Gravity When I finally buy a phone and call a few folks from home They're all talking 'bout the school bus Our finest scientific minds say there's no such thing as time Just consequences moving through us Damn, well I feel even worse if there's no other universe where you escaped the fire But there cannot be a past if they transport natural gas on the same track where it hit the choir Was there any force drawing my body to you It never ends of course, I'm falling in a dark grave too Even now we are entangled souls No longer stars, just black holes I'm still jealous of the friends your mourning mother mentioned From AP Physics back to Head Start Everything we think is chance is just a false flickering glance of what really pulls us apart But the local news will say twenty years ago today An act of God, a faulty signal Curse those networks of spin, goddamn that's not what happened They're singing lies out of a hymnal Was there any force drawing my body to you It never ends of course, I'm falling in a dark grave too Even now we are entangled souls No longer stars, just black holes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From Nadalands - The Days of Awe LP (September 25, 2023) Gravity Pronounced "grave-ity," this song expresses the narrator's confusion about tragedy and physics. A theory of quantum gravity attempts to combine quantum mechanics at small scales with general relativity at large scales. The narrator seeks to understand a personal loss in terms of larger-scale explanations of the universe. call a few folks from home This refers to the observer effect in quantum physics; talking to friends in his hometown makes the school bus tragedy real, just as measuring quanta changes what we perceive as objective fact. school bus School bus disasters are a common trope in popular culture, including French series "Les Revenants," which features a soundtrack by Scottish post-rock band Mogwai. Mogwai's "We're No Here" in the final episode is arguably the best use of music in a work of art. Our finest scientific minds say there's no such thing as time, just consequences moving through us One of the theoretical attempts at reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, loop quantum gravity, posits that time is a function of human perception rather than a separate objective reality. Time arises out of the connections between events. An Einsteinian "block universe" notion of time as always existing rather than progressing linearly is expressed in the graphic novel series Watchmen, season 1 of TV series "True Detective," and the film "Synchronic." if there's no other universe The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests that every quantum event splits the universe into two branches. If this is the correct model, then the dead love interest could still be alive in a parallel universe. In contrast, Forest on the TV series DEVS dislikes "Everett" (many worlds theory) because it presents the possibility of other universes in which his wife and child did not die. Like the protagonist of DEVS, Lindenbaum lived in San Francisco and commuted to Silicon Valley. there cannot be a past if they transport natural gas on the same track where it hit the choir Because transportation authorities have not learned from the school bus tragedy, the narrator thinks that linear time cannot exist. force Unlike the three other fundamental forces, gravity is not well understood at extremely small quantum scales. Gravity is the attraction of objects towards each other, or for Einstein, the curving of spacetime. It never ends of course, I'm falling in a dark grave too Because the narrator is entangled with the dead person, he also is in the grave. entangled souls Quantum entanglement holds that measurement of one entangled particle will reveal a state that is the same for the other entangled particle, even at large distances. Only two particles can be entangled, like soulmates. No longer stars, just black holes Stellar black holes are formed when large stars collapse and explode. A black hole has so much gravity that light cannot escape. The narrator once emitted light but now emits none, despite an unchanged gravity. Black holes are particularly difficult for a theory of quantum gravity to fully explain. Black holes were originally theorized as dark stars in 1783. "Dark Star" is the title of an often excessively jammy Grateful Dead song that rewords "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, Lindenbaum's favorite poet and a terrible person. From AP Physics back to Head Start The classes the narrator shared with the dead person, the most recent of which could have involved the study of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Here time is operating in reverse. Everything we think is chance is just a false flickering glance of what really pulls us apart Quantum theorists disagree about determinism, the idea that every state of the universe is caused by earlier states and the laws of physics (which could preclude human free will). In a deterministic universe, the bus/train disaster would not be a chance vent but rather a predetermined moment on the train track of causality. An act of God, a faulty signal Others blame the school bus tragedy on a malfunctioning train signal rather than a deterministic result of physical causes. The narrator favors a scientific rather than religious or happenstance interpretation of the tragedy. "Signal" here also refers to evidence available to scientists about the hidden universe, which is not always reliable. networks of spin Local media outlets reporting the school bus tragedy as a chance accident are "spinning" the event. Spin networks are diagrams that represent quantum particles, fields, and states. hymnal the Standard Model of particle physics, which does not include gravity.