In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce punctuates his image of the eternities with exclamation marks: “For ever! For all eternity!... Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grapes in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness.... And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before the bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun.”
Have you seen the clip of the girl who is laying on a lawn then it zooms out to the world, solar system, galaxy, galaxies, universe? And then it goes in reverse all the way back to the girl on the lawn then goes into her veins and as far down molecularly as we currently understand? It’s a small example of infinity being enormous and minuscule.
It’s hard to think about infinity without Maren, literally and figuratively. It’s easier to think about “taking part in the infinite” with her on a smaller scale: one look, one touch…
Here's one that zooms across time, not space: it's beautiful and bonkers in its prediction of a universe of all 'zombie stars' and blackholes in the inconceivably distant future (where any scale of number we might conceive of today is a rounding error).
Just to make the same point, all of these scaling videos across time and space assume a very, very narrow view (in part because they must imitate our formalisms for infinity): they operate precisely on base 10, from exactly one perspective, and, in their austere views, make very implicit assumptions about, say, whether neutrons decay over the very long haul (which will determine a lot about the far distant future and which we just don't know). It's not that I don't trust these visions; it's just that I think we're all better off when we recognize that both finite physics as well as infinite formal views have significant limits
Your point about Maren is precisely the right one: no infinity without Maren, becomes no infinity without Grant and Maren for the rest of us, which sounds just right to me as your friend. To an infinity of friendships!
Hi, thanks for the comment! Would love to hear a bit more of the melody here if you want? Are you thinking of music and infinity aesthetically (the experience of music), the continuum of possible sounds and acoustic complexity, the endlessness of rhythm, or other ways?
All of those plus the way genres/sub-genres proliferate; the beauty (both cold and warm) of the drone; the differences between composition and performance; the vast variety of acoustical spaces, physical and virtual, in which sounds can sound; the repetition of practice (which I'm not good at) and the process of discovery of an instrument that is like a continuous falling into a more complex space; the communal aspects of listening to and performing music; microtonal scales (something I know almost nothing about); and whatever else I haven't thought to mention or don't yet know about.
Nice! I like the idea of music as a creative practice that is also formal analysis. In other words, I see in sound, acoustics, and music a kind of minimal infinity work that fills limited wave space and then dissipates after a very limited period of time (what a mess it would be if sound, with Laplace's demon, did not stop echoing!). Formal analysis and creative practice appear inseparable from one another, where harmonikos means Greek for skilled with music and harmonic analysis, such as Fourier analysis, lets us operate across acoustic frequencies in spacetime (plus heat transfer, cryptography, sonar, and whatever else): long may creative practice and formal analysis harmonize, eh?
I thought of this article today when Hank Green mentioned that there are more atoms in a grain of sand than there are grains of sand in the world.
Have you seen the clip of the girl who is laying on a lawn then it zooms out to the world, solar system, galaxy, galaxies, universe? And then it goes in reverse all the way back to the girl on the lawn then goes into her veins and as far down molecularly as we currently understand? It’s a small example of infinity being enormous and minuscule.
It’s hard to think about infinity without Maren, literally and figuratively. It’s easier to think about “taking part in the infinite” with her on a smaller scale: one look, one touch…
Thanks Ben
Nice! I love these "powers of ten" videos: 1968, 1977, 1998, and maybe a more recent one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44cv416bKP4
Here's one that zooms across time, not space: it's beautiful and bonkers in its prediction of a universe of all 'zombie stars' and blackholes in the inconceivably distant future (where any scale of number we might conceive of today is a rounding error).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
Just to make the same point, all of these scaling videos across time and space assume a very, very narrow view (in part because they must imitate our formalisms for infinity): they operate precisely on base 10, from exactly one perspective, and, in their austere views, make very implicit assumptions about, say, whether neutrons decay over the very long haul (which will determine a lot about the far distant future and which we just don't know). It's not that I don't trust these visions; it's just that I think we're all better off when we recognize that both finite physics as well as infinite formal views have significant limits
Your point about Maren is precisely the right one: no infinity without Maren, becomes no infinity without Grant and Maren for the rest of us, which sounds just right to me as your friend. To an infinity of friendships!
Here's why I'm not scared of infinities: music
Hi, thanks for the comment! Would love to hear a bit more of the melody here if you want? Are you thinking of music and infinity aesthetically (the experience of music), the continuum of possible sounds and acoustic complexity, the endlessness of rhythm, or other ways?
All of those plus the way genres/sub-genres proliferate; the beauty (both cold and warm) of the drone; the differences between composition and performance; the vast variety of acoustical spaces, physical and virtual, in which sounds can sound; the repetition of practice (which I'm not good at) and the process of discovery of an instrument that is like a continuous falling into a more complex space; the communal aspects of listening to and performing music; microtonal scales (something I know almost nothing about); and whatever else I haven't thought to mention or don't yet know about.
Nice! I like the idea of music as a creative practice that is also formal analysis. In other words, I see in sound, acoustics, and music a kind of minimal infinity work that fills limited wave space and then dissipates after a very limited period of time (what a mess it would be if sound, with Laplace's demon, did not stop echoing!). Formal analysis and creative practice appear inseparable from one another, where harmonikos means Greek for skilled with music and harmonic analysis, such as Fourier analysis, lets us operate across acoustic frequencies in spacetime (plus heat transfer, cryptography, sonar, and whatever else): long may creative practice and formal analysis harmonize, eh?