Dear Gorjus—Thank you for PARLIAMENT, which is, as it turns out, an incredibly fecund word anagrammatically speaking. I consider myself a PERT ANIMAL, but my MARTIAL PEN could never have found so many anagrams in such A PLAIN TERM. Perhaps it is because I’M PARENTAL, but I don’t think so. I am not one of those PARTIAL MEN, but on the whole I am rather ordinary. It is true that after a few beers I perhaps take a MALTIER NAP than most, and I prefer the PALMIER TAN of Florida to the white skin of my friend, poor PALE MARTIN. It is also true that I do bonsai (but only with one tree—I TRAIN MAPLE) and practice yoga, but I do not attend yoga studios, because the last time I did they forced us to write our own chants and then put them on the floor in a MANTRA PILE. In my defense, I have had to cut back because I keep knocking over the potted plants—my PLANTER AIM is off—and I have recently gone to a PLAINER MAT. (I’m sure you’re familiar with the yoga mat, that PLANAR ITEM on which one performs the asanas.)
Nevertheless, the flavor of my toothpaste is A PEARL MINT, and when I read a menu (A MEAL PRINT), I usually spread my napkin or other LAP RAIMENT first, just like most people. (I eat out a lot because my cookware doesn’t work—the local bigbox where I bought my pot made a false claim about it, just a MART PAN LIE.) I do play with my food sometimes—I PLAIT RAMEN, for example. I like to stop and smell the roses, particularly in California, where I have been known, on occasion to sniff a MARIN PETAL.
Aside from yoga, I am not terribly athletic. I have done enough running to hear A MILER PANT, but on our softball team, though I sometimes homer and knock in a few runs, I am not the MAIN PLATER. In golf, I LAMENT PAR as unattainable. I do backpack. (There’s a funny story here—warning my mother about where she put her foot once, I said TRAPLINE, MA—and then, somewhat rudely, I admit, admonished, TIP, MA: LEARN.) But I am less likely to scale the Matterhorn than to take an ALPINE TRAM. On the whole, if I were an ant, I am sure I would be A LIMPER ANT.
I’ve done a little acting, but I only had a MENIAL PART. My one line consisted of congratulating an actress on her figure (TRIM LAP, MAE, I said).
My abilities are more in the PAINT REALM. I’M PANEL ART mostly, though I do a bit of wood sculpture (I’m IN MAPLE ART too). My best known works are the illustrations I did for a chart of ancient Rome (RE LATIN MAP). I have always had an artistic nature. In Santa Fe, I fixed up the street we lived on, and when my daughter visited, she saw it and exclaimed, TRIM LANE, PA.
I travel, but am in no hurry to sign up with the local travel agency, or as I think of it, the MAPNET LAIR. I’m willing to let MALTA RIPEN before I visit. Nor do I like driving. Too often, turns on a superhighway ENTAIL RAMP.
If I may, a REAL TIP, MAN: Don’t worry about the ALIEN TRAMP unless she threatens Earth directly, saying something like I RAM PLANET.
I wouldn’t be so bold as to offer advice, except that your posting was like a birth for me, a PRIME NATAL. It convinced me we are a MENTAL PAIR. If your name were Al, I would say MEAN TRIP, AL, in which, by “mean,” I mean awesome, of course. Perhaps we should consider combining our efforts into one unsurpassable uber-anagram.
I would continue, but there is something wrong with the lighting here—a TEAR IN LAMP?—and I am feeling the call of biological necessity. Now if I can just find that LATRINE MAP . . .
Well of course Dawkins tried the God Hat and felt nothing! Oh my God, that’s hilarious, that makes so much sense.
Unfortunately it also makes sense that he considers this a proof of the non-existence of God. But then it seems he’ll consider anything proof of that, won’t he?
Here’s my take on “brightness”, in brief: it’s an entirely Bush-related phenomenon, at least to the extent it gets any attention. Scientists in the States feel the dead hand of Jerry Falwell resting on their shoulders, and they’re freaking out; their frenzy to excise religion from the human belief system can be likened to a kick in a dogpile—at a certain point you feel it doesn’t matter who your blow connects with, so long as it connects with someone.
The rest of the world views this reaction as somewhat hysterical, though, since theocracy is plainly not coming to the United States: from an outsider’s perspective, the evangelical-political coalition Bush has based his elections on is doomed to disintegrate, even if I understand that to you guys it does seem like your most dreaded apocalyptic scenario finally come to pass, irrevocable. I worry about the American people dismantling their government’s nascent secret-police system and learning to admit they were complicit in the way they were gulled by their leaders—I even worry about things getting worse instead of better—but I don’t worry about federally-mandated prayer in schools and degree programs in Creation Science or Creation Math or what-have-you. In my estimation, the peak of this phenomenon is already past. Although I like the way Robert Graves put it in I, Claudius:
“Who groans beneath the Punic curse/And strangles in the strings of purse/Before she mends will sicken worse.”
