The Bending of Time

"Spacetime is usually explained by asking you to imagine something flat but pliant - a mattress, say, or a sheet of stretched rubber- on which is resting a heavy round object, such as an iron ball. The weight of the iron ball causes the material on which it is sitting to stretch and sag slightly. This is roughly analogous to the effect that a massive object such as the sun (the iron ball) has on spacetime (the material): it stretches and curves and warps it. Now if you roll a smaller ball across the sheet it tries to go in a straight line as required by Newton's laws of motion, but as it nears the massive object and the slope of the sagging fabric, it rolls downward, inelutably drawn to the more massive object. This is gravity - a product of the bending of spacetime." (126)

This theory was proposed by Einstein, arguably one of the most influential and best known scientists ever. The reason I wanted to blog about this is not just because it's an interesting proposal, but the idea of curiosity. Where would we be without curiosity? If people were never curious, we would unarguably not be where we are today. If people were never curious we would never had had the invention of fire, or the wheel, or the cell phone. The question 'what if?' is the driving force behind the social and economical evolution of the human race.

I guess by realizing how curious Einstein was is what led him to his success, much like most other successful people. These types of people often ask 'what if we did this to make that better?'. I think that society has done a good job at ramming the question 'what if' into our heads. 'What if you could make your life easier', 'what if you could look better', 'what if you could save money', 'what if you could make more money'. All of these questions promise the idea of success or happiness in one way or another, and the curiosity behind the question is what drives us to make a change to something in some shape or form.

You're a ball of energy

"You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame 7 x 10^18 Joules of potential energy-enough to explode with the force of thirty hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out" (122)

In Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" I keep learning random facts. It's not the story line (if you can call it that) that makes the book interesting, it's the interesting facts like this one that stand out. After reading this one, it made me wonder why if we have so much potential energy, why I sometimes have trouble staying awake in class. If I could find out a way to get some of this energy to work in my favour that would be ideal. Another thought it triggered was that if everything (living and not living) had such a huge amount of potential energy, why it is such an issue to turn off a light when you're not in a room. In todays society where one day we have cell phones that can only make a call to the next where cell phones are mini computers, we can't seem to figure out how to get a bit of this potential energy from everything and anything and make better use of it.

Supernova

In reading my non-fiction book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, he has made several intriguing statements. The first I found when reading about supernovae. He said a supernova "occurs when a giant star, much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns... 'like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once.' " (30).

I decided to blog about this because trying to imagine what one hydrogen bomb can do or what it's like is difficult enough, but to imagine a trillion hydrogen bombs is completely inconceivable. He goes on to say that "if a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners." (30) If you think of how long a single light year is (about six trillion miles), for one single explosion to reach that far and cause damage can seem unimaginable; but 500 light years is even more beyond belief. As suggested in 'The Educated Imagination', being humans we can only imagine what we have seen or experienced on earth; the human experience. What goes on in the universe is much bigger than we are and can seem completely ridiculous on such a large scale. The truth is, we only occupy a microscopic place in the universe even though sometimes it seems everything revolves around life here. Bryson has made this clear with several examples in his book and this was one of the ones I found the most intriguing.

The reason for poetry

"There is no direct address in literature: it isn't what you say but how it's said that's important there. The literary writer isn't giving information, either about a subject or about his state of mind: he's trying to let something take on its own form, whether it be a poem or play or novel or whatever... That's also why it's no use telling the poet that he ought to write in a different way so you can understand him better." (p24)

I never thought about poetry this way. I was always frustrated when it came to reading poems because I could never comprehend what they were trying to get across. It makes sense now because what Frye is saying is that it's how someone words things to express or convey certain themes that intrigue people and make them want to read it. If someone were to write about love or sadness or happiness and just said 'I am very happy' there is no point in reading it or writing it in the first place. Frye is saying that poets allow themselves to step outside of the box and use their imagination for the poem to "take on its own form." Maybe the reason we find that a lot of poems don't make sense because of people's state of mind behind the poem. Last year in English class was a perfect example when we did the train of thought writing. People's thoughts would stretch from the homework they had to do or the fact that they missed the bus that morning to what they were going to have for dinner. People's thoughts are always jumbled and trying to sort that out and control it would be impossible. It's possible that due to this confusion it comes across in the literature we read.

Imagination vs. Experience

“[Imagination is] the power of constructing possible models of human experience.” (p.8)


I think Frye is saying that since we are human and we have the ability of consciousness we can imagine another world of things that we want. He goes on to say "In the world of imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens". I think he is just showing a contrast of how we can think of things and not do them because of our level of consciousness. I noticed that he only said "possible models of human experience". I believe the reason he only said human experience is because we can only see in our imagination a humans perspective and nothing else and you can't truly imagine the perspective of another animal because they don't have this consciousness or the ability of imagination. I agree with what Frye is saying because if you really think about it when you imagine something, most of the time it is something of human desire or something you have heard happen and you want to happen to yourself. For example, you could imagine what winning the lottery is like because you've heard of other human's experiences of this happening.