Sunday, May 24, 2015

In memoriam

Tomorrow is Memorial Day.  The day we remember our honored dead.  It was originally a remembrance of the end of our nation's most bloody conflict so far - the Civil War.  An estimated one in four soldiers were lost in that war (most to disease).  Around 620,000 men -  two percent of the nation's population - died in uniform in four bloody years.  Think about that - that would require 6 million deaths today.  The South was estimated to have lost one man in every ten.

The Civil War ended 150 years ago this month.  We don't even have any of the children of the veterans left any more to directly carry on their stories.

This is also the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe.  We lost around 405,000 men during those four bloody years.  Two-thirds as many as during the Civil War.  At least we weren't shooting at each other.

Civil war battles were bloody.  Unimaginably so to today's generation of casualty-averse leaders.  The one-day battle of Antietam Creek/Sharpsburg cost around 6,000 lives (total on-the-spot and died of wounds).  The battle of D-Day (Normandy, France) on June 6th, cost around 4,400 Allied lives - American, Canadian, and British.  The horrific battle for Iwo Jima lasted over a month, and cost 6,800 lives.  The three days of Gettysburg cost 51,000 lives.

Remember them, and what they died fighting for.  Freedom is not free, but is purchased in blood.  It levies a price that must be ever renewed, lest it be lost.

And another thing

Naturally, I forgot to include some thoughts in yesterday's post on fundamental physics.  As if anybody actually is interested in this, even though I suspect it may actually be correct.

Just as there is a minimum distance between points of SpaceTime, so there is a maximum distance.  This distance is presumably that where the gravitic field strength is zero or nearly so.  Beyond this maximum distance, new points of SpaceTime are created as necessary.  There are a few conditions requiring/allowing the creation of new points.
  • The edge of space.  New points are continuously created at the edge of spacetime, expanding it into nothingness. Newly created points have an initial time vector pointing away from their 'parent' points.  Thus, time points outwards at the edge of space.
  • The middle of voids.  Matter, and thus gravity, seems to be concentrated in lines and sheets. (Almost as if they were created by intersecting waves in a fluid medium.  Wow, who'da thunk it?)  As space expands, the voids between galaxies and galactic clusters grows, spreading the points of spacetime thin.  This creates new points in the middle of the emptiness.  These new points, in turn, push upon their new neighbors, because they are too close together - helping to expand the void further.  Thus, the universe expands a bit faster than expected by standard theory.  (This is a possible explanation for the effects that the term 'dark energy' was coined to explain.)
  • At the beginning of the Big Bang, there was a single point of SpaceTime, with far too much energy in it.  In addition, it was surrounded by an endless expanse of absolutely nothing.  So, new points were created all around it, in every direction, each gaining a portion of the original energy.  These points were created at the minimum distance, due to the overwhelming amount of energy contained in the original point, and then the overwhelming amount of energy in the new points.  And each new point was New points were created, at the minimum distance, each point sharing a portion of the energy from the parent point, and with a time vector pointing outwards.  Eventually, the initial energy is distributed to acceptable (but not identical - some points will have a bit more, some a bit less, due to random circumstances) among a horde of new points, each point adjacent to its fellows, and each point with a time (and velocity - remember all that energy) vector pointing outwards.  So, in a miniscule time which subjectively does not happen, the initial massive surge of energy is spread out over a wide area, much faster than the speed of light would allow.  Then the universe explodes outwards, much as if it were in a plasma state.  Due to random fluctuations (there are too many points packed into too tight a space to not interact with each other locally, jostling about as they strive to reach equilibrium), waves ripple through spacetime.  These waves eventually subside as spacetime continues to spread and cool, but the aftereffects remain - seen as the patterns of galactic strings, sheets, and voids we see now.

Anyway, that's how I see it.  It's fairly simple, and explains a whole lot that is otherwise complicated.