Of course that’s Rome, not America. But Dawkins’ “brightness” seems to me best understood as a symptom, even so.
As to space: very cutting-edge questions, Jack, at least I think they are. I should preface my response by saying that I am not a physicist (as they probably say on the Internet, IANAP), but even so I flatter myself that I know a couple things about it.
Thing #1: the expansion of the universe would be apparent even if we were all expanding too, because each point is receding, not from a central point, but from every other point around it. A useful way of considering this is to paint a bunch of black dots on the skin of a balloon, and then blow the balloon up—each dot recedes from its neighbours at a constant rate, but the next-neighbour-over dots will move away faster than that. A moves away from B at (X) velocity; B moves away from C at (X) velocity; but A moves away from C at (X + X) velocity. So no, it appears you’re not expanding, because you’re made of so many “dots” that if they were all moving apart from one another in this way you’d quickly fizz away into nothing.
Although, maybe I speak too soon: the expansion of space proceeds at something like 70 meters per kiloparsec per second, or some crazy number like that: so maybe you are expanding, but just don’t notice. However, if you’re expanding then so is everything else, too, including the stars, and one would think a few billion years would be enough for the bigger ones to simply start evaporating: in a universe like that, radiation pressure and gravity would not (I think) balance routinely.
Did I mention I’m not a physicist? There will be nothing I say here which isn’t incredibly open to correction…
However again, though, Thing #2: I suppose if the entire substrate of the universe were blowing up like a balloon—if all the things our measurements measure were changing—then at some point down that total road we wouldn’t be able to know about it. But at a point like that, the question is similar to the old phenomenological poser that asks how you know you’re not just a brain in a vat, having simulated experiences—because the answer’s the same in each case: the scenario may be scientifically possible, but it’s philosophically absurd. If the thought experiment is centred on the requirement that we cannot know, then we cannot know. Ipso facto, there you are.
Still…the next question is why, isn’t it? Or more precisely: what the hell does all that add up to? If the universe expands, why don’t we expand too? The question is really about where all this “new” space in the universe is coming from—is the space we’ve got only being stretched out, or is new space being injected into the universe, like butter into a turkey? As yet there is no consensus on this issue, and if I’m any judge no one is even looking for there to be consensus on it; most people shun the idea of making it an issue in the first place. And yet, here’s Thing #3: physics is full of little signs that someone believes something about it. The quantum vacuum is fizzy, full of virtual particles popping into and then out of existence like bubbles in foam—so “stretched” or not, if the universe is expanding then the amount of pair-production in empty space is going up along with it. Because our model of space is as a plenum, everywhere there’s space there’s also pair-production “filling it up”, so it seems to me that at some point the question can’t be avoided any more, because the overall energy-density of the universe is always the same (zero), but then the universe is always expanding too, but then at the point of the Big Bang the energy-density was infinite, and so if we want a cosmology we can show off in town I think we have to be willing to clean it up a little, one of these days.
And so here’s some signal vs. carrier stuff for you, for real: what the heck is space, anyway? The plenum model is attractive because it suggests that particles establish new space, and new space establishes particles—it unifies space and matter as Relativity unified space and time (although I should say, rare is the person who can keep the true meaning of spacetime unity in front of their eyes for long—it’s an extremely simple vision, but an extremely demanding one too), and therefore it has just the sort of elegance we find most attractive in our explanations.
Thing #4: but questions raise more questions, if elegance is what we want. You may be right: we may need a rule that says matter is exempt from expansion…which is to say, we may need a fuller explanation of why it wouldn’t be subject to it. Of course—I’m sure you see it—if matter and space are two sides of a coin, then if we ask what space is we’re asking what matter is as well. What is it really? This is a big one, maybe the biggest: we are back to Ancient Greece on this one, which is to say we are no further ahead. Though the equivalency of matter and energy is long-established, so was gravitation long-established by the time Einstein came along to explicate its mechanism. At the moment we are still stuck with the equivalence alone, still trying to imagine up some higher unity to explain its principle—well, and that’s really all principles are, just maps to a higher unity not yet arrived at.
So your guess is as good as mine!
