Physics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There may be no firm fundament but is there a fun firmament?

It’s Tuesday morning, now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer, mainly to spare my thumbs, but also because I just prefer real typing to the constrictive and error-ridden twiddling of virtual buttons on a very small phone screen.

Speaking of the day, if the Beatles song Lady Madonna is correct, then it’s still Tuesday afternoon, and has been at least since last Tuesday, since “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending”.  Of course, if Tuesday afternoon really is never-ending, then it has been Tuesday afternoon ever since the first Tuesday afternoon.  From a certain point of view, this is trivially the case.  After all, every moment after 12pm on the first Tuesday that ever happened could be considered Tuesday afternoon—or, at least, they could be considered “after Tuesday noon” if you will.

Enough of that particular nonsense.  I only wrote that because there’s nothing sensible about which to write that comes to my mind.  But, of course, in a larger sense, there is nothing “sensible” at all.

There are things that can be sensed, obviously.  I can see, hear, and touch this computer, for instance.  If I wanted, I could probably smell it, though I think its odor is likely quite subdued.  But I mean “sensible” in the more colloquial, bastardized, mutated sense—as in the word “sense” just there—which has to do with something being logical, reasonable, rational, coherent, that sort of thing.  Indeed, it has to do with things having meaning.

Deep down, though, from the telos point of view, there is no true, inherent meaning to much of anything, as far as anyone can see.  Certainly there’s no meaning that anyone has ever demonstrated or asserted convincingly that I have encountered at any point in my life.

Of course, people have beliefs and they have convictions, and humans assign meanings to various things.  All the words I have used in writing this post so far, and all the words I will use henceforth, have “meanings”, but those are invented meanings.  There is nothing in the collection of letters—nor indeed in the shapes of the letters themselves, nor the way we put them down on paper or a screen—that means anything intrinsically.  They were all invented, like justice and morality and the whole lot of such things.

That something is invented doesn’t mean it isn’t real, of course.  Cars are an invention, and only a fool (in the modern world) would deny that cars are real.  But they are not inherent to the universe; they are not in any sense fundamental.

In a related sense, even DNA and the protein structures for which it codes are very much not fundamental; they are quasi-arbitrary.  Of course, one cannot make DNA or RNA or proteins out of substrates for which the chemistry simply will not hold together.  But the genetic code—the set of three-nucleotide-long “letters”, the codons, in the genetic code that each associate with a given amino acid (or a stop signal, or similar) as they are transcribed into proteins—is arbitrary.  There’s nothing inherent in any set of three nucleotides that makes it associate with some particular amino acid.

This sort of thing took me quite a long time to realize as I was growing up and trying to understand biology and chemistry and such.  What, for instance, was the chemical reaction with, say, adrenaline that made things in the body speed up and go into “fight or flight” mode, as it were?  How was it that aspirin chemically interacted with bodies and nervous systems to blunt pain?  How many possible chemical reactions were there, really?  It was mind-boggling that there could be so many reactions, and that they could all produce such disparate effects on various creatures.

When finally I was shown the real nature of such things, it was definitely a scales-dropping-from-eyes moment.  There is nothing inherent in the chemistry of DNA, or of drugs or hormones, that produces their effects.  There is no inherent “soporific” quality to an anesthetic.  You could give a dose of Versed  that would kill a human to some alien with a different biology, and at most its effects would be those of a contaminant.

It’s all just a kind of language—indeed, it’s almost a kind of computer language, and hormones are just messengers*, which are more or less arbitrary, like the ASCII code for representing characters within computer systems.  Likewise, there’s nothing in the word “cat” that has direct connection with the animal to which it refers.  It’s just keyed to that creature in our minds, arbitrarily, as is demonstrated by the fact that, for instance, in Japan the term is “neko” (or, well, it sounds like that—the actual written term is ねこ or 猫).

Of course, there are things in the universe that, as far as we can tell, are fundamental, such as quantum fields and gravity and spacetime itself.  But even these may yet peel away and be revealed to be arbitrary or semi-arbitrary forms of some other, deeper, underlying unity, as is postulated in string theory, for instance.

