Physics

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Noisy events on the horizon of my attention span

It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?  Well, I guess it may not be Tuesday when you’re reading this, but it’s Tuesday as I’m writing it.  It’s the second day in the latest of a seemingly endless stream of utterly pointless “work weeks”.

Welcome to our world.  Welcome to our world.  Welcome to our world of noise.

That’s a paraphrase of the song that was (and may still be) sung by the dancing animatronic puppets in the main front area of the big F.A.O. Schwartz store that sits just by the southeast corner of Central Park in Manhattan.  I’m not sure why I felt like including it there, but it definitely expresses the sentiment I have that nearly everything in the universe is effectively “noise” in the information theoretic sense.  At the very least, the signal-to-noise ratio in the world is vanishingly tiny.

It’s not zero, mind you.  There’s some info hiding in all the nonsense.

Of course, whether something is signal or noise depends very much on what signal you’re seeking.  If you’re trying to detect gravitational waves, then nearly everything else around is “noise” in the sense that it is not evidence of gravitational waves, and is just going to make that evidence harder to find.  But if you’re an ornithologist, then at least some of that seeming noise might be the birdsong “signal” of a rarely seen species there in Louisiana, which I think is where the first LIGO observatory was constructed*.

And, of course, if you’re a seismologist, what you consider a significant signal would very much be noise to the LIGO people.  If there were a gravitational wave strong enough to be seismically significant, it would have to be from a very close and catastrophically violent event.

We don’t expect there to be such a thing any time soon.  And apart from such events, gravitational waves are so relatively weak‒gravity being by far the weakest of the “forces” of nature‒that so far they can only be detected from things like black hole and/or neutron star mergers, which are ridiculously violent events.

Incidentally, apparently recent observations of one such merger has given confirmatory evidence for Stephen Hawking’s black hole horizon theorem**.  That states that when two black holes merge, the (surface) area of the new, combined event horizon must be at least as large as the two prior event horizon areas combined.

In this, as in other things, black holes and their horizons act very much like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and that is consistent with the Bekenstein-Hawking thesis that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the area of the event horizon, as measured in square Planck lengths.  Indeed, the maximum entropy‒the maximum information‒of any given region of space is that which would be encoded upon an event horizon that would hypothetically enclose such a space.

As for the volume of a black hole within the event horizon…well, that’s harder to quantify.  The apparent radius, as judged from the sphere of the event horizon‒the Schwarzschild radius for a non-rotating black hole‒is almost certainly much smaller than the radius that would be perceived by someone within the horizon, for spacetime is very distorted there.  Indeed, I suspect that, at least by some measures, the volume within a black hole‒or at the very least the radius from the “center” to the horizon‒is infinite, with the “singularity” actually stretching down away forever.

Of course, an asymptotically infinite well of that sort need not always have infinite volume.  There is, for instance, the counter-example of “Gabriel’s Horn”, a shape made by rotating a truncated function (y = 1/x for x ≥ 1) around the x-axis.  This shape has infinite surface area, but it has a finite volume(!).  So you could fill it with paint, but you could never finish painting the inner and outer surface.  Weird, huh?

Of course, the dimensionality of things within a black hole’s event horizon is probably at least one step higher than things in the Gabriel’s Horn comparison, so the finite/infinite comparisons may not translate.

I’d like to be able to do a better job working that out with more than my intuition; that’s one reason why I own no fewer than four fairly serious books on General Relativity.

That’s not the only reason, of course.  I would also like to try to solve what happens to a space ship that accelerates near enough to the speed of light that its relativistic mass and relativistic length contraction puts it below its own Schwarzschild radius (at least in the direction of motion).  Also, how would that figuring be changed if the ship were rotating around the axis of its motion***?

Unfortunately, I rarely have the mental energy to put into pursuing adequate mastery of the mathematics of GR, and so I can (so far) just try to visualize and “simulate” the spacetime effects in my imagination.  That’s fine as a starting place, but even Einstein had to master the mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry and matrices and tensors before he could make General Relativity mathematically rigorous.

It’s almost certainly a pipe dream that I will ever get to that level of expertise.  My chronic pain and chronic depression (dysthymia) combined with the effects of my ASD (level 2****, apparently) and the effort that’s required for me to act “normal” enough to get along just really wear me out mentally.  It’s frustrating.  I have a stack of pertinent texts above my desk at work, where I hope they will entice me.  I even have a copy of my old Thomas and Finney college calculus text there too, so I can do some reviewing in that.

If only I were able to spend some time without pain and to get a good night’s sleep once in a while, I might even make progress.  I suspect that such things are not in the cards, however.

I would love to be dealt The Magician (in Tarot cards) but I fear that I am just The Fool.  Oh, well, that’s all just metaphorical, anyway.  It’s possible to predict the future, of course, but it is difficult, and it’s very unlikely that any set of cards‒however cool they may be‒is the way to do it.

*I remembered correctly.  It is in Louisiana.

**The theorem, being a theorem, is mathematically rigorous, but the question remains whether it describes the way our universe actually works.  That is always a matter of credences rather than “proof” in the mathematical sense.  In the real world, probabilities may come vanishingly close to zero or to one, but they never quite reach them.

***In Special Relativity, when something is traveling around a circle at a significant fraction of the speed of light, length contraction has the effect of “shrinking” the circle from the “point of view” of that which is moving at that speed.

****”Requiring substantial support” according to the official definition.  I do not have such support.

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For they blog between term and term, and then they perceive not how time moves

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so of course I’m writing my “traditional” blog post, with my “traditional” salutation and ending.  I haven’t written the ending yet, but I will, and of course, when you’re reading this, I will have already written those four closing letters—like a vortex manipulator, it’s a kind of cheap and nasty time travel.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, the device formerly known as a laptop computer (to me, at least), because I thought it would be good to write my traditional Thursday post on my traditional type of device.  It’s all very exciting, obviously.

Except of course that it is not exciting.  Nothing is exciting.  There are many worrisome and alarming and infuriating and disgusting things happening in the world and in my pseudo-life, but they are not exciting.

I can’t even feel one of my turns coming on.  Rather, I think I’ve been in “one of my turns” in a low-key way for quite some time now.

