Interstellar the Movie

I saw "Interstellar" on Putlocker a couple of days ago. Although the slow internet and the quality of the video was stressful for me (made me want to throw the keyboards out the door), the story did manage to hook me despite of everything.

1. 1. 
      
   2. In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are 
   3. slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand
   4. (Michael Caine), a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans
   5. to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a 
   6. new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send former 
   7. NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a team of 
   8. researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find
   9.  out which of three planets could be mankind's new home.

The movie is slow and more of thinking movie than a techno-action sci-fi.

1. Time Dilation 

There are many movies that featured Einstein theory of relativity, but this film did great in showing the effects of time dilation. When Cooper, Doyle, Amelia and robots TARS and CASE landed on Miller's planet, a water planet, to investigate if it could support life, they were caught off guard by giant waves that killed Doyle and marooned the shuttle for an hour or so and when they returned to their ship Endurance 23 years had already passed..

The time dilation was due to the strong gravitational pull of the black hole Gargantua. The stronger the gravitational pull, the slower time ticks. And according to Einstein's theory, inertial and gravitational mass are the same. That's why when an astronaut is in a speeding vehicle like say a rocket nearing light speed, his time slows down compared to the people on earth. Speed increases mass, and mass is relative to gravity: the larger the mass the greater the gravity. black holes have massive mass and gravity that light could not escape from it. That's why they are called black holes, by the way. Hmmm...obvious enough.

Bending time and space.

2. Wormholes.

Distance is the main problem with interstellar travel. Even if a ship that could travel as fast as light, it would still take years to visit the nearest star and hundreds and even millions of years to explore our galaxy.

So, instead of inventing an engine that could move a vehicle or a spaceship from point A to point B at great speed, scientists have this idea of bending time and space. It's like driving a car from Taytay to Cebu but instead of the vehicle moving, the whole of the Philippines was bent allowing the car to get to Cebu without leaving its position, its the roads under the car that moved! Of course,this will take massive amount of energy and according to a physicist about the power of a star.

In the movie, a wormhole appeared near Saturn (or Jupiter) and NASA sent probes and later astronauts to search for habitable planets for the emigration of the survivors or the genes of the survivors on Earth.

3. Fifth Dimension

We live in a three dimensional world. 

3 Dimensions: L,W and H.
spatial dmension

2 deimensions: L and W

Easy to understand think of movies. 2 D movies have length and width or lines: plane. One Dimension is line and the other is plane. Now with 3D movies, depth is added: space. The third dimension is space. these are spatial dimensions. This is how we are able to coordinate location .

4 Dimensions 3 spatial dimensions+Temporal
Dimensions.

Fourth dimension is time. In three dimension we could place location but with the addition of time as fourth dimension, it is now possible to locate "events". Think 3D movie again, but since we are outside the 3d movie, we could go to and fro through time in the movie.

In the movie, Cooper  sacrificed himself so that Endurance and Amelia could survive. He was sucked into the black hole and later found himself floating behind his daughter's multi-level bookcase. with each level, he could see events in the past. He was later able to manipulate objects to send messages to her daughter in the past. In the  present, Murphy, Copper's daughter, realized that it was her father who has been talking to him in codes from the past. She discovered that the data on gravity was being transmitted by her father in morse code through his watch which was given to her before Cooper left for space.

The tesseract (3 dimensional representation of time-space) collapsed and Cooper was sucked into the future rescued by a NASA space station travelling towards Edmund's planet. Cooper was reunited with his daughter Murphy who was 120 years old then.

There will come a time when humanity will
surpassed the limitations of biological bodies
brain and move on to the next level: the Singularity

What's the fifth dimension then? Cooper was outside space and time. Sapce-Time was represented in 3 dimensions where Cooper was able to move about inside looking out at temporal locations. This is the fifth dimension.

4. They.

Humanity was saved by entities called they.  They created the wormhole that enabled NASA to travel interstellar and they, according to Cooper, also allowed him to go into the fifth dimension. Who are they? They are us from the future.

