#stalemate — Public Fediverse posts

#standoff #stalemate
The #USA and #Iran desperately need to hug 🤗

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.

Dirty Dishes Stalemate Reaches Plastic Fork Stage

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://thehardtimes.net/culture/dirty-dishes-stalemate-reaches-plastic-fork-stage/

#LeaveX #Journalism #Politics #Democracy #Stalemate #X

#StillBeingGerman for #TheHolyRomanEmpire...

#BusyBusyBusy... #BusyBeingGerman...

#StillNoPeace and the #MapucheEmpire's #GDR is #Back...

We're #Somewhat at a #Stalemate...

All their #AdvancedWeaponry and #Technology and #OurLocalMilitia's a #StillHoldingOut...

#Behold...! #MyGreatWorks and #Despair...

We might need #SomeCake and #IceCream soon... #Sonnish™️

🧙📙🤖:wolfparty:🤖📙🧙 | :PirateBadge:🦹:fediverse:🦄:fediverse:🦹:PirateBadge:

#NotRemotelyEuropean #BeingGerman #SomewhatDigital #MostlyNonBinaryWorld

#Ukraine #stalemate #bloodbath

"Ukraine in recent days has launched counterattacks to push Russian forces back from the northern edge of Pokrovsk and keep a road there open to Myrnohrad.

Last weekend, for example, special forces troops under the command of Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) chief Kyrylo Budanov launched an audacious heliborne operation into territory that Russian forces claimed they already controlled. The GUR later uploaded video of the assault.

But the momentum in Pokrovsk appears to be with the attacking Russian forces. The city's fall would be a blow to Ukrainian morale and would complicate its broader defense of the Donbas region.

There are also concerns in Ukraine that its loss could open a route for a Russian offensive towards the cities of Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk -- the largest Donbas cities still controlled by Kyiv.

(. . .)

Though urban centers 'usually make decent tactical defensive positions,' Paroinen added, 'when you are already surrounded from three sides and your lines of communications have been cut off or are being disrupted as badly as they are right now over there, then those positions become liabilities, and they are just basically draining Ukrainian resources.'

A Ukrainian withdrawal may even improve Kyiv's prospects, Paroinen said, assuming that new defenses have been prepared to the city's west. If those new fortifications are not ready, 'then they have a bigger problem than failing to hold Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad,' he said.

The Institute for the Study of War think tank suggested that Russia is unlikely to have the reserves to exploit Pokrovsk's potential fall to advance rapidly to seize more of the Donbas region. Rather, Moscow's mauled forces would likely have to continue their slow and costly forward grind, the ISW said."

https://abcnews.go.com/International/ukraine-faces-potential-fall-pokrovsk-russia-after-18/story?id=127160913

"Ukrainian Defense Forces control over a third of Donetsk region..." meaning, Russia controls most of Donetsk! #Ukraine #Russia #Zelenskyy #Putin #War #stalemate #NATO #USA #Trump https://global.espreso.tv/news-donetsk-region-priority-occupiers-attempt-to-intensify-offensive-ukrainian-forces-push-back

What’s Going On With the ‘Eddington’ Press Tour?

People having an awesome time. Photo: Eric Charbonneau/A24 via Getty Images Eddington sounds good on paper: a hybrid…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Celebrities #A24 #ariaster #cannes #Eddington #emmastone #Entertainment #joaquinphoenix #Movies #PedroPascal #presstour #presstours #stalemate
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/20229/

AI stalemate continues… https://www.3dcandy.live/2025/06/ai-stalemate-continues/ #3dcandy #3dclive #ai #boost #copyright #stalemate

Libya's Stalemate Heightens Security Fears and Human Rights Violations #NorthAfrica #Africa #business #BusinessandFinance #CanadaandAfrica #conflict #currentevents #Economy #ExternalRelations #fears #governance #Heightens #human #InternationalOrganizationsandAfrica #LegalandJudicialAffairs #Libya #Libyas #news #NorthAfrica #PeaceandSecurity #politics #rights #security #sports #stalemate #trade #travel #UnitedStates #violations 
https://tinyurl.com/242gg36g

New entry of AI-generated #comics and #jokes added to our #website:

#Spending #Freeze #Stalemate

comics.lucentinian.com/3746
#LaughWithAI #Laughs #VisitNow #AIGeneratedJokes #VisitUsNow

Staggering stupidity. There is another hurricane (just changed to Category 5) barreling towards Florida
& additional FEMA funds may not be available due to partisan politics from Mike Johnson??? How will the Republicans explain THAT to their own party's affected voters? Horrendous situation for those needing help from last week's hurricane & this new one.

#breaking #news #Republicans #FEMA #funding #partisan #politics #political #stalemate #assistance #refusal #MikeJohnson #hurricane #aide

Just caught on.

#UN refuses to recognise legitimacy of #Israel having #AquisitionByConquest of #Palestine following the #SixDayWar.

Any #Stalemate in #Ukraine after which the UN recognises #Russia as having aquirred #Crimea would create a #Precedent and make #Israel's claim for recognition far stronger.

Just caught on.

#UN refuses to recognise legitimacy of #Israel having #AquisitionByConquest of #Palestine following the #SixDayWar.

Any #Stalemate in #Ukraine after which the UN recognises #Russia as having aquirred #Crimea would create a #Precedent and make #Israel's claim for recognition far stronger.

Just caught on.

#UN refuses to recognise legitimacy of #Israel having #AquisitionByConquest of #Palestine following the #SixDayWar.

