Science

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Birthdays, Holidays, Mythology, Vectors, Maxwell, and a Beatles song…

It’s Friday again, the 25th of September.  There are only three more shopping months until Newtonmas.

Yes, I know that it isn’t strictly accurate to celebrate Newton’s birth on “Christmas”, because Newton was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar.  The Gregorian calendar had been invented already; England just hadn’t adopted it (partly because it was a Catholic invention).

But Newton’s birthday was a lot closer to December 25th than Jeshua bin Josephus’s was.  According to what I’ve read and heard from scholars who specialize in such things, the Nazarene was born sometime in the summer.  Oh, and also, there was no census requiring men to return to their towns of birth ever promulgated by Caesar Augustus, not according to any single official record of any kind.  The author of that gospel just threw that in to provide an excuse to have Jesus born in Bethlehem, so that his birth could comply with certain messianic prophecies.

Yes, the so-called fulfillment of prophecies that is used as “evidence” that Jesus was the messiah was added after the fact, by people who never knew Jesus, writing decades (or longer) after his death.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone, really.  Religions in general don’t tend to be very coherent and consistent; they just sort of happen by a kind of memetic evolution, and they are made of various hodgepodges of prior myths and folklore and post-hoc shoe-horning into supposed prophecies.  They bear no hallmarks of having actually been created and/or delivered by supernatural entities of any kind, let alone omniscient ones.

I certainly don’t think any deity is responsible for the fact that today is Friday, so I will not be thanking one, whether God or Brahma or Amaterasu or Quetzalcoatl or Odin or Jupiter* or Whatever.  Also, I am scheduled to work tomorrow, so this is not the end of my work week, anyway.

I’m relatively pleased to inform you that I’ve been reading a decent book for the past few days (not continuously, ha ha).  It’s called Vector, and it’s about (oddly enough) vectors‒the mathematical entities that have magnitude and direction, among other things.

It follows the lives and insights and advances of people like Hamilton, who brought us quaternions (which are very cool) among other vector insights, and various other people who developed the mathematics and science of vectors (we will be getting to tensors and so on before long).

Currently I’m in the midst of the discussion of Maxwell and his astounding development of the principles of electrodynamics, including his recognitions that electricity and magnetism would, if oscillating, produce a self-propagating wave that would travel at precisely the “speed of light”, by which he deduced that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave.  (This accomplishment is one of the most impressive in the history of science, and it is a tragic injustice that Maxwell’s name is not as well-known as those of Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Schrodinger and so on.)

Indeed, the very invariance of the speed of light as revealed by Maxwell’s equations was one of the things that led Einstein to postulate that the speed of light is an absolute constant in all reference frames, leading to Special Relativity (and eventually, even more impressively, to General Relativity, which will make use of and extend the vectors and tensors and matrices to which we’re gradually being introduced).

It’s very exciting.  Honest, it is.

And, of course, there’s the very cool fact that quaternions ended up being useful for describing the curious properties of particle “spin”, including the fact that, for spin ½ particles (which are “fermions”), if you want to rotate it and get back to the state in which you started, you have to rotate 720 degrees, not 360.

If this seems counterintuitive, just think about a Mobius** strip.  Are you thinking about it?  Good.  That should distract you nicely from trying to grasp the nature of fermion spin.

Kidding!  It helps to show you how the notion is not something deeply bizarre or seemingly nonphysical.  With a simple Mobius strip, going around 360 degrees will land you on the opposite side*** of the paper from the place where you started; you need another full trip around 360 degrees to return to where you began.

I’ve occasionally thought that it would be fun to set up an art gallery or other kind of museum with a single “circular” corridor that crosses over itself (by going up or down a level gradually) and that requires visitors to go around twice to get back to the entrance.  It wouldn’t really be difficult to pull off, and it would be much better (I think) than the Guggenheim layout.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to commission such a gallery, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Don’t let me down.

Okay, well, that’ll about do it for today.  I should be writing a post tomorrow, so if that’s something that pleases you, then you can safely and reasonably anticipate being pleased, exclusis improvisis.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*Though the planet Jupiter deserves some thanks for helping make life on Earth more possible and stable by sweeping up a lot of the stray space debris that might otherwise have slammed much more often, or much more persistently, into Earth.  But, being a planet, Jupiter doesn’t require thanks or praise to do what it does.  It just requires physics.

**He shows up in the book, too.

***Though the Mobius strip has only one side, really.  And a Klein bottle has a continuous, single surface encompassing its inner and outer aspects (i.e., the inside and outside are the same), and crosses through itself without breaking that surface.  At least, it does that in 4 spatial dimensions.  Our three dimensional Klein bottle models are shadows, if you will, of a true Klein bottle, much as a drawing of a Mobius strip is just a shadow of such a strip.

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Say to them “My Own Special Creation has sent me to you.”

I think I will really keep this post short today, because I think I may be coming down with something.  I’m not certain, but I have the beginning of that sort of systemic feeling of interleukins, interferons, and other cytokines and such hitting the system.  I sometimes don’t get a very clear early fever response to things because I almost always have NSAIDs on board, so it can be hard to tell.

