Physics

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Oblivion is cold comfort, but it’s all the comfort I have to offer

Well, it’s Monday.  Meet the new week‒same as the old week.  There is nothing new or interesting happening, as far as I can see.  Nothing is new in my personal interactions with the world, and nothing is new in the world at large.  There may seem to be new things, and there are probably some details that are unique.  But then again, every snowflake is supposedly unique, but they’re all just flakes of snow, airborne ice crystals, and the overall behavior is nothing different despite all the trivially new specific flakes.  The phenomenon of snowfall is still just overall the same.

“So in the world,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar said.  “‘Tis furnished well with men.  And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.”  He goes on the claim that he is unique in the next sentence, but immediately thereafter, Brutus, Cassius, et al, demonstrate that he too is merely flesh and blood like all the rest.

All the heroes, all the villains, all the ordinary people‒they are all functionally identical, despite all their trivial differences.  What percentage of the people who have ever lived are remembered at all?  A smattering, a handful, if that‒not even a rounding error compared to the total of all people who have lived.  And many of those we do remember are probably highly fictionalized and may not have actually existed at all.

What are the odds that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were real people?  How about Achilles and Hector?  For crying out loud, we know that even Richard III, presented as Shakespeare’s most thoroughgoing villain (perhaps matched by Iago) and deformed as well, was pretty much nothing of either sort in real life (or that’s what the historical evidence suggests).  He was simply defeated and then vilified by those who had defeated him, presumably to help justify their own actions.

And, by the way, who remembers them?

This sort of fact is part of why I sometimes refer to people (and other lifeforms) as virtual particles.  They pop into existence, persist for an infinitesimal period of time, and then literally vanish again, without a proverbial trace.

Well, actually, as with all virtual particles (which are not actually a thing but are merely mathematical and pedagogical tools) the collective effects of us virtual particles‒aka living things‒can have impacts on the world as a whole.  It’s even conceivable that, in just the right circumstances, as with the “real” virtual particles*, a virtual personicle can become actual.  I’m not sure what that would mean in the real world, though, and I’m not convinced that it has ever yet happened.

All this is part of why I have no patience for people who become fanatical about their particular ideologies and such.  They’re all just equivalent to some fanciful imaginary imaginings by a group of photons or neutrinos or what have you.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to approach their current affairs and ideas as “important” in their local** transient bailiwick, for some things to be important to them.  But it would be silly in a pronounced (but unfortunately not funny) sense for anyone to imagine that they had access to some final, consequential knowledge about the nature of the world and particularly about how people should behave.  If someone had such knowledge, I suspect it would be obvious to any intellectually honest person, including intelligent but disinterested aliens.

Humans and their dogmas are transient and transitory and ephemeral (and other synonyms as well) as are all other specific forms of life and ways of life.  Life overall is transient; as far as we can tell, it cannot even in principle go on forever.  That’s not just referring to individual lives, but to life as a phenomenon.  We could be wrong about this; there is much we don’t know, and in principle, our descendants could discover ways around the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  But that’s quite a big “if”, as it were.

Sorry to be such a downer; it’s just my nature, apparently.  Look not for comfort from me, as the ghost of Marley said.  It comes from other regions and is delivered by other ministers to other sorts of people.  Though, in this case, I’m not sure about what sorts of ministers and people would be involved, let alone what “regions” might produce such comfort.

In any case, I have no comfort, so I can offer none to anyone else; I cannot give what I do not have and what I do not even hope to have.  The best I can offer is to say that, well, oblivion seems to be the only viable alternative to discomfort offered by this universe.  It’s not much to offer, I admit, but it’s the best I have.  And, as pointed out above, as far as we can tell, it’s waiting for us all, eventually.

I won’t say that I look forward to it, because that really doesn’t make much sense.  But I am tired of trying to continue despite having almost no good reason to do so.

I hope you, the average reader, feel better than I do.  Batman help you if you feel worse.

*There’s an oxymoron.

**That “local” can, in principle, include the entire planet.  The point is merely that it is quite finite and limited.

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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.

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The stochasticity of quantum interactions and the names of days of the week

It’s Wednesday today.  That’s a weird way to spell a day, and a weird way to spell a version of the name of the god Wotan or Odin, after whom the day is named (unless I am quite, quite mistaken).

Our days are peculiarly and seemingly haphazardly named here in the English-speaking West.  We’re not the only ones with inconsistent weekday names, but ours are certainly a strange hodgepodge.  Sunday and Monday are relatively straightforward:  they’re named for the sun and the moon.  Then, weirdly, we suddenly switch to Norse (!) mythology and name the next four days after four of the old Scandinavian deities.  Then, abruptly, we switch to a Roman god, Saturn, for Saturday.

This “names of the days of the week” thing was clearly not planned out.  It just sort of happened.  But that’s the way so many things occur in the real world—indeed, perhaps everything just sort of happens, and at multiple levels—not randomly but nevertheless stochastically and in a way that is functionally unpredictable, at least in its details.

