Physics

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If you can look into the seeds of time, and blog which grain will grow and which will not

Hello, and also, good morning.

What to write about, what to write about‒that is the question today.  Of course, “to be or not to be” is always the question as well, as was recognized by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.  If I recall, he arrives at the conclusion that the titular rock-rolling protagonist must be “happy” despite the patent and constant pointlessness and absurdity of his existence.

That goes along with the whole recognition of the absurdity of life itself that is central to the existentialism movement.  Still, it’s hard for me to “imagine Sisyphus happy”, unless he was a true Bodhisattva or had been thoroughly lobotomized by Zeus (or whoever it was that had doomed him to his…well, his doom).

It can help, I guess, to think about the vast scale of the cosmos in space and time (and any other dimensionality that might apply) and also about the incredibly minute scale of the cosmos, the fundamental quantum fields (and whatever gravity ultimately is) interacting from the Planck scale on up.  It helps keep things in perspective.

Of course, even given the scales of the cosmos*, there’s another, almost sort of Buddhist/Taoist notion that notes that each individual‒each particle even‒always exists at the nexus of two “light cones”, existing in an ever-moving now.  These are 4-dimensional cones, by the way, but it’s okay to reduce things by one dimension if you will.  It makes them easier to visualize.

Your (or anyone’s) past light cone is the outer boundary of all influences that can possibly have had any effect upon you at the present moment‒those influences that could have reached you at the speed of light or more slowly.  Similarly, one’s future light cone encompasses all those things that could possibly be influenced by things at the present location at or below the speed of light.

Any motion within the light cones‒the only motion that anything within spacetime can execute, as far as we know‒is called timelike motion.  Any motion that would require going outside a light cone is considered “spacelike” motion, and is not allowed by relativity.  This is not merely because of the speed of light, it’s because the speed of light is defined by the speed of causality.  Causes cannot travel faster or have effects beyond the speed of causality.  This is a bit tautological, I know, but it nevertheless simply must be true.

So each individual’s experience, each individual process, sits at the moving balance point of a future light cone and a past light cone, crossing at the moving present, tracing out a “timelike” path in spacetime.  Of course, individual creatures are not individual particles, and so their overall spacetime path would resemble the final line produced by a sketcher going over and over a particular path to make the curve the artist desires.

If one could look at the structure of a human in spacetime, like the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse Five, but one could also trace even the spacetime paths of individual “particles”**, a human life would be a sort of higher-dimensional braid in spacetime, surrounded by a haze of incoming and outgoing quantum entities, most of which will be locally bound and interacting, and so will be moving at a net velocity lower than the speed of light.

I’m assuming you don’t eat your food or drink your water or breathe your air or (shudder) sweat or excrete at near light speed.

Imagine what the inside of a mere proton or neutron might look like if one were able to see it as a rendered, four-dimensional model in fine detail!  If you think it wouldn’t be that interesting because it’s so wee, think again.

Remember, only the tiniest fraction of the “rest mass” of a nucleon comes from the mass of the three “net” quarks in it (two up, one down or two down, one up depending on whether it’s a proton or neutron).  Almost all the rest of its mass is the energy of the interactions between these three quarks:  all the gluons exchanged, all the virtual quark/anti-quark pairs popping into existence, mediated by that famous strong force and its weird*** “asymptotic freedom”.

Bringing this back around, I guess my point was merely to note that everyone and everything is pointless from the perspective of the laws of nature and the spacetime scale of the cosmos, but when you learn about those things‒the cosmos at large and small levels‒you are at least familiarizing yourself with those vast workings, and you are in a sense taking part of them into yourself.  That’s kind of a cool thought.

But don’t take too much of it into yourself!  For, much as would happen to someone who stuffed all the information about Graham’s number into one head, if you do you will become a black hole.  Now, it may be possible to survive becoming a black hole, but I don’t recommend betting on that pony.

TTFN

*I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero about how it might be useful for people to consider the cosmic perspective as contrasting with their prosaic concerns.  I don’t remember how good it was, but here’s the link, in case you want to read it and give any feedback you like.

**I use this word for want of a better term that everyone would recognize and that would be succinct.  I think we need such a different term, because a lot of the perceived so-called weirdness and mystery of quantum mechanics comes from trying to use inaccurate terms that originated in times before we understood things as well as we now do.  Quanta are not little “particles” that sometimes act like waves, nor are they little waves that sometimes act like particles (though that’s slightly more accurate).  They are entities unto themselves, and the ways they behave are all always consistent with that nature.  They don’t sometimes act like one thing and at other times act like another.  They all, always, act like what they are.

***Except it’s not weird, really.  Those of us who are surprised by it?  We are the weird ones.  Quantum chromodynamics has always done exactly what it still does, since long before any life at all existed in this universe.  To quote Yudkowsky again, “Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened.”

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Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown; Our blogs are ours, their ends none of our own.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 26th of February in 2026, a date that’s only very slightly interesting whether you write it as 2-26-2026 or 26-2-2026.  The fact that you have repeated 2s and repeated 26s is somewhat entertaining, but the zero throws potential symmetries off, making it not nearly as much fun as it could conceivably be.  It’s a shame, really.  I suppose you could write it as 26-02-2026 and rescue a bit of symmetry, but that feels like reaching.  It’s not quite symmetrical anyway, unless one is writing in base-26 or higher.  No, wait, even that wouldn’t work.