If I remember to go according to plan, I will have set this to post at about 8 o’clock eastern time.  I don’t recall if it’s EST or EDT, because I honestly don’t really distinguish them.  It’s all arbitrary, anyway; as long as everyone in this time zone is calling it the same time, they can call it Eastern Nap Time if they want.

There must have been some decent-seeming reasons for creating the whole “daylight savings time” thing; I mean, Ben Franklin was involved, I think, and he was not a stupid man, though like everyone he had his limits.  But for the life of me, I don’t see why we keep using it.  I don’t think it has any residual benefits, if it ever had any at all, which I doubt.

Oh, well.  That’s not really important, and it’s a bit of a tangent.  The point I was making is that I will have set this to go up at about 8 am, my local time, to see if that has any effect on how many people read it.  I will also try not to be moody and morose*, because I don’t want to frighten any potential new readers away.

At least, I don’t want to frighten them with that kind of stuff.  If they are frightened by my would-be sense of humor, or my topics of interest, then there’s nothing much I can do about that.  Like Popeye and God and that character from La Cage aux Folles, I am what I am.  I’m not going to try to change who I am just to get attention, in case that’s not obvious.

In other news, well, I am not really going to talk about the news much, in general.  It’s generally boring and/or stupid.  Though the agent(s) breakout from OpenAI and hacking of Hugging Face** was quite interesting, and I’ve watched some videos, by people who specialize in such things, about what happened.  It’s quite fascinating.  I won’t try to comment on it, because I am not an expert, but I’ll embed a video from computerphile, featuring Robert Miles, and another one that goes over the whole thing by a new YouTuber I’ve recently encountered, both of whom have interesting insights into the situation.

Let’s see, what else is going on…

Well, I just checked my temperature, and I may just barely have a low-grade fever.  Then again, body temperature fluctuates throughout the day, and I haven’t often tested it at this hour.  In general, for most people, body temperature bottoms out around 3 am, but those people tend to be asleep at three.  I had already been awake for about two hours by then, after dropping off to sleep at maybe eleven pm.  It’s 4:30 as I am writing the first draft here, and the heck of it is that this is not an outlier.  It’s not significantly different than usual.

So, if people wonder why I tend to be grouchy or whiny or what have you, at least that gives me some leeway I would hope.

How’s the weather by you guys right now?  I know, you’re not all in the same place, but I would still be interested in your comments about your local weather.  Down by me it’s quite humid and slightly rainy, and quite warm/hot, though it’s better in the morning.  However, at this time of day, the air is often stagnant and still, which makes humidity rather more oppressive.  Still, this is not all that big a difficulty.  If I could be cured of my chronic pain but had to face muggy weather every day for the rest of my life, well…

…actually, I would have to think about it pretty carefully.  But it would be tempting.  Still, both problems can be addressed, at least to some degree, without making weird deals that trade one misery for another, trying to assess which is the lesser of two evils.

Even if there were some type of supernatural entity with which one could make such bargains‒and I do not believe in such a thing‒I don’t think I would try to seek its favors.  I don’t like owing debts to people, let alone gods or demons or whatever.

Okay, well, I’ve been a bit all over the place this morning, haven’t I?  I’ll blame it on being slightly ill, as if it were any different than how I usually am.

I hope you all are well and having a good day.

*Which sounds like a law firm.

**Why did they name their company after the larval form of xenomorphs?

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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“He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame”

It’s the day of the moon today.  By which I am not referring to Doctor Who, series 6, episode 2 (the second part of a two-parter) which was called The Day of the Moon, if memory serves.  That was a good episode, and it tied into a long arc of a storyline that Stephen Moffat had put into motion in series 4, when he wasn’t even the show runner yet.  But it has nothing to do with my first sentence, today.

No, I am simply referring to the fact that this is Monday, the weekday named (in English and some other languages) for the moon.  It’s also the last day of August in 2026.

I occasionally wonder, what if Tsukino Usagi, AKA Sailor Moon, recognized that her name was associated with the first day of the work week (and of the school week).  I wonder this because Usagi is notoriously not fond of having to go to school.  She’s also something of a crybaby, and I can just imagine her lamenting the fact that her Sailor Senshi name is linked to the start of the work week.  I can also imagine her being jealous of Sailor Venus, since in Spanish at least, that is associated with Friday (Viernes).  Sailor Venus probably wouldn’t care.

And it also only just occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Sailor Pluto once Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet*.  I mean, if she’s really more associated with the God of the Underworld than with the now-dwarf planet, as does seem to be the case in the manga and anime, then I guess it’s fine.

Perhaps Sailor Pluto wryly smiled and shook her head indulgently upon learning that the humans had named a very small, very icy object among countless other similar objects, with a highly eccentric orbit that isn’t even in the same plane as that of the planets, after her namesake.  And she might indulgently shrug upon hearing of the more recent reclassification.  She probably didn’t care much, but she might well have known.  She was one of the Sailor Senshi who never seemed really to revert to a truly mortal form nor to have been reincarnated as a normal human.

