Why I left work and became homeless

The story behind Uh Little Less Dum and what led me to leave my cozy life as a developer behind.

TLDR: restless kid > life changing event > further deepened sense of curiosity > epiphany regarding space and time > demonstrated model > 2 years trying to demonstrate model further > releasing ULLD early because I'm in such a bad spot that I can no longer make any meaningful progress on either ULLD or this model of relativity in my current living situation.

Forgive me, but this is a bit of a journey as you can imagine. My best chance of making this make sense is to start at the beginning.

Reckless youth

As a kid, I spent countless nights walking around well into the early morning, just staring up at the sky. I often slept at the park, just amazed at the vastness and the scale of space, with this deep, growing sense of awe and wonder.

It was then, in 6^th grade when the first of a series of events that would forever change my outlook on life occurred. I won't bother the reader with the details, but I remember exactly where I was. I was walking back from our science classroom, in the corner of the basement of my middle school. I didn't know it then, but the following moments would set me up for an experience that would later change me forever.

I went through life more or less as normal through the following years. I was always a little bit more of a risk taker than most, and I had a world view that was quite a bit different from my peers fueled by my experience in that middle school basement, but overall it was just the normal teenage years of an aimlessly rebellious youth.

My Inspiration

It wasn't until I was 21 that I had another experience that would change my life forever. If what happened in middle school was a gentle nudge towards the path that I'm now on, this was like getting hit by a bus. I began to isolate, probably to the point of being detrimental. I had an incredible large and diverse group of friends to this point, but all of a sudden the things we enjoyed together meant nothing to me and we drifted apart. I didn't isolate out of a sense of depression or anxiety, but rather out of a sense of curiosity, as strange as that may sound.

With this second life altering experience, I went from being uninterested in money and wealth to a complete unwillingness to spend my life working for nothing more than a paycheck and playing a role in making rich people richer at the expense of everyone else. I knew I had to do something impactful, something to play even the smallest role in getting this world back on track, and I was going to follow that pursuit no matter what the cost.

It wasn't until February 15^th, 2021 that things started to make sense, and in some ways, make less sense than ever. The dots were finally getting connected, but where they led left me with more questions than answers. It was almost as if I went out for a cup of coffee and got a glimpse into the inner workings of space and time, and just wasn't capable of making sense of it. I spent the next year and a half with this incredible, burning sense of wonder, with an almost desperation to find the missing piece.

I couldn't focus on my work as a developer, taking on as little work as I could to pay my bills while spending every free minute reading over paper after paper. Everything from 19^th century publications to the latest cosmology journals, even going over 6^th century BCE writings by the most brilliant minds of the time. I was desperately seeking anything capable of offering a new perspective on the nature of time and space.

The epiphany

I continued going over as many interpretations of space and time as I could find, from Pythagoras to Einstein and everything in between. I knew somewhere along the way we missed something. General relativity does a phenomenal job explaining the world around us to a point, but it has led us straight into a dead end. I began to feel that this pursuit was pointless, and then one night, sitting at my counter in the early morning hours waiting for my toaster to pop out my bed time snack, I opened a book I had sitting just beside me; something I'd kept within arm's reach for a quick glance while I ate breakfast. I wasn't planning on doing any more research for the night, but if I was going to be awake for another 30 minutes, why not make the most of that time?

That book was On the relativity principle and the conclusions drawn from it, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: The Swiss Years1; a collection of Einstein's work. I wasn't planning on being up much longer, as it was already well into the morning hours, so I just picked a page hoping to find where the lengthy introduction ended.

I had already read this book and most of the papers in it a half a dozen times, but this time something stood out to me. Maybe it was my lack of sleep that made me more willing to entertain ideas that were less obvious, or maybe it was the fact that it had already been over a year without the answers I was after, but there it was:

But wait... what if that is not true? Of course it seems like a logical assumption, especially for a young physicist that was insistent on the Universe being static well into his career, but we can now measure the apparent rate of cosmic inflation. The equation is so symmetrical, that all of the validations of relativity can be accounted for by applying that dilation to space and not time. Einstein was insistent on a static Universe when he wrote On the electrodynamics of moving bodies, the paper that gave us what we now call special relativity, but we now know that the Universe is expanding; we can measure it. Would it not be more sensible to consider that it is perhaps space that dilates with relative motion, and not a medium that we can't directly measure? Should we really apply this observable dilation to a medium in which we can't directly determine our rate of change, and then forcefully dilate variables that we can to accommodate this abstract quantity?

