Physics

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And simple truth miscall’d simplicity, And captive blog attending captain ill

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and so it’s time for a more fully fledged blog post for the week, in the manner in which I used to write them when I was writing fiction the rest of the week (and playing some guitar in the time between writing and starting work most days).

I’ve been rather sick almost every day since last week’s post, except for Friday.  I don’t think it’s a virus of any kind, though that may be incorrect.  It’s mainly upper GI, and it’s taken a lot of the wind out of my sails.

I haven’t played guitar at all since last Friday.  I’ve also only written new fiction on a few of the days—Friday, Monday, and Wednesday, I think—since the last major post.  Still, on the days I wrote, I got a surprisingly good amount of work done, I guess.  It seems as though Extra Body is taking longer than it really ought to take, but once it’s done, I’m going to try to pare it down more than I have previous works, since my stuff tends to grow so rapidly.

I’ve been trying to get into doing more studying and “stuff” to correct the fact that I didn’t realize my plans to go into Physics when I started university.  I had good reasons for this non-realization, of course, the main one being the temporary cognitive impairment brought about by heart-lung bypass when I had open heart surgery when I was eighteen.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about that before, but I didn’t know about it then, and I didn’t learn about it until I did the review paper I wrote for my fourth-year research project in medical school.  I just felt discouraged and stupid, though I consoled myself by studying some truly wonderful works of literature as an English major, including once taking two Shakespeare courses at the same time.  That was great!

It’s always nice to learn about things, all other things being equal.  I don’t think there are pieces of true information about the world that it is better not to know.  Our response to learning some intimidating truth about the greater cosmos may not be good, but the fault then lies not with the stars but with ourselves.  If you truly can’t handle the truth, then the problem is with you, not with the truth.

Of course, knowing what is true is generally not simple, except about simple things, and often not even about those.  This is the heart of epistemology, the philosophical branch that deals with how we know what we know when we know it, so to speak.  The subject may seem dry at times, especially when it gets weighed down by jargon that serves mainly just to keep lay people from chiming in on things—at least as far as I can see—but it is important and interesting at its root.

Not but what there can’t be good reasons for creating and using specific and precise and unique terms, such as to make sure that one knows exactly what is meant and doesn’t fall into the trap of linguistic fuzziness which often leads to misunderstanding and miscommunication.  That’s part of the reason most serious Physics involves mathematical formalism; one wants to deal with things precisely and algorithmically in ways that one can make testable and rigorous predictions.

Physicists will sometimes say that they can’t really convey some aspect of physics using ordinary language, that you have to use the math(s), but that can’t be true in any simplistic sense, or no one would ever be able to learn it in the first place.  Even the mathematics has to be taught via language, after all.  It’s just more cumbersome to try to work through the plain—or not so plain—language to get the precise and accurate concepts across.

And, of course, sometimes the person tasked with presenting an idea to someone else doesn’t really understand it in a way that would allow them to convey it in ordinary language.  This is not necessarily an insult to that person.  Richard Feynman apparently used to hold the opinion that if you truly understand some subject in Physics, you should be able to produce a freshman-level lecture about it that doesn’t require prior knowledge, but he admitted freely when he couldn’t do so, and was known to say that this indicated that we—or at least he—just didn’t understand the subject well enough yet.

I don’t know how I got to this point in this blog post, or indeed what point I’m trying to make, if there is any point to anything at all (I suppose a lot of that would depend on one’s point of view).  I think I got into it by saying that I was trying to catch up on Physics, so I can deal with it at a full level, because there are things I want to understand and be able to contemplate rigorously.

I particularly want to try to get all the way into General Relativity (also Quantum Field Theory), and the mathematics of that is stuff that I never learned specifically, and it is intricate—matrices and tensors and non-Euclidean geometry and similar stuff.  It’s all tremendously interesting, of course, but it requires effort, which requires time and energy.

And once other people have come into the office and the “music” has started, it’s very hard for me to maintain the required focus and the energy even in my down time, though I have many textbooks and pre-textbook level works available right there at my desk.  I’ve started, and I’m making progress, but it is very slow because of the drains on my energy and attention.

If anyone out there wants to sponsor my search for knowledge, so I wouldn’t have to do anything but study and write, I’d welcome the patronage.

But I’m not good at self-promotion, nor at asking for help in any serious way.  I tend to take the general attitude that I deserve neither health nor comfort in life, and I certainly don’t expect any of it.  I’m not my own biggest fan, probably not by a long shot.  In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that I am my own greatest enemy.

Unfortunately, I’m probably the only person who could reliably thwart me.  I’m sure I’m not unique in this.  Probably very few people have literal enemies out there in the world, but plenty of people—maybe nearly everyone—has an enemy or enemies within.  This is one of the things that happens to beings without one single, solitary terminal goal or drive or utility function, but rather with numerous ones, the strengths of which vary with time and with internal and external events.

I’ve said before that I see the motivations and drives of the mind as a vector sum in very much higher-dimensional phase space, but with input vectors that vary in response to outcomes of the immediately preceding sum perhaps even more than they do with inputs from the environment.  I don’t think there will ever be a strong way fully to describe the system algorithmically, though perhaps it may be modeled adequately and even reproduced.  This is the nature of “Elessar’s First Conjecture”:  No mind can ever be complex enough to understand itself fully and in detail*.

A combination of minds may understand it though—conceivably.  Biologists have mapped the entire nervous system of C elegans, a worm with a precisely defined nervous system with an exact number of neurons, and of course, progress is constantly being made on more advanced things.  But even individual neurons are not perfectly understood, even in worms, and the interactions between those nerves and the other cells of the body is a complex Rube Goldberg machine thrown together from pieces that were just laying around in the shed.

Complexity theory is still a very young science.

And the public at large spends its energy doing things like making and then countering “deep fakes” and arguing partisan politics with all the fervor that no doubt the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans and the ancient Chinese and Japanese and Celts and Huns and Iroquois and Inca and Aztecs and Mayans and everyone else in ancient, vanished, or changed, civilizations did.  They all surely imagined that their daily politics were supremely important, that the world, the very universe, pivoted on the specifics of their little, petty disagreements and plans and paranoias**.

And so often so many of them, especially the young “revolutionaries”, whose frontal lobes were far from fully developed, were willing to spill the blood of others (and were occasionally even willing to sacrifice themselves) in pursuit of their utopian*** imaginings.  This is true from the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks to the Maoists and the Killing Fields, and before them all the way back to the Puritans of Salem, and the Inquisition, and the Athenians who executed Socrates, and the killers of Pythagoras****, and the millions of perpetrators of no-longer-known atrocities in no-longer-known cultures and civilizations.

And then, of course, we have the current gaggle of fashionably ideological, privileged youth, who decry the very things that brought them all that they take for granted, and who will follow in the blood-soaked footsteps of those I mentioned above—l’dor v’dor, ad suf kul hadoroth, a-mayn.

In the meantime, I’ll try to keep writing my stories, and try to keep learning things, and if I’m able to develop an adequate (by my standards) understanding of General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, it’s just remotely possible that I might even make legitimate contributions to the field(s).  But more likely I’ll self-destruct, literally, well before any of that happens.