Hmmmm...Kant and nonsense

Okay, so last time there’s a little bit about Berkeley’s idealism which simply put means all our reality is a condition of the mind; all reality is that we know is in the mind. Of course one may ask how this can be when I can touch, hear, breathe, see and think about stuffs. When I hit my head with a hammer or an ax, I get hurt and I bleed. How can all these things, our reality be in the mind when I experience things as real and as “I am in it” and I am participating in it? How can all this be in mind? Does this mean our reality is a bundle of sensation and memory, an illusion? Berkeley thought so.

So, outside the mind there is no material reality; everything is real because we perceive it and our reality is an emanation of a great all perceiving mind which Berkeley called God.  

Now Kant had a different idea for he did not think that reality is all in the mind: Kant did not doubt the existence of matter. There is a matter but a part of it is created by our perception; the mind contributes to the construction of our reality. So, there is rock, moon, sun, car, computers etc. all these things are real but part of their reality is because they are transformed into our minds into ideas. There is matter but it is our mind through our perception that gives them reality at least in the way that we know or perceive them. We know what we perceive and the manner by which we perceive them as human beings—which we cannot say for other beings because they may have other ways of perceiving things; they may have different perception of dimensions like they may perceive in two dimension, or four dimensions, or they may perceive light in the different spectrum, or they may use echo which would give them a picture of reality very different from ours.

So, what we experience is not the whole for in our way perceiving some things are lost; the whole is not fully apprehended because of the limitations imposed by our organs of perception.So, if I am perceiving an object, lets us say my guitar; I am seeing the guitar as I perceive it. And all of us, humans, because our mind are programmed to see things the way they are, we all see my guitar the way we know what a guitar is. But in perceiving or seeing the guitar, we only see what we are capable of seeing but there are some aspects of my guitar that we will never be able to perceive and know: things are not what they are before we perceive for it is our perceiving that gives them the what-they-are-ness (or the phenomenon) that we experience.

Well, anyway...

 Since science can only explore or see things through our perceptions it cannot go deeper beyond the surface or things: it cannot prove into the things-in-itself because no matter how sophisticated our scientific instruments and apparatus, they are still limited by our perception and the way our minds process this information and according Kant, and other philosophers too, this deeper-into-things is where philosophy comes in to explore and to delve into.

How about theology? Religion cannot be proved by theoretical reason by using finite categories; and, If I may say so, language is finite and arbitrary and if come things are lost through our perceptions how much more with symbols especially written language. We cannot apply finite categories into the world of  the unknowable.

Anyway...just thinking.

Bronchial Asthma, Lost etc.

February 13, 2011. It was raining. I didn’t mind the rain. I strapped on my helmet sans my raincoat which I did not bring, rode on my motorcycle and left the school. I enjoyed the cold rain drops beating down on my face. It was cold because it was still February and the weatherman from the hopeless PAG-ASA, the country's weather bureau, kept on telling us that the tail end of the cold front was still on us, whatever that meant.

Anyway, I was wet and cold but enjoying my ride home. When I arrived, my wife gave me dry clothes and hot coffee. I sat down and rested for a while, and then it began: I started coughing. It was a little cough which I did not mind at all; I cough a lot because I have allergies, all that mucus and other yucky stuff. Things started to get weird when I went to bed: I started coughing really hard because of abnormal mucus secretion; my throat was constricted; I was cold but sweating. I was not able to sleep the whole night. 

The day after, I went to see the doctor. The diagnosis: bronchial asthma. I was given asthma medicines and anti-biotic, but the best of them all--not that I like being sick--I was given a three day rest which counting the weekend, meant I had five days of rest. I spent Valentine's day sick.

But things didn’t go that well. I didn’t know if there’s some connection or something because when I woke up yesterday, my ankle was hurting and when I looked at it, my ankle bone was missing--my rheumatism or gout or whatever this inflammation of the ankle joint Is called was acting up again. Heaven’s when it rains it pours! Asthma and rheumatism they do come hand in hand. (I really don't know if I had rheumatism, or arthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis, or arthritic rheumatism or arthritic-rheumatoid-rheumatism-arthritism...) I don't know if its psychosomatic or some sort of..anyway..I do need to take care of my diet now.

Age is what it is…I used to hate the smell of Efficascent Oil, or Omega Pain Killer Extra Strength, but now that I frequently used them, and  I have become used to their smell, now, I mean...in the bedroom, sort of a love scent or something...aromatic-aphrodisiac...hmm sort of.

