This is a story about projection...

Do you want to predict the future? Would you like to be in the right place at the right time? Ever wonder how ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky gets to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been? How does a torpedo fired from a submarine intersect with its target, while following a relatively straight trajectory? Welcome to the world of dead reckoning.

Imagine I have a single data point - a latitude and a longitude - which tells me the location of a target at one point in time. I don't know how fast it's going, and I don't know what direction it's going. Fairly useless information. In the parlance of physics, I know location, but I don't know momentum. All we can say is that the probability of its next location spreads out from the point of origin: the thing being tracked is very unlikely to be a long way away, and it's more likely to be somewhere near where it was last seen. This is a probability cloud.

Next, we've measured two data points. We're sure it's the same thing that we're tracking, because we have identified some unique characteristic about it. In the submarine example, the sonar operator will be listening to the sound of the propeller, so they will know if it's the same ship, because it's got the same number of propellors generating the same kind of sound, underwater.

If we have two data points, we can draw a straight line between them, and assuming the same course and speed, we can predict where the object we are tracking is going to be next. We measure the distance between the two points, and divide by the time it took to travel between them, and we have the speed. Then, we simply extrapolate the line between the two points, and we can guess where the target will be on that line, at a future time.

But, the simple extrapolation model is flawed. Perhaps currents are pulling the ship in a different direction from the direction steered. Perhaps the captain of the ship is steering an arc-shaped course, to go around an obstacle, or to change direction.

With three data points, we can now fit an elliptic curve to fit those measurements. The elliptic curve shows us whether the captain is steering or drifting right or left. Additionally, we know whether the ship is speeding up or slowing down. If the ship is accelerating, but steering a constant course, it will be further along the line we plot than we think it will be. Equally, if the ship is decelerating, it won't get as far along its course as we anticipate.

Finally, with four data points, we can come up with a mathematical function that fits the data. To give a very simplified example, if the captain of the ship is zig-zagging to avoid submarines, we could fit a sine wave to the data, and predict when the ship is going to make its next turn... assuming that the captain tacks with regular frequency, of course.

As we gather more and more data points, plotting the course history of the ship we're tracking, we can come up with ever more sophisticated mathematical models to predict where we're going to see the ship next.

The arc of a ball travelling through the air is fairly easy to model. We just need to model momentum, gravity and air resistance. Momentum would be constant in a vacuum, so if you whack a tennis ball with a racquet while floating in the outer reaches of the galaxy - where there is little gravity - then the tennis ball will continue on a straight trajectory, at the same speed, more or less forever. Back here on Earth, the tennis ball will be pulled down to the ground by gravity, and it will also slow down, due to air resistance.

Given that air density and gravity are more or less constant at ground level, where you expect to find tennis courts, we probably only need 3 data points, and we should be able to make an accurate guess as to where the tennis ball's going to land. Even with gusts of wind, the flight of the tennis ball is relatively short, so the wind speed is unlikely to change dramatically during the flight of the ball. It should be a case of simply fitting an elliptic curve to the 3-dimensional co-ordinates of the 3 points of measurement, and then working out where that curve intersects with the plane of the ground, to predict where the ball's going to land.

"But what about spin?" I hear you ask. Yes, good point.

Spin is angular momentum. For our tennis ball example: the fluffy exterior of the ball will exert a 'grip' - friction - on the air. Therefore, the spin of the ball makes a reasonable difference, as more air gets pushed towards one side of the ball, by the rotating face. Just like a wing, the ball will experience a small amount of lift: the ball is 'pulled' towards the side that is spinning in the same direction as the air flow. That's the Magnus effect.

If we had hit our tennis ball with spin out in the vacuum of space, it would not create a curved trajectory, because the fluffy tennis ball has no air to grip on - a vacuum is frictionless. However, the centripetal force of the spinning ball will cause it to stretch to be slightly bigger than it would be if it wasn't spinning, because the outside is being thrown away from the centre, like a centrifuge. The elasticity of the ball will be trying to pull it back inwards, and in so doing, energy will be released in the form of heat. Eventually, all the energy of the spin will be radiated away, and the ball will slowly stop spinning. This effect is far too minuscule to even bother calculating, for our tennis court example here on Earth.

Of course, all this maths is just to model a dumb tennis ball, which can't make decisions and alter its own course, once it has left the racquet. To predict the behaviour of even a single individual is hard - this is the work of top poker players - and when we try to model complex systems made up of vast numbers of individuals - such as financial markets - the systems become chaotic and unpredictable. Thus, past performance is not a predictor of future results, unless you're a tennis ball.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about how to fuck up a kid...

I love the symbolism of this image. What it means to me is this: we have to jump through hoops, like some kind of trained circus animal.

What made you decide that you could give your kids a brilliant life? What made you decide that creating new life on an overcrowded planet was a great idea?

Was it the fact that climate change is an undisputed problem, and your children will inherit a drowning world?

Was it the fact that neoliberal capitalism has given us a cruel ruling elite who have enslaved most of humanity in menial jobs, and left the rest to starve?

Was it that a small handful of oligarchs, monarchs and plutocrats control all the world's wealth, and the chances of being elevated from poverty are the same as being hit by an asteroid, twice, on the way to collect your lottery winnings?

Was it that the social structure of the tribe, the clan and the extended family has now all-but ended, as we are forced to roam the entire planet in search of a golden opportunity that does not exist, and we are forced to content ourselves with social media, text message and video-chat interactions, that are in place of actual face-to-face human relationships with our nearest and dearest?

It won't be long before our babies are whisked away from us at birth, and we can do nothing but follow their progress on a Twitter page, as they forge their way through an educational system designed to produce compliant drones, who have no hope but to join the enslaved masses in some soul-crushingly dreadful job. And the reason why we never get to see our children? So we can continue to pursue our unfulfilling jobs for as many hours as we can possibly work before collapsing with exhaustion.

I have this little fantasy about being a dad. In my fantasy, me and some imagined partner are woken up early in the morning by our two children. One child is a toddler, and the other is slightly older but still a preschooler. The kids clamber into bed and we all spend the morning watching cartoons together. Then we all get up and dressed and eat pancakes together around the kitchen table.

Then, I also have this imagined version of reality.

I wake up before the kids, get showered and dressed although I'm desperately tired. I then have a stressful commute through traffic and endless crowds of people. I arrive at a job that I hate, because it's boring and stressful, underpaid and my bosses have nothing but contempt for me and the capitalist scum who run all the corporations have no gratitude or respect for the workers who toil to line their pockets. I get to look at a photograph of my children on my desk, but this is merely a form of emotional bribery. Without the picture of my kids on my desk, I would question what the hell I was even doing, and just quit the awful job.

In my imagined version of reality, I work extra late to try and impress the bosses and get a precious promotion that may allow the basic essentials of life to be bought without constant financial struggle to make ends meet. Every time the car breaks down or some home improvements are needed, it always costs more than any savings that have been put away as contingency for these eventualities. A debt spiral has been happening because of having to use short-term borrowing to simply meet the cost of living. Then more debt was incurred servicing the first debt. This wasn't money that was spent on frivolities, but on such things as fixing broken plumbing and essential child-rearing equipment like cribs and pushchairs.

