WhimsyLand

I am reminded of that old joke:  What keeps a dyslexic, agnostic insomniac awake at night:  Wondering if there really is a dog.

When we last left our struggling cosmologist (that would be me), I had questions about the recession of galaxies.  Most of my confusion was straightened out by reading Expanding Confusions (actually reading it half a dozen times) and going through the tutorials and other resources provided by noted cosmologist, Ned Wright.  The first Aha Moment was recognizing how the universe is expanding (as an example, see the different ways that Ned Wright's face can stretch).  The easiest way to think of it is considering a smattering of ants on the outside of a balloon.  The analogy is imperfect, but it works for a while.  If we are one of the ants, then we may see that one ant (Ant A) is over there about a foot from us, and another ant (Ant B) is even farther from us, say 2 feet.  Assume that the balloon is seriously blown up, like the size of Yankee Stadium, so the horizon is quite a bit of a way from where we are.  Expansion of the universe works in a way, as God or Whomever continues blowing up the balloon, that when Ant A recedes from one foot to two feet (doubling the distance between us), Ant B recedes from us from 2 feet to 4 feet (also doubling the distance).  Now, Ant A has traveled one foot in the time that Ant B has traveled two feet, so clearly Ant B appears to be traveling away from us at twice the speed of Ant A.  That's the simple reason why Hubble's Constant (actually Hubble's Parameter, but that's another story) says that galaxies farther away from us are receding from us faster, thus the greater red-shift of the light they are so graciously sending us. 

The more you read of this stuff, the more amazing it gets.  Of course, it helps if you involve yourself in a quick review of Special Relativity (SR) and General Relativity (GR).  I had a bit of the former when I was a physics major (heck, I was a major in almost everything except The Arts).  My calculus skills barely held up in reading the papers indicated above, but I at least came away with a little better kenning of worldlines, spacetime, boundaries and horizons.

Of course, this stuff is hard to do if you get caught up in the actual scale of the phenomena you're thinking about.  For example, if you take all the travel done in the U.S. on planes, it comes to about a trillion miles a year.  If you add the air miles by everyone else on Earth, let's say it's 10 trillion miles.  A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, and the nearest star in our galaxy is about 4 light years.  So, if we stopped taking United to Cleveland, and instead used all that traveling to get to Alpha Centauri, it would still take everyone on Earth four years of traveling to get there.  Of course, everyone is traveling at the same time on Earth, and we'd have to do the travel back-to-back as it were, which would take 100 generations at any speed that we could conceivably reach with current technology.  So we would have to plan for food and sex and child-raising and an intra-Ship government and the possibility of revolutions and mass hysteria due to claustrophobia. And at the point of disembarkation we would be at the closest star in our modest galaxy.  We are currently mapping galaxies that are a billion times farther away than that.  To get to them (and we probably couldn't as they are receding too fast), we would have to spend more time than the history of the earth, thousands of times more than the history of the human race.

I also chatted with a couple of Noted Poets this week, which was wonderful.  And read a large part of Tracy Smith's Duende, the James Laughlin Award for best second book from the Academy of American Poets, of whom I am a card-carrying member (she also won the 2002 Cave Canem Prize, went to Harvard, was a Stegner Fellow, teaches at Princeton).   I'm sad to report that I was seriously underwhelmed, and I've probably read 100 second books that I thought were better, but then I'm not handing out the prizes.  One noted poet whose opinion I respect says that Bob Hicok's This Clumsy Living is killerbee, so I ordered that.  Otherwise, no poetry news, except I keep scanning P&W and Jendi and Adam's Winning Writer's site for contests, but it's slow in the summer.  I think Junie's got the blues, and everyone in the Midwest is suffering from heat and humidity.

Whacha gonna do?  See you tomorrow.