Tag: relativity

Posted on

Betwixt and Between

Island Time 2022

As you read this article I am traveling. That would usually not be considered an interesting statement on it’s own. If I said that I was traveling to London and Paris and Rome, it might acquire a romantic cachet. Traveling to Egypt or India is still more exotic; I have been to the former, but not the latter.

If I were to tell you that I was wandering the astral plane, or traversing the rivers of time itself, you’d either think me a fiction writer or a madman-though some small number of you might take me at my word.

But this trip is a simple vacation to a rather pedestrian area of the Florida Gulf Coast; one which I return to nigh annually at this time of year as it coincides with other interests that make such a visit affordable. Excepting two postponements during the pandemic, this has been on my August calendar for the past several years, and likely remains so.

It is this occasion of locomotion that inspired me to delve into the subject matter of this week’s article, namely that of liminal spaces and the use to which they can be put in imagining our magic.

The liminal space is that undefinable point between one thing and another thing. It’s a border that is not marked on the map. It exists in space and in time, in object and artifice, and in mind, if not in body. It is part of neither, but joining both. By this nature of poetic non-existence, it provides an opportunity to draw power from the fabric of the universe, send messages across the aethers, and walk between the worlds.

The crossroads and hedgerow are traditionally liminal locations. Mountaintops, the banks of rivers and streams, and the shores of lakes and seas also qualify. Cemeteries and graveyards, being places where the living go to meet with the dead, are ripe places of the in-between world.

Temporally midnight in modern society is considered between one day and the next, though it is not always the Witching Hour referred to in writings on the subject. Cultures like the ancient Celts and Hebrews reckoned the day as from sunset to sunset, so these times, along with the dawn which is the middle of that day, become points of special significance.

The eve of the High Sabbat Beltane is considered to have a special nature, and is called Walpurgisnacht in central European tradition. Midsummer’s eve opens the doorway not just to Oberon and Titania but to a host of spirits and devils. Hallowe’en is connected to the Samhain ritual of the Celtic people, and given similar power. The Winter Solstice and the Equinoxes were likewise marked and celebrated, though lore regarding their status as liminal gateways is less extant. These are pinions the Wheel of The Year turns on, and their importance goes back to our days in the caves.

Of course, sometimes the magic needs making and the crossroads at midnight is not a desirable place to be, and it’s weeks to any of the High Sabbats. The doorway of your house, apartment, or room constitutes a working liminal space. In our experience of the world, we are always now… never in the past or future, but always in the present moment. That makes time itself something of a crossroads.

But when we travel, we also experience liminal spaces. It’s important to be aware of this, because we can use those energies. If we are not aware, then we are also susceptible to having our own energy altered, sapped, or diverted as we encounter these places.

The most liminal space I can think of in the modern world is the airport. It’s not a real destination. No one is going to the airport to be there in any way other than temporary. Either you are going because you are leaving for someplace else, or you have arrived from someplace else and want to leave the airport.

The energy of an airport is chaos. So many people want to be elsewhere. People are nervous, frustrated, homesick, longing, exhausted, and sometimes just plain lost. If you’ve done any amount of air travel, you know what I am talking about.

oskar-kadaksoo-DDBDkz0p918-unsplash
Despite the vast number of hours I have spent waiting for flights, I’ve never snapped the requisite “waiting for a flight” photo. Maybe I’ll do that this time. Until then: Photo by Oskar Kadaksoo on Unsplash

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports. One of my former occupations had me flying around the planet every couple of weeks. Thankfully this was when I was younger, and the security was less intense, but it was still generally a place of unease. If I was departing on a mission, my mind was on the next stop, what time I would have to get my bearings when I landed, and what problems awaited me there. If I was returning home, I was impatient to get on the plane and get going, even if it was 8 to 12 hours in the air.

Often I would arrive some hours before the flight, owing to hotel check-out times and rental car returns. After you’ve shopped duty free, had dinner, and as many drinks at the airport bar as you could and safely make it on the plane, there’s not much to do but sit and think.

This was pre-Internet. There was no Wi-Fi (free or otherwise) and you might only find a TV in the bar. Even if there had been Wi-Fi, my company laptop was a rarity among air travelers in those days. So if I’d finished that novel I stuck in my luggage, my only choice was to people watch (which is not nearly as interesting the 45th time) or retreat into my own mind for a while.

I spent a lot of that time contemplating the nature of reality. If you’re weird, and you’re bored, that’s a thing. While not necessarily working with magic, I did develop a lot of my personal ideas about how energy works, how it can be manipulated, and the relationship between perception and reality. And a good deal of that was related to ideas about traveling betwixt and between said perceived realities.

