How does the road know the way?

Having established that I do not exist (see earlier posts),  I would now like to tern to some amazing consequences of the fact that we are not what we perceive ourselves to be.  One of the most amazing things to me is that we think we know so much about our world and the universe and yet we do not know the simplest things.  Take gravity for example.  There are many theories of what gravity is, and there are pretty thorough descriptions of how gravity works, but really... no one knows what it is!

What... I thought that since that apple hit Newton on the head we figured out what gravity is... nope!  They can not even agree if gravity happens instantaneously or if it has "gravitons" that must travel at the speed of light.  Humm... how can we do rocket science if we do not understand gravity???

When my 14 year old was 3 we were on a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.  We had several of our extended family in Colorado and sort of made a tent city!  One afternoon some of us decided to take a drive over Trail Ridge Road to visit Granby.  That was a fun time and on the way home almost everyone "punched out".  My wife was driving and I was riding shotgun... trying to keep my eyes pried open to support her and keep her awake.

After we reached the high point on the ridge and started down I was thinking about the discussions I had been reading about the speed of gravity.  One would think that such a basic question would have an obvious answer... unfortunately, it seemed to have several obvious answers and was intuitively obvious to 3 different groups!  So, they seemed to dismiss each other as incompetent, or dumb... sad thing science...

Suddenly, I heard a small voice from way in the back of the mini van... "Daddy, where are we going?"  I did not want to disturb the sleepers, so I just quietly said "Home."  I heard no more, so I went back to my musing.  In a few minutes, again I heard, "Daddy?"  "Yes."  "Are we going to our house, or back to our tent house?"  I was amazed!  This little one really had a grasp of things!   She was clearly thinking through things as we watched the glory of God's creation streaming past our windows.  "We are going back to our tent house."  Silence... Musing... Silence... "Daddy?"

"Yes."  "How will we know how to get back to our tent house?"  Now I was really awake.  This little one was capturing all of my attention.  What was going on in that pretty little head?  I thought about the scene from "The Hiding Place" where Cory's father decides to only answer the direct question and not weigh the little one down with a long drawn out answer that would be far beyond the question.   So, I just said "We will follow the road."  Silence... Musing...  "Daddy?"

"Yes dear?" "How does the road know the way to the tent?"  ... a 3 year old? I thought for only a second, but for some reason, I felt like I was wading in a river and just stepping into a hidden pool that was much deeper than I was ready for.  "The road knows because it is already there."

I am not sure if she said anything else... my brain was about to pop out of my scull... that was it!  Gravity acted instantaneously, because it was just the expression of the interaction between things that were already there... sort of...  I could not focus what I was thinking... it was just out of reach... but I knew the vision was the key.  Over the next 11 or so years I remembered that moment in the car, the tiny voice  and the feeling of wondering if I would loose my balance as I stepped into the deep pool in my mind and drifted the rest of the way on the road back to the tent house.

I will try to unpack this a bit in a few posts.  I will touch on Fourier transforms, Cheerios, Entropy, Holograms and a few other bushes to run around. While I have read several books, articles, web sites since that day, I do not know of anyone thinking in exactly this way... so here it goes... baring my soul... be gentle.

I do not exist - Condensate

My earlier posts established that I am insane... and you are too... as a matter of fact, I proposed to you that I do not exist... and neither do you.  I promised 4 simple arguments... First, my perception of me... is all in my head!  There is no objective evidence that I exist... my brain is totally isolated from what it perceives.  My argument from the Microscope showed that we are composed of transient stuff... what am I anyway?  Even my bones are totally new every 3 years.  The third argument went from the Cosmic "soup" of stars dense enough to fill high magnification photos, to the vast empty space between the sub atomic particles that compose every object around us.  That chair you are sitting on does not exist... it is just micro dust specs with thousands of times the empty space between.  Or, is it...

In my last existence post I mentioned that the teachers who showed me that my chair did not exist still lied to me!  Even the molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons do not exist!

