Oct 22, 2019 / Steven C. Hayes, PhD (ideas.ted.com)

Molly Snee

Most of us live with a constant stream of internal statements, criticisms and commands running through our heads. But we do have a choice: We don’t have to let them define us — or our days, says psychology researcher Steven Hayes. Here’s how we can disentangle ourselves.

When we’re worried or dissatisfied, most of us will do anything not to feel these feelings. Instead, we avoid them, search for something to distract or soothe ourselves, or try to problem-solve our way out of them.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) takes a different tack — it’s all about cultivating the psychological flexibility so we can live with what’s unpleasant and not let it run our lives. “Changing our relationship to our thoughts and emotions, rather than trying to change their content, is the key to healing and realizing our true potential,” says Steven C. Hayes, psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the originator and pioneering researcher of ACT.

Hayes and other colleagues have found that psychological flexibility is made up of six core skills, including one that they call “defusion.” Below, Hayes explains what it is and how we can learn to build it. 

Much of the time, most of us are living in a state of cognitive fusion — fully buying into what our thoughts tell us and allowing them to overly direct our actions and choices. This happens because we’re programmed to notice the world as structured by our thoughts but we miss the fact that we are the ones thinking these thoughts.

The flip side of fusion is when we see our thoughts for what they really are — ongoing attempts to make meaning of the world — so we give them power only to the degree that they genuinely serve us. We’re able to notice the act of thinking, without diving in or getting entangled in our thoughts. Our made-up word for this act of just noticing is “defusion.”

Helpful in learning defusion is understanding the yearning that drives our obsessive self-chatter and problem solving. It’s a yearning to create coherence and understanding out of our mental cacophony, and it’s a perfectly understandable desire. We feel vulnerable when our thoughts don’t fit nicely together, especially when they are contradictory.

The first step in making the pivot away from believing our automatic thoughts is to become aware of just how complicated our thought processes are. One way to start is to give your mind free rein to think for a few minutes and then write down the string of thoughts that emerge.

I did this exercise as soon as I woke up one morning I was writing this book, and here were my thoughts:

It’s time to get up. No, it isn’t; it’s only 6:00. That’s seven hours of sleep. I need eight — that’s the goal. I feel fat. Well, birthday cake, duh. I have to eat cake on my son’s birthday. Maybe, but not such a big piece. I bet I’m up to 196 lbs. Shoot … by the time I run the Halloween candy/Turkey Day gauntlet I’ll be back over 200. But maybe not. Maybe more like 193. Maybe exercise more. Anything would be “more.” I’ve gotta focus. I have a chapter to write. I’m falling behind … and I’m getting fat again. Noticing the voices and letting them run might be a good start to the chapter. Better to go back to sleep. But maybe it could work. It was sweet of Jacque to suggest it. She’s up early. Maybe it’s her cold. Maybe I should get out of bed and see if she is OK. It’s only 6:15. I need my eight hours. It’s close now to seven and a half hours. Still not eight.

Not only are these thoughts remarkably circuitous, but most of them are about rules and punishment. Many of them are also contradictions of prior thoughts. This kind of mental to-and-fro is probably familiar to you.

This kind of arguing with ourselves comes naturally to most of us. In fact, the old cartoon device of a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is understood even by small children. When we are deeply focused on a mental task, our minds enter into a state of flow, in which our thoughts, emotions and actions are all temporarily in sync. But our more usual state is one of mind wandering, which is often characterized by a good deal of mental disagreement and disengagement.

To get a look at how automatic and circuitous your own thinking is, take a minute to point your thoughts in any direction of your choosing. Then, track them as they run their course. Write down everything you notice.

After completing this exercise, repeat it two more times, letting your thoughts run for one minute each time. In round two, imagine that your job is to figure out whether each thought is true or appropriate. In round three, imagine that your thoughts are like the voices of quarreling first-graders. Adopt a posture of curiosity and amusement, but do nothing except for notice them.

In round two, you probably experienced the sense of being pulled directly into your thoughts. Their loudness may have increased; your focus on their content may have gone up. You might have gotten into an argument with your mind. In round three, you probably notice the general flow of your thoughts. Very likely, the specific content seemed less important, and you had a sense of being outside any arguments.

That difference explains how defusion exercises weaken the link between automatic thoughts and behavior. Our ability to step back from our thoughts grows stronger as we practice. When we learn defusion skills, we can take the energy of our counterproductive yearning and pivot it toward learning to be gently guided by our experiences.