Anyway, what did I do with my five days rest?

I read book, played guitar and watched DVDs.  

Here’s the strange thing: every time or most of the time when I am reading a book and I am interrupted to go to the comfort room, when I come out of the comfort room I forget where I put my book or sometimes I forget that I am even reading a book. So, I end up looking for the book which usually I just slam on whatever surface page-open-faced-down. When this happens, I end up picking up my guitar and playing some pieces that I knew, but I can’t concentrate because I am still thinking where I put the book that I am reading.  

When not looking for the book, I find them in the strangest places like upstairs on the bed, or on the aparador with the cracked mirror, or under the plastic sofa hidden by the throw pillows that looked like rugs now, on the motorcycle seat and sometimes even on top of the dog’s cage.. Hmm…weird, I sometimes think there are naughty gnomes living in the house.

Still learning Bach's Gavotte en Rondeau on the guitar for almost a year now. A happy guitar piece--I like Bach's music because they are happy. Gavotte is a French Folk dance which explains why its a happy, lilting, jumping music and rondeau means round: ABACA form. Anyway, just learning it because it's beautiful music..

My wife complains that she is better off when I am at work because then she does not have to deal with the clatter (bootleg DVD jackets, books, guitar scores, banana peels, cotton swabs…) I leave wherever I sit.

Anyway, I am now in season five of Lost! Great, great series to watch. Just one complain though, I hate the 360 degrees camera sweep. I mean the camera starts from the face, then to the ear then to the nape, then the other ear, then back to the face again, cliche.

Thinking about Time

This is the last day of the old year and the day before the New Year and this is the best time to think about Labelstime. So, my post will be mostly about time.

Chronos was a Titan god, the beings that were in existence before the Greek gods. He was the god of all time and the universe. Chronos became ruler of the cosmos after he killed his father Ouranos. Zeus, his son, in turn  overthrew him thus ending the reign of the Titans.

       Time  is linear. 

     This is how we normally think of time, a one way movement from one moment to the next moment. There is the past, present and the future. The past is what happened after, the present is what is happening now, and the future is still anticipated. We have knowledge of the past, we have knowledge of the present, but we could not know the future until it becomes the present.

This idea of time is self evident in natural processes from aging to cooking to making coffee. We age from birth to date; we cook by following a process from step 1 to step x until the food is cooked, but we cannot reverse the process. The same with almost everything we do i.e. there are processes that cannot be reversed.

To illustrate:

Linear A.

past                            present                         future

The past is were everything happened or everything we experienced happened in an earlier time. We have knowledge of our experiences from the past through our memory.  The present is what is happening now. The future is what we anticipate. Though we can not know the future, but because of the of causality, we have idea of what the future may be.  (Many do not hold on to the necessity of causality, the skeptic David Hume is one of them. His assertion is that it is not logically justified that the future can be predicted by events in the past. He was criticizing induction, the primary process we use for learning.)

Anyway, if we look at time this way, since the past has reality or has become realized, and though they seemed illusory because we have knowledge of them through our memory, this diagram of linear time shows possibility of time travel but only in one direction: to the past. 

Actually we do this mentally all the time through recollection but we cannot mentally travel to the future because the events are not yet realized. Hence, when we mentally think about the future, we really think of possibilities or of possible worlds. (This is the subjectivity of time, we have different experiences of time.)

Where am I?

So if we invent time machine it could only travel to the past because the future is still blank. But we cannot travel before the invention of the time machine. (Why invent a time machine at all?)

Linear B:

past              present                                                   future

This is like consuming time. It's like a rail road where the future is realized and we are just experiencing the present. Time travel is possible for the future. But time travelling is limited to the time the time machine is invented. (So, your time machine is stuck?)

Linear B.

past                 present                  future

If we are an observer outside of time, reality would look like a tableau. Everything is all laid out, so technically, there is no past, present or future. These tenses of time are mere experiences of time.

Book illustration.

Linear A.

Its like reading a book where the pages are being written as you read but the read pages are preserved.

Linear B.

It's like reading a book where all the pages are written except the read pages are lost.

Linear C.

Its ike a reading a complete book. Pretty much everything is determined.

