Tuesday, January 29, 2008

We all start off life like some kind of sea monster crawling out of our mother's vagina

You pluck a cell of you and filled it with yolk.
mixing your father and mother into it.

then life's hunger to move beyond you
entices you to strip bare in front of an alien human a stranger
open your mouth to him
suck on his spit
suck on his tongue inside your mouth
suck on his cock inside your pussy.
the things we piss with
swallow his spit
drive him bodily crazy enough
so his loins cough up living cells of himself
into you
and your vagina sucks them up and swallows them!

swimming vermin of himself
mixed memories of HIS father and mother in YOUR private bedroom
private act!


to suck his living vermin deeper within you,
life hammered orgasms into you
no chance to think twice about this deadly act now
inviting danger into your innards
you do NOT own your own body, life does..
you're only one stopping point on a journey billions of years old
it's marching through you right now
boots pounding with every beat of its heart

You call them to swim deeper
they race with each other
fight with each other
they swim long in your sea like Beowulf and Brecca
till they land on the yolky shore of your eggself exhausted
She chooses only one, and she EATS him
Now, she, a parasite in your belly, ready to kill
has a parasite in her, ready to kill
or create
the days will tell.

And when his other swimming selves die, you expell them!

and what IS that parasite in your belly?
the lucky one.
is it a person?
is she a person?
she's a mushroom!
swells to some jelly fish thing
folds up into a worm

and there,
with that ad hoc assembly of memories
of your mother
and his father
and his mother
and your father...

the two of you had sloppily picked parts from each
like some kind of Dr. Frankenstien..

and you sewed them into her, crazy quilt

she almost screws up!
she almost folds up into a cretin and dies!
like her brother did (and you expelled him)
and you didn't even know..

such are new beginnings

but she ripples into a fish finally
swimming in your watery womb
behind your belly button memory of your mother.

not really a fish,
she's got gills, but they don't work!
she can't breath in there!
there's no krill in your wombsea for her to eat!

do something!

weave yourself deep to her
bleed into her and let her bleed into you.
she almost killed ya, didn't she?

are you guys one or two?


Is she human YET?

no, now she's a newt.
now, a mouse!
now some kind of scratching puppy thing with a big head...


Now it's time to let her out.
Time to tear that weaving apart.
time to tear half yourself from yourself again,
let her be her

now it's time to open yourself up
let her crawl through your vagina
dragging your shared blood out with her

the two of you wrestle
she's tied to you
blood to you

you've got to turn yourself inside out!
heave!
wrestle all night
maybe you hate her for a moment
dump out your wombwaters
finally tear that bloodweaving placenta from you
push her into the world all bloody and slimy
and she almost kills you again!


well? cut the cord!
she'll bleed to death
her muscles think fast
close like fists 'round those severed arteries for ever
separating your bloodtides

light!
Cold!
she coughs the warm womb water from her lungs
to breath in the fiery oxygen
yells her lungs into breath.

wakes up to her own long frightening journey.


but you're still tied
let her suck milk from your own fat.
let her swim, a fish again, on your warm belly

you try to stay together, you two
new fish swimming on your breasty sea
but dammit she keeps growing.

first she's a fish again
then a larva with giant oggling laughing head,
her eyes focus,
her hands grasp for the world
she learns to eat
and your seeping springs of milk run dry.

her fingers become intelligent.
she gets up on her feet and walks away
imagines herself into a separate being

and begins to fear the night.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Epic Poem Needed About World Wide Physics Experiment Collaborations



ATLAS is a particle physics experiment that will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. Starting in mid-2008, the ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons ofø extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 2100 physicists (Including 450 students) participating from more than 167 universities and laboratories in 37 countries.

The protons will be accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider, an underground accelerator ring 27 kilometres in circumference at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The particle beams are steered to collide in the middle of the ATLAS detector. The debris of the collisions reveal fundamental particle processes. The energy density in these high energy collisions is similar to the particle collision energy in the early universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.






Does the world know about this thing, this effort? This collaboration between nations to dig into the guts of reality? I think I need to write an epic poem..


Example of engineering:


Excerpt:

"All the toroid magnets are superconducting in order to allow a large magnetic field without too much particle–stopping mass or wallet–busting energy consumption. To achieve superconductivity, each magnet needs to be cooled to a freezing -269°C, just 4.2 degrees above absolute zero (using liquid helium). Each needs to be maintained in a good vacuum for optimal working conditions. The main parts of the magnet are called the “cold mass” and weigh about 120 tonnes, and are about 10m across. The large magnetic forces (many hundreds of tonnes) acting, mean that careful design and analysis are required to ensure that fractures do not occur when the magnet is turned on.


