Dark Anything

Did I mention that I’m an atheist? Or rather, an agnostic on steroids. It’s not that I hate or despise or actively deny the existence of a god—I just don’t see or feel the need for one. But, with a gun to my head, I must admit that I just don’t know. And this state of unknowing, along with healthy dashes of doubt and skepticism, colors my tendency to disbelieve in anything I cannot prove or have logically demonstrated to me.

So, um, physics … The acceptance of and belief in what’s called “dark matter” is based on the motion of stars in a galaxy. We add up all the things we can see at galactic distances—that is, the things that shine brightly—and compare them to what we see in our own solar system and nearby detectable systems. The biggest things, the heaviest things, and the ones that shine most brightly are stars. Our Sun is about 99.9% of the mass of our local system. Not even Jupiter and Saturn compete as heavyweights. The rocky planets, the moons, the asteroids, and the icy comets are just a rounding error. That bright thing up there in the sky—the thing that can be seen from other systems in the Milky Way, if anyone is looking—is essentially the mass of our solar system. And we have no evidence that other stars, other bright things we can see, are any different.

Well and good. But add up all the bright things in visible galaxies, estimate their collective mass, and compare that mass and its computed gravitational effect to the observed motion of the galaxy’s stars—and you get an anomaly. The stars in the average galaxy, based on the mass holding them together as a system, should be rotating like wood chips swirling in a whirlpool. That is, the ones near the center should be circling faster than the ones on the periphery. But instead, we observe that they rotate like stars painted on a disk, with the outer ones keeping pace with, and so moving faster than, the inner ones. For that to happen, the galaxy must contain more mass—have a higher gravity attraction and greater bending of spacetime—than the sum of the mass of the bright things. From this is born “dark matter”—can’t see it but weighs a lot. Current candidates are “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs), which would be really big subatomic particles that don’t show up in any reactions, and “massive cometary halo objects” (MACHOs), which would be big objects in the periphery of galaxies, like huge rogue planets or roving black holes, that just don’t shine.¹

The other issue in physics is the expansion rate of the universe. We know that the universe is expanding because we can use “standard candles”—certain periodically variable stars and certain types of exploding stars, both with a known brightness—to measure the distance to these galaxies. By knowing the actual brightness of these objects and comparing that with how bright they appear in our telescopes, we can estimate how far away they and their home galaxies are. In the same way, if you know that the light you see on a distant hill is from a 100-watt bulb, you can know that it’s closer than if it was from a 1,000-watt bulb, which would appear to be farther away.

But the other thing we see, aside from the apparent brightness of known stars, is that the light from all the stars in a particular galaxy, including these standard candles, is “red-shifted.” That is, instead of being, say, bluish-white—as we would expect to see in the light from a similar star in our own galaxy—the light from distant galaxies has a longer wavelength, more reddish in appearance. This is the Doppler effect. If the stars were coming toward us—and some galaxies, like Andromeda, are actually approaching the Milky Way—then the light waves would be compressed, more bluish, just as the sound waves of an approaching train’s horn are compressed and so appear higher in pitch. But stars that are going away shift redder, their light waves more stretched out, like the descending wail of a train that’s leaving you. And the farther away a galaxy is, the redder its apparent light. So from this, astronomers conclude that the universe is expanding.

Well, yes. It supposedly exploded from a single infinitely hot, infinitely dense point some 13.8 billion years ago. So, of course, it’s expanding. But based on observations of galactic red shifts at various distances, as well as from analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation—the fading “echo” of the Big Bang—the expansion rate is apparently increasing. The momentum of the explosive expansion isn’t fading or even holding steady—it’s speeding up. Nothing in current physics explains this result, and so astronomers have proposed that the universe is influenced by something called “dark energy.” There is no good candidate for this energy, except perhaps some kind of “vacuum energy” that resides in and drives the expansion of empty space itself. But whatever it is, it’s vast.²

If you collect all the visible, bright matter we can see in the universe and compare it to our computation of the amounts of dark matter necessary to keep the galaxies spinning like they do, then dark matter makes up about 85 percent of the physical stuff in the universe—way more than the bright objects we can see and, supposedly, interact with.

And if you try to account for all that dark matter plus the dark energy necessary to create and drive the expansion of the known, observable universe, then about 69 percent of everything is dark energy, 26 percent is dark matter, and only 5 percent is the familiar, atomic matter that we can see as stars, planets, dust, gases … stuff. So, in short, we know very little, and have only vague conjectures and initial theories, about the vast majority of the universe we live in.

That’s either a shameful admission—or a vast opportunity.

In a blog last month, I mentioned a breakthrough discovery that gravity—which has long been conspicuously absent from the calculations of quantum mechanics, the science that deals with the invisible world of subatomic particles—may actually exist at and be measurable at the microscopic level. Einstein’s theories of relativity, dealing with the macro world of planets and stars, and quantum mechanics, governing the realm of the unbelievably small, were long thought to be mutually exclusive and irreconcilable. But if gravity is exerted by grains of sand and maybe by subatomic particles, then we may finally be in line to create a “Theory of Everything,” combining relativity and quantum physics—the goal of physicists since early in the twentieth century. That may eventually explain mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.

