I wisht I kud right gud

Man, I feel like a beginning writer again.

Many of the verbal tics, linguistic shortcuts, and habits of speech that served me pretty well in tech writing actually can get in the way of different kinds of writing, like this. I’m having to unlearn some ways of writing while I simultaneously trying to learn others. It’s interesting--- a word I use maybe too much--- but it’s also frustrating. Time and again, like a novice writer, I find my ideas far outrunning my ability to get them down in writing in an acceptable format.

The video report on the tornado chase, for example, was (and is) partly an experiment to see if I could use that format for rough-drafting a conceptual article of some sort. I was hoping that narrating the videos might be a faster and easier way to assemble the basic skeleton of a longer piece, even if that longer piece isn't necessarily video.

I’d tried rough-text-plus-pictures earlier (in http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=310834 ) and added stand-alone video later. That experiment worked pretty well and was well-received (generating over 100,000 page views), but it was very time consuming to produce. It might have been simpler just to produce a full-blown treatment than to produce all those pages of what was, essentially, just a rough draft.

And then there are things like this: The current issue of New Scientist has an interesting discussion on Dark Matter--- the as-yet unknown stuff that makes up 90% of the mass of the universe. Physicists don’t know what it is, but they’re pretty sure it exists because we see its gravitational effects. For example, if you go by just the visible, “ordinary” matter we see in other galaxies, there’s not enough to hold a galaxy together against its own spin. The galaxies all should be flinging themselves apart.

They’re not. An enormous mass of something, something that we can’t see, is gluing them together with its gravity. We don’t know what that something is yet, but we can give it a working placeholder name in the meantime: Dark Matter.

Back to the New Scientist article. It was discussing neutralinos as a Dark Matter candidate, and went on to give a great thumbnail description of something called supersymmetry. This is a working but unproven theory that says that every “normal” particle of matter has a partner that’s not normal matter as we usually think of it.

The theory posits that the universe began with a matched, symmetric sets of particles. One set shared the properties we now associate with “normal” matter--- it’s the stuff we see, the stuff we’re made of. The other set didn't have those properties. Instead, it went a completely route. Its “normal” state was eventually to decay into a sea of heavy neutralinos, and/or maybe some other exotic particles as well.

The New Scientist that Dark Matter might even collect in regions of space where things would be incomprehensibly different from normal space as we know it. It also discusses how gravity and perhaps other forces connected us to these “shadowy realms” as New Scientist calls them.

Sounds pretty strange, but the thing is, when physicists did the math to calculate the mass of the theoretical supersymmetric neutralinos, it turned out to be just about exactly right to be the universe’s missing mass; the Dark Matter. This theory really could be right!

If it is, then the universe is populated with two radically different kinds of matter. Both share a common origin, but they split apart in the earliest moments of time and have gone on to develop in radically different ways. The material world we know and experience is as wholly alien to Dark Matter as Dark Matter is to us.

But perhaps because of that shared, common origin, "our" matter (normal matter) and Dark Matter do interact: We feel the pull of Dark Matter, even if we can’t see it.

OK, all that’s is interesting (that word again), but what brought me up short was how neatly supersymmetry theory echoes the many philosophies that hinge on dualism: light or dark, good or evil, life or death, self or other, enlightenment or ignorance, belief or nonbelief, being or nonbeing….

Do we perceive dualism naturally not just because it’s imprinted culturally; not just because it’s a product of the fleeting electricity of our conscious minds; not just because it’s in our brains' bubbling chemistry and in the slow motion shuffling of our genes; but maybe because it’s somehow hardwired into the actual individual particles of matter that make us up; hardwired into the very substance of the universe?

Maybe we somehow know- -- perhaps at the subatomic level and at every level built up from there--- that something's missing, and that everything we see is only a small part of a larger story.

Gahhh. See what I mean? Just can't make the words flow. There's an idea in there, but damn, I'm having a hard time getting it out.