A Thought on the Physics of Light

Why do we not see the light travelling from the sun at night until it is reflected by the moon? That is, light travelling away from us does not appear, unless it is reflected as off smoke or dusty air. Ok, to simplify the sphere of the sun, consider a circle and the rays coming off the circle. There is no empty space at the perimeter, though the rays must necessarily become further away from one another the further they travel from the source- yet they do not! This is a form of Zeno’s paradox, where an arrow must travel half the distance in x time, and so can never arrive at its target- yet the arrow does arrive! The fact, shown by experiment, disproves mathematics and logic, and sends us back to our deductions, where a premise must be in error. There is no empty space between points on the perimeter, and each point is traced back to its source, apparently on the surface of the sphere that is the sun. This is because our assumption about rays, lines and points is an abstraction. Light “waves” are themselves circular or spherical, expanding as they proceed from the source to fill up all the space equally, and one can tell this because the light becomes weaker the further it proceeds. And hence, in this way, light does not behave at all like a particle but like a wave, as from a stone dropped into a pool, only in three dimensions, as with sound waves.

I you like this musing, check out the third blog from the beginning in the archives, about seeing into the past, literally.

Flint Water Funds Run Dry: No Rainwater In Sight

Funds for bottled water will soon cease to flow, and Flint has still not figured out to stop relying on government and turn to rainwater, at least to supplement the leaden city water system. Rain barrels could have been providing much water for washing, but they are watching this go down the drain. Inventions for rainwater collection systems are ignored, or cycled here among a few fellow authors on WordPress, while entrepreneurs and fellow inventors play on Facebook, and Google just cannot seem to locate my website on any of the search engines. Seriously, can no one who wants to make things and make money, can no one see that it is possible to filter and collect rainwater for drinking, at half the trouble and expense of bottled water? Can no one see the possibilities for patents and inventions regarding water? Can no one see that it is possible to collect rainwater in a larger a way, for whole communities, and even to sell bottled rainwater, if it can be filtered and tested? The future use of these systems will only increase, while Flint and everyone else watches the rain water go through the poisoned ground, the poisoned rivers and poisoned pipes before they try to filter it. I can see these possibilities, and it is quite painful to watch Flint fumbling around with bottled water and new pipes while the rain flows down the drain. That is why my vice is libertarian cynicism. A bit of integrity in about five different offices and areas, and these problems would long ago have been moveing toward these obvious solutions.

Meanwhile the Trump fever does seem to have broken with his recent drop in the polls, after a continuous and meteoric rise. America may be seeing through the sham behind the curtain, and be on her way home to Kansas after all regardless. That is why The Wizard of Oz is the American Myth.

Rainwater and Maple Syrup

Today we (myself and cats) are collecting rainwater and trying to collect Maple sap and boil it into syrup. Syrup will replace honey for coffee and pancakes during the roughest time of the year. I would tell Flint again about collecting 2 1/2 gallons  just last night, with 2-3 more predicted to fall. And of course all the bathwater in Flint could be coming from roofs, but WordPress has blocked my access to the search engines, or theirs to me, and I wont be paying their extortion fee, except with a lawsuit, soon to commence. I will sue them in small claims court to set the principle, or appeal to what remains of the ACLU, or find  hungry young lawyer eager enough for the percentage to consider the argument. (“Nothing? Then tis like the breath of an unfeed lawyer, / You gave me nothing for it.”) One would think integrity in business would be easier than suffering that from me! They could just knock it off, give up on the extortion way of producing value, and join the genuine model of American business, which, Mellon-wedge, is a lot more fun.

Boiling Maple syrup is a good demonstration of how much energy it takes to distill water. Those with wood stoves could boil down sap for free all day long, like the principle of my attaching a distiller to every house heater in the north in order to have an emergency five gallons of clean water always on hand for zero energy dollars. We have a Kerosene heater, and a very nice column of bricks to make an adjustable backyard bar-b-cue, with hibachi lids to keep back the wind, and walnut twigs and apple logs to burn. The Sap tastes like sugar water, and is a nice if bland beverage until boiled down into syrup. Then the alchemy takes place, and very suddenly the flavor appears. We just know the Pottawatomi boiled sap to get sugar in the woods of Michigania long age, but wonder how they worked the tap and the pot for boiling. My tap failed, but just below it, the bark of the 140 year old Maple tree made an arrow shape, so I wedged a tobacco can under it, and most of my sap has come from there. I think I have lost as much as I collected, but did get some watery stuff on pancakes yesterday. No wonder the mysterious copper Kettle was so sacred, and why the Keepers of the fire seem to have had a ceremony involving gratitude for maple syrup.

