Ignorance
Our Thorough Dumbing Down

 Our ignorance
is a dumbing down
—a benumbing
  of perception

 He’s awake at two in the morning. Woke up a while back and then, and he could kick himself, he started to think, again. About neutron stars of all things.

Somewhere up there, he had read a while back (and he wondered precisely where now but couldn’t think of it), there’s a neutron star that someone, possibly at JPL in Pasadena, at some point had named “PSR J1748-2446ad”. And how on earth he remembered this string of letters and numbers masquerading as a name was beyond him.

Be that as it may. This very bad, easily forgettable name stands for an incredibly heavy object, weighing in at about twice the tonnage of our sun, but with a radius of a mere 16 kilometers—which gives it, roughly, a diameter of 20 miles, which is a lot, a lot less than the 865,370 miles worth of diameter of the sun's, which is 43,268 times larger than, let’s call him, the PSR guy. This guy, then, as astronomical things go, is an amazingly (bordering on, if not moving beyond the unbelievable) compact ball.

And that is only half the story, for as it happens, this ball spins. Fast. It spins very, very fast. 

This PSR guy is, in fact, as far as he after some research could ascertain, the fastest spinning pulsar known to astronomy (aka Mankind) clocking in at 716 Hz, which is the nerdy way of saying that this pulsar spins at 716 revolutions per second (or that each spin takes just over a millisecond, i.e., 0.0013959548 seconds). 

As a pedestrian (aka culinary) frame of reference, a regular kitchen blender spins at between 250-500 revolutions per second; but, of course, the kitchen blender blades do not stretch out 10 miles in all directions.

Again, he tried to picture it: A globe, twenty miles across, weighing in at twice the sun, spinning at twice the speed of the average kitchen blender. If that surface sported any sort of life, it would have to hang on really well. Strong fingers. Or toes.

But, he then wondered slash speculated: would he, close enough to PSR to observe him with his own eyes, would he detect motion? Would it, to his human eyes, appear to spin, or would PSR for all he could make out simply sit there, a dark, heavy ball in space?

Something told him the latter. He simply was not equipped to detect events at the millisecond rate. Was anyone?

Well someone, or something, apparently. After all, they (whoever they were) had clocked it at 716 Hz.

On the subject of hard-to-come-to-grips-with speed, he now goes on to think, sleep but a fading memory at this point, he had recently discovered that there can be as many as 3,000 chemical reactions per second inside a single living human cell. Per second. A single living cell. That would mean that one such chemical reaction could be initiated, take place, and wrap up in, say, 1/2000th of a second. That is a whole different clock than the luminous one on his bedside table (that’s frowningly showing 2:36 AM).

By the time he’s finished this thought (he thought), say it took five seconds, cells in his arms and hands might have seen between 10,000 and 15,000 chemical reactions each (in order to supply the energy to move his arms and fingers as he scratches first his head and then his left thigh).

Two things: how did they detect this speed (what instruments did they use and who are they?), and what type of natural perception would it take to observe this rate of activity?

And how aware would you have to be to keep track of those neutron revolutions?

And then, staying with hard-to-fathom speed, he remembered the stonefish: stone-like (hence the name) they wait patiently for prey to swim by, a small fish or shrimp or something, and then—when this prey is within reach—they attack and swallow the little guy in as little as 0.015 seconds—that is in 15/1000th of a second. In water no less (which offers pretty good resistance, mind you). From dead-still to attack, engulf, swallow, back to dead-still in one and a half hundredth of a second. He shook his head.

Mother Nature is sporting a lot of different clocks.

Also, he remembered, making sure you will not step on him twice, the stonefish is also the most poisonous animal in the oceans: not one of, but the.

Another thing that has not bothered him precisely but nonetheless kept him up some (other) nights: how long is the now?

Some quantum physicists have proposed that the physical universe pulses in and out of existence at a rate of 3,000 times per second—a curious match with cell chemistry (he now thinks). The thing, of course, is that the gap between one here and the next here must be a lot shorter than the here itself, or we would notice the gaps, no? Were the gap longer than the here, would then not everything appear as gap instead of a here (as in our “real” world)? Would everything not appear as that state of affairs that must exist when the universe pulse is off—the nothing there?

Then he thought of movies. There’s a parallel. When you step back and take a close look at what a movie is all about you see (or are told) that it is 24 still frames per second, each frame a frozen bit of time (image of) that when run through a projector at just the right speed (i.e., 24 frames per second) will seem as seamlessly progressive a stream of occurrence as any sequence of moments we live through. 

Movie-wise, then, each now is a 24th of a second long. And, he adds, the gaps between film still images (i.e., frames) are, and he had looked this up, about 10% of the frame itself. Does the universe pulsing in and out sport a similar ratio, one wonders: 1/3,000th of a second worth of here versus 1/30,000th of a second of not here. You’d have to be very observant to see/sense the 1/30,000th of a second gaps. Very.

So, how long is the now? Apparently not longer than 1/3,000th of a second, possibly shorter, with a 10th of that of nothing in-between.

This brings to mind another piece of stray information, another 3,000 thing. The Buddha once said that there are 3,000 mind moments in the blink of an eye, and how long is that? Less than a second, no?

How did the Buddha know? Was there a time, he wondered (at about 2:44 AM), when the spirit of man (or his spiritual predecessor) was sufficiently well-tuned to observe each and every spin of the neutron star, to observe each pulse in (the 1/3,000th of a second here) and each pulse out (the 1/30,000th of a second not here) of reality? And if so, when and how did we dumb ourselves down to observe all this pulsing in and out as one single, steady progression?

The Buddha apparently saw and new and told.

2:52 AM and still musing.

No more sleep tonight.

::

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