If ever there was an argument for death being a portal to a new plane of existence, Shock G might have it down. He died a few days ago, 57 years old. He was a co-inventor of contemporary hip hop. There are lots of actual bios of Shock, this isn’t one of them. And honestly, my brain is giving me a little stress in remembering all these details. I was going to write that I loved Shock, but we all loved him, what’s the point of stating the obvious when we’re all sitting around a puddle of spilled beer, and we’re in pain. Shock was just one of those guys that couldn’t die, because he was too smart, too sensitive, too hilarious, too gifted. But then we said that about Pac too, so what do we know?
I have to take off the veil for a minute … this is Rick Yukon, coming to you from a hotel on the back of the Walheem. I’m not sure that I’ve stopped drinking since I heard the news, it hit me like that time Stumpy Lefkowitz conked me on the noggin with a billiard stick. My head sounded like a coconut, that sound, I can still hear it. I had no idea that Shock had died, I read about it somewhere on social media, I can still hear the sound in my head … like a coconut, how could I have been so stupid? Not to give him a call from the old days? Not to appreciate him being alive back when he was alive. My head is hollow, I should have been a better person.
But we all say that, what’s the point of bringing up the obvious?
Shock G knew music as only a kind of trained musician could know music, he flexed, he competed, and when he couldn’t find competition, he invented competition. He put Humpty, Peanut and Buttafly on the stage because he couldn’t find enough people to prime the pump, to turn hip hop into more than music, but into something like a sporting event, where artists could compete and get their feedback directly. I’m going to say that Shock invented that. I don’t know if it’s true, but if it isn’t true, then I don’t know of anyone else who went to so much trouble to develop his own competition. And then Shock met Pac, and then Shock’s world changed. I don’t remember much from those days, I guess I drank a bit too much back then, and I was on the outskirts of the scene, I handled some of their technical issues. I had no idea what I was looking at back then. Shock’s work payed the bills, and that was enough. I remember the dawn of Pac over Shock’s life, I guess Shock was a bit in denial at first, that someone could be so good as Pac, that a mere human could cast a shadow over all of poetry. But it wasn’t long before Greg recognized what was happening in front of him, Hip Hop suddenly had its Albert Einstein. And then Greg was smart enough and talented enough to just stand back and let Pac do what Pac did. He produced, he played keys, but at that point, he no longer really needed Humpty or the Professor, he had found a competition that was so far beyond anything he could manage that it seemed his new life mission was to do whatever he could do for Pac, and we owe Shock for that.
Would there have been a Pac without Shock? Maybe not. What kind of complete, emotionally-resonant human does it take to not only admit that there is someone so far beyond his own abilities, but also help him up? The rest of us, we know what we do, we knock down true talent, we’re threatened by it. But Greg saw what was in front of his face, and he seemed to accept that to stand in Pac’s way would have been a crime against humanity. And here we are in 2021, Black Lives Matter, a cop was just pronounced guilty for killing someone. But Pac where there. And Pac was there because Shock was there. And Shock was there because Humpty and Peanut kept him there, and they were all there because Greg had a gift of nature. He had something in him so purely unselfish that it was like the curve of a puppy’s tail, or a beam of sunlight that pokes through the fog. Greg was there because Nature willed him to be there.
Yeah, I’m doing what I promised I wouldn’t do. I’m defining Shock in terms of Pac. They’re separate people. But they weren’t, they were as intertwined as two people could be. None of us even knew Pac. We know the guy who rained paychecks, we knew the fountainhead of that poetry, but he wouldn’t let any of us through the barricades. He seemed to open up to the women in his life, and he opened up to Greg. How do we mourn the force behind The Force of Nature? We can’t, because Pac is gone, but Shock will live forever. We learned from him how not to be selfish, how to smile when it hurts, and how to help the people you love.
Political Scientists have become something of a well-loved meme in the political landscape, they seem to generate a few fans, while others tend to think of these people as a collection of turbo-putzes. I’m kind of in the middle on them. On one hand, their child-like simplicity is really adorable. The political scientist is proud of his history as a retired political science professor, and in fact once boasted that he came from a poor background but rose to the point where he could in fact become a retired political science professor, as if somehow this combination of words is worthy of an actual accomplishment in life … hey, I stand on a little stage in front of a bunch of young adults who have to take a class to fulfill their mandatory courses and every now and then, a student asks me a question that makes me think they really want me to help them find their place in the world!
Yeah, it’s pretty damned adorable … thinking that politics can be a “science” with actual feedback and control, and not a barely manageable shitshow of public sentiment and chaos is kind of admirable, in a way. Even sociologists, who have shown themselves as increasingly indispensible in our “build it back better” world have to admit that their science is so close to the edge of human chaos that it’s all they can do to try to manage sociological theory and application to actually get homeless people and those with addictions and disorders out of their cycles and back into the kind of lives that they really prefer. But political scientists have none of that reality to deal with. They simply stake a claim on the political landscape, and when something fits their “science” they declare the success of their process, and when something doesn’t fit, they tend to reclassify the fringes of their classifications. It’s not so different from a weird little backwater of physics, where we declare certain ill-posed and ill-behaved systems as “non-Newtonian” because they’re in fact so violently non-Newtonian that we have no choice but to do so. And then as we type or scribble the words “non-Newtonian” across the surface on a nonlinear, non-homogeneous differential, we know in fact that the entire world is non-Newtonian, because Newtonian physics is wrong, and in fact F=m(dv/dt) only when we ignore the quantum realities … but sometimes Mother Nature gives us a freebie and allows us to ignore those quantum realities well enough to do what our employers tell us to do.
And sure, as a fellow doctor, I want to be respectful of someone like Dr. Political Scientist, and I do find him somewhat likeable to the degree that he seems to outwardly support the same kind of progressive politics that I support. But ultimately, he is what we used to call in high school, a “poseur.” He’ll donate money to causes to demonstrate his commitment to his supposed ideals, and even challenge others to do the same, as he has done many times on the internet with his assorted “bets.” But he’s a poseur because he outright rejects the capstones of progressivism. When someone writes something with which he disagrees, he wants those words eliminated. When someone challenges him, he actively recruits support (apparently with his charity) to suppress the thoughts and ideas that challenge him. Of course that takes time, so in the short run, his method is to set up his lawn chair on the political landscape and declare that those who disagree with him must in fact be non-Newtonian … or his political sciency words “enemies of the cause” or “fake” or “agent provacateurs” or whatever his Ph.D. advisor taught him to say to quell dissent. Because ultimately, the reason politicos are not “scientists” in any real sense is because there is no absolute arbiter of their “truth” other than their ability to donate a few Euros to this cause or that cause and then try to control the discussion.
A biologist is a scientist because that person can stake a claim, and then with specific measurements, support or disprove other claims with the process of measurement. A chemist can measure energies, a mathematician can generate a logical proof, unassailable in many cases because at the end of the thing, one hundred and seventeen must still equal one hundred and seventeen. And of course, a physicist can drink a bunch of Michelob for breakfast because he or she just worked all night on an aerosol model for a pharmaceutical company, and in fact, the predicted mass and potential function from the Navier-Stokes model is right on the matzo-ball with the actual measurements in the environmental chamber with the mass and potential function. Apologies for the digression, but it’s worthwhile to explain to non-physicist what something like this feels like when you’re a physicist, when you set your lawn chair on the landscape with a claim something along the lines of a “mesosonic energy front can divert a non-negligible mass of submicron particulates from a pathogenic target” and then that physicist actually builds the device and his or her mathematical predictions are spot on. That feeling, it’s just indescribable … like waking up next to a supermodel in the county jail, because the sheriff was so impressed with your massive prank, that his deputies gave the two of you a private cell to copulate and make prison supermodel babies that will someday think of a way to top the epic prank you just played on the city of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It feels that good because that’s what actual science does, it feels good to understand Mother Nature and non-Newtonian potential flows to the point where you can not only predict what a female as intoxicating as Mama Nature will do, but then use her own tools to change the world, to save lives, to help make the world a more happy and healthy place for your fellow humans, plants and animals.