Physics

There is suddenly a great excitement over Einstein’s thought on gravity, since a gravitational wave from the collision of two black holes some fifteen billion years ago was just now detected, as a little bleep. Early in the history of this webpage, we tried to set out some thoughts on physics, just common sense thoughts, though one or two special ones seem to have escaped notice.

We left off on Galileo, and the question of causes by noting that he does not wonder what makes the ball one, one thing a ball, or what6 makes all these molecules stick together into one ball, but only assumes the beings, their form and function, and then continues on in pursuit of his material and efficient causers, useful in the enterprise of mastering and possessing nature or trying to impress one’s patron.

The thought on gravity has helped me to further the common sense physics along this line. Natural objects are more a wonder than artificial as to what makes, say a rock, to be one thing, or a river, and we suspect that these are often just piles of stuff given significance by our perspective. But living things are quite obviously single beings, demarcated from their world as “subject” and “object.” Artificial things, like our round balls for rolling, imitate the unity not of non-living beings like crystals and rocks, but of living beings.

So, gravity is said to be not a wave but a curve in space. We wondered for a long time if this “curved” did not assume a “straight.” In the Euclidean cosmos, Geometry is the measure of space. Curved, I thought, would assume a “straight”, and so space could not be “curved” in every sense. Then we realized that it is curved relative to the matter of the planet that has gravity, or even relative to the space taken up by the matter that has gravity. The objects on the earth have weight because their mass is effected by gravity, less the further out they are. In order to weigh the dirt that is part of the earth, one may have to separate it from the earth and raise it up a bit, to get the scale under it. Now, one only feels acceleration and deceleration, not motion. Yet one feels gravity as kinetic or built up energy especially when separated from the rest of the ball that is the earth. Lying down on it, we feel our own weight.

So our gravity experienced as weight seems due to being an object on the earth that is not quite attached. We used to wonder why a fly in a school bus does not smash against the back if it gets up to fly around: it is not just the wind, but the momentum. And would the fly slow down when out of contact with the energy of the gas being added to keep the school bus moving?

The big mystery is order, shape, meaning, logos, and it is here we must seek a unified field theory, considering natural and living things, or the milieu of these, as the basis of analogy, and the consideration of the cosmos in terms of “copy and shadow,” as St. Paul says. Physics and metaphysice, not Big and small physics, are what need be joined to have a theory of the whole, but no one can even think, let alone believe, that this is so, or that it is more important than Big and small in Physics. But we have now a thought that what makes the molecules of Galileo’s ball to be one thing is that they too have their own gravity, attracting them together like piss bubbles in the toilet water (though that is likely a force, static-electrical, and not literally gravity). We used to marvel at this too, and unlike the question of where the bubbles come from when one boils water, we do not quite yet have a sure answer for this either.

The objects on the earth that are not attached to the earth have their own gravity too, so space would be curved by these as well as by the earth. Gravity is said to be a very weak force, noticeable only for huge objects. But does it not act on objects because the curved space made by these is curved opposite to the curved space made by the earth? We’ll have to work on that one, in our common sense physics program. We also want to think more about the space that matter takes up, especially compared to space without matter, and guess that one is this “curved” while the other, well, that would be “straight.” I am still pissed that no one realized the brilliance of my thought that it is theoretically possible to literally see into our own past, if we could find a reflector or two a few light years out in space and catch the light that left us long ago. No one noticed either the thought that for all we know there could have been 16 Big Bangs, or that to say the least this Big Bang theory does not give us a geeks version of Genesis. A Russian physicist also noticed this, so it is not just me doing common sense physics