One of the crazy repercussions of the idiotic “war on drugs”, apart from destruction of innocent lives and whole countries like Mexico and the US, is that you cannot openly buy many quite harmless substances while relatively dangerous ones are freely available.

An interesting chemical in this respect and also in regards to the philosophy of mind and what we understand to be “truth” is 2-(diphenylmethoxy)-N,N-dimethylethylamine, short Diphenhydramine (DPH). As a sleep aid it is available cheaply in 99 cent stores (in the US). You can also spend a lot of money instead buying the exact same marketed as Benadryl against allergies.

The following parallelepiped was found by Clifford Reiter und Jorge Sawyer (Lafayette College, Easton, Pensilvania) with brute force computer trials.

When selling popular science, relativity theory is presented as weird, the quantum as unfathomable, inflation is ghostly, faster than light. Prominent scientists justify this self important glamorization. They claim it arouses the interest in science.

I believe it back-fires. It promotes esoteric mystery, the opposite of science. It promotes belief in authority, the enemy of science. They effectively say: look kid, it is too difficult for you, but see, I understand, and so you just follow my opinion, and this is nevertheless called critical thinking and skepticism because you follow what we determine to be science.

Is cosmic inflation faster than the speed of light?

Coincidences in fundamental physics, sometimes in the form of so called “fine tunings”; what are they? Generally speaking, some parameter happens to have a value very close to some other interesting number, and we do not see why. Often, some totally unrelated parameters are equal, at least as far as we can tell given measurement accuracy and finite resolution.

During cosmic inflation, the universe's volume doubles only about 260 times. Not much, but still, if this happens during an amazingly short time duration Δt, it would be an amazingly fast process. Lets see about this. The duration of cosmic inflation Δt is constrained by particle physics. Reheating, which is the end of inflation, also called “Big Bang”, must happen before the so called electro-weak symmetry breaks at around 10^-12 seconds in cosmic time.