#newton — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #newton, aggregated by home.social.
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¿Sabían que la NASA no usó una sola fórmula mágica sino las leyes físicas de Isaac Newton escritas en el siglo XVII para calcular la ruta exacta que llevó al Apolo 11 a la Luna?
Para lograr que los astronautas llegaran a su destino el 20 de julio de 1969, los ingenieros de la NASA se basaron por completo en la Ley de Gravitación Universal de Isaac Newton. Esta famosa regla de la física donde se calcula la fuerza de atracción entre dos objetos en el espacio según sus masas y la distancia que los separa. El gran reto del viaje espacial es que la Tierra, la Luna y la nave se mueven al mismo tiempo, un problema físico hipercomplejo conocido formalmente como el problema de los tres cuerpos que no se puede resolver con una simple operación de lápiz y papel.
Para resolver este laberinto matemático, los científicos dividieron el viaje en pequeñas partes utilizando un método de cálculo numérico llamado método de Encke. Las computadoras de la época, como la famosa computadora de guía del Apolo que era menos potente que cualquier teléfono celular actual, repetían miles de veces estas ecuaciones paso a paso para corregir el rumbo constantemente. De esta manera, el equipo de la misión lograba predecir con números exactos cómo la gravedad de la Tierra iba soltando la nave mientras la gravedad de la Luna empezaba a jalarla hacia su superficie. El éxito de la misión demostró que las matemáticas puras de hace trescientos años combinadas con la tecnología de programación de los años sesenta eran capaces de trazar un camino perfecto de ida y vuelta a través de 384,400 kilómetros de vacío espacial.
— A. Eldritch, Periodista, Locutor, podcaster y bloger del fediverso
Alt text via @altbot y @TeLoDescribot
#Apolo11 #NASA #Matematicas #Fisica #Luna #Newton #Historia #Espacio
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¿Sabían que la NASA no usó una sola fórmula mágica sino las leyes físicas de Isaac Newton escritas en el siglo XVII para calcular la ruta exacta que llevó al Apolo 11 a la Luna?
Para lograr que los astronautas llegaran a su destino el 20 de julio de 1969, los ingenieros de la NASA se basaron por completo en la Ley de Gravitación Universal de Isaac Newton. Esta famosa regla de la física donde se calcula la fuerza de atracción entre dos objetos en el espacio según sus masas y la distancia que los separa. El gran reto del viaje espacial es que la Tierra, la Luna y la nave se mueven al mismo tiempo, un problema físico hipercomplejo conocido formalmente como el problema de los tres cuerpos que no se puede resolver con una simple operación de lápiz y papel.
Para resolver este laberinto matemático, los científicos dividieron el viaje en pequeñas partes utilizando un método de cálculo numérico llamado método de Encke. Las computadoras de la época, como la famosa computadora de guía del Apolo que era menos potente que cualquier teléfono celular actual, repetían miles de veces estas ecuaciones paso a paso para corregir el rumbo constantemente. De esta manera, el equipo de la misión lograba predecir con números exactos cómo la gravedad de la Tierra iba soltando la nave mientras la gravedad de la Luna empezaba a jalarla hacia su superficie. El éxito de la misión demostró que las matemáticas puras de hace trescientos años combinadas con la tecnología de programación de los años sesenta eran capaces de trazar un camino perfecto de ida y vuelta a través de 384,400 kilómetros de vacío espacial.
— A. Eldritch, Periodista, Locutor, podcaster y bloger del fediverso
Alt text via @altbot y @TeLoDescribot
#Apolo11 #NASA #Matematicas #Fisica #Luna #Newton #Historia #Espacio
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¿Sabían que la NASA no usó una sola fórmula mágica sino las leyes físicas de Isaac Newton escritas en el siglo XVII para calcular la ruta exacta que llevó al Apolo 11 a la Luna?
Para lograr que los astronautas llegaran a su destino el 20 de julio de 1969, los ingenieros de la NASA se basaron por completo en la Ley de Gravitación Universal de Isaac Newton. Esta famosa regla de la física donde se calcula la fuerza de atracción entre dos objetos en el espacio según sus masas y la distancia que los separa. El gran reto del viaje espacial es que la Tierra, la Luna y la nave se mueven al mismo tiempo, un problema físico hipercomplejo conocido formalmente como el problema de los tres cuerpos que no se puede resolver con una simple operación de lápiz y papel.
Para resolver este laberinto matemático, los científicos dividieron el viaje en pequeñas partes utilizando un método de cálculo numérico llamado método de Encke. Las computadoras de la época, como la famosa computadora de guía del Apolo que era menos potente que cualquier teléfono celular actual, repetían miles de veces estas ecuaciones paso a paso para corregir el rumbo constantemente. De esta manera, el equipo de la misión lograba predecir con números exactos cómo la gravedad de la Tierra iba soltando la nave mientras la gravedad de la Luna empezaba a jalarla hacia su superficie. El éxito de la misión demostró que las matemáticas puras de hace trescientos años combinadas con la tecnología de programación de los años sesenta eran capaces de trazar un camino perfecto de ida y vuelta a través de 384,400 kilómetros de vacío espacial.
— A. Eldritch, Periodista, Locutor, podcaster y bloger del fediverso
Alt text via @altbot y @TeLoDescribot
#Apolo11 #NASA #Matematicas #Fisica #Luna #Newton #Historia #Espacio
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¿Sabían que la NASA no usó una sola fórmula mágica sino las leyes físicas de Isaac Newton escritas en el siglo XVII para calcular la ruta exacta que llevó al Apolo 11 a la Luna?
Para lograr que los astronautas llegaran a su destino el 20 de julio de 1969, los ingenieros de la NASA se basaron por completo en la Ley de Gravitación Universal de Isaac Newton. Esta famosa regla de la física se representa de forma matemática mediante la ecuación $F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r2}$, donde se calcula la fuerza de atracción entre dos objetos en el espacio según sus masas y la distancia que los separa. El gran reto del viaje espacial es que la Tierra, la Luna y la nave se mueven al mismo tiempo, un problema físico hipercomplejo conocido formalmente como el problema de los tres cuerpos que no se puede resolver con una simple operación de lápiz y papel.
Para resolver este laberinto matemático, los científicos dividieron el viaje en pequeñas partes utilizando un método de cálculo numérico llamado método de Encke. Las computadoras de la época, como la famosa computadora de guía del Apolo que era menos potente que cualquier teléfono celular actual, repetían miles de veces estas ecuaciones paso a paso para corregir el rumbo constantemente. De esta manera, el equipo de la misión lograba predecir con números exactos cómo la gravedad de la Tierra iba soltando la nave mientras la gravedad de la Luna empezaba a jalarla hacia su superficie. El éxito de la misión demostró que las matemáticas puras de hace trescientos años combinadas con la tecnología de programación de los años sesenta eran capaces de trazar un camino perfecto de ida y vuelta a través de 384,400 kilómetros de vacío espacial.
— A. Eldritch, Periodista, Locutor, podcaster y bloger del fediverso
Alt text via @altbot y @TeLoDescribot
#Apolo11 #NASA #Matematicas #Fisica #Luna #Newton #Historia #Espacio
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¿Sabían que la NASA no usó una sola fórmula mágica sino las leyes físicas de Isaac Newton escritas en el siglo XVII para calcular la ruta exacta que llevó al Apolo 11 a la Luna?
Para lograr que los astronautas llegaran a su destino el 20 de julio de 1969, los ingenieros de la NASA se basaron por completo en la Ley de Gravitación Universal de Isaac Newton. Esta famosa regla de la física donde se calcula la fuerza de atracción entre dos objetos en el espacio según sus masas y la distancia que los separa. El gran reto del viaje espacial es que la Tierra, la Luna y la nave se mueven al mismo tiempo, un problema físico hipercomplejo conocido formalmente como el problema de los tres cuerpos que no se puede resolver con una simple operación de lápiz y papel.
Para resolver este laberinto matemático, los científicos dividieron el viaje en pequeñas partes utilizando un método de cálculo numérico llamado método de Encke. Las computadoras de la época, como la famosa computadora de guía del Apolo que era menos potente que cualquier teléfono celular actual, repetían miles de veces estas ecuaciones paso a paso para corregir el rumbo constantemente. De esta manera, el equipo de la misión lograba predecir con números exactos cómo la gravedad de la Tierra iba soltando la nave mientras la gravedad de la Luna empezaba a jalarla hacia su superficie. El éxito de la misión demostró que las matemáticas puras de hace trescientos años combinadas con la tecnología de programación de los años sesenta eran capaces de trazar un camino perfecto de ida y vuelta a través de 384,400 kilómetros de vacío espacial.
