Rick's b.log - entry 2025/12/26

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White Christmas

The point has arrived. And with it, the first White Christmas in a long time. In fact, I can't remember the last time it snowed actually on Christmas Day. We've had cold, and snow, that's normal for this far north in the winter time. But on the 25^th?

It snowed all night, but it wasn't so cold prior and it wasn't exactly a blizzard, so more a road-dangerous dusting of white stuff, but hey - it's there - it counts.

I made a video, which you can watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bNpbcNDqSo
In it, you'll see Anna came out, looked across the field, and noped herself right back home.
Yeah, I'll admit, I did likewise.

Thinking about time

I'm not going to delve into what this means, suffice to say that a tiny amount of mass could be converted into a massive amount of energy, as nuclear weapons demonstrated. To put this into stark contrast, in a nuclear explosion, most of the uranium in the bomb breaks down into krypton and barium. The mass of the krypton and the barium together is just slightly less than the mass of the uranium. The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima released around 60 terajoules of energy, which means that around two thirds of a gram of uranium was converted into energy while the rest became krypton and barium.
Yes, in order to have a 13 kiloton explosion, of the 64kg of uranium inside, of which only around 700g underwent fission (the early bombs were extremely inefficient), less than a gram was converted into energy. That mushroom cloud was caused by the conversion of a tiny amount of uranium into energy (but the rest was needed to get the reaction going).

The flip side of this equation, however, is that we won't be able to travel faster than the speed of light, which will put a huge chunk of the universe out of reach to us forever.

You see, as an object with mass, like our spaceship, approaches the speed of light, its relativistic mass increases, which means that it takes more and more energy to keep accelerating the object, until you arrive at a situation where an object travelling at c would have infinite relativistic mass which means it would require infinite energy. Clearly either the entire universe will collapse into the gravity field of our spaceship, or its a ludicrous concept and we simply won't have enough energy to get anywhere near that sort of speed.

I keep using the phrase "relativistic mass". Things have an invariant mass, that is to say how much something weighs. I am about 70kg, Anna is about two and a half (she's small for her age), or my car's 350kg unladen. While all of these will have a different relativistic mass when in motion, the effect is negligible until you're talking about speeds close to the speed of light.

Now I would like to propose an alternative reason why we cannot travel faster than ~~the speed of light~~ time.
As we know from special relativity, "time is relative", that is to say that somebody on earth and somebody whizzing around the planet wearing synchronised watches will have a disparity in their measurement of time. It won't be a perceptual thing, as the typical disparity is in the order of milliseconds. Their, what, twenty-or-so thousand kilometres per hour difference to us is enough to measure, if not enough to feel. It is, however, something that GPS satellites have to take it into account to maintain accurate time.

Time is a dimension. Specifically our fourth dimension. There's up and down, left and right, forward and backward, and there's time.
Some people don't like to consider time to be a dimension because they don't see it as something we can move in. The thing is, we are moving in it, we just aren't able to freely move as time, to us, always goes the one direction.
That being said, if you were to walk off a tall cliff, you'll discover that your ability to freely move in the usual three dimensions becomes severely restricted. Just because one cannot necessarily move as they wish in a dimension doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Now you hopefully noticed that I crossed out "the speed of light" above, and replaced it with time. It is my belief that there is nothing inherently special about the speed of light. Light, and by extension radio waves, etc (the electromagnetic spectrum), is a massless photon. These travel at the speed of light in a vacuum because they don't have mass which means they won't attain infinite mass requiring infinite energy. They just zip along through the emptiness of space unhindered as fast as the universe will allow them to go.
We refer to this as the speed of light because light is something we can observe. I feel, however, that it would be more accurate to refer to this as the speed of time. Things simply cannot go faster than this because that would cause...issues.
If something were to go faster than the speed of time (or light), it would effectively be going backwards in time. So what happens? Let's assume we accelerate a pizza to c. It will need to have pineapple on top, because your regular cheese pizza just isn't going to violate reality. Now let's push that pizza just a little more so it is travelling just over c (we'll ignore the infinite energy thing). If the pizza exceeds c it will begin moving backwards in time compared to our viewpoint, so what happens? Does the pizza just suddenly start backtracking from whence it came, only to slam into whatever spaceship launched it at a seemingly sedate crawl which is actually three hundred million metres per second? That's about six hundred and seventy million miles per hour for people used to ye olde measurementes. I'm sure you can understand that the slow-moving pizza, actually travelling back in time, would not only annihilate the spaceship but potentially kick off a supernova-scale explosion in space wiping out everything in the vicinity.
See? I told you it was bad putting pineapple on pizza.

