time

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There’s an infinity that shapes our ends, despite having no end itself

It’s Friday now.  It will in fact be Friday now until midnight tonight, local time.  Indeed, one could argue it will be Friday now until finally midnight strikes at the international date line, when this Friday will finally be gone from the entire Earth, forever.  So, though as a matter of physics there is no universal “now”, and even for individuals, the “now” is an evanescent thing, a constantly moving and infinitesimal single frame of the movie of one’s existence, nevertheless that “now”, for me and for most others on Earth, will still be Friday for some time.

How many such “nows” are there, even for one individual?  Well, that depends a bit.  If the Planck time (5.39 x 10-44) is just an artifact of our lack of complete knowledge or ability to calculate, and time is truly continuous, then there is an uncountable infinity of such “nows” in any given day, or indeed in any given hour, or in any given second, or in any given picosecond, or indeed, in any given Planck time*.

Such is the nature of the uncountable infinity, as in the case of the real numbers:  between any two numbers, no matter how arbitrarily close you want to make them (as long as they are not identical) there is an uncountable infinity of numbers, larger than the number of possible quantum states in the visible universe, larger than the “countably” infinite number of integers.  In fact, that uncountable infinity between any two such real numbers is as large as the uncountable infinity of the set of real numbers itself, of which it is a subset.

Infinities are weird.  You need to be careful with them.  I doubt that contemplating them has actually driven anyone to madness‒though it’s easy enough to imagine that it might exacerbate depression‒but maybe minds somewhat prone to madness are more likely than others to contemplate infinities in the first place.  In any case, contemplating them can put other things into perspective.  For instance, no matter how arbitrarily large a number you might pick, it is just as far from infinity‒even the boring old “aleph nought” infinity‒as is the number one.

An interesting thing to contemplate is that, if you could pick a truly random number from, say, all positive integers, you would almost certainly get some number far huger than any number ever named or contemplated by humans, larger than a googolplex, larger than Graham’s number, larger than TREE(3), larger than the time required for a Poincare recurrence of the cosmos.  Graham’s number (for example) is big; the information required to state it precisely, if contained within the space equivalent to a human brain, would cause that space to collapse into a black hole!  But Graham’s number is nevertheless finite, and so there is a finite number of positive integers lower than Graham’s number but an infinite number of them larger than it.

It’s interesting to note the related fact that the chance of you randomly picking any particular integer is mathematically equivalent to zero‒so I’m told‒and yet you will pick some number.  Let that bake your noodle for a bit.

By the way, when I earlier compared the moments between two points in a continuous time stream to the number of possible quantum states in the visible universe, I was being a bit contradictory.  After all, our designation of the maximum number of possible states in a given enclosed region of spacetime‒which is “equivalent” to the number of square Planck lengths (each such square being 1.6 x 10-35 meters, squared, or 2.6 x 10-70 square meters) in the surface area of a sphere surrounding such a region**‒is based on quantum mechanics, and thus implicitly entails time being only sensibly divisible down to the scale of the Planck time.  So comparing that to a continuous time is comparing two fundamentally incompatible realities.

Oh, incidentally, I’m writing this post on my smartphone today.  I just didn’t feel up to bringing the lapcom with me yesterday, and I didn’t expect to write any on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado today.  I did, however, have a bit of a thought, as I’m prone to do when conscious, whether I want to do it or not.

That thought was that, perhaps, I can try to write my blog posts in the evenings‒on the way back from work, say‒but set them up still to be published the following morning and work on fiction in the morning.  Writing fiction seems to give me a boost, mental health-wise, when I do it in the morning.  It’s quite ego syntonic, as they say, or at least it seems to be.  But I don’t really want to stop writing this blog.  Then I’d just be floating in the void all alone, writing fiction that I like but that almost no one else will ever read.  That is a discouraging thought.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be writing a post (for) tomorrow, since I don’t think I’m going to be working tomorrow.  If I am, and if I cannot get out of it, I guess I will write a post, and it will likely be a grumpy one if it happens.  But I may start next week writing the following day’s blog post on the evening before and doing fiction in the morning.  One good aspect to writing fiction in the morning is that the initial writing and the editing process are separate.  I don’t have to edit what I write each day on that day, which I have to do with this blog.

We shall see what happens.

In closing, I leave you with this juxtaposition of two notions:

*If time is not sensibly divisible even in principle below the Planck time, then the maximum number of “nows” in a given day is just 24 hours divided by the Planck time, or about 1.6 x 1048 “nows”.

**See Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy calculations and the Holographic Principle.

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.