I don’t know about what I’m going to write this morning.  That in itself, of course, is nothing unusual.  But I don’t feel that I have much to say about anything at the moment.  I don’t want to get into my depression and ASD and anxiety and chronic pain and insomnia and just general moribund state, because I’m sure no one wants to hear about it anymore, and in any case, there seems to be no way anyone can do anything about it that’s useful, which makes it all the more frustrating.  Writing about it certainly hasn’t cured or even improved my state much, if at all.

Anyway, as I said the other day, you have been put on notice.  Unless you just started reading my blog for the first time yesterday, you’ve no right to act fucking surprised no matter what happens.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.

Now, let’s see, what should I write today?  I could discuss some topics in science, especially physics, though I also have literal, legally recognized expertise in biology, and I know a lot about quite a few other branches of science as well.  This is because I have always been curious about how the world, the universe, actually and literally works on the largest and on the most fundamental scales.

I mean, yes, humans also have their rules and laws and social mores and antisocial morays and all that nonsense, but if you step back even a bit, you can see nearly all human behavior encapsulated by basic primatology.  If you know how the various monkeys and gibbons and gorillas and chimpanzees behave‒especially their commonalities‒human behavior almost always fits right in.  It’s usually not even very atypical.

That doesn’t make the specifics of behavior very easily predictable in any given case, necessarily; then again, we understand an awful lot about the weather and the climate, but the specifics of tomorrow’s weather are tough to predict precisely and accurately, let alone next week’s weather.  Nevertheless, the physics of longer term climate effects of certain kinds of atmospheric gases is almost trivial.

Anyway, humans are too annoying to be very interesting, except in special circumstances.  In this, they are perhaps a bit like cockroaches.  From the point of view of a scientist who studies them, they can be interesting, and from just the right angle and with the right detachment, they can even be beautiful (or some of them can).  But overall, they are merely large masses of highly redundant little skitterers, just doing their shit-eating and reproducing and infesting almost every possible location.

Which type of creature did I mean to describe just now?  See if you can figure it out.

Of course, on closer scales, cognitive neuroscience and neurodevelopment and related stuff, such as “neural” networks, “deep” learning, and other such areas are fascinating.  One thing interesting about them is how all the things that brains and computers and so on are and do are implicit in the laws of physics‒clearly they are some of the things that stuff in the universe can do‒and yet, for all we know, they have only ever happened here, just this once in all the vast and possibly infinite cosmos*.

And for all we can tell, given the human proclivity to plan about 20 Planck units ahead and then after that trust to luck, this could be the only place they occur, and their time will not continue much longer, certainly not on a cosmic scale.

I could be wrong about that…except in the sense that, since I am stating it merely as one of the possibilities, I am not actually wrong at all.  Even if humans do survive into cosmic time scales and become cosmically significant, it will still not be easily debatable that it could have happened that humans would go extinct and would fail to go anywhere but Earth.

Of course, depending on the question of determinism, I suppose one could say that if humans (or their descendants) become cosmically significant then there literally was nothing else that could have happened, at least as seen from outside, at the “end”.

On the other hand, if Everettian quantum mechanics is the best description of the fundamental nature of reality, then in some sense, every quantum possibility actually happens “somewhere” in the universal quantum wave function, though those variations may not include all conceivably possible human outcomes.

Some things that seem as though they should be possible may simply never happen to occur (or occur to happen?) anywhere in the possible states of the universe.  That feels as though it should be unlikely, given how many possible states can be locally evolved in the quantum wave function, but I don’t think we know enough to be sure.

Okay, well, I vaguely hope that this has been mildly interesting and perhaps thought provoking.  It would be enjoyable to get more feedback and thoughts, but I don’t have a very large readership, and only a certain small percentage of people ever seem to interact with written material in any case, so I’m probably lucky to get the feedback that I get.

TTFN

*With the inescapable caveat that, if the universe is spatially and/or temporally infinite, and if as it seems there are only a finite number of differentiable quantum states in any given region of spacetime (the upper limit of which is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of the given region) then every local thing that happens, and all possible variations thereof, “happen” an infinite number of times.  But given that all these regions are more or less absolutely physically distinct and incapable of “communicating” one with another, they can be considered isolated instances in a “multiverse” rather than parts of the same “local universe”.

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Are gravity and frivolity truly opposites?

It’s Wednesday morning (not quite five o’clock yet) and it is February 25th.  There are only ten more shopping months until Newtonmas*.

For those of you who don’t know (and as a reminder for those of you who do know) Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, 1642 (AD**).  Now, there is a parenthetical here:  Newton was born on December 25th by the Julian*** calendar, which was the one used in England at the time of his birth.  By the Gregorian**** calendar, Newton would have been born in early January of 1643.

This might seem to imply that December 25th nowadays shouldn’t be considered Newtonmas, but of course, it’s a closer fit than celebrating the birth of Jesus on that day; supposedly, biblical scholars have found that Jesus was probably born in the summer or something.  As with many things, “The Church” appropriated the popular holidays celebrating the winter solstice and grafted Christian religious significance onto it.

There’s nothing particularly bad about that.  All these holidays and divisions of the year are fairly arbitrary (though celebrating solstices and equinoxes is common enough in multiple cultures, which makes sense because these are objective events in any given year that can be noticed by any culture that is paying attention).

The length of a year is a concrete, empirical fact, as is the length of a day and the length of a lunar orbit around the Earth.  None of them are straightforward multiples of each other, unfortunately‒they are waves that are not harmonically associated with each other.

