Notes from a lecture given at the Modern Music Guild Research Symposium on November 10, 2024 in Oberlin, OH.
Gravitational vortex at 39.91903995642235, -123.76499417983251
Observations and hypotheses
In the summer of 2024, I encountered a zone of anomalous gravitational behavior while traveling from Sonoma County, CA to Portland, OR. I've been thinking about this as an example of how difficult it is to locate things within space, and the many kinds of space that together constitute spatial experience.
For example, we have these coordinates in the title, and that works as a mathematical location with reference to a geodetic coordinate system, in this case the World Geodetic System 1984 used by Google Maps and most GPS systems. In order to calculate my location while outside of cell service, my phone used the Global Positioning System, an array of satellites (operated by the United States military) that continuously broadcast their time and position. A GPS receiver works by comparing its local time to four of these satellites. This difference is related to the distance to the satellites, allowing the receiver to calculate its four-dimensional location in space-time. This is how a locality looks to a computer, to a satellite, or to a map.
In practice, space is nothing like this at all—spatial experience depends on visual density, on orientation, on attention, and so forth. This GIF might serve to demonstrate what I mean. It's cut from a longer video of driving past the anomaly, and although the video kind of missed it it's off to the right here. And maybe this gets closer to the ground truth, but it reveals very little about the site.
We might also think about space in terms of navigation by car. Here are directions to the anomaly:
Not only is it next to a road, it isn't really anywhere in particular--as with GPS, it's located at a certain distance from more easily referenced places. Given these approximate distances, we might be able to lay out pieces of string on a map and determine where they intersect, giving us a sense of the location of the anomaly.
Alternatively: The gravitational vortex is located in Piercy, CA, in northern Mendocino County. Three miles south of it, actually, along the highway, and then a little bit off to the side. To the right side, if you're driving north, and to the left if driving south. If you lived near it, it might cease to exist, as things adjacent to everyday life tend to do. A highway is itself a relationship between places, and this zone is laterally adjacent to that relationship.
The point here is that it is not so straightforward at all to say that anything is where it is..
-
Causes
- A concentrated iron deposit
- A meteorite in the ground
- A unique combination of minerals
- A buried alien computer
- A vortex where time slows down
- A multidimensional door
- A special spot where spirits gather
In his essay "On the Necessity for Ruins," J.B. Jackson writes, "The town of Centerville suddenly realizes that it is nearly one hundred and fifty years old." Centerville replaces the electric lighting in its downtown with gas lamps, and the shops convert their storefronts to replica 19th-century pioneer town facades. Soon, tourists flock to the historic town of Centerville, and the story it tells comes to transcend the facts of its origin. A sign placed by the California Office of Historic Preservation details the "true" origin of this place.
But as I looked into this phenomenon, I realized that this doesn't really tell the whole story. In actuality, it's more like this:
- Electron vortex
These diagrams are taken from books that attempt to explain gravitational anomalies found in roadside attractions.
A friend once told me that the most interesting motion is between the phenomena of time and space.
A light cone shows the emanation of light from a point in spacetime. The vertical axis represents time, and the three dimensions of space are represented on the hypersurface containing the two horizontal axes. Since the speed of light is the limit of speed relative to time, all possible paths taken by objects occur within this cone.
Road trip
This is what a road trip looks like to a map
So if we plot this as a worldline, as an object moving through time and space, we get something like this
And to position that within the light cone, it must fall inside of the cone since the cone is bounded by the speed of light.
But this is from a static point of view. If the observer is in motion relative to the light source, the cone is affected. So the hypersurface and the time axis are tilted relative to space in the direction of movement. And that angle is constantly shifting as the speed of the observer changes.
But what I want to focus on here is this. This is a more accurate visualization of a road trip in experiential space. It's nonlinear and places take up varying amounts of perceptual and memory space. And so both physical and experiential explanations of phenomena are both kind of unpredictable.
Senses of distance are altered, this is the most obvious example of that
The temporal perception of these locations also changes in unpredictable, illusory ways.
So we are actually encountering a kind of hyperobject that distorts the experience cone in unpredictable, nonlinear ways, similar to an object with massive gravity.
The idea I want to propose here is that the process of travel is a continuous negotiation with hyperobjects, resulting in encounters with unexplainable phenomena.
