Who Wants to Die in their Bed?

I am by nature a coward, but I have daydreams of having a heart of cold, unfeeling steel.

Some famous writer or other, can't remember who, said “Marriage is the only adventure open to the wary”. Well I disagree. For some even that might be an unattainable goal, some might not find it terribly interesting or adventurous at all, and ultimately there is an adventure we all must take.

Hero, coward, one and all, everyone has to die. And without wishing to spill into horrible mawkish Gandalf “it's a journey we all must take” territory, it is a journey we all must take.

The trick is to make it as exciting as possible. After you've delayed it for as long as possible of course.

So no dying in my bed for me, not like most people.

I rather fancy the idea of being killed in an apocalypse...atomic war, tidal wave, asteroid strike. As a research project, it would be amazing, a literal, actual, once in a lifetime experience to end all experiences...the earth churning up under you, the thundering of a deadly wave, a scorching hot extinction event from the skies.

I w'd want to be there. I'd have to see. I'd have to know.  If it's a fate we'd all share, I wouldn't be worried about dying alone. I'd like to think tat especially in the case of a nuclear explosion, it would be like the climax of “Sunshine” where quantum and relativistic effects made it possible for Cillian Murphy to touch the surface of a re-ignited sun. How could you not want to go like that?

Reality check. The odds are against most of those things happening, in a huge way. I suppose I'll have to settle for being eaten by a pride of lions, ripped apart while I record my sensations into a dictaphone. Or smearing raw meat on my legs and running through a pack of komodo dragons.

How tedious.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10.09.2014

The Unquiet Mind in the Universe

I'm not right in the head today.

I'm full of tics, twitches and glitches. Feel very uneasy.

I can get down on it sometimes, he thought of heading back into an awful job, and all that stuff. Modern day George Orwell in the workplace of dead souls.

And then you try and "think of the positives" to use an awful cliche. But there are some...the anxious mind, the Tourette's  mind, is one that is closesly tuned to the movement of the universe.

Every twitch, every judder, every flip thought of panicky thought, is the mind picking up a neutrino, or a graviton, or a Higgs boson. A major attack of tics is the intersection of the rippled, uneven edges of two universes within the eleventh dimension, causing all the n-s and p-s and superstrings to vibrate.

A major convulsive Tourette attack with yelling and raging, is a more substantial universe collision, resulting in a big bang somewhere in the multiverse.

Astronomers listen! Put way your expensive detectors and enormous tanks of dry cleaning fluid deep underground. Turn off your LHC. Just use your eyes.

And look at me.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/07/14

The Intricacies of Multi-Dimensional Yoga

Just down the road from me is a yoga studio, yes that’ll be the place, another of those middle class emporia of spirituality, an overheated pine floored sweat box, where people get convo-knotted while things happen with their chakras.

All the lazy cliches any jealous, stiff as a board writer might fingerspit on to his keyboard as he feels his back begin to ache yet again, the fool. Yet, I always feel a faint contempt, spritzered with a splash of envy as I cycle past the yogistas every Thursday, either arriving or leaving, purple and green mats rolled up in a professional manner, leggings on the women, loose Boris Becker type shorts on the the men.

And yes, the cliche spits out again, there is more than a whiff of “the organic” about most of them.

The thing that amazes me is the number of them. Not that there’s many people interested in yoga in this town, but that they can all fit into the tiny end terraced house the studio is located in. It really is small, it must be like a yoga tardis up there to have so many people doing sun salutations in a two up two down.

This led me to wonder - perhaps the studio isn’t extra dimensional, but the yoga practitioners are.

Imagine, when doing your bow position, or dying dog, or cervix of the moon (half or full), in a crowded studio full of sweat trained buttock leggings shoved into your face, how much more comfortable it would be if you could alter your quantum state to actually move your ankles through your things, or sink your head back right into your back. Do the standing splits and pull your calf through your head, and that of the ripe old hippy next to you.

As well as alteration of quantum state, utilising my beloved eleventh dimension would enable more yoga folk to fill the space, than there is actual three dimensional space. But in order to maintain the eleventh dimensional bubble, they have to carry out ultra low frequency Hindu chants that warp space time and cause earthquakes on the far side of the world.

Sometimes the yoga carried out is of such intensity, the dimensional bubble opens up completely into the brane dimension, and the yogis can communicate with other alien contortionists...invertebrates who can fold up their 256, light year long tentacles into a the nucleus of an atom, insectoids who carry universes instead of wings within their shells and thus cause a big bang every time they do a cobra position.