I’ve probably gone on too long already, as has this blog post.  I thank you for your patience with my meanderings.  Please try to have a good day, and I hope those of you who celebrate it are having a good Passover.

TTFN

*This implies that Laplace’s Demon could not be within the universe about which it knows the position and momentum of every particle and the strength of every force.  It needs to be instantiated elsewhere.

**Should that be “paranoiae”?  It feels like that ought to be the formal way of putting it, but Word thinks it’s misspelled.

***Not to be confused with “eutopian”.  Utopia means “no place”, whereas Eutopia would mean “good place” or “pleasant place” or “well place”.

****He was caught despite a head start, so I’ve heard, because he refused to cross a bean field, believing that beans were evil.  He was a weird guy.  It’s apparently from his followers that the term “irrational”—which originally just meant a number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers—developed its connotation as “crazy” or “insane”.  They didn’t like the fact that irrational numbers even existed.  Too bad for them; there are vastly more irrational numbers than rational ones…an uncountable infinity versus a “countable” infinity.  It’s not even close.

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There’s a divinity that shapes our blogs, rough-hew them how we will

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and as I promised‒or threatened, depending on your point of view‒here I am, writing my weekly blog post as before, back when I was regularly writing and publishing my fiction.

I’m not sure what topic(s) I should cover here, today.  I rarely seem able to plan these posts in advance, and when I do plan them, I don’t think they often come out very well.  That’s from my point of view, of course; maybe other people have found my planned posts excellent and wish I would write them more often, but if so, they haven’t given any clear feedback.  So, I don’t really know what will happen from now until the end of this blog post.

Of course, if the universe is deterministic, then whether I or anyone else knows it or not, what I will write is already a certain thing, as is the fact that I don’t know it‒indeed one could legitimately claim that it “already” exists in a sense, particularly if one is invoking the picture of Special and General Relativity and the “block” spacetime concept.

However, the Copenhagen interpretation (if that’s the correct term) of quantum mechanics states that wave-function collapse is truly “random”, and so the future is not determined, at least at the smallest level.  But if the wave function truly collapses, then that would be the only fundamentally irreversible temporal process known in physics so far, and that seems suspicious to me.

I’ve been reading the original EPR paper and thinking about this subject at least a little bit lately.

Of course, in a way, the Everettian “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics would say that the future really is determined, but that at every instance of decoherence, the wavefunction becomes subdivided into waves that no longer interact with each other directly.  People interpret this as if new universes were coming into existence each time, and that’s a decent way to conceptualize it, but to me it seems misleading.

To my mind, it’s just waves that are traveling along in “parallel” and not influencing each other.  But that’s not really any different from the sounds of two separate conversations happening in a crowded room‒maybe one involves a group of people discussing a recent sporting event and another gaggle is talking about some new show on Netflix.  Maybe the conversations are even in different languages.  The sound waves propagate from each conversation independently, and though there may be places where troughs and crests pass and add or subtract for an instant, locally, they are very much different processes.  But there is no mystical invocation of “new universes” such as what troubles some people about Everettian quantum mechanics because of a misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor.  There are just separate, “parallel” things happening within the same overall universe.

That’s not a perfect analogy, of course.  The “waves” of the quantum mechanics are more complex* than sound waves, and are more fundamental, and once they decohere, it seems they are far less likely to interact with their other “branches” than are even sound waves of parallel conversations in different languages.  But even those are more separable than we think.

We have an exquisitely evolved capacity to parse the information out of human conversation, decoding the waves without thought, and so we don’t think very often about how astonishing that process is.  If aliens who communicated only by light flashes were trying to interpret such a set of conversations, they would have a daunting task, indeed.

Just think about how hard it has been even to decode the communications of dolphins and whales‒highly intelligent and social creatures that clearly communicate with each other.  And these are our fellow mammals from the same planet, who also use sound for communication!  We vastly underestimate the complexity of what we’re doing when we understand conversation and other noises, because our auditory processing systems do it without our conscious intervention, and they have been honed over hundreds of millions of years by the brutal and pitiless sieve** of natural selection.

Likewise, we thoroughly underestimate the complexity involved in catching a pop-up fly ball, or a thrown football, or the process of walking, or of throwing a ball, or of finding a specific item on a cluttered desk.  It shouldn’t surprise us that even if the future “division” of the universal wave function seems random, it can be utterly deterministic, and in that sense each branch “already” exists.  But each “branch” that no longer interacts with others after an instance of decoherence will “feel” to given humans*** as if it were the one and only “universe” and that all others have collapsed out of existence somehow, when they’re really just there but not interacting anymore with the person in question.

Maybe I’m wrong, of course.  I mean, I’ve been right before, but not often enough to make it my default presumption.

Anyway, there you have it, the stuff about which I was “destined” to write, though I had no specific plans.  That’s fair enough.  “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” as the saying goes.

Speaking of plans, though, I plan to write tomorrow and Saturday**** on my fiction (probably just on Extra Body).  I may take my laptop with me to do it; the experiment with my smartphone seems to be working okay (see my reports from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), but it doesn’t feel quite as “natural” to me, still.  Who knows, though?

Only Laplace’s Demon® (Quantum Version™) knows.  But of course, that entity would feel, if anything, less “free” than those of us who know not yet what is to be and know not fully what has been.  For an entity that can see every detail of the past and the future laid out deterministically and in full detail is utterly incapable of taking any action on such knowledge‒for its own actions are as determined as all others, and it “knows” this.  Indeed, it cannot but know it.

Ignorance is not bliss, but it does at least give you room to improve, and that can be ego syntonic.

Have a good week, if such is your destiny.

TTFN

*Ha ha, that’s a little physics joke there, when you think of how quantum wave functions involve complex numbers.

**Mixed metaphor alert!  How would a sieve hone anything?  Oh, well, I’m not going to change it; it works too well to communicate my meaning.

***And the very process of “feeling like something” is extraordinarily complex, and we only really understand the bare rudiments of how this happens.  This relative ignorance engenders the propagation of nonsensical, conceptually vacuous ideas like panpsychism and the like, and the pseudo-mystery of the “hard problem” of consciousness.  Well, it is a hard problem in a sense, but not the way philosophers of consciousness seem to express it, as far as I can see.

****I think I will be working Saturday, but I’m not certain, because of the highly atypical thing that happened last Saturday, with the office being closed.  This coming Saturday will be my son’s 24th birthday, and I will now literally have missed half of his life more or less completely.  That’s his preference, not mine, though it started as a consequence of my own misadventures‒our personal wavefunction decoherence if you will.  Still, when enough people repeatedly decide they don’t really like having you around or interacting with you too much, you have to think there must be some powerful causes for the consistency, especially when you don’t even really want to be around yourself.  So, I am profoundly sad about the state of things, and I miss my children terribly, but I have to conclude provisionally that they’re making a reasonable decision.  At least I “talk” to my daughter from time to time, and that’s not a small consolation.

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Blog post for 4-10-2024 Wednesday

I’m not writing any fiction again today, it seems.  I just don’t have any urge to do it.  The very prospect of it feels almost entirely pointless, though that could be at least partly due to the fact that I’ve felt so gormy these last few days.

