, a single bacterium could multiply to a volume greater than that of the visible universe within a month.  I’ll try to check my math on that when I get to sit down with a pen and paper***, but whether the specific time of a month is not quite right, it’s in the right ballpark.

This is the sort of doubling that is thought to have happened‒at an even faster rate, of course‒during the “inflationary” stage of the universe, if inflation happened.  Of course, in a sense, if “dark energy” is really the cosmological constant, then we are still undergoing inflation even now, just with a slower doubling time.  That doesn’t help is with our exponentially growing human population, though; spacetime itself can expand at, functionally, faster than the speed of light****, but nothing travels through spacetime faster than light.

Anyway, we’re already slowing down our population growth rate, which is good, since Malthusian growth tends to be unpleasant for almost everyone.  Therefore, as time goes by, the fraction of all humans who are dead will probably more and more overtake the fraction who are living.  And all early deaths are, in hindsight, not too terribly early.

This is one reason I get slightly irritated by people who talk of “saving lives” or characterizing a person’s death, per se, as a tragedy.  If every death is a tragedy, then the anti-natalists are right, and each new life should be avoided.  But, of course, it’s not that death in and of itself is a tragedy‒or if it is, it’s an inevitable one that’s going to happen to us all, sooner rather than later.  Even a being that lived for thousands or billions or googols or googolplexes of years would come no closer to living eternally than does a mayfly.  This is a mathematical fact.

It’s suffering that is the tragedy, not death.  Death can be a decent shorthand, in certain circumstances, because‒as Carl Sagan pointed out‒if one is dead, there is very little one can do to be happy.  Then again, if one is dead, there is also very little that can happen to make one disappointed or sad or in pain or afraid.  And since these things are more common and sustainable, or at least more reliable, than joy is, life itself, as a shorthand, is at least as good an indicator of suffering as death is of loss of possible joy.

It’s possible, I think, to live without joy‒meaning that it can happen, not that it’s a state one can or should seek.  But I don’t know that it’s possible for any true living things, or at least any living things with any equivalent of a nervous system, to exist without suffering.

So, perhaps Dumbledore’s post-mortem***** admonition to Harry Potter could be truncated to “Do not pity the dead, Harry.  Pity the living.”  Full stop.

*Which should have been the title of the sequel to Jaws.

**That’s maybe not as impressive as it might seem, since much of the time I hate my life and myself.  But it’s the only life I have with which to bet.

***With a typical length of 1 micrometer (10-6 meters) and a doubling time of approximately 20 minutes (leading to 72 doublings a day), after only one day, a colony of bacteria would be roughly 4700 cubic meters in size, a cube more than 16 meters (just over 50 feet) on a side.  After 2 days, its volume would be about 2 x 1026 cubic meters, or a cube 280,000 kilometers long on a side.  That’s nearly the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  After the 2160 doublings involved in a month of doubling, that would yield a volume of 2 x 10632 cubic meters, or with a side length of about 5 x 10210 meters.  A light year is 10 trillion kilometers, or 10 quadrillion meters, which is “only” 1015 meters.  So that’s a cube with a side length of 5 x 10195 light years‒waaaaaay more than a googol light-years.  Indeed, if you subtracted a googol from that number, it would not change it to any degree measurable by any means known to humans (5 x 10195 minus 1 x 10100 is still, basically, 5 x 10195).  The visible universe is only about 92 billion light-years across, yielding a sphere with a volume of “only” 4 x 1080 cubic meters.  It’s not even close to the order of magnitude of a volume of 2 x 10632 cubic meters!  My estimate was far short of the mark.  But that only strengthens my point, doesn’t it?

****It doesn’t actually do so locally‒I suspect that is also impossible, since it would defy the speed of local causality.  It’s only the summation of all the local doublings spread across the entirety of space that can make distant points separate at faster than the speed of light.  Then again, can “traditional” inflation cause any kind of local superluminal expansion?  I don’t think so.  Could two points in space a Planck length apart separate at a local speed that exceeds c even during inflation?  I doubt it, though I’m not absolutely sure.  Of course, if space is mathematically continuous, then there are no two closest possible points, anyway.  Between any two points on the real number line, there exists an uncountable infinity of other points, no matter how arbitrarily close you make them.

