essentialsaltes: (wrong)
You may remember [haha, no, of course not] when I dispensed with math as fictional [somewhere near the end of that rambling entry].

I had a similar epiphany about space and time. As one does. I mean I've known for a long time that space and time aren't what people naively assume they are, or even perceive they are. But it took some poking and prodding and internet tough guy arguing to really get a handle on it.

While conceding that space itself is not made of matter, someone was asking whether it was, nevertheless, a 'thing'. I was immediately leery of calling it a thing, but pressed on the issue ('how can nothing expand?') led to some deeper thinking.

Now the expansion of space is fraught with misunderstanding. All our standard analogies are really misleading: pennies taped to balloons, raisins in raisinbread dough. These treat space as though it really were a thing that stretched and expanded, carrying other things with it.

If you think that 'space streams' carry galaxies away on it, you're thinking of it wrong. If you think galaxies are pinned to space like they've been nailed into some stretchy jello, you're thinking of it wrong.

So what's right? What is space? What I ultimately came up with was:

"Space is, perhaps, our mental model of the world. We are betrayed by our senses into mapping objects into a three dimensional Euclidean space, and then implicitly reifying that model."

Temperature is modeled by a number that fits on a number line, but we are not tempted to reify that as a real physical dimension. It is only because distance behaves more or less like distance in Euclidean geometry that we assume that space is 'out there' for real, rather than just distance being a property shared between two objects, like the temperature difference between two objects. Well, not just that, it also seems to us in our perceptual visual field (or at least it does to me) like there's a three dimensional more-or-less-Euclidean space out there. Of course, all we really perceive are objects. We have no way of putting space-itself under the microscope, or look at it.

Anyway, so space is just a mental model and it isn't real. You all think I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy. My interlocutor thinks I'm crazy, and asks: "Would you say [space] has always been just a mental model? i.e. when Einstein first presented [GR], he had no intention of implying that space is a thing that actually bends and stretches?"

Oh crap, I'm in for it now. I'm a humble Physics lieutenant, and he's going over my head to the general.

Einstein thought a lot about the Problem of Space:
"It is characteristic of Newtonian physics that it has to ascribe independent and real existence to space and time ...

Newton himself and his most critical contemporaries felt it to be disturbing that one had to ascribe physical reality both to space itself as well as to its state of motion; but there was at that time no other alternative, if one wished to ascribe to mechanics a clear meaning.

It is indeed an exacting requirement to have to ascribe physical reality to space in general, and especially to empty space. ...

The psychological origin of the idea of space, or of the necessity for it, is far from being so obvious as it may appear to be on the basis of our customary habit of thought."

.......

On the basis of the general theory of relativity, on the other hand, space as opposed to "what fills space", which is dependent on the co-ordinates, has no separate existence. ...

Space-time does not claim existence on its own, but only as a structural quality of the field [i.e. the metric].


I honestly did not expect to find Al stating it so unambiguously. I'm not sure why it was so surprising to share the same view, since I had the advantage of standing on his shoulders, but it was still thrilling.
essentialsaltes: (Laika)
ORRIN LINDSAY'S
PLAN OF

AERIAL NAVIGATION,


WITH A NARRATIVE OF HIS EXPLORATIONS IN THE

HIGHER REGIONS OF THE ATMOSPHERE,

AND HIS WONDERFUL

VOYAGE ROUND THE MOON!

The first relevant experiment which I made worthwhile here to relate was by confining a young bull terrier dog, weighing about fifteen pounds, in the square box before mentioned, attaching a twine to the box and allowing it to ascend in the air. The dog did not seem to relish this compulsory mode of making him contribute to the cause of science; but up he went, box, twine and all, near two hundred feet high, to the length of the twine. I pulled him down and let him ascend slowly for several times. I had all along kept a tight string upon the box, so as to moderate the velocity of ascent; but, wishing to observe the velocity which it might attain, unimpeded, I gave it at last a slack twine. Starting slowly at first, it gradually increased its rate of ascent (on the same principle as the ascent of a vertical ash pole, sunk deep in the water and then let to go) until it came to the length of the string, of which I kept hold, by which time, it had acquired so much momentum as to snap the twine. It continued to ascend with still accelerating velocity, its course modified a little by the winds, until it finally entered a fleecy cloud, and was forever lost to my sight.
essentialsaltes: (Default)
It's now official & public. My story "Inlibration" has been accepted for publication in an upcoming Chaosium anthology of cyberpunk/Lovecraftian stories edited by Glynn Owen Barrass and Brian M. Sammons. Here's the line-up:

Eldritch Chrome

Playgrounds of Angolaland - David Conyers
The Blowfly Manifesto - Tim Curran
SymbiOS - William Meikle
Obsolete, Absolute – Robert M. Price
Open Minded - Jeffrey Thomas
The Battle of Arkham - Peter Rawlik
The Wurms In the Grid - Nickolas Cook
Of Fractals, Fantomes, Frederic and Filrodj - John Shirley
The Gauntlet - Glynn Barrass and Brian M. Sammons
Indifference - CJ Henderson
Dreams of Death - Lois Gresh
Inlibration - Michael Tice
Immune - Terrie Leigh Relf
Hope Abandoned - Tom Lynch
Sonar City - Sam Stone
The Place that Cannot Be - D.L. Snell
Flesh & Scales - Ran Cartwright
Real Gone – David Dunwoody
CL3ANS3 – Carrie Cuinn
essentialsaltes: (Cognitive Hazard)
I really am working, but my current task is eerily similar to a pigeon pecking at a food bar at occasional intervals. So you are all hostage to the blathering that emerges from my brain, mediated through fingers and the intertubes. So I was reading Pharyngula, and a couple items caught my attention.
pull up a chair and set a spell )

Profile

essentialsaltes: (Default)
essentialsaltes

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
456789 10
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 15th, 2025 08:05 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios