Now to the supercrank. Yes, it gets very, very cranky from here on in, so shields up!  Sanity in check!

Well, we've got the postulate that space without matter expands, and the larger the region of space without matter, the faster it expands.  So, matter slows or stops this expansion.  Expansion is self-limiting as it gets fast enough to rip matter from virtual particles or generate enough gamma radiation that particle pairs are created spontaneously, this increases the density of matter in a nearly uniform flashover, and expansion slows precipitously until space can sort itself out again into regions of matter and not-matter. 

Note that nowhere in there was a big bang.  I'm not against a big bang, really I'm not.  I'm not a steady-state universer by any stretch of the imagination.  But the proposed future of the universe in an accelerating expansion model looks, to me, suspiciously like the inflationary universe.  So I wondered if this flashover was all that was needed. If the universe was a series of expansions and sudden stops. 

Then I wondered a little more.  I thought about the current theories of gravity, mostly those which involve the Higgs Boson, and some more which involve gravity waves.  I can understand it to some extent, but I keep getting confused with inertia.  I suppose it has to do with frames of reference, the actual substance of relativity which gave rise to all of modern physics both as we understand it and as we use it.  So, normally I wouldn't touch it.  Normally. 

So, what about inertia and momentum?  Push an object and it gets moving.  How does this work with Higgs Bosons and gravity waves? Does it cause an imbalance in Higgs Bosons?  Is a gravity wave put in motion? 

Or could I try and dig something up out of my cranky, cranky vacuum pressure postulate? 


Let's dig. 


What if we postulate that this abhorrence of matter can be very, very local?  That trying to move matter from one region of the vacuum to another takes energy.  Fair enough.  We've got some inertia, I suppose, if it takes energy to move matter, fighting against the tendency of the vacuum to want to exclude matter and expand. But what about momentum?  

What if the same thing happens in reverse to vacuum that matter leaves?  What if some energy is released when this happens? 

If these balanced, then the energy required to enter the next region of the vacuum would equal the energy required to leave the last region, and unless you added or subtracted energy, that's all you'd have.  Any change in this equation would force a change in the momentum of the object. 

But what if the vacuum we're getting near is already suppressed a bit by other matter, or not expanding as quickly? 
Then the amount of energy required to push it down is less, and the equation is imbalanced. So, if you suddenly have more energy in this equation we have: an increase in momentum.  

What if the opposite happened?  Then you'd imbalance the other way, and we'd have a decrease in momentum. 

Does this sound a bit like gravity?

Pretty cranky, eh?  Well, it gets worse.

Next installment: the vacuum-mass model and relativity (speeds near that of light in a vacuum)

Now, the previous entry on "A Vacuum Abhors Nature" had some pretty bizarre speculation. 

Let's get crankier.

Just so folks know, I'm not trying to push "push" gravity or "photon" or "shadow" gravity.

For those that might not know, these work on a premise of not-pull but push (as in you are being pushed down, not pulled towards a gravitational body, and the reason you are pushed more towards the ground is that you are "shaded" on that side from the push of the entire rest of the universe). 

So, what I'm going to say: not, I repeat not push gravity.  Also not quintessence, or "electrogravity" or any other cranky gravity theory.  This one's all my own. 


Now, previously I'd postulated that there was a possibility that the vacuum of space acts as a negative pressure force, or inverse gas.  This (if the effect was not uniform and universal, as in a lot of cosmological constant scenarios) might also account for dark-matter profiles in galaxies.  But what about ellipticals, and others that have no dark matter, or little dark matter?  

Here goes: a galaxy in a cluster needs to be near the edge or periphery of the cluster (measured as center of mass) to be itself affected by vacuum pressure; within a cluster, the effect is lessened (as in the dark matter profile in a single galaxy not in the center of a cluster, dark matter falls off towards the center) so that ellipticals effectively lose all of the high-speed high-temperature gas and stars that they otherwise keep if their dark-matter profile does not change.  To make an elliptical, send it through the center of a cluster.  This tapers its dark matter profile, the gas spins out into the cluster, and the galaxy adheres more to what we would expect from a straight non-dark-matter profile.  In other words, ellipticals are not old; they are visitors to the center of clusters. 

Therefore, we should expect ellipticals and the hot gas in a cluster they occupy to have a similar profile. That is, the gas should have a profile similar to what would happen if you took all the dark matter from a spiral: what would spin out if this profile changed catastrophically?

Also, the larger the cluster, the higher the ratio of ellipticals (there is more chance that a single galaxy within the cluster will encounter the precipitous drop in dark matter profile by passing through or near the center of the cluster). 

