2012-12-08

Some photos...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cottrell003/

2012-09-24

Cosmological Precepts

1.  Something cannot be created out of nothing.  That is prima facie illogical.  One must be very careful when they hear people speak about the "void" or the "vacuum" of "empty space" and the like.  They are talking about areas between identifiable objects or particles that we are able to detect.  One hears terms like "dark energy" and "quintessence" and in the old days the "aether".  There is no basis now for thinking that there are any truly empty spaces. It may be reasonable to think that there are not any such empty spaces.

2.  The universe had no beginning, because that would mean that something can come out of nothing.

3.  The universe is defined to be all that there is, everything that exists, everything.  It encompasses the largest and the smallest scales.  If there is anything like multiverses, they would be subsets of the universe.

4.  Existence is conserved. Things may be transformed, but never completely annihilated. Mass and energy may be different views of stuff that is out there, and there are interchanges between them, and perhaps other metrics as yet unimagined, metrics that measure what is out there.  But it is always a case of transformation, and never results in something going into nothingness.  Nothing cannot become something, and something cannot become nothing.  If something appears to become nothing, then we must be missing something, and vice versa.

5.  The universe can have no end, because there is nowhere else to go.  Conservation means that there will be something...whatever it is.

So at best, the big bang theory is a partial theory, one that tries to look at a portion of the universe within a limited range of distance, and has nothing to offer regarding what preceded the BB.  And if the universe had no real beginning, and the BB theorists say it is expanding at an accelerating rate with no end in site, isn't it likely that it WOULD ALREADY HAVE DONE SO since it's been around forever?  And if it had done that, how is that we can still perceive portions of the universe that are finite.  Wouldn't they have already have expanded into oblivion?

2012-09-17

The Rotten Egg Problem


Here is a deceptively complex logic problem that I solved in 2003:

1. You have a dozen eggs.

2. One of them is rotten, but they all look alike.

3. The rotten one is either heavier or lighter than the others, but you don't know which.  The others all weigh the same.

4. You have a balance scale, and you are permitted to use the scale only 3 times.  

Puzzle:  Which is the rotten egg?


I'm sure a lot of math heads out there have seen and maybe solved some version of this problem.  I confess that I probably put a good 3 hrs into it, usually sitting out in my front yard in the afternoon or evening, the shady side of the house...with a beer or wine or whatever...doodling and thinking about it for half an hour to at most one hour at a time.  That worked for me.

2012-08-29

Shot taken in Jeep on way home after day out in the Ojito Wildnerness in August 2012.

2012-08-23

America's plutocrats should keep this in mind.