#cosmic inflation
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Physics Friday #15 [DWQ]: Multiverse theories
Preamble: What is DWQ?
This is another mini-series that will be ongoing. Similar to opinion posts, there is another type of post that I want to explore.
DWQ - Dealing with Quacks (alternatively, Crackpots or Nuts)
Both crackpots and quacks are unified by what they do. They propose there is something "fundamentally wrong with physics" and that they have this new theory that will change everything.
Their theory is about some fundamental truth with the universe. That the "physics establishment" is constantly attempting to chase ridiculous theories because they don't want to accept reality.
A crackpot is someone who generally has expertise in physics, or a related field like chemistry or engineering. Often they are motivated by a desire for fame.
A quack is someone who has no experience in the field, often with a monetary interest in what they are selling.
"Nuts", which is short for "religious nuts" are those who promote their ideas out of faith and a desire to spread their beliefs. They are more likely to strawman existing ideas first.
I hope that you, the reader, can already understand why I don't like these people. They muddy the waters, mess around with science communication, and give the profession a bad rep. They also lie and pedal disinformation, which ends up acting as a gateway to more serious conspiracy theories within the medical or political realm.
It's also important to identify that this acts on a scale. Technically, some string theorists are a lite form of crackpot - particularly in the way they present their theories and ideas to the public.
But they are significantly more respectable than a flat-earther, or a self-help guru, or a evangelical apologist.
The Multitude of Multiverse theories, or the MultiMultiverse
Multiverse theor(ies) are usually strawmans made by religious fanatics. Think PragerU as a great example.
The argument goes like this:
Scientists have no empirical explanation for fine tuning or the reason for the existence of the universe
In order to explain it, they constructed multiverse theory to explain the source of it
By occam's razor, the simpler argument is the existence of a creator entity, that fine-tuned things for us
Of course you can see how bad the arguments are. The problem is of course that science hasn't accepted any multiverse theory.
Multiverse theories are neat explanations or consequences of other theories, but they are either limited in their explanatory power, or their efficacy to test.
But what are the multiple multiverse theories? Here's three that people claim are multiverse theories:
Many worlds interpretation (a QM thing, and only a multiverse theory in pop culture)
Inflation multiverse theory (one possible consequence of the cosmic inflation hypothesis)
Just an actual multiverse theory (arguable cosmic inflation can lie here)
Many Worlds Interpretation
I've already run through the main gambit of what the Everett interpretation is, so I'm going to tackle this from a pop sci perspective.
When you were younger, you might've heard that the many worlds interpretation literally means many worlds. That with every decision you make, you create a new seperate branching reality. And that multiple realities can simultaneously exist.
Of course, there is an issue with this. Mainly that there aren't multiple realities - there is just one reality, in a superposition of states.
This superposition dictates there is one reality, just that this reality is probabilistic. These realties aren't separated by physical space. It's just one big 'wavefunction'.
Decisions in the many worlds interpretations are also examples of when pop sci goes wrong. It's not necessarily the religious nuts who cause this misconception.
What causes more splits in the wave function is the interactions within it. When an electron collides with a positron, when a chemical in your brain goes from one end to the other. Interaction is what creates these splits.
Technically, decisions are caused by the interactions between electrical signals in our brain, and us making a decision often involves interacting with the world around us. This is how the misconception arises, but the reality is that the split occurs well before and well after a choice is made.
Of course, it's important to state that, the many worlds interpretation is still not the "correct" interpretation. What it posits hasn't been proven.
Inflation Multiverse theory
Inflation theory in itself is already a bit on the rocks in terms of an explanation of why our universe is the way it is. There isn't really any way we can use GR/the standard model to explain why inflation happened. At least, without having to add an extra field or constant in our equations.
Generally, inflation is explained using the addition of a new inflaton field, which in the higher temperatures of the early universe, caused a rapid expansion of spacetime.
This rapid expansion is generated by the field living in a heightened energy state.
At some point, the field reaches a sudden drop-off, at which point the expansion rate suddenly slows down to our expected GR level. The inflaton field then remains at a local minima.
Where does the Multiverse theory come into this?
The drop-off of the inflaton field is not universal. It only occurs at particular points in spacetime. This creates a 'bubble' of space that slowly expands in comparison to the surrounding ocean of space that is rapidly expanding.
We exist in one of these bubbles, which expands at a normal rate. But we aren't the only bubble.
There could be several bubbles surrounding us. All separated by physical space that expands at incredible rates. These bubbles create an effective multiverse.
It's not technically a multiverse because every bubble is still in one single physical universe.
Generally, this version of inflation multiverse theory is better accepted as it has inflation theory to back it up. But it's still not provable, so it's not regarded as truth.
The actual Multiverse theories
There are several multiverse theories. But the key thread linking the other multiverses, is that there is no physical way to traverse the space in-between worlds, and that each universe is seperate in beyond a physical capacity.
I can't go into many different multiverse theories, because the main point is that they're all either bullshit or thought experiments.
One example is the "temporal multiverse theory" which states that time is actually a 3-dimensional quantity, were our multiverses are caused by separations in time.
When you go back in time and alter the past, you end up in an alternate timeline future. This is a common way to interpret most time travel movies or scenarios.
Another is the "10-dimension" theory. There are 3 dimensions of space, 3 dimensions of time, and 3 dimensions of "universe". What is this universe dimension? Well it's effectively supposed to be an altering of the fundamental physical parameters.
The problem is that we don't think that the universe happens to perfectly have three degrees of freedom in it's construction.
The 10th dimension is usually unexplained in this theory.
So what was that fundamentalist strawman about?
