Getting Old Sucks

may you rise, as you fall.

cheers bro

Cheers To ya!!!

what a drag it is getting old

-Rolling Stones


cheers

How come you won't let me call you Fletchy?

I am 19 and already have gray hairs... it does suck.

If you look at getting old as just a little step through time its not too bad. When you think about it, most people get about 75 years per lifetime, which in the billions of years Earth's been here is not even a sneeze on the timeline.

But in reality and unreality, everything is eternal and timeless. So time, as we sense it, is one of eternity's greatest illusions.

IM GONNA GET SO FUCKING LIT ON THIS BOARD TONIGHT.

LETS HOPE MY WINGS DONT TURN INTO FLAMES.

feeling gravity's pull.

yeah, but i probably don't care nearly as much about all those billions of years as i do my 75.

gravity is our only enemy.

'The farther I go the less I know
One foot goes in front of the other
It all boils around to not hanging around
To keep moving in front of the gravity
The answer is there the answer is there
but there is not a fixed position
It keeps moving along so I keep coming along
and that's why I'm a long distance runner
and if I stop to catch my breath
I might catch a piece of death
I can't keep your pace if I want to finish this race
My fight's not with it
It's with the gravity
Long distance runner.'

Reason had harnessed the tame
Holding the sky in their arms
Gravity pulls me down

Gravity is another illusion. In space there is no up and there is no down.

I'll be 30 this year

Sounds kinda old to me, last time I blinked I was 21 and at college.

Time moves fast but its all fun Here's to the 30's

Ill smoke to that

gravity is no more of an illusion than time. or "space" for that matter. simply put, gravity is the attraction between any two objects that have mass.

Having a wife 27 year younger than me and a 15 month old baby, keeps me young.

But just had a real bad time with anemia and that sucks.

With the age the knowledge and experience comes, but the energy to use is goes.

Just thought of that myself.

I hope science fixes that soon.

So it would seem.

Alleged Gravitational Attraction
People who are not familiar with Einstein's discoveries about gravity tend to think that the reason for gravitational phenomena has been the universal gravitational attraction. It has been thought to be one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Indeed it looks like the objects in the universe attract each other. Yet they look like that only if we don't look too closely.
It is like with all magic tricks. If we observe everything that makes the trick it turns out that really it is not what it looks like it is. It turns out that it is really something else.

The same thing happens with the alleged gravitational attraction. If we measure everything with high accuracy it turns out that there is no way of fitting the gravitational attraction into the picture. The gravitational attraction is a fake explanation for what's going on. The objects in the universe just happen to move in a fashion that simulates attraction but there is no force that forces them to do that. It is just their natural free movement. The explanation why this free movement is so strange is the subject of Einstein's theory of gravity.

In times of Newton such free movement in absence of forces was thought to be possible only with constant velocity (meaning with constant speed along a straight line). It has been thought that any other movement requires a force to make it different than movement with constant velocity. Einstein proposed, and precise measurements confirmed what he proposed, that all objects when left alone move not along straight lines in space but along straight lines in certain more general "super space" that is composed of space and time together and called spacetime for short. It is like we call a man and a woman who live together a couple rather than "a man and a woman living together" because "couple" tells us more about their relation. Many of their actions depend on each other (e.g. they don't have any more that much of a freedom of choice as to whom they marry; they may be even already married to each other). It is similar with the spacetime in which behavior of space depends on behavior of time and vice versa. As if space had been married to time. Something that was not known in times of Newton when it was thought that time and space don't form a couple in which behavior of one is related to behavior of other in any way. In Newtonian theory the time and the space are totally independent from each other. At the times of Newton's it was not known that the time at some circumstances may run slower and in other faster. Einstein knew this already (especially after discovering his earlier theory called special relativity) and applied it to gravity. It turned out that in places where the time runs faster (more time) the space shrinks a little bit (less space) and v.v. As if the nature tried to keep the same the total amount of both all the time.

Gravitational phenomena
To understand how gravitational phenomena arise without gravitational attraction let's imagine that we are inside of a big container with a slippery floor, carried by a truck and the truck is just negotiating a tight turn on the road.
If we are someplace in the middle of the container we start sliding toward the container's wall. We might think that the wall attracts us. Similarly as when we fall toward the earth we tend to think that the earth attracts us.

Physicists, who analyze such things more carefully, thought that two different forces act in those two cases: inertial force in the former and gravitational in the latter.

