Spent the morning with Aslan, Cozy's youngest, from last year. Nice kid. He was in our group when we came up from the sea. A bit 'clingy' and very much daddy's little boy. Which is really where the current problem comes from.
Cozy thinks the kid's some kind of 'ueberpenguin' and has given him the most awful role in the little extravaganza. Well actually it's not just him, one of Cozy's other offspring, Caspian, has got a similar role but he's decided it's impossible AND dangerous and so has gone into a sulk. Aslan (Cozy likes the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you can tell can't you?) has to leave the chute and do a backward somersault and then land on his belly. Ah, you're thinking, this is just like Sparky's problem! It's not!
You see, Aslan has no problem with the somersault, he does that perfectly and has for some days, it's relatively easy. No, the problem is Aslan's backwards rotation takes all the momentum out of his forward 'glide' and he keeps dropping way short of the place where Cozy wants him to land. Aslan has tried Sparky's trick and attempted to induce forward momentum using his body and wings but by the time he's in a position to do that, without upsetting the somersault, he's just lost too much forward velocity. We've tried to persuade Cozy to accept that the somersaulting penguins will just drop short of where he wants them and leave it at that but he keeps harping on about the 'integrity' of his 'artistic vision'.
It's a pity there weren't enough females this year, otherwise Cozy would be sitting on an egg right now and we wouldn't be having this difficulty. Cozy generally only breeds every other year. I think that it's only when we get a good surplus of females turn up and some get a little desperate that Cozy breeds. I think a lot of the females here get a bit 'turned off' by Cozy's rather generous proportions. 'Waddling tub of lard', Fricka calls him. 'Pretentious, wobbling tub of lard' might be closer to the truth at the moment. Oh well, just have to keep thinking and hope that Aslan doesn't get too dispirited about not living up to daddy's expectations if I can't find a solution.
Stopped by someone else's blog yesterday. Quite an interesting idea, Einstein for dummies. Yes I know it's been done before but it was quite good nonetheless. Only trouble was I came away thinking almost the exact opposite of what I've thought for years. Not about Einstein, but about quantum theory. Relativity for the layman is actually quite easy. It's a 'classical' theory and generally is something we can all relate to without getting ourselves tied up in objectivity knots. But quantum theory?
Now I don't want to get immersed in pointless philosophical discussion here so we'll set out a few assumptions:
God does not exist.
Life begins at a certain point in time. For argument's sake we'll say it was with the first self replicating molecule.
Penguins, people et al evolved from ancestors by natural selection who in turn evolved from ancestors etc etc.
I exist today. If you're reading this then that statement applies to you too.
When a scientist tells me x experiment confirms a prediction that E=MC2, I give him the benefit of the doubt.
OK? With me so far?
Now we evolved with one purpose; to replicate, produce copies of ourselves. Whatever else you may think, everything else, Beethoven, skyscrapers, digital watches, nirvana, God etc etc, it's all secondary. If we don't replicate, nothing else is possible. So as mother nature tinkers and plays with us, she needs to make us evolve in ways that stop whatever reality is out there from killing us before we can replicate. On the whole she's not done a bad job, by no means perfect, but good enough. It's been like that for millions of years.
Then along come you lot.........and mathematics!
At first, everything was all fine and dandy. You could all relate to 5 + 5 = 10, plane geometry, newtonian mechanics, wave mechanics etc. It all relates to things you can perceive, ie it's about the objective reality we all evolved to deal with. And then along comes Max Planck and his solution to black body radiation and the world gets turned upside down.
Now I've read loads of stuff about quantum mechanics from the exemplar of science for the 'layman' by a scientist, Dick Feynmann, through Penrose, Hawking and all kinds of other stuff and I thought I had as good a grasp of it as you could get without a few years post grad as a physicist. Yesterday I realised that not only didn't I but without about 5 years hard study, I couldn't. Needless to say, I found that a tad annoying.
What I realised yesterday, and who knows if I'm right, is that mathematicians have created a reality which is not only different to the one we've evolved to deal with but which is at odds with it. The only way that that reality makes any sense, and it seems to, is in terms of the mathematical equations used to describe it. Anything else gets you nowhere. Whether it's Schroedinger's cat; light travels all available paths but the probability (amplitudes) of nearly all cancel each other out and you're left with the straight (geodesic) line; let's all play 'collapse the wave function'; they don't EXPLAIN it, do they? Only the maths does that!
So is there any point in TRYING to understand it? On one level, we have to. It pervades everything you do. But on another level, we'll never understand, only misunderstand, and that might be worse. Perhaps everyone just needs to study advanced maths for a few years!
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