But politico scientists don’t get this luxury. They can measure opinions, polls and make predictions that are often true. But when they aren’t true, the façade collapses, and their “science” is shown to be another facet of the complexity of human thoughts, emotion and the indecisive nature of biological action. That’s what life is after all, the choice of a cell not react to a certain osmotic overload, the choice of a person to vote against his or her better judgment and against his or her better futures. Do we contradict ourselves? So we contradict ourselves, as Descartes said, we are complex, we contain multitudes, and these multitudes make a mockery of things that masquerade as “science” that are not science.
I’ve little doubt that I just killed a vast chunk of my career with that statement, but so be it. Science still does mean something real and something specific. It relies on the nature of measurement, and it’s not science if that process can’t be repeated precisely over and over and lead to the same result.
So why is it that politicos like retired political science professors get so deeply offended when their “science” is exposed as a kind of pseudo-science? Do business people get upset when they realize they are not scientists? Do politicians get upset when they realize they are not scientists? Why does this retired dipshit pound his sad little warpath when this undeniable truth is pointed out to him?
It reminds me of the old Yiddish joke … a highly prominent Jewish cardiologist wishes to impress his parents with his success and wealth. He sends a limousine to pick them up at their house and delivers them to his afternoon party on his yacht. On his yacht, he has also invited influential politicians, leaders of business, academics, all people whom he has saved their lives or the lives of their loved-ones. The cardiologist takes his parents on the grand tour, feeds them the most exotic foods, flown in from the corners of the Earth. He introduces them to the dignitaries of the day, and all these people fawn over their son, proclaim their love for him for saving their lives, for bringing back their loved ones from the bring of death itself. And then he shows them the yacht, the extravagant staterooms, the richly appointed bar with exotic hardwoods, the powerful engine room staffed by a highly-trained engineers, the giant masts made from the strongest trees and the sails made form the finest canvas, with a crew who deftly maneuvers the ship through the afternoon and which none of the guests even spill a drop of their champagne. And then at the end of this majestic afternoon, he presents his dad with a gold-braided captain hat, just like the one that he wears, as his crew and his guests all call him Captain. His parents are happy to see their success with his son, once just a little pisher studying the Mishna, and now, a beacon of cardiac surgery, a titan of culture. He walks them back to the limousine, and notices that his dad has not put on his captains hat, but rather it sits in his lap. “Don’t you like it?” he asks. “Yes, the hat is lovely, your yacht is beautiful and you have saved so many people, your mother and I are very proud of you.” “Then why won’t you wear the captains hat like I wear mine?” His dad looks up his son, so proud of everything that he has accomplished, but he still sees the little pisher who sometimes forgot his place in the world. “Son, to your mother, you are a captain. To me, you are a captain. But to a captain, you are not a captain.”
The reality is that science is as science does. A half-decent scientist will drink himself or herself into a stupor to find that the work is wrong. But he or she will open that Schrodinger’s box to determine the state of that cat. Because more important than pride, or success, or happiness to the scientist, is simply knowing what the fuck is inside the box. And while the politico prides himself on not simply taking the millions and billions of Euros that he simply could have taken if only he wanted to take them, he instead says something like “I instead chose to help the world with my science.”
And yes, he’ll actually believe that, as he rocks himself to sleep at night, convinced in the tangibility of this alternate reality.
But of course, the non-alternate reality is that he did well enough in school to stay in school, and then he kept moving through the academic landscape to the point where he graduated high school, then college, then graduate school and then someone needed to hire a professor of politics because that’s the way the sausages are made, and the school can’t expect to be the single largest private property holder in the tri-state region without creating an accredited curriculum. But he never got that memo, that memo was from He Who Shall Not be Named, the unspoken truth. So instead, he viewed his progress as tantamount to an intellectual contribution. And as he bullied his students with subtle hits to the grades of those who said “I disagree” and rewarded those who “yes perfesser” him in just the right, non-cloying way, he started to believe that he was in fact, a captain. That he did know how to set the sails, how to tune the engine, how to manage the navigation … that his skills as fixing hearts were not the result of a lot of people showing him how to do it, but rather the result of his excellence as a human. And if only he wanted, he could repack the stuffing box, and rebuild the raw-water strainer, rewind the jiggered windlass and even fix the intermittent flaw in the box thruster. But of course, he chose not to do these things, because he had to save his majestic hands for surgery. “But if I had,” he thought to himself as he walked away from the limousine, “I could have been a better captain than the captain.”
Extraction is a bitch.
We find ourselves in these positions in life, faced with the truth, and all we can do is chew slowly, accept that at some point, we cannot change the things in life that we cannot change, and then we lie to ourselves some more.
So when a politico scientist tells the world that he is a progressive, while simultaneously accusing those with whom he disagrees of Nazism, he becomes about the same as the fershlugginer putz who runs social experiments because he’s too lazy to do actual work, and he rewards himself with his daily dose of sparkling ganja, delivered to his lungs with the stuff that is going to end his life sooner rather than later, as coughs up the sputum that resembles the alien that his wife and her lover laugh at on the screen in their room at the Marriot, and he does things to her that actually resemble the kind of love that she could never get from her husband, the International Idiot.
Didn’t I warn you? Extraction is a bitch.
Intelligent people welcome dissent because it’s an opportunity to find truth. Idiots rally support for their lies, because it’s the only way they can generate something which gives them sufficient illusion of truth that they can go to sleep at night without being high or without bullying their wife like he does every damned night, which is why she’s snuggling with that guy and watching cartoons in the Marriot.
Editor’s note: Apologies for the blank spots in transcription of this recording. It was made in a noisy nighclub, apparently recorded onto a conventional cassette tape, and then it was transferred for some reason to an 8-track cartridge tape, which Dr. Cassandra found under the spare tire in her Alpine Tiger. She told us that she isn’t sure how Rick got it under there, as she tells us that she never let Rick drive that car, for fear of him crashing it. We have several blank spots in the interview, which we have denoted by ( . . . ) with approximately one period for each approximate 15 seconds of the conversation or silence which we were unable to discern and transcribe. We also lost part of the discussion when the 8-track player moves between tracks. Unless otherwise noted, all of the transcribed words belong to YUkon, unless otherwise noted.
