Of Pens and Swords

I finished off the summer semester, 2 A’s, 2 B+’s. I can’t complain…I’m tired of school, and am glad that there is only about another year for this degree. There will be another year and a half for the Masters…but I’ll worry about that then. One milestone that I’m getting ready to hit, and wasn’t aware that it was there to hit, is getting the AAS. I’m about 15 credits over, but if I would have known/cared/and planned for this, I would have had an associates at least. I will by the end of this year. More or less, it’s a small milestone, but it’s one none the less. I’m just tired of school, tired of not ever having any free time for anything. But, what can I do? I could quit, but I’ve worked too hard to get this far…

Jess started school as well last week. So, we now have 3/4ths of our house population going to school, and 1/4 just getting into everything and pushing buttons on whatever has a button. I think Jess is liking it so far :)

One week of relative freedom between semesters. My classes start again next Saturday. At least they look relatively easy. That, and I’m only taking 9 credits this semester, since one of the classes is a physics lab that marries up to the physics class. Both of them combined only make up 3 credits…so, it’ll put me a class behind, but I’m all about a slow semester…Not too bad though, even with taking a half semester off this year to get my MCSE, and taking a 3/4 semester, I’ll still get in 27 credits. Not too bad really.

We’ve gotten a few little things done around the house. One thing is ripping up all the old landscaping, and getting the yard into something a bit more family friendly, not so much older lady friendly. It’s a pain in the ass. The people before us left so much crap that we’re still dealing with, but it’s almost gone now. The next thing I need to do this week sometime is get the attic cleaned up a bit. It’s tore up from whenever they re-done the roof last. Once that is cleaned up, then we have to get insulation up there. It’s something that I’m hardly looking forward to, but at least I’ll sweat off a few pounds up there ;) Last time I was up there, it felt like it was 120 degree’s…yee haw.

I told Jess that it looks like, though not confirmed, that my unit may be getting deployed early ‘09. I know that she isn’t thrilled about that at all. In some regards I’m not either, but in other ways, it’s part of the job. At least this time I won’t be in a situation where I’m getting screwed from the get-go, I’ll have a section dedicated to one mission, and I’ll be able to get the guys trained up before we go for the job; unlike last time…anyways, it doesn’t make it any easier, but it’s also part of that oath I took, and I know full well what that means. Jess does too, and that at least makes it easier on both of us in some regards. You can’t just dump commitments because you’re not in the mood anymore, not if you want to be taken seriously by everyone else in the world anyways.

I’ve been running through some theory (major subject change) lately, and I think I’ve bored the hell out of the Missus with my astro-physics conjecture. At least I don’t think I’m the only one thinking along the same lines, since I read a story coming from the scientists at CERN that sort of go along the same lines that I’ve been thinking. At CERN, scientists are saying that we can’t see dark matter because “Gravity” isn’t in any of the equations, they’re only looking for sub-atomic particles, by examining the force they exert on the universe at large. That fits in with what I’m thinking, but I also think that along with Gravity, it’s Time that we’re missing. (If you don’t want to have your brain challenged right now, turn away)

Now, I’m not going to go back to the Big Bang, but instead focus on black holes. Hawkings first said, though he’s recanted recently, that matter entering the black hole disappears. I don’t think it disappears, I just don’t think we have the means to see it.

When matter gets closer to the event horizon of a black hole, the point of no return, the matter starts getting pulled away from itself, and from our point of view it looks like the matter is being extruded into a particle stream. From the point of view of an object on the event horizon though, there is no real change, it’s still the same object, the time-distance between particles is the same as it were in normal space/time. Take for instance two cars going down the road at 30MPH. A 2 second separation between those two cars is 88 feet, but they’re only 2 seconds away from each other. At 60MPH, at 2 seconds away from each other, they’re 176 feet from each other, but they’re only still 2 seconds from each other. Now, think of that on a molecular and even further sub-atomic particle level. The spacing between the two particles is greater once crossing the event horizon, but in a time relationship with themselves, they’re the same distance.

Now, once crossing the event horizon, a 3 dimensional object will, from our point of view, start taking on a 2 dimensional point of view as the particles are extruded around the black hole funnel, but for the object entering, it’ll still more or less feel like itself. Because the particles are at the same time-distance from each other than they were before they entered the black hole, there will be no real felt difference for that object.

Now, whats to say that the forces exerted in a black hole not only effect the object, but the particles themselves. what if a single sub-atomic particle is now stretched itself when going into the black hole? One side of a particle will have the same time-distance relationship within itself, but it looks more like a smear of what used to be a particle to us. It still has the same effect of gravity it did before, and it still can condense with other like particles to make molecules, but it’ll be spread out over a greater time.

The search for dark matter is hindered by our in-ability to either spot Gravity, and our inability to see anything in time other than right now. We can’t time-lapse our views on a particle that may be traveling at any speed and see the whole particle, and more than likely we wouldn’t even see the very small sliver of that particle that is showing in this very instant due to us not knowing what to look for.

I don’t think that a black hole destroys matter and forever erases the history of memories that get caught in it’s grasp, but instead believe the output of the gravity well is a particle that is no different than what entered, with the exception that it is now sped up within itself. The output is a particle that resides in more than one instant at any given time, and we cannot see it because we can only see in one instant at a time without the picture becoming a blur and unusable information.

I could sit in the same job, and do the same shift work forever, never getting anywhere, if I really wanted to. Anybody can do that, and unfortunately, a lot of people do just that.

Since I am sort of stuck in my job right now, waiting on conditions to be right to move on, and not really learning much, it has the same negative impact on my ability to think.

But I have friends. Friends who have questions, problems, technical issues. I might not be able to solve any of them, but it gets my brain juices moving. One poses a question, and I automatically get to start thinking of any and all possible solutions that I’ve ever run across, possible problems that are site specific, so forth. These are problems that I can’t just create due to either lack of interest or lack of imagination.

I want to thank all of my friends for keeping my brain moving. I know I probably don’t return the favor as much, but then again, I don’t run into the daily technical issues that all of you do. I’m more of a manager now, and don’t get to play with the technical stuff nearly as much as I’d like to.