Back And Forth

I think I may have read this about time travel before. Thinking about this in too much detail reminds me of the section I read in The Ancestor's Tale yesterday. I got it at Christmas but was slightly put off by the depth and length but having started reading it at last, it is interesting and very well written - just enough humour to not be irritating. The Tasmanian's Tale is a recounting of the mathematical and biological investigations which are necessary to estimate the time at which we find a common ancestor to all living human beings - the point at which it is possible to follow through the descendants of this ancestor and reach any living person. Mind blowing - No? What was even more difficult to believe if not to understand was that it would be possible to go back to some shrew-like ancestor and find that it was the ancestor of all living human beings while another animal of the same species could be the ancestor of all living aardvarks. Without the text it is difficult to recount the details but I seem to remember that certainties came into it - that we must find two members of the same species which led to two totally different living branches of animals. Not something to go over late at night to make sure you have understood correctly.

Actually, thinking about it, the idea of Quantum conditions being applied to prevent backwards time travel affecting the future is easier to understand that the stuff about ancestors. Smug look on the face of this reporter. Just don't ask me to explain it. I stupidly once mentioned the twins paradox at work and was told that it was rubbish. The world is stranger than we can imagine but try and convince people of that fact. The lives of human beings would be strange in the extreme to some of the possible life forms. I once read an article in Omni magazine (sadly defunct though it was rubbish in the later years - don't search for it on the web - you will get Penthouse Magazine) about the possibility of life forms living on the surface of Super-Dense Neuron stars. I think the article was by Ben Bova and described blobs of jelly flattened against the unimaginable gravity, living their lives at high speed relative to ours because of the increased speed of chemical reactions prevalent in a world without electrons. Not sure of the exact physics as it was 25 years ago that I read it but I think that was the upshot. The creatures lived in low, roofless houses with thick inward leaning walls braced against the gravity which reminds me of Flatland. Anyway, the point of this ramble is that these Neutron Star creatures would be able to travel to us using small black holes to maintain the gravity that kept them alive but as their lives would rush by in seconds, they would not be able to see us as anything other than static beings; in short we would be as weird to them as they would be to us.

In another connection worth of the great James Burke, this reminds me in turn of a short story regarding a gang of bank robbers who used a machine to speed up time for themselves but no one else and so were able to walk into a vault literally in front of the bank staff, even leaving the ill-gotten gains on the sidewalk (an American Story I guess) while they went back for more. If anyone knows of it then I would like to know the details. And "A Sepulchre of Songs" by Orson Scott Card as well. It was in Omni when Omni was good but I don't have the relevant issue any more. It seems like it should be in a sci-fi story collection. I was at college when I first read it and it made me cry then. It's not exactly true science-fiction - more a story about science fiction. The last sentence is a doozy.

Some weeks ago I may have blogged that I wanted to set aside a certain amount of time each day for such things as poetry and the resolution came back to me this morning. It then struck me that setting aside time for poetry is not exactly poetic. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes fell into a routine but they were professional and I never will be. It all smacks of the poetry text book used in the class in Dead Poets Society where appreciation of verse was reduced to a convenient graph. Should "Dead Poets" be possessive? Lynn Truss where are you?

Remember that the phrase 'Intelligent Design' is an attempt to put a pseudo-scientific spin on what is just Creationism. Remove the religious-sounding titles for the theories and you get something which might just suck in some rational college freshmen. Sub-consciously I want to believe in ID but it comes back to the same thing - there is something outside what we see and it has made the Universe fit for us to live in rather than we have made ourselves fit to live in the Universe we exist in. The bottom line of all this is who created the creator? We are bootstrapped and it must be so if you want to avoid all the rubbish of cause and effect. I think a phrase which I have used before is relevant here - GOD Over Djinn where GOD is an abbreviation for .... er .... GOD Over Djinn. Thanks to Douglas R. Hofstadter and Godel, Escher, Bach for that. I don't remember GOD Over Djinn being a debunking of Creationism but it fits so maybe it was - I will have to read the book again. Really! This is the end.