Time is Circular

Time is circular.

Circular time means the past can be become the future and the future can become the past. The main idea behind circular time is recurrences. This idea of time is dominant in many religions in the Orient. The belief that everything comes around is evident in the belief of karma and reincarnation. many philosophers have taken this idea of circular time especially those who are influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.

Time is spiral

sorry for the drawing...

This is a sort of a combination of linear and circular time. Yes, we experience time in a linear way, that is we have past, present and future, but this idea also includes the concept of recurrences. Yes we experiences recurrences but we there is a distance or separateness from the previous recurrences.

The Classics

Let us look at some of the great thinkers idea about time.

Aristotle: "Time is the measure of change...but time is not change itself"

                    Pretty much orthodox.

René Descartes : He argued that a material body has the property of spatial extension but no inherent capacity for temporal endurance, and that God by his continual action sustains (or re-creates) the body at each successive instant. Time is a kind of sustenance or re-creation. 

                               

      Descartes idea of time is best illustrated by this 80's Twilight Zone Episode written by Theodore Sturgeon.

Isaac Newton argued very specifically that time and space are an infinitely large container for all events, and that the container exists with or without the events. He added that space and time are not material substances, but are like substances in not being dependent on anything except God.

Time contains event, but time is not dependent on anything but God.

                              So time is like a canvass where events are painted, But even without the painting, the     

                  canvass still exist. This is quite comprehensible.

Gottfried Leibniz  argued that time is not an entity existing independently of actual events. He insisted that Newton had underemphasized the fact that time necessarily involves an ordering of any pair of non-simultaneous events.

According to Leibniz time necessarily involves ordering of events...time needs this ordering and without it, time cannot exist.

                                               Remove the painting and you remove the canvass.

Of course, there are those who deny the existence of time and there are those who are not bothered by time.

Immanuel Kant has a very different idea about time. Kant proposes that space and time do not really exist outside of us but are "forms of intuition," i.e. conditions of perception, imposed by our own minds.  To understand this a little bit more, Kant reacted to the theory of knowledge prevalent that the mind is a passive organ that absorbs experiences and through this process we acquire and organize knowledge. the famous motto is Locke's tabula rasa to which Kant opposed. This is his Copernican revolution, sort of.

Kant reacted by proposing that the mind is not a passive organ but an active one. It does not merely absorb impressions but it has the ability to organize these impressions. To do this, Kant proposes a priori knowledge that is transcendental. (Getting lost here... "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them.";;Kant)

Anyway, to make it short, time and space are a priori forms in the mind that made it possible for our mind to actively organize and grasp ideas or impressions. Ouwardly we experience Newtonian time but also there is an element of Leibniz, the organizing aspect or function of time.  

Anyway... this is way too abstract.

Hmmmm... 


Time and God.

Is God timeless?


This proposes that God is outside the flow of time. To Him, everything is in the present. This means that everything is determined. This view sacrifices freedom.


Is God eternal?


God is subject to the flow of time but he is not affected, as nature is, by time. This sacrifices many of God's omni- attributes. God is limited because God is not in control of time; he is subject to time. God's knowledge is also limited because he can not look beyond the present. This view puts emphasis on freedom.


Anyway...hmmm...

Happy New Year and do take the time to reflect about time...but most of all, whatever our idea and philosophy of time is...I mean...hmmmm... I think a simple Happy New Year is enough :-)

Meanderings on Time: Physical Time

The New Year is significant to most of us because it signifies an end and a new beginning. So for most of us, the ending of an old year means looking back and reflecting or hind-sighting on what happened within the passing year. We take time to take a look at the good things, achievements, and even the failures that transpired in the last year.

We make assessment and we make resolutions for we believe that we cannot change what happened in the past be it good or bad, but we could make changes for the coming 365 ¼ days; every new year is a new beginning.

Of course this is a stupid idea, but who cares...

an hourglass...primitive clock

But what is time?

Time is how we measure the passing of events and how we organize these sequence of events. Time is measured in hour, minutes and seconds, and with today’s technology, time can even measured to smaller units like the millisecond. It is also measured in days, weeks, months, years, decade, millenniums, and etc. We may have different time zones, different clock settings but basically we all have grasp of this definition of time. 