There is an idea in physics called "quantum darwinism". This theory basically states that from the many worlds interpretation, there will be one probabilistic reality where human consciousness lives in. And thus that version of reality will be the one we see, as it was fit for human life.
This principle can be extended to various different versions of multiverse theory. That out of the many possible realities, we observe the reality that created the perfect conditions for human life.
This argument, that the universe was predisposed to observation, because it had to circularly, is called the anthropic principle. It can be said that it's an extension of the copernican principle.
And that's it. That's the strawman. Of course, this form of darwinism is not really an actual theory, more a thought experiment.
Conclusion
This post is slightly less long than the other ones but still a lot. Oops! Ruh roh!
Anyways, I hope y'all like this post with a different topic. They will be rarer because I want to take my time tackling these types of posts. Please lmk if you think this post was informative or if you'd like to see more!
Next week will probably be on Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. Follow if you wanna see more!
#physics friday#stem#stemblr#academics#science#physics#astronomy#astrophysics#many worlds#quantum mechanics#cosmic inflation#I was going to use hashtag “inflation” but I then I thought about it#multiverse theory
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What’s a Cosmic String?
Nowadays, we have telescopes that detect not just light, but gravitational waves. We’ve already learned quite a bit about astrophysics from these telescopes. They observe ripples coming from colliding black holes, giving us a better idea of what kinds of black holes exist in the universe. But the coolest thing a gravitational wave telescope could discover is something that hasn’t been seen yet: a…
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#cosmic inflation#cosmology#gravity#Higgs#LHC#LIGO#mathematics#particle physics#quantum field theory#string theory#theoretical physics
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Parallel Universes: A Beginner's Guide to Reality's Funhouse Mirror
Alright, folks! Buckle up, because we’re about to embark on a cosmic rollercoaster ride through the wacky world of parallel universes. By the end of this, you’ll either be completely fascinated or questioning your life choices. Possibly both. Ready? Let’s go!
The What and Why of Parallel Universes
Imagine you’re at a mega-cinema complex with countless movie theaters. Each theater is playing a…
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#Alternate realities#Bubble universes#Cosmic inflation#Multiverse hypothesis#Parallel universes#Physics for beginners#Quantum mechanics#Schrödinger&039;s cat#Science humor#String theory
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Thinkfast is perhaps the Most Relationship of all time. Barely any on-page development. Presumably became canon simply because nothing else was happening there. Then every 16.5 months something with insane implications will happen with them and there will be no follow up so I’ll just have to think about that for months on end
#I Cannot Believe#they’re seemingly following up on that Patri-not stuff#AGAIN#every time it happens it’s like. ‘oh yeah that was weird. anyway I don’t think we need to worry about that again’#ages pass. then BAM. ‘don’t forget David’s ill conceived cosmic destiny. it’s still relevant it is STILL happening.’#😬#I wonder if. or when I guess. Tommy’s in SW&QS if David will even come up#I care about them so much. and for what? what do I get? they’re like one of those inflatable giant hammers#fun for a minute but ultimately hollow. mostly just for getting bonked on the head#David baby I fear for you#david alleyne#tommy shepherd#thinkfast#marvel#comics#Wednesday spoilers#dead x men
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‘Nope’ 2022 Collection.
Acrylic statement necklaces inspired by Jordan Peele’s newest horror film, ‘Nope’. I guess it goes without saying that it left a massive impression on me lol
SHOP.
#personal#the idol collective#nope 2022#nope Jordan peele#nope movie#acrylic jewelry#horror art#horror jewelry#handmade jewelry#statement necklace#cosmic horror#eldritch horror#jean jacket#wacky inflatable tube man#horror movies
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*in the 2020s* he would do numbers on twitter
*in the 2010s* he would get shares on his blog
*in the 1990s* he would be a wiz on the multi-user dungeon
*in the 1950s* he would get ratings on the television
*in the 1930s* he would command the masses on the radio
*in the 1880s* he would do dots and dashes on the telegram
*in the 1790s* he would do arm signals on the semaphore
*in the 1600s* his prints would be distributed widely
*in the 1400s* he would sound the trumpet in battle
*in the 700s* his words would be passed down by oral tradition
*in the 300s* he would do smoke signals in the sky
*in the neolithic* his artifacts would enter the archeological record
*in the pliocene* his bones would be preserved in the sediment
*in the mezozoic* he would do permineralization in mineral rich groundwater
*in the paleoarchean* he would facilitate recombination of his genome
*in the hadean* his molecules would self replicate in the early ocean
*in the matter dominated era* his stellar nursery would collapse into a star and an orbiting cloud of dust
*in the cosmological dark ages* quantum fluctuations in his density would form the first cosmological structures
*10^-32 seconds after the big bang* his elementary particles would dominate in baryogenesis
*in the plank epoch* he would do cosmic inflation in the energy dense early universe
*10^-43 seconds after the big bang* he would be
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Metamorphoses: Violent Delights
As the creature’s grip tightened, Eris spat a tooth at its face, splattering the optics with a mix of saliva, blood, and shards of other teeth. Her fist swung and slammed into the side of its head; the first blow sent sparks scattering, and the second resulted in her hand piercing through the other side.
Silence descended as she lay sprawled on the ground, her legs bent at unnatural angles. The remaining quartet gawked, one shaking, poised with an arrow ready to loose. A series of sickening pops and ghostly cracks echoed, followed by a string of untranslatable Turian curses she’d learnt from Nihlus.
Then she rose, shrieking and ready to go.
