c squared

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After a poor night’s sleep according to my fit bit I woke and thought about a very common night dream I had as an elementary age kid. Back then, like most children, I denied I fell asleep. Dreams, such as I had, seemed to be the product of my own thinking like day dreams only I was having them at night. The particular recuring dream I had over a year was, I think, prompted by the new vocabulary word “infinity.” Back then, as now, there was great curiosity about whether there was an end to the universe. At night I would imagine myself flying past stars like the space ship Enterprise of a popular series a few years later at which time I’d moved from starry Kansas to the ten thousand lakes of Minnesota.

Long before the enterprise my Kansas nights were a succession of dark dreams of me passing through space passing widely spaced stars. I have a feeling that when I projected myself through space I would be aware of previous nights and imagine I was continuing where previous night travels had left me. Always I had great curiosity about reaching the end of the universe which was always beyond my dreams because of that new vocabulary word. This morning as I transferred my thoughts from Trump to Science and AI that in the previous post’s title looks like the name Al I realized that like Star treck I was passing impossibly fast through space well beyond the speed of light. How fast I wondered and I thought back to the famous formula E=mc2. That got me out of bed, which I made, fed the cat, and went to my bookshelves for the book I had yet to read by Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.

I only bought the book when he wrote an amendment to it which is indicated on the front cover by the description beginning, “The updated and expanded…..” I think I bought the book a few years after its release which means its been one of the books circling my library airport’s tarmac for nearly 30 years. It was first published in 1988 and republished in 1996. It took me a long while to find it because I was looking for a hardcover book. I bought the $18 paperback and probably paid full price. It wasn’t in the bookshelf I first looked which contains reference books and anthologies of the work of my favorite cartoonists. It was in the smaller bookcase where I’ve been putting books that I should read right now. There are about 50 of them.

I looked in its index for speed of light and read four fascinating pages 18-22 which explained that light’s speed was first calculated by a Danish astronomer in 1676 at 140,000 miles a second. Not a bad guess although Mr. Roemer fell short of the modern value of 186,000 miles because, I presume, the guestimates of Jupiter’s distance from Earth had not been perfectly estimated by his colleagues in the 17th century. Jupiter’s moons were key to his discovery as they were to Galileo’s Papal home imprisonment when – after discovering that they were obviously orbiting Jupiter and ignoring the Pope’s infallible pronouncement that everything orbited our sun – he incautiously wrote a parody about the Pope’s all knowingness. Which brings me to three books I hunted down this morning.

Its time for some coffee….I will resume this after church.

Damn, I just knew going to church would dampen my early morning eagerness to blog one let alone two new posts. So, Let me mention my Reading list. In 1979 I began a mostly thorough list of important not children’s books I was reading. When I began my first blog www.snowbizz.com I began a more scrupulous listing of books with a few years so dedicated to noble lost causes I stopped reading books. By 2017 my Apple software was so antique I could no longer make updates to either of my now neglected pages for books or new snow sculptures year by year. I recently searched for mentions of books to update the books list and I made a post here that I hope to keep updating. (It doesn’t contain the books I could recall reading prior to 1979 which are listed in the original Snowbizz My Reading list page.

More about these books

A Brief History of Time by the iconic Stephen Hawking has probably been on my book shelves for close to 30 years. My four page read today was the first ever in it. It deals with worm holes and time travel and I suspect even with the AI a hundred years from now sending a human to a different star would be unthinkable for thousands of years at best. Maybe a silicon chip could make the trip. The most advanced aliens would have the same difficulties. Armadas of space vehicles are the stuff of Hollywood.

You will see that in my first year attacking books I read 11 authored by Isaac Asimov one of the most prolific authors ever. I had read his several thousand page Foundation trilogy a few years earlier which for me was serious reading indeed. That trilogy is now being produced as a series. It imagines the Milky Way or a similar galaxy run like the ancient Roman Empire with technological oomph. Asimov a physicist was said to have photographic memory. The books of his I tackled in 1979 were the entirety of Western European History from the Greeks to the Byzantines. I also spent a lot of time on the Biographies he put in chronological order of scientific thinkers and inventive inventors which are marvelously cross referenced to show how ideas progressed over time. Asimov was a clear writer who I amired for his incisive and clear exposition.

The final book has no yellow marker in it and yet I read it fairly rapidly hoping to get a sense for Einstein who’s life I’ve bumped into in other books. He was the subject of a multi part television series that was a little soap opera-ish but which filled him out as a man.

As for the 2 squared I’m not sure my calculator has enough digits to show how far light squared would travel. All the mass of the universe exceeded that speed at the beginning of our universes time from all the measurements modern science has been able to sort through. A human is only a tiny speck of mass by contrast but 180,000 miles times itself would be:32,400,000,000 or 32.4 billion miles. But that’s just one second. There are 86400 seconds in a day. If a person travels at the speed of light they stop aging compared to the people they have left behind. That’s why sci fy time travel movies show young people coming back to Earth while their children have grown old. Could they grow younger and become fetuses? Our generations will never know. But time leaves footprints and we will continue to learn how to read those tracks.

Maybe I’ll come back to see if part one pre church and part two post lunch fit together. But probably not. Besides the next post calls. Castrating Trump’s ego and terrorism is the most important thing on my mind these days. This guy wants a Nobel Peace prize. Were looking at Alzheimers here folks – Dementia with the nuclear button.

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty