Physics

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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.

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Only the truly continuous is infinitely divisible

Well, it’s Friday, the last day of another work week—the first full week of August (or Sexember, if you prefer) in 2025.  And here I am writing things that, so far, are not only trivial but banal.  Perhaps, as I go along, I will write something more interesting and surprising, but so far, I’m not impressed with myself.  I guess these things happen.

I did not end up riding my new bike back to the house last night, because there were thunderstorms in the area, particularly down by where I live.  I’m not too intimidated by riding a bike in the rain, but it’s a new bike, and its configuration is different than the type to which I am used, and it is slightly wobblier than my normal, so I felt it wasn’t a great idea to ride it five miles in the rain.  It turned out the rain was almost over by the time I got to my train stop, but it was nevertheless still quite wet and puddly, and I probably was wise-ish to avoid riding in it.

Still, it’s slightly frustrating.  Hopefully, today it won’t be an issue, because it would be a shame to miss the whole weekend with it by the house.  There are supposed to be thunderstorms today again, but they are expected earlier in the day than yesterday, and the weather is predicted to clear by early evening.  That should be fine, at least.

Of course, weather prediction is never perfectly precise—Chaos Theory being applicable and all that—but forecasts done for only twelve hours or so in the future are likely to be much more accurate than those for a day or a few days or a week ahead of time.  After about five days, trying to get too specific a forecast is a bit of a waste of effort, and it may always be.  One cannot, with finite computing power, calculate things to infinite precision, and without infinite precision, in the long term, Chaos makes one’s predictions ever more inaccurate.

Of course, that raises (not “begs”!) the question of whether reality is actually defined in any meaningful sense down to the level where limitless precision would apply.  In other words, are Real Numbers actually a thing that exists in reality?  That may seem a strange question, given that they are called “Real Numbers”, but that’s just a name, given by humans as a file heading if you will, a way to index the subject.  It doesn’t actually signify the reality of the real numbers, any more than those who call themselves “Conservative” in the current US are in any legitimate sense conservative by most agreed upon uses of that word.

Of course, all non-complex numbers are Real numbers, and all Real numbers can be considered complex numbers (just with a zero i component if they are only Real).  The counting numbers are still Real numbers, as are all the integers and fractions, and of course, all our best known “irrational”* numbers, like π and e.  But the vast majority of Real numbers cannot be specified by any reductive formula or algorithm, but have do be described digit by digit, forever—maximum information-type entropy.

So, to describe fully a “typical” specific Real number usually requires infinite information, with infinite precision.  But there’s a real (haha) question whether any portion of reality is defined so precisely, or whether that could even have any meaning.  As far as we currently know, the smallest distance that has physical meaning is the Planck Length (about 1.6×10−35 m), and the shortest time that makes physical sense is the Planck Time (about 5.4×10−44 s), and so on.  These are very tiny numbers, but they are finite, not infinitesimal, and are certainly not infinitely non-repeating decimals.

But does the Planck Length (and Time) apply to actual, bottom-level reality, or is that merely a limit within the constraints of our current understanding?  We don’t know, for instance, how such things apply to gravity when it becomes strong enough for such scales to apply.

It’s mind-boggling, or at least wildly stimulating of probably inexpressible thought, that reality may be only finitely defined at every given point in space (which “points” themselves would only be finitely packed, so to speak, such that below a certain scale, the distance between two points would have no meaning) or that it may in fact be infinitely defined, down to the fully expressed Real Number level, and that indeed it may be infinitely divisible in the same sense Real Numbers are—and thus there would be, between any two points in spacetime, as many points as there are in ALL of spacetime.

Either possibility is wildly cool and difficult to represent internally—indeed, impossible to represent perfectly internally, but difficult even to contemplate roughly at any very deep level.  Is it any wonder that people like Cantor and Gödel were mentally ill, given the kinds of things they contemplated and explored?  I’m not saying those things were the reason for their illness; that would be a cheesy sort of magical thinking, redolent of an H. P. Lovecraft story.  But the contemplation of infinities and complexity and chaos is both sobering and intoxicating at the same time.

What do you know, I drifted into less banal areas after all.  I guess that’s a decent way to end the work week of blog posts.  I hope you all have an interesting and good weekend, without too many utterly unpredictable events (unless they’re good ones for you).