My imagination tells me that, in reality, I would then struggle home late through yet another stressful commute, only to find that the kids are already in bed. My partner is exhausted from the demands of working a part time job that brings in marginally more money than the cost of the childcare that we must pay for so that she can have her very badly paid job. Juggling work and childcare arrangements, she must travel twice as far as a normal commute, in order to pick up and drop off the kids at their daycare facilities. The household budget is super tight, and extremely diligent use of discount coupons, shopper loyalty schemes and knowing the cheapest supermarket to obtain our groceries for each product, is the only way that a few extra pounds can be found to balance the books.

Exhausted and stressed - in this imaginary reality - we collapse into bed. The pressure that me and my imaginary partner are under means that we are arguing all the time, so we aren't having sex or any kind of physical intimacy anymore. We are just two exhausted scared and anxious people, trying to survive and hide the desperation of the situation from the children.

The children - I imagine - are browbeaten into believing that they have one shot at getting good school grades and not fucking up their lives. Me and my imaginary partner tell our kids how important it is that they study hard and try their best, so that they can go to university and get a great job. We repeatedly tell our kids that life is a struggle, and the world is a mean place, and that they should stop laughing and playing, and knuckle down and do some damn homework.

Grow up! Concentrate! This is important! Pay attention! You have no idea what the real world's like! We rebuke our little kids. We are desperately anxious that our children should not suffer the same fate that we endure. Endless arguments over schoolwork and bad grades. Endless stress about whether or not our kids are thriving in the rigid educational system. Every bit of spare time we have goes into educational activities. We can't just make a fort out of cushions... we have to turn it into a history lesson, or a lesson about the physics of why buildings don't fall down. Everything is twisted into an opportunity to try and cram a bit more knowledge into our little kids' craniums.

Your kid drives themselves nuts with the pressure and expectation placed upon them. Kids are sensitive to their parents anxiety. Kids are like sponges, and they're getting the message loud & clear about how important it is that they apply themselves and try their hardest. Some kids will respond, and will allow themselves to have their personality dissected, sifted and sorted. Some kids will quietly allow themselves to be judged and graded by complete strangers who couldn't give two fucks about who they are as an individual.

Then, finally, it's time for the big wide world that we've promised our children is the whole reason why they can't have a childhood. The whole reason why we didn't let our kids play in the dirt, or spend time with their friends, was so that they could have their noses in books, writing essays or taking mock examinations. Now, it's time for your kids to spread their wings and be whatever they want to be.

Use your imagination! Follow your dreams! Find your passion! We tell our precious children.

What we really mean is: go get a sensible job for a reputable corporation, shovelling shit for the capitalists.

Childhood was jettisoned in favour of academic achievements. We told our kids they couldn't be friends with some of the other children, because they were too stupid and a bad influence. We told our kids they couldn't laugh, play and have the simple joys of their childhood, because there was too much at stake. Our kids' precious future was on the line. It was life or death.

And now, your kids have the same shitty job that doesn't pay the bills and is inadequate to support a family. Your kids busted their balls to get their grades, go to university, follow their dreams. Guess what? There aren't any jobs for historians or philosophers. There aren't any jobs where you need to speak dead languages like Latin or Ancient Greek. There aren't any jobs for artists.

Your kids are going to have to get a job keeping score for the capitalists, while they wait for the planet to become totally uninhabitable. It's a football game with 21 referees and 2 goalkeepers. It's a rowing race with 20 coxswains and 2 rowers. Over 80% of the 'economy' is made up by service sector bullshit.

This is it? This is what you you wanted to give your kids? This is the life that you thought your children would be so happy to live? Did you think about this stuff? You did think about this stuff, didn't you? No? Why didn't you think about this stuff?

"Everything will be alright in the end"

No. It probably won't be.

Things probably won't be alright in the end, because everybody has that attitude. Through collective wilful stupidity, and a desire to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes, we spawn yet more children in the hope that one of the little fuckers is smart enough to solve the world's problems. It's like setting alight to the basement of your house, in the hope that it will put out a fire in the roof.

Don't get me wrong; I love kids. I think kids are cute and I love the way that they make me feel happy when I look after them. I definitely feel very fulfilled as an animal, when I'm playing make-believe daddy, and imagining that I might have kids of my own. There's definitely something biologically right about reproducing one's genes. However, ethically it would seem to be the wrong thing to do.

You know, you made your choice, and I like you and your kids. But collectively it's fucking insane.

I would say that the only way to redeem yourself now would be to pull your kids out of school. Go and live near your parents, uncles and aunties. Form a little village of your relatives. Let your kids play and be children. Teach your kids about the grave responsibility that faces them, but don't fucking bullshit them. Stop selling this lie that hard work and a lost childhood will somehow pave the way for a happy adulthood.

Just look at the goddam stats. Soaring rates of mental illness and suicide. Almost everybody hates their fucking job and doesn't get to spend enough time with their families. Almost everybody is stressed as fuck about money, job insecurity and the uncertainty over whether they will be able to provide housing, food, clothing and everything else they need for them and their children. It's fucking awful.

But, you know what? There are more of us than the goddam capitalists who want to maintain the status quo. Sure there are police and the army, who are there to make sure that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. However, the system only continues to function while we all collectively help to prop it up. Are you happy? Is this what you want for your children? Is this it?

Is this it?

Tags: #capitalism #childhood

This is a story about ethics...

Let us suppose for a moment that the great scientists who gave us our quantum mechanical world, were also animal lovers. Instead of putting cats into boxes with radioactively decaying elements which trigger poison gas to be released, killing the poor innocent creatures, how's about if we dress them up in clothes instead?

In this alternative quantum experiment, instead of Erwin Schroëdinger's original design, we shall instead be putting socks on the poor cat that faced a 50% probability of death before.

In our new experiment, we shall be putting different coloured socks on the cat. The socks can be whatever colour we like, but they're always different colours from each other.

As the cat walks into the room, we can see that the cat is wearing a pink sock. We can't see the cat's other foot yet, but we know that the other sock is not going to be pink.

It's not like the second sock decided to choose its colour when we looked at the first. It's not like the second sock needed to know the colour of the first, and have the information transmitted to it as soon as we made our first observation.

John Stewart Bell penned a tongue-in-cheek scientific paper explaining the simplicity of hidden variables, which seem to offer a much more objective reality than the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. For sure, the likes of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had elegantly described the subatomic world with mathematical precision, but the need to abandon a tangible objective reality seems unnecessary if we say that there are hidden variables.

However, from this simple thought experiment comes a theory that is very real and very testable. Bell's theorem says that the experimental results will differ significantly in a quantum world versus one that behaves classically. Quantum mechanics makes predictions that no classical theory could. Therefore, if you want to know whether probabilistic behaviour indicates a failure to truly imagine what's going on in the subatomic world, you just have to do the experiments.

If Bell's theorem were proven correct, this could suggest that experimental observations are "known" in advance, and in fact we are living in the 'clockwork' universe as predicted, for example, by Newtonian mechanics. Were you to know the precise starting conditions of everything, you would be able to predict everything that would ever happen: no surprises!

In short, Bell's theorem was tested, and the result was surprising: we may be living in a superdeterministic reality, where there is no free will and all outcomes are fixed in advance.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about spacetime...

