Cause and Distance

"Send this habitat module to Sirius Prime, now!"

' OK ...'

Right-click habitat module, Properties, Location tab, highlight "Earth", enter new text "Sirius Prime", press Enter.  Drone work, really, but Fred just counts himself lucky at being able to find a summer job.

Sharp distance runaround

I find it interesting that despite the strange and counter-intuitive models we've developed for sub-atomic matter, we still cling to the Newtonian idea that cause is carried by force, and force involves objects banging into each other.

So we've had "The Aether" before we could get our heads around empty space, the idea that waves must travel in a medium (neatly solved by counter-generating electro and magnetic fields), and the "problem" of action at a distance that is modelled on throwing particles around.

We understand space and time as interrelated through the speed of light, so that "distance" can be envisaged in either terms. 

Trapped in the mesh

Trying to resist the idea of desire-guided evolution, consider the need for senses (or sensors, if you like).  We sense what we need to attain, avoid or overcome, not what we can happily ignore as irrelevant.  Does hard drive S.M.A.R.T. monitor the tides of the ocean?  Nope.  Does the body monitor radiation levels?  Nope, as this had not been relevant during the timescale when shaped by selection pressure.

We are of the universe and are unable to transcend "distance" (be it conceptualised as time or space) at will, though we have a limited ability to physically move towards or away from things.  So we perceive distance as a dominant property of our environment, shaping concepts such as "cause and effect" and "the arrow of time". 

But this perspective may be a platform-specific perception issue, rather than a universal truth.  Perhaps if we visualize things differently - e.g. consider the distribution of mass as a constant, and "distance" as a particular parameter, then some things may snap in to focus, such as gravity as a "curvature of space". 

Often a graph that has a shape that is hard to grapple with, becomes a tame line drawing when the scaling of an axis is changed; certain problems, such as shapes that tend towards but never reach zero, may resolve themselves.  So it may be with "distance".

After writing this, I found the articles I've linked to, along with this one.  It would probably be more enlightening to fan out from here than to read the post you have just finished reading  :-)