We are often in conflict, often in tension. Balancing one force against another. Action straining against reaction. The humdrum need to gather coin to pay bills and creditors versus the personal human quest for understanding, beauty, fulfilment or pleasure. The laughter and immediacy of inconsequential fun versus the deep and lasting commitment to care, love and commit. We balance our personal needs with the needs of our partner or family. On one side the logic and detailed technical understanding of how things work and how the universe ticks – and yet simultaneously our wild leaps of faith to believe in a particular God who can never be revealed, or a partner we have known for only a few months or weeks, yet we swear ‘is the one’. How is that possible? How do we ever square one side of us with the other? A few don’t and forever decide to show just side of their mask to the world, but most stay in some sort of balance of tension and contradiction. Or perhaps in some part of your life you follow – or have to follow – a particular path where you may show just one side for some time – become single-minded, dedicated, a zealot. Then at some time – a death perhaps, or a change of fortune - it reverses, and the engineer suddenly becomes more of an artist, or a doubter stumbles on a revelation, or a believer sees the light of reason and science.
I watched a programme on Edwin Lutyens a while ago. I have seen some of his country homes near here in Surrey and I love the style of them – somehow organically and sympathetically interwoven with the Surrey countryside, especially with Jekyll’s gardens. They can seem almost timeless, part of the soil, the landscape. Yet they were built – and paid for – by the privileged few. His great friend (and owner of one of the houses) was the founder of ‘Country Life’ – you just couldn’t get more Surrey than that. So here I am – a working class lad from a terrace in the North East admiring country houses in Surrey. The pubs of my youth had strippers and talk of ‘The Lads’ – now it might be guys in green wellies who have to go to pick up Pippa from the stables. Tension and contradiction.
I revelled in the richness of the Hollywood, Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice on TV. A long way from the book of course, but hugely enjoyable, as are the original stories – landmarks in fiction, and yet… and yet… very much about privilege and idle, rich, spoilt young men with fortunes to live off and grand estates – and highly articulate, but sometimes rather silly young women chasing determinedly after them. The richness of English language, of theatre, of art and music often owed a great debt to rich patrons, backers and buyers. Poor artists and rich buyers. Art and Commerce. Is one devalued by the other? Is one enriched or excused by the other?
Maybe tension is good – it could drive us, give an extra edge, an extra dimension to us and to what others see in us? A rubber band, wound up inside to give us some energy. As a kid I made many a balsa plane powered by a well-wound rubber-band. I enjoyed them and they flew pretty well too. Well – that is - they did until the rubber band snapped, or the plane crashed. That’s made me feel quite tense now...
Monday 16 January 2012
Thursday 5 January 2012
Time Machines
All the talk about OPERA and time travel made me interested again in Time Machines - is there some real physics that gives some hope that one could be developed some day?
Prof Ronald Mallett at Connecticut University is working on a technique. Mallett published a paper describing how a circulating beam of laser light would create a vortex in space within its circle (Physics Letters A, vol 269, p 214).
Then he had a eureka moment. "I realised that time, as well as space, might be twisted by circulating light beams," Mallett says.
To twist time into a loop, Mallett worked out that he would have to add a second light beam, circulating in the opposite direction. Then if you increase the intensity of the light enough, space and time swap roles: inside the circulating light beam, time runs round and round, while what to an outsider looks like time becomes like an ordinary dimension of space.
A person walking along in the right direction could actually be walking backwards in time -- as measured outside the circle. So after walking for a while, you could leave the circle and meet yourself before you have entered it.
Link: Mallett
Kip Thorne of CalTech has a nice discussion of the possibilities here: Thorne
In it he postulates that perhaps the Casimir Effect, by providing a source of negative energy, may be used to prevent space-time wormholes from collapsing. It just needs rather a lot of energy...
Prof Ronald Mallett at Connecticut University is working on a technique. Mallett published a paper describing how a circulating beam of laser light would create a vortex in space within its circle (Physics Letters A, vol 269, p 214).
Then he had a eureka moment. "I realised that time, as well as space, might be twisted by circulating light beams," Mallett says.
To twist time into a loop, Mallett worked out that he would have to add a second light beam, circulating in the opposite direction. Then if you increase the intensity of the light enough, space and time swap roles: inside the circulating light beam, time runs round and round, while what to an outsider looks like time becomes like an ordinary dimension of space.
A person walking along in the right direction could actually be walking backwards in time -- as measured outside the circle. So after walking for a while, you could leave the circle and meet yourself before you have entered it.
Link: Mallett
Kip Thorne of CalTech has a nice discussion of the possibilities here: Thorne
In it he postulates that perhaps the Casimir Effect, by providing a source of negative energy, may be used to prevent space-time wormholes from collapsing. It just needs rather a lot of energy...
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