And you thought I'd forgotten you . . . .
Our relationship might rely on a stream of photons, but it's not dead yet.
Greetings, salutations, and best wishes of every imaginable kind from a perch upon which I see a cold and glistening snowy, icy corner of the world.
Okay, yes, a wee bit of explanation for the much-too-long interval between these postings, articles, or whatever. [I tend to go with ‘posts’, but that might not quite be doing justice to some of the pieces, especially some of the things currently in production—of which, more later, er, uh, . . . next time.]
I’ve been busy. No, wait, that’s not quite the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—as if anything ever is, of course, but I’m often a bit of a stickler regarding truth and its representation, conveyance, and preservation. Which makes it all the more ironic, as well as annoying, that I routinely receive solicitation text messages from Donald J. Trump, ex-president and, I hope, future convicted and imprisoned felon. (I’m assured that I am not at all special or unique in receiving these, but they are certainly an irritant, and I hope the irony isn’t seen only by yours truly. When he descended on that golden escalator, I hoped it would just keep taking him down, down, down, and down, to depths from which return would not be possible. Hey, like Dante, a man can dream, right?)
It is closer to the truth to say I have been occupied. Mentally, that is. As far as I know, there are no larval alien life forms about to burst from my chest and attack Sigourney Weaver. Though there’s an entire industry wanting me to recognize and get all touchy-feely with my microbiome.
What has been occupying my brain’s cognitive regions? Lots of things. The Middle East1. Copyright law2. Politics in democracies and their superficial mimics3. The meaning of Christmas4. The corruption of capitalism (as Adam Smith envisioned it)5. The meaningfulness of art, literature, and music6. Why I can’t find a good phone number for God7. What seems to be a nascent mass extinction, courtesy of human hubris, greed, and stupidity8. The fact that the lightest shades of red are seldom if ever called ‘red’, but are nearly always termed ‘pink’, at least in English, and why ‘pink’ became associated with the feminine, and blue masculine9. Owls10. Dogs11. Why time travel is such a persistent fantasy12. The nature of time13. The immense difficulty of getting gravity and quantum physics to play by the same rules, mathematically speaking14. Whether it’s inevitable that liberal societies will always sink into depravity15. The miracle (as I quite literally see it) of Rayleigh scattering producing such beautiful blue skies16. The fine distinctions in use of parentheses, square brackets, and those fancy brackets that seem like some sort of typesetter’s Victorian filigree17. The overwhelming flow of western society towards an areligious and hyper-materialistic nature18. What it would have been like to have been Newton or Leibniz perceiving the infinitesimal and its utility. The immensity of the universe. That physicists speak knowingly of the Planck time, and how doing so seems to do more than merely suggest that space and time are themselves quantized. The prevalence of bilateral symmetry in Animalia. The difficulties fledgling democracies face in the 21st century. Winter-flying moths. What it means that human intelligence is in a mutualistic relationship with human emotion and consciousness. Whether there might possibly be some other kind of mathematics than that which we know, with its own hard-and-fast, ironclad axioms and laws, equally able to categorize, number, and measure the world but completely foreign to our mode of thinking.
To bring it somewhat nearer to home, let me say simply that I was constantly dealing with life, which in turn was following the ancient theme—no, not One Damn Thing After Another, but A Whole Mess of Damn Things Pretty Much All at Once. My engineering officer says that average neuronal firing activity has been forty-eight percent higher than normal, and the engines, the network, the fuel supply, the “whole stretched-to-its-limits, doon nae what it’s designed for, held together by bailing wire and the last of the doctor’s stretchy gauze shit, it canna be takin’ much more;” he’s “not a miracle worker, ya know.” We’re not gonna catch up on everything at once, here and now. So, which thread do we pull on to start undoing the Gordian knot?
None of ‘em. I’m just gonna shove the whole damn Gordian knot into the kitchen drawer where we put stuff we might want or need at some indefinite point in the future, assuming of course we make it that far. Maybe Gordon Ramsay will find the Gordian knot and turn into a nice spaghetti carbonara. Or (k)not. Whatever.
But I’ll send something out into the world again soon.