There are even universes where Lycra itself is a highly developed life form.

No wonder the yogani look so contented when they come out of their tiny studio, mats dripping. While I scoff, their spiritual antics have indeed taken them to a higher plane of existence.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.07.14

The Moon-a-Mucks Aboard Spaceship Moon

So, if it has been established (!) that the moon is indeed a giant spaceship, who are the intelligences behind it? What are the entities that hollowed it out using huge steampunk sounding engines and rendered the surface a mess of lava and slag? What is their purpose?

Looking at all the evidence for Spaceship Moon, I can venture a few theories of my own.

The moon was once a beautiful, fertile world that orbited the star Epsilon Eridani 11 light years away. However, the action of a passing mini black hole ejected the world from that stellar system, and catapulted the Moon across the local region of space in the direction of the sun. As soon as the sun got too far away, all life died, including the sentient inhabitants who were much fond of gardening and other agricultural pursuits.

When it had nearly reached the heliopause, a group of wandering bio-mechanical life forms encountered the dead, lonely world, and were greatly saddened. Luckily they specialised in planetary renovations, so having claimed salvage rights, they endeavoured to recover the moon's lost beauty, evidence of which had been left by the former inhabitants.

As had been theorized, these tall, 8 tentacled creatures, resembling a semi-metallic, upright squid, used their vast technological advances to hollow out the moon, install living quarters for themselves, and take up vast amounts of space with an inertial gyroscope drive, and terraforming equipment to green the Moon once again.

They wept, so they did, at the devastation they caused to get their engines of creation in place - their had still been a certain sterile beauty to the Moon - but remembered that given time the Moon would be a treasure of the heavens again, and time was something these near immortal life forms had in abundance.

So they set a course for the nearerst habitable looking solar system, our sun. It took a while for their inertial propulsion system to bring the colossal mass of the Moon into the Earth's sphere of influence. But once they had done so, contrary to geological evidence a mere 10,000 years ago, they began to work. The Quartz moonflowers began to grow.

Moonflowers are two metre tall sunflower like pseudo-plant designed to provide oxygen, through a complex light driven reaction with the quartz crystal matrix. But they need help, and this is where the moon-a-mucks come in.

Moon-a-mucks are a metre long, soft grey creatures, with a beak like a platypus only in a trumpet, or horn shape. They have bright green eyes, and don't need to breathe, existing as they do on joy absorbed from the eleventh dimension. When a moon-a-muck is fed with joy, its grey fur fluffs up, and it begins to sing a song in the electro magnetic spectrum that radiates out everywhere in the universe...so when you smile on a sunny day, that is caused by the moon-a-mucks song, the song of a creature only I suspect exists on our narrow minded little world.

But the moon-a-mucks prime function is to sing to the moon flowers in the sub-surface growing rooms. Their songs cause the quartz crystal structure to resonate like someone rubbing a wine glass with a wet finger, and as it does so it stretches, before snapping back in place with a melodic molecular shattering, releasing oxygen from the Sio4 structure.

As the oxygen is released, the moon-a-mucks collect it with their lunar-flippers into a special feldspar container on their backs before carrying it deeper underground on their moon-a-muck railways to deposit in caves.

We don't see this, how can we? When every time we send a probe or lander, the tentacled moon-masters gather up their singing flocks of moon-a-mucks and herd them to underground barns where they won't be found or heard...they tell them to be very quiet and bribe them with moon truffles.

The purpose of all this is to one day flood the lunar surface with oxygen, held in place by gravity generators so it doesn't leak out into space, and then commence the Greening of the Moon.

One day, the moon will rise, and we will find it as green as an emerald. And the tentacled moon masters and the moon-a-mucks will be waiting, for those they deem worthy...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.03.14

The Planet of the Artists

I read now that the Mars One colonization project – a one way trip to found a new society on Mars, essentially – has now found a producer for the reality TV programme that is going to be constructed around it.

While the whole thing smacks of an eccentric rich Dutchman's idea of highly publicised group suicide to some, there is no doubt that sooner or later someone is going to have to try and colonise another world in that very fashion...what kind of people will they be? Will they be scientists, dry, practical yet crackling with mechanical invention? Or oridinary people, drawn by inducements to leave an overcrowded Earth for our real life future “Off-World Colonies” on plasma rockets of shining silver?

Or perhaps, the technology to send people extraterrestrial will become available to artists.

