Philsrantsandstories

Author: philrdutton

  • STRANGE FIELDS

    I sat in the cool breeze of the very early morning. My part of the Earth had not yet rotated far enough for me to see the sun, but it would happen in a couple of hours. Inevitable. Mysterious. Like the Escher hands, cooperating through the contours of space, which tells mass how to dance, while mass choreographs the shape of the stage.

    I was thinking more about the pirouetting of small things. The idea that the most fundamental unit of the structure of the universe would be an indivisible particle appears in many ancient cultures, and I think it might have been Democritus, in Greece about 400 BC, who is best remembered for the idea of the atom. The name is from the Greek “atomos,” meaning something that cannot be split. Until Ernest Rutherford and Enrico Fermi started splitting atoms all over the place in the early 20th century. Fermi even built a nuclear reactor under the grandstand of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, so it’s a good thing that worked, otherwise Chicago wouldn’t exist, but Lake Michigan would be a bit bigger. General Groves liked this idea, so Oppenheimer grabbed Fermi along with many others, and we all know where that led at the end of World War II. We all know that they got together under the title of the Manhattan Project, and invented the nuclear bomb, which was then used on Hiroshima and destroyed an area bigger than Manhattan.

    J.J. Thompson discovered the electron in 1899 while working with cathode rays. Cathode ray tubes were very popular around this time. Scientists were pumping the air out of tubes and then passing electricity through them like there was no tomorrow, so there was a lot of sucking going on inside laboratories. Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays about 1895, and suddenly they were all the rage, not only used in medicine but even for party tricks so that people could photograph each other’s bones. Wilhelm X-rayed his wife so frequently she died of cancer.

    I digress. After their discovery, electrons were imagined to rotate around the nucleus of each atom, and Rutherford’s experiments gave us a nice, comfortable image of the atom as being like a small solar system. Then only a few years later, the New Kids On the Block spoiled the party with the idea of quantum mechanics and the wave-particle duality of electrons and other atomic particles. So the double slit experiment results in an interference pattern, and the electrons themselves have certain well defined orbits, the size of which corresponds to integral multiples of the electron’s wavelength. Worse still, you can’t tell what an electromagnetic wave is doing until you look at it, and then it suddenly becomes an electron with a certain spin and a certain momentum although you’re not allowed to know what they both are at the same time. This leads to a situation where a cat in a box can be alive and dead at the same time. Erwin Schrödinger didn’t like cats.

    But stranger than that, the latest idea in physics is that there are no particles unless observations are made, but everything is primarily a field. An electron field and a quark field and a Higgs field and so it goes. So you and I are both ripples in the same fields, and those fields extend throughout all of space and time and join us with all of the other humans and animals, but also with the Earth and the wind and the swaying trees and the sighing of the tides. All of these things are ripples in the universal fields that encompass the existence of all of the particles that we thought were the fundamental building blocks of everything.

    So our thoughts are fields, and our feelings too, and these fields are common to all humans and to all human minds, and maybe this is why I yawn if you yawn, and I laugh if you laugh, and I weep if you weep, and I even cry when I see an animal suffering. We are all made of the same stuff, and it’s not me observing that you have hands and feet and a face and a brain, it’s far more intimate than that.

    It’s because everything that makes you is generated by all of the fields that pervade the universe and everything that makes me is generated by the same fields, so in a way we are related more intimately than even if we had been born of the same mother, because we do all have the same mother, and that mother is the reality that we all share, and the fields by which we all exist.

    I found myself suddenly thinking about absolutely nothing, and I began to wonder what nothing would look like at a subatomic level, and if there is a nothing field. If you remove all matter and energy from an area of space in an attempt to create absolutely nothing, it creates a quantum vacuum, but I have seen a computer simulation of a quantum vacuum and it seems like a very active place to be, with virtual particles whizzing in and out of existence all the time, and the fabric of the fields of space and time still rippling constantly and energetically, as if absolute nothing and absolute vacuum are both completely impossible, as if the fact that the universe exists is because it has to exist and because the absence of existence completely is impossible: the nearest we can get to a vacuum is not nothing, and the nearest we can get to nonexistence is therefore also some kind of something, and so now do we have to even question what death is like? If being dead is when you become part of the nothing field, then it looks like it’s a pretty busy place to be.