I’m not as nauseated as I was yesterday (though I’m probably just as nauseous, ha ha ha), since I took two omeprazole tablets last night, and also I didn’t take any aspirin or naproxen yesterday.  I did take a few acetaminophen, though those don’t tend to work as well on their own as they do in combination with aspirin and so on.  Still, I hate the feeling of nausea*, and would rather have at least a little pain than be nauseated.  It would have been one thing if I were sick enough just to throw up and get it over with, but all I had was just general gastro-intestinal distress and discomfort throughout the day, which really sapped my energy.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my fiction.  This week I just haven’t had any enthusiasm for it (nor for any other positive thing in life, really).  Maybe I should try to reignite my energy by sharing more of the links to my pre-existing fiction on Twitter and Facebook and the like.  Maybe if I got any feedback of any kind on any of those posts or shares it might stoke the fire of creativity a bit.

Of course, it’s hard to see why anyone other than the people who already read my stuff would respond to my posts, but who knows?  It’s difficult for me to predict what might motivate other people to do something, at least some of the time.

I feel slightly awkward sharing my links and stuff on the various anti-social media, particularly because I’m currently reading Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, about the detriments of social media and smartphones to younger people.  On the other hand, unless you’re asking an elf or a vampire, I probably would not be considered a younger person.  Also, I developed my neuro-psychiatric issues long before smartphones and even before the Worldwide Web—I come by them naturally, so to speak—so I shouldn’t have to worry too much about them twisting me in some negative way.  My personality, such as it is, is already formed.  Though, as I discussed yesterday, I do seem to be reasonably good at learning new things even though I’m an old geezer.

I guess maybe I will share my stuff on at least X** and Facebook, and maybe even LinkedIn, though I have less interest in the latter, since I don’t do the whole networking thing.  I might as well make those old posts in which I “advertised” my new stories and such work for me.  And I might as well make Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s endeavors serve some useful purpose, since it’s not as though they pay much in taxes or anything.

I don’t knew where I’m going with this today, otherwise.  At least I’m not going off on weird tangents about playing with infinite series that have obvious outcomes once you work them through.  I mean, yes, it’s rather fun to fiddle with such things in the moment, particularly when one has nothing better to do, and it’s even good when it comes back around and you realize it’s revealed something that should have been obvious with much less work***.  That’s okay.  There’s nothing too wrong with coming at something in a complicated way and finally realizing how simple the answer is.  As I mentioned yesterday, at the very least, it’s good mental exercise.

Still, I shouldn’t go off on too many tangents like that too often.  I don’t think people like those posts very much.  Though, for all I know, they might think they’re the greatest thing anyone’s ever done, they’re just too shy to say anything about it.  I simply don’t know.  It’s like firing a photon off in the direction of an intergalactic super-void:  I’m not ever going to get any feedback about what happened to that photon if it doesn’t interact with something relatively nearby very soon****, and even if it does, unless it reflects back, or unless some intelligence sends a signal in response, it’s still going to be lost.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I expect to write my usual Thursday post tomorrow, so if you look forward to such things, you can look forward to that.  If I don’t write it, it will be either because I’m not feeling well (more so than is typically the case) or I’m dead, or perhaps that some other, unpredicted alternative possibility has interfered.  I’d give well over 50% odds that I’ll write a post tomorrow.  But for today, this post is already too long and is almost entirely without substance (and I don’t mean that just because it’s written on a word processor and shared online).

I really do hope that you all have a good day.

*I know, how unusual, right?

**Does Mr. Musk realize that by calling his platform “X” and putting its symbol in the upper right corner of the various X-cretions, he makes it look as though one is supposed to click on that symbol to make a “tweet” go away?  I know that’s the way I feel, and I’ve even tried to do it once or twice when I was distracted.

***In this case, for instance, if you add some (single) fraction of an original number to that starting total, the amount that you added is now one integer step smaller fraction of the new total.  In other words, if you start with some number, then add a ninth, say, of the original number, you now have ten of those ninths in your new total, i.e., 1 and 1/9.  But that 1/9 is now 1/10 of your new  total, trivially.  So, if you want to tip, for instance, 20% of the new total (including the tip) then you need to tip 25% of the original amount before the tip.  In other words, to tip one fifth of the total including the tip, you tip one fourth of the original, pre-tip total, since then you will have five fourths.  Anyway, let me stop this now.

****Unless, I suppose, the universe if both closed—i.e., it loops around on itself like a torus or a sphere—and smaller than anyone has any reason to suspect.  It would have to be small because, based on the expansion rate of the universe as currently measured, any photon of reasonable wavelength would probably have red-shifted into undetectability long before the time I could receive it from the other direction if it circumnavigated a closed universe on anything like the minimum scale we think the universe is.  A photon of too tiny a wavelength, i.e., of high enough energy, would have too high a chance to spontaneously decompose into some particle-antiparticle pair somewhere along the way…I think.

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Would YOU eat Zel’dovich pancakes for breakfast?

It’s Tuesday, and I’m writing another blog post rather than throwing some kind of curve ball and doing my fiction writing today, since I wrote a blog post yesterday, when I had scheduled myself to write some fiction.  I don’t know if that counts as a double curve ball or as a capitulation to a simple, over-the-plate, none-too-fast soft pitch.  It’s probably the latter, but I suppose there is no absolute right answer, and the judgment would depend upon one’s point of view.

I’ve realized that, contrary to what I wrote yesterday‒to what I honestly thought was the case‒I did not bring my small laptop computer with me when I left the office on Thursday.  I had unplugged it with the intention to pack it, but then I had left without it.  I can’t recall ever having done that before.  It goes to show just how crappy I felt on Thursday, I guess.

I really want to keep writing fiction.  It would be a shame to take this new story that I’ve well begun, with over 10,000 words written so far, and let it just fall by the wayside.  Then again, I’ve left The Dark Fairy and the Desperado hanging, and more egregiously, I’ve left Outlaw’s Mind hanging, so it’s not as though there is no precedent.  And, of course, in the past I’ve left stories incomplete many, many times.  But it seems particularly sad, now that I’ve published 5 novels and 2 collections of “short” stories, to fall back into that pattern.

But I need to find a way to be able to work fiction writing into my daily routines without messing up habits that have become somewhat compulsory for me.  I’ve tried to find ways to block out the noise in the office, so far without much success.  Yesterday I bought a rather inexpensive pair of noise-canceling headphones.  They didn’t do that good a job at the noise canceling; they reduced it a bit, but it was still there, though if I put in earplugs as well and then also played a YouTube video about field theories and similar stuff, if helped, but that is certainly not a combination of measures I could take while trying to write fiction.

I’m of two minds (at least) about the headphones.  I’m glad I didn’t spend very much on them, since they don’t turn out to be as effective as my more old-fashioned, gun-range and airport style ear defenders (when combined with ear plugs).  They can also play music or the sound from videos, but I didn’t get them for that.  I already have things that can do that.  But I wonder if more expensive ones would do any better.

It’s a shame that no high-powered movie executive has read any of my books or stories and approached me to option them for movies or shows or anything, but it’s obviously not surprising.  I’m terrible at self-promotion, more by temperament than merely due to lack of skill.  This blog is my closest approach to self-promotion, and I spend most of my time here spewing my random and often depressed and depressing thoughts in some wishful, pseudo-Freudian free association kind of exercise.