The arrow pierced her in the right shoulder. Laughing, she yanked it out and broke a blade from the bots arm. Guts spilt like ribbons as she moved in a blur again, carving each one as she passed.
From the look on Lawson’s face, she realises that any comprehension she thought she had of who Eris was from vids, files and interviews, she was sorely mistaken.
He finally asks. “You have no idea what she might be capable of now, do you?”
To him, the notion is inconsequential; he would never be in her sight lines. He couldn’t say the same of Cerberus or anyone so much as tangentially connected to it.
#mass effect fanfic#mass effect fanfiction#femshep#canon divergence#mass effect#renegade shepard#earthborn shepard#ceberus mass effect#nihlus kryik#eris shepard#Miranda Lawson#cosmic inflation series
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PLAYING THE GAME | PJS
cw - reader can fit into jay’s clothes, a bit of obsession, yandere behavior, oral sex (f), unprotected sex, creampie
∘₊✧─── 𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓸𝓻𝓼 𝓭𝓸 𝓷𝓸𝓽 𝓲𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓽 ───✧₊∘
football player!jay is the epitome of perfect. he’s good looking, talented, and popular. from the moment he stepped on campus, he was considered a king among his peers. the star athlete of his college who has it all, except the thing that he wants the most in this world — you.
it’s a complete surprise for football player!jay when he finds himself falling for you. maybe it’s life’s cosmic joke that he has a hallway crush who never looks his way, who directs that pretty smile at every person she sees except him, who doesn’t care that he’s the campus heartthrob. it’s all very devastating to him because he spends so much time pining for you in spite of you not noticing him.
this goes on until football player!jay can’t take it anymore. he boldly takes a seat next to you in class on a random day. the smile he directs at you as he introduces himself to you is charming and attractive. you’re floored by his cute display because he says this to you like you don’t know who he is when of course you do.
football player!jay doesn’t know that, though. because you still just give him a polite smile and then focus on the lesson the rest of the class. for some reason, it just makes him want you more. so for the next few weeks he makes the biggest effort to get close to you.
football player!jay treats you so sweetly and gently. he always gets you coffee in the morning and walks you to all his classes. somewhere along the way, you started to look forward to sitting next to him in class. you two become real friends, but it’s not enough for him. while you’re very friendly and open to spending time with him, you don’t ever respond to him flirting with you. and on one of the mornings he brings you your coffee, he finally figures out why.
it’s really hard not to crush the cup in his hands when he sees you talking to a ta notorious for fucking students. the way you shyly laugh and smile at that sleazy loser makes football player!jay’s blood boil. as he works through his rage and jealousy, you saunter over to him without knowing he’s practically seething.
“you close with that guy?” it’s a casual question that hides the animosity he feels.
“i’m getting to know him.” you say as you take a sip of the coffee he bought for you.
“just be careful, babe.” jay says as he throws an arm around your shoulder. he squeezes you closer to his side, loving how you feel against him. “he fucks around a lot.”
it’s the first doubt he plants in your mind. he can literally see you starting to feel turned off, and he has to hide his smirk. football player!jay’s plan doesn’t end there. it’s fairly easy to convince his slutty ex to fuck the ta under the guise that they might possibly get back together. she didn’t expect it to end with both of them being kicked out of the university after being caught.
football player!jay feels a little bad to see you upset, but he’s ultimately happy that you run into his arms after his plan is complete. that night he spends hours eating you out, licking and sucking on your pretty little pussy until you literally can’t take it anymore. he feels like he’s on top of the world when he asks you to be at his next game and you say yes.
the sight of you adorned in football player!jay’s jersey that has his number and his last name plastered on the back only deepens his feelings for you. after he leads his team to victory, you run down and jump into his arms. he easily catches you and spins you around, his ego more inflated than it ever has been. your sweet voice congratulates him, and it makes his dick throb when you demand to go back to his place so you can give him his prize.
it all feels like a dream when football player!jay has you in his bed, kissing you deeply as your scent and taste invade his senses. he groans into your mouth, slowly teasing your entrance with his leaking tip. his pupils are blown wide as he slowly slides his cock deep inside of you. your moans are so cute that jay has to stop multiple times to prevent himself from cumming right then and there.
“fuck, baby.” jay moans before he starts licks and suck on your neck, leaving his marks on you. “you feel so fucking good.”
you’re whimpering and moaning underneath him, locking your legs around his hips to push him deeper inside you. football player!jay had never felt better than he does now with your sweet pussy sucking him in, clamping down on him and massaging his aching cock with your swollen walls. his thrusts start to pick up speed, chasing the addicting feeling of fucking you.
“harder!” you squeal against jay’s lips. “fuck me harder!”
football player!jay angles your hips up, allowing him to press his leaking head against the soft spot that makes you see starts. you clench down even tighter around him until it feels like you’re suffocating his cock. he swears under his breath, panting heavily against your lips. jay’s thrusts are rough and insatiable, pounding into you as an indescribable pleasure consumes you both.
“so fucking tight — all for me.”
jay’s growl makes the coil in your belly snap. you moan out his name as you cum all over his cock. he groans along with you, sloppily fucking back into you as his own orgasm hits. thick ropes of cum paint your silky walls, effectively marking you as his in the most primal way possible.
football player!jay won’t ever get enough of you clinging to him while you moan his name so prettily. he’s gently rubbing soothing circles on your throbbing clit as you start to come down from your high. the smile he directs at you is so pretty and endearing that you have to pull him down for another kiss.
as you two lay in his bed after, football player!jay presses a sweet kiss to your head. your sleeping form cuddles closer to him, and his heart swells. because now that he’s had you, no one is going to take you away from him. ever.