Finally, couple of notes: not being a physicist, I don’t keep up-to-date with the journals. Only in a university setting can you keep up-to-date, and I’m not there, so I can’t. The Internet helps, but you still have to work to keep on top of things, and also on the Internet the walls to serious discussion and argument are set high-ish. As they should be, of course, but that means you must take me with a grain of salt, because I’m not a physicist and I’m not up-to-date, and most of the serious discussion I get involved in about this kind of stuff involves beer. Having said which, rare is the full-fledged Ph.D you can take without grains of salt, either: that’s straight out of Phil. of Sci., which is a field in which I do have some legitimate membership, even if not exactly full voting privileges.
Also, one more thing: I know I’ve seemed to make “particles” and “matter” equivalent here—technically they’re not, because photons are “particles”, too. But it shouldn’t trip anybody up too much; this is just blog commentary after all, and as generous as the Fakers are if there’s one place space isn’t infinitely expandable, it’s in a comments thread.
Gee, that was fun! I love lecturing at people!
Oh no, folks! I’ve just remembered, I’m going to be away digging ditches for the next few days! Damn. That means I’ll likely miss out on the cut-and-thrust…
Will make an effort to secure some Internet access where I’m going to be…this is some of the most fun I’ve had online in ages…
That was fun. Plan more response later. For now, off for TG for a few days. May there be good times for all.
Dear Plok—
Been away longer than I thought. Flu struck right after TG.
1) We aren’t expanding, nor is any material object, because, as you point out, the points would be getting farther apart, all points. Therefore, even though the space between points was expanding, so galaxies were indeed, as we observe, receding, we would be able to compare our expansion to the expansion of the universe.
Therefore, in order to suppose that space and particles form a unity (a concept I am familiar with, yes), we must explain why the matter/particle form of space does not expand and the other manifestation of it does.
So what I am asking is not an unanswerable philosophical conundrum, but an inquiry into the concept of expanding space. This is a well-formed human concept and should be amenable to examination.
I asked the question in the first place because people like Penrose are careful to say that the red-shift of expansion is different from the red-shift caused by mere velocity since space itself is expanding. Such thinkers are also careful to point out that the Big Bang was not really an explosion in our sense, but the rapid ballooning of space itself.
Okay. If space is expanding, what do you mean by space? Why is it different from the other stuff in the U?
2) I still cannot devise any way in which the notion of “space” can be separated from the notion of measurement. What is absolute about our measurement systems to the extent that we can speak of units as something separate from the very space in which we imagine the units to occur?
Perhaps the answer is that indeed matter does not participate in the expansion of space, and that all our measurements are based on material standards. We get into a little trouble with atomic clocks, but ignore that. If this answer is true, then we are back to my first question: HOW COME matter don’t expand when space expands?
Incidentally, I am willing to make a fool of myself in public, and will hereby state my doubts that a) there is such a thing as the Higgs boson, and that CERN will find it; and b) that WIMPs explain so-called “dark matter.”
As for dark energy—the physicists themselves haven’t got a clue.
I suppose what gripes me—and once again, I insist I am a lover of mathematics and science—is the contemporary tendency of many (not all) scientists to treat speculation as if it were theory. No matter how awesome and complex the math is, if you can’t prove it, it is speculation. We fancy ourselves a very scientific age, though few of us can actually DO science, and so there is a huge public appetite for “new” scientific discoveries. This, in my opinion, tempts some to treat their speculations as hard science. We have gotten accustomed to a startling scientific discovery every few days, as if discovery were like tv programming. The demand has created, I feel, a slew of pseudo-discoveries.
Dark matter and dark energy are now thought to comprise 96% of the mass of the universe. In any other realm of thought, if your ideas had accounted for only four percent of actuality, they would be dismissed as hopelessly inadequate.
Dark matter: if mass curves space, why wouldn’t curved space register as matter, even if there were no matter there? Who says space can’t have curved regions? Such regions would function as initial structures to aggregate matter, so we could expect matter to loosely but not exactly coincide with dark matter.
Dark energy: When I hear about a mysterious acceleration with no perceivable source, I think of a gravitational field. What if there were a universal gravity field that only seemed to us to be all around us, drawing the galaxies to itself faster and faster, a sort of Universal Black Hole, but was actually the multidimensional center of the universe? So that the Big Bang and the Big Crunch were the same event seen different ways?
These notions may be way off base (for one thing, I doubt the accuracy of any notion which purports to be a complete explanation) but they show the ease with which one may propose testable alternatives.
In many ways, today’s astrophysicists seem to me to be saying, Hey, it’s complicated, you wouldn’t understand, but trust us. I see increasingly complicated nets of theory, not the blazing simplicities that physicists proclaim. I am reminded of epicycles, which were accurate enough, but increasingly unwieldy to use, and the intellectual property of a very restricted class.
As you say, in many ways we have not progressed beyond the atomism of the Greeks. We still divide existence into two categories, matter and energy, in spite of Einstein’s brilliant formula. Perhaps the concepts themselves are problematical?