I’m very tired.

I wish getting out the lapcom got me fired up to write some new fiction.  I certainly have plenty of story ideas and plots and whatnots in the back of my mind.  But I have no energy to act on them.  By the end of any given workday, I can barely drag myself onto the train to go back to the house, to be honest.

Then, of course, there’s the current washing machine problem.  The machine has finally been delivered, but the old, broken machine is still in place, so the new one hasn’t been installed, and I’m not sure when it will be.  I’m eating into my savings, such as they are, buying new clothes in the meantime.

The need to buy new clothes is particularly irritating, because—quite apart from the expense—I had no desire to buy any, possibly ever again.  New clothes are for people who have a future toward which they look with at least some degree of positive anticipation.  I do not see my own future with any good feelings.

Speaking of the future and not having one and also writing fiction, I thought of an amusing, cautionary tale, a fable of sorts, recently.  Imagine a young man—this sort of story really only works with such a protagonist—who finds a literal genie in a lamp and is given the traditional three wishes.

For his first wish, this young man asks for the ability to stop other people (and things) in time, imagining/planning various nefarious deeds he might undertake while people are “frozen”.  The genie is puzzled and seems troubled, but he grants this first wish.  Soon, the young man finds himself in a situation where he wants to test the power, but when he turns it on a chosen target, as soon as he does, the person just…vanishes.

The young man summons the genie, saying the power didn’t work, panicking a bit about what happened.  The genie explains that the person for whom he stopped time vanished because they simply did not continue past the point in time at which they had been frozen.  So, they did not exist in any future time, and they never would.

The genie had wondered why the young man wanted that power, but he had granted it.  Unfortunately, this deed cannot be readily undone; they cannot bring the person out of the past using the young man’s power as it is.  To change that power and to bring the person back would require the use of the two remaining wishes.

Will the young man choose to do it?  Will he correct his error?  Or will he continue to have the power, now using it as a weapon rather than the for the lascivious means for which he had imagined using it?

I admit, it would be kind of interesting to have such a power.  It’s reminiscent of the ability to send people “away” that the main character had in Stranger in a Strange Land.

What would you do with such an ability?  I would probably use it in morally questionable ways, myself.  But there certainly are people about whom it can safely be said that the world would, overall, be better off if they stopped moving forward through time.

Incidentally, this process would not run afoul of the principle of conservation of energy.  That conservation principle, like all physical conservation principles, is dependent upon the symmetry of the system—this was demonstrated by the genius Emmy Noether in her famous theorem.

The conservation of energy is (or, rather, it would be) a consequence* of the time symmetry of the universe.  But the universe is not symmetric in time, not on large enough scales.  So, on large enough scales, energy (and thus also mass) is not conserved.  Locally it tends to be, because locally, time is symmetrical to a good approximation, rather as the local surface of the Earth is approximately flat on a small enough scale…or rather like the way a small enough portion of any continuous curve can be arbitrarily closely matched by a straight segment on a small enough scale.  This latter fact is the source of the power of calculus.

But just as one can have a local hill or curved shape on the surface of the Earth, one could—in principle—violate local conservation of energy given the right available manipulations.  Now, we in the real world cannot do such a thing, at least not right now, but presumably it would not be beyond the power of a genie.

Okay, well, that’s all pretty stupid, I know, but what do you expect?  It’s me, after all.

I hope you or y’all have as good a day as you possibly can, which you will have, since there is no other possibility.  That doesn’t mean it will be a good day.  It will merely be the best possible day you can have, even if it’s horrible.  Still, I do hope that for you, at least, it will be good.

TTFN

*An interesting term to use, given the current subject.  It has a relation to the order of things in time:  con (with) sequence (ordering of things).

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“The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older.”

Okay, well, here we are.  It’s Wednesday.  I don’t know what else there is to say about the day.  I guess…yeah, I don’t know.  It’s another day.  It’s a stretch of (roughly) 24 hours, the specifics depending on whether you’re using solar time or sidereal time or just the “self-contained” UTC time*.

UTC time is kept on a variety of clocks around the world and is based on the oscillations in the hyperfine transition frequency of the Caesium-133 atom.  That frequency has been defined as 9,192,631,770 Hz.  The international measuring community thing, whatever they call themselves, thereby agreed on defining the second as exactly 9,192,631,770 of those Caesium-133 oscillations.

Of course, oscillations of atoms, like all other processes that take time, slow down with increased spacetime curvature and with increasing speed relative to any given observer.  This is why the GPS satellites have to adjust their own time to account for both special and general relativity.  It’s pretty cool; you’re carrying proof of Einsteinian relativity in your smartphone.

You probably already knew that.

Then, of course, once they’ve decided on the precise value of a second‒knowing that the speed of light (or more precisely the speed of causality) is constant‒they then defined the meter as how far light travels (in a vacuum) in⁠ 1/299,792,458⁠ seconds (approximately 30 2/3 “vibrations” of a Caesium-133 atom).  Mind you, two observers moving relative to each other will see their meters as different each from the other, but c’est de la relativité.

It can be easy to imagine that definitions of units in science (and related fields) are not merely arbitrary but circular, almost tautological.  But really, given that these are attempts to codify specific attributes of reality itself, they would almost have to be self-referential with each other to be useful.

The length of a day is something that happens for real.  Thanks to the base 6 and 12 numbering system of the Babylonians, the day was long ago arbitrarily divided into 24 hours, each 60 minutes long, and each 60 seconds long, so a second was 1/(24 x 60 x 60) days or 1/86,400 of a day.

That worked well for a long time, especially since, before Galileo et al, humans couldn’t really measure time very precisely, anyway.  And then, until railroads allowed rapid travel between cities, it wasn’t necessary to worry too much about having the same time in different places.

But eventually that did become useful and necessary for many purposes, and eventually it was realized that a day wasn’t exactly what we were calling 24 hours, and indeed, that the length of a day varied slightly from day to day and year to year; also, a year isn’t a whole number of days long.  Also also, a day could be measured relative to the sun‒which is close enough that a day doesn’t end quite exactly after one full rotation since the Earth moves relative to the sun over the course of a day‒or with respect to distant stars, by which estimate a day comes closer to being exactly one complete rotation.