Here’s a starter set of commonly used defusion techniques. The first two are general defusion-building exercises, and the others are tailored to defusing from specific problematic thoughts. Consider these to be the core of your defusion practice. In your first couple of weeks, repeat each one at least once a day. Additionally, if during the course of the day you notice that you are ensnared by a thought, use a couple in the moment to break free.

While it’s common and even helpful for you to feel a sense of freedom and distance in a matter of minutes after practicing these exercises, be careful. Your mind may try to convince you that you have solved your problems. Don’t believe it: your inner dictator is just giving you a dangerous new thought to defuse from.

No matter how good you are at defusion, your mind will keep forming new thoughts that you’ll naturally fuse with. One example is thinking: “I’m the world’s expert in defusion!”. It’s vital for you to stay aware of this tendency. I’ve been practicing defusion for more than 30 years, and I still have to catch myself every day as I get entangled with my thoughts. For me, sometimes just catching my thoughts is enough to break the grip, but if not, I immediately engage in one of these practices. However, fusion still sometimes slips by me for a while. Your goal is progress, not perfection.

One last warning: Some of these exercises may seem odd, even silly. We humans are funny creatures! Just work through them with a sense of self-compassion.

1. Disobey on purpose

Let me start with one that I’m sure will seem perplexing. Just trust me. Stand up and carry a phone, book or other object with you while you slowly walk around the room, reading this next sentence aloud several times. Yes, read this sentence while walking.

OK? Ready? Stand up. Walk. Read. Go!

Here is the sentence: “I cannot walk around this room.”

Keep walking! Slowly but clearly repeat that sentence as you walk at least five or six times. “I cannot walk around this room.” Now you can sit down again.

It is such a tiny thing, isn’t it? It’s a tiny poke in the eye of the Dictator Within — which is what I call the domineering problem-solving part of our minds that is constantly suggesting “solutions” for our psychological pain — and a little tug on your superhero cape.

This exercise was one of our earliest defusion discoveries. Even though it is a silly exercise, a team in Ireland showed recently in a laboratory experiment that it immediately increased tolerance to experimentally induced pain by nearly 40 percent. In the study, people were willing to keep their hand on a very, very hot plate (not hot to the point of injury but hot enough to cause real pain) 40 percent longer — after just a few moments of saying one thing while doing the opposite.

Even the smallest demonstration that the mind’s power over you is an illusion can give you significantly more freedom to do hard things. You can easily build this into your life as a regular practice (right now I’m thinking, “I cannot type this sentence!” as I’m typing).

2. Give your mind a name, and listen to it politely

When we listen to another person, we choose whether we agree with what they have to say (or not). With our internal voice, we don’t usually feel like we have that option to agree or disagree, but that’s the posture I’d like you to try taking. Research has shown that naming your mind — give it a name other than the one you call yourself — helps with this. Why? Because if your mind has a different name, it is different from “you.”

I call mine “George.” Pick any name you like — even Mr. Mind or Ms. Mind will do. Now say hello to your mind by using its new name, as if you were being introduced to it at a party. Of course, if you are around others while you’re reading this — say, on a bus or a train — do this in your head.

3. Appreciate what your mind is trying to do

As you listen to your thoughts and notice when your mind starts to chatter, answer it back with something like, “Thanks for that thought, George. Really — thank you.” If you speak to your mind dismissively, it will continue right on problem-solving, so be sincere. You might want to add, “I really get that you’re trying to be of use, so thank you for that. But I’ve got this covered.” Say this out loud if you’re alone, or internally if you’re with others.

Your mind will probably push back with thoughts like, “That’s silly — that won’t help!” Respond again with, “Thanks for that thought, George. Thank you — I really do see how you are trying to be of use.” You might consider inviting it to comment further by replying “Got anything else you have to say?”

4. Sing it

This method is powerful when you’re having a really sticky thought. Turn that thought into a sentence and try singing it — again, do this out loud if you are alone or in your head if you have company. Any tune will do. My default is “Happy Birthday.” Don’t worry about the wording or rhyming scheme — you are not auditioning for America’s Got Talent! Just repeat your thought to whatever tune you choose.

Now find a thought that is nagging you, and try this out. Experiment with different tunes, or sing it fast or slow. How will you know whether you’ve “succeeded”? It’s not that the thought goes away or becomes unbelievable; it’s that you can see it more clearly as just another thought.