So far, we have three distinct phases of spacetime - plasma, fluid, and solid.  Each with a different set of properties.  We really only understand fluid spacetime.  It's hard to understand something (like a black hole or the big bang) , when you can not experiment with it, or even observe it.  Some mysteries may never be fully solved, but we can at least make entertaining, educated guesses.

Edit 2020:  So much of this is wrong.  I hate how science is misrepresented in science books and journals.  It's almost like they don't understand it themselves, or deliberately want to confuse people.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

More deep thoughts on small subjects

OK, so I have some time to think weird thoughts on the train to and from work.  This is what my mind does what it would otherwise be parked in idle.  Please forgive the writing style-  my thoughts aren't linear, and I would never make a good teacher.  This is all so clear and simple in my head, but words are hard.

Space-time behaves as a liquid.  each particle that makes up the liquid is very small (really, unimaginably teeny-tiny).  There is a definite amount of space between particles.  This space is determined by the instantaneous strength of the gravity field at that location.

The particles can move.  They're not in fixed positions.  This allows them to flex with changing gravity field conditions.  It also means that space itself is also mobile.  Just like stirring a spoon in the center of a pot of water causes all the water to rotate, so does a spinning galaxy cause all the space throughout it to eventually spin with it.  This helps explain why the outer edges of galactic arms spin faster than traditional gravity theories describe.

Gravity fields are infinitely fast, because they operate outside the structure of the matter-energy we see, and operate on the substrate of the universe itself.  As do electromagnetic fields.  This is easily explained in thought experiments.
  • EM fields (not waves or particles acting in those fields) propagate faster than light, most likely infinitely fast.  (It doesn't actually matter how fast they move, since they're moving faster than anything we could possibly use to measure them with.)  Perform a classic two slit experiment.  Notice how the photons form an interference pattern.  Now slow the experiment down.  Emit single photons in a stream - they still form an interference pattern.  Slow the experiment down even further, so that a single photon is being emitted every few minutes.  The photons still exhibit the interference pattern.  (This experiment has actually been done.)  Think about this.  How does the photon know where to go, if the field wasn't ALREADY THERE, guiding it?  The field MUST move faster than the photon, in order to form the interference patterns that guide the motion of the photons.  If it's moving faster than the photon, it is by definition moving faster than the speed of light.
  • The Earth moves towards where the sun actually is, not where it's light makes it appear to be.  Gravity fields move faster than light.  This effect can also be seen between stars, and even between galaxies.  Gravity is istablished as being faster than light.
There is no wave/particle duality.  Objects (even photons) are particles, vibrating at certain frequencies, following guide waves, established by the appropriate field.  The fields are infinitely fast.  Waves acting upon these fields move at the speed of light.  Particles moving along those waves move, at most, at the speed of light.

Photons move forward at the speed of light.  They also rotate about the axis of movement at various speeds.  This axial rotation is what is counted as the energy of a photon.  What it is is the rotational velocity, measured more easily as frequency.  There is a minimum frequency, 1, as established by Plank energy.  There is a maximum frequency, determined by the speed of light.  (The rotational velocity cannot exceed C.)  This means that there is a maximum energy of a photon, which is bounded by C.

Time is distance.  Distance is time.  This is actually provable.  C is a constant.  Measurement units are arbitrary, so let us set the velocity denoted by C to 1.  So C=1.  But we know that velocity (what C actually is - a fixed velocity) is distance per unit time.  C = D/T.  In our units, C=1, so 1 = D/T.  Multiply both sides by T, and you get T = D.  Time is distance, distance is time.  This is why objects traveling at near the speed of light shrink in their forward axis, in the same proportion as their subjective time slows down.


Remember that whole space-time particle thing?  Yeah, the distance between each particle and the next is both distance and time.  Quite literally.

SpaceTime gets more dense in higher gravity fields.  (It acts as a liquid.)  The particles are simply forced closer together.  (No, I don't know why this works.  I'm just working on 'how' and 'what' here.)  That means that in areas of higher gravity, space is smaller, and time runs more slowly.  As is proven in several experiments, where atomic clocks with vertical spacing as little as one meter from the Earth run at different speed.

