R-105 Idiot Brain

 Sitting around with my feet propped up the other night watching random discussions, classroom/training snippets, and documentaries on an utterly silly range of subjects on Wondrium. One of my favorites was a couple/three hours of a variety of high-end physicists and philosophers trying to work out whether time actually exists or is simply an emergent property of chunks of the universe interacting with each other. 

Basically the problem is that Newton's universal time was destroyed by relativity, in which time is dependent on the motion of the observers which made for all kinds of unlikely time/space stuff, and current attempts to incorporate gravity into quantum mechanics (quantum gravity) had an odd outcome when gravity is plugged into certain quantum transforms of electromagnetism. Specifically, the variable "t" (Time) disappears. So, then, the question is whether that's just algebraic weirdness or an actual physical fact.  

Turns out a right fair whack of no-kidding scientists have decided that it's literal:  Time does not exist, any more than a chair "actually" exists. It's simply an emergent phenomenon that we perceive as time, and no more exists than our perception of the standing-wave expression of Schrodinger's equations we call a "chair". 

I can talk at some length on this, but that's not the point. The point is, why is my idiot brain wired in such a manner as to soak up junk like this? 

Or energy fluctuations in classical DeSitter space? Or bird and dinosaur hips? Or how octopuses are essentially copper- instead of iron-based? Or evidence that tectonic plates and movement might be the result of super-meteor impacts 4 billion years ago? Or plant-life movement as revealed in time-lapse photographs? Or entropy, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the arrow of time (which may not exist)? Or whether string theory is valid, and if so is it in 11- or 12-dimensions?

In short, WTF is up with my head? Have you any idea how far along I'd have gotten in life if I had simply focused on something and dropped the rest? But, no. I have the attention span of a goldfish. 

While sometimes entertaining, this predilection for diving down rabbit-holes and emerging somewhere else a week or so later can be damned annoying. Nothing to be done about it, I suppose, except bitch. Which IS the point of this post.

So there it is. I feel better now. Which is good, as I needed to clear the decks because I just found out that near-zero mass up-and-down quarks moving at near-light speed while confined to the protons/neutrons they create by exchanging glueon particles actually have so much kinetic and potential energy that the raw energy accounts for about 98% of my mass (see "mass/energy equivalence). Which flies in the face of the fact that I usually barely have enough energy to drag my fat ass out of bed in the morning.

So, yeah. Stand by for exciting news on THAT front.

Idiot brain.