    Doesn’t this mean that I cannot be completely eliminated and that I cannot completely cease to exist? Is this the source of the idea of religion and eternal life? I think it could be true then, that other beings are out there beyond the wall of death, and I wonder why is there even that wall before we can meet these other beings if they exist at all, and worst of all, why do we have no imagination of what they are like?

    We invent stupid caricatures. If there was a God I’m sure he wouldn’t be an old guy on a dusty cloud who has difficulty shaving. Or a fat giggling statue who is still flexible enough to sit cross-legged. Or the Islamic Allah, so paranoid he cannot even be portrayed or drawn on fear of death from his followers.

    So why has this happened? I think it is partly because of the necessity of existence that we need to find some rationale for why that is the case and we need to philosophise about it to try to justify our feelings for why we exist, even though it might be that the fields that make up the universe mean we must exist. But we still think we have to figure out some philosophical justification for it, so we adopt different gods or different political philosophies and then we go to war against each other over those differing principles and we try to kill each other by the hundreds and thousands and by doing so we try to defy the fact that existence seems to be inescapable, because the fields are always there. I wonder if that’s one of the reasons that these things happen.

    Is there a humanity field?

    These differing ideas would also explain why we are not telepathic even though we are made up of the same fields. I have some ninety billion neurons in my brain and so do you, and they might connect with many thousands of others via the synapses, creating a network that could have a hundred trillion connections. That’s as many synapses as there are stars in a thousand Milky Way galaxies. Your mind contains a universe. With this complexity it’s impossible to imagine any two people being able to read each other‘s mind. Sometimes I can barely read the bloody newspaper.

    It gets worse if you try to imagine how many different possible combinations of those synaptic connections might exist. The number of different combinations of a set of items is the factorial of the number of items in the set. So if you have five items you can arrange them in five factorial different ways, notated as 5! Which simply equals 1×2×3×4×5. Factorials get very big very quickly and the factorial of the trillions of connections of all the synapses in your brain would be an impossible number. Excel only goes up as far as 170!, which is about 7.2×10^306, (7.2 followed by more than 300 zeros), and there are only 10^80 atoms in the whole universe. Or rather, 10^80 ripples in the atomic fields.

    I do think that if we didn’t exist in our current form then something else would have to exist, or be created by the fields, in order to be conscious. What would be the point of the whole universe and all of the fields and the rest of creation if it had no knowledge of itself and no awareness?

    The next major puzzle at the moment in terms of cosmology is the nature of the dark energy field, which seems to be pushing the universe apart and making it expand more and more quickly. This means that eventually space itself will have expanded so much that even the space between atoms and quarks will have expanded, tearing fundamental particles apart.

    This means we will only be left with the quantum vacuum, but in that quantum vacuum virtual particles are always zipping in and out of existence, and in the infinity of time surely everything which can possibly happen must happen, and so at some stage the virtual particles will all collect together at one particular point and generate another Big Bang, creating another universe and giving rise to more fields and more conscious creatures, and they too, will wonder why they exist, without knowing all that came before them, so they will walk through real fields, and feel the ground beneath their feet, and the light of their sun on their skin, and the breeze on their faces, and the warmth of each other’s hands as they move through the journey of life yet again.

  • RECURSION

    I’m sitting in my chair and I have done this many times before, and it was always the same every time, the same cushion, the same chair, the same television. Everything is always the same. It’s like life is just on a repeat cycle but I suppose that’s how it must be. When I was working, it was a repeat cycle as well. Get up go to work come home have a beer and dinner go to bed. Get up go to work come home have a beer and dinner go to bed. Get up go to work come home have a beer and dinner go to bed, get up… You get the idea, but then there are more cosmic recursions are there not? Every day the Earth rotates so that we see the Sun for a certain amount of time, which we call the day, and we get to see the stars for a certain amount of time that we call the night, as the Earth rotates and we fade into the terminator and back out of it again. It is recursion. And we still use God‘s words for day and night. I guess that’s the recursion of the language of the Bible. That happens all the time in all sorts of contexts. The cycle of good and evil has been happening for all of recorded time and we still do not know how to stop it, and keep it at a good period.

    Everything is recursion. The water cycle is recursion, rainfall is evaporated by heat, goes back up into the air as water vapour and then when the air cools, the rain falls again, and it goes back up into the air and the recursion continues.

