Russell Brand on heroin, abstinence and addiction. The last time I thought about taking heroin was yesterday. I had received ‘an inconvenient truth’ from a beautiful woman. It wasn’t about climate change (I’m not that ecologically switched on). She told me she was pregnant and it wasn’t mine. I had to take immediate action. I put Morrissey on in my car and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills my misery burgeoned. Soon I could no longer see where I ended and the pain began. So now I had a choice. I cannot accurately convey the efficiency of heroin in neutralising pain. It transforms a tight white fist into a gentle brown wave, and from my first inhalation 1. A bathroom floor in Hackney embraced me like a womb, and now whenever I am dislodged from comfort my focus falls there. It is ten years since I used drugs or drank alcohol and my life has immeasurably improved. Shooting An Elephant. An essay by George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in 1936. In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been. View the latest status of the ozone layer over the Antarctic, with a focus on the ozone hole. Satellite instruments monitor the ozone layer, and we use their data to create the images. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships and generally a bright outlook. But the price of this is constant vigilance, because the disease of addiction is not rational. Recently, for the purposes of a documentary on this subject, I reviewed some footage of myself smoking heroin. I sit wasted and slumped with an unacceptable haircut against a wall in another Hackney flat (Hackney is starting to seem like part of the problem), inhaling fizzy black snakes of smack off a scrap of crumpled foil. When I saw the tape a month or so ago, what was surprising was that my reaction was not one of gratitude for the positive changes I’ve experienced. Instead I felt envious of this earlier version of myself, unencumbered by the burden of abstinence. I sat in a suite at the Savoy hotel, in privilege, resenting the woeful ratbag I once was who, for all his problems, had drugs. That is obviously irrational, but the mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and, unless they have structured help, they have no hope. This is the reason I have started a fund within Comic Relief, ‘Give It Up’. I want to raise awareness of, and money for, abstinence- based recovery. It was Kevin Cahill’s idea — he is the bloke who runs Comic Relief. He called me after reading an article I wrote after Amy Winehouse died. Her death had a powerful impact on me, I suppose because it was such an obvious shock, like watching someone for hours through a telescope advance towards you, fist extended with the intention of punching you in the face. Even though I saw it coming, it still hurt when it eventually hit me. What was so painful about Amy’s death is that I know that there is something I could have done. I could have passed on to her the solution that was freely given to me. The Official Web site for International Talk-Like A Pirate Day, September 19th. Because we're guys, and because we can. That's right: Officers threw a flashbang grenade in my son's crib -- and left a hole in his chest. It gets worse. Notes. 1. Possible reference to 'The best government is that which governs least,' motto of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review,1837-1859, or 'the less government we have, the better' - from Ralph Waldo Emerson's.Don’t pick up a drink or drug, one day at a time. It sounds so simple, it actually is simple, but it isn’t easy — it requires incredible support and fastidious structuring. Not to mention that the whole infrastructure of abstinence- based recovery is shrouded in necessary secrecy. There are support fellowships that are easy to find and open to anyone who needs them, but they eschew promotion of any kind in order to preserve the purity of their purpose, which is for people with alcoholism and addiction to help one another stay clean and sober. Without these fellowships I would take drugs. Because even now the condition persists. Drugs and alcohol are not my problem — reality is my problem. Drugs and alcohol are my solution. If this seems odd to you, it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 9. I have friends who can smoke weed, swill gin, even do crack, and then merrily get on with their lives. For me this is not an option. I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion. Even if it began as a timid glass of chardonnay on a ponce’s yacht, it would end with me necking the bottle, swimming to shore and sprinting to Bethnal Green in search of a crack house. I looked to drugs and booze to fill up a hole in me. Unchecked, the call of the wild is too strong. I still survey streets for signs of the subterranean escapes that used to provide my sanctuary. I still eye the shuffling subclass of junkies and dealers, invisibly gliding between doorways through the gutters. I see the abundantly wealthy with destitution in their stare. I have a friend so beautiful, so haunted by talent that you can barely look away from her, whose smile is such a treasure that I have often squandered my sanity for a moment in its glow. Her story is so galling that no one would condemn her for her dependency on illegal anaesthesia, but now, even though her life is trying to turn around despite her, even though she has genuine opportunities for a new start, the gutter will not release its prey. The gutter is within. It is frustrating to love someone with this disease. A friend of mine’s brother cannot stop drinking. He gets a few months of sobriety and his family bask, relieved, in the joy of their returned loved one. His life gathers momentum, but then he somehow forgets the price of this freedom, returns to his old way of thinking, picks up a drink and Mr Hyde is back in the saddle. Once more his face is gaunt and hopeless. His family blame themselves and wonder what they could have done differently, racking their minds for a perfect sentiment wrapped up in the perfect sentence, a magic bullet. The fact is, though, that the sufferer must be a willing participant in their own recovery. They must not pick up a drink or drug. Just don’t pick it up — that’s