May was a busy month, obviously. It really made up for a slow start to the year. I went back to New Mexico for a second work trip but before I get to that there were a few miscellaneous items that I want to catch up on. I had a job just outside of LA in between the two NM trips and before I flew home I visited an old High School friend who works for CBS. Anjali gave me the backstage tour and when we ran across the Wheel, I snorted a little bit. I didn't know I was such a Price is Right nerd, but I did spend a lot of time watching that show when I was a kid so, I guess it's kind of legendary. Anjali kindly accommodated my not-so-inner geek. Afterwards we went to some industry party that was going on; some friends of hers who own a sound studio were throwing a casino night.
When I sat down at the poker table and was apparently asking stupid questions, they asked me if I even knew how to play and I told them yeah, I've played Yahtzee. I didn't get to stay long; had a plane home to catch. But I learned that some of those LA stereotypes are waaaay ON base. On our way to the party we walked through the Farmer's Market by CBS and some pasta seller tried to pitch Anjali a terrible idea for a TV show. And then at the party when people realized I wasn't in the business, they gave me some pretty hard "who is this bumpkin?" looks... that may have been fish out of water anxiety though, to be fair, because everyone was actually pretty nice. It was really fun.
Also in May, the above photo got picked up by National Geographic for their stock photo page! It's not a BIG deal as they have like jillions of photos on that site, plus I don't have a High Res version of it, having snapped it with a disposable camera and I seem to no longer have the original photo, just the scan I made of it so all they got was a low res digital version which they have made available for free because no one will pay for such quality. But still, cool. If you want to see it on the stock photo page, go to nationalgeographicstock.com and then type 'Chiemsee' in the search bar, mine should show up in there somewhere.
And now I just have a couple of leftover shots from the first week in New Mexico of various signs I ran across. Above is the New Mexico State Road 2001; it is a very short road that leads up the hill to the International Space Hall of Fame. I kind of have to think it's a gimmick. Somebody pushed someone to get that road appellation put there.
New Mexico has some pretty existential road signs. Gusty winds may exist. They might not, who knows?! Wind is invisible so it may be the aether. No no, I get what they really mean; that it might be supergustywindy so drive with caution. It's just an odd way to word it. Maybe in Pennsylvania here we should change our signs to say "Icy Roads May Exist. They might not, if it's Summer, but they might."
A sign on the way in to the White Sands Missile Range, with the Organ Mountains in the background. Doesn't really need further comment. And that's pretty much it for my leftover photo salad. As I said I just got back from my second New Mexico trip and I'll have more on that soon. In the meantime, here's a leftover flash forward sign shot.
And so after leaving the Las Cruces area, I drove the four hours back up to the San Agustin plains, and got there just in time to catch some sunset photos of the VLA. The cold opener above is an HDR I tried out and they aren't supposed to come out looking like that, but I really really like it.
I got some Plains life in just before the sun set. That deer above was headed straight away from me, so I shot him. And these cows, too.
There is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset.
That movie 'Contact' was filmed in part out here, and there is a scene where Jodi Foster is looking out over a canyon, with the radio dishes behind her. Yeah, that's Hollywood stupidity. There is no canyon; I looked. I hate that. Why do they always feel the need to amp up things that in reality need no amping up? If you want the VLA in your movie, film it as it is. It doesn't need a canyon to be awesome.
But HDR doesn't hurt! Actually, taking HDR shots at sunset is a tricky business. Weird colors kept popping in that aren't in any of the original bracketed photos. This next one is not HDR, but it almost looks like it is. I'm learning that not everything needs such embellishment, myself. And also how hard it is not to embellish, sometimes. Maybe I should go easier on Hollywood.
I really like this next one; there's two small line gaps in the dish where the setting sun shines through them, and echoes the reflective train tracks quite nicely. I like the continuity of theme in that; the radio signals from space track down into the dish, and get carried along the train tracks back to the receivers that interpret them.
