Thank you, Donald Trump.\u00a0 Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.\u00a0 I feel I\u2019ve been paid back for any trouble I\u2019ve taken on your behalf in the last four years.\u00a0 Hallelujah and amen.<\/p>\n
Okay now it\u2019s 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\u2019s going to do.\u00a0 Have at it, boys.\u00a0 Give \u2018em hell.<\/p>\n
So, what\u2019s for me to talk about tonight?\u00a0 Well, I\u2019ve got to talk about what\u2019s chasing around my head tonight.\u00a0 First off, I\u2019m grumbling about how damn cold it is today.\u00a0 The heating system at the Compound is undersized.\u00a0 Or maybe the insulation should be the focus.\u00a0 When the outside temperature dips below zero Fahrenheit, it won\u2019t hold a set point above seventy.\u00a0 And that\u2019s too bad because I hate being cold inside my own home.\u00a0 Camera Girl holds me directly responsible because I never put the weatherstripping around two of the external doors.\u00a0 I explained to her that these small insulation problems are only a minor part of the problem and that I\u2019m addressing the problem holistically by spending considerable time thinking deeply about all the ways that a solution can be reached.\u00a0 I\u2019ve considered the thermodynamic aspects of the problem.\u00a0 The psychological ramifications of the fear of cold.\u00a0 The physiological mechanisms by which the human body adapts to hypothermia.\u00a0 The cultural involvement of cold in the human industries that are called clothing and shelter.\u00a0 The quantum meaning of absolute zero.\u00a0 And finally, the latest bill from the heating oil company.\u00a0 All these things I showed her and admonished her to have patience and faith in my stewardship of the Compound\u2019s Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (U).\u00a0 None of this registered with her at all.\u00a0 She made certain primitive Sicilian gestures with her face and hand that I won\u2019t dignify with detail.\u00a0 Suffice it to say they were not helpful in the least.\u00a0 I\u2019m going out tomorrow for other reasons.\u00a0 But I may also pick up some weatherstripping.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n
I was recently in a discussion about General Relativity with a friend.\u00a0 The question of the curvature of space came up.\u00a0 I told him I\u2019ve never been convinced of the idea that mass curves space-time.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 How would we know the difference?\u00a0 After all, how the hell can you bend something that isn\u2019t even there?\u00a0 It\u2019s empty space.\u00a0 Now sure, particles are always popping into existence because of quantum effects.\u00a0 But by definition those things aren\u2019t empty space they\u2019re matter.\u00a0 So how the hell can something that\u2019s nothing bend?\u00a0 Anyway, after the argument got us nowhere, I got hold of a book on general relativity and started reading it.\u00a0 But my mathematical skills have degraded so I\u2019ve had to break out a book on vector analysis to try and remember what tensor notation means.\u00a0 Oh, my aching head.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was going to buy it used and was amazed how expensive text books have gotten.\u00a0 Yikes!<\/p>\n
So anyway, I\u2019m ensconced with the Kronecker delta, the curl and the Laplacian.\u00a0 And I think I\u2019ve made a big mistake.\u00a0 I predict by the end I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0 I think the idea that space is curved is just a figure of speech.\u00a0 The reality is \u201cspace\u2019 goes on endlessly in every direction.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it loops back around behind us or anything like that.\u00a0 It just keeps going.\u00a0 It\u2019s the same as physicists saying that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang.\u00a0 Well, what about five seconds before that?<\/p>\n
So here I am with my cave man cosmogeny and cosmology trying to relearn Einstein\u2019s equations (at my age!).\u00a0 Well, why not?\u00a0 Trump\u2019s fixing the country.\u00a0 The least I can do is straighten out the theoretical physicists.\u00a0 Camera Girl! Where\u2019s my slide rule?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thank you, Donald Trump.\u00a0 Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263,3545,6],"tags":[2441,4399,4772,165,4773],"class_list":["post-31987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-science","category-trump","tag-albert-einstein","tag-astrophysics","tag-general-relativity","tag-science","tag-the-curvature-of-space"],"yoast_head":"\n