What could a planet settled by artists, and a society begotten by artists be like? Peaceful with an intense co-operation and indeed socialism in the Martian wind? Or competitive, talents of all kinds striving to out-do each other in the new world they created?

Movements will divide up the five continents after the devastating war between the conceptualists and the realists. Sculptures cast their new style idols high above the inconceivable red landscape, organic forms in brass and bronze glinting in the reduced sunlight, so high that across the Straits of Da Da the Island of the Photographers can see them plain. The photographers document themsevles, document themsevles taking pictures of each other, feedback in the lenses choing to eternity.

The photographers forget to feed themsevles, so intent with their documentation and display thereof are they. They rely on food-drops from the poets, who make edible books out of their poetry because on mars paper is not only edible but a delicacy...the future poet of Mars thinks that his words are literally and doubly so food for the soul and so should be distributed free from sub orbital space capsules.

How does a poet know how to build a space capsule? They have made lyrical the instruction manuals and their iambic factory workers can cope with this form of industrialisation.

The land of the architects, which on the southern shore of one of Lowell and Schiaparelli's canals, which are really real but highly misunderstood, is one of holes. For reasons of contrariness, all land above 5 metres in height is levelled with powerful instruments, and vast holes are dug, holes that are in the shape of buildings that aren't there...a Chrysler building made of nothing, a Palace of Knossos in insolid air, Eiffel Tower up not down, girder shapes etched in the rock, into the depths.

Of course, these architectural spaces being sacred, their creators don't dwell in them and live in crude tents in the super-dry terraformed atmosphere, throats coated in sand so they can't speak.

Finally there is the Continent of the Painters, a community engaged in an endless project – to reproduce in entirety the night sky on the ground in utter exactitude. It is a beautiful wonder, and to avoid spoiling it, they live underground, deep enough so their rabbit digging does not fracture the art. They painted the land black, and picked out stars in titanium oxide white, Tio2, tinting them occasionally yellow or red to match in utter exactitude the tints of Capella, Betelgeuse and the rest. The poets don't feed them because they don't like their slavish copying of nature; they have learned and evolved to subsist off their own paint.

The project never finishes, because every new comet, meteor and nova has to be added in, streaking the blackscape in more white and making the painters scream “THIS MASTERPIECE OF CREATION SHALL NEVER BE FINISHED”

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.03.04

Too Close for Comfort, Mr Bond...

Back pain, serious back pain, and a touch of toothache as well. These things have sapped my inspiration the last few days, and I was at a complete loss as how not to waste the afternoon.

Luckily, I was watching “Goldfinger”, and as the luridly waiscoated Gert Frobe detailed the true nature of his “Operation Grand Slam” to 007, it reminded me of a mental wondering I've often had in the past.

What would happen, if one were sat next to a detonating nuclear bomb?

It is of course, a fate many people have experienced in movies; Stanley Tucci as Conrad Zimsky in the finale of ludicrous geo-disaster movie “The Core” springs most immediately to mind. But no-one really shows what happens, no-one wonders about what you would see, feel, or experience. Most of the time, our incineratable hero normally makes a laconic joke with a sideways grin, before the shot cuts away to a safely distant exterior shot of the flash, fireball then mushroom cloud.

But what can it be like, to be a metre away from a hydrogen bomb, a yard away from a “Fat Man” blast? Would you have time to register anything at all before your body was reduced to its component atoms, or would you just step into everlasting blackness the same moment the detonation was making a CERN experiment out of your very organs?

Well, I think you would notice something, simply because it would be a travesty to be so close to such a major event and be catapulted into death without knowing it. So, I'd like to think - without any evidence or theory to back me up at all - that the detonation on a megaton sized device would create a huge well in the curve of space time, and thus time would slow down.

So, rather in the fashion in the activation of the solar bomb in “Sunshine”, time and space would be “smeared out” and you'd be able to see the expanding mass of energy heading out towards you – unless you had your eyes shut, this may be tricky not to do – so you could almost run your fingers through it like million degree treacle.

And then of course, you would be immolated beyond all measurable trace. But I'd so hate to be so close to an event like that, and not be able to study it a little.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 02.02.14

Schroedinger's Organ

The insides of our bodies, the slew or supremely organised mess and gore that lies inside all of us, is a Schrodinger’s cat, a blood soaked feline wreathed in nerve and sinew waiting for the knife.

For how do we ever really know our own internal structure? We never see it. Until it is X-Rayed or MRI scanned, it isn’t there and the conditions of imaging (i.e. measuring) our structure must change it – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says so.