This hit me like a Rorschach test. For so long all I could see was the butterfly, and then all of a sudden I noticed the couple kissing and could never look at the picture the same way again.

Leaving work

That night I knew I was going to dedicate everything I have to resolving this issue, no matter the cost. I began accepting less work, and only a few weeks later I finished up my last paid work as a developer to pursue this model of relativity without any distractions. I didn't know how I would demonstrate this model and distinguish it from our current interpretation of relativity, but I knew that this was what I needed to be doing. I felt like I had a moral obligation to follow this through to the end.

It was May of 2022 when my lease was up. I knew I wouldn't be able to afford more than another month in this lovely but woefully overpriced apartment, so I chose not to renew my lease. I moved everything into a storage locker, only to be unable to afford that just 2 months later. The first nights in my car were a struggle. Every place I tried to sleep I felt like someone was staring at me, but that quickly fades. I gave up on the idea of hiding the fact that I was sleeping in my car or the fact that I was now homeless and just found places where I was less likely to bother people.

People still walk by and make jokes with their friends, yell things from across the street or throw things at the car, but there are good people out there to. Not nearly as many as I thought there were before I was in this position, I mean sometimes it feels like catching a glimpse of Bigfoot, but they do exist.

The lighthouse

It was the middle of summer, and there was only one place I knew of where I could spend all day in the shade with a nice breeze. There's an overpass in Milwaukee where the freeway goes over the Milwaukee river, right where the river joins Lake Michigan. There's a small park to the side near the lake, and a few parking spaces underneath where I spent almost every day that summer, parked just feet from the Milwaukee river. I spent every day going over the most basic math dozens of times, hoping that I would see a pattern, and then it hit me; simultaneity is the key to this conundrum.

See, when I wasn't staring at my notebook I was watching the water gently flow by, day dreaming about what it would be like if the speed of light were on a human scale. As I sat looking over the Milwaukee river, just a few blocks from where I was initially sent down this path, there were two prominent land marks: a lighthouse and a clock tower.

Milwaukee isn't exactly New York or Chicago, but we do have what was the biggest 4-faced clock tower in the world, and apparently, a small light house where the Milwaukee River meets Lake Michigan. I sat and wondered every day what it would be like to travel between those to points, the lighthouse and the clock tower near the speed of light.

Simultaneity

I day dreamed about travelling between that light house and clock tower at relativistic velocities every day for weeks, and then one day it hit me; what if an observer in motion agreed with an observer at rest to travel at precisely some velocity between the lighthouse and the clock tower? If they agree upon a velocity, surely that velocity should be equivalent in both reference frames. Velocity after all, , is a variable which the observer can directly manipulate.

If the observer in relative motion travels at an agreed upon velocity of relativistic magnitudes between the lighthouse and the clock tower, how can this observer reach the clock tower at a time other than ? This is no longer a matter of physics alone, but of pure physical and mathematical definition.

We know experimentally that is applied as a scalar of , but what about this simultaneity? Surely, even if there must exist a simultaneity that permits the observer in relative motion to reach the clock tower in a time that allows this time dilation while still accommodating the agreed upon velocity.

The only possible way to accomplish this simultaneity while still permitting this experimentally validated dilation of time was to apply this scalar not to time, but to distance. With this scalar applied to distance, to space itself, the observer in relative motion can reach the clock tower in precisely . This model however demonstrates something more profound; as time in the frame at relative rest becomes space for the observer in relative motion, the coordinate system, and space itself is less dense in the coordinate system of the observer in relative motion. This must be what we currently describe as cosmic inflation.

Gravity

From this new interpretation regarding simultaneity it should have been obvious where I needed to take my investigation, but you know... the whole hindsight thing. It was months before I was able to put together how this relates to something foundational to the genesis of general relativity, the equivalence principle.

If it truly is space that is dilating according to relative velocity then in turn this dilation must be variable. If that is true, then space itself must be distributed across a larger space. This doesn't demonstrate time as a 4^th dimensional spatial axis, but rather as a density axis across this larger space.