#kumawaii.exe#enhypen smut#jay smut#park jongseong smut#enhypen x reader#enhypen fic#jay enhypen smut#jay x reader#park jeongseong smut#enha smut#enha x reader
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The Most Anthropic of All Possible Worlds
The Most Anthropic of All Possible Worlds
Today, we’d call Liebniz a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher. As a mathematician, Liebniz turned calculus into something his contemporaries could actually use. As a physicist, he championed a doomed theory of gravity. In philosophy, he seems to be most remembered for extremely cheaty arguments.
Free will and determinism? Can’t it just be a coincidence?
I don’t blame him for this.…
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#cosmic inflation#cosmology#history of science#mathematics#particle physics#philosophy of science#quantum mechanics#string theory#theoretical physics
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In all your findings, have you been able to come across cow beasts? Or beasts with cow parts? I've been looking myself and have been empty-handed so far.
The Minotaur is fairly popular, so I'm assuming you don't want any bulls in there? There's a lot of bull in mythology...
If you want explicitly "cow" or "cow parts", there's the cosmic ice-licking cow Audhumla from Norse mythology, the sea cows with inflated bladders on their noses from Iceland, sea cows in general, the Cuero or "Cowhide" from Chile, the Butatsch Cun Ilgs or "Cow's Stomach" from Switzerland...
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hello! i've got some GROUNDBREAKING space news for you!
scientists have uncovered evidence for a gravitational wave background (GWB) in our universe, and the way they went about it is fascinating.
To fully understand what's going on here, we need to go into a bit of background information.
First of all: what are gravitational waves? gravitational waves are often called 'ripples' in spacetime, often caused by extremely energetic processes such as black holes colliding, or two neutron stars orbiting each other closely.
So, how did scientists figure this out? They used 67 pulsars (known as the Pulsar Timing Array) throughout the Milky Way, practically creating a galaxy-sized telescope in order to study this.
Pulsars are the extremely dense cores of massive stars, left over after they go supernova. These are fascinating on their own, but for this project, they had an essential feature: Pulsars rapidly rotate (think up to hundreds of rotations per second), spewing radiation out in pulses from their magnetic poles. For some pulsars, these radiation jets cross Earth's line of sight, and we get incredibly constant bursts of radio signals, which can be catalogued and used as a sort of standard, universal clock.
Here is a link to a gif showing the rotation of a pulsar. Please be warned for flashing and eyestrain.
For 15 years, a team of astronomers working for the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), used radio telescopes around the globe to track minuscule changes in the signal patterns from pulsars. The changes they found are due to the slight movement of spacetime between us and the pulsars, stretching and compressing the paths of their radio waves as extremely low frequency gravitational waves pass through the universe (yes, that includes you. your atoms, as well as the atoms making up everything around you, are very slowly shifting position, dancing along to the heartbeat of the universe).
At the moment, scientists are still debating what could have caused this gravitational wave background, but some there are some leading theories: the GWB could be caused by trillions of binary black hole systems (black holes orbiting each other) throughout the universe. It could also be due to cosmic inflation, or even the big bang itself. Scientists just don't know yet, but the opportunities this discovery opens up are incredible.
The knowledge of the GWB could help us better understand the formation of early galaxies, or even help us understand the origin of the universe.
#aspaceinthecosmos#space#astronomy#outer space#just jupiter#astrophysics#gravity#gravitational waves#physics#pulsars#black holes#neutron stars#the universe#LIGO
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the moon and all her stars
[a deleted scene from 23.5, episode 6]
Because she was an alien, people expected Aylin to enjoy looking at the stars, but the truth was that she didn’t. Staring at the heavens far above her only made her feel homesick. She preferred observing from the safety of her bedroom instead. So when Luna began fiddling with her projector and set loose a constellation of stars upon her ceiling, Aylin was more than happy to lay on the floor with her and take in their cosmic beauty together.
The stars above her might not be real, but they hurt less than the real things.
“Do these stars have names?” Luna asked, pointing randomly to one of the bright lights above them. Although the stars on the ceiling did not mimic any real constellations, Aylin had lain just like this often enough to have memorized each one. She had named them herself and wrote their histories in her heart.
“Of course,” she said
“Then what’s that one called? The big one right in the middle.”
Aylin smiled because that one was her most favorite. “Home,” she said. She felt Luna turn to look at her, but she didn’t say anything, so Aylin just kept staring up at the stars. Eventually, Luna looked back at the ceiling.
“Does your planet have any moons?”
“Yes. One.”
“Well now it has two.”
Aylin smiled as the projector continued to spin, washing the room in an ethereal glow of purples and blues and pinks. No one else had ever been in here with her before. It felt nice to not be alone.
Eventually, though, even Aylin had to admit that it was time for bed. The stars were more beautiful in her dreams anyway.
“Good night, Human Senior,” she said, standing and flipping the projector back over to its usual setting. A glowing white moon returned to its rightful place in the middle of her ceiling and staring at its familiar craters, she felt content. “You can sleep on the floor.”
“Oh!” Luna argued as Aylin climbed into the twin bed she shared with her inflatable alien friend, Puuan, and pulled the covers up to her neck. “But you didn’t even give me any blankets!”
“Moons don’t need blankets.”
“Then neither do aliens!”
The covers were pulled off of Aylin. She sat up, shocked to find that they were now clutched tightly in Luna’s hand. Luna smirked down at her and when Aylin tried to reach for the blankets, she snatched them away.
“Give those back!”
“If you want the blankets, then you have to share the bed.”
“But there’s not room on the bed,” Aylin argued. With her and Puuan lying side by side, there was no room for anyone else.