For most people most of the time, though, this precision, and that upon which it is based, are probably not merely irrelevant but unknown and unguessed.

Likewise, I don’t know how many people know about how Celsius made his temperature scale 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling of water at sea level pressure (a pretty reasonable choice, though I’m led to understand he initially had 100 assigned as the freezing point and 0 the boiling point!).

Then it was discovered that there existed a minimum possible temperature in principle, and they decided to set that scale, the Kelvin scale (named after William Thompson Scale**) using degrees of the same size as Celsius, but with zero defined as‒understandably enough‒absolute zero.

It’s all fairly interesting, if you’re in the right frame of mind.  But, alas, there’s every reason to suspect that all this information will be rendered moot and useless and perhaps even lost as the world winds down, or if life is replaced by artificial intelligence, or everything ends in some other way, as seems more than possible even in the relatively short term.

In any case, the laws of physics, as we know them, seem clearly to predict that the universe will tend toward ever-greater entropy and eventually all life, all structure will end.  Sometimes, I think it cannot happen soon enough for my taste.

Then again, there are cyclic universe proposals, such as Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.  It bases its model on the fact that entropy, though always tending to increase, is not really an absolute quantity, not a substance, and that our universe’s “maximal” entropy may be the next universe’s low-entropy beginning, just on different scales; it doesn’t even require any “inflationary” burst of expansion to explain the uniformity of the CMB, I think.  I haven’t yet finished Penrose’s book about CCC, because though he is a stunningly brilliant mind, his writing can be a bit plodding and dry.

I guess it’s hard for any person to be good at everything, though Penrose has many strengths.  If memory serves, he invented a set of shapes which can be used to tile an infinite plane (in principle) with no gaps and no repeating patterns.  Supposedly this has been proven to the satisfaction of professional geometers, though I am not familiar with that proof.  Still, if it is a mathematical proof, then it is one of those rare things that we know to be certainly true, given its set of axioms.

It’s not necessarily useful in any practical sense, of course.  For instance, I think it’s probably true that any tiling system that can tile an infinite plane without repeating could not be used to tile a closed, finite, simple geometrically shaped portion of a plane‒such as a rectangular room.  I think you would always have to cut some of the tiles as they reach the wall, no matter how big the room is, as long as it is finite.  I do not know this for certain, that’s just my intuition.

Well, I guess I’ve wasted space and time enough here for now.  It’s no more wasteful than has been my entire existence, I guess, but also no less wasteful.  Or is it?  I don’t know.  In any case, for now I will stop wasting your time.

Please have a good day.

*Yes, it’s probably redundant to say “UTC time”, but the order of the acronym is sort of Yoda-esque‒it did not originate with an English term‒so I feel it’s tolerable to use it this way here.

**That’s a joke.  He was really William Thompson, the first Baron Scale***.

***I mean the 1st Baron Kelvin, of course, all joking aside.  A baron scale sounds like some long forgotten and unused (i.e., barren) bit of laboratory apparatus, left for eons, gathering dust in an abandoned world, like the broken statue of Ozymandius.  It’s very sad.

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“I’m falling down the spiral, destination unknown”

Well, it’s Friday morning, and I’m still fasting.  I’m also, once again, writing this post on my smartphone.  It is so hard not to take the easiest, lowest “action” route at any given time in any given moment, such as when leaving the office to go back to the house.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised by that; it’s what the laws of nature themselves do at every time in every place, following the “path” with the least local action.

That is local though.  Nature doesn’t necessarily come out with the most straightforward long-term pathway for things.  That would require it to see ahead, to be able to act at a distance, in a more literal and broad sense than even just the collapse of the wave-function*.  And so, likewise, for instance (please forgive me for being very loose with my analogies) I leave the mini lapcom at the office even though I will regret having done so the next morning.

And so, also, I will snack on and just eat unhealthy foods in too-great amounts, even though I will regret it later, and despite prior experience.  That prior experience can only change my action when its negative effect applies strongly enough in the moment of temptation.  But alas, it’s difficult to get to that point.

If I were somehow to get sick to my stomach‒or, well, even just nauseated‒every time I ate anything but the healthiest food, I would probably rather quickly stop desiring a lot of foods, because nausea is a very strong internal signal that leads to longer-term aversion in the human nervous system, a fact shaped by evolution to prevent someone from eating poisonous or infectious foods more than once (ideally).

Anyway…

I’m tolerating my fast so far with minimal trouble, which doesn’t surprise me.  Indeed, by the end of work yesterday, I felt very upbeat, at least physically.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was euphoric, but it was a feeling in the same genus, if not the same species.

However, I did not sleep well last night, even for me, which surprised me a bit.  I honestly expected I would probably feel sleepier than usual, just as a matter of energy conservation.  Of course, that would fly in the face of my own reasoning about the extra alertness and motivation engendered by food deprivation, at least up to a point.  So I should not be surprised, and if I am, that’s a sign of my own relative lack of thorough and rigorous thinking about what was happening.

Mind you, it’s only been 36 hours since I last ate something.  That’s not exactly earthshaking.  I’m sure that other states of mind and body would/will arise if I continue to fast.  I do feel a little floaty and disconnected already, but then my mind is weird even at the best of times.

One thing that fasting makes clear to me:  food really is practically the only thing that gives me any reliable dose of joy anymore, however transitory and however low the rebound takes me afterward.  There is nothing else in my life‒nothing of which to speak, anyway.

I don’t do anything for fun, I don’t really have any conversations with anyone (except my sister slightly less often than once a week), I don’t go anywhere for fun or inspiration or interest.  I watch semi-random YouTube videos and putter around on a few other social media just as distractions.  I haven’t even watched any sports or any other shows, not after the first regular season football week, because it rapidly got boring.  I don’t even play any of the video games I have.

I still do read some, but I’m running out of books in which I have any interest‒currently I’m most of the way through If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.  After that, I don’t even know what I would want to read next.

