In a moment I will draw upon a lengthy excerpt from an unpublished essay which was one follow up to The Eternal Difference. The excerpt centers around an Einsteinian-informed thought experiment and the conclusions that one can draw about the fundamental nature of energy, and thus the Universe as a whole. I find it hard to believe the thought experiment extension and implications that I attempt to elucidate have not been drawn by others, but maybe there exists a gap in the discourse, or I am an island with this. Hopefully this paper can move forward our understanding of energy, either by it’s refutation or acceptance, but it is something that has not had enough brain power devoted on something so important. We might retreat from trying to create black holes in laboratories (one of the craziest most cavalier and dangerous things that pass for “scientific inquiry”), we might make so many different daily choices, such as driving in cars… but I digress. It’s relevant to put here, I think, that in many ways Hendrik Lorentz might have had the more honest view of spatial reality than Einstein; he did not build the artifices out of the Lorentz contractions that Einstein went on to do with his relativity theories. Not to deny that Einstein’s theories aren’t useful tools and have stood the test of a century so far (but was it the most rational century, one that saw two world wars and countless preventable deaths and species extinctions?). Still, there is no unified field theory, and maybe the reason for that is there is too much clutter within physics, historical and current, in the way, rather than the supposition that we just haven’t found it yet; maybe we are precluding our finding it because we look to the wrong places—we create the wrong places. There is too much taken for granted, too much dependence on the tools of math, too much hope that machines will interpret our complex reality for us, but I think we are belittling our imaginary powers—imaginary powers that conjured the beautiful non-scientific ideas of Poincare, Lorentz, Einstein, Bohr, and others. Ideas outside of science that then were “verified” by science, but we must remember not created by science. I could drivel on and on, but let me return to the introduction.
With regards to the title “The First Unlaw of Thermodynamics”, I hope to show how the first law of thermodynamics is technically true, but also highly deceptive because the experience of energy tells a very different story than “neither created nor destroyed, just changed from one form to another”. The word “form” and what it entails can be highly misleading to a fragile/sensitive imagination (my own at the least) that has high hopes that are shattered in the face of a supposed wal-law of the Universe. The excerpt is long, and I let it ramble on for the possibility of meeting your interests, and to flesh out some of the ontological percussions of mis-acting in the world, and how the fragility of a beautiful living space can be torn down by concentrated mass/energy. Minor additions for clarity that I insert are [put in brackets in a grayed font], but as usual language—mathematical, logical, colloquial, symbolic, and other realms that language torments—is generally inadequate to take on the task of explaining the reality in which we inhabit.
A large way towards re-conceiving motion is to imagine it as not solely existing in dimensional space, but manifesting itself in changes in energy amounts, which cause changes in the very texture of space that lay available for our maneuvering. Because of this, energy requires a new understanding which physics has been ambiguous about giving it. It is on and between this platform that this section will dwell, revisiting the salient points on which much of physics basis itself.
Galilean and Newtonian relativity, simply stated, show us that the spatial motion of one body is only relative to other spatial bodies, and there is no way of determining if something is “absolutely” at rest or in motion (there is no absolute background). Einstein’s relativity has elaborated the picture, showing us that space bends due to the motion of bodies, or, alternatively, space bends to determine the motion of bodies, bending more or less based on the mass of the body in motion.
One of the famous thought experiments to rise out of Einstein’s relativity, popularized in the form of the “twins paradox,” shows how the speed at which something moves effects its spatial and temporal situation relative to other entities moving at different speeds. The experiment shows that if one twin stays on earth (the earth twin) and the other (the astronaut twin) is sped away from the earth at a speed close to that of light, two light-years away from earth and two light-years back to earth, that the astronaut twin will come back almost completely un-aged, whilst the earth twin will be over four years older. This is because the motion—physicists call it the “time dimension”1 of spacetime—internal to the astronaut twin is slowed down when things are moving so fast relative to the speed of light. However, if we bring back the arguments of Galilean and Newtonian relativity, we can say that it cannot be the speed that is slowing down the aging process of the astronaut twin; as we have learned, it could be equally said that the earth and the solar system are speeding away and then towards the astronaut twin at close to the speed of light, rather than s/he being the one who is necessarily speeding away. Something must be happening beyond basic spatial motion to change the inertial frame of reference—the name physicists allocate to a particular stable and synchronized region of spacetime—of either the astronaut twin, the earth, or both, so that processes normally at a common rhythm (synchronization) to one another now vary greatly.
It is a matter of energy, not speed at all, that changes the layout of the spatial region in question. Energy is more than just “the ability to do work” that moves something through space; energy is all space and matter and, its relationship with and within itself. The diffusing outward of energy is one and the same as the spreading out of space. On the other hand, the bundling together of increasing energy in a given area is experienced as the collapse of spatial differentiations—an intensification and simplification. The more intense energy is, the greater the gravitational effect is, explaining the slowing of change for the astronaut twin. The energy inerted into the spaceship’s inertial frame is so great that the ship will barely change, relative to the aging taking place in the less energetic galaxy from which the spaceship breaks. This creates a strong energetic division, putting the spaceship out of sync with the [rest of the] galaxy, making a multiplicity where there once was (and again may be) a holistic singularity [singularity as opposed to multiplicity, not to be confused with the singularity that is posited as the original bundled cosmological origin of the Universe] with common levels of energy dispersion.
Just as objects with higher gravity dominate the maneuverability of the surrounding space, distorting it in a limiting fashion, so too does the energetically accelerated body that cuts through large swaths of space, tearing it and unmaking what has been creatively fashioned out of energy dispersal. A bullet in motion is always breaking, never growing, sending out shards of anti-harmonic sound, breaking organic vibration rhythms, collecting metallic-sameness unto itself. Its relationship with that of the surrounding space is surely a relationship between two multiplicities. Direction does not play a role in determining whether something is at odds with another entity, as elements with differing directions can still be part of a singularity. One of the large finitude of examples is a singular organism with separate cells moving each and every way. [Rather,] multiplicities are derived when differing directions within a singularity start to greedily pull in more energy, leading to an inability and disregard for synchronization with the rest of space, simplifying the spatial field by cutting into it. This is the bullet that has too much accelerated energy to creatively interact with its environment, it is a moving wall that ensures its dominance over that of the less energetic surroundings.b
1The debate over whether time is something extended, like the normal understanding of a dimension, and pre-existing to our perception of it, or rather just an imposed form on what is essentially the motion of matter (and space), is comparable to the debate in the philosophy of time between eternalism and presentism. Eternalism, as I understand it, is what most Einsteinian physicists believe is true, except in addition to the past always existing (what eternalism proper sets down), for the physicists the future does too, and simply has to be “moved into.” Presentism contends that there is no time “dimension,” that the future has to be created out of the present, without any metaphysical or extra-spatial access to “the past.” Both of these philosophically different understandings of reality can be made to agree with all the empirical findings of Einsteinian relativity, though this essay contends that presentism, after a consideration of other arguments, is the actual ontological situation that reality exists in (see the section “Presentism With A Twist”. Thinking of time as extended is just another conceptual mistake that occurs when misconceiving motion.
bHowever, it is the less energetic surroundings that have more curvability to creatively limit the bullet’s negative impact on their synchronizing differentiating culture. Why this is so will hopefully be explained next.
Subverses 