Spring Bee Hiving Moon
When old men gather, you expect what one friend calls “the organ recital.” We had that last night. Frank’s back. Tom’s thumb. Even those with no organ about which to recite checked in as ok. For now.
You might not expect these topics though. Flash trading, now in the news a lot, showed up in Woolly conversation several years ago thanks to Scott Simpson’s attention to investing. He id’ed this algorithm driven, high-speed cable actuated technique as unfair. Now many agree with him.
On computer assisted travel, aka the Garmin and other similar devices. I found her ability to know right where I was and tell me 400 feet ahead of time that I needed to “Turn left at Old Knob Road” most amazing. The two true geeks in the room, Tom and Bill, identified as much more impressive the Garmin’s ability to measure on the fly either the fastest or the shortest route to your destination. This is, after I listened, a continuous solution to the traveling salesman problem: “The travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard* problem in combinatorial optimization…” Wikipedia
*A problem is NP-hard if an algorithm for solving it can be translated into one for solving any NP-problem (nondeterministic polynomial time) problem. NP-hard therefore means “at least as hard as any NP-problem,” although it might, in fact, be harder. Wolfram (I added this just to clear things up.)
A movie review on Particle Fever, now at Lagoon Cinemas, from Tom (positively valenced), got us into the most interesting topic of the evening from my perspective, the recent publication of empirical support for the 30-year + old inflationary theory of the universe. I won’t go into an explanation because this excellent NYT article does a wonderful job using a coffee press as an easy to grasp metaphor.
What I want to add to this astonishing discovery is my own metaphor concerning what it might mean. If I grasp the implications of this inflationary theory correctly, it proposes that the big bang, rather than a one and done event (see NCAA basketball), is a forever red-shirted freshman, a player that can just keep on playing. No, that’s not the metaphor.
Here’s the metaphor: the big (or in Monty Python language, really huge, very enormous, most gargantuan) fountain. Again, if I get it, the moment just after the big bang, just 380,000 years after (incredible precision for an event well over 13 billion years old), produced and continues to produce a fountain of universes, ever increasing. I imagine them as large fireworks display, sending off into the darkness of whatever it is, a constant flow of brightly lit, unbelievably rapidly expanding-faster than the speed of light-universes. A fountain of metaphysics, each spark a new reality, each with its own laws of physics, many of which will develop sentient life forms who, as in our anthropic universe, will look back in wonder at the moment of their creation, their universe becoming aware of itself.
And here’s one more interesting piece. There is no looking behind the big fountain. The power of its engine prevents any data surviving from before it began. So, any speculation about the trigger: God, the cookie monster, pure whimsy is both in bounds and never to be answered. Now we look there darkly; later we will look there darkly, too.