I don’t know how long it would take for their “waves” to come back into some primordial alignment and “start over”, but it’s probably moot, because the length of a day and of a lunar orbit and of the orbit of the Earth are changing slowly.  The moon, for instance, is moving steadily (but very slowly) away from the Earth over time, and so its time of orbit is increasing (since things that orbit farther away orbit more slowly).

I think Kepler’s third law was/is that the period of a planet’s orbit around the sun is proportional to the 3/2 power of the length of the semimajor axis of its orbit.  I’m not sure if that exact power holds up on the scale of, say, the lunar orbit, but the laws of gravity are as universal as anything we know.  Indeed, there are materials that are opaque to light, but as far as we know, there are none that are opaque to gravity.  Gravity is nevertheless constrained by the geometry of spacetime, so orbits will always slow down at a faster rate than the distance from the center around which a mass orbits increases.

The inability of anything we know of to block gravity is one thing that makes me take seriously the notion that, at some level, there could be more than three spatial dimensions.  If gravity is not confined to three dimensions then nothing that is so confined could stop it; it would merely flow around any obstacle (maybe gravity waves, for instance, can even diffract around matter and energy, though that might not imply higher dimensions).

This is related, indirectly, to the fact that it is impossible to tie a knot in a string in 4 or higher spatial dimensions.

By the way, having those extra spatial dimensions curled up tiny, as is usually presented in depictions of the notions of string theory, is not the only way for them to exist and be undetected.  If most of the forces in the world we know‒the electromagnetic, the strong force, the weak force, and the various matter-related quantum fields‒are constrained to a 3-brane because their strings are “open-ended”, then we could live in a 3-brane (in which all other forces, including matter, are confined) nested in a higher-dimensional “bulk”.  Gravity could be conveyed by a “looped” string, which could pass through the 3-brane, interacting but not being confined to it.  This could also explain the comparative weakness of the gravitational force and might even explain dark matter (and why it is so difficult to detect).

This sounds extremely promising, maybe, but there are issues and hurdles, not the least that strings and higher spatial dimensions are very difficult to detect, if they exist.  Also, it’s very hard to pin down all the implications mathematically in a useful way.

I remember one lunch break when I was still in medical practice when I tried to see if I could work out mathematically if “dark matter” could be explained by a relatively nearby, parallel brane-universe (it would probably be more than one, but one was difficult enough) whose gravity spills over into and overlaps the gravity of our brane-universe.

Here’s a sort of reproduction of some of the scribbling I did then:

Unfortunately, though I could visualize what I was considering and get an intuitive feel for what the math would be like, my precise mathematical skills were just not up to the task of sorting it out rigorously.  Also, of course, lunch was not long enough, and I had many other things on my mind.  Anyway, findings like the “bullet cluster” provide some fairly strong evidence that “dark matter” is something physical within our three dimensions of space.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  I’ve managed not to talk about my depression and stress and self-destructive urges/wishes (except just now, of course), so I hope you’re pleased to have had those things cloaked from you today.

Take care.

*Working out the exact number of days, I think I figured that it was 302.  December 25th is 7 days before New Years, so it’s day number 358 in the (non-leap) year.  And today is the 25th day of the second month, and January has 31 days, so today is day 56 of the year.  And, of course, 358 – 56 = 302.

**Why not my usual “AD or CE?”  Because at the time, in England, it was just “anno domini”.

***Named for Julius Caesar, though as far as I know, he had no more to do with actually formulating that calendar than he had with the invention of the 7th month.  As far as we know, he wasn’t even born by the then-existing version of Cesarian section, which was more or less always fatal to the mother, and his mother lived well beyond his birth.

****Named after Pope Gregory XIII, also known (by me) as Pope Gregory Peccary*****.  He did not formulate the newer calendar, but supposedly he at least commissioned the Vatican astronomers to create it when it had become obvious that the Julian calendar was not quite tracking the actual year but was overshooting over a long period of time.  So, the Gregorian calendar is better named than the Julian calendar, or so it seems to me.

*****The nocturnal, gregarious wild swine.

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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, blogs in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, in case you didn’t already know.  Though, if you’re reading this on some day other than Thursday, then I guess it’s not Thursday for you.

You could think of it as us being on sort of parallel time streams—and indeed, we each carry our own “proper time” around with us, according to Relativity.  And while communication is possible between those timelines, it is communication in one direction only.  I can send messages to you, where and when you are now reading this, but you cannot send messages back to me.

Wait, wait, I hear you say*, you can communicate back to me in my parallel time, because you can comment on the post below (there’s only one person who does this with any regularity, but sure, it’s possible for you to comment, in principle).  So it’s not one-directional communication.

Ah, but that’s where I’m being esoterically precise here.  You cannot communicate back to me where and when I am now.  You can only communicate with some “future” point, something quite a bit down the line from where and when I am as I write this.  And I cannot then communicate with the you that is writing back to me, but only to some future state of you.

Okay, well, duh, you say**, that’s just how time works.

That only seems unremarkable to you because it’s all you’ve ever known, and you’re adapted to it—personally and evolutionarily.  But if you step back, so to speak, it can seem quite remarkable.

Special Relativity demonstrates that space and time are not separate but are intertwined, and space and time bleed into one another depending upon relative motion—indeed, within the event horizon of a black hole, it appears that space and time are flipped ninety degrees (as though along an axis at 45 degrees to those of space and time) so to speak, so that space becomes time, which is part of why you can never get out of the black hole—you cannot reverse time, but must move forward to its end at the singularity, if such a thing exists, which is probably not the case.

