Time flies…

Being grandad involves giving the grandkids the only thing they truly want from you: your time, so it seems doubly ironic that this autumnal period of life in which, theoretically, you have more spare time to spend with them coincides with the moment when you become increasingly aware that it is very quickly ticking away. Many people far brainier than I (and I know that doesn’t narrow it down much) have stated that time is a man-made construct, and I would not begin to contest this – mainly because I don’t understand it – but I do know that the passage of time is not. Without it we would not get older, great concerts would not feel too short, worthy films would not seem too long and car journeys would not be filled with a million ‘are we there yet’s. Look into any bathroom mirror: you cannot deny the passage of time.

But time is, as we all know, elastic. See which passes more quickly, an hour with a good book and an even better whisky, or an hour in the dentist’s waiting room with root canal treatment just around the corner. It has the capacity to fly by when we don’t want it to and to really drag its heels when Celine Dion is on the radio.

And time, in a cosmic sense, is distance. Light years are the measurement of distance in space: how far light travels in a year, so if a year did not exist as a measurement of time then, obviously, everything would be in the same place at the same time, and kerboom! we all know the kind of trouble that can lead to. (I can’t help but wonder, space being a vacuum, whether The Big Bang might actually have been little more than a super-sized whisper. I was actually about to say that I am not even certain that sound can be transmitted through a total void, but then I thought of Donald Trump’s voice coming out of J D Vance’s arse…) I mean, whoever thought that it would be a good idea to measure distance in time? (It was that idiot Einstein again, wasn’t it? I already hold him personally responsible for everything I don’t understand.) It’s like taking my waist measurement in MPH – actually, given the way it is spreading, not such a bad idea. Mind you, if time and distance are the same thing then one cannot exist without the other: no time, no space – which puts us in a whole heap of trouble if my understanding of astrophysics is anything like solid (thankfully, it isn’t).

When you are young, you have so much time available to you that wasting a little bit of it really doesn’t matter, yet for a child it drags its feet over everything. A journey may take no more than an hour, but an hour takes forever. The distance between meals stretches out into eternity which explains why children are always hungry, but not why they won’t eat anything green. At my age a year can fly by without even a pause for thought between birthday cakes: a week in the blink of an eye. Remembering when things occurred becomes more difficult, not because of encroaching senility but because, as time rushes towards the finishing line, the spaces between things begin to compress. (Time, of course, does end for everyone and everything except, perhaps, for ‘The Archers’.) Life is a Slinky; time is the stairs.

I remember being a child – or, more correctly, my memory being about as reliable as that of an errant politician, the spirit of being a child (aided in this, my wife would argue, by the fact that I am in many respects still a child) and what I recall most clearly is the sensation of constantly waiting for something to happen. Life was never in the present, it was always about waiting for what was to come next. I am now at an age when I steadfastly try to ignore much of what lies in the future. I am stuck in the present and – increasingly so – the past. The future – although I would like to live as much of it as possible – is far too uncertain to consider. There is a certain comfort in the past: I know that I have survived it.

It is a simple fact that I have left far more time behind me than lays ahead, and what I have is passing with an unseemly haste. Time flies, but it is a twin-edged sword (courtesy of mixedmetaphores.com). I am a grandad and, eventually I might be a great-grandad. I do not want to be that old, but I do not want to miss out on whatever joy being that age might bring me. Making time for great-grandkids may not prove to be the easiest thing on earth – what with the carers to consider – but I’m definitely up for the chance to give it a go. Time might be ticking, but you can slow it down if you refuse to look…

Five More Minutes in the Car

I’m fascinated by characters that slowly reveal themselves through nothing more than conversation. These two people first appeared in Five Minutes in the Car back in July 2022. I stumbled across them a few days ago and decided that I would like to revisit…

