Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Triumph of Light


New York, Marriott Marquis Broadway Room November 27, 2007

This is an amazing way to experience New York. The Broadway Room is shaped like an enormous flying saucer launched out of the Marriott Marquis, hovering over THIS. From a window seat, one could sit for hours just comprehending it all. The hotel lobby is tall enough to build a Moon rocket within; capsule-shaped elevators zip from floor to floor. Since this hotel was designed during the Apollo years, Cape Canaveral’s VAB may have inspired the architect.

For one not accustomed to mega-cities, New York is science fiction like BLADE RUNNER. The movie’s prediction of jumbo video screens has already come true. We don’t see flying cars, this year’s Personal Air Vehicle challenge did not turn out anything revolutionary, but year 2019 is not quite here. The dream of leaping above traffic has always been with us. Out of the spotlight, some inventor is working on a flying car.

The most fascinating thing about New York is that it functions at all. Those bright lights indicate millions of people and machines going about their business. Despite threats from terror and other “dark energies,” the huge machine that is a city continues to function and grow. Improvements to Times Square in the past few years are legendary. Evidence of New York light refutes the idea of “dark energy.”

Proponents of “dark energy” would have us believe that its invisible presence dominates the Universe. They would also believe that the Universe is ripping apart in chaos. If so, formation of structures would have ceased long ago. Many observations like the Pleiades Cluster show stars forming to this day.

From experience we know that the majority of mass lies hidden in the darkness. The simple addition of a changing speed of light means that Black Holes could be ubiquitous in the Universe. They could lurk undetected in great voids, which we would perceive as Holes in the Universe. Smaller Black Holes could be orbiting in our Solar System, even within Earth’s core. Those people down there may be completely unaware of a Black Hole beneath their feet.

TOMORROW: With luck, we hope to see 30,000 new lights

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4 Comments:

Blogger nige said...

Wow! You do get around the world very fast. Since you are in New York, maybe you should try to interview "Not Even Wrong" author Peter Woit at Columbia University, New York, if possible.

Have they got Christmas decorations up in New York?

1:44 AM  
Blogger  said...

Hi Louise,how are you?

Alex

2:12 AM  
Blogger L. Riofrio said...

For nige: I did get to meet Woit at a nearby town; more about that soon.

Christmas decorations will be in the next post.

For Alex: Things are very exciting, thank you. I am glad that you continue to enjoy the blog articles.

4:01 AM  
Blogger nige said...

Well Louise, I hope he was encouraging and maybe offered to endorse some papers to arXiv, although from his latest post (on the geometric Langlands programme), it seems that he is very busy and committed to keeping up to date with abstract mathematical physics.

It's interesting to see on one Geometric Langlands site there is a notice saying that the Geometric Langlands research "program is partially supported by DARPA ..."

It's weird that this research is being funded by a U.S. military agency, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But it was DARPA (then called just ARPA) with the RAND corporation which produced the first kind of internet (a very rugged mesh type network of computers), to enable some data communications to survive effects from a nuclear war.

It's funny how these completely unexpected spin-offs like the original code-breaking computers and now the internet occur from research into military technology! Maybe some new extra-dimensional brane gun will be invented by the Langlands physicists for DARPA, and will make them rich while millions of the enemy are sent into another dimension.

But it would be really great if mainstream work on extra-dimensional manifolds in string theory could one day be used to improve the manufacture of spaghetti so it isn't so messy to eat. I always have to suck up the strands and get tomato sauce all down my tie or chin. If spaghetti could be compactified into a Calabi-Yau manifold, I'm sure it would be just as tasty but less messy to consume? ;-)

2:19 PM  

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