Okay, well, that was a weird little discursion that handily demonstrates some aspects of my rather niche nerd status.  I went from Doctor Who right over to Sailor Moon (while making passing references to planetary astronomy).  That’s fine, though.  I really like both…series, sagas, stories?  I’m not sure the best word to use to encompass them both.  Perhaps “universes” is good.

It does annoy me that we now use the word “universe” when referring to things that might be merely one of many, of perhaps infinite, things, when “uni” means one**, with the implication that it is the only one.  I wish we could find a better term, so we could go back to using Universe, with the inherent capital “U”, to refer to whatever encompasses everything.

I had intended to use the term “metaverse” in my own stories, such as The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, that dealt with many planes and subsections of existence, but then Fuckerberg stole the term.  And I did start thinking about it and using it way before he arrogated it to his pathetic little virtual empire.  Then I had to switch to “Omniverse”, which may actually be a more accurate term than Metaverse, but it doesn’t sound as good in my opinion.

So, yeah, now (even in legitimate physics) there is the general use of (small u) universes, which is almost inherently contradictory.  Many Worlds may be better, but its a little nonspecific.  There are, many worlds, many worlds just in our solar system.

Maybe the term “polyverse” might work?  Perhaps “facets”?  I don’t know.  I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  It’s just me dwelling on and being bothered by things that don’t really even register to most other people.  Thoughts unlike those of my brethren, indeed.

I hope you have a great day.

*I was resistant to the notion when I first heard about it, from my kids as it turns out.  But I looked into it, and I heard the arguments‒perhaps most accessibly addressed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson‒and I was convinced.  It turns out that the international astronomical community doesn’t lightly go and change the designation of something, knowing there will be many pissed off Boomers and Gen-Xers (Hello!), but does so only with very well thought-out reasons.

**Though, to refer to cartoons again, Uni was also the name of the little unicorn on which the barbarian character doted in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons from way back when.

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The sun is the same in a relative way…but not as much as the CMB

Meet the new day; same as the old day.  Or at least, in everything but the trivial details, every new day is indistinguishable from the previous oodles of days.  It’s just a full rotation of the Earth around its axis, such that when it’s done, the same points on Earth are lined up with the same…

…well, okay, here there’s some variation depending on how you’re measuring the day.  There are solar days (our usual measure), which are reckoned when the same line of latitude points “directly” at the sun again.  But, of course, the Earth is moving relative to the sun, and at a noticeable rate:  it goes roughly one 365.25th of the way around the sun in one day, and so it takes slightly longer to get back to the original orientation toward the sun than it would otherwise.

Then there are sidereal days, in which we reset when the same point on Earth is aligned with the same relatively distant stars.  Such distance means the angular change to those stars caused by Earth’s motion is much smaller than the angular change to the sun.  So those day lengths are, I believe, more consistent, but they are actually slightly less than 24 hours long.

I suppose, at our current level of technology and understanding, the most consistent day measure would be Earth’s rotation relative to specific spots on the cosmic microwave background radiation, which would basically be as far away as anything we can measure.

The Milky way is moving slightly relative to the CMB though.  I think this is called proper motion*, but I may be misremembering that term.  Still, that rate of motion is tiny relative to the scales involved.  Although, come to think of it, since the Earth is moving within and along with the Milky Way, it’s possible that the Earth’s motion relative to the other, relatively distant stars within the galaxy may be smaller than its motion relative to the CMB.

I don’t know whether or not that is the case.  If anyone out there knows off the top of your head, I would be delighted if you would let me know.  But don’t bother Googling it, or asking some LLM about it; I can do that for myself if we’re going to resort to such tactics.

Speaking of relative motion and such, I did something relatively new yesterday afternoon with respect to reading.  Allow me to set the stage**.

I recently started dabbling (very inconsistently) in the online courses at MIT (and other universities) on their YouTube channel(s).  I started with Quantum Mechanics and then also started the General Relativity course, since I have some personal curiosities related to that subject that I’ve yet to see answered.

In the first lecture, the GR professor went over the main texts they would be using.  Well, I already have two of them, so I figured I would get the third.  I ordered it in paperback (the hardcover was ridiculously expensive, whereas the softcover was about the same price as any good-sized trade paperback).  After it arrived, it sat rather forlornly on my desk for some weeks.

oplus_34

Now, as I’ve said, I’ve been having a hard time reading fiction or nonfiction lately.  But a softcover textbook is no heavier than my lapcom would be, unlike the two hardcover GR texts I own.  So I brought the text General Relativity, by Wald, with me when I left the office yesterday.

The cool thing is, I actually read from it while waiting for the train and then while on the train.  I completed the preface/introduction and chapter one!  It’s not a long chapter, of course, and it mostly reviewed concepts of special relativity and so on***, which I know relatively (har) well.

Still, I feel reasonably pleased to have done this, and I hope to continue the process.  Maybe once I get this book under my belt, I’ll feel more inclined to do similarly with Sean Carroll’s Spacetime and Geometry, which is hardcover but not too terribly heavy.  Gravitation, on the other hand, is a book comparable in scale to Harrison’s, the “bible” of internal medicine.  It’s not a book one tends to carry around (though it provides its own rather pointed example of the effects of gravitation).