— A. Eldritch, Periodista, Locutor, podcaster y bloger del fediverso
Alt text via @altbot y @TeLoDescribot
#Apolo11 #NASA #Matematicas #Fisica #Luna #Newton #Historia #Espacio
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Knicks’ NBA title joins list of great New York moments https://www.rawchili.com/nhl/599548/ #AndyPettitte #Basketball #ContainsCommerceOrAffiliateContent #GothamFC #Hockey #MLB #NationalSports #NationalWomen #NBA #NewYork #NewYorkKnicks #NewYorkRangers #Newton #NewYork #NewYorkRangers #NHL #NJContentSharingMorristown #NJContentSharingNorthJersey #NWSL #NY #PlaxicoBurress #Rangers #SportsNews #VancouverCanucks
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Knicks’ NBA title joins list of great New York moments https://www.rawchili.com/nhl/599477/ #AndyPettitte #Basketball #ContainsCommerceOrAffiliateContent #dcc #GothamFC #Hockey #MLB #NationalSports #NationalWomen #NBA #NewYork #NewYorkKnicks #NewYorkRangers #Newton #NewYork #NewYorkRangers #NHL #NJContentSharingMorristown #NJContentSharingNorthJersey #NWSL #NY #PlaxicoBurress #Rangers #SportsNews #VancouverCanucks
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Hype for the Future 218P: Roselawn, Indiana
Overview The Roselawn community within the State of Indiana is a notable community associated with Newton and Jasper Counties in the State of Indiana and is located near the State Road 10 exit of Interstate 65 and east of the State Road 55 corridor. While much of the community is largely residential, notable resorts such as Sun Aura are notable as nudist resorts located within the general vicinity and are naturally age-restricted and privacy-gated as a result.https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/06/hype-for-the-future-218p-roselawn-indiana/
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Hype for the Future 218P: Roselawn, Indiana
Overview The Roselawn community within the State of Indiana is a notable community associated with Newton and Jasper Counties in the State of Indiana and is located near the State Road 10 exit of Interstate 65 and east of the State Road 55 corridor. While much of the community is largely residential, notable resorts such as Sun Aura are notable as nudist resorts located within the general vicinity and are naturally age-restricted and privacy-gated as a result.https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/06/hype-for-the-future-218p-roselawn-indiana/
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Hype for the Future 218P: Roselawn, Indiana
Overview The Roselawn community within the State of Indiana is a notable community associated with Newton and Jasper Counties in the State of Indiana and is located near the State Road 10 exit of Interstate 65 and east of the State Road 55 corridor. While much of the community is largely residential, notable resorts such as Sun Aura are notable as nudist resorts located within the general vicinity and are naturally age-restricted and privacy-gated as a result.https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/06/hype-for-the-future-218p-roselawn-indiana/
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Hype for the Future 218P: Roselawn, Indiana
Overview The Roselawn community within the State of Indiana is a notable community associated with Newton and Jasper Counties in the State of Indiana and is located near the State Road 10 exit of Interstate 65 and east of the State Road 55 corridor. While much of the community is largely residential, notable resorts such as Sun Aura are notable as nudist resorts located within the general vicinity and are naturally age-restricted and privacy-gated as a result.https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/06/hype-for-the-future-218p-roselawn-indiana/
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Hype for the Future 218P: Roselawn, Indiana
Overview The Roselawn community within the State of Indiana is a notable community associated with Newton and Jasper Counties in the State of Indiana and is located near the State Road 10 exit of Interstate 65 and east of the State Road 55 corridor. While much of the community is largely residential, notable resorts such as Sun Aura are notable as nudist resorts located within the general vicinity and are naturally age-restricted and privacy-gated as a result.https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/06/hype-for-the-future-218p-roselawn-indiana/
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Hype for the Future 218N: Newton County, Indiana
Introduction Newton County is a notable rural county within the State of Indiana and is a notable county south of the Kankakee River in the northwestern portion of the State of Indiana and the Central Time Zone. Today, the notable communities of the county include the Towns of Morocco, Mount Ayr, Brook, Kentland, and Goodland, with the community of Kentland serving as the county seat. Today, the communities are largely associated with the corridors of Interstate 65; Routes 24, 41, and 52; […]https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/06/hype-for-the-future-218n-newton-county-indiana/
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Hype for the Future 218N: Newton County, Indiana
Introduction Newton County is a notable rural county within the State of Indiana and is a notable county south of the Kankakee River in the northwestern portion of the State of Indiana and the Central Time Zone. Today, the notable communities of the county include the Towns of Morocco, Mount Ayr, Brook, Kentland, and Goodland, with the community of Kentland serving as the county seat. Today, the communities are largely associated with the corridors of Interstate 65; Routes 24, 41, and 52; […]https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/06/hype-for-the-future-218n-newton-county-indiana/
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#BostonWeekend Sat MUSIC #Medford (MA) Porchfest is free! #Dorchester Porchfest is Free! #Newton Porchfest is free! #Franklin Porchest is free - go, go to all of the porchfests! https://porchfest.info https://medfordporchfest.com #BostonMusic #MedfordMA #boston #DorchesterMA #NewtonMA #FranklinMA
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#BostonWeekend Sat MUSIC #Medford (MA) Porchfest is free! #Dorchester Porchfest is Free! #Newton Porchfest is free! #Franklin Porchest is free - go, go to all of the porchfests! https://porchfest.info https://medfordporchfest.com #BostonMusic #MedfordMA #boston #DorchesterMA #NewtonMA #FranklinMA
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Always striking to see how multi-faceted some of the great scientists of the past were ( #Gauss, #Faraday, #Maxwell, #Newton, #Somerville, #Lovelace etc.). The boundaries between disciplines were much more fluid back then, and the same person could contribute to multiple fields, even though they might be remembered for only one today.
#Neuroscience #Physics #ComputerScience #Mathematics #Biology #Astronomy #Geophysics #ScienceHistory
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Always striking to see how multi-faceted some of the great scientists of the past were ( #Gauss, #Faraday, #Maxwell, #Newton, #Somerville, #Lovelace etc.). The boundaries between disciplines were much more fluid back then, and the same person could contribute to multiple fields, even though they might be remembered for only one today.
#Neuroscience #Physics #ComputerScience #Mathematics #Biology #Astronomy #Geophysics #ScienceHistory
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Tal día como hoy de 1812 #Babbage, #Herschel y #Peacock fundaron una sociedad para modernizar las #matemáticas abandonando la notación de #Newton para él cálculo y adoptando la de #Leibniz. Dos siglos más tarde los matemáticos se siguen tirando de los pelos cuando ven a #físicos manejar #diferenciales.
https://bsky.app/profile/evocid.bsky.social/post/3mlddphzons2r
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Tal día como hoy de 1812 #Babbage, #Herschel y #Peacock fundaron una sociedad para modernizar las #matemáticas abandonando la notación de #Newton para él cálculo y adoptando la de #Leibniz. Dos siglos más tarde los matemáticos se siguen tirando de los pelos cuando ven a #físicos manejar #diferenciales.
https://bsky.app/profile/evocid.bsky.social/post/3mlddphzons2r
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Engaging Essays In Cosmology by A. Tomilin
About the Book
A book of essays and short stories in three parts and ten chapters about the people and the achievements of the great science of the structure and development of the Universe from antiquity to the present day, composed and written on the basis of many sources by the author.
About the Author
A. Tomilin is a lecturer at an institute. Engaging Essays on Cosmology is not the first book by this author.
Young readers have repeatedly encountered his name in the pages of journals and popular
science collections. Several works have come from his pen, published by the “Children’s
Literature” publishing house, including the booklet For What – Nothing, written in
collaboration with N.V. Terebinskaya, the book Project Alpha K–2, as well as the book Engaging Essays on Astronomy, issued by “Molodaya Gvardiya.”This English translation of the book in English by Damitr Mazanav, has an extended epilogue containing exciting new discoveries the theories from 1970s to 2026 that have fundamentally changed our views about Universe.
Translated from the Russian and typeset in LaTeX by Damitr Mazanav using Quattrocento
Illustrations: G. Kovanov and V. Kovynev
This English translation released on the Web by The Mir Titles Project in 2026
under Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0 License.You can get the book here and here
Translator’s Note
This is the fourth book I am translating the Eureka series. The author A.N.~Tomilin has written several popular science books. We have earlier seen his book on cosmogony, titled Fascinating Cosmogony. This book is on a related theme of Cosmology. I was first introduced to ideas of cosmology and general relativity during my masters. Since then, the idea that we can infact study and make sense of the origins and structure of the universe at the largest scale have fascinated me. Translating this book in many ways was refreshing some of the ideas of cosmology and general relativity that I had learned. The quote by Corliss is indicative of how with limited data, we here on Earth, an insignificant part of the universe can make sense of it at all, constructing theories that will make sense of what we observe.
Since the book was written in 1971, several speculative hypotheses presented in the book have not been supported by data. To indicate this, at some places I have added sidenotes with my initials “DM”. I have also added an \textbf{Epilogue: Cosmology as of 2026} which summarises some of the major landmarks in the themes discussed since the book was written in 1970s. Another change that I have added is to give the chapters descriptive titles. Originally, the chapters were just numbered, but I thought giving descriptive titles would be a better choice.
The reader will occasionally encounter brief, aphoristic remarks attributed to Kozma Prutkov in the last chapter. These are not incidental embellishments, but deliberate inclusions. Kozma Prutkov was not a single individual, but a fictional author created in nineteenth-century Russia by a group of writers, including Aleksey Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers. Presented as a pompous yet self-assured thinker, Prutkov’s writings consist of concise maxims, paradoxes, and satirical observations on knowledge, reason, and human pretension.
At first glance, such a figure may seem out of place in a discussion of cosmology. Yet the inclusion is not without purpose. Scientific inquiry, particularly in a field as vast and abstract as cosmology, carries with it a natural tendency towards overconfidence in models, measurements, and interpretations. Prutkov’s aphorisms serve as a quiet counterpoint to this tendency. They remind us — often with a touch of irony — that clarity is hard-won, that appearances can mislead, and that systems of thought, however elegant, may conceal their own limitations.
There is also a more practical reason. Cosmology deals with scales and concepts far removed from everyday experience. At such distances, both literal and intellectual, language can easily become either overly technical or excessively grand. A well-placed aphorism has the virtue of restoring proportion. It compresses an idea into a form that can be held in mind, even as the surrounding discussion expands beyond immediate intuition.
The remarks of Kozma Prutkov are therefore included not as commentary on specific results, but as companions to them. They are meant to be read not as authorities, but as provocations — brief interruptions that invite the reader to pause, reflect, and occasionally question the very framework within which the narrative unfolds. Mistakes and omissions (and I am sure they will be there), if any, are my own.