So, why does time work differently than space?  After all, If I live on a street parallel to yours, I can cross to your street by any of a number of cross-streets, cut through back yards, follow alleyways, etc., in more or less any direction, and I can return in a similar fashion.

Imagine, though, if it worked the following way.  I start at my address—let’s imagine it’s number 13*** for the moment—and want to go to your street.  But I can only go by routes that are at higher address numbers than my address.  And then, when I want to return to my street I have to go down (or would that be up?) the numbers on your street, to take a cross-street (or whatever) that’s even farther from my house.

So, say I crossed to your street right after number 17, where a cross-street exists.  And say the numbers on your street line up with those on my street, just for simplicity’s sake****.  Luckily, your house is at number 19 on your street, so I can reach it.  I could never go back to number 17 on your street, let alone number 13.

But when I want to leave your place, I can only head toward higher numbers, so I can’t go back to the cross street near 17.  I have to go down to, say, the street past number 23.  But even once I get to my street, I can’t go back to my house!  I must head in the direction of higher numbers.

I can only get back to my house if my street goes all the way around the world and comes back to my house from the other direction, and I suspect that it doesn’t do that.  I’m stuck farther down my own street, homeless now, because I cannot reach my address.  And it’s not as though you can take me in, because I cannot go back to your address, either, and if you leave your house to meet me, you will be in the same predicament in which I languish.

That’s sort of how time seems to work.  Unlike the three spatial dimensions, we cannot simply choose our direction, change our mind and our course, go back to where we came from or even just go around and around the block (which may or may not be a stupid thing to do—see yesterday’s post).  Why is time different?  The laws of physics appear to be locally time symmetric as they are space symmetric.  In other words, they work the same backwards and forwards.  But macroscopically, time is directional.

I’ve speculated a bit on this over at Iterations of Zero.  I’ll try to link to the pertinent blog post(s).  Some of that speculation compares the directionality of time that we all experience to the directionality of space that exists here on the surface of the Earth.

Wait, you say, what do you mean “the directionality of space”?  (You do love to interrupt, it seems.)  Well, think about it.  When you’re on the Earth, the directions forward/backward and left/right (or any other non-parallel axes you might choose along the surface, such as north/south and east/west) are freely navigable.  You can go in any direction or combination of directions along them, barring local obstacles.  But the same cannot be said for up/down.  It’s much harder to go up than to go left or forward.  And if you lose support beneath your feet, you will be unable to avoid going down.

Perhaps, as has been speculated by others with greater expertise than mine, the “Big Bang” provides or entails a local state that creates a local directionality to time, but far enough away from that “event”, time will become just as non-directional as any spatial dimension.

This is the way it works with the dimensions of 3D space:  when you’re far enough away from a local “event”, such as the surface of the Earth, the dimensions are all freely navigable.  But there’s not too much to do there, and it seems that life and complexity are likely to emerge only where these local gradients—whether in space or in time or both—exist, doing their part to provide the “free energy” which is required by things like life.

Anyway, that’s my random set of thoughts for this Thursday.  I hope you have a good day.  As for me, I continue to follow the local directionality of my metaphorical space; in other words, I continue to trend downward.  I do not perceive any other available direction for me.

TTFN

*Or I think I do.  I have terrible hearing and persistent tinnitus, so I might have been hearing the sound of rain on the roof or of wind in the trees or of otherworldly, eldritch creatures scratching at the fabric of reality, trying to break through the barriers between their realms and ours.  Probably not, though.

**You’re a bit rude, don’t you think?

***It’s not, unfortunately.

****Simplicity is one high-maintenance person.

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The moving finger writes, and having writ, now must edit

This is it:  my last blog post of 2025 (barring some truly unexpected circumstances).  I will probably be writing a post tomorrow, because I think we’re going to be working tomorrow, despite the fact that it will be New Year’s Day, and a stunningly large fraction of the people of the world will be hung over or otherwise exhausted from ringing in the New Year.

I suspect New Year’s Eve/Day is the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, far surpassing the numbers who celebrate any mere religious holiday.  Since the world in general uses the same “Gregorian”* calendar, it’s a rare commonality for the human race, and worth celebrating.

If only they could work on finding more things in common, since after all, they have almost everything actually in common with each other.  And yet, they focus on trivial cultural or superficial differences and battle viciously over them, as if they were fighting truly alien beings.  Talk about your narcissism of small differences.

Humans are so stupid.  The more of them there are, the stupider, somehow, as though the lowest common denominator tends always to dominate the dynamics.  It’s like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Men In Black:  a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

That isn’t always the case, obviously.  Humans have accomplished great things in large groups, interacting with mutual exchange to mutual benefit (or not so mutual benefit), but that probably only happens in rarefied circumstances, discovered or arranged by luck or by the skill of one or a few who are cleverer than average, and sustained thanks to a form of natural selection.

Because of the sheer power of such organizations of people, those rare few types of interactions can endure for tremendous lengths of time and be astonishingly effective and broadly prevalent.  This can distract one from the fact that the ideas were so singular and ingenious.

Money, for instance, has been invented more than once, but it’s a relatively low-hanging and particularly nutritious fruit, allowing as it does for the far more efficient exchange of goods and services to (ideally) mutual benefit.  Of course, commerce can be cheated and can thereby become nonproductive or even counterproductive, especially if one or a few entities obtain disproportionate wealth and power.  This sort of selection for detrimental equilibria happens in the world of biology as well.

Imagine a football game in which, every time one team scores, that team gains an extra player and the other team loses one.  Once one side takes the lead, they’re likely to keep it and increase it, making them ever more likely to maintain their dominance.  It can make for a pretty boring and not very productive game.  Such a situation is worth avoiding, even if you happen to be on the winning team.

