MARVEL SUPERHERO "BATHOS" AND A LOCAL LORENTZ FRAME

**SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT for Marvel movie Thor: Love and Thunder**

Oh, I see what he’s doing. Trying to capitalise on the science audience from college by using all these science terms for analogies, and bringing up Marvel pop culture references to make it seem interesting…

Yes, I can read minds. And you’re probably right, this is a flimsy attempt at original content meets SEO optimising. Prophet needs to focus on the business end too.

The idea of using a local Lorentz frame to serve as some far-fetched analogy on life in general had come up to me back during the General Relativity course at college. And I had to revisit old General Relativity notes now since I had forgotten the whole idea, not that great a feeling. So I have to make this worth the effort.

I’ll keep the science short.

In a local region of curved spacetime, one can always choose coordinates where the metric looks approximately like the flat Minkowski metric. This is the local Lorentz frame.

Ok ok that seems like hard-core science stuff but please just hold on. What that means is, however curved or distorted be the spacetime, we can always draw in really close to a portion of it, and choose to look at it in such a way that the spacetime actually looks flat from where we look. Metric basically means a measuring stick for how curved the space is. Minkowski is the scientist guy who got his name stuck with flat, level spaces.

Genius analogy: Spacetime is life. Not a bad comparison to make, spacetime IS life. And the hard truth you realise about the spacetime that is life is that it ain’t flat. It’s shaped like a giant rollercoaster track that curves up and bends down in all weird, unpredictable ways. There are the sudden dips when you think nothing can possibly go wrong, the sudden skyrocketing when all hope seems lost, and the constant swaying left and right that makes you pity the childhood you who thought it was going to be all smooth sailing.

But the fact remains that we all of us have the faculty to look close enough into where we currently are on this spacetime ride and see the local Lorentz frame where we can feel like we’re in control and can take responsibility for our troubles than brooding over that sudden dip we just got through that’s shaped like the iceberg that hit Titanic. To not curse fate or gods, to not hope for the magical rise that’s going to set everything straight and is just around the corner, and not take it easy till the ‘bad time’ in our horoscopes run out. To look at the situation objectively, figure out the loose ends and start patching up the issues one day at a time, that’s viewing the local Lorentz frame.

Finding the local Lorentz frame is a truly difficult task, takes practice. But understand that it is indeed there for the finding. I believe that this is one of the coolest and badass-est skills that can be attained in mortal realm.

Now there are those among us mortals who have mastered the art of using a local Lorentz frame, but they use it in the worst ways. Those lousy excuses you make even when you know it’s your fault when life’s going bad? When you know you don’t want to keep working on that project because you’re not really interested in it, but you make excuses like, “it’s just another bad day, it’s the lack of positive thinking, it’s the fucking weather…”  Another example? The friend you miss but don’t call because all you can remember is his comment at your growing hairline he made the last time you met. Now these are dumb ways to use a local Lorentz frame, seeing issues through the narrow lens of convenience, excuses and fear.

 

                            

Now for the clickbait-ey part. To see the extremes of the art of finding local Lorentz frames, look no further than the Marvel cinematic universe. These guys are on a mission to find a moment of release and optimism at every slight hint of tension. When Rocket joked about the Guardians of the Galaxy standing in a circle as “a bunch of jackasses” right after their teaming up to set off on a death mission, it was super funny and the height of cool. It has since frequented so often in their releases that when Lady Sif lay dying with a chopped-off arm or when Jane aka Lady Thor was dying of cancer, there’s no emotional weight to these scenes (sorry it’s all Thor: Love and Thunder references, that’s the latest Marvel movie I watched and the easiest to recall). Nothing’s a big deal soon as Thor drops a joke or the screaming goats scream. And the technical term associated with this slick move, which I came by in a YouTube channel named “Just Write”, is "Bathos". Coined by 17th-century legendary poet Alexander Pope, it is the sudden drop of a sarcastic joke or side-line comment at a super serious moment like at the height of a battle or right before the heroes walk down to face their biggest foes.  This is overdoing the local Lorentz frame.

Hope I have ranted enough on the local Lorentz frame to get my point across. How to master this art? Well that’s your own journey of self-discovery, and Prophet is still only slightly good at it as of now. Meditation, journalling, just taking a moment to think things through, blah blah blah.

Master the art of using the local Lorentz frame correctly. It is one of the few superpowers you can develop here on Earth. Thanks.

Oh, also to those of you who might not find this blog post all that great, change your mistaken mindset, and find the local frame where you grasp the sheer brilliance I’ve divined here. May that be your first step into using this art correctly.