The various quantum fields just sort of interact in ways that, at their lowest stable energy levels, give us quarks and gluons and electrons and photons and W and Z bosons and various neutrinos and a nonzero Higgs field that interacts with some (but not all) of the other fields.  The quarks and gluons just happen to form up stably into protons (and some neutrons, but neutrons are only stable within an atomic nucleus—they decay with a half-life of about ten minutes when existing freely).  And the protons happen to interact, via the electromagnetic field, with the electron field, and they stably pair up, and neutrons come into play “afterwards”, stabilizing larger atomic nuclei (though that’s not all they do).

Then, on large scales, the graviton field (if there indeed is such a thing, which is suspected but not certain) interacts with all the other fields, and where the density of stuff is slightly higher it pulls that stuff in towards itself, and where it is less, that rarefied stuff gets thinned out further as its components are pulled by neighboring stronger areas of gravity.

This process undergoes positive feedback—as stuff gets denser, its gravity gets more prominent, and that in turn tends to make the stuff get denser still.  And if there is any net angular momentum to larger collections of the stuff—and there almost always is some net angular momentum, since there’s only one way to have zero angular momentum, and there is a functionally limitless number of ways for it to be nonzero*—the stuff starts to rotate around a net common axis.

And then, of course, we get galaxies, and in those galaxies, we get stars, in which the interactions of the various quantum fields and gravity lead the protons and neutrons to get together into bigger clumps, some of which are quite stable (and the ones that aren’t stable simply don’t endure but transform into other states until they find ones that are stable).

Then stars run out of fuel, and the various field interactions and gravity produce various kinds of spectacular deaths, most of which involve scattering at least some heavier elements** out into the reaches of the galaxies.  Then we get next generations of stars, which (by the way) clump and develop angular momentum in a smaller but similar way to the galaxies.  And now, with heavier elements, we get planets, some of which are largely solid.

I think you know the broad strokes of the rest of the story.  If not, let me know.

Of course, this is a very general sketch of how stuff just came together to form the universe in which we exist, and there’s no indication that that is anything more than just small things—or esoteric things, really, such as quantum fields and their local perturbations—interacting with each other and making patterns on larger scales, much as water molecules can clump into fantastic patterns in the frost on windows or in snowflakes when they get cool enough.  Simple (well, relatively simple) rules at small scales can come together to produce surprising things at larger scales when they all interact at secondary, tertiary, quaternary and higher levels.

If you want to see how remarkable that tendency can be even in two dimensions, find a website that lets you play “John Conway’s Game of Life” and see how stable and active and interactive shapes can arise from even truly simple rules.

What was my point?  Sorry, I got distracted there for a minute.  Oh, right, I just meant to say that the things that happen and that all seem very real and important and even inevitable and fundamental are largely the products of stochastic processes interacting in ways that ultimately are far from being representable by any kind of linear equation.

It’s entirely possible and plausible that, if the rules of the quantum fields—or the specific types of quantum fields*** involved—were different, and thus interacted with each other differently, they might still accumulate into structures and functions on higher levels, and though they might produce a universe that would be all but incomprehensible to us, and in which we could not survive for an instant, they might nevertheless form structures and processes that could become what would have to be called “alive” and even “aware” and “intelligent”.

But in how many such universes would there be creatures that name the days of whatever passes for their weeks after various astronomical bodies (or whatever they have that is comparable) and random mythological figures from different places and times?

I leave it to the reader to speculate.

*There’s only so fast anything can be spinning, since no part of the spinning thing can exceed the speed of light.  Even black holes have a maximum angular velocity.  Nevertheless, both the angular velocity and the net axis of rotation can be more or less continuously variable.  If we can apply the real numbers—which ironically may not be possible in the real world—there is an uncountably infinite number of possible ways for angular momentum to be nonzero.  That makes zero really unlikely and unstable.

**Astronomers call any element but Hydrogen and Helium a “metal”, which is a very loose use of the term if you ask me.  I think many astronomers would agree, and sometimes I think I detect more than a tiny amount of embarrassment when they tell people that astronomical definition.

***Or the configurations of strings and branes if superstring/M theory turns out to be correct.

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Thoughts on real versus virtual keyboards, books, and quantum teleportation

It’s Friday, and I’m writing this post on my mini laptop computer, because although yesterday I forgot it and had to use the smartphone, it was really quite nice the other day to be able to type for real and not tap around on some simulated keyboard with no aesthetic appeal, on which one cannot feel the keys responding to one’s touch (and which gives this one arthritic pain in the base of his thumbs).

I remember when the notion of such a virtual keyboard first appeared to me—this was in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I thought the idea seemed terribly unsatisfactory despite being very clever.  I mean, I recognized the efficiency of it, but when the characters would read books and such things on their little portable “tablets”, it seemed almost heartbreaking.

Obviously, in a star ship in deep space, they’re not going to have room for a vast physical library such as the virtual one they clearly have in the ship’s computer.  It’s much like the fact that I have many more books in my Kindle library than I have in my physical living space (though I used to have way more physical books than I have current Kindle books).  But something is lost a bit, nevertheless, at least for me, with such virtual collections.

Actually, it just occurred to me:  in Star Trek, they use replicators to make their food and so on, applying the transporter technology to reproduce scanned items that include food.  Why could they not use that to replicate books as needed, then scan them away when they were done?

