One really serious issue that I have to deal with is that I'm constantly flooded with new information, and it all interests me. I don't work with any of this stuff, have no degrees, no labs, no research grants, and have no use for any of it other than to annoy bedrock fundamentalists who think the earth was created about 6000 years ago. But I also have no filter - it's like drinking out of a fire hydrant, and frankly it's kind of a pain in the ass.
I think my brain may be full, so I've got to dump a bunch of stuff so I can remember where I put my motorcycle keys. Thank you for your attention.
I think my brain may be full, so I've got to dump a bunch of stuff so I can remember where I put my motorcycle keys. Thank you for your attention.
Negative Energy
No one really knows what negative energy or negative matter are. However, there's a hell of a lot of it (probably about 95% of the matter in the universe and about the same percentage of the energy.) It seems that at least one form of negative energy can be expressed as the force the universe produces as a result of quantum vacuum fluctuations. (In point of fact, all matter probably is nothing but quantum vacuum fluctuations, but that's another story.)
Take two polished plates. Really polished. Bring them together, but not touching - microscopically close. There is a measurable force "sucking" the plates together, a force created from nothing - a negative energy. Turns out that quantum vacuum fluctuations of all sizes are occurring all the time throughout all real space, the result of enormously improbable events becoming almost inevitable because that's how vast nearly infinite sweeps of time and space work when combined with vanishingly small probabilities.
But due to the geometry of the fluctuations, some just won't "fit" between the plates, and the higher number and larger size of those outside of that "between space" can therefore "push" them together. Enormously large versions of this (as in "fractional universe size") are occurring all the time, and are suspected to be one possible reason that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate instead of decelerating. (Picked up from various sources.)
Take two polished plates. Really polished. Bring them together, but not touching - microscopically close. There is a measurable force "sucking" the plates together, a force created from nothing - a negative energy. Turns out that quantum vacuum fluctuations of all sizes are occurring all the time throughout all real space, the result of enormously improbable events becoming almost inevitable because that's how vast nearly infinite sweeps of time and space work when combined with vanishingly small probabilities.
But due to the geometry of the fluctuations, some just won't "fit" between the plates, and the higher number and larger size of those outside of that "between space" can therefore "push" them together. Enormously large versions of this (as in "fractional universe size") are occurring all the time, and are suspected to be one possible reason that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate instead of decelerating. (Picked up from various sources.)
Bug Sex
Certain male bugs (Warehouse Pirate Bugs, among others) have solved the problem of females who only want to mate once. Since bug semen is good for a lifetime (probably helped by the fact that bug lifetimes are measured in days) once Miss Buggy takes some lucky StudBug's cumshot, she's set for life, and can fertilize her eggs at her convenience from then on out. Needless to say, that pretty much shuts down her interest in letting another less-lucky male bang away on her as, from her point of view, there's no evolutionary advantage to it - she's already got everything she needs for the rest of her life from the virginal encounter.
This annoys the also-rans, so they've developed a whole 'nother method of getting their baby-batter into the mix, so to speak. It's called "traumatic insemination," and it's exactly what it sounds like it is - they simply penetrate any convenient body part that presents itself, as in PENETRATE, as in punch a new hole, blast away, and move on to whoever is up next. They don't call it a "dagger penis" (and they do) for nothing.
This, as you might expect, leads to a pretty high mortality rate among the females, usually due to infection, but also because they are being "traumatically inseminated."
However, the females have developed an entirely separate gland that's responsible for killing infections, so that's good, and as they're dragging around dying over being dagger-penised a few times, they actually lay a LOT more eggs, and that, combined with the no-longer-single-source semen, means that the genetic health of the species seems to be working out. And you thought YOUR sex life sucked because he wants ANAL once in awhile. You are referred to the concept of counting blessings, and all that. http://www.livescience.com/20174-traumatic-pirate-bug-sex.html
This annoys the also-rans, so they've developed a whole 'nother method of getting their baby-batter into the mix, so to speak. It's called "traumatic insemination," and it's exactly what it sounds like it is - they simply penetrate any convenient body part that presents itself, as in PENETRATE, as in punch a new hole, blast away, and move on to whoever is up next. They don't call it a "dagger penis" (and they do) for nothing.