    You look at the stars and you see them rotate every night. They move from east to west every night as the Earth rotates beneath them, and they also move across the sky as the Earth rotates around the Sun, as Heraclides said. Smart buggers those Greeks. Eratosthenes even worked out the size of the Earth by waiting for the recursive motion of the Earth’s rotation, and using a stick and measuring a shadow.

    You can see different constellations as the passage of the year passes but it’s not them rotating, it’s you, but you can’t believe the horoscope because that’s complete piffle. The twelve signs of the zodiac were first defined back in Babylonian times, but the Earth has a recursive motion that is called the precession of the equinoxes, and between Babylonian days and now the Earth has precessed just enough to make some of those zodiac constellations different to the original ones. Apart from which if you read the horoscope and believe it you really do need to get another life. I suppose that would be another form of recursion.

    If you take a photograph of the sun once a month or even once every couple of weeks with a fixed camera it will form a figure eight, which is called an analemma, and this is also a recursion because you don’t need to take any more photographs. The next year’s sequence will be just the same. The whole thing is because of the inclination of the Earth, which gives us the seasons and there again is another recursive sequence. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. People have written a lot about that, even Vivaldi, but he used violins and not verbs, and when his music is finished you will experience the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter again, over and over.

    Then there is the recursion of the tides, flowing in and out twice a day everywhere on the Earth, feeding and then drying out the creatures that live on the edge of the ocean. There is an astonishing number of life forms that exist in this periodic tidal region. Even Sydney rock oysters that you eat at a restaurant and for which you pay a high price, are subject to the tides. The Great Barrier Reef, the only thing made by living creatures that can be seen from the international space station, also reproduces due to the recursive nature of the lunar cycles.

    Ancient wisdoms that are passed down from parent to child are recursive as well. Adults tell children things, and the children tell their children the same things, and so the recursion goes on, otherwise Nursery Rhymes would die out. And they don’t, although I think today they might be in danger of being lost. I do not hear kids walking on a footpath and saying, “Step on a crack and you break your mother‘s back.” All of those things are gone, because kids are too busy playing computer games on their smart phones.

    I used to tune harpsichords and that is a recursive process as well. You tune the A with a 440 Hz fork, and then go up a fifth and then go up another fifth and then go down an octave because you’re too far up the keyboard, and then you go up another fifth and another, and you keep doing this until you have covered every note in the middle octave, and then the notes that you have tuned must be tuned by octaves to the other notes until you have covered every key on the entire keyboard. It’s a very recursive process but then I suppose music is recursive isn’t it? You have the Sonata form where there is a theme and a development and then a return of the theme, or you have theme and variations where there is a theme and of course bloody variations and a return to the theme at the end, but it’s not the same with life is it?

    We all know that that we will die one day. It is the same for everybody, because we have seen it happen and we know it does. There is some kind of recursion promised in the Bible but who knows if that’s true. It might just be the imagination of people living in the iron age. It may be the word of God but which God is that? There are many gods. There was even a pantheon of gods and they died and came back several times and that was some kind of divine recursion. Even Jesus did that, but only once as far as we know, although when he was resurrected apparently all the graves in the area gave up their dead in a mass resurrection.

    That was a strange recursion but now we have to think about the rise and fall of civilisations. Rome rose and fell, England’s empire rose and fell, the Spanish empire rose and fell, and many others. There is a rise and fall of everything and that echoes the tides themselves.

    Then there are the recursions in mathematics, the most artistic of which is the Mandelbrot set. All you have to do is calculate Z squared plus C and then keep feeding the result back into the initial Z and simply plot everything that does not fly into insanity. If you do that with a high degree of resolution you will then find recursion within the shape itself even at the highest magnifications.

    Sometimes the lack of recursion becomes a big puzzle. Take the number pi. There are no recursions in it because it just goes on forever, each digit apparently random. In fact if you converted the numbers in pi into letters it would just be a jumble but somewhere in the infinite length of that number there would be a group of words that made sense and they would describe your entire life but they would also describe your life in infinitely incorrect ways so you can’t rely on pi to tell you when you’ll die.

    There is also recursion in the production of beer because everything is recycled. The bottles are recycled, the spent barley is sold to farmers for animal feed, and the spent yeast goes to make Vegemite. The animals eat the feed and shit on the ground and it becomes a fertiliser, probably somewhere it will be fertilising the next generation of barley, which will go to make more beer, and when I worked in a brewery we always kept our particular strains of yeast in the laboratory, so that we could use them again for the next generation of brewing, another recursion, and all the people who eat Vegemite will go and buy some beer so the consumption and production are both recursive.