5. Carry it with you

Write down a recurring, critical thought on a small piece of paper. Maybe it’s “I’m just stupid” or “I’m unloveable” or “I’m going to fail.” After you finish writing, hold up the paper and look at it as if it were a precious and fragile page from an ancient manuscript. These words are an echo of your history.

Even if the thought is painful, ask yourself if you’d be willing to honor that history by choosing to carry this piece of paper with you. If you can get to “yes,” place it in your pocket, wallet or bag and let it come along for the ride. During the days you carry it, every so often pat your wallet or bag (or wherever you keep it) to acknowledge that it is part of your journey, and it is welcome to come along.

By practicing exercises like these, we can start laying down unhelpful thoughts that have driven us for years. If we learn to think of our internal voice as that of an advisor rather than a dictator, it can become enormously helpful to us. We come to see that our mind itself is not bad or harmful as long as we don’t let it rigidly dictate our behavior. It’s a tool and when we learn to put it on a leash, it can serve us even better.

Excerpted with permission from the new book A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Towards What Matters by Steven C. Hayes. Published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. © 2019 by Steven C. Hayes.

Watch his TEDxUniversityofNevada talk now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven C. Hayes, PhD , is a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. The author of 43 books and more than 600 scientific articles, he has served as president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, and is one of the most cited psychologists in the world. Dr. Hayes initiated the development of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and of Relational Frame Theory (RFT), the approach to cognition on which ACT is based.

Image by Luke Ellis-Craven/Unsplash, Public Domain Dedication (CC0).

Ross Gay

Published July 25, 2019

So writes Zadie Smith toward the end of her beautiful essay “Joy.” She gets there by explaining that she has an almost constitutional proclivity toward being pleased. She is a delight to cook for, she suggests, because your pancakes will be the best pancakes she has ever eaten! And she has what I consider the wonderful quality—doubly, triply, wonderful in the almost prosecutorially vain and Hollywood-obsessed (or whatever’s the new Hollywood) culture of ours—of finding interesting faces beautiful. I love that. Something crooked or baggy. A squirrelly tooth or two. Hairs where hairs, according to the magazines or movies, ought not be. (Let me take a moment to honor and delight in and hover above the birthmark of my father’s left temple, which he kindly bestowed upon my left hip, in a lighter shade, and which makes, in conjunction with the long scar zipping my upper thigh beneath it, an upside-down exclamation point.) But I have veered, as I am wont to do, from Smith’s meditation on joy, which veering also delights me. But that’s not, here, the point.

The point is that she differentiates between pleasure and joy, and for that I thank her. Pleasure—for me, this morning, a perfect cake donut at the vegan bakery down the hill, which I rode to on my bike, the early fall briskness breaking me into a few tears in my bombing (delight!: the word bombing wrested from military discourse to mean going fast down a hill on a bike or skateboard, especially to the vegan baker), is great, but it is not, by itself, a joy.

And given as I am writing a book of delights, and I am ultimately interested in joy, I am curious about the relationship between pleasure and delight—pleasure as Smith offers it, and delight. I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both “of light” and “without light.” And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. What I think I’m talking about. Being of and without at once. Or: joy.

Smith writes about being on her way to visit Auschwitz while her husband was holding her feet. “We were heading toward that which makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.” It has little to do with pleasure (though holding one’s love’s feet is a pleasure; and having one’s feet held by one’s love is a pleasure). It has to do with this other thing Smith describes perfectly, if a bit riddly, which seems perfect given as it is a bit riddly: the intolerable makes life worthwhile. How is that so?

There is ridiculous, and then there’s ridiculous. I prefer the latter, I think, sitting behind a family tending to their two kids, digging through their carry-on for medicine for the little one, who wears a kind of foam hockey helmet wails. Was wailing. I think it was Kenzaburō Ōe who said somewhere, wrote somewhere, that he wouldn’t know what it was to be a person without his son, who has a profound cognitive disability. I have no children of my own, but I love a lot of kids and love a lot of people with kids, who, it seems to me, are in a constant communion with terror, and that terror exists immediately beside … let’s here call it delight— different from pleasure, connected to joy, Zadie Smith’s joy, somehow — terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up.

