Monkey Magic

Dear God,

Are you religious? Do you go to church regularly? Do you believe in yourself? Do you praise yourself?

The thing is, I sometimes get the feeling I'm singing my hymns to a heathen, or maybe even a Moslem. Should I put my wife's head in a bag? I'd like to please you but what if I've got the rules wrong?

Maybe you're a Jew? That's two religions out of three that don't approve of pork, so maybe I should stop eating it? Statistics say I should.

Maybe you're a new-age hippy and only like people who show the proper respect for Stonehenge? It's so hard to be sure.

Yours sincerely,
A true Christian, unless you're something else, in which case I'd like to be one too.

It’s strange how things can connect…

Thinking about the role of sex in the universe caused me to remember the Watchmen (film) where Dr Manhattan has become so ‘distant’ that his girlfriend has abandoned him for the warmth of the Owl.

Dr Manhattan, seemingly sick of the machinations of mankind’s puppeteers, forsakes Earth for Mars and is increasingly drawn into a kind of clockwork world of his own creation.

However, there is still a bond, a glimmer of love perhaps, that connects him to the girl he once loved, surviving somewhere deep within the scientific, almost callous, attitude he has slowly adopted as he becomes ever less human and ever more godlike.

Yet this small glimmer of emotion has the power to change the future and perhaps save the planet.
Because it causes Dr Manhattan to realise what a miracle the existence of his ex-girlfriend truly is, all the more so because of the unlikeliness of her parents ever getting together…
In an instant of insight he realises that she is not so much a result of her parents coupling as their coupling was a result of the future's need of her!

Make those monkeys dance.

I'll give it a try FTSE.
Here is a tune that might at least inspire a little jig...

"Astronomical observations tell us that 96% of the Universe is unknown." because it's invisible.

It is the Universal equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
You can only ‘see’ this invisible 96% if you’re really intelligent and since most people aren’t then they have to trust the few people who are.
It is there folks, our theories prove it!

If it is invisible how do you know it is still there?
Well, we can tell by the way that some of the light gets bent.
“Okay, how long has this light taken to get here?”
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I suppose we ought to consider the speed of light because it has very important consequences.
Almost everyone has seen the famous Einstein equation E=MC2 …
NB read as E = MC squared.
Einstein was telling us that Energy was related to Mass by the constant C.

The problem is that the speed of light isn’t constant.
Well, probably not a problem since that is very likely the reason Einstein used it in the first place.
First, I should add that C is actually the speed of light through a vacuum.
Now that does help to bring the speed closer to a constant but of course Einstein tells us that light is bent by gravity and so that would likely affect the speed, as would, in the case of the Earth, the effect of the sun’s bubble which envelops the Solar System.

Still, as I said, Einstein probably relied on the fact that C wasn’t actually totally constant because he needed something that reflected the local state of space. The speed of light through a vacuum whereever you (the observer) are can be used as a constant because everything else is relative to that speed.

Problem is we have never actually managed to get anything outside the sun’s bubble let alone into deep space and so we know nothing about what’s beyond our Solar System other than by telescope and guess work.

It may well be that space time has several different ways of bending light and that gravity is simply the most convenient one to explain why the current theories don’t fit the observations!

The statement "if dark matter existed, then the results would be those we actually observe" is not the same as the statement "dark matter exists". You fill the knowledge gaps with a placeholder, something that works for the moment but that you fully expect to be superseded as knolwledge advances. The alternative would be to say "we don't know nuffink and we never can," and just give up.

I don't argue with you FTSE.
However, how often do you actually see "If Dark matter exists..."?
or "If the Universe started with a Big Bang."?
All these theories are invariably presented as facts!

By the way FTSE. I've been thinking about the dispute we had over whether or not speed is massive.

I was quite confident at the time since Einstein himself had asserted that as the speed of an object approaches the speed of light then its mass approaches infinity.

However, it did occur to me that even if this were to be so surely it would only be true in the direction that the object was travelling -
that it would be the mass of the velocity and not of the speed that would be apparent to a relatively stationary observer.

Hence it follows that you are probably right and speed doesn’t increase mass only the relative mass.
Does that mean we were both right, relatively speaking? ;O)

To tell the truth I'm starting to have my doubts about Einstein's theory of gravity!

I shouldn’t take much notice of these musings as they are essentially meant just for Mystic and mates.

Following a dispute with FTSE over whether or not speed was massive I came to re-think Relativity.
Were we mistaking WHAT Relativity actually provides?
Is it just a means to see things from a different viewpoint rather than a way of understanding the Universe?

