samedi 13 février 2021

Update: Hobbyhorsing Around

 

Update: Hobbyhorsing Around

I’mbeing urged to update my last post, so here goes. Some friends accused me of believing in little green men, alien abductions, etc. Well I never really gave much consideration to little green men, although little green robots are still in the possible mix. And I don’t really think I’m going off my trolley but I’m definitely suffering from lockdown; suffering from too much time to think, insufficient evidence and an inadequate brain.

Too much time and idle curiosity have got me delving into unexplained archaeological mysteries. It’s a good subject for curiosity because so little is known for sure if we go back a few thousand years. Let’s dispose of at least one case of the stone carving precision I mentioned previously, at Cusco in Peru. To recap, the mystery is how huge stones in walls were carved in complicated shapes so accurately that they fit tightly together with no mortar, inadequate tools (as far as we know) and without even a paper’s width between them. I’ve found a paper which gives an explanation. The stones were mined and the mining would have produced an acidic slurry. The paper proposes that this slurry was used as mortar between the stones. The stones are of granite with a high silica content and the acid in the mortar would have attacked and softened the silica, itself dissolving in the process. The weight of the upper stones would then have crushed the lower stones together. That explanation seems very likely to me; using mortar between stones in a wall was common practice so now it seems it was perhaps the absence of that that most needed explanation. The rest then follows.

There’s plenty more that needs explaining of course but my curiosity has revealed a few gems. One recent discovery puts back the time at which we think humanoids (not necessarily homo sapiens) made tools by some 100,000 years, which illustrate how little we really know about what was going on tens of thousands of years ago. In fact, on occasion after occasion a finding puts back the time at which the first of whatever happened by a few thousand years. There is significant evidence of the use of electricity that long ago, not that people fully understood it then but that they were able to generate and harness it in limited ways. The same goes for the smelting and use of metals, although how the very high temperatures needed were achieved remains a bit of a mystery. What I think I have learned is that crude technologies were in use much earlier than we have previously thought and that tens of thousands of years ago the earth consisted of relatively sophisticated civilisations existing cheek by jowel with extremely rudimentary ones. Think city building farmers alongside hunter-gathering cave dwellers.

Another thing I think I’ve learned is that widespread travel happened much sooner than we realised. For instance, there is quite strong evidence that the Chinese arrived in north America earlier than anybody else. tens if not hundreds of thousands of years ago, which throws our current reading of the movements of early man into the melting pot. If that is true the spotty nature of the spread of technology seems a bit strange but maybe the traveling adventurers didn’t include technologists. People moved more easily than ideas: that wouldn’t be so strange.

There’s still those aliens to account for. I’ve no idea whether they exist or not and the probability according to astrophysicist seems very low. The counter to that is, as Heisenberg has said, physics is not just more complicated than we think but more complicated than we can think. So…...to the little green robots. What do we send to far planets that we want to investigate? Robots; so they would liely be the first things that any advanced alien civilisation, if it existed, would send to investigate Earth. A general objection to any alien beings visting Earth is the limitation of the speed of light over the distances involved. If nothing can exceed the speed of light, as Einstein’s theory of relativity insists, the time to reach Earth would exceed the lifespan of anything we can conceive of. But…...we know Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong, maybe only slightly so but possibly fundamentally so. The limitation of the speed of light is essential to the theory of relativity but not to quantum physics; in quantum physics could speeds vastly superior to the speed of light be possible? At the moment, it seems, nobody knows, so that’s another mystery waiting to be solved. Quantum physics in itself is an invitation to fantasy. When a theory is proposed in science, to be of any use, it also has to have an observable test proposed that would demonstrate whether it explained whatever anomaly it sought to resolve. But…….we appear at the moment to have reached the limit of size of particle we can detect; we (think) we know there must be smaller particles but, since we can’t detect them, we can only theorise about their existence and, more damningly, therefore can’t propose an experiment that would demonstrate their existence. Physics, in this sense, seems to have reached the same point as philosophy did with Wittgenstein; put bluntly, it disappears up its own arsehole.

Behind all this thinking and speculation is the little consideration of trying to separate fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, what we (think) we know from what still has to be understood. In popular discussions, scientific facts are often referred to, equally often without the realisation that scientific facts aren’t necessarily true; they merely accord with the available evidence. The only true facts in science are mathematical axioms, which don’t get you far when trying to unravel archaeological conundrums.

All through the writing of this piece I’ve tried to be very careful of my use of language. Facts, truth, reality, fantasy, what we (think) we know……...a dance of the semantics. As an aside, it throws a light on the politically correct crowd who want to control our use of language. I have a friend who has had a stroke and becomes angry if anyone tries to describe him (in French) as of disadvantaged mobility; he insists he’s handicapped. That’s the reality.

All this apart, what’s been happening in the last fortnight? Well, the daylight hours have increased markedly, which suggests gardening. Not much is yet possible but I can get down to some pruning and clearing of dead stuff. I’ve also decided to advance my cooking into the field of desserts. I normally eat fruit of some (any) sort for dessert and just get ice cream for those I invite. However, I made baclava yesterday and it proved an instant hit. My next target is a good rice pudding, with lemon, cream and a covering of nutmeg. And this morning I found some popcorn, my favourite munch whiile watching football, in the local supermarket, mid-size plastic buckets of it. Learning from last year, I bought three of them. They’ll be sold out by next week and that will be it for the year. A UK supermarket would immeduately re-order anything that sold out that quickly; here «it’s great that sold so quickly, now let’s get something that lasts longer on the shelves». There’s no sign of a COVID jab for me yet; my friends Steve and Jo, who should be ahead of me in the queue because of Steve’s handicap (sic) have been offered the possibility of one in June. So for me…….August, September maybe, and I’m in one of the priority categories. Come on France, wake up!