Written language is, of course, the single most important human invention‒more important than even the invention of language itself, though that was a necessary prerequisite, so the argument could be made that it is more important or at least more fundamental.  Thankfully, language is a different type of thing than money, so it’s not as easy to game it to secure an unreasonable advantage for any individual or group.

There is, of course, an often-used attempted strategy of discouraging or preventing literacy in some groups or one sex (always the same one, it seems) to keep them from gaining the power that written language can impart, but it can be harder to keep those systems in place than for a monopoly to maintain its economic advantage.

Still, even written language isn’t automatically self-protective.  It’s possible for misinformation and disinformation to spread and even prosper, at least for a time (such situations tend to self-destruct), and it can do terrible damage, much as mutations in somatic DNA can lead to cell dysfunction, cell death, and sometimes cancer.

Analogous things can happen to whole civilizations as well, and they have happened many times, but that’s no reason to blame language or learning.  One doesn’t prevent cancer by eliminating DNA itself or by killing the host organism (that does eliminate the cancer, but in an unsatisfying way).  Only better, more thorough thinking and language, the equivalent of DNA proofreading, can do that without catastrophe.

And I, by writing this post, try to contribute to the good language, the useful or at least interesting language, in the world.  I suspect I will continue to do so as the next year begins.  I hope you enjoy whatever celebrations you have in store.

*Though Pope Gregory the Whatever Number was merely the one who commissioned it.  Astronomers and mathematicians actually did the work.  We have some scientifically literate Popes nowadays, at least, and a Belgian priest was among the first to do rigorous mathematics using Einstein’s new field equations (though Friedman got there a little earlier, his work was apparently not as convincing) to demonstrate that the universe could not be static** based upon them.

**Leading Einstein to introduce Λ (lambda), the cosmological constant.  He later called this his biggest blunder (supposedly) but it turned out to be a useful and term and concept in describing the apparent evolution of the universe as we know it now.  Like Planck before him, even Einstein’s fudges*** were deeply insightful and useful.

***Speaking of Einstein, I recently got an email from my old med school alumni association with the subject line “You are responsible for Einstein’s success”.  To which I so wanted to reply, “I know, right?  But did he mention me in any of his papers or even throw me a word of thanks (in German or otherwise) in his acceptance speech when he got his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that light comes in ‘packets’ which we now call photons?  No!  Ungrateful bastard.”

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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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“And, to SLEEP, you must slumber in just such a bed.”

Well, it’s f*cking Saturday, and I’m going in the to f*cking office to f*cking work, because it’s not challenging enough for me to recover my limited mental equilibrium when I have two days off, so I should try to do it with one as often as possible.  Oh, and the one day I supposedly still have to take off is the day I have to do all my laundry, which means I have to go into the other part of the house and, more often than not, deal with their overly energetic and poorly trained dog‒and it’s a big dog.

I’m not afraid of dogs.  I like dogs, even very large ones.  But I have little sympathy for dogs that have not been trained, and who act like they’re still teething or something.  If it were my dog, I could rapidly train it out of the habit of putting its moronic jaws around peoples’ forearms, and it and I and others would be happier overall.

Maybe next time I’ll go out with suntan lotion or even pepper spray all over my arms, so it gets an unpleasant mouthful if it tries.

Honestly, sometimes I’m tempted just to slip it a few chunks of the rat bait/poison that I have.  It’s not the neurotoxin one, which is supposedly less harmful to people and pets than to rats.  It’s the super-coumadin, blood “thinning”, anticoagulant one.  To be honest, though, I would probably not be willing under nearly any circumstance to poison a dog, since the agency of such a creature is limited and its poor behavior is largely due to the humans in its life.

And yes, of course I have a big, multi-pound bag of rat poison.  Who knows, I might get peckish at some point and want it as a snack.  The holidays are upon us, after all, and it can be so hard to stay on a diet at this time of year.

Anyway, that’s just one possible nosh that I have for potential last meals.  I even have a couple of emptied out fiber capsules that I’ve refilled with broken glass pieces.  They would actually go nicely with the previously mentioned snack, wouldn’t they?  Like salted caramel, the two components could really enhance each other.  You might even call it synergy.

Enough about such tempting treats.  The point is, I’m going to the office today.  Then I’m heading back to the house.  Then I’ll be trying to rest if I can for the remainder of the weekend, though when I think of my own mind, I am inescapably reminded of Boromir describing Mordor:

That works pretty well to describe my very annoying brain/body.  I cannot seem to sleep very long, and I never feel like I sleep “all the way” if you will.  I am always somehow on yellow alert; I don’t know why.  It’s exhausting.  There are plain few upsides or effective distractions, and almost never any relief.

I don’t even know what I’m writing about right now, really.  I just feel a general, free-floating hostility and even hatred for most things in existence.  Sometimes I just want to wipe out the whole universe.  It can be done rather easily, at least from a certain perspective.

Incidentally, creating a new local source of the hypothetical inflaton field would probably not do the trick, assuming that inflationary cosmology is correct.  Most of the mathematical solutions to that possible situation indicate that, such a field would initiate a new, rapid, inflationarily expanding “universe”, but from the perspective of our universe the created bubble would just plop through and out of spacetime.  I haven’t done the math myself‒I am not adequately trained to do it at this time‒but I have this from more than one fairly reputable and reliable source, including people who actually do have the necessary expertise.