“Sure there is. You just have to tell Puuan to sleep on the floor. He won’t mind. He doesn’t get cold.”
“But this is Puuan’s bed!”
“Well then I hope Puuan can keep you warm,” Luna said and then laid down on the cold, hard floor and wrapped herself in Aylin’s blankets.
Aylin tried to wrench them away from her, but Luna was holding on too tightly. She screamed out in frustration but, refusing to admit defeat, laid back down, wrapping her arms and legs around her alien friend, searching for warmth that wasn’t there. She looked at Puuan and then she looked at Luna.
“Fine!” she cried, setting Puuan down on the ground next to the bed. “You can sleep up here with me.”
Luna preened and sprang up as if Aylin had never rejected her at all. Then she climbed into bed next to her and threw the covers over them both.
Aylin was immediately struck by just how small her bed was. She’d never realized it before, but with Luna pressed right up against her side, she was immediately overwhelmed. She didn’t like when people touched her—not usually—but she was surprised to find that this time, she didn’t mind. It was a new sensation, but it was nice. Like a glass of water on a hot summer day.
“See,” Luna said, turning onto her side to look Aylin in the eyes. They were so close that her nose was almost touching Aylin’s cheek. “Isn’t this nice?”
“You’re very close,” Aylin said.
“Yes, about that,” Luna agreed and then reached up and pushed Aylin’s antennas to the side so that they were still on her head, but lopsided. “Much better. Now they’re not hitting me. Good night!”
She turned onto her back and closed her eyes, immediately pretending to sleep as if she worried Aylin might kick her out if she stayed awake any longer. She wasn’t entirely wrong to think so. Aylin had considered it. But she didn’t. Instead, she lay there, thinking about the moon and the sun and the stars and how she had never felt more at home than this.
She chose not to question it. She straightened her antenna back up and fell asleep with one moon above her and another by her side—a piece of space fallen down to Earth. Just like her.
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🔺The Guardian🔻
A wacky inflatable tube man & rainbow bunting to protect your neck from any eldritch beings you might encounter in the skies!
Featuring: Acrylic tube man with Swarovski Crystal, glass cut crystals, acrylic rainbow bunting, small Swarovski crystal accents, & a stainless steel chain.
Available in my SHOP this Sunday, 8pm EST 💛
#personal#the idol collective#nope film#nope movie#nope 2022#jordan peele#wacky inflatable tube man#the guardian#Jean jacket#horror art#horror movie#horror jewelry#handmade jewelry#acrylic jewelry#shop small#cosmic horror#eldritch horror
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MY LOVE IS A WEAPON THROWN ONTO THE OBLIVION OF YOUR BODY (taken from booklet of original art and essays by Sufjan Stevens, written to accompany his new album Javelin)
read essays ↓
1.MY LOVE
My first love was an involuntary sound – the music of the spheres – a subdued, white-noise shuddering of my heart, a fluster of hummingbird vibrations that I could taste in the prenatal hemispheres of my mouth, body against body and brain against brain, two conjoined selves conjuring an off-shore thunderstorm in the horizontal distance, dazzling with flashes of metallic music and elemental chaos in the safe harbor of my mother’s womb. There was no light and no dark, no semblance of simile or semaphore. There was only the blurred and audible presence of a distant and divine voice hovering above the waters where I balanced between the prism of absence and presence on an inflatable dirigible of sea foam, wandering into the oleaginous abyss with a half-smile of hazardry and wizardry – my maiden voyage into the “unbeknownst” of oblivion. For what did I really know at this point in my primordial mindlessness? Nothing at all. I was struck dumb, created from ignorance and ether, first without function or features, then without order or form. I was sensation and consciousness postponed, a wet and placid portion of monotonous fruit cut in quarters awaiting heaven’s blessing. My only occupation at this point was to occupy, be occupied, preoccupy, and prevail nature in a womb-world of benevolence and buoyancy. The music of the heartbeat of the universe danced me to sleep. Within this realm, I was love and life supreme, undivided by thought, word and deed, a small promise kept until the act of doing would undo me for good. My birth was my undoing. And then I was born into oblivion.
2.IS
I remember in college, falling in love for the first time, two spring months of rapture, residing on the tail end of a helium balloon. I was so giddy about everything: washing the dishes, tying my shoes, scrambling eggs, binding books, pulling berries off juniper trees. My infatuation had such an arrogant persuasion on the world around me. Everything as metaphor ascribed with romance. I remember, while mowing lawns on the college campus, finding an injured fledgling crow by the dining hall. I carried it to the biology lab, where we called a woman who ran an animal sanctuary from her home. She met us on a bike with a wicker basket. “You are doing the universe a great favor,” she said, holding the bird to her breast, like Mother Goose. The event provided endless fodder: for prose poems and folk songs and long conversations on the roof of the aspirin factory, where we got drunk on Boone’s Farm sangria, speculating on cosmic intentions and the order of the universe. So much meaning, so little time. I was young and dumb and in love. Guided by a perverse curiosity and a voracious sensation-of-the-imagination pivoting at the tip of my tongue, I marveled at the mysteries of life laid out before me, awaiting in the calm commotion between innocence and experience.