Of course, it’s about as useful to me as Freudian psychoanalysis* ever has been clinically demonstrated to be for anyone, which is to say, very little, if at all.  Nevertheless‒and also like psychoanalysis for many of its patients‒it has been habit forming, and I feel awkward and disjointed without it.

Also, as I noted yesterday, it’s the only means by which I keep contact with anyone other than my sister in the world outside of the office.  I’ve really become a shell of my former self, and the fact that there is physically more of me now than there has ever been before only makes that more biting, the irony enhancing the contrast with the past, when I used to relieve suffering and save lives and be beneficial to the world.

Ah, well.  From a cosmic perspective, all such benefits will probably be transitory, or effectively be nonexistent.

Which reminds me:  yesterday I was looking at the abstracts of some recent papers on “quantum cosmology” uploaded onto arXiv, the preprint server.  Obviously, most of these subjects were well beyond my expertise truly to be able to follow, but I get the concepts involved in most of them.  Also, exposure to the mathematical formalism when I don’t know how to manipulate it often makes it easier to understand later, as there is familiarity and applicability that helps add to the more complete picture I gradually build in my mind about such things.

This has happened to me more than once in the past.  I don’t learn by rote, I learn by building mental models and maps and structures that link areas of knowledge and understanding together.  So, I don’t learn quickly, but I learn deeply and durably.  I think this is a much better way to go.

Anyway, that’s tangential.  What was amusing is, I read about a paper involving some deSitter** models of inflation in a universe which (if I recall the abstract correctly) was matter-dominated in early moments and so had no uniform pressure (unlike radiation-dominated situations, which, if I’m remembering correctly, is pressure intensive and homogeneous, and is how our early universe probably was).  In such models, if I understood the point correctly, you could find more noteworthy inhomogeneities than seen in radiation-dominated phases, which makes sense, since the radiation pressure works against gravitational collapse.

So, the model discussed would be unlike our universe, in which the CMB demonstrates extreme homogeneity, down to a few parts in a hundred thousand, even from one edge of the cosmic horizon to the opposite edge, encompassing regions that could never possibly have been in any form of direct causal contact at least since the hypothetical time of inflation.  The light from each side has only just now reached us, and so is only halfway across to the other side, and may well never reach it if the universe expands quickly enough.  Yet the temperatures are the same to a few parts in a hundred thousand, which is probably more than can be said about the room you’re sitting in now.

One type of this theoretical homogeneity in the model in the abstract had apparently been previously described as a “Zel’dovich pancake”.  This is apparently nothing new (first described in the 1970s), but is a really amusing way to think of a cosmic structure, and I kind of want to look into it and see what it describes, to see if I can understand, at least superficially, the math behind it.

Wow, that was a whole ‘nother tangent of much greater departure than before.  I think I’ll call that good for now for this day’s blog.  I’m kind of all over the place, and if I’m not too careful, I might undergo decoherence and split into multiple versions of myself.  That seems all too possible, since I’ve never been naturally inclined to very impressive coherence in the first place.

I will probably be writing here tomorrow.

*Not to be confused with the more general term “psychotherapy”, which can be useful depending on the type of therapy and the person receiving it.  CBT is one of the most effective of these; it didn’t work all that well for me, but I’m annoying and perverse, so that’s no surprise.

**DeSitter spacetimes are just spacetimes with positive cosmological constants‒like our universe, with its apparent “dark energy”‒which will tend to drive accelerating expansion.  The whole “holographic universe” concept was motivated, or perhaps inspired, partly by the Bekenstein-Hawking recognition that the maximal entropy of any region of spacetime is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of that region.  Any greater entropy in the region would add to the mass of the black hole associated with that horizon, and so would make the horizon larger; thus that is the maximal entropy for that initial region.  QED (Quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics) if you will.  The holographic principle regarding a universe has only ever been worked out for anti-deSitter spaces, with negative cosmological constants, which we know is not the case for the universe in which we live because…well, because we’re alive, and those spacetimes tend to collapse rapidly.

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Chaos surfing and the omni-curious mind

It’s Saturday morning and‒as I warned you‒I am writing a blog post today.

I just experienced a tiny little frisson of déjà vu, which is always interesting when it happens.  It involved that seemingly obvious, curious sensation that I could remember dreaming about the process of writing this particular blog post, in the location in which I’m writing it, at some time in the past.  Of course, I have no reason to suspect that precognitive dreams are actual things, except occasionally, by coincidence, due to the large number of dreams that happen and the brain’s capacity to model/predict its world with decent accuracy due to the regularities therein.  But déjà vu is still an interesting and sometimes enjoyable experience.

In case you haven’t noticed, mine is very much a stream-of-consciousness kind of blog.  I sometimes wish I were writing something more useful or informative or thought-provoking.  Then I could imagine I was contributing to the world in some way.  I have a wide range of knowledge on lots of topics‒science in general, some physics and cosmology, biology and medicine, some mathematics, a tiny bit of computers, and of course some philosophy (and psychology).

I sometimes regret not having explored philosophy more at an earlier age.  There was a philosophy class in my high school; it was one of my favorite classes, and the teacher was great, but I avoided philosophy in college deliberately.  I had little understanding of how good and useful it‒as well as pure mathematics, not solely for use in physics‒is in improving one’s ability to think about all subjects.

At its “worst” it’s at least analogous to doing calisthenics to get stronger and more fit.  One doesn’t do push ups in order to become a world champion at push ups‒usually‒and one doesn’t do push ups because one expects to become a professional pusher up and to make one’s living that way.  As far as I know, there is no such profession.  One does it to keep one’s body fit so it is more capable of responding to any of a functionally limitless number of specific challenges throughout life.  So it is with the mind, but the mind is far more capable of growth and strengthening than even the greatest athlete’s body has ever been.

I get so frustrated when I hear people whining about, say, the fact that they never use the Pythagorean Theorem in their daily lives, or haven’t used algebra since they left school.  My first reaction when I hear such moans is to think, “If that’s true, then too bad for you; you’re missing out.”

But I also find it noteworthy that most people don’t complain of the fact that they’ve never played kickball or tag or used their sandlot baseball skills in their later life.  Similarly, very few people get jobs playing video games‒there is a vanishingly small few who make at least temporary livings playing video games competitively, but that’s not a reliable long-term strategy for almost anyone.  Such skills are, for the most part, far less useful than those of algebra and calculus‒though I understand that there is some evidence that playing video games can make people better drivers by improving their alertness and response times.

Breadth and depth of knowledge are ends in themselves; they are their own reward, one might say.  When one learns something new, one makes oneself “larger” without taking anything away from anyone else*.  Information can be shared without loss, and one can contain whole universes‒real and/or imaginary‒in one’s mind.  It’s remarkable.

But also, knowledge, even of esoterica, is of practical, basic value.  Insights gained from having studied epistemology or Boolean logic may become useful, unexpectedly, in a business negotiation or a plumbing emergency.  Who knows?  The world is too complex for one to be able to predict the specifics of local events very far ahead of time‒and even the precise knowledge of that fact is based on an originally obscure branch of mathematics and information theory, and was formally born of the use of a “primitive” computer weather simulation.