We all know what Euclidian geometry is, right? Up & down, left & right, forwards & backwards. We know how to draw a triangle, a square. We know how to calculate the volume of a cube, a sphere, a cone. We even have methods of calculating where the points of 3-dimensional object will be, if we rotate it. We can use matrix transformations to do a rotational calculation, and work out where the corners of a spinning cube are going to be.

But what about when space gets all stretched and weird? What about non-Euclidian geometry?

If I draw two lines on a flat piece of paper, they will intersect at some point unless they are perfectly parallel. If I draw two 'straight' lines on a 'flat' hyperbolic plane, they will curve away from each other and not intersect. Even though both lines and both planes are 2-dimensional, the behaviour is very different, depending on the geometry.

Do you think you live in a 3-dimensional universe? Wrong.

So, you think you live in a 4-dimensional universe, where the 4th dimension is time? Also wrong.

You live in a 3 dimensional universe where the speed that you are travelling at relative to everything else affects the curvature of spacetime. Pretty obvious, huh?

So, if you're not moving relative to the things that you can see, then you are moving in time. If you're moving relative to something else, then you are moving in space, and ever so slightly less in time than the other object(s). Is that clear?

If I get in a rocket and fly away from the Earth at the speed of light, and fly back again at the speed of light. The whole time I was on the rocket, I was moving in space but not in time. The speed of light is the speed limit of the universe, so if I was travelling at the speed of light, then time stood still for me. However, the Earth was not moving anywhere, so it was moving at full speed through time, but not at all through space. Is this making sense?

Here's an example: let's say I travel to the moon and back. The moon is 384,400km away, so I travelled 768,800km. The speed of light is 299,792 km/s, so the round trip took me 2.6 seconds, according to your stopwatch. According to my stopwatch, my trip took me 0 seconds.

Why did it take me zero seconds to travel to the moon and back at the speed of light? It's simple really: because I was travelling through space at the maximum possible speed, so therefore I was not travelling through time at all.

Why did the person on Earth with the stopwatch record a time of 2.6 seconds for me to travel to the moon and back at the speed of light? Again, it's pretty simple: the person on Earth was not moving at all through space, so therefore they were travelling through time at the maximum possible speed.

This is the nature of spacetime: any movement through space means less movement through time, as measured by an independent observer. When you're jetting through space in your rocket, your clock doesn't seem to be ticking any slower, but the independent observer can verify that time had indeed slowed down for you when you get back to Earth and you compare your clocks.

We have just described special relativity and minkowski spacetime.

Albert Einstein is the headline act for special relativity, but it was Hendrik Lorentz who was the mathematical genius behind figuring out how objects move in minkowski space, and of course it was Hermann Minkowski who came up with the special geometry where the wonders of spacetime play out.

I got very excited a few years ago because neutrinos had been detected arriving on Earth from a distant supernova, before photons (particles of light) and this was reproduced in an experiment between CERN and Gran Sasso in Italy, 730km away. The experiment's results seemed to suggest that neutrinos were travelling 8km/s faster than light.

We all learn at school that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So far, special relativity has proven to be a pretty robust piece of science. Discovering something travelling faster than light would have meant tearing up the physics textbooks and going back to the drawing board.

However, the beautiful theory and equations proved to be correct. The experiment was found to be flawed due to faulty timing equipment. Damn. No time travel for us, unless maybe you're made of antimatter.

By the way, I made a little Lorentz/Lorentz joke at the start, because I was thinking of writing about chaos theory. Perhaps I'll save that delight for another day. Let's see how this one goes down before I delve into any more topics that I have a shaky understanding of.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about science fiction...

Do you know what the trouble with physics is? Are you aware how much the scientific community is dominated by dogma, doctrine and the status quo? The business world is full of powerful dinosaurs who have too much to lose if they were dethroned. So why would science be any different?

Let's start with a madness that afflicts nearly every physicist.

Do you know what the difference between a model and a theory is? A theory is some equation, algorithm or logical thought experiment, that can empirically explain real-world observations and make testable predictions.

If I have a theory that explains the arc that a ball will trace when I throw it, it should be able to predict where it lands. I plug in the wind speed, the weight of the ball, the size of the ball, the strength of gravity on the planet, and the initial force and angle that will be imparted on the projectile, and the theory gives me the expected result. By testing various different balls and various different throws, the theory can be said to be proven insofar as the predictions are in agreement with the measurements, within a margin of error.

If I take various measurements from various experiments and gather them together in some great big database, and then attempt to infer a relationship between the measurements and the outcome, then I have a model. For example, it's fairly obvious that a heavy ball will not travel very far versus a light ball, when thrown with the same force. From the data, there emerges this statistical correlation between the weight and the distance, but there is no underlying theory that predicts much beyond this simple association of variables.

This is what we understand as the most important distinction between theory and model: that theories can make useful predictions that are testable, and give us some elegant mathematically expressible equation about the true nature of the universe, but models can only give us clunky retro-fitted attempts to make sense of vast swathes of data.

To understand the theory of a thrown ball, we had to employ the laws of motion, the laws of drag coefficients (wind resistance) as well as gravity. Newtonian mechanics tells us about the movement of objects in a frictionless universe. Fluid dynamics tells us about an object travelling through something like air or water. General Relativity tells us about objects acted upon by the force of gravity. Through the combination of these three theories, we can accurately predict where a thrown ball is going to land.

However, a model can make a reasonably decent job of the numbers, within a margin of error. Big heavy balls didn't travel very far, and small light balls flew further. No need for all that theory mumbo-jumbo. A model can easily be within the same order of magnitude as the theoretical predictions.

Have you heard of the Standard Model of particle physics?

The Standard Model tells us what goes on at a subatomic scale. Or rather, it attempts to, given vast quantities of experimental data.

Before I tell you any more about the Standard Model, let me let you in on a little secret. It doesn't scale. Yes, that's right. The Standard Model is very successful at the subatomic scale, but when we use it to model the entire universe, it doesn't work. In order to use the Standard Model to explain what is observable in the universe, cosmologists have had to invent 3 massive cludges, for which there is no experimental evidence to confirm the existence of: inflation, dark matter and dark energy.

The Standard Model concerns itself with stuff that we can see, and how things interact with each other. However, cosmology has had to invent dark matter (27% of the universe, but you can't see it), dark energy (68.3% of the universe, but you can't measure or detect it) and inflation (which attempts to explain how we got into this mess in the first place).

Religion is often derided for asking the faithful flock to accept things at face value without evidence, but now the dominant science of physics and cosmology asks us to to believe that over 95% of the universe is made up from stuff that's never been seen, never been measured, is not predicted by any fundamental theory and was basically dreamt up because our favoured model of the subatomic world doesn't scale.

Now, please don't get confused with quantum mechanics.

Quantum theory is quite empirically testable. The quantum behaviour of the universe is nearly impossible to visualise. Our day-to-day experience of the world is a deterministic one. When I put down the ball and look away, when I look back it's still there. When I throw the ball, I can know both its momentum and its location. I can predict where balls are going to land, in the deterministic world of the macro scale. Things get mighty weird in the quantum world, but that doesn't mean that things are not underpinned by good theoretical science.