3.A WEAPON
And then experience pummeled me. Many years later, after the long-suffering exhaustion of life had driven me into the bleak underbelly of realism, my most profound thought was sad and static: that nothing really matters, nobody loves me, and loneliness would always be my most devoted companion. In my new sobering worldview, absent of love, I began to encounter everything as an object without meaning, without modifier. The homeless man selling day-old newspapers on the subway was just a homeless man selling day-old newspapers on the subway. There was no metaphor, no rapture, no cosmic intentions. I had to ask myself: does this make the man, the newspaper, the subway, or myself any less meaningful? No. Quite the opposite. For what resided in that substantial vacancy where I was always prone to symbolize the world to death is exactly what I needed right then: Opportunity. Presence of Mind. Peace On Earth. Stable Stoicism. Absence of Metaphor. Responsibility. And Hard Facts. That was my prayer: to shake off the doting artistry of an over-eager poet with a proclivity to create dreams from doldrums; to approach the world as a concrete object, a thing to be held, not a thing to behold, or allegorized; to remain at peace and in careful jurisprudence in spite of the resentful intonation of my overarching loneliness that devastated innocent bystanders with all the magic castles of the imagination. I told myself: I must snuff out the candle of candy-corn dreams. I must soldier on like a dead-end daydream undeterred. I must be steadfast in the stolid presence and essence of common sense and survival. I must be true to life internal and reside in resignation at last.
4.THROWN
My second love was less ecstatic, but more tragic: the “gift” of sight – an elemental flash of lightning, which struck me like a bag of metal shavings thrown out onto ice reflecting back at the centerpiece of my sternum. A sucker punch to the chest. My cold consciousness came into sharp focus, rattled by illuminating waves invading everything around me. The light was loud and extraordinary. And even with my eyes closed, my pupils began pontificating at the pornography of sight, and I was momentarily carved into madness. Seeing is believing is birth. I shuddered and shirked at the tangible evidence of something else – the others – the imposition of a sensation outside myself, in which everything was separated into opposable armies: the land from the waters, the air from the earth, the seasons from the doldrums, the seen from the unseen, sin from sainthood, light from dark, good from evil. Everything was put in its place by the curse of namesake. The world was now before me, beneath me, above me, and ultimately against me, a pressure foot pressed down on all sides. I felt a cold claustrophobia, empty and alone, trans-natal and tragic, baffled by the violence of this new environmental context. And to think I was just a silly beansprout of a thing shivering under the medical lights, squirming like an open earthworm, now tasked with this terrible act of naming. God gave me a pen and a pad of parchment paper. “Transcribe your feelings and your findings,” she said. “Do your thing. First thought, best thought.” I did as I was commanded, a dutiful sea urchin inching its way to the possibility of words and wisdom.
5.ONTO
A world without language was once the indication of certain death. Soundless, voiceless, nameless vapor. A typography of empty vessels. The void! But now, what of the tragedy of names, spoken into existence with the demystification of words? I was culprit and complicit, identifying all the divergences, differentiations, variations, permutations, diversities, dichotomies and double entendres. Categorizing the animals, cutting them down to size, organizing the parts of the body with the parts of speech, a fanatical grammar-game of possession, domination and death. I had to ask myself: Is this manner of identification in the name of higher knowledge even if it disregards purpose, analysis, and compassion (observation absent of intention)? And how could it be undertaken without idolatry and ulterior motive? I desired the objectivity of the photography of the baby-brain, whose fuzzy visionary reception was a delightful nebula of perfumed consciousness and joy. I wanted to see the world coherently and without discretion, discernment, reduction, and deduction – unintelligible intelligence. Instead I began to perceive how intimate knowledge generates prosperity (fullness) and progeny (fruitfulness) – of ideas and offspring. To be “made known” was to be consummated: “Adam knew Eve” – intercourse as discourse (knowledge as physical/sexual engagement). To know someone was to take possession (to gain access, in confidence and with confidentiality). The exchange would potentially unveil the secret knowledge between lovers (the nominative ordinances of arousal) – wherein posterity would become the observable antecedents of this sacred wisdom, and pleasure would be its misfortune (of infatuation and love, of chaos and order). My sexual discourse began to die a slow death of observation and objectification, a nonsense category of substances seen and deemed believable, predicating a cosmic break from the universe: a psychic rebirth, from which invisible things transformed into figures of speech, wherein figures of speech were left dead in the wake of rivulets and rivers, drowning in a molten waterfall of dread, where they would meet their maker in linguistic whimsy. My death was now new life. My reincarnation, a reverse sublimation. I was made known; therefore, I knew nothing.
6.THE
For a short time, my pet peeves were my shortcomings: dry skin in the morning – brushing off the bed sheets with bits of outer insulation from my body. Was I molting? I needed to drink more bitter herbs, I thought. I had chronic stomach pain, below the clavicle, a small fist of air. Sweet antacid, mint leaves, fennel seed tea. Invisible Anxiety. The pain in my leg: a hypochondriac’s dream. Soothing myself with palm oil and camphor. Small applications on the surface. At dinner with guests, supplementing aspirin with ice-water, saying very little otherwise, a friend agreed with everyone’s assessment: “Yes, sometimes you are cold and unfeeling. You could warm it up a little.” My apparent coolness – was it a matter of objective safety? That remote vacancy which I brought to every engagement, keeping the world at arm’s length, the anthropologist’s vantage point, sustaining the presumptive: was that my vocation – the judicious spectator, an odd outlier outlining all this activity while staying behind the line of sight? As the youngest sibling, I was always evaluating my older sisters with fierce judgment from the corner of the room, just out of reach: eavesdropping on phone conversations, catching glimpses of padded bras, curling irons, and maxi pads passed between casual doorways. Taking stock of the panoply of premature adulthood (teenage pregnancy), unruly rebellion (sneaking out at night), clumsy and combative excursions with our wicked step-mother (cat fights with elegantly finger-nailed fisticuffs). I watched from a dutiful distance, careful not to engage, harboring a catalog of tragicomic events and all their moral assessments in order to avoid the worst-case scenario for myself. I was in the world, but not of it. I learned from the mistakes of others: that I was nothing more than a mistake waiting to happen, potential energy. I learned from the mistletoe to keep watch overhead so as to avoid the dangling modifier of accidental affection. I learned from the stone in my shoe to keep walking through the pain with a staggering refrain in my step, a constant reminder of the brokenness of my body and the indefatigable self-loathing of my own self-consciousness.