But have you actually tried to get in there? ( . ) Try someday, you have to get up to one of the airline offices, and then get into the stairwell, go up a few flights, and just hope that someone left the door open. You can see where it is from the outside, I think they still use it for special events. ( . . ) I assume just old-money types who used to party there back during WWII, but I saw some laser connectors when I was up there, so I’m sure someone had a dance party up there at some point, probably one of Harvey Morse’s relatives. ( . . . . . . . . ) I used to print in that building. Have you ever been to that roof? ( . ) Take the elevator to the top floor, then a stairway up to the Penthouse, it’s nuts in there. I have no idea what they intended for that space, it doesn’t look like a living space, it looks more like a place to perform ritual sacrifice. There is a big round room, with a balcony off to the side. But it’s just raw industrial space. There were one hundred percent some insane parties in there. Nobody would be able to hear it in the building, maybe a little bit in the street. ( . . ) No, it’s not that one, I thought you meant the one on the corner of Varick and Canal. ( . . ) Yeah, I know the building you mean, my mechanic lives there. But the one with the rooftop ritual sacrifice room is that building on the corner of Varick and Canal. ( . . . . . . . . ) Right, but that was never my intention there anyway, the whole purpose of all that was to raise money for my physics research. I knew I would never fit into the academic structure because I’m just not wired that way. I barely finished my own research, I don’t see any way that I could have managed a tenure committee, I’m just too old for that shit. ( . . . ) If they have the silver tequila, then yes, but if it’s the dark tequila, then just make it a gin and tonic. ( . . ) For the silver? ( . ) Okay, but don’t use gin for this one, it won’t work, it had to be silver tequila. ( . ) Put a shot of the tequila into a shaker, add crushed ice, if you have mint, put that in, but Gia probably doesn’t have mint, so tell her she can just throw in a couple of those breath mints, a little mouthwash will work too if she doesn’t have any breath mints. Add one shot of soda water, and one shot of simple syrup or if she doesn’t have simple syrup she can add Seven-Up or Squirt. And then you have to put in one of those BC aspirin powders, I know she has a bunch of those, she cuts her coke with those. ( . . . ) Inositol won’t work, it has to be BC aspirin powder, because the drink can’t balance without that bitter. Inositol isn’t bitter enough. ( . . . . .) You got it. ( . ) I’ve never named it. ( . . . ) Maybe, that’s a good name for that drink. What’s your name, beautiful? ( . ) Good to meet you. This is Dr. Cassandra, and I’m Rick. ( . . ) We’re not married, we’re coworkers. ( . . . ) I agree with you, but I can’t speak for her, you need to ask her yourself. ( . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ) I call her Dr. Cassandra just because I’m used to that. ( . . . ) Cassandra? ( . ) That sounds weird to me, like she’s someone else. ( . . . ) If you two end up hooking up and don’t invite me, I’m going to just sit here and drink those pups until I die. ( . . . ) Wait, so you know that she’s a physicist, what did you think I am, just another drunk? ( . ) Good to know. ( . . . . ) I guess I’m kind of proud that I’m known more for my alcoholism than my physics. ( . ) We work together. ( . . . . . . . . . . . ) Ladies, apologies to you both, why don’t you take my seat, I’m going to have a smoke and then get a drink for each from you Gia. Two Lanilla’s, ladies? ( . . . ) I know how to take drink orders, I’ll cover for you for a few minutes, take a break, sugar. ( . . . . . . . ) at Harry’s, and there is another one at Thompson.* [not Yukon] ( . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ) fourty-eight, and give her half of the top, okay?* [not Yukon] ( . . . . . . ) I never had time, I just ran about eight vodka cranberries. What the hell is it with vodka cranberries? ( . . . ) It’s a dead easy drink to make yeah, I guess with all the help you’re giving Gia, it’s better that the drink orders are simple, huh? ( . . ) What did you two talk about while I was gone? ( . . ) If you’re into that kind of thing, I guess. I’m more into fixing old snowmobiles, but I’m happy to help out where I can. ( . . ) Probably a good idea. ( . . . ) With Gia? ( . ) Oh. Yeah, I’m not sure I could survive long enough in that kind of environment to actually get any work out. I’m a soldier. Soldiers don’t have a place in academia. ( . . ) That’s an actual solder, hell no. ( . . ) I paid my time in actual soldiering. I’m sufficiently experienced at this point to receive my missions directly without having someone bark them into my ear. ( . . . ) Yeah, but I don’t do that with you, I never give you instructions unless you’re on the payroll, and we have to ship product. ( . . . . . . . . ) He didn’t say. ( . . . .) Thank you! ( . . ) Do you want me to do an official tasting? ( . . ) I guess you can take that as a yes. Tell her it’s perfect. Better than I’ve ever made. ( . . ) Tell you what sugar, you can have some of mine, if you bring me another one of these as soon as you and Gia have a minute to breathe. ( . . . ) See! I wasn’t faking it, the drink actually makes you do that, right? ( . ) Okay. ( . . ) Well, when I do that, I apologize. ( . . . ) Okay, but that’s just me being an asshole. I’m not being an asshole to you because you’re a woman, I’m an asshole to you because I’m imperfect, and that’s why I drink. ( . . ) Right, as long as I’m a little bit imperfect, I might as well open the throttle up all the way! ( . . . . ) I still have mine! ( . ) On my leg. And I got one today on my hand, I pulled the bike up, and some jackass engineer routed the manifold under the seat without a jacket. ( . . ) Bullshit, that’s bad design. It wouldn’t have mattered much to jacket it, because the manifold and the frame have almost the same diameter. By the time I noticed I wasn’t pulling up on the frame, it was already pretty well burned. ( . . ) Just to show you fucked up I really am, right after that, I thought “I’m glad I wasn’t wearing my gloves. ( . ) Exactly, I would rather burn my hand because that heals, but my glove would have been ruined forever, it’s a cold weather glove, it’s not built to handle an exhaust manifold. ( . . . ) I never did. ( . . ) Nope, it was just for the fun of it, never made a dime on those tours, I wasn’t good enough. ( . ) And I wasn’t really committed to it either. I had my money from the products, that was funding the research pretty well, adding tour money on it would have gilding the lilly a bit. ( . . . . . . ) Everyone is an expert. I got out the work that was important to me. ( . . ) But that’s because I could communicate the basic idea well enough to other physicists that I didn’t need to do that work. What would have been accomplished by me doing it anyway? I’d become rich? I’d become famous? I wouldn’t have to beg for scraps? I knew that someone was going to take my work in the vacuum field and move in that direction, I just needed to feed it to them. But my work in humanitarian stuff, who was going to do that? ( . ) Maybe. But he didn’t have the background in physics. And (redacted) had the background in physics, but he didn’t know how to engineer a product to market that could be built through the E equals C system. ( . ) Okay, but he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow in thermodynamics. He doesn’t have the training. ( . . ) She could sell snowcones at an Inuit picnic, but what does sales actually bring you if these can’t be solved in place, in the E equals C system? Then it’s just more one-sided, wealth-building capitalism. Any medium-minded asshole can do that. That’s the secret to to E equals C right. We turn the company itself into an appliance, and the wealth bypasses the company and moves right to a single pool of employees. Every owner is a manager, every manager is a worker, every worker votes with their shares. ( . . . ) Right, but why not? I was busy enough with the physics, that was sufficiently difficult to just keep the corporate structure as simple as possible. ( . . . ) Honestly, no, there hasn’t been much of that, but I’m sure it’s going to come eventually. ( . ) I guess it’s just the nature of people. People want to leave their mark. But that’s fine. The work in energy propagation through the vacuum field, that was (redacted) making his mark, right? ( . ) But I didn’t need to do it! I was able to do the E equals C work. Who was it that said “you can accomplish anything as long as you’re willing to let someone else get the credit for it?” ( . . . ) Damned Dulles Brothers huh? But the Saatchi Brothers fixed them up. ( . ) Brothers fighting brothers! ( . . ) I never had a brother, always wanted one, I bet we could have ripped some shit up together. ( . . . ) Because that was the work in the vacuum photon field. ( . . . ) When I flick on my flashlight and shine it at a wall, how does the energy get from my flashlight to the wall? ( . . ) my flashlight is pumped into the vacuum field, HUP and Thermodynamics immediately spring into action and say “that’s not allowed!” And the vacuum field responds by saying “we know it’s not allowed ( . . . ) The vacuum photons that received that pumped energy from my flashlight carry it for the longest distance and the longest time that HUP allows them, which would be slightly less than the Planck length and Planck time, and then they hand it off to another set of vacuum photons, fully obeying conservation of angular momentum, ( . ) in a straight line, this keeps happening, with the virtual photons handing off the energy to their next-in-line saying “get this damned energy off my hands, I’m not allowed to hold it.” ( . . ) Hand it off to another terrified vacuum photon and surprise, a big, strong fermion of wall paint says “here, let me lighten your load.” Since fermions are at or above the ground state, it can take the energy and then do what it likes, leisurely, since it can reach excited states without violating HUP and Thermodynamics, and then casually decode what to do next, like work with wall paint fermion brothers and their phonon activity to reradiate the energy at a different wavelength, absorb it, allow some deformation to the phonon structure, recombinate, whatever fermions do when they absorb energy. ( . . .) light moves through a pure vacuum field at the speed of light in a vacuum, but when light moves through a material, it’s less than c, right? In some cases the index is such that we can nearly stop the light inside. So what’s happening there? Pure empty space cannot transmit light because our pure empty space is the absence of vacuum photons. But in real life ( . . ) ratio of empty space to vacuum space. So the silicon cantilever has more vacuum space inside of the bulk substrate than an osmium cantilever, because the atomic density of osmium is higher and the density of fermions per unit volume is higher. (Think of a fermion as a tiny blob of empty space.) We can measure this ratio of empty space to vacuum space through the shape of the exponential decay at the potential barrier. Once you set up an experiment with two different cantilever materials, characterize the gap between the cantilever and the substrate, and then vary the vacuum field, you ( . . . ) get some real data. If nanoscale depositions aren’t to your liking, I suspect that you can find similar kind of results by measuring changes in the mass defect for different isotopes of materials heavier than iron, because the fermions in the shell of the atom perform some of the same potential barrier functions relative to the fermions in the nucleus as the cantilever. ( . . . ) In five minutes? Then I’ll take two and Dr. Cassandra, two too? ( . ) So four total.
