Roger Penrose’s Book

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I’m reading a book called “Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe” by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.  Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on black holes so he’s a pretty big brain.  But so far, the whole book has been a sort of no mathematics discussion of entropy and how the existence of the second law of thermodynamics relates to the Big Bang theory.  We spent a whole chapter talking about mixing blue and red paint in a bucket becoming purple and then how an egg falling off a counter on the floor is basically an irreversible process.  So far, I guess I follow him on time being a one-way affair.  As far as the red shift of very distant galaxies proving the Big Bang theory, I’m waiting to see if he has something a little less mundane to say.

I’ve watched a few YouTube videos with Penrose as one of the speakers and I will say he comes across as a very lucid speaker (at least as far as Nobel laureates go).  I just hope by the end of this book it will live up to the title.  But already he said something that I found interesting.  He said that the estimates of the age of the universe are based on taking the expansion rate of the universe and back calculating how long it took to get to where we are now from an initial condition where the size of the universe was a single point.  At the same time, I see how that seems like a straight forward idea and also a ridiculous one.  So, the whole universe is a single point.  What in the hell does that mean?  I’ve read that the conception of the conditions at slightly after the Big Bang has a universe that is almost infinitely hot and at the same time completely devoid of matter.  So, everything is photons?  But somehow this spawned the universe we see around us today.  None of that makes any sense to me.

I’ll admit I have a tiny brain compared to these mathematical geniuses but I have to wonder if they know what the hell they’re talking about.  I can sort of believe in black holes and neutron stars and gravity waves.  The predictions that have been made in the past seemed to have been confirmed with instruments that have measured gravity waves associated with merging neutron stars.  The measurements and behaviors seem to match exactly the theoretical modeling.  But when it comes to the cosmological models and how they correlate with observations of the universe we see very large deviations and no convincing evidence for the patchwork fixes like dark energy and dark matter.  I think we’re waiting for a new generation of physicists that won’t just sit around spinning unprovable theories and instead actually figure out ways of getting additional data.

So come on Roger, give me something in the second half of this book that I can point to and say, “That’s an Extraordinary New View of the Universe!”

Goodreads Book Giveaway February 7 – 19 of “The Sniper”

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Huzzah!  The chance to win a free paperback copy of this desperately sought after literary jewel.  Did I say jewel?  Nay!  Miracle!!!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Sniper by Jake Barter

The Sniper

by Jake Barter

Giveaway ends February 19, 2026.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Jeff Bezos Eviscerates Washington Post.  photog Unconcerned

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I watched a few YouTube videos by journalists.  They were hilarious.  But they were kind of long and there was a lot of swearing.  So, I embedded a news station’s coverage which was still kind of funny but shorter and without the swearing.

Bezos is firing 33% of his staff, eliminating the sports page, the Metro Section, the Middle East bureaus and most of the foreign desk in general.  And he’s getting rid of their podcast.  Well, I’m not the biggest fan of Jeff Bezos.  I think he’s a pretentious twit.  But now he’s become one of my favorite billionaire twits.  Just thinking about the number of butt-hurt leftwing journalists and their friends who will soon be looking for new jobs in a journalism environment completely devoid of opportunities makes my mouth water.  Now you might think I’m an awful human being but I’m not.  I can tell because I’m not happy about the tradesmen working on the printing presses and the other non-journalists who are losing their jobs.  For them I feel sorrow.  But the left-wing journalists are awful people who hate individuals like me and feel superior to ordinary people who don’t believe in the social justice creed that the elites follow.

So in the words of Barack Obama’s favorite anti-white clergyman, “The chickens have come home to roost!”  Bari Weiss is gutting CBS News.  Bezos is chloroforming the Washington Post and Disney is finally getting around to eliminating the crew that did a hatchet job on Lucas Films.  But this is still just the tip of the iceberg.  All of the cable and broadcast networks are being overhauled by people tasked with restoring them to profitability, if possible, or shuttering them if not.  I’m particularly curious to see what happens at MS NOW.  Initially they unloaded complete deadwood like Joy Reid but the place is still stocked to the gills with overpaid leftist lunatics like Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Jen Psaki who each make millions of dollars.  I’m waiting for at least one of these losers to get the heave-ho in 2026.  In fact, I expect the whole shooting match to be closed down within eighteen months.

So this exercise going on at Bezos’s rag is sort of a template for the rest of the industry.  Right-sizing these journalism companies will be a herculean task that may not even be possible.  The business model for journalism was upended by the internet and literally no one knows how all of this will end up.  But currently all of the people I hate in journalism sound like a chorus of scorched cats, the schadenfreude is amped up to eleven and it feels just wonderful.

And just to make sure that things continue in the right direction, that paragon of journalistic incompetence, Don Lemon has picked this moment to become a martyr for the First Amendment (or I guess maybe against the First Amendment).  But maybe sometime in the next few years one of the new or old news outfits will get its feet back on the ground and start selling actual honest to goodness objective facts at a price people are willing to pay.  And that will be really be good news.