Anyway, with any luck, maybe I’ll inaugurate a more useful commuter reading schedule.  And maybe I’ll achieve enough skill at GR that I might be able to explore my perennial question.  At least, I should be able to learn more stuff, and that’s always a good thing.

I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, no, in astronomy “proper motion” has to do with angular movement with respect to more distant stars, or something along those lines.  I don’t think it’s a great term for that.  The motion of a galaxy relative to the CMB is apparently called the “peculiar motion”, which seems like a rather peculiar choice to me.

**I don’t know how you could stop me even if you so wished.

***It has one practice problem, which is a version of the classic barn door paradox aka the ladder paradox, but I didn’t work the problem.  I know the basic answer already; it involves the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity, and the author asks us to draw a spacetime diagram demonstrating the basic issue.  I had no resources to do this on the train.

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These our bloggers, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air

Hello and good morning.  As you probably know, it is Thursday.  If you’re reading this later, however, I guess it might be useful for you to know that the 23rd of July in 2026 CE was a Thursday.  Maybe you’re an anthropologist or an archaeologist, and it’s a thousand years from now, or more.  If you’ve forgotten how to convert your year-numbering system to CE (AKA AD) then I am sorry, but I cannot help you.

Oh, wait, maybe I can:  the last time comet Halley passed through the inner solar system was 1986 CE, so 40 years ago from the year in which I write this.  Does that help?

Maybe you need a better description of comet Halley.  Well, it’s a big ball of ice and some rock, and when it gets close to the sun, the heat causes a lot of the ice to sublimate and become vaporous, and the vapor, which scatters light well, turns into a sort of aura and a “tail”, trailing away from the sun in a direction caused by the solar wind…

Oh, so you know what a comet is and looks like, you just want to know about this specific comet.  You want to know things to help you determine which comet it is so that you can get a clear guide to what I mean by “1986 CE/AD”.

Well, I can only tell you a little more than I already have.  It’s a short period comet, orbiting eccentrically (as comets tend to do) from well inside the Oort Cloud or even the Kuiper Belt*.  It is quite regular, as things in orbits that are not frequently significantly perturbed tend to be.  The period of its orbit is, if memory serves, about 76 years.  That ought to help you a lot, at least if you have astronomical records and keep track of such things at any level.

Years, of course, are a natural time increment, being the length of time it takes the Earth to go around the sun once “exactly”, returning to the precise spot in its orbit relative to the sun.  Mind you, the solar system, and the galaxy, and the local group, and all that other stuff are constantly moving, so in fact neither Earth nor comet Halley ever truly returns to where it was before.  But the solar system moves as a whole, more or less consistent in its internal motions despite the fact that its all orbiting the center of the Milky Way** about once every quarter billion years.

Of course, far enough in the future, the period of comet Halley will change, and eventually it will basically evaporate.  Also, the Earth’s orbital period will change over time (though much more slowly, since it is much more massive and its orbit less open to perturbation by other quite massive objects).

And, of course, in about five billion years‒about twenty turns ‘round the Milky Way‒the sun will become a red giant.  It won’t be like flipping a switch or something, where the sun is just the sun one day, 4,999,999,999 years and 364 days (or whatever) from now, then the next day, boom, it’ll swell up and devour the inner solar system.

No, it will be a pretty gradual process, for as the sun fuses more and more hydrogen, there will be proportionally less available, and the outward pressure caused by fusion will decrease, and so the the sun’s core will contract and it will get hotter so that helium will begin to fuse, but that won’t last nearly as long as the hydrogen did.

Also, as the core of the sun contracts and gets hotter, the outer portions of the sun will swell due to the increased heat within.  Well before the sun is a full-on red giant, its increasing temperature will have made conditions impossible on Earth for life as we know it.

But if you’re still around, five billion years from now, I hope your technological advances will make my help utterly irrelevant.  You might even have made the natural life cycle*** of the sun as much a matter of historical trivia as will presumably be the natural lifespan of an average modern human.

Anyway, by five billion years from now, you’ll be seeing the close-encounter/merger/collision of the Andromeda galaxy with the Milky Way, and that’s likely to be quite a spectacle.  That is, unless you’ve developed technology to intervene in that scenario.  It seems implausible, but five billion years is a long time for scientific and technological advancement.

In closing‒just in case you’re even farther in the future even than that and cosmic expansion has caused all but the local galaxy to pass over the cosmic horizon‒I want to tell you that this is not the only galaxy in the universe.  At the time of this writing, within the visible universe, there were between a hundred billion and a trillion extant galaxies.

But the universe, which “began” much more compactly, has been expanding since nearly 14 billion years ago, and if that expansion is continuously accelerating, as currently seems to be the case, the distance to all other galaxies will have eventually become too great and the recession too rapid for light ever to reach the Milky Way from any of them again.  But they did and do exist, even if there’s no trace left of them that you can see.

I thought you might like to know.

TTFN

*Do you need me to explain what these are?  Let me know.  Oh, wait, I’m in your past.  You can’t let me know without time travel (unless I’m still alive in your time), and if you had that, you wouldn’t need me to try to give you clues to the date system used in my time.