Adjacent to the airport is another liminal space, and that is the airplane itself. Aside from boarding and unboarding (which are also liminal times at the boundary of the flight) the plane is almost constantly in motion, even though you are sitting still. “High into the sky, moving without moving” seems a fitting snippet for all manner of spell crafting. You are above the clouds. You are near to the stars. You sail the heavens in a silver bird. All wonderfully evocative and poetic thoughts for making magic.

Closer to ground, of course, are trains and buses, and the depots that they stop at. In the USA this manner of travel is less common than it used to be, outside of commuter traffic. But there’s no reason to ignore the potential on the subway. You are tunneling into the bowels of the earth, going underground and underwater, in the belly of a metal snake. In those darkened tunnels you may find displaced trolls and gnomes, raised from their natural slumber by the incessant clickety-clack of the passing cars.

A personal automobile is just as easily seen as a space between, but if you are the driver, I discourage any complicated working. As a passenger though, you can enjoy the ride, traveling without moving. You are pulling at the edge of the world around you, dragging it along, pushing it up in front of you. That’s the only real way that you are going to get that big car through the tiny tunnel you see ahead on the road.

Traveling shifts our perception of time and space. Indeed, how is it that the tunnel entrance grows larger as we near it, and then gets small again as we drive out the other side. Logic tells us that the tunnel is always the same size, it is simply our perception of it that changes. Things only look smaller because they are farther away. Yet no one is really quite sure why light behaves like that, or our brains translate it that way.

Light does strange things when you are moving. Einstein (sorry, we’re going to be doing maths again) posed his thought experiment of the railway carriage to explain the idea of relative observation of phenomenon. It goes like this.

Say you are on a moving train and you drop something heavy out the window. You will see it drop straight down.

Meanwhile, someone else is standing on the side of the track, and sees the object drop down at a forward angle. So far this doesn’t seem too weird. After all, the person in the train is moving forward at the same rate that the item is moving forward as it drops. From the point of view of the train rider, the object goes straight down.

But because it was moving forward when it left your hand, it still has the forward momentum of the train, and will until it drops to the ground. So someone watching from the side will see it going forward and down at an angle. If we plot both observations together we get a right triangle.

The nifty thing about right triangles is that they are subject to the rules of Pythagoras, expressed as the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. If you fell asleep in Freshman Geometry, the hypotenuse is the longest side, in this case, our angled descent.

Now we could measure the distance that the object fell from the train window, and measure how far forward it travelled before it contacted the ground and stopped, multiply each of those by themselves, and then add them together, and take the square root of that number to determine how long the long side is. That’s a useful tool in surveying and working out how high something is in the sky, and I recommend learning it. In this case, though, our eyes will tell us what we want to know.

The path of the object falling at an angle is longer than the path of the object that dropped straight down.

But the object traveled the longer path in the same amount of time that it dropped the shorter distance straight down from the train.

Now, we can go invoke the same logic that gets us through that road tunnel up ahead, and say, well, what was really happening is that it was traveling the longer distance. It was the perception of the person on the train that was wrong.

But that perception is 100% accurate, from the context of the train. So how do we get around two different distances being traveled at the same speed in the same amount of time. That’s physically impossible.

Simple. You just alter time.

You may want to sit down for this. Take a sip of water. It gets bumpy.

raliway experiment
When one is late for their flight and desperately searching the interwebs for “railway experiment” to illustrate this portion of the text as the nifty demonstrative infographic didn’t get done, you may find the strangest things. For instance, the first passenger railway carriage, clearly modified from a stage coach, was call the Experiment. I don’t know if anyone riding inside it perchanced to drop their watch from the window, but at the staggering speed of 15 miles per hour, the same strange alteration of time and space would occur according to Einstein.

When you are on the train, you experience time passing at a slower rate than the person standing on the siding. So time for you passes slow enough for the object to fall along that longer angled path, exactly as you watch it travel the shorter path to the ground.

Since Einstein, we’ve become accustomed to the term “space-time” or “space-time continuum” if you want to be fancy. Basically what this says is that time is a dimension of space, just like length and depth and height. So in the universe we inhabit in our waking state, things are left or right, up or down, here or there, and past or future, relative to our position.

Space gets curved by gravity. We’re still not entirely sure how, but it works that way. We have proof of this in the recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, showing light from distant galaxies being distorted by the gravity of a closer star. It takes longer to get through curved space than “flat space” so the light we see gets bent.

Gravity is a factor of mass. Something really big can bend space, and since time is connected to space, well it gets bent too. Mass can come from large amounts of matter, but it can also come from smaller amounts of matter that are moving. This is because energy itself has mass, and something that is moving has energy.