Is this metaphorical bridge in the body of the parent? And if so, what are the provinces it connects? Or is it connecting the towns of terror and delight, which might make the dangling legs very high up belong to the mayors of terror and delight, both of whom look, I’m afraid to say, exactly like your child.

When Rachel fell to her death—an accident, a slip, doing precisely what you or I did one thousand times as kids, fucking around, balancing on some edge, trying to get a better look, a little closer, a little faster, a little higher—

The bridge exists, on second thought, perhaps, in the bodies of all those to whom the fallen child is beloved, and in the bodies of all those to whom the fallen child is beloved, and in the bodies of all those to whom any possible falling child would be annihilation, which, sorry to say, is all of us.

And the slipping child—hand from a rung, foot from a rung—what metaphor the ladder?—how she seems to pierce us, drive a hole through us.

A hole through which what.

Here’s the ridiculous part. Is it possible that people come to us—I do not here aspire exactly to a metaphysical argument, and certainly not one about fate or god, but rather just a simple, spiritual question—and then go away from us—

I don’t even want to write it.

Rather this: And what comes through the hole?

. . .

There is a scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty where Jep, the one-hit-wonder novelist and socialite in what we might call late middle age visits the exhibit of an artist who has taken or had taken photos of himself every day of his life since he was about four or five. It’s thousands of pictures of this, oh, forty-five-year-old guy, all hanging like a quilt on the walls in the courtyard of some beautiful Roman building. As Jep looks over the photographs, his arms behind his back, he’s overwhelmed—we see him seeing time passing in some utterly unequivocal way: the boy’s mussed hair; the skinny teen; the newly facial-haired young man; the what, weariness, as his true adulthood comes on. It devastates me, and only partly because of the lamenty song, “The Beatitudes,” played by the Kronos Quartet, filling out the scene as Jep’s chin starts to quake. It’s devastating because we know that Jep is seeing his own life—what remains of it—pass. Lost love, dead friends, the whole bit. He is seeing what I was going to write was the fundamental truth of his life, but that is a fundamental truth of our lives, which simply that we die. Or, everything dies. Or, loss. Or, as Philip Levine put it in his beautiful poem—truth is, this is what I’ve always gathered from the title; the poem’s kind of otherwise concerned—“Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” Nothing expresses it better than that. And sometimes—maybe mostly?—we are the animals.

I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization—in that clear way, not that oh yeah way—that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now.

It’s a feeling I’ve had outside of dreams as well—an acute understanding, looking at a beloved’s back as the blankets gather at her waist and the light comes in through the gauzy shades, lying across her shoulder; watching my mother sleep in her chair, her mouth part open, the skin above her eyes exactly like mine; looking at the line of mourners; tugging the last red fish pepper from the plant. It’s a terrible feeling, but not bad—terrible in the way Rilke means when he tells us at the beginning of the Duino Elegies that “All angels are terrible”; terrible in the old German way (if you think I know what that actually means I have a bridge to sell you), or maybe more accurately in the Romantic sense, or in the Burkean sublime sense, which speaks to obliteration and annihilation—all angels remind us that annihilation is part of the program. And those terrible angels—the angel of annihilation—is a beautiful thing, is the maker, too, of joy, and is partly what Zadie Smith’s talking about when she talks about being in joy. That it’s not a feeling or an accomplishment: it’s an entering and a joining with the terrible (the old German kind), joy is.

Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classroom to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might be somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

And what if the wilderness—perhaps the densest wilder in there—thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?)—is our sorry? Or, to use Smith’s term, the “intolerable.” It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything—lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

Is sorrow the true wild?

And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?

For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

I’m saying: What if that is joy?

(Oct. 2, 2019)

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This essay originally appeared in The Book of Delights, and is reprinted with permission of Algonquin Books and the author.

This essay was originally read in the On Being episode “Tending Joy and Practicing Delight.”

A splendid 1913 celebration of how solitary walks enliven “the country of the mind.”

Brain Pickings|

• Maria Popova (getpocket.com)

Kenneth Grahame.

“Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Thoreau wrote in his manifesto for the spirit of sauntering. And who hasn’t walked — in the silence of a winter forest, amid the orchestra of birds and insects in a summer field, across the urban jungle of a bustling city — to conquer some territory of their interior world? Artist Maira Kalman sees walking as indispensable inspiration: “I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see for a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory.” For Rebecca Solnit, walking “wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.”