I would like to apply for the position of Senior Equity Research Analyst. I have worked around financial people for a large chunk of my career. I tended to look at them the way the my dog looks at me when I rebuild the engine on my snowmobile; I knew they were doing something that made them happy, I knew I loved them, but I had no real grasp of how it put food into my bowl.
And now I’m somewhat old, pushing toward the fulcrum of fifty, and success still eludes me. My truck is rusted and dented, there is a crowbar in the bed that I sometimes use to lever the door when I lock my keys in the cab.
Back before I devoted my life to science and invention, back before my Ph.D. in applied physics, back before my printing career, I sat in Paulie Steermaster’s office at the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t really give a rat’s ass if he hired me for the San Francisco bureau, I made good money running computers, which were fairly new at the time. I can’t remember anything about the interview, other than a sign behind his desk that said “There is no such thing as too many stories about Japan.” Japan could do no wrong back then.
He hired me and I shipped out the San Francisco, where I covered the nascent video game and internet industry for that gang of tequila-sucking degenerates. And I loved them, but financially, I didn’t know my ass from my elbow. I was a scientist even back then. (I found that if I wrote a story about someone who applied math to some kind of finance, that it would never get the spike.) It was all somewhat forgettable for me, but one thing stuck … Steermaster told my friend Cathy Glomar (who was one of the editors) something to the effect of “That Mike, he’s either going to become a millionaire, or he’s going to … “
And I never learned Steermaster’s alternative, I only knew the first part. Cathy told me “I’m not going to tell you the last part, it’s not so nice.”
So now, I’m not a millionaire, my truck is full of rust and dents, my inventions seem to meet a modicum of success, I’ve made a lot of money for others, little for myself. Clearly, I became the thing that Cathy couldn’t tell me. What was it? How bad could it have been?
A psychopath who builds and sells folding boats and backcountry sleds out of corrugated plastic? A common drunk? An applied physicist who can’t seem to catch a break? Something worse? A Fool?
I buy stocks, I’m pretty good at it, but I have no real idea how to buy anything for short-terms. I buy what seems cheap to me, even though I still don’t have clue how price-to-earning-ratios actually work. I recently sold my crypto to buy cruise line stocks, aircraft stocks and oil stocks, because I figure this COVID thing isn’t going to last forever. And I’ll probably sell them all to pay bills, with regret, but that’s the way I live. It sucks, but it’s reality, I’ve done it many times.
I’m still a scientist. I know how to extract rare earth elements from produced waters that are pulled from oil and gas wells, and geothermal bores. I knew how to make the REEs a functional co-product the same way the nuclear energy was a co-product of our quest to enrich uranium to win the Cold War. I know how to desalinate water with the sun. I know how to separate misshaped white blood cells from a leukemia patient so that they can survive the chemo without choking by an arterial roadblock made of dysfunctional cells. I know how to clean the PM 2.5 particles from a pollution stream with a proprietary dry scrubbing process. I know how to harmonically balance an advanced two-stroke engine so it’s locked into a single RPM so it can charge an EV more efficiently than any liquid fuel engine on the planet. And I know how to do all this stuff in full compliance with the rigor and immutable precision of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Entropy will eventually bring the planet to my way of seeing things. And if I’m lucky, and if I do my job right, it will save the lives of children in Haiti and Burkino Faso and Bangladesh, so that a few million children don’t have to die from diarrhea, or cholera, or malaria, or pneumonia, or air pollution.
All of this stuff means nothing in the quest to put food into my bowl though, because I still know nothing about finance.
I can speak to financial folks like a sumbitch, of course. I can help them see what has true long-lasting value in advanced industries, in the future … or actually, inthefuture.com. (I force my children to always follow the phrase “in the future’ with “dot com” because “that’s the only fucking thing of value that your old man owns, other than the 1975 Fiat in the garage.” And I nearly lost that beloved bit of property to one of Peter Mitsubishi’s interns, when he had me convinced they were going to use it for a podcast, but I saw through the ruse just in time, and luckily, that particular jewel in the crown of thorns is still mine.)
I can help other Fools make money, lots of it. It’s one of my skills. I might be able to keep their attention, that’s sort of a half-skill that I used to have. And I need the work … I need a new truck.
I didn’t proofread this. But given that you’ll likely never get back to me, please don’t get angry at me if I post this cover letter on SpaceForce7.com. I need to preserve these touchstones of my memory. They might mean something to my children someday.
Physicists talk shit all the time. It’s a game for us to screw with the heads of non-physicists. Why? Because we’re assholes. We’re emotionally damaged. We’re deranged. We should rightly be rounded up and executed for our crimes against human emotional stability. And it’s not really that we necessarily want to screw with the others, but rather than the clarity of the situation unfolds us as it unfolds in front of us.
Why do I bring this up? Because we have probably spent enough time for a while on theoretical physics. We have lost our direction, brothers and sisters. We have become an outmoded collection of unemployed half-assed mathematicians with the main purpose in our lives to train engineers to have stable families and happiness instead of us. There are specific problems and physicists can’t continue to be content with our fundamental asshole structures in the body-centric, just because a sufficient number of us have jobs that either train engineers to have stable families and happiness instead of us, or train the people who will train the engineers to have stable families and happiness instead of us. Some of us will also train doctors and nurses to recognize the inherent limits of their ability sub-inferior to their ability to take and remove life from the crumpled frames that inhabit their workspace. The specific problems, they are medical, infrastructure, and disruptional. And now the world slides into self-orchestrated poverty, the ones who will take it in the shorts are the ones who usually do so, those broken, crumpled frames in Haiti, Bangladesh, Burkino Faso, and any other place that has opted out of the global client state economy in the last two hundred years or so.
We can’t sit on our bony asses and our fat asses doing physics as the world collapses around us. “Not collapsing” you say? Tell that to the mother in Haiti who has buried two baby sons because of diarrhea. Or the dad in Bangladesh who buried two daughters because of pneumonia. The “collapse” is not a disease that kills old people, it’s the diseases that kill babies, and eight-year-old girls who want to be like mommy and weave straw mats for yoga instructors in Pocatello.
Dr. Cassandra apparently wants nothing more to do with me, I guess she’s still pissed about the death-faking thing, but I had to do what I had to do. I get that I was a corrosive influence in her life. She and I spoke last night …
Do you know how to sell things?
I built production in Pocatello for 960 units/month of a new Millennial toy. I haven’t figured out how to sell them yet.
They sell for $24/each, they’re made in Pocatello, buyers pick their colors, and I’m set up to make 960 units/month in the space I have now in Pocatello. I’m making some TikTok style videos, I’m hoping that these will get some traction. So far my Facebook ads are only returning on $5/unit. That shows that the recipe is wrong. It needs to be down to about $1/unit to build momentum. My daughters are good at the TikTok, I think there is a chance with that.