The force acting upon matter and energy that we call gravity is actually just time.  Each point of SpaceTime has a time vector pointing away from it.  The strength of this vector is proportional to the local gravity field, and points in the direction of higher gravity.  Or, more simply, the vector points at the closest other point of SpaceTime, with a strength proportional to the square of the inverse of the distance between the points.  (Sound familiar?)  There is an ideal distance between points, arbitrarily declared to be 1 unit, which is how far two points of SpaceTime would be from each other in the absence of any gravity field strength.  Gravity is the directional flow of time.   It acts on all matter and energy (E=MC^2, after all) equally at each point.

Velocity is also the directional flow of time.  Remember T=D?  Each piece of matter, each unit of energy (photons, etc.), has a velocity.  That velocity is most easily explained as the direction that time flows for that object.  This explains why time can never run backwards - the vector can only point away from the object or point.  It can't point inwards, it could at most have zero length.  (And even that is debatable.  An object with no absolute velocity would experience no passage of time at all, and the universe would end before it ever did anything.)  Velocity is directional time.  Gravity is directional time.  Objects moving in a gravity field alter their velocity based on the simple addition of time vectors.  Inertia is time.  The vector doesn't change, unless acted upon by some outside force.  Such as another time vector, like gravity.

Remember how light has a rotational velocity?  That is what is affected by adding or subtracting energy to the photon.  This is also a time vector, just a rotational one.

E=MC^2.  One minimal unit of mass is equal to the energy of one fully charged photon.  Forward velocity C times rotational velocity C.  Energy can obviously be less.

Time dilation due to speed is simply explained as perceived density of SpaceTime.  The faster you go, the more dense SpaceTime appears to be, the closer the particles appear to be.  So time appears to slow down, and length appears to shrink to others.  Think of it as a ruler.  At a speed of 1, the ruler has only one dot on it.  No problem.  At a speed of two, there are two dots.  Scale this up, until the dots start crowding each other on the ruler.  In order to put more dots on the ruler (increase speed), you have to make each of the dots a little closer to the others.  This is where the time dilation effects start to be noticeable.  Eventually, you can't add any more dots, because the ruler is full of them., and there simply isn't room for any more dots to be added.  This is the speed of light - the maximum units of SpaceTime that something can travel, or the maximum strength of a time vector.

Notice that the speed of light is measured in points of SpaceTime.  So light travels a smaller absolute distance in areas of higher actual (not perceived) density.  Time slows down in areas of higher gravity.

'Reference frames' from General Relativity are areas with matching SpaceTime densities.  If two objects are in areas of similar densities, they will have similar experiences of time and distance.

A Singularity is the place where the liquid of space time becomes a solid.  Our rules of physics don't generally apply in the different medium.  The points of SpaceTime are crowded together to the maximum possible density, and the time vectors of SpaceTime achieve the strength of C, raising the energy of each photon to maximum possible (turning it into matter?), but eliminating its ability to escape.  The velocity vector is completely overwhelmed by the gravity vector, and becomes unimportant.  Note that gravity and EM fields, acting outside of the strictures of the points of spacetime, still exist and propagate.  (Think about it - if gravity and EM fields propagated at the speed of light, the gravity itself wouldn't be able to escape the gravity of a black hole, and it dwouldn't be able to generate a magnetic field.  Obviously incorrect.)  Interestingly, absolute time still passes, even though perceived time does not.  (Photons still travel through space, even though they have no perceived time passage.)  So the black hole moves, and rotates, and grows, while perceiving no passage of time.  Indeed, as was stated by the scientist in the extras to the movie Interstellar, time flows towards the center of a black hole.  (That's what gave me the flash of insight to come up with all the rest of this.)

