Pleasantville

 


  It is very difficult for me to be optimistic when
  I think of human nature under the duress of that great 
  conceptual revolution that we are all approaching. 
 
  Like the artist Rockwell who portrayed not what we are, but
  what we would like to be, it seems in some way virtuous
  to try and propagate that optimism in the same manner: 

  This movie is about a little idyllic town cast in black,
  white and gray. When these contented inhabits are 
  introduced to color, it spreads like disease and chaos 
  ensues. The movie is none-the-less optimistic in that
  things can change drastically and that we will cope.

       Pleasantville 

  Many people's economic livelyhoods are usually built on the
  idea of "controlling both sides of the equation"; that
  is, the problem becomes its own solution. People put
  up with inferior models because it provides them with
  funding while they _slowly_ fix the "problems". 

  Computer programmers do this, blue collar workers do this
  and marketing executives do this,... 
  Dilbert poked fun at this when he declared that marketing
  execs don't like to get into anticipation wars with their
  competitor's marketing execs, so instead of doing anything
  'new', they just do the same thing over and over. This is
  a collusion between corporate marketing divisions that 
  gives them 'time'. A 'whistle blower' will disrupt this
  falsity and create competition resulting in volatility.
  
  Art is quite different. In art the idea is to be 'new',
  and at some level unanticipated. Shock-art is one extreme
  and realist art minimizes what is 'new' but never really
  eliminates it. To be able to 'predict' art goes against its
  grain.
  
  The science in the art, is that we don't bother physically
  reproducing the same old thing over and over once we can 
  predict it, instead we create a symbol for it as a compressed
  form of subjective representation. That is an economy of
  representation in terms of communications, and forms much
  of the basis of physics and applied mathematics. Understanding
  physics in terms of communications theory unravels alot of its
  theoretical 'flaws', though many of these flaws appear to be
  intentional.  

 Someone provided me with this link:
  http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/vjs.html


  That is indeed a very interesting paper within the
  scope of physics. I've wondered myself whether
  particles could bounce off the vaccuum due to an
  impedance mismatch and whether mass itself is definable
  in this manner. In resonant electric circuits, the
  inductor is usually mechanically modelled as a mass
  while capacitance is modelled analogously as a spring.
  When one includes the ideas of impedance the mechanical
  analogs become very interesting.

  At the moment I tend to think analogously, of particles travelling
  backward in time as being similar to those little
  spring cars that you push _backward_ on the floor
  to wind up the spring _backwards_, it will come back
  to you with negative momentum and procede past the 
  equilibrium point of the spring to wind the spring in
  the other direction; without too much friction, the car would
  oscillate back and forth for a while like a clock.

  It also seems easier to get an idea of virtual particles,
  by studying the Boson (massless particles like light)
  equivalent of virtual images made of 'virtual' photons
  in holography. Virtual images are the backwards version
  of real images.

  Remember in olden days when the sun circled the earth
  and when they plotted out the orbits of the planets
  they ran into these things called epicycles and retrogrades
  wherein the planets zigzagged across the virtual sky ?

  Here's a picture of Copernicus and retrograde:
     

  A new mental 'basis' was found where these 'effects'
  just didn't happen. It had nothing much to do with
  physics because either way you looked at it you were
  looking at the same thing, it was largely a subjective
  leap forward which simplified matters mathematically.

  I think here of virtual particles travelling backward in time.