We can’t ever see our own heart our liver or lungs. We only have the word of others that they are there. If you were to try and take a look at your own heart, you would almost certainly kill yourself in the process.

I’d like to think, in my own case certainly, that until you take a scalpel to my rib cage, I don’t actually have any internal organs. I certainly don’t have a heart. I think that my body is actually part of the multiverse, that the eleventh dimension and all the branes it contains, is actually within this unsleek skin. My insides are not a butcher’s shop slab; they are stars, and black holes and quasars and masers.

Starlight shines, and yet, as I know for sure, there must be an awful lot of dark matter and dark energy in there too, in the cranial space where my brain is thought to be by conventional science.

It is ironic too, that the means of my escape from drudgery are contained within me, a journey into the universe! And I can never reach it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16/11/13

The Space Time Trampoline

It occurs to me that when people try to explain the concept of Space-Time they always use an analogy of a foam mattress or the surface of a trampoline to illustrate it. Gravity is then shown to be what happens to Space-Time you sit a mass in it - it creates a dip, or hole, in the surface of space, that objects - usually rolling marbles! - fall in towards.

"So, if Space-Time really is like a trampoline" I wondered to myself, "would this form of space travel work?"

What I had in mind was a sort of bounce effect.

If you were to take a large mass, and then thrust it into the surface of Space-Time using some sort of exotic energy or field source, you could drive it into its surface like an acrobat, and then harvest the spring back effect to lift it out of Space-Time.

I would imagine, to observer's in the 4 dimensional universe, you would disappear in a shower of energetic relativistic particles to mark where the object "took off" from.

And then it would travel out of time, either straight up or down, or perhaps in a non-existent curve, and arrive back in our Space-Time in another shower of energy as its energy is absorbed by the 4 dimensinal universe. It may stay in place if enough energy is scrubbed off, or it may "bounce off again" somewhere else.

I wonder what there would be to see outside of Space-Time? Where gravity bleeds into our world, and where light perchance bends back on itself.

The Intergalactic JCB

The thousand different shades of green I can see outside the window are quite breathtaking, as I daydream away over this keyboard wondering when inspiration might find its way in to my fingers.

There are no diggers working away anywhere in my vicinity thank the stars, but for some reason I have a vision of one visible between the birch trees, a savage looking JCB digging up the bowling green, scattering brown earth and burnt umber onto the palette. It shakes its jaws and more lightweight matter is dispersed into the damp atmosphere.

And then it came to me. Instead of having a mere artisan JCB digging in the dirt, could you have a more sophisticated intra dimensional digger, carving its way through space time? Tunnelling like the Eurostar to the galactic destination of your choice?

It would require colossal energy, perhaps akin to that of a Black Hole, perhaps even powered by one, to operate, and would have jaws the size of a medium sized asteroid. Its teeth however are as small as quarks, and move like a quantum chain saw as they slice the fabric of space apart.

The more it digs, the more it sinks into a well in space-time of its own creation, a relativistic jet of super energetic matter indicating where it once sat on the surface of the universe. The navigating entity, man or machine, uses complex multi dimensional spinor mathematics to plot a path through the rent in space, and although the process takes forever relative to the machine, it takes place out of time and thus to observers takes no time at all before it carves its way back to the surface again, at the chosen destination in whichever galaxy, or indeed universe, of choice.

The passengers are now ready to embark in the shuttle vehicle, to fall out of our space, only to re-emerge to here knows when, to see wonders beyond imagination.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01/10/2013

A Journey to Andromeda...

I've been imagining a fascinating experiment in human psychology.

Endurace type events have always been an obesession of mine. Long distance running. Cycling. Nordic Skiing. The idea of walking the entire coastline of Britain, waterproof clad, relishing the rain.

So, watching a cosmological Horizon on BBC4, a programme going boldly to the outer edges of my knowledge - about a five second jouney - I was inspired to imagine another such voyage.

A journey from here to the Andromeda galaxy, 2.25 million light years away. I'm making assumptions like no one has assumed before here; that perhaps the people at the British Interplanetary Society can come up with a working design that would get us there within, say, ten million years or so, that ayone would want to make such a journey, and that they could survive it.

Allocate those a variable, x,y and z. Matrix them, forget about them. It can be done. I want to put someone in a spaceship, alive and conscious the whole time, for ten million years. Face fixed forwards perhaps, contemplating the doppler shifted stars at insane velocities, Plato's cave in space.

