Universes At Large

Variations in the cosmic background radiation have prodded some scientists into speculating that the universe might be enclosed in a bigger universe, older than the one we all know and love so well.The observed asymmetries cannot be convincingly explained only by inflation -that hypothesised period where our universe threw a big, giant wobbly and expanded much faster than at any other time.
Indeed, reckons Sean Carroll, at Caltech:

"..something outside our observable universe or before the period of inflation left a relic, left some imprint on what we can observe today,”

I find this fascinating. We may be just one of a series of universes - possibly each with its own laws of physics - since it's much harder to explain, mathematically, a once-off occurrence of universe-within-universe than to explain an infinite chain of them.
Where does it stop? Why should it? The discontinuity implicit in a finite number of nested universes would need some hectic mathematical modelling.

Speaking of discontinuities, today is Youth Day in South Africa, when we remember the Soweto uprising and the trail of ash and smoke it left across the country in 1976.
I was grateful to my partner this morning for kicking my mind out of a rut. I had always taken it for granted that this particular June 16th happened mainly because the students were being instructed in Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor. So my elders had told me-I was 16 in that year and finishing school in Rhodesia;I have no recollection of the events as they unfolded.
Well, Warren commented that he had always believed that the students were not , up to that point, taught in Afrikaans at all, and that this was a silly idea since most of their teachers were Black and would rather use their own mother tongues.

The truth probably lies somewhere between these two indoctrinations.

As for whose agenda was behind it all - if there is a need for agenda in such a case and not just action crying out to be taken - well, there's another place where I've been forced to realise that the things I was taught and accepted without much question may not necessarily be so. I'm coming to a place of full-blown distrust of the news media at last, and history as published in main stream journals may not be so very true to life, either.Paranoia is staring to run rampant, but it's not an uncomfortable place at all. Rather I'm just beginning to do some healthy and, it seems, much needed questioning of my assumptions in many areas, at last.

Public holidays like this one are an opportunity for me to take long daytime naps, play music all day, and let my mind hum along in standby mode. Unfortunately, this often results in painful searchings of my personal past as well. At times like this I feel very close to breaking into tearful tantrums, remembering the days when my son was still with me, wanting to yell gone, all gone, and it's never coming back! at the universe (err...or universes) at large, sometimes with a ghostly undercurrent of a feeling that I'm alive in a dream right now, and when I awaken I will see all the heartache as a vivid nightmare. But I can't live as if that were so. I've loaded this task onto myself, and I have to work through it.

Gods bless the youth of this country and of all other nations of the world - may they see more clearly, and act less lazily, than many of their forebears have done.

Pic: Latest with Andrea, whoever she may be.