    And there is Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theory, which was achieved by a recursive process of layering symbol upon symbol in order to prove there were true statements in arithmetic that could never be proved by ordinary logic and this upset mathematicians at the time but it has not been disproved and so we still have to believe that self-referential recursion can be fatal for any form of science or mathematics.

    Even politics is recursive in its own sad way. First we get Labor, and then we get Liberal, and then we get Labor again, and then we get Liberal, and so it goes round and round like a windmill of moderates. Nobody cares much about that here because they’re really just all the same. The leader doesn’t run the country, the public service does and we don’t get to vote for them. They just stay in their jobs forever, until they die. This is yet another recursion limited only by mortality, and thank God for that.

    I wonder sometimes if life could be recursive. The whole universe will die one day, and there will only be a quantum vacuum. Will anything come back and will there be another awesome recursion?

  • LIGHT

    If I want to see something, then I really must have light,

    If that thing is very small the wavelength must be tight,

    What if looking at the Planck length was my final goal?

    The energy required for that would just make a black hole.

    When I look at an amoeba eating what it’s earned,

    Does all the light from my condenser give it bad sunburn?

    A moth spirals towards my light and it’s life ends too soon,

    Because it tries to stay at a right angle from the moon.

    The light and dark have great influence on all our emotions,

    We’re happy in the light but darkness gives us darker notions,

    We put lights everywhere in order to defy the night,

    First fire, and then candles, now electrons making light.

    We put lights on our cars, we can hold torches in our hands,

    We put lights on our ceilings and on ornamental stands,

    Light comforts us and that’s the way we seem to want to be,

    But when the last light is snuffed out I wonder what I’ll see.

  • CLOUDS

    The sky is grey and very wet and clouds conceal the sun,

    We only have one nearby star, clouds cover up that one,

    And they are not impressive clouds just weak grey little things,

    It’s cold enough without them but with them the coldness stings.

    I don’t know just what type they are but they are pretty bland,

    Not cumulo or nimbus and not tall and white and grand,

    They come here in their numbers with all of their water vapour,

    They have the personality of shreds of thin rice paper.

    They are not in the stratosphere that’s much too high for them,

    I think they’re in the dullosphere, a place I would condemn,

    My daily walk is on grey footpath, I don’t need grey skies,

    Everything seems grey this time of year, I don’t know why.

    Where are those climate protesters who hose things down with orange?

    I guess that they are using something grey, like old cold porridge,

    I need some colour, my cone cells are there for just that reason,

    Or should they put their feet up and then sleep for the whole season?

    And what about my cortex? Much of it processes sight,

    I’m sure it likes some variation in the kind of light,

    Imagine if the Big Bang had been grey right from the start,

    We’d have grey stars, grey galaxies, and nebulae like farts.

    I wonder if the universe might wear grey underpants,

    Within the bulging pocket in the front the stars could dance,

    But then of course you’d need to keep the underpants quite clean,

    I just cannot imagine such a huge washing machine.

  • FREE WILL AND CATS

    Do we have free will? And if we do, is it because of Quantum Mechanics?

    Everything is governed by the immutable laws of nature. When you put a steak on the barbecue, the proteins in the muscle tissue of the steak begin to denature and unwind. They become brown and opaque and this is what you want them to do when you are cooking a steak. There is no steak in the world that can sit on the top of the barbecue and refuse to be cooked. The chemical reactions caused by heating the muscle tissue of the steak are inescapable.

    When you see that it is going to be sunset at 8 pm, if you want to watch the sunset you walk outside at 8 pm and it will definitely be sunset. There is no way that that can change because the laws of gravitation and the properties of mass and acceleration are inviolable, and yet you can refuse to go outside and look at the sunset or you can decide not to eat the steak so it would seem that you have the ability to rise above all of the natural laws that govern everything that happens in the universe.

    It seems that way but maybe it is not. Maybe there is no free will. Maybe we just don’t understand the complexity of the web of causations that make us do what we do, thinking that we have a freedom that we don’t have, but let’s have a look at that using reductio ad absurdum. Let’s have a look at how things would be if there was no free will.