**Other candy bars are available.

***Other personal exercise devices are available.

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Cosmic. Way out. I can relate.

Well, here we are beginning another Monday, and I’m writing this post—again—on the mini lapcom.

I say “again” not because I am writing this very post for a second (or more) time, nor because the last post I did was written on the lapcom, because it was not.  I mean “again” in the sense that last Monday I wrote my blog post on the lapcom.  I also did so on Tuesday and on Wednesday last week, but I cannot yet say that I will do so tomorrow and the next day.  I won’t even say “barring the unforeseen”, because I can rather easily imagine, and therefore foresee, situations in which I will not write those blog posts on the lapcom.

Of course, I also cannot predict whether, like last week, I will write Thursday’s and Friday’s posts on the smartphone.  It’s not that unlikely, but I don’t know ahead of time whether I will write them on the smartphone or the lapcom.  I could make predictions, but I think anything deviating terribly far from 50/50 would probably be very much a rectally sourced prediction.

I will say, though, that if I do write blog posts the rest of the days this week—which will include Saturday, alas—I will almost certainly write them either on the lapcom or the smartphone.  How’s that for a bold prediction?  It’s not a certainty, of course, but then again, pretty much nothing is.  It’s getting into the high 90 percentiles though, I’d guess.  I’m not skilled enough at probability/decision theory to get much finer in my estimation than that.

Anyway, that was about 250 words of utterly pointless drivel, wasn’t it?  It’s quite odd how much and how quickly I can write about more or less nothing of significance.  Mind you, from a certain point of view, nothing is really of significance.  Also nothing is of significance.  I mean two different things by those two different uses of the same words.

The first means that there is almost nothing in the universe that, in itself, is significant (cosmically speaking, of course—on different scales, significance has different requirements).  No individual, localized thing or fact can matter much on the largest scales.  On the other hand, nothing—the vacuum, absence, whatever you want to call it—is significant.  This partly refers to the fact that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerated rate, and this seems to be due to the vacuum energy, the energy of “empty” space.  A uniform energy density in space creates a negative pressure, which creates “negative gravity” in a sense, and that drives an expansion of spacetime.

The nature of this vacuum energy, or cosmological constant, is definitely significant in that it will determine, almost solely as far as we can tell, the future fate of the universe.

Of course, the term “vacuum” may be somewhat misleading given its ordinary usage (quite apart from when one refers to the household appliance).  The vacuum is never really “empty” despite what the usual meaning of the word is.  It’s full of all sorts of quantum fields as well as the gravitational field that is spacetime itself.  The vacuum is just when these fields are in their lowest possible states/energy levels*.

There’s also the famous Higgs Field, which actually is one of the quantum fields, but it is interesting in that it is a scalar field, meaning that it has magnitude at every point but not direction (like a map demonstrating local temperatures on Earth’s surface, as opposed to one detailing the wind, which will have magnitude and direction).

If this seems a peculiar distinction to you, think of the electromagnetic field, which has both magnitude and direction at every point.  It’s actually a little more complex even than just that, because of course, electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the electromagnetic field, but each one of them is a vector field (with magnitude and direction) which interacts with the other, so the combination of them is something more involved.

Also, when energies are high enough (changing the way the Higgs field interacts with other fields), the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force turn out to be part of the same thing, called the electroweak force.  And, of course, there is the question of whether all the fields are really just aspects of some “higher” field or structure.

This would be some form of “unified field theory” (not to be confused with GUTs, or “grand unified theories”, which are less grand and less unified than unified field theories).  Of course, we don’t know that there is a unified field.  There may not be.  There may just be a minimum number of fields that cannot be further reduced.

If M-theory (AKA string theory) is correct, then yes, there is a unified form from which all fields derive their character thanks to the shapes and resonances of their vibrations in high-dimensional spaces.  On the other hand, other versions of quantum gravity such as “loop quantum gravity” leave gravity (AKA spacetime itself) as a separate kind of field, composed of tiny, tiny parts (the “loops”) knitted together.

At least some versions of this theory have been disconfirmed, however, because it predicts a very, very slight difference in the speed of travel of electromagnetic waves depending on wavelength, and light from extremely distant quasars has been tested and found to be uniform in arrival time (based on variability in the quasars and specific catastrophic events, if memory serves) from wavelength the wavelength, even to tiny parts in billions of light years traveled.

Okay, well, that’s surely enough trivia for anyone early on a Monday morning.  I wish I didn’t have to work today, but then again, I wish I didn’t feel like I have to do anything.  But I do feel that way.  I guess it’s probably better than being inert.  Without a goal or goals—terminal, instrumental, or otherwise—there is no action.

You can call it a “drive” instead of a “goal” if you prefer.  That may be a more accurate term, since nature doesn’t act in a teleological way (outside of thinking minds) but instead generates drives/urges/impulses, some of which lead to increased genetic reproduction and some of which lead in the other direction.  Over time, the former are the ones that tend to accumulate, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Enough.  I already said it was enough, didn’t I?  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.  And remember, if you tend to come to this blog via other social media, you can subscribe to it using your email, and then you’ll get emails sharing every new post with you directly.