The problem comes in when we model. The Standard Model has over 20 free constants, which are tweakable numbers fed in from experiments. The Standard Model is designed to be constantly improved, as new data become available. The often touted defence about how well tested and accurate the Standard Model is, is null-and-void, because many of those experiments actually feed back into the model itself. The Standard Model automatically adjusts itself to match experimental observation.

The problem with the Standard Model is that it doesn't make any testable predictions. The tests that we have done have simply improved the model. The experimental measurements change the free constants that are plugged into the model. The model confirms itself, but it doesn't tell us anything we hadn't already experimentally measured.

The only true test of the Standard Model would be to scale it up to see if it matches observations from cosmology. It doesn't scale.

Models don't give us fundamental theories that underpin the universe, and allow us to make predictions about previously unobserved phenomena that we can then design experiments to investigate. Models cannot be proven or disproven, because they do not make predictions. Models are unassailable, because they can adapt themselves to include any new experimental data.

The whole era of shut up and calculate has been a hinderance to the progress of theoretical physics. When people talk about the staggering accuracy and number of experiments that confirm the Standard Model, they ignore the fact that the model is only as accurate as the measurements that were used to build it. The model has told us nothing about the fundamental nature of reality.

Now, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detected a bump in experimental data at 75 GeV, we had over 300 papers published to explain such an anomaly. The bump turned out to be nothing more than noise, a glitch. Physicists are writing science fiction - fan fiction - to explain the workings of the universe, but none of it is backed by testable theory that makes useful predictions.

Show me the physics that predicts a discovery in advance as opposed to proton smashing and attempting to retrofit data to a model. The current design of experiments completely contradicts the scientific method.

Until we return to the era of coming up with hypotheses and fundamental theories that make testable predictions, and then building experiments to prove or disprove those theories, we will be stuck with our multi billion dollar particle smashers, that do nothing except to improve the accuracy of models by a few percentage points, and unearth no useful physics at all.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about simplicity...

A compressed spring is heavier than an uncompressed spring. When you lay down on your mattress, the springs of the mattress are actually getting heavier. When you get in your car, the springs of the suspension are getting heavier. When you wind up a clockwork watch, it weighs more. Wait, what?

Yes, it's as simple as I just said. When you squash a spring, the spring gets heavier. Any questions?

Probably just one: whaaaaat?

Well, it's because of E = mc² you see.

Oh, boring. It's one of Nick's crazy rants about physics. Perhaps he's gone nuts again. Perhaps he's having another hypomanic episode. Well, in some ways you're right. But before anybody shouts "BANANA" at me [it's my 'safe' word] you should really read on a little further.

The reason why I race off on those hypomanic episodes is that most of the time, some evil passenger in my car keeps putting the handbrake on. People keep climbing on my back and making me carry them. People keep putting rocks in my pockets and getting me to drag their shit along for them. I'm basically frustrated as hell the whole time at the endless monotonous boredom and not being able to get on with my projects because of absolute bullshit. I just like to work on things and finish them, you see. If you tell me that you need something building, I'll get on and build it, and give you a completed project, instead of sitting around with my head up my butt. I don't really like sitting around with my head up my butt. I like getting on and building shit.

And so, I become a compressed spring. The more that I'm held back, the more that I become coiled and squashed and full of energy, ready to spring forwards when I'm released. The time windows are very short, but I build a lot of cool stuff very quickly. I built iPhone apps that reached #1 in the charts in a matter of weeks. I built a gigantic summerhouse in my garden in the space of a few days. I don't generally fuck about.

"But why do springs get heavier when they're compressed, Nick?" I hear you ask. It's really easy to explain.

Energy and mass are equivalent. Therefore, if you apply a weight to the top of a spring, and it squashes down, the energy that is stored up in that spring is stored as mass. More mass means the spring is more heavy. When you take the weight off the spring, allowing it to uncompress, the mass is converted back into energy, and the spring gets lighter again.

That's all that the equation E = mc² really says. It says energy equals mass [times the speed of light squared]. Energy-mass equivalence.

OK... the speed of light squared is a pretty big number, so the amount of mass is pretty tiny compared to the amount of energy. So tiny that there isn't a set of scales accurate enough in the whole world to measure just how much heavier our spring got, when we compressed it. The amount of mass that we created from energy, by compressing the spring, was teeny tiny.

Equally though, you don't need to turn much mass into energy to create lots of energy.

When people talk about splitting the atom and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure what your average person on the street imagines. Perhaps they think that atoms are actually being destroyed to create the explosion. When a chemical explosive is detonated, the chemicals are rapidly being turned into gas, which is many many times more voluminous than the size of the solid or liquid explosives. This is not what's happening during a nuclear reaction.

The nuclei of atoms are held together by the strong nuclear force. Think of it like a door latch. The door latch holds together particles with similar electrical charge. I'm sure you remember playing with magnets, and you know that like poles repel each other. So, when you put the red end of magnet towards the red end of another magnet, they don't want to touch each other. The strong nuclear force holds those two red ends together, stopping them from flying apart. This is much akin to our coiled spring.

When the nucleus of an atom is split by being bashed into by another particle, a bit like a wrecking ball smashing into a house, then the 'latch' of the strong nuclear force is broken, and the particles with the same charge repel each other. The different parts of the atom fly apart because of this repulsion. It's like those coiled springs are uncoiling.

This means that energy is being released. Lots more energy than it took to unlatch the strong nuclear force that held the nucleus together. It's a bit like a room full of mouse traps, all sprung-loaded and waiting to go off. It only takes one light little touch to cause one mouse trap to go off, and before you know it, they're all setting each other off in a great big chain reaction.

And that's how a self-sustaining nuclear reaction works. A small amount of input energy is required to start the chain reaction, but once it's started, there's plenty of energetic particles flying around to smash into other nuclei and cause them to break apart. Less energy input was required than the amount of total energy output, and only a very small amount of the mass is actually being released, by the strong nuclear force being overcome, allowing the subatomic parts of the nucleus to fly apart.

The same cascade reaction is used in a nuclear power plant as was used in the atomic bombs that blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's called nuclear fission.

So, how does this relate to anything? Well, whether it's reading a stack of books about nuclear physics (this, by the way, was only the most basic introduction I'm afraid) or writing hundreds of thousands of words, I'm kinda a bit like that coiled spring, ready to unleash my energy on whatever I can when I'm given my chance, and I'm unlatched.

I just need a small opening, a small opportunity, and I'll run headlong at it. I'm so desperately bored by having to go at snails pace because of the limitations of the world around me. I live with constant frustration that I can't go at a natural pace, and so I go twice as quick as I should do when I'm finally given the opportunity to get on with something.

Had I ever gotten the chance to study theoretical physics at university, I would have read half as much in twice the time. Had I ever gotten to write at my own pace, with enough money behind me to keep a roof over my head, I would have taken twice as long and written half as much.

I'm now wrestling with the problem that I'm pretty much working two jobs, and in one of them I'm trying too hard at to compensate for the lack of fulfilment in the other. My day job doesn't challenge me. My day job gives me zero job satisfaction. And so when I get home in the evenings, I write and I write and I write. I've even taken to rattling off a couple of short stories every day while I'm at work. The one I wrote this morning was 6,000 words. That's right. I just rattled off 6,000 words because I'm so damn frustrated and bored, but I'm still working a full time job as well as producing some 14,000 words a day. It's too damn much and I'm going to burn out, but my day job is utter bullshit. My life is utter bullshit.