*****Of course, if one can deliver admonitions, one is not really dead in any useful or meaningful sense.  But it’s fiction, and it’s magic within fiction, so leeway can be given.  We have no evidence nor have I encountered any even borderline convincing arguments for any “life after death” in the real world, unless you count things like multiverses or Poincaré recurrences or the like, and I don’t, since they really entail other versions of a person, not a continuity of personhood.

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Learning about science, troubles with reading and socialization, and (not) writing fiction

It’s Saturday morning, and boy was yesterday’s audio blog a little weird.  I think it’s not so much that I said anything particularly weird—certainly not for me—but rather the odd meanderings thing took, from musing on the fact that I’ve been losing any joy of any kind in my life, becoming more and more bored or even irritated by more and more things that used to be interesting, on to the various declining cinematic universes and finally to thoughts about General Relativity.

At least that latter part encouraged me to read some material and watch some relatively hard-core YouTube videos about General Relativity and its mathematics.  By “hard-core”, I don’t mean there was any graphic sex involved.  First of all, I don’t think they allow stuff like that on YouTube, but even more to the point, I don’t see how one could work such a thing into an educational video about matrices and tensors and stuff like that.  I mean “hard-core” as in being more in-depth than just a general information, analogy kind of educational presentation, and especially that it talked about the mathematics underlying the science.

Not that I’m against the more general stuff.  I certainly began all of my interest in science with general knowledge/information.  When I was a kid, growing up (which is what kids do if things go well), I had a whole bookshelf I called my “science shelf” full of various kid-level books about everything from biology to paleontology (there were lots of dinosaur books—my first career ambition was to be a paleontologist) to “how things work” kinds of books and so on.

I didn’t really start to have as much physics and astronomy related material until after Cosmos came out.  That show was the reason our family got our first color TV.  I also asked for (and received) a hardcover copy of the book for my 10th or 11th birthday (it came out in 1980, I think, so it should have been 10th), and I was very pleased.  That book and show really triggered my love of space-oriented and physics-oriented science, including—of course—cosmology.

I chose my undergraduate college precisely because it was where Carl Sagan was a professor, though I never did meet him.  I would have thought it presumptuous and appalling to try to seek him out and bother him with gestures of my admiration and thanks.  I tend to feel that way about inflicting myself upon anybody—friend, foe, or stranger.  I just feel that I don’t have any right to intrude upon anyone else’s life or time, and also that I frankly don’t know what to say if I do meet them.

It’s a bit sad, though.  By most accounts, Professor Sagan tended to be quite pleasant and positive toward people who liked his work, and he considered himself—according to him—first and foremost a teacher.  He certainly taught me a great deal.  Though his books are now somewhat out of date, they are mostly still great repositories of fact and interest, and they remain overflowing founts of wonder.  I feel confident in recommending them to anyone, most prominently Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, and especially The Demon-Haunted World.

Of course, I’ve read a lot of his intellectual descendants since then, and his cousins as well in other fields (Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Dawkins’s books and collections about biology are wonderful, too, for instance).  One thing I like about listening to podcasts that focus on ideas is that the guests are often people who have recently (or not-so-recently) written books, and if the subject is interesting I can read their books to get more deeply into their work.  I first encountered David Deutsch and Max Tegmark (and many others) on Sam Harris’s podcast, for instance.

And, of course, I have also read books by Brian Greene and Sean Carroll (and others) about physics in general.  It was to The Big Picture that I turned yesterday after my audio blog, in addition to the aforementioned video, to review some of the mathematical basics of General Relativity.  From there, maybe I’ll go on to the YouTube videos of Leonard Susskind’s* real graduate level lectures at Stanford, and to reading Sean Carroll’s textbook.  I’d also like to read through Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, which I’ve mentioned before (with the thought of going on to his textbook if I can).

I have Zee’s layperson-oriented book in hardcover, but the print is small, and it’s difficult to read.  Still, I took delivery yesterday of a new set of reading glasses that are slightly stronger than the ones I was using, so I hope they’ll make it easier.  I’d really prefer to learn by reading than even by watching videos.