Ok that's probably not how the signals actually get sent to the receivers, damn you Hollywood! You've corrupted the way I interpret things with your need to visualize everything dramatically! But still. Pretty.
And yes, I really like tonemapping. Sometimes the accidental byproducts are neat, such as green radio dishes. At any rate, remember when I said that there is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset? Well, that's nothing compared to doing it at night.
Unfortunately, the moon was really bright that night, and I had to work hard to get any stars in the photos at all.
Damn moon. At one point I tried taking a ten minute exposure, but that didn't really bring out any more stars either. Still.
You'll notice the dish is pointing at a different angles in different photos. They moved them to point at different parts of the sky every so often. I tried to get a shot that captured the motion in an interesting way, but it kept catching me by surprise. This is the best I could do.
At one point, a couple of guys with a mexican accent drove out to where I was in a dirty pick-up and told me I had to leave because the astronomers don't like it when people hang out by the dishes at night. Hope I didn't mess up any of their work! But still, I couldn't leave without at least attempting a laser light self-portrait.
So picking up where I left off, after leaving the VLA I headed down to Las Cruces for work. Actually, I stayed in Las Cruces but my job was in the White Sands Missile Range, just over the mountain pass 20 miles or so. Inside the base, about 100 miles north of where I entered it, is the Trinity site where the first nuclear bomb was tested. It's open twice a year for the public to tour, unfortunately one of those times did not coincide with my visit. There is a museum on base though.
An open air display of many of the missiles they've tested there over the years. What about the Bomb you ask? Here's one. You might recognize it from it's stint on that long con of a TV show, LOST. It's called the Fat Man.
Sobering. I mean, it could have actually had a plot, and then it would have been a great show, but they made their cowardly writing choices, and all we were left with was that fat bloated sorry excuse of a bombed TV show. Bomb... right, sorry, got sidetracked. At any rate, as fascinating as a "museum"consisting of a yard full of devices designed solely to exterminate as much of the human race in one shot as possible is, I did run across something a little more interesting.
I don't know if you'll be able to read that so here it is, cropped.
I would guess that they were trying to insert this into the Roswell narrative somehow, but the "first firing date" of 1966-1967 is well after the alleged UFO Crash near there so it's a clumsy attempt in that case, especially since it also seems to have abandoned the "weather balloon" story but then why bother mentioning Roswell at all? I sort of suspect that it's a bit of a psi-op, or perhaps the military folk at White Sands actually simply have a sense of humor. We'll never know, because I'm sure a sense of humor in the military is classified information.
So out in the middle of the base, just off of the public highway that runs through it, is the White Sands National Monument. It's a vast sea of sand dunes composed of white gypsum crystals, where the military base took it's name from.
Got a picture. The sand really is very white, and because it's gypsum it stays cool to the touch even at midday in a very hot sun. I walked around barefoot for a while, it was nice.
But you know, sand is sand. I drove on to Alamogordo where they have the International Space Hall of Fame, which is not sand, and which is dedicated to the less destructive aspect of rocket technology. It's always fascinated me how the two aspects of rocket science so perfectly represent the potential destruction or salvation of the human species. The ones designed for killing are meant to fly only high enough to get over their target before crashing back down in fiery armageddon, while the ones designed for exploration are meant to keep going up and up until they escape the insanity of local politics. The other more interesting thing about this inherent symbolism of rocket science is that we humans are ourselves the architects of the instruments of our own destiny, whichever way it goes. If there is ever a day of Heavenly Judgment, raining fire on us from above, it will be of our own design.
Having said that, they all crash in the experimental phase. This is a crashed V-2 rocket, designed by Werner Von Braun for the Nazis before he came over to our side. They also had a moon rock at the museum, showing that sometimes rockets do get to where they're supposed to be going.
I got to hold it thanks to an amateurish bit of trick photography. I also hit on one of the pretty scientists that worked there. She was all wrapped up in her work though. "Hey baby, can I have a job?"
