Tootfinder

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

I'm trying to understand the Hopf fibration. There seem to be many, many ways to look at it, but since I'm a type theorist I would like to understand it synthetically. I think the following is how I want to think about it:
A fibration over S² with fibre S¹ is a map F : S² − Type that lands in the connected component of S¹. Without loss of generality the base point of S² gets sent to S¹, so F is a loop in the pointed space (S¹ = S¹, id).
But we know that S¹ = S¹ is S¹ S¹ (intuitively, the only symmetries you can apply to a circle are to rotate it in place, or first flip it and then rotate it, corresponding to the two connected components of S¹ S¹). So such a fibration amounts to choosing a loop in S¹ S¹ pointed at the first component, i.e. a loop in S¹. If you pick the trivial loop you get the trivial fibration; if you pick a generator of π₁S¹ (a loop that goes around the circle once) you get the Hopf fibration.
This seems the most appealing to me because it is based purely on geometric intuitions and does not involve any mention of "multiplication" (although that is implicitly what the generating loop in S¹ = S¹ is). It also does not require trying to visualise fibres in the 3-sphere (although that may help).