“…So, do you think it’s possible that Einstein could have been wrong about things?”
“What kind of things?”
“Well, he said that energy could neither be created nor destroyed didn’t he?”
“Possibly, yes.”
“So he can’t ever have seen you on a Saturday night.”
“Once, just once I fell to sleep during ‘Strictly’.”
“I mean, I look at you and I believe that energy can obviously be destroyed. You are like a vigour shredder. Someone has taken the second ‘o’ out of your oomph.”
“Omph? I don’t understand.”
“Exactly… and if he claims that it can’t be created either, then where did it come from in the first place?”
“Weetabix?”
“It will be the Big Bang I suppose. That’s the problem with Einstein: everything’s boils down to the Big Bang.”
“I remember I went with you to the cinema once to watch Fifty Shades of Gray. That definitely sapped all of my energy.”
“Well, let’s be fair, most of it went over your head, didn’t it?”
“All I know is that if I approached your nipples with two giant paper clips, the reception would be less than welcoming.”
“You have a valid argument there.”
“Anyway, the point is, I went in full of energy and came out two hours later without even the will to live, so where did all the energy get to?”
“You chewed a lot of popcorn.”
“I yawned a lot. I held my head in my hands…”
“I think that just illustrates what Einstein said doesn’t it? Energy doesn’t disappear, it just changes.”
“Into acute embarrassment?”
“Well… Look, we’re driving along now right, which uses a lot of energy.”
“Ok.”
“But that energy isn’t actually lost, it’s just changed.”
“Into what?”
“Well, overwhelmingly into tedium when I’m with you.”
“No, come on. Be serious: I’m interested. Energy drives the car along right, I get that. So where does it get to after that?”
“It’s turned into friction.”
“Friction?”
“Yes friction. It makes the tyres get warm.”
“…A bit of a waste isn’t it?”
“What?”
“All that energy just to make the tyres warm. You could just do it with a hair dryer.”
“But that wouldn’t get us to the Supermarket.”
“My point entirely.”
“Look, if you rub two surfaces together, it takes energy doesn’t it?”
“Right.”
“But it creates friction.”
“Right.”
“And that…”
“… makes car tyres warm apparently… Do you know, I think you might be right.”
“Do you? I mean, you do?”
“Yes, I think that Einstein bloke was obviously an idiot.”
“Wow! That’s going to rattle a few academic cages. Let’s just take a minute here and discuss your evidence.”
“Well… O.K… Right… Boiling the water to make a cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon; that uses a lot of energy doesn’t it?”
“According to British Gas it certainly does.”
“And when we drink the tea?”
“We watch a film and fall asleep.”
“Yes! So, where has all that energy gone?”
“Into snoring, in your case… and farting.”
“Oh come on, that takes no effort at all. Look, just suppose that we’re right and he got it all wrong about energy, he could be wrong about everything else as well.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… Gravity! What if he was wrong about gravity?”
“Well, I don’t think it was him that actually invented gravity. Wasn’t that Isaac Newton: an apple on the head and all of that? I suppose when you come to think about it, he could probably have sued someone…”
“Oh… Ok, not gravity. So what else did Einstein actually come up with then?”
“The Theory of Relativity.”
“Like genes and all that?”
“No, like the Speed of Light.”
“What do you mean?”
“Einstein calculated the Speed of Light.”
“The Speed of Light? Surely that would depend.”
“On what?”
“Well, whether it was fast light or slow light.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“Yes, of course. The light on the front of an aeroplane goes much faster than that on the front of a bicycle. It stands to reason.”
“Right. I’m not sure that…”
“So did he say anything else then, Einstein, did he have any other great ideas?”
“Well, he said about the Big Bang, the origins of the Universe, all of that…”
“Right, so the Big Bang, I know about that. Everything stated with one almighty explosion, is that what he said?”
“In principle, yes, I think so.”
“So where did the energy come from?”
“The energy?”
“To make the Big Bang. Where did the energy come from? There was nothing before it, right? And according to him energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so where did it come from?”
“Well, it must always have been there I suppose.”
“Before the Big Bang?”
“Yes.”
“The same Big Bang that created everything?”
“…What’s your alternative?”
“I don’t know. A Supreme Being?”
“God?”
“Possibly.”
“So what was there before God?”
“Nothing.”
“Must have been very boring for him.”
“How do you know it was a ‘him’?”
“How much sense does the Universe make to you?”
“It’s very complicated.”
“And serves very little purpose.”
“I see… Anyway, I suppose he had a lot of time on his hands.”
“So he created energy?”
“Yes, obviously.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know… God stuff…”
“I see, so, just before we give Brian Cox a ring and explain that his whole life is a pathetic sham, what exactly is our position on Einstein’s Theory of relativity?”
“What?”
“You know, E=MC².”
“What does that even mean?”
“Well, ultimately it means that half a dozen egotistical old men have enough power at their fingertips to destroy the whole world a hundred times over.”
“Well, let’s hope that he was wrong about that as well then… Have you got any mints?…”

Probably a couple of things I should explain here. In the UK British Gas also supplies electricity and there are two famous Brian Cox’s: one is a great actor and the other is a heart-throb astrophysicist – I don’t know which is which…