What if gravity—the bending of spacetime according to the amount of available mass—exists and could be measured not just at the level of stars and planets, but in grains of dust, atoms of dispersed gases, and subatomic particles flying through “empty” space? The effects would be small, vanishingly small. After all, the effects of gravity are subtle. It’s the weakest of the four known and fundamental forces.³ The mass of the entire Earth has such a weak gravity field—an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared toward its center from the planet’s surface—that you can overcome it briefly simply by jumping and more permanently by firing off a chemical rocket.

But over vast distances, the distances between galaxies? We know that the bending of spacetime caused by a gravity field creates a “time dilation.” That is, time slows down under the influence of gravity. A clock on the surface of the Earth ticks more slowly than one out in interplanetary or interstellar space. It’s not just that the clock’s mechanism is retarded by the force of gravity, but time itself as the clock measures it has slowed. And a clock positioned near the event horizon of a black hole is slowed so much that the passage of hours it records would register as years to an astronaut orbiting outside the black hole’s effective gravity well.⁴

So … If dust, gases, and subatomic particles hanging about in intergalactic space have actual gravity effects—bending spacetime for anything small enough that passes near them, like a moving photon—might not that effect the timing, the energy level, of the photons themselves? This is a conjecture, similar to but not exactly the same as the “tired light” hypothesis described in the second footnote below.

I told you I was an agnostic, and I write a kind of science fantasy—not real but hypothetical and, hopefully, barely plausible. As a skeptic, I don’t accept that our current knowledge of anything is actually final.

Sir Isaac Newton refined the observations and theories of the ancient Greek and Babylonian astronomers. Then Albert Einstein refined the observations and mathematics of Newton. And then Niels Bohr and the quantum physicists threw it all into a cocked hat at the subatomic level. Edwin Hubble observed that the light of distant galaxies was red-shifted and so moving away from us, and that the universe was expanding. Cosmologists then used this expansion to wind it back to a single point some 13.8 billion years ago, and the decay of the cosmic microwave background as measured by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson seemed to confirm that dating. Then astronomers figured that the universe is actually larger than it could have grown in that time, and so Alan Guth proposed inflation—that at the moment of the Big Bang, the universe expanded exponentially fast, faster than light speed—to finally arrive at the observable scale. Now we have dark matter and dark energy—unknown and, so far, undetectable “things” and “forces”—to explain anomalies in our observations that don’t fit our theories.

As I said before, these are exciting times. But the whole thing may eventually get tossed into a cocked hat. The Big Bang is, after all, just another creation story, like God moving across the waters and separating the light from the dark, or Great Raven dropping a wing feather upon the Earth to create everything. We yearn to know. And when we don’t, we keep piling theory on theory, until eventually we come upon a universe made up of things and forces we can’t know and can only imagine.

We ain’t done yet.

1. By now it’s generally accepted that our galaxy—and every other one we can study at close range—include a massive black hole at their center. These invisible objects have a mass on the order of a million suns, give or take. The one at the center of the Milky Way is about 4.3 million suns. So, why doesn’t that constitute “dark matter” all by itself? Well, our galaxy has over 100 billion stars; so the central black hole is not even one percent of galactic mass—kind of the situation of all the rocky planets, moons, and asteroids in the solar system.

2. An alternate theory has been proposed to this red-shifted Doppler effect—one that would discount the continuous expansion of the universe in the first place. Suppose light that travels long distances just “gets tired.” Suppose that photons traveling so far—not just between the Sun and the Earth, or from nearby stars to the Earth, but the billions of light years between galaxies—tend to lose energy, so that their wavelength becomes increasingly longer and redder. But there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism driving this effect. Nothing in the vacuum of space exists to “sap the energy” of a moving photon. And just as a body in motion tends to stay in motion—according to the first law of Sir Isaac Newton—until and unless some outside force acts upon it, so light waves should retain their energy unless they interact with something.
    It is part of the General Theory of Relativity that objects in deep gravity fields—spacetime that is bent sharply enough—experience time dilation, as described above in the main text. A physical object in the gravity field of a black hole and approaching its singularity or one moving at light speed—if it could ever attain that velocity—would experience the complete stoppage of time. So presumably a photon, which has no mass, experiences a timeless, changeless existence. But might it not also, at that speed, because it is moving through the dilation, lose just a bit of its energy, become just a little red-shifted, and more so the longer it travels? Conventional physics and cosmology say not, but our observations and theories are continually evolving.

3. The strong nuclear force, which holds quarks together to form protons and neutrons; the weak nuclear force, which holds these particles together in atomic nuclei; the electromagnetic force, which holds electrons in their atomic “orbits” or shells and accounts for the joining together of atoms into molecules, among other effects; and gravity, which bends spacetime around large masses and holds planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies together.