Could you stand it, fed and watered, somehow entertained, for ten million years. If the sanest person on Earth started the journey, how far beyond the bounds of madness would they have reached after a mere ten years? Suicide could not be allowed to be an option, so restraint and feeding tubes may have to be employed. Would the brain evolve into a new lifeform in its own right? Would it discard the body, would the body discard the brain?

Would the endless dark of intergalactic space be enough to drive you mad without everything else.

If anyone could do it, I envy them. Life isn't long enough to take in these feats, and that makes me sad. I doubt I'll be around to confirm extraterrestrial intelligent life exists, and that makes me sad too.

Doctor Manhattan says it best. When we die, the Universe doesn't even notice.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/09/2013

The Anti-Carbon Ghosts of Warminster

This is not a post about inhabitants of the spirit world who have an inexplicable hatred of element number 6 in the Periodic Table, but rather, it is based on a conversation I had with a strange man from Warminster I met last week.

He was an elderly fellow, just about turned 70 give or take, but his hair was only lightly streaked with grey and his face relatively young looking, but he walked with a stick and his eyes were such a pale blue I thought initially he had cataracts.

Anyway, we were sat waiting in the Betjeman at St Pancras station, and talk turned to his Wiltshire hometown. Warminster has long been famous as a strange sort of place, and in 1964-1965 had been the home of the Warminster "Thing"  - a bizarre series of UFO sightings and strange  happenings - men in balaclavas wandering country roads late at night, that sort of thing. Anyway he told me of what was really going on, as we both drank JD and cokes while waiting for a delayed Brighton train.

It wasn't Aliens. It was far stranger than that.

Apparently, Warminster is historically located around various nexuses (nexi?) of ley lines. This old guy - a former maths professor -  believed rather than being rooted in organic hippy dippy lore, the ley lines are dimensional rifts, less than a quark in width, that are so narrow they don't normally affect our space time.

However, at Warminster, at a hub where several of these rifts intersected, there is a larger interdimensional intersect, where matter from dimensions 8 and 11 is able to find its way into our universe. The stuff from the 8th Dimension is an irrelevant mess of random open superstrings that don't correspond to any of our standard theory particles, and thus don't interact a whole lot of bugger all with anything.

But the 11th dimensional matter is different (He explained to me over another drink)  - it's anti matter carbon, atomic number -6, valency 4(1+i). To put it simply, as he was eventually able to after a fifth drink as rain shorted out the rails, it's ghost carbon. Reverse carbon. Graphite hard as diamond, diamond you could write with.

A carbon that in our world has negative mass, yet thanks to the positron complex root 1 valency, it can actually covalent bond with our hydrogen. And its low energy state means it can substitute out native carbon atoms from the organic chemicals found in such things as...living matter.

This was a lot to take in. He himself didn't believe it until he saw the effects on night in Warminster in 1965, where a farmer, his two sons and flock of sheep suddenly glowed black, and vanished from the field in which they were working. Three days later they re-appeared, the sheep unshorn, and the farmer wild with tales of "some other place" he had visited that he could not describe, but was wonderful.

He was sedated and locked in a padded cell, from which he disappeared three weeks later, this time permanently. 167 pupils and 9 teachers were sucked out of a Warminster primary school the next month, and neer seen again apart from eerie imprints certain short sighted people could see, ghosts on the landscape, apparently smiling, but as insubstantial as the wind.

And it wasn't just organic forms disappearing from our world. We had visitors from the 11th dimension too, velvet soft trees you couldn't see, but you could bump into, and climb, before their trunks swept back into the dimensional rift from which they came.

Clouds came too, from worlds as indescribable as love, and it was these, sailing high in the sky, inverse-gravity lensing their background, that were mistaken for UFOs. And it were MOD spooks, confused but excited by the goings on, that were running around on Norton motorcycles in black in the middle of the night, chasing the shadow people that had fallen foul of the leaking ghost-carbon as they flitted between states of being no one had ever been able to comprehend.

And as he told me this, the fellow's eyes twinkled, and I wondered if he had been one of the chasers, or one of those sprites that could flit between our world and the eleventh. And as I looked into those odd eyes of his, I barely noticed his hand pass straight through his own glass, before it picked mine up. And then as his hand reformed, it seemed, that glass of his shattered, and began to bleed pure molten silicon while his own flesh was whitely untouched.

And then, after draining my drink, he winked and left the bar, heading in entirely the opposite direction from where the Brighton train was shceduled to leave, if indeed it ever arrived.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17/08/13

The Television of the Apocalypse

Watching films like "Deep Impact", where humanity is looking directly into the dark abyss of extinction, always makes me wonder.