It's such a fucking rush, a hurry. It's such a fucking struggle. Trying to put up with enough boring bullshit that I've got a lump of money behind me to allow me to take a break and work on something I love and I'm passionate about. Either that, or I just take the tiny windows of opportunity where I find them, and work as hard as I can and as fast as I can, before the bullshit catches up with me again.

I honestly thought to myself that prison wouldn't be so bad. So much time to read and write, and ponder stuff. Really, I'm a fucking prisoner at the moment. I can't exactly get an interesting book out at my desk. Even when I'm writing, I'm doing it while looking over my shoulder. I've got to keep one eye on the boss, and be on my game in case I get asked to do something or somebody has a question for me. It's so fucking tense you know? It's compressing me. It's squashing me. It's making me dense and dark and heavy.

I fantasise about living in a tent, unencumbered by having to make rent payments and keep the electric and gas switched on. What would I really need, in this day and age? You can do so much on a smartphone.

I'm coming full circle. In a little over a month I will have been writing every day for a year. This whole thing started with me writing about some research I did on a public bench at a railway station. I think how different my life was then, and somehow I had much better quality of life, even though I was destitute.

Do I want this? This life? This life of commuting on the morning train, and office chit-chat and the daily grind, and of looking busy at my desk and saying clever shit to impress the boss, and hiding in the toilets browsing the Internet, and writing short stories in a really small font to disguise what I'm doing, just to pass the endless boring hours, and watching the clock, counting down, counting down, down, down. Down to what? My premature death from the stress and anxiety of it all?

Plenty of research has now proven that working a boring shitty office job is more unhealthy and lifespan shortening than smoking. Famously, people are suing their employers for the mind-numbingly dumb work they're asked to do. It's almost physically agonising. I'm being squashed. My very life force, my energy, my dignity, my passion, my personality... it's all being squeezed out of me like I'm a tube of cheap toothpaste.

I feel so sick and anxious. I don't know how to continue. I know that fiscally it makes perfect sense to continue. It's easy money, but it doesn't look that easy when it seems to be the root cause of my mood instability. People either ask me to work too hard for too long, so I burn out, or they bore the shit out of me, so I eventually explode with frustration. The pyramid scheme of corporate life is destroying lives. My life is being destroyed.

Oh God I want to throw up. This isn't just a job you fuckers. This is literally fucking me up. I can't do it much longer. I'm going to have a motherfucking breakdown. I can't cope and I'm waving the white flag in surrender but yet the gunfire does not seem to pause.

"Everybody needs to work"

"You have a great job"

"You're so well paid"

"People would love to have your opportunities"

"Count your blessings"

"Just another few decades and you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams"

"Not long now"

"C'mon it can't be that hard"

"You should try my job"

"You've got things easy"

"I'd love it if I was bored all the time"

"You spoiled bratty bastard"

"You earn 6 or 7 times as much as I do"

"Why don't you follow your dreams"

"You've got nothing to complain about"

FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF

Argh! I can't deny my feelings any longer. I fucking well did what I have to, to get out from a fucked up situation, and I got somewhat out of the way of the oncoming collision, but it's been at great personal expense. I can't express how much it's killed me to put myself in a position where I might as well put my brain in a pickle jar and wheel my cryogenically frozen body into position at my desk.

Imagine if I picked fruit and vegetables for a living, and I slept in a barn on the farm where I worked. I could keep some of the fruit and vegetables that I picked, and eat them. My labour would provide my contribution for my space in the barn, as well as enough beans, rice, pulses and meat to keep my protein and carbohydrate intake at a healthy level. I would be able to see, quite literally, the fruits of my labour each day.

I live a life that could not be more opposite. I will never meet the people who use my software, and I don't even create the software anymore. I manage a bunch of people to create software for me. And I don't even see the people I manage face to face. They live thousands of miles away in some developing world country. I don't even know what management is. I pretty much just say "you're doing a great job. Keep going!" over and over again, to these poorly paid people who toil away, on the other side of the planet. Then some money is digitally credited to my bank balance, and I digitally credit it somewhere else to pay my rent. I never see actual physical money. I don't ever carry cash. Coins are just an antique novelty to me.

Modern life is making me unwell, I can sense it.

I have embraced technology and science, and I understand it better than 99% of people. In abstract terms, I'm doing really well, and it looks insane to be dissatisfied with my lot in life, but how do I really define my existence? Can I define myself as a father and enjoy family life, when I have no children? Can I define myself as a builder or a soldier, when what I do is so ethereal and intangible? Can I define myself as a farmer or a gardener, when what I do is so unnatural?

I'm a spring. That's what I am: a rusty spring.

I'm coiled up and compressed, ready to unspring, ready to bounce and boing.

It's fucking awful, let me tell you, being so unable to apply yourself to some useful mission, project or productive endeavour. It's fucking awful, feeling so trapped and imprisoned. That's why my thoughts turn dark and brooding so often. That's why suicide is so often on my mind.

Tags: #physics #writing #suicide #bipolar #career

This is a story about information technology...

In the beginning, there were sticks and rocks and maybe bits of vine. Perhaps there was some clay, and with fire, there came pottery.

There was the iron age, where metal tools were made, like the scythe, which led to greater agricultural yields.

The industrial revolution brought us steam power, and the use of coal as a source of vast quantities of energy far outstripped what could be achieved with horses and manpower.

Two world wars meant huge advances in factories and mass production, meaning that many more goods could be manufactured than would ever be needed by humanity. There are 62 Lego bricks for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Industrial chemistry - such as the Haber process - can produce vast quantities of fertilisers and pesticides, to give us food surpluses that are capable of adequately feeding every member of the human race.

The loom, which has been improved beyond all recognition to give us today's weaving and knitting machines, is now producing enough textiles that even the very poorest are able to wear garments that are recognisably 'fashionable'.

Medicine and surgery has advanced to the point where injuries and infections are now largely survivable. Germ theory, soap, disinfectant and antibiotics protect us from microbes, while chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgical interventions can often save many patients with different types of cancer.

The jet engine has shrunk the globe. People hop from continent to continent as if they were catching a train to work, and even the steam-powered locomotive is a relatively recent nation-shrinking innovation. With the intermingling of different cultures, the world's leading universities are able to share their top scholars and the very best ideas and research are circulated throughout academia.

But what of information technology?

Has the information age fulfilled its promises? As a young boy growing up in 1980s and 1990s Britain, I used to enjoy watching a BBC television program called Tomorrow's World. Many of us living in the postwar age of optimism and hope for the future, imagined a world filled with robots and hovercars. Where the fuck are they?

When I turn up at one of the railway stations that the Victorians built, instead of buying a ticket from a real person, I buy one from a robot. Except that this ticket machine still needs a real person to come along and extract the cash that it has collected in its hopper. The ticket machines still need a person to come along and replenish the spool of blank tickets, ready to be printed. Is there really much labour being saved?