The specific forms of the fundamental particles and forces in our universe may—if string theory and eternal inflationary cosmology for instance are correct—be just one possible version of a potential 10500 or more** possible sets of particles and forces determined by the particular Calabi-Yau “shape” and configuration of the curled up extra dimensions of space that string theory hypothesizes.  So, the very fundamental forces of nature, or at least the “constants” thereof, may be arbitrary—historical accidents, as much as are the forms and specifics of the life that currently exists on Earth.

And what’s to say that strings and branes and Calabi-Yau manifolds are fundamental, either?  Perhaps reality has no fundament whatsoever.  Perhaps it is a bottomless pit of meaninglessness, in which only truly fundamental mathematics are consistent throughout…if even they are.

I’m not likely to arrive at a conclusion regarding these matters in a blog post written off-the-cuff in the morning while commuting to the office.  But I guess it all supports a would-be Stoic philosophical ideal, which urges us to let go of things that are outside our control and instead try to focus on those things over which we have some power:  our thoughts and our actions.

Of course, even these are, at some deeper level, not truly or at least not fully ours to control—we cannot affect the past that led to our present state, after all, and the future is born of that present which is born of that past over which we have no control.  But, for practical purposes, the levers that we use to control ourselves are the only levers we have to use.

We might as well keep a grip on them as well as we can, and not worry too much about things that are not in our current reach.  Though we can try to stretch out and limber up, maybe practice some mental yoga, to try to extend that reach over time, I suppose.  But that’s a subject for some other blog post, I guess; this one has already gone on long enough.

*For the most part.  Things like cholesterol and fatty acids and sugars—and certainly water and oxygen—and other fundamental building blocks do have inherent chemical properties that make them useful for the purposes to which bodies put them.  Then again, words can have tendencies that make them more useful for some things than others, too.  “No” and “yes” are short and clear and clearly different sounds, for instance; it makes sense that such words evolved to be such important, fundamentally dichotomous signals.

**That means 10 x 10 x 10 x 10… until you’ve done that multiplication 500 times.  You may know that a “googol” is a mere 10100, and that in itself is already roughly 20 orders of magnitude (100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times!) larger than the number of protons and neutrons estimated to exist in the visible universe.  So 10500 is a number far vaster than could ever be written out within the confines of the universe that we can ever see.  There’s not enough space, let alone enough matter, with which to write it.  It’s a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Not all new things from Microsoft et al are annoying

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

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

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

And here is the audio from today:

If such a thing is possible, enjoy.

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Causality, relativity, uncertainty, and attractive versus repulsive gravity–these are worth celebrating

Okay, well, I’m writing this blog post from the office, because this is where I slept last night after the holiday party.  We did not have the party at the office, just to be clear.  We had it at a very decent restaurant called Maggiano’s, which may be part of a chain to some extent, I think.  It was a nice enough restaurant, food-wise, and the building and the outside lights were quite beautiful (see below).  However, inside, it was way too crowded and noisy, and we were seated at a very long, narrow table against a wall.

I felt incredibly stressed when we first arrived; I can hardly hear out of my right ear for one, and I have had tinnitus in it since about 2007 or so, and everything else was a tumult and commotion.  There was too much visual sensory overload also, and way too many people in too close quarters.  I miss the social mores of the pandemic, honestly.  I was barely able to endure long enough for our server to get me a drink so I could calm down a little.  I almost left and just walked back to the office.

My difficulties with such things have gotten worse over time, probably at least partly because I only ever used to go to restaurants and whatnot with people with whom I felt quite comfortable—my family, near and extended, then my wife, her family, our family, and so on—so there was always someone on whom I could focus, and with whom I could speak.

The drinks were rather weak, which may be good, since it was a work night, but I had to drink several to keep from tensing up.  Even so, at the end of the night, when they wanted to take a big group photo, I just walked away.  I had been dodging pictures all night already; there was a terribly annoying number of them, because everyone has their own little cameras in their smartphones, so instead of conversation—which was very difficult with anyone more than one seat away, and pretty hard even with those neighbors—people just took their little, instant, digital snaps, which I suspect will never really be used for recalling memories.