    In the Principia Mathematica, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that became the dominant scientific paradigm for centuries until it was tweaked by the Theory of Relativity. Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating all doubt about the Solar System’s heliocentricity.

    He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and out in space could be explained by the same principles. Newton’s laws put a man on the moon and got the New Horizons spacecraft all the way to Pluto. The Theory of Relativity accounted for some of the inconsistencies that occur at very high speeds or in proximity to very massive objects but the fundamental idea of a consistent set of laws of motion remained.

    Under these laws, if you knew all of the velocities, positions, directions, masses, momenta etc., of all the bodies in a given system, then the future of all of those bodies could be determined. The whole system is perfectly deterministic and in a system such as this, real free will would be impossible, so now you must either believe that free will does not exist or that if it does, there must be something beyond Newtonian mechanics that allows it to exist.

    Whether you believe in God or evolution the situation is the same. Suppose there is no free will and everything is purely deterministic. In this case, eventually every predator would work out exactly how it’s prey behaved and it would hunt successfully every time until there were no more prey animals left, or the prey animals would be the first to work out exactly how the predators operated and would avoid them every time and so eventually all the predators would die from starvation.

    By the same logic, human behaviour would be deterministic and would therefore operate on universal principles with predictable consequences. For example, there would only be one supermarket chain across the entire globe and it would be the one that had first worked out exactly how to predict consumers’ behaviour so that by its advertising, presentation and range of products, it would appeal perfectly to all of the consumers’ desires and all the consumers would go to that one particular supermarket.

    Similarly, either by chance or design, at some stage an automobile manufacturer would have found out exactly what makes automobiles most appealing to a purchaser and the first manufacturer who discovered this formula would obviously apply it to all their models and their advertising and the result would be that everyone would want the same brand of car.

    We would all be shopping at exactly the same shop, driving exactly the same brand of car, and we would be living in exactly the same kinds of houses, in countries that all had the same kinds of governments. We would all be wearing the same kinds of clothing and listening to the same type of music and eating the same favourite foods and it would be an absolute nightmare because every day all you would do is meet people exactly like yourself and you would discuss the same things and look the same and be the same and go absolutely crazy in the same way and overpopulate the same mental hospitals where the staff would become patients as well, and then even children would begin to realise the inevitability of what was going to happen and they would commit themselves into mental homes immediately instead of bothering about going to school first where in any case they would all have been taught the same things by the same crazy teachers.

    And if there were any fringe groups remaining like the LGBTQ community they would have to live like hermits, but because everybody else would have the same kind of house in the same kind of suburban sprawl occupying pretty much all of the inhabitable land on every continent, then the amount of space for the hermits would be quite restricted and they would have to form their own community, which would conflict with the desire of hermits to be alone and so the hermits would go crazy as well and they would have to join all the other crazy people in the mental hospitals, then the mental hospitals would need more space and they would have to annex suburb after suburb until entire countries became mental hospitals where everyone would be a patient.

    If there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe then it would also be deterministic, and you would have to conclude that it must also follow roughly the same path of discovery and industrialisation that happened here on earth, and that would mean that other intelligent civilisations would also be trying to discover whether or not they were alone and they would also be using some form of radio communication technology to see if they could locate other intelligent civilisations like ours, and it would be highly likely that we would have found each other by now even if we were too far away to visit or be visited.

    But all the aliens would be the same as each other as well according to the previous logic and they would also be in the process of going universally crazy so even if we could talk to each other the conversation would be completely pointless.

    Then you might question whether it would even get to that point. Perhaps once Newton’s laws revealed that everything was deterministic people would give up and stop raising families, or maybe even millions of years before that the dinosaurs would have realised that everything they do turns out the same way and they might have become so bored that they eventually prayed for the asteroid to come and destroy them and they would be good at praying as well because if you look at those tiny little arms there’s not much else that you could do with them is there?

    The lack of will to exist in a deterministic universe might have made everything give up even before that. You could imagine that LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor might have been sitting on its single celled couch thinking to itself that the future looked so bleak there was no point continuing and so it might have committed apoptosis right there and then.

    None of this is true, so free will must exist, but how?

    For free will to exist there would have to be some kind of uncertainty in the laws that govern the universe. There would have to be some situation in which, at every decision point, two or more different paths were available so that a choice must be made and this choice would be the agency of free will. The idea of Schrodinger’s cat comes to mind as a perfect example.

