What If?

We all have “what if” questions.  We wonder about how things would be “if”.  What if one day we turn on the switch and no light comes on, the dishwasher, the garage door, and oh no! The TV does not work. We take these things for granted because they’ve always worked.  But we know better because indeed things could go wrong.  Also, sometimes we do wonder about some outlandish hypothetical “what ifs”.  What if the sun does not rise tomorrow?  What if the tide does not come in, or for that matter, not ebb?  I read this e-book while on vacation last week that addressed some insanely ridiculous “what ifs”. What hooked me to it was that the author actually put in the time to look at scientific scenarios for what would happen “if”.

From the book, “What If? : Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions” written by Randall Munroe, Emily Dunham asked this question, “When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?”  The author went on to pose a lot of assumptions, based on a lot of things: Facebook’s growth rate, age breakdown and compositions of users, etc.  With so many variables, the surprising answer was a date range of between 2060 and 2130.  Again, one must assume Facebook will still be around then. It is possible something new and more exciting mass media phenomenon will replace it, people will get tired of it, or some kind of earth-shaking cultural shift takes place, or for some unforeseen sociological forces – who knows?  I don’t have a Facebook account so I have no opinion on its future.

These “what if” questions do seem to be more intriguing than the standard run-of-the-mill ordinary questions and they do make us wonder.  For example, Mr. Munroe estimated that since its inception as many as 10 to 20 million who created profiles on Facebook had since died; however, more young people than older ones are in that category. That is counterintuitive but one must consider that there are more young people who use Facebook by a huge number over people older than 50.

There are a lot more but less morbid hypothetical questions in the book. Some are even funny. Mimi asked this, “If you call a random number and say “God Bless You”, what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?”  As difficult as that to determine, even unknowable perhaps, the answer is an estimate: probably one in 40,000. Other questions are more catastrophic:  (a) What if all the rain in a thunderstorm fell as one raindrop? (b) What if all lightning strikes around the world (and there are a lot) were concentrated in just one spark over one spot, what would happen? (c) What would happen to the batter if a fast ball was pitched towards him at the speed of light?

Here is one for the physics nerds. Asteroids and man-made space junk burn up on entry and re-entry towards earth, respectively, from atmospheric friction.  Alex Haley asked: “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” First, we must ask whether one wants his steak rare or well done; is it 8 ounces or 12 ounces, defrosted or not before the drop.  From my personal experience, a typical ¾ inch thick steak needs to be cooked 4-5 minutes per side (8-9 minutes total cooking time).  Apparently, even if dropped from 100 kilometers above the earth, there is not that much time before the steak hits the ground because falling bodies like a piece of space debris, even the size of a grain of sand, do travel rapidly and fall fast downwards.  Anyway, if NASA has some extra money, which it does not, it will have to settle this one or maybe Richard Branson or Elon Musk may fund the experiment. Meanwhile, try wrapping steak in an aluminum foil, secure it just above the exhaust manifold of your car, drive for thirty minutes and see what happens to the meat afterwards.

American high school students prospecting to go to college must face taking the SSAT (Secondary School Admission Test). Rob Balder asked this: “What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on ever multiple-choice questions? How many perfect scores would there be?” Actually, one had come up with a scientific process that involved statistical probabilities and intelligent assumptions and the short answer is: NONE.  The question reminds me of another one.  It is the classic query about getting a chimpanzee to type away random keys on a typewriter.  How long would it take, if at all, for it to somehow type a readable novel?

Anyway, the message to high school students is: There is no other way but to study for the SSAT because, quoting from the book, even “If all 4 million 17-year-olds took the test and they all guessed randomly… each used a computer to take the test a million times each day, continued this every day for five billion years … the chance of any of them ever getting a perfect score on just the math section would be about 0.0001 per cent”. From that, a high school student will have a fair idea about his or her chances of passing the SSAT by just guessing – ZERO. On the other hand, a diligently prepared student can do it in one take. So students, like everything in life, there really are no short cuts.  Guessing, in fact, will take forever.

After reading the book, I thought I’d come up with a couple of absurd hypothetical questions of my own. There was not much to do on this rainy weekend so, why not, especially coming back from a 10-day vacation?