So on the train the amount of energy present from it’s motion is slightly bending space-time. Bending it enough so that when you dropped that rock out the window you saw time pass slower than the person standing on the siding.

So when you are traveling betwixt and between on an airplane over the Atlantic, you are in fact, time traveling. You are living at a slower time than the friends you left on the ground behind you and you will be moments younger than them when you land.

The faster you go, the slower time gets. Of course, the faster you go, the more energy you have, and the greater your mass. This causes space to curve as well as time, and explains why, at least as far as our little universe is concerned, you can’t exceed light speed. The faster you go, the more bent space becomes, and the slower time passes. Eventually you reach a point that you can’t get there from here, and that is the lightspeed barrier.

At least not in this universe. Which is why scientists and science fiction have created holes in the universe that open onto other universes, alternate realities, and “hyperspace” where the gravitational wall doesn’t apply. Hyperspace and wormholes are the ultimate in liminal space. They can be reached, accessed, traveled through, and yet never inconveniently partake of the local laws of physics.

Witches have been using these things for eons. Wandering in Faerie has many similarities with these non-Newtonian spaces. Years pass in a matter of days. Castles, kingdoms, and entire worlds exist through a hole in a hedge. Relative size is not fixed. One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small.

Look you for the openings at the edges;
Places where water comes from nowhere;
The way not seen in passing,
but only glimpsed when looking behind.

At least it will give you something to do when you’re flight is delayed and you’re stuck in Denver.

Thank you for reading this week’s article. Rest assured I will return from my bit of Island Time to present more conundrums for you next week.

Please Share and Enjoy !

Posted on

It’s Full of Stars

Saturn Sunrise

This morning, when you got up, everything you saw, touched, heard, tasted, and smelled was made of tiny atoms that were formed in the dark fiery heart of a giant dying star untold billions of years ago.

Those atoms are clouds of circling particles, that are made up of clouds of circling particles, that are probably also made of clouds of circling particles over and over and over.

It’s turtles all the way down.

The particles aren’t really particles. They’re packets of energy, moving through space, in ways that cause invisible forces to shape the nature of space to create our ordinary visible world.

This is not magic. This is science. At least, this is among the leading current theories on the nature of the universe.

So if you have someone giving you a hard time about believing in invisible spirits that influence your life and alter your destiny, ask them to show you a box of gravity.

There is nothing new under the sun. Or in it. Although the sun itself is reckoned to be about 4.6 billion years old, it too, is made from the bones of dead worlds. We’re all in someone’s afterlife here.

And around that other sun, the mother sun, that gave birth to us all, there may have spun many worlds as well. And on the surfaces of those worlds may have been water, and oxygen, and amino acids and condominiums and car parks.

We’ll never meet them. We’ll never know how they felt or the songs they sang or if they cried when it rained. Because they’ve all gone down to dust and the dust has come back up as us.

Cosmic time can kick you for a loop.

On the left is one of countless galaxies visible to the instruments of modern technology. It represents billions of billions of billions of worlds, each possibly full of richly diverse life forms that are similar to, and vastly different, from what has grown on our little speck of damp rock circling an unspectacular star in a quiet backwater of our own galaxy. The lovely spiral arms bely a terrible secret. At the heart of most galaxies, we think, is a monsterous black hole, swallowing entire star systems into an impenetrable void. One theory holds that our entire universe will eventually end up in such a state, when the energy of the Big Bang is no longer able to withstand the inward pull of gravity. The opposite fate is just as terrifying; a future where every particle of every particle drifts so far apart that no energy remains at all, and the rest is darkness.
This is the much shown Hubble Deep Field image. This shows galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies (many of which may already be extinct, since the light left them before the dinosaurs were born). Each galaxy may be like the one above, with untold numbers of life-creating planets. And this represents a part of the sky equal to the size of a tennis ball viewed at the other end of a football field. There are roughly 24 million times more galaxies than the 3000 or so here.

For example, the vast majority of humanity has lived and died in the last 30,000 years or so. Of them, we remember the names of princes and potentates, and a few laureates, visionaries, and healers.

And that’s it.

The further back we go, the fewer we can name. Past about 7000 years or so, it’s totally anonymous. They may have been called Gilgamesh or Noah or Hermes or Lucifer but that’s what we called them later. No one really knows their names, and their stories are doubtless confused and embellished.

We don’t know the name of that Sorceror on the wall of Troi Freres, or the artisan that lavished so much time and care on shaping the tiny Venus of Willendorf. The builders of Catal Huyuk and Gobekli Tepe are abstractions. We know only the little that remains. A few bones, some stone tools, and then oblivion.