It would be best‒not just for me but for everyone else in the long run‒if I could apply enough willpower to stop eating completely, forever.  Goodness knows that’s what I want to do.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it, though.  I mean, I will try, I am trying, and maybe after the first few days it will become easier.

So far, though, dealing with the dearth of activation in my nucleus accumbens is daunting.  I’m a miserable person even when I can stuff my face with food that I like.  Without food or music or creative writing or any other expression, it’s all very much a long, long road with no inn at the end or even any rest stops along the way.

I don’t know what to do.  Perhaps some epiphany will hit me.  I doubt it.  I suspect there is no deep, secret answer.  There’s only transient, pointless existence then a return to nonexistence; so I suspect, though I do not claim to know for certain.

Whatever.  It’s Friday, and the weekend approaches.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ll still be fasting by Monday for my next blog post.  I would like that.  I would also like it if you all have a very good day and a good weekend.

*That is what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance”, not quantum entanglement. 

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I’m back and (nominally) going forth

It’s Monday again‒the last Monday of September in 2025.  This day, in this month, in this year, will never come again.  Or, well, even if the universe is one big closed time-loop of some kind, it seems quite clear that the scale of it is so huge that it may as well be eternity before this time will come around again.

And then, of course, even if it does come around again, it’s not as though we would be aware of it.  I’ve brought up before the notion of it being like people in movie on a DVD or Blu-ray or what have you; at each moment, the characters are, from their viewpoint, facing an uncertain future with many possibilities, and yet we the viewers know that exactly the same things will happen to them, and they will do exactly the same things each time we watch the movie.

That’s all old hat, I guess (a weird expression, but somehow it works).  But it is interesting to consider occasionally, and then to think about where (if anywhere) quantum indeterminacy fits into such a picture, from the possible “many worlds” Everettian version of quantum mechanics to things like superdeterminism on the other end and so on.

Whatever.  Sorry, I sometimes get a little swept up in such matters, and it probably gets quite boring for my readers.

Anyway, I did not go to work on Friday, and that’s why I didn’t write a blog post.  My apologies.  I felt truly horrible at a sort of pan-corporeal level; it almost felt as if I were experiencing the effects of some kind of poison (though I do not actually suspect such a thing, it’s just a way to convey my experience).  I think something “global” and metabolic was going on, though I guess it might have been some viral syndrome or other.  I’m not feeling completely better, even today.

I also scratched my right eye in my sleep apparently, on Thursday night, and that didn’t help matters.  Thankfully, the conjunctivae heal very quickly, so that’s mostly better now.  It’s still a little irritated, and so it is irritating, but that should just be a matter of time.

As for anything else, well…I have nothing, really.  That applies in more than one sense, now that I think about it.  But in this case, I mean that I have nothing interesting in mind about which to write.  It doesn’t help that I’m doing this on my smartphone, which makes writing slower and also a bit painful.

I really should bring the mini lapcom back to the house with me.  It’s so much easier to write on it‒it really allows me to be in some ways more fluent and fluid even than when speaking (although if you get me started on a subject in which I’m interested, I can talk at a rate that will make most people wish for me to get severe laryngitis).

It’s tough, however, to talk with my six pm self to get him to want to bring the lapcom, when he’s globally fatigued at the end of the workday.  Likewise, he has a hard time making excuses to my morning self, who is still fatigued and who has sore thumb bases.

Nominally, of course, they are “the same” person‒and taking “the person” as the four-dimensional self-reinforcing and self-sustaining pattern that I am, like a complex braid in spacetime, one would say that they are indeed the same person, or at least that they are parts of the same person.  But as an experiential matter, they are subjectively quite different, instantiating different states of body and mind.

Oh, they are obviously far more alike than unalike‒the morning me is closer by far in overall state to the afternoon me than to any state of any other person, let alone any other animal or what have you.  But still, the Buddhist (and similar systems of thought) notion of the lack of any fixed “self” riding around inside the mind like a homunculus is clearly correct.

There is no “center” of consciousness in the brain except for the whole brain itself.  But even that does not exist in a vacuum*.  Its state is influenced by the states of the rest of the body, of the environment, of the information coming into the person’s mind via the senses, and so on.

It’s a fucking complicated system, okay?  It’s the most complicated thing‒at least on this scale‒of which we are aware.  By that, I mean human (and humanoid) minds and brains in general, not mine specifically.  I have a fairly high judgment of my own intelligence, but I’m not as egotistical as all that.

Maybe I should try to be.  Maybe I should cultivate a sense of self-importance and specialness (why is that not “specialty”?) that would keep me feeling nominally good about myself.  But people like that are so boring and annoying and even pitiful.  I don’t know if going that way would be more triumph or surrender.  It would probably be the latter.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*Unless it’s a Boltzmann Brain, which is pretty unlikely.  You can know you’re not a Boltzmann Brain if you continue to exist for more than a few seconds before disintegrating into the global entropy of a nearly empty universe.  Although, of course, your memories of having existed for more than a few seconds may simply be false memories, a real possibility in principle in any Boltzmann Brain.  But contemplating those possibilities reveals that they would make baseless any notion we have of consistent physical laws, including the laws that allow for Boltzmann Brains (if they do, which is questionable), so it gets pointless pretty quickly.

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I’ll have blogs more relative than this

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, if you can believe it.  It feels like it was just seven or eight days ago that it was Thursday last time, and here it is again.  I don’t know how this keeps happening.  Weirdly enough, though, from within, this week has felt as though it’s moving very slowly, and yet, it also feels as though Thursday has come again sooner than I expected.

The mind’s time sense is clearly not entirely objective and consistent.  Then again, why would it be?  Extremely precise long-term time-keeping would not have been a particular evolutionary advantage in the ancestral environment, certainly not one worth the inescapable biological (metabolic) cost of maintaining such a thing.

In any case, now we have incredibly precise time-keeping mechanisms which rely on some fundamental and consistent physical laws.  And though time does pass (so to speak) at different rates depending upon one’s relative velocity and the local curvature of spacetime (i.e., gravity), thanks to Einstein, we know how to adjust our disparate measurements of time with enough precision that we can maintain contact with a bunch of satellites in orbit, and they with each other, and use them to “triangulate” our precise position on the surface of the Earth to within a few meters (there’s generally more than one such triangle, thus the scare quotes—there is probably something more like a tetrahedron).