You cannot fundamentally alter the chaotic nature of reality.  You cannot effectively steer the chaos‒but you can learn to surf on it.  And the more you know and the greater the breadth of your mental skills, the more likely you are to be able to catch the right waves and ride them to someplace you’d like to be.

Anyway, back to what I was saying earlier:  I sometimes imagine myself doing a more informative or exploratory blog, a discussion of sorts, albeit one-sided.  When I leave it to my stream of consciousness, my blog is often depressing (or at least it’s often depressed).  But I don’t know what people might like to read my thinking about; I have a great deal of difficulty understanding what other people find interesting or engaging, let alone why.  So, if anyone has any general subjects they’d like me to explore, whether truly broad or regarding current events or science news or anything within my relative wheelhouse**, feel free to let me know in the comments…or, I suppose, via Facebook or Twitter.  I don’t like to encourage such things, but these “social media” can be entertaining and even useful in certain rarefied situations.

In the meantime, have a good weekend if you’re able to do so.

*Apart from the tiny, tiny increase in overall universal entropy that all learning entails.  But that’s going to happen anyway, and the entropy created by a lifetime of astonishing erudition is unnoticeably small next to, say, that produced every day simply by the Earth absorbing sunlight, warming up, and releasing higher-entropy heat back out into the cosmos.

**My wheelhouse walls are made of rice paper, so I can easily knock them down and expand that chamber as desired.  I dream of my wheelhouse eventually being as large as the cosmic horizon‒or even larger!  Why not?

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There may be no firm fundament but is there a fun firmament?

It’s Tuesday morning, now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer, mainly to spare my thumbs, but also because I just prefer real typing to the constrictive and error-ridden twiddling of virtual buttons on a very small phone screen.

Speaking of the day, if the Beatles song Lady Madonna is correct, then it’s still Tuesday afternoon, and has been at least since last Tuesday, since “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending”.  Of course, if Tuesday afternoon really is never-ending, then it has been Tuesday afternoon ever since the first Tuesday afternoon.  From a certain point of view, this is trivially the case.  After all, every moment after 12pm on the first Tuesday that ever happened could be considered Tuesday afternoon—or, at least, they could be considered “after Tuesday noon” if you will.

Enough of that particular nonsense.  I only wrote that because there’s nothing sensible about which to write that comes to my mind.  But, of course, in a larger sense, there is nothing “sensible” at all.

There are things that can be sensed, obviously.  I can see, hear, and touch this computer, for instance.  If I wanted, I could probably smell it, though I think its odor is likely quite subdued.  But I mean “sensible” in the more colloquial, bastardized, mutated sense—as in the word “sense” just there—which has to do with something being logical, reasonable, rational, coherent, that sort of thing.  Indeed, it has to do with things having meaning.

Deep down, though, from the telos point of view, there is no true, inherent meaning to much of anything, as far as anyone can see.  Certainly there’s no meaning that anyone has ever demonstrated or asserted convincingly that I have encountered at any point in my life.

Of course, people have beliefs and they have convictions, and humans assign meanings to various things.  All the words I have used in writing this post so far, and all the words I will use henceforth, have “meanings”, but those are invented meanings.  There is nothing in the collection of letters—nor indeed in the shapes of the letters themselves, nor the way we put them down on paper or a screen—that means anything intrinsically.  They were all invented, like justice and morality and the whole lot of such things.

That something is invented doesn’t mean it isn’t real, of course.  Cars are an invention, and only a fool (in the modern world) would deny that cars are real.  But they are not inherent to the universe; they are not in any sense fundamental.

In a related sense, even DNA and the protein structures for which it codes are very much not fundamental; they are quasi-arbitrary.  Of course, one cannot make DNA or RNA or proteins out of substrates for which the chemistry simply will not hold together.  But the genetic code—the set of three-nucleotide-long “letters”, the codons, in the genetic code that each associate with a given amino acid (or a stop signal, or similar) as they are transcribed into proteins—is arbitrary.  There’s nothing inherent in any set of three nucleotides that makes it associate with some particular amino acid.

This sort of thing took me quite a long time to realize as I was growing up and trying to understand biology and chemistry and such.  What, for instance, was the chemical reaction with, say, adrenaline that made things in the body speed up and go into “fight or flight” mode, as it were?  How was it that aspirin chemically interacted with bodies and nervous systems to blunt pain?  How many possible chemical reactions were there, really?  It was mind-boggling that there could be so many reactions, and that they could all produce such disparate effects on various creatures.

When finally I was shown the real nature of such things, it was definitely a scales-dropping-from-eyes moment.  There is nothing inherent in the chemistry of DNA, or of drugs or hormones, that produces their effects.  There is no inherent “soporific” quality to an anesthetic.  You could give a dose of Versed  that would kill a human to some alien with a different biology, and at most its effects would be those of a contaminant.

It’s all just a kind of language—indeed, it’s almost a kind of computer language, and hormones are just messengers*, which are more or less arbitrary, like the ASCII code for representing characters within computer systems.  Likewise, there’s nothing in the word “cat” that has direct connection with the animal to which it refers.  It’s just keyed to that creature in our minds, arbitrarily, as is demonstrated by the fact that, for instance, in Japan the term is “neko” (or, well, it sounds like that—the actual written term is ねこ or 猫).

Of course, there are things in the universe that, as far as we can tell, are fundamental, such as quantum fields and gravity and spacetime itself.  But even these may yet peel away and be revealed to be arbitrary or semi-arbitrary forms of some other, deeper, underlying unity, as is postulated in string theory, for instance.

The specific forms of the fundamental particles and forces in our universe may—if string theory and eternal inflationary cosmology for instance are correct—be just one possible version of a potential 10500 or more** possible sets of particles and forces determined by the particular Calabi-Yau “shape” and configuration of the curled up extra dimensions of space that string theory hypothesizes.  So, the very fundamental forces of nature, or at least the “constants” thereof, may be arbitrary—historical accidents, as much as are the forms and specifics of the life that currently exists on Earth.

And what’s to say that strings and branes and Calabi-Yau manifolds are fundamental, either?  Perhaps reality has no fundament whatsoever.  Perhaps it is a bottomless pit of meaninglessness, in which only truly fundamental mathematics are consistent throughout…if even they are.

I’m not likely to arrive at a conclusion regarding these matters in a blog post written off-the-cuff in the morning while commuting to the office.  But I guess it all supports a would-be Stoic philosophical ideal, which urges us to let go of things that are outside our control and instead try to focus on those things over which we have some power:  our thoughts and our actions.

Of course, even these are, at some deeper level, not truly or at least not fully ours to control—we cannot affect the past that led to our present state, after all, and the future is born of that present which is born of that past over which we have no control.  But, for practical purposes, the levers that we use to control ourselves are the only levers we have to use.

We might as well keep a grip on them as well as we can, and not worry too much about things that are not in our current reach.  Though we can try to stretch out and limber up, maybe practice some mental yoga, to try to extend that reach over time, I suppose.  But that’s a subject for some other blog post, I guess; this one has already gone on long enough.