4. This was one of the effects correctly described—not all of them were!—in the 2014 movie Interstellar.

Strange New Energies

It’s right on the tip of my tongue, the edge of my mind, about how we will drive to the stars. This is because I’m a science fiction reader and writer and have bathed in notions of faster-than-light travel, generation ships, warp drives, and worm holes since I was a teenager. It’s part of the mythos that human beings will one day have the energy, derived from our understanding of physics, that will let us cross the vast gulfs between the stars. Our stories abound, too, with other beings, other cultures, aliens who supposedly have cracked the secret. And while they are obviously more technically advanced than us, they are not magicians.¹

We human beings are aware of and have the potential to use three forms of energy. One is chemical, the making and breaking of atomic bonds, representing electrons donated to or shared between the energy shells of different atoms. This is every form of energy known and used up to the twentieth century. It is the energy of fire, of the chemical processes that drive reactions inside our cells, of burning hydrocarbons to make heat, and of releasing nitrogen atoms from complex molecules that then join together in ravenous diatomic bonds that drive most chemical explosions. It will also drive chemical rockets into orbit around the Earth, as far as the Moon and outer planets, and eventually, by inertia, over vast amounts of time, beyond our solar system.²

Within the last hundred years, we have learned about newer forms of energy. We discovered that heavy atoms—those with lots of protons but that have added or are missing their complementary neutrons—can be induced to break apart at a nuclear level to make smaller atoms and so create heat. This reaction is not normally found in nature in any great quantity—not enough so you would notice—although it is a suspected contributor to the heat at the cores of the rocky planets. Nuclear fission is the energy of the first atomic bombs and of reactor “piles,” and it has since been promoted—although not without opposition—to supply our electrical grid.

And then we learned, almost immediately after discovering the fission process, that the lightest atoms—those with just one or two protons and almost no neutrons—can be induced to come together to make slightly heavier atoms and also to make heat. This is the reaction that drives all the stars—at least until they burn out to become cinders, masses of pure neutronium, or black holes. We’ve been trying ever since to harness this reaction on Earth and put it into our grid, but the fusing process is trickier and more unstable than fission. And so far, although we’ve tried collapsing plasmas with powerful magnetic fields and laser pulses, the only thing that seems to work reliably is a massive gravity source—the weight that brings a star together in the first place. So, although there are a gazillion times more light atoms than heavy ones on this planet, and the newly fused atoms don’t create a waste problem, we still haven’t found a way to use the reaction to make steam and drive generators—we just use it to make bombs.

Finally, in a form of energy that we don’t actually use yet, we know that two particles of the same kind but of a different sort—divided into “matter” and its “antimatter” counterpart—will come together under the right conditions to annihilate each other in a cascade of pure energy without any waste products at all. This sort of reaction is presumed to be the ultimate release of energy, and it’s favored in the Star Trek television series to drive their “warp engines.” The only problem—Hoo-whee! “Only”!—is that while matter exists all around us in a great variety of forms, antimatter is extremely rare, actually nonexistent in our everyday life, and can only be created at great expense in particle accelerators.³ So, driving your ship or powering your grid with a matter-antimatter explosion is going to cost you an arm and a leg, repeatedly, thousands of times a second, over the course of your journey.

So, those are the kinds of energy we know: manipulating electron bonds, creating fission inside big nuclei, and creating fusion of small nuclei, as well as the potential for matter-antimatter annihilation. All the rest is just fantasy and … magic.

But there, on the tip of my tongue, the edge of my mind, are energies as yet undiscovered, that won’t be discovered until we have a different appreciation of physics.

In the short story “Waldo” by Robert A. Heinlein, a young man with myasthenia gravis—or muscle weakness due to an autoimmune disease—is taught by an Amish farmer to tap into the latent energy of the universe by drawing strange glyphs on his machines. And since that story came out in the 1950s, cosmologists have discovered that the expansion rate of the universe is mysteriously increasing—a fact they attribute to what’s called “dark energy.” Some theorists believe this is some kind of “vacuum energy” that exists in the depths of space without any interfering particulate matter around.

Dark energy poses problems, as does the actual expansion rate of the universe. By sighting known stars in distant galaxies—Cepheid variables and certain types of supernovas, whose light provides astronomers with “standard candles”—and measuring their red shift as an estimate of their distance, we can figure that the universe itself is expanding, and that the galaxies are pulling away from each other, at a rate of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc, an expansion rate measured over 3.26 million lightyears) with an error of plus or minus 1.0 km/s/Mps. This has been confirmed with measurements taken by both the Hubble and the James Webb space telescopes.

But this is a different expansion rate from the one derived by measuring the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. This is the “hum” of energies left over from the Big Bang—after light waves were first freed from all the precipitating particulate matter in the mix—that have been attenuated—or red shifted—from their originally high energy down to about three degrees Kelvin—almost stone cold—by the subsequent expansion of the universe. This measurement yields an expansion rate of 67.4 km/s/Mpc, with an error of plus or minus 0.5 km/s/Mpc. The expansion rate by the microwave measurement has been the standard of cosmology for decades—and it doesn’t jibe with standard-candle observations. The difference is not insignificant. So, what gives?