1)      What if suddenly one morning we (all of 7 billion people around the world) woke up and each household or every single unmarried able-bodied adult has a net worth of over a million dollars?  Don’t ask how? What would the world be like?  I think it will be worse than yesterday. Imagine Elon Musk – I’m picking on him – took out his top of the line 2017 Tesla Model S to drive to a nearby Starbucks for his favorite latte. He won’t get one because the barista who served him yesterday (and all baristas, in fact) is no longer working there. Would you, if you had a million dollars in the bank? Elon Musk will soon find out there is no one to collect his garbage, deliver his mail, and there is no one working at the Tesla plant or the Space X headquarters. He will not be alone in that predicament.  Try imagining every scenario anywhere and you’ll know it is not going to be pretty. The Maasai cattle herder in Tanzania, previously subsisting on a daily food intake of 1400 calories or less daily, who can now afford to increase his herd of cattle, will find out that there are no cattle available for sale because every Maasai around the region will want to do the same. There is much celebration across the country and alas, every cattle was butchered for the big party.

Around the world home prices will skyrocket when every homeowner, including those living in cardboard boxes from everywhere poverty was the norm yesterday, will want a nice home today.  Mathematicians, sociologists and political scientists will not want to answer this “what if” scenario.  Economists – let us not forget them - will for the first time agree on something: the world economy will collapse into a sudden implosion. There will be no one to sell anything to anyone; besides who will be working anywhere to produce the goods or provide the services of any kind. Who will keep the peace on the streets, and so on and on? You get the picture. Suffice it to say, it is going to be a maddeningly chaotic world!

2)      What if one day your doctor tells you after a very rigorous checking and re-checking that your cells will go on forever young – a kind of incredible mutation has your body replenishing every dead cell? You will live forever; you are an immortal. Wow, you say, but what’s the problem?  You did jump up and down and even did a head stand while still at the doctor’s office. The jubilation stopped when you reached home.  You are gripped by uncontrollable fear and quivering with incessant anxiety in the following days.  But why?  Now that I had time to think about it, it is not what immortality is made out to be. 

Living forever has its drawbacks that, believe it or not, may far outweigh most of anything we ever fantasized about living forever.  You’d be worried sick about retiring. How would you like to be wondering if you had enough in your 401k to last forever?  If you will be receiving a pension, will the company or government entity from which you draw your pension survive even for just a couple of hundred years?  You can say, since you will not grow old, you can work forever.  Would you?

On the other hand, you can try every hobby there is.  25-50 years to master golf, chess, bridge or canasta. In a century, you’ll get tired of woodworking or aqua culture, you can fish and hunt and witness the evolutionary processes change the behavior of the fishes and animals you’ll be going after.  “Climb Every Mountain” is not just a song from the Sound of Music – you will actually do it. Come to think of it, Mt. Everest goes up in height about 4 millimeters a year from tectonic action - you can climb it every time it rises another meter.  Traveling the world through space and time may get you the chance, like no person ever will, to find the proverbial soul mate. It comes with a price, of course.  Your soul mate’s limited life span will have a devastating effect in the end.

Now, we know why anybody will get sick at the prospect of living forever. The first "what if" above goes to show why income and wealth equality is impossible to achieve, it may not even be actually good, Mark Zuckerberg's suggestion of guaranteed income for everyone notwithstanding. Think hard about it. What will it do to society and what will it do towards aspirations, ambitions, working harder, etc?  Mr. Zuckergberg's net worth is $50 billion. He seems to suggest that, perhaps with a tinge of guilt, that rich people should redistribute some of their wealth to help even out incomes, or is he just talking about another government role to achieve such a Utopian dream.

Well, what “what if” scenarios can you come up with. Try it.  It could be fun. And exercise the mind to go along with it. 

(Note: The book I mentioned is free for download online).

Timing Is Everything

“Timing Is Everything”, is almost always associated with good tidings, with all the trappings of serendipity, but seldom to describe a bad outcome.

But then:

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

― Willie Nelson

There, Old Willie may have stumbled upon a typical country-and-western philosophy and an intriguing theme for a debate. Timing did work for the bird but what about the worm that wriggled itself up early to the surface, or near enough to be detected and plucked? It too must have had a good reason to be up early. On the other hand, the eager first mouse to grab the cheese paid the ultimate price so the second one can benefit; although I read that in actuality no mice will ever come near a mouse trap with a fellow dead mouse in it, as enticing as the cheese may be (likewise, a rat trap must be cleaned so thoroughly of the warning scent left by the previous occupant before it will catch another rat; and re-using a mouse trap may not work at all as the tale tell scent from the prior victim remains).  So, timing may not have worked so well from the perspective of the early worm but it is always everything to the beneficiary of the bounty, which is often the story we hear, the mouse version per Old Willie, notwithstanding.

On the other hand, there is this to think about:

“Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.”

― Scott Adams

Of course, there is such a thing as being ahead of the times and so the rapper in the Year 1317 was not going to make a good living but, just to be clear, there were minstrels in that era who did well. “Being at the right place at the right time” made sense then as it does now; and so the corollary to it, “Being at the wrong place at the wrong time”, and other permutations associated with the two phrases.