With the invention of the clock, our conception of time has become related to speed. We think of time as directly related to movement like production, schedules, plans, trips etc. Time is a unit just like any other unit by which we measure things like the gram, meter, inches and feet if you’re an American, or as a basis from which we compute things like profit, speed, velocity, etc. This is our shared understanding of time, the physical time. So, this is time for most of us:

      1.       Born on _____________.

      2.       Study for _______________.

      3.       Go to work at __:__ then leave work at __:__.  

      4.       Go to church on ________.

      5.       Celebrate birthdays on _______________.

      6.       Get married on _________________.

      7.       Retire on ____________________.

      8.       Die on ______________________.
    
      Of course we do not know the exact time for all the items in the list, but they are pretty much determined.

      A big schedule!

People waiting for their train schedule in China. Looks like they are wprshipping the god of time.

I think with the invention of the clock, our whole understanding of existence and being changed dramatically: we have become the slave of time. I was reflecting upon the never ending debate about determinism versus freedom, but I think one of the factors that favors determinism (in all its shade) is when we have all become slaves of physical time, hence, even the freedom we think we have is even more belittled by the imposition of schedules upon us by physical time. Though we think we have freedom, but in reality we have lost all that freedom that we think we have when our lives, even to the minutest details, are subject to schedules.

Of course physical time is concerned with measurement and measurement is limitation. Anyway, time has become a factor in measurement and this is the common conception productivity: production x labor x time x interest x etc. : time is money.

Since the industrial revolution...our conception of time.

This, I think, is one of the reasons why the study of the humanities, the arts, the process of reflection, philosophizing, all other creative and conceptual activities are treated with contempt by people who understood time in terms of physical and financial productivity. This fact is lamented by educators because most of the curriculum created today focuses on production and productivity thus relegating the arts and the study of the humanities into the backseat. It can be said that the soul of human study is slowly being killed by the study for the quest for the continuing improvement of productivity. Introspection, reflection. philosophizing, conceptual creativity...creativity, they are second to useless in this age utilitarianism.

Anyway…where am I?

So, Time is something (for lack of better and understandable term) that is outside us. Its invention,  mean the measurement of  physical time, is a way for us of understanding and relating to the physical world around us, from going to school to observing atoms.

Time is a factor.

I imagine time as a conveyor belt that moves us from one place in time to another place in time. 

So for me (or for us) time is linear, ever moving forward but our consciousness of it is measured by the present.

Time is a conveyor belt that brings us to the end of our journey: death. Of course we believe that death is a way of bringing us outside the conveyor belt into timelessness or into an infinite conveyor belt but is not subjected to the physical deterioration of the movement from one point to another. You know, I think, sometimes annihilation is much, much better.

And what is that present?

Day? Hour? Minutes? Seconds?

Paul Tillich said it very well:

  The moment we say, “This is the present,” the moment has already been swallowed by the past. The present disappears the very instant we grasp it. The present cannot be caught; it is always gone. So it seems we have nothing real—neither the past nor the future, nor even the present. Therefore there is a dreaming character about our existence…

Dali's painting says it all...

 Crazy ha...

Lamarck, Paper Mache, Just Having Fun...

I was sitting and reflecting… letting my imagination run amok, looking at my pupils’ papier mache projects. I  was wondering where did my pupils get the inspiration to make papier maches of creatures that have no legs or arms…reptiles and nematodes like snakes and worms are legless, so, no wondering there. 


I was looking at the ovoid shaped-mega cephalic-limbless- benevolent looking-cute-but weird creatures that they have papier mached.

Mind you, I have nothing against these art works. They are great. I am proud of them. They are the product of my pupils’ efforts and imaginations. I didn’t give them  specific instruction on what to make or not to make except that they should not submit to me a papier mache of amoeba or germs. (Crumpled paper with some paint on it!)


Any creatures will do. So, I am happy that they did not create boring stuff like a detailed, lifelike paper mache of a flying grasshopper, crouching tiger, flying eagle, mating rabbits, etc. I gave them artistic freedom. So, they created what they wanted to do and not what I wanted to see. I respect the subjective in art.  