*Just to remind you, this does not refer to numbers that are in some sense crazy, just that they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers, no matter how large the integers.  That’s the original meaning of the word irrational, but the very fact that there existed such numbers seemed so horrifying to the old Pythagoreans—or so I’ve heard—that it almost immediately acquired it’s secondary, now more common, usage.

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You flocks, you shoals, you fine emergent things

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m feeling a bit beat up and wrung out from yesterday, which was an extremely bad day, pain wise.  I really felt quite stiff and sore all day, and I couldn’t help walking with a limp.  It’s quite frustrating.  I do have potential assistance of a kind coming today, and hopefully that might make a difference.  We shall see.  I’ll tell you more when I have more information.

As for anything else, well, there’s really nothing else going on in my life.  I still haven’t done any work on new song lyrics, nor have I played the guitar or keyboard at all, nor sang.  I don’t even know what kind of shape my voice might be in at this point, but it’s probably pretty rough.

I think maybe I should drink more coffee during the day.  I used to drink it regularly when I was up north, but I’ve fallen off a lot since coming to Florida.  A big part of that is just that coffee is a hot drink, and hot drinks in Florida can be quite unpleasant.

But also, if I can reevaluate my own internal workings and decision-making memory‒which I can‒I tried to cut back on caffeine because I feared it was a major contributor to my tension and hostility and anxiety.  Well, you’ve read my blogs before (unless this is your first time), so it should be fairly clear that that particular intervention was not fit for purpose.  And one thing coffee has always done for me has been to be something to put in my mouth and stomach other than food.  That’s certainly worth a lot in my case.

Anyway, in the new office we have two refrigerators‒the boss brought in one from his garage that was not being used much‒and though neither has an ice maker, ice trays are easy.  So I can make iced coffee to take the sting off coffee’s hot nature.  I can’t directly take the sting off Florida’s hot and muggy nature, of course, but it’s bearable most of the time.

And in the long run, who knows how Florida’s specific climate will alter as the world’s overall surface temperature increases?  One might assume it will just get hotter and more humid*, but it’s best not to jump to conclusions.  Weather patterns are the archetypal chaotic system, and though climate and weather are not synonyms, there is a relation.

Many things interact to maintain specific local climates.  For instance, the Gulf Stream keeps the British Isles much warmer than they would be otherwise, being so far north, but it is not a fixed pattern in the Atlantic, but a product of confluences of various forces and feedback loops (as well as probably feed-sideways paths).  It has not existed forever.  It just feels like it has because human lives are so short, and human minds tend to be woefully parochial and provincial.  This is a source of so many human problems, not least the failure to learn obvious lessons from history.

But I guess there’s not much point in moaning about that lamentable fact right now.  I try to do my little part by writing about what I think are occasionally interesting and thought-provoking ideas, and by trying to learn about all sorts of things myself, from history and philosophy to biology and physics and mathematics‒and, of course, I’m technically an expert on medicine.  It’s as if I hope that by increasing my own knowledge about as many things as I can, I’ll be able to bring up the average and perhaps have some magical diffusion effect.

I don’t actually think that, of course, nor is that really my motivation for learning about various things and stuff.  I just like to understand and know things, to the degree possible, and I enjoy the process of learning them.  Physics is the most interesting subject to me in many ways because it is the study of the workings out of physical reality.  Everything else that happens is “simply” chaotic, emergent murmurations that happen on the surface of the underlying processes.

There is a question whether mathematics is even more fundamental than physics or is rather an invention of humans to describe and work with the patterns that are happening that are not guided by mathematics, perhaps, but simply produce it as an epiphenomenon.

I think Stephen Wolfram proposed something along those lines, based on “cellular automata”**, but though I have his book A New Kind of Science, I have not read it, because I have the Kindle edition.  It’s not really formatted for Kindle, so it’s basically just a PDF of the original book, and that can make it very difficult to read on one’s smartphone.

Such thoughts are quite entertaining and they can sometimes be productive.  I often wish more people were interested in them rather than, for instance, what some particular celebrity did to some other celebrity, or whether some particular advertisement can, with tortured logic, be “judged” to be inherently offensive and even evil, or just how horrifically to punish someone who agrees with only 99% of the things you believe, but disagrees on 1%.