Back along that path the family turns into the ancestors, and the ancestors into the legends, and the legends into the myths. And past the myths, we are going out beyond Saturn, beyond the old Titans, into the realm of the outer dark.

It’s a cold, dark, and largely empty universe that might as well be infinite because we can’t really work out how to get outside it.

Science can’t even agree on that. So far theories suggest three possible outcomes.

It’s either an expanding universe that will keep expanding until everything is so far away from everything that all those particles of particles of particles cease to glow with any residual spark and the entire thing becomes nothing.

Or it’s a collapsing universe that expands just so far before the gravity within it starts to overcome the initial energy of its creation and everything falls back down into itself, crushed into an infinitely dense and infinitely tiny dot. Again, essentially nothing.

And some argue that it’s an oscillating universe where cycles of expansion and contraction go on and on and on forever, where each previous universe is erased from existence by being crushed into a point so dense and so small that it erupts into the next one.

Does any of this sound a tad magical to you? Mythical at the very least? There’s a few similar stories in old Sanskrit. The kalachakra, or Time Wheel, oscillates universes that are born, grow old, and die, just as humans do, and as with humans, the universe is reborn into the next order of life.

And that one about the universe suddenly springing into existence in a flash of light. . . well, the scientists call that the Big Bang. You can find it Genesis if you read carefully.

The world was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Let there be light.

This is about energy expanding into the void of space.

What the Kabbalah expresses as emanations of the divine into the material; the bolt of lightning comes down through the realms of the Tree of Life to illuminate the mundane worlds.

This action was a conscious withdrawing of the Divine Intelligence to create something that was Other than itself.

The light was divided from the darkness.

The Divine Intelligence created the universe in order to know itself.

And the morning and the evening were the first day.

Time started. And we’ve been trying to understand it ever since.

In this image by Stonehenge Dronescapes Photography shared on Facebook, we can see the sky as our ancient ancestors experienced it. Without the light pollution of modern industrialization, or even the fire that kept predators away at night, the universe we inhabit is very much present. It is not hard to imagine seeing Indra dancing above the horizon, or the plumed serpent Quetzlcoatl rising up into the night sky. Now we are only able to experience such awe in places like the deep desert, where technology doesn’t intrude.
An artificial starscape is projected on the ceiling of the Gobekli Tepe museum. This site in modern-day Turkey is possibly 7000 years older than the megaliths at Stonehenge, but seems to have some similar purpose as both temple and timepiece. Much recent archaeology suggests that multitudes gathered at this site over a period of 1500 years, to feast, trade, and get intoxicated. The remains of ancient beer is found here among the animal bones, suggesting that the fermentation of grain was a key part of the site’s activity. One theory has been put forth that this desire for mind-altering grog is what led to domestication of grains, and not the other way around. Fascinating if true, it makes our remote ancestors need to travel inwardly as well as outwardly of far greater significance that was once believed.

That’s why we watched the stars on cloudless nights when we huddled around the fire, and named those stars after things in our world. We noticed the ones that were wanderers and called them planets.

We used them to tell us when it was time to move south because the winter was coming. We used them to show us where south was. When we started to domesticate plants and animals we used them to tell us when to plant, when it was birthing season, and when we should harvest.

We built places like Stonehenge and the Sunwheel and the temples of Meso-America and pyramids of Egypt to connect with this fundamental understanding of space-time. Religion and ritual are built around propitious times and locations.

We do things when the stars are right.

We mark out our year by equinoxes and solstices and dot the in-between times with feast days derived from lunar phases and tallied days. We divide our time by months that were once moons, and split them up by days defined by the seven planets of the ancient Chaldees. We live in a modern digital scientific world and modern science basically proves that those ancient Chaldees had it on the ball.

So when your scientist buddy scoffs at you discussing energy work, you might remind them that all matter is energy, that the universe is teeming with light, and that energy can be manipulated to create various effects. They might choose to use a high voltage magnetic field rather than an incantation. The only difference here is that their “spell” is supported by modern convention and belief, just as a few hundred years ago, yours would have been.

In the 1600s, everyone believed that magic existed and did things, even if they didn’t really understand it. It was potentially dangerous, maybe evil, and could be used effectively only by those who knew how.

In the 1800s the same things could have been said about steam engines and electricity.

The 20th Century applied these ideas to the power of the atom.

All are ways of describing how the universe works, and harnessing that natural energy that is everywhere. We don’t know where it came from, or how it got here, but it’s here, and we are affected by it.

We are made of it. We can’t help but be affected by it.