What???  It is even more amazing that this was known long before I was born in 1949!  For example, The foundations of quantum physics were laid back in the 20's.  Heisenberg stated his famous Uncertainty Principle in 1927.  One simple example of this is trying to find the location of an electron.  The energy you use to observe the electron, moves the electron so that it is no longer there!  You can measure velocity or position, but not both at the same time.  Another example that I use all the time is tuning my guitar using beat frequencies.  I start by tuning one string to some source, then use that string to tune a second string.  I press the string to a fret so that the two strings play the same pitch.  Then I listen.  If I hear a beat in the sound, I tune the second string until the beat slows down.  In order to tune the string perfectly, I would need to wait forever to prove that there was no beat!  So, I just get it slow enough that I make it faster if I try to get it closer.

All sorts of strange things happen in the realm of quantum physics.  Another example is the double slit experiment.  Back in 1803 Thomas Young explained the phenomenon where light passes through two slits and forms an interference pattern on a screen behind the slits. What should particles do?  If you shoot bullets at a slit in a steel wall, you see a line of bullet holes in the screen behind the wall.  OK, so make two slits, and what would you see?  Yep, 2 lines of holes, each neatly behind the 2 slits.  Easy!  We use electron guns to make (now old style) TV displays (cathode ray tubes).  So, lets shoot electron "bullets" at 2 slits... we should see two neat lines of "electron hits" behind the slits - right?  However, we do not!  Instead, we see electron hits in an interference pattern just like the light made!  What?  The electrons behaved like waves, not like particles.  Some described the electrons as merely "probability" distributions, and others talked about the paths they took.  For example, in 1948 Feynman published his "Path Integral" explanation.  Basically he said that the particle traveled all possible paths to it's destination!  Weird!  More double slit into.

 Of course, one of the most amazing and famous things that was stated around this time was Einsteins formula, E = MC**2 (1917).  Basically, it says that matter and energy are interchangeable!  If you think of that in light of our discussions of particles and waves, you must deal with the fact that those particles we perceive are just a manifestation of the energy that composes them.  If you want to visualize the universe as starting in a big bang, then think about it as God imagining a 4-dimensional (at least) space, then thumping it with a big old finger to instantly create "all the stuff that ever was and ever will be"... stuff = matter = waves = energy.  The wave-particles are all held together by electro/magnetic/atomic force to cause us to perceive them as solid objects... Can you feel the vibs yet?

So, we can not figure out where an electron is, and we see that it behaves as a wave as well as a particle and is just a manifestation of big bang energy.  So basically, we can visualize the electron as "popping in and out" of existence in the vicinity of the nucleus of an atom in one of the discrete bands determined by its quantum state sort of like it would appear randomly in an interference band behind two slits.  The other building blocks of the atoms, the neutrons and protons are made from bosons that behave in similar ways to the electrons, so you see... even the subatomic particles do not exist!  So, the atoms do not exist... so I do not exist!  Simple - eh?

Now for a final example, lets get to the condensate... back in 1924-25 Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein imagined a very odd behavior of matter.  They said that if matter could be cooled to near absolute zero, the atoms would become totally indistinguishable!  Basically, thy would become a glob, not individual anymore.  As it turned out, we did not get to observe this behavior until 1995, right here in good ol'e Colorado at CU.  They used the wave troughs of laser light to grab the atoms, and thus, cool them, and an electro-magnetic field to lock them into the center of the beam so that they could not bounce into other atoms and heat up again.  When they accomplished their goal, they saw the phenomenon. The atoms got "fuzzier" and "fuzzier" until they just merged together into one condensed blob!  Double weird!!  Atoms are not the nice little solar systems we were told about, are they?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate   More details http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/2242

Well, you may not think these  arguments have been simple as I promised, but I think I can summarize them simply... I do not exist because...

- My perception of myself is based on a remote sensing scam.   My brain interprets sensations that come in from remote sensors via electrical impulses and does not actually experience any of the things that it perceives.  That does not prove that I do not exist, but it opens the possibility that I might not exist.

- Any Microscope shows that my body is not any thing like I think it is!  It is a battle field of microscopic beings, worms, mites, foreign cells, and many other things and even the part that I think of as "me" is constantly refreshed, even including my bones within 3 years!  After I die, liquids and gases are released as the soft stuff rots until only a tiny collection of minerals is left behind.