I just saw your Facebook thing on the phone. You’re either an undiscovered supermodel or you’re a retired supermodel. Why are you broke? You could like, make hundreds of millions for recovery and humanitarian projects in Haiti and Burkino Faso. The camera just fucking loves you. The camera wants to BE you! It’s a big deal Cassie, it’s called visual charisma. And then you have this kind of sad elegance at the same time, I do believe that you might be one of the few women on the planet who is actually admired rather than jealousified by the legions of bimbos. It’s weird, it’s like you exude a kind of wisdom.
Are you sure that Aspen is the right place for you at this point? You could save millions of lives of children in Developing Nations if you got involved in that area of philanthropy. You have a have a kind of patience … visual patience. It’s like a complexity buried under the cheerleader. Generally, you should expect to see about 8% of the money you raise. It’s not good to go above that. If you go a little lower, like 6%, you might make more money because it lowers the non-profit’s overhead.
The time is now Cassie. This COVID shutdown is going to be like a tornado in Developing Nations. The U.S. assistance was only a trickle before COVID, now it’s even less because our economy was butt-fucked by COVID. So if someone as beautiful, elegant, mysterious and pissed off as you got involved in this, you could bring hundreds of millions into Developing Nations, employee-equity companies, small business grants for economically disadvantaged communities.
It’s not really ethical to charge a fee on non-profits, but if you incorporate with a 501(c)3, you can draw a salary from that which would approximate about 6% of the money you raise. If you figure in another 4% of internal friction, plus an additional 10% of sub-prime friction, you’re still looking at something like an 80% direct-to-recipient program. That’s good. That would save lives.
Post COVID, we’re going to need a shit-ton of water disinfection in Haiti, Bangladesh and West Africa. Anti-fungals, anti-bacterials, at least 1500 pediatric nurses need to be trained locally. We’re talking about the opportunity to save up to 2 million lives in 2021 from diarrhea, 3 million lives in 2021 from pneumonia, save another 2 million lives from Malaria and Antibiotic mmm Encephalitis.
If you do this, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll take you on a date to the Burj Club.
The current U.S. fundraising industry for Developing Nations needs disruption. It doesn’t need to be elegant, it doesn’t need to be tasteful. We have to get in front of Millennials and get them to adopt kids, get them to vacation in places like Haiti and Ghana, and just get some real change to happen. Because we’re looking at about 4 million children who die every year because of lack of basic sanitation and basic medicine. You can get onboard this train Cassie, we’re going to fucking slam dance this. The era of the e=c is coming. Employee Equity Company. This is the next logical progression after the failure of socialism and the failure of capitalism. e=c is going to change everything. You’ll soon see it everywhere, inthefuture.com, but you saw it here first. I’m the architect. I slam danced this shit, I did the worm in a pile of broken glass while Minor Threat and Screeching Weasel pumped the Universe full of 100% not-from-concentrate love. I can do this, but you can do it better.
You can do it better. I need you. I know I don’t know you. I don’t want to fucking know you because I’ll fall in love with you like all those other assholes and I’ll end up drinking myself to death. With nothing more than Haitian Sunrises and Haitian Lanillas and Uncle Donnie’s Toasted Oranges. I need you to do this. Yes, I’m insane, all substandard humans are insane and I’m sub-substandard. But you need to do this, the kids need you. You are the United States of America, Cassie. You are the best ideals and talents and knowledge and hard work that we can offer. And if you don’t do it, at least please don’t unfriend me here, because I want to copy that letter i just wrote to you and sell it to Stumpy Lefkowitz for a bottle of tequila. I love you.
When a woman turns down a date to the Burj Club, she isn’t into you, dude.
But the point is still the point … we spend a lot of time on physics that isn’t testable for the most part, often even when we happen to have a supercollider in our back pocket. So here’s my hare-brained suggestion … let’s resolve to spend 25% of our time on the most pressing humanitarian issues, 25% of our time doing what used to take 90% of our time, we can waste the other 25% and still be ahead, and then we can spend the last 25% on testable methods to open up some of these hidden areas of science like dark matter and dark energy and the Fine Structure Constant, the sensitivity of the Cosmological Constant, gauge theories, and all that wacky stuff that physicists do. So here’s the pitch … most departments can devote a couple of benches in one of their lesser-used labs to testing the mass-defect. It’s not trivial work, but it’s tractable work that doesn’t require billion Euro grants. Normally, testing nucleus-level resolution isn’t easy, but in this case it’s mostly mediated by the electrons and we’re good at measuring electrons. We can infer what’s happening in the nucleus through the electrons. We should see some variability to the mass defect as the universe expands, and we should be able to simulate an acceleration of that with the far wings in the electron spectra. Again, not easy, but tractable if we can settle our lives sufficiently long to build up a National Instruments bus, and see what we get. We’ll need to build some Josephson Junctions, we’ll need to build some standard Hall Effect sensors and fluid Hall Effect sensors with the opposite charge flow. We’ll need to build some Casimir Effect devices, just some airbag-sensor type neutron etchings, nothing that the materials people can’t build in a year or a few weeks if they’re chugging. (Materials folks, look at the feedback and control for interfacial stress on your cantilevers from oxidized surfaces and surfaces with diffusion barriers like tungsten. You should be able to amplify the small effects near the ground state.)
Yes, we’ve all done this work at various stages in our careers, but rarely with any kind of integrated effort to measurements of changes of the mass-defect in materials subjects to various frames of reference. This is what we need, and it should go a long way to really figuring out how much “wandering” happens around the ground state-barrier, and that might be popular with the dark energy folks.
So mass-defect is a potentially minute-measurable effect, along with those other effects near the ground state. But one other potentially measurable effect should also show up in the Kelvin barrier, which we can measure at around 15 nanometers up to about 150 nanometers depending on the complexity of the molecule. But anyone who has ever seen some electron microscopy images of the crystalline structures down below 25 nanometers or so, knows how sensitive those geometric packings are. Hell, solid state physics is built on that sensitivity, and thank goodness it only takes a tiny bit of dopant to make the layer do what we want it to do. (We do need to incorporate REE extraction from geothermal energy production however, we need to make REE the tail that wags that dog, so that the geothermal extraction is the free co-product, in the same way that nuclear energy was the free co-product of the Cold War’s race to build nuclear warheads. But iPhones and Beats Headphones play way better in Peoria than nuclear warheads, so it’s a safe bet that we’ll need REEs for a long time into the future, and perhaps all countries should have our own domestic production of that, and do so in a way that doesn’t make a pristine river in Ghana the consistency of Chinese egg drop soup? If we pull REEs from the produced waters, I’m quite sure that we can make REE production a human and environmentally-responsible activity. There is nothing in the Laws of Thermodynamics that says a bunch of millionaire engineer CEOs suddenly have the need to become filthy polluting wankers. Yes, it will require more effort to optimize the process to do it cleanly, but don’t heap your lazy ass bullshit onto the Third Law of Thermodynamic, huh?)
I digress again, apologies …
Anyone who has looked at the these crystalline structures knows how sensitive they are to defects. The packing structure shows it like the carcass of a bluebottle fly in a bag in white rice. So, we should be able to see measurable variances of carefully characterized structures near the Kelvin Barrier, and that’s fairly straightforward to measure, because an increase or decrease in the Kelvin barrier directly impacts the number density of the unaggregated particles.
Cassie, I miss you, Happy Birthday, babe. I love you. I hope you’re having fun in Pocatello.
One of the cliches of applied physics theory is that you can’t fuck with entropy. Your harebrained new theory violates conservation of energy? Eh, why not? You just dreamed up a way to de-harmonize the deBroglie oscillation? Give it a try chili-girl, maybe you got something. But your theory violates the Third Law? Perish the thought, you’re all washed up, and that rot.