One of the other museum guides who worked there was a guy named Viggy who had worked on the Hawk missiles from their inception over at Fort Bliss in Texas. He was obviously proud of that so I asked him to pose with his rocket for me.
The only other interesting thing going on at the Space Hall of fame was that Ham, the first chimp in space, is buried there. I paid my respects.
After leaving the Alamogordo area, I headed back to White Sands for work, and from there I made my way back up to the VLA for some more shots before flying home. But I'll leave it here for now.
This is the Very Large Array, in New Mexico. I had a job in the south of the state last week for five days, so I flew into Albuquerque and proceeded to head straight for the, uh, very large array of 27 independent radio telescope antennae for a visit on my way down. Get ready for many, many shots.
I didn't get there until the evening, after the visitor center was closed, but I headed over anyway to try and get some night shots. It was windy, cloudy, and cold.
So I did my best, but even with a tripod it is difficult to get clear shots in such weather at night. Black & white helps; makes things look intentionally arty, or summ'at.
HDR could even only do so much for me. But it works. However, my prize for the night came about completely accidentally. I was trying to take some long exposures, hoping to get a few stars in through the clouds (didn't wind up getting any), and I was testing different settings for them to see if I could get it to work (I couldn't). But after I'd got back to my dingy hotel room in the tiny New Mexican town of Magdalena and went through my photos, I saw that with one 30 second exposure I'd caught a meteor shower!
I certainly did not actually see the shower while taking the picture, but the exposure revealed it. I'm not sure how that works but, there you go. My regret of course is that it's such a dark, noisy picture. Had I left it exposed just a bit longer, or used a better ISO... anyway. I tried messing with it to make it look better, and this is the best I could do.
Still noisy, and I honestly can't decide which of the two is any good. But still, meteor shower points! What's weird though is that the expected meteor shower from the tail of Halley's Comet hit Earth and peaked on May 6th, whereas I took this photo on the evening of May 10th, so I'm not sure what it is we're looking at, unless it's just a random shower that nobody predicted, and nobody knew about, because I can't find any mention of news for a May 10th shower. Maybe it's just some Halley leftovers.
At any rate I got up early the next morning and headed the 20 miles back to the VLA. There are 27 (according to Wikipedia) or 29 (according to my admittedly faulty memory) independent radio dishes arrayed about the vast Plains of San Agustin, over a distance of three 13 mile tracks set in a single large Y-shape. The dishes are frequently moved from close together to spread completely out, depending on the configuration they need. Last week, they seemed to be spread completely out, making it difficult to get shots with multiple dishes in them.
But with a telephoto lens and a little determination, I did my best. How do they move them you ask? Why, by specially designed train cars of course. There's this whole process which they explain in a video at the visitor's center, and it's pretty fascinating but if I revealed everything, why would you ever want to visit the VLA yourself?
There are two of those dish transport vehicles, and they always seemed to be moving about on some mission or another. But I like this shot because it gives you some perspective on how large the dishes actually are. Just imagine a little guy standing in the man-lift there and you'll see what I mean. Plus, it's nice to have some color in one of these shots. The Plains of San Agustin (as in the winds are a'gustin'?) are beautiful, but fairly large and colorless. At least during the day, anyway.
So okay having said that, here are the obligatory HDR shots.
And I tried to get all clever with the next one. There's a balcony on one of the buildings that they don't let you go in. The stairs are on the outside, so they do let you walk up to get a slightly higher view, and there is a large window which acts as a one way mirror so that you can't see in. But it allowed me to experiment further with HDR.
As Julie noticed, in our mirror Universe, people smoke. In our mirror near-twin Universe, they do not. Also, the dummies who smoke are so primitive that they need handles to open doors. And I just like this next one. The fluorescent lights behind the mirror make it look like the dish is shooting death rays.