Of course, the quantum mechanics of potential real world transporter-type technology is such that you couldn’t mass produce anything from “scanning” any one particular item; as part of the required entanglement process for quantum teleportation, one destroys the quantum states of the particles in the original item (or person, if it’s a person, so Dr. McCoy was right to be leery of the transporter).

Also, the entangled particles used to reconstruct the item by creating a new set of particles in identical quantum states to the original, could not be kept in their transitional states indefinitely; such states are not inherently stable.  Even if they could be maintained thanks to advanced technology, once they were used to recreate the original item or person, those entangled particles would also have their own quantum states irreparably altered, and could not be used to make another copy.

You can never make more than one copy of a thing sent by quantum teleportation, The Enemy Within notwithstanding*.

Still, maybe the people in TNG could “scan” a bunch of real books, as if about to transport them using the ship’s transporters, and just…save them for later.  You couldn’t make multiple copies, again because the originals would not still exist after being scanned—as I noted before, such scanning destroys the initial quantum states of all the constituents of the scanned item (or person).  But they could just be singly stored in the “buffer”, saving the quantum state of the entangled particles used to apply quantum teleportation.

But wait, I hear you say, storing all those books “in transition” would entail a tremendous amount of stored quantum information that would need to be maintained in its entangled state indefinitely, at presumably great cost in data and energy.  Not only that, one would have to have the equivalent of the mass of those items in the ship at all times, no matter** what.

You are very clever, and you are, of course, correct; it wouldn’t be efficient in any sense, and would add to the power requirements of the ship.  Also, in any serious disruption of the ship’s stability and power—such as happens in nearly every episode, so more than twenty times a year on average—much of that quantum information would probably be lost.

Maybe it really doesn’t make practical sense to try to do such a thing.  After all, I’m the person who has bemoaned the incredible data wastage necessary to store audio, let alone video, files rather than the much more efficient written word.  And I have not changed my mind on that set of subjects.  I could record a video, or even an audio, of me reading the words of this blog post, and it would have a file size in the hundreds of K at least; for a video, it would probably be many megabytes in size.

Meanwhile, my average blog posts, as stored in Word, are 16 to 20 K in size.  It’s quite a difference.  Even just using the RAM of this small computer (4 gigabytes) I could load up as many as a quarter of a million blog posts (assuming nothing else were in the random-access memory, which in not the way things work).  That’s about 250 million words.  Even I am unlikely to write that much during my lifetime.

More importantly, with the written word no one has to look at my ugly mug (though I will admit that my voice is absolutely lovely, so it might be worth hearing any audio file I produce…Ha-ha, just kidding).

Anyway, as I noted, it’s Friday, and I’m almost certain we’re not working tomorrow—I’m inclined to say that, even if the office is open, I’m not working tomorrow, but I tend not to follow through on such ultimata, because I’m a pushover—so there won’t be another post until Monday, at the earliest (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I hope you all have a good weekend, but at least I know, as I pointed out yesterday, that you will have the best weekend you possibly can, since whatever happens becomes inevitable as soon as it happens, and it may have always been so (if quantum superdeterminism is correct).  Of course, that means you will also have the worst weekend possible.  But for most weekends, that’s a comfort.  For most such weekends, you could honestly say, “Well, if that was the worst weekend I could possibly have had, it’s not so bad.”

Usually, you could honestly say and feel that.  And it’s very likely that this weekend will be one such usual weekend.

Have a good one.

*In any case, that episode is really more of a fable than anything truly science fiction.  It assumes a bizarre kind of dualism between body and mind and a further, cleanly divisible dualism even in the mind itself, which in the episode is split into discrete but very broad personality aspects that can be separated out into different bodies.  It’s an interesting exploration of the tension between aspects of a person’s character, and engages speculation about whether a dark/violent side is a necessary aspect for a good leader.

**No pun intended, but I’m leaving it.

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Maybe it’s signal. Maybe it’s noise. Maybe it’s Maybelline?

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I don’t know that I have anything of use or substance to say, or anything to say that isn’t mostly just noise.  Perhaps I’m just some peculiar source of radio static in the background of the universe.  Or perhaps…perhaps I’m just pretending that what I do is unplanned, when in fact everything is calculated and subversive.

Ha!  I wish.  My brain doesn’t work like that, and I’m not sure anyone else’s does, either.  Even John Von Neumann had to develop complex mathematics and sophisticated models to deal with the limited degree of uncertainty in highly simplified versions of one-on-one poker.  If he was so intrigued by what he‒possessing perhaps the highest general intelligence of which history is firmly aware‒could not fully model, then this is strong evidence that no one, now or ever, has really been in control of anything.

Of course, game theory has advanced since Von Neumann co-invented it, and it is certainly useful, but it is clear that, at best, it deals in probabilities and tendencies.  There is no Asimovian 2nd Foundation Hari Seldon psychohistory that can figure out the specific events of whole galactic civilizations well into the future, and I doubt there ever will be.