Let’s consider some aspects of Relativity that are obviously simply about communication.
The fact that it takes light a certain time to get from one place to another should be no more relevant than the fact that sound does the same - were it not that Einstein posits that nothing can travel faster than light.
The nonsense that travelling faster than the speed of light would make you time travel is simply saying that if you could catch up with yesterday’s light then you could see the past - but not be present in it.
The nonsense talked about time travel is a misunderstanding of Einstein’s belief that the Universe too is limited by the speed of light.
Hence if the sun blew up we wouldn’t notice for about 500 seconds.

While blowing up the sun would be a rather extreme experiment I agree that you wouldn’t see it explode for just over 8 minutes but that the Earth would notice immediately!

Still, we can leave all that for later for now we should consider why mass increases with speed.
Well does it? As (I think) FTSE put it ‘you can’t get mass from nowhere’.

Yet there is no doubt that as a body accelerates its mass does seem to increase.
However, if we use Einstein’s trick of moving the observer - make him the pilot of a space craft.
If his ship was travelling at close to the speed of light, but not accelerating, would the mass of his craft be noticeably greater than if he were travelling at a much slower speed?
The point being - can you calculate your speed from your change in mass?

It might seem difficult to guess so let’s look at an orbiting space craft.
If it is an orbit in which the crew seem weightless what does that say about the speed of the craft?
It is important to realise that although the crew are weightless they still have their original mass…
In fact since they are moving relatively quickly (by vehicle standards) their mass should be greater.
Still, how to measure the mass if it has no weight. Hit it with a known force and measure the result…
So, mass is related to inertia and need have no noticeable weight.

Right so if mass increases with speed it must be because it feels some resistance from empty space.
Presuming that we can imagine that a craft orbiting at about 80% gravity is essentially in empty space.
NB when I say 80% gravity, I mean at a distance from Earth where the acceleration of gravity would be
(about 8 metres per second per second)

Now Newton presumed that the resistance to acceleration would be linear but Einstein predicted that in fact it would not be at very high speeds and that the resistance would increase to infinity as the object attempted to accelerate to the speed of light.
In other words the mass would become infinite.

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So, let us consider E = MC squared.
Since we are saying that mass does increase with speed then can we say that the increase will be equal to the increase in Energy divided by the (supposed constant) C squared?
Where is the speed in this formula you may ask and I would argue that it is in the measurement of C.
Imagine that you are in a space craft travelling at 99.9999% of the speed of light and you measure the speed of a light beam along a fixed distance from the back of the ship to the front.

Now, since the light source is already moving at almost the speed of light how fast will the beam travel through the empty space that the ship is moving through. Perhaps you might find it easier to imagine a strut at the back of the ship and one at the front that contain the light source and detector.
Since now the light is travelling through space and not the ship it might make it clearer.

Well, I think that the beam will travel at the speed of light as, we are told, it always does through empty space - yet, since the detector is also travelling at an almost similar speed then the beam must appear to be travelling much slower than normal.

Yet, if we use the measured speed as C how does this effect M?
Since C squared is now much less than it was then M must be much greater since M = E divided by C squared
(don’t forget that C is the speed of light through a vacuum). :O)
So it would appear that although a speeding object does not gain matter it does gain mass.

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Before we continue to think more about mass we should consider weight.
Many people believe weight to be a measurement of mass on Earth…
In a way they are right and in another way they are wrong.

As we know inertia causes a ‘reluctance’ to change and so if matter is ‘attracted’ by gravity it resists that attraction, put simply inertia limits the acceleration of falling objects.

Some argue that not just mass but energy too is effected by gravity -
I’m not convinced but we will look at the possibility later.
For now let’s concentrate on gravity and matter and mass.

Gravity causes matter to fall unless something counters it.
Hence weight is the force of the matter toward the centre of the gravitational attraction... usually seen as down.

So, you stand on a covered spring and the downward force compresses it moving a pointer on a scale which indicates your weight (weighing scales) or you stand on one side of a pair of true scales and someone adds a number of known weights to the other until they balance.

Now weight becomes confused with mass because mass reflects the amount of matter and it is matter that is effected by gravity!

It would be great if someone who wasn’t as lazy as I am could actually find how fast things would fall were in not for inertia. However, we must remember that this inertia is ‘remembered’ and can be reclaimed, as say, by a ball bouncing.

I suppose that I ought to add that energy that causes movement which affects the overall inertia of a body would effect the mass of the body and so I have no quarrel with those who, for instance, see kinetic energy as being slightly massive.

I will go off and think about whether energy itself is effected directly by inertia and if not where this leaves the mass of so called Dark Energy.

Sorry Mystic - I'll tidy this up later I want to add more first. What's your take Paul?

SPECULATION!

If we go back to the space craft mentioned earlier which is orbiting at 80% Earth gravity and we slow it down a little - what would be the result? It would start to fall. Why? Because, now, it can!