Well that's all I got on that morning's trip; I had to head down to Las Cruces for work. There's only so much free time on my work trips, after all. Sigh. But don't worry, I had to fly home from Albuquerque (which brought me past the VLA again!), and the area around Las Cruces held a few surprises as well, so there are more pictures to come. But this post is long enough and I got other stuff to do. I'll post some more junk later. Meanwhile, check out 'ol Radiohead, here.
I want to do a book report on Brian Greene's new publication in the worst way, but I'm not sure that I am capable of it. I used to read popular science books quite regularly, and I'd realized that it's been years since those days at about the same time that 'The Hidden Reality' caught my eye. As I was going through it I realized that reading, and keeping pace with, popular science texts is a skill which must be practiced, especially if one is not particularly well trained in physics.
That's not to say that he doesn't do a great job of explaining the concept behind 9 different types of multiple/parallel Universes quite engagingly; he does. It's more that, once I put the book down for a few minutes after every couple of pages to think about the implications of whatever mind-blowing concept he's introduced, the particulars begin to drain away because my poor little head is not lately used to holding on to the strange and complicated concepts behind Infinity, Relativity, Quantum physics, and String Theory.
However I'm going to try because I feel that my motive in writing about this book is more an effort to hang on as best as I am able to the understanding of a beautiful dream that fades quickly after waking than an attempt to convince anyone else to read it. Of course after completing that last sentence, I've sat and stared at the book cover for about ten minutes trying to figure out how to start. Sigh.
So here then; let's begin with the apology. Mr. Greene himself goes to great lengths in the book to make the reader understand that, at the moment, no versions of the multiverse which he posits are actually provable with hard data, and therefore may fall slightly outside the boundary of science. I say slightly, because though their detection may currently lie beyond our best detectors, they are in fact unavoidable outcomes of certain aspects of science which ARE scientifically sound, mathematically speaking.
As a comparison, when Einstein published his theory of General Relativity the technology available at the time was not capable of disproving his math. He came up with that theory using creative visualization, math and perspiration. And whatever other tools of genius he had at his disposal. But he himself did not go out and measure the Cosmic Background Radiation which ultimately helped to prove his theory correct. Now I'm not comparing Brian Greene or any other String Theorist to Einstein, (and neither was Greene in his book) merely the scientific process itself which is at work here. If you follow the math it leads to amazing places which, more often than you might think, describes the cosmos as it is in reality, even though it may also lead beyond all common sense. So this exploration of the side effects and the possibilities of infinity, string theory and math is extremely valid science, even if in the end it turns out that they've missed something and there are other things at work. You have to explore every avenue if you want to find out what's actually out there.
So why bother getting all excited over Parallel Universes if there's a chance it's inaccurate? Because it's exciting. And because, all things being equal, it's probably not inaccurate. It is currently science's best guess, much as Relativity and Evolution once were, and therefore worth a lengthy consideration.
So I'll start with the multiverse which I understand the most clearly, naturally. He calls it the Quilted Multiverse and here is how it works: There is some question in the cosmologist community whether the space that we inhabit is either very, very, very freaking large but ultimately finite, or whether it is in fact infinite. It all depends on the overall shape of the universe, which we don't yet know. (It's important to have a good grasp of the concept of infinity for this one, which I am lucky to have in some finite degree thanks to Rudy Rucker. His book 'White Light' is a rollicking exploration of infinity, and with extremely visual storytelling really helped me to glimpse what mathematicians actually mean when they use the term infinity. I highly recommend it.)
At any rate, If our Universe in fact turns out to be infinite (as the current trend of thought among cosmologists apparently believe is the likeliest scenario) then there is almost certainly another messiestobjects out there, writing up a book report about a publication by Brian Browne, (the last name of the author perhaps being the only difference between that Earth and this one) and positing some strange world where a version of himself is typing up a book report on a publication by a Brian Greene. In fact, there would be an infinite amount of Earths out there, that look just like ours. And there would be an infinite amount of other possible Earths as well. One, perhaps, that was solely inhabited by shrimp. Or one with no shrimp. Let your imagination go wild, like mine!