Again, I'm sorry that this isn't more organized.  I'm sure I missed something, and that this is probably harder to understand than it needs to be.  The space inside my head isn't organized, either.  I'm pretty bright - ACT 33, SAT 1460, Army GT score 145.  My whole trick seems to be to grok things.  I learn a new concept more slowly than others - but then there is the moment of clarity, where everything suddenly makes sense.  And the concept becomes part of me, simple and beautiful.  It's trying to explain these simple concepts that is difficult for me.

I've been doing more science reading, and I haven't found anything to refute the basic concepts presented here.  That's not to say it's all right.  I just haven't found anything to prove it wrong yet.  And in physics, the simpler idea is usually the more correct one.  Time = Distance.  The force of Gravity and Velocity (inertia) are really Time vectors.  SpaceTime is made of particles, that flow like a fluid.  Higher gravity fields are places where the density of SpaceTime is higher (particles are closer together).  Simple, really.

Edit 2020:  So much of this is BS.  Almost everything in the books I read on these subjects was wrong, or at least massively misleading.

Friday, May 8, 2015

VE Day +70

Today is VE Day +70 years.  This is a cause for celebration and remembrance.  Celebration of the successful and victorious conclusion of combat in Europe.  Remembrance of those who didn't return from those fights, and of the memory of those who did who are no longer with us.

Today was the greatest collection of WWII aircraft in 60 years, over 50 planes, doing a flyover of Washington, DC in multiple waves.  I went up on the top of my office building to watch and take pictures.  The property management people caught us near the end of the show and shooed us downstairs.
Here are (admittedly poor) pictures of some of the planes.


Catalina emergency landing

B17s

B24 with P51 escorts

B25s

B29


Formation of biplane trainers

P51s hotdogging.  They flew low down the Potomac, and then popped up above the Mall.

Catalina.  It arrived early, and circled for a while to wait for its turn.

I think its a Texan.  It acted like an in-flight sheepdog for the fly by.

Not sure what these are.  I think they're monoplane trainers.

P40s and the sheepdog.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Objective Reality

I am a believer in objective reality.  This is the reality that remains when preconceptions and dogma are ignored.  The Soviet military used this term when speaking to their commissars about actual facts, as opposed to politically correct 'facts'.

Objective reality - when compared to whites, blacks are less intelligent.  These are statistical facts comparing two different populations.  This is not a value judgement.  This is not a proclamation.  This is 'truefact', ground truth, objective reality.  Cries of "Racissss!" in 3, 2, 1 ...  Statistics are not individuals.  The 'worth' of a man lies not in his physical attributes, but in his conduct and in his soul.  To paraphrase a great man - I dream of a day when all men will be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

Blacks are less intelligent than whites on every conceivable test.  IQ scores - blacks average an entire SD lower than whites (The Bell Curve, et al.).  Employment figures.  Income figures.  Job performance figures.  Crime figures.  Hospital (especially emergency department) figures.  Education/learning figures.  Rates of marriage and bastardy.  Rates of STD transmission.  And on and on and on ...

I have seen arguments that violence is built in, and a result of certain genes.  I have not seen enough of such studies to determine for myself if this is true.  What I have seen is that violence tracks negatively with intelligence - that is, the more intelligent the population, the less violent its individuals tend to be on a day-to-day basis.  (War and political violence are excluded from this - I'm talking about individual and small group criminal violence.)

This is objective reality.  I have no idea what the root cause of this lack of intelligence is.  The traditional arguments of nature vs/ nurture in this case work out to be - is it genetic or cultural?  Looking at the evidence, I'd guess it's a little of both.  The world-wide intelligence difference can't be just attributable to culture, because there are many different cultures.  And in every single one of them, blacks compare poorly to whites in intelligence and outcomes.  Anecdotally (a sufficient number of anecdotes does become statistics), when some blacks try to do well at a job or in school, the others tear him down for "acting white".  That's culture, if only the culture of the crab bucket.  It's anti-American to drag somebody down to your level.  The American way is to build yourself up to be even better.


