time

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I’m back and (nominally) going forth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

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

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I’ll have blogs more relative than this

Hello and good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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Gravid questions of time and gravity (and labor)

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

Ha ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Thank Batman it’s Friday.

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

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

****That place is 7-11™.

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

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Only the truly continuous is infinitely divisible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Try to remember the kind of Sexember…

Well, first of all:  TBIF (Thank Batman it’s Friday).  I’ve been feeling particularly poorly this week, with sleep that’s even worse than my usual, and that is not good to start with.  At least, on the weekend, I can knock myself out at night with Benadryl and not really care that I will be groggy the next day.

I’m basically going to call this week a loss.  I haven’t gotten much of anything done that I had intended to do, and that’s discouraging.  But it’s a new month now, so there may be some psychological* tendency to think of it as a potential new beginning of sorts.  Mind you, there’s really nothing special about this day relative to any other; the length of a month is related to the lunar cycle and the length of the year, but only roughly, and the specific divisions are fairly arbitrary.

Of course, we know that August is named for Augustus Caesar, née Octavian, who succeeded in taking control of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar (after whom July was renamed).  But it’s interesting, at least to me, to consider what it would have been named otherwise.  September, after all, is named after the fact that it was “originally” the seventh month, as October was the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth.

So, would August originally have been named Sexember (the sixth month)?  I think that would be the correct form, though Latin scholars among my readers should please correct me if I’ve used the wrong prefix**.  If I’m correct, I would like to propose a global change of name for this month back to the potential previous name.

“Sexember” sounds like a much more fun month than “August”, with its dog day connotations and so on.  Although, the prefix “sex-” referring to six has, as far as I know, nothing at all to do with the word “sex” relating to the reproductive divisions among animals, nor to the process involved, which‒for good, sound, biological reasons‒is something dwelt upon and enjoyed and even obsessed over by so many.  But I’m not worried about etymological purity here.

Imagine the antics on the various social media as oodles of young people of all ages geared up to celebrate “Sexember” and talked about how they planned to celebrate it.  Of course, I suspect most people would exaggerate their planned exploits, as people tend to do.  Social media is a supremely fertile ground for hyperbole and posturing and pretense and performative outrage, whether about political matters or just how “hot” one is and how perfect one’s life is.  I wrote a song about this topic a few years ago:  Like and Share.  Here, I’ll embed it in this post.

That brings up an issue raised by a very old*** and good friend of mine.  He noted that, since the company which published my songs put things on YouTube with disabled comments, there’s no direct way for people to give me feedback on them, good or bad.  Of course, the songs are also on Spotify and iTunes and supposedly on TikTok and all those others, but many of those don’t allow comments, either.

My works are also among the various available background songs that one can choose for “reels” on Instagram and on Facebook.  I enabled that last bit, and even used one once.  You all should feel free to use them, too.  In principle, I get paid when you do****.

Anyway, the thought I had was that maybe I should embed the songs here, on my blog, as posts.  Or maybe I could create a new page, like the one I have for “my books”.  I could call it “my songs” and could put the officially released ones there, as well as ones in progress, and I could even share some of my covers.  If I shared them as blog posts, at least, comments would be always available, and are almost always welcome.

Of course, that covers and the incomplete stuff are already on my YouTube channel, such as it is, and I even have a created playlist with all of them in it.  Those are already available for comment and response on YouTube.  I’m a long way away from having a monetized YouTube channel, though, and this blog isn’t monetized, either (though I sometimes think maybe I ought to monetize it, at least partially, or make a Patreon account or something).

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

In the meantime, hopefully today will be better than yesterday, which was a day on which I quite literally wished to be dead, because I felt miserable and in pain and alone, to say nothing of failing to achieve what I’ve wanted to achieve this week (or in this life).  The thing that most prevented me from taking action on that wish was that the effort involved would have been too great.

I feel less bad today, which‒given the nature of number lines and greater than/less than meanings and equivalences*****‒means I feel better than I did.  I still haven’t crossed the origin into positive territory, though, and I don’t know if I ever will again.  That’s the consideration that leads to contemplation of death:  if one’s present and expected future wellbeing function is always in the negative, then a return to zero is a net gain.  It’s analogous to a jokey thing I used to say:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Enough of this nonsense.  I’ll call this post and this work week to an end now.  I wish you all an excellent weekend, and of course, enjoy the first of Sexember!

*I made an interesting typo when I wrote this word, one which I don’t think I’ve made before, though it would seem a very easy one to make, given the layout of the QWERTY keyboard:  I wrote it as “paychological”.  That seems almost like something that could be a new slang term, with related terms “paychopathology” and “paychopath”.

**Perhaps “Hexember” would be at least as proper or more so (though we don’t have “Heptember”).  I’m not sure.  That would surely please some of the many Goth people I tend to follow online, but it doesn’t have as broad an appeal as “Sex-” does.