Okay, I need to avoid getting started on that train of thought.  So, I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, by tomorrow I will have some relatively better news than I’ve had recently.  If so, I will probably share it with you.  In the meantime, try your best to have a good day.

*Particularly if sea level rises enough for a lot of the state to become submarine‒now that would be high humidity.

**The most well-known case probably being John Conway’s Game of Life, which is a “game” on a 2-dimensional grid of squares, with particular, simple rules about what happens to any given square depending on whether its neighbors are empty or not.  Remarkable, self-sustaining, and even traveling patterns form from these basic notions, similar to the way the flocking*** behavior of birds can be described with a few basic rules followed by each bird individually, requiring no communications other than just seeing where one’s nearest neighborings are.

***That sound like an epithet, does it not?

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“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the hill; those wounds run…pretty deep.”

It’s the penultimate day of July in 2025, and I can’t honestly say I’ll be sad to see the month go‒nor the year, nor the life, for that matter.

The word “penultimate” does make me wonder if any stationery company ever marketed a writing implement as the “Pen Ultimate”.  If so, I’ve not heard of it.  I guess it’s not a terrific marketing idea, just a mildly amusing play on words.

Anyway, it’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day‒because presumably once one passes the midpoint of the week, one finds it easier to coast through the rest of the week, as if one had reached the top of some hill (or hump) and was now loping, or perhaps sledding or skiing or snowboarding, down the other side.

Of course, that metaphor presumes there’s something akin to gravity applicable here, which is the force that makes it hard to go up a hill and easier to go down it.  But there is no such force applicable to time (though time is affected by gravity).

As far as I can see, no matter what you do, the days of the week proceed at the same monotonous rate, whether one puts any effort into it or not.  Time passes at the same rate (ignoring tiiiiiiiny adjustments for relative speeds and altitudes) for the most active athlete or business tycoon or person in the grip of mania as it does for someone idle or even someone in a coma.  And even if one can slow down one’s time relative to others‒for instance by going some substantial portion of the speed of light relative to them or by going into an area of strong gravity‒one’s own “proper time”, the time one experiences, will still be the same*.

One might effectively travel into the future of the people one left behind on one’s high-speed voyage, but one will also skip and miss all those years that one is “away”, and there’s no way to get that time back.  The nature of causality appears to preclude it.

So, yeah, the concept of hump day is purely psychological, and like so much of human psychology, it is stupid.  I wish I could say that my impression of such things has become less negative as my own proper time has passed, but alas, the young provide no more basis for hope with their presumed energy and creativity than the older ones do with their presumed greater experience and knowledge.

Almost all humans are really quite pathetic and come despair-inducingly far from achieving anything like their potential in wisdom or intelligence or creativity.  They mostly just bounce around like air molecules in a closed chamber, achieving maximal local entropy.

And don’t delude yourself that any other creatures on the planet are any “better” than humans.  Even the relatively smart ones like chimpanzees and porpoises and cephalopods and corvids tend to be often vicious, selfish, and violent.  That’s not all they are, of course, but it’s plenty.  They’re certainly not pure or innocent or fundamentally beneficent creatures.

Neither are dogs or cats or other mammals, or reptiles of any kind, nor fishes, nor birds, nor arthropods, nor annelids, nor protozoa, and so on.  Nothing in the world is inherently beneficent.  Even plants fight and harm and kill each other; trees waste their resources by growing taller to outcompete each other for sunlight, when if they all stayed shorter, at some uniform height, they would all be better off.

And fungi eat everyone, using other life forms for their resources and sometimes for locomotion, and they wage constant war with bacteria and so on.

There’s no good reason to expect any form of alien intelligence to be any better, nor AI either.  No matter how much smarter one being is than another, the most powerful defining factor of each is its limits.  Every finite thing is equally far from infinity.

Unfortunately, beneficence overall is not really an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Even if all beings in a given ecosystem were mutually benevolent, all it would take would be for one mutant to instantiate a degree of selfishness and ruthlessness and it would have a tremendous advantage over its kindly brethren, and its genes would spread and become more and more prevalent.

