I put ten BBs in my Red Ryder, an icon almost unknown but not unknowable in the UK. As they hit and jolted the cans I had set up among the broad beans, it got me thinking about velocity. It also assuaged that feeling of frustration you get after a session trying to get a computer to do something. All that time spent and you dont even get to learn anything.
Theres nothing like time wasted on a computer to make you realise in a panic that theres a blue sky out there and somewhere a sail wire tinging a mast with that sound. Just get out and do something. So the BBs made me think about velocity.
The universe is flying apart faster than BBs out of the barrel of my Red Ryder. Why? What is the universe for exactly? Mount Everest presses down on the mantle so the universe must do something. If its flying apart in all directions then it cant be pressing down on something. Or is it?
I was reminded the other day that Fermi was making in 1945 a ball of plutonium go critical by pressing it from all sides, squeezing it. Then it occurred to me that if the universe is expanding in all directions it must be squeezing something else. Something out there is getting squeezed. Getting squeezed means running out of space to do things you would normally do. If you put the squeeze on somebody theres an implication that they run out of options. So is out there beyond what we can see, getting into an unstable state like the ball of plutonium? That will do for one day