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Free will with any purchase of $100 or more

Happy Boxing Day, everyone.

For those of you in the US who don’t have much interaction with Great Britain or Canada (or the “antipodes”, where I think the day is also “celebrated”), Boxing Day is the official name for the day after Christmas, and since Christmas was yesterday, today is Boxing Day.  QED.

There is, no doubt, a thorough and accurate explanation for why this day is called Boxing Day, but I have not yet encountered it, despite occasional half-assed searches.  I also, honestly, don’t care very much.  I have a vague set of notions for possible explanations, existing in a sort of quantum superposition/probability cloud in my head, and that’s good enough for me.

On the other hand, if anyone out there knows the definitive, accurate, appropriately cited and replicated explanation for the source of the term Boxing Day…just keep it to yourself.  I’m not interested in reading any comments about it.

I am also not interested in reading any comments about Christmas, but I hope those of you who celebrate that holiday had a very lovely day, and enjoyed it in the best possible way with the best possible company.

By “best possible” please don’t take me to refer to some idealized, perfect*, eutopian** day.  I mean, the best possible day you could have given the circumstances of all the people and events in your life and around you.  I don’t expect it was without any unpleasantness or drama or minor irritations.  At the very least, most of us have to use the toilet several times a day, and those who don’t are generally worse off, not better off, than those who do.

But if you got to spend the day (or a significant chunk of it) with at least one person you love and who hopefully loves you, then you have at least some reason to think of it as a good day.  I did not have a good day, but hey, this is me, right?  When do I ever have a good day?

The next big holiday coming up is New Year.  Of course, if the universe overall is a closed loop of time (I have no real reason to suspect that it is, but no strong reason to be convinced that it is not) then this year is not new, nor is it old, it is just fixed.  From within any kind of deterministic spacetime, loop or otherwise, it can feel as though time has passed, but as Einstein pointed out, this would be an illusion (albeit a persistent one).

If things are nondeterministic, then all bets are off with respect to whether time is an illusion or not.  But please, don’t fall for the notion that the facts of quantum mechanics mean that the universe is non-deterministic.  They can mean that, depending on the truth underlying the mathematical descriptions, but quantum mechanics can be just as deterministic‒in a slightly more complicated way‒as Newtonian or Einsteinian classical physics.  Two examples are “superdeterminism” and the Everettian, many-worlds description of quantum mechanics.  There are probably others.

The point being, if the universe is deterministic, then each moment, each year, each Planck time is in a way permanent and “eternal”.  Each event is not only implied in the prior state of the universe, but it is also implied in the future state of the universe.

Some might complain that this would imply that there is no such thing as free will.  I think you are correct.  But so what?  Your will is patently less free than you imagine even in simpler, more straightforward terms.  Can you quickly drink a fifth of Wild Turkey 151 on an empty stomach (with no regurgitation) and choose not to become intoxicated (and possibly dead)?  Can you choose just not to feel tired after being awake for 36 hours?  Can you choose not to feel acute or chronic pain?  If you can do that last thing, I’d be interested in knowing how, so feel free to put that in the comments, but don’t waste my time with nonsense, please.

Anyway, as I like to say, I either have free will or I don’t, but I don’t have any choice in the matter.

It’s a bit like when people say absurd things such as “I wouldn’t want to live in a world without a God”.  My response, usually internal, to such statements is, “I don’t recall being given a choice about which kind of universe I would live in.  Did I miss some prenatal, preconceptual meeting where people were given the various options regarding into which universe they would be born?”

Anyway, it is whatever it is.  In a certain sense, it can of course be useful to consider what the nature of reality most truly and completely is, so we can navigate it in the best available way.  But in another sense, the ability to learn about a deterministic universe is just baked in.  And like everything else, it is permanent, albeit not in the usual, prosaic sense of enduring through time unchanging, since time itself is one of the permanent things.  Does this imply some “meta-time”***?  Not necessarily, but it could in principle.

I don’t think we know enough about the deep roots of reality to do more than speculate about such things.  The speculation can be fun, though, and occasionally it can briefly distract one from the unbearable shittiness of being.  Alas, that distraction never lasts for long; mine is fading rapidly even now, and I don’t feel like writing or even breathing any more.  I can’t do much about the latter process without causing a big to-do, but the writing I can stop any…

*Whatever that even means.

**This is not a typo or a misunderstanding or misspelling.  This is my (apparent) neologism for a truly and realistically ideal place.  The word “utopia” means essentially “no place”, highlighting the fact that such a place does not exist, even potentially.  Whereas my term uses the prefix “eu-” which means “true or good or well” as in eukaryote or eugenics or my middle name “Eugene”.

