Enigma in a riddle…..

My nephew and I have an ongoing debate where I insist that time as perceived by humans is an artificial construct (which it is!), and he insists it’s not. Anyway, I was watching Agents of Shield (season 3, episode 15) and it had the simplest explanation of how you cannot go back in time to change the future that I have ever seen. Check it out.

It made me think about the space-time continuum which I find equally fascinating and headache-inducing. However, I had a thought….. Although I have the tendency to mock M-theory and its 11 dimensions (mainly to provoke the physicists I know), looking at the manifold models theorized by physicists reminded me of how strings of amino acids get folded to become proteins. This  folding being on the sub-atomic level in the cosmos, we may not have the equipment to confirm the structures yet. But, would that account for the extra mass that is attributed to dark matter? The particles we should be searching for may not be as small as we believe so we are looking in the wrong plane, so to speak….

It also reminds me of nervous transmission – the way nerve impulses travel along axons and then from dendrite to dendrite (or directly if axons are not present), and how the message is transmitted via synapses, all without physical contact between the parts. Maybe that’s how quantum mechanics works, and how quantum entanglement (or spooky action at a distance) is possible. The particles aren’t crossing big distances in a linear fashion, they’re jumping from fold to fold. Ultimately, it suggests that space may indeed be foldable and we can travel at warp speeds i.e faster than light. Nirvana for all Trekkies and nerds everywhere. What does this have to do with skincare products? Nothing whatsoever, but it’s my blog so I’m going to indulge myself  and give any scientists reading this a good laugh at any rate 🙂 Besides, it’s 1a.m and I’ll keep thinking about this wretched stuff if I don’t write it down.

Today’s pictures are of pretty cool stuff that I like:

• An egg drilled with tiny holes
• The natural state of the element Bismuth. The iridescence automatically forms as the element is oxidised on exposure to atmospheric oxygen. That cubic/angular shape of the crystals is also naturally-occuring
• The Tiger Stone brick-laying machine. I want one, right now!
• Mechanism for a Patek Phillipe watch
• Coins hanging off the edge of a table with no support. Try it, it works

Hope you have a day full of wonder and magic.