***By which I mean he has been my friend from way back (starting freshman year of college), not that he is very old.  He’s roughly the same age I am, and‒though I often feel as if I’ve been kept alive by one of the great rings for centuries or even millennia beyond my natural time‒my real age, in proper time, is 55 years, soon to be 56.  Of course, there is no actual quantum leap in age at the anniversary of one’s birth.  Time is continuous‒or, well, it is quantized, but at the scale of 10-43 seconds.  So for all foreseeable, practical purposes within our lifetimes, it is continuous.

****Though the pay rate is nearly as miniscule as the Planck time mentioned in the previous footnote.

*****A pet peeve of mine is when some people denigrate the notion of choosing “the lesser of two evils”, particularly during elections, expressing such sentiments as “the lesser of two evils is still evil”.  This may be true in a simple-minded sense, but it misses the point entirely and expresses woefully clunky thinking.  Such a person might be expected to feel that owing a debt of $10 was not any better than owing a debt of $100,000, since both are debts.  But when you think about with which debt you’d prefer to be saddled, the difference is clear.  Money has a way of sharpening people’s intuitions regarding numbers.  Indeed, there’s some evidence that “negative numbers” were first invented to deal with debts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chords in music and in time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The pointless but occasionally enjoyable music of this sphere.

Well, it’s Tuesday now, as you will know if you’re reading this on the day of its release.  You might not be sure if you read it later.  As far as I know, it’s not possible for you to read this earlier than I write it, but if you have that capacity, presumably you don’t need me to tell you what day and time it is when I’m writing it.  Presumably, you have quite a handle on times that things happen if you have that kind of ability—though I suppose that if you travel through time a lot, you might eventually have a hard time keeping track of what the local labels are on dates and times.

Sorry, that’s a bit of frivolous nonsense, which I hope doesn’t offend any non-time-travelers out there.  I’m here again, writing a blog post on my way to work and wondering what the point is to anything.  Not that I honestly suspect that there is a point to anything, really.  As far as I can see, there is no point to anything, and there is also no point to everything.  Everything just happens, and there’s no more to any of it than that, as far as I can see, and as far as anyone knows.

There are people who will tell you otherwise.  Lots of people claim to have found or been taught the meaning of life or of existence and whatnot, but either they are trying to manipulate you and/or sell you something, or they are sincere but mistaken.  In any case, they are not correct.  They do not know the meaning of life.  If they were to know it (not merely believe it), it could be conveyed in a way that, presumably, would be convincing to pretty much any listener.  Certainly they should be able to muster arguments, and perhaps evidence, that would convince a highly intelligent but disinterested extraterrestrial.

Enough philosophy for now.

Looking back to yesterday, I mentioned my idea about setting myself a goal of writing a song a week or maybe every two weeks.  Well, I didn’t do any song writing yesterday, but I did go to the Shakespeare AZ quotes site and flip coins repeatedly to pick the topic of a first song, and what I got was:  Earth.

That’s a bit unusual as a song topic, but I guess it’s doable.  I wouldn’t want to try to do some “We are the world” kind of thing, because that’s not what I really think of when I think of the Earth.  I think of the planet, the physical things, including all the animals and plants and fungi and bacteria and archaea and all that, but also including the geology and the geography and the chemistry and physics and everything else.

Despite the saying, man is not the measure of all things.  Man is barely even the measure of man, so to speak.  Humans by and large are relatively impressive animals, but they tend to think far more highly of themselves than is merited, in almost every case.

There are probably exceptions, but none of them come immediately to mind.

So, I’ll come up first with some lyrics (AKA a poem) about the planet Earth, or at least taking off from there, so to speak.  I have to remind myself that it doesn’t have to be very long, indeed that it should not be very long—I tend to get carried away when writing things, as you probably know.

I also need to decide what structure the song should be, like verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus or what have you.  Then, after that, I’ll think of an appropriate melody to go with the words.  It will probably all be quite mediocre, but the point of the exercise is not to worry about trying to be brilliant, but just to get something done.  We’ll see how that goes.

In other news—related, at least distantly—I just discovered that my former college roommate, who is also the best guitarist I’ve known, has begun producing and releasing more new music, on YouTube and on some other site.  His YouTube channel is bluetonegtr, which is a fun name because his name is Tony and of course, he plays guitar, and the blues is a big part of any really good guitarist’s repertoire (not mine).  I highly recommend checking his stuff out; he’s really good.  I’ll embed his latest song below, for your ease of access.

As for everything else, well—the world is still shit, though it certainly doesn’t have to be.  It just tends that way, or at least the human world does.  Maybe I could make that part of my song idea.  Or maybe I could deal with the fact that even life overall is pretty crappy, I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see.  Maybe I’ll just address the issue of absurd flat-Earth notions.  Maybe I could make it a comical song.

I don’t know.  This is all probably a stupid waste of time, anyway.  But time is a waste in any case, I guess, so I might as well use it stupidly.  Everyone else seems to do so.

I hope you at least enjoy at least part of your own wasted day today.

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Had we but time enough, and space…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that there would be anyone to notice.

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

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

*I am not one of those people.

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

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