***This term has nothing to do with Facebook or Instagram or whatever else to which Z*ckerberg has tried to arrogate the term “meta”.

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Mon Dieu, it’s Mon day

Well, it’s Monday again and here I go again…on my own…going down the only road I’ve ever known.  Like a drifter, I was born to wear cologne*.

Anyway, I’m starting a new blog post at the beginning of a new work week, and the number of words in the footnotes is already significantly larger than the number here in the “main body” of the post.  That’s not all that unusual for me, but it is probably above the mean by at least a standard deviation.  I don’t see any practical way to check that, though, and I certainly don’t have enough interest to try to figure out such a way.  If any readers want to figure it out and share their results, please feel free to share them (but not with me).

I wonder if I’ve ever written a blog post in which the number of words in the footnotes is larger overall than the number of words in the main body.  It’s not impossible.  I wouldn’t be surprised either way, honestly.  But I’m not going to check.  You guys can if you want, and you should definitely share the results if you do (but again, not with me***).

[Quick aside‒I just thought of a spoof term, “Alexathymia”:  a condition that occurs when a person is so ensnared by the internet, web, and social media, that they need to ask their “digital assistant” how they feel (or should feel) about some product or issue or person.]

I’m sorry, I know this is a fairly strange sequence of thoughts to convey in a beginning-of-the-week blog post, even for me.  At least it feels that way from the inside.  I guess that’s one of the perks and the drawbacks of not having an agenda when one starts writing a post.  It can go anywhere (yay!), but also, well…it can go anywhere (ugh!).

Still, however erratic or hard to follow or annoying my writing here is, it’s at least better than me writing about all the negative thoughts and feelings that run through my poor excuse for a mind.  I hope it’s better.  If my dark, crumbly center is the best of me, well, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Probably, I would just make a mess.

However jerkily erratic my writing might be this morning, at least I’m sticking with my new word count “goal” of 701, so hopefully I won’t bore you for too long with my weirdnesses.  Also, I hope I won’t bore you with my banalities.  To be too unremarkable or to be too unusual are both negative things; you can tell by the use of the word “too”, which in this case refers to detrimental excess (though it can also mean “also”, but that wouldn’t make much sense here).

As for anything else, well…I guess this is the first full week of the new month, November****.  We also had the daylight savings time flip over this weekend here in the US, the one where we “fall back”, i.e., we set all clocks back an hour.  I’m never sure whether this constitutes the start or the stop of “Daylight Savings Time”, but it really doesn’t matter, so I don’t waste any time trying to memorize it.

It’s a strange thing, this hour shift, and it can throw one’s circadian rhythms off a bit, which is troubling if one is subject to seasonal affective problems, which I am.  It’s particularly annoying for nightfall to come suddenly much sooner than it did the day before.  I know that the nighttime grows longer during the time between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice anyway, but it’s easier to stomach without the sudden jump.

In college, though, I liked getting that extra hour on one weekend in the autumn, though I rued its reverse in the spring.  Mind you, I suspect it had little actual impact, but the psychological reward/punishment effect on my affect was not to be entirely dismissed.

And, with that, I think I’ll draw this fairly disjointed blog post to a close and put it out of your misery, if not its own.  Thank you for joining me here in the month of November.  I say “here” as if it referred to a place rather than a time (or a range of time, though we rarely refer only to dimensionless points when we refer to places in space, so I guess that’s okay).  ANYWAY, I hope you all have a week this week that is better than the last was, and that this trend continues, even if only in the most gradual fashion, for the rest of your lives.

*That’s a Mondegreen‒a misheard lyric‒from the song Here I Go Again by Whitesnake (which I thought came out much later in the ‘80s than it actually did, which was 1982).  Well, the last sentence was a Mondegreen**, the previous ones were accurate.

**Though I often do wear cologne, because I like having a pleasant odor.  But I’m not wearing any today, and I certainly was not born to do so.

***Okay, I’m trying to be funny and to seem coolly uninterested, but I would hate for someone to figure those things out and yet not share them with me, so please do share it if you gather that data.

****“November” almost seems like it might mean “new” something…a new ember perhaps, the first cast-off remnant of a dying fire symbolizing the fading of the year.  But, of course, the Nov- here refers to the number nine rather than to newness, as in “nova”*****.

*****Of course, in Spanish, nova could mean “no go”, as in, “it doesn’t go”, which partly explains why the Chevrolet Nova didn’t sell that well in Latin America.

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“What IS real? How do you DEFINE ‘real’?”