I’ve often pointed out the Foucault pendulum and gyroscopes are amazing examples of objects with an acceleration that allows them to disregard other forces.

So, let’s speculate that a planet in orbit around a sun is not falling because it has a sufficient acceleration (from gravity constantly changing its direction) to ignore gravity (in a strange way a lot like the tempo of a pendulum swing depends on its length because its accleration sets its speed) which suggests that the ‘reluctance’ of the inertia of the planet might have reached its maximum due to its orbital motion and so it cannot fall.

Put simply, the planet's speed around the sun uses all it's 'allowance of reluctant motion' and so its inertia will not allow it to fall...
it has no movement allowance left :O)

This would suggest that in one sense speed is king, in that an object can only travel at a certain speed (regardless of direction) limited by its ‘reluctance’ but that the 'reluctance' is based on the object’s acceleration :O)

I think I’ll come back to that when my head stops spinning ;o)

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If you consider the main difference between Newton and Einstein it is in the essential cause of gravity.
Newton believed it was simply the attractive force between two or more bodies which was instantaneously transmitted THROUGH space.
Einstein on the other hand seemed to believe that gravity was a property OF space and was limited by the speed of light.

So for Newton space was merely the distance between the masses but for Einstein the mass curved space and created gravity.

I don’t know if you are familiar with Escape Velocities, even if you are you may not know that it is a speed not a velocity and it equals (at least in space) the speed at which a falling body would be travelling, when it reached THAT distance from what it was falling towards, were it to have fallen from an infinite distance. Clear as mud?

Okay, if you have a sun with planets then the speed of each planet is proportional to its distance from the sun. So, anything in orbit at the same distance from the sun travels at the same speed regardless of mass.
Now, the escape velocity of any planet of that sun is about 1.4 times its orbital speed.
It is actually the square root of 2 which is approximately 1.4142.

Now if you think about it the escape velocity must be almost as fast as anything can travel through that bit of space if it is equal to the speed that a body would have reached had it been falling for an infinite distance. So, what does that suggest?

It suggests that the orbital speed at any point is related to the maximum speed at the same point by the same ratio as one side of a square has to its diagonal.

To me that does NOT suggest that space is curved so much as the speed is the same for both but since we call the orbital velocity the orbital speed then it seems less... but I suppose that you can argue that relatively speaking the ‘curving’ is using up the rest of the speed.

A different way of expressing this is that, if hypothetically you could create an airless hole to the centre of the Earth and drop something into it.
By the time that something reached the centre it would be travelling at the same speed as a similar hypothetical something orbiting the Earth
(at ground level without being effected by air resistance etc).

Just a thought - since scientists calculate the speed that stars are moving away from us by using Doppler shift I was wondering how they can differentiate between frequency shift caused by the velocity of the stars and that caused by gravity.

It struck me that all the light that reaches us from distant stars must come from fairly massive ones and since I believe that gravity compresses space-time then I would imagine that it would cause an increasing Red shift as the light moved into less ‘dense’ space.

If this were to be so then it would mean that many of the calculations of how fast the Universe is expanding would be exaggerated.

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I've always wondered what effect lenses, mirrors and of course atmospheres have on light that has spent most of its 'life' travelling through 'empty' space - the problem being that anything used to detect light must effect it.

Does light have a particle aspect when it travels through 'empty' space?

Further back I wrote the sentence below which is still true but not for long…

“Problem is we have never actually managed to get anything outside the sun’s bubble let alone into deep space and so we know nothing about what’s beyond our Solar System other than by telescope and guess work.“

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"We have gotten to the point where the wind from the Sun, which until now has always had an outward motion, is no longer moving outward; it is only moving sideways so that it can end up going down the tail of the heliosphere, which is a comet-shaped-like object,"
This phenomenon is a consequence of the wind pushing up against the matter coming from other stars. The boundary between the two is the "official" edge of the Solar System - the heliopause.
Once Voyager crosses over, it will be in interstellar space.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11988466

“... now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain.
It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1...

Very interesting piece, once again questioning life. I like it, although there's a lot of different things to take in at once. I love the initial monkey analogy though! Brilliant :)

Thanks parkster!

I remember someone saying that if a dog wrote a book it would mostly be about bones so I presumed that monkeys would mostly write about bananas :O)

What I hope to point out to people is that we don't know that much about ourselves and so we too often don't take 'human nature' into account.

We lie to ourselves and to each other and form relationships and organisations that are always in danger of being totally corrupted by the lies we choose to believe.

In a way I'm simply arguing that we don't know ourselves well enough to notice how much power corrupts us!

You should read Roger Penrose. His stuff is the bomb

check it out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Reality:_A_Complete_Guide_to_th...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time_(book)

Thanks Valis!
Your links are always interesting and often amazing.