Is it lack of access to education?  Well, America has tried that experiment for the last 50 years, and the answer is a resounding "no".  Blacks attend the same schools as whites, and are taught by the same teachers, using the same text books and worksheets.  Blacks perform more poorly in school than whites.  (As to Latinos to a much lesser degree, while Asians perform better.  And Ashkenazi Jews, when taken as a population, perform better that the white average.  I'm obviously such a racist, that I place my own race below others.)

Modern society, modern American life, is complex, and getting more so.  Good jobs (and thus income and status) go to those with the education and aptitude to perform well.  Blacks, as a whole (individuals are not populations, and should not be mistaken for such), do not have the intelligence and education to perform well at high-end jobs.  That's why there are so few blacks in Silicon Valley.  This is not racism - it's simply reality. 

Every attempt to override reality with political correctness distorts life away from reality.  Political correctness is orthogonal to correctness.  (PC, the term, is not new, and is a feature of cultural Marxism.  http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/)  We, as a culture, descend further and further into madness as we insist on more and more politically-correct 'facts', theories, and political systems.  "Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so."

Blacks are not kept out of good paying jobs because the employers are racist.  (Remember, statistics, not individuals.)  They are kept out because they are not qualified to do those jobs.  And when PC based "affirmative action" hiring practices are used to hire unqualified blacks, all blacks, even those who are competent to hold those jobs, are looked at with a jaundiced eye.  The same principle applies to women hired under the same policies, for the same reasons.  (But for different base principles - men and women are different, have different physiques, skills, and likes.  Again, statistics, not individuals.)

If blacks and whites are known to have different physical capabilities (White Men Can't Jump), be subject to different diseases, and can be determined to be different on sight by toddlers, who can deny that the populations are distinct?  Of course we are all the same species - homo sapiens sapiens.  We can interbreed.  (And boy, do we even interbreed.  It's what humans seem to do best.)  That's not to say that there aren't different races.  That is like saying that there is only one kind of dog, since they can all interbreed.  Obviously, there are different dogs, and dogs are different from wolves.  But since they can interbreed, they constitute a single species, with very little genetic difference.  The same applies to human populations.  Look at different groups from around the globe - they are all different.

One of the biggest, most pernicious lies I experienced when growing up was that "everybody is the same".  Obviously, we're not.  "All men are created equal."  Yes, and then they are born.  All men are equal in the eyes of God, and should be equal in the eyes of the law.  It's when we pervert this principle that things go wrong.  (See Baltimore over the last week or so, Ferguson last year, etc.)  Police and Firefighter tests for hiring and promotion are dumbed down because blacks can't pas them.  Blacks are disproportionately promoted in the military to maintain the 'proper proportions'.  Affirmative action hiring quotas all across the spectrum.  None of it works as it purports to intend, and all of it makes life worse for everyone.

Talking plainly about this topic is deemed 'controversial'.  How can stating the plain truth be controversial?  Is this not America?  The land where we laugh at the emperor with no clothes, and mock his ministers?  Do we now bow down before our 'betters' and accept the popular 'truth' of the day?

The worst part of the denial of truth is that it destroys the concept of truth, and the belief that America is the land where your actions determine your fate, not vague outside forces and membership in the right group, or birth status.  The land of opportunity and the great melting pot.  The truly American dream of success or failure on your own merits and efforts, of a better life for your children.  The lies eat away from this dream, and replace it with the nightmare of corruption that most of the rest of the world lives with.

For those who read to the end here, congratulations.  I know my thoughts wander, and I am not a great communicator.  But the essence of my thoughts on this subject are not that 'blacks are bad'.  Far from it.  My intent was to show that political correctness is bad, nay not just bad, but evil.  Political correctness is the opposite of objective reality.

Speak the truth and shame the devil.  2+2=4, and no dictator or priest can make it otherwise.