And now there is a breakthrough discovery that gravity—which has long been conspicuously absent from the calculations of quantum mechanics, the science that deals with the invisible world of subatomic particles—may actually exist at and be measurable at the microscopic level. Einstein’s theories of relativity, dealing with the macro world of planets and stars, and quantum mechanics, governing the realm of the unbelievably small, were long thought to be mutually exclusive and irreconcilable. But if gravity is exerted by grains of sand and maybe by subatomic particles, then we may be in line to create a “Theory of Everything,” combining relativity and quantum physics—the goal of physicists since early in the twentieth century. It may eventually explain mysteries like dark matter, which appears to drive the internal motions of stars in a galaxy, and dark energy, which appears to drive the motion of galaxies themselves and the expansion of the universe. These are exciting times.

And still, the idea haunts me: that somewhere, out between the stars, exactly where we want to go, there’s an abundance of energy that’s just waiting to be tapped—understood, captured, and used—if we only knew how. Maybe by drawing strange glyphs on our equipment?

But this is all just theoretical. And feeding my haunts is the fact that there is so much more we don’t understand about the universe. In fact, as I have suggested in the past,⁴ we really don’t understand three basic concepts in physics: the real nature of space, of time, and of gravity. But maybe, just maybe, we are beginning to …

1. Of course, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But magic is by its nature impenetrable and practiced on an arcane level of the mind, while technology is—with the right mental and philosophical tools—comprehensible.

2. An offshoot of this chemical energy—or maybe an entirely new form of energy, making four usable forms—is the photoelectric effect. There, a photon—a high-energy particle, as from sunlight—impacts the right kind of material and knocks loose an electron from its orbit around an atomic nucleus. With the right setup—say a semiconductor sandwich connected to a circuit—the freed electron goes one way, and the “electron hole”—the material’s atomic need to complete that electron shell—goes the other. This creates a flow of electricity. Something similar happens in a fuel cell. But it’s still energy based on movement and exchange of electrons, which is in the realm of chemistry.

3. How much would a source of antimatter cost? At CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, they can potentially make about a billionth of a gram of antimatter per year—or, over about ten years, enough antimatter to power a sixty-watt lightbulb for an estimated four hours—but that is not the CERN equipment’s intended purpose. To make a single gram—1/28th of an ounce—of the stuff would reportedly cost a million billion euros. Yeah, whether you think in terms of euros or dollars, that’s an unreasonable amount to pay to drive your starship over, what, about ten inches?

4. See my blogs Fun With Numbers (I) and (II) from September 2010.

Getting the Fear Message

I don’t know what’s on your Facebook feed these days—or if many people actually have Facebook anymore, and not some other social media platform. But still, I’m getting a lot of what we used to call “blooper reels.” Maybe because I pause to watch them—there doesn’t seem to be any clicking involved—that the media gods decide to send me more of these. And there doesn’t seem to be any advertising, just a series of twenty or thirty of these three- to five-second clips, obviously gathered from home videos and smartphone cameras, rather than staged. A counter always clicks down to tell you how many more of them you get to—or have to—watch.

These clips are supposed to be hilarious, but most of them are just brutal. Someone is walking alongside a swimming pool at a party, missteps, and falls in—but it’s not a clean fall, and they usually smack their knee or their head on the pool’s coping. Ouch! Or some kid is skateboarding and decides to jump on a stairway’s center railing and ride down on the flat of his board—but instead he tumbles and lands on his neck. Ouch—and maybe a couple of fractured vertebrae! Or someone is swinging from a rope in a tree over the bank of a river or a lake—but he or she lets go too soon and slides face-first in the dirt before plowing into the water. Double-ouch—with a mouthful of gravel.

Being an empathetic sort, I feel an electric jolt go through my body with each of these impacts. I know the person is getting a serious injury—or at least I would if this were happening to me. The sensible thing would be to scroll on before the mayhem starts, but I just can’t look away. Maybe that’s the masochist in me. (I don’t think I’m a sadist, taking delight in these peoples’ pains. And I don’t find these bloopers at all funny. But they are … hypnotic.)

Some of these blooper reels involve motorcycles, too, where a person who is unmindful—or perhaps never learned to ride in the first place—does something stupid. He or she gives the throttle too much twist starting out, or tries to do a wheelie, or has a friend jump on the back while the machine is moving. And predictably, the bike upends or wobbles around and then falls over.

And finally, there is a variant of the blooper reel showing traffic accidents, apparently derived from dash cams. Cars swerving in front of the driver, trailers come unhitched, motorcycles get side-swiped or rear-ended. And in some cases, a car or truck up ahead has stalled on railroad tracks after the gates go down, a train barrels through, and the car is destroyed. These things are almost a repeat of the “death on the highway” films they used to show—maybe still do—in driver’s ed class.

Why do I mention all this? Because I recently sold off my motorcycles and have occasionally thought about buying another one. And seeing a sudden influx of these blooper videos with real pain in them as well as unpredictable highway crashes is having a subliminal effect. Maybe the social media gods are pointing the middle finger at me. Maybe nobody else is seeing these things and reacting. Or maybe it’s a campaign to teach us fear—or, if you find yourself laughing at these bone-crunching exercises, to make us callous and cruel.

The thing that resonates with me, especially in the automotive clips, is that the visual experience is eroding my personal confidence.

