I’m still trying to recharge after my last trip to Florida . I think I got 12 hours of sleep in 3 days.. Ate only 3 real meals and only ran once. It seems that all my careful attention to deliberate mindfulness , sleep, diet, meditation, etc. go out the window when I travel. The funny thing is that many friends at the conference told me that I was looking/seeming/acting more like ‘my old self’ . I’m not sure if that’s a) a sign that inside feeling and outside appearance aren’t always linked.. or b) ‘my old self’ was always burned out, sleep deprived and spacey.. I’ll go for b)
I spent the day trying to get started on stuff.. and for the most part didn’t get anywhere.. mostly got caught up on stuff left undone while I was gone. One thing I did get done while I was traveling was to get about half way through Brian Greene’s excellent (so far) book “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality” .. The book gives a very accessible (i.e. no math) overview of the evolution of our physical understanding of the world. It starts with classical Newtonian mechanics then describes how Einstein and relativity showed that as appealing as they were.. Newton’s laws were only an approximation of the way the world works. It then goes into the introduction of quantum mechanics and how it challenged Einstein’s view of a deterministic world.. Right now the book is talking about the concept of spacetime. It spends a great deal of time discussing the very meaning of time.. what is time ? .. and why does it only appear to flow forward. ? . It points out that there is nothing in the math that we use to describe the universe that prefers forward time to backward time.. Our perception of time seems to be the only thing that is asymmetrical there. Greene talks about the ever increasing entropy.. the disorder in the universe, and how it relates to the ‘arrow’ of time… Right now he’s talking about how time and quantum mechanics relate on the scale of very small things… on his way to describe string theory and eventually the current thinking on ‘M’ theory. The thing that has me really thinking hard at this point in the book is how some folks think about the dual wave/particle nature of things like electrons and protons. E.g. It turns out that you either know where an electron is.. or how fast it’s going.. but never both at the same time. The ‘where’ an electron is ,in general, can only be described as a probability distribution… all that I’ve ‘known’ since I was a kid.. but here’s where it gets weird.. Many folks have tried to explain this dual wave/particle nature .. The strange thing is that if you observe where an electron is.. it suddenly isn’t in all the other places it might otherwise be.. If you don’t observe it.. it can literally be anywhere.. And that ‘not being elsewhere’ effect can effect the outcome of experiments that are far away in both space and time.. In fact observing a particle at one moment can, mathematically speaking, change it’s past. This effect can actually be observed in the laboratory in experiments like the double slit experiment. (I know I posted this before).. I just got a note from the producers of ‘What the Bleep do we know’ that these videos cost $250K to make.. eeek !)
The way this works has changed the way that physicists think about words like ‘now’ and ‘then’ .. Folks like Richard Feinman chose to explain the distributions of ‘wheres’ as a sum over all history that is.. every thing that could ever happen to you .. if you’re an electron.. does happen to you .. in one universe or another.. all at the same time.. every possible place, every possible interaction.. all right now..
Greene is talking right now about how by extension it might imply that everything that can ever happen to us actually happens all at the same time. An infinite number of possibilities and outcomes playing out in an infinite number of interacting worlds.. right ‘here’.. right ‘now’ .. Now wonder I feel tired.
Maybe there are a huge number of worlds out there were Sam is still snowboarding or floating down a river. I really hope so.. in fact I’m sure I’m right there with him right ‘now’ .. Gnite folks.. I have a bunch of universes to go through tonight. Catch you later Sam.
-me