Of course, we don’t quite know completely just what time is, or at least, we don’t know for sure whether it’s fundamental or emergent from a deeper underlying set of physical laws.  We do know, based on General Relativity alone, that time would be in many ways “an illusion”, because simultaneity is not a consistent thing, and what counts as “now” relative to you depends very much on the direction and speed of your travel compared to other people.

From that point of view, all of spacetime in a sense “already” exists, and our experience of change is an illusion produced by the fact that we are within the block of spacetime.  Like characters and events in a movie on a DVD (or in any other stored medium) the events of the future are already laid out for us, and the end of the movie is as real and as permanent as the beginning, even when we watch the movie for the first time and don’t know what’s going to happen.

I think I talked a bit about this phenomenon in a post on Iterations of Zero called “Playing with spacetime blocks”.  If you want a better introduction to the ideas than anything I could give you, Brian Greene described it really nicely in either The Fabric of the Cosmos or The Hidden Reality.  I’m sorry that I don’t recall for certain which of the two books it is, but they’re both really great and are well worth your time.

Now, as it often does, quantum mechanics puts a bit of an onion in the ointment of fixed 4-D spacetime blocks, and the questions it raises depend—or so it seems to me—on which “interpretation” of quantum mechanics one applies.  In the standard version(s), in which there is such a thing as the collapse of the wavefunction when a quantum interaction occurs that leads to decoherence, there is a fundamental unpredictability to the outcome of such interactions when “measured”.

But if the permanence of spacetime as a whole that appears to be implied by General Relativity is correct, even those seemingly unpredictable events, countless numbers of which happen every second of every day in Dorset alone, are actually fixed and unchangeable.  This implies a mechanism of sorts for “superdeterminism”, or so it seems to me.

Of course, the Everettian “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics—which doesn’t require a deus ex machina wavefunction “collapse” that has to be added “by hand” to the calculations—seems to imply that, if spacetime is fixed in the GR sense then the state of being so fixed includes a fixed set of every outcome of every quantum interaction that would lead to so-called branching of the wavefunction of the universe.  That can be put into the works of GR, and it would give spacetime an added dimensionality of sorts—the dimension in which those “branched” paths exist.

But it would leave in the reality that we ourselves could not say which future “we” would experience, because every possible one actually happens; we just experience one at a time, so to speak*.  It would still be deterministic, just not as a “local” experience for those within spacetime.  Reality would be more like a “choose your own adventure” story than a fixed, scripted movie, but as with those books, all outcomes of any path are still fixed ahead of time.

I think I’ve rehashed a lot of the stuff I discussed in that blog post from IoZ, though I haven’t the will and patience right now to go check.  The specifics of my take on things are probably different this time; certainly, I think I understand all of the pertinent subject matter better than I did when I wrote about it before.  So, hopefully, this has given you at least something new.

Whatever the case, I cannot have done any differently than I have—unless I cannot help but do every possible different thing, but each branch of me, being a branch, only experiences its subset of the universe.  Even if, in a sense, you go both left and right at every metaphorical turn, you still only experience one direction.  It’s just that there is more than one of you, in a sense, experiencing each direction itself but unable to experience the other(s).

It’s really wild and cool stuff, isn’t it?  Science is amazing and awesome and fun.  Thomas Dolby sang that She Blinded Me With Science, but it’s really a way of removing blinders, of wiping the lenses of one’s glasses (and eyes) and focusing more precisely and rigorously on what’s really there, i.e., what’s happening whether anyone believes it or is there to experience it or not.

That’s probably enough for now.  I hope every possible version of you—even if there is only one—has a wonderful day today.

TTFN

*Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is human (or other creatures’) choices that determine the branching points of Everettian many-worlds, as seems to be implied by the movie Sliding Doors among other things.  It is quantum interactions resulting in decoherence that lead to the “splitting” of the wavefunction, and they are rarely the result of human choices, at least outside of places where experimental physics is done.

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Gravid questions of time and gravity (and labor)

It’s Monday, the first of September, which was “originally” the seventh month, but which is now pushed back to the ninth by the two “caesarean” months.  Speaking of such things, it’s also Labor Day in the US (I’m not sure about other countries) a day on which we celebrate labor by giving most people the day off.  This isn’t quite as perverse as it might sound.  After all, what woman would want to work while in labor?

Ha ha.

Anyway, my workplace is open today, though only for half a day.  It has become more and more common for nearly everything to be open even on huge holidays like New Years and so on, let alone “ordinary” federal holidays.  The reasons are fairly straightforward, and they have nothing to do with any kind of formal, deliberate, corporate conspiracy such as is imagined by so many naïve people on social media.

It’s just the same problem‒or situation‒that leads trees to grow tall when it would make much more sense for them all to stay closer to the ground and not waste so many resources on trunks and xylem and phloem, on getting water and nutrients from the ground up to their highest leaves*.  The trouble is, if all the trees were low but then one variant appeared that was slightly higher, it would have a significant advantage over its species-mates (and other species), so it would be more effective at reproduction, ceteris paribus.  Its offspring would come to dominate, unless and until yet other variants occurred that tended to grow even higher.  And thus the “arms race” would begin.

So in the human world:  if everyone else worked four days a week, but one worker was willing/able to work more days or longer days, especially if for the same or only slightly higher pay, then that worker would have a job advantage, (again, ceteris paribus).  And so competition leads at least some workers to strive to outdo each other to the extent they can, and so on, working for local, individual advantage that inexorably leads to less pleasant outcomes for everyone.  It’s just game theory applied to economics.

Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to discuss this morning.  I wanted to discuss two physics-related ideas I’ve had in the last few days.  The later one is just a bit of silly fun, but the other is more interesting to me.

The second one happened this morning (at about 2 am, when I was awake, because of course I was).  I put on a YouTube video of Star Talk in which a string theorist was the guest, and Professor Tyson asked her about the possibility of more than one dimension of time, and she said most such theoretical possibilities fall afoul of paradoxes and trouble with causality.