I’ve said it before, it’s not the case that things on the internet (or smartphones or whatever) are forever, as is sometimes claimed.  There is such a cacophony of data and images and whatnot, a good portion of it now not even being “real”, that most things will be swiftly lost like a drop of ink in a roiling, stormy ocean, or the quantum information of something that’s fallen in a black hole.  In principle it’s all there, but in practice it’s as lost as the echoes of Julius Caesar’s death rattle.

I guess it was a pretty nice evening, and the food was pretty good.  The salad was above average, and the broccoli I had on the side with my ziti dish was good.  It was all certainly well above the level of, for instance, the Olive Garden, but it was terribly noisy, literally and figuratively.  By the end, when we were the last party in the restaurant, it was still noisy, because our group was terribly noisy, and it was embarrassing and unpleasant.

I think I mostly at least prevented anyone from capturing my disgusting current face and form on camera in anything other than, perhaps, an oblique angle.  I really don’t like how I look, or how I feel, and certainly don’t want it memorialized, even if it’s evanescent and ephemeral*.

After the party, I was brought back to the office, which is only about four miles from the restaurant.  I could have walked, since the night was reasonably cool, but since I knew I wouldn’t be taking a shower, I decided not to do that.  I have washed up this morning and applied antiperspirant and aftershave (or whatever you call it when you haven’t actually shaved) and I brushed my teeth and everything.  I slept on the floor, with my backpack as my pillow, and it was about as comfortable as sleeping at the house, and I got about 3 hours of sleep.

This is the state in which my life is and has been for years now:  sleeping at the office and spending time here (by myself) is just as pleasant as being at the place where I nominally live.  That’s because I have no life, and I don’t expect one to occur again for me.  I’m really absolutely dismal and morose and unpleasant, even to myself.

I’ve hardly even read anything in over three weeks now, which is very weird and rare for me.  The single thing to which I’m now looking forward is the Doctor Who Christmas special, and that’s not a huge draw, just a pleasant one.  It’s not as though I’m actually watching it with anyone or can talk about it with a friend or anything.

I got out the hardcover books Spacetime and Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible at the office.  I have them resting on the desk, hoping to entice myself during any downtime I might have at work.  So far it hasn’t paid off, but I would like to master the mathematics of GR well enough that I can understand intuitively why a uniform energy field permeating space generates “repulsive gravity”.  I understand that it does, but I don’t have a good picture of it in my head, whereas I do have a much clearer intuitive sense of why the curvature of spacetime (especially the time part) leads to the apparent force of attractive gravity.

In a way, that’s my only remaining unaccomplished (and reasonably achievable) goal.  Quantum field theory is interesting and all, but the basic concepts of it seem fairly straightforward to me**.  Contrary to what people often say, quantum mechanics (et al) are only really counter-intuitive if you insist upon trying to apply macroscopic and mesoscopic intuitions to phenomena that happen at much smaller scales.  It’s a bit like expecting one of your bathroom tiles to behave just like the Burj Khalifa, only the scale is much more disparate between the quantum and the macroscopic.

People seem somehow puzzled by the notion of how complementary pairs of one’s measurements of quantum “particles” can never be more accurate than a certain level, as if this is truly different from measurements of macroscopic phenomena.  I’m quite sure that the errors when measuring, say, the mass or velocity of something as large as an elephant, or a car, or what have you, are waaaaaay huger than the absolute uncertainty in measurement of the position and/or momentum of a particle.  They’re just not as noticeable because the thing itself is big, and so the percentage of the error might be smaller and less consequential.

But we know things change with scale, like surface to volume ratios and whatnot.  An uncertainty of a millimeter when measuring a blue whale is hardly relevant, but if you’re measuring an ant, it could easily be crucial, and if you’re measuring a dust mite that error would be larger than the organism.

I also don’t get the objection to the possible “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics that derives from the fact that we only ever see and experience one world.  I don’t know why that puzzles people.  It’s not as if you can see both the outside and the inside of all the solid objects around you.  If you touch the near surface of a basketball with one finger, you can’t feel the opposite side of the ball with the same finger at the same time.

