DOWN TO EARTH

.

GROUNDED~!

.

NO …

I don’t mean that The Spouse has put me on a leash or locked me in the doghouse. I refer to one of my favourite interests, Crank Science.

ANYONE

capable of fogging a mirror back in the sixties/seventies will remember the cardboard pyramid craze. In a nitshell you made a wee cardboard pyramid to the exact proportions (scaled down a bit) of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and if you aligned it precisely on north, and if your sample was at the correct height above the base and on the centreline … you were in business.

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE ABOUNDED

With many quoted examples of all sorts of miraculous events occurring within scaled-down pyramids. Meat wouldn’t rot, milk stayed dredible (new word: it’s the liquid equivalent of edible) for months etc etc but the best of them all was (SFX: TA-DAAAAAH! here please) blunt razor blades correctly aligned therein would resharpen themselves. Or, if you dried your blade after use and popped it in it would never go blunt.

NOT ONE TO ACCEPT

the improbable on face value; and not giving a hoot who might think me a

PHOTO CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK: inside

.

CAN MEAN—

.

—inside the weather systems too, you know. As in tropical cyclone Lusi finding his/her/its way down from the tropics to clobber us in New Zealand. Hard luck, it’s a long way down and cool enough here to slurp and dissipate her energy.

HER?

Storms used to be named after women. I admired and liked that, it seemed very apt. And then some PC twat got in on the act and decided that in the interests of sexual equality men should have a fair go too—after all, men can be just as awesome and terrifying as women, no?

Pie Day

.

CIRCULAR REASONING

.

just a brieffie, this week I’ve lost a lot of time fighting this computer. So on with the show …

NEW SCIENTIST

advises us that a recent date was ‘Pi Day’. Three dot one four (must be American, the fourteenth of March is actually one four dot three in real English). Whatever. It’s a bit too late to take the analogy further as in 1916 being a finer resolution (but coming up soon to a planet near you, a replay). Brrrr.

SOMEWHERE

(and please don’t ask me to find it) I wrote a brief tale of interplanetary travel wherein the good travellers were on their way to a nearby star and had to sleep in their cocoons for many millenniums. On-board automated thingies would awaken them when within cooee of their destination or in event of unforeseen necessity.

To keep itself amused the on-board computer(s) were set to happily calculating pi to ever finer resolutions. (The theory—demonstrable so far—is that Pi never ever ever works out whole.) So when the travellers were awakened they wondered why, until they discovered that after about some thirteen thousand years at umpty zillion calcs per second the Pi computer had suddenly  stopped. On a number …

AND NOW

to do some bits of catching up about the place, and revisit the Photo Challenge of the week. (I still think ‘whimsy’ would be a good one, and possibly ‘what’s left out’.)

.

CARPE DIEM

.

TIME, TO BE REAL

.

… must therefore exist.

.

“Temporo, ergo est”  (or something like that).

Is it time to define time? Off the top of my head then—

Time is the medium of Change

.

—meaning: no time, no change. None. Zilch.

.

“Mummy—?”

“Yes, little Virginia?”

“Mummy, what’s a Singularity?”

“Singularity … hmmmm. A singularity is a dimensionless point in time and space containing everything that ever was, is, or will be; squished down into an eternal timeless non-existent nothing.”

“Wow! …  … Mummy, what’s a Big Bang?”

“(Pest!)  The Big Bang, my sweet child, is what you get when something in your singularity shifts and so triggers a colossal explosion that releases the entire universes—”

“Mummy?”

“Eeek?”

What could possibly change in a timeless singularity and so trigger a Big Bang?”

“How many times, beloved child, do I have to tell you not to get all metaphysical in a blog? Now be a good girl and just exist. Quietly.”

“So we’re not going to discuss how long the singularity existed before it went bang? Or where it came from?”

.

I guess not, so we’ll just have to figure it out for ourselves. As a start point we’ll revisit “No time = no change” … you know, if you slow the movie down as it goes through the projector all the action slows; if you freeze-frame the movie all motion ceases.

.

“Daddy!”

“Yes, Virginia, my darling child?”

“Daddy … how long can you stop time for, before anyone notices?”

” … … … (Eeeeek) … … Silence, pest! Or I’ll nail your slipper to the floor and you’ll walk round in circles for ever!”

.

Virginia raises good points though:

• Does time exist, even if it’s outside of anyone’s control?

