Tag: General Relativity

The Day After the Day After Tomorrow

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In the comments for yesterday’s post on anti-matter there was some discussion about the methodology for interstellar travel; matter/anti-matter annihilation as a form of impulse power versus the use of a worm hole to poke in and out of space as needed.  As was intimated (being turned inside out) the current understanding of general relativity does not present any clear mechanism for human beings to utilize such a phenomenon and remain alive.  And that got me thinking.

Five hundred years ago if you wanted to go from Portugal to India you would get on a sailing ship and circumnavigate the continent of Africa and then cross the Indian Ocean.  And when you returned from this trip thirty months would have passed.  Today, a direct flight from Lisbon to Calcutta would take about twelve hours.  Call it a day for a round trip.  That’s about 900 times faster than the old way.  A trip to Mars at its shortest takes about six months.  Adding in the return trip makes the whole voyage something like 26–34 months.  If somehow, we could increase our speed by the same 900 times we could go round trip to Mars in a day.

Of course that’s impossible.  But only in the sense that we would be trying to improve the same means of travel in the future case.  So, if you told Vasco da Gama he could make a round trip to India in one day he would assume you were either joking or insane.  Because the very idea of a jet plane was an impossibility in his world.  Before you can have jet planes you need Galileo, Newton and Maxwell.  In other words, you need the mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to know that a jet plane could exist.

What if the mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering of the twenty second, twenty third and twenty fourth centuries conspire to make the round trip to Mars only one day by finding a completely novel approach to travel.  What if wormholes really could be harnessed for human transport?  Then a day long trip would just be a convenience for meals whereas actual travel time would be zero.  But you argue, “wormholes are a theoretical aspect of relativity that have never been observed and if they exist would be as inimical to human life as a black hole would be.  And I would counter that feeding flammable liquids like octane into a machine that produces electric sparks and depends on metal parts rotating thousands of times per minute is much too dangerous a method for transporting humans from place to place.

So, I won’t say I know that we’ll ever reach the stars.  But I think anyone who says categorically that we cannot is making assumptions that cannot be taken as fact.  They are conjecture based on the current understanding of physics and engineering.  So, I guess we’re free to fantasize about galactic empires and worm holes and warp drives and anything that makes us happy.  And some days I want to read about the day after tomorrow and other days I’ll dream about galactic empires.  Why not?

Where’s My Slide Rule?

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Thank you, Donald Trump.  Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.  I feel I’ve been paid back for any trouble I’ve taken on your behalf in the last four years.  Hallelujah and amen.

Okay now it’s up to Trump and his merry band of madmen to fix Washington and fix the country and do that list of a million impossible things that he said he’s going to do.  Have at it, boys.  Give ‘em hell.

So, what’s for me to talk about tonight?  Well, I’ve got to talk about what’s chasing around my head tonight.  First off, I’m grumbling about how damn cold it is today.  The heating system at the Compound is undersized.  Or maybe the insulation should be the focus.  When the outside temperature dips below zero Fahrenheit, it won’t hold a set point above seventy.  And that’s too bad because I hate being cold inside my own home.  Camera Girl holds me directly responsible because I never put the weatherstripping around two of the external doors.  I explained to her that these small insulation problems are only a minor part of the problem and that I’m addressing the problem holistically by spending considerable time thinking deeply about all the ways that a solution can be reached.  I’ve considered the thermodynamic aspects of the problem.  The psychological ramifications of the fear of cold.  The physiological mechanisms by which the human body adapts to hypothermia.  The cultural involvement of cold in the human industries that are called clothing and shelter.  The quantum meaning of absolute zero.  And finally, the latest bill from the heating oil company.  All these things I showed her and admonished her to have patience and faith in my stewardship of the Compound’s Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (U).  None of this registered with her at all.  She made certain primitive Sicilian gestures with her face and hand that I won’t dignify with detail.  Suffice it to say they were not helpful in the least.  I’m going out tomorrow for other reasons.  But I may also pick up some weatherstripping.  Maybe.

I was recently in a discussion about General Relativity with a friend.  The question of the curvature of space came up.  I told him I’ve never been convinced of the idea that mass curves space-time.  I stated that what is the difference if gravity bends the path of light and matter when it comes close to an object like the sun but space is unaffected?  How would we know the difference?  After all, how the hell can you bend something that isn’t even there?  It’s empty space.  Now sure, particles are always popping into existence because of quantum effects.  But by definition those things aren’t empty space they’re matter.  So how the hell can something that’s nothing bend?  Anyway, after the argument got us nowhere, I got hold of a book on general relativity and started reading it.  But my mathematical skills have degraded so I’ve had to break out a book on vector analysis to try and remember what tensor notation means.  Oh, my aching head.  I had an old advanced calculus test from my undergraduate days that would be very helpful on some points but then I remembered I threw it out (stupidly) about thirteen years ago when I moved.  I was going to buy it used and was amazed how expensive text books have gotten.  Yikes!

So anyway, I’m ensconced with the Kronecker delta, the curl and the Laplacian.  And I think I’ve made a big mistake.  I predict by the end I’ll have nothing but a murky idea of the meaning of the proofs of relativity but no explanation as to why we would think of space as being curved.  I think the idea that space is curved is just a figure of speech.  The reality is “space’ goes on endlessly in every direction.  I don’t think it loops back around behind us or anything like that.  It just keeps going.  It’s the same as physicists saying that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang.  Well, what about five seconds before that?

So here I am with my cave man cosmogeny and cosmology trying to relearn Einstein’s equations (at my age!).  Well, why not?  Trump’s fixing the country.  The least I can do is straighten out the theoretical physicists.  Camera Girl! Where’s my slide rule?