    Before we get to the cat we need to understand some background about Quantum Mechanics. The idea of Quantum Mechanics arose gradually during the early 1900s from theories that were devised to explain observations that could not be reconciled with classical physics, such as Max Planck’s solution to the black-body radiation problem.

    The black-body problem dealt with radiation from a heated source and the problem was that as the energy of the heated source increased towards the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, the equation that determined the energy emitted from the source gave results that increased to infinity. This was called the ultraviolet catastrophe and Max Planck’s solution was the proposal that the energy came in discrete, defined packages called quanta. Einstein then completed this solution to the black body problem by postulating that Planck’s quanta were real physical particles that we now call photons, and not just mathematical fictions.

    The other problem at the time was called the double slit experiment, in which electrons were fired at a barrier that contained two vertical slits with a screen at the other side and when individual electrons were fired, the screen at the other side displayed a pattern characteristic of wave interference, not of individual particles, and this showed that subatomic phenomenon could exist as waves and particles at the same time and it seemed that only the observation of the system caused it to behave in either one way or the other, and this was called the collapse of the wave function.

    Quantum systems have bound states that are quantised into discrete values of energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other properties, in contrast to classical systems where these properties can be measured continuously. Measurements of quantum systems show characteristics of both particles and waves, and there are limits to how accurately the value of a physical quantity can be predicted prior to its measurement given a complete set of initial conditions, and this is called The Uncertainty Principle.

    The Uncertainty Principle, also known as Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle, is a fundamental concept in Quantum Mechanics. It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.

    So, the cat. In Schrödinger’s original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, a radioactive source and a Geiger counter are placed in a sealed box. The occasional decay of an atom in the radioactive source is considered a stochastic event. If this is detected, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The most widely accepted interpretation of Quantum Mechanics implies that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead whilst the box remains sealed. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.

    This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other. Schrödinger’s seemingly paradoxical thought experiment became part of the foundation of Quantum Mechanics. The scenario is often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, particularly in situations involving the measurement problem. As a result, Schrödinger’s cat has had an enduring appeal in popular culture. The experiment is not intended to be actually performed on a cat, but rather as an easily understandable illustration of the behaviour of atoms.

    It now seems that the observer is an integral part in the actual creation of the observed reality. It is as if, on the subatomic scale, you create your own reality moment by moment simply by the act of being a conscious observer, and your decision about what to observe governs the result of the collapse of the waveform and my proposal is that this is the subatomic origin of free will.

    You are your own creator.

  • Does anyone who reads this think along parallel lines?

    Written by 

    philrdutton

    in

    Uncategorized

    I’m wondering if anyone has the same thoughts as I do surely everyone does. Especially if you have lived some years and loved and suffered and wondered. I’ve tried putting it down in words and sometimes it flows freely and sometimes it is not easy so I wonder whether you have ever tried to do the same thing and how much of a task have you found it to be. I would like to know. It is an extraordinary thought there are 8 billion of us on this earth now and I’m sure that at some stage we all question our existence. That’s 8 billion questions. Staggering.

  • TIGER

    I went out for my daily walk. I walk about five kilometres. That’s enough for me. I walked past a couple of major intersections and there’s a lot of noisy traffic. I especially hate motor bikes and people with tiny cars that have had huge exhausts attached to them that make an enormous amount of noise. I don’t know how those people feel about all the noise they make maybe they can’t hear it from inside the car they just want all the rest of us to have to suffer it. I sometimes think I should move out to the country somewhere, somewhere where there are no noisy cars and no major intersections and no motorbikes.

    That would be just me and the sky and the land, and I think that could be pretty good but then again if it was kilometres to the nearest supermarket that would constitute a major inconvenience. But maybe it would still be worth it. Selling my house would be a major problem of course packing everything into cardboard boxes and saying goodbye to my own front door. That’s something I have not done for decades and I’m sure there would be a certain degree of sorrow involved in doing that again.