The Endless Queues of Happenstance*

I wandered onto the page today with absolutely no idea of what I was going to prattle-on about. Many of my ‘blog buddies’ publish ‘random thoughts’ posts at such times, but I fear that, should I attempt a similar feat myself, I would find only a void where the thoughts should be. I am used to my own version of ‘random’ running not quite adjacent to everybody else’s, but to be honest, I do have a habit of ‘stewing over things’ a little more than is entirely healthy and so I fear that after the first ‘random’ thought, the rest of such a whinge might become somewhat less arbitrary than intended. If the first thing to cross my mind also gets under my skin (I’m now fixated on ringworm!) who knows, you may well spend the next five minutes of your life listening to an incoherent rant about nothing much at all. Ah…

Anyway… I always write with music playing and lo and behold, as I sat to write about ‘who-knows-what?’ (who-knows-why?) the phrase ‘…it’s written in the stars…’ tumbled out of the speakers and my mind started to whirr because it occurred to me that, should you view it so, everything can be written in the stars. There are so many of them. Take a look at the Constellations: who on earth saw pictures in those? Proof, if ever it was needed, that the recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs did not begin in the summer of 1967. The Great Bear? Really? Sagittarius? Half man/half horse? Do you think, perhaps, that some of the stars might have moved? Oh yes, of course I can see a man firing a bow and arrow over there, right by the USS Enterprise… It’s like being given a Dot-to-Dot with only two dots and the leeway to draw whatever you fancy in between.

I suppose that it’s the way that the human brain works, by taking a random mess that it does not understand and turning it into something familiar. It’s like watching a Quentin Tarrantino film: everything makes just as much sense as everything else. The good news is that you can’t be wrong! In an infinite Cosmos of random chaos, everything is right – except, perhaps, for men in dinner suits and Roman sandals. It is possible to believe in anything. It is possible to believe in God, or not to believe in God (whatever his/her form or name) and both are valid points of view, worthy of respect because both, along with everything else, are equally illogical. In order to believe in God, you have to accept that he/she has always been there which is all well and good, but how did he get there? In order to not believe in God you have to accept that the Universe has not always been there, in which case who, or what, started it? (And don’t try to confuse me with all that Big Bang nonsense, we all know that is just a prank by the intelligentsia designed to remind the rest of us of how stupid we really are).

The truth is that absolutely nothing is written in the stars – not even your future or your disposition: even those who make a living from astrological predictions do so now with tongue firmly in cheek (often their own) – they are merely a skyful of suns, many of which – due to the constraints of the Speed of Light – no longer even exist. There is no order to them. They just sort of bob there in the sky – although why they don’t all just fall to the bottom I have no idea – and make the infinity of space look pretty.

I suppose that once you can grasp the whole concept of being such a miniscule part of a vast random chaos, it makes your sock drawer less of a worry.

I wonder if I’ve ever written a post about socks?…

*”…an exquisite distillation out of random patterns – endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.” – Frank Herbert

Should this not be sufficient for you, you can find links to my first glimpse into the universe below:
‘To Infinity and Beyond’ (part one) and (part two)
Oh, and I also found ‘Odds and Sods – One of my Socks is Missing’, which sadly does not actually live up to its promise of featuring socks.

Odds and Sods – Why the White Rabbit?

I need your help.

I September 2019 I published a post entitled ‘Making Up For Lost Time: a Soapy Head, a White Rabbit and a Black Hole Paradox’ (You can read it here.) It was a fairly unprepossessing thing – just me postulating, as usual, about something that I did not understand: Time on this occasion. As most of these things do, it started off with a real – if insignificant – incident and, once I’d started to write about it, well, you know how it goes, don’t you; you’ve been on these journeys with me before. I could live with what I had written, or else I wouldn’t have published it. Its reception at the time was more lukewarm than school custard, but with another post to write and publish, I never gave any particular thought as to why. If people like what I have written, that’s gratifying; if they don’t, it’s understandable. I was not nominated for the Booker after all. Its fate, as with most of what I write, was death by neglect – except, for some unfathomable reason, it has not died. It has come to life as some kind of zombie post: tottering, arms outstretched, onto my list of most-read posts almost every week and I have no idea why.

I have re-read it a number of times, to try to glean from it an essence that I can revisit. Nothing. I have checked out the tags: not a single mention of vitamins, keep fit, or diet – nothing that would explain why people keep stumbling across it: because that is what must happen. I have even considered the possibility that some poor soul keeps getting it each time they log onto WordPress – a kind of Groundhog Day blog, which, I am almost certain, would ensure that I, personally, would never try to log on again.