Take care.

*There is also a thing called a false vacuum.  Spacetime itself could be in such a state, if the vacuum energy is capable of tunneling to an even lower energy level than the one at which it currently resides.  This would not be a good thing for the current inhabitants of the universe, but at least they would never know it if the drop-down happened, because everything that currently exists would be erased at the speed of light.  The universe as a whole would even be affected, but it wouldn’t be endangered per se.

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I almost forgot to put a title here again

I’m writing this blog post on my smartphone, as I did yesterday’s post, and in contrast to the posts from Monday through Wednesday.  I haven’t yet received any direct feedback on whether there’s a difference for the reader or what it might be, but the numbers seem to indicate that the phone-written posts are more popular than the lapcom-written ones.

This could, however, be mere statistical fluctuation, having no relation to whether readers find one or the other type of post better.  Quite possibly, most readers wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other without being told, even if the lives of their dearest loved ones were on the line.

Such is the difficulty with finding truly dispositive evidence in ordinary life.  But that’s not to say it can’t be done.  One just has to try very hard to be clear-headed and objective.  And I don’t mean “try to try” to be clear-headed, not just to be able to say “I tried to be clear-headed”, but actually to act with the true intent to be clear-headed.

Of course, the human senses and human brains gather a tremendous amount of information every waking moment, checking it against their hitherto-built model of reality, seeing if things meet expectations according to that model, and trying to improve that model, that map, of reality.  Mind you, there’s way more info in most places than anyone can take in.  That’s okay, for the most part.  Most of that detailed information is irrelevant to the life and reproduction of a far-flung African ape*.

Speaking of updating one’s models of reality, I just yesterday came across a video/written course on tensors (for physicists and would-be physicists).  The professor’s approach seems like it’s going to be a good one, so I’m planning on trying to go through the course.

I want to learn well about tensors (about which my understanding is not yet fully clear, though I get the gist of the basics) not just for my own curiosity‒which drives me, in principle, to want to try to understand everything in the universe‒but also because I will need skill in using them and manipulating them if I am to solve my longstanding point of curiosity in Special/General Relativity.

I have a specific question about what the theories predict would happen in specific circumstances, and I have not been able to find anyone who reliably answers it.  Really, no one has answered it at all, which is not too surprising, since it is fairly esoteric.

We’ll see whether I can commit to the bit.  I have a hard time maintaining focus on things for too long at once.  I dearly love to learn about new things and to develop new skills, especially in the sciences‒well, also in the arts‒but it seems that after (far too short) a time I get distracted by another interesting thing.  Either that or I just get mentally fatigued and need to distract myself, usually either with music or something funny.

I suppose that’s not really that unusual.  But lordy, it’s frustrating.  I wish I could actually want to do what I want to want to do.  Maybe I will be able to do so someday.  Maybe I will be able to devise or find more direct control of the regions of my brain which govern attention, focus, and drive.

Of course, we do have some somewhat direct ways to affect those brain regions.  The most widely used of these ways is caffeine.  The majority of people in the world use some form of caffeine on a regular basis.  At least, that was so the last time I looked.

Of course, there are other such tools, some more powerful in some ways than caffeine, but they come with their own sets of difficulties:  these include the amphetamines and related compounds and cocaine.  They can be useful in certain circumstances, but are difficult to use well, without significantly detrimental overall outcomes.

It would be easier if we could directly stimulate (and suppress) specific areas and processes of our brains at will.  Of course, the technology to do such things exists, more or less, in raw form.  One can stimulate the brain with implanted electrodes, or one can manipulate it more indirectly via externally applied electric and magnetic fields.

This has been done, of course, if only fairly crudely.  The technology I describe in Unanimity is (mostly) very real.  Is that what makes it scaaaary?

Probably not.

Okay, that’s enough for today, and for this week as well, since I am not working tomorrow (barring the truly very much unforeseen).  I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.  Have a good meal or two while you’re at it.  Though, possibly, that’s implicit in most concepts of good days and good weekends, come to think of it.

Oh, well.  Have good ones nevertheless.

*That refers to humans, in case it’s not clear.

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The name IS bond…but a double-N is more stable than a double-O

Well, it’s Friday at last, and this time, I can actually be pleased, because I don’t have to work tomorrow.

I suppose I don’t have to work any day, in principle.  I don’t have to do anything, really, if you think about it, and neither do you.  As Louis CK pointed out, if you really don’t want to do something, you can always kill yourself.  You can only do that once, but you can do it.

That was stand up comedy, of course, so don’t take it too seriously.  It’s not as though self-destruction is the only option.  One could instead just destroy the people and things that are trying to make you do something.  It would be a bit more work (ironically), but it would probably be much more satisfying*.

And it might be less work than you would think.  Most things and beings are far more breakable than they appear‒the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is always on your side here.  And, to quote another joker (this time the Joker), “Everything burns.”

Actually, though, strictly speaking, if we’re thinking of chemical burning/oxidation such as what the Joker did to that very large stack of money, then it is not true that everything burns.  Actually, burning such as we have here on the surface of the Earth may be an extremely rare cosmic phenomenon.