I don't know if either of these is true, but either would serve as confirmation or refutation of some of these ideas.  There may be (almost certainly) other reasons for both; but the confirmation of these predictions would at least possibly serve to show the idea might have a shred of merit.

Next week: truly fruity craziness as inertia and mass are tackled using outgrowths of this same set of ideas.

==========================

After doing a quick search, it looks like all of the above conjectures are borne out (ellipticals found more in larger clusters, intergalactic medium in clusters resembling intragalactic medium in isolated spirals, isolated galaxies more likely spirals).  I honestly did not know any of this before making the above conjectures.  All I knew is that apparently galaxies and clusters share the dark matter "shell" profile. 

I'll be the first to admit I have a few, some, no, many cranky ideas.  That's not to say I'm a crank, just that I deal in crank.  I'm a crank dealer, not a crank head. 

Anyway, it was interesting to read some things that go towards the theory of mind I'm somewhat infatuated with.

The idea that a lot of what flies around in our head is very similar, but has a labeling system, or addressing system that keeps it all in line.  That is, your musing about what your friend said a few minutes ago is distinct from him speaking right now, but only because both are processed in the same region with different tags.

If you confuse the second with the first, it's an hallucination.  If you confuse the first with the second, it's dissociation and possibly psychosis. 

All of that just from a file system gone wrong.

If you think about memory, processing, recall, and analysis as all operations just using different files, you can really toss around some cranky ideas.

A recent occurrence and a long distant one are separated by this file system.  And by "recent" I mean "still flooding in and processing."  If current continuity memory (memory designed to keep you conscious and in the moment) ever got conflated with long-ago memory...

Recent labeled as long-ago: deja-vu.
Long ago labeled as recent: dementia.

Monologues that we have with ourselves (many people don't speak them out loud; I do) versus actual heard conversations. 

External labeled as internal: delusional thinking, assuming people can read your mind, paranoia
Internal labeled as external: hearing voices, delusional thinking, schizophrenia

Any time we mix up external and internal we run into delusional thinking.  


Now, I run across a researcher who says there is a sub-processor that runs in the unconscious portion of the brain, and it has an attention getting system for when it runs across something significant.  It can set a flag saying "insight! Come and get it!"  Think about what could happen if this goes wrong.  Insights not labeled as such means someone devoid of intuition.  Everything labeled as insight leads to delusional thinking, everyday situations seem infinitely significant, paranoia as completely wrongly associated ideas are given more confidence and significance than they merit, and so on. 

This (last version) would explain why people feel so insightful on marijuana yet also are capable of developing intense paranoia.  Both are facets of the same mistaken processor result flagging. 

Again, cranky ideas. 

One of the things I've tossed around is the "reheating" event described in Inflationary cosmologies to account for the final temperature plus the final distribution of matter after the Big Bang. 

I'd approached this one of several ways, after going into ideas about Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and wondering what, if anything, the "negative pressure" postulated as a possible parameter in space time would look like. 

Well, then I'd heard about evaporating black holes.  Apparently if you have two virtual particles, and they are separated in short order, one can actually make them "real."  In other words, a force strong enough to separate the ephemeral twinned virtual particles in a brief enough span of time could create matter, in a sense, if only twinned matter eventually doomed to annihilation (matter and anti-matter being created equally). 

So, what if the inflationary event caused new matter, if it indeed did expand as quickly as we've postulated.  Would we need a "decay of the scalar" or would this particle creation by tearing asunder virtual particles be enough to account for reheating?  

...and what if, just what if, it turns out the event (the reheating/particle-pair creation) was the event that stopped inflation?  Inflation would be self-limiting in that case, to a speed at which it eventually created particles and effectively stopped itself.

...this would also (potentially) mean that  matter and expansion are abhorrent to one-another, in other words, where you find expansion, you don't find matter, and vice-versa. 

So, if we don't find expansion near matter, it might mean that space behaves like an inverse gas, "negative pressure" that expands more rapidly with increasing volume.  If matter limited this expansion, space would become a foamy mixture of large areas of expanding negative pressure and matter limiting this expansion. 


It might look, and behave, a bit like the profile of Dark Matter.  


A lot of kooky conjecture, to be sure.  But it does fascinate me enough to cause me to return once in a great while to this thought experiment.  Especially since one of the possible consequences is not a Big Bang, but a series of Big Flashes: universes that empty enough to accelerate to the point that it flashes over to a massive creation of matter, and the cycle begins again, meaning additionally that (perhaps beyond our horizons) there might be "fossil" black holes crushed from the acceleration of space and lying remnant from universes previous to ours. 