This, as you might expect, leads to a pretty high mortality rate among the females, usually due to infection, but also because they are being "traumatically inseminated."
However, the females have developed an entirely separate gland that's responsible for killing infections, so that's good, and as they're dragging around dying over being dagger-penised a few times, they actually lay a LOT more eggs, and that, combined with the no-longer-single-source semen, means that the genetic health of the species seems to be working out. And you thought YOUR sex life sucked because he wants ANAL once in awhile. You are referred to the concept of counting blessings, and all that. http://www.livescience.com/20174-traumatic-pirate-bug-sex.html
Early Universe Cosmology - Orange Sky And The Word of God
Cosmological observations reveal that the universe started out as a perfectly symmetrical, homogenous, single-density entity. The problem is that for gravity to work, it needs some variation in density. Which is to say, single-density matter would not "clump" into stars, galaxies and whatnot. It's been something of a mystery just what it was that caused the universe to tip over from steady-state, non-gravitational smoothness to the structures we see. The universe currently appears to be made up of huge sheets of galaxies and galactic clusters, interspersed with vast vacant "holes," rather like a sponge in close-up:
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| The Universe Looks Sorta Like This |
So, how did it get from being a smoother-than-the-smoothest-thing-that's-ever-existed, silently expanding sphere to the mottled, lumpy, gravity-filled thing that's there now? Well, for an answer, we look at the CMB, or "Cosmic Microwave Background," and base our observations there. This takes us back to a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had cooled enough to be orange. Literally the color orange, like the sponge above. The reason we see it as "microwave" instead of "orange" is that the insane amount of red-shift that occurs at those large distances drops it out of our visual EMF range and down thru red, infrared, and finally to microwave.
What the CMB, and projections backward though time based on the CMB tell us is that the early, smooth, non-clumping, non-gravitational-effect universe developed sound waves. Literally sound waves. As one guy put it, the early universe, if you had been there, was ringing like a gong, at about 120dB (loud rock band,) although about 50 octaves lower than human ears can hear.
These sound waves roiled around through the gas as the intensely energetic, super-hot universe cooled to super-hot plasma, then finally to the point that atoms could form (which would not have occurred in the uniformly smooth universe existing immediately after the Big Bang.) Then the enormously large (as in under an inch all the way up to universe-large) sound waves, rushing around and about in the gas and plasma at fractional light speeds, were almost suddenly frozen into place, rather like splashed waves from a meteorite strike, which suddenly freeze when the rocks cool enough to stop freely flowing as a fluid.
This resulted in the mottled CMB we now see, and (of more importance to us) an unequal distribution of the newly formed atoms - and viola! - gravity can do the work necessary to pull together the structures we see today (spongy sheets of galaxies and stars like dust and pretty girls in summer dresses and whatnot.)
These sound waves roiled around through the gas as the intensely energetic, super-hot universe cooled to super-hot plasma, then finally to the point that atoms could form (which would not have occurred in the uniformly smooth universe existing immediately after the Big Bang.) Then the enormously large (as in under an inch all the way up to universe-large) sound waves, rushing around and about in the gas and plasma at fractional light speeds, were almost suddenly frozen into place, rather like splashed waves from a meteorite strike, which suddenly freeze when the rocks cool enough to stop freely flowing as a fluid.
This resulted in the mottled CMB we now see, and (of more importance to us) an unequal distribution of the newly formed atoms - and viola! - gravity can do the work necessary to pull together the structures we see today (spongy sheets of galaxies and stars like dust and pretty girls in summer dresses and whatnot.)
You missed it, didn't you? The real question? OK, I'll give it to you: Where did the "Sound of Creation" come from? No one really knows. The earliest universe, just after the big "bang" was in fact totally silent, no waves, no disturbances, a perfect sphere expanding at near-or-over light speed with nary a whisper.
