Foam Related Quotes

Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

Long ago there was a man that was crucified for being too loving and too lovable. And strange to relate I met him thrice yesterday. The first time he was asking a policeman to not take a prostitute to prison; the second time he was drinking wine with an outcast; and the third time he was having a fist-fight with a promoter inside a church

The flowers of spring are winter's dreams related at the breakfast table of the angels.

A bunch of links were to spiritual warfare, which Uncle Earl had told me about once, where people think they’re off fighting demons. I suppose that’s one way to make church more interesting, but it all sounded like Jesus LARP to me. (I told Uncle Earl that, which forced me to explain LARPing. If you’ve never tried to describe hitting other people dressed as orcs with foam weapons, particularly to an elderly relative, you haven’t really lived.)

I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations.

This is arguably the besetting mistake of all naturalist thinking, as it happens, in practically every sphere. In this context, the assumption at work is that if one could only reduce one’s picture of the original physical conditions of reality to the barest imaginable elements—say, the “quantum foam” and a handful of laws like the law of gravity, which all looks rather nothing-ish (relatively speaking)—then one will have succeeded in getting as near to nothing as makes no difference. In fact, one will be starting no nearer to nonbeing than if one were to begin with an infinitely realized multiverse: the difference from non-being remains infinite in either case. All quantum states are states within an existing quantum system, and all the laws governing that system merely describe its regularities and constraints. Any quantum fluctuation therein that produces, say, a universe is a new state within that system, but not a sudden emergence of reality from nonbeing. Cosmology simply cannot become ontology. The only intellectually consistent course for the metaphysical naturalist is to say that physical reality “just is” and then to leave off there, accepting that this “just is” remains a truth entirely in excess of all physical properties and causes: the single ineradicable “super-natural” fact within which all natural facts are forever contained, but about which we ought not to let ourselves think too much.

She melted the butter in the pan. She warmed the egg yolks by immersing them in a bowl of hot water and mixing them with vinegar, then pouring in the shining golden butter little by little. She moved the whisk ceaselessly, making the contents of the bowl whirl round and round. Having observed Chizu's troubles up close, and learned how to avoid them, she succeeded in producing the fine egg-colored foam relatively quickly. Her whole hand, from the wrist down, was dancing on a waltz. The tigers in the book, whose desires had kept them spinning round and round until they transformed into butter, had ended up in the stomachs of Little Babaji's family. Even after their deaths, Kajii's victims continued to be exposed to and consumed by the curious gaze of the general public. Rika had stopped believing that any blame lay with the victims themselves. Being sucked into the vortex of Kajii's ominous power, like she herself had been, was something that could happen to anybody. Thinking this, she went on single-mindedly whisking the butter. Through her adventures with the quatre-quarts on Valentine's Day, she'd learned that waiting on the far side of all of this seemingly endless whisking was not stasis or evaporation, but emulsification. If she couldn't tear her eyes away from Kajii, if she couldn't stop herself from spinning round and round, then maybe all that was left to do was to grip on to Kajii with all her might, so as to ensure she wasn't shaken off. 'Done!' Rika said to herself and lifted up the whisk. The sauce of warm, bright yellow that came dripping off the whisk was smooth as cashmere.

The biggest stumbling block that has traditionally plagued all the unification endeavors has been the simple fact that on the face of it, general relativity and quantum mechanics really appear to be incomprehensible. Recall that the key concept of quantum theory is the uncertainty principle. When you try to probe positions with an ever-increasing magnification power, the momenta (or speeds) start oscillating violently. Below a certain minuscule length known as the Planck length, the entire tenet of a smooth spacetime is lost. This length (equal to 0.000...4 of an inch, where the 4 is at the thirty-fourth decimal place) determines the scale at which gravity has to be treated quantum mechanically. For smaller scales, space turns into an ever-fluctuating "quantum foam." But the very basic premise of general relativity has been the existence of a gently curved spacetime. In other words, the central ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics clash irreconcilably when it comes to extremely small scales.

If dimensions are virtual like the particles in quantum foam are virtual then, entanglement is information that is in more than one location (hologram). There are no particles, they may be wave packets but the idea of quantum is, a precise ratio of action in relationship to the environment. Feynman's path integral is not infinite, it is fractal. If you look at a star many light years away, the photon that hits your eye leaves the star precisely when the timing for the journey will end at your eye because the virtual dimension of the journey is zero distance or zero time. Wheeler said that if your eye is not there to receive the photon then it won't leave the star in the distant past. If the dimension in the direction of travel is zero, you have a different relationship then if it is zero time in terms of the property of the virtual dimensions. Is a particle really a wave packet? Could something like a "phase transition" involve dimensions that are more transitory then we imagined. Example; a photon as a two dimensional sheet is absorbed by an electron so that the photon becomes a part of the geometry of the electron in which the electrons dimensions change in some manner. Could "scale" have more variation and influence on space and time that our models currently predict? Could information, scale, and gravity be intimately related?