Aside from solemn Presidential broadcasts telling us to keep our faith in God as humanity prepares to be squashed flat by an asteroid God himself could have stopped if He so chose, what is on television or the radio when the event occurs?

I'm sure plenty of people would just swarm out of their houses and choke the roads heading for the high ground while continuously screaming, but plenty of folk, perhaps the older ones without young familes facing immolation, would stay home. Surely caring, sharing governments (ha) with advance warning of the earth's destruction, would arrange for there to be media to entertain us in humanity's death throes?

No doubt, religious programming would take up a fair amount of scheduling; can you imagine the number of death bed conversions the various deities would be dealing with as firebrand preachers sounded their joy at the last trump being sounded at last?

Other programming would be more contemplative; gentle pastoral sounds on classical radio, scenes of cloud and sea on television, perhaps overlayed with a ticker of dedications to friends and families scrolling along the bottom, a veritable requiem of tweets as the St Matthew Passion gently poured from the speakers.

Perhaps some channels would just think "fuck it" and decide to broadcast the dirtiest pornography imaginable, figuring no-one would be bothered about hairy palmed deviant onanists as the sun set on life itself forever. No doubt ITV2 and BBC3 would broadcast the usual "100 Worst" type clips or rolling film of Del Boy Trotter falling through the bar to give mankind a smile on its face as it met icy cometary death from above.

Or, as is so common in our current age, would people decided to watch rolling news coverage of Armageddon? I'm thinking they would. Even in the darkest hours, there would be plenty of broadcasters willing set their egos above their families and the prospect of death, and see who could get the highest ratings - and who could go on the longest as the oceans boiled and lava sprayed from the fractured crust onto the sweet land of ours. And no doubt, folk would want to see how long they could go on watching. I know I would, if I was watching.

But I wouldn't be. I'd be outside, with a rum and coke and Radio 4, waiting with joy for the hammer blow from space. God bless it, and all it would bring.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10/08/2013

The Extreme Sinus Problems of Outland

Just been fortunate to find a DVD copy of Peter Hyam's "Outland" for next to no money in the usual shop of ill repute.

Set in a drug addled mining colony on Jupiter's moon Io, it features an excellent Sean Connery in what is essentially a sci-fi update of "High Noon"; a lone white hat surrounded by corruption and having to take on the bad guys unaided.

Making use of the same blue collar vibe as Alien, with added lashings of the ever amusing "music of the future" and oily PVC clad space pole dancers, it's a pretty decent film. But the standout memory for the young me, seeing this movie as a thirteen year old kid or so, are the exploding heads.

People have drug freak outs in Outland. They think their working spacesuits have spiders in them, and they take their helmets off in a panic. Exposed to the vacuum, they undergo a troublesome cerebral expansion...

The fun doesn't stop there of course, and entering a depressurising airlock without a spacesuit is seen to cause major gastric issues.

When the bad guys arrive, despite being alone, Sean Connery is of course well up to the task. This David Crosby lookalike falls foul of the cunning of 007 and a chain smoking comic relief Doctoress.

The special effects, consisting of what appear to be inflateable footballs with crude faces stuck on them, are of course laughable now, as is the science - you don't blow up like Mr Creosote when exposed to a vacuum. But to a teenager, it was damn scary to imagine the panic, the fear, the terror of feeling your face, and eyes, and skin, and tissue, expand out into the unforgiving cold of space and rip you to shreds in a lengthy burst of stretchy agony.

Brrrr. Shivers...

To Lick a Quantum

The Dimension X story I listened to the other day, featuring a male dissident and a typically attractive woman, involved people being reduced to a size way beyond the sub-atomic, and living their lives on a planet like electron orbiting a nucleus.

In the space of ten of our seconds, Einsteinian time dilation caused them to spawn an entire - presumably rather inbred - race that reached a glorious peak before dying out to leave one last message for folk in the our-scale reality.

*Note - Dimension X and X Minus 1 need an article to themselves one day.*

For some reason, this made me think about the curious property known as Quantum Flavour Number...

Sub atomic particles indeed have a flavour - leptons can be flavoured as electrons, tau particles or muons, ditto their corresponding neutrinos. Quarks are flavoured according to charm, strangeness, topness and bottomness.

As ever, this is essentially made up stuff designed to cover up  immensely complex mathematics and the all but beyond understanding properties of these particles. You could call them "banana, strawberry, blackcurrant and lime" and it wouldn't make a difference.

