Philsrantsandstories

Tag: philosophy

  • 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?