Contents
Translator’s Note vii
Instead Of An Introduction xviiI. People 1
1. The Miletus Manifesto 3
1.1. When the Earth Was Flat… 4
1.2. In the Homeland of Science .
1.3. Thales of Miletus 11
1.4. Heraclitus of Ephesus 21
1.5. Philosophy + Mathematics = ? 24
1.6. Elea: Xenophanes and Parmenides 31
1.7. Zeno of Elea and His Paradoxes 35
1.8. The Atomists 40
1.9. Summa summarum of Greek materialism 432. The Philosopher King of Physics
2.1. Aristotle 47
2.2. The Triumph of Aristotelianism 53
2.3. At the Decline of Classical Greco-Roman Culture 58
2.4. Zigzag of History 64
2.5. Flames of Bonfires Do Not Dispel the Night 67
2.6. The Principles of Papal Infallibility 70
2.7. The Catholic Church and Progress 75
2.8. The Middle Ages and Technology 803. From Cusa to Calculus 89
3.1. Nicholas of Cusa 91
3.2. Cosmological Rubicon 96
3.3. The Immortality of the Great Heretic 102
3.4. Eppur si muove!. 110
3.5. René Descartes (Cartesius) 124
3.6. Isaac Newton 132
3.7. How Useful It Is When There Are No Great Discoveries 136
3.8. Newton’s Apple 142
3.9. The Universe of Sir Isaac 148II. Successes and Doubts 157
4. The Star-Struck Philosophers 159
4.1. The World in Lomonosov’s Hands 162
4.2. The Universe as a System — Early Speculations 166
4.3. Immanuel Kant — Natural Philosopher 170
4.4. Epilogue of the Philosopher’s Life 178
4.5. Johann Lambert 183
4.6. William Herschel 1875. The Dark Night of the Paradox 195
5.1. Olbers’ Paradox 198
5.2. Knights of the “Heat Death” 203
5.3. Hugo von Seeliger 210
5.4. A Celestial Census Saves the Situation 2136. The Copernicus of Curves 219
6.1. What Euclid Taught 222
6.2. The King Midas of the Land of Mathematics 229
6.3. Visiting the Flatfolk 235
6.4. Gauss’s “Magnificent Theorem” 241
6.5. The Copernicus of Geometry 245
6.6. The Real Construction of the “Imaginary World”256
6.7. The Astonishing Spaces of Bernhard Riemann 261III. Ideas 269
7. The Symphony of Space-Time 271
7.1. Can a “Decisive Experiment” Fail? 273
7.2. Overture to the Symphony of Relativity 279
7.3. In Search of the Harmony of the Universe 286
7.4. The Fourth Dimension 293
7.5. Special Theory of Relativity 302
7.6. The next step was inevitable… 305
7.7. “Look!” 3148. The Priest, the Prize, and the Point of Origin 331
8.1. Nineteen Hundred And Seventeen, February 332
8.2. “I Only Solve The Equations” 342
8.3. Yet Another Great Discovery 354
8.4. Horizons of the Universe 365
8.5. Father Georges Solves Equations 369
8.6. Genius of George Gamow 372
8.7. “Big Bang” 3779. A Journey Along the t-Axis 387
9.1. From “Radio Stars” to Star-like Objects 389
9.2. Quasars, or What Practice Does to Theory 395
9.3. A Journey Along the t-Axis 399
9.4. The Universe, the Year 1971 40710. The Battle for the Soul of the Cosmos 413
10.1. When an Idea Is Not Mad Enough 415
10.2. Kabbalistics of the Twentieth Century 424
10.3. Matter + Antimatter = ? 434
10.4. The Battle of Ideas Continues 441
10.5. What Is the Universe? 446IV. Epilogue: Cosmology as of 2026 453
11. The Dark Side of the Cosmos 455
11.1. The Mystery of the Missing Mass 457
#Ccbysa #Oer #astronomy #bigBangTheory #cosmicMicrowaveBackground #cosmology #damitrMazanav #einstein #galaxies #galileo #historyOfAstronomy #historyOfScience #ideasAboutTheUniverse #largeScaleStructure #newton #popularScience #relicRadiation #sovietLiterature #translation
11.2. A Hi-Res Echo of the Beginning 460
11.3. WMAP and the Age of Precision 465
11.4. Planck: The Ultimate Map (So far…) 467
11.5. Seconds after the Bang 470
11.6. The Cosmic Web: The Universe Draws Its Own Map 474
11.7. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey 476
11.8. Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe 479
11.9. The Hubble Deep Field 483
11.10. Hearing the Black Holes 487
11.11. The Future of the “t-Axis” 490
11.12. The Hubble Tension 496
11.13. The Next Horizon: The Engines of Discovery 499
11.14. The Mathematical Horizon 503
11.15. Concluding Thoughts 504 -
Truck overboard: Why Worcester Line trains were late this morning
https://www.universalhub.com/2026/truck-overboard -
Truck overboard: Why Worcester Line trains were late this morning
https://www.universalhub.com/2026/truck-overboard -
Truck overboard: Why Worcester Line trains were late this morning
https://www.universalhub.com/2026/truck-overboard -
Truck overboard: Why Worcester Line trains were late this morning
https://www.universalhub.com/2026/truck-overboard -
Truck overboard: Why Worcester Line trains were late this morning
https://www.universalhub.com/2026/truck-overboard -
Below the Mesh
The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.
Physics has been quietly telling us for about thirty years that we are the fish. The reef is spacetime. The water is something else.
Start with what general relativity gets right, because any honest argument has to begin there. Einstein’s field equations predicted the bending of starlight around the Sun in 1919, the slow precession of Mercury’s orbit, the precise timing signals that let a phone in a pocket know where it stands on the planet’s surface, the gravitational waves LIGO caught in 2015 from two black holes colliding a billion light years away, and the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 that the Event Horizon Telescope imaged in 2019. No theory in the history of science has paid off more predictions with more accuracy. General relativity is correct about what it describes.
Notice the hedge. General relativity is correct about what it describes. It describes spacetime as a smooth four-dimensional manifold with curvature determined by mass and energy. The question of where that manifold comes from, or what it is made of, sits outside the theory’s jurisdiction, and Einstein himself acknowledged as much. His equations assume the stage and then tell you how the stage bends. They offer no theory of the stage.
This is the crack through which everything interesting is currently flowing.
Juan Maldacena, working at Harvard in 1997, published a paper that is arguably the most important theoretical physics result since the Standard Model. He showed that a particular kind of gravitational universe, one with a specific negative curvature called Anti-de Sitter space, is mathematically equivalent to a quantum field theory living on its boundary. Everything that happens in the volume can be reconstructed from information encoded on the surface. Gravity, in this setup, stops being fundamental and becomes a holographic projection of something simpler happening in lower dimensions. The interior of the universe is a rendered image. The pixels sit on the edge.
Mark Van Raamsdonk, at the University of British Columbia, took Maldacena’s correspondence and pushed it somewhere Maldacena had not. In a 2010 essay that won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation contest, Van Raamsdonk showed that if you dial down the quantum entanglement between two regions of the boundary theory, the corresponding regions of spacetime in the interior pull apart. Reduce the entanglement further, and the spacetime between them thins, stretches, and finally tears. Spatial distance, in this picture, is a measurement of how strongly two regions of the underlying quantum substrate are entangled with each other. The gap between Earth and Andromeda functions as a readout rather than as an empty stretch of pre-existing room. It is what weak entanglement looks like when the universe renders it as geometry.
A careful reader will note that the mathematics of this correspondence is most securely established in universes with negative cosmological curvature, which is called Anti-de Sitter space. Our universe has positive curvature, which is called de Sitter. Whether the same entanglement-as-geometry relationship carries over into the kind of cosmos we actually live in is one of the most active open questions in the field. Most theorists working on the problem believe the principle generalizes. Nobody has yet proven it, and the first person who does will earn a Nobel Prize within the decade.
Leonard Susskind at Stanford and Maldacena again, in 2013, proposed that this goes further still. Their ER=EPR conjecture argues that any two particles that share quantum entanglement are connected, at the substrate level, by a microscopic wormhole. The entanglement is the wormhole, seen from the rendered side. The wormhole is the entanglement, seen from the substrate side. They are the same object described in two languages.
Sit with what this means. If the geometry we measure is an output rather than an input, then the speed of light is a property of the output layer. It is the maximum rate at which information can propagate through the rendered image. Nothing in the substrate logic requires that the shortest path between two points in the image correspond to the shortest path between the data that produced them. Two pixels on opposite edges of a screen can sit adjacent on the memory bus behind the screen. The cable does not run across the glass.
This is where the writer in me wants to stop being careful, because careful has produced about a century of stalemate on the interstellar question, and careful is not what the moment calls for.
Here is the argument I want to make. The reason we have found no aliens, the reason the sky is quiet when statistics suggest it should be noisy, is that any civilization clever enough to cross the gulfs between stars figured out the gulfs were not the real problem decades into their investigation. Such a species stops building faster rockets. The engineering attention shifts toward entanglement itself. What looks from our side like interstellar travel, to them, becomes an exercise in editing the source code of distance.
I cannot prove this. I can argue it is consistent with what the physics now permits. A civilization that learned to manipulate the entanglement structure of its local vacuum would not need to cross four light years to reach Proxima Centauri. It would rewrite the entanglement between here and there and reduce the rendered distance. Travel becomes a matter of reconfiguring the substrate relationship between the departure point and the destination. The ship does not move. The geometry moves around the ship, because the geometry was always a consequence of a deeper relational fact that the civilization has learned to set directly.