The Middle East. Oy. According to Wikipedia, which, given the current state of affairs calculated as a global average of how far from satisfactory any given condition, circumstance, or combination or set thereof is, and the amount of time the average person is willing to devote to any topic not likely to produce a significant economic return on investment, might be the most relevant reference source, the Middle East “is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.” The entry also tells us that the phrase “came into widespread use as a replacement for the term Near East . . . in the early twentieth century.” Why popular sentiment demanded a replacement for ‘Near East’ with the demonstrably less logical ‘Middle East’, in both cases assuming of course that an obviously Eurocentric descriptor was in some way appropriate, is not discussed. That Wikipedia’s definition includes the ‘Levant’, which I am willing to bet surveys consistently find to be more commonly identified as either a twisted, nut-encrusted bread or a model of car made by Mitsubishi than as a geographic region suggests that they’re perhaps a little too reliant on the thoughts and recommendations of a formal committee meeting in Prague before the Great War. To give Wikipedia its due, they give a large portion of credit for the coining of the phrase to Alfred Thayer Mahan, perhaps America’s greatest Naval strategist prior to the Second World War, and long-time professor and then president of the U. S. Naval War College. Why Mahan shunned ‘Near East’ is unclear, as far as I know. At any rate, the region has been in perpetuity noted to have great significance in international affairs, due both to its land-bridge connections twixt the eastern end of the Mediterranean and greater Asia and its envelopment of the sea routes that offered more secure and economical alternatives to land transport and oceanic transport around the Cape of Good Hope, all with eyes towards facilitation of trade between the Far East (China, Japan, the “East Indies” of a couple centuries back, etc.) and Europe. In the present moment, those same sea routes are the scene of great mischief by and on behalf of Iran and its regional dependencies, especially the Houthi rebels of South Yemen. Meanwhile, of course, the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli war that has been bubbling along since 1948 continues to splatter the walls at regular intervals with, to mix metaphors, violent eructations from the bowels of oppressed, downtrodden, isolated, and fearful peoples that most often take direction from religious and ethnic leaders with, all too often, rather dubious motives. Depending on what criteria are used and where one stands, there are, right now, as many as a dozen “conflicts” that those involved in (and, often, others) would call “wars” scattered around the Middle East.
Copyright law is a mess made by good intentions applied to a divergent pool of problems by legislators and bureaucrats of varying competence and skill. Bad intentions, which of course tend to spawn evil actions, make copyright law of some sort necessary. Somehow, it’s gotten us to a point where it stringently protects the legal rights of Tolkien’s heirs regarding the who, how, when, what, and why of use of his Lord of the Rings works fifty years after the author’s death—at least in western developed nations, while allowing Milne’s Pooh Bear, Piglet, and others to be turned into creatures of horror, pornography, etc. because he’s been dead just long enough that somehow that’s now okay.
Democracies are the always-on kettles of bubbling politics that dilute the back-room and private parlor affairs of those who wish to run things for the rest of us with periodic voting by almost universally ill-informed commoners prone to panic, despair, and belief in demagogues, charlatans, con-artists, etc., with results as one should expect. Government mimics of democracy are most often a hybrid of authoritarianism and weak democratic structures. See: Russia and Putin, Venezuela and Maduro, El Salvador and Bukele, Iran and Raisi, and others.
With no disrespect intended toward Schulz and Linus and Charlie Brown, Christmas as a religious holiday is not holding its own in the face of the ever-larger annual tsunami of commercialism and materialist envy. Even amongst Christians, the meaning of the holiday, on Christian terms, is typically now a watered-down “just be nice to everybody” theme, with a side helping of “a time to be with family”. As if there’s anything particularly Christian, Biblical, or even religious about either. Heck, even in the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special, his little tree of celebration isn’t recognized as good or special until it’s all dolled up with lights, ornaments, garland, and gewgaws, until it’s no longer recognizable. What’s the meaning of Christmas? Ask the nearest hedge fund manager.
Capitalism in 2024 is dominated by obsession with materialism and in denial of the importance of morality, justice, and love and respect for others. Among the results are mega-corporations and more mega-corporations, ever more distancing of relations between producer and buyer, the reduction of workers to, as a large corporation employee reminded me in a customer service call just the other day, “cogs in a machine”. Smith is now turning over in his grave so rapidly that if one puts a magnet in his hands and wraps some wire around his casket, he’ll be a huge source of sustainable electricity.
A really most difficult topic, having at its center the universal human desires for meaning in existence, sharing of experience, love, and outlets of frustration, fear, and anger.
