Quantum Forest

I used to lay in the grass, look up into the sky, and imagine I was falling.

Reality is a pane of glass
That we tread upon with bare feet
We keep our eye’s forward
Suddenly aware of infinity
When we meet eyes.
I could walk off the earth
Into the ocean of stars in front of me

Being a parent has a tendency to amplify the present and keep your mind from wandering much. Life is full of sound, urgency and redirected priorities. No sooner do you start something only to find your attention is needed elsewhere and you have to consistently make these snap decisions on assigning priority between making a sandwich and cleaning up a mess. It’s exhausting, but you do get acclimated to it over time. It’s just normal now.
So when I find these pockets of quiet, I try to make them last an eternity.
The rain just started falling, and I have the house to myself. A rarity.
Moments like this bring back reality. The magnification of the scales at work.
Hearing the birds sing through the gentile cracking of raindrops against leaves.
The motion of wind as it passes through trees, sending cascades of rain through the wood line.

I’ve been reading a lot about Systems Theory/Dynamic Systems lately.
Donella Meadows specifically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL_lOoomRTA
I started off with Thinking in Systems, and in that book she quoted a book that shaped the way I view the world. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Seeing this drew me in and made me think that maybe this was something I needed to spend some time on.
Donella Meadows, from what I have read of her and her thoughts, seems nothing short of a sage.
Systems Theory originates in computer science, as an offshoot of Control Theory. Long story short. I have this dream of running an automated greenhouse when I retire (or before, we’ll see). In the process of researching that, I’ve come across this standard way of modeling a system and how it behaves. Donella’s focus was environmental. It seems intuitive to view the world this way, but the complexity that they’re able to describe and model with System Theory is pretty amazing. It’s fractal in how it can break down a system hierarchy and maintain this overall picture of a system. In a way, I think it is a way for science to look at something and learn while maintaining the beauty of it’s design.
You can see the purpose of everything, rather than just the function. It makes sense of biodiversity and how energy flows from the sun to you. A blade of grass to a human and everything in between. It describes economies, and computers. Cars and the solar system. You can look at an area with a high mosquito population and use it to deduce why they’re not being controlled properly, and find leverage points in that ecosystem to encourage predation. You can use it to model your household. Your finances, schedules, kids. It’s been pretty eye opening.

Sometimes I feel alone in my mind. Like I’m adrift. I get excited about things and I just kinda want to bounce them off people. I can’t really talk to anyone about this stuff, or what’s on my mind. I’ve always had trouble coming up with a justification for staring at the grass for so long when someone asks me if I’m alright when I’m caught in one of those rare pockets of peace.

“yeah, sorry, was just daydreaming”

Back to life.

In the Navy, my job was primarily to stare into a large field of noise and try to make sense of it all. I would stare into a visual and audio representation of the electromagnetic field and everything that was emitting a signal onto it, intelligible or otherwise, and try to find patterns in all the chaos that existed in a realm that goes largely unnoticed to the un-indoctrinated.
Initially, when you start working in that field, it’s like sensory overload. You’re staring at pure static mixed with an array of beeps, buzzes, clicks, and anything else that the audio module down converted into sound. It’s like staring at an antenna TV with no signal and trying to find patterns in the snowy screen. The first time you identify a signal, which is usually a local radio station, you feel this brief sense of accomplishment that you were able to dig through the haystack and find something. But it’s short lived, as you realize that you’ve basically just manually done what your car stereo can do with the seek button. It wasn’t until my first mission that I really gained a sense of the power that this role had, and also began to make sense of noise.
Overtime, as my experience grew, I began to find patterns easily. I could stare at the spectrum and find familiar signals intuitively. Instead of seeing pure chaos on my screen, I began to see an image of the environment. I could piece together various signals and deduce what “platforms” were around us. I also began to hunt in this forest of chaos for things that didn’t want to be found. I became passionate about the job, and by the time I was approaching the end of my time in the Navy, I had made a name for myself in mastering this form of esoteric warfighting. I felt a sense of purpose. I had a niche that I was proud of.
Then I got out.