Perched midway in time between Thoreau and Solnit is a timeless celebration of the psychological, creative, and spiritual rewards of walking by the Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame (March 8, 1859–July 6, 1932), best known for the 1908 children’s novel The Wind in the Willows — a book beloved by pioneering conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson, whose own splendid prose about nature shares a kindred sensibility with Grahame’s.

Five years after publishing The Wind in the Willows, Grahame penned a beautiful short essay for a commemorative issue of his old boarding school magazine. Titled “The Fellow that Goes Alone” and only ever published in Peter Green’s 1959 biography Kenneth Grahame (public library), it serenades “the country of the mind” we visit whenever we take long solitary walks in nature.

With an eye to “all those who of set purpose choose to walk alone, who know the special grace attaching to it,” Grahame writes:

Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow.

In a sentiment which, today, radiates a gentle admonition against the self-defeating impulse to evacuate the moment in order to capture it — in a status update, in an Instagram photo — Grahame observes:

Not a fiftieth part of all your happy imaginings will you ever, later, recapture, note down, reduce to dull inadequate words; but meantime the mind has stretched itself and had its holiday.

Art from What Color Is the Wind? by Anne Herbauts.

Nearly a century before Wendell Berry’s poetic insistence that in true solitude “one’s inner voices become audible” and modern psychology’s finding that a capacity for “fertile solitude” is the seat of the imagination, Grahame writes:

This emancipation is only attained in solitude, the solitude which the unseen companions demand before they will come out and talk to you; for, be he who may, if there is another fellow present, your mind has to trot between shafts.

A certain amount of “shafts,” indeed, is helpful, as setting the mind more free; and so the high road, while it should always give way to the field path when choice offers, still has this particular virtue, that it takes charge of you — your body, that is to say. Its hedges hold you in friendly steering-reins, its milestones and finger-posts are always on hand, with information succinct and free from frills; and it always gets somewhere, sooner or later. So you are nursed along your way, and the mind may soar in cloudland and never need to be pulled earthwards by any string. But this is as much company as you ought to require, the comradeship of the road you walk on, the road which will look after you and attend to such facts as must not be overlooked. Of course the best sort of walk is the one on which it doesn’t matter twopence whether you get anywhere at all at any time or not; and the second best is the one on which the hard facts of routes, times, or trains give you nothing to worry about.

In consonance with artist Agnes Martin’s quiet conviction that “the best things in life happen to you when you’re alone,” Grahame writes:

As for adventures, if they are the game you hunt, everyone’s experience will remind him that the best adventures of his life were pursued and achieved, or came suddenly to him unsought, when he was alone. For company too often means compromise, discretion, the choice of the sweetly reasonable. It is difficult to be mad in company; yet but a touch of lunacy in action will open magic doors to rare and unforgettable experiences.

But all these are only the by-products, the casual gains, of walking alone. The high converse, the high adventures, will be in the country of the mind.

Complement with poet May Sarton’s sublime ode to solitude, Robert Walser on the art of walking, and Thoreau on the singular glory of winter walks, then revisit Rebecca Solnit’s indispensable cultural history of that art.

This article was originally published on January 10, 2018, by Brain Pickings, and is republished here with permission.

The first few minutes of this 14-minute video cover some basics, the rest will blow your mind. 

By the way, since this video was made, Google has announced that one of its quantum computers has solved a problem in 200 seconds that it estimates the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10,000 years to solve. 

Some physicists think they can explain why the universe first formed. If they are right, our entire cosmos may have sprung out of nothing at all

• By Robert Adler

6 November 2014

People have wrestled with the mystery of why the universe exists for thousands of years. Pretty much every ancient culture came up with its own creation story – most of them leaving the matter in the hands of the gods – and philosophers have written reams on the subject. But science has had little to say about this ultimate question.

However, in recent years a few physicists and cosmologists have started to tackle it. They point out that we now have an understanding of the history of the universe, and of the physical laws that describe how it works. That information, they say, should give us a clue about how and why the cosmos exists.

Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because “nothing” is inherently unstable.

This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science’s two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Here, then, is how everything could have come from nothing.

(Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), CLASH Team, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

Particles from empty space

First we have to take a look at the realm of quantum mechanics. This is the branch of physics that deals with very small things: atoms and even tinier particles. It is an immensely successful theory, and it underpins most modern electronic gadgets.

Quantum mechanics tells us that there is no such thing as empty space. Even the most perfect vacuum is actually filled by a roiling cloud of particles and antiparticles, which flare into existence and almost instantaneously fade back into nothingness.

