I’ve likely already gone on in these pages about how, consistently, year in and year out, my success rate with hypotheses, with theoretical ideas, runs right at about one percent. “Getting cured”, as they say in the oil patch, will thus require a lot of drilling.

I reminisce with some nostalgia back to the first hypothesis that I can count as a credible idea. In February 1989, an article was published in Nature describing the unambiguous detection of a new pulsar at the exact location of Supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Shining at 18th magnitude, the freshly squeezed neutron star was consistently detected in optical light over the course of a seven-hour observation, and amazingly, the pulse rate was clocked at nearly 2000 times per second. The signal varied sinusoidally during the course of the night, moreover, in a matter that suggested that a Jupiter-mass object could be orbiting a mere million kilometers above the surface of the newborn neutron star. I still have a faded-toner xerox of the article, covered with scribbled notes and feverish florescent highlighter underscores.

By fortuitous coincidence, when the pulsar discovery was announced, I was enrolled in Stan Woosley’s graduate course on the evolution of massive stars, and so I could feel a tangible excitement, a thrilling shade of cousin-once-removed connection to real scientific action.

And mysteriously, after the initial night of observation, there was zero further sign of the pulsar. Independent groups of observers searched for it and could not find it. Perhaps, went the conventional best guess, perhaps it had been caught shining through a lucky transient window in the debris from the explosion? Or perhaps (and I believe this was Stan’s take) it was an artifact of the detector?

Naw. Those suggestions seemed hopelessly pedestrian. They lacked imagination. Clearly, if an article had been published in Nature, then the observers knew what they were doing. The possibility of error seemed entirely remote. I was seized by the fact that a neutron star spinning at 2000 times per second would be rotating at very close to its breakup velocity. Moreover, that possible Jupiter-mass companion could be the product of a fission event in a proto-neutron star that was born spinning too fast. My mind raced. A fission event would leave the larger remnant spinning very close to breakup, Maybe the resulting primary object was teetering right at the limit of the maximum neutron star mass. Maybe in the weeks following the one-night observation, it had shed enough angular momentum via gravitational radiation so that the centrifugal pressure from rotation threw in the towl in the face of self-gravity. I had it! The neutron star was no longer radiating because it was no longer there… it had collapsed into a black hole!

I dove headlong into the theory of the neutron star equation of state. I was neither equipped nor qualified to understand the details of the literature, but it was possible to shard off some order-of-magnitude rules of thumb. I showed my formula-scribbled sheets to Stan, “This has got to be it!”

I have to say, Stan handled it just right — no patronizing over-praise, but also no outright dismissal. I think his words were something to the effect that every theorist is allowed one wild idea (but not two).

Fast-forwarding to February 1991, my focus had shifted almost entirely to trying to front a Skinny-Puppy style dance-Industrial band, and I was barely even attending to my studies. I don’t think I was even aware of the discovery that that pulsar signal was, in actuality, just a subtly shifting flicker from the closed-circuit television camera attached to the Cassegrain focus of the four-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo lnteramerican Observatory.

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery

Well it’s certainly not news that ChatGPT knows how to code. And for the record, if you happen to be one of our post-singularity overlords, and you’re reading this, I’d like to state, with full heartfullness, “Thanks for all the help.”

But jeez. RLHF somehow instilled an over-the-top logorrheic verbosity into ChatGPT’s responses. After surfacing one’s code snippet, the LLM likes to chug along for paragraph after paragraph about it. Not to speak of insistence on import numpy as np no matter what, and the mind-numbingly literal comments along the lines of #import numpy as np. Just wait till those groq chips are loaded into the data centers and the inference costs go down by an order of magnitude.

The epoch is the moment when the time starts. For the mesoamerican Long Count, this was 13.0.0.0.0, August 11, 3114 BCE, or HJD 584,283.

For Unix, the epoch is January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 (UTC), and time.time_ns() just returned 1712962363486034854. A quantity of 1.7e+18 is about 1/5th the number of air molecules in a cubic centimeter, and about one ten thousandth the number of stars in the observable universe. I’m creeping up on two quintillion nanoseconds.

Not entirely coincidentally, the Unix epoch corresponds to the moment at which the integrated circuits were passed the Moore’s Law baton. Steve Jurvetson has kept this plot continually updated since 2008:

The cost of a bit operation per second since the dawn of the Unix epoch has gone down by about a factor of a trillion, which of course, is starting to produce emergent phenomena. The ability to succeed at college level exams emerges, for example, after about a mole of training compute flops.

More moles of training flops are projected to lead to a number of outcomes, some quite unsettling.