But it occurred to me, if there were a situation with time travel involving, for instance, the “grandfather paradox”, maybe the fact that preventing one’s grandparents from meeting makes one no longer there to prevent the meeting doesn’t necessarily unravel the universe, but maybe the paths and events correct and change each other in a closed, repetitive loop of time, interfering with each other** until only one, complete resonant spacetime line is there.

It’s analogous to a plucked string*** in which all sorts of vibrations and waves go back and forth between the fixed ends, but most waves/vibrations end up canceling each other out except the ones that fit an even number of times within the confines of the fixed string.  So maybe the actual events of reality could thus only be the ones that are resonant within that spacetime…whatever the hell that might mean.

Anyway, that’s the frivolous question; though it’s a bit fun, it probably doesn’t really have anything to do with our actual world (though it could…remember my thought a bit ago about forces traveling backward and forward in time and interfering until only a fixed number of outcomes resonate****?).

More interesting to me, really, was a question that occurred to me while I was reading Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, a physics book (of course) and a particularly good one.  It was not really discussing the question that popped into my mind, other than that Professor Randall was reviewing the particles in the Standard Model.

We know that fermions cannot pile up one on another (cannot share quantum states), and that bosons can (e.g., in lasers).  We also know that massless force-carrying bosons such as gluons and photons travel at c, the “speed of light”.  The W+ and W- and Z bosons of the weak force do not because they interact with the Higgs field and so have “rest mass”.

Anyway, that’s not really the point.  The point is that gravitons, the hypothetical force-carrying particle of the gravitational field, are also massless bosons, and gravity travels at the speed of light*****.  But something popped into my head that had never occurred to me before and I’m not sure why:  do gravitons come in different frequencies?

We know that light has a limitless number of possible frequencies, across a very wide range, and that higher frequencies/shorter wavelengths are associated with higher energies per photon.  We also know that all matter radiates photons at a spectrum of frequencies that depends on temperature‒the so-called black body radiation.  Well, we also know that all matter “radiates” gravitons, or at the very least it all interacts with the gravitational field.  What if matter gives out gravitons in a spectrum that depends on total mass?

What would it mean for a graviton to have higher frequency or lower frequency?  Would that entail a stronger (and weaker) gravity?  Or would it correspond to something else entirely?

Of course, I know that gravitational waves are of varying frequencies depending upon the source‒that frequency and intensity (amplitude) increase as, for instance, two mutually orbiting black holes get closer and closer, orbiting faster and faster, before they coalesce.  Is that analogous to them producing large numbers of gravitons of those increasing frequencies?  Or are gravitational waves different types of things than “ordinary” gravitons?  Is ordinary gravity propagated by “virtual gravitons” much as the electromagnetic force is carried by “virtual photons”, which are really just mathematical shorthand for perturbations in the quantum field of electromagnetism?

I suspect that, because we don’t really have anything like a good quantum theory of gravity, there would be few clear answers to my questions about gravitons, but there may be constraints based on what we already know that would make my questions answerable or moot.

I mean, I know that “we” know that gravitons would be spin-2 particles, meaning that to rotate them 180 degrees would leave them unchanged******.  I don’t know how this or other aspects of gravitons would affect possible frequencies, though.  Also, can gravitons be polarized in a manner analogous to light?  I’m not sure whether my graviton questions are sensible or pertinent or utterly off the mark.  If anyone out there is a physicist specializing in such things, please, if you can spare a moment, let me know?

This post has gone on for a long time, I know.  I could meander around much longer on these subjects, probably for pages and pages and pages, but that would be a bit much for a daily blog post, if it isn’t already.  Maybe because it’s a holiday, at least some of you will have the time and interest in reading such thoughts, but I don’t want to push my luck.

However, I welcome any comments on the above subjects if you have an interest, and especially if you have relevant expertise (though I welcome all interested thoughts).

In any case, please try to have a good day.

*A fascinating physical process that’s only possible because continuous liquids can actually have negative pressures.

**Not in any inappropriate way, just that they interact and waves can cancel out.

***Not a “superstring” or heterotic string or what have you, just for instance a guitar string or a cello string.

****This is not unlike Feynman’s path integral/sum over histories notion, really.

*****We know this is so because there was a neutron star merger detected by LIGO and VIRGO that was quickly looked at using “light” telescopes as well, and the timing matched up (As a silly aside, since gravitons are bosons and could thus in principle share quantum states, one might, in principle, be able to create a coherent beam of them…a GRASER or GASER if you will).

******Spin-1 particles basically return to their identical state if you rotate them 360 degrees.  And for spin ½ particles, you need to rotate them 720 degrees (!) for them to return to their prior configuration.  Once you’ve rotated them 360 degrees they’re kind of the opposite of their prior configuration.  If that’s hard to think about, just imagine traversing a Mobius strip laid out in a “circle”:  once you’ve gone 360 degrees, you’re on the opposite “side” of the strip than that on which you began, and you have to go another 360 degrees (so to speak) to get back where you started.  Neat, huh?

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Doff thy name; and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all my blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m going to try to be more upbeat today in my writing.  So, given my track record, I’ll simply now say…

TTFN

Ha ha, just kidding.  I would never let you off that easily.  I don’t, though, really know what I’m going to write today.  Of course, I never really know ahead of time, as you know (ahead of time) if you’ve read this blog for long.  But now we’re doubly ignorant*, because I have to choose from a much narrower realm of things about which to speak:  the Positive (or at least the Non-negative).

I suppose we could talk about electric charge‒that can be positive, if you’ll pardon the pun (and even if you won’t).  But of course, charge, and specifically positive charge, has interesting historical contingencies.  Because, of course, positive and negative are merely chosen terms; there’s nothing inherently “negative” about the charge of an electron, nor is there anything inherently “positive” about a proton.

As I understand it, Benjamin Franklin was the one who named the two charges and who began the convention that current moves from positive to negative along, for instance, a wire supplied by a voltaic pile (or “battery”, another term Franklin coined, according to what I have read and heard).

Of course, it was quite a long time before people discovered that‒oops!‒the moving particle carrying the charge in a flowing current is the electron, the “negatively” charged particle.  So, based on the already widespread convention, current, as described by physicists and engineers (and electricians I presume), flows in the opposite direction from the actual charge carrier that’s moving.

