First Blog

  Your Time is Limited Each of us is given only so much time. There are no timeouts for mistakes, though no worthwhile life can be lived without them. It is best not to waste too much of it, though we’re all guilty as charged. Waste of time - examples ·         Repetition of useless endeavors. ·         Spending too much time on problems you can’t solve. ·         Creating problems you don’t need or want. ·         Obsessively being materialistic. ·         Obsessively chasing mere status. ·         Making malicious harm, including revenge. ·         Dwelling on past mistakes. They happen. Good uses of time – examples ·         Take care of your physical plant through diet and exercise. ·         Taking care of your children, giving them your best time. ·         Loving life and giving love. ·         Reflecting on life, relaxing, appreciating. ·         Counting your blessings. ·         Learning and understanding new things, mistakes incl

  You must live in all time zones, past, present, and future. If you live only for today, there is no tomorrow. If you live in the future, there is no today. If you live in the past, time ceases.

  Field of Dreams We know it well. Picture this field as a vast plane, stretching to infinity. In it is contained all your hopes, ideas, wishes, aspirations, yearnings, and desires. Even faith has a presence. Many visit often. Some live there. Only a few have forgotten where it is. This field is special, part fantasy, part spiritual, part a plan, and part the solution. It is the place where dreams meet reality. Each of us sees this field stretching before our present and future. For each, there are hopes, even prayers for those dreams to come true.   Your field of dreams is a fertile plain, lush with flowers and grasses, but also with spines and thorns. because not everything growing there is what you want.   To be avoided are those most tempting, the dreams of excess. We should thus call this short essay Your Field of Dreams Parents often say, “Sweet dreams” to their children on tucking them in. Before that, you dreamt of having children, healthy and able, good and happy. Befo

  On the job, I wasted much time. In retirement, time is wasting me. 😉

Time is a really big four-letter word.  We talk about it, write about it, measure it, but really no one quite knows what it is.  Consider by analogy the fish living in water.  Does it know or recognize the water.  For the fish, water is almost unrecognized and surely unknown. Like time is for us. It is not known whether time has a direction.   This means we don’t know if time is reversible.   Most think time does have the proverbial arrow – no reversal.   Physicists are especially interested in time, and what it means. Railroads live by it.   Airlines mostly ignore it. Doctors never heard of it. Sometimes what a thing means is reflected in how we use it or modify it, as with an adjective. For time, there is a long list of at least fifty modifiers.   Here are some of them. They betray both our confusion and our understanding of time.   Look at all our needs for this basic quantity/concept in our lives. ample   first   long   olden   short  

Imagine finally having time to do what you want, but then find there is nothing you want to do.

Feeling pretty sharp today?  Gray cells a-buzzin'?  I've got some problems for you.  The problems can be approached at all levels.  But they are not easy.   A. Suppose you are asked to contribute to a 100 year time-capsule, with the directive it should be something beyond a picture, joke, or comment of the day.  What will you write?  It can be a prediction, a state of being, world conditions, problems solved or unsolved by then, etc.* B. Suppose you have all the power of congress, the President, and the courts for one day. You can pass one law. Your experiment is to describe the law, its desired future impact, and what could go wrong with your law. C. You journey back in time one hundred years, more or less – your choice.  You can do anything. Pass a law, start a war, cure a disease, kill a person, save a person…  Make your selection and predict how the world will have changed at your now-time. *In many ways you operate your own time capsule(s), not for 100 years ah

Schrödinger’s cat* can be expanded to Schrödinger’s universe .   In fact, we could well reason that the universe is, in fact, a rather large probability distribution of entities. Even the smallest probabilities are a part of this – such as those of the cat’s wave equation.   Simplify this notion by asking, “If there is a universe and nobody observes it, does it exist as we observe it?” The simple answer is no, but the deeper answer is this implies time may not exist.  Time may well be an observational illusion of a particular path within this distribution. The path creates its own physics of its unique universe, with the common factor being gravity between them all. This becomes the particular universe observed by us with the path creating its own dimension of time. Bottom line: Time a path-wise artifact.  It is difficult to unshackle thinking from process and therefore from  time .   * From Wikipedia: Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a  radioacti

  To Donald: A sweet tweet is worth more than a thousand trivial tweets. Advocates of “cookoo” theories often chime the loudest and are always on time. ______________ That Pesky Time . On the time travel paradox.   One of the most frequently applied scenarios against the possibility of time travel is the “grandfather” paradox.   Here it is. Right now, you travel back in time with a pistol to see your grandfather walking in a park long before he has even met your grandmother.   You shoot and kill him. Therefore, grandpa never meets grandma, and thus you cannot exist to travel back in time. ( This where the time travel paradox usually ends. But it goes on… )   Now then, since you don’t exist you couldn’t have traveled back in time to kill grandpa. Thus grandpa does meet grandma, and eventually you are born.   But now you can travel back to make the kill.    This repeats ad infinitum. What seems to be created is a time-conflict. Kill, no kill, kill, no kill, …   Doesn’t