These so-called virtual particles don’t last long enough to be observed directly, but we know they exist by their effects.

The Stephan’s Quintet group of galaxies (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team)

Space-time, from no space and no time

From tiny things like atoms, to really big things like galaxies. Our best theory for describing such large-scale structures is general relativity, Albert Einstein’s crowning achievement, which sets out how space, time and gravity work.

Relativity is very different from quantum mechanics, and so far nobody has been able to combine the two seamlessly. However, some theorists have been able to bring the two theories to bear on particular problems by using carefully chosen approximations. For instance, this approach was used by Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge to describe black holes.

In quantum physics, if something is not forbidden, it necessarily happens

One thing they have found is that, when quantum theory is applied to space at the smallest possible scale, space itself becomes unstable. Rather than remaining perfectly smooth and continuous, space and time destabilize, churning and frothing into a foam of space-time bubbles.

In other words, little bubbles of space and time can form spontaneously. “If space and time are quantized, they can fluctuate,” says Lawrence Krauss at Arizona State University in Tempe. “So you can create virtual space-times just as you can create virtual particles.”

What’s more, if it’s possible for these bubbles to form, you can guarantee that they will. “In quantum physics, if something is not forbidden, it necessarily happens with some non-zero probability,” says Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Maybe it all began with bubbles (Credit: amira_a, CC by 2.0)

A universe from a bubble

So it’s not just particles and antiparticles that can snap in and out of nothingness: bubbles of space-time can do the same. Still, it seems like a big leap from an infinitesimal space-time bubble to a massive universe that hosts 100 billion galaxies. Surely, even if a bubble formed, it would be doomed to disappear again in the blink of an eye?

If all the galaxies are flying apart, they must once have been close together

Actually, it is possible for the bubble to survive. But for that we need another trick: cosmic inflation.

Most physicists now think that the universe began with the Big Bang. At first all the matter and energy in the universe was crammed together in one unimaginably small dot, and this exploded. This follows from the discovery, in the early 20th century, that the universe is expanding. If all the galaxies are flying apart, they must once have been close together.

Inflation theory proposes that in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe expanded much faster than it did later. This seemingly outlandish notion was put forward in the 1980s by Alan Guth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and refined by Andrei Linde, now at Stanford University.

As weird as it seems, inflation fits the facts

The idea is that, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the quantum-sized bubble of space expanded stupendously fast. In an incredibly brief moment, it went from being smaller than the nucleus of an atom to the size of a grain of sand. When the expansion finally slowed, the force field that had powered it was transformed into the matter and energy that fill the universe today. Guth calls inflation “the ultimate free lunch”.

As weird as it seems, inflation fits the facts rather well. In particular, it neatly explains why the cosmic microwave background, the faint remnant of radiation left over from the Big Bang, is almost perfectly uniform across the sky. If the universe had not expanded so rapidly, we would expect the radiation to be patchier than it is.

The cosmic microwave background (Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team)

The universe is flat and why that’s important

Inflation also gave cosmologists the measuring tool they needed to determine the underlying geometry of the universe. It turns out this is also crucial for understanding how the cosmos came from nothing.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells us that the space-time we live in could take three different forms. It could be as flat as a table top. It could curve back on itself like the surface of a sphere, in which case if you travel far enough in the same direction you would end up back where you started. Alternatively, space-time could curve outward like a saddle. So which is it?

There is a way to tell. You might remember from maths class that the three angles of a triangle add up to exactly 180 degrees. Actually your teachers left out a crucial point: this is only true on a flat surface. If you draw a triangle on the surface of a balloon, its three angles will add up to more than 180 degrees. Alternatively, if you draw a triangle on a surface that curves outward like a saddle, its angles will add up to less than 180 degrees.

So to find out if the universe is flat, we need to measure the angles of a really big triangle. That’s where inflation comes in. It determined the average size of the warmer and cooler patches in the cosmic microwave background. Those patches were measured in 2003, and that gave astronomers a selection of triangles. As a result, we know that on the largest observable scale our universe is flat.

It may not look flat… (Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))

It turns out that a flat universe is crucial. That’s because only a flat universe is likely to have come from nothing.

Everything that exists, from stars and galaxies to the light we see them by, must have sprung from somewhere. We already know that particles spring into existence at the quantum level, so we might expect the universe to contain a few odds and ends. But it takes a huge amount of energy to make all those stars and planets.