Of course, all this is probably just “pie in the sky” thinking.  My biggest difficulty is just summoning the will, the energy, to do these things.  It’s similar to the trouble I have with writing fiction.  I have quite a few story ideas I could write, but I have no drive, no desire to do the writing.  There’s no percentage in it, so to speak.  It’s not as though I have any fans out there telling me how much they like my books and want more.  I mean, my sister has read them all, and she liked at least most of them, and says she really liked The Chasm and the Collision.  That’s very nice, and I do appreciate it.  Apparently, though, it’s not the required stimulus for me to want to write more fiction.

Perhaps nothing would be.  Perhaps I’m just deteriorating too much, or have deteriorated too much.

Or perhaps it’s that I feel that a truly tiny minority even of people who engage with fiction do so in written form nowadays.  There’s too much competing immediate gratification out there, and primates—probably almost all life forms—are prone to fall for immediate gratification, and to someone else doing the imaginative work for them.

I fear that much of the general population has allowed their personal imaginations to atrophy, much as physical health atrophies when someone goes everywhere by car.  People even play Dungeons & Dragons online now, apparently.  That seems weird to me.  I don’t think I could really stand to play role playing games with strangers.  Playing them with my friends, as I did back in junior high and high school, for countless hours, was greatly enjoyable, and I think it did exercise and improve my imagination and my story-telling and story-creating “muscles”.

Oh, well.  I don’t have anyone with whom to do any of that stuff now, and I can’t even really imagine trying to find new people with whom to do it—see my above discussion about inflicting myself on people for part of the reason, but that’s not the only one.  I also don’t want to invest the considerable necessary stress and effort and anxiety into trying to find friends with whom I actually share interests—if such people even exist—and then have it all go sour or just go away as nearly every other relationship of any kind that I’ve ever had has done.  The juice, however delicious, is not worth that old vice-grip-on-the-testicles (and on all the joints and tips of one’s fingers) level squeeze.  The juice doesn’t last, anyway.

I’m on the train now, and I’m not exactly producing anything edifying, am I?  I’ll bring this week’s writing to an end, but I hope I’ll have the will to keep studying, at least.  And, of course, I hope most fervently and sincerely that all of you have a very good weekend.

*I also have his series The Theoretical Minimum in kindle and/or paperback and/or hardback form; his most recent one was about GR.  But I’ve had trouble reading physical books of any kind (let alone the Suss kind…ha ha) lately; I’m hoping my new reading glasses will help that.

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Audio blog for Friday on anhedonia, fatigue, declining entertainment franchises and Newtonian and Einsteinian physics

This is an oddly meandering audio blog that I made this morning, having little desire to write much, and it goes from my troubles with depression and lessening interest in any former source of joy to the fact that even Star Wars and Marvel franchises are going downhill (with speculation about the causes) on to physics–first Newtonian then Special and General Relativity, and ponderings about the nature of near-light-speed travel and its potential effects when a spaceship passes the Schwarzschild radius in the direction of its motion (and even a tiny dabble into cosmic strings, which are not to be mistaken for the “superstrings” of string theory/M theory).  I find no firm conclusions, but maybe it’s mildly interesting somewhere.  It’s longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully not too long.

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My gruntlement is low today

It’s Tuesday morning.  I wasn’t actually planning to write anything when I got up today, but then I remembered that, more or less on a whim, I had brought my little laptop computer with me, so I figured I might as well write something.

For one thing, I’ll embed the “video” of my last audio blog—the one about Morgoth and whatnot—below, so if anyone prefers to do their listening via YouTube, they can do so.  Evidently, the Google podcast app is going to be phased out, and one is going to have to listen to podcasts via YouTube Music at some point in the future (or use some other service/app).  That’s a bit frustrating, because there’s at least one podcast that I get via subscription that one cannot get in its entirety on YouTube, but can get through the app.  I guess they’ll figure out a way to deliver that, but it’s irritating to have to change my settings once again.

I guess it shouldn’t matter.  I should just cancel all my subscriptions and services and platforms and even cable and internet.  They’re not really doing me any good, and they cost money, and honestly, I really would expect not to be alive starting sometime soon.  I’ve been expecting that for a long time, now, though, and I haven’t really been able to work up the gumption to bring it about.