7.OBLIVION
My third love was a surprise affection – ticklish touching and tender swaddles of terry towels and cotton cloth wrapped in armfuls of goose down feathers transfixed in the careful undertaking of childcare. A sensual delight! I was an object to be objectified, a thing to squeeze and prickle, caress and carry about in a breadbasket. I grew from a pinecone to a pine tree, from a newt to a dinosaur, from a poppy-seed to a poppy flower bursting with fireworks. This love then transferred its fornications onto something wet, wild and ornithological – a flying, feathery python ascending to its countenance as a bastion of bridegrooms in a flaming aviary chariot of leathery kisses all aimed at my elbows. Hope is a thing with bird feeders. So I watched the feathered fowl crowd around the seeds and suet, grubs and grains with dinosaur intensity, beaks and claws doing their vast prehistoric business with messy execution. My lovers cawed at their community of plumy mishaps like transcendental mother hens: nuthatch and creeper, tanager and titmouse, blue jay and junco gallivanting together like an armful of woolen throw blankets clapping the dust from their ornamental features. Our fairy dance of foreplay lasted for days. Cat calls as birdsong with balloons, iambic pentameter poems, chimes that rhymed with clanging crystals hung on fishing line, and all the fanciful costumes with sequins and fringe, flowered bell bottoms, metallic body suits, reggae music, ballroom dancing, charm bracelets, diamond rings, glimmering little earrings with fly-fishing ornaments, and, on the last day, a very long and serious monologue about global warming. Our lovemaking was quick and witty, a little slutty and clumsy – nothing more than a jaunt, a quick choreography of slaps and body slams, two pigeons in a mosh pit, working things out in juvenilia. Nature had done its work. Afterward we lounged together in the afterglow with soft pillow talk and dreams of nest eggs and parenting, protecting, foraging, feeding, and changing diapers, all the domestic labors of love. But for now, in a warm bird bath, sunning ourselves with a glistening glow, I could only think of the sweet bliss of here and now, the wetness of loving kisses on my nape, my neck, my back, my rump, my foreshortened wings and a sweet nectar nightcap. Hope is a thing deferred, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.
8.OF
My fourth love was peripatetic: a suitcase stored in an overhead bin on an airplane. Things beget things beget responsibilities. I procrastinated my life by traveling far from it. A day before the voyage, I stayed up late in the polar forces of the night, diligently packing the baggage on the couch, opened up like can of tuna fish, a glass of lemon juice on the nightstand (master cleanse), the Siamese cat washing itself, the dollar store dishes in the sink, my dirty clothes in a paper bag. The last time I had left for this kind of trip, my things were in boxes in one room on the second floor of a gated town house in God-knows-where, New York. Now everything had been transferred as in a swap meet, boxes upon boxes, things upon things, other voices, other rooms. The living room was a labyrinth of speculative journeys, a crossword puzzle of travel prompts. Outside, gale force winds rose to the occasion, knocking on the windows like unwanted guests. I imagined the weather overtaking everything in an apocalyptic frenzy: cups and saucers trembling in tongues, plastic wrap coming undone in a transparent wedding train, pillowcases falling over our heads like hard hats, ceiling fans circumnavigating the neighborhood like helicopter rides, the colored crayons on the kitchen shelf thrown asunder to make slapdash hieroglyphs all over the window panes, the mysterious penmanship of the gods! My mind was preoccupied by disaster, a force majeure, an act of God, a ball of yarn, and the four horses of the Apocalypse. I wanted nothing of it: this origami suitcase lifestyle of travel and transition. I wanted to be here and now. I wanted silence, solace, and stillness. I wanted the simplest of things: a bowl of vanilla ice cream, a warm bath, and a quiet place to sit and stitch my hand-crafted cross-stitch of rainbows and sailboats framing a sexy cartoon portrait of Dionne Warwick diligently working the lines for the Psychic Friends Network from way back in the 1990s, when every solution to every problem was just a phone call away.
9.YOUR
History repeats itself, defeats itself, cheats itself, berates and beats itself. I am not historic. I am histrionics. I must hate my mother and my father. I must hate myself and take up the cross and be born again. In this way, my fifth love was an immutable shadow following me with sticky tricks and schemes, a cancerous contamination of the mind that could only be cured with the deadly venom of a cone snail. I couldn’t quite shake it, the cobalt-blue memory of a ghost haunting my sophistry, a prescient reminder that the knowledge of faith and the substance of hope were right behind me this entire time (and not something to pursue, or follow, like an ornamental object on the horizon, dazzling, elusive and alive in the distant future). The Divine Inside was a “previously known encounter.” I could never see it face to face, but only feel it in my shadow, the former patterns of an aura left behind, pushing forward, pursuing, persuading, steering and navigating my memory through the valley of the shadow of death. I wanted so desperately to “have and to hold” the real substance of things (evidence!), the physical, intimate engagement with the body and the blood, which I actively sought out in transcendental activity, prayer and supplication, the sacraments, the feasts of the saints, a metaphysical substance to salivate and sublimate within the natural order of things. But this was a false pretense. God is not natural, but supernatural. The real material of divinity is ineffable, unassailable, unknowable, unutterable, and unreal. The evidence of providence is not within our line of sight, nor within our grasp, but instead beyond and behind our physical kinesphere. It is unapproachable, unspeakable, unobservable, and ultimately “erstwhile”. And yet still we continue to feel it “under our skin” and “within the universe” of our own personal history: The Past/The Passed/The Repossessed. God is our delayed consciousness – the nameless, faceless dichotomy of our secret truth. And we are made in its indistinguishable appearance. Therefore our own true “image” is without a name or a face – a baseless, shapeless cloud hovering above the waters, a countenance of empty atmosphere (signifying nothing) – a gothic apparition, a vision of love, a dance of the eternal travesty of life, a burrowing beetle of impenetrating curiosity. Digging for the true grit of life in the eternal dirt of the universe.