I’ll just be right back in a tick, Jack…
But I had to say, right off: yes, the Higgs boson seems a pretty unimaginative answer, doesn’t it? Almost as though it wasn’t really an answer at all. I think I hate it, in fact: “I’m sure it’s just some sort of force, mediated by some sort of particle”. This very nearly takes us back to before the Greeks; we might as well be saying that Osiris makes it to be so, except it would be a sort of terribly uncreative Osiris, a real one-trick pony of a god.
And, “dark energy”, a term meaning nothing whatsoever, really. I myself have rhinitis, which is Latin (or is it Greek?) for “nose problem”...
Meaning I blow my nose a lot. As “dark energy” means, almost literally: “something going on that we don’t understand.” Slightly worse than dark matter: “something out there we haven’t observed”.
Okay, must locate a dinner. Back shortly.
Hope the flu only made you stronger, Jack! Thanks for waiting; I’m back now, after figuring out that my subconscious interprets the word “dinner” as “bottle of whiskey”...and I do in fact have something to say about the measurement/space thing, although I’m not sure it’ll be right. But here goes:
The thing about the expansion of the “balloon” that’s apparently described by the Hubble constant is that…hmm, the Hubble constant doesn’t actually say anything about whether we’re expanding or we’re not (I call this the Copernicus Defence—hey, I was just working on my narrow interest, it’s not MY fault that my findings have wider implications, I only wanted to know what value X had for Experiment Y and NOW I DO SO DEAL WITH IT…!), but the balloon’s a pretty good realistic image to base this opinion on: that I don’t think an expansion that can be defined also as an acceleration pegged to distance is capable of screwing up sufficiently short-range measurements enough so that we have to talk about their shortenings or widenings. I may be wrong about that, of course. But that seems almost like an epistemic scope question: seventy whateverometers per kiloparsec per second, per second…that’s a pretty tiny shift, so even if our twenty-meter tape measures were expanding (to keep their shape? Another question), intergalactic distances would be expanding so much faster that we would be able to measure a change with those tape measures, even if the change we measured was a little screwed on the short side. Galaxy X is receding at 10 meters per year, because it’s 100 jillion parsecs away…the tape measure (whose length is measured from WHERE YOU ARE) is only getting longer at a ridiculously smaller fraction of that amount, so using it you can still see expansion taking place. And even if the numbers aren’t quite what they say they are, they’re still pretty close: the deflection is only by what you might call a cosmological amount, and in sufficiently dire circumstances it could (conceivably) be corrected for. And also to return to the balloon with the dots of black ink on it: those dots are getting bigger too, but they’re not getting bigger at the same “rate” that Dot Q is receding from Dot M…much less are they getting bigger at a rate in any way “comparable” to the speed at which Dot A is receding from Dot Z. Or, if you see what I mean, Dot Aleph from Dot Omega.
Because the only common metric there is the Hubble constant anyway. In other words it is ONE expansion value, but it creates different relative velocities from point-to-point. And not all points are the same, even in a system lacking a centre. So if matter does indeed expand too, at a certain point of scale the deflection in measurement will become imperceptible—if you use a nanometer scale to reckon things with, you may not notice it happening in the lifespan of the universe. You will notice it down on the atomic scale; but you won’t notice it in continental drift, let alone cosmological expansion.
Nevertheless, and having said all that: I certainly agree with you, and in fact I couldn’t agree more strongly, and there is nothing in what I just said that makes me feel like it’s mandatory for me to BELIEVE it. Because matter is a mystery: there are many reasons to think that matter (what’s the Greek name for that again?) is NOT expanding, and almost NO reasons to think that it is. Your remark about the curvature of space is acute: many theorists these days seek to collapse the differences between matter and spacetime—but this is illegitimate, if only because E=mc2 informs us so strongly about what is the relationship of energy to matter, and what is not. Later geniuses like Hawking or Penrose (from your account, Penrose does a very fair science-writer job of spelling out the whys and the wherefores…sigh, my hero) may have found a way to talk about energy being directly rendered from the super-brisk curvature of spacetime, but the idea that matter is just what spacetime looks like when it’s sufficiently curved…well heck, even string theory has got a better patter than that.
And when did all our physicists turn into wannabe gurus, anyway?
You’ve read “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” I suppose, Jack? Or, PrettyFakers, you’ve read that? I like to read it as an accompaniment to Watchmen…
I plan to have more to say on the matter of matter that Jack’s brought up—my fixation over the last few years—but now my stomach is saying “sleep”.
Either that, or “bottle of whiskey”. But at this point those two things are pretty much the same anyway.
GOD I hope that was coherent.