I started inventing things, and I couldn’t stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it’s because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn’t constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That’s how my brain was.

- Oskar Schell, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

The concept of the fieldThis post is more me rambling about things I don’t understand and simply using fields an example for how often answers very rarely actually answer questions.Things such as gravitational and magnetic fields have always bothered me considerably. They’re there, we can detect their effects such as the fluorescent tubes up there being powered by an electrical field produced by the wires overhead (they’re not attached to a power source.)  but they just don’t make sense. Gravity is the easiest one of these to explain on the surface, mass warps space time and thus creates a gradient. Gradients are one of those things in the universe that are often overlooked but INCREDIBLY important, this sets up a system whereby one state has a higher (potential) energy than another state and according to thermodynamics everything tends towards the lowest energy state, thus we have objects with mass being pulled towards eachother. But this doesn’t explain why, or even how this happens. It’s one of those great explanations in life that answers the question only to a certain level and it’s hoped we won’t realize there are obvious holes in this explanation. It’s like how rainbows form and simply being told that it’s how light refracts within water droplets. It only answers part of the question but does not talk about the complex series of optical refractions, or the varying wavelengths of light in white light and it especially does not explain why the light doesn’t all mix back together or why it’s shaped like an arch. Anyways, so if gravity causes distortions in space-time then maybe other things cause distortions in some other dimensions which leads to electrostatic forces. And in fact if you try the math by adding a 4th dimension for electrostatic forces you find it works for a bit, but then to explain more phenomenon you have to add more dimensions you have to add more dimensions, eventually winding up at 11, and then we get string theory (which I in no way endorse at this moment in time).But this still doesn’t explain what a field is or how it works or what actually causes it. We can say that forces are caused by warps in dimension, but there will always be another question underlying that. The truth is that with all questions, no matter how simple, it’s impossible to get an answer that actually explains anything. The more I learn the more I realize that nobody knows anything. Then again I could be wrong.

The concept of the field

This post is more me rambling about things I don’t understand and simply using fields an example for how often answers very rarely actually answer questions.

Things such as gravitational and magnetic fields have always bothered me considerably. They’re there, we can detect their effects such as the fluorescent tubes up there being powered by an electrical field produced by the wires overhead (they’re not attached to a power source.)  but they just don’t make sense. Gravity is the easiest one of these to explain on the surface, mass warps space time and thus creates a gradient. Gradients are one of those things in the universe that are often overlooked but INCREDIBLY important, this sets up a system whereby one state has a higher (potential) energy than another state and according to thermodynamics everything tends towards the lowest energy state, thus we have objects with mass being pulled towards eachother. But this doesn’t explain why, or even how this happens. It’s one of those great explanations in life that answers the question only to a certain level and it’s hoped we won’t realize there are obvious holes in this explanation. It’s like how rainbows form and simply being told that it’s how light refracts within water droplets. It only answers part of the question but does not talk about the complex series of optical refractions, or the varying wavelengths of light in white light and it especially does not explain why the light doesn’t all mix back together or why it’s shaped like an arch.

Anyways, so if gravity causes distortions in space-time then maybe other things cause distortions in some other dimensions which leads to electrostatic forces. And in fact if you try the math by adding a 4th dimension for electrostatic forces you find it works for a bit, but then to explain more phenomenon you have to add more dimensions you have to add more dimensions, eventually winding up at 11, and then we get string theory (which I in no way endorse at this moment in time).

But this still doesn’t explain what a field is or how it works or what actually causes it. We can say that forces are caused by warps in dimension, but there will always be another question underlying that. The truth is that with all questions, no matter how simple, it’s impossible to get an answer that actually explains anything. The more I learn the more I realize that nobody knows anything.

Then again I could be wrong.

Thoughts on time travel.

We are always moving forward in time, therefore time travel forward is possible. However the future has not yet happened so we can assume it does not exist (blah blah blah determinism blah). Therefore although we can move in that dimension, we have no where to go. Conversely the past has happened, but we don’t move back in time (although retro-causality…) so although it exists, we cannot move there.

I feel like doing a proper post on time travel. I wish I could find the essay I wrote on it…

It may sound sappy (in fact it does ngl) but sometimes when I’m out and about walking along the street at night and I look up I swear I can almost feel it trying to suck me off this planet and if I were just a bit lighter or stared a little longer it would.

It may sound sappy (in fact it does ngl) but sometimes when I’m out and about walking along the street at night and I look up I swear I can almost feel it trying to suck me off this planet and if I were just a bit lighter or stared a little longer it would.

Gravitational time dilation

I feel like talking about physics, and something I’ve always found fascinating at that. For years I’ve been interested in the concept of time, it’s about as far as I like to tread into philosophy, but anyways on with the show.

Gravitational time dilation is the odd effect of relativity where by gravity affects the passage of time. Most of you should know about the sort of analogy as space-time (And hopefully most of you know that space and time CANNOT ever be separated) being compared with say a rubber sheet and lead weights. The lead weights if placed on the rubber sheet then stretch it and if you were to draw two points on the sheet before stretching it they’d be further apart after applying the weights. Obviously it’s a bit more complex and 3D, but it illustrates the point quite nicely. Any way these distortions affect both time and space (well really just space-time but whatever) and what this does is mean that the closer you are to a mass the slower time will pass. Similarly the further away the faster time travels. This has been measured experimentally a few years back using atomic clocks which are hugely accurate at various altitudes above the Earth. The differences between them were only a few nanoseconds but none the less GPS satellites had to be recalibrate to take it into account.

Oh I just had a thought. Let’s assume that a black hole reaches an almost infinitesimal point in space (I’ve heard singularity thrown around but I’m not sure if that theory is still in vogue), that means as you approach said point time will become increasingly slow, which means you may theoretically never reach the centre. Woah.