The Bible is chock-full of scenes in which people get messages directly from God. Moses, I think, got more than his fair share. Abraham at least often met with angels, as did others, according to OT stories. God also spoke from pillars of cloud and from mountaintops. God delivered a message to Balaam by way of a talking donkey. Then, of course, there’s also the whole God-made-flesh affair with Jesus walking about and talking, preaching, healing, and miracles of various sorts. Also of course, given how Jesus’ sojourn on the planet turned out for him, it’s not hard to see why God might not want to visit again. But still, it’d be nice to actually be able to talk with the Almighty about things now and then. We’re told that God watches over and loves and cares for each one of us, but He won’t give out his number. <sigh>
There’s a bit of argument amongst scientists, environmentalists, and representatives of the rich, famous, and don’t-wish-to-be-disturbed about whether we’re really on the cusp of a mass extinction. The nay-sayers claim, basically, that things are just not that bad yet, while the more pessimistic folks say we’re on a rapid downhill slide into the next mass extinction and picking up speed. By most every reasonable attempt to measure current rates of extinction, we’re seeing many more extinctions per unit time now than at any other point since bipedal apes started to become the dominant species. But don’t worry; technology, our new god, will sort it all out.
An old topic, in a sense, but interesting in various ways, from the sociological to philological.
“Owls, you say?” Yes, I do. They are, I believe, one of the things about which it can reasonably be said that “If we really knew and understood them, we—and everything else—would be much better off.”
Dogs. See also owls, above. More or less the same applies, but to, like, the power of ten or something. Then there’s the love and companionship, features owls, sad to say, are short on. Dogs have performed more miracles in my life than any other species, and second place isn’t even worth trying to discern. Dogs are wonderful.
I wrote a really rather long, complex, highly detailed note about this, and inserted it right here. But it disappeared. Really. I put it right here, tomorrow. Did it just last week. Ask Bill and Ted, they were here when I did it.
If you really want to exasperate a physicist, get the physicist’s boss to assign said physicist the task of explaining the nature of time to a high school remedial general science class. Or anyone else, for that matter. As soon as somebody uttered the phrase, space-time continuum, whoever was in charge should have stopped the car and demanded everybody get out. Yeah, yeah, there are attempts by physicists to “explain” the space-time continuum—see Neil deGrasse-Tyson’s attempt here—but, like Tyson’s, though they generally get the trains to run on time, they are not capable of withstanding close examination. Most particularly, they elide any mention or description of what time actually is. The closest they get is to say “it’s another dimension” of the space-time continuum that, Tyson and others tell us, we all operate within all the time, without the tiniest thoughts about how we are, in his version, combining the three dimensions of space with consideration of a separate dimension of, well, a separate dimension of reality, that dimension being time, and as we live our lives in this four-dimensional construct, we each produce our very own “world-lines”—the “lines” through spacetime on which we exist, completely and utterly unique. It’s around this point in discussion at which somebody pipes up, saying, so, time is just another dimension of space, really. It’s easy to see that this is not the case, however. We can, and do, move through space volitionally—that is, we made decisions and take actions about where we are, where we’re going, and so forth. With some modest limitations, within our local environment we can move in pretty much any direction of space whenever we wish. We cannot move through time except in the direction it is always going—into the future. The most we can do is to slow it down or speed it up slightly by the rate at which we move through space and within gravitational fields. The time component of the space-time continuum gets stretched and compressed by our rate of movement in it, and spatial relationships with gravitational fields that are themselves stretching that famous space-time fabric. But one thing does not change: In one minute, you will be either a teensy bit older or dead. There are no other options. Despite the fondest wishes of innumerable sci-fi writers, readers, film-makers, film-viewers and most every adolescent, there is no going back in time. Not even for Zaphod Beeblebrox. So just what is it we can’t go back in? It’s the thing that helps us separate and keep track of what is happening. I think. Something like that, anyway.