Anyway…I love these artworks because I see beauty. The real beauty in them: effort, creativity, humor and fun! (Form, symmetry, center of attention, balance etc...these word should not be discussed with children because these words are confining. A philosopher once said, "You cannot get substance from form."

I was  writing my lesson plan when a pupils came to submit this. At first, I was confused. What did I miss? I was tempted to say things like "is this a mutant yema" or "wow, this looks like Java the Hut with hepatitis C!"But the enthusiasm and the smile on her face was so contagious that I smiled and said, "very good!" I gave her good grade because she met my requirement: she had fun doing the project.

I ask what kind of animals or creatures are these? According to them, these creatures are from a computer game called Angry Birds. Being prone to computer game addiction, I stopped playing games. So, I was a bit at a lost about the new fad in online gaming. A couple of months back, I got so addicted  to Plants and Zombies that even  my bodily function was affected; I almost developed stones from not getting up to pee. So, I made a resolution to stop playing computer games…hmm, maybe, at least until the classes are over.

A good pillow...

Reflecting upon the papier maches...the name Lamarck popped in my head. Lamarck was known for his theory of heretibality of acquired characteristics. Before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, natural selection, mutation etc. Lamarck proposed his theory that acquired characteristics can be passed to the offspring. Okay...look at the picture below:

Here's from the experts:

In Lamarck's view, we must imagine a situation in the past where the best food for browsing mammals was higher up in trees, the lower vegetation having been eaten by other animals. The ancestors of the giraffe—which we should imagine like antelopes or deer—needed to adapt their behavior to this changing environment. As Lamarck wrote, "variations in the environment induce changes in the needs, habits and modes of life of living beings ... these changes give rise to modifications or developments in their organs and the shape of their parts" (p. 179). So Lamarck imagined that over generations the habit of continually reaching for the higher browse produced in the giraffe's ancestors a lengthening of the legs and neck.


The giraffe with the short neck dies of hunger; and in the process, they eventually become extinct.  The giraffe with the long necks would naturally survive. Of course there are stages in between, their offspring maybe mixed some with long neck, some with short neck but according to selection, the short necked offspring would eventually die out because they could not adapt.

This one reminds of the pet alien creature from John Carpenter's earliest sci-f movie Dark Star.   Again, they enjoyed doing it...good grades from me.

The Lamarck view of evolution is that animals (or creatures) develops or modify their organs to adapt to their environment. So, if an organ is not used, these organs die off naturally. Like if an animal (or people) do not use their arms, the arms atrophies and die...maybe they will even fall off, as in, "Wow, me arms fell off. Guess, I am not using them that much!" 

What made this one special is its mass. When a pupil gave it to me, I almost lost  my balance. This was made from 100% recycled paper. No wire or bamboo stick skeleton, pure muscle, so to speak. I had fun...good grade from me.

So with the brains. "Aaccchooooo!" Look at that big snot that flew out of my nose! "Son, that's not a snot! That's you brain. Guess you are not using it that much anyway."

Of course, its true that organs that are rarely used are wasted away but according to Lamarck, these dying off, the wasting away of unused organs could be inherited. Goes both way, if we follow Lamarck, trumpet blowers should have developed large lungs, thick lips and enlarged testicles. According to Lamarck, these acquired characteristics could be passed off to the next generation.

At first glance, I almost shouted, "Bert! Is that you? What did they do to you? Ohh noo.. where's Ernie?!" I thought this was Bert's head. Again...what's important is we all had fun.

So,it is important to check what your ancestors line of work to better understand some of your features. Like, If you have fine delicate fingers, your ancestor could be a pianist. If you have thick lips and you walk like a duck, your ancestor could be a tuba player. Or, if you have an abnormally large big feet, your ancestor could be a spartan.

My co-teacher, Jayson Marquez, and I were discussing these two.  On the right is a cobra while on the left...hmmm... we came to an agreement, an amoebic poop. Artwork that makes me think and write...sort of... is way,way up there in my creativity scale. Most definitely, deserves an A from me. 

Anyway...where was I?  Lamarck....if Lamarck is right. These legless creature will...this is how we could look like: the future homo sapiens...the homo cyber potatoes. Why? More and more people are spending their time sitting down in front of the computer, game boy, PSP, etc...you do the math.