*For the most part.  Things like cholesterol and fatty acids and sugars—and certainly water and oxygen—and other fundamental building blocks do have inherent chemical properties that make them useful for the purposes to which bodies put them.  Then again, words can have tendencies that make them more useful for some things than others, too.  “No” and “yes” are short and clear and clearly different sounds, for instance; it makes sense that such words evolved to be such important, fundamentally dichotomous signals.

**That means 10 x 10 x 10 x 10… until you’ve done that multiplication 500 times.  You may know that a “googol” is a mere 10100, and that in itself is already roughly 20 orders of magnitude (100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times!) larger than the number of protons and neutrons estimated to exist in the visible universe.  So 10500 is a number far vaster than could ever be written out within the confines of the universe that we can ever see.  There’s not enough space, let alone enough matter, with which to write it.  It’s a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol times a googol!

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Mad morning musings and “The End of All That Is”

It’s Wednesday morning again, and here I am, reverting to habit, writing a blog post (this time on my smartphone) because I frankly can’t seem to think of anything better to do with my time.

Well…I could sleep.  That would be a better use of my time.  Except I can’t sleep.  Even on weekends, the only way I get myself to sleep through the night is to take two Benadryl™ before I lie down.  But that’s not really effective, restorative sleep, and though I stay in “bed” later, I can tell the next day that I’m not really rested.  Or maybe that’s just residual effects of the antihistamine, I don’t know.

The best thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression‒which didn’t work overall, and gave me bad side-effects‒was that it made me not just able to go to sleep at night, but to actually feel good going to bed and going to sleep, to enjoy the process.  I had never experienced that before, nor have I since.  But, as I said, there were other side-effects that made it quite bad.

Also, it made me gain weight, which would be particularly bad now, because I’m already heavier than I’ve ever been.  That’s what can happen when one’s only reliable pleasure comes from eating, and when one also eats as a sort of “stimming” and soothing thing to try to ease a constant sense of anhedonia and stress and dysphoria.  And it’s not as though I could simply “embrace” my body size, because it comes with worsening pain and other unpleasant consequences.

Unfortunately, I don’t get immediate worsening of pain when I eat.  It’s delayed.  If it were immediate, I would probably develop a habitual avoidance, and that would be great.  I try to remind myself, when my ankles and knees and back and hips are hurting a lot, that this is caused, at least partly, by eating too much, but that auto-suggestion doesn’t seem quite to work.

I’m pretty sure that I would eat less if I slept better.  Chronic sleep loss tends to affect one’s regulatory and stress hormones, and can stimulate appetite (especially for carbohydrates) in many people.  I appear to be one of these people.

I wonder if I could figure out a way to cause myself pain while eating‒maybe I could put a clothespin on the end of my pinky when I eat, every time I eat.  I don’t know if you all remember, but having a clothespin clamped on your fingernail hurts quite a lot, and hurts even more (albeit briefly) when you take it off and circulation returns*.

If I could arrange something like that to happen whenever I eat, that would be useful.  I did have a TENS unit that never helped my chronic pain, but some of its higher settings could be quite uncomfortable.  I suppose it might be useful to train myself, though it would require setting it up and activating it every time I ate.  Also, I’m almost sure that I threw it away in frustration because it didn’t work.

It would be really useful if I could somehow trigger nausea any time I ate, as in the style of aversion training seen in A Clockwork Orange.  I suppose I could try to force myself to eat eggplant with every meal…but no, I don’t think I could.  It’s very hard to force oneself to eat things that make one feel sick.  That’s the whole point of this line of thought.  I guess I could look for some syrup of ipecac.  I’ve never used that, but I think they used to use it to make people throw up if they’d eaten something poisonous or the like.  It might be worth a try.  I think I’ll send myself a reminder to look it up on Amazon.

The train just arrived.  I must say, Tri-Rail seems to have deteriorated slightly since changing their schedules, but maybe they’re just in the middle of making adjustments.  I try to give other people and organizations the benefit of the doubt when I can.  The Principle of Charity is one that I think would be very useful for society as a whole, or at least for humans:  the idea of trying to see what people say and do from the best possible light you can, instead of reflexively assuming the worst, of getting judgmental and self-righteous and assuming anything you find even slightly uncomfortable is a personal attack on you, precisely because you feel uncomfortable.

If I took that attitude, I could definitely see myself trying to destroy the world or even the universe, because a lot of reality bothers me a lot of the time.  Fortunately, I know that my feelings are my problem and my responsibility, not anyone else’s.

Not that I don’t fantasize about global and even universal destruction when I’m feeling particularly pan-antipathic.  I imagine working to perfect technology to adjust the course of asteroids.  I could even sneakily get government funding to do so, but then I could actually use the technology to steer near-Earth objects toward the Earth rather than away from it.  Some good asteroid hits might be extinction-level events, and a comet impact (of sufficient size) could wipe out nearly all life on Earth.

I say “nearly” because some microbes are remarkably resilient.

Of course, if one could study the possibility of vacuum decay‒causing, for instance, the cosmological constant or the Higgs Field to quantum tunnel to a lower energy level‒that would produce a wavefront process that would obliterate all forms of matter, a wavefront that would expand at the speed of light and wipe out everything.

Well…it wouldn’t literally wipe out everything, actually.  First off, it would leave behind whatever cosmos is entailed in the new Higgs (or other field) set-point.  And, of course, beyond our cosmic horizon, there are bits of reality that are moving away from us‒carried by the expansion of spacetime itself‒at faster than the speed of light.  So the vacuum decay wave would never reach them.  But it would obliterate everything in the observable universe, and that might be heartwarming enough.

Vacuum decay, though, may not even be a physical possibility‒it’s not a consensus prediction, though there are reasons to think it might be possible‒according to the best models we have of cosmic history, the Higgs field did settle out in a non-zero state after the electroweak era, and if inflationary cosmology is correct, then the “inflaton” field similarly decayed.

Still, we also have no idea how (or if) such a decay could be triggered.  There is no apparent risk of initiating it through highly energetic physics, because there are constant, extremely high energy processes happening in the cosmos, and everything we can see is all still there, as are we.

Oh, and contrary to the X-Men comics’ Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga, unfortunately, a “neutron galaxy” would not be “The End of All That Is”.  If such a “neutron galaxy” were to “appear” in the middle of the Milky Way, that would be bad for us, though its effects would take a while, since even gravity doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light.  But effectively, a “neutron” galaxy would be no more cosmically devastating than a supermassive black hole with the mass of a hundred billion suns or so.  That’s a big black hole, bigger than any we’ve seen (and probably too big to be expected to exist at the current age of the cosmos), and as with any black hole, if you get too close it can be bad news**, but from a distance its effects would be no more harmful than an ordinary galaxy of equivalent mass.

Oh, well, I’ll have to keep brainstorming ways to destroy the world or humanity at least.  Maybe biology is the way to go‒it might be possible to genetically engineer something like the Blob or the Chicken Heart that Ate the World.  Or one could deliberately make an AI that has the terminal goal to turn everything into paperclips, not by accident but on purpose.  That would be humorously ironic.  Or one could just make an AI nanobot, Von Neumann probe-style thing that literally had the sole programming to replicate itself as much and as fast as possible, using every available resource.

I’ve written before about how such a thing could even instantiate a new kind of galaxy-level natural selection.