I have at least been creeping my way in that direction.  I have flammable liquids for potential immolation—useful for other, more traditional things as well, of course.  I have scalpels and utility knives, useful for cutting various things, including oneself, but of course, they’re also generally useful for many things.  And recently I bought a nice length of rope—too long, really—and learned how to tie a hangman’s knot.  That last bit is rather surprisingly easy, and it’s a pleasant and useful knot, it turns out, especially to someone who used to be in the Boy Scouts a lifetime ago.  Ironically, it has many similarities to an informal necktie knot.

But, I’m still alive for the moment, though I’m very uncomfortable and unhappy in general, and I still haven’t gotten health insurance.  I get a near-panic feeling when I even think seriously about getting insurance.  I’m not entirely sure why that is.

Yesterday morning I felt really horrible, and I think it’s because I was trying to reintroduce some things I like into my diet to see if I can tolerate them.  I guess I can’t, at least not in the state I’m in (Florida).  It seems I can’t even enjoy the things I like to eat, but then again, I can’t expect nature to be there for my convenience.

I could try to work against nature’s convenience, in return, I guess.  At the very least, I could do my best to add to global warming and disrupt the biosphere and cause toxins and pollutants to accumulate, as a silly sort of revenge.  It might be fun.

I did feel less bad as the afternoon wore on and I avoided any indulgences, to the point where, near the end of the day, in idle moments, I got out Spacetime and Geometry, Gravitation, Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and even the old Thomas and Finney calculus text—the latter because sometimes I feel like I want to re-hone and improve my skills with mathematics, and Brilliant, for all that it’s a wonderful site, just doesn’t seem to work for me for some things.

I did find the two physics texts (which I opened in the middle, since I was looking for rather specific information relating to Λ, the cosmological constant) much more accessible and relatively easy to follow compared to what I was expecting.  Gravitation, in particular, is an intimidatingly large tome, but is nevertheless a bit of a “my first reader” in overall impression when compared to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine.  I didn’t get very far in any of them in the time I had yesterday, but it was nice to realize that—though some mathematical formalisms are beyond my current expertise (thus the Thomas and Finney)—all of it made sense to me.  Credit the writers as much as my own cleverness, but I do give myself some credit.

Maybe I should get a biology textbook, just to reinvigorate my interest in that general subject as well.  I’m more of a literal expert in that subject than I am in GR or quantum mechanics or mathematics, though, so maybe a basic college text would be too repetitive?  I don’t know.

I’m having a bit of trouble with my laptop today; Word has frozen up on me twice this morning, which is a bit frustrating.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’m not sure how long I’ve had this laptop, but it’s been a few years, at least.  Ordinarily, I would think of getting a new one to replace it, but that seems like entirely too much work, and is rather pointless.  I don’t expect to write any more fiction.

The thing that led me to bring the laptop computer back with me last night was the thought of maybe at least rereading what I have so far of Outlaw’s Mind and maybe even DFandD.  I talked to my sister on Sunday and gave her a bit of a (probably rather tedious) rundown of how those stories, especially the former, interconnect with the larger universe of my books, including particularly The Chasm and the Collision, and the potential novel Changeling in a Shadow World, and other stories, all going back to the first novel I ever “finished”, back in high school—Ends of the Maelstrom—which I could probably recreate* if I had the gumption.  I certainly still know all the main characters’ names and stories and arcs and all.  I even remember my opening line:  “Horraban was happy now.”  I also remember my rather ominous ending, though not the precise words.

Many of the universes of my stories are connected to each other.  In effect, I suppose, they’re all connected via what the wizard in DFandD refers to as the “omniverse”.  I had long thought of it as the metaverse, but then Mark Fuckerberg arrogated that term to his pathetic attempt at virtual reality, and so I had to find another term.  I guess “omniverse” is actually more accurate and descriptive, but I thought the other sounded cooler.  Now it doesn’t.

Anyway, I have scads of potential stories I could write, some interconnected and some stand-alone, but I doubt that I will ever write any of them.  I just don’t have the energy nor do I have the motivation.  Merely going to work and getting back to the house uses up all the mental energy I have, and then some; much of my mental energy I need is sucked from my future, shortening my potential span of mental life as I go.

