I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas

If you lie beneath an obelisk and look up to see drifting clouds, the obelisk appears to be moving. This is just one of the side effects of our brain's solution to creating the universe in our heads without having to jam in a representation of each and every particle of the actual cosmos.

Anyhoo...Steven Hawking proposed that our universe is just one of a sequence of universes that are created in a Big Bang, expand to a limit, contract to a singularity, which triggers the next Big Bang and universe and so on and so forth. (Like a string of saugages - Hawking's analogy not mine) He also proposed that while the universe is expanding; entropy increases. That is the energy and particles in the universe tend to become more amorphous or randomly and evenly distributed.

So our perception of an expanding universe is dependent on our perception of entropy increasing. But what if, like the flying obelisk, it is only a perception and we got it wrong and entropy is decreasing and the universe is contracting. With no external framework to reference how do we know either way.

Spike...where are you, Spike? ~sings~ I'm walking backwards for Christmas.

Freedom's Just Another Word

I think I have a border-line mathematical axiom...if something has a bunch of characteristics each of which can vary, and you can show that one of those characteristics is limited in how much it can vary; does that mean the something does not have an infinite capacity to vary?

Or is it necessary to show, and this seems a much harder thing to do, the something's number of varying characteristics is also limited? (Is there something vaguely Suess about all this?)

So my leap in my previous blog is a little extreme and we are back to life is all a flip of a coin...depression avoided....well, unless you are obsessive/compulsive...

Settle your Hash

So if something is making noise, the noise is saying something about the something. But if the something never repeats itself then you have to listen to all the noise forever to know the something properly.

But the noise has limits; it cannot be louder than the something can make it for example. Is it true to say that the noise is predictable because it cannot be random without limit? (I can sense a cosmos full of mathematicians screaming for a stoning for that little generalisation/transgression.)

Which means that something/anything/everything must be predictable and chance is a myth.

Therefore fate is actual...wonder how many depressions that will spawn?