I wonder what would happen if I tried to crowd-source a project to end all life in the universe, maybe with a “GoFundMe” page…

Anyway, my station is coming up, so I’ll draw my insane musings to a close for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything tomorrow.

*Don’t worry, this was not something anyone else ever did to me.  This was something with which I experimented on myself, because while it was painful, it was quite fascinating that the pain got worse when I first took the clothespin off.

**Although, with one that big, you could probably traverse the event horizon without tidal forces killing you‒at least not just yet‒by spaghettification, so it might at least allow for some interesting final experiences.

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Causality, relativity, uncertainty, and attractive versus repulsive gravity–these are worth celebrating

Okay, well, I’m writing this blog post from the office, because this is where I slept last night after the holiday party.  We did not have the party at the office, just to be clear.  We had it at a very decent restaurant called Maggiano’s, which may be part of a chain to some extent, I think.  It was a nice enough restaurant, food-wise, and the building and the outside lights were quite beautiful (see below).  However, inside, it was way too crowded and noisy, and we were seated at a very long, narrow table against a wall.

I felt incredibly stressed when we first arrived; I can hardly hear out of my right ear for one, and I have had tinnitus in it since about 2007 or so, and everything else was a tumult and commotion.  There was too much visual sensory overload also, and way too many people in too close quarters.  I miss the social mores of the pandemic, honestly.  I was barely able to endure long enough for our server to get me a drink so I could calm down a little.  I almost left and just walked back to the office.

My difficulties with such things have gotten worse over time, probably at least partly because I only ever used to go to restaurants and whatnot with people with whom I felt quite comfortable—my family, near and extended, then my wife, her family, our family, and so on—so there was always someone on whom I could focus, and with whom I could speak.

The drinks were rather weak, which may be good, since it was a work night, but I had to drink several to keep from tensing up.  Even so, at the end of the night, when they wanted to take a big group photo, I just walked away.  I had been dodging pictures all night already; there was a terribly annoying number of them, because everyone has their own little cameras in their smartphones, so instead of conversation—which was very difficult with anyone more than one seat away, and pretty hard even with those neighbors—people just took their little, instant, digital snaps, which I suspect will never really be used for recalling memories.

I’ve said it before, it’s not the case that things on the internet (or smartphones or whatever) are forever, as is sometimes claimed.  There is such a cacophony of data and images and whatnot, a good portion of it now not even being “real”, that most things will be swiftly lost like a drop of ink in a roiling, stormy ocean, or the quantum information of something that’s fallen in a black hole.  In principle it’s all there, but in practice it’s as lost as the echoes of Julius Caesar’s death rattle.

I guess it was a pretty nice evening, and the food was pretty good.  The salad was above average, and the broccoli I had on the side with my ziti dish was good.  It was all certainly well above the level of, for instance, the Olive Garden, but it was terribly noisy, literally and figuratively.  By the end, when we were the last party in the restaurant, it was still noisy, because our group was terribly noisy, and it was embarrassing and unpleasant.

I think I mostly at least prevented anyone from capturing my disgusting current face and form on camera in anything other than, perhaps, an oblique angle.  I really don’t like how I look, or how I feel, and certainly don’t want it memorialized, even if it’s evanescent and ephemeral*.

After the party, I was brought back to the office, which is only about four miles from the restaurant.  I could have walked, since the night was reasonably cool, but since I knew I wouldn’t be taking a shower, I decided not to do that.  I have washed up this morning and applied antiperspirant and aftershave (or whatever you call it when you haven’t actually shaved) and I brushed my teeth and everything.  I slept on the floor, with my backpack as my pillow, and it was about as comfortable as sleeping at the house, and I got about 3 hours of sleep.

This is the state in which my life is and has been for years now:  sleeping at the office and spending time here (by myself) is just as pleasant as being at the place where I nominally live.  That’s because I have no life, and I don’t expect one to occur again for me.  I’m really absolutely dismal and morose and unpleasant, even to myself.

I’ve hardly even read anything in over three weeks now, which is very weird and rare for me.  The single thing to which I’m now looking forward is the Doctor Who Christmas special, and that’s not a huge draw, just a pleasant one.  It’s not as though I’m actually watching it with anyone or can talk about it with a friend or anything.

I got out the hardcover books Spacetime and Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible at the office.  I have them resting on the desk, hoping to entice myself during any downtime I might have at work.  So far it hasn’t paid off, but I would like to master the mathematics of GR well enough that I can understand intuitively why a uniform energy field permeating space generates “repulsive gravity”.  I understand that it does, but I don’t have a good picture of it in my head, whereas I do have a much clearer intuitive sense of why the curvature of spacetime (especially the time part) leads to the apparent force of attractive gravity.

In a way, that’s my only remaining unaccomplished (and reasonably achievable) goal.  Quantum field theory is interesting and all, but the basic concepts of it seem fairly straightforward to me**.  Contrary to what people often say, quantum mechanics (et al) are only really counter-intuitive if you insist upon trying to apply macroscopic and mesoscopic intuitions to phenomena that happen at much smaller scales.  It’s a bit like expecting one of your bathroom tiles to behave just like the Burj Khalifa, only the scale is much more disparate between the quantum and the macroscopic.

People seem somehow puzzled by the notion of how complementary pairs of one’s measurements of quantum “particles” can never be more accurate than a certain level, as if this is truly different from measurements of macroscopic phenomena.  I’m quite sure that the errors when measuring, say, the mass or velocity of something as large as an elephant, or a car, or what have you, are waaaaaay huger than the absolute uncertainty in measurement of the position and/or momentum of a particle.  They’re just not as noticeable because the thing itself is big, and so the percentage of the error might be smaller and less consequential.

But we know things change with scale, like surface to volume ratios and whatnot.  An uncertainty of a millimeter when measuring a blue whale is hardly relevant, but if you’re measuring an ant, it could easily be crucial, and if you’re measuring a dust mite that error would be larger than the organism.

I also don’t get the objection to the possible “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics that derives from the fact that we only ever see and experience one world.  I don’t know why that puzzles people.  It’s not as if you can see both the outside and the inside of all the solid objects around you.  If you touch the near surface of a basketball with one finger, you can’t feel the opposite side of the ball with the same finger at the same time.

Yet, there’s no real doubt that the inside and the other side of physical objects really exist.  We just can’t sense the whole of any given thing at once.  Any part of space that will never enter our future light cones is something we will never, ever see at all***, but we don’t have any good reason to doubt that far distant regions of spacetime exist.  Internal consistency of reality and logical coherence of the world seem to demand many things existing with which we will not, and sometimes cannot, ever interact.

Okay, that was a weird tangent.  My apologies.  Anyway, I doubt that I’m going to achieve my “dream” of getting an intuitive, mathematical understanding, something I can feel, about why spacetime expands in the presence of a uniform energy.  After all, it’s something about which I honestly care, and my track record with such things is abysmal.  I don’t expect to achieve anything else of value, even to me, in my life.

I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m depressed, I’m alone; the only person in whose presence I always find myself is a person I despise (me).  My catharsis via this blog isn’t working.  I’m getting no help, though I wish for it, but I’m not sure how well I would respond if some were to come.  Maybe, like the wonderful simile Sting used in Be Still My Beating Heart, I would wriggle like a fish caught on dry land, unable to tell the difference between help and danger, between an offer of comfort and a warning of pain.

