Tuesday - Back from a brief break

 I took a couple of days off. That's obvious because there were no posts on those days. I needed to wrap my brain around the things I'm learning. A lot of what I'm learning is an expansion and deepening of things I'd learned before. Some involves unlearning things I thought I knew. It is a strenuous activity and it is also fun.

An example of this relates to the brief post of Sunday morning. I've previously come to grips with the relativistic nature of time, and also the granularity of time. My time and your time can be synchronized but as soon as we start moving apart from each other, my time is not the same as yours. I've got this and I understand why. And though time may pass more quickly or more slowly, it takes an external observer to see this. For me, time moves at my local rate. A year for me, takes a year and for a person traveling on a very fast moving vessel away from and then back to earth, that person would perceive their time at the same personal rate, but when we compare our watches, we discover that they are younger. 

The same effect is seen if the other person has spent time close to a very massive object, such as just outside the event horizon of a black hole. 

The granularity of time seems a counterintuitive. The world and things in it may seem infinitely divisible, but this is not the case. Zeno's paradox breaks down at the smallest scales. Max Planck discovered that energy comes in little packets we now call quanta. It's more complicated than this, but as a result, he worked out what we now call Planck's constant and from this is derived the smallest unit of time. - no surprise that we call it Planck time. It's of a very short duration.

Among the things I find fascinating about this is that it may define the shortest amount of time after the big bang that we can know anything about. I say may because we haven't gotten that close to knowing what happened that soon after T-0, yet.

Okay, enough. If I keep going on you'll think I have too much time on my hands.

A few midtown east photos from about a month ago.

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