Did you spot the flaw in the above discussion? If the pizza is coming back to the ship due to moving back in time, and thus causes the ship to explode due to its extreme speed...
Well, actually there are two flaws. The first is what happens to the original pizza? Does it's motion forwards in time match the backwards motion? Does the spaceship see two pizzas? Will it take the same path back? So will they crash into each other?
If by some magic the pizza makes it back to the ship, kaboom, huge explosion... remind me when the pizza was launched, sped up, and crossed the speed of time? This would seem to me like a good example of violating causality, in other words the effect happening before whatever caused it.

A ham and pineapple pizza roaring through space.

I bet you never expected "pizza" and "causality" in the same discussion.

Let's look at all of this again, only without the pineapple. It it theorised (because this hasn't been tested for very obvious reasons) that things get a bit weird as one approaches the speed of light. Time slows down. Until, at the speed of light, time has stopped.
But, here's the thing. Our current understanding is that time has only stopped from the perspective of the observer. On the spaceship (or pizza) that is travelling so fast, time is passing at the normal speed.

To imagine how this might work, instead of thinking of the speed of light, instead think of this as the speed of time. Light happens to travel at the same speed because it doesn't have a mass so can go as fast as anything can possibly go. Which means that, yes, time dilation is real, but there's an upper limit to it. You can't go faster than time, so time will always seem to be progressing normally to you until you're nearly at the speed of light, at which point time will start to slow down for you as well — and if you were able to touch the speed of light, time would be frozen both inside and outside, because having normal time inside would result in a scenario where time would in theory be moving faster than the speed of time.

Which means that our inability to go faster than c doesn't cause infinite mass or require infinite energy. It is much simpler. Computers have clock pulses. We have neurons firing. Propulsion systems have chemical reactions. All of these things need time in which to happen, and without time there is no processing, no thinking, and no fancy chemistry.
In other words, we cannot exceed the speed of time because time is necessary for everything to happen in an orderly way, and when time stops...everything stops. The ship will carry on due to momentum, something with mass isn't going to just physically halt, and time will dribble as it slows a little less than c, but due to time stopping it won't ever be possible to exceed that speed.
The speed of time is immutable.

This discussion leads to the question: What is time?
Our typical three dimensions have quantities that can be measured. Whether we are talking metres in a room, miles in a country, or arc-minutes in the sky, we have numerous ways of measuring and quantifying distances that correspond to the three spatial dimensions. Most of these are small local values because talking about parsecs is useless to most people as it's not something that they will experience or need to deal with.
But what is time, exactly? How do we measure time?

Time is, put simply, the stuff that stops everything happening all at once. And it is measured, by humans, using a rather arbitrary units of short time measured by clocks (hours, minutes, seconds) and long time measured by calendars (days, months, years).
We have devised and standardised a second as a specific (and seemingly arbitrary) number of wobbles of a caesium atom; but in reality time was first measured the other way around — by observing the behaviour of the moon, the seasons, and of course the time span of days with the sundial showing the shadow in the same place at the same point of the day. This was then broken down into smaller and smaller increments in order to be useful - a vestige of this is why we have morning, afternoon, and night. In olden times nobody needed to know that it was quarter past four (and thirty seven seconds).

Of course, it wouldn't be science if it was as easy as this. For time is something that we feel and experience every moment of our lives. The time it will take you to read this sentence is quantifiable. Go back and do it again, this time counting seconds. Maybe four or five? How long has it taken to read this far?
Now tell me how fast you are moving.
And, no, "zero" is not the correct answer.
Even if you are lying in your bed snuggling your favourite teddy and trying to recover from all the things you ate yesterday, zero is not the correct answer.