Yet, there’s no real doubt that the inside and the other side of physical objects really exist.  We just can’t sense the whole of any given thing at once.  Any part of space that will never enter our future light cones is something we will never, ever see at all***, but we don’t have any good reason to doubt that far distant regions of spacetime exist.  Internal consistency of reality and logical coherence of the world seem to demand many things existing with which we will not, and sometimes cannot, ever interact.

Okay, that was a weird tangent.  My apologies.  Anyway, I doubt that I’m going to achieve my “dream” of getting an intuitive, mathematical understanding, something I can feel, about why spacetime expands in the presence of a uniform energy.  After all, it’s something about which I honestly care, and my track record with such things is abysmal.  I don’t expect to achieve anything else of value, even to me, in my life.

I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m depressed, I’m alone; the only person in whose presence I always find myself is a person I despise (me).  My catharsis via this blog isn’t working.  I’m getting no help, though I wish for it, but I’m not sure how well I would respond if some were to come.  Maybe, like the wonderful simile Sting used in Be Still My Beating Heart, I would wriggle like a fish caught on dry land, unable to tell the difference between help and danger, between an offer of comfort and a warning of pain.

Whatever.  Sorry, that’s all pathetic, isn’t it?

In closing, I wonder if anyone listened to my little audio snippet yesterday, and if anyone thought it was worth it for me to try to do such a thing more often.  Let me know in the comments (on WordPress) if you have any feedback to offer.  Thanks.

maggianos

*Performing together live, for the first time.

**Straightforward for quantum field theory type things, anyway, to be fair.  I don’t mean that it’s not complex (ha ha! it uses complex numbers all the time, get it?) but I have a sort of picture of how the processes work, and it makes sense.  The rest would just be building details and specifics on top of the basic framework, which is a lot, of course, but there’s no real intellectual hurdle to be cleared.

***Assuming we do not discover any exceptions or workarounds to special relativity and the speed-of-causality limit.  There could in principle be workarounds, but it seems unlikely that there are local exceptions to the cosmic speed limit.  In any case, even such exceptions shouldn’t violate chains of causality.

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It’s all a matter of degrees

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m waiting for the second train of the day, the one I caught yesterday.  I slept a bit better last night than Sunday night.  That’s not saying much, but beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes.  It still feels a bit better, at least.  You know you’re in some weirdness when four or five hours of heavily broken-up sleep feels fairly restful, and you don’t even really consider bothering to go and catch the 4:20 train.

It’s relatively cool here in south Florida, by which I mean the current temperature is 57 degrees* according to my weather app.  This is, rather amusingly, lower than the app’s statement of what the low temperature overnight is supposed to have been.  Anyone paying attention might be excused for feeling that the app, in contradicting itself so flagrantly, should not be considered reliable.

Of course, it’s obvious that the app, or service, or whatever it is, simply doesn’t bother to update its “printed” overnight low prediction just for local minutiae.  It’s not meant to be too precise, and in any case, local temperatures can vary quite a bit.  The predicted low was 60, so it’s only off by 3 degrees.

Those who have not been thoroughly enough educated might think this is a five percent error—small, but not negligible.  That is not correct.  Both Fahrenheit and Centigrade are relative temperature scales, based around the freezing and boiling points of water, which is a useful, but provincial, set of benchmarks.

No, to get the correct error estimate we must work with the absolute temperature scale, or Kelvin, which begins at “absolute zero” the coldest “possible” temperature and goes up to whatever the maximum possible temperature is**.  So, the error in absolute degrees (which are the same size as degrees in Centigrade, by convention) would be 3 degrees times 5/9, or 15/9 degrees Kelvin.

Now, to get the predicted temperature in Kelvin, we first convert to Centigrade—by taking (60-32) x 5/9, or (28 x 5)/9, or 140/9, or about 15 and a half—then add 273 (which is what zero degrees Centigrade is in Kelvin, ignoring the digits after the decimal point).  So, the predicted temperature, in Kelvin, was about 288 degrees.  15/9 is one and two thirds degrees, so 1.67 degrees (taking 3 significant figures).  As a percentage of 288, that’s pretty tiny.