all. It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals who had ‘brought it on themselves’? Peter Hitchens is a vocal adversary of mine on this matter. He sees this condition as a matter of choice and the culprits as criminals who should go to prison. I know how he feels. I bet I have to deal with a lot more drug addicts than he does, let’s face it, I share my brain with one, and I can tell you first- hand they are total nightmares. Where I differ from Peter is in my belief that, if we regard alcoholics and drug addicts not as bad people but as sick people, then we can help them to get better. By we, I mean other people who have the same problem but have found a way to live drug- and alcohol- free lives. Guided by principles and traditions, a programme has been founded that has worked miracles in millions of lives. Not just the alcoholics and addicts themselves, but their families, their friends and of course society as a whole. What we want to do with Give It Up is popularise a compassionate perception of drunks and addicts and provide funding for places at treatment centres where they can get clean using these principles. Then, once they are free of drugs and alcohol, to make sure they retain contact with the support that is available to keep them clean. I wound down the hill in an alien land; Morrissey chanted lonely mantras. The pain accumulated and I began to tell myself the old, old story. I thought of places I could score. Off Santa Monica, there’s a homeless man who I know uses gear. I could find him, buy him a bag if he takes me to score. In my mind, I leave him on the corner, a couple of rocks, a couple of $2. I get home, pull out the foil, neatly torn. I break the bottom off a Martell miniature. I make a pipe for the rocks with the bottle, lay a strip of foil on the counter to chase the brown, pause to reflect and regret that I don’t know how to fix, only smoke, feeling inferior even in the manner of my using. I see the foil scorch. I hear the crackle from which crack gets its name. I feel the plastic fog hit the back of my yawning throat. Eyes up. Back relaxes. The bottle drops and the greedy bliss eats my pain. There is no girl, there is no tomorrow. Even as I spin this web I am reaching for my phone. I call someone, not a doctor or a sage, not a mystic or a physician, just a bloke like me — another alcoholic, who I know knows how I feel. The phone rings and I half hope he’ll just let it ring out. It’s 4a. m. in London. He’s asleep, he can’t hear the phone, he won’t pick up. I indicate left, heading to Santa Monica. The ringing stops, then the dry- mouthed nocturnal mumble: ‘Hello. You all right, mate?’He picked up. And for another day, thank God, I don’t have to. Give It Up for Comic Relief is on BBC1 on Friday 8 March at 1. Red Nose Day is on 1. March; rednoseday. Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less – just £1. Wormhole - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A wormhole or Einstein–Rosen bridge is a hypothetical topological feature that would fundamentally be a shortcut connecting two separate points in spacetime. A wormhole may connect extremely long distances such as a billion light years or more, short distances such as a few feet, different universes, and different points in time. A wormhole is much like a tunnel with two ends, each at separate points in spacetime. For a simplified notion of a wormhole, space can be visualized as a two- dimensional (2. D) surface. In this case, a wormhole would appear as a hole in that surface, lead into a 3. D tube (the inside surface of a cylinder), then re- emerge at another location on the 2. D surface with a hole similar to the entrance. An actual wormhole would be analogous to this, but with the spatial dimensions raised by one. For example, instead of circular holes on a 2. D plane, the entry and exit points could be visualized as spheres in 3. D space. Overview[edit]The equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. The first type of wormhole solution discovered was the Schwarzschild wormhole, which would be present in the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole, but it was found that it would collapse too quickly for anything to cross from one end to the other. Wormholes that could be crossed in both directions, known as traversable wormholes, would only be possible if exotic matter with negative energy density could be used to stabilize them. Wormholes are also a very powerful mathematical metaphor for teaching general relativity. The Casimir effect shows that quantum field theory allows the energy density in certain regions of space to be negative relative to the ordinary vacuum energy, and it has been shown theoretically that quantum field theory allows states where energy can be arbitrarilynegative at a given point.[1] Many physicists, such as Stephen Hawking,[2]Kip Thorne[3] and others,[4][5][6] therefore argue that such effects might make it possible to stabilize a traversable wormhole. Physicists have not found any natural process that would be predicted to form a wormhole naturally in the context of general relativity, although the quantum foam hypothesis is sometimes used to suggest that tiny wormholes might appear and disappear spontaneously at the Planck scale,[7][8] and stable versions of such wormholes have been suggested as dark matter candidates.[9][1. It has also been proposed that, if a tiny wormhole held open by a negative masscosmic string had appeared around the time of the Big Bang, it could have been inflated to macroscopic size by cosmic inflation.