Entropy has progressed enough that we note another week’s slide into the abyss of the past. I’ve been listening to a lot of YouTube lectures on entropy and spacetime. Hasn’t made any difference that I can discern. The weather is cooler. Here along the coast it does that, because of fog I believe. I call it the hole in summer although summer hasn’t started yet. It starts for astronomers around 21 June. For me it starts when I shed my leather jacket on the motorcycle and tare around in a tee shirt. When one is 77 years old and still riding a motorcycle the idea of mortality has been embraced so why not be comfortable. There will not be a viewing. No buffet will be provided. No wake, BYOB or otherwise. The ashes will be there but I doubt they’ll be mine. Those crematoriums are licensed yes but they’re never asked to prove the authenticity of the ashes. I imagine a crematorium operator who is an amateur ventriloquist, a hobby , when pressed to answer the question, “Is that really the remains of (“Loved one’s name here“) – from the vase seems to come a voice, “of course its me honey, hurry up and pay the man”, the operator’s lips hardly moved.
Seems like I’ve been laughing in the face of impending doom for a couple of years now. The end will come eventually one way or another so its kind of pointless to anticipate it – too much. Might step away from the path of a run away locomotive but might not be able to do the same for a nuke or virus. The fear of impending doom used to be called the unreasoned fear of impending doom. The shrinks come over my way of thinking. After all, even in the 70’s we said, “just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t after you”. Unreasoned, not reasonable. No, when a couple of times a month the guy with the most nukes under his launch authority rattles the sabers, its reasoned., but is it fear? No, more like concern. We’ve seen this movie too many times. But the grim reaper is horizontally integrated, he works with entropy (my new favorite word) to decompose even the universe itself.
The only thing I can figure is to pop out of this reality and into another. Knowing what I want to do is step one. Figuring a way is steps two thru n where n is enough steps. See, its looking more feasible just by describing it. Obviously this reality isn’t cutting it. unacceptable in so many ways. But I find on YouTube plenty to encourage me to think I will be able to get out of this existence and into a better one. I know that palms will need to be greased and deities offered sacrifices but faint hart never won fair maiden or even tried. A hart is a deer not a dear, dear.
On the subject of astronomy there is a big event about to happen. The James Webb IR telescope is about to produce its first public photo. Hubble was the opening act and it offered amazing views. Webb is going to top that I think. Because seeing in the longer wave lengths thru a big mirror cold as space is like seeing thru walls. Walls of gas have blocked our furthest view. So much will be revealed that Astronomy and Astrophysics will experience a revolution. As always more questions will be discovered than answers but that is how progress is in science. Stuff like gravitational lensing and quantum entangled photons make the real seem like science fiction. That warp drive and FTL are out there somewhere, or rather the principals needed for them are. Awaiting the grad student crunching the data who, freezes and asks, “WTF!” and history notes the beginning of the expansion of humanity. So maybe it would be better that we survive. Or not…..
CSB 