Train travel in London is a particularly hot topic. When I travel on the Docklands Light Railway, the train is driverless. However, there is still a person on board to close the doors and check tickets. Tube drivers are unable to drive through a red signal without the train brakes being automatically triggered, but yet, we still have human drivers to tell us to stand clear of the doors and mind the gap [between the train and the platform].

We've all seen pictures of futuristic factories where robot arms are welding automobile bodies together, or spraypainting. The pictures of those robot arms have been standard stock footage of the factories of the future for my entire life. But yet, at the old car factory in Oxford - near where I grew up - BMW still have armies of people screwing Minis together by hand in a big production line. Surely, that can't be right, can it?

At the end of the day, computers aren't much use for anything, are they?

Quantum Mechanics, the biggest breakthrough in physics since the days of Newton, 200 years earlier, and the 'splitting' of the atomic nucleus, was all achieved without the programmable computer that we would recognise today. At the very same time as the undoubtably brilliant Alan Turing was creating the Enigma machine, the secrets of the subatomic world were being unlocked to unleash the atom bomb. Clearly, computers were not necessary for giant leaps forward in science.

The work at Bell Labs that yielded the semiconductor technology that's at the root of everything that we see as valuable today, was being done without the very microchips that were born due to the invention of the transistor. The world's most valuable company - Apple - puts computer chips inside boxes with a picture of a piece of half-eaten fruit on the outside.

So, now, what is the result, today?

Well, a bunch of geeks meet up to discuss how to address the crises that face humanity, using information technology. Then, tellingly, it turns out that it's all fake. It's all utter bullshit. It's all vapourware crap.

The I Sea app epitomises everything about the false promise of the information technology age for me, where complete fucktard "social media marketing" experts and ad-agency douchebags, who couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, simply concoct some toxic vapourware bullshit that they know will be newsworthy (i.e. clickbait).

Yes, we can all imagine some pretty funky stuff, but it's science fiction not science fact. When all the posturing and hypothesising and dreaming is done, there are relatively few actual engineers out there who can tell you what can and can't be done with technology.

At the end of the day, we're talking about computer systems that were created to be some kind of automated abacus. The computers we have today were invented to count beans. The computers we have today are very good if you want to do some kind of compound interest calculation, but they're not going to solve world hunger. We already did that when we invented the tractor, combine harvester, fertiliser and insecticide.

So, if somebody tells you that machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), gamification and social media are going to solve all the world's problems, you have my permission to shout "BULLSHIT!" in their face really loudly. In fact, I encourage you to do so. We need less ineffectual waste-of-space blaggers in the world.

Tags: #computing #socialmedia #politics #capitalism

This is a story about the start of an eventful year...

On May 13th, 2015, which was my Mum's birthday, I decided it was time to try and clean up my act and get back on my feet. I spoke with a friend from Ireland who had been very supportive during a very difficult start to the year, but later that day I was sideswiped by events that defy rational interpretation. This is my account of those events.

I came to be staying in a hotel near Finsbury Park, Islington, North London. How I came to be there is a matter of shame and regret, that I don't particularly want to go into. I believed that the predating matter had been settled, and I was killing time until the 13th of May, which was the last possible date I considered it acceptable to have not yet managed to get my shit together. I had set myself a deadline, but I was being quite slow to get on with what needed to be done.

When I had checked into the hotel, it had seemed quite an ordinary place, stuffed full of tourists. The layout of the building was maze-like, and I struggled to find my room. The room numbering wasn't logical, and there seemed to be staircases everywhere. My room was sparse beyond belief, with two very basic single beds, and a flimsy wardrobe. The curtain was barely more than a semi-transparent sheet. I'm not being snobby, because I was lucky to have a dry roof over my head, but I mean to describe the setting for some of this tale.

My hotel room was on the top floor, with a large sash window looking onto the terrace of houses opposite. You could see in the windows of the house opposite. Outside the window was the top of the bay windows of the rooms below, forming a kind of balcony without any railings. Obviously you weren't supposed to climb out of the window onto that balcony, but more on that later.

There had been some excellent sunny weather, and I had come and gone from my room to a little shop nearby to purchase ice lollies, as well as other food & drink, but I was pretty under-nourished. I was also extremely sleep deprived.

2015 had not been going well. In Swiss Cottage, my landlord had decided he wanted to end the contract of me and my flatmates and re-let the flat at much higher rent, after he had spent money on much needed renovation. The flat had chronic damp problems and the heating didn't work, until I had eventually nagged him into fixing the place up... triggering my own eviction. My contract with Barclays had been unexpectedly terminated due to a complete asshat of a guy trying to protect his key-man dependency and little fiefdom... I wasn't the only one who he didn't get on with, and the existing contractors had refused to work with him, leaving me with the short straw.

I returned to the hostel I had lived in, after being chucked onto the street by Camden Council, a year earlier. Camden Council had been most unhelpful in their legal duties to house a resident, and had wasted a lot of time. I was given two weeks in a crisis house, but it was then left up to me to try my luck with local homeless charities. They literally didn't care.

In the summer of 2014 I had been living in a hostel in Camden Town, funded using my overdraft. This had gotten me back on my feet, so why wouldn't I go back there at the beginning of 2015, when I no longer had a place to live? It turned out that most of my friends had managed to move on and make a better life for themselves. The prospect of starting to rebuild my life again, from scratch, was devastating.

I decided to head out East, and lived in a hostel in Shoreditch and then one back in Swiss Cottage. These were chaotic times. Food and sleep were the big casualties, which had a knock-on effect on my mental health. Dragging piles of bags all over London, while not looking after yourself and having very uncertain living arrangements is quite detrimental, it turns out.

It has to be confessed that stimulant abuse was a large component of these problems. The insomnia and anoretic (appetite suppressing) effects of these chemicals conspire to cause you to neglect to sleep and eat. Without sleep and nutrition, the brain quite naturally gets pretty strung out, and you're more susceptible to strange thoughts and behaviours. Quite possibly this entire tale can be told as the result of a chain of unchecked drug binges, but there are elements that are clearly external influences.

As with any drug addict, ever, I decided to have "one last hit"... and this is where things go a bit sketchy.

I was overcome with a sense of threat. I felt like I was being watched, listened to. I decided to lock myself in the bathroom, around evening time on the 13th of May, 2015. I stayed there until the next morning, trapped by fear.

Fear of what? Well, at first, it was impossible to describe. I felt that the people in the houses opposite were staring in through the large sash window, with its flimsy curtain. I felt that the people in the neighbouring rooms were listening in to my mutterings. I felt sure that there was some hostility, just outside the door of my room.

When I was in the bathroom, for the whole evening and night, there was nothing to suggest that anything untoward was happening, but I was still racked by this irrational fear. In the middle of the night, to calm myself down I started telling stories to myself, in the pitch blackness: I hadn't turned on the bathroom light. I gave myself a lecture, on all the physics that I know. I went through everything from fluorescent lightbulbs, to Cathode-Ray Tube televisions, Light-Emitting Diodes and lots of other phenomena that can be explained by Quantum Mechanics. I then started to tell myself a story about the birth and death of the Universe, in some kind of helio-centric model, with a new interpretation of atomic fusion. Clearly, I had lost my mind.

