The Longest Road

For over a year, I've not written here. Once prolific, my writing enthusiasm has ebbed since life has filled with stresses and responsibilities taking their toll on time. But it was time tonight to reconnect with this thread and see where it goes on its way to your worldline, even though Twitter abandoned the Like icon a long time ago so that I wouldn't know whether you did or not.

Worldlines are different for everyone, yet in many ways there are generic similarities. Since we only see a small portion of the world in our relationships and media reflections, we perceive our uniqueness acutely, and often feel very alone as we view the circumstances around us closing in. Lockdown hit most of us pretty hard one way or the other, whether we felt it at the time or not.

Since I was last here, the Quantumology group has settled to a steady pace with 2,200 members, some of whom have felt personal connection more than others. As with most things in life, there are many watchers and few voices, for the world has made us shy even of Shadowland where we dwell for hours in virtual reality. Technology has overtaken humanity, as Einstein said it would, and we are left on the cusp of an existence governed almost entirely by machines capable of calculating without the burden of emotion. Nevertheless, even these machines suffer confirmation bias, whatever the data they are crunching, and tell us what is real without heed to the consequences of a binary system based on truth or falsehood, a judgement of What Is versus What Is Not from information fed by an Overlord with conscious intent. Search Google for Einsteins' quote as above and you'll find a raft of negating articles claiming he didn't say anything of the kind. That's new! Oh - :) ....and if you don't think technology has got you by the bullocks and the shekels of silver, remember that anything with a screen is driven by it.

The worldline of techology has accelerated fast and we've hardly felt the shockwave, so keen we have been to surf it. Given advance notice of the right language to pin a tail to, we live as we are told to live a lot of the time, and that can extrapolate into our relationships if we're not careful, which most of us donkeys aren't. We are a very young species compared to those who have quantum transection in the bag. Wherever another consciousness may come from, its origins are of less importance than its capabilities.

The pictures here are of a nestling brought in by a neighbour who opened his eyes the next day; as the first thing he saw was me, he'll be an imprint, a bird that identifies with its human as the being to be with. Falcons that imprint will mate with a hat on their owner if they're male, or crouch in the mating position if female, and breeders take advantage! Well-bred falcons are worth thousands of pounds. This sparrow will just be very tame, and may need the wild again one day. If, of course, he survives the ravages of Life sent in the meantime. So far, so good - the cold, weak nestling made it through the first night, and three days later is a different bird, as you can see.

Quantum mechanics, as the Blog history suggests, has been by my side for many years. How the universe works is still a mystery to all of us, however we may claim it to be or whoever we may think we are. Strangely, though, it reliably delivers certain things on cue, as if there is a force to govern timing as there is one to govern Nature.

What if the "Force of Nature" is simply "drive to know its own creator"? What if every life form sprang from a thought that could maybe bring closer the answer it wants - making for better speed, better looks, better dances. Maybe evolution, the secret process no-one is deigned to witness, is just a progression of Life's attempts to understand itself twixt a mother planet and a father sun. 

Why does this sound logical to me at all? We can do without more crackpot theories from people who don't know what they're talking about. Well, neutrinos come from the sun (mainly), and they fly through matter. And they oscillate, which is what quarks do, even though quarks are stuck fast within atoms. Seems to me that information is one of those unbreakables in the universe, a thing that can't be created or destroyed - a substrate of spacetime on which everything else merrily bounces around. So to me it is logical that quarks and neutrinos talk to each other, in a continuous stream of information exchange that sometimes will come back for more - I read it said that many neutrinos turn at the Heliopause to run through the solar system again. They don't take much time getting to where they want to go. This turnaround, though, is now absent from my search engine - I would have linked to an article here, but there are none to find. Interesting.

When we realise how to get out of our infancy, we may find ourselves with somewhere to go that we hadn't bargained for. On the grounds that you don't see these things coming. Someone told me once he'd start smoking again when he was 82.... wouldn't we all love to get past the mirrors.