Of course, if we want to be trivial, we can predict the far future with some degree of confidence:  Eventually, unless our knowledge of the universe is deeply mistaken*, as entropy increases inexorably, new stars will stop forming, old stars will burn out (even red dwarfs), black holes will evaporate, and the universe will be a thin haze of elementary particles.  Indeed, if everything eventually reduces to massless bosons (e.g., photons) then in a very real sense, time will literally have no meaning, since photons, being massless particles, do not “experience” time.  From their point of view‒to speak very figuratively‒their entire existence is instantaneous.

Of course, going on to the very far future, given the nature of probability, new universes may arise.  Something like Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology may be the way things happen, or there may merely be a Poincaré recurrence of the universe.  Or maybe, as I’ve speculated previously, time is not one way, and our future might also be the future of another, far distant “big bang” but for which time/entropy increases in the opposite direction.

Also, of course, if civilization and intelligence persists and grows, which is not a small “if”, then who knows where technology will develop?  Our descendants could conceivably develop the capacity to do cosmic engineering, literally shaping the large-scale development of the universe, or even making new ones.

But I suspect they still will not be able to micromanage perfectly the interactions of innumerable agents in complex systems.  Some limits are fundamental, and I think this may be one.  This comes down to something related to my “Elessar’s First Conjecture/Theorem”, that no complex, intelligence can ever fully understand itself in detail, because to model a given complex system requires a system of greater complexity, which itself will need to be described, leading to an infinite regress.

And, of course, we know that in complex systems, in which interactions are stochastic and multivariate and nonlinear (and thus exhibit chaotic development) the specifics of future happenings will be unpredictable since to know them perfectly, we would need an infinite number of significant digits**, though in some cases‒like entropy‒we can make general predictions with high confidence.  

This is part of why “planned economies” fail, and almost certainly always will, unless they are stupendously lucky.  In any case, such luck will not last, just as neither strength nor good purpose will last in the presence of the One Ring.  This is also why most complex conspiracy theories are simply laughable.

People derive their models of the world to too great a degree from our ubiquitous visual entertainment, which has been around long enough to be deeply self-mimicking and self-derivative.  Gunshots and explosions don’t behave in real life the way they do in action movies, but action movies (and shows and videos) take their models of the world from previous action movies, much as an AI’s model of human speech and interaction, if derived from the internet, is going to be increasingly contaminated by the products of other AIs, and may end up veering far away from anything reminiscent of human interactions, at least if left to its own devices.

Maybe that’s an advantage of written fiction over movies and TV and other videos; it’s not presenting a simulation of some version of reality, it’s telling you a story, describing things, but you have to imagine them.  Meanwhile, if all your fiction is in words, your physical intuition of the real world‒and your psychological and sociological and economic intuition‒would be derived from real events, not the Machiavellian machinations of Manichean movie-based manipulators.

That was an interesting stream of consciousness, if I do say so myself (and I do).  Who could have predicted it?  Not I.  And I’m the one who wrote it.  Which goes to my point.

Please try to have a good day.

*This is always possible in principle, but for many aspects of cosmology, our credences can be justifiably high.

**I sometimes say that while knowledge can vary greatly, ignorance is always infinite.  This can be proven with a single, simple example:  the digits of pi.  There are an infinite number of them, and no matter how many we calculate, there will be an infinite number we don’t know.  Ditto for e and any other transcendental numbers, let alone all the other real numbers that have no specific designation, of which there exist an uncountable infinity.  And this is just one place where infinite information dwells, of which we will always have only finite knowledge.

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We skipped the light fandango…

Well, here I am, writing a blog post again on Tuesday, Batman* only knows why.  I don’t really have anything of substance to say.  Not that I had anything of substance to say yesterday.

Actually, come to think of it, I did encounter a neat fact last week.

One morning I decided to get in a bit of reading in one of the textbooks I keep in my office‒Classical Electrodynamics by John David Jackson.  I employed a technique I’ve often used for reviewing:  I flipped a coin to increasingly winnow down the textbook‒heads is first half, tails is second half, etc.‒and pick a random section to start reading.

I knew that much of the mathematical formalism and at least some of the technical matters in the book would be unfamiliar, so I didn’t expect to understand fully what I was reading.  But I also know that the stuff I do and don’t understand will linger in my brain, and as I’m exposed to other things that go with it or explain it or link up with it, the picture will form.  I don’t read or learn especially quickly, but I do learn deeply, and in a way that connects ideas and principles together in the end.

There was much of this brief section (which was about refraction and/or absorption of light** by water) that was slightly over my head.  Nevertheless, it was interesting, and the author introduced a graph (see below) showing at the top the refraction of light by water across wavelengths, and how it tends to vary.  I assume we’re all at least implicitly aware of the fact that different wavelengths are refracted by water differently‒thus the phenomenon of rainbows.

Below this is a table showing the absorption of electromagnetic radiation by water across frequencies.  Here there is a steep upward slope when coming in toward the center from highest and lowest frequencies.  It peaks at around the microwave/infrared wavelengths from the left and around the ultraviolet from the right.

Then a striking thing happens.  There is a sudden, precipitous drop in absorption down to very low levels in a fairly narrow range of frequencies in the “middle” of the graph, meaning that in this range, light passes through water with relatively little absorption.  This is the range we know as visible light.