The energy of matter is exactly balanced by the energy of the gravity the mass creates

Where did the universe get all this energy? Bizarrely, it may not have had to get any. That’s because every object in the universe creates gravity, pulling other objects toward it. This balances the energy needed to create the matter in the first place.

It’s a bit like an old-fashioned measuring scale. You can put a heavy weight on one side, so long as it is balanced by an equal weight on the other. In the case of the universe, the matter goes on one side of the scale, and has to be balanced by gravity.

Physicists have calculated that in a flat universe the energy of matter is exactly balanced by the energy of the gravity the mass creates. But this is only true in a flat universe. If the universe had been curved, the two sums would not cancel out.

Matter on one side, gravity on the other (Credit: Da Sal, CC by 2.0)

Universe or multiverse?

At this point, making a universe looks almost easy. Quantum mechanics tells us that “nothing” is inherently unstable, so the initial leap from nothing to something may have been inevitable. Then the resulting tiny bubble of space-time could have burgeoned into a massive, busy universe, thanks to inflation. As Krauss puts it, “The laws of physics as we understand them make it eminently plausible that our universe arose from nothing – no space, no time, no particles, nothing that we now know of.”

So why did it only happen once? If one space-time bubble popped into existence and inflated to form our universe, what kept other bubbles from doing the same?

There could be a mind-boggling smorgasbord of universes

Linde offers a simple but mind-bending answer. He thinks universes have always been springing into existence, and that this process will continue forever.

When a new universe stops inflating, says Linde, it is still surrounded by space that is continuing to inflate. That inflating space can spawn more universes, with yet more inflating space around them. So once inflation starts it should make an endless cascade of universes, which Linde calls eternal inflation. Our universe may be just one grain of sand on an endless beach.

Those universes might be profoundly different to ours. The universe next door might have five dimensions of space rather than the three – length, breadth and height – that ours does. Gravity might be ten times stronger or a thousand times weaker, or not exist at all. Matter might be built out of utterly different particles.

So there could be a mind-boggling smorgasbord of universes. Linde says eternal inflation is not just the ultimate free lunch: it is the only one at which all possible dishes are available.

As yet we don’t have hard evidence that other universes exist. But either way, these ideas give a whole new meaning to the phrase “Thanks for nothing”.

“All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate—and I wish I could find one.” 

–Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone quoting a woman patient of Theodore Reik in her book The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Beloved Bentinho

Posted by: Margaret RouseWhatIs.comContributor(s): Ivy Wigmore

The fourth industrial revolution is the current  and developing environment in which disruptive technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way we live and work.

The third industrial revolution, sometimes called the digital revolution, involved the development of computers and IT (information technology) since the middle of the 20th century. The fourth industrial revolution is growing out of the third but is considered a new era rather than a continuation because of the explosiveness of its development and the disruptiveness of its technologies. According to Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum and author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the new age is differentiated by the speed of technological breakthroughs, the pervasiveness of scope and the tremendous impact of new systems.

The first industrial revolution, in the 18th and 19th centuries, involved a change from mostly agrarian societies to greater industrialization as a consequence of the steam engine and other technological developments. The next technological age, the second industrial revolution, was driven by electricity and involved expansion of industries and mass production as well as technological advances.

The World Economic Forum provides a brief presentation about the fourth industrial revolution:

• Margaret Rouse asks:Has your organization been impacted by digital disruption?Join the Discussion

SEX ON TUESDAY TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2019

Sex on Tuesday

BY AIDAN BASSETT | STAFFLAST UPDATED OCTOBER 22, 2019 (dailycal.org)

Most bisexuals and pansexuals I know often get asked which gender they prefer. Apart from the underlying innocent (if occasionally off-putting) curiosity, I assume people ask for the vicarious entertainment: Almost invariably, it is straight people who ask me, and almost as invariably, they’re bashful but rapt as they do.

Perhaps surprisingly, I agree it’s a good question.

The notion of preferring one gender strikes me as a very heterosexual way of thinking, but preferences aren’t so crazy, even if you really like all your options. And I often used to wonder: Do I have a preference? And if so, why?

