One Small Step

 

Blame It On The Bossa Nova.

Blame it on the bossa nova with its magic spell
Blame it on the bossa nova that he did so well
Oh, it all began with just one little dance
But soon it ended up a big romance
Blame it on the bossa nova
The dance of love

One small thing can be to blame for a whole chain of events.

If during my Freshman year at Brown University, the Kent State shootings had not occurred and the college had shut not have shut down, then I might have changed my major from Engineering to Quantum Physics.

If I had not taken an Electrical Engineering course,  then when I saw a plot of reliability, I would not have said that it looks like the response of  Resistor-Capacity, RC, circuit..

If the Atlanta Regional Commission, ARC, had not asked  Cambridge Systematics, the firm at which I work, to comment on its Volume Delay Functions, VDF, that varied by Time of Day, TOD, and the response had not been that vehicles should have the same VDF all day, then it might not have occurred to me that maybe the VDF was the reliability of the drivers, which could vary by TOD,  AND the time of the vehicles. Then both parties could be correct.

If COVID-19  had not confined me to home, then I might not have time to research an alternative to the speed-volume curve for vehicles that could be combined with reliability .

If my engineering courses had not included Fluid Mechanics, then it might not have occurred to me that the speed-volume vehicle flow in traffic looked like fluid flow in pipes.

If that proposal had not been reviewed and rejected, and one of the rejections said snidely that people in vehicles don’t behave like water, then I might not have been gotten mad enough to try and prove them wrong.

If I had not gotten mad, then I might not have started looking at other instances that looked like flow in a pipe, with separate stable and chaotic domains, which led me to cosmology and the proposal that space, the universe, was hyperbolic.

If I had not tried to understand  the articles on a hyperbolic universe, then I would not have learned about Minkowski Space. I had learned about  Lorentz Transforms before, in Quantum Mechanics, but it had been to flat Euclidean Space not hyperbolic non-Euclidean Space.

If I had not watched YouTube videos on Minkowski space, then I would not have leaned the concepts of invariant spacetime intervals, or that the  transition from Minkowski to Euclidean space was a Lorentz Transform, and I would not have proposed an alternative transform from Minkowski Space to hyperbolic space.

If I had not watched those YouTube videos and learned that the worldline of an event in Minkowski space which was the transform of a trajectory in the universe,  then I would not have thought about the quantum entanglement dilemma. While events with the same trajectory are the same in space, events with the same worldline are the same in Minkowski space. Thus spooky action at a distance, quantum entanglement when particles are separated by a distance, might be nothing more than the same particles having the same worldline, even when they are separated by a spatial distance.

If I had not had a career in traffic engineering, then I would not have known about Entropy Maximization and proposed that Entropy Maximization in hyperbolic space might be responsible for what appeared to be gravity in a flat Euclidean  space.

So if I am correct that... space is hyperbolic, the transform between Minkowski and hyperbolic space is NOT the Lorentz Transform, and gravity is apparent not fundamental, …blame it on the shootings at Kent State.