Let’s consider that our scientific universe of space-time is spinning and whirling and oscillating along like mad. Yes, the planets circle the sun, but the sun is spinning around the galaxy, and the galaxy is whizzing across the universe, and the universe is doing whatever it is the universe is doing. So relative to where we are here on Mother Earth, it might look like we see the sun going up and down in about the same places, and those places wiggle ever so slightly between Midsummer and Midwinter, and the planets and the stars overhead seem to repeat their familiar patterns.

But this is all relative to our viewpoint. Which is what Einstein was telling us about the universe. What we see isn’t what is. It’s what was, a moment or so ago, when the light of whatever happened left the place it happened and headed toward us. So for the moon that’s only a few seconds. For Mars, it appears to be where it was a couple of minutes ago.

The sun itself is about 8 minutes back in time. If it went out right now, we wouldn’t know it for eight whole minutes. If we were on Pluto, we wouldn’t see that final sunset for over four and a half hours.

So we really are time travelers in this fixed formal digital modern magicless universe. We see the stars as they were years and decades and centuries and millennia and eons ago.

The universe we look at each night was gone before we were even born.

We, our children, grandchildren, the human species, and even the earth itself, may be gone before the light of some of those stars, as they are now, ever reaches this spot.

But it’s safe to say that whether it’s the universe of the past we see, or the universe of the present that we never will, each moment in time describes a unique and never repeated structure of the energy within the universe. Now is now. The instant before was different, and the instant after will be different, and it keeps on going and going.

Even on a summer night on a quiet suburban street, we are still drawn to look up and marvel at the heavens above us. In such a scenario, the best we can hope for is the changing face of the moon, a few of the brighter planets, and a handful of the most prominent constellations on a very clear night, and away from the glare of street lamps and house windows. We know instinctively that there is something out there that we are a part of, even if our technological conveniences have blinded us to seeing it.

This is one of the reasons I find some merit in the practice of astrology. Granted, the most usual natal charts are based on the relative local positions of the planets, asteroids, and some calculated points derived from these, as seen overhead (or below the horizon) at the time of your birth.

Plug that into the context that a constantly spinning, whirling, whizzing, evolving universe is never in the same place at the same time ever, and each human lifetime can be seen as a change in the fabric of the universe. When you are born, you alter the nature of all that is by your presence. Surely an event of such significance participates in something of that greater universe.

The light from the sun and moon reach us first, and then all the planets. So applying their energy, their influence, most directly, seems only logical.

The background stars, which form the signs of the Zodiac, and to some extent rule the houses, take a lot longer.

By virtue of that, they are only slightly changed from when Claudius Ptolemy charted their positions in Roman Alexandria, using data compiled by those witty Chaldees a few thousand years earlier.

The energy we receive now, may only have left some of those stars when the Chaldeans named them, or when Ptolemy charted them. That energy is consistent, and thus the attributes we ascribe to it is consistent. At least for as long as I will be drawing up horoscopes anyway.

As Above, So Below! I acquired this polished orb of ocean jasper because it immediately reminded me of the storms that churn across the surface clouds of our largest planetary neighbor. The stone sphere is some two inches or so. Jupiter is 1000 times larger than the entire Earth. Our planet would fit across it’s famous Great Red Spot. The most easily seen feature on Jupiter’s surface was possibly discovered by Galileo Galilee in the 1600s. It’s a hurricane that potentially has been going for 400 years or more. Despite it’s horrifying size, Jupiter is made of mostly “air”, a swirling miasma of hydrocarbons, floating above seas of liquid methane. It may be much bigger than the little stone sphere, but the sphere is more solid. For comparison, Great Jupiter would fit inside the sun as many times as our Earth fits inside Jupiter. There are millions of stars in the galaxy that are 1000 times bigger than the sun.

But if I were standing beneath the red rays of far Antares, and looking up through Scorpio’s claws toward our tiny pale sun, I would have a very different universe. I might have two moons in the sky at night, or seven. My longer year would be punctuated by their movements, forward and back (with multiple moons you get retrograde). The names I would give to the stars and the pictures I would draw between them would be what my remote ancestors had seen when they set by the fires in front of their caves, and began trying to work out how to manage the energy that was teeming through the universe.

Because that’s what living beings do.

The Divine Intelligence created the Universe to Know Itself.

We all participate in that. We are all bright sparks of that limitless eternal energy.

That’s why we’re here.

Thank you for reading to the end. I hope you found it enjoyable. These are the things I think of when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, the market is down, inflation is up, and Monday lies too closely ahead. It is, I think, helpful to remember that we are all part of something much brighter than the dust and bones around us.

Space images are courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unless otherwise noted.

Please Share and Enjoy !