The author took the time to point out that this fact about the nature of water‒that it is more or less transparent in this very narrow range of frequencies‒is exactly why we Earthlings tend to see only in that range.  It’s not an accident of evolution, some ancient, stochastic occurrence that is thenceforward cemented, unchangeable, into all descendants, like the DNA code and ribosomes and the chirality of biological molecules.  It is instead a fundamental fact of physics that determines where creatures will be able to see if they first developed vision while living in water and then developed eyes that, like the rest of them, were mainly made of water.

There’s no point in making retinal proteins that react to wavelengths of EM radiation that are almost entirely absorbed by water.

That simple fact‒simple in summary, at least‒is enough to explain a huge swath of the nature of our visual perception, and it doesn’t require any further explaining to understand why we see in the range of light we do.

That was just a randomly chosen section of a textbook that reputedly is extremely difficult.  I don’t disagree with that assessment of difficulty; it was a very dense bunch of material even in just 4 or 5 pages.  But to think that one can find such remarkable facts while just trying to read and learn in random order from a textbook!

So, that’s an interesting little tidbit that seems worth sharing, at least to me.  It’s far more interesting than anything going on in the human world right now.  What’s more, this is a fact that has existed as long as water itself has existed‒and implicitly, it existed even before that, lying there waiting in the fundamental laws of nature.  And it will be there long after everything but those fundamental laws is gone.

If you want to embrace eternity, and things like Hilbert’s Hotel and Cantor’s diagonal proof make you worry about your sanity (this happens to many of us, so don’t feel bad) then focus on this fact about visible light.  It’s there, it’s real, it’s quasi-eternal, and it’s concrete.

Though the absorption spectrum for concrete is…quite different.

*This harkens back to the reference from Batman Begins, when Flass says “I swear to God,” and Batman snarls “Swear to me!”  It seems fun to use Batman when one would normally say God.

**By “light” I mean all electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves to gamma rays.

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In the voids between galaxies, it’s already next year, but there’s still no life there.

It’s Tuesday, now‒the first Tuesday of the new year.  This is not anything particularly interesting, of course.  It’s really just another day.  But it is also the last day of the first week of the new year, the 7th day of the year, as indicated by the fact that it is January 7th.

“Brilliant, Holmes!” I hear you say.

In this case, though, it truly is elementary.  It’s also pretty boring, so I’m sorry to go on about it.

There have been troubling things in national news, of course:  the terroristic suicide attack-by-vehicle in New Orleans; the guy who blew up his cyber truck; severe cold weather striking large swaths of the eastern US; and, of course, no one has yet yelled “Psych!!” regarding Donald Trump’s election for a second term as president.

I’m not as rabidly anti-Trump as many; he’s just a man, of soft and squishy flesh and blood, like everyone else.  He’s also just one more incompetent government official on a world stage that might as well be a collection of (poor quality) Three Stooges clones.

It would be remarkable and praiseworthy if humans actually elected smart, calm, intellectually honest government officials with personal integrity.  Alas, when holding elections, humans seem unable to be as rigorous in their evaluation of candidates as they would be when screening babysitters or even gardeners.  And, of course, since few people are in the habit of reflecting on themselves in any way to improve on their own flaws in judgment, it seems unlikely that things will change very quickly.

This is all nothing new, of course.  The modern shape of cyberspace and the borderline-antisocial media add little twists and peculiarities, introducing new dynamics to the system.  But the dominating principles of primate social and sexual dominance hierarchies and displays have not changed much, if at all.

The only really interesting thing I’ve found in the news is the statement about a new study‒an elaboration of a first theoretical paper from some years ago‒that proposes a potential alternative explanation for the fact that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating that doesn’t require “dark energy”.

The cosmological principle, which underlies the usefulness of standard model, lambda-CDM cosmology, states that, on the largest of scales, the universe is uniform and homogeneous.  However, on anything other than the largest scales, the universe is decidedly clumpy.  This is because of gravity, of course, pulling things together in regions where things are more dense (making them still denser) and making the spaces in between ever more rarefied and so on.

But, of course, gravity is not just a simple attractive force; it works its effects through the warping of spacetime, and in ordinary circumstances (so to speak) its effect on time is far more significant than those on space.  This is a very real effect, one for which we have to adjust when using GPS satellites for instance, so while general understanding of it may be relatively rare, it is not an esoteric bit of physics.  It’s textbook stuff.

The point being made by this new hypothesis is that perhaps there is no real dark energy, but instead, in regions where more mass exists, time slows down.  This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s quite true, and indeed, to a large extent, all the apparent physical effects of gravity are produced by the differential flow of time between places where the manifold is more vs. less curved.

So, in the places where matter/energy is relatively scarce, time moves “more quickly”.  So, since the universe is definitely expanding (due to the Big Bang), those regions are going forward through their expansion more quickly than regions with more matter, and so the space between galaxies and clusters appears to expand more quickly, and as the comparative difference, the contrast, in energy concentration increases, the difference in passage of time will tend to increase, too, producing an apparent accelerated expansion.

[Note to self:  how would this model be expected to affect the extreme measured uniformity of the Cosmic Microwave Background?  Is this going to be a point of evidence against it?]

