Wake up.  Or maybe in another 9 minutes.  But by the time you’ve rolled over to press the snooze button, time and space, order and chaos, axiom and idiom have all been reaffirmed ad infinitum by your subconscious into something as soft and palpable as the pillow you lay on, all before you’ve taken the first breath of the day.  A snap of the fingers contains the same power as the most violent impact at the Large Hadron Collider.

Outer space. Think about it.

And for what do these men of the wheel seek?  Take a glass jar, suck all the air out of it so it’s a vacuum and there will still be a measurable amount of energy inside the jar, it’s not really empty.  Why?  The space occupied within the jar needs some sort of scaffolding to uphold the fact it is in existence, that there are three dimensions, time moves in a straight line and the laws of physics apply, you don’t get all that for free.  The universe is finite, it’s just a giant ball, and if you were able to travel past its edge, none of the rules I described in the previous sentence would apply.  The ether exists.

But ether is too 18^th century a term, so now it’s a scalar field, or Higgs boson, or “God particle”.  The idea is, it’s the energy in the empty jar, it’s the scaffolding, particles are just particles until they interact with the scalar field and acquire attributes such as mass.  Even better, some theories posit this scalar field is present beyond the edge of the universe, and some sort of anomaly in it was the cause of the Big Bang.

$10 billion to find out what’s in an empty glass jar?  $10 billion to discover the fabric of the universe?  $200 billion to bailout AIG.

Think of the red peak as a particle interacting with the green scalar field

But the real brilliance harkens back to the first paragraph.  The scalar field is our inherent morning bedside unrealized miracle.  I can reference the largest thing known to man (the universe) or the smallest (10^-35 meters, the Planck Length) and you can understand what I’m talking about at face value.  One quick digression on Planck…time and space are all quantized (hence the term quantum mechanics), they’re small individual packets, not a continuum.  Travelling from point A to B in a straight line, you will skip some of the intermediate points.  The passage of time is like an incredibly fast-spinning Rolodex of individual slices.

So when you hear Blimpy talk about freedom or “the kingdom of heaven is within”, this post is in no small way exactly what I am talking about.  The human brain can form a million new neural connections a second.  The world’s most complicated computer chips only contain a million transistors with no capacity to grow or change.  A computer chip a second…that puts your mental capacity at hundreds of million times greater than what I am typing on.

Dear singularity, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.

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