My car has pretty good speakers in it for bass. I listened to this song in it, and it sent shivers down my spine when the beat dropped the first time:

Also, that dude's facepaint is kinda awesome.

I fell asleep last night thinking about relativity. The concept frustrates me, because I find the thought of a disorderly universe offensive, and yet online people are always explaining it in ways that make it more confusing -- "it's simultaneously true that the light is on and off", and, "time slows down when you speed up".

Now, disclaimer, I might be about to make a fool of myself by talking about my rationalizations for things I don't understand....... I think that the way that humans rationalize their environments is fascinating on its own.

As I lay in bed, certain things I've heard suddenly seemed to make sense to me, considering that causality moves at about the constant speed (conventionally?) associated with the speed of light, that time would seem to slow for a person who approaches the speed of causality. It's just like how sound has to keep up with you when you move, and then fails when you reach the speed of sound, causality has to keep up with you and fails when you reach the speed of light. So the causal relationships between all of our constituent particles in space is what "propels us forward in time" (so to speak), and they simply become unable to affect one another if we are moving faster than their relationships permit. So then, time doesn't exist on its own, but is rather simply the experience of change.

It's not that the light is simultaneously on and off, then, but rather it is that one party subjectively experienced a longer time (less change) before they observed the light changing state.... right? What am I not getting here? It frustrates me the way that pop media gives partial explanations in order to make science more interesting, by making it more mysterious, and making it impossible for their readers to accurately represent what they've presented. I've seen it over and over in my own field of study; I wonder if relativity is only inaccessible because it hasn't been explained to me well.

Also, I don't understand why we're saying light (of all things) has to move at the speed of causality, unless the speed of causality also changes with temperature, field, and medium, in which case, I am of the opinion that we should be more clear when we teach our young students about time and motion. Rather than explaining things in terms that are technically wrong, but easy to grasp, we should rather explain things in terms that are technically right, but take special effort to deliver them in small and easy-to-grasp bites.

If we're really convinced of this, then we should be straight-forward with people and tell them that time doesn't exist but is rather conventional, and physicists should teach us to treat the time associated with each object as a series of independent causalities rather than some axis upon which the whole universe is progressing at uniform pace. If causality is a spatially limited phenomena, rippling across some experiential medium, then I wish we would explain it better so that people would stop making science fiction about time travel, and rather sink their imaginations into producing fiction which is more bound-up in the actual limitations on time and space.

But then again, I suppose I don't really know what I'm talking about.

"It's vinegar."