-- The Cosmos is a soup of particles called stars with vast intervening empty space... ah... except the 2 Hydrogen nuclei per cm**3... Then, zoom down to the super-microscopic world of atoms and we find the same thing... tiny specs of "matter" with comparatively vast volumes of emptiness between them... basically, the chair you are sitting on is nothing but empty space with some specs held together by electrical force.  Go ahead... jump up and down on it...

-- Finally, that solar system picture of the atoms was false too!  Not only are the atomic components made from other, smaller entities, but those entities do not behave like particles at all!  They flip in and out of existence and can not even be located!  How can they make something that does exist?

Like me for example, I do not exist.  At least not in the way that I perceive myself to exist...  not in the sense that I am sitting here on my non-existent chair, typing with a non-existent keyboard a non-existent message... oh bother...

The only thing that finally relieved my tension, felt from childhood, of realizing that I did not exist was finally figuring out that I did exist!  I exist in exactly the way that the creator created me to exist, and how He designed me to perceive my existence.  I think I said it simply in an earlier post... I am a figment of His imagination, not mine.  Sorry Rene... He thinks, therefore I am.

Ac 17:28 - for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, `For we also are His children.'  (NAS - CrossWalk online Bible)

2000 kWh/y with a 30' vertical turbine!

Greentheo... we just got bested!  Forget the Stalkerator!  These guys can generate around 2000 kWh/year with a 30' vertical wind turbine.  The article does not say what kind of windy knob you have to live on to do that, but the Mariah site says you only need an average wind speed of 12 mph!  The sample home they showed seemed to be in a reasonable location.  http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/gallery/mariah-power-windspire-photo-gallery  With a 30' height, small footprint, and quiet operation, they can get past a lot of neighborhood restrictions... probably not in my current location though...  (only 8.8 dba in 50mph wind!)   I could not find a price.  They had a "nice" cost-saving calculator on the site, but alas, one of the fields you had to put in was the cost of the unit... duh...

I first learned about vertical turbines years ago when I read about Darrieus turbines which were invented in 1931 by French engineer Georges_Jean_Marie_Darrieus. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine)  The Mariah unit seems to be a close cousin, or maybe a nephew!

Greentheo and I have been blogging about several energy producing and saving ideas and have noted several examples of homes that only needed 1000 kWh/y.  With this turbine you could splurge and watch cartoons on Saturday morning! OK Greentheo, I am ready to go build my papercrete elliptical dome in the boonies with my own little power source!  I hope the wind is blowing on those cold Colorado nights!

Mars fuel to go please...

I have read quite a bit about the water ice found on Mars.  I have read a lot about the prospects of life on Mars, but not much about something that immediately struck me when I heard it... Fuel to go!

As I have blogged about elsewhere, a big problem with distant space travel is carrying enough reaction mass to propel the craft.  It takes an incredible amount of O2 and H2 to get our big payloads off this planet, so we must keep the amount of fuel we carry to a minimum.  On the other hand there is a big difference between carrying fuel and carrying energy.  A lot of energy can be carried by using nuclear sources, but what can you do with that energy if there is nothing on board to use the energy to throw out the back - ya know?

Enter ICE.  Yep, good old ice.  You can get several kinds of ice on Mars including water ice and "dry" ice (CO2).  So, one of the really important aspects of finding ice on Mars is that we do not need to schlep our reaction mass up there for the return flight!  All we need to do is take the energy!  Actually, we could even capture some of the energy while we were on Mars by using solar panels.

How could we use the ice?  Well I know of a couple of ways.  One would be to  melt the ice, then use hydrolysis to split the water into H2 and O2 (or Brown's gas).  That could go into standard rocket engines to blast off and return.  Other folks are working on ways to use high energy fission products to heat gas for use in rockets.  In that case, all you have to do is start the fission, then throw in either kind of ice and ZOOM!

I suppose reaction mass is not as sexy as finding life, but I think it could get us boots on the ground a lot faster if we did not have to lift fuel for the return flight.  What do you think?

Mars colony mining ice.  http://www.redcolony.com/art.php?id=0401070

americium-242m high energy fission products for space travel:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010103073253.htm