 The universe is a complicated place, to be sure.  But for a moment every now and then I try and speculate on what might be, what we know.  For instance, the question of "what would happen if you shined a flashlight at the speed of light" is moot, because at the speed of light everything collapses into a horizon: all of your existence in the universe, and your view of it, is an infinitely thin "plate" effectively, if that: more than likely all of your experience, motion, everything is a point, a singularity of experience.  Given this undifferentiated "ball" is it any wonder a photon can interfere with itself?  


I've always wondered if we could tease out of a paired photon something of its future: fire a photon into a beam-splitter, let one go on it's way towards a detectable event and keep the other behind, reading from it instantaneously what the entire potential future of that twinned photon is. Even if you had to wait until the traveler was near or at the event you wanted to detect, you'd still get the information twice as fast than if you had to wait for a return signal.  

 I've been considering writing fiction.  The problem is, I never finished a story.  I drew comics, so the "end" of a story wasn't as much a consideration.  I often let them unfold as they wished, but I had only vague outlines of where they would go. 

The fiction I've been considering is somewhat in the fantasy genre, but not like a lot of other fantasy worlds.  It's a world where magic has rather simple rules, but the consequences of it and the outgrowth of people studying it has far reaching repercussions.  It's complicated, derived from a relatively simple set of rules. 

It's, in other words, a more "scientific" view of magic.  Takes a lot of the mystery and romance away, I know.  Which is part of the reason it's sat on the shelf for so many years. IF there is something knowable, I can't just wave my hand and say "Uknowable!" I have to consider what might be in this area, how one would find out, what would be the consequences to this information. 

Then there's the question of what would happen with this concept.  I only have one concrete character in mind so far, and he doesn't even have a name.  

...and the world is rife with wildlife, effects, long-term consequences and terrain features - but no real nations or even tribes yet.  

This is really something backwards from what I usually do.  My usual tack is to Tolkien it up a bit and develop a culture, language, and so-on before I go about making anything different about the world. 

But this has been rattling around my head for nearly ten years now.  Maybe longer, might go back to '98 or '97.  

Long story short (ha-ha) I can't come up with a beginning or ending, or a middle, but I know the underpinnings. 

Now we know what we have to do. Get yer marching shoes.

Using lasers and microwaves on zirconia
Paper
Microwave laser in a chip:
Paper
Laser sintering of metal for manufacture:
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Metal Injection Molding using a matrix; various version discussed, problems of removing matrix in pre-step to sintering.
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"Squirt-Shape" plastic extrusion from CAD for artificial limbs
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A combination of an extruder, metal in extrudable-quickly-cooling matrix and on-site sintering pass with a microwave laser embedded near the extrusion tip (following it perhaps, or integrated) could allow for deployable one-pass part manufacture. Possibly even on-site production of repair of complex shapes, reducing the need for a parts inventory and reducing transport and machining costs. Parts libraries can be transmitted, meaning one device could be used in multiple environments limited only by information passed and material available.

Plastics require only the extrusion step, metal parts require the extrusion-and-sintering pass. Problems include issues with shrinkage of materials in metal sintering, ranging from 5% to 40% part shrinkage, making an extrusion-and-sintering approach problematic.

Cements can be extruded in larger passes by larger machines, meaning that a scaled-up system could be used for builiding or building component manufacture, ideally entailing multiple systems synchronized through swarming behavior to complete a building. Only suitable initially for single-floor designs, with floors having to be placed otherwise to go above a single storey, unless special materials that extrude at higher tempuratures and cool rapidly could be employed for flooring manufacture, say very stiff and rapidly cooled plastics.

Extruders ideally should have a nozzle-heating mechanism and a cooling mechanism post-nozzle, to allow for extrusion of stiff plastic materials and immediate tempering.

The outcome of this is a generic manufacturing robot, perhaps three types. One for plastics, one for metal parts, one for building materials. Combining the plastic and metal machining process allows for gross circuit board manufacture, and manufacture of electronic componenets.

More complicated materials (such as solenoids, transistors, and the like) might be possible with the right kind of micromachining and nanoassembly. Generally, the call would be for extruder CAD/CAM devices that are scale dependant, but capable of cooperation to create complex designs, dynamically assigning manufacturing and assembly duties between themselves as well as being mobile.

An unfinished painting of a Suchomimas spp.
( Suchomimas, not to be confused with Simosuchus )

A little critter I drew up and put in my gallery...this is described as a "pug-nosed" crocodilian, and since I couldn't find any other renderings other than a skeleton, I thought I'd take a whack at it. ( Simosuchus )