manic at 2 AM

This year I have noticed I need way less sleep, as I am not depressed all the time, which is really, really nice, as this is the first year since fifth grade (when I could sleep in a bit more) that I have not been exhausted every second of every day.

Anyway, last night I was actually manic... I would say hypomanic, but some of the symptoms seemed to be more like mania. I didn't think so at the time, of course (I never think I'm manic when I'm manic). But I was up really late, like 2 AM, having these epiphanies about astrophysics that I thought were brilliant. In the morning, I just laughed, and wondered how I could have not realized I was manic, up at 2 AM, bouncing off the walls, coming up with brilliant discoveries about the universe, and having grandiose ideas about myself. That's like the definition of mania.

But the things I thought about actually were pretty cool...

Like the universe is 20 billion (at the most, it is predicted right now) years old. This is because the furthest star we can trace is like 20 billion lightyears away. Okay, well let's assume the universe is actually 20 billion years old. So of course no star can be more than 20 billion lightyears away from us. So if we view time as linear (which of course it's not) and the expansion of the universe as an exponential or logarithmic or something like that function, then (and this will never happen of course as I will explain) there could potentially be a point when the rate of the expansion of the universe exceeded the rate of time, and the furthest stars would be more lightyears away than the universe was old, meaning they existed before the big bang. WOW, not possible I know. Which is why I concluded last night that time and the rate of expansion must be closely related functions that never cross eachother, but rather are sort of parallel (not in actuality, but for the purpose of explaining this).

Also, if we think about E=mc^2, for an object/objects to reach the speed of light the energy must be infinite and the mass must be zero. Well, at the moment of the big bang, the energy was infinite, so comparitively the mass was (to use calculus) a limit approaching zero. Therefore, the universe (condensed in that pinpoint) had the capability of going (or exceeding) the speed of light.
If the universe approached or achieved the speed of light, then for a star or solar system or perhaps entire galaxy, time would have either slowed to a very, very slow crawl, or stopped. That means that there were some galaxies/stars that could have lived WAY longer than the normal star lives. Those systems though would live out normal lives, because time is relative. Of course, as matter grew farther away from the pinpoint where the big bang occurred, the speed would have slowed down. Meaning that when we look at the sky and see (see being figurative, it would take a massive radio telescope) that star 20 billion lightyears from us, we could be seeing time at a dead stop.

Time is obviously not linear as well because of this- if you imagine humans as experiencing time as a river, events flowing in a certain order, and God (just imagine a God) experiencing time as an ocean, all visible and occurring at once, then when we look at the sky, we are seeing a fraction (only a fraction because God would see infinite time, unless the universe has a defined beginning and ending) of what God sees. When we go outside and look at the stars at night, we are essentially looking at every instant in the last 20 billion years all occuring at once in the sky above us.

Now, let's go back to the E=mc^2 thing. If the matter right after the big bang were to go faster than the speed of light, theoretically time would have gone backwards. If that happened, then time would fold in on itself and then out again (a theory of Stephen Hawking's), which would mean that what I am doing right now was doing billions and billions of years ago by someone that was a clone of me... no, WAS me... and potentially that person was the clone of (WAS) a me billions and billions of years before that...
But I don't want to believe that because that means that although I am choosing my actions right now, their outcomes are already decided. I guess it's a bit like the God thing, looking at time as an ocean, everything occurring at once (which is difficult to imagine).

One final thing... I've been reading about string theory, the idea that the universe is made of time subatomic strings that vibrate in ten dimensions (they have some tests set up to test this, like smashing protons and such in a particle accelerator, and if sparticles result, it is proven, or sending three satellites up around the sun with lasers in between to test the displacement of gravity that Einstein says surrounds every object). The theory says that the intensity/rate of the vibrations determines what kind of particle it will form (ex. something vibrating xxtimes/minute is a proton, yytimes/minute is a neutron, etc.).
So think about ten dimensions... they are things like acceleration, velocity... scalar things. They are basically all just derivatives of the first dimension. So we are the third derivative... or rather the way we experience things is.

Sorry, just ONE more thing... if dark matter (in spherical shape) were to exist between the earth and the sun, then the light that hits the earth would curve around the dark matter, distorting our view of the universe. So say Hubble's up there in space, taking pictures of galaxies, saying there in certain coordinates, when actually they are lightyears away from that, just distorted due to dark matter. So if we were ever going to try to set coordinates in a satellite to go somewhere a long ways away, we'd need to figure that out.

Okay, I'm done now. Anyway, that's why I was awake at 2AM.