Of course, universal malevolence and selfishness are not stable, either.  That’s a recipe for overall destruction, as much as anything else is.  Prey are necessary for a predator to survive.  As Porter said in Payback about nice guys:  You’ve gotta have somebody to take advantage of.  The food web has to have a base somewhere.

It seems to me that there will never be any system that doesn’t have some such mixture of predators and prey‒even metaphorically within species and societies.  Of course, it makes sense to prevent and mitigate the depredations of the assholes and, if possible, to discourage them from existing at all.  That’s better for everyone.  But as with the trees**, it doesn’t happen on its own, and it is not self-sustaining.  The price of such freedom really is constant vigilance, and unerring vigilance of that kind is probably impossible in principle.

I’m not really trying to come to some point here.  Mostly I’m just expressing my frustration and despair and cynicism/nihilism.  There is not only horror in the world, but horror is always there and almost certainly always will be, at least until the ultimate (but at least peaceful) horror of universal heat death (or whatever) brings about the elimination of all experience of any kind in the universe.

The only enduring peace and freedom may be simple nonexistence.  But then there’s that damn Poincaré Recurrence!

Ah, well.  Have a day.  You can call it a hump day if it amuses you.  I don’t know why I care.

*And, of course, if one is traveling at a substantial portion of the speed of light, if one doesn’t have adequate shielding, one’s lifespan is liable to be shortened significantly due to exposure to induced cosmic rays:  When you travel at a very high speed through the elementary particles of open space, the elementary particles of open space travel at a very high speed through you.

**Think about it:  those beautiful California redwood trees are possibly the greatest, most glacially persistent testament to the “dog eat dog” nature of the non-human world; a centuries-long spectacle of cutthroat one-upsmanship, each tree fighting maniacally to outcompete the others for sunlight.  They are beautiful, of course, but so is a raging fire.

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Chords in music and in time

It’s Monday again, the start of another work week‒that is, if your work week begins on Monday.  In the modern world‒and indeed, perhaps always‒there are many people whose work weeks start on days other than Monday.  I suspect, though, that the majority of people still work their week starting on Monday, at least in the West, though it may not be a large majority.  If anyone out there has easy access to any rigorous statistics on the matter, I would be interested to learn.  On the other hand, I’m not going to seek the information on my own, so it’s not a tragedy if no readers have it.  I like trivia, but this is definitely quite trivial, at least from my point of view.

I hope you all had a good weekend.  My own was not very interesting, and I felt tired, but then again, I did have a cold starting in the middle of last week, so I guess I was still recovering.  I feel as though that particular infirmity is reasonably well on its way.

I worked a little on the chords of last week’s song, Native Alien, though not very much.  At least at the house I have my keyboard, so I can play melody and chords at once to confirm which chords sound best to me.  Interestingly, it seems that the chord to start the song (at least the melody) will be a C major chord, which is the V chord of the key of F major (though if the song could be considered to be in D minor, it would be the VII chord).  This is not unusual, of course, nor particularly noteworthy.  It’s just interesting for me to recognize specific facts to which I didn’t pay attention when I wrote earlier songs, because I’ve thought more about music theory since then, probably because of the guitar.  It’s a curiosity for me.

Speaking of songs, today I plan to do another round of flipping coins to pick a basic topic, or subject, or trigger‒whatever might be the better term‒for another song (lyrics) for this week.  Of course, last week’s word, Earth, didn’t really become the subject of the song, just a takeoff point, but that’s fine.  The idea was just to give me some way to give myself a start.

In other news, I had a weird thought last night after watching one of Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest videos.  I wrote an email to myself about the thought so I wouldn’t forget it, and I’ll include that text here, so you‒yes, you‒can see what you think (I have edited this text for clarity and to correct typos):

“If the overall arrow of time is caused by the tendency toward increase in entropy from a lower to a higher entropy state (“Big Bang” to heat death, at the cosmic level), that could behave analogously to a current (like in the ocean, not a wire).  Meanwhile, locally*, we know that the laws of physics don’t appear to have any directionality time-wise.  So perhaps locally, matter and wave interferences in the sense of quantum wavefunctions can happen not just in space but in time itself and the future can feedback on the past, just not in such a large way that it would overwhelm the overall tendency (though maybe even that is not impossible).  The effect of such a temporally retrograde wave wouldn’t flow backwards so fast that it would override the current itself (probably).  However, that wave could still affect its predecessor, creating standing interference patterns in time and things along those lines that might be the source of so-called super determinism.  Think about this a little bit.”