To be able to move through your day, you must be able to forget—or at least not dwell on—the possibility of falling and breaking your neck, or stepping into the street and getting sideswiped by a car, or reaching for something on a shelf and having it collapse in your face. You need to believe that you are competent, balanced, centered, and in control. If you think about all the possibilities for death and disaster all the time, you will be frozen with fear.¹

To ride a motorcycle, you must have a certain belief in your own mastery and, yes, your invulnerability. We used to call it extending your chi, your spiritual force, around yourself and the bike. You must think ahead, maintain your margins, keep your eyes on a swivel, and believe that you have the roll-on speed and swerve-avoidance, if not the braking distance, to stay out of trouble. You must adopt the mindset of the “immortal motorcyclist,” or you would never get out there and play among the cars and trucks.

But then there come these blooper reels and highway crash videos. Falling off the bike hurts, just like landing on your neck in a skateboard accident. Falling off at speed scrapes you up and then gives you blunt-force trauma as you come to a stop against a guard rail, bridge abutment, or the bumper of the car ahead. These images are a reminder to me that riding a motorcycle is being a ballistic object held in the saddle only by the force of gravity. And a fiberglass and styrofoam-padded helmet, a leather jacket with neoprene-armor inserts, sturdy jeans, and steel-reinforced boots are not going to be much protection except in the slowest, most dainty of falls.

If the Facebook gods are pointing the finger at me, I am certainly getting their messages of fear. Or maybe I’m just starting to notice them.

1. And this, of course, is a metaphor for life. Every action you take does invite risk. On top of that, we still live under a variable star in a dangerous cosmic neighborhood. And then, whatever you do, sooner or later you will die. Live a perfect life, utterly safe, avoiding all risks, and your organs and connective tissues will eventually clog up and break down anyway. This marvelous meat-covered skeleton made of stardust that you’ve been driving all along is not immortal. And the possibility exists—coming to you sometimes in the middle of the night—that the you who’s driving it might not survive the meat machine’s ultimate collapse. Maybe after life … there is no life.

Obsessions and Whims

The human brain and the mind that it embodies are always active, always thinking, feeling, reacting … forever humming along. The quality of a person’s life then, depends on what that mind does, what it feeds on, and what it produces.

And here, I’m thinking about idleness, ease, lack of activity, concern, and motivation. Lack of engagement with actual life. The reason for this meditation is that, now that I am retired and between books—for which I haven’t had an otherwise imposed deadline in years, but work at my own pace to my own thoughts—and not actively engaged with more than volunteer work and my own pleasures, I find my mind is … wandering. Spinning its wheels. Humming along to no purpose.

This is not a good thing. To someone who has been under the gun with deadlines, responsibilities, things to do in a certain way and a certain time frame for all of his working life, this might seem like a reprieve. And indeed, a few days with “nothing to do,” nowhere to go, no one to meet or satisfy, is a luxury. At least for a few days. But then, the mind keeps humming along.

Without a definite purpose, a life-involving goal or ambition—or conversely, a daily struggle for mortal survival—the mind ends up spinning upon itself. It takes up obsessions that have no purpose or direction. Or it flutters about on the wings of whim and whimsy, alighting nowhere.

I find myself in this state right now. For example, all my life I have been mindful of my keys. I started wearing them on a chain in high school. That way, I never had to worry about leaving them stuck in a door or lying on a table somewhere, put down for just a moment and then slipping my mind completely. If I let go of them, they banged against my leg until I remembered to feed them and the chain back into my pocket.

And then, when I started riding motorcycles, a few years after college, I valued having my keys on a chain. When you sit with your knees high against the gas tank, it puts a slant on the pockets in a man’s slacks. Keys and loose coins can work their way down to the opening and fall out. Now, this never happened to me. I never lost so much as a dime. But you think about this, if your key ring is loose in your pocket. And you don’t happen to think that, if your keychain is longer than about twelve inches, the keyring and chain will fall into the rear wheel, tangle in the spokes, rip up your pants or disrupt the bike itself. You’re more worried about losing your keys in the first place.

So, over the years, it has been my semi-serious hobby—or obsession, take your pick—to find just the right key ring and chain combination. Light chains that are not the pre-made silver things you can buy at a jewelry store are difficult to come by. I’ve used dog choke chains with the end rings cut off, various grades of stainless-steel necklace chains and bracelets, and the light chains used in furniture for drop-leaf desk fronts. Different weights, metals (even a couple in titanium), and finishes (chrome plated or not). To complete the ends, I have generally settled on French marine hardware for the hooks that attach to my belt loops and the shackles that connect to the final link, top and bottom. For the keyring itself, I use a small carabiner or tie down, usually in marine-grade stainless steel rather than the traditional split ring—which always seems to lose its tightness and show a gap with use.

I now have a collection of different chains, different lengths, metals, and finishes, and different keyrings to match with them.