It is the last magnet being tested on ATLAS before nominal operation, so this is a major milestone,” says Arnaud Foussat, one of CERN’s magnet engineers. The end–cap toroid magnets were installed in the experimental cavern in the summer of 2007. The ATLAS engineers worked hard during October to cool the magnets to -269°C. The cooling process took five weeks because the magnets are so large."


Take a tour:



Latest test:


excerpt:
"Once ATLAS is up and running, real data will be fed out to the Grid and spread all over the world for permanent storage and analysis. The Grid is a global network of computers which, in the same way that the Internet is used to share information, will be used to share computing power and data storage capacity. ATLAS needs to use the Grid because of the sheer volume of data that will be recorded, and the immense amount of computing power that will be required to process it.


Initially, the CERN computing centre, known as Tier 0, will farm out data to ten scientific institutes and laboratories across the globe, known as Tier 1 centres. These will subsequently distribute it amongst local ‘clouds’ of Tier 2 centres — mainly academic institutions — associated with them. Between them, these three Tiers will reconstruct the data to build up a picture of the trajectories and energies of individual particles recorded by the detector, and analyse them to try to gain an understanding of what happened during the proton collision.

...

When the LHC starts we want to analyse the data within a few days. We want a very quick feedback to see what’s good, what the problems were, if there’s any new physics, if there’s anything really exciting in there,” said Charlton. “To do that we must make sure this whole system works; that we can get the data out to people where they can look at it very quickly.”



So, even when hungry, angry, fulfilling one's curiousity can be a big healing process. Getting outside your own troubles and seeing the world can be cleansing. Maybe for the world?



Sunday, January 6, 2008

Renormalization In Conway Life?

Just finnished skimming through: Robert B. Laughlin. "A Different Universe: reinventing physics from the bottom down".

review:

Some comments.

first of all it was tantalizing but fustrating! hints, but no details! my guess is that to get a feel for what he's saying i'd have to get a degree in physics and then read the papers he quotes. oh well.

however it reminded me of this problem: For years I've had vague notions of finding cellular automata somewhere between John Horton Conway's game of life and chemistry. The inventiveness of Conway-life fascinates me. To be able to 'play' with a game like chemistry knowing PRECISELY all the microscopic rules would be fun. But there is one important element of Conway life that is disappointing in this regard. It is very brittle to random fluctuation. Change ONE cell, and you can create a disturbance that eventually destroys a whole 'life form'.

Chemistry is not ordinarily like this. Even in far from equilibrium conditions where random fluctuations can be amplified, they don't ordinarily send the whole ensemble crashing to a halt. So I've wanted to invent a cellular automata that is stable like chemistry or physics.

My intuition was that it has something to do with benzene etc... Atoms interact with each other locally but there are also long range interactions, which i do not understand microscopically. I have a vague notion that they have something to do with quantum mechanics. I also have a vague notion that you can't predict benzene from first principles in quantum mechanics. We certainly didn't predict Buckyballs after 60 years of quantum chemistry.

Then, in his book he mentions something about not being able to get the stable properties of macroscopic matter from microscopic quantum mechanics. That it comes from somewhere else. Something to do with Renormalization? I don't know ANY details about this! I have only a vague imagination about renormalization, so i make a guess: Do I have to introduce renormalization to Conway-life?

I imagine it means this: to calculate the next generation fate of each cell, do the following: calculate its fate according to its usual neighborhood of 8. Then look at each neighborhood of 4 surrounding that cell. Look at the whole Conway universe by 4's. There will be 4 such ways to partition the universe. Go through each one. For each 4-universe each new cell is the average (?) of the 4 original cells of the original universe that it contains. Now calculate the fate of the 4-cell containing your original cell for this new universe just as you do for the original Conway universe. Do it again: now partition the universe into 9-cells, there will be 9 such possible partitions. calculate the fate of the cell for each of those. go out to infinity. Now summation. produce a weighted sum of each of these fates like 1/16 (sum 1 to 4 of each 4-universe fates) + 1/81(sum 1 to 9 of 9 of each 9-universe fates) +... Can it be contrived to converge? This then must be done for each cell for each generation of recalculating Conway life.

