I’ve been struggling to find my centre. How I can add to the world and let it add to me. Covid has somehow reversed my relation to the world – a place from which I withdrew when I chose, when it was sufficient my mind, before Covid, to a place I am struggling to re-enter, how to reach that level of sufficiency, even though in some respects the daily engagement is the same.
Time to re-engage with the blog. Time to post more cooking entries. Time to write up my notebook, with glosses.
23rd December, a Wednesday
Yesterday, something reminded me of this quote, which I couldn’t place at first:
Vacuum, in modern physics, is what you get when you remove everything you can, whether practically or in principle.
Alternatively, vacuum is the state of minimum energy. Intergalactic space is a good approximation to a vacuum.
Void, on the other hand, is a theoretical idealisation. It means nothingness: space without independent properties, whose only role is to keep everything from happening in the same place. Void gives subatomic particles addresses, nothing more.
Frank Wilczek, from Edward Tufte’s Seeing With Fresh Eyes
Gloss
I’d made a very conscious effort to make my handwriting readable. It’s been atrocious ever since when, and had reached the stage where I couldn’t actually read my notes. This was the first entry in my notebook where I’d made a conscious effort to make my handwriting readable. It’s not good but it is readable.
Other than that this is a terrible entry. ‘Something reminded me of this quote’ – what, you fool? what?!
I have no idea what caused the quote to spring to mind now of course, but re-reading it, I was struck by the notion of the void allowing addresses.
Draw analogy with cadastral addressing and structures: of course between the locations and boundaries there is terrestrial and mundane substance in the world, but between those addressed locations in their abstract plane, there is only a void. They are different addresses, but only a digit between them, or a line in a ledger.
The Matrix does this quite well with the address system for its human batteries: What lies between the individuals is different to what lies between them in their world. There the real world is cadastral, and the unreal world, apparently substantial.
During Covid lockdowns, we became our addresses, physical and IP, with a void inbetween. Homeless people were given interior shelter locations in the UK, a very good reminder we can do these things if we want.
