I love that song! Have it on cd. Once upon a time I thought I might use it in a rope-skipping routine. But time & the river & Wind River (defining scene: “you didn’t see it”) breezes thru windows of opportunity that are thrown open for just so all too briefly long … I couldn’t match pace with this song now (not even close) … but let it come on the Sirius 70’s channel, & all those bullet-holed signs let even more light pour into an even heavier foot …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc1Z6uYXcv0

Interpretation. An. Extended. Multidirectional. Universal. One. In the current time slice. Even if patter’s the tempo & makes for a denser chewy-chewy coco pop moment:

Am reading Smolin’s Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe – which, if I was Ed, & a tease, I’d accuse of being bad bot writ, but ya’ know I’d just be confession-projecting if I did: it’s not my perfect cup of tea, is all (have you priced good stuff 1st-2nd flush Darjeeling lately? I don’t even bother, anymore.). But it still has its moments (like most reads do).

Smolin used to be among the physicists that consider time to be an illusion. He’s gone through the history of that picture of Dorian Gray & now I’m getting to his recantation arguments. Maybe there will be some Brian May cites (Queen lead guitarist – which did the Highlander soundtrack, a movie about immortal head-loppers – & an astrophysicist) – nope, none in the index, soooo, maybe John Cage & his 4’33” – nope…ain’t no musical river without time (including the time between/behind time some emphasize).

Working backward in so far time spent with this bot:

“Another big problem with extrapolating the Newtonian notion of “law” to the whole universe is that there is one universe but an infinite choice of initial conditions. These correspond to an infinite number of solutions to the equations of an alleged cosmological law – solutions that describe an infinite set of possible universes. But there is only one actual universe.

The very fact that a law has an infinite number of possible solutions describing an infinite number of possible histories forces us to conclude that it is meant to be applied to subsystems of the universe, which come, in nature, in an enormous number of versions. The plenitude of nature is matched by the plenitude of solutions. So when we apply a law to a small subsystem of the universe, the freedom to specify initial conditions is a necessary part of the law’s success.

By the same token, when we apply a law that has an infinite number of solutions to a unique system, such as the universe, we leave a great deal unexplained. The freedom to choose the initial conditions turns from an asset into a liability, because it means that there are essential questions about the one universe that the theory (which the law expresses) gives no answer to. These include any feature of the universe that depends on the universe’s initial conditions.”

((Model builders’ fixative fumes. Huff-huff-huff. Styrenes plasticity-toxicity, brittle-hard & glued, command chains the born on the 4th of July Gyrenes to go in – & they Nuremberg do. Payola gets the playola & plastic implosives like asylum shotcaller David Geffen is bilkionaires (the dirty entertainment industrial laundry cleans a lotta’ cash). All of this is preset ‘initial conditions’. As is the ouroborus beginning-middle-end of this 4-star flick:

“From an operational point of view, applying quantum mechanics to the universe was crazy to begin with. It failed because we applied it in a context in which none of the operational definitions that define the theory make sense. All this is payback for committing the fallacy of extending a method well adapted to small parts of the universe to the whole of it.”

((Taleb, the wise: “The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; & the wise does neither.” everybody else has some egg on face. But some humpty dumptys, the eggmen, paint egg-‘em-on-faces on egg. And it’s more or less continuous Egger Sanction, because of it.

“Einstein modified his equations by adding a term that counters gravity by causing the universe to expand. This modification came with a new constant of nature, representing an energy density of empty space. Einstein called it the cosmological constant. There is good evidence for it in the recently observed acceleration of the expanding universe. A more general name for the cause of the accelerated expansion is dark energy, but if its density is constant in space & time it can be described by Einstein’s cosmological constant. So far the observations are consistent with this, but several cosmological scenarios require the dark energy to eventually vary.

((libido dominandi energy…& irony.))

I don’t think that Einstein ever imagined that this constant would one day be measured, but it has been. It has an incredibly tiny value – & correspondingly enormous consequences. Even though it’s tiny, its effects add up across the universe. Thus there are two opposing forces acting on the universe. Gravity from all the matter causes contraction, while the cosmological constant accelerates expansion.”

((Iron/y Butterfly wing-flap effect. A gallon of wine makes “in the Garden of Eden” slur out in-a-gadda-da-vida. All pidgins are equal, but some sell a million copies & spawn millions more.))