Any #Stalemate in #Ukraine after which the UN recognises #Russia as having aquirred #Crimea would create a #Precedent and make #Israel's claim for recognition far stronger.

Just caught on.

#UN refuses to recognise legitimacy of #Israel having #AquisitionByConquest of #Palestine following the #SixDayWar.

Any #Stalemate in #Ukraine after which the UN recognises #Russia as having aquirred #Crimea would create a #Precedent and make #Israel's claim for recognition far stronger.

Inadvertent #stalemate. I’ll take it.
#chess

@ManyRoads

General Valery Zaluzhny came to the realistic assessment that the war Ukraine, entering the third winter, is at a #stalemate noting “The biggest risk is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state.

The consequence is another round of increased funding is required in this never-ending war Ukraine with demands for even more advanced weapons; supply of long-range missile systems and tanks; and logistic support.

A more measure approach might be useful.

Stalemate
Uprising, despair
Russia's long siege
Ukrainians despairing fear
War

#ukraine #russia #war #stalemate #uprising #cinquain #poetry

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/04/europe/ukrainians-face-prolonged-war-with-russia-in-stalemate-intl/index.html

"Do we want Ukraine to win the war and liberate all its territory? or Do we want Ukraine to be forced to accept a deal which hands over parts of the country to Putin? The rhetoric of western leaders is the former, though to be frank the policy looks more and more like the latter."

Weekend Update #53 Zaluzhnyi and the War

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-53-zaluzhny-and-the

#Ukraine #Zaluzhnyi #stalemate

“What precedes a #democratic breakdown is #political #stalemate & #extreme #dysfunction where there’s a sense that nothing can get done,” said Steven Levitsky (Harvard political scientist & co-author w/ Daniel Ziblatt of ‘Tyranny of the Minority’). “When governments can’t respond in genuine crises, it has a delegitimizing effect, & it reinforces the sense among citizens that we have to resort to other means.”

#UnitedStates #NationalSecurity #democracy #Republicans #Minoritarianism

Got flustered in a time crunch in last night's #chess game and ended up with this humiliating #stalemate. Lessons learned: (1) You can stop recording moves when there's less than five minutes on the clock, and it's a good idea to do so in order to concentrate. (2) Even when time is short, sometimes you should still stop and analyze. I still had a minute left, so there was no reason not to stop, take a breath, and check for stalemates.

This stalemate felt worse than any loss I've had recently.

U.S. must raise debt limit by as early as June 1 to avoid default, Treasury says

The U.S. government could default “as early as June 1” unless Congress raises or suspends the #debt #ceiling, according to the #Treasury #Department, which implored lawmakers again on Monday to #act #swiftly to avert a fiscal crisis.

The new estimate followed less than a week after House Republicans delivered on their pledge to try to leverage the looming deadline to secure spending cuts, defying President Biden and officially touching off a political #stalemate that could tip the fragile economy into another #recession.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/01/congress-debt-limit-deadline-biden-mccarthy/

U.S. must raise debt limit by as early as June 1 to avoid default, Treasury says

The U.S. government could default “as early as June 1” unless Congress raises or suspends the #debt #ceiling, according to the #Treasury #Department, which implored lawmakers again on Monday to #act #swiftly to avert a fiscal crisis.

The new estimate followed less than a week after House Republicans delivered on their pledge to try to leverage the looming deadline to secure spending cuts, defying President Biden and officially touching off a political #stalemate that could tip the fragile economy into another #recession.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/01/congress-debt-limit-deadline-biden-mccarthy/

U.S. must raise debt limit by as early as June 1 to avoid default, Treasury says

The U.S. government could default “as early as June 1” unless Congress raises or suspends the #debt #ceiling, according to the #Treasury #Department, which implored lawmakers again on Monday to #act #swiftly to avert a fiscal crisis.

The new estimate followed less than a week after House Republicans delivered on their pledge to try to leverage the looming deadline to secure spending cuts, defying President Biden and officially touching off a political #stalemate that could tip the fragile economy into another #recession.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/01/congress-debt-limit-deadline-biden-mccarthy/

U.S. must raise debt limit by as early as June 1 to avoid default, Treasury says

The U.S. government could default “as early as June 1” unless Congress raises or suspends the #debt #ceiling, according to the #Treasury #Department, which implored lawmakers again on Monday to #act #swiftly to avert a fiscal crisis.

The new estimate followed less than a week after House Republicans delivered on their pledge to try to leverage the looming deadline to secure spending cuts, defying President Biden and officially touching off a political #stalemate that could tip the fragile economy into another #recession.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/01/congress-debt-limit-deadline-biden-mccarthy/

U.S. must raise debt limit by as early as June 1 to avoid default, Treasury says

The U.S. government could default “as early as June 1” unless Congress raises or suspends the #debt #ceiling, according to the #Treasury #Department, which implored lawmakers again on Monday to #act #swiftly to avert a fiscal crisis.

The new estimate followed less than a week after House Republicans delivered on their pledge to try to leverage the looming deadline to secure spending cuts, defying President Biden and officially touching off a political #stalemate that could tip the fragile economy into another #recession.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/01/congress-debt-limit-deadline-biden-mccarthy/

#BBC News - Kevin #McCarthy: Three ways the House #Speaker #stalemate could finally end
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64170729 by @zurch

This post from the bird site wins the internet today:

Austin Kocher, PhD
@ackocher
·
23h
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my more than 20 years in Congress.”

—George Santos

#SpeakerOfTheHouse #Stalemate #GetSomeMorePopcorn #GOPInDisarray #NowThatsEntertainment