[1. The American theoretical physicist. John Archibald Wheeler coined the term wormhole in 1. German mathematician Hermann Weyl, however, had proposed the wormhole theory in 1. This analysis forces one to consider situations.. Embedding diagram" of a Schwarzschild wormhole (see below)Definitions[edit]Topological[edit]An intra- universe wormhole is a compact region of spacetime whose boundary is topologically trivial, but whose interior is not simply connected. Formalizing this idea leads to definitions such as the following, taken from Matt Visser's Lorentzian Wormholes. If a Minkowski spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R × Σ, where Σ is a three- manifold of the nontrivial topology, whose boundary has topology of the form ∂Σ ~ S2, and if, furthermore, the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a quasipermanent intrauniverse wormhole. Geometric[edit]Wormholes have been defined geometrically, as opposed to topologically,[clarification needed] as regions of spacetime that constrain the incremental deformation of closed surfaces. For example, in Enrico Rodrigo’s The Physics of Stargates, a wormhole is defined informally as: a region of spacetime containing a "world tube" (the time evolution of a closed surface) that cannot be continuously deformed (shrunk) to a world line (the time evolution of a point). Schwarzschild wormholes[edit]. An artist's impression of a wormhole from an observer's perspective, crossing the event horizon of a Schwarzschild wormhole that bridges two different universes. The observer originates from the right, and another universe becomes visible in the center of the wormhole’s shadow once the horizon is crossed, the observer seeing light that has fallen into the black hole interior region from the other universe; however, this other universe is unreachable in the case of a Schwarzschild wormhole, as the bridge always collapses before the observer has time to cross it, and everything that has fallen through the event horizon of either universe is inevitably crushed in the singularity. Lorentzian wormholes known as Schwarzschild wormholes or Einstein–Rosen bridges are connections between areas of space that can be modeled as vacuum solutions to the Einstein field equations, and that are now understood to be intrinsic parts of the maximally extended version of the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole with no charge and no rotation. Here, "maximally extended" refers to the idea that the space- time should not have any "edges": it should be possible to continue this path arbitrarily far into the particle's future or past for any possible trajectory of a free- falling particle (following a Geodesic in the spacetime), unless the trajectory hits a gravitational singularity like the one at the center of the black hole's interior. In order to satisfy this requirement, it turns out that in addition to the black hole interior region that particles enter when they fall through the event horizon from the outside, there must be a separate white hole interior region that allows us to extrapolate the trajectories of particles that an outside observer sees rising up away from the event horizon. And just as there are two separate interior regions of the maximally extended spacetime, there are also two separate exterior regions, sometimes called two different "universes", with the second universe allowing us to extrapolate some possible particle trajectories in the two interior regions. This means that the interior black hole region can contain a mix of particles that fell in from either universe (and thus an observer who fell in from one universe might be able to see light that fell in from the other one), and likewise particles from the interior white hole region can escape into either universe. All four regions can be seen in a spacetime diagram that uses Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates. In this spacetime, it is possible to come up with coordinate systems such that if you pick a hypersurface of constant time (a set of points that all have the same time coordinate, such that every point on the surface has a space- like separation, giving what is called a 'space- like surface') and draw an "embedding diagram" depicting the curvature of space at that time, the embedding diagram will look like a tube connecting the two exterior regions, known as an "Einstein–Rosen bridge". Note that the Schwarzschild metric describes an idealized black hole that exists eternally from the perspective of external observers; a more realistic black hole that forms at some particular time from a collapsing star would require a different metric. When the infalling stellar matter is added to a diagram of a black hole's history, it removes the part of the diagram corresponding to the white hole interior region, along with the part of the diagram corresponding to the other universe.[1. The Einstein–Rosen bridge was discovered by Ludwig Flamm[1. Schwarzschild published his solution, and was rediscovered (although it is hard to imagine that Einstein had not seen Flamm's paper when it came out) by Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen, who published their result in 1. However, in 1. 96. John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe, and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to the other exterior region. According to general relativity, the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently compact mass forms a singular Schwarzschild black hole. In the Einstein–Cartan–Sciama–Kibble theory of gravity, however, it forms a regular Einstein–Rosen bridge. This theory extends general relativity by removing a constraint of the symmetry of the affine connection and regarding its antisymmetric part, the torsion tensor, as a dynamical variable. Torsion naturally accounts for the quantum- mechanical, intrinsic angular momentum (spin) of matter. The minimal coupling between torsion and Dirac spinors generates a repulsive spin–spin interaction that is significant in fermionic matter at extremely high densities. Such an interaction prevents the formation of a gravitational singularity.[clarification needed] Instead, the collapsing matter reaches an enormous but finite density and rebounds, forming the other side of the bridge.[1. Although Schwarzschild wormholes are not traversable in both directions, their existence inspired Kip Thorne to imagine traversable wormholes created by holding the "throat" of a Schwarzschild wormhole open with exotic matter (material that has negative mass/energy). Traversable wormholes[edit]. Image of a simulated traversable wormhole that connects the square in front of the physical institutes of University of Tübingen with the sand dunes near Boulogne sur Mer in the north of France. The image is calculated with 4. D raytracing in a Morris–Thorne wormhole metric, but the gravitational effects on the wavelength of light have not been simulated.[1.
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