10.BODY
My last love was a kind of science fiction. I was out running errands at the mall when I saw a fleet of lampshades falling like flying saucers from the sky. The alien robots came to me in an escalating beam of light and said: “We come in peace! The obverse seeks to make its face shine upon you, while the inverse hides in shame.” They did their thing with my body, prodding and poking around for some good news, but at first I would have none of it. I struggled and squirmed under nylon restraints strapped onto a stainless steel operating table. I was a basket case of curmudgeonly vitriol, pointing out everything that was wrong with the world around me: Fossil fuels. Cancer. Money. Greed. Sales Tax. Frozen Yoghurt. Religion. Varicose Veins. Junk Mail. But the alien robots were unflappable. They said, “We just need a little DNA, not a diatribe,” while swabbing the insides of my mouth with a cottony Q-tip. Then, after careful intubation and a slow drip of aesthesia, I eased into the abyss. They removed my clothes and covered my body with a marshmallowy spray foam. They swaddled me into a warm cocoon of maroon goo, where I remained in stasis to the end of the ages, slowly resuming into the soft, pillowy features of my former self – pre-natal, premature, pre-conceived – a slippery and succulent primordial membrane of soupy warmth and illuminating agency awaiting, once again, the cosmic journey laid out before me like a yellow-brick road of possibilities – the secret oblivion of love, the “unbeknownst!” Within this pinprick vision, I saw a tapestry of afterbirth in afterglow as an addendum to an immaculate after-thought of rapturous joy. I was born-again in fullness and truth. I was a peanut. I was a pretzel. I was a pan-fried shrimp. I was pandemonium personified. I was once again myself waiting to happen again and again and again and again and again … until the end.
— Sufjan Stevens
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HOW IS OUR UNIVERSE EXPANDING??
Blog#308
Saturday, June 24th, 2023
Welcome back,
The universe was born with the Big Bang as an unimaginably hot, dense point. When the universe was just 10-34 of a second or so old — that is, a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in age — it experienced an incredible burst of expansion known as inflation, in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. During this period, the universe doubled in size at least 90 times, going from subatomic-sized to golf-ball-sized almost instantaneously.
The work that goes into understanding the expanding universe comes from a combination of theoretical physics and direct observations by astronomers. However, in some cases astronomers have not been able to see direct evidence — such as the case of gravitational waves associated with the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang.
A preliminary announcement about finding these waves in 2014 was quickly retracted, after astronomers found the signal detected could be explained by dust in the Milky Way.
According to NASA, after inflation the growth of the universe continued, but at a slower rate. As space expanded, the universe cooled and matter formed. One second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons, photons and neutrinos.
During the first three minutes of the universe, the light elements were born during a process known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Temperatures cooled from 100 nonillion (1032) Kelvin to 1 billion (109) Kelvin, and protons and neutrons collided to make deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. Most of the deuterium combined to make helium, and trace amounts of lithium were also generated.
For the first 380,000 years or so, the universe was essentially too hot for light to shine, according to France's National Center of Space Research (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, or CNES).
he heat of creation smashed atoms together with enough force to break them up into a dense plasma, an opaque soup of protons, neutrons and electrons that scattered light like fog.
Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for atoms to form during the era of recombination, resulting in a transparent, electrically neutral gas, according to NASA. This set loose the initial flash of light created during the Big Bang, which is detectable today as cosmic microwave background radiation.
However, after this point, the universe was plunged into darkness, since no stars or any other bright objects had formed yet.
About 400 million years after the Big Bang, the universe began to emerge from the cosmic dark ages during the epoch of reionization. During this time, which lasted more than a half-billion years, clumps of gas collapsed enough to form the first stars and galaxies, whose energetic ultraviolet light ionized and destroyed most of the neutral hydrogen.
Although the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity, about 5 or 6 billion years after the Big Bang, according to NASA, a mysterious force now called dark energy began speeding up the expansion of the universe again, a phenomenon that continues today.
A little after 9 billion years after the Big Bang, our solar system was born.
The Big Bang did not occur as an explosion in the usual way one think about such things, despite one might gather from its name. The universe did not expand into space, as space did not exist before the universe, according to NASA. Instead, it is better to think of the Big Bang as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe. The universe has not expanded from any one spot since the Big Bang — rather, space itself has been stretching, and carrying matter with it.
Originally published on space.com
COMING UP!!
(Wednesday, June 28th, 2023)
"IS THE MOON RUSTING??"
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🔥literary criticism
Close reading and thematic analysis of fiction is, like, fun. It's a great hobby! But it's really not much more than that. The entire field has a truly cosmically inflated view of its own importance, with numerous negative downstream effects.
(To the extent that any books can be usefully dissected to, like, tell you the secrets of modern society, it's bloated mass-market nonfiction.)
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