That last injunction was intended for me, but if any of you want to think about it, you’re welcome to do so (it’s not as though I could stop you even if I wished to stop you, which I don’t).  Of course, if I’m going to really explore this notion, I’m going to need to bone up on my mathematical physics in a serious way, and it’s always hard to find the time.  That’s always been a bit of a weakness of mine:  I get very interested in something and develop skills in it because of my interest, then something else catches my attention, and soon all my energy goes there.  I don’t tend to forget the things I learned previously, at least, and sometimes when I return to them, I even find that I’m better than I was before (e.g., after not playing guitar for quite a while, when I picked it up again, certain songs or chords with which I had trouble before had become much easier).

Also, of course, the fact that I have to work for a living is another distraction.  I really do need some ultra-wealthy patron out there to provide me with living and intellectual resources so that I can devote my time to my wonderful pursuits without having to earn my living.  I also want world peace, world freedom…and a unicorn.

I guess in the meantime I should probably go back to using Brilliant dot org to spruce myself up in terms of mathematics and physics (and computer science in the meantime, why not?).  I have an annual subscription (supporting Sabine Hossenfelder, whom I mentioned earlier), so I might as well use it.  It’s a better use for my spare time than diddling around on social media.

Okay, well, I hope you all have a very good day, and that it is the beginning of a very good week for you.

*I’m using the colloquial meaning of “locally” her not the strict physics definition of locality.

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“Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.  Thursday night, your stockings needed mending*.”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I’m feeling a bit better than I have so far this week.  Perhaps I really did have a virus of some type that my body has been fighting.  If so, it triggered/worsened symptoms of already existing pathologies in my body—in my back and hips and shoulders and other joints, and so on—in addition to making me feel achy and feverish, though without the actual fever.

I can’t really blame my psychopathology on a virus, unless it’s some form of mental virus**, or more likely some lifelong accumulation thereof.  Such “viruses” are rarely acute and self-limited, though they could be, I suppose.  What, after all, is a momentary fad or brief obsession, perhaps with a song, or the spread of a particularly funny new joke, that goes away before long?

I don’t really think my mental issues are primarily caused by acute memetic infection, if you will.  They started a long time ago.  In any case, my brain is apparently of an atypical type, at least based on my autism diagnosis, and that creates a substrate on which supervening inputs can become prone to cause certain forms of pathology.  Depression and anxiety are two of those things that are very common in those with ASD—significantly more so than in the general population***.  The statistics on autism indicate that suicidal ideation and attempted and successful**** suicide are much more common in people with ASD than in so-called neurotypicals.

I often think of depression—at least in some of its forms—as a sort of weather-pattern in the mind that becomes self-sustaining in the right circumstances, rather like a hurricane or other massive storm system.  One doesn’t find hurricanes in environments that are not conducive to them—Siberia and the like, for instance—but in minds that are the metaphorical equivalent of the tropics, such mental storm systems may be much more common, and sometimes very destructive.

Who knows, maybe ECT treatment for severe and recalcitrant depression is something akin to the (ill-advised) notion of dropping large nukes in the middle of a hurricane to disrupt its pattern.  If hurricanes occasionally had the tendency to obliterate all or even most life on Earth, we might be willing to try something as extreme as dropping nuclear weapons in a developing tropical storm system to disrupt it, if we could find no other solution.

I wonder if even the large storm cells that occur over places like the great plains of North America could be considered something like episodes of depression (the fact that some weather systems are called “depressions” relates to the barometric pressure, and should not be construed as in any way related to psychiatric depression, other than etymologically).  To what would a “super cell” that produces massive tornados be analogous?

Of course, there need be no actual analogy, because the weather concept is a metaphor, really.  But it is not completely a metaphor, so I don’t think it’s too frivolous to push the notion further in order to trigger some thoughts.  Complex systems like the brain and the weather, with internal feedbacks and feedforwards and “feedsidewayses” that can lead to vicious and/or virtuous cycles can have actual attributes in common if looked at in the right way.