This is not a definitive, tested hypothesis, but it rests on sound principles.  It probably won’t supersede lambda-CDM, but it has the potential to do so.  This is no crank, RFK Jr. style hypothesis by any means.  I haven’t read the papers involved yet; rather I read articles and watched some videos about it; I will try to learn more.

But, since the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe in the late ‘90s was the single most exciting (non-personal) event in my life, the idea that there is a new approach that might change that again is also truly exciting.

It makes me wish I had just gone into physics as I had originally intended.  However, post-open heart surgery, transient cognitive impairment, and an exacerbation of depression triggered by the same thing, made it too difficult, in the short term, to keep up with my physics and math classes in the semester after my heart surgery, so to English I went.

But as I picture the large-scale universe differentially flowing through time and thus expanding at relatively different seeming rates, producing this wonderful, higher-dimensional twisty-bulgy-filamentous shape, I can at least feel a little twinge of the joy of contemplating science.  My only real contribution to science was in studying the effects of gliotoxin on naked DNA in vitro, and though that’s quite interesting, it’s not exactly cosmology.

Oh, I also wrote a pretty decent review article about the various effects on cognition and other neurological functions of heart-lung bypass as done during open-heart surgery.  Clearly, that was motivated by personal experience.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  Tomorrow begins the second week of the year, but I don’t expect to write again before Thursday.

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If idle blog will once be necessary, I’ll not sleep neither. This mortal house I’ll ruin…

Good-o and hell morning.

It’s Thursday, so I’m writing my formerly standard (and potentially newly standard) weekly blog post today.  Huzzah.  Admittedly, I last wrote a blog post on Monday, so there have only been two blank days since I posted, but it still feels odd.  My daily blog posts are almost never worth reading, anyway, though, so it’s not a huge loss.

It was slightly nice to let myself not feel pressured to write a “report” on my progress these last few days.  I also didn’t push myself to write more than one page a day.  Historically, that has often nevertheless led to me writing quite a bit more per day, but not this time.  Over the last two days, I’ve written a total of 1,361 words on Extra Body, bringing it to its current total of 57,886 words (88 pages).  I just haven’t had much energy for writing, or for anything at all.  That’s even relative to my usual level of energy.

I say that, but I have been trying to study some mathematics and physics.  I’ve been doing the Brilliant course on intro to linear algebra, which is quite interesting, and should help prepare me for more in-depth work in quantum mechanics/quantum field theory and (most important to me) General Relativity.  I need to review and improve my calculus as well.  I also got the e-book (PDF) of Advanced Theoretical Physics by the guy who runs the Science Asylum YouTube channel.  He does a really good job explaining things on his channel‒including things I already understand well, so I know he’s rigorous and thorough.

I’ve also been reading Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum book on Special Relativity, with plans to move toward the subsequent one on General Relativity (and to circle back to the one on quantum mechanics).  And, of course, I’ve also been reading Sean Carroll’s two Biggest Ideas in the Universe books.  Basically, I want to ground myself in the concepts and renew and improve my mathematics skills before I get into real study of GR, using Sean Carroll’s textbook (I already own it and Gravitation) and possibly some other recommended texts, and also some university level quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

One reason for this is:  I’ve long wondered just what would happen if one were to accelerate a space ship to close enough to the speed of light that its relativistic length contraction and relativistic mass put it below its Schwarzschild radius (at least relative to outside observers), which should mean it should become a black hole.  But of course, it’s not a simple spherical mass, so the solutions for the equations might be much more complicated and lead to unexpected outcomes as in the Kerr solution for spinning black holes.  This is the most realistic black hole model, since basically all black holes spin, and often do so quite energetically.  Conservation of angular momentum applies to collapsed stars just as it does when a spinning skater spins faster as the skater’s arms are pulled in.

I have a secret fantasy that a spaceship situation such as I described above might allow a ship to turn itself into a wormhole instantaneously if everything is done right, and achieve something that is effectively faster-than-light travel.  But even if that’s not workable, I’d like to know what would happen in such a situation.  I know this is not idle thinking, because there was real curiosity whether, if there really were curled up dimensions that are large enough, particles at the LHC might achieve relativistic mass enough to become tiny black holes*.

This is far from the only question I would like to understand better about GR.  I want to understand, deeply, the mathematics that makes a cosmological constant produce “repulsive gravity” and thus expanding spacetime.  I’m actually starting to get a little inkling of how that works, but only an inkling**.  I need more.

I would like to understand everything, of course, everything that there is to know…but only through the dint of my own work.  I would never want just to be given knowledge.  How lame and boring that would be!

I also have been able to (re)read some fiction amidst all this‒The Belgariad, by David Eddings.  I picked up near the end of Queen of Sorcery and am now in the first half of Enchanter’s Endgame.  It’s nice to be able to read at least these fiction books that I haven’t read in a while 

Basically, I’m frantically grasping at straws‒panicking in my weird, quietish way‒trying to find something, some reason, to keep me going.  I fear it’s not working, though.  The downward pull is too strong; I’m orbiting in the inner accretion disk of my personal black hole, and unless I can be pulled out by someone or something‒for I cannot do it on my own‒I will soon enter the “plunging region” where orbit is no longer possible, and nothing remains but to cross the horizon.  Every single day I yearn for everything to be over.