Here, I’m going to go to the calculator program on my laptop, and it gives me…roughly 0.58%.  That’s just over half a percent error.  Not too bad, when you think about it.  How often are your own estimates that accurate?  If you could pick stocks that well, you could rapidly become a billionaire, I would think.

Here’s a funny little aside:  the southbound train just pulled in across the tracks, and I’ve apparently used the Wi-Fi on that specific train before, because my laptop just prompted me to sign in.  The train is pulling away now, and it’s too late, but it must have a pretty good Wi-Fi signal.

Okay, on to other matters, none of which seem nearly as interesting to me.

I think I’m going to try to use the same person who helped my coworker (the one who had a stroke) get new health insurance at what appears to have been a very good rate to sign up for some for me.  I don’t even want to try to use Medicaid or Obamacare if I can help it.

I don’t trust the human government, anymore—as Radiohead sang, “they don’t…they don’t work for us”.  It’s not that I think the government overall is malicious or evil or whatnot.  It’s just that everyone in it is very small and parochial, working for their own local self-interest under local pressures and incentives.  It’s astonishing that they ever accomplish anything useful at all.

Ants and bees (and termites) do a much more impressive job when they build their hills and hives and mounds, but then again, they are individually less self-serving in many ways.  That’s not to their particular credit—it’s the just way nature has shaped them for their lifestyle and reproductive strategies—but it’s true, nevertheless.

Human governments, meanwhile, are made up of individually motivated creatures whose reproductive processes (and thus their drives and fears) are not much different from any other mammals’, but who try to work in ultrasocial settings as if they were some close relatives of Hymenoptera.  It’s a testament to the incredible power of language (particularly written language) that they accomplish anything at all.

When it has dealt with me specifically, “the” government has done far more harm than good, and most unjustly***.  The less I have to do with any level of their power—I will not grant them the word “authority”—the more comfortable I will feel.  I have a learned aversion and probably some form of complex trauma associated with such things.

I don’t see any reason to overcome that aversion, because I don’t see how it would make my life any better.  It certainly would not make local or state or national governments any less likely to grind me—or anyone else who isn’t massively wealthy and unscrupulous, which probably includes you—into bone meal.

With that, I’ll start to wrap things up for today.  It’s the fifth day of Hanukkah, so enjoy it.  Also, there are only a lucky 13 days left until the annual celebration of Newton’s birthday (they also celebrate some other guy’s birth on that day as well, and though he seems to have been a good sort of guy overall, he really wasn’t born on anything like December 25th).

Christmas was, of course, grafted on to a pre-existing solstice festival, and why not?  Heck, Newton’s birthday was only on December 25th according to the Julian calendar, so it’s at least a week or two out from the Gregorian “date of his birth”.  I could figure out the correct Gregorian date, but I can’t be arsed.  It’s a question with no gravity, no momentum, not even any real significant potential energy.  One might say it is of infinitesimal importance.

Have a nice day.

*Fahrenheit, of course.  If it were 57 degrees Centigrade, global warming would indeed have taken an abrupt turn for the very much worse, and we would all be in the express lane to extinction, unless it were a very transient phenomenon.  And, of course, if it were 57 degrees Kelvin, we would all already be frozen to death quite nicely, since even the nitrogen in the atmosphere freezes below 63 Kelvin, and oxygen is a liquid below 90 K (both of these numbers are at “normal” pressures, which would not prevail in these circumstances).  I don’t know quite what it would mean to be at a 57 degree angle outside—would that simply mean that everything in the universe had been rotated by slightly less than a sixth of a full circle?  Given the rotational symmetry of the laws of physics, from which comes the conservation of angular momentum, I don’t think anyone would even notice.  And, of course, the Earth rotates locally 360 degrees a day, by definition.