It’s a bit like relating stars’ intensity by describing how dark they aren’t.  And it turns out, given that the magnitude scale for stars indicates brighter stars by smaller/more negative logarithmic numbers, that’s actually‒in a sense‒how it’s done.  This is also due to historical contingencies.

These sorts of things happen a fair amount.  Remember when VHS beat out Betamax because it was basically first to the market, even though pretty much all reputable experts agreed that Beta was the better, more reliable, clearer, lighter-weight format?  Once people get used to something, they often don’t want something new, even if it’s better.  I get it, of course‒unnecessary change stresses me out severely‒but it’s definitely unfortunate.

It occurs to me now that the “demotion” (really just the redesignation) of Pluto from planet to “dwarf planet” was a rare exception to this, when humans, recognizing that the terminology they had been using was not ideal, changed it.  Of course, this was the work of an international astronomical society, a group of scientists, so certainly it wasn’t a typical situation or decision.

It also was basically a matter of necessity**.  Several other Kuiper Belt objects similar to Pluto had been discovered, some more massive than Pluto, and all with very elongated, non-circularish orbits (like Pluto’s), so either there were going to be a slew of highly irregular planets with highly eccentric orbits, outnumbering the “older” and more orderly planets, or we were going to have to call these things something else.

It’s useful to remember that the names and categories that we put on things are just our names and categories.  They are not arbitrary, at least not if they are useful; but they are our designations, like the little bits of code that let operating systems know where to find programs and files on a computer’s disk memory.  They let us talk to each other about things and address them with consistency and rigor, so that we can better understand them.

But Pluto doesn’t care whether we call it the ninth planet or a dwarf planet or a cartoon dog.  It doesn’t care if we call it Pluto or Hades or Osiris or Hel or Mandos.  It doesn’t have any idea what we call it or how we “define” it.  It doesn’t have any ideas at all, as far as anyone can tell.  It’s not the sort of thing that has ideas or cares about things.  To quote Mister Spock (who was not speaking about Pluto) “It is, essentially, a great rock in space”***.

For nearly 4.5 billion years, Pluto‒like Jupiter’s moons, like Ceres, like the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud and so on‒was just there, and no one knew it was there, no one had seen it, no one was aware of it (as far as we know, anyway).  Intelligent awareness does not cause things in the universe to be; rather, things in the universe being and doing what they do sometimes, rarely, cause intelligent awareness, at least in one tiny place in the cosmos.

BTW, you are in that place and you are one of those intelligent awarenesses, in case you didn’t know that.  But I suspect you already did know that.

It’s quite the rarefied club to which to belong.  Even if there are countless intelligent species in the universe (however one might reasonably define intelligence) they must nevertheless be a tiny, petite, and wee part of all the stuff in the universe, at least for now.  In principle, that could change eventually, and intelligence could come to dominate the universe, but that’s probably a long way off, if it’s going to happen at all.

It can be hard to be optimistic about that possibility sometimes, given the state of humanity, which always seems abysmally stupid.  But remember, the smarter ones among humans have an advantage, the greatest advantage we have seen in our world:  they are smart.

And with that, for real this time:

TTFN

*I know, if there are fewer things from which to choose, one is in principle less ignorant, since there are fewer unknowns, the entropy is smaller, etc.  However, sampling from these spaces is not random; the negative concept-space is more well known and thus less random (and more likely to be chosen) than the positive space, about which I know but little.

**Not to be confused with the question of the necessity of matter.  That’s a whole sort of “metacosmological” notion.

***I know, I know, Pluto is largely made of water ice.  Trust me (or not), at the temperatures of Pluto, water is a rock.  And at the temperatures and pressures of Titan, methane is the stuff of lakes and streams (i.e., it is a liquid).  And at the temperature of the interior of the sun, tungsten is a plasma…or so I suspect.

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Is it a sine of the (space)times that we are where we are in the week?

TBIF* or TDIF**, either way, it’s Friday.  It’s the last day of the work week.  I started writing “It’s the end of the work week” (emphasis added), but I realized that, since it is early in the morning, and I am just on my way to work, this time could not accurately be called the end of the work week.  One could, in fact, say that 20% of the work week yet remains; that can hardly be called an end, any more than a B minus can be considered a perfect score (unless one radically changes the grading system one is using).

Such are the random things that spring forth from my brain via my fingers when I am writing my blog posts in the mornings (in this case on my laptop computer, which is literally on my lap***).  I’m sure you’re well aware of that, if you’ve read this blog for any length of time.  I don’t really know ahead of time what I’m going to write, unless I have a specific subject to address.  Even then I often address subjects in ways that surprise me.  This is because when I write I am really “thinking out loud”, although in this case, “out loud” is figurative.

Do my thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box?  Well, they’re probably more like a restless discarded Cheetos® wrapper in the wind of a nearby tornado; one should almost certainly use a junk food metaphor when describing the way my thoughts spontaneously arise.  Not that I think my thoughts are “junk”, no more so than anyone else’s are.  I just think it’s rather appropriate to consider many of them as having a bit of a temporary amusing effect, but without any real nutritional substance.  Junk food has its place****, after all.

I don’t know what else to write today, but I’ve only written about 450 words so far, including the first four footnotes below.  I would say that I don’t want to shortchange you, the reader, but you’re not actually paying for this in any sense other than spending your time.  And since time cannot be used as legal tender—when you “spend” it, I don’t receive any from you—I guess I shouldn’t consider it to be shortchanging you.

In any case, whether you spend your time reading my blog or doing something else, your time passes all the same.  You could slow it down relative the those around you by accelerating to relativistic speeds, but you would still require the same amount of your “proper time” to read a blog post.  And to those watching you pass at some substantial fraction of the speed of light, it would seem to take you longer than it would take us.

Remember, from a particular, mathematically precise, point of view, you’re always moving at the speed of light—it’s just that most of your motion is through time.  This is part of why you cannot ever reach the speed of light through space:  As you tilt your motion vector toward faster motion through space, less of your motion is through time, until it would stop for you completely.