It doesn’t help that my sleep has been rotten, even by my own standards.  And my chronic pain always interferes with everything.  And my tinnitus is just galling, keening away like a permanent near-the-ear mosquito, but higher in pitch, especially now that I have a bit in my left ear as well as the major tinnitus in my right ear.  It makes the various other noises of the world feel all the more chaotic.  And I’m very much alone in my head, and in my life.  I feel like the only member of my species, like that last passenger pigeon that lived, companionless, in the Cincinnati Zoo for a few years before dying.

Meanwhile, the weather down here in south Florida is thoroughly sloppy, with rain and flooding and everything that goes with them‒such as the Internet being out where I live‒leading to my long commute being more unpleasant than usual.  At least it’s cooler, though (in temperature, not in fashionableness).  There were a few times during the night last night in which, when I started awake‒as I do several times most nights‒I realized that the air conditioner wasn’t even running!  That’s rare in June in this part of the world.

Oh, and I mentioned Substack a few days ago.  Well, it turns out that, technically, I already have a Substack account, since I follow a few other writers and thinkers thereon.  So I guess, if I so chose, I could write stuff there and set it up with a paywall.  Of course, actually, I could do that here on WordPress already, I think, and loyalty would suggest that it would be the better choice.  Of course, I could set up a Patreon account and link it to my work here and to my YouTube channel and so on.

All these thoughts are pipe dreams, though.  I don’t honestly expect any of them to come to fruition‒they’ll just drop to the ground like most of the fifty-six trillion mangos in south Florida, merely to rot there and attract fruit flies.

We’ll see, I guess.

Meanwhile, I’m scheduled to work this weekend, so I’ll have two more days of fiction writing this week and three next week before my next scheduled blog post.  It’ll be almost the equinox next Thursday, and of course, this coming Sunday will be Father’s Day.  I wish that were a holiday I could enjoy; being a father is the most important and greatest thing I have ever done.  But that all went bitterly off-kilter, and I crashed and burned, and right now I’m just surviving in the wasteland near the wreckage, fantasizing about a rescue or an escape, but knowing more and more every day that such a thing is vanishingly unlikely.

Anyway, enough.  This is getting too long.  I hope you all have a good week and a good weekend.  If you’re a father, I hope you have a great day Sunday, and for those of you who have fathers who are still around and who deserve it, I hope you get in touch with them at least and make sure they know that they matter to you.  Men are expected to be stoic about love and other feelings…but men also die by suicide in about three or four times as great numbers as women.  Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but it sure doesn’t rule it out, either.

TTFN

*This was never a worry, just to be clear, even if it had happened.  A tiny black hole that size would decay almost instantly via Hawking radiation.  But that would (or should) produce an essentially random shower of particles, not the usual decay products of the original particle.  Alas, no such events (or event horizons) occurred, so if there are curled up extra dimensions, the LHC didn’t get energetic enough to probe them.

**That sounds like the word for a baby pen, doesn’t it?

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“Sleep”, writing, and studying physics–report for June 5, 2024 AD/CE

Well, I got almost 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, plus 20 minutes or so of on and off dozing.  While that sucks big-time, it’s better than it’s been lately.  At least I’m not seeing bugs on the walls out the corners of my eyes right now–though I still keep briefly thinking there’s a cat waiting by any door that I open, until I look down and see that there isn’t.

What can you do?  Not much right now, it seems.

Anyway, I produced a decent amount of work this morning.  I wrote 1,373 “block” words and 1,388 “net” words, with a difference then of just barely over 1% no matter which number you take as your denominator.  The total word count of this would-be short story is now 54,327 words, and it is 83 pages long in the format I described yesterday (I think).  It’s definitely more of a novella.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading these last few days, skipping between Sean Carroll’s two Biggest Ideas in the Universe books and the first volume of Feynman’s lectures and Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape*.  As you know, I’ve been trying to teach myself more of the physics on which I missed out by switching majors after my heart surgery, especially General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics/Quantum Field Theory.  Sean Carroll’s** “Biggest Ideas” books are focused on explaining those things for interested laypersons without avoiding the mathematics, but not practicing teaching/practicing how to do the math, so it’s a good beginning.  Of course, in a perfect world, I intend to beyond the overviews and actually to get comfortable with using the mathematics, particularly because I want to understand the cosmological constant at the level of the mathematics of General Relativity, because that’s the only part that I don’t quite get intuitively.  But really, I want to understand and be able to use all of it, and to be able to read all the papers on arXiv and understand them at the level of a professional, like I can with medrXiv and bioRxiv.

I doubt that I will live that long.  But, in the meantime, at least I’m learning new things.

Tomorrow is Thursday, so of course, I will be doing my more standard Thursday blog.  It’s silly to call it a “weekly” blog, since I’ve been writing these reports almost every day; once I’ve started a habit it’s hard for me to deviate from it.  But I don’t plan to write any fiction tomorrow, but instead will just focus on the blog post.  I’ll see you then (so to speak).