That leap is not a small one and deserves to be named. Reading the entanglement structure of the vacuum is a measurement problem that current physics is making genuine progress on. Writing to that structure with enough precision to change a macroscopic distance is a different problem, and nothing in the current mathematics guarantees the two are connected by a practicable engineering path. My argument is that the theoretical door exists, which is a stronger claim than it was in 1990 and a weaker claim than saying a key has been cut.
This is not quite the Alcubierre drive, though it shares a family resemblance. Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity showed that general relativity permits a metric in which a bubble of space contracts in front of a ship and expands behind it, carrying the ship between points faster than light without the ship ever locally exceeding the speed of light. The original solution required negative energy densities we cannot produce. Erik Lentz at Gottingen in 2021 and Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire that same year published soliton solutions in peer-reviewed journals showing the negative energy requirement could be relaxed or eliminated. The energy budgets in these revised solutions remain astronomical, running from planetary to stellar mass-energy depending on geometry, configured with exotic precision we do not currently know how to impose. The door Alcubierre described is no longer obviously locked. Calling it merely heavy undersells the problem, and leaving it locked oversells the physics.
The substrate argument goes deeper than Alcubierre because it does not require you to manipulate the metric from inside the metric. It suggests the metric is downstream of something else, and that something else is where the leverage actually sits. Alcubierre is a clever exploit within the rendered layer. Substrate engineering is a rewrite at the source.
The intergalactic problem forces this issue whether we want it forced or not. The universe is expanding, and the expansion compounds with distance. Every galaxy currently more than about sixteen billion light years from Earth is receding faster than light can close the gap between us. The cosmological event horizon is not an engineering problem, and no rocket, fusion drive, or antimatter drive solves it. The space between us and those galaxies grows faster than any signal we send can cross it. Those galaxies are leaving the observable universe in real time, and nothing that respects the rendered geometry can catch them.
If there is any answer to intergalactic travel at all, the answer lives below the mesh. The rendered layer disqualifies itself. You either work beneath the rendering or you accept that the Local Group is the edge of forever.
I think the rendering can be worked beneath. I think the physics of the last thirty years has been quietly assembling the vocabulary for how. The holographic principle, emergent spacetime, ER=EPR, entanglement geometry, the soliton warp metrics, the loop quantum gravity spin networks that discretize the substrate into countable units of area and volume. What looks at first like a crowd of unrelated speculations turns out, under pressure, to be a single converging picture in which what we call space is a high-level description of something relational, informational, and combinatorial happening at a scale we have not yet learned to address directly.
The skeptic will say this is all mathematical machinery with no experimental handle, and the skeptic is right about the second half of that sentence and wrong about the first. Mathematical machinery without experimental handle is exactly what general relativity was in 1915. It took four years to get the eclipse data that confirmed it. The Higgs boson was a mathematical necessity for forty-eight years before CERN found it. The gap between a coherent theoretical framework and the instrument that tests it runs sometimes a decade and sometimes a century. Silence from the apparatus is a statement about the apparatus, not about the theory waiting for it.
The question I opened with, the one a correspondent put to me, asked whether we are thinking about spacetime correctly or whether we need to change our thinking. An honest answer splits the question in half. We are thinking about spacetime correctly for the layer we live in and incorrectly for the layer that produces it. A light year remains a good unit for measuring our prison. It is a useless unit for describing the door.
Every generation of physics has had to accept that the last generation’s bedrock was someone else’s floorboards. Newton’s absolute space became Einstein’s curved manifold. Einstein’s curved manifold is becoming, in front of our eyes, a holographic projection of an entangled quantum substrate. The pattern is consistent. The bedrock keeps turning out to be a floor. There is always something underneath.
I suspect, and I am willing to say it in public because a blog post is the right venue for saying what a journal article cannot, that the civilizations we have been listening for are silent for reasons that have little to do with their absence. Radio waves are a rendered-layer phenomenon. Any species that figured out the rendering would have less reason to keep leaking signal through the old substrate the same week they learned what the water was. The Fermi question has other candidate answers, from the Great Filter to rare-Earth biology to the simulation hypothesis, and each of those deserves the serious treatment it has already received elsewhere. What I am offering is one more candidate the physics of the last thirty years has made more plausible than it was in Fermi’s original framing. If we want to find them, we are going to have to learn what they learned. We are going to have to stop asking how fast we can cross the reef and start asking what the water is.
The reef is beautiful. I have spent a lifetime admiring it. The water is where the answers live.
#einstein #galaxy #geometry #gravity #ideas #investigation #knowing #lightYears #math #mesh #newton #science #stalemate #tech #timeTravel #universe #water -
Below the Mesh
The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.
Physics has been quietly telling us for about thirty years that we are the fish. The reef is spacetime. The water is something else.
Start with what general relativity gets right, because any honest argument has to begin there. Einstein’s field equations predicted the bending of starlight around the Sun in 1919, the slow precession of Mercury’s orbit, the precise timing signals that let a phone in a pocket know where it stands on the planet’s surface, the gravitational waves LIGO caught in 2015 from two black holes colliding a billion light years away, and the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 that the Event Horizon Telescope imaged in 2019. No theory in the history of science has paid off more predictions with more accuracy. General relativity is correct about what it describes.
Notice the hedge. General relativity is correct about what it describes. It describes spacetime as a smooth four-dimensional manifold with curvature determined by mass and energy. The question of where that manifold comes from, or what it is made of, sits outside the theory’s jurisdiction, and Einstein himself acknowledged as much. His equations assume the stage and then tell you how the stage bends. They offer no theory of the stage.
This is the crack through which everything interesting is currently flowing.
Juan Maldacena, working at Harvard in 1997, published a paper that is arguably the most important theoretical physics result since the Standard Model. He showed that a particular kind of gravitational universe, one with a specific negative curvature called Anti-de Sitter space, is mathematically equivalent to a quantum field theory living on its boundary. Everything that happens in the volume can be reconstructed from information encoded on the surface. Gravity, in this setup, stops being fundamental and becomes a holographic projection of something simpler happening in lower dimensions. The interior of the universe is a rendered image. The pixels sit on the edge.
Mark Van Raamsdonk, at the University of British Columbia, took Maldacena’s correspondence and pushed it somewhere Maldacena had not. In a 2010 essay that won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation contest, Van Raamsdonk showed that if you dial down the quantum entanglement between two regions of the boundary theory, the corresponding regions of spacetime in the interior pull apart. Reduce the entanglement further, and the spacetime between them thins, stretches, and finally tears. Spatial distance, in this picture, is a measurement of how strongly two regions of the underlying quantum substrate are entangled with each other. The gap between Earth and Andromeda functions as a readout rather than as an empty stretch of pre-existing room. It is what weak entanglement looks like when the universe renders it as geometry.
A careful reader will note that the mathematics of this correspondence is most securely established in universes with negative cosmological curvature, which is called Anti-de Sitter space. Our universe has positive curvature, which is called de Sitter. Whether the same entanglement-as-geometry relationship carries over into the kind of cosmos we actually live in is one of the most active open questions in the field. Most theorists working on the problem believe the principle generalizes. Nobody has yet proven it, and the first person who does will earn a Nobel Prize within the decade.
Leonard Susskind at Stanford and Maldacena again, in 2013, proposed that this goes further still. Their ER=EPR conjecture argues that any two particles that share quantum entanglement are connected, at the substrate level, by a microscopic wormhole. The entanglement is the wormhole, seen from the rendered side. The wormhole is the entanglement, seen from the substrate side. They are the same object described in two languages.
Sit with what this means. If the geometry we measure is an output rather than an input, then the speed of light is a property of the output layer. It is the maximum rate at which information can propagate through the rendered image. Nothing in the substrate logic requires that the shortest path between two points in the image correspond to the shortest path between the data that produced them. Two pixels on opposite edges of a screen can sit adjacent on the memory bus behind the screen. The cable does not run across the glass.
This is where the writer in me wants to stop being careful, because careful has produced about a century of stalemate on the interstellar question, and careful is not what the moment calls for.
Here is the argument I want to make. The reason we have found no aliens, the reason the sky is quiet when statistics suggest it should be noisy, is that any civilization clever enough to cross the gulfs between stars figured out the gulfs were not the real problem decades into their investigation. Such a species stops building faster rockets. The engineering attention shifts toward entanglement itself. What looks from our side like interstellar travel, to them, becomes an exercise in editing the source code of distance.
I cannot prove this. I can argue it is consistent with what the physics now permits. A civilization that learned to manipulate the entanglement structure of its local vacuum would not need to cross four light years to reach Proxima Centauri. It would rewrite the entanglement between here and there and reduce the rendered distance. Travel becomes a matter of reconfiguring the substrate relationship between the departure point and the destination. The ship does not move. The geometry moves around the ship, because the geometry was always a consequence of a deeper relational fact that the civilization has learned to set directly.
That leap is not a small one and deserves to be named. Reading the entanglement structure of the vacuum is a measurement problem that current physics is making genuine progress on. Writing to that structure with enough precision to change a macroscopic distance is a different problem, and nothing in the current mathematics guarantees the two are connected by a practicable engineering path. My argument is that the theoretical door exists, which is a stronger claim than it was in 1990 and a weaker claim than saying a key has been cut.
This is not quite the Alcubierre drive, though it shares a family resemblance. Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity showed that general relativity permits a metric in which a bubble of space contracts in front of a ship and expands behind it, carrying the ship between points faster than light without the ship ever locally exceeding the speed of light. The original solution required negative energy densities we cannot produce. Erik Lentz at Gottingen in 2021 and Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire that same year published soliton solutions in peer-reviewed journals showing the negative energy requirement could be relaxed or eliminated. The energy budgets in these revised solutions remain astronomical, running from planetary to stellar mass-energy depending on geometry, configured with exotic precision we do not currently know how to impose. The door Alcubierre described is no longer obviously locked. Calling it merely heavy undersells the problem, and leaving it locked oversells the physics.