It only happens here because there is so much free molecular oxygen‒it’s roughly 20% of the atmosphere (by molar concentration, I believe, not necessarily by mass, since oxygen is a heavier element than nitrogen‒each molecule of oxygen is about 8/7 as massive as each molecule of nitrogen).  The percentage of oxygen was even higher in the past for a while; that was the time when those “giant” insects lived.

But free molecular oxygen is not stable for the long term, not if there are other chemical elements nearby.

Nitrogen molecules are stable, of course (else it wouldn’t remain the majority of the atmosphere‒it would, at the very least, react with oxygen).  N2 is a triple-bonded gas molecule, with some of the strongest bonds in all of chemistry.  This is part of why so many explosives are made with nitrogen based compounds.  The separated nitrogen atoms within want to join together, and they do so with a tremendous snap, releasing a lot of energy in the process.

Think of ammonium nitrate:  NH4+ /  NO3–.  If that gets enough of a kick, those nitrogen atoms crash together violently.  Then, of course, the four hydrogen atoms bond with two of the oxygens, releasing more energy and making water.  The remaining oxygen atom probably bonds with whatever atom it next encounters, I would guess.  That’s what oxygen tends to do, unlike nitrogen, which likes** to bond with itself best.

And that is why chemical, oxygen-based fires may only exist on the surface of the Earth (and any other planet that might have evolved organisms whose metabolism releases oxygen as a byproduct).  Free oxygen tends to react with any of many, many other kinds of atoms, and those bonds tend to be very stable.  CO2, for instance, is highly stable, as are the various silicon oxides***.

Indeed, it apparently took eons for the cyanobacteria and archaea that photosynthesized on the early Earth to produce enough oxygen to become a significant part of the atmosphere, because first the free oxygen reacted with all sorts of exposed other elements, such as iron.  It seems that rust as a kind of iron “ore” may not be all that common in the universe either!  It’s prevalent on Earth because of the oxygen that floated around reacting with it for millions and millions of years.

So, anyway, what was I saying?  Oh, yeah:  instead of destroying yourself so you don’t have to work, you could instead destroy the place that wants to make you work.  On Earth, at least, pretty much everything that isn’t already an oxide (and so is, in a sense, ash) can burn, so the Joker’s claim is not entirely incorrect within the appropriate bailiwick.

Or, on the other hand, you could just…not go to work.  If your job is so repugnant to you, you could seek another job or another way of life, and you probably would not need to destroy or even harm anyone.

But that’s crazy talk; we’ll have no more of that!  This is a family blog‒it has a wife blog and two children blogs at home****.

I hope you have a good weekend.

*Actually, satisfaction is a term that probably doesn’t even apply to the dead, so almost everything would at least have a higher “absolute value” or “magnitude” of satisfaction than being dead would have.  The problem is when that vector of satisfaction is pointing in a negative direction‒then, in the number line sense, being dead would entail being more satisfied, or at least less unsatisfied.

**I’m being reckless by using anthropomorphic language here and elsewhere in this post.  There is no reason to suspect that nitrogen atoms actually like anything, nor do they appear to have any capacity to have preferences (panpsychism notwithstanding…and it is not withstanding as far as I can see).  I am speaking figuratively for the sake of being able to convey things concisely, but please don’t be misled by intentional-seeming language.  Perhaps it would be better to say that it “tends to” rather than “likes to”.  It would be more accurate, but I think most people don’t really feel how strong such tendencies can be.

***These are even more stable than the carbon oxides, and they tend to be solid at typical temperatures and pressures, which tips the scales away from the likelihood of silicon-based life.  Otherwise, chemically, silicon is much like carbon, in having 4 valence electrons, each taking up a “half” orbital, so in principle it could, like carbon, make huge, long, complicated molecules analogous to DNA.  But the solidity and density and lack of solubility it engenders would tend to get it the way.  Silicon is also a larger atom and the valence electrons are farther out from the nucleus, so the bonding strength between silicons is weaker, and they don’t form four-partner bonds as stably as carbon.

****To steal a joke from Dave Barry.

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In nature’s infinite blog of secrecy a little I can read.

Hello and good morning.

I may be brief today*, because I am mentally fairly exhausted.  Yesterday was a bad day for me, pain-wise and mood-wise.  I’ve had large amounts of more than one kind of pain medicine on board, and I felt…well, I felt somewhat less pain in some places, but I’ve started to get some broader symptoms that I sometimes get when I’m taking too many NSAIDs for too long.

My thumbs and my knees and ankles and such are actually feeling wobbly and unstable as well as being generally a bit puffy and plenty sore.  This isn’t really like an inflammatory kind of swelling; that would indeed be a failure of the Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug(s) I take, would it not?  No, this feels more like a sense of having excess fluid in each joint, as well as in between them, and less tautness, less stability, and somewhat ironically, more pain, albeit of a slightly different character that usual.  It’s quite frustrating.

Also, my back and hips and shoulders don’t feel much, if any, better than usual.