It’s a bit akin to how the motion of a pendulum and the oscillation of a circuit and the “probability waves” of quantum mechanics can be described by very similar mathematics.  Also, the relations between pressure, flow, and friction in fluid dynamics with voltage, current, and resistance in electric circuits are almost spookily alike.

This probably demonstrates something rather fundamental in the nature of reality.  Perhaps it’s distantly related to the fact that geometry seems to have a deeper influence on the workings of reality than one might at first think, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Pythagorean relations and the appearance of Pi (π) in often surprising places.

This is all speculative stuff, and I’m not being very rigorous in my thoughts, though I’m trying not to be too frivolous.  But I think this is a good place to wrap up this post for today.  I hope you all are doing well and that you continue to do well, and even better, that you improve at least a little bit, in at least some way, every day.  You might as well.

*Has anyone reading ever actually mended their stockings (or darned their socks, as in another Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby)?  I have mended a sock at least once in my life, and probably more than once, but nowadays socks are so readily available that I tend just to throw them away when a hole develops.  I guess that’s a testament to how “spoiled” we are in the modern world.  Incidentally, I added the Thursday part of Lady Madonna to this quote-based title because I realized that I’m never likely to use it on an actual Thursday blog post, because for those I use mutated quotes from Shakespeare.

**In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a replicator of the mind, and it has become a useful scientific term, in addition to being a slightly imprecise shorthand for usually humorous pictures of various kinds shared online.  Such memes can become highly potent self-replicators in various senses, and they can combine in ways that make them more prone to spread, in “meme-plexes” of various kinds.  Some are useful for the organism, and so could be considered beneficial viruses (memetic rather than genetic) while others can become terribly destructive, at least in certain circumstances.  Certainly the mind-virus(es) associated with the Jim Jones cult was/were lethal to most of those who were infected.  Likewise with the Heaven’s Gate viruses.  Some of such comparisons can be a bit glib, but others are robust and can be subject to rigorous study.

***I’m not referring to a prison-based “general population”, though at times the metaphor of modern society as a prison is truly warranted, especially for those of us with atypical brains.

****There are times when I would think of a completed suicide as indeed a thoroughgoing success, i.e., a positive thing overall, but here I’m just using the term “successful” to mean “having completed what was intended, as intended”.

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Had we but time enough, and space…

It’s the beginning of a new week but the end of an old month:  Monday, June 30, 2025, AD (or CE, if you prefer).  After tonight at midnight, we will be in the second half of this year, for whatever that’s worth.

Of course, one can debate whether Monday is really the beginning of the week or just the beginning of the work week.  Many consider Sunday to be the start of the week, at least here in this region of the “West”.

But, of course, since mainstream Christianity sees Sunday as the sabbath day, a day which is supposed to commemorate the day on which God rested after creating the world, seeing Sunday as the beginning of the week doesn’t make a lot of sense.  In the “original” observance of the sabbath—the Jewish one—Shabbat falls on Saturday (beginning Friday at nightfall), which makes more sense.  Then, Sunday really is the beginning of the week.

Not that any of this actually signifies anything real.  The start of the week or the start of a month or the start of a year are all just as arbitrary as one’s choice of the location of the origin and the x and y axes in setting up a system of coordinates in Euclidean space (or a plane, in this case).  As long as one is consistent in applying them, any calculations involved will turn out the same.  It is, in a way, a kind of symmetry, which would—in physics, anyway, if one were applying Noether’s Theorem to such as absurd situation—imply a conservation law of some variety.

I suppose there is a sort of conservation of days and months, in that one cannot by adding or subtracting days or months on a calendar change the length of a year or of a lunar cycle.  Although, with a big enough rocket or explosion or whatever, one could noticeably alter those things—it would be catastrophic for creatures on Earth, but this is science we’re talking about here, and if life on Earth must suffer for the advancement of science, then so much the worse for life on Earth!

I was kidding with that last bit there.  I am currently alive and on Earth—though at times I rue both facts—so I don’t actually want to treat life on Earth frivolously for my own curiosity’s sake.  Also, and more importantly, the people who matter most to me live on Earth*.

