As with my efforts with NaNoWriMo, I think I just need to start typing. Fucking hell, there’s just nothing in the chamber ready to fire even though days have past, miles have been traveled, family has been encountered, and dreams have been dreamt.
I’m trying to read A Brief History of Time. My father in law gave it to me from his library. So I started reading it and I’ve been trying to read the paragraphs of chapter two over and over.
I suppose you can take it at face value, and just allow the assumption that I “understand” to wash over, and maybe that’s sort of what it takes considering the levels of abstraction are going to ratchet up, but that’s not the way it works for me.
I want to actually understand it. But how can I understand a warped four dimensional space-time? I’m trying to reduce it to three dimensions, but even that is too hard to comprehend. It’s the general relativity part, and this doesn’t even get to the quantum physics stuff yet.
Do I have COVID brain? Yeah, I’ve got a cold right now too. I’ve tested for COVID twice but that’s negative, but can you even trust old antigen tests? So who knows? Sitting on a plane with people sneezing and coughing, yeah, I wore a mask, I’m trying to understand simple stuff like the future event cone and my brain is just not letting me do it. Is it ADHD? Maybe I take another pill? Is it that my one verified case of COVID has already sapped me of a few IQ points? Or is it age?
I could have sworn I was good with a certain level of multidimensional thinking, if only until I forgot it. But now, I’m having trouble holding thoughts that seem simple in my head. But I don’t know if this is temporary, or learning, or the limits of my brain. I mean, I’ll never have 160 IQ. And in the life I have now, limited time, limited money, limited opportunity to truly change that ever, like most people on the planet, no matter how hard I try, I’m not going to be able to list off the scientific contributions of Maxwell or Kepler or Aristotle and the experiments that proved or disproved their theories. I’m going to be able to perhaps talk “about” them, but now when I’m deeply trying to figure something out.
I’ve learned lots of stuff in moments of need and I’ve applied them powerfully. This is my talent. Keeping them in a fucking mind palace though? No, it’s more like a mind ocean. If I need to remember the cool grotto under the waves I’ve visited in the past, it isn’t a matter of seeing it in my mind and telling you about the flora and fauna, the thingamabobs, or the statue of Eric there, it’s that I’ve got this vague recollection of something down there that might be useful and I’ve got to put on the gear, hire a boat, find a map, and swim all the way back there before I’m of much use at all. Sure I remember a couple landmarks on the way down, and maybe a little of how the thingamabob worked, but can I have a conversation about it? Can I think back and tell you a story of how it came to be, why, and what I did? Is it just there for me to talk about at length, in my head? No.
This isn’t new. It’s been this way since I was getting my double Bachelors. Somehow I survived, but as I’ve said many times before, I’m a gumby train.
But generally, given that I’m sitting in a grotto looking around, I’ve been able to grok. Am I still? This I just don’t know. There’s that saying that somebody “knows enough to be dangerous”. I don’t want to be “dangerous”. I want to know enough to actually DO something. In other words, I don’t want to know about warped space-time. I want to know warped-space time.
But I keep picturing Homer Simpson going down a black hole into 3D, not how the moon, the earth, or the sun are all moving in a straight line in a warped space-time. I can only say the words. The words flying around in my head, and the images I’m trying to hold just keep dancing around. Nothing’s sticking.
I’ve dealt with this in programming too. I don’t know. Even Hawking himself said he has enough trouble visualizing 3D space without even thinking about the 4th dimension. It’s this space where somehow you’re supposed to fully get it, but at the same time there’s no way to visualize it. Am I just supposed to accept that? Apparently researchers, after doing something other than just weighing Einstein’s brain (which was the same as any other humans of course), they discovered that his “spatial reasoning” area was much larger than average. That makes sense. But could he actually grasp four dimensions (or more) in his head?
But the noise in my head. There isn’t an id/ego/superego of course. But if you want to abstract it, at least for me, there’s about seven ids running around, another seven super-egos, and me watching all this happening, trying to figure out what the hell is going to happen next.
How can I get quieter? In programming, it’s this space between pencil and paper, and not. I’ve tried drawing out the concepts I’m thinking about but they end up being boxes and lines, and they hardly ever achieve what I’m going for, but they don’t get concrete in my head. It’s the same with this space-time thing, except for Homer or some ball rolling around on a hanging sheet, that keeps getting in the way of really knowing it. So I guess I’m just “dangerous”. But only a little because what I know, dissolves away like the tracks behind the train or the map to the grotto.
