One of the enjoyments of life is reading the science
information to be found in The New York Times, often in the Monday science
section but also sometimes in the magazine or just daily if the information is
noteworthy – it gives any layperson willing to read it an expanding sense of
the universe which we all know now is expanding, one of the forces involved
being the Dark Matter.
I like this name, Dark
Matter, even better than the misnomer “The God Particle” which some
journalist applied to the Higgs Boson, another tiny elusive thing which we are
spending billions to confirm at the Cern particle accelerator located about 900
feet underground in mostly Switzerland although it overlaps in to France a
little bit. The 27 Kilometer circular
tube is powered by huge magnets which fire in a sequence to pull particles to
near light speed before they are thrown at targets, bursting apart matter into
component pieces which last for fractions of a second only measurable with
electronic eyes and high speed computers. We are truly peering into what used
to be the dark.
The Physics
of Memories
Time, how can I know you besides as
Destroyer?
you spill my life
into the dirt,
you are gasoline, evaporating me,
I should strike a match to better know your violence,
how can you be a dimension
when you give no space,
pushing me relentlessly ahead
to the cliff?
I will visit Switzerland to see the Ring
where they hope to destroy you within
twenty-seven kilometers of gizmos wired
to choke the truth out of you,
maybe then I can again know childhood
instead of seeing the monsters of congress and my life
at work at nothing in the attic of my mind,
burning my soul to ashes,
tell me --
is this Alice or us in Wonderland?
I wonder,
tipsy-topsey,
electrons in two places at once,
gravity called a weak force
and Time, you are called out,
your metronome stumbling
on sister Velocity –
is fair foul and foul fair –
our sphere a Macbethian deceit?
high-energy physics has me lost --
I think Einstein must have been Shakespeare’s bitch
for all the witches he has spawned,
in the catacombs of Cern now
the alchemists rending the cloth
looking for threads, nearly tearing time apart,
there I would dance around the caldron
to hear the witches speak of
cat mews and hedge-pig squeals,
of quarks and things,
‘tis time, ‘tis time they would sing
and I would throw the eye of Newton in ‘til
‘tis time for Alice
for only the mad hatter gets to murder time,
oh, Time for me you are gasoline
spilled,
vanishing constantly yet never stopped
so Time, I ask you for my relief,
you being quite close to the Dark Matter
and other things, yet
I think only the White Queen
can put me backward to
before my wars,
to a first kiss,
a hairless chin,
until I will suckle mother again
and disappear in her shrunken womb,
I will be the light
reflected in parents eyes,
pure joy
but there are no electromagnets to return me
‘tho those witches and wizards of Cern
unravel the cloth and see
the particles of gods,
things on the dark side
of matters (where I think some of my memories go) –
this, Time, is your dimension,
those memories of things past,
you, forward, ticking at your own pace
and I back and forth
like a fly in that collider machine,
scattered by it all
until I am stuck at tea-time
while the wizards hurl their beams
at light’s slowed clock –
let the white queen accuse me daily
of memories in only one direction
but of that I am glad,
as glad as anything to be found
in that huge dark Ring.
Recently one theoretical physicist, Lee Smolin, proposed
that among the Strange Things
(emphasis mine) that we should consider is that the Einsteinian concept of the
relativity of time may be in conflict with how time may behave, if we can
anthropomorphize time, in the evolving universe. In fact he postulates that the
universe, to sustain life, has its own anthropomorphic qualities, evolving
within the narrow ranges to sustain life, provide black holes, and forming stars, and that only by looking outside of
the current definitions of modern physics theories can we explain some of the
relationships between things; for example, how can an electron exist in two
places at the same time or how can one particle appear to be tied to another
simultaneously, as though there is no distance between them because one effects
the other without any lapse in time?
Smolin proposes that the universe has a universal time which is not
subject to Einstein’s relativity and that the laws of physics and how the
universe operates are evolutionary, seeking efficiencies like water runs
downhill.
Here is the real kicker – Smolin says that every particle in
the universe is in casual relationship to every other particle. Does this sound like a modification to the
adage that when a butterfly takes off in South America it changes the weather
in New York?
Weather
Theory
do you feel the vibrations, the flutter of those wings?
touch them to know the butterfly dust
on your skin,
thousands of miles away,
that is why the wind blows here.
But as a poet I love this stuff. How do I address the mysterious without
wandering into the spiritual? To me if
anything stinks of anthropomorphic application, it is the spiritual where we
tiny short-lived animals ascribe all kinds of our species’ characteristics upon
causality, applying simplistic caveman answers to the strange things, almost as
though water, in order to flow downhill, must have a brain or have been powered
by the thought of something which at least resembles us enough for us to
describe it being sentient and having influence over the world and us as kind of
a super animal or super human. And yes,
I did enjoy reading the Superman comics as a kid.
So where does that leave us with the Strange Things? How do we explain what is going on?