The modern physics recognizes only one force in both cases, an inertial force called also a pseudo force. The name comes from the fact that e.g. in the case of the turning truck we are really not pushed against the wall with any force. It is the wall that is moving toward us when the truck is turning while we are still moving in a straight line as the truck had been moving before getting to the curve. From the point of view of the wall that does not know about its acceleration it looks as some force pushes us against it.

When, in the process of the truck making a turn, we finally collide with the wall, it starts pushing us with certain force depending on how tight turn the truck makes and with what speed. Therefore depending on how fast the wall accelerates towards us, now together with us pressed against it. If there were an open door in that wall we might never collide with the wall, just flew out through the door and never feel any force despite that from the wall's point of view there might have been a force that has thrown us out of the container.

So pseudo forces are forces that seem to exist from the point of view of one system and may not exist at all from the point of view of another system. In this case the one system would be container's wall that is seeing us moving faster and faster toward her (presumably pushed by some force), and the other system is us who just keeps moving along a straight line as we did before the tuck got to the curve.

In the case of falling on the earth the situation may seem not identical but it is surely a similar one. Like in the case with a moving container we don't feel any force while we are falling toward the earth (we are weightless then). When we finally collide with the earth, presumably survive the collision, and then lie pressed against it we are feeling a force pushing us up. If there were a hole in the earth leading to the other side of the earth so that we wouldn't collide with the earth, we would never feel any force as in the case of flying out of the container.

The difference between the two cases is that we think that the earth's surface does not accelerate towards us when we are lying on it, as the container's wall has been. Einstein has proposed that it actually does accelerate towards us all the time and we accelerate with it when we stay put on it. And that's why we feel the force that we used to call gravitational attraction that still is a gravitational force but not attraction anymore, just plain inertial force caused by acceleration.

We don't feel any force when we are falling on the earth, ignoring negligible gravitational effects generated by our own body called tidal effects. Those effects arise from the change in the time rate generated by the earth mass around itself that is still called gravitational field but does not mean field of force any more. Neither we feel any force (except small tidal forces about which later) when we happen to be on an orbit around the earth. We feel a force that looks like attraction only after we are pressed against an object whose surface then accelerates together with us, creating an inertial force that presses us to that object. The nature of that strange acceleration seemingly without any movement is the main point of Einstein's discovery.

To understand Einstein's discovery and why the gravitational force is the same inertial force we feel at other occasions e.g. when we are tossed around in a moving vehicle, we should first understand what the acceleration really is as a physical phenomenon and how it is generated.

Gravitational force
The thing that is relevant for our purpose is time running faster in space at direction in which the object accelerates and slower in the opposite direction. An accelerated observer is seeing clocks ticking faster than normal in the direction of acceleration and slower than normal in opposite direction. The difference is proportional to the acceleration and the distance to the clock. It is rather easy to figure out why it has to be so:
Let's imagine ourselves sitting at the rear end of a long room comparing a clock on the front-end wall with our wristwatch. If the room is at rest or moves with a constant speed (in relation to something that does not accelerate as verified by an accelerometer fixed to it) the clock on the wall has to be set a little ahead to look synchronized with our wristwatch. It is because the light from clock on the wall needs time to reach us across the room. When the room starts accelerating, we will see images of the clock getting to us a little earlier than when the room moved with constant speed, because we encounter those images of the clock moving against them with higher and higher speed. This way the clock looks running ahead of our wristwatch proportionally to the acceleration and to the distance to the clock.

When we stop accelerating the clock on the wall will be running at the same rate as our wristwatch again, but it won't be in sync anymore because we've seen it running faster when we were accelerating and it can't just jump back to "right time" when we stopped accelerating. It will show more ticks than our wristwatch. It shows that during the acceleration the time was running faster at the place where that clock is (at the wall in front of us).

This is one of facts that people have hard time to believe. It turns out to be a physical fact: rate of time in respect to us is not fixed but depends on various conditions. E.g. it depends on our acceleration and the distance to the place when the rate of time is measured.

The opposite will happen to the clock behind us. It will show fewer ticks, which confirms that it has been running slower. Or that time has been running slower there where this clock is.