Entropy is what it is because we have never found an exception, we have never found a causality violation, we have never seen Nature do what Nature does in any way except as a glorious testament to the Laws of Thermodynamics.
But why?
“Why” is the kind of question that physicists don’t like to think about, it forces us to confront our own mortality. Yeah, artists and poets can handle that, but physicists … we all suffered through Jackson together, maybe we even suffered through Cohen-Tenoudji together. We have the keys to the l’automobile, why should we sit in the parking lot smoking spliffs if we can actually drive away?
We don’t think about why entropy increases because if we did, we would have to think about entropy decreasing. And entropy never decreases, right?
Unless it decreases.
Please don’t pillory me yet, just look at the expansion first. I’m going to avoid rational numbers and rational units here to avoid the temptation to do the math and take away the fun from Paul Muni. So say the Universe at this moment expands by an average of 100 knots per second. Okay, so as the universe expands, what is happening to the entropy of the universe? The particles become further apart, even the distance from the mass-defect radius to the nucleus, the decay to the Coulombic radius suffers, shit falls apart, electrons take off for parts unknown, they hang out with seedy neutrinos, they might even oscillate, the neutrons say “fuck you bitch” and leave the protons to manage their weak-force balance until they decay into a new isotope, bingo bango, Bob’s yer uncle, entropy in action. And it’s measurable.
So the expansion of the stuff of the universe itself increases its disorder as it increases the average number density in thea given volume. Things have gone to pieces, right George? (You never did a no-show when I needed your song, good buddy.) https://youtu.be/4EBCE9OCyok
Volumetric expansion (hell, even fractal expansion between 2D and 3D) is an entropic increase, that defines the limit of the function for the work that we recover from the increased entropy. It’s like Mother Nature coyly hands us all the energy we could need by nudging down the ratio of h-bar omega (Feynman says “fuck the factor of two”) and all we have to do is take credit for sweeping it up.
But what happens when the dielectric constant between the vacuum of the Universe and the empty space that encompasses our delightful bubble of life start to equalize such that the Casimir force becomes repulsive rather than attractive? That’s likely the point that the universe says “nice eating bagels with you shmoes” and starts to collapse again, the long hard slog back to the point where the dielectric imbalance again demands an attractive Casimir force, it crunches as far as it cares and then it starts heading back to this shit again, the endless cycle of renewal and despair.
But what happens to those poor flasluguner shmucks who have to live with a collapsing universe? Because the entire universe has a decrease in entropy all the time. That seems wonderful to our monkey brain, all that delicious and delightful ORDER, but where is this endless well of work to decrease this entropy? Presumably from the fabric of the universe itself, as the mass-defect then starts to expand, and the fermions of destiny coalesce around the new mass defect, probably somewhere near European Opium (aka Europeum) or even Americium, or Amerigo Vespuccium as it will inevitably be known. So the ground-state changes, and it begins to gobble up all the available above-ground-state energy that it can, shuffleboarding it into the ground state, where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle protects it from illegal energy poaching. (They warned us about renormalization, didn’t they?)
The idea of a universally-decreasing entropy is far more spooky than of universally-increasing entropy. At least on this journey, we don’t really know how long we have, until we actually calculate the dielectric balance of the vacuum of the universe versus the empty space around our bubble of enjoyment. But when it collapses, that’s convergence, and everything that rises much converge, said Flannery, so we look at that convergence point, and our face goes white, we see our destiny, it’s in in front of us, the end of the ride.
How many people have had to face that? Never knowing if the universe would find a way to spontaneously recombust another Tupac? Somehow find a way to grant humanity the ability to make a good batch of ceviche? Miserable. I hope those folks had the good drugs, they deserved them. And it may not have even squished everything to a point … the Big Bang only needs the delectric balance to come within the Kelvin barrier of the component average in the vacuum. (I guess Kelvin barrier wouldn’t be the right word, since it’s vacuum, but say a vacuum barrier) which then varied the dielectric balance between the vacuum and the empty space that surrounds our bubble, then engorged with the luxury of volume, the entropy of empty space, increasing and sucking up the work function of the vacuum. Like a snack gorging on its tail … so are the Days of Our Lives.
From ARS Technica, we are presented of what the future of war in space will be. Link. Okay, what the actual fuck?
Yeah, we get it, the United States of America, and Russia, India, Pakistan, France, China and some others are apparently preparing to go to war in space. What’s the point of going to war in space? It’s hard enough to go to war on the land and the ocean and under the ocean, and in a dark basement somewhere in Frankfurt trying to hack into Lisa Cutter’s website just because you’ve been in Germany for most of your life, working for those goddamn slave drivers at the hacker’s organization that employs you, and woman, it would just be really nice to just just ride your board for a while at Steamboat, chill with a Haitian Sunrise, talk about the later works of Franz Kafka, maybe make a few bucks a week pulling weeds around town in the summer, maybe picking up a little hacking work on the side.
The point is, it’s hard enough going to war anywhere where a war needs to supposedly happen since they are inhabited by people who don’t own credit cards. But in space? Man, what’s the point of that? Yeah, I’ve no doubt there is some square-jawed asshole warning someone somewhere about the directed microwave-enshrouded beta particle beams from space that are going to penetrate the tinfoil on his skull and bake his brains like a can of hobo beans. But as a general rule, there are about 7 billion people on the surface of the earth, that could sufficiently manage the ten million of so psychopathic assholes who seek to enslave us because oppression for some reason makes them feel like they’re coming into a jar of marshmallow fluff. Fair enough, we do tend to let them do it quite often in the short recorded history of our planet. (I read that after the Haitian revolution, the leader outlawed the use of whips on the former slaves, so the bosses switched to some kind of locally-grown whip, made of organically-grown material rather than leather. Zouk la ce sel médicament nou ni!) But things are changing to a degree, over the last couple hundred years we seem to have reached some evolutionary epoch where us humans can process both emotions and logic at the same time, and recognize that just because we don’t necessarily lose sleep over a hundred thousand millionaires who unfortunately died at the too-young age of 98, we can be bothered rather intensely by a Haitian child who dreams of being a professional baseball players someday, and will statistically end up in fact dying of diarrhea if he gets it once too often. We have become better humans to a degree. And it’s not because of social media, or computers, or electric cars, or a package delivery service that rhymes with Mamazon who is unwittingly trying to privatize the people-owned United States Postal Service. The assholes don’t get to claim credit for this change, they were part of the problem, who somehow managed not to get in our way long enough to get this shit done, son. It’s just because time marches forward, as times tends to do, and cultures mature just as people mature. Cultures die as people die, and we just happen to be alive at a moment when the short history of human culture has coincided with a reasonably banal time in the Short History of Temporary Explosions. We happen to be alive at a time when the slaves revolted again, and by some weird fluke, we managed to hold the shit together without letting too many of the ten-million assholes out of their cages to victimize us.
(Odd the irony of that “cage” isn’t it? When a violent criminal who is poor is captured by us, we lock them in a metal box, and subject them to search for humanity in the confines of that hell. When a violent criminal who is wealthy is captured by us, we lock them in a computer, and subject them to search for their own kind in the confines of that heaven. It’s tempting to conclude that the wealthy ones have it better, they certainly are more likely to live to the too-young age of 98 when the unstoppable juggernaut of the disease-du-jour finally finds a way to put them into the box. But it’s a nonsensical discussion. We put them in a box of comfort because their power allows them that comfort. We put the powerless into a box of discomfort because we aren’t really as evolved as we would like to think ourselves.)