    But just to be rid of the traffic noise it could be worth it. To be able to sit outside and look at the sky in the night time unpolluted by street lights. Yes that could be worth the move. Then of course I would not know anyone but maybe I don’t need to. Maybe I could become a hermit. I don’t know what hermits eat or what they do in their spare time but I imagine I could find out. Is there a course you can do on being a hermit? There’s a course for pretty much anything else isn’t there? I wouldn’t have to worry about how I dressed or how often I showered. Nobody would care because they would be exactly nobody. I would have to buy a house that has some fields around it and maybe a creek running along the bottom of the hill. Then I could walk down by the side of the creek and listen to the water babbling over the rocks. And then I could go back home and sit on my Veranda and watch the sun go down. It all sounds too idyllic to be possible so I will probably still be here on site tomorrow listening to the motorbikes. I was thinking all of this while I was walking, and then I saw the tiger. It looked like a real tiger. I stopped because I was scared, but then I realised it was just a very large cushion shaped and coloured exactly like a tiger. It was very convincing but obviously they had thrown it out for collection on garbage night. I thought if I was in the country there would be no tigers.

  • SPRING

    It’s spring, life blooms and everything we see is new and young,

    It’s all about new growth and unsung songs that will be sung,

    New energy, new time, new futures that must yet take place,

    But where? Don’t know. Let’s just use the infinity of space.

    Okay but how? Well you’ve already grown without a care,

    I have to wonder of the depths of things that dwell in there,

    It will not always be as bright and sunny as today,

    You will face things that turn against you in a dreadful way

    But such events can help you learn and deepen your poor soul

    Then when much greater threats arrive you still retain control,

    And just remember spring also means something odd that bounces

    And so you can recoil from all the things that spring announces.

    So just relax because most things are best handled with calm,

    A nice warm bath some music and a moisturising balm,

    You can sometimes allow yourself these kinds of little joys,

    It is the grown-up version of your younger children’s toys,

    But will these toys make us as happy as we’d like to be?

    I think that’s a big question that each one of us must see,

  • WHO IS OUT THERE?

    We all have two conflicting psychological needs. The need for privacy and solitude, and the need for company and connection.

    WTF? Who designed that quirk? How many people are institutionalised when that delicate balance fails? How many die? At the extremes of such an imbalance live psychopaths and tyrants.

    It is inescapable. Protection and procreation are both needed for survival. It’s in our chemistry. Every feeling, every urge and every action is transmitted between our brain cells across tiny gaps called synapses and this connection is purely chemical. You have 100 billion brain cells. One for every star in the galaxy. Each of them can have thousands of synapses, all connected by chemical interactions.

    You are chemistry, and chemistry achieves its aims by subterfuge. Without it however, almost all medications would be useless, and consciousness itself would not exist.

    You cannot escape this. All the chemicals, hormones and other bodily fluids contain traces of your chemistry. You know it. Your doctors just love blood tests.

    Every kiss, every handshake, every inhaled breath bears the chemical signature of those you have touched and others around you. You have probably already inhaled some of the same molecules of air that were previously inhaled by Genghis Khan, Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. Look at how much trouble we had to go through to control the transmission of Covid, but without victory.

    When I worked as an electrical trades assistant years ago, my workmates and I started going to the Bald-Faced Stag in Leichhardt. A nice pub not too far from work. We found a cosy table up against the wall and that became our usual spot in the pub. The seats were a bit worn and there were a couple of stains on the wall but that was no problem.

    One day one of the regulars commented to me that I was sitting in Kenny’s seat. Apparently Kenny had been a long time regular there and had recently passed away. He used to sit in that chair and rest his head against the wall and after years of doing that, left a stain on the wall just from the normal oils in the hair and skin.

    I thought about that, and I thought about the fact that we are all chemistry and I wondered how many minute traces of Kenny’s feelings and emotions had insinuated into the chemistry of his body right to the extremes of every hair on his head and how much of that had been absorbed into the wall of that pub. There must have been something of the essence of Kenny left there. Hair is an excellent reservoir of chemicals, and even contains detailed forensic information.

    Now Kenny was gone but just by resting my head against the mark left by him our chemistry had met. You might think this feeling is far fetched but maybe I was thinking about it because of the need for connection. Of course I was at the pub with mates, but the idea of an unconscious and impalpable connection with a person I had never met fascinated me. 

    Two weeks later the walls had been scrubbed clean. Kenny was gone.

    But not completely because we are all connected. You have two parents, four grandparents and so on. If you go back 5,000 years we all have the same set of ancestors. If you entered any village on Earth around 3,000 B.C., the first person you met would probably be one of your ancestors. 

