Summer Days - Lexington 1961

On a lazy summer morning recently, I was lying in bed looking out of the second-floor window. Because there are windows at three sides and dozens of trees nearby, I always feel like I am in a treehouse. With the early morning light and some breeze, the leaves were waving and reflecting multiple colors of green. This experience, like other days I am lazing around, makes me float back to my childhood.

I moved from Cleveland to Lexington, Kentucky when I was 11 years old, during fifth grade. That summer, like any summer of my childhood actually, I spent it exploring every nook and cranny of the neighborhood, like an anthropologist collecting evidence of time before. We lived in a new neighborhood, with new houses, but it was bordered on two sides by Lex's old farms that still had barns and horses and plenty to figure out. I would climb over the fence and fearlessly walk up to horses that were much larger, ones that were grazing on the bluegreen grass in the field.

I really wanted a horse, but we were not going to get one, so I pretended these were mine. I had a brush and I spent time brushing their manes and petting their faces. Even though I was 11, evidently I could make something up and believe it, because I eventually had a horse of my own - called Golden Fire - and she had a golden mane and tail and was sleek and proud. I loved this horse until we moved to a new house two years later and I had to leave her behind.

During this summer with the horses, I also found an old treehouse in one of the fields. You had to angle up an old, scraggly oak to get to the platform, but it had walls and a big door and windows, and I claimed it. It must of been someone's in yesteryear, but now I was enjoying it like an adventurer who had conquered and stayed.

The lazy days of summer are only an instant away if you free yourself to enjoy them.

Good Light

Sun's intensity facinates

I was blogging about a science story today that discusses the sun's power. After looking at images of the sun, I found it amazingly beautiful. It has inspired a painting. In the meantime, here are some beautiful photographs that google has provided for us.

Time Warping and Staying on Course

I still re-read this Scientific American article on time: here is an excerpt and a link to the article.

Speed is one way to jump ahead in time. Gravity is another. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein predicted that gravity slows time. Clocks run a bit faster in the attic than in the basement, which is closer to the center of Earth and therefore deeper down in a gravitational field. Similarly, clocks run faster in space than on the ground. Once again the effect is minuscule, but it has been directly measured using accurate clocks. Indeed, these time-warping effects have to be taken into account in the Global Positioning System. If they weren't, sailors, taxi drivers and cruise missiles could find themselves many kilometers off course.

What about going backward? This is much more problematic. In 1948 a scientist produced a solution of Einstein's gravitational field equations that described a rotating universe. In this universe, an astronaut could travel through space so as to reach his own past. This comes about because of the way gravity affects light. The rotation of the universe would drag light (and thus the causal relations between objects) around with it, enabling a material object to travel in a closed loop in space that is also a closed loop in time, without at any stage exceeding the speed of light in the immediate neighborhood of the particle. The solution was shrugged aside as a mathematical curiosity--after all, observations show no sign that the universe as a whole is spinning. His result served nonetheless to demonstrate that going back in time was not forbidden by the theory of relativity. Indeed, Einstein confessed that he was troubled by the thought that his theory might permit travel into the past under some circumstances.

John :) - 2007