“The geodesics of spacetime, as opposed to space, are the paths that take the most proper time rather than the shortest distance. This is a quirk of the way spacetime geometry is formulated; a free-falling clock ticks faster & thus more often than any other clock travelling between two events. This leads to a good piece of advice: If you want to stay young, accelerate.”

((The need for speed. Put on Reunion, get on your bikes & ride.))

“But what does the geometry of space & spacetime have to do with gravity? General relativity is based on the simplest of all scientific ideas, which is that falling is a natural state.”

“This is the debate to which the arguments of this book are addressed. I don’t address them in the terms favored by philosophers, which are often bound up with linguistic analysis. Rather, I’m concerned with their presuppositions in physics – among them that special relativity can be applied to the whole history of the universe. But special relativity cannot be applied to the whole universe, because it doesn’t contain all of physics; in particular, it doesn’t contain gravity. It can be, at best, only an approximation to a theory that does contain gravity. The problem of extending relativity theory to gravity was solved by the invention of a still deeper theory, which is general relativity. This took Einstein ten years of hard work.”

((Yeah. Keep an eye on cunning linguists. Machiavellian mathematicians, too.))

“If we take this method too seriously, we may be tempted to imagine a clock external to the whole universe, by which we can measure change in the universe. This is the route to a big conceptual mistake, which is to believe that the universe as a whole evolves with respect to some absolute notion of time coming from outside it. Newton made this mistake because he was caught in the fantasy that the physics he invented captured God’s view of the universe as a whole. This mistake persisted until Einstein corrected it – by finding a way, within relativity theory, to put the clock inside the universe – & we should not make it again.”

((Serious we’s cannot help themselves, be otherwise.))

“The epicycles, as these mini-circles were called, rotated with a period of one Earth year, because they were nothing but the shadow of Earth’s motion. Other adjustments required still more circles; it took fifty-five circles to get it all to work. By assigning the right periods to each of the big circles, the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy calibrated the model to a remarkable degree of accuracy. A few centuries later, Islamic astronomers fine-tuned the Ptolemaic model, & in Tycho’s time it predicted the positions of the planets, the sun, & the moon to an accuracy of 1 part in 1,000 – good enough to agree with most of Tycho’s observations. Ptolemy’s model was beautiful mathematically, & its success convinced astronomers & theologians for more than a millennium that its premises were correct. And how could they be wrong? After all, the model had been confirmed by observation.

((My tail’s in my mouth. I’m looking right at it. I’m gagging on it. My curve fit observation is undeniable true romance reality. Plus, I’m a freaking genius.))

There’s a lesson here, which is that neither mathematical beauty nor agreement with experiment can guarantee that the ideas a theory is based on bear the slightest relation to reality. Sometimes a decoding of the patterns in nature takes us in the wrong direction. Sometimes we fool ourselves badly, as individuals & as a society. Ptolemy & Aristotle were no less scientific than today’s scientists. The were just unlucky, in that several false hypotheses conspired to work well together. There is no antidote for our ability to fool ourselves except to keep the process of science moving so that errors are eventually forced into the light.”

((Another bit of glint shining on why I think the end of season one True Detective flipped it to False Detective. “The light’s winning.” Uh-huh. Tides ebb & flow, they don’t win & lose.))

Paul Dirac, who ranks with Einstein & Niels Bohr as one of the most consequential physicists of the 20th century, speculated: “At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus, we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of us holding uniformly throughout spacetime.” John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great American physicists, also imagined that laws evolved. He proposed that the Big Bang was one of a series of events within which the laws of physics were reprocessed. He also wrote, “There is no law except the law that there is no law.” Even Richard Feynman, another of the great American physicists & Wheeler’s student, once mused in an interview: “The only field which has not admitted any evolutionary question is physics. Here are the laws, we say…but how did they get that way, in time?…So, it might turn out that they are not the same [laws] all the time & that there is a historical, evolutionary, question.”

“Some of the literature of contemporary cosmology consists of the efforts of very smart people to wrestle with these dilemmas, paradoxes, & unanswerable questions. The notion that our universe is part of a vast or infinite multiverse is popular – & understandably so, because it is based on a methodological error that is easy to fall into. Our current theories can work at the level of the universe only if our universe is a subsystem of a larger system. So we invent a fictional environment & fill it with other universes. This cannot lead to any real scientific progress, because we cannot confirm or falsify any hypothesis about universes causally disconnected from our own.”