I suppose if some wealthy benefactor were to show up and offer to pay my expenses in return for getting me to write full time, I might do so.  Perhaps that could happen, but I won’t hold my breath, and I don’t encourage you to do so either.

In the meantime, though, here is the “video” from my last audio blog.  If you watch it on YouTube, please give a thumbs up, and subscribe, and share, and all that, if you’re at all willing to do so.  Thanks.

*It was 574 pages (and roughly 250,000 words, I think), handwritten on thin-ruled notebook paper, with many additions that ran into the margins, though some of these were tattered because I habitually ate paper from the edges of notebook sheets back then.  Anyway, I lost that original book when I lost all my belongings thanks to the depredations of the counties and state of Florida.  For that, I hold at least something of a grudge.

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Mad morning musings and “The End of All That Is”

It’s Wednesday morning again, and here I am, reverting to habit, writing a blog post (this time on my smartphone) because I frankly can’t seem to think of anything better to do with my time.

Well…I could sleep.  That would be a better use of my time.  Except I can’t sleep.  Even on weekends, the only way I get myself to sleep through the night is to take two Benadryl™ before I lie down.  But that’s not really effective, restorative sleep, and though I stay in “bed” later, I can tell the next day that I’m not really rested.  Or maybe that’s just residual effects of the antihistamine, I don’t know.

The best thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression‒which didn’t work overall, and gave me bad side-effects‒was that it made me not just able to go to sleep at night, but to actually feel good going to bed and going to sleep, to enjoy the process.  I had never experienced that before, nor have I since.  But, as I said, there were other side-effects that made it quite bad.

Also, it made me gain weight, which would be particularly bad now, because I’m already heavier than I’ve ever been.  That’s what can happen when one’s only reliable pleasure comes from eating, and when one also eats as a sort of “stimming” and soothing thing to try to ease a constant sense of anhedonia and stress and dysphoria.  And it’s not as though I could simply “embrace” my body size, because it comes with worsening pain and other unpleasant consequences.

Unfortunately, I don’t get immediate worsening of pain when I eat.  It’s delayed.  If it were immediate, I would probably develop a habitual avoidance, and that would be great.  I try to remind myself, when my ankles and knees and back and hips are hurting a lot, that this is caused, at least partly, by eating too much, but that auto-suggestion doesn’t seem quite to work.

I’m pretty sure that I would eat less if I slept better.  Chronic sleep loss tends to affect one’s regulatory and stress hormones, and can stimulate appetite (especially for carbohydrates) in many people.  I appear to be one of these people.

I wonder if I could figure out a way to cause myself pain while eating‒maybe I could put a clothespin on the end of my pinky when I eat, every time I eat.  I don’t know if you all remember, but having a clothespin clamped on your fingernail hurts quite a lot, and hurts even more (albeit briefly) when you take it off and circulation returns*.

If I could arrange something like that to happen whenever I eat, that would be useful.  I did have a TENS unit that never helped my chronic pain, but some of its higher settings could be quite uncomfortable.  I suppose it might be useful to train myself, though it would require setting it up and activating it every time I ate.  Also, I’m almost sure that I threw it away in frustration because it didn’t work.

It would be really useful if I could somehow trigger nausea any time I ate, as in the style of aversion training seen in A Clockwork Orange.  I suppose I could try to force myself to eat eggplant with every meal…but no, I don’t think I could.  It’s very hard to force oneself to eat things that make one feel sick.  That’s the whole point of this line of thought.  I guess I could look for some syrup of ipecac.  I’ve never used that, but I think they used to use it to make people throw up if they’d eaten something poisonous or the like.  It might be worth a try.  I think I’ll send myself a reminder to look it up on Amazon.

The train just arrived.  I must say, Tri-Rail seems to have deteriorated slightly since changing their schedules, but maybe they’re just in the middle of making adjustments.  I try to give other people and organizations the benefit of the doubt when I can.  The Principle of Charity is one that I think would be very useful for society as a whole, or at least for humans:  the idea of trying to see what people say and do from the best possible light you can, instead of reflexively assuming the worst, of getting judgmental and self-righteous and assuming anything you find even slightly uncomfortable is a personal attack on you, precisely because you feel uncomfortable.