Anyway, over time the orbit of the moon is going to lengthen, as the moon very slowly draws farther and farther away from the Earth (which it is doing).  The length of a day and of a year both also slowly and subtly change over time.  Those time scales are long, though, and probably the sun will go red giant before either rate has changed enough to cause significant trouble, barring some large-scale asteroid collision or something similar.

This does, however, raise a point about the relationship of symmetry and conservation laws, à la Emmy Noether’s theorem.

It is the symmetry of translation—moving something from one place to another doesn’t change the laws of physics—that implies conservation of momentum.  And it is the symmetry of rotation—it doesn’t matter in what direction you’re oriented, the laws of physics are the same—that implies conservation of angular momentum.  And it is the symmetry of time—the laws of physics don’t change from one moment to the next—that implies the conservation of energy.

But here’s the rub:  on the largest of scales, the universe is not time symmetric; the past is significantly different than the present (and the future).  And so, on long time scales, the conservation of energy does not apply.  This is not merely a case in which I’m playing word games, by the way.  In this instance, I am speaking the truth about the nature of energy at the level of the cosmos according physics as it is understood today.

It’s an interesting question whether our local asymmetry in time—i.e., that the direction toward the “Big Bang” looks quite different from the other direction in time—is really just a local phenomenon.  That may seem strange, but perhaps it will be useful to consider an analogy with the various dimensions of space.

In space, in general, there is no directionality to the three dimensions.  One can go up and down, back and forth, and from side to side with equal ease, at least in space in general.  However, if you live on the surface of the Earth**, there is a very real difference between “up-down” and the other two sets of directions.

This apparent directionality to space is caused, of course, by the gravitational effect of the mass of the Earth itself.  It is an entirely local directionality, caused by a local phenomenon.  And similarly, the seeming directionality of time may be merely because we are “near” (in time) to a local, powerfully influential phenomenon:  whatever caused the Big Bang and produced a region in time of extremely low entropy and significant expansion, whether it is cosmic inflation or something else.

It seems pretty clear that, as entropy increases “over time”, the difference between past and future will become less and less noticeable, until eventually, there will be effectively no directionality to time***.  And so, in the “heat death” of the universe, the conservation of energy would steadily apply more and more, even at cosmic scales.

Not that there would be anyone to notice.

Of course, one can ask if there exists more than one time dimension.  I have asked this before, myself, I think on my other blog, Iterations of Zero.  But now there are some serious physicists entertaining the notion.  This sort of thing always makes me feel at least a little bit clever:  when I thought of something before the mainstream physics articles were published (or at least before I encountered them).

Anyway, that’s enough of that for now, this morning.  I hope you all have as good a week as you can.  Well, you will inevitably have as good a week as you can, but I hope it will subjectively be good  for you, too.

*I am not one of those people.

**As I suspect most of you do, at least physically.

***Very much in the way that, as one gets farther and farther away from the surface of some strongly gravitating body, like a planet, the difference between up and down becomes less and less prominent and finally vanishes into undetectability.

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Compassion is true justice, isn’t it?

It’s Friday, and I’m writing what should be my last blog post of the week, since I don’t think I’m going to work tomorrow—we’ve been having a good week, all things considered, though it doesn’t have a great deal of impact on me other than making it more likely for me to have Saturday off.

I guess I’m grateful for that.  After all, I really do seem to need frequent time to decompress by just lolling about and doing nothing.  Considering that, throughout my life, I’ve almost never given myself any time to rest beyond that which is absolutely necessary, I guess it’s not too surprising that I’ve worn myself out.

I feel a vague, general hostility this morning, bordering on unfocused hatred—not towards any specific or particular thing but toward everything in general.  It’s a bit of a shame.  It’s not really new for me, though.  I remember, well into my past, realizing that I didn’t like “people” overall, but that I had a hard time specifically hating people I knew, or at least the people I knew fairly well.

That’s a curious fact.  I could recognize that, at first glance, I found humans as a whole frustrating, often disgusting, frequently reprehensible, and in general just rather pathetic—but then, when I got to know someone, I usually found them at least tolerable, and usually in some ways likable.  It’s probably because, when you get to know a person, and you see the various aspects of their lives and their personalities, you realize that even their negative attributes are clearly not of their choosing, and you develop at least a sense of compassion for them, even if there is no actual affection.