The main suspect in where the sound came from is tunneling quantum particles. Even in a perfectly smooth, unbelievably hot universe immediately after the Big Bang, quantum physics rules, mostly. And one thing that quantum physics tells us is that particles are often not where they are "supposed" to be. They often are, for no particular reason other than probabilistic quantum physics, somewhere else (Heisenberg Uncertainty weirdness in play here.)
This results in places in that early universe that are more dense (more particles) than expected for just a bazillionth of a second, and other places that are less dense (less particles.) Enough of this sort of thing on a universe-wide scale, and you'll have shifting densities rolling around all over the place due to what can be called an osmotic effect (particles flowing into low density areas and out of high density areas.) When they begin reinforcing one another, making waves of density fluctuations in the fluid matter of the early universe, you wind up with about as good a definition of "sound" as you're likely to get.
The main suspect in where the sound came from is tunneling quantum particles. Even in a perfectly smooth, unbelievably hot universe immediately after the Big Bang, quantum physics rules, mostly. And one thing that quantum physics tells us is that particles are often not where they are "supposed" to be. They often are, for no particular reason other than probabilistic quantum physics, somewhere else (Heisenberg Uncertainty weirdness in play here.)
This results in places in that early universe that are more dense (more particles) than expected for just a bazillionth of a second, and other places that are less dense (less particles.) Enough of this sort of thing on a universe-wide scale, and you'll have shifting densities rolling around all over the place due to what can be called an osmotic effect (particles flowing into low density areas and out of high density areas.) When they begin reinforcing one another, making waves of density fluctuations in the fluid matter of the early universe, you wind up with about as good a definition of "sound" as you're likely to get.
Or you can take the traditional view that God spoke a word, and the vibration of that word effectively collapsed the infinite smoothness of the early universe into the universe we presently inhabit. Which is vaguely possible and a lot less complicated, and therefore by Occam's razor is a good bet.
Eh. You call it.
Eh. You call it.
Wherever it came from, it can be heard, with some clever mathematics and wave-form rebuilds. Below is a button that will let you hear the scream of the early universe, (or the Word, as you will,) the literal sound of creation - from shortly after zero to one million years from the Big Bang - it's been shifted up about 50 octaves or so, and volume- and Doppler-corrected, so we puny humans can translate it through our limited equipment (ears.) I'd recommend you hit this button two or three times to listen to the subtlety of that first high-pitched scream as it fades down to a rumbling background engine...I dunno, I thought it was pretty cool. Go to this website if you want to see what it means and how it's done: http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dmw8f/BBA_web/index_frames.html, If you're a geek, be prepared to lose an afternoon, and if not, be prepared to be lost as a babe in the woods..
Click for sound
It Turns Out Being Irradiated May Not Always Suck
Meanwhile, someone (a guy named Svensmark) got to looking at patches of the galaxy where new stars are being born. In these areas, there are lots of energetic things going on and, more to the point, huge quantities of enormously energetic particles (gamma rays, protons, stripped atoms, plasma, extremely high-energy electrons and whatnot) roaming around which are produced by a variety of star-forming activities in general and super-novas in particular. These areas are reasonably well mapped.
Now, the solar system (and, perforce, the Earth) is rotating around the galactic core. Since the galaxy isn't solid, various parts rotate at various speeds, which means that the Earth is rotating through various galactic neighborhoods on a predictable and calculable schedule. We rotate around the galactic center once about every 230 million years. Since the first remotely humanish ancestor turned up only about 1.5 million years ago, and animals we would actually classify as more-or-less human about 150,000 years ago, we've only been here for about 0.0007th of a galactic rotation. In other words, humans aren't really that big a deal, so we can ignore them as a barely-noticeable sliver in the river of galactic/geologic time and get on with the larger questions having to do with life in general, which has in fact been around for a bunch of galactic rotations.