But what if it really did? What if all the quarks, neutrinos and leptons did actually taste of something. Imagine being shrunk down to a size by which relative to you, an electron is the size of a lollypop. Lick it! Perhaps you might get a jolt of electric charge to add to the experience, but then the flavour bursts through. Is it sharp and citrusy? Or sweet and mellow. Will sucking the cranberry flavoured charmed quark ease an acid bladder? Perhaps a blueberry flavoured tau super neutrino will de-fur your arteries, and reduce your risk of a heart attack?

But the crazy thing is, even this wild surmising is nowhere near as fantastic as the universe of the super small actually is. I don't understand it, and I suspect the number of people on the planet who really do is barely in double figures.

It's a mad universe, however it tastes.

CINEMA - Krell Wonders - The Forbidden Planet

At one point in this classic, vivid piece of science fiction film making, the id-ally challenged Doctor Morbius asks of strong chinned space captain Leslie Neilson "Would you like to see some more Krell Wonders?"

"Hell yes!" he replies, or words to that effect, and off they go to explore more chambers of inconceivable alien other wordliness.

"Hell yes!" I always say too, whenever I see the film.

Promo Poster that doesn't at all reflect the real atmosphere of the film

The child in me never gets to see enough of the Krell; their enormous, mysterious city with its electronically burbling  giant resistors and massive pill shaped "things" moving up and down for no apparent purpose; and the Krell themselves, entities we never know anything about other than the fact they need great broad pentagonal doors and were destroyed utterly by the same psycho-physical terror that Morbius is manifesting.

Yes I know that in terms of the purity of cinema, less is more, and don't reveal your monster blah blah, but my inner child always feels cheated by the lack of actual Krell. And as for their city, well, what else was there apart from the eye searing power source and the great echoing caverns of electricial switching mechanisms? Where did they live? What were their transport systems? Leisure? Agriculture?

The "electronic tonalities" of Louis and Bebe Barron, the first time a film had had such a score, add to the futuristic gloss of the whole production, and leaves you wanting so much more. I love the movie, and I still wonder what the krell world was still concealing from us, when it finally detonated its monsters of the id for good.

Superheavy and Exotic

At the base of the existence, are the quarks, and the particles you create when you stick them together with the strong nuclear force. Mesons and baryons, hadrons all. Two quarks for a meson, three for a baryon like a proton or neutron. Up, down, strange and charmed.

That's in our tediously three dimensional universe anyway.

But there are places where this is not always the case. When a supermassive star goes not mere supernova, but hypernova, then the massive energies produced by the explosion fuse these particles into far more exotic and superheavy combinations, that are blasted through holes ripped in space time into dimensions that are rugged enough to take their weight.

For example, take 6 up quarks and 6 down quarks, and you get a tetrahadron. Tetrahadron matter is more solid that diamond, yet you can put your hand through it. In our universe, it appears as ghosts and spectres, which are actually the impression of lifeforms in dimensions 4,6 and 9 who's fantastic mass creates human like bumps in our space time, like pushing your hand underneath a drumskin.

Sometimes the particles and matter created from them are so huge, they rip through our space time surface whenever they merely brush up against it. Archamesons, they make up the living creatures of these dimensions, and in their own environment they work as accountants and bus-drivers, but we see them as Loch Ness Monsters, Yetis, and Giant Octopus a thousand feet long. Our glimpses are fleeting, because they immediately rip again through our dimensional structure and land in another one, like Indiana Jones falling through the canopies in Temple of Doom.

22 strange and charmed quarks form meta-theons – the true god particles, they can only exist in dimension eleven. These are angels to us, cherubim and seraphim, although they have long since passed the stage of mere thought and drift through the multiverse uncaring, each wing of six comprising galactic superclusters that don't have to break through any intradimensional barriers, they just are!!!

There are petrons, sarcatrons, polyorthagonal-dynameons, and matter that is simultaneously larger than every universe put together, and smaller than nothingness. But my favourite is made of 7 charmed quarks, and one anti-strange quark, less paradoxical than sum. It is the hope particle, and it exists in the 5^th dimension, just beyond ours, and only science has the will to find it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08/06/2013

How to Breathe Forever

Long term deep sea divers do not breathe in  pure oxygen or air when operating at great depth - the oxygen becomes toxic at high pressure, and the nitrogen causes nitrogen narcosis. Instead, Helium is added, in a mixture known either as trimix or heliox depending on whether nitrogen is present in the mix.