I’ve previously discussed vacuum collapse; if one could figure out how to trigger that‒assuming it is possible‒one could literally wipe out everything in the current universe.  Though, of course, it would take a long time, since it could only happen at the speed of light, so really, you’d only be wiping out everything in your future light cone.  There may be no way to destroy the universe that doesn’t effectively take a limitless time to accomplish.

On the other hand, when I spin around, it’s possible to view that action as the universe spinning around me while I’m stationary.  There are legitimate reasons why we don’t tend to think of it this way, but it’s a perspective that can be taken.

From that sort of perspective, when one dies (from one’s own point of view at least) the entire universe ceases to exist.  It’s very simple and thorough!  Of course, if there is an afterlife, that plan would fail, and one would be forced to go back to the drawing board.  But I’ve never encountered even borderline intriguing evidence or argument that might indicate an afterlife exists, unless you count things like a Poincare recurrence*.

So there is at least one reasonably reliable and plausibly achievable way to destroy the universe, from my point of view.  And the good thing about that is, from other points of view, the universe would still exist, and this would be no more contradictory than the fact that someone falling through the event horizon of a large enough black hole wouldn’t even notice it happening, but those far away would see the faller as never even quite reaching the event horizon.

Anyway, that theoretical stuff isn’t really very interesting for present purposes.  What matters is, at the very least, I can destroy the universe in a sense, if I so desire.  And every day it seems to become more and more tempting to do so.  This world is just so disgusting so often, and it’s not just humans that meet that description.

Ah, well.  Try to have a good day if you can for as long as the universe does exist.  After that, you’re on your own.

*Or the possibility of quantum immortality in the context of Everettian quantum mechanics.  But the various other possible alternate versions of me in such a theoretical quantum multiverse are not “me” even now, from my point of view‒not exactly, anyway, not in any sense that I can experience.  So future possible subsets of the wave function of the universe that contain randomly immortal versions of me are not worth taking into account, and they are vanishingly rare**.

**Though I suppose, as time goes by and all mortal things die, the quantum wavefunction of the universe might come to be dominated by such versions of…well, everyone.  None, however, would be able to interact with each other as far as I can see.

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A very low magnitude happiness vector

It’s Friday now, for those of you who have been drinking heavily in the run-up to the big holidays and have lost track of the days.  I’m certainly working today, but I don’t know if the office will be open tomorrow, so I don’t know if I will write a blog post tomorrow.  If you’re interested, feel free to check this site in the morning.  Or, if you like, you can subscribe, and you’ll be sent emails for new posts.  But take that suggestion like a broken barometer:  no pressure.

That’s almost all that I feel I have to say.  Ordinarily, not having anything to say doesn’t mean I won’t write a post.  I’ll just blabber and blather for nearly a thousand words, just to see myself write*.  But there won’t be anything of substance.

Probably a good fraction‒perhaps even a significant majority‒of everything you can find on this blog is pointless nonsense.  Though, of course, I might contend that everything is pointless nonsense.  But here in this blog, you will sometimes find it concentrated, distilled, freeze-dried, and vacuum sealed.

No, I don’t know what some of those things might mean here, metaphorically, any more than you do.  I was just saying words that I thought seemed good.  I have curious tastes, though, so I’ve no idea what others might think of them.

Anyway, that’s me trying to act all silly and funny and whatnot, as if I might be even slightly happy, so that other people don’t have to worry about me.  Well, don’t worry about me.  I’m not happy at all, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest, because neither do I.  Maybe that’s just the way everything is, or maybe it’s just me.  Neither would particularly surprise me.

So, anyway, yeah, I’m not happy, not in any useful sense of the term.  John Galt said that happiness is a state of noncontradictory joy, and that’s always seemed to me like a pretty useful definition of the word, though it’s not the only useful one.  But I like how it separates joy from happiness.  Even people going to the gallows can sometimes joke and laugh, if only as a defense from fear, and in those moments of laughter they may feel joy.  But it is perforce transient, and it’s unlikely that they would be willing to say that they were happy**.

So, in that usage of the word happiness, joy would be necessary but not sufficient for actual happiness.  And both might be relatively orthogonal to a state of wellbeing (which is another word that has more than one interpretation).  Still, though the dot product of happiness and wellbeing may be surprisingly small***, I don’t think it could be zero.

Yes, I use vector multiplication as metaphors for such things, though honestly, it’s not really even so far separated as to be merely a metaphor.  Vectors can be useful for tremendous numbers of things that may seem far afield from each other, from computers and artificial intelligence to physics to biology to economics and ecology.

They can even be of use in psychology, though I don’t know how often they are used therein.  I haven’t dived into a lot of more formal psychology recently, though I like the popular works of Daniel Kahneman and of Jonathan Haidt.  And Paul Bloom is great fun.  But popular works of psychology rarely involve measuring aspects of mental functioning as vectors in a phase space.

Though, as you might have picked up if you’ve read a lot of what I’ve written here, I think it’s useful to think of human behavior and actions as the outcome of a vector sum of all the various “pressures” in the brain/mind, which end up with a resultant that determines what one’s actions will be in that moment.

But, of course, the action itself can feed back on the input vectors, altering them in various ways (maybe their angles, maybe their magnitudes, rarely but possibly their actual sign, which admittedly would just be equivalent to an angle change of 180 degrees, or 𝜋 radians).

Likewise, the state of many of those vectors can change with time.  For instance, one could imagine a vector associated with one’s degree of alertness.  Such a vector would tend to have greater magnitude in the daytime than late at night in most humans, so it waxes and wanes inherently (though even this is likely a result of input vectors delivered by various aspects of the sensory systems).