It’s a bit analogous to moving (say, driving or flying) in particular compass directions.  Imagine your default motion is all northwards, so there is no east or west component to your momentum, but that your momentum vector is always the same length, i.e., you speed in your direction of travel is constant.  If you start to veer eastward a bit, going at that same fixed speed now in a north-northeast direction (for instance) the component of your motion that is northward is smaller than it was*****.

As you veer more through northeast toward east-northeast and beyond, staying at your same speed but in your new direction, the component of your motion that is northward becomes smaller and smaller.  Finally, of course, if you go due east, there is no longer any component of your motion in the northerly direction.

This is close to being the same thing that would happen if you could somehow achieve the speed of light through space, except that the geometry of spacetime is (if memory serves) hyperbolic.  This means “relating to or described by hyperbolas”, it doesn’t mean that the geometry of spacetime exaggerates things all the time.

In any case, though, an object or person traveling at the speed of light (through space, so to speak) would cease to experience any “proper time”.

And with that, I think we’ve come to the proper time to bring this week of blog posts to a close, even if the work week still has a fifth of its time remaining.  I hope you all have a good day (whatever day on which you may read this) and then a good weekend (whenever the next one is for you) and a good week and so on and so on and so on.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday.

**Thank Doom it’s Friday (I suppose one could use TDDIF, Thank Doctor Doom it’s Friday, but that would eliminate the parallel with the more traditional version of the acronym).

***Does the term “laptop computer” imply that there could be a “lapbottom computer”?  What would the bottom of a lap look like?  Would it just be the “bottom”, in which case it really has nothing to do with the lap, since your lap disappears when you stand up, but your ass doesn’t?  If there is no lapbottom (i.e., if laps are instead bottomless) then why use the term laptop?  Why not just call it a “lap computer”?  If people wanted a foreshortened version of that, they could just call it their lapcom.

****That place is 7-11™.

*****By how much?  Why, one only need apply the Pythagorean Theorem to the components of your momentum vector.  It’s dead simple.  If you prefer, you can use trigonometric functions, such as the cosine of the angle of your motion relative to full north, but mathematically there is no difference.

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Oblivion is cold comfort, but it’s all the comfort I have to offer

Well, it’s Monday.  Meet the new week‒same as the old week.  There is nothing new or interesting happening, as far as I can see.  Nothing is new in my personal interactions with the world, and nothing is new in the world at large.  There may seem to be new things, and there are probably some details that are unique.  But then again, every snowflake is supposedly unique, but they’re all just flakes of snow, airborne ice crystals, and the overall behavior is nothing different despite all the trivially new specific flakes.  The phenomenon of snowfall is still just overall the same.

“So in the world,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar said.  “‘Tis furnished well with men.  And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.”  He goes on the claim that he is unique in the next sentence, but immediately thereafter, Brutus, Cassius, et al, demonstrate that he too is merely flesh and blood like all the rest.

All the heroes, all the villains, all the ordinary people‒they are all functionally identical, despite all their trivial differences.  What percentage of the people who have ever lived are remembered at all?  A smattering, a handful, if that‒not even a rounding error compared to the total of all people who have lived.  And many of those we do remember are probably highly fictionalized and may not have actually existed at all.

What are the odds that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were real people?  How about Achilles and Hector?  For crying out loud, we know that even Richard III, presented as Shakespeare’s most thoroughgoing villain (perhaps matched by Iago) and deformed as well, was pretty much nothing of either sort in real life (or that’s what the historical evidence suggests).  He was simply defeated and then vilified by those who had defeated him, presumably to help justify their own actions.

And, by the way, who remembers them?

This sort of fact is part of why I sometimes refer to people (and other lifeforms) as virtual particles.  They pop into existence, persist for an infinitesimal period of time, and then literally vanish again, without a proverbial trace.

Well, actually, as with all virtual particles (which are not actually a thing but are merely mathematical and pedagogical tools) the collective effects of us virtual particles‒aka living things‒can have impacts on the world as a whole.  It’s even conceivable that, in just the right circumstances, as with the “real” virtual particles*, a virtual personicle can become actual.  I’m not sure what that would mean in the real world, though, and I’m not convinced that it has ever yet happened.

All this is part of why I have no patience for people who become fanatical about their particular ideologies and such.  They’re all just equivalent to some fanciful imaginary imaginings by a group of photons or neutrinos or what have you.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to approach their current affairs and ideas as “important” in their local** transient bailiwick, for some things to be important to them.  But it would be silly in a pronounced (but unfortunately not funny) sense for anyone to imagine that they had access to some final, consequential knowledge about the nature of the world and particularly about how people should behave.  If someone had such knowledge, I suspect it would be obvious to any intellectually honest person, including intelligent but disinterested aliens.

Humans and their dogmas are transient and transitory and ephemeral (and other synonyms as well) as are all other specific forms of life and ways of life.  Life overall is transient; as far as we can tell, it cannot even in principle go on forever.  That’s not just referring to individual lives, but to life as a phenomenon.  We could be wrong about this; there is much we don’t know, and in principle, our descendants could discover ways around the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  But that’s quite a big “if”, as it were.

Sorry to be such a downer; it’s just my nature, apparently.  Look not for comfort from me, as the ghost of Marley said.  It comes from other regions and is delivered by other ministers to other sorts of people.  Though, in this case, I’m not sure about what sorts of ministers and people would be involved, let alone what “regions” might produce such comfort.

In any case, I have no comfort, so I can offer none to anyone else; I cannot give what I do not have and what I do not even hope to have.  The best I can offer is to say that, well, oblivion seems to be the only viable alternative to discomfort offered by this universe.  It’s not much to offer, I admit, but it’s the best I have.  And, as pointed out above, as far as we can tell, it’s waiting for us all, eventually.

I won’t say that I look forward to it, because that really doesn’t make much sense.  But I am tired of trying to continue despite having almost no good reason to do so.

I hope you, the average reader, feel better than I do.  Batman help you if you feel worse.

*There’s an oxymoron.

**That “local” can, in principle, include the entire planet.  The point is merely that it is quite finite and limited.