Spaces

One probably should not blog when one has been drinking, but upon further reflection, what the fuck, let's live a little.

It seems that the further along science advances, one of the things that is beset upon the periphery of our awareness is that space means very little. And by that I mean, the physical space that separates you from things seems to mean less and less the more we learn about it.

For example, I just read an article that posited it was the action of neutrinos, produced by the sun, that caused the rates of radioactive decay to vary. This is quite startling, because up until now it was commonly held that rates of radioactive decay were NOT variable, that they were in fact static. But they began to find fluctuations in the patterns.

Why, they asked in forum, should this be so? And they began to suspect that it had to do with the predominant solar activity of the time. In other words, as the earth was closer to the sun, and thus bombarded by a greater number of solar neutrinos-- why, it would change the rate of radioactive decay. And likewise when the earth was further from the sun.

This is a peculiar thing to science. As one fellow pithily put it, (I'm paraphrasing), "This is a case of particles that don't affect anything changing something that doesn't change."

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. There is also evidence, in the quantum field, that once two quantum particles have been in contact (and here I'm going to mangle this terribly-- in another life I'm a quantum physicist, but that life is certainly not this one) they will alter the behavior of each of them. As one changes its spin, the other will affect a change in behavior, and vice versa. And the really peculiar part is that physical distance seems to have no dampening effect on this phenomenon-- the changes will register instantaneously, regardless of distance.

Now, it should come as a surprise to exactly nobody that all this was predicted long ago, put in words that of course have no scientific validity as such, but are plenty true nonetheless. I'm thinking specifically of Buddhist ideology, which holds as one of its central tenets the interconnectedness of all things. If this were true, they posit, there would be nothing complete and alone unto itself-- rather, that all things would affect it, and that it would affect all things.

Basically, what I'm interested in is that this seems to actually be the case, in at least some senses of the idea and in some particular manifestations.

To keep going on this particular path way out into the goofy ether, maybe this begins to explain some sort of phenomena that we all have an intuitive sense of, but have no proof whatsover-- telepathy, ESP, astral projection, whatever. While I'm certainly not going to come out and go "IT'S ALL TRUE GUYS, YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW", what I do continually wonder is: what is the smallest particle that can inform us of something? In other words, how widespread and systemic does something have to be in our body before we become aware of it?

Put it like this: if something is affecting our entire circulatory system, there's a good chance we know about it. If we have pneumonia, it won't go unnoticed. There will be signs, symptoms, so forth. But to extrapolate from that, if something should affect one organ, one tissue, one molecule, one cell, one atom-- do we know? Can we tell? If one of our electrons should alter its spin based on a counterpart electron somewhere else, does this change anything in our being, behavior?

Perhaps not. They are, after all, very very very fucking small. But I wonder.