Those effects have been noticed by the physicists before Einstein but they were considered to be too mysterious to think about since it was not considered possible that time may run faster or slower than at its usual rate. It was left for future generations to explain, which Einstein did by demonstrating that if the speed of light is always the same then the time actually has to run faster or slower depending on various physical conditions. It was a simple explanation and a basis of Einstein's special relativity that deals with systems that move with constant velocity.

Then, when Einstein started considering also accelerated movements this variable time rate became a basis for a new theory of gravity called general relativity.

All the above is the explanation of the second paradox in the twin paradox. This second part was that the if rate of change of velocity was causing one twin aging faster than the other then the velocity of one twin with respect to the other was the same as the other in respect to the first and so were their mutual "accelerations". So it is not the rate of change of velocity with respect to something, that causes those effects, but real acceleration that is a physical fact measured by an accelerometer regardless whether it is related to any velocity with respect to any reference point.

The traveling twin who flies to a distant star has to accelerate toward the earth when she starts her return trip and her accelerometer will show it. During this acceleration caused by the change of direction of the movement from away from the earth to towards the earth the time on the earth runs much faster in relation to the accelerating twin. It runs faster proportionally to the change in velocity and to the distance to the earth. This faster running time has never a chance to wind back so on her return to the earth the traveling twin meets her twin that is now older than the traveling twin.

It would be the same if the traveling twin were just sitting on a more massive planet then the earth (while her twin was sitting on the earth).

While sitting on a planet one feels acceleration away from that planet and so time away from that planet has to run faster. So again, after her return from vacation on a more massive than the earth planet the traveling twin would found her twin older too even ignoring all the acceleration effects arising from the change of direction of movement.

So once we know how acceleration influences time rate, and we know that velocity is there only as a purely abstract mathematical thing (an integral of that acceleration) the twin paradox disappears. It disappears because one twin really accelerates (her accelerometer shows something rather large) and the other, who stays on the earth, does not (her accelerometer shows about zero). Now we know the difference between the twins' movementsand so we know which one will be younger when they meet: the accelerating one.

To see how this acceleration causes gravitational force let notice that we have here acceleration causing a difference in the time rates along direction of acceleration. There is a strict relation between the two that may be expressed by a simple formula involving only rate of time, acceleration, distance, and the speed of light. Einstein thought that if acceleration is causing a change in the time rate then perhaps the change in time rate would cause an acceleration (and the unavoidable inertial force connected with it). It has been called the principle of equivalence (of acceleration and gravitational force) and it turned out that the nature really works that way.

The presence of mass (or energy, to which this mass is equivalent by famous Einstein's formula E = mc2) causes that time runs slower in the vicinity of that mass, as verified independently by very accurate clocks that became available only recently. It is all that is needed to create acceleration detected by accelerometers and cause inertial forces proportional to that acceleration. It is all without any movement of anything. This way the origin of gravitational force has been explained by the mass of the earth causing the time running slower in its vicinity causing all the conditions that show up when something accelerates. Therefore, on Einstein's principle of equivalence it causes the acceleration, which in turn causes inertial force.

This slowing of time in vicinity of a mass is called gravitational time dilation. This time dilation causing inertial force is what people used to take for the old attractive gravitational force. It may still be called gravitational but there is no way of making it attractive any more since it disappears immediately after the "attracted" object loses physical contact with the "attracting" one. So it does not act at the distance as an attractive force would and as it was imagined that it does.

There is certain popular misconception, even among physicists who are not too familiar with Einstein's theory so it is worth of explaining.

This misconception is that a hypothetical "gravitational attractive force" causes gravitational time dilation and all other relativistic gravitational effects (like e.g. curvature of space). Obviously it can't be so since time dilation by itself causes acceleration and so it causes the inertial force that is exactly equal to that hypothetical "gravitational attraction". If there existed also this hypothetical "gravitational attractive force" then the gravitational force that we observe on the earth would be twice as big as it is: one part caused by the "gravitational attractive force" and one by the time dilation. We observe only one of those parts and since time dilation is verifiable fact (trivial truth verifiable by precise clocks) the other part (the "gravitational attractive force") must be a fiction.

This is how the gravitational attractive force disappeared from physics. That it still stays in minds of some physicists is kind of mystery, which can't be explained by asking those physicists questions since as it was mentioned they claim the lack of time for answering them.

In any case this gravitational time dilation effect (sometimes called time curvature) is the first half of the Einsteinian gravity. It explains fully the same things that Newtonian gravity managed to explain and gives exactly the same numerical results.