As dawn broke and I could see light under the bottom of the bathroom door, I was certain that I saw flickering light and shadows in my room. This made me extremely agitated. As time went on, I heard stampeding in the corridor, and crude animal noises being made by people, whistling sounds. Then, the fire alarm bells started to be sounded at random intervals, accompanied by yet more running around that sounded like adults acting like children.

I was intensely annoyed at this animal call, running in corridors, fire bell cacophony. I felt extremely persecuted and afraid of imminent attack by these savages. Clearly, I was being deliberately spooked, pranked, by some malicious idiots. This went on for a couple of hours.

Eventually, I could stand it no more, and decided to act as if I couldn't hear what was going on, and try and act normally. I had a shower in the dark, towelled myself off and burst back into the bedroom to face my persecutors. There was no clear sign of anything wrong, but I was freaked out.

There were sounds that were quite clearly audible of the other hotel guests in the adjoining rooms. I was muttering to myself under my breath, in a German accent for some reason. I assumed that my low-volume muttering could not be heard by anybody. I was quite angry and resentful that I had been made so fearful by a bunch of childish adults, playing pranks in the corridor, and started to mutter all kinds of weird things about these people, mostly about them being crass, uncultured out-of-town folks.

At some point, it seemed like I had clearly been overheard, and there was an angry reaction outside the door. I felt ashamed that I had caused offence, as much as I felt surprised that my insane mumblings had been overheard. I took the 'please do not disturb' sign and tore off the 'not' and hung it on my door handle outside my room as some kind of peace offering. As far as I could tell, the hostile family I had upset took particular offence to this, and it sounded like I was about to be lynched.

I hurriedly packed my bags and phoned the hotel reception, and asked if they could smooth things over with these guests, as I didn't fancy getting my head kicked in by some family of chavs who seemed to be spending most of their day hanging around in a budget hotel room antagonising me, rather than going sightseeing around London. I begged the manager to send somebody to safely escort me to a waiting taxi, where I would beat a hasty retreat.

There was a knock at the door, and an energetic young man, beaming from ear to ear bounded into my room when I opened the door. He listened to my concerns with a look of pure amusement playing on his face. He looked as if he could barely stifle a laugh. I'm still not sure if that's because of my strange behaviour and the fact I was clearly off my rocker, or whether he was "in on the game"... but that's just paranoia. The fact that he was a young, well-dressed English guy in good physical shape certainly jarred with the sullen under-paid Eastern European staff that I had encountered up until that time. I had not seen this man behind reception ever, during my comings and goings.

Nothing much seemed to happen. No taxi arrived. No phonecall from reception to say the coast was clear and I could make my escape, free from persecution by the chav family, baying for my blood for taking the piss out of them as uncultured scum. I know it's pathetic to say it now, but I had been half-joking and simply continuing the madness of muttering random crazy stuff to myself, in a bad German accent, such were the depths of my insanity.

I phoned the non-emergency number for the police, and tried to explain my predicament. This didn't go well, and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The day wore on and started to get towards evening time. None of this could prepare me for what happened next.

The strange thing is, that over 24 hours had elapsed since I had taken any drugs, and the amount of time that they would last would normally be around 16 to 18 hours, maximum. It made no sense that I was still experiencing severe paranoia, auditory hallucinations, delusions and other weird thoughts and ideas. I struggle to explain later events by simply saying that it was a result of drug abuse.

Perhaps I had finally done it. Perhaps I had finally tipped myself into complete insanity. Certainly, the sense of threat that I had initially perceived was mostly unfounded, unwarranted, irrational.

So, I'll leave it at that for part one. We pause this tale, with me terrified of an angry lynching mob of a family outside my bedroom door, the hotel staff alerted to my distress as well as some non-emergency contact with the police, who were no strangers to me... although it was Kentish Town (Camden) police who I'd had brushes with in the past, but I was now in a different borough of London (Islington). Who knows how joined up the different forces and stations are, especially when dealing with somebody who's got no criminal record.

I wonder what the conclusion will be when the tale is told. That I definitely interacted with people during this time, suggests there is a very real but unfathomable component to this weird story... let's see where it leads.

This is where things started to get unravelled, before I ended up in a couple of hotels near Finsbury Park. The fun run took me right past my bike, where it was locked up on the street outside, as a deliciously ironic twist (May 2015)

Tags: #london #drugs #addiction #bipolar #police

This is a story about being bored to death...

I've had enough of alienating people. I even bore myself with my repetitive themes, labouring the same points over & over again. I know I wrote once before about changing the scratched record, but I've struggled to do it yet.

If you've stuck with me this far, I'm amazed, and I'm grateful. I will try my hardest to make it worthwhile, as the narrative hopefully turns in a positive direction. I decided that I was going to blog for at least a year, every day if possible, and I've stuck pretty true to my original objective. I'm about 8 months into this whacky project.

When I think back to some of the weird and (not very) wonderful stuff that has spewed out, during some rather strung out periods, it's a bit cringeworthy. Having all this brain dump out there for all to see is quite embarrassing, shameful, but who cares? The genie is out of the bottle.

I'm far more self aware than you probably think I am. I'm aware how bitter & twisted I come across. I'm aware how much I'm grinding my axe, and refusing to bury the hatchet. I'm aware how stuck in the past I am. I'm aware how absolutely bat shit insane I've been at times.

It's going to take months before I have most of the pieces that build a stable life. I currently have a place to live and a couple of friends that I see regularly, so that's more than I had in July 2014, homeless on Hampstead Heath, but it's still a pretty incomplete picture. I don't have a lot of control over how long it's going to take to get another job, and rebuilding a social network is going to take ages. Who knows if I'll ever patch things up with my family?

I wrote before about compassion fatigue, and besides, don't my problems look self made anyway? Doesn't it look, to all intents and purposes, that I'm a spoiled little rich brat, wailing about first world problems, or things that I shouldn't have to fix up anyway? How can I talk about being fortunate at one time, and then talk about being down on luck another time?

When I'm starting a sentence, I notice how often I'm using a personal pronoun. It's all "I" and "me". This hasn't escaped my notice. As a proportion of the world that I inhabit, I'm alone with my thoughts far more than most. No job, no work colleagues, only one friend that I see regularly, apart from my one flatmate.

If you think I've become self absorbed... or maybe that I'm always self absorbed... that's perhaps a function of isolation, loneliness, being an only child up to the age of 10, being bullied & ostracised, being moved around the country away from friends, switching schools 6 times, isolated in a tiny village in France every school holiday.

I try and fight the self-absorption, but it's a fact of where I am right now. I'm broke, unemployed and I don't see anybody face-to-face on any kind of regular basis. I have no passion at the moment, nothing to live for, nor the money to pursue a passion.

There's a bird I photographed, when I was living up on Hampstead Heath. Perhaps I seem free as a bird to you, seeing as I don't have any kids to feed & clothe, seeing as I don't have a partner to buy handbags and shoes for, seeing as I don't have a mortgage to pay anymore.

Certainly, I felt free when I didn't have rent to pay, debts to service. It was exciting, an adventure, sleeping rough in London. But, I'm not stupid. Sleeping rough is no fun when the weather is bad. Sleeping rough is no fun when your luck turns, and you get robbed or in trouble with the police or park wardens.