Whew. This was a mistake. Not the content of the statement—I’m down with that, as the barista just told me in a completely different context. But putting this right after the “nature of time” bit. But here goes: quantum physics and gravity. Two things of immense importance that are quite adamant about playing by their own rules. While quantum physics theory—which is expressed by the rules and mathematics that together comprise quantum mechanics—has a really impressive history, though it’s still a theory that (in its Schrödinger-based versions) shares the planet with at least a few people older than it is. The reason people are so impressed by the history is that it takes whatever is thrown and it and remains standing. On my bookshelf I can see right now Einstein and the Quantum, written by A. Douglas Stone, Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics at a quaint little place called Princeton University, just down the street from the Institute for Advanced Study, once the professional home for that same Einstein fellow. Anyone who’s read really much of anything in twentieth-century physics is likely to know that Einstein was not a fan of quantum mechanics, once declaring, in apparent opposition to the notion vital to the theory that at the most elementary level, the smallest bits of reality, called quanta—and which Einstein had more or less introduced to the world in his description of the photoelectric effect (and which was the major work noted by the committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physics)—don’t exist as particles but instead are something called wave-functions, which were initially no more than invented entities created to describe mathematically the cloud-like nature of probabilities of where in that cloud the particle would be found—once the wave-function ‘collapsed’ into physical being as a particle. Until that moment of observation, the particle, Heisenberg maintained, existed only as that cloud of probabilities, not as a particle. And how was that wave-function collapse brought about? By something called observation’, which itself was not well defined. (This was one of the sticking points for Einstein and others: obviously, the universe keeps on, well, let’s just say it keeps on happening, and there are interactions between this photon and that photon, another photon and that receptor, and so on and so forth, on and on and on and on and on, and, so, okay, then, who or what is doing all the ‘observing’ necessary to collapse all those wave functions and get the particles into existence so they can interact?) And what determined just how, when, and where the wave function collapsed? Nothing—it just happens. Oh, and by the way, if that particle that now exists as a result of a wave function collapse is/was entangled with another potential-particle wave function across the room, across the continent, or across the galaxy, that second potential-particle wave function is also now collapsed into the exactly proper corresponding particle. (Yep, minds blown pretty routinely by this, even a hundred years later. Makes Einstein’s protestations about “spooky action at a distance” seem both reasonable and somewhat quaint.) Now is probably as good a moment as any to mention that Einstein, through his description of the photoelectric effect and quite a bit more thinking about the challenge of indeterminacy, actually poured a pretty dang sturdy foundation for quantum theory, and built some of the first walls thereon. But he didn’t think the whole thing stopped there. He insisted that there must be something to be found ‘below’ this model of particle indeterminacy that, based on real things at a specific point in that space-time continuum, but at the very smallest of scales, determined the outcome. No one has found it. But here’s the rub: gravity refuses to be described by quantum mechanical equations. There are expectations that there is a graviton—that is, a particle which, through its nature, produces a gravitational field and is thus the elementary particle—the quantum—of gravity. But, for reasons I shan’t go into here, it seems impossible to get the math to work so as to bring an appropriately-sized graviton (perhaps massless) with an appropriate gravitational field-producing nature into the quantum mechanics fold and keep the damn thing renormalizable, which is, as best we know now (or so I understand it—I think) necessary. I wouldn’t myself be surprised if it is ultimately found that Einstein was at least partially right—that there’s another level of stuff going on that will allow both for quantum mechanics-friendly gravitons and reduce the fog of indeterminacy. Stone’s book is great, by the way. Those wanting a shorter (obviously less complete, less obviously less enjoyable) version of Einstein’s thinking about quantum mechanics and why he deserves more credit than he’s often given can go the Scientific American route about the matter here.
This is the sort of question that comes up when one looks at the history of democracies and their close kin: the best on view, historically, were probably in Athens and then later instantiated in the Roman Republic. And they didn’t hold up over time. Inevitably, discussions of this or related topics prompts someone to vomit up the fashionable quote, ostensibly originating, as with so many pithy sayings, from Churchill, despite the fact he as often as not cribbed them from elsewhere: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for everything else.” But there does arise a serious question about how democracies age, and whether the freedoms once cherished become weakened in accompanying the ease of life in a prosperous nation, and the necessary morals (archly referenced by such as Franklin and Adams at the founding itself) gradually corrupted, some even abandoned, in such a manner that decadence begets ever more of the same, until the rotten shell collapses.
For a very quick-and-dirty primer regarding blue skies and Rayleigh scattering, I’ll send interested readers to space.com. Note, though, that they don’t well explain why the same thing explains red skies early and late in the day, though the answer is simple. See metoffice.gov.uk for that.
I’m going to leave everyone to their own devices here. There are few hard-and-fast rules, and so to each his own, I say. The really dispositive thing, for me anyway, is simple: Does your use of brackets make clearer—and sufficiently so—what you’re trying to say? Or does it just muck things up?
Okay, I’m calling it done here. I’m being told by the powers that be at Substack that this thing is “nearing the email limit”, so that’s it for now. I’ll get to the rest later. Or not.
Re: #7- He said you haven't answered His calls. He also said He will take all the time you want to explain everything He's ever authored without loathing to do so. But I lost Him when He said He would communicate with you at the speed of light and therefore it wouldn't take very long (Apparently He knows that you will understand what He's talking about here.) Finally, He told me to remind you that you can find Him in your closet- don't forget to shut the door.
you. are. treasure.
my heart and mind rejoice
that yours hold
such riches
thank you for offering
your original words
whenever the spirit moves you
you are right on time
to this life giving party
you create