Of course it seems impossibly impractical to me. I suppose you could do it in stages. Take a whole bunch of Conway life forms and work them out up to the 4-universe stage. Do it again up to the 9-universe stage. Again for the 25-universe stage... Does this procedure tend to some kind of behavior? Or is it just wildly different each time?

Is this how quantum mechanics is now done? I recall something about calculating all the possible feynman diagrams for each interaction at finer and finer scales each with more and more loops and summing them hoping it converges. is this where the infinities come in? how were they bannished?

Anyway for the Conway life scheme, if it COULD be done, what would happen? Would it so constrain the system that NOTHING interesting would happen?

This reminds me of another variation on Conway life I wanted to try, continuous Conway life: In R-2 you have a set of points. Say a disk of radius one centered at the origin. We will generalize conway life rules. The neighborhood of each point is a disk of radius... hmm... how did I choose the radius? Don't remember now. I'm not sure how to choose the neighborhood radius relative to the original shape i want to follow. That's bothersome. So hard to create a universe! Let's say r=1/2. So for each point look at the fraction f, of the disk r=1/2 that surrounds it that intersects with the original set. The continuous Conway life rules would be:

if f<2/8>3/8 (or 4/9) the original point 'dies'
if 2/8<=f<=3/8 (or /9etc..) the point stays
if for an empty point f=exactly 3/8? asking too much? 2.5/8<=f<=3.5/8? then 'turn that point on'

Well, you gotta decide the way you want to generalize the rules. Anyway It isn't hard to calculate the fate after the first generation or two for simple shapes like disk, square... but after a few generations the boundaries become complex and the formulas for them become complex and they are required to calculate the new boundaries. for instance a disk turns into an annulus which overlaps the edge of the disk. the annulus would turn into two concentric annuli? Square was harder.

Since it's difficult to calculate I thought up a scheme. Approach the system digitally. Break up the set into finer and finer digital approximations. At each stage see what the fate is under digital Conway life with larger and larger neighborhoods, with rules 'renormalized' (is that the appropriate use of the term?) appropriately. So the Conway life rules become more and more 'continous'. So to approach the fate of a square under continuous conway life, carry out the following procedure:

Approximate the square as 6x6 cells in original conway life and calculate its fate as many generations as needed, till it settles (or doesn't). Approximate the square as a square of 8x8 cells and calculate the fate (as many generations as needed...) under appropriately renormalized neighborhood-of-16 Conway life. (should the neighborhood be a 4x4 square or something closer to approximating a disk? So many choices!). Approximate the square as 10x10 cells and calculate its fate in neighborhood-of-25 Conway life. Continue. Will the behavior of each of these discrete Conway life universes CONVERGE to the behavior of the continuous one?

What are the origins of life: Despair Of Being a Tiny Dot Stuck to a Random Planet.

After reading Loren Eiseley wondering about our ignorance of the origins of life, I too wondered. And I to despaired over our ignorance! We've got merely ONE example of life here on Earth. We haven't even gotten the chance to explore mars with human eyes and hands and knees. I think the results are that mars had some active geology, surface water for some 100s of millions of years? It seems that life had a window of only a few 100million years on Earth to appear. So the question is: is life a natural consequence of chemistry or is it special? If Mars had conditions conducive to some kind of far from equilibrium chemistry developing for a couple 100 million years, and we explored for 100 years and found NO clues of mircrobial life then that would tell us something. If we DID find microbial fossils, that would tell us something again!

Of course of Venus, we are totally ignorant. Presumably Venus has had a much longer history of geological and chemical activity than mars. Our total igorance of details waiting in the rocks of Venus is a severe flaw in our attempt to fathom the origins of life.

As an aside, why isn't there massive amounts of funding for this exploration? Perhaps the powers that be are not to keen on busting through that question? Perhaps they are afraid to break the last barrier of belief that life is the special creation of God? That belief propelled by the same greed for eternal life that propels the funding for research in medicine?

And Titan? Io? Here are more places to look. So the verdict is in, Titan has methane rainfall. That means there are far from equilibrium cycles of methane evaporation and fall. It's cold there, but there is still 1/64th the amount of sunlight available as there is on Earth. Sunlight of the same quality as on Earth, so photochemistry CAN happen there. Just at 1/64 the rate it happens here. So instead of 4billion years of evolution, it's like 70million years... hm... What can happen in that amount of time? And Io and her sulfur volcanoes? What fascinating chemistry there is to explore! We've only just begun!