And with my departure, I lost my access to the noise. I went back home, to find a “normal” life, and had to begin my re-integration into society. It took me about a year to start looking into re-joining the military. I was not re-integrating well, and I was having a hard time turning off taking myself too seriously. I ended up focusing pretty heavily in trying to carve a new niche for myself as a civilian and I expected a lot of myself. At the time, cyber security was just starting to emerge as a profession and I’d been on the cutting edge of it. I was going to college and had involved myself in clubs and competitions where I could differentiate myself among my peers. I was doing well and likely would have been successful in that industry. But while I was sinking all my attention into my professional development, I had been completely neglecting myself socially, and as a person.
The Navy had re-structured my identity for the most part and separating left me as a bit of a hollowed out shell of my former self. While this had gone largely unnoticed by me, my family and friends could see, clearly, that I was on a downward spiral. I hadn’t taken time to rebuild myself, as a person, and was relying almost entirely on my professional development as an identity. After about 2 years of being out of the military, I lost someone I loved and it catalyzed a collapse of ego into the hole that I’d structured my life around rather than repaired. I consider the time I spent in this hole as the worst time of my life. I tried a few times to fight my way out of it with some unhealthy methods, but each time I fell back in. It didn’t take long to realize that without doing the work to repair the hole I had dug, I was going to continue to fall back in every time.
One particular night I remember very clearly above the fuzziness of that time, that I spent staring into the snow while it was falling.
At the time, the concept of chaos I had was different. It was inefficient, and was an inherited trait of disorder, or rather, a complete lack of determinism. It happened when things were wrong, or untuned. When a plan falls apart, it succumbs to chaos itself, as an entity. But that night, as I stared into the snow longer and longer against the solid black backdrop, I couldn’t help but feel like I was seeing patterns. Little waves of snow flakes in patches as they fell, and opposing pockets of no snow. Areas where snowflakes fell and curved against some invisible gradient. This wasn’t purely chaos, there was still some degree of determinism happening here.

I know now, as a 36 year old father of 3, that chaos is nothing like what I thought it was. It’s not something you can prevent, only anticipate and prepare for. There’s a paper that was written in the 70’s called “Period 3 Implies Chaos”, and I can’t help but see the irony in it. It seems to be the perfect number of children to ensure that your life remains in a complete state of chaotic resonance. That aside, you do learn how to thrive in it. There are patterns in chaos, that I think our minds are able to pick up on intuitively, and have been picking up on long before the introduction of chaos theory and fractals. Like when things are “too quiet” or life seems to be going “too well” you almost expect for something to throw a wrench in things, and inevitably, something will. You see your kids playing, but you left out a gardening tool on the opposite side of the yard that they could get hurt on, and you instinctively pick it up, knowing that some how, that gardening tool will become an attractor and the kids will somehow get hurt on it. You start to build these bifurcation maps in your mind of everything that can happen given a particular phase state and how things can break down.
<sigh>
Sometimes I just wish I could spend a day watching the surface of a stream.

Life’s lessons are many.

Back to work I guess.

At some point it dawned on me that something had to exist for the “big bang” to happen in. It was probably my first real, practical look at infinity.
Imagine something as vast, and similarly shaped, as the ocean. With everything we on earth have ever seen in the nearly 14 billion years of light that we have access to exists in a tiny, spontaneous bubble in that ocean.

Since we simply can’t see out that past our little bubble, a lot of our explanations for reality work within the context of a bubble.

That really irks me.

We develop this linear explanation of the universes timeline

The Big Bang -> Existence -> The Heat Death

The big bang is this idea that all matter and energy in the universe originated from an explosion.

This explosion, set forth a chain reaction that set everything we know into motion. Everything from galaxies to the bird that just flew by my window.
The sounds you hear, the people you love, the thoughts you have are all a result of the energy produced by this bang. This energy drives existence. It’s conserved when your tomatoes eat photons from the sun and convert them to energy, which is then consumed by you.
As this energy pushes along through time and space, it settles. Like anything else, it has it’s limit. The heat death is the idea, or rather, the inevitability, that all energy in the universe will at some point fall into equilibrium. The ball will stop rolling and everything just falls to a stand still at the atomic level.

It implies two things:

1. Time began somewhere

2. Time will end somewhere.

I do think that if the big bang is how what we can observe began, which it seems to be, there will be a beginning and an end to this explosion that we’re all cascading through. But I don’t think we’ll actually reach a heat death before the energy is in some way recycled. It seems more likely to me that the universe eats itself through black holes, and as they consume everything and each other, they would eventually reach some degree of criticality.

That kinda shits on the second law of thermodynamics. Hawking would be pissed, but it’s just kind of a copout to accept that reality ceases to exists because we’ve decided that in our bubble, this is how things work.

What if everything spills out like when an above ground pool spills out into the yard, and everything begins again.
Infinity isn’t terminal, and I’d think that has to apply to time and energy as well.

The real question, I guess, is how is energy re-introduced into a universe. What’s the process that drove the big bang to release it’s massive store of energy? Where did that come from? Is it different from anything we know like nuclear fusion? How, tf, do we get back to a higher energy state from nothing?

To watch the colors of the leaves reflected up from the glassy water as we talk like we’re without the weight of the world hanging over our heads.
This is the best I could come up with otherwise.