Conservation of Energy in Einsteinian Gravity
One issue that confuses many people is a question what is the real world equivalent of the old Newtonian potential energy (a.k.a. "gravitational energy").

Some of us may remember from high school that we were told that (according to Newtonian gravity) when we lifted a weight, we did work against attractive gravitational force with which the earth attracted the weight. That the work we did got converted into potential energy of "gravitational field". This potential energy was thought to be able to be recovered when this lifted object was falling down either doing work or just acquiring kinetic energy.

Now we learn from this article that there is no such thing in the real world as gravitational attractive force. The attractive gravitational force turned out to be a mathematical fiction. And so there is no physical field. "Field" is only a name of the space where the phenomena under consideration occur. And obviously a name can?t absorb any energy.

Seemingly there is nothing that could be transformed into kinetic energy or absorb the kinetic energy converting it in "potential energy of the field". And yet all lifted objects need energy to be lifted, and when they fall they acquire kinetic energy and this kinetic energy is of course real as we can verify if the object falls on our foot. So where this kinetic energy comes from if no force acts on a free falling object? Obviously it can't be created out of nothing since the principle of conservation of energy prohibits such extravagance.

Those of you who read this article carefully might have guessed already where the energy comes from. Those who didn't might be still baffled by the fact that despite that no forces act on a freely falling object it falls faster and faster and so its energy is seemingly increasing. But where is this energy coming from? Those baffled people need some simple explanation.

The explanation is of course simple as most things in nature. It is only people who make them complicated, mostly because they learn mathematical descriptions of those things without understanding physics behind this math, and the math that describes simple physical phenomena is often extremely complicated.

So when a gravity physicist is asked how a falling object acquires kinetic energy that seemingly is coming from nowhere, he might say: "don't worry, energy is automatically conserved since divergence of stress-energy tensor vanishes identically at any event" (?!).

It might be good explanation to some but most likely won't be understood at all by poets and not even by some science teachers. Interestingly enough even many gravity physicists who deliver such "explanation" do not understand it and more or less privately think that this energy is created from nothing.

They don't understand it because it is just a mathematical description of what's really going on and the whole education of gravity physicists in physics is limited to memorizing the math. I'm not kidding this time. This is what's really going on in gravity physics. So let's explain in plain English what Einsteinian gravity says about how it works.

The thing that you could guess already is that total energy of any object is, as Einstein discovered, its inertial mass multiplied by the speed of light squared (the famous E=mc2). When the object is in free fall, e.g. falls straight "down", its velocity "v" increases and so its kinetic energy increases even faster than its velocity (when velocity doubles the kinetic energy quadruples as one may see from the formula for kinetic energy mv2/2, where m is the mass of the object, if one still remembers it from school).

It also happens that inertial mass of the falling object increases since energy has mass (again the same E=mc2) and so mass of the object depends on its velocity. Yet while falling down, the object gets into space where, as we already know, the time runs slower, and there is also more space (the famous Einsteinian "curvature of space"). This slower running time, and increasing amount of space that the light has to cover, causes the speed of light being slower in relation to a remote observer who is observing what happens and calculating energy of the falling object by multiplying its mass "m" by the speed of light "c" squared.

And so the observed speed of light drops by a tiny bit. Obviously it does not drop "locally" (as seen by the object itself) where it is always the same "c" as required by the basic principle of relativity that local speed of light, one that is measured by the object itself (if it could do such a thing) is always the same "c". But of course the object does not see its own kinetic energy neither so for the object (locally) its mass and speed of light, and therefore its energy is always the same (E=mc2). Only the remote observer is wondering what's going on and where the kinetic energy comes form if there is no force attracting the falling object to the earth.

It must be that increased mass has the same influence on energy as decreased speed of light so the amount of the energy of the falling object (as observed by all observers) stays the same while the object is falling. Actually it stays the same whichever way the object goes unless the object is pushed by some force. It only looks like it changes its energy when it?s in a free fall because we don't notice the changes in rate of time nor changes in the amount of space and so the tiny change in the speed of light. So the fact that total energy of this object remains constant is difficult to notice.