First of all I think our quest for how the universe
functions is mostly going to entertain us as it allows the creation of smaller
transistors and so forth. Better living
through Bosons. But also as we dispense
with myths and beliefs thousands of years old (is that really possible in this
world?), we should be able to both move forward as a people toward some more
realistic understanding of things, such as the fact that the universe is
indifferent to us, and also we should paradoxically go backward – to return to
the honesty of sensing things as they are to us as a bunch of animals who
think. We should be able to understand that
the factors which determine our behaviors are just about everything, almost as
though Smolin’s theories of causality are confirming astrology and Jupiter’s
position relative to Mars is why you are on a tear today (just joking). I prefer to stick a little closer to home and
point out that our evolution has created us as sensitive creatures working
below the level of conscious thought to survive, so we catch our mega-data much
as NSA does and we process it for clues underground, in the dark, and then,
depending on who we are, things swim to the surface and are done –
rationalized, performed, ingested as our free-will-determined behaviors.
Do you like stories of empathetic behaviors? People behaving
altruistically? Dogs and cats
together? Let’s talk about science and
evolution. Why shouldn’t free will mean
that we all just go for it and get everything we want with the most powerful
winning all? Isn’t that what is
happening today with the 1% getting richer?
Why then do people in need give generously to others?
Think about single celled creatures slowly getting together
and forming a union for survival. It is
now known that slime mold, for example, can both exist as single celled
organisms in places of abundant food supplies, or band together for survival
when food is scarce. Then consider the human body which has a whole bunch of
cells banded together and evolved so that some cells perform special functions
that other cells don’t. It is another stage
past the slime mold because as the cells specialized they could not
disassemble. Then add in a whole bunch
more organisms that don’t have the same DNA but which also perform beneficial
functions and the resultant ecosystem walks and talks while underneath various
cells are sending out chemicals telling the body to be hungry, to have sex, to
sleep, and influencing emotions. Some
have proposed that modern sanitation has had some weird consequences so that
fewer bacteriological exposures have resulted in more allergies, lower defenses
to infection and even, in the absence of stomach worms, a less well balanced
digestive system.
Slime
Mold, I Love You
Slime Mold, I love you,
we are crawling together on this dirt,
you might tell me who I am
if I would listen.
Let’s then think about some of the survival characteristics
of the animal which has evolved into the modern human. Banding together to hunt would be an
asset. Being territorial would be an
asset. Protecting children would be an
asset. Forming emotional bonds so that
family units have a will to survive would be an asset. Having and following leaders would be an
asset so long as they are reasonably well chosen. These things are fairly
obvious and well established. We see leadership in a herd of cows, we see
cooperation in a pack of hunting wolves, we see territoriality in household
cats. What this implies is that the
modern human, evolved primarily in wild circumstances where these
characteristics were extremely beneficial, now often lives in such density that
some of the characteristics are a bit in conflict with others. Of course we have also evolved with memes and
we have cultural characteristics and layers of retained learning which includes
codification of empathetic behaviors into moral strictures, philosophies, laws,
etc. and all religions include instructions about behaviors which are central
to their messages. In spite of all of
this the human condition continues to be filled with self serving at the
individual and group levels and thus we have crime and wars, not to mention the
destruction of the environment which we need to survive.
So here we are with the human condition on teeter-totter
between self and group and perhaps that is as it always was after the start of
agriculture provided the stability for us to gather in large groups. Citing science again, recent use of ladar (a laser
technique that looks through foliage at the ground using computers) has
indicated that failed cultures such as Angor Wat in Cambodia or Mayan cultures
in Central America failed from too much city destroying the ability of the city
to provide for itself. Sure, now we have
the ability to float anything half way around the world for now, so the shift
of balance next time is likely to be a larger event in nature than merely local
water or food supplies. We are all of us contributing to that coming doom or at
least major shift in the paradigms of life as we drive our cars even if fuel
efficient, and chatter on electronics – we are all consumers of the world,
eating it up as a swarm of bugs might consume an apple, and our old moral codes
do not seem to weigh enough towards the group and survival. Will this be another evolution? Given the relatively slow pace at which we
humans can biologically evolve compared to short lived bugs, we many not change
fast enough for most to survive unless it is a evolution of the memes – that
is, an evolution in learned behaviors, heading back towards those few humans
who once practiced the holiness of the Earth.
Here I think I could support the use of the word god, just so long as we
don’t do that anthropomorphic thing.
Maybe we just need to sleep more. Science, without the use of 27 kilometer
tunnels, has determined that sleep is more than dreams, that sleep is the place
where memories are fixed. If you don’t
sleep well ,or enough, you may not retain learning as well. If children do not get good sleep they may
behave in nervous ways which are misdiagnosed as ADHD, leading to inappropriate
treatments. Here I am only partially
joking because what if we did not rush around and do so much that we don’t get
8 – 9 hours of sleep a night? This
accelerated life is symptomatic of a malaise which demands more and more yet
does not provide any more true satisfaction than living in the dirt outside and
following the rhythms of the seasons, as we evolved.
Now We
Go To The Y
sweat dripping onto the machine
which doesn't know I am alive
I am only trying to remember
the savanna, the hunt, the sun.