The subject of time has seeped into many of my posts, because I find it so very difficult to understand. Scientists say that it does not exist; that it is a manmade construct. If that is the case, what lies between now and then? What sits between lunch and dinner on a rain-soaked Sunday afternoon (other than Carry on Camping, of course)? What is the pub landlord banging on about when he rings his bell of a Friday evening? How do we get older? Astro-physicists tell us that the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago – and if that’s not time, then I don’t know what is.

Anyway, White Rabbit was far from my first – and certainly not my last – plunge into the unfathomability of time, which has nagged away at me for several posts (all of which, if time really does not exist, must have been written simultaneously – showing a distinct lack of imagination on my part.) It cropped up most explicitly in Dog Years, which I have also just re-read, and I, for one, remain none-the-wiser.

Whilst Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit was also obsessed with Time, the quote I used at the end (from White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane) was clearly about drugs. Could that be part of the reason for the on-going interest in this post? Well, no, I don’t think it can. The world is full of drug references. Why would a single, oblique reference in an unknown blog entice new readers in?

I have to confess that it is highly likely that I am missing the one, certain and bleedin’ obvious reason. (Perhaps the title is very similar to a different blog that is worth reading.) Maybe you too have inadvertently stumbled into my White Rabbit post and you could tell me what you were hoping to actually read at the time. I would be so pleased of your help…

Addenda.

On holiday, last year, I was talking with a family member about the plethora of great songs either explicitly about or obliquely referencing drug use. We listed many and I compiled for him a ‘Now That’s What I Call Drug-Refrencing’ CD for Christmas. Here’s the track list. Try it on Alexa – she’ll be thrilled to play it for you:

1. White Rabbit – Jefferson Airplane (Slick)

2. One Way Ticket – The Darkness (J. Hawkins/D. Hawkins/Poullain)

3. Elephant Stone – Stone Roses (Squire/Brown)

4. Bad – U2 (U2)

5. White Light/White Heat – Bowie (Reed)

6. China Girl – Bowie (Bowie/Pop)

7. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds – Beatles (Lennon & McCartney)

8. Happiness Is A Warm Gun – Tori Amos (Lennon & McCartney)

9. Cocaine – Eric Clapton (J. Cale)

10. Medicine Jar – Wings (McCulloch/Allen)

11. Golden Brown – Stranglers (Stranglers)

12. Itchycoo Park – Small Faces (Marriott/Lane)

13. Meet Me On The Corner – Lindisfarne (Clements)

14. Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed – Thin Lizzy (Lynott/Gorham/Downey)

15. Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix (Hendrix)

16. Perfect Day – Lou Reed (Reed)

17. Gold Dust Woman – Fleetwood Mac (Nicks)

18. Morning Glory – Oasis (Gallagher)

19. Dealer – John Martyn (Martyn)

20. Waiting For The Man – Velvet Underground (Reed)

21. Roll Your Own – Jethro Tull (Anderson)

22. F.U.B.B. – Wishbone Ash (Wishbone Ash)

23. Day In The Life – Beatles (Lennon & McCartney)

Some of the versions I’ve included are covers (Bowie’s version of ‘White Light/White Heat’ easily eclipses the V.U. original). I left out ‘Heroin’ by Velvet Underground, because it wasn’t a ‘hit’ record* and, to be honest, as Lou Reed wrote about little else, I could have simply copied his Greatest Hits compilation. Similarly so the mid-period Beatles. Also, I have just realised that I left off ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ by the Shamen – for no other reason than I am probably too old for it.

*Although Lou Reed’s version on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal’ is as close to a ‘seminal’ recording as I can cast my mind to.

Anyway, there it is. I now predict lots of new readers – or a knock on the door from CID at least…

To Infinity and Beyond – A Brief Guide to Everything I Don’t Understand About the Universe…

International Astronomy Day 28th April 2019

Perhaps I should begin by explaining that almost everything I do understand about the Universe is courtesy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: my problem is not that I don’t understand how the Universe works, it is that I do not fully understand why I would ever want to understand how the Universe works. The answer can only be disappointing. Tell me that the Universe is an upside-down colander and the stars are the flashes of light that come through the holes where the rain normally gets in and I will gladly believe you. Give me some claptrap about a Universe that wasn’t there and then was, a Universe that is both infinite and expanding, and then doubt sets in…

Perhaps I should begin, as it would appear all things did, with the Big Bang. My understanding is that two atoms spontaneously appeared in a vastness of nothingness, occupying the same place at the same time and Kerboom! With a ‘bang!’ not dissimilar to a teenager leaving a room, the universe was created. A broiling, violent, expanding everything – and everything that everything contains. Really? So who put the atoms there? If nothing existed, where did they come from? If they didn’t exist, and then they did, where did the ‘ingredients’ come from? If these two atoms contained all the ‘stuff’ from which the universe is now made, just how big were they? They must have been massive, which, given my exceedingly limited understanding of atoms, seems fairly unlikely. Anyway, putting all that to one side for now – generally because it is further from my comprehension than the edge of the Universe and more baffling than the first six chapters of Ulysses – we must move naturally onto what happened after the Big Bang.