This is what causes deep sea divers to have squeaky voices, and film-makers a problem if they don't want their cast to sound like chipmunks. In "Sphere" they invented some sort of "voice adaptor", whereas in The Abyss they merely ignored the issue altogether.

What the world doesn't know that in the 70s, a pioneering group of swiss led divers discovered that if you breathe pure Neon at a depth below 2000 metres, not only does it become possible to dive at great depth for an unlimited time, the inhalation of pure noble gas meant that biolgically, they had become immortal, and indeed if they switched to an Argon-Neon mix, aging was actually reversed very slightly.

Sadly this is only possible 2000 metres below sea level, and indeed the effects seem to be magnified the deeper you go. So this was immortality was only available to a very elite few, and the news of this discovery was greatly supressed. However, those in the elite diving community continued to be in the know, and since the early 1990s, greater and greater numbers of them have decided that the surface world is in such a state that they have migrated to the great depths of the abyssal plane, to join the colossal squid and oarfish in forging a new society.

In their small habitats, they glow green and blue like street signs as they live a life of oceanic contemplation while harvesting protein from sources unknown to us ignorant surface dwellers. They don't need to know about us, their society is impregnable and infinite. They will barely even care as we kill ourselves off up here. They create art out of lava flowing out of the sea bed, and smoke cigarettes made of kelp. They make an alcoholic drink out of distilled squid ink, and play chess with pieces sculpted from feathery starfish and creatures unknown to our science.

They need nothing we can offer them. I envy them.

CONCEPTS - More thoughts on super fast space travel

I spend a lot of time travelling through space (inner) considering methods of travelling through space (outer).

I was reading about relativistic jets, the beams of energetic particles emitted from the poles of objects like neutron stars and the supermassive black-holes found at the centre of galaxies - the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has a particularly fine example.

Consisting of streams of electron-positron or electron-ion matter marshalled into energetic jets by tightening magnetic fields around a black-hole's accretion disc, or by frame-dragging, a "way out there" phenomenon associated with super massive objects sitting in space time.

These jets move at anything up to tiny fraction below the speed of light, and so it occurred to me, you could out a craft in these jets, suitably heavily shielded against the tremendous energies and ration involved, and surf the jet to a phenomenol speed in a guaranteed constant direction. In my notebook, I even drew a picture of this thing happening! As a three year old physicist would.

The other idea I threw into the space above my head, was a craft employing a generator that projected a major stream of Higgs Particles at a point in space, to generate a super massive singularity ahead of it in space-time. The craft can then fall towards it's self created gravity well, and when sufficient acceleration is gained, it can then project the stream to a further point to keep its momentum up.

Yep, this probably violates every newtonian law of motion under the sun, but this isn't newtonian space! And in my space, perhaps these things can work!

Anti Matter Man

I was reading about Anti Matter a couple of days ago, and the question of why there is such an imbalance in favour of matter in this universe of ours, when high energy particle collisions would indicate that matter and anti matter should have eradicated itself out of existence in a blitz of photons.

Anti matter has hidden itself away. It has buried itself where normal matter cannot find it. It is locked in the DNA of the folk with Tourette's and Asperger's, the me folk, the we folk.

For when we have a relationship with somoeone made out of normal matter, catastrophic annihilation results. So we live alone, contributing to the mysterious dark matter that physicists can never figure out.

Well, I know where it is.

CONCEPT - The 11th Dimensional Universe Printer

This is something that does exactly what it says on the (very large) tin.

Rather than make your own personal design of mug, or copies of Richard III's skull, the 11 Dimensional printer makes Universes to your own specification.

What you need is a very very high energy environment, and a method of producing an anti (or inverse) gravitational field that leaks back into the 11th dimension from where our gravity originates, according to theory.

The printer utilises the holes punched into Dimension Number 11 by the inverse gravitational force, and washes backwards and forwards across the interface forcing exotic particles through the divide, and into their new environment, an inflationary bubble within the brane multiverses; a new universe.

Customise your universe how you want. Do you want the value of Pi to be 4, or 2, or 222? No problem, the 11th dimensional printer can handle this. Do you want gravity to work backwards, a planet the size of Jupiter to be as light as a feather, and a feather itself to crush you if you try and stand up on it? All yours. Gold shall burn like coal, and lead balloons shall float to the edge of atmosphere like the dispersing seeds of a dandelion. Superstrings the size of bass strings shall vibrate the fundamental particles of your universe. And one day life shall evolve, and what oh what form shall it take?

It all depends what bits you throw in the mixer.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 29/04/13