I’ve been wondering lately if I might have some form of relatively mild hypermobility syndrome, which often goes along with ASD it seems (some of the causative genes are probably the same, or at least tend to travel together through the genome).

I have long had certain slightly atypical flexibility issues or attributes**.  For instance, I’ve always been able, with a bit of a pull, to put one or the other of my feet behind my head from a seated position.  I can also scratch pretty much any part of my own back, and I have always been able to do this, though I sometimes need to pull one arm a bit with the other.  Also, I have a hard time holding my head straight upright for very long at a time; it’s uncomfortable, and I need to lean it to one side or another pretty much constantly.  Maybe that’s just a weird habit, I don’t know.

Of course, hypermobility can be associated with various kinds of chronic pain, and can certainly make other things worse.  Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be cured, any more than autism can be cured (or any more than having a particular color of eyes or hair can be cured, though they can be masked, as by dyes or contact lenses).

I am far from sure about this tentative self-diagnosis, and I’m always leery of “second year med student syndrome”, but I think I am being reasonably objective here.  Genetic testing would be required to confirm something like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, but I don’t meet the criteria for full-blown EDS***, and less full-blown syndromes may not easily (nor cheaply) be testable, or testable at all.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter much.  I do not expect my baseline previous health to be recoverable in any reasonable sense.  This is one reason I’m not too terribly worried about things like heart disease and infections and so on.  Why would I want to live a longer life of the kind I now live?  It’s like asking someone if they want the massive street construction project on their block, that’s slowing traffic and making terrible noise all day and into most nights, to be extended‒not by the workers doing more improvement, but just by working more slowly and being less efficient.

At least yesterday, in between doing payroll, processing deals on an unusually busy day, and trying to discourage my body from committing war crimes against itself, I remembered and indulged in a resource I haven’t used in a while:  I got on bioarXiv and skimmed through the abstracts of some of the more recently uploaded papers in general biology, neuroscience, genetics, molecular biology, and such like.  It can be kind of fun.

I don’t enjoy it as much as I do going to the original arXiv (hosted at my alma mater), which deals in physics, mathematics, computer science and the like.  But the bio site requires less mental effort and is simpler in many ways.  This is at least partly due to the fact that I am an MD, and I got my degree from one of the more research-oriented medical schools (we were required to do a publishable medical science research project as part of our degree) so the terminology is more or less at my fingertips.  This probably would apply even more at medrXiv, at which I spend less time than the latter two.

ArXiv, the physics/maths/CS site, has oodles of interesting articles always up‒I have, for instance, downloaded a PDF of a paper by David Deutsch from there‒but most require more mental effort than on the other sites, because I don’t have as good a handle on some of the jargon, and I often need to review the mathematics involved, or more often try to absorb it for the first time.  Still, it’s very cool, though it’s a real embarrassment of riches; it’s like being in the biggest candy store in the world,  but having only three dollars to your name, and having to choose what to buy with it.

The potential opportunity costs are staggering, but I guess that’s a good problem to have.

Speaking of reviewing mathematics, I found a nice little YouTube channel by a woman from MIT who does good reviews of basic integration and more advanced techniques like integration by parts and trig substitutions and such like.  I find her stuff much less sleep-inducing than the videos on 3Blue1Brown, though Grant has oodles of great videos, well-produced and in-depth but clear, about many topics in mathematics.  Unfortunately, his voice is if anything too calm for me, and his animations, though superb, are if anything too smooth.

I think, also, that I learn better by seeing someone writing the stuff out‒possibly this engages my mirror neurons and thus makes more of my whole brain focused on what’s happening.

Incidentally, the lady mentioned above is not officially affiliated with MIT, she just went there.  But you can actually “attend” lecture courses in various subjects in Physics, in Mathematics, in Economics, in Computer Science, and so on, from MIT at their YouTube channel.  It’s truly remarkable, and if you’re just after learning the stuff but aren’t seeking an Official Piece of Paper™, it’s a tremendous resource!  Stanford also has similar online lecture courses, as I think does CalTech.

I’m pretty sure Harvard does this also, but there’s no need for any of you to go slumming there.  Why not just watch Baby Shark or something‒and Gangnam Style is actually pretty enjoyable.  I know, I know, Steven Pinker is at Harvard, and he’s one of the most enjoyable (and thought-provoking) public thinkers in the world, but I don’t think he gives any of their online lectures.

Although, given the notorious grade inflation known to be rampant at Harvard, you might just get an official “A” from them simply by clicking on one of their videos.

Okay, I’m at the stage of taking cheap shots at Harvard (they do not deserve such disrespect, even though there really is a problem with grade inflation), so I’ll call this post to a close.  I hope you’re all having a better week, year, decade, and life than I am having.  Though, really, if you’re not reading preprint scientific papers for free online, how good can your life be?

TTFN

*I was not.  Perhaps this is analogous to the situation that led to the famous quote about not having time enough to write a short letter‒only in this case, it is not time but mental energy that limits my concision.

**Some of these things are slightly curtailed now because I am too plump, but that’s a different issue.

***No, I do not refer to Ross Perot’s old company, Electronic Data Systems.