So we get to the concept of “projections”. Hawking talked about it but it only makes me more confused. In programming, I suppose that’s what all the UML diagrams are if you think about it. Since there are just too many dimensions to address between class inheritance, compositions, instances, types, and especially time streams, there’s no way to capture all that in 2D so you have to project that space into 2D representations.
Hawking said something similar, but then actually sort of backwards. He wrote that the an object is flying in a straight line over a bumpy land, but what we witness is the shadow of that object as it zigs and zags on the ground based on the bumps. So we’re projecting a line onto a warped surface? Argh!! So literally the earth is moving in a straight line but we’re warped?
I just can’t see it. I understand Newton’s laws about the inverse squared force on objects. I mean here I am being held to the ground. But the earth is rotating, so I’m actually moving very fast on a curved path, am I also moving in a straight line “here at rest” except that I’m being warped? I guess so, right? That’s the only explanation is that everything looks straight, but really we’re being warped in all three dimensions because of the mass of the earth.
I’m trying to imagine this in one dimension instead of three. That should be doable, right? It’s not even a plane, just a line that is warped by a mass. But is mass another dimension then? if we’re talking one dimension, like a number line, then what is warping? What is mass? Is there a projection here somewhere? I just see a bent line. But which is the projection, which is the straight line? Are we the shadow Hawking’s talking about?
Is it easier to think about this in two dimensions instead of one? It shouldn’t be. Are three dimensions required? If you have one dimension and you’ve got two points on that line that have mass, what does that get you? What does a warp look like because of those masses? Heck forget two, how about one mass and a photon? Can you warp one dimension? Does that smush the distance between each equidistant point? With only one dimension, the photon and the mass have no place to go but either into each other or away from each other, depending on which way the photon’s going. So in a world of one dimension can there only be two things? Or is there a way to represent warping that would make it easier to understand in two and three dimensions? I’m stuck.
Ok, so with a one dimension space, I’m stuck. All I see are two dots that either run into each other, or diverge. Wait, though. This does bleed into the third possibility of the universe that was described. The flat universe. But we weren’t talking about galaxies, we were talking about planets. Is a galaxy just another mass when looked at from a long way away? So a planet or a galaxy are somewhat equivalent when it comes to space-time warping?
The reason I only want to deal with one dimension is because there is a second one required, time, because there ain’t nuthin’ without time and without time there is no motion. And if there’s no motion, it doesn’t matter if the space is warped because nothing’s moving so the points just sit there.
Okay, so Hawking actually did draw this out in his book with an X and a T graph showing these three possibilities. And that third possibility is the “flat” universe where the mass and the photon or another mass I guess are diverging at a rate that they’ll never escape nor will they collapse.
How this relates to warping I just don’t know. I suppose it means there could be three points then, all expanding flatly. It’s the “red shift”. So the “big bang” in this case would be those three points emerging from one dense point and expanding outwards. There was the theory that the universe looks the same from all directions. How does that work of you’re the rightmost point? Looking one way, you see infinite void, looking the other way, you see one point, and can’t see the farthest point. That breaks the theory. Somehow that rightmost point must see the leftmost point.
Hawking described it in two dimensions. I guess two dimensions? He used a balloon with dots metaphor saying that you’ve got dots on a balloon. I’m going to add that it’s a very special spherical balloon that has no nub that you have to blow into. And you blow it up. No matter which way you look all the other points are there somewhere and they’re all getting farther away as the surface of the balloon gets bigger. AND, that surface is “flat”! But it’s a spherical balloon, it’s not flat. How does that reconcile? Can I really fly off in one direction in space and end up back where I started (like on the surface of a balloon, but in three dimensions)?
And what does this mean for my x-time space? I guess it means that it’s a number line, BUT that number line is a circle.
I asked ChatGPT iteratively to write me a Python program to do the above.
Those points are flying away from each other in ONE dimension. So the real universe is a hypersphere. But… That’s got nothing to do with warping, right?
On this note, I say Happy New Year! This is how I look back upon my year. Pondering the questions of the universe. Actually this is a space filler to keep since I’ve got to stop writing now…
To be continued…
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