Time marches forward, we’re gradually fixing what is fucked up, we’re actually making progress in trying to keep that baseball-dreaming kid in Haiti from dying of diarrhea, so that he can grow up to most likely be some working asshole like the rest of us, but actually pretty fucking happy with a few bucks in his pocket, his kids in school, and his wife able to turn a spigot in the kitchen to get water for the new baby rather than have to walk two miles with it from the only certified safe well-draw, like his mom had to do it to keep him from dying of diarrhea when he was a kid and used to dream of playing shortstop for Miguel Sano and the Twins. Life doesn’t really need to be complicated or wonderful to be okay. Sometimes the bill collectors can be after your ass, the tooth your were trying to save could have just been knocked out of your skull by falling off the ladder while trying to clear The Widow Anderson’s rain gutters, and without even a buck in your pocket to afford a beer, you have half of cigarette left that you found outside the Albertsons, and if you break off the filter, you should be able to smoke it without worrying about catching Hepatitis from whomever had it before you … and yeah, life is still pretty damned beautiful. Life is still worth living, even when they’re trying to explode your brain with that directed microwave-shrouded beta-particle beam from space.
Eventually, the few remaining uncaged psychopaths will get the message that we’re done with war, for the most part. We’re dealing with too much shit in our heads to want to kill anyone. So once we finish up the remaining wars on the surface, and then figure out a way to get all the children with nice fat bellies, and keep them alive long enough for them to realize that real life is even better than daydreams and Hollywood, then why in the actual fuck would we want to start waging war in friggen space?
There’s an unlimited supply of it, and the planets that are down there are generally far more inhospitable to us than the actual space. Assuming we can gather enough energy from above the ground-state to convert Bosons to Fermions, we won’t really need the course matter of asteroids and rocks. The true currency of the universe is energy, not mass. Mass is an odd, temporary state of energy, gradually decaying from Fermions back to Bosons as the critical radius decreases sufficiently that the intermolecular forces no longer dominate, and the interatomic decay both above and below the mass defect can predominate. And if we can’t reduce the entropy of Bosonic systems, then there is no point in even going into space, because there is nothing for us there, and we’ll never be able to go anywhere anyway, nor would we particularly want to go anywhere. So if in a few hundred years, we still haven’t found a way to affordably reduce the entropy of Boson clusters in a motor at least as efficient as a Fuji 488, 2-stroke, 2-cylinder, 2-carb, valve-free engine, then okay, let’s just give up, let the criminals and psychopaths destroy our lives here, because what’s the point then anyway, if we’re all stock on this rock like a prison. But assuming we can do what seems obvious, we should just do that, and then Space Force 7 can field our line of family-fun space boats, and hell, we might even allow political pundits to consume Uncle Donnie’s Natural Bar Snacks while onboard.
Time moves forward, and we’re likely just less fucked up as a collection of people just because we hit the temporal lottery, and we happen to be fortunate enough to live in an era where a boot doesn’t smash our face every morning at 5:34 A.M sharp.
We’re not going to go to war in space, sir. Sorry, we’re going to chill in space, and we’re going to listen to Barry White and drink some excellent cocktails, and we’re going to get laid sometimes, with great effort, but we’re going to get laid nonetheless.
For all you Space Force 7 cadets who ride your bicycles at hours where you worry about getting hit by vehicles, the new Swarm Case is for you. Attach to your bike’s handlebars in seconds, remove in seconds. Fill with your gear like phone, book, sandwich, patch kit, pump, smokes or a drink. And light up the Swarm at dusk, dawn or night, when you prefer the extra visibility to being flattened by bread truck or some maniac putting on mascara and texting while driving.
Unlike those hyper-bright flashing bike blinkers, Swarm stays lit steady and spreads the light across the surface of the case. From a distance, it looks more like a car headlight, making it easy for the driver to see how far away you are and how fast you’re moving.
This is not a pleasant subject, this idea of retrofitting our current method of space propulsion to move to a “quark chemistry” type of entropy reduction model. Probably the biggest barrier to me personally, is that I’m actually pretty good at quantum chemistry, but quantum chromodynamics is a little bit too complicated for me to understand. It’s not necessarily that one is more difficult than the others, but rather than quantum chemistry is usually taught by chemists, while quantum chromodynamics is taught by the same physicists that tend to teach covariant relativity, or quantum electrodynamics. They’re smart people if just for the reason that they found a way to find someone to pay them to do covariant relativity and quantum electrodynamics for a living. But chemists tend to teach physics better than physicists for the same reason that engineers tend to teach math better than mathematicians … because the chemist learned physics to do chemistry, and because the engineer learned math to engineer. For many students (perhaps most students) an instructor that takes a blue-collar approach to teaching the tools of the trade will teach better to the majority of students. Yes, the mathematics Ph.D. will have learned her most important things about math from a fellow mathematician, but the nursing student, the accounting student, the engineer looking to learn Linear Algebra or Topology for their job? Put them in an engineer’s math classroom and they’ll likely absorb it better.
So we have this need to not bring the mass with us from Earth, but rather gather it as we merrily roll along through the ocean of below ground-state energy. Without getting too technical, we can get a rough idea of how much Bosonic energy there is above the ground state for us to harvest for our line of family-friendly tourist boats … figure that outer space averages 2.7 Kelvin. That’s dead nuts money, brother man! 2.7 Kelvin! Yeah, it’s colder than a supermodel’s titties, but 2.7 Kelvin is 2.7 Kelvin, right? Of course, I should compute this with covariance, but I’m a dumbshit, so just using straight root mean square, we have a mass = kT/c^2, for the bosons at 2.7 Kelvin, so we’re looking at a mass of what, about (1.38×10^-23 * 2.7)/9×10^16, which is about 4×10^-40 kg, per converted Boson. That’s kind of small, it’s just the same photon mass equivalence that I found with thermodynamics instead of Relativity, which I tend to do, because thermodynamics is a proven market leader in the field of Family Fun Space Tourism. Relativity is a huge downer in the Family Fun Space Tourism business, we prefer to call it “The R-word.” That’s a joke with us here at Space Force 7. We like to have fun here, and not just with tequila.
Anyway, so say we have a photon flux density of 1×10^16 photons per second per square meter … I just picked that flux as being something that seems tractable to acquire if the path is chosen carefully, but I could be off by a few orders of magnitude. So if our synthetic funnel area cross section is say 1,000 square meters, we’re looking at 1×10^19 photons per second. So per second, we’re pulling some 4×10^-21 kg of mass into our “snowball catapult.” Use our energy onboard to both fund the entropic reduction from the UD Bosons to the UUD and DDU Femions, and then some more energy to raise the temperature of that converted mass up to say 4,000 Kelvin, and we’re looking at a velocity for those new Femions of about 4 meters per second. That isn’t great, and the mass-transfer with a 10,000 kg tourist boat is only about 1×10^-24 m/s.
That’s even slower than the mass gathering method, and we still need to do all that work to decrease the entropy from Bosons to Fermions.
And that’s why this is not a pleasant subject. It’s because Mother Nature shits all over our plans to zip around the universe. So ultimately, we need a better way than this. The limitation is that 2.7 Kelvin isn’t a lot of energy, and in space, most of the energy is where we can’t touch it, below the ground state. Even if we didn’t know anything about quantum mechanics, we can see there is a substantial ground state by just looking at the temperature of the background radiation in space, it’s only 2.7 Kelvin, and yet the temperature even in Miami on a lovely day in December might still be some 300 Kelvin. So the difference between a lovely day spent drinking Haitian Sunrises at a lovely bar in Wynwood, and instant death in the furthest reaches of space is only some 300 Kelvin. BUT … the amount of below-ground state energy is about the same in both places. This should demonstrated to all those who visit Moira Jane’s Cafe in Coconut Grove, that what we see as our universe of energy is barely a thin crust of available energy over an ocean of locked-up energy below the ground state, h-bar omega, time 1/2 if absolutely necessary.