The reason why this would be so is simply statistical. Matter is evenly distributed throughout the visible Universe on very large scales. What that means is, you can take a really big box, say about 100 million light years cubed and chunk it down here, then weigh all of the matter in it. Then pick it up and chunk it down over there, again weighing all of the matter. Do this in several locations throughout the Universe and you will find that each box-full of matter will weigh in at about equal amounts, and it will be so all throughout the Universe. The idea here is that while matter may be evenly spread throughout an infinite Universe, there is a finite amount of forms that matter can take.
So the implication of this is that matter, as much of it as there is, can only arrange itself in so many ways. It's like a deck of cards; there are 52 cards in a deck, and 52 cards can be arranged in 1067 unique ways. That number fully written out is 80,658,175,170,943, 878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000 which is obviously a really huge number. However, once you have arranged those 52 cards in that many unique ways, the cycle will repeat and you will start to get duplicate arrangements. Of course, some arrangements are more likely than others, so you will have odd random assortments of cards duplicate more often than you will see the deck fall out completely arranged from aces to Kings in all four suits, but as unlikely as that is, it will happen eventually.
The same is true for the arrangement of matter. In the entirety of our visible Universe, there are about 1010122 possible particle configurations. Which again, is a totally inconceivable number yet is definitely a finite number. Once you've reached every possible unique combination, the patterns will begin to repeat, and repeat infinitely. Thus, messyobjects is out there, messierobjects, and even an evenmoremessiestobjects, all trying to say hi to me right now. Since our brains and life experiences are nearly completely identical and in some cases absolutely identical, I can say hi to them and they've received the message! I know this because I've received their message, having sent one myself. We're totally braintext messaging across the infinite light years right now. They say hi back, and ask how's the wife and pets and I say oh, the same as yours, pretty much. ad infinitum. (Of course it's not a very interesting conversation, having identical thoughts and all, but there's always a downside.)
Whew. That was the first and easiest version of a multiverse in this book, and believe me they get far more difficult to grasp. The existence of the Quilted Multiverse depends only on discovering the shape of the Universe we currently reside in without calling any of the more unproven forms of science into the matter, but it is important here to note that Brian Greene and other String Theorists did not go out looking for multiverses. They did not read some ridiculous New Age drama and say "Oy, how can we finagle the math to come up with parallel dimensional portal-thingies in order to dazzle the public?" No, the attempt to understand actual observed phenomena through the framework of String Theory led them mathematically all on its own to many other different types of possible multiverses.
The Inflationary Multiverse, which better fits the definition of a multiverse in my extremely humble opinion, is one in which bits of our universe break off and inflate into bubble universes of their own, our Universe having broken off from another "larger" one at its own birth. There are also the Brane, Cyclic, Landscape, and Quantum types of multiverses. I like the Quantum Multiverse; it basically goes back to the Schrödinger's Cat thing, and Quantum uncertainty.
(jpeg of a print by Jie Qi) In case you are not familiar with Schrödinger's Cat, it is a Thought Experiment designed to help one visualize how Quantum Particles behave. The way it goes is, you put a cat in a box, close the lid, and have a radioactive atom timed to decay and open a flask of poison. In the quantum world, there is an equal possibility of the decay happening and causing the cat to be dead or alive when you open the lid. Until you open the lid, the cat is actually in an uncertain state, being both alive and dead at the same time which would be an unsettling thing to witness, I'm sure. The traditional outcome of this little game is that when you open the box, the probability wave collapses and the cat becomes one or the other. Thus the very act of observation determines the ultimate quantum state. (For a more accurate and less confused rundown of the thought experiment in mid-twentieth century science nerd jargon, visit the wikipedia page on the subject)
This is weird. But this type of behavior has been observed in quantum particle physics, hence the Quantum Uncertainty Principle and it does not apply to the world of things of our size, only to the realm of the very, very small. There is a gap between the quantum scale and ours where Quantum Theory breaks down and reality then becomes guided by Newtonian physics and Relativity. If you add String Theory math to this experiment, you can bridge the gap and in fact the cat is actually both alive and dead for realsies, in two different universes! Long, complex, nearly-incomprehensible-to-a-non-String-Theorist story short, the reason that Quantum particles behave so oddly is that we are seeing them play out every possible state of existence across a multiverse.