After I came out, I felt a lot of unfortunate pressure (mostly just ginned up in my own head) to actualize my burgeoning bisexual identity, and it felt like eons before I had any sexual experiences with boys. In high school, I felt I had to make an active nonchoice: I needed to invest my time equally in relationships with boys and girls — or else risk feeling somehow “fake,” as if my bisexuality required proof. But every time I kissed a boy, I compared it to kissing girls; every time I flirted with a girl, I noticed the differences in flirting with boys. So if I don’t have a preference, it’s not for lack of thought.

But choosing presumes your options are predictable, and in my view, stereotypes only get you so far. Yes, boys I’ve liked tended to be more confident, assertive and forward, ready to chase what they wanted from the start. Yes, girls I’ve liked tended to be more patient and took longer to decide in the first place — at times to my chagrin. Mostly, though, intimacy with boys and girls ranges so much that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The boys I’ve kissed, for instance, tend to be worse kissers, but not necessarily because they’re too assertive or forceful. (One time, a gay guy did criticize my kissing by saying I “kissed like a girl,” but how he would know, I’m not sure.) More interestingly, the girls I’ve kissed have typically been subtler yet more passionate, while the guys have often been less inspired, less supple and less intense. (Sorry, boys.) And one girl I dated felt my lips were “too soft” — a complaint I still don’t understand.

These intricacies and unpredictabilities of people and their emotions are generally what make love and sex exhilarating for me. One of the great joys of being bisexual is that these nuances are multiplied by the variation within each gender. Although I deplore the stereotype that bisexuals are promiscuous or sexually distractible, the universal human desire for novelty probably inflects my bisexuality; even if I love not needing to choose among genders, my mood still varies. 

In the months or seasons when I want the energy or clarity of a cut-to-the-chase sexual partner, I find myself pining for the authoritativeness of the guys I’ve liked. Every boy I’ve been involved with has been older than I was — something of a necessity, given how long boys take to mature — and all of them have kept me on my toes. And in my experience, if boys are one thing, it’s unpredictable.

In more emotionally introspective times, by contrast, I crave the intimacy, self-knowledge and immersive affection of the girls I’ve dated. In my life, girls have typically varied more widely, but whether they show it visibly or not, girls are typically savvier, more emotionally intricate and more dynamic. Girls have the sexual range of boys and then some, but it all depends on the circumstances.

If I had to choose a favorite aspect of being bi, it would be the joy and variety of these fluctuations — of these celebrations of my nonchoice. After breaking up with my first serious girlfriend, for instance, I had my heart set on a boy entirely her opposite: assertive, flamboyant, shrewd. But he defied my expectations for boys. Despite being the first boy I ever kissed, he made me wait for quite some time and wanted me to be very sure of my feelings before starting a relationship.

Perhaps unfortunately (for him?), the tumult of our drawn-out courtship coincided with a renewed desire for ease and simplicity in my life, and I opted for another girl I’d been smitten with for years, a girl whom I’d thought was cerebral and predictable but who instead gave me one of the most adventurous years of my life.

Pretending I could reliably prefer one gender ultimately ignores the fact that gender or sex have limited bearing on who someone is, and any statement of preference would revolve mostly around genitals, which (obviously) vary immensely in quality. I’ve fallen in love with very different people, and no matter what traits I presumed based on their gender, they surprised me.

If I said I preferred boys to girls or vice versa, it would be like saying I preferred Braeburn apples to mandarin oranges even though I preferred tangerines to Gala apples or (God forbid) Red Delicious, which are, in fact, abominable. In short, it would be somewhere between a lie and an oversimplification.

So facing the choice to choose or not to choose, I’d choose not to choose because choosing is meaningless, impossible and, above all, blessedly beside the point.

Aidan Bassett writes the Tuesday column on sex. Contact him at sex@dailycal.org.

The following screen snap provides a lot of info:
– the url
– a static image of what you find when you go there, which can be dynamic
– it can be set. As the date in the lower right shows, I’ve set it for my birthday. I have not yet compared this to my chart—it will be an interesting shift in perspective.
– a control panel. At the top, below the URL, there is a drop down next to “Any time.” Clicking this causes the control panel to be displayed.

–Michael Kelly, H.W.

Or go to link here: https://www.bing.com/widget/t/solarsystem?q=solar+system&height=520&pos=3&tag=afcd98f5cab196c16c439af537a0aeabbf5e064b&fbclid=IwAR1YzVaWUTs-8W0Yn8Qgj_RYOvRGi38Vl2zPrh01KM6b5TcL1H7UhKOsvF0