The substrate argument goes deeper than Alcubierre because it does not require you to manipulate the metric from inside the metric. It suggests the metric is downstream of something else, and that something else is where the leverage actually sits. Alcubierre is a clever exploit within the rendered layer. Substrate engineering is a rewrite at the source.
The intergalactic problem forces this issue whether we want it forced or not. The universe is expanding, and the expansion compounds with distance. Every galaxy currently more than about sixteen billion light years from Earth is receding faster than light can close the gap between us. The cosmological event horizon is not an engineering problem, and no rocket, fusion drive, or antimatter drive solves it. The space between us and those galaxies grows faster than any signal we send can cross it. Those galaxies are leaving the observable universe in real time, and nothing that respects the rendered geometry can catch them.
If there is any answer to intergalactic travel at all, the answer lives below the mesh. The rendered layer disqualifies itself. You either work beneath the rendering or you accept that the Local Group is the edge of forever.
I think the rendering can be worked beneath. I think the physics of the last thirty years has been quietly assembling the vocabulary for how. The holographic principle, emergent spacetime, ER=EPR, entanglement geometry, the soliton warp metrics, the loop quantum gravity spin networks that discretize the substrate into countable units of area and volume. What looks at first like a crowd of unrelated speculations turns out, under pressure, to be a single converging picture in which what we call space is a high-level description of something relational, informational, and combinatorial happening at a scale we have not yet learned to address directly.
The skeptic will say this is all mathematical machinery with no experimental handle, and the skeptic is right about the second half of that sentence and wrong about the first. Mathematical machinery without experimental handle is exactly what general relativity was in 1915. It took four years to get the eclipse data that confirmed it. The Higgs boson was a mathematical necessity for forty-eight years before CERN found it. The gap between a coherent theoretical framework and the instrument that tests it runs sometimes a decade and sometimes a century. Silence from the apparatus is a statement about the apparatus, not about the theory waiting for it.
The question I opened with, the one a correspondent put to me, asked whether we are thinking about spacetime correctly or whether we need to change our thinking. An honest answer splits the question in half. We are thinking about spacetime correctly for the layer we live in and incorrectly for the layer that produces it. A light year remains a good unit for measuring our prison. It is a useless unit for describing the door.
Every generation of physics has had to accept that the last generation’s bedrock was someone else’s floorboards. Newton’s absolute space became Einstein’s curved manifold. Einstein’s curved manifold is becoming, in front of our eyes, a holographic projection of an entangled quantum substrate. The pattern is consistent. The bedrock keeps turning out to be a floor. There is always something underneath.
I suspect, and I am willing to say it in public because a blog post is the right venue for saying what a journal article cannot, that the civilizations we have been listening for are silent for reasons that have little to do with their absence. Radio waves are a rendered-layer phenomenon. Any species that figured out the rendering would have less reason to keep leaking signal through the old substrate the same week they learned what the water was. The Fermi question has other candidate answers, from the Great Filter to rare-Earth biology to the simulation hypothesis, and each of those deserves the serious treatment it has already received elsewhere. What I am offering is one more candidate the physics of the last thirty years has made more plausible than it was in Fermi’s original framing. If we want to find them, we are going to have to learn what they learned. We are going to have to stop asking how fast we can cross the reef and start asking what the water is.
The reef is beautiful. I have spent a lifetime admiring it. The water is where the answers live.
#einstein #galaxy #geometry #gravity #ideas #investigation #knowing #lightYears #math #mesh #newton #science #stalemate #tech #timeTravel #universe #water -
Below the Mesh
The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.
Physics has been quietly telling us for about thirty years that we are the fish. The reef is spacetime. The water is something else.
Start with what general relativity gets right, because any honest argument has to begin there. Einstein’s field equations predicted the bending of starlight around the Sun in 1919, the slow precession of Mercury’s orbit, the precise timing signals that let a phone in a pocket know where it stands on the planet’s surface, the gravitational waves LIGO caught in 2015 from two black holes colliding a billion light years away, and the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 that the Event Horizon Telescope imaged in 2019. No theory in the history of science has paid off more predictions with more accuracy. General relativity is correct about what it describes.
Notice the hedge. General relativity is correct about what it describes. It describes spacetime as a smooth four-dimensional manifold with curvature determined by mass and energy. The question of where that manifold comes from, or what it is made of, sits outside the theory’s jurisdiction, and Einstein himself acknowledged as much. His equations assume the stage and then tell you how the stage bends. They offer no theory of the stage.
This is the crack through which everything interesting is currently flowing.
Juan Maldacena, working at Harvard in 1997, published a paper that is arguably the most important theoretical physics result since the Standard Model. He showed that a particular kind of gravitational universe, one with a specific negative curvature called Anti-de Sitter space, is mathematically equivalent to a quantum field theory living on its boundary. Everything that happens in the volume can be reconstructed from information encoded on the surface. Gravity, in this setup, stops being fundamental and becomes a holographic projection of something simpler happening in lower dimensions. The interior of the universe is a rendered image. The pixels sit on the edge.
Mark Van Raamsdonk, at the University of British Columbia, took Maldacena’s correspondence and pushed it somewhere Maldacena had not. In a 2010 essay that won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation contest, Van Raamsdonk showed that if you dial down the quantum entanglement between two regions of the boundary theory, the corresponding regions of spacetime in the interior pull apart. Reduce the entanglement further, and the spacetime between them thins, stretches, and finally tears. Spatial distance, in this picture, is a measurement of how strongly two regions of the underlying quantum substrate are entangled with each other. The gap between Earth and Andromeda functions as a readout rather than as an empty stretch of pre-existing room. It is what weak entanglement looks like when the universe renders it as geometry.
A careful reader will note that the mathematics of this correspondence is most securely established in universes with negative cosmological curvature, which is called Anti-de Sitter space. Our universe has positive curvature, which is called de Sitter. Whether the same entanglement-as-geometry relationship carries over into the kind of cosmos we actually live in is one of the most active open questions in the field. Most theorists working on the problem believe the principle generalizes. Nobody has yet proven it, and the first person who does will earn a Nobel Prize within the decade.
Leonard Susskind at Stanford and Maldacena again, in 2013, proposed that this goes further still. Their ER=EPR conjecture argues that any two particles that share quantum entanglement are connected, at the substrate level, by a microscopic wormhole. The entanglement is the wormhole, seen from the rendered side. The wormhole is the entanglement, seen from the substrate side. They are the same object described in two languages.
Sit with what this means. If the geometry we measure is an output rather than an input, then the speed of light is a property of the output layer. It is the maximum rate at which information can propagate through the rendered image. Nothing in the substrate logic requires that the shortest path between two points in the image correspond to the shortest path between the data that produced them. Two pixels on opposite edges of a screen can sit adjacent on the memory bus behind the screen. The cable does not run across the glass.
This is where the writer in me wants to stop being careful, because careful has produced about a century of stalemate on the interstellar question, and careful is not what the moment calls for.
Here is the argument I want to make. The reason we have found no aliens, the reason the sky is quiet when statistics suggest it should be noisy, is that any civilization clever enough to cross the gulfs between stars figured out the gulfs were not the real problem decades into their investigation. Such a species stops building faster rockets. The engineering attention shifts toward entanglement itself. What looks from our side like interstellar travel, to them, becomes an exercise in editing the source code of distance.
I cannot prove this. I can argue it is consistent with what the physics now permits. A civilization that learned to manipulate the entanglement structure of its local vacuum would not need to cross four light years to reach Proxima Centauri. It would rewrite the entanglement between here and there and reduce the rendered distance. Travel becomes a matter of reconfiguring the substrate relationship between the departure point and the destination. The ship does not move. The geometry moves around the ship, because the geometry was always a consequence of a deeper relational fact that the civilization has learned to set directly.
That leap is not a small one and deserves to be named. Reading the entanglement structure of the vacuum is a measurement problem that current physics is making genuine progress on. Writing to that structure with enough precision to change a macroscopic distance is a different problem, and nothing in the current mathematics guarantees the two are connected by a practicable engineering path. My argument is that the theoretical door exists, which is a stronger claim than it was in 1990 and a weaker claim than saying a key has been cut.
This is not quite the Alcubierre drive, though it shares a family resemblance. Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity showed that general relativity permits a metric in which a bubble of space contracts in front of a ship and expands behind it, carrying the ship between points faster than light without the ship ever locally exceeding the speed of light. The original solution required negative energy densities we cannot produce. Erik Lentz at Gottingen in 2021 and Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire that same year published soliton solutions in peer-reviewed journals showing the negative energy requirement could be relaxed or eliminated. The energy budgets in these revised solutions remain astronomical, running from planetary to stellar mass-energy depending on geometry, configured with exotic precision we do not currently know how to impose. The door Alcubierre described is no longer obviously locked. Calling it merely heavy undersells the problem, and leaving it locked oversells the physics.
The substrate argument goes deeper than Alcubierre because it does not require you to manipulate the metric from inside the metric. It suggests the metric is downstream of something else, and that something else is where the leverage actually sits. Alcubierre is a clever exploit within the rendered layer. Substrate engineering is a rewrite at the source.
The intergalactic problem forces this issue whether we want it forced or not. The universe is expanding, and the expansion compounds with distance. Every galaxy currently more than about sixteen billion light years from Earth is receding faster than light can close the gap between us. The cosmological event horizon is not an engineering problem, and no rocket, fusion drive, or antimatter drive solves it. The space between us and those galaxies grows faster than any signal we send can cross it. Those galaxies are leaving the observable universe in real time, and nothing that respects the rendered geometry can catch them.
