quantum-physics

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If the vacuum collapses, everything gets messy

It’s Wednesday morning now, and I feel slightly better than I did yesterday, which should probably be no surprise.  I went back to the house last night, and I had a decent sleep‒for me, anyway‒and no major evening issues.  Now I am working my way toward the office.  It’s payroll day, so it should be at least mildly more hectic than most other days, but it shouldn’t be too unbearable.

Well, it shouldn’t be unbearable at all.  I mean, the state of being unbearable or not is a purely binary thing, isn’t it?  Either something is bearable or it is not.  If something is unbearable, then it cannot be borne.  So, saying something is not “too unbearable” is probably almost always nonsensical.  I suppose one could imagine something being only just unbearable, so that one could almost be able to bear it…but not quite, and one would finally be forced to succumb to whatever outcome that entailed, despite one’s possibly heroic struggles.

In some ways that sounds like it could be worse than something being thoroughly and unequivocally unbearable.  If one can see that something is truly unbearable, one will probably be less likely even to try to bear it.  One would not bother attempting to style out the brunt of a supernova; if one could not get far enough away, one would presumably just close one’s eyes and grit one’s teeth and take what comfort one could in knowing that the explosion will probably happen and obliterate one faster than any nerve impulse could propagate.

That’s one of the (tiny) comforts about the possibility of there being a “vacuum collapse” of the universe, in which the present “dark energy” vacuum state could, hypothetically, quantum tunnel down to a lower, truer vacuum state than the present one*, releasing that potential energy drop in such a way that wipes out all currently existing particles/fields.

This would erase everything in our visible universe (the “visible” part is deliberate and crucial; do you see why?**) in a sort of wave of collapse that starts at the site of the first state change, like the propagation of ice crystals forming in hitherto supercooled water.  But though it would be a shame, from our point of view, it would be one we would never experience, since the bubble of state change would expand at the speed of light.  It would thus be literally impossible to see it coming, because once you could see it, it would already be there, and you would be wiped away before you could possibly be aware that it was happening.

By the way, this possibility is “only” hypothetical; we aren’t even sure it could happen, not least because we’re not sure whether the vacuum state of the universe is as low as it can go or not, among other things.  But don’t worry:  if the vacuum collapse of the cosmos doesn’t kill you, something else will.

Even my truly immortal vampires in Mark Red might be wiped out by vacuum collapse.  I suspect they would, which might be a comfort to many of them, so to speak.  Of course, that would depend very much on how the “supernatural” forces in that book’s universe interact with the vacuum state and other quantum fields.  It’s not inconceivable that they might survive even that.  How’s that for horrifying?

These are odd thoughts for a Wednesday morning, aren’t they?  I mean, on a Thursday they wouldn’t be that odd, and even less so on a Friday.  On a Saturday they would be almost boringly predictable.  But on a Wednesday morning?  That’s just, well…odd, as I said.

I’m being silly.  My apologies.

I guess it’s more uplifting than is the prospect of universal Armageddon***.  Though, really, the Tao te Ching (in the version with which I am familiar) encourages us to embrace death with our whole hearts because that will help us to be prepared for most everything else we can encounter.

It does not encourage us to love death or to seek it; quite the contrary.  We are merely encouraged to accept it, not just intellectually but viscerally, to internalize***** it.  This is one of those curious circumstances in which the Tao to Ching and the movie Fight Club give the same advice, which is no indictment of that advice in either direction.

I try not to indulge in the vice of advice, but I will express my hope that every one of you who reads this post today or any of my other posts has a particularly good day, today and every day hereafter.

You’ve suffered enough already.

*This is analogous to what is thought to have happened when the “inflaton” field dropped down to a much lower energy level about 13.8 billion years ago, releasing the differential energy as the very hot soup of elementary particles that eventually became the universe we see.

**Okay, fine, I’ll explain.  It’s not just that the wave is expanding at the speed of light and so one would “see” it only as it hits.  But, given the current, accelerating expansion of the universe, the wave of change could never, even in principle, reach areas of the cosmos that are outside our cosmic horizon, because those places are receding from us faster than the speed of light/causality.  There is no causal influence from us that can ever reach them, or vice versa (assuming no wormholes or warp drives or similar).  Likewise, someplace beyond our horizon****** could be collapsing already, but we need never worry, because that collapse is not going to reach us (unless it changes the rate of overall cosmic expansion or even reverses it, which is not inconceivable.  We might then find ourselves in (or near) an anti-deSitter space, in which case, well…yeah).

***Not to be confused with the often misused**** term “apocalypse” which is basically just synonymous with “revelation”.  It’s become associated with the end of the world (and with lesser catastrophes) because one of the alternative titles of the book of Revelation is “The Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine” or whatever they called that nut bar.

****That rhymed, and it had a good rhythm too, both quite by accident.  I did that in yesterday’s or Monday’s post as well, but I didn’t call attention to it.  Can you find it now?

*****I would love to be able to use the term to grok it as in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, but much as when Fuckerberg stole the term “metaverse” from me, likewise Elon Musk and the would-be tech boys who idolize him have arrogated the term “grok” and made it embarrassing to use.  Don’t even get me started on the disgusting theft of the word Palantir by Peter Thiel.  He deserves to be tortured interminably for the unmitigated gall he has shown in daring to use that term, but I would accept his immediate, painless disintegration and that of his company.

******Speaking of horizons, it is interesting to wonder what a vacuum state collapse would do to currently existing black holes.  I suspect they would basically be impervious to it, since the vacuum state is something that exists within spacetime, with the gravitational field as the backdrop of other quantum fields, but we don’t necessarily know enough about quantum gravity to feel very sure, as far as I know.  I suspect it might change the specifics of Hawking radiation at the level of the event horizon, and thus change the specific rate of black hole decay.  Also, I think in the first rush of particles generated by such a vacuum decay, most black holes would grow briefly with the influx of newly released energy all around them that had previously been bound up in the vacuum energy.  But that’s just my initial intuition.

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Gravid questions of time and gravity (and labor)

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

Ha ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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?