**If memory serves, it’s called the Planck temperature.  Anyway, this would be the temperature at which each local point in spacetime would be so hot that the local energy would make a black hole, and in any case, the usual laws of physics would break down.  However, of course, if that energy is uniformly spread out, as presumably it would have been in the very early universe, any local spacetime curvature might be entirely effaced, so there would be no such black holes, as all the universe would be full of such energy.  I think inflationary cosmology would imply that there never really was an era of such intense local energy, unless that would be the “inflaton field” itself, but I may be misremembering this.  Anyway, that’s getting well into speculative physics.

***I am, of course, inescapably biased in this assessment, and I honestly could in principle be convinced by argument and evidence that I am wrong.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I’m incorrect in considering that statement to be accurate and true, with a fairly high credence—certainly well into the mid to high 90 percent range.  In other words, if I considered about a hundred assessments in which I was comparably confident as I am to this one, I would expect to be wrong about only a handful of them.

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Believing in “believing in” matters of empirical reality…or not

The other day, I was scrolling through The Website Formerly Known as Twitter—which I tend to do after sharing my blog posts there, since it seems the polite thing to do—and I saw a “tweet” or an “X-udate” or “X-cretion” or whatever one calls them now, that asked, “Do you believe in global warming?”

Such questions always seem bizarre to me.  It’s similar to the old, “Do you believe in UFOs?”  Though, with the latter, one can always snarkily reply, “Why, yes, I believe in unidentified flying objects.  I think people often see things in the sky that they cannot properly identify, especially if they are not experts and conditions are not ideal.”  But really, even that sarcastic response misses the point and can be misleading, so it’s best to be avoided.

The problem is, the question entails a kind of category error.  The reality of global warming—by which I assume the questioner means some form of anthropogenic climate change—is an empirical question.  It is a statement about reality itself, and is either true or false whether or not anyone even knows about it as a possibility, let alone “believes in it”.

It’s more reasonable to ask, “Do you believe that anthropogenic climate change—AKA global warming—is happening?”  That, at least, is a sensible question, when using the form of the word “belief” that means that, based on the evidence and reasoning one has available, one has arrived at the provisional conclusion that global warming is happening (or is not).

In using this term “belief”, one would usually imply that one is reasonably convinced, but open in principle to alternative explanations and counter arguments and new evidence—as one always should be in matters of empirical fact, at least if one is committed to always trying to make one’s map describe the territory as well as possible (to borrow a phrase from Eliezer Yudkowsky).

But when people say, “Do you believe in…” something, it doesn’t come across—to me at least—like a question about facts, but rather as a question about ideologies, about team membership, about religion, in a way.  It can be at least excusable and appropriate, if still rather nonsensical in my view, to ask someone if they believe in Santa Claus, or in Communism, or in God.  It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with external reality other than the state of certain people’s minds, but at least it’s reasonably appropriate.

The absurdity of this conflation of “believing in” something with an assessment of a thing’s actual reality is pointed out well in Terry Pratchett’s delightful Discworld novels—in either Wyrd Sisters or Witches Abroad, if memory serves.  I don’t recall how the point comes up, but it relates to belief in the gods of Discworld.  The narration says that, of course, witches knew that the gods were real, they had dealings with them, they sometimes met them.  But that didn’t mean there was any call to go believing in them.  It would be like believing in the postman.

If someone were to ask me whether I think that climate change is real, and why I think whatever I think, I might reply that the general consensus of the world’s climate scientists—people who actually specialize in the area—seems to be that it is happening, and though their most specific predictions can be highly uncertain, as can all specific predictions in science beyond the realms of simple linear dynamics, most of them conclude that it is really happening.

I read a statement once that claimed that the percentage of climate scientists who are convinced that human-caused global warming is really happening is higher than the percentage of medical scientists who are convinced that smoking tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer.  I don’t know whether that statement is true, and I don’t recall the source—it sounds more like a rhetorical point than an actual argument, which makes me suspicious.  If it is true, it’s remarkable in more than one direction.

One can look up in journals the papers and the data that is being gathered and analyzed by climate scientists.  Google Scholar works nicely for searching out real, published scientific studies on almost any amendable topic.  One can also go to pre-print servers such as arXiv, to see papers that have not yet been peer reviewed.