If there is any answer to intergalactic travel at all, the answer lives below the mesh. The rendered layer disqualifies itself. You either work beneath the rendering or you accept that the Local Group is the edge of forever.
I think the rendering can be worked beneath. I think the physics of the last thirty years has been quietly assembling the vocabulary for how. The holographic principle, emergent spacetime, ER=EPR, entanglement geometry, the soliton warp metrics, the loop quantum gravity spin networks that discretize the substrate into countable units of area and volume. What looks at first like a crowd of unrelated speculations turns out, under pressure, to be a single converging picture in which what we call space is a high-level description of something relational, informational, and combinatorial happening at a scale we have not yet learned to address directly.
The skeptic will say this is all mathematical machinery with no experimental handle, and the skeptic is right about the second half of that sentence and wrong about the first. Mathematical machinery without experimental handle is exactly what general relativity was in 1915. It took four years to get the eclipse data that confirmed it. The Higgs boson was a mathematical necessity for forty-eight years before CERN found it. The gap between a coherent theoretical framework and the instrument that tests it runs sometimes a decade and sometimes a century. Silence from the apparatus is a statement about the apparatus, not about the theory waiting for it.
The question I opened with, the one a correspondent put to me, asked whether we are thinking about spacetime correctly or whether we need to change our thinking. An honest answer splits the question in half. We are thinking about spacetime correctly for the layer we live in and incorrectly for the layer that produces it. A light year remains a good unit for measuring our prison. It is a useless unit for describing the door.
Every generation of physics has had to accept that the last generation’s bedrock was someone else’s floorboards. Newton’s absolute space became Einstein’s curved manifold. Einstein’s curved manifold is becoming, in front of our eyes, a holographic projection of an entangled quantum substrate. The pattern is consistent. The bedrock keeps turning out to be a floor. There is always something underneath.
I suspect, and I am willing to say it in public because a blog post is the right venue for saying what a journal article cannot, that the civilizations we have been listening for are silent for reasons that have little to do with their absence. Radio waves are a rendered-layer phenomenon. Any species that figured out the rendering would have less reason to keep leaking signal through the old substrate the same week they learned what the water was. The Fermi question has other candidate answers, from the Great Filter to rare-Earth biology to the simulation hypothesis, and each of those deserves the serious treatment it has already received elsewhere. What I am offering is one more candidate the physics of the last thirty years has made more plausible than it was in Fermi’s original framing. If we want to find them, we are going to have to learn what they learned. We are going to have to stop asking how fast we can cross the reef and start asking what the water is.
The reef is beautiful. I have spent a lifetime admiring it. The water is where the answers live.
#einstein #galaxy #geometry #gravity #ideas #investigation #knowing #lightYears #math #mesh #newton #science #stalemate #tech #timeTravel #universe #water -
Below the Mesh
The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.
Physics has been quietly telling us for about thirty years that we are the fish. The reef is spacetime. The water is something else.
Start with what general relativity gets right, because any honest argument has to begin there. Einstein’s field equations predicted the bending of starlight around the Sun in 1919, the slow precession of Mercury’s orbit, the precise timing signals that let a phone in a pocket know where it stands on the planet’s surface, the gravitational waves LIGO caught in 2015 from two black holes colliding a billion light years away, and the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 that the Event Horizon Telescope imaged in 2019. No theory in the history of science has paid off more predictions with more accuracy. General relativity is correct about what it describes.
Notice the hedge. General relativity is correct about what it describes. It describes spacetime as a smooth four-dimensional manifold with curvature determined by mass and energy. The question of where that manifold comes from, or what it is made of, sits outside the theory’s jurisdiction, and Einstein himself acknowledged as much. His equations assume the stage and then tell you how the stage bends. They offer no theory of the stage.
This is the crack through which everything interesting is currently flowing.
Juan Maldacena, working at Harvard in 1997, published a paper that is arguably the most important theoretical physics result since the Standard Model. He showed that a particular kind of gravitational universe, one with a specific negative curvature called Anti-de Sitter space, is mathematically equivalent to a quantum field theory living on its boundary. Everything that happens in the volume can be reconstructed from information encoded on the surface. Gravity, in this setup, stops being fundamental and becomes a holographic projection of something simpler happening in lower dimensions. The interior of the universe is a rendered image. The pixels sit on the edge.
Mark Van Raamsdonk, at the University of British Columbia, took Maldacena’s correspondence and pushed it somewhere Maldacena had not. In a 2010 essay that won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation contest, Van Raamsdonk showed that if you dial down the quantum entanglement between two regions of the boundary theory, the corresponding regions of spacetime in the interior pull apart. Reduce the entanglement further, and the spacetime between them thins, stretches, and finally tears. Spatial distance, in this picture, is a measurement of how strongly two regions of the underlying quantum substrate are entangled with each other. The gap between Earth and Andromeda functions as a readout rather than as an empty stretch of pre-existing room. It is what weak entanglement looks like when the universe renders it as geometry.
A careful reader will note that the mathematics of this correspondence is most securely established in universes with negative cosmological curvature, which is called Anti-de Sitter space. Our universe has positive curvature, which is called de Sitter. Whether the same entanglement-as-geometry relationship carries over into the kind of cosmos we actually live in is one of the most active open questions in the field. Most theorists working on the problem believe the principle generalizes. Nobody has yet proven it, and the first person who does will earn a Nobel Prize within the decade.
Leonard Susskind at Stanford and Maldacena again, in 2013, proposed that this goes further still. Their ER=EPR conjecture argues that any two particles that share quantum entanglement are connected, at the substrate level, by a microscopic wormhole. The entanglement is the wormhole, seen from the rendered side. The wormhole is the entanglement, seen from the substrate side. They are the same object described in two languages.
Sit with what this means. If the geometry we measure is an output rather than an input, then the speed of light is a property of the output layer. It is the maximum rate at which information can propagate through the rendered image. Nothing in the substrate logic requires that the shortest path between two points in the image correspond to the shortest path between the data that produced them. Two pixels on opposite edges of a screen can sit adjacent on the memory bus behind the screen. The cable does not run across the glass.
This is where the writer in me wants to stop being careful, because careful has produced about a century of stalemate on the interstellar question, and careful is not what the moment calls for.
Here is the argument I want to make. The reason we have found no aliens, the reason the sky is quiet when statistics suggest it should be noisy, is that any civilization clever enough to cross the gulfs between stars figured out the gulfs were not the real problem decades into their investigation. Such a species stops building faster rockets. The engineering attention shifts toward entanglement itself. What looks from our side like interstellar travel, to them, becomes an exercise in editing the source code of distance.
I cannot prove this. I can argue it is consistent with what the physics now permits. A civilization that learned to manipulate the entanglement structure of its local vacuum would not need to cross four light years to reach Proxima Centauri. It would rewrite the entanglement between here and there and reduce the rendered distance. Travel becomes a matter of reconfiguring the substrate relationship between the departure point and the destination. The ship does not move. The geometry moves around the ship, because the geometry was always a consequence of a deeper relational fact that the civilization has learned to set directly.
That leap is not a small one and deserves to be named. Reading the entanglement structure of the vacuum is a measurement problem that current physics is making genuine progress on. Writing to that structure with enough precision to change a macroscopic distance is a different problem, and nothing in the current mathematics guarantees the two are connected by a practicable engineering path. My argument is that the theoretical door exists, which is a stronger claim than it was in 1990 and a weaker claim than saying a key has been cut.
This is not quite the Alcubierre drive, though it shares a family resemblance. Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity showed that general relativity permits a metric in which a bubble of space contracts in front of a ship and expands behind it, carrying the ship between points faster than light without the ship ever locally exceeding the speed of light. The original solution required negative energy densities we cannot produce. Erik Lentz at Gottingen in 2021 and Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire that same year published soliton solutions in peer-reviewed journals showing the negative energy requirement could be relaxed or eliminated. The energy budgets in these revised solutions remain astronomical, running from planetary to stellar mass-energy depending on geometry, configured with exotic precision we do not currently know how to impose. The door Alcubierre described is no longer obviously locked. Calling it merely heavy undersells the problem, and leaving it locked oversells the physics.
The substrate argument goes deeper than Alcubierre because it does not require you to manipulate the metric from inside the metric. It suggests the metric is downstream of something else, and that something else is where the leverage actually sits. Alcubierre is a clever exploit within the rendered layer. Substrate engineering is a rewrite at the source.
The intergalactic problem forces this issue whether we want it forced or not. The universe is expanding, and the expansion compounds with distance. Every galaxy currently more than about sixteen billion light years from Earth is receding faster than light can close the gap between us. The cosmological event horizon is not an engineering problem, and no rocket, fusion drive, or antimatter drive solves it. The space between us and those galaxies grows faster than any signal we send can cross it. Those galaxies are leaving the observable universe in real time, and nothing that respects the rendered geometry can catch them.
If there is any answer to intergalactic travel at all, the answer lives below the mesh. The rendered layer disqualifies itself. You either work beneath the rendering or you accept that the Local Group is the edge of forever.
I think the rendering can be worked beneath. I think the physics of the last thirty years has been quietly assembling the vocabulary for how. The holographic principle, emergent spacetime, ER=EPR, entanglement geometry, the soliton warp metrics, the loop quantum gravity spin networks that discretize the substrate into countable units of area and volume. What looks at first like a crowd of unrelated speculations turns out, under pressure, to be a single converging picture in which what we call space is a high-level description of something relational, informational, and combinatorial happening at a scale we have not yet learned to address directly.