Apparently this huge Kerboom! took only a fraction of a second to create everything that ever was, is, or will be, which was then blasted out into the vastness of space – so where did all that space come from? First there was nothing and then there was infinity. From zero zilch to an infinite abundance of it. Anyway… Massive explosion, all sorts of everything created in the blinking of an eye, and it all flies off into nothingness at a speed greater than the speed of light. (Except that’s not possible, is it? If it went faster than light, it would go back in time and, if it did that, it would surely not have existed in the first place. Oh dear…) Anyway… I do know that the Universe is infinite. And expanding. Really? Into what exactly? If the universe is everything, then what is it spreading into? Perhaps a Black Hole… Yup, now here’s something even more complicated than the Big Bang. There are so many paradoxes, inconsistencies and downright impossibilities associated with Black Holes that even your average Italian Hairdresser will not be able to explain them to you (take, for instance, why the much vaunted photograph of a real-time super-massive black hole was so disappointing – and so much less impressive than the artists impressions of the same). I envisage them as a kind of House of Commons for rational thought – it works for me.

Anyway… I believe that one of the giant telescopes that we now have circling the Earth has spotted stars that are billions of light years away at the very edge of the Universe. So far away, in fact, that the light they are sending our way actually emanated at the dawn of time. (Did I mention that time didn’t exist before the Big Bang? Kind of messes up my same time/same place theory.) Right, so, surely what is today at the fringes of the Universe would, at the dawn of time, have been right in the middle of it. If so, why is the light of the Big Bang! coming from the fringes? How can these suns be seen at a time and a place that they weren’t until now, if the light we are seeing was emitted at a time when they weren’t there but were here? In short, how can light emitted at the time of the Big Bang! have taken billions of light years to reach us when, at the time of the big blast, we were all in the same place?

Our solar system is one of millions in the galaxy; our galaxy is one of millions in the Universe and our Universe is… no, I’ve lost it again. You see I’ve never really understood how planets and stars stay where they are in the first place. If they have mass whilst space does not, how come they don’t all just end up at the bottom? How do they remain where they are? You try spinning around at 67,000mph (the speed that Earth orbits the Sun) and see if you end up where you started… Anyway… The Hitchhiker’s Guide told us not to panic. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know what’s going on, astrophysicists understand all that there is to know about the entire history of the universe; in much the same way that 17th century apothecaries knew all there was to know about phlogiston presumably. They know that all their sums would add up – if only they could find some dark matter. (Presumably they’ve never thought to look between a four-year-old’s toes.) What they really need to verify their theory is a Higgs Boson particle. So, they build a Large Hadron Collider and, glory be, they create one. They also create a mini-black hole, but don’t worry; this is tiny, nothing like the super-massive black hole that, at the end of time, will swallow up the whole universe. Mind you, seeing as the whole caboodle began with just two atoms, I can’t help but wonder just how big it would need to be…

N.B. I realise that all the basic hypotheses on which I have built this post are, in all probability, total nonsense. I have no idea how scientifically verifiable my ‘facts’ are, but they’re all I’ve got. Where knowledge fails, I fall back on fantasy: what I don’t know, I make up. It is not even a conscious thing, it is just that whenever my brain finds a gap in my knowledge it fills it up with whatever it has to hand. I am no Brian Cox or Brian May – more like Brian from The Magic Roundabout. I carry absolutely no expectation that anything I have said above is not demonstrably incorrect. I have a basic inability to comprehend what existed before anything existed – and more precisely how there can possibly have been nothing. Surely nothing can only exist if there is something for it to exist within? Much like infinity: I am perfectly willing to believe in infinity, if only somebody could explain to me what’s at the end of it… Whatever the true cause of the Big Bang – and I realise it almost certainly is not what I said (whatever that was) – surely something had to be there to cause it. Unless the Big Bang as we know it (know?) and the start of our universe was actually caused by the very last atom of a previous Universe being sucked into a black hole… Anyway, if there is anybody out there who feels that they can explain all this to me in a clear and concise manner – please don’t bother, as any attempt to do so will only make us both feel terribly inadequate.