So, we’ll accept “good timing” and “bad timing” as two sides of the circumstantial coin. Hopefully, they do not occur with the regularity of a 50-50 coin toss and more with an 80-20 split in favor of “good timing”. 

Speaking of coin:

“Time is a coin that you can spend only once. Use it, invest it and make it count”.

--- Anonymous

Speaking of count:

How do we account for something we cannot see, physically hold, taste, smell, etc.? Such is time but it is not even an entity we can point to, up close or from a distance, let alone restrain it in a container for later observation. This takes us to: What is Time really?  A handful of physicists (emphasis on ‘handful’) and perhaps twice as many philosophers say it is just an illusion.

 

Let’s detour that way without pre-judging it as a silly or crazy idea.  Bear with me because, if anything, it exercises the mind to think or ponder these things from time to time. The Babylonians started it with their sexagesimal numbering system, counting in 60s versus our decimal system of 10s. Counting in 10s, 20s, 30s look straightforwardly simple today but there was a method to the Babylonians’ madness when they came up with 60 seconds to a minute and 60 minutes to an hour. 60 is a good number between 1 and 100 that can be factored nicely, i.e., 60 can be expressed as: 60X1; 30X2; 20X3; 15X4; 12X5; 10X6.  In other words, it has the most number of factors, namely: 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30,60. Likewise, 12 and 24 have the most number of factors than numbers lower than them.  For example, 12X1, 6X2, 4X3 has more than 10X1, 5X2. (Try that with 24).  Time, the 4th dimension as we are often told, was subdivided for the convenience of the early, ancient timekeepers. However, today’s digital watches and clocks negate the advantage of the sexagesimal method.  The decimal point has allowed us the ability to dissect anything into almost infinitesimal fragments, including what was conceived as the basic unit of time – the second.

If recorded history is 5,000 years old, thanks to the Sumerians and their Cuneiform writings, the first humanoids were supposed to have first appeared 1.7 million years ago, while our direct human ancestors began their evolutionary journey a mere fraction of that time when they first appeared 2,000 centuries ago. Throughout all that pre-clock era humans had no concept of a ticking time. In fact, modern time keeping began only when the first pendulum clock was invented in 1656. Before then, folks got by just fine. Early on, before clocks and calendars, they simply observed and made mental notes, passed on from generation to generation, culture to culture, the changing of the seasons, phases of the moon and the daily routine of waking up at sunrise and settling down after sunset.  What is more amazing though, if we think about it, is that early thinkers and observers figured out a calendar of a year composed of 365 days, more or less, even without first realizing that the earth revolved around the sun.  Galileo got in trouble with the Church when he posited the idea that the earth was not the center of it all.

The first adjustable mechanical alarm clock was patented in 1847. It is hard to imagine before then how people managed to wake up in the morning to go to work.  More profoundly, before the clock, how did folks organize their days, how were things scheduled and how did schedules get kept. If you toiled for a living, there were no hourly or daily rates for your work. There were no psychiatrists, obviously, as how could they have billed their patients or declared the end of a session. We can say that before the clock time as we know today did not exist. There was no tick tock to segregate the second-by-second march of time. A lot of activities we have and do today did not exist before the clock came about.
 

Today, we have accepted that time is this oppressively ever present part of life – it is there at every moment, like an invisible wall pressing forward whether we are paying attention or not, but it has only this one direction that is not known to go backwards or sideways.  Most of all, this invisible entity, if it is even an entity because we cannot actually physically feel it, rules our modern world. Massive amount of money is moved around the globe by traders obsessed with precision timing, from time zone to time zone as markets open and close, as fractions of a cent in well-timed executions can make or break a fund’s daily performance. Mega law firms live by their billable hours while boutique law offices charge hourly what their clients can afford. Cynical, perhaps, but the world can be obsessed over Usain Bolt’s 9.81-second 100-meter dash in Rio (2016), or be awed by Michael Phelps victory in the 100-meter butterfly 2008 Beijing Olympics over Milorad Cavic, who came in second by a mere fingertip (literally).  Their time was separated by 1/100 of a second. Had the touch pad technology not been invented, the race could conceivably have been ruled differently (or declared a tie) if the judges relied on manual stop watches.

