too late to be evening, too early to be morning

A bit drunk. Tired. Thinking.
Attempting to wrap my mind around "things", or more specifically Leonard Susskind's "Black Hole War".

The best way to sum it up is with a condensed quote, from the conclusion of his book.

"There is nothing new about the universe expanding, but without a cosmological constant (which Einstein discovered, disliked and dismissed), the rate of expansion would gradually slow down, reverse, and result in a cosmic crunch, a reversal "Big Bang". However this cosmological constant, also known as dark energy, allows the universe to appear as doubling in size about every fifteen billion years, and indicates an indefinite expansion.

In an expanding universe, the greater the distance between two points, the faster they move away from each other,(think of the old universe drawn on a balloon trick). If you look out far enough in such an expanding universe, you will come to a point where the galaxies are moving away from you with the speed of light. It appears that in our own universe, at a distance of about fifteen billion light-years, things are moving away with the speed of light, but even more important, it will always be that way for all eternity.

In every direction we look galaxies are passing the point at which they are moving away from us faster than light can travel. Each of us is surrounded by a cosmic horizon - a sphere where things are receding with the speed of light - and no signal can reach us from beyond that horizon.

When a star passes the point of no return, it is gone forever. 

At about fifteen billion light-years away our cosmic horizon is swallowing up galaxies, stars, planets, moons, and probably even life.

  

It is as if we all live in our own private inside-out black hole.

There is a philosophy that says if something is unobservable in principle it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality - it's a figment of our imaginations. . .

Very likely, we are still confused beginners, with a continually skewed subjective perspective.

 The more we discover, the less we know."  - Leonard Susskind

The Big Screen.

For a few years I've been showcasing different pieces at The Actors Play Pen, a little place in Hollywood right off Sunset Blvd.  Anyway last year I was contacted by a production company who did some filming there and asked if they could use one of my pieces in the background of a scene from their movie "A Simple Promise".  

Here are some pics:

And here is a picture of the piece:

While I can't say I enjoyed the movie too much, kinda fast forwarded through most of it, it was pretty cool to see my piece on the screen.  I also liked the way it was cropped.  If it were stretched a bit it would go great over a fancy rosewood couch!