Whatever.  Sorry, that’s all pathetic, isn’t it?

In closing, I wonder if anyone listened to my little audio snippet yesterday, and if anyone thought it was worth it for me to try to do such a thing more often.  Let me know in the comments (on WordPress) if you have any feedback to offer.  Thanks.

maggianos

*Performing together live, for the first time.

**Straightforward for quantum field theory type things, anyway, to be fair.  I don’t mean that it’s not complex (ha ha! it uses complex numbers all the time, get it?) but I have a sort of picture of how the processes work, and it makes sense.  The rest would just be building details and specifics on top of the basic framework, which is a lot, of course, but there’s no real intellectual hurdle to be cleared.

***Assuming we do not discover any exceptions or workarounds to special relativity and the speed-of-causality limit.  There could in principle be workarounds, but it seems unlikely that there are local exceptions to the cosmic speed limit.  In any case, even such exceptions shouldn’t violate chains of causality.

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He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not blog upon his like again.

 

Hamlet:  My father—methinks I see my father.

Horatio:  Where, my lord?

Hamlet:  In my mind’s eye, Horatio.

-Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2

 

It’s Thursday, October 4th, the day of my father’s birthday.  He would have turned seventy-nine today if he were still alive, but he died just under two years ago.  I don’t remember the exact date of his death, and I see no reason to memorialize it.

My father and I didn’t always get along; in many ways we were too alike to avoid butting heads, especially since one of the ways we were alike is a deep stubbornness.  But my father was an admirable man in many ways; he always took care of his family to the best of his ability, which was usually very good indeed.  He and my mother were married right up until the day he died, which is more than I can say about myself, and I admire them both for it.  That they were best friends and constant companions is an unarguable fact, and they got along as well as any long-married couple I’ve ever known.

It was from my parents—both of them—that I got my love of reading, and more indirectly, my love of writing, of making stories.  It was my father who received as a gift, and who proudly wore, a tee-short quoting Erasmus in saying, “When I get a little money, I buy books.  If any is left, I buy food and clothes.”  This wasn’t quite my parents’ literal attitude, but it was damn close.

I didn’t quite realize how proud and supportive my parents were of my love of reading and writing until in college I came to a point of crisis.

I had always intended—for as long as I thought about it—to become a scientist, though I’ve also always written stories, books, plays, and even screenplays (the latter too laughable to discuss).  By the time I was ready for university, I had decided that I wanted to be a physicist.  I went to Cornell as a Physics Major, and in my first year did quite well in all my physics and mathematics coursework (while also thoroughly enjoying my freshman seminars, first Fantasy and then Writing About Film).  But then, during the summer after freshman year, I underwent open-heart surgery to correct an atrial septal defect (quite a large one) that had only been discovered that year.

In later times, in medical school, I learned more about some of the central nervous system effects of open-heart surgery, and I even wrote a review paper on the nature of the (usually temporary) cognitive decline that heart-lung bypass in heart surgery frequently causes.  Its effects in triggering mood disorders such as depression (something for which I already have a familial and personal predisposition) are probably more widely known than the temporarily diminished mental capacity that comes to most people who have undergone such surgery.  The state of the art may have improved since 1988, but I doubt the problem has been eliminated.

Anyway, I returned to college at the beginning of sophomore year (only two weeks after my surgery!), and over the course of that semester and year, with the combination of a low-grade-sometimes-veering-into-high-grade depression and a dip in my mental acuity, I had a hard time keeping up with the higher level math courses (and the physics was getting into the intro to serious quantum mechanics and other areas, with matters requiring vector calculus, tensors, partial differential equations, and all that fun stuff).  I think if I’d just had the temporary cognitive impairment and not the depression as well, I might have muscled my way through, and brushed up on things once my mental clarity improved.  Alas, not only was I not so lucky, I also had no idea why I was having such difficulty; I felt merely that I was an intellectual and moral failure as a Physics Major.

I didn’t fail any classes or anything like that—I don’t think I got anything below a low B—but I could see myself having more and more trouble as I went forward, if things remained as they were.  At the time, I was already close friends with the woman I would eventually marry, and she had read some of my writing (and really liked it).  She talked to me long and hard about my options, and with her help, I came to the decision to switch majors to English.

I was mortified about this.  I felt that I was failing myself in some important way, and worse, that I was letting my parents down, but I didn’t see any alternative.  So I called them, and I very nervously told them the decision I had made…

They were practically ecstatic.  My father in particular said that he just thought that English suited me better, because I loved reading and writing so much, and was good at it.  They’d always been supportive of my love of science, too, of course, and had been behind me all the way in my goal to become a scientist, but they’d apparently thought that such a career wouldn’t fulfill me…though they were wise enough not to try to change my oh-so-stubborn mind.  I think my parents—and particularly my father—would have been prouder of having a son who was an author than of having a son who won the Nobel Prize in Physics.  I hadn’t ever thought of that before.  But the fact that they were so supportive of, and even excited by, my choice was an incredible, tremendous relief and encouragement.

I’ve occasionally wistfully looked back and wished I’d gone farther in my formal studies of physics and math, but…well, those are things I can study on my own, and I do so when the mood strikes me.  But as an English Major, I realized my deep and abiding love of Shakespeare (at one point I took two Shakespeare courses at the same time; that was fun!), and I learned of the works of Spenser and Mallory and Milton.  I read Paradise Lost (my personal nomination for the greatest English language work of all time), and innumerable other great works beside, ancient and modern.  I’ve never regretted those exposures.  Who would?  I also learned how quickly I can write at need, when I discovered that I’d mis-marked the due date for my honors thesis, and I had to write the whole thing in one weekend.  That was pretty stupid, but maybe I can blame it on the residua of my cognitive impairment, which thankfully seems to have faded completely in the intervening years.

Anyway, it was thanks to my parents’ support, and my father’s words—and the example he set—that I was able to feel good about my choice.  We had some pretty serious interpersonal problems in subsequent years, but eventually we put them behind us, and though I didn’t become an “official” writer directly after college (I went to medical school instead…go figure) I am finally now finally fulfilling my destiny, as the Jedi and the Sith are prone to say.*

I’m tremendously happy that my father lived long enough to see me publish my first few books, though I wish he’d been alive to read The Chasm and the Collision, since his advice had real, beneficial impact on its style.

And now I have my own version of his tee-shirt that reads, “When I get a little money, I buy books.  If any is left, I buy food and clothes.” It was a gift from my sister, and I come as close to embodying the words as my parents did, if not closer.  I’m more like my father, probably, than I am like any other person I’ve ever known.  I’m a little more playful than he ever was—he was quite a serious man most of the time, and he was exceeded in stubbornness only by his youngest son—but he’s still the only other person I’ve known who had the patience and desire to spend as much time in zoos and museums as I do.  He always loved to learn new things, and I consider that shared love (which also came from my mother) perhaps the greatest gift that I could ever have been given.

I miss him terribly, and my mother as well.  But as Arthur Bach said in the original movie, Arthur, “I was lucky to know him at all.”

*If there is such a thing as destiny, then surely it’s impossible to do anything but fulfill one’s destiny.