The point of this lengthy disquisition is that, when my mind is not properly occupied with more weighty matters, I tend to obsess about how I wear my keys. The last time I went out, did I fumble a bit with a chain that was too long? Maybe the shorter chain would be more convenient. Or, I’m not really riding a motorcycle—or not right now—so maybe I could drop the chain and just put the keyring naked in my pocket. But then, the last time I handled just the ring, it took my fingers too long to work it around to the key I wanted; maybe I should put on a fob for easy handling. (Oh, yes, I have a collection of fobs, some decorative and some—like those little cannisters that hold my caffeine pills or maybe a couple of aspirin, or a small Crescent wrench—more useful.)

Some days, when I am not fighting for my life on the motorcycle or deep in the settling of plot mechanics, I change my keyring, the chain, or the fob two of three times, depending on whim and the vagaries of what feels right at any particular moment. And each time, it’s like, this is perfect for now and forever. Until the next change of mind.

The idle mind is not the devil’s playground, it’s a loose nut rattling around in its shell. I should take up a dangerous hobby, like skydiving or motorcycle riding, to put me in fear of my life and make me concentrate on the essentials.

Why the Moon

In November 2022, NASA launched Artemis 1, an unmanned capsule capable of carrying four crew members, on a mission to circle the Moon and return. In February 2024, Intuitive Machines of Houston, Texas, launched the Odysseus lander to the Moon’s south pole. Although it fell over on its side and ceased functioning, the lander made a successful arrival without damaging impact—like some other government-launched probes. And SpaceX is now doing trial runs of its Starship, a heavy lifter—capable of carrying 150 metric tonnes to orbit and beyond—that could eventually get crews, supplies, and building materials to Mars or the Moon.

So, apparently, without having to invoke John Kennedy’s brave vision of the 1960s, “We choose to go to the Moon,” we are going back to the Moon. Yes, maybe to Mars, eventually. But people seem to be invested, by various routes, with various vessels and funding sources, to return human beings to the Moon. Mars can be inhabited by robots for now, but the Moon will apparently get the first off-world human visitors. Again.

And why not the Moon? Yes, Mars has more gravity, but still a whole lot less than the Earth’s. This means Mars has trouble holding on to an atmosphere composed of molecules lighter than carbon dioxide. So yes, Mars does have an atmosphere, with an ambient pressure about 1% that of Earth’s and composed almost solely of carbon dioxide. And that near-vacuum still carries dust storms that persist for weeks or months at a time. In contrast, the Moon has no atmosphere, and the dust settles the instant it gets stirred up. Sometimes, the absence of a thing can be a greater blessing than its minimal presence. More importantly, Mars is a long way away, with an outward bound and return trip measured in months rather than days. The logistics of going to Mars and being supplied there are really tough.¹

So, we’re going back to the Moon, this time not just to step out and say we did it, but maybe to establish a presence. Maybe to scout a base. And possibly, eventually, to establish a colony. And I say, “Good!” Maybe even, “Hallelujah!”

Why? Because we humans are a curious and exploring species. We walked out of Africa and expanded around the world. It was not just the Europeans who reached the water’s edge and sailed beyond—the heritage of the Vikings, the Portuguese, and the Spanish—but everyone who was dissatisfied with their little plot of land and wanted to look beyond the horizon. Well, now the horizon is beyond the atmosphere. And yes, the artifacts of dead civilizations who never left their planets will be picked over by the living ones who dared to make the trip.

And that brings me to my point. We need the Moon, not just to satisfy our curiosity or to say we did it. We need the Moon as a forward base. Mars, yes, one day, for colonizing, if we ever need the elbow room. But the Moon is our logical off-planet base, outside the deepest part of the Earth’s gravity well, able to focus our telescopes and listen on all sorts of wavelengths because of the lack of atmosphere, and a station on the far side is shielded from all the radio noise on Earth. And the Moon is also the first place that the Others—the friends, the enemies, the intruders, the invaders, the aliens—will set up their own base, their dropping-off point, as they approach the Earth.

And you know they’re coming.

For the past hundred years or so, we’ve been broadcasting coherent radio signals into the stratosphere and leaking them out toward the stars. At the speed of light—which is also the speed of radio waves—that creates a bubble of our babblings two hundred light-years across for anyone who’s been listening.

True, according to the inverse square law,² those signals that are broadcast rather than beamed directly tend to diminish rapidly. At a distance of one hundred light-years, Marconi’s original radio broadcasts will be remarkably faint—probably on the order of the barest whisper. They might be drowned out by the clang of two nearby hydrogen atoms colliding. And the Sun is a loud star, radiating not only in the infrared—or heat—and visible light but also with lots of radio noise. Compared to that, the broadcast radiations from Earth will be like a mouse farting on the stage at a rock concert.

But people looking for signs of life on planets around likely stars will discount the rock concert. They will be listening for mouse farts. And, if these listeners are already out there, they will probably have better ears than we do.

I’d say it’s a race against time. And we’re already fifty years behind.

1. As I’ve sometimes said, if you want to build a colony on Mars—or the Moon, for that matter—first build a five-star hotel with Olympic-sized swimming pool at the summit of Mount Everest. The logistics are better, and the air is breathable—barely. If that’s too hard, because of the smallish footprint, then build it in Antarctica. Logistics, atmosphere, and temperatures there are a snap.

