“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, June 20, 2021

Inertia

 ...I have these thoughts about gravity and time and so on. 

Doesn't the fact that things move at all weird you out, at all? The thing we just take for granted? I mean we explain things in terms of subatomic particles, such as electrons. But we never explain simple mechanical motion. I'm not talking about strange quantum vibrations. I'm talking about, how come there can even be the illusion of mechanical motion, if it is indeed an illusion? And so on. 

We even explain mass using the Higgs boson, but not this. I'm talking about things moving in space and the feeling of time passing, yeah that feeling. There's a physicist at Imperial College, I don't recall her name, she's also obsessed with that. She thinks that we shouldn't just explain away the regular every day taken for granted feel of time passing. 

I like that because it's really Heideggerian. Examine the most incredibly obvious seeming thing in the room, the elephant. 

So let's talk about a basic basic fact of movement called inertia, the fact that things keep on moving

In short, when something is moving through outer space and it just keeps moving until it's stopped. What is that, actually. What the fuck is it. 

So I'm crowdsourcing this idea because I think it's quite strange. There are lots of parts of it, but here's one. 

In a supercooled fluid, the electrons are all over the place, and it's a superconductor. 

If there are gravitons then spacetime is a supercooled fluid, mostly ("the vacuum of space"--it isn't one really). The gravitons are all over the place. So things can slip and slide easily until something stops them. 

Movement in a vacuum is pretty much because spacetime near to its ground state is superconductive.

Discuss. 


(There's a whole bunch of these speculations, all related, and I'm going to start sharing them here, because I don't know how else to talk to physicists.) 

Sunday, June 13, 2021

No Fly

 I shan't be flying to give lectures and etc etc anymore. 

It's the 2020s, and as I observed on Twitter, it's time to get extremely real. 

Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Italian Dark Ecology Came Out Today and Here's Something from It

 I'm very happy with how the press has handled this book

I Think You Will Enjoy This New Yorker Piece about Me

 Morgan is a brilliant writer--you'll see what I mean at once. Something very very actually "me" was captured here. 

Sunday, June 6, 2021

Want to Sponsor My Friend?

 My dear dear friend Carlyle. Grief counselor, hospice chaplain, so much more. He's walking for water and it would be great if you supported him. The organization was started by his mentor Sobonfu Some. 

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Dublab Desert Island Discs (You Can Listen Now!)

 ...this was such a good thing to do. An hour and a half of talk and lots of music as well. If you've ever heard Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 you will have heard something like the format here. But this was so much more in depth. Really nice to hear afterwards for me.