The skeptic will say this is all mathematical machinery with no experimental handle, and the skeptic is right about the second half of that sentence and wrong about the first. Mathematical machinery without experimental handle is exactly what general relativity was in 1915. It took four years to get the eclipse data that confirmed it. The Higgs boson was a mathematical necessity for forty-eight years before CERN found it. The gap between a coherent theoretical framework and the instrument that tests it runs sometimes a decade and sometimes a century. Silence from the apparatus is a statement about the apparatus, not about the theory waiting for it.
The question I opened with, the one a correspondent put to me, asked whether we are thinking about spacetime correctly or whether we need to change our thinking. An honest answer splits the question in half. We are thinking about spacetime correctly for the layer we live in and incorrectly for the layer that produces it. A light year remains a good unit for measuring our prison. It is a useless unit for describing the door.
Every generation of physics has had to accept that the last generation’s bedrock was someone else’s floorboards. Newton’s absolute space became Einstein’s curved manifold. Einstein’s curved manifold is becoming, in front of our eyes, a holographic projection of an entangled quantum substrate. The pattern is consistent. The bedrock keeps turning out to be a floor. There is always something underneath.
I suspect, and I am willing to say it in public because a blog post is the right venue for saying what a journal article cannot, that the civilizations we have been listening for are silent for reasons that have little to do with their absence. Radio waves are a rendered-layer phenomenon. Any species that figured out the rendering would have less reason to keep leaking signal through the old substrate the same week they learned what the water was. The Fermi question has other candidate answers, from the Great Filter to rare-Earth biology to the simulation hypothesis, and each of those deserves the serious treatment it has already received elsewhere. What I am offering is one more candidate the physics of the last thirty years has made more plausible than it was in Fermi’s original framing. If we want to find them, we are going to have to learn what they learned. We are going to have to stop asking how fast we can cross the reef and start asking what the water is.
The reef is beautiful. I have spent a lifetime admiring it. The water is where the answers live.
#einstein #galaxy #geometry #gravity #ideas #investigation #knowing #lightYears #math #mesh #newton #science #stalemate #tech #timeTravel #universe #water -
Below the Mesh
The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.
Physics has been quietly telling us for about thirty years that we are the fish. The reef is spacetime. The water is something else.
Start with what general relativity gets right, because any honest argument has to begin there. Einstein’s field equations predicted the bending of starlight around the Sun in 1919, the slow precession of Mercury’s orbit, the precise timing signals that let a phone in a pocket know where it stands on the planet’s surface, the gravitational waves LIGO caught in 2015 from two black holes colliding a billion light years away, and the shadow of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 that the Event Horizon Telescope imaged in 2019. No theory in the history of science has paid off more predictions with more accuracy. General relativity is correct about what it describes.
Notice the hedge. General relativity is correct about what it describes. It describes spacetime as a smooth four-dimensional manifold with curvature determined by mass and energy. The question of where that manifold comes from, or what it is made of, sits outside the theory’s jurisdiction, and Einstein himself acknowledged as much. His equations assume the stage and then tell you how the stage bends. They offer no theory of the stage.
This is the crack through which everything interesting is currently flowing.
Juan Maldacena, working at Harvard in 1997, published a paper that is arguably the most important theoretical physics result since the Standard Model. He showed that a particular kind of gravitational universe, one with a specific negative curvature called Anti-de Sitter space, is mathematically equivalent to a quantum field theory living on its boundary. Everything that happens in the volume can be reconstructed from information encoded on the surface. Gravity, in this setup, stops being fundamental and becomes a holographic projection of something simpler happening in lower dimensions. The interior of the universe is a rendered image. The pixels sit on the edge.
Mark Van Raamsdonk, at the University of British Columbia, took Maldacena’s correspondence and pushed it somewhere Maldacena had not. In a 2010 essay that won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation contest, Van Raamsdonk showed that if you dial down the quantum entanglement between two regions of the boundary theory, the corresponding regions of spacetime in the interior pull apart. Reduce the entanglement further, and the spacetime between them thins, stretches, and finally tears. Spatial distance, in this picture, is a measurement of how strongly two regions of the underlying quantum substrate are entangled with each other. The gap between Earth and Andromeda functions as a readout rather than as an empty stretch of pre-existing room. It is what weak entanglement looks like when the universe renders it as geometry.
A careful reader will note that the mathematics of this correspondence is most securely established in universes with negative cosmological curvature, which is called Anti-de Sitter space. Our universe has positive curvature, which is called de Sitter. Whether the same entanglement-as-geometry relationship carries over into the kind of cosmos we actually live in is one of the most active open questions in the field. Most theorists working on the problem believe the principle generalizes. Nobody has yet proven it, and the first person who does will earn a Nobel Prize within the decade.
Leonard Susskind at Stanford and Maldacena again, in 2013, proposed that this goes further still. Their ER=EPR conjecture argues that any two particles that share quantum entanglement are connected, at the substrate level, by a microscopic wormhole. The entanglement is the wormhole, seen from the rendered side. The wormhole is the entanglement, seen from the substrate side. They are the same object described in two languages.
Sit with what this means. If the geometry we measure is an output rather than an input, then the speed of light is a property of the output layer. It is the maximum rate at which information can propagate through the rendered image. Nothing in the substrate logic requires that the shortest path between two points in the image correspond to the shortest path between the data that produced them. Two pixels on opposite edges of a screen can sit adjacent on the memory bus behind the screen. The cable does not run across the glass.
This is where the writer in me wants to stop being careful, because careful has produced about a century of stalemate on the interstellar question, and careful is not what the moment calls for.
Here is the argument I want to make. The reason we have found no aliens, the reason the sky is quiet when statistics suggest it should be noisy, is that any civilization clever enough to cross the gulfs between stars figured out the gulfs were not the real problem decades into their investigation. Such a species stops building faster rockets. The engineering attention shifts toward entanglement itself. What looks from our side like interstellar travel, to them, becomes an exercise in editing the source code of distance.
I cannot prove this. I can argue it is consistent with what the physics now permits. A civilization that learned to manipulate the entanglement structure of its local vacuum would not need to cross four light years to reach Proxima Centauri. It would rewrite the entanglement between here and there and reduce the rendered distance. Travel becomes a matter of reconfiguring the substrate relationship between the departure point and the destination. The ship does not move. The geometry moves around the ship, because the geometry was always a consequence of a deeper relational fact that the civilization has learned to set directly.
That leap is not a small one and deserves to be named. Reading the entanglement structure of the vacuum is a measurement problem that current physics is making genuine progress on. Writing to that structure with enough precision to change a macroscopic distance is a different problem, and nothing in the current mathematics guarantees the two are connected by a practicable engineering path. My argument is that the theoretical door exists, which is a stronger claim than it was in 1990 and a weaker claim than saying a key has been cut.
This is not quite the Alcubierre drive, though it shares a family resemblance. Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity showed that general relativity permits a metric in which a bubble of space contracts in front of a ship and expands behind it, carrying the ship between points faster than light without the ship ever locally exceeding the speed of light. The original solution required negative energy densities we cannot produce. Erik Lentz at Gottingen in 2021 and Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire that same year published soliton solutions in peer-reviewed journals showing the negative energy requirement could be relaxed or eliminated. The energy budgets in these revised solutions remain astronomical, running from planetary to stellar mass-energy depending on geometry, configured with exotic precision we do not currently know how to impose. The door Alcubierre described is no longer obviously locked. Calling it merely heavy undersells the problem, and leaving it locked oversells the physics.
The substrate argument goes deeper than Alcubierre because it does not require you to manipulate the metric from inside the metric. It suggests the metric is downstream of something else, and that something else is where the leverage actually sits. Alcubierre is a clever exploit within the rendered layer. Substrate engineering is a rewrite at the source.
The intergalactic problem forces this issue whether we want it forced or not. The universe is expanding, and the expansion compounds with distance. Every galaxy currently more than about sixteen billion light years from Earth is receding faster than light can close the gap between us. The cosmological event horizon is not an engineering problem, and no rocket, fusion drive, or antimatter drive solves it. The space between us and those galaxies grows faster than any signal we send can cross it. Those galaxies are leaving the observable universe in real time, and nothing that respects the rendered geometry can catch them.
If there is any answer to intergalactic travel at all, the answer lives below the mesh. The rendered layer disqualifies itself. You either work beneath the rendering or you accept that the Local Group is the edge of forever.
I think the rendering can be worked beneath. I think the physics of the last thirty years has been quietly assembling the vocabulary for how. The holographic principle, emergent spacetime, ER=EPR, entanglement geometry, the soliton warp metrics, the loop quantum gravity spin networks that discretize the substrate into countable units of area and volume. What looks at first like a crowd of unrelated speculations turns out, under pressure, to be a single converging picture in which what we call space is a high-level description of something relational, informational, and combinatorial happening at a scale we have not yet learned to address directly.
The skeptic will say this is all mathematical machinery with no experimental handle, and the skeptic is right about the second half of that sentence and wrong about the first. Mathematical machinery without experimental handle is exactly what general relativity was in 1915. It took four years to get the eclipse data that confirmed it. The Higgs boson was a mathematical necessity for forty-eight years before CERN found it. The gap between a coherent theoretical framework and the instrument that tests it runs sometimes a decade and sometimes a century. Silence from the apparatus is a statement about the apparatus, not about the theory waiting for it.
The question I opened with, the one a correspondent put to me, asked whether we are thinking about spacetime correctly or whether we need to change our thinking. An honest answer splits the question in half. We are thinking about spacetime correctly for the layer we live in and incorrectly for the layer that produces it. A light year remains a good unit for measuring our prison. It is a useless unit for describing the door.
Every generation of physics has had to accept that the last generation’s bedrock was someone else’s floorboards. Newton’s absolute space became Einstein’s curved manifold. Einstein’s curved manifold is becoming, in front of our eyes, a holographic projection of an entangled quantum substrate. The pattern is consistent. The bedrock keeps turning out to be a floor. There is always something underneath.