If I took that attitude, I could definitely see myself trying to destroy the world or even the universe, because a lot of reality bothers me a lot of the time.  Fortunately, I know that my feelings are my problem and my responsibility, not anyone else’s.

Not that I don’t fantasize about global and even universal destruction when I’m feeling particularly pan-antipathic.  I imagine working to perfect technology to adjust the course of asteroids.  I could even sneakily get government funding to do so, but then I could actually use the technology to steer near-Earth objects toward the Earth rather than away from it.  Some good asteroid hits might be extinction-level events, and a comet impact (of sufficient size) could wipe out nearly all life on Earth.

I say “nearly” because some microbes are remarkably resilient.

Of course, if one could study the possibility of vacuum decay‒causing, for instance, the cosmological constant or the Higgs Field to quantum tunnel to a lower energy level‒that would produce a wavefront process that would obliterate all forms of matter, a wavefront that would expand at the speed of light and wipe out everything.

Well…it wouldn’t literally wipe out everything, actually.  First off, it would leave behind whatever cosmos is entailed in the new Higgs (or other field) set-point.  And, of course, beyond our cosmic horizon, there are bits of reality that are moving away from us‒carried by the expansion of spacetime itself‒at faster than the speed of light.  So the vacuum decay wave would never reach them.  But it would obliterate everything in the observable universe, and that might be heartwarming enough.

Vacuum decay, though, may not even be a physical possibility‒it’s not a consensus prediction, though there are reasons to think it might be possible‒according to the best models we have of cosmic history, the Higgs field did settle out in a non-zero state after the electroweak era, and if inflationary cosmology is correct, then the “inflaton” field similarly decayed.

Still, we also have no idea how (or if) such a decay could be triggered.  There is no apparent risk of initiating it through highly energetic physics, because there are constant, extremely high energy processes happening in the cosmos, and everything we can see is all still there, as are we.

Oh, and contrary to the X-Men comics’ Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga, unfortunately, a “neutron galaxy” would not be “The End of All That Is”.  If such a “neutron galaxy” were to “appear” in the middle of the Milky Way, that would be bad for us, though its effects would take a while, since even gravity doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light.  But effectively, a “neutron” galaxy would be no more cosmically devastating than a supermassive black hole with the mass of a hundred billion suns or so.  That’s a big black hole, bigger than any we’ve seen (and probably too big to be expected to exist at the current age of the cosmos), and as with any black hole, if you get too close it can be bad news**, but from a distance its effects would be no more harmful than an ordinary galaxy of equivalent mass.

Oh, well, I’ll have to keep brainstorming ways to destroy the world or humanity at least.  Maybe biology is the way to go‒it might be possible to genetically engineer something like the Blob or the Chicken Heart that Ate the World.  Or one could deliberately make an AI that has the terminal goal to turn everything into paperclips, not by accident but on purpose.  That would be humorously ironic.  Or one could just make an AI nanobot, Von Neumann probe-style thing that literally had the sole programming to replicate itself as much and as fast as possible, using every available resource.

I’ve written before about how such a thing could even instantiate a new kind of galaxy-level natural selection.

I wonder what would happen if I tried to crowd-source a project to end all life in the universe, maybe with a “GoFundMe” page…

Anyway, my station is coming up, so I’ll draw my insane musings to a close for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything tomorrow.

*Don’t worry, this was not something anyone else ever did to me.  This was something with which I experimented on myself, because while it was painful, it was quite fascinating that the pain got worse when I first took the clothespin off.

**Although, with one that big, you could probably traverse the event horizon without tidal forces killing you‒at least not just yet‒by spaghettification, so it might at least allow for some interesting final experiences.

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Not all new things from Microsoft et al are annoying

I did a little talking into the microphone this morning about a few things, including the above–relating specifically to the “Clipchamp” video editing software from Microsoft, which actually seems pretty darn good, all things considered, and my futile dreams of more deeply studying subjects in Physics that I like, and some about walking, but finally about how I’m not up to anything.

I may not make this into a video on YouTube.  I did make yesterday’s audio into a “video”.  If anyone wants me to do that with THIS audio, let me know.

Anyway, for all you gluttons for punishment, here is yesterday’s audio turned into video:

And here is the audio from today:

If such a thing is possible, enjoy.