*I’ve not yet encountered a better teacher of mathematics than Professor Ellenberg.  He captures and conveys the fun and beauty of math as well as anyone I’ve encountered and better than the vast majority.  He narrates his own audio book versions, too.  If you want to review general mathematical ideas and then general geometric ideas (and their surprising applications) in an accessible and enjoyable way, you could not do much better than reading (and/or listening to) his books.

**Professor Carroll is another great teacher, though he deals with slightly more high-falutin’ stuff than Professor Ellenberg in his books, so the subject matter can be denser.

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My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they blog their watches on unto mine eyes

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again—indeed, it is the last Thursday in May of 2024, common era, and this day will never come again.  That is, it will not come again unless time turns out to be cyclical, in which case, I guess this day will come again over and over, an infinite number of times, though it would never feel that way from inside.

Certainly, in at least some sense, this day is permanent.  For instance, this is so if, based on Special and General Relativity, one can consider the universe to be a “block universe”, i.e., one in which each event and moment or whatever you want to call it in all of space and time is simply what it is and is “always” there, like a cosmic Blu-ray® that plays itself.  Except it doesn’t play itself.  Again, it simply is, and the sense of time passing is simply something experienced by tiny beings that comprise little four-dimensional braids of energy because of the way they are put together or rather the way they exist in local spacetime.

I’ve written about this before, considering the question, if we (and everything else) are permanent and unchanging local patterns in spacetime from the beginnings of our lives to the ends, might it be that, when we die, from an experiential point of view, we merely start over at the beginning, with everything in our lives happening over and over.  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to think that, in such a case, there is still a “me” that is living yesterday, experiencing it, and the day before and the year before and the decade before, and so on, in a possibly infinite continuum of moments.

If that were to be the case, then the best general advice would probably be to try to make your life such that, if you are going to live it over and over again for eternity, that will not be the equivalent to being condemned to Hell.  I think Nietzsche talked about something like this, but I may be misremembering.

Of course, each time one lives one’s life again is restarted from a local blank slate.  It’s not as though you would ever have any memory of having gone through all this before, any more than a character in a movie learns from the fact that you’ve played the movie before and behaves differently next time.  Anakin Skywalker will never avoid becoming Darth Vader, no matter how much we see that he suffered horribly and did horrific things that he regretted, all while failing to achieve what he had meant to achieve by going to the dark side in the first place.

So, however you were going to live your life is how you were going to live your life—from the outside perspective—and you should just try to do the best you can in any case, because…well, why would you do anything else?

Of course, whatever you end up doing is literally doing the best you can, since you cannot change what you do once it’s done.  See above regarding the permanence of time and so on.  Even if quantum mechanics in some way derails the “simple” spacetime block notion*, that doesn’t make the past any more amenable to adjustment.

Whatever the nature of reality ultimately is, it is, and we are not going to change that.  We can learn more and more about it and use that knowledge to our benefit, but we cannot ever escape whatever the meta-level rules of reality are, any more than a pawn can make any legal move that allows it then to change the rules of the game of chess.

Anyway, that was all good fun and we all had a jolly good laugh, but I feel that perhaps I’ve trodden such areas too often, and I’m probably boring my readers.  Apologies.

Junes is coming in two days, and it’s a relatively eventful month.  A close family member of mine has an important birthday; the Solstice will be here (Summer in the north, Winter in the south); and of course, Father’s Day comes in June.  That’s a bitter holiday for me, unfortunately, but there’s nothing I can do to change that preexisting fact; again, see above.

As for other things, well, I think I got a slightly better sleep last night than I’ve been getting lately.  I still began waking up at about 1:30 in the morning, but I was able to go back to sleep again until a little after 2 and then about 2:30 or so, and 3, and then started just giving up and fully waking up at about 3:20.  Even so, at least I was able to get to sleep somewhat earlier than I usually do, and that’s saying a lot.  It may be quite tragic that three and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep feels so much better than usual, but it does.

It’s not simply happening randomly, just to be clear.  I am making interventions and trials and seeing what helps and what doesn’t.  I’m not going to get into them for the moment, lest I cloud my own mind with the discussion.  But it’s not just that, hey, wow, I’m sleeping slightly better these last two nights, gosh I wish I knew why.  It’s the product of my always ongoing attempts to improve things when I can.

I’ve also been reading a bit for that past few days on and off—mainly Sean Carroll’s new book—but, while this is a good thing, it’s not an unadulterated good.  I won’t get into the reasons for that caveat, and in any case, from my perspective, it’s overall a positive.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to writing my one page (or possibly more) on Extra Body, and I will give a brief report on that (probably), though my brief reports are somewhat prone to digression into not-so-brief discussions of tangentially related subjects.  I am also going to be working Saturday, barring any changes, so I’ll probably rinse and repeat then.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a great rest of the week as May draws to an end and June arrives.

TTFN

*It need not do so.  The spacetime block might merely be more complex than our first, naïve notion of it, and actually be a spacetime block made of the universal wavefunction, with “branches” at every quantum decoherence and a level of splitting that may be as fine as the divisions of the real numbers, uncountably infinite.  Taken as a whole, though, these could all still be fixed and “permanent”; there would just be more of a fractal sort of character to it at the level of quantum interactions and the like.