I suspect, and I am willing to say it in public because a blog post is the right venue for saying what a journal article cannot, that the civilizations we have been listening for are silent for reasons that have little to do with their absence. Radio waves are a rendered-layer phenomenon. Any species that figured out the rendering would have less reason to keep leaking signal through the old substrate the same week they learned what the water was. The Fermi question has other candidate answers, from the Great Filter to rare-Earth biology to the simulation hypothesis, and each of those deserves the serious treatment it has already received elsewhere. What I am offering is one more candidate the physics of the last thirty years has made more plausible than it was in Fermi’s original framing. If we want to find them, we are going to have to learn what they learned. We are going to have to stop asking how fast we can cross the reef and start asking what the water is.
The reef is beautiful. I have spent a lifetime admiring it. The water is where the answers live.
#einstein #galaxy #geometry #gravity #ideas #investigation #knowing #lightYears #math #mesh #newton #science #stalemate #tech #timeTravel #universe #water -
Well that takes a load of my mind - I'm glad we got to the bottom of this!
Researchers @ University of Pennsylvania have confirmed that gravity's strength weakens with distance almost exactly as predicted by the equations developed by Newton and later incorporated into Einstein's theory of general relativity. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-gravity-newton-einstein-cosmic-scales.html #Gravity #Newton #Einstein #GeneralRelativity #TheoreticalPhysics #Physics #Astrophysics #Universe #Galaxies #UniversityofPennsylvania
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Well that takes a load of my mind - I'm glad we got to the bottom of this!
Researchers @ University of Pennsylvania have confirmed that gravity's strength weakens with distance almost exactly as predicted by the equations developed by Newton and later incorporated into Einstein's theory of general relativity. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-gravity-newton-einstein-cosmic-scales.html #Gravity #Newton #Einstein #GeneralRelativity #TheoreticalPhysics #Physics #Astrophysics #Universe #Galaxies #UniversityofPennsylvania
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Rachael Garden cold case: New age-progression image released https://www.allforgardening.com/1712727/rachael-garden-cold-case-new-age-progression-image-released/ #App #ColdCase #ColdCaseUnit #DecadesOldDisappearance #download #garden #go #investigator #missing #NewAgeProgressionImage #NewHampshire #NewHampshireAttorneyGeneral #NewInformation #Newton #office' #OriginalInvestigation #RachaelGarden #RachaelGardenColdCase #teenager #today #Update #year
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Rachael Garden cold case: New age-progression image released https://www.allforgardening.com/1712727/rachael-garden-cold-case-new-age-progression-image-released/ #App #ColdCase #ColdCaseUnit #DecadesOldDisappearance #download #garden #go #investigator #missing #NewAgeProgressionImage #NewHampshire #NewHampshireAttorneyGeneral #NewInformation #Newton #office' #OriginalInvestigation #RachaelGarden #RachaelGardenColdCase #teenager #today #Update #year
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https://www.alojapan.com/1475787/mental-notes-with-hilary-valdez-time/ Mental Notes with Hilary Valdez Time #Japan #KurihamaPrison #MentalNotes #news #newton #Okinawa #OkinawaNews #psychology #science #sofa #time #usnh #yokosuka #YokosukaNavalHospital #沖縄 Hilary Valdez (Photo by Hilary Valdez/Stripes Okinawa) A meaningful life is not measured in years, but in how consciously time is lived. Newton described time as absolute, meaning it exists whether anything happens or not. Time in psychology is not just so
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https://www.alojapan.com/1475787/mental-notes-with-hilary-valdez-time/ Mental Notes with Hilary Valdez Time #Japan #KurihamaPrison #MentalNotes #news #newton #Okinawa #OkinawaNews #psychology #science #sofa #time #usnh #yokosuka #YokosukaNavalHospital #沖縄 Hilary Valdez (Photo by Hilary Valdez/Stripes Okinawa) A meaningful life is not measured in years, but in how consciously time is lived. Newton described time as absolute, meaning it exists whether anything happens or not. Time in psychology is not just so
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Chap 2
of New Year #Resolutions implementing changeI enrolled in an on line meditation course. I joined a few forums specialising in dharma or #Buddhist lore. There was no stopping me. I even announced my intention, probably not a good idea. Nothing riles Buddhists more than someone trying to practice Buddhism in a way they don’t approve of. I also joined a sort of Buddhist therapy by the enlightened. The non-dualists fired questions about what you were until you finally realised it was all a fantasy and nothing known as self exists. My ego was to be vapourised?
My new found on-line sangha or Buddhist community, were very kind. They have to be, it is part of the rules. Not really rules, more like skillful recommendations?#Buddhism was started by a sort of male Grace Kelly #Princess of an ancient kingdom. Not happy with a sheltered magical life, the Shakya Clan Princess went through a series of New Age treatments until finally sitting under a tree and having a fig drop on their sacred bonce - or was that #Newton? Anyway he worked out the gravity of the situation and went about shouting the equivalent of #Eureka but with a little more decorum. Could this work? Where was the nearest fig tree?
I built a couple of shrines and slept on the floor between them. Buddhist monks are not allowed raised beds in case they hide women underneath. I am not sure of many women who would hide under beds for a bit of slap and tickle with a penniless baldy but one can take no chances. If a period of institutional misogyny has to be endured, sorry ladies, just be grateful I am not a strict #Jain. Their women have to incarnate as men to become enlightened! Ah well, a bit of nonsense helps with the training in patience. Or Not?
So the environment was in place, I chanted for help from Manjushri, Chenresig, Cundi (female Buddha), Tara (Lady Buddha too) and anyone else listening in the pantheon of other realm helpers. How could I fail? I installed Buddha’s in the garden, kitchen, bathroom and on an iPad, falling asleep with Buddha enlightenment on the mind and iPod touch tinny chants of encouragement.
There was a diversity of Buddhists. #Meditation seemed recommended by the majority as the fast way to #Nirvana, satori, awakening. The good stuff?I soon learned that the mind is an unruly fellow to follow. Constantly changing. Never satisfied. Meditation would tame this beast and what would be left is Buddha Nature or #Enlightened #Mind All I had to do was sit and watch the antics of the meandering experience in stillness. Until finally, exhausted and exposed for time wasting, it would just sort of dissolve away into an empty puddle of nothingness. I had a plan. I could almost smell the land of #buddhas beckoning me... or was it moth balls?
:agummyhug: :0dd_verified: :ab_heart_gay_pride:
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Chap 2
of New Year #Resolutions implementing changeI enrolled in an on line meditation course. I joined a few forums specialising in dharma or #Buddhist lore. There was no stopping me. I even announced my intention, probably not a good idea. Nothing riles Buddhists more than someone trying to practice Buddhism in a way they don’t approve of. I also joined a sort of Buddhist therapy by the enlightened. The non-dualists fired questions about what you were until you finally realised it was all a fantasy and nothing known as self exists. My ego was to be vapourised?
My new found on-line sangha or Buddhist community, were very kind. They have to be, it is part of the rules. Not really rules, more like skillful recommendations?#Buddhism was started by a sort of male Grace Kelly #Princess of an ancient kingdom. Not happy with a sheltered magical life, the Shakya Clan Princess went through a series of New Age treatments until finally sitting under a tree and having a fig drop on their sacred bonce - or was that #Newton? Anyway he worked out the gravity of the situation and went about shouting the equivalent of #Eureka but with a little more decorum. Could this work? Where was the nearest fig tree?
I built a couple of shrines and slept on the floor between them. Buddhist monks are not allowed raised beds in case they hide women underneath. I am not sure of many women who would hide under beds for a bit of slap and tickle with a penniless baldy but one can take no chances. If a period of institutional misogyny has to be endured, sorry ladies, just be grateful I am not a strict #Jain. Their women have to incarnate as men to become enlightened! Ah well, a bit of nonsense helps with the training in patience. Or Not?
So the environment was in place, I chanted for help from Manjushri, Chenresig, Cundi (female Buddha), Tara (Lady Buddha too) and anyone else listening in the pantheon of other realm helpers. How could I fail? I installed Buddha’s in the garden, kitchen, bathroom and on an iPad, falling asleep with Buddha enlightenment on the mind and iPod touch tinny chants of encouragement.
There was a diversity of Buddhists. #Meditation seemed recommended by the majority as the fast way to #Nirvana, satori, awakening. The good stuff?I soon learned that the mind is an unruly fellow to follow. Constantly changing. Never satisfied. Meditation would tame this beast and what would be left is Buddha Nature or #Enlightened #Mind All I had to do was sit and watch the antics of the meandering experience in stillness. Until finally, exhausted and exposed for time wasting, it would just sort of dissolve away into an empty puddle of nothingness. I had a plan. I could almost smell the land of #buddhas beckoning me... or was it moth balls?
:agummyhug: :0dd_verified: :ab_heart_gay_pride:
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Echo Bridge is part of an aqueduct system. The bridge crosses the Charles River in Newton Upper Falls
https://adam-gladstone.pixels.com/featured/on-top-of-echo-bridge-adam-gladstone.html
#photography #newton #massachusetts #charlesriver #buyintoart #ayearforart #fineartamerica #hemlockgorge #photo #photographyisart #fedigiftshop
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Echo Bridge is part of an aqueduct system. The bridge crosses the Charles River in Newton Upper Falls
https://adam-gladstone.pixels.com/featured/on-top-of-echo-bridge-adam-gladstone.html
#photography #newton #massachusetts #charlesriver #buyintoart #ayearforart #fineartamerica #hemlockgorge #photo #photographyisart #fedigiftshop