These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and helpless role I was destined to play. But I thought, also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief. I was among the missing dead of the Martinez disaster, an unrecovered body. I could see the head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the University Club and the Bibelot shaking their heads and saying, “Poor chap!” And I could see Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-bye to him that morning, lounging in a dressing-gown on the be-pillowed window couch and delivering himself of oracular and pessimistic epigrams. And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains and falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner Ghost was fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific—and I was on her. I could hear the wind above. It came to my ears as a muffled roar. Now and again feet stamped overhead. An endless creaking was going on all about me, the woodwork and the fittings groaning and squeaking and complaining in a thousand keys. The hunters were still arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious breed. The air was filled with oaths and indecent expressions. I could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship. Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping dens of animals in a menagerie. Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging from the walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested securely in the racks. It was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and pirates of by-gone years. My imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep. And it was a long, long night, weary and dreary and long.

Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains, and whose links describe their proximity relations. Space-time is generated by processes in which these spin networks transorm into one another, and these processes are described by sums over spinfoams. A spinfoam represents a history of a spin network, hence a granular spacetime where the nodes of the graph combine and seperate. This microscopic swarming of quanta, which generates space and time, underlies the calm appearance of the macroscopic reality surrounding us. Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta.

HOW MUCH FOAM is the proper amount? Most people feel that an inch is about right, although this is a culturally determined preference. The amount is also related to the level of carbonation. Many of the Belgian beers have loads of carbonation, and it’s virtually impossible to pour a beer like Duvel without creating a big, fluffy head. For this reason, many of these beer glasses have a capacity about twice the size of the serving portion. With the right beer, properly poured, you can create a rich, creamy head. To do so, pour the beer right down the middle of the straight-up glass. Trickling down the side is for sissies and will result in a too-gassy beer with little aroma and a poor, quickly dissipating head. A vigorous pour will create a lot of foam, and this is good because when it settles down, the head will be dense and long-lived. It’s also important, especially with bottled beer, to release some of the carbonation. Too much fizz masks things like hop aroma and fills you up quickly. So pour and let the beer settle as many times as you need to in order to fill the glass. There are places in Europe where drinkers are suspicious if the beer arrives too quickly, because they understand what is needed to create a great head on a beer and are willing to delay gratification for a minute or two for the sake of a better experience.

By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode - what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is a culmination of our experiences in a way that we - biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions - can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction.

The great teachers of our historical culture insist that morality is deeper and more substantial than effervescent foam. It stands to reason, they insist, that where there are waves and foam there is a deeper body of water. These sources describe a sea of substantial morality that lies beneath the ephemeral and ever-changing surface expressions of emotion, taste, and satisfaction in ordinary human intercourse. They describe character as the gravity that keeps us afloat and virtues as the sails that propel us and the instruments that help us to maintain our course, even when the ship is being rocked by stormy waters and high seas. Sailors need to know when to use ballast or throw down the anchor, lest the ship sink and they drown. In like manner, the virtues enable us to respond correctly to those moments of life that are the moral equivalents to such conditions at sea. However, an ability to discern these moments and respond appropriately entails more than formal techniques of decision-making, just as successful sailing requires that one know more than just the techniques of good navigation. As the latter requires a knowledge of and familiarity with the sea that cannot be taught in books but can only be learned from seafaring itself, so the moral life requires that we be virtuous. The virtues are not just the moral equivalent of techniques of good sailing; rather, they are the way as well as the end of goodness and happiness. If we assume, however, as so many of the textbooks would have believe, that problems and quandaries are the whole subject matter of ethics and that the decisions we make are the purpose of morality, then we are likely to interpret even the virtues in the same superficial, utilitarian way in which we already think of values. But if we pay heed to the ancient sources, we will recognize that the virtues are related to a much thicker and deeper moral reality. We will see the virtues as the qualities of character that we need in order to steer our way through the complicated and mysterious sea of morality into which we all have been placed. For such journeying, a pocketful of values is neither sufficient ballast nor a substitute for sails, compass, or sextant.