    It also means that all of us have ancestors of every colour and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past family. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Ku Klux Klansman’s family has some African roots. Millions of people today are descended from William the Conqueror or Genghis Khan.

    The need for communication is very powerful. Think of how much more enjoyment is had at a live performance in a theatre compared to watching the same thing on TV at home alone. A meal with a friend, a walk, a tour through a gallery. An experience of any kind shared is usually better for it.

    Sometimes however, you just want to be left alone, don’t you? You look away from passing strangers, walk along the outside edge of the footpath, hang up the ringing phone, lock the door and disappear beneath the blankets.

    I still think that connection tips the balance. The monumental edifices of art, music and literature are testament to this just as much as the number of pets in households around the world. Nature documentaries are extraordinarily popular. There are even channels on Foxtel where the amount of time taken up by nature documentaries almost equals the amount of time taken up by advertisements. 

    Plants communicate with each other too. Plants exchange information with one another and with other organisms such as insects. Think of the scent of newly mowed grass or crushed sage. Some of the chemicals that make up these aromas will tell other plants to prepare for an attack or to summon predatory insects to defend them.

    There is then the urge to find other civilisations, not just in our past but on other worlds. Strangely, we have laws against unsolicited contact between people and yet governments spend millions of dollars on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Our relationship with aliens has been a rocky one even though we have never met one, apart from the occasional regional American who has been gently probed in a UFO.

    Even our more recent science fiction movies have depicted aliens in a positive light as often as in a negative one.

    The question of the existence of alien civilisations has been considered for some time but was most notably expressed by the physicist Enrico Fermi and is known as the Fermi paradox. Fermi was working on atomic fission and built the first atomic fission reactor in 1942 in a squash court under a university in Chicago so it’s just as well that nothing went wrong otherwise Chicago would be a huge crater to this day.

    Fermi observed that given the number of stars and planets the odds would be in favour of the existence of other civilisations in the galaxy but will we ever meet one? I don’t think so. 

    Life has existed on earth for about 3.5 billion years. Intelligent life capable of communicating with other intelligent life has only existed for about 100 years, the time since we mastered radio communication.

    Imagine you had a stick 1 km long and this represented 3.5 billion years of life. The 100 years of life capable of communication with other stars would be represented by a little red stripe 0.7 mm wide at the end of the 1 km long rod.

    Now imagine that you had 1000 such rods, each one representing a possible alien civilisation, and that you took all of these rods up in a large aircraft and dropped them to the ground at the same time. I don’t think there is any chance that any two of those little red stripes would line up together. So, there could be aliens out there but they will either be so far behind us or so far ahead of us that communication will be impossible. 

    They will certainly not be short hairless creatures with egg shaped heads and almond shaped eyes.

    The other problem with extraterrestrial life is that perhaps there is none. Here on earth there are three domains of living creatures. The bacteria, the archaea and the eukarya. The first two are comprised of single celled organisms called prokaryotes that have barely evolved at all in 3.5 billion years.

    The eukarya includes all the animals and plants, and are made of more complex eukaryotic cells that contain a nucleus and mitochondria and various other subcellular organelles. The best definition of the eukarya is everything that has ever appeared on a David Attenborough film.

    The problem is that nobody knows how prokaryotes gave rise to eukaryotes and this process might be so rare that it has only ever happened once.

    Only once.

    Only here. 

    Ever.

  • FLOWER MOON

    The Killers of the Flower Moon,

    It sounds like it’s all doom and gloom,

    And runs for a whole afternoon,

    I’d watch the clock, “Does this end soon?”

    I’d get distracted, grab a broom,

    And start to sweep out my bathroom,

    I’d finish, get the old vacuum,

    And go and do some other rooms.

    Check if the piano is in tune,

    Eat dirt to see if I’m immune,

    Blow up a red and blue balloon,

    And mount it on an old soup spoon.

    Check out the sci-fi movie Dune,

    And watch the war film called Platoon,

    Drive east, swim in a blue lagoon,

    Or paint the toilet walls maroon.

    Draw my own face like a cartoon,

    Sit in the fridge, and think its June,

    Watch episodes of Daniel Boone,

    And hold my breath until I swoon.

    Dry out some plums to make some prunes,

    See whether I can play bassoon,

    Then go back to the living room,

    And catch the end of Flower Moon.