I guess, in a way, it’s a realization that humans are not much more responsible for their character than, say, a dog is, though they delude themselves otherwise.  And although there are dogs that are unpleasant, with bad habits and so on, people mostly recognize that dogs are not the authors of their negative attributes (nor of their positive ones).

Humans in general have more agency than dogs, but not nearly as much as they think they have.  No one chooses their ancestry, of course, and so they do not choose their genes, nor the location and circumstances of their birth, nor the culture in which they live, nor the things they are taught—true and false and nonspecific.  It’s probably unnecessarily biasing to think of everyone as “victims”, since not all the things that happen to us (or within us) are negative.  But certainly, people are passengers in life rather than drivers.

Yes, even those who have great wealth and power are no more the authors of the world than are the most abjectly impoverished.  They are luckier, of course; it would be churlish and foolish to think otherwise.  But they are not really any more “in charge” than anyone else is.

They don’t like to admit it, but that’s probably because they are terrified of recognizing their own powerlessness, which is understandable.  But there is little to no doubt about the fact that they are just the same type of flotsam and jetsam as everyone else.  Even the vastly wealthy and successful (and reasonably smart) Steve Jobs fell victim not just to pancreatic cancer but to his own irrational biases in eschewing scientifically supported treatment for it.

This is not to imply that, had he been treated, he would definitely have survived.  Pancreatic cancer is no joke.  The pancreas has no tissue capsule around it, and it is not surrounded by firm structures that would lead to early pain and thus early diagnosis of the illness, so by the time most people know they have the disease, it is often very advanced and has spread quite far.

Jobs’s outcome might have been no better had he engaged the best, top-level, scientifically validated treatment available (which he certainly could have afforded).  His chances would just have been better.

Sooner or later he would have died anyway, just like everyone else.  Death is not optional, not even for the universe itself, as far as we can tell.  This is not to say that spacetime may not endure forever in some form or another—it quite possibly shall—but what we consider to be our universe, a place in which complexity and life itself can exist, even if only in a tiny, tiny, miniscule fraction of the cosmos, is inescapably working toward increasing entropy.  And while a Poincaré recurrence may also wait in the distant future (the mathematics suggests that it does), that’s not likely to be much consolation to anyone here and now.

No, in the scope of time even more so than in the expanse of space*, the place for any kind of life appears tiny indeed.  People say silly things like “our universe is fine-tuned for life”, but that’s absurd on its face.  Almost every location in the cosmos is incapable of supporting life as we know it, at least without significant modification**.

People are biased because they live in places where life is possible—but that’s tautological, when you think about it.  And even here, on the surface of the Earth, in a civilization that spontaneously self-assembled to house humans and their subordinate animals, most people could not survive without the technology and services provided by (and invented by) other humans.

So, perhaps compassion is the most reasonable attitude to have toward people, even when they are at their worst.  That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to stop people from doing bad things and hurting each other and themselves.  But thinking of them as evil is probably not merely counterproductive but actually unjust.  Evil is an adjective that can apply to deeds, but I think it’s never a very good description of individuals in real life.

That’s me being relatively positive and gentle, isn’t it?  I know, it’s disgusting.  I’ll try to avoid it in the future.  In the meantime, please try to have a good day and a good weekend, and repeat after that for as long as you can.

*If time and space are both infinite in extent, as they may be, it’s difficult to compare fractions of them to say which might, in some fashion, be a bigger proportion.  Is a googol (10100) a bigger percentage of infinity than 1 is?  Not mathematically.  Any finite number one can choose, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero when compared to infinity.  And that’s just the smallest version of infinity, ℵ0.  Don’t even try to start considering fractions of, say, the real numbers.  You can’t even begin to count them, because you cannot, even in principle, find a smallest one with which to begin, or the next one from any starting point.  There are an uncountably infinite number of real numbers between any two specific numbers you might pick, no matter how close together they are.

**I did a YouTube video related to this, that I titled There is NO life in the universe.  I don’t remember how good my points were, but if you’re interested, here it is.  Actually, even if you’re not interested, here it is.