Fails, “Forgiveness” and Time

Religious Humor: did you know that The Vatican “forgave” John Lennon for saying that “We (the Beatles) are bigger than Christ?”

I’m not sure what they are in a position to “forgive” Lennon but that’s another story.

This is how one cartoonist sees it:

(Bill Mutranowski of Atheist Cartoons )

Hunting Fail

Via the Fail Blog; this warthog didn’t take too kindly toward being hunted.

Education: I am an unusual liberal in that I am ambivalent, at best, about sex education in public schools. Sure, the kids ought to learn about the biology of it all, but in my mind, school is more for academics than anything else.

This type of situation is what I don’t want happening.

Science: Another excellent post in Cosmic Variance: this one is about time. What if time is a real construct rather than some sort of approximation?

If the quantum state evolves in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, it evolves ergodically through a torus of phases, and will exhibit all of the usual problems of Boltzmann brains and the like (as Dyson, Kleban, and Susskind have emphasized). So, at the very least, the Hilbert space (under these assumptions) must be infinite-dimensional. In fact you can go a bit farther than that, and argue that the spectrum of energy eigenvalues must be arbitrarily closely spaced — there must be at least one accumulation point.

Sexy, I know. The remarkable thing is that you can say anything at all about the Hilbert space of the universe just by making a few simple assumptions and observing that eggs always turn into omelets, never the other way around. Turning it into a respectable cosmological model with an explicit spacetime interpretation is, admittedly, more work, and all we have at the moment are some very speculative ideas. But in the course of the essay I got to name-check Parmenides, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Augustine, and Nietzsche, so overall it was well worth the effort.