The Earth is whizzing around the Sun (~30km/sec, or 67,100mph). The Solar System is whizzing around in the Milky Way (~230km/sec, or 514,000mph). And the entire Milky Way itself is whizzing through space (~600km/sec, or 1,340,000mph). So, no, you are definitely not motionless as you lie in your bed.

So, poop your pants because we're on an epic wild ride, hurtling along at about a million and a third miles per hour. The thing is, as you clutch your teddy just a little bit tighter, you are aware of exactly and precisely none of this. Some of you may have been like "no way!" and Googled the speed of Earth through space (spoiler: yes way).
But time? That nebulous 'thing' that separates one moment from the next? We feel that. We experience that. And we always have, and always will, for our entire lives. Lives that are, themselves, measured in time.

I can't really go much further with a definition of what time is, because this is a question that has perplexed philosophers and scientists alike for millennia. I subscribe to the Newtonian view that time is a dimension, albeit a peculiar one that only goes in one direction. It may, in fact, be less of a "dimension" in the traditional sense and more a natural consequence of everything being flung outwards in the Big Bang. What we think of as time is simply the motion of gunk through an ever expanding emptiness that we call space.
Others, such as Kant think that time isn't a thing, it cannot therefore be measured or travelled, instead it is a mental framework that allows us to perceive events. While an intriguing way of looking at the problem of time, by our understanding time existed before the development of brains (to have the mental faculties to experience time) and will carry on going long after the last brain has died out. Furthermore, as the burning of a candle demonstrates, time does not rely upon any sense of perception. If somebody lit the candle and all multicellular life suddenly vanished, there is no reason to believe that the candle won't still keep on burning...unless, of course, one such multicellular lifeform was holding said candle, but you know what I mean.

Wait, hang on, there's a flaw. Quantum Physics has suggested that the collapse of the wave function (in other words, when something happens and things must attain a state) causes state to change everywhere, so your entangled whatsit here and your entangled whatsit over there assume positions in a way that would seem to be faster than light, suggesting that something is indeed breaching that limitation.
Well, two thoughts come to mind. The first is that maybe we're simply not fully understanding what is going on. What we observe may only be half the story, with some other mechanism at play. Which leads to the second thought, namely that Quantum Physics is weird. Like weird enough to make you wonder how it is that people who study it don't go mad. Perhaps what we view as two things in two places with a linear space between them is, to the quantum particle, a maze of twisty passages all different and it comes equipped with a backpack full of dynamite to blast its way through to where it needs to be. This is the sort of thing that we call wormholes, that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line if reality is a wibbly wobbly timey wimey thing where the shortest path between two points can actually be found at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

Defrosting the freezer

Look mom, I'm eating vegetables!
(though, these are pretty much the only ones I will eat...)

It actually defrosted pretty quickly, maybe an hour and a quarter in a lightly heated kitchen (I think it's about 9°C in here). I helped it along the way by knocking off the stuff that had defrosted enough to be soft.

This picture is every bit as cold as it is outside.

It was mostly done by ten past four. I gave the thing a good wipe down using paper towels, as at this time of year it would take a really long time to dry naturally.
Then, at quarter past four I put the drawers back and turned it back on. In the first half hour it only made it down to near freezing (so a difference of around 9°C) but in the next quarter hour it was down to -14°C so I opened it up and put the stuff in the cool box back into the freezer. It went up a little (onviously) and then back down, and has settled down at -18,5°C, but there's not an awful lot in there at the moment. Some veg, some pastries, and a third of a bag of chips.

I guess this means the next defrost will be around August time? Cool, summer holiday.

Wish me luck!

I've just seen there are three new episodes of Stranger Things, lasting about three and a half hours. So, I think I'll settle down in bed under the heated blanket with a mug of hot chocolate and, well, that'll be the rest of the evening sorted.

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