Being difficult to notice it?s not impossible to calculate and the calculations show that "lost" (due to smaller speed of light) internal energy of the object, and its "gained" (due to increasing inertial mass of the object) kinetic energy, are equal. There is no net change of the total energy of a object in a free fall as observed by any observer. The principle of conservation of energy is still working as it has always been and the mysteriously disappearing Newtonian "potential energy" is found as a part of the total energy of the falling object. It is hidden there in the falling object, perfectly localized, contrary to ideas of those who still explain the world with Newtonian gravity with its "universal gravitational attraction" and for whom the energy is "somewhere", in some unspecified limbo (called "field").

It turns out that energy is in a limbo only in mathematical theories like Newtonian gravity or Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. In the real world however since energy has mass (as E=mc2 shows) this energy has to be in a concrete point in space at any concrete time because this is where this mass is located. So it is located within the free falling object itself. And so the "potential" energy is not "gravitational". It is just the internal energy of the object itself.

So we see that according to Einsteinian gravity the "gravitational energy" does not exist at all.

It turns out to be the same kind of mathematical fiction as "gravitational force", and many other mathematical fictions that are slowly explained as such by physical theories like Einsteinian gravity.

The magic of fictitious entities working (almost) as predicted by mathematical theories that only say what is going on and when, is being slowly replaced by science, by physical theories that not only explain what is going on and when, but also why.

For mathematically oriented poets and science teachers there is an appendix showing how Newtonian potential energy is recovered from the internal energy of the object while the object is falling. When the object is rising the process works of course in the other direction: the disappearing kinetic energy is accumulated as internal energy of the rising object.

i was keeping it simple by stating classic/newtonian theory. cut and paste is really impressive.

'no sticks. no stems, no seeds, no stress.'

I hope I die before I get old.

Until then, I'll be out of my brain on the train.

basically gravity can be looked as as the curvature of space-time by mater (only looking at einstein).

what makes that really interestng is when you take the special relativity theory that stats time doesn't flow at a fixed rate, and then 'generalize' it by gravity (ie: curvature of spacetime), you get all sorts of strange things. like time dilation.

i used to think getting old would suck... till i considered the alternative ;-)

They Might Be Giants put out an awesome track called 'Hope that I get Old before I Die.'

a friend of mine and i always used to say if we both happened to get terminally sick at the same time, we should get on a couple of motorbikes, crank it up to 100KM/H and drive into a brick wall.

i always kinda liked the idea.

There's a tiny, tiny chance that you wouldn't die immediately on impact. I'd rather swallow a hundred Tuinal pills. Eternal sleeeeeep.

IM FUCKING LIT - IM THREEWAY CALLING NIGGAS.

FUCKED BEYOND GLORY BEYOTCH.

DIALING PDX NOW.

the correct speed was actually 250KM/H - should be enough.

more exciting than pills...

Im nearly 60. Just do what I do when your old. Take pain killers for the pain and follow it with a bottle of good brandy. In a couple of hour the pain is gone, you feel like your 30, and will think your a genious that can tell quit how to make money.

Skydiving without a parachute would be cool under those circumstances. It would suck if you changed your mind halfway down tho.

no stems, no seeds,
that stuff you don't need
Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed

There is even a better chance that you would get sick long before you died if you ate that many.

Mainline - much more effective

yeah, that'd be cool too. for some reason i like the idea of seeing the wall in the distance, throttle wide open, and just pointing it.

There is no gravity....the earth sucks

I know! But is cutting and pasting really possible under classic newtonian theory?

I have hair in my ears and nostrils.

First sign of old age, second is looking for it.

if you need to look for it, you aren't old yet, just anticipation.

Why are manhole covers round?

Holy shit dude, it's burning already..

Is this some Freudian slip Mr. Anonymous?

Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Pretty soon now you're gonna get a little older

I have a second-cousin who was totally grey by 20, but it looked like platinum-blonde. I kind of hoped I'd get her genes...but no, here I am at 35, with the same damned mousy-brown hair I've had for 31 years...maybe four or five greys. They're lurking; they'll arrive en masse any day know, I just know it.

30 didn't feel old to me. I felt really good about it. And I have no idea how I got to 35. Those years...*whoosh*. Now I'm happily looking forward to 40. I hated 35. I don't plan on recognizing the next few birthdays. Forty and beyond will rock, I am sure. Or at least, that's how I've convinced myself.

gravity,Euclidean real space-time or quantum theory?

Einstein was famous for his theorys, but was not as great a mathematician as a lot of people think he was

My friends decided about 6-7 years ago that when they turn 70 they'll start doing heroine full-time.