((Not to mention methodological t/error that’s compelling to leap into. “Medicine” makes each individual universe subsystem of/to the cohort averages cartel invents & imposes…& devil takes the hindmost overtly…but it also takes the rest – including its membership – subvertly. Musically, it’s radio format – truncated – dirge.))

“My argument starts with a simple observation: The success of scientific theories from Newton through the present day is based on their use of a particular framework of explanation invented by Newton. This framework views nature as consisting of nothing but particles with timeless properties, whose motions & interactions are determined by timeless laws. The properties of the particles, such as their masses & electric charges, never change, & neither do the laws that act on them. This framework is ideally suited to describe small parts of the universe, but it falls apart when we attempt to apply it to the universe as a whole.”

“If we believe the task of physics is the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that captures every aspect of the universe, then we believe that the truth about the universe lies outside the universe. This is such a familiar habit of thought that we fail to see its absurdity: If the universe is all that exists, then how can something exist outside it for it to be described by? But if we take the reality of time as evident, then there can be no mathematical equation that perfectly captures every aspect of the world, because one property of the real world not shared by any mathematical equation is that it is always some moment.

Darwinian evolutionary biology is the prototype for thinking in time, because at its heart is the realization that natural processes developing in time can lead to the creation of genuinely novel structures. Even novel laws can emerge, when the structures to which they apply come into existence. The principles of sexual selection, for example, could not have come to exist before there were sexes. Evolutionary dynamics has no need of vast abstract spaces, like all the possible viable animals, DNA sequences, sets of proteins, or biological laws. Better, as the theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration in time by the biosphere of what can happen next: the “adjacent possible.” The same goes for the evolution of technologies, economies, & societies.

Thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism – a philosophy that asserts that the truest description of something consists of specifying its relationships to the other parts of the system it is part of. Truth can be both time-bound & objective when it’s about objects that exist once they’ve been invented, either by evolution or human thought.

On a personal level, to think in time is to accept the uncertainty of life as being the necessary price of being alive. To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time. To be human is to live suspended between danger & opportunity.

We try our best to thrive in an uncertain world, to take care of whom & what we love & now & then enjoy ourselves in the process. We make plans, but we can never anticipate fully either the dangers or the opportunities ahead. The Buddhists say that we live in a house we haven’t yet noticed is on fire. Danger might arise at any time, & in hunter-gatherer societies it was ever present, but in modern life we have organized things so that it’s comparatively rare. The challenge of life is to choose wisely, from the enormous number of possible dangers, what’s worth worrying about. It is also about choosing, from all the opportunities that each moment brings, what to do next. We choose where to devote our energy & attention – always in the face of incomplete knowledge of the consequences.

Could we do better? Could we overcome the capriciousness of life & achieve a state wherein we knew, if not everything, enough to see all the consequences of our choices – the dangers & the opportunities alike? That is, could we live a truly rational life, without surprises? If time were an illusion, we could imagine this as possible, because in a world in which time was dispensable there would be no fundamental difference between knowledge of the present & knowledge of the future. It would take just a bit more computation to work out. Some number, some formula, could be computed & decoded to tell us all we needed to know.

But if time is real, the future is not determinable from knowledge of the present. There is no escape from our situation, no redemption from the surprises that come from living in ignorance of most of the consequences of our actions. Surprise is inherent in the structure of the world. Nature can throw us surprises for which no amount of knowledge would have prepared us. Novelty is real. We can create, with our imagination, outcomes not computable from knowledge of the present. This is why it matters for each of us whether time is real or not: The answer can change how we view our situation as seekers of happiness & meaning in a largely unknown universe.”

Nothing greases a skid down memory lane like music. But especially the music that happened to be around when sex hormones started waxing your boards – that’s what locks notes into cell receptor staff lines, synapse-fusing chemical-fire emotions that “we” indeed didn’t start. Your songbook gets burned in at 451 F…your mother of dragons begets dragons & by the time she gets to Phoenix that blue flame firebird o’ happiness’ll be rising up your nose, & you’ll never forget it. Reunion puts the whole jukebox into one song. Billy Joel puts tons of everything else people were doing/observing/living the repercussion la vida (much of it stupid, same as now) – & some perspective, too – into one song.

And all this happens in face of the older song set initial conditions of scarcity, real & supposed & imposed: see the section on copyright & royalties (indeed). Cartelization doesn’t create the right people, the creators, but it attracts the far more numerous wrong people, the desecrators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrics

Nice thread, ya’ll. Appreciate the compliments!