But the actions taken as a product of previous moments’ vector additions can affect this vector, too.  If a previous resultant led to one having a strong cup of coffee, that might increase the magnitude of the alertness vector, though there would be a delay.  Alternatively, if the previous outcome had led to one drinking a significant amount of Wild Turkey 151 on an empty stomach, the alertness vector might soon start decreasing in magnitude.

Okay, I’ve reached the point in the blog post where I’m using vectors to describe the effects of coffee versus whiskey.  I think it’s reasonable to bring things to a close now.  I hope you all have very good days, by any reasonable measure.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll write a post tomorrow.  I’ll leave figuring out what effect that will have on your own wellbeing for your consideration.

*Analogous to speaking to hear oneself talk.

**Though I can imagine possible situations in which one might be literally happy even on the way to the gallows.  It would be a very brief happiness, nonetheless.

***I doubt that it is, but I also doubt that it is the full, direct product of the magnitudes, as it would be if there were no angular difference at all.  Wellbeing, I think, is more complicated than happiness, which is itself by no means simple.

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“These our actors…are melted into air, into thin air.”

Well, it’s Tuesday, and for reasons (or, rather, causes) that are unclear to me, I had a particularly poor sleep last night.  I just didn’t feel sleepy.  Even this morning, when I told myself I needed to buckle down and get some shut-eye at least, I was only “out” for a few moments.  I even felt, or worried, that I had overslept somehow, if that’s believable.  But when my eyes snapped inevitably open, I saw that maybe 15 minutes had passed.

Eventually, even someone as stubborn as I must give way to the brute facts of reality, so I gave up and got up.  Of course, even if one doesn’t decide to “give way”, it doesn’t change anything.  Reality doesn’t depend upon the approval or acquiescence of conscious beings, however they might like to flatter themselves that it does.  It simply is whatever it is.  That’s what makes it reality.

This is a good thing, of course.  If reality could simply be changed by the power of a mind‒for instance, my mind‒there would be many, many people who failed to signal or otherwise drove badly who would simply disappear, never again to be heard from by their friends and loved ones*.

In reality, though, if one wants to disintegrate someone, it’s a somewhat laborious and messy process.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to make something like a phaser from Star Trek that can just scatter someone into particles, or whatever it is that phasers do.  Trust me, I’ve thought about potential designs on and off over the course of decades.

You can’t shoot a beam of gluons because they self-interact and are not found outside the nucleus (or a quark-gluon plasma), which is why the strong force has such relatively short range despite having a massless force-carrying boson (i.e., the gluon).

One also cannot shoot W or Z particles, perhaps hoping to initiate some form of decay.  Those bosons interact with the Higgs field, and so they have mass‒quite a sizeable mass for force-carrying particles.  And the W bosons even have electric charges.  So they don’t have a range much longer than the size of a nucleon, if that.

One could accelerate neutrons; or rather, one could accelerate parallel and matched electrons and protons and set them to collide with each other and continue in their initial trajectory as newly formed neutrons (plus some neutrinos).  Depending on their speed, they might just break apart some larger nuclei (or raise the atomic numbers of some others, à la the S process and R process nucleogenesis such as occurs in supernovae and neutron star collisions).

This could do some damage, I guess.  One might even be able to make it lethal if it were strong enough; and it might be a delayed death, which could be useful for assassins of one kind or another, I guess.  But if you wanted to disintegrate someone, you’d have to cause a very large explosion, which would not treat you kindly if you were anywhere near.

If you could generate a beam of antimatter‒positrons or, worse, antiprotons or antineutrons‒you could certainly obliterate someone if you had enough.  But it would be an even worse explosion than the neutrons would give.  A person’s mass, annihilating with an equivalent amount of antimatter, would yield far greater explosive force than any nuclear weapon ever detonated (even the Tsar Bomba, which only involved the conversion of about 5 pounds of matter into energy, much smaller than any adult human).

So, yeah, instant disintegration by a ray gun (or a beam from the eyes like in comic books) using anything we currently understand is unworkable for various reasons.  Whether dark matter particles (if they exist) or even neutrinos (which do exist and do have quite peculiar properties) could be made to disintegrate someone is far from clear or promising.  In any case, they would be likely to lead to some manner of explosion such as mentioned above.

You wouldn’t want to do that in traffic.  The whole point is to delete people who needlessly make driving less safe for those around them!  You would cause more harm than good, by quite some margin, if you obliterated them, however satisfying it might be to turn an inattentive driver (and their car if they are alone**) into a small but very powerful explosive.

Wow.  I guess this is the sort of stuff that goes through my mind when I sleep very poorly, huh?  It makes me feel a bit like writing some on HELIOS.  I could explain why but that would give potential spoilers for the book, in case I ever write it.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day.  But do use your signals when you drive, for goodness’s sake.

*I know, I’m being unreasonably generous.  Of course, people who don’t signal properly when they drive don’t have friends, and it’s all but certain that no one loves them.  Whether they are, themselves, capable of love is open to debate.

**If they are not alone in their car, or on the road, it would be too dangerous to obliterate them in situ, in terms of collateral damage.  Perhaps the neutron beam that is only lethal after a delay would be useful for that after all, doing damage that only has its full effect over time.  One could similarly use X-rays or even gamma rays for that, but their penetrating power makes it much harder to avoid hitting innocent people.

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“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”

Well, isn’t this a surprise?