Did we inadvertently invent time to rule over our activities? Let’s get back to the Olympics for a minute. Let’s have a thought experiment about extraterrestrials reviewing films of the 1938 and 2016 Olympics. We cannot assume they have some kind of time keeping system, let alone, similar to ours (it is possible they do not even track time at all) but they will have no problem recognizing that Jesse Owens won the 100 meter event in 1938 as did Usain Bolt in 2016.  They will be oblivious to our concept of time but they can discern the idea of the race and appreciate each respective result. When we come to think about it, time is not necessary for an event to occur.  It is mainly a recording entry after the fact that an event occurred.  

Our concept of time is naturally local – local to earth, that is.  Despite Isaac Newton’s fervent belief that time is absolute all throughout the universe, we now know it’s not.  Time does not “run” at the same rate on a satellite; actually, it is not even the same on a 747 or F-18 Falcon, albeit by mere billionths of a second, relative to the clock sitting on the ground. Time “runs” faster at the executive office 85 floors above compared to the basement, again in billionths of a second; thus, the top-floor-dwelling CEO is aging faster than the janitor. As weird and incredibly silly as that might seem, it is factually and scientifically true. Nanoseconds, big deal, we say, but it is significant enough that clocks on the satellite must be constantly synchronized hourly with earth based clocks, lest they get out of step quickly, making your car GPS navigation system worthless within a few hours if not corrected.  Put two identical clocks (one on Jupiter, the other earth-bound) and they will quickly be out of whack with each other, in relative terms. Jupiter’s clock will run slower relative to the earth clock, while earth’s clock is observed by Jovian residents to run faster. [Note: Jovian citizens exist only in my imagination].

I needed to make that detour into what many might consider the abstract, if not weird, nature of time. It does not clarify or define what time really is but rather to make us think a little bit more about this “thing” that permeates every facet of our lives but which, unlike anything that affects everything around us, including everything we do, we cannot actually physically touch it or hold on to it or re-direct it, or give it away.

We’re told too about how time is allotted equally to each and every person every morning he or she wakes up and any of it unused is gone forever, then we start all over again the next day – with the same amount disbursed for everyone.  It makes for a gem of an insight, a most astute even profound observation, as if time is an equal opportunity provider of fair chances for everyone.  It does sound inspirationally motivating, but is time really all that?  I actually subscribed to that in my earlier musings because it does seem to connote equal opportunity.  But then I began asking: (a) Where does time come from, if we were to treat it as being equally allotted to each and every one of us?; (b) Why can’t one have more?; (c) Why does time go incredibly fast when we’re having fun?; (d) How come molasses outruns the “flow of time” when we’re bored with nothing to do or waiting for someone who is late?

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen all at once”.

The above quote had been attributed to a lot of people, including Albert Einstein and other famous folks, but there has never been any documented proof.

“The oldest confirmed use of any version of this quote… is from Ray Cummings' short story ‘The Time Professor’, published in the Jan. 8, 1921 issue of Argosy All-Story Weekly.

"I do know what time is," Tubby declared. He paused. "Time," he added slowly -- "time is what keeps everything from happening at once”.

That quote is best said with a little shrug of the shoulder with both hands raised mid-torso, palms pointing upwards, which will then prompt any listener to roll his or her eyes.  Well, let’s ponder that for a moment.

Is it possible that what we perceive as the running of time resides only in our brain as it tries to make sense of the orderly step by step sequences that make up an event or events?  Everywhere we look, we can only observe events to occur at a particular order because a bowling ball must first be seen rolling away from the bowler’s hands before striking the pins and not in any other order or a pitcher must first throw a baseball before the hitter swings. Now, before you say to me, “Thank you, Captain obvious” or roll your eyes and invoke the “Well, duh!” moment, think for a minute about why the arrow of time goes only in one direction - forward.

“The Arrow of Time, or Time's Arrow, is a concept developed in 1927 by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington involving the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of time. It is an unsolved general physics question”.

Part of the problem is that in 1927 and long before that and since, many laws of physics had been established without necessarily specifying the arrow of time.  Many formulas actually work whether time has a positive or negative value. Let us not make any more detours and reserve that for another time.  There’s enough here to tickle the mind. Or compel it to park on idle.

Now, back to “timing is everything”:

The quickest way for water to boil over a pot or for anything you are frying to burn is to step away for “just a bit”.  On the other hand, the shortest elapsed time sequence before the accident was what’s between the moment you took your eyes off the road and the second you looked down to type an unimportant text while driving.

The years contained in all the total combined generations that had ever lived are a fraction of a blink of an eye in the context of how long the universe had been in existence. From that perspective, we ought to realize the overwhelming incentive to make the most of every moment.  Whether time is an illusion or an accessory of our consciousness, it does not take but a moment to say how much we appreciate somebody dear to us. Make it count each time because another moment will be different from the one we missed.