• And if it does exist—does it ‘flow’ as common sense dictates from simple observation?

• You know, that old past-present-future thing; is it for real?

I say not.

But that’s for a future post, next time — and I thank you this time for your time.

.

KISMET

BELOW THE INFINITE

AND FURTHER BELOW …

We think of infinite as being towards the larger end of the sizing scale: big, bigger, bigger still, even more bigger, even more bigger yet etc etc on to never-ending. But does the converse hold true? Can we have infinitely small? (WARNING: Don’t go there. Like in Ancient nautical charts… ‘Beyond here be monsters‘.)

Now another thought—taken from my library book (“Wonders of the Universe” by Prof Brian Cox) which is a summation of four recent documentary shows by the BBC on the universe. I think the quote purports to be the current word of science and who would we mere mortals be to argue? I tend to, though … plough on:

BIG BANG in the Great Scheme

That ‘far smaller than an atom’ thing has been given names ranging from Primordial Atom (PA) to Singularity.

The scientists are clever: having created an infinitely dense infinitely small PA floating all by itself in the middle of a non-existent nothing, they then blow it up to create the universe. According to the good book (BBC) the Bang happened almost 14 billion years ago, creating a universe which is now about 45 billion light years across. (Oops … something seems not quite right there …)

Anyway, if it were me had to explain it all I’d have taken the Occam’s razor approach and gone for simplicity. Somehow God is tidier, and infinitely neater, than their blasted Primordial Atom. Either way it’s a giant leap of faith but the evidence is on a par.

The same old questions questions linger—

• Out of what exactly, in a vast empty nothingness, did God create Himself before there was a beginning? Then having created Himself, out of what did He create Creation? Or did a bigger better Goddier God create Him?

• Or—how long did the timeless Primordial Atom seethe and fester before deciding to go POP and liberate those “thousands of trillions of suns” to go forth and multiply in the heavens?

•  And—what could possibly have changed inside that timeless Primordial Atom/Singularity/cosmic Egg/Thing … given that any form of change is a function of time?

•  And—if it did change enough to make it Big Bang the universe into existence—what took it so long?

MY POINT IS THAT both science and religions require the same amount of faith, based effectively on similar ‘evidences’ (which too often are dogmatic statements by the initiated). I suggest that for ‘evidence’ we should insert Supposition, as in “The Flavour Of The Day” — seeing that yesterday’s science is always today’s Barrel Of Laughs (as will be today’s science tomorrow—but none of them will ever admit that).

My case here is the Big Bang. The terms ‘Big Bang’ and ‘God, the Creator’ are identical and interchangeable—it takes the same kind of religious faith to believe in either, and once believing, so dismiss the other out of hand. Some lucky souls can believe in both at the same time—I salute them.

In the meantime that damned Infinity Box is still priced waaaaay too high, I don’t have the infinite wealth to match my infinite curiosity and desires; perhaps I can create one in my workshop, but my skill with electricity would guarantee a Big Bang of my own.

.

KISMET

BEYOND THE INFINITE

How high is the highest?

A shop going out of business in our town has an ‘infinity box’ for sale. The box is glass fronted and electrically illuminated, you can peer in and without seeing yourself at all you see multiples of whatever you’ve put in there fading off into the far, far distance.

As a child, on my back on hilltops far from light pollution on frosty moonless nights (I used to sneak out when all the house was mute) I would contemplate the shivering stars and ponder infinity. I still do. Contemplate, that is, I no longer sneak out—but I’m no closer now to any answers than all those years ago. Okay then, Einstein, if you’re so clever—

A traveller, footsore and weary happens fortuitously upon an inn just as night is falling and a terrible storm about to break. But (there’s always a ‘but’ in these things, ever notice?) the receptionist smiles sweetly says without regret, “Sorr-eee! We’re all full up! Hard luck!”

After going through (and being repulsed on) all the usual suggestions like double up? laundry? shed? kitchen? share with dog? doss down in the lounge/cellar/attic? it finally occurs to our clever traveller to ask “How many rooms do you have in this truly magnificent hostelry?”

To which the smirking reply is “Infinite, Sir! This is an ‘infinity Inn’ — we have an infinite number of rooms and all of them are occupied. Full. Taken. So very sorry.”

To cut to the chase our weary traveller makes a suggestion, which after ghasting the young lady’s flabbers scores him a room for the night without having to bunk in with anyone else. How so?

KISMET