A total solar eclipse is a remarkable phenomenon. It comes about as close as possible to getting everybody on the same page. It takes discipline for astronomy bloggers to resist that urge to hold forth in the teachable moment. Tidal dissipation is driving the Moon outward by tapping Earth’s spin kinetic energy. Several billion years from now, Earth will be left with only annular eclipses.

The partial fraction in southern Connecticut reached up into the nineties, and for several long minutes, the eerie unsettled atmosphere that proceeds totality — the unease that so motivates the Allais effect — began to take hold. I stepped outside, into the wan, diminished, angular sunlight. The leaves of a holly tree cast a thousand shimmering pinhole crescents on a brick wall.

I thought back to 1991. We drove the length of the Baja Peninsula and stood at the centerline of the maximum eclipse of Saros Series 136. “Clear sparkling air and the sky that special shade of blue that goes so well with circling vultures, blood and sand — the raw menacing pitiless Mexican blue.” The Moon was near perigee, Earth was only days past aphelion, and the duration, with the Sun almost directly overhead, was a near-eternal seven minutes. I remember a strange subdued roar, and how the plane of the Solar System was revealed by the jarring noontide alignment of Mercury, Venus and the occulted Sun.

“…Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes…”

That has to be one of the best lines ever, and indeed, the stories of H.G. Wells are well worth re-reading for the way they excel in connecting the familiar — in the form of quotidian routine — to the exotic — in the form of alien invasions, invisibility, time travel to the ultra-distant future, with an eye to detail that imbues them with eminent plausibility.

The letters of William S. Burroughs contain a number of references to the stories. In a July 8th, 1953 letter posted from Lima, Peru, Burroughs wrote, “H. G. Wells in The Time Machine speaks of undescribable vertigo of space time travel. He is much underrated.”

The art of writing the non-fiction science fiction versions of The Time Machine was pioneered in its most effective form by Freeman Dyson. in his 1979 article, Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe, Dyson drew on the physics and cosmology of the day to run the clock forward over ever-vaster and ever-more unsympathetic stretches of time.

Dyson’s narrative of the future rests on a critical assumption that the proton is unconditionally stable. Yet the fact that baryogenesis occurred, that is, the very fact that I’m writing this, strongly suggests that the inverse process can also occur, and that protons, and hence all ordinary atoms, are ephemeral (to make exceedingly liberal use of the term). More precisely, proton decay is a predicted consequence of the so-called grand unified theories, which, in one form or another, have been in favor for decades, albeit without confirmation. Experiments, particularly at the Super-Kamiokande in Japan, have now established minimum proton half-life limits of longer than 2.4×10^34 years. The Hyper-Kamiokande, an upgraded version of Super-Kamiokande, will either add a factor of five or ten to this half-life (and in so doing, spur the important question of which superlative exceeds hyper), or alternately, pin that lifetime down.

24,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years is an absurdly long time, but it is utterly de minimis in comparison to the power tower numbers that Dyson cooly slides across the desk. He proposes, for example, that neutron stars will quantum-tunnel into black holes in 10^10^76 years. That is not dead which can eternal lie, but with strange aeons even death may die.

Proton decay aside, the critical this-just-in update to the extremely distant future arrived right at the turn of the millennium, with the realization that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Imagine a tire that inflates if you let air escape from its valve. On length scales sufficient to encompass superclusters of galaxies, that’s a good analogy for how the universe behaves. Over time scales that are short in comparison to the trillion-year lifetimes that characterize low-mas red dwarf stars like Proxima Centauri, all external galaxies are red-shifted to infinity. Eventually, against a backdrop of endless accelerating expansion, the black holes all evaporate, and the residual soup of electrons, neutrinos and photons grows ever more ludicrously thin.

Accounts rehearsing this flavor of the Dark Era often come with a curious form of self-aggrandizing almost pearl-clutching histrionics. I’ve been guilty of that myself, indeed as recently as two paragraphs ago. Amid all the bombast, however, there is quite interesting result. As initially elucidated in a 2000 paper by Krauss and Starkman, the existence of dark energy places a hard thermodynamic Landauer-style limit on future computation. In short, in conditions of ever-accelerating cosmic expansion, you can’t flip bits.

Last week, however, a three-sigma result from the DESI survey, which is progressively building a colossal three-dimensional map of redshifted galaxies, suggests that the dark energy may be weakening with time. Structure on the nearby giga-parsec scale might be rushing away from itself at a slower pace than would occur in the presence of a strict lambda-CDM style cosmological constant.

And the consequence? The descendants of the B100s may continue to push the analogs of embeddings through the analogs of transformers for substantially longer than was believed possible. But stay tuned, the distant future is sure to undergo many new operating system releases.