I’m writing a blog post on a Saturday for the first time in quite a while, because at the last minute, the boss sprang on us the notion that he needs us to start coming in on Saturdays again.  Things have been a bit slow the last few weeks, and a company with whom we had made a recent contract has apparently stiffed us a bit.  This is hardly our fault, of course—we had no input in the decision-making process—but we are going to be bearing the brunt of it.

Unfortunately, the coworker with whom I used to alternate Saturdays has already been picking up some shifts at his bartending job on Saturdays, so he cannot work, at least for the foreseeable relatively near future.  So, I’m going to be coming in on Saturdays, it seems.  Because, of course, he has a wife and young daughter to care for and with whom to spend time, whereas I have absolutely no one, so I am expendable.

I admit that I don’t do very much on weekends at the house, but if there was one good thing, it was that on Friday nights I could at least take some Benadryl and force myself to sleep in a little bit on Saturdays.  It’s not ideal rest, of course, if it’s achieved via well-known side-effects of antihistamines.  But it was the best I’ve been able to do, and that extra rest, however far from ideal, did me some good.

I can’t sleep in on Sundays, because I need to do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I don’t want to have to go traipsing through the other parts of the house while the other renters are up and about.  That’s more stressful than getting up early.

I swear, there are times when I suspect that my boss wants me to kill myself.  If so, I wish he would just say so.  I’m amenable to the idea, especially if I could get some help to make it go easier.

This has not been a very good birthday week for me.  In fact, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying that the birthdays that passed while I was in PRISON were better than this week.  At least then, I could hold on to the delusional idea that, once I got out, life would be better.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!

I think more and more often—or, well, it feels as though that’s the case—that I ought just to embrace my innate nature as a destroyer and commit myself to the destruction of the entire human race.  We have no business contaminating the rest of the universe with our presence, or with the presence of our emissaries, if we create some AI-based self-replicating robots or whatever to send out.  We can’t even manage the minor issues of our current “civilization”; what business have we trying to colonize the galaxy, let alone the universe?

We could wipe out everyone—and probably lots of other species—with another mass extinction, and then nature has plenty of time to develop another technological civilization if it’s so inclined before the sun goes red giant.  Of course, whatever they might be could be no better than humans are.  There’s no reason, for instance, to imagine that any kind of animal currently alive on Earth would manage things better if they were suddenly granted the capacity to have a technological civilization.  But at least it would be out of our hands.  We would be laid to sleep like the children in the nursery rhyme prayer, dying before we wake.

We certainly are not awake now.  Look around you.  The most powerful nations (ever) on Earth are in the hands of collections of moral imbeciles.  As always, as Yeats pointed out, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  There are logical, causal reasons for this fact, but they do not make it easier to stomach.

I hate this fucking planet.  I hate this fucking species.  In fact, I’m not fond of the universe overall, at the moment.  If I could imagine a way to trigger a vacuum collapse that would wipe out everything, I would consider doing it.  But that’s at best a hypothetical possibility.

I guess I have to start somewhat smaller.

Contrary to popular imagining, there is no danger in creating, for instance, a small black hole in a particle accelerator, even if we had an accelerator with that capability.  Small black holes disappear almost instantly, vanishing in flashes of Hawking radiation.  Even if they didn’t, a miniature black hole would almost certainly just sink to the center of gravity of the Earth and perhaps do a bit of extra heating of the core.

Black holes don’t magically suck things into themselves, they merely gravitate just like anything else of equivalent mass (which would be tiny indeed for one produced from a particle accelerator).  Yes, anything that passes the event horizon cannot escape, but for a subatomic black hole, that horizon would be unimaginably tiny.  Even a black hole with the mass of the whole Earth would only be the (outer) size of a pea.

One could and can, of course, create thermonuclear reactions without requiring a fission explosion (which requires rarer materials) to trigger it.  A network of lasers triggering local fusion in appropriately placed samples could direct that energy toward a lithium deuteride* core and generate enough heat to trigger a growing chain of explosions.  But such a “bomb” would need to be large and stationary.

Still, one could set up a dummy corporation with branches in numerous large cities throughout the world and build those bombs, maybe also setting them up in “research outposts” in Antarctica and/or the Arctic, to melt the polar ice caps.  Possibly putting some similar “research facilities” near the thin-points of various volcanoes and super volcanoes would also enhance the outcome.

Alternatively, one could use a particle accelerator to generate anti-matter and store it.  Now this would be quite a technical challenge, since one cannot store neutral antimatter easily—it annihilates if it touches any normal matter, and so it is generally stored in electrically charged forms such as positrons and antiprotons, in evacuated chambers, contained by powerful magnetic fields.  It’s not an efficient way to do things, but one could, possibly, store enough of it that, once one released the magnetic containment, one could unleash an explosion that would make the Tsar Bomba look like one of those little paper poppers we used to play with when we were kids.

There are other ways, of course, to do things.  I’ve mentioned before that it wouldn’t be all that hard to use rockets to redirect the orbits of large asteroids so they were more likely to collide with the Earth.  Or one could genetically engineer and mass-produce a more hardy and virulent form of anthrax (for instance) and disperse it aerially over major cities.

I guess the point is I’m not in a good mood, and it would probably be better for all of humanity, as well as for me, if I were to cease to exist.  I’m so tired of everything.

I hope you’re having a nice weekend.

*Although, for the lithium to be converted to tritium most efficiently, on needs a source of neutrons, which are handily provided by primary fission explosions in usual thermonuclear weapons.  I suspect one could arrange alternate sources with only minimal effort.