2. The strength of any radiated signal—radio waves, light waves, sound waves—diminishes at the square of the distance from the source. So, the light from a bulb at two feet from the socket is one-quarter the strength of the light at one foot.

“Good Dog” Management

Back when I worked in internal communications at the local utility company, I edited a monthly newsletter for managers and supervisors. One of the themes that we promoted was the art of leadership, which I define as “accomplishing objectives through the willing participation of others.” In my view, this is one of the highest art forms to which a person can aspire. It involves setting values, providing sound judgment when necessary, and motivating people. It’s a tricky task for anyone.

And there are a lot of natural human impulses that can poison the atmosphere and make leadership along these lines almost impossible.

For example, it is a natural human impulse not to give up an advantage. If you are working in a position of authority over someone, it can be a natural tendency not to praise their work. Why not? Because then you give up some element of imagined control. If you praise them, then it becomes harder down the line to point out their errors and faults. You have given up some of your authority—you think. And you imagine that if you later need to correct that person, they will in turn say, “But you told me I was doing a good job! Now you’re criticizing me. That’s not fair! That’s not right! Make up your mind!” Hearing this subsequent conversation in your head, you may decide it’s just not worth the hassle to tell people they are doing well—even if they are.

It gets worse. Some people in positions of authority think they can gain advantage by putting their subordinates in what I call the “bad dog” condition. Rather than refraining from pointing out the subordinate’s good actions and positive results, these leaders and managers take every opportunity to find and criticize errors and faults. They think that by keeping their employees in the doghouse and fearing for their jobs, they have increased their own control. And maybe that works with actual dogs, who will tolerate amazing amounts of abuse from someone who puts down their daily food bowl.

With actual people, however, who are capable of thinking and reflection, being put in the “bad dog” position creates resentment. Hostile employees might, given the opportunity, participate in what used to be called a “white mutiny.” That is, they will take advantage of a developing situation to engineer a bad outcome for which they will bear no direct responsibility. They won’t disobey orders or throw their shoes into the gears to sabotage the operation. Instead, they will simply look the other way, play stupid, follow ill-considered orders to the letter, and shrug their shoulders. Oh, well.

And it gets worse. People who are continually criticized, harassed, and micro-managed to their spiritual detriment will eventually give up. It’s not that they hate the organization or wish it ill, they just don’t know what to do, because anything they do turns out to be wrong. Inappropriate criticism saps a person’s motivation. It makes them ineffective. They will do the bare minimum to keep the organization from falling apart, but not much more.

The issue of micro-management is separate but related. The boss—I won’t say “leader” here, because such a person isn’t one—thinks he or she has all the answers. The boss wants to see that only the things he or she can imagine or envision get done, and only in the way, by the methods, and in the timeline that he or she can see. They don’t want the “willing participation of others” so much as the activation of “meat robots.” Micro-management is one step removed from pushing the employee or subordinate aside and saying, “Here, it’s just easier if I do it myself.” The micro-managing boss wants employees to do it exactly like that, except using their own minds and hands under a kind of frenetic, telepathic control.

So, what is the alternative? The true leader sets organizational values and goals, provides fair and rational judgment when a novel question or situation arises, and otherwise motivates people to think, reflect, envision, and act on their own for the good of the organization. This requires a major element of trust in his or her employees or subordinates. The leader must put them in the “good dog” position—always being respectful of the fact that they are not actually dogs or animals. The leader must then have the security in his or her position to step in and tell an individual or group when something has gone wrong or an objective has not been achieved, and then to suggest a better way of doing things. But all the while, the leader has given up nothing by letting people know when things are going well and that they are doing the right things.

Leadership is tricky. The leader is constantly balancing needs and objectives with the sense of what his or her employees and subordinates are perceiving and thinking and how they are likely to react. That’s a tough job. But it’s one of the best jobs and the highest interpersonal endeavor. It’s a true art form.

Quantum Entanglement and Other States of Mind

Okay, here is where I show either my great ignorance of science or a glimmer of common sense.

My understanding of quantum mechanics is based on reading various articles in science magazines, reading books about it for the lay reader, and watching The Great Courses lecture series on it. There may be things I don’t understand because I’m not a mathematician, but some of the claims seem to be more in the human mind than anything that’s going on in the universe.

Take the notion of quantum entanglement. Supposedly, two particles—two photons, say—can become entangled. Typically, this happens when the particles are created together. For example, when a rubidium atom is excited, its decay releases two photons, and they are entangled. Or a photon passing through a lens made of certain types of crystals will split into an entangled pair. They will remain entangled until one or the other interacts with something—that is, generally until it is observed by human interaction. And this entanglement, this connection, will persist across vast distances, and what happens to one of the pair, even at the far end of the galaxy, will be instantly communicated to the other. That is, the lightspeed restriction of general relativity on the transmission of information is ignored. This was the “spooky action at a distance” that Einstein questioned.