As an interesting aside, that particular multiverse explanation is where the idea comes from that every time one makes a choice, universes diverge and a separate reality for each choice carries on it's course. It may sound a bit hippie or New Age-ish, but if String Theory turns out to be correct, this in fact may actually be happening, right now, right next to you.
Another multiverse is the Holographic Multiverse, which is conceptually easy, but also very hard to explain the whys and wherefores of. This one is due to the nature of information and how it is stored in the universe, and when looked at closely begins to look a bit as though all matter as we see it is actually a projection of another type of matter on a distant quantum dimensional surface. In this multiverse all of our actions, in fact all interaction between all forms of matter everywhere is a shadow play. We're hand puppets. Don't ask me to explain the science though. It has something to do with Black Holes, very tall drinking straws, and math. Beyond that, I haven't retained a thing. Damn it.
The final multiverse of the book is the so-called Ultimate Multiverse, a distinction earned due to a new twist on the Anthropic Principle, which is the idea that asking the question "How is it possible that our planet, our very universe have the conditions necessary to bring forth life?" is meaningless because life evolves in the place to which it is suited. In other words, we are here both to ask the question and be the answer. I like this one for purely philosophical reasons, as it's an (yet another) answer of sorts in the debate between religion and science, at least for a certain set of debate points. The religious often like to point out that the Universe, Life, and Everything are far too complex to have "just happened" which is about as far as their understanding of the sciences of Cosmology and Evolution usually go. A very sad, limited viewpoint indeed.
At any rate, the Ultimate Multiverse answers the question of why the Physical Laws of our particular Universe are just right in order for galaxy, star, planet, and life formation to "just happen". Because in an infinite multiverse, where every possible Universe that can exist does exist, one with our physical laws and conditions for life merely becomes an inevitability, not a miracle. Therefore there is no "why" of existence, merely the statistical likelihood of it. You'll note that the Ultimate Multiverse differs from the Quilted Multiverse in the sense that, with the latter, there may be an infinite set of volumes with repeating particle configurations, allowing for infinite versions of themselves, however they are all still set in the same Universe as we are and subject to the same physical laws, merely separated by distances too large for any technology to ever cross. The Quilted version answers the question of why there is life on Earth, but does not answer the why of the overall conditions in our Goldilocks Universe and its particular laws of physics being just right in order to allow life to come about in the first place. The Ultimate Multiverse does, however. It states that while there are Universes like ours with just the right amount of density for galaxies, stars, and planets to form, there are also an infinite amount of stillborn ones. Our Universe is the Royal Flush that comes along once in a blue moon... or rather once in a Blue Iteration.
There are solid mathematical underpinnings to the Ultimate Multiverse, as well as for all of the others, but I'm not going there. If you want to try to understand them, or any of the other concepts, I suggest that you pick up a few popular science books and get cracking. 'The Hidden Reality' is wonderful, but unless you've already attempted to come to grips with the ideas behind Relativity, Infinity, or Quantum Physics, you might want to get a more basic picture of the Universe first. 'Cosmos' by Carl Sagan is an excellent place to start for basic Cosmology, that Rucker book I already pimped for Infinity, and Brian Greene's earlier work 'The Elegant Universe' is a great introduction to String Theory. So get busy with the head scratching, braniac!
Another great way to contemplate infinity, by the way, is to obsessively-compulsively watch fractal zoom videos. I've posted about fractals before, here and here. I don't know how, but I'm sure that fractal math figures in to multiverses somehow. This one magnifies the Mandelbrot set 10275 times, and ends up at a copy of itself. Apropos.
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