I know. Someone like myself who hardly even begins to understand the formulized arrangements of count, and how the various, dynamic, ratios of same interact to describe the many black boxes of the physical world, and their relationships with each other, shouldn't be offering up much at all on the whys, and wherefores of the big questions of existence. Unfortunately, as with many other things, I just can't help myself.
A lot of it, of course, has to do with considering myself to be, for better or worse, something of a systems analyst. That I made my living based, in significant part, on looking into much less complex business, or industrial process, systems, only goes so far in allowing one to claim to any kind of credibility in grappling with the biggest complex system of all. But still, stretch though it may be, I continue
I continue, not only because I cling to the notion of being that first order of fool who would risk ridicule no matter what, but because I take some comfort in the similarities between computer coders, and physicists, and astronomers, in general. In looking at the breakdown of how anything complex works one usually starts with conceptualized generalities, breaking them down in ever more specific abstractions of process until one is left with the actual steps of operation that must occur. In fact, in object oriented coding these days, one hardly needs to get very far down into the nitty gritty of actual conditionals, and iteration loops, that make up a process algorithm. One simply instantiates the already coded logic object, feed it the state specifics inherent in the context of interest, and then let it do its thing.
What I do need to do, however, when I venture forth into this foolishness, is to avoid stating what I am considering as a possibility for insights to big picture operations as anything other than a question. That I don't always succeed in this is usually a testament to how deeply I feel about a notion, and how much that feeling affects the not caring part of playing the fool.
So. All of that having been stated let me once again play the part of the guy at the castle of ideas who wears the coxcomb on his head.
The announcement has been made that gravity waves have finally been measurably detected. And in two, quite physically separate locations on the planet. It took a fairly old interaction between two mass singularities, with a relative velocity of .5 of the speed of light to do it, but the time of reception disturbance of the laser beams used as spacial reference indicators seems to be pretty convincing.
Not only do I consider the way they went about this pretty cool (non violently invasive, and with purely observational deduction), I also share their feeling for the weight that ought to be given to the conclusions drawn from the experiment. As I said, it seems pretty convincing.
I bring it up now both because these people deserve a lot of credit, but also because it is a lovely way to segue into a question I have had about how General Relativity treats relativistic mass, as well as its corresponding kinetic energy, in the calculations of all of the mass and energy in the universe.
It's interesting to me because A: all of what and when is supposed to have started out with infinite mass, and now, a great deal of expansion of what and when later, our inventories of what is out there now comes up quite short; whereupon dark mass comes into the picture. Not only that, though, the rate at which what and when expands is actually increasing (begging the further question of whether this rate increase has always been there, or what mechanisms might be in play to either keep it constant, or cause it to vary), for which dark energy has been introduced. And B: because we now can see how relative motion has real effect on the fabric of space time; something a bit more viscerally substantial than knowing that space time works quite openly in preventing things from getting close to the speed of light precisely because of the addition of the nominal mass of the object with its current velocity. Getting it to go faster becomes ever more difficult because it is that sum that you are always throwing more energy at via the expression of counter force mass.
Relativistic mass is also interesting to me because it might echo difficulties General Relativity already has with Quantum Theory. I say that because, in a sense, all mass is relativistic. All objects are, after all, encapsulated systems of motion working at different scales of consideration. And despite the fact that they keep bashing away to find that one, final, irreducible, quantifiable, they keep coming up with more (where even the Higgs Boson may have constituent sub quanta whirling away inside).
Lots of interesting questions that I just can't keep from putting my two cents worth into. The one thing I would hope from these wonderfully creative, and intelligent people is not that they stop regarding me as foolish. The fact of the matter is that I am pretty foolish, and quite often so. Can't help that either though I do try to keep my propensity for same in perspective (taking full responsibility when needed). My hope is rather that they keep in mind that count, and the amazing predictive abilities that count, and the formulized expression of count interactions, give us, aren't necessarily the end all and be all of existence. Count, just as with information itself, is not necessarily meaning. It can certainly be an aid to meaning, but hardly ever meaning of itself. Meaning is the association of layers of abstraction with with what is felt in, and by the meaning processor. The one absolute for which we have everything else to be relative to, and for which the responsibility of choosing falls. And before you dismiss how important choice is just consider where light would be if no choice was made on how to measure it.
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