“So then let’s just take some of the energy from the below the ground state,” says the science fiction nerds who think that wanking to Carrie Fisher dancing around for Captain Kirk is somehow a substitute for actual training. It never has been, it still isn’t. We can’t touch that energy because the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle keeps showing us that we can’t. And if we can’t touch it, we most certainly can’t build inexpensive production machines that exploit it. So we have to stick with “quark chemistry” for now, lick our wounds and accept our losses. But when one door closes, another opens, and that’s what we have to go on here. For all we know, the Pirelli results are misguided and wrong-headed, but it seems they are closer than many of the rest of us, given nothing more then the longevity of their research. So if we move from Pirelli’s work toward a method of interacting weakly with manufacturable devices that cost no more in inflation-adjusted dollars than a Fuji 488, 2-stroke, 2-cylinder, 2-carb engine cost in 1972, then we’re in the ballpark at least.
If that’s the case, then fuck it, let’s just interact weakly, grab the neutrinos while grabbing them is entropically favorable, possibly while they’re either at the apex or the trough of an oscillation. Then we have a deep well of mass to pull from, without worrying about scraping our faces against the ground state barrier. Neutrinos are the way to go for gathering mass, but they come with the undeniably difficult problem of engineering a way to interact weakly and grab that mass. That’s a highly nontrivial problem, and we’ve barely started working in it, other than a handful of low-energy physicists that are far more intelligent than I am, but generally tend to converge on “Hell’s teeth man, this is very difficult work!”
Thus for now, the Family-Fun Enterprise at SpaceForce7 has decided to license our weakly-interacting neutrino coupling technology from the ladies at Zouk Machine. For those who don’t have time to watch the whole video, please forward to 2:10 where Zouk Machine explains in words and body movement how their new weakly-interacting neutrino technologies can be built for a moderate cost as crate-engines into tourist boats of all sizes …
There is one main reason why it’s much cheaper to move cargo with a jet engine than with a rocket engine. It’s because a jet engine is able to gather mass from the air for its mass-reaction that moves the aircraft forward. The fuel drives the process, but it’s all that air screaming through the jet engine that forms the fundamental reaction pair with the aircraft. In other words, do you remember from sixth-grade science class that every action has an equal and opposite reaction? For a jet plane, that means that the mass of the aircraft is essentially pushed forward by pushing a mass of air in the opposite direction. That pushing is done by the jet engine, which works through the energy stored in the jet fuel.
On the other hand, a rocket can’t gather air for the mass-reaction, because it’s in space, so it uses the mass in the rocket fuel to push in the opposite direction as the rocket’s flight. That works fine of course, since there is no air in space to gather and push out for the mass reaction. But it’s a very expensive (and thus slow) way to move the rocket, because that valuable rocket fuel is reacted and fired out the back. I liken it to pushing oneself across a frozen pond by hurling gold bars through the ice. Yeah, it will get you across the ice if there is no other way, but a less expensive way would be to gather blocks of ice, or water, or snow and throw those to get the mass reaction pair.
So, how do we find mass in space the way we find air in the atmosphere? It turns out there is a little bit of mass, within the confines in the solar system, about one molecule per cubic centimeter. This is an average, composed of things like dust, tiny bits of ice, or molecules made of things like hydrogen or helium. Stick a sufficiently large funnel on the front of a boat, and you’ll be able to gather tiny bits of mass, but would it be enough? Lessee … say the funnel can gather 1,000 cubic meters of space per second. (That seems a reasonable thing to build, and it gets easier as the funnel — and the boat to which it is attached — moves faster, but consider the 1,000 cubic meters per second as an average. So that’s 1×10^9 cubic centimeters, and thus 1×10^9 molecules, say each one has an average mass of about 3×10^-18 kg. That’s not too much. How much?
First, let’s get a handle on the speed of those hydrogen molecules if we use our fuel to heat up the molecules to say 4,000 Kelvin, and then use the root mean square velocity of those hydrogen molecules (with mass about 2 amu each), we’re looking at about 4,000 meters per second, very much non-relativistic. Just using a straight momentum conservation, with say a boat of 10,000 kilograms that would impart a maximum velocity of about 1×10^-18 m/s. That’s considerably slower than the rate of erosion of bedrock. Sure, we could gather a lot more molecules, just circling the solar system somewhere between two planet’s orbits, building speed. (And of course we would need some really good Gaussian shielding to protect the boat as it reaches higher speeds and becomes endangered from things too big for us to handle at speed, like a grain of sand, or a chunk of ice.) But it seems like a dogshit way to get anywhere. No wonder the boring Space Force uses rockets. They suck, but they’re the only game in town.
And then that’s when things start getting dicey. Because this is when the weird science comes out, and people start echoing the nuances of science fiction television shows like Star Wars with Captain Kirk and that giant gorilla guy, Chewbacca, hanging out in spaceships that go fast. Real life isn’t like that … we have established means of production. There are things that we can and cannot make with the means of production and characterization that are actually available to us.
Fundamentally, if we want Space Force 7 tourist boats to “zip across the galaxy” like Robbie Ronzoni puts, then we need a better method of locomotion. We don’t have the deep pockets at Space Force 7 to use rockets or even ion generators. We need to gather our mass for our reaction pair in space, because we can’t afford to bring it from home. So where do we get mass?
We might be able to get it from the sea of low-temperature Bosons in space itself, that exist with an energy somewhere around 3 Kelvin. We can use our fuel to raise the temperature of these bosons, but they are integral spin particles, with an even number of quarks, and thus they can’t be used for mass-reactions without taking on an additional quark. So, can we find materials and methods to interact weakly with energy and convert integral-spin particles into half-spin particles? If we could do that at will, just guide a shit-ton of bosons through our weakly-interacting device, and convert some of that energy back to mass, and do so economically, then we can potentially gather our mass for the reaction-pair in space itself. But in doing that, we’re definitely decreasing the entropy of the boson-fermion system, since we’re essentially asking the universe to allow us to convert three quark Bosons of say (UD + UD + UD) into a Fermion of say a neutron-proton pair of (DDU + UUD). We can do that, but the entropy has been reduced from (UD + UD + UD) to (DDU + UUD), because the disorder of the quark system has been reduced. We can potentially provide the work to reduce that entropy from the energy in our fuel, and then use a bit more energy to heat up these particles for the mass-reaction pair. But unlike gathering stray hydrogen molecules, we can gather most any Boson that is above the ground state energy, and there should be a lot of those, a helluva lot more than just a few per cubic centimeter. True, we have to do work to lower the entropy of the quark system, which we don’t have to do when we gather molecules, but at least the Boson flux is apparently sufficient for us to get our tourist boats to some lovely locations and back in an afternoon. The whole idea of sending people into space for the rest of their lives is a money loser. Nobody is going to want to buy a ticket on a tourist boat like that, and we don’t want to make boats that don’t return in a lifetime.
If we can find a way to interact weakly, and control that, we have a shot at making efficient engines for our line of family-fun and family-friendly tourist boats. (As mentioned before, we’ll also need to get the Gaussian shielding to work reliably, we can’t have any more of our boats getting blown to smithereens just because they impacted with a grain of ice the size of a pinhead.)
Okay, weakly interacting. There was some traction perhaps about fifteen years ago with some “blue sky research” at Pirelli in Milan, where Luca Gamberale and Flavio Fontana supposedly found a possible way to use sapphire crystals under a modulated and highly unstable pressure gradient to show significantly increased interaction potential with neutrinos. They were using it for communication and they had apparently been working on it since at least the mid 1990s, where I first ran across this type of weak interaction while in the New South Wales State Library in Sydney.
Regardless Pirelli, this does seem a tractable problem, at least not much in physics screams out that it’s impossible to perform this kind of “subatomic chemistry” in some way. We’ll need a kind of “temporary explosion” to add sufficient work to counter the entropy gradient from Bosons to Fermions, and then add some energy to the resultants so that they are warm enough to use.
I like the idea of Pirelli leading our way to affordable and fun tourist space boats. That’s a stylish company, Pirelli. Calendar girls? Wrestling in body lotion? Lloyd Cole? Good market synergy.