Well, it’s Friday again, as happens if one waits long enough, but it wasn’t Thursday here yesterday.  Okay, well, that’s an exaggeration, obviously.  I simply didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick‒I ate something that chose to take vicious, but thankfully temporary, revenge on me for having eaten it‒and when I don’t go to the office, I don’t usually do a blog post.

It would be a somewhat interesting universe if time were constrained in some fashion by my blog post writing, or even defined by it.  Of course, that’s pretty vanishingly unlikely, since it would not readily be able to explain all of history‒including my own life and memories‒from before I started writing my blog and before blogs even existed.

There are philosophical and mathematical prestidigitations that can be performed that can allow one at least entertain the notion that all those memories and all those historical records are in their present configuration by mere chance, but such arguments tend to bite themselves in the ass by destroying all basis for believing in any specific laws of nature, including the probabilistic/entropic ones that, in principle, allow for such things.

Anyway, here I am, heading to the office on Friday, the first “real”* day after Wednesday, though I’m still a bit beat.

Given that last fact, I hope you’ll excuse me if I’ve nothing profound or even interesting to say today.  It’s the tail end of a week that should or at least could have been one of reasonable celebration, if I were inclined to consider the fact that I have lived another year something to celebrate.  Alas, I don’t have any strong inclination to consider that so, and I guess that’s just as well, because it hasn’t been a very good week for me.  I feel exhausted, and this is only “first thing in the morning”.

I don’t think I actually am literally exhausted, in the sense of being completely and thoroughly used up, because I am, after all, going to work and writing this.  A car with no gasoline does not even start let alone move**.  Whereas I am still moving, and contrary to some popular sayings, one cannot keep moving out of spite or stubbornness or whatever similar notions might be applied.  I don’t mean to dismiss the power of stubbornness, let alone of spite, but they do not (and cannot****) allow one to violate the laws of physics.

I am simply very fatigued‒physically, yes, and also emotionally, mentally, even “spiritually”, however that last word might be defined.  I don’t know how close to the bottom of my personal tank I really am.  Goodness knows, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have died at least twelve years ago, or even twenty.  I did not die (as you might be able to tell), so in a certain sense, my surprise is that I am alive.  But it’s not much of a happy surprise.  I certainly don’t feel any giddy joy over the fact that I have gotten through all the nonsense in my life so far without it killing me.

Still, it would be churlish and pathetic of me (perish the thought!) not to admit that there are still moments and occasions of joy and even happiness (which John Galt described as a state of noncontradictory joy, and I rather like that interpretation of the word).  But it would be nice to have occasional truly pain-free days.

Oh, well.  The universe does not conform to anyone’s wishes nor bend to the best interests of any given individual or even all individuals‒not as far as I can see.  But if the world did bend to my will in such matters, then all my readers would have a wonderful day today, and that would be the start of a long‒perhaps unbroken‒string of wonderful days hereafter.

And heck, everyone else might as well have wonderful days, also.  For it is difficult even for the most prosperous to be reliably and persistently happy in a world where there is gross injustice and undeserved misery.

*If by “real” we mean “days defined by the writing, by me, of one of my blog posts”, and if by “me” we mean the first person objective singular pronoun referring to Robert Elessar, the author of this blog (among other things).  But, of course, we don’t mean such a thing when we use the word “real” and though I define “me” that way, you would probably define it differently, but in very specifically different ways.  This is all just me (the same “me” from earlier) being somewhat silly.

**Well…unless it’s an electric car (or even a diesel*** powered car).  Ideally, one probably doesn’t want any gasoline in an electric car.  Gasoline in an electric engine is just a fire hazard.  It’s not a good conductor, so it probably wouldn’t cause the engine to short out directly, but once ignited, the fire could create local ions/plasmas that could conduct electricity and thus, among other things, short out the workings of the motor.  That would probably be among the least of the problems such fire caused, though.

***I once knew a guy who modified an old diesel Mercedes so that it ran on peanut oil.  Due to economies of scale, it was actually more expensive to drive than other cars, but at least it ran on a renewable fuel, of sorts.

****This is definitional, in my view:  anything that actually happens is, perforce, allowed by the laws of physics.  If you find something that seems to violate the laws of physics as you know them, that’s just an indictment of your understanding‒of the events and/or of the laws of physics.  This isn’t a horrible thing; it’s a chance to learn something new.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m very tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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

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

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

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

You probably already knew that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please have a good day.

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

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

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

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I’m back and (nominally) going forth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

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

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I’ll have blogs more relative than this

Hello and good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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Gravid questions of time and gravity (and labor)

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

Ha ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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