Projecting the Earth's path back through time, it's simple(?) to plot out when it was in a relatively high-density, high-energy, new-star-birth area of the galaxy. Then if you putz around with rocks going back through geological time and see what life was doing, you find out that the healthy biodiversity of the planet skyrockets during those times when we were in high-supernova-territory, and presumably being bathed in high-energy junk, and plummets when we are not. In fact, the biodiversity/supernova correlation is so strong that practically anyone can see it, once it occurred to someone to look for it:
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| From ftp://ftp2.space.dtu.dk/pub/Svensmark/MNRAS_Svensmark2012.pdf |
As noted in the caption, you can read Svensmark's paper at Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society here:Your Brain Was A Mistake
or, if you prefer something less insanely calculus and statistical-analysis driven, just Google "Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth," for various summaries.
It seems that the reason we're able to consider all this stuff and annoy readers by blogging about it endlessly may well be due to a mistake in our DNA. Due to folding and copying errors, genes are occasionally duplicated or copied twice into a DNA build. For example, there's a gene called SRGAP2 which was accidentally duplicated in our genome structure about 3 million years ago, which was fine, but about 2 million years ago, it was accidentally duplicated again. The problem is that this time the gene was only PARTIALLY copied, which means that you have a duplicate stretch of SRGAP2 combined with a duplicate stretch of only PART of a SRGAP2 gene. This particular copying error seems to result in relatively rapid brain growth, as well as larger numbers of more-efficiently arranged neuronal connections in that larger brain.
They stuck this stuff into mouse DNA, and sure as sunrise, the mice displayed a speedier migration of brain cells during development and much more efficient organization. As far as I know they have disassembled all those mice during study, and no one's bothered to let them keep mating for a few generations to see how far this all goes. Given the massive trouble that big-brain primates have caused since the SRGAP2 mistake, it seems prudent to me to avoid compounding the damage by creating super-intelligent mice who will doubtless escape and kill us all, but no one's asked me for recommendations on the matter.
No Wonder T-Rex Was In Such A Pissy Mood All The Time
A close study of the mouth parts of fossilized fleas (Yeah. Really.) finds that they were adapted to handle punching blood-sucking holes into stuff WAY more armored than what few mammals and small birds were around 150 million years ago (Jurassic period.) Like dinosaurs, for example. So, you have a flea that's about twice the size of modern fleas drilling down through dino hide to get to the goodies:
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| Jurassic Flea |
Make you want to squash and eat Jeff Goldblum just out of general annoyance, right enough. Well, OK, to be fair, his acting would probably give you plenty of excuse, but I'm just sayin'...
In Our Next Episode: In the inside pocket of my leathers! That's where my keys are! Yay! I'm going to go ride a motorcycle. Maybe I'll tell you about it when I get back. In terms of physics - why you have to countersteer - a primer in gyroscopic precession and how you will wind up in the ditch if you screw it up. No? Fine. Something else then. Perhaps redhead related.
Nah, I'm pretty sure that negative energy is just because some dumbass cunt got hammered and started fucking, like, everybody at the party except her main squeeze, whom she had sent out earlier to fetch her a pack of Slims cuz she was all out and he gets back and sees her being simultaneously anal and pussy banged while she has, like, five dicks in her mouth. And when he gets in line to get his turn she suddenly throws up on him and passes out and he, well, screws her anyway because he hasn't had any outta her for a while and when she comes to she blames him for the stains on her silk blouse and divorces him, taking the kids, the house, and the Beemer.
ReplyDeleteI'm fairly certain that's where negative energy comes from.
Once we were in the car and the iPhone adapter fell out (we had been listening to music) and we were startled by loud static. I apologized to the girls and Maya said, "that's okay, Mama, I like hearing the creation of the universe." :-)
ReplyDeletegekko: I think we've ALL been to THAT party. I usually just laugh at their goofiness. Well, till it's my turn, anyhow. And silk is just impossible to clean, so who can blame her? Personally, I always just aim for her hair. It's only polite.
ReplyDeleteserenebabe: She's actually 100% right. That static hiss/roar isn't ALL Cosmic Microwave Background, but a pretty good percentage of it is, believe it or not.
I know. :-) Her school (like her class, but so small it's multi-grade, so it was the whole school) read some Hawking related book (to his son? by his son?) about black holes. She knew, more than I did, what she was saying. :-)
ReplyDelete