Supposedly, if two particles are entangled, they will have complementary but opposite qualities. For example, if one entangled photon has “positive spin,” then the other will have “negative spin.” But according to quantum mechanics, the characteristics of any particle at the quantum scale cannot be determined except by observation. Further, the existence of any particle is not determined—is not fixed in time and space, is not concrete, is not “real” in the world—until it is observed. This includes its exact location in space, its direction of travel, and qualities like its spin state. So, a photon’s spin may not only be either positive or negative; the photon’s spin is both positive and negative—that is, in a quantum superposition of both states—until the photon is observed and its spin is measured.

In another case, if a stream of photons is passed through a two-slit experiment—some going through one slit in a shield, some through the other—their intersecting fields will create an interference pattern, like waves passing through a narrow harbor entrance. This interference yields a series of parallel lines on a screen beyond the shield with the two slits. The interference lines will be heavier in the middle of the series and lighter out at the ends, indicating that most of the photons travel relatively straight through. Still, the result will not be two isolated bands of hits but instead a diffraction scatter.

But according to quantum mechanics, if a single photo is fired at the two-slit experiment, it does not necessarily hit the screen opposite one slit or the other. Instead, it may randomly fall anywhere within that diffraction pattern. The single photon passes through both slits, its field interferes with itself, and it acts as if it is in two places at once, until it is observed hitting the screen in only one place.

In a third case, some experiments with photons—including the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which was used to disprove the idea that light traveled throughout the universe as a wave in a medium called “luminiferous ether”—employ partially silvered mirrors. These are mirrors that randomly reflect some photons and randomly pass others. If you set up a course of these mirrors, so that some photons take one path and some another, you can place detectors to see how many photons go which way. But interestingly, according to quantum mechanics, if you fire just one photon through the experiment, it will take both courses until it’s detected along one path or another. According to quantum mechanics, the photon’s position is everywhere in the experiment until frozen on one path by the act of detection or observation.

This idea of a particle at quantum scale being everywhere at once—with no fixed position, direction of travel, or defining characteristics until actually observed—is central to the nature of quantum mechanics. The physicists who practice in this field understand that the act of observing a tiny particle—a photon, electron, neutron, and so on, all of which are observed in flight—changes it. That is because you cannot observe anything that small without interfering with it—like hitting the detector screen beyond the slits or bouncing another particle off it in an electron microscope—and either stopping it in its tracks or deflecting it off toward somewhere else. The quantum world is not fixed or knowable until it is known by observation.

This is the example of Schrödinger’s cat. Seal a cat in a box with a vial of poison and a mechanism that breaks the vial when an atomic isotope decays. Until you open the box, the cat is both alive and dead—a superposition of these two states—and the cat’s actual condition is not resolved until you observe it. This is taking the quantum physicist’s belief in “unknowability” to an extreme.

I believe that part of the basis for this mindset is that quantum mechanics is a mathematical system, built on equations based on probabilities. In mathematics, it’s hard to build an equation around a statement that says a value might be one thing or it might be another. Instead, you place a probability function in place of the necessary value. So, in the experiment with Schrödinger’s cat, the cat’s life or death has a probability based on the nature of the isotope and the length of time in the box. If the isotope has a half-life of ten thousand years, and the cat has been in the box ten minutes, there’s a high probability the cat is still alive. If the isotope has a half-life in seconds, like some isotopes of oxygen, then the cat is likely dead. But the probability function is not resolved until the cat is observed.

In the case of two entangled photons, the probability of either one being positive or negative spin is fifty percent, an even coin toss. And, in the mindset of quantum physicists, once the spin of one photon in the pair is established and fixed, the spin of the other is also fixed. The fifty-percent probability function collapses and all is known. The question in my mind is not whether the two photons communicate with each other across the spacetime of the span of a galaxy, but how the observer at one end can communicate the discovered state to the non-observing holder of the photon at the other. If the holder of the passive photon observes it, then yes, he will know its spin state and resolve the probability function to his satisfaction. He will also know instantly that the distant photon has the opposite spin. But he can’t communicate any of this to his partner holding the other photon until his message travels across the lightyears. So, big deal.

Say I cut a Lincoln head penny in half across the president’s nose. One half the coin shows his eyes and forehead; the other shows his mouth and chin. Without looking, I take each half-coin and seal it in an envelope. I give one to my partner, who takes it across the galaxy. If he opens his envelope and sees mouth-and-chin, he knows that I must have eyes-and-forehead. And vice versa. But I won’t know what I have—unless I wait eons for a light-speed signal from him—until I open my own envelope. The penny, existing in a classical, non-quantum world, has an established state whether I look or not. It does not exist in a superposition of both eyes-and-forehead and mouth-and-chin until one of us observes it.

My point—and I certainly may be misunderstanding the essence of quantum mechanics—is that the concept of superposition, of probability functions, of tiny things being in two or more places, two or more states at once, and going nowhere until observed by human eyes and instruments is a thoroughgoing mindset. It’s a reminder to the quantum physicist that you don’t know until you observe. It says that the whole conjectural world of the very small is just that: conjecture, theory, and a mathematical construct until human instruments intervene to prove a thing is so or not so.

And that’s a good reminder, I guess. But taking it to the extreme of denying that the cat is neither alive nor dead—even a very tiny cat who makes no noise and is otherwise undetectable—until you open the box … that calls into question the reality of the entire enterprise.