I suddenly realized that if we are being propelled up¹ this density axis, we must be in motion relative to something. While Einstein demonstrated that relative motion plays a significant, physically consequential role in an observers experience, if we are being propelled down this density axis, then there must be a cosmic rest reference frame (CRRF).

While difficult to wrap one's mind around, the fact is that if space itself were to be dilating with time, and in turn every apparatus we use to measure space, this variation would remain completely undetectable for an observer in motion across this axis on semi-local scales. If I was going to find our local velocity relative to the CRRF, relying on supernovae research or CMB² surveys wasn't going to suffice; I would need to demonstrate this with local measurements.

It seems obvious in hindsight, but it took me far too long to realize that if it is space that dilates with relative velocity, and if the equivalence principle dictates that gravity is in every local manner indistinguishable from an upward acceleration, then this dilation of space could be the source of this equivalence. Maybe this equivalence isn't just a useful mathematical tool; a mysterious symmetry that pops out of a mechanism we don't understand, but an actual physical expression of a platform in motion relative to this larger space.

Once I made the connection between this proposed model of spatial dilation and the equivalence principle, it was trivial to derive the velocity required to produce our local gravitational effects. Simply finding the derivative of our local gravitational acceleration with respect to the Earth's radius, and then the average of the integral of that derivative gives a scalar that can be applied in a manner that is mathematically consistent with the manner that is applied, which in turn provides a means of connecting these two equations.

Since the time dilation scalar is given by:

We can solve that for , and we find:

If is to be applied to spatial dilation in the same manner as it is believed to apply to time dilation, than and the result of the integral mentioned above, must be numerically equivalent.

Where

and

we find that , a number that just happens to fit nearly directly on top of probability curves found through direct observation via the supernovae and CMB methods mentioned above.

The Anticlimactic Pause

Well... that's more or less where I'm at now. Kind of anticlimactic, I know. I struggled to title this section because I didn't want to call it the 'anticlimactic end', but I needed to focus on other things if I didn't want this to be the climactic end of me.

I've been working on binding this model with electromagnetism, and when I'm able to spend time on it I make some pretty meaningful progress, but that just hasn't been the case for months. I know where the holes are, but living in this situation has caught up with me and I just haven't been able to dedicate any time to it.

If you're here, you're probably aware of the origin story of ULLD. It was something I pieced together for my own research, just adding features here and there as I needed them. For the past 6-8 months I've spent every day reworking ULLD into a tool that not only includes³ all of the features I built for my own pursuits, but allows other developers, researchers, teachers and anyone willing to learn the ability to extend ULLD more readily than any other academic tool.

Reworking an existing app like this into a new architecture would normally be a much faster process, but living in this manner adds some pretty significant hurdles. Needing to reinstall a dependency when you won't have internet access for another day or two, working with an already outmatched computer that's thermal throttling due to the heat and sometimes not having access to a power outlet for days at a time brings progress to a crawling pace. To make things significantly worse, the car that I'm sleeping in just gave up on me, and I'll likely be losing my place to sleep to a tow truck in the coming days.

The Early Pre, Pre-Beta Release. The Delta?

I was planning to release ULLD in a much more complete state, but unfortunately I'm going to have to release a very, very early beta before the plotting components, the whiteboard components and the Jupyter integration are available. There is still a complete bibliography manager, a task manager and quite a few embeddable components already available, but these other core features will have to wait for an upcoming release. If I was able to find a stable work environment, I would be able to push most of these features to production in a week or two, with the Jupyter integration following shortly after. Unfortunately, that seems to be pretty unlikely in the very near future.

The best thing to address this issue in the short term, something that you can help with, is to expose ULLD to as many people as possible, and of course, help support the project directly if you can.

Wrap Up

So all in all, do I regret giving up a comfortable life to pursue this model of relativity? Not at all. Of course, I probably should have looked for more freelance work along the way, and I maybe should've bought a more reliable car, but the potential impact this model may lead to was something that I felt I had a moral obligation to pursue.

I guess only time will tell how long I'll be without shelter now that my car has given up on me. While my short term future is sure to be unpleasant, and this model may not lead to any meaningful discussion any time soon, when the right person is exposed to it this will all be worth it; even if I'm not around to see it.