Rejecting the rat race can only be done for so long, before you are unemployable and so far outside the system that you can never re-enter it. People and their neat little pigeon holes can't cope with a gap in a CV where you were a no-fixed-abode hobo. When you have no address to fill in your last 5 years of address history, the forms just aren't set up for that. Computer says no.

There's a very real lack of excitement and adventure in my life at the moment. The more that you play chicken with the grim reaper, the more the humdrum daily existence becomes anathema. My whole childhood and career was mostly boredom, so the chaos of even traumatic and stressful events holds more interest than yet more rat race game playing.

In a way, I want to fix up things in my life, only so that I can burn them down again. To chuck things away at the moment would be an insult to two people who've helped me not lose everything that we consider vitally important in the world of the rat race. It's a shame to admit how depressed I am at the moment though.

Am I supposed to be happy about the prospect of brown-nosing bosses and dressing up in a fancy suit every day, trying to make a good first impression with new work colleagues? Am I supposed to be excited about having the money to wipe out my debts, and to feather the nest of my landlord? Am I supposed to be pleased that while death rushes headlong towards me, I'm saving up towards some imagined future time when hopefully I have enough health & wealth left to fuck the whole thing off?

During periods of exhaustion and particularly poor mental health due to extreme stress and pressure, I've talked about wanting to teach deprived kids physics, write a book, solve the riddles of the Universe, set up a hostel for refugees... basically jack in the rat race and do something worthwhile. There's a social conscience and a curious mind that are completely unfulfilled, and 36 years of trying to keep it at bay is just as damaging as anything you can do to yourself with drink & drugs.

But, when I'm well, I'm a realist. I will choose the path of least resistance. I won't burn every bridge.

However, I do worry that the day has finally come when I've burnt every bridge. This website, where my entire psyche and darkest secrets are out on display for all to see... it could be the end of my professional reputation. It could derail my gravy train. If it does, I'll feel guilty for those who tried to protect me from myself, but I'll probably be happy, deep down. The rat race is a miserable existence.

There's a Lego gravy train. Adults like playing with kids toys. What does that tell you about how pointless and boring most jobs are?

Tags: #homeless #career #mentalhealth #depression #bipolar #parents #childhood

This is a story about preying on the weak...

I'm lucky enough to live in a secular society, so I'm not expecting a major backlash over what I'm about to say, but religion is still an emotive topic in some parts of the world, and amongst extremists.

As I thought about how this story should start, I considered word-play around the similarity between prey and pray. The friends I have who are overtly religious all seemed to find their God during periods of intense personal development, turmoil. The two things might be unconnected, but I somehow feel that they are not.

I myself reconsidered the existence of a deity, as death drew dangerously close. I don't think I would exactly have found myself praying for my soul, pleading for forgiveness or any of that bullshit, as I drew my final breath, but certain events in my life brought theological questions into sharp focus in my mind.

One of the most profoundly unsettling questions I have, is not "what happens when we die?" but actually, is it possible to die at all? The conclusion I reached, when I really was at death's door, was that it isn't actually possible to die... at least in any way that you can usefully perceive.

That sounds pretty nuts, right? However, the conclusion is actually borne out of real scientific empirical evidence. I won't go into the details, as I have already written at length about Quantum Eraser experiments and the problem of separating the scientists performing measurements from their experiments.

But what does it all mean in practice? Well, in actual fact, this line of thinking has brought me ever closer to Christian values than I would have ever thought possible. Do I mean Christian in the bible-bashing, ramming religion down people's throat sense? No, what I mean is Christian... as in, the teachings of Jesus Christ, not the out-of-context bullshit peddled by dogmatic religious thought leaders.

Let me give you an example: heaven and hell. We are all familiar with the concept of eternal damnation in a fiery underworld full of sin and deviancy. Well, it was through a fairly sinful path that I arrived at my understanding of what heaven and hell might look like, in a world where we don't actually die. But what the hell does that mean, we don't die?

You're going to die, but you won't be aware of it. You're going to see me die, but I won't be aware of it. We're going to see everybody die, except ourselves in fact... my interpretation of what I can see from the evidence, is that our own consciousness persists in some form or other, for eternity. This is the multiverse, and the many-minds theory.

If a consciousness lasts eternally, that means that you will be eternally haunted by your past actions. If you do 'sinful' deeds, then you will have an ever-increasing amount of guilt, and your life will be increasingly awful, until destruction has wrought havoc over the entire surface of the Earth. Eventually, you will have exhausted every resource at your disposal, and you will be presiding in immortality over the scorched and blackened surface of the planet, wrecked by your increasingly 'evil' behaviour. In essence, you will have created your own personal hell.

Equally, as an immortal living in a future shaped by your actions, you could preside over something that is the polar opposite of hell. With all eternity to refine and improve things, if you aspire to enhance the state of existence, then you will be able to create a kind of heaven.

What I've found, from personal experience, is that there is no heaven to be found at the bottom of a whiskey bottle or a crack pipe. The things that seem to offer heavenly euphoria or "floating on cloud 9" as some people say, are actually pathways that actually lead to misery and destruction. The short term quick-fixes eventually lead you to lie, cheat and steal.

Nobody preaches as loud as the converted former sinner, and so it is the case that if you examine the past of those who have found religion, you will very often find that there is very real repentance for a life of sin. We should remember this famous quote:

"The only difference between the saint and the sinner, is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future" -- Oscar Wilde

I believe it's over-simplistic to talk about right & wrong, good & evil, dark & light and saints & sinners though. We are a product of circumstances, not free will. I strongly believe that it's quite possible that time runs in both directions, and our memory is just a 'trick' that makes us think we are actually making decisions.

Let's examine what I just said in a little more detail. If time is running in the opposite direction, you know exactly what decisions you're going to make and your final destiny, but you have no memory of any decision that you made in the 'past' because your memory is being erased.

If you have no memory of things you did in the 'past' then you have the opposite belief system. Instead of believing that the future is unknowable and that you're in control of your destiny, you know that your destiny is fixed, but the past decisions that led you to your present existence are unknowable. The illusion of free will is shattered.

I don't believe it's actually possible to experience consciousness when the flow of time is reversed, so in theory, there is only one stream of consciousness that spans all time, and every conscious being, with time just zig-zagging its way backwards and forwards through all eternity. It seems, to me, probable that there is only ever one 'active' consciousness at any one time in a Universe, and every other being that ever existed for all time in that Universe is actually part of the same chain of conscious periods, where time runs 'forwards' as we perceive it.

Does your brain hurt yet? Look, it's really simple: you feel conscious, and that you have free will, and that you have memories that go back to early childhood... however, you're going to see everybody you know die, while you live for all eternity, and then bang! one day it seems to start all over again, but actually it's the same Universe, but you just don't remember the bit where time went into reverse, and you're now living another person's life in the same Universe as you'll inhabit for all time. Simples?

If you think I've gone totally potty, don't worry... I don't believe in that hypnotherapy mumbo jumbo where we can remember past lives. There's just no good scientific theory to support such a preposterous idea.

Also, by the way, there is no such thing as a space wizard who created the whole world in 6 days and then had a rest for a day. Sorry about that.

Go ahead and ask for whom the bell tolls... you're immortal so it's not going to be tolling for thee

Tags: #physics