If one is judicious, one can even find decent science news in less technical publications—phys.org seems to be pretty good—but mainstream reporting on such things is often unreliable and inconsistent, since after all mainstream media exist primarily to sell themselves, not necessarily to promulgate the most rigorous truth they can uncover.  Even Scientific American has turned into a twisted mockery of its former self.

I understand at least some of the physics behind the “greenhouse effect”, without which the Earth would be uninhabitably cold.  Visible light passes through the atmosphere without interacting much with the gases therein—which is why air is mostly transparent, other than the modest scattering of blue light that leads to the sky’s daytime color (and inversely to the color of sunsets).  But such relatively low-entropy, high frequency light is absorbed by the ground, then reemitted as higher entropy, lower frequency light, such as infrared, which is much more readily absorbed by molecules like CO2 and H2O and methane (CH4).  The reasons for this are quantum mechanical in nature, but the fact that it happens is basic physics that’s been well known since before anyone currently alive was born, as far as I know.

And so, these atmospheric gases heat up (and in turn heat up the other atmospheric gases) until the outer surface of the atmosphere is warm enough to radiate out as much energy as comes into the Earth.  Such is the nature of so-called black body radiation.

But for the outer atmosphere to be warm enough to do this, the middle atmosphere must be warmer, and the layer below warmer still, and so on, since outer layers radiate inward as well as outward.  The outer layer of the atmosphere will always be just warm enough to radiate out just as much energy as the Earth receives in light from the sun; if it were not, the Earth would rapidly get hotter until a new equilibrium was reached.  The final radiating surface might end up being higher in the atmosphere, which would mean that, closer to the surface, things would be warmer.

Anyone who has dressed in layers in cold weather should understand this intuitively.

[By the way, there may be some slight imprecisions in my very quick summary above of the thermodynamics of atmospheric gases, so if any experts in the matter would like to make any corrections—especially if such corrections are truly substantive—please feel free to do so in the comments.]

There are other atmospheric effects that are even easier to understand at basic chemical levels, such as the fact that increasing CO2  concentration leads to increasing acidification of the oceans.  This is fairly straightforward chemistry—carbon dioxide, when dissolved in water, partially reacts to form a weak acid—“weak” meaning just that the hydrogen ions do not completely dissociate from the molecule H2CO3*.  This can be demonstrated easily by getting some pH paper (readily available at all high street pH paper shops), testing some neutral water (to confirm its baseline neutral pH) and then blowing through a straw into the water for a few minutes.  You can then check if the pH has dropped, which—if you are a typical mammalian creature from Earth—it will have done.

I think this experiment can also be done with phenolphthalein, which is wine-red when in a basic (alkaline) solution and clear when in an acidic environment.  You can do a sort of magic trick, turning “wine” into “water” with just your breath through a straw bubbling in a glass.  Don’t drink it, though.  I don’t think phenolphthalein is particularly dangerous, but I wouldn’t want to endorse someone imbibing it.

I’m not going to tell you my conclusions about the empirical fact of whether or not “global warming” is happening and how and why and all that.  You can explore the subject as a homework assignment (but don’t hand it in to me).  But I will tell you my conclusion, which is probably obvious, about “believing in” things.  I don’t believe in “global warming” nor in the lack thereof.  I don’t believe in Santa Claus.  I don’t believe in Capitalism or Communism or Socialism or Fascism or Scientism** or Antidisestablishmentarianism.  I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy, and I don’t believe in life after love.

And I really don’t believe it’s useful or good or anything but an irrationality to “believe in” matters that involve claims about the nature of reality itself.  Reality is that which exists whether or not anyone believes in it—indeed, whether or not anyone exists to be capable of believing in it.  That’s why it’s reality, as opposed to fictions and ideologies and other abstract concepts of various kinds.

I know*** that Amazon delivery people exist.  That doesn’t mean there’s any call to go believing in them.

* H2O + CO2 ⇌ H2CO3 ⇌ H+ + HCO3–.  Something like that, anyway.

** Though I have more sympathy for Scientism than most “isms”.

***Not to a mathematical certainty, but to such a high degree that there’s no clear point in considering other possibilities, pending new evidence and/or arguments.