Multiverses, not just for fun and fiction anymore.

(Actually, this isn't really "news." The multiverse theories have been around for awhile. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has been around since at least the sixties, and I first read about it in the late nineties when I read some of the works of David Deutsch. I was just amused to see it make Yahoo's news page.)

Labels: entertainment, quantum mechanics, science

Other than helping you move bodies, of course.

From the eccentric explorations that consume Cris's day comes the ridiculous and yet fantastically entertaining concept of blending random objects. My personal favorite is the dozen glow sticks, but I have to admit the neodymium magnets were very cool as well (nothing like a magnetic powder to play with). The light bulbs were interesting, too, but my fear of silicosis is too great to appreciate it on the same level as the glow sticks, and as much as Lisa likes Coke slushies I doubt she's going to let me make them with an entire unopened Coke can . . .

Tim earned 5 "friend points" (redeemable for cool gifts and prizes!) by linking me to XKCD, which is just esoteric enough that those of us "in the know" can't help but chuckle while those with real social lives look on in a puzzled blend of pity and incomprehension. Escher bracelets! Recursive daydreaming! And Schrodinger's Cat references! I think Lisa was slightly disturbed when I confessed that this actually happens to me (I know it's an inanimate object, but it seems like it's being friendly!). And at the risk of offending all of my friends who happen to have MySpace pages (not my "MySpace friends," per se, as my pretentiousness disallows communication through such a coarse medium), I would like to thank the artist for putting in pictures what I've tried to put politely in words to every single person who has ever linked me to a MySpace page (embedded MIDIs sucked a decade ago; adding words to them hasn't made them any less annoying).

Tim also earned 1 bonus "friend point" because I found another comic I liked through the one he sent me. Anything featuring a sarcastic, witty (yet secretly good-hearted) main character with a penchant for making jokes about her ample posterior has got to be written for me. (We just won't even go into the extra points for sword references.) The fact that I spent the last 5 hours reading this strip and secretly wondering if women like this exist in Omaha is probably a sign I need a better social life.

Labels: amusement, cool, quantum mechanics

To contrast with the monstrosity of the post antecedent to this one, I present a tidy collection of random events, each as special as a tinfoil-wrapped chocolate egg, minus the whole tooth-decay thing . . .

- I received my baby sister's graduation announcement. Family jokes aside, there was of course never any question about whether she would graduate, but I do find it amusing that their "class song" is Bon Jovi's "It's My Life," a song that was initially released when she was 11. I will refrain from further examination, however, as (a) it's not a country song and (b) if I remember correctly, I suggested Queen's "Princes of the Universe" when I was a senior and was shot down in flames (my proposal to use the "Imperial March" in lieu of "Pomp and Circumstance" was likewise dismissed with rolling eyes).

- Apple has officially postponed Leopard, and hence my iMac purchase, to October. Stupid iPhone.

- It's hard to be a crimefighter in the days of caller ID.

- I read a couple of science articles over the last couple of days that are, to me, at least, very interesting. The first is about a quark-gluon plasma generated at Brookhaven National Laboratory that has the same mathematical signature as five-dimension microscopic black holes. The other involves the hendecatope, which I don't fully understand so I'm not even going to try to explain it. Let's just say it's really interesting.

- The latest abstinence education study, commissioned this time by Congress, has found that they're completely ineffectual. To be fair, they also don't increase the rate of unprotected sex, as some critics have maintained. But that's really not a good reason to keep funding them.

- I snapped a photo of the billboard I mentioned in the previous post. In the process (which involved some swearing as I'm not familiar with that part of town, especially after dark), I noticed that the backside of that billboard has the other billboard that has made my blog lately; I thought they'd taken it down, but it turns out they just moved it (both billboards are together in this composite picture). I'm curious if there was coordination of if they ended up together by chance.

- Being third in the nation on the list of music piracy means you should just expect the lawsuits.

- I've been meaning to link to this page for awhile. There's some good stuff there. This is my favorite.

I hope everyone had a good weekend. :)

Labels: amusement, funny, miscellany, quantum mechanics, religion and atheism

I was interested in this article on what is being billed as the first commercial quantum computer, although the interest was punctuated with a sign of my geekiness when I laughed at this unintentionally humorous sentence:

He said all the evidence the company has indicates that the device is performing quantum computations, but he acknowledged there is some uncertainty.

Of course a quantum computer has uncertainty. Silly reporters.

Labels: quantum mechanics

This is impressive. How long before you can do this, Tim?

I caught up with the entire season of "The Office" last night. In retrospect, staying up until 6 a.m. to watch them all was probably a bad idea, but it's like crack. Or Count Chocula. Which is like less unhealthy crack.

The "Angela" character on the show reminded me of a woman I overheard in conversation at a restaurant on Sunday night (yes, I eavesdropped; shame on me). The "So, tell me about your life" questions implied a first date of some sort, one brought crashing down by a violation of one of the cardinal first date rules: no talking politics or religion. A mutual disdain for atheists (yes, how ironic that I was sitting right behind them) started them on the right foot, but theological differences proved a pitfall. I can honestly say this was the first time I'd heard, in person, someone use the sentence "Do you know what it is that bothers me about people like you?" (If you're curious, what bothers her is people who don't go to the same church every weekend, because they're not submitting themselves to an established authority and thus are going to Hell. It's all about the membership card, you know.) I'd wager my as-of-yet-theoretical Christmas bonus that Date Number Two failed to transubstantiate.

I have heat! It's not entirely finished (some venting lines to permanently attach and a new programmable thermostat to install), but there is, in fact, a brand new piece of machinery standing defiant where the petulant scrap heap previously squatted. Still, that old furnace had a hell of a lifespan; if the inspection tag that was tied to it is to be believed, it was over 40 years old, double its projected life. I'll have pictures up later to amuse people with its quaint construction (it didn't burn buffalo chips or anything, but the filter system should be good for a laugh).

The Christmas presents I ordered in October have been back ordered again. My family may be getting little boxes saying "Quantum Christmas Present: Until opened you both have and do not have a gift. Open at your own peril!" I see Target is carrying the gifts I ordered now, and I could cancel the online order, but because I got a promotional discount on each gift it would cost me almost $100 more to buy them in the store. I'm really not that attached to the whole "December 25th deadline" thing. Besides, if I'm going to spend $100 on something, I have other things picked out, like a really cool towel rack or a voice-activated R2 unit, or, given the "responsible adult" image I'm expected to maintain, a furnace.

Labels: holiday, house, miscellany, quantum mechanics

Because I'm being remiss if I go more than a few months without mentioning Schrodinger's Cat, ya know.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Little attempt has been made to disguise my love of science. From my early experiments in grade school making hydrogen out of zinc canning lids and battery acid to my entire freshman undergrad year of chemistry and physics classes, science has always fascinated me. And regular readers of my blog know about the posts on quantum mechanics and four-dimensional visualization . . .

Despite all this, I'm a bystander. I'm well-versed in many science topics, but it's all academic. I can explain gene therapy or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but I haven't done any hands-on experimentation or verification, which in a way is a shame. On the other hand, I laughed this week when I realized that at one point I was subconsciously analyzing and formulating in much the way early scientists did. I brought my solar engine to my office and put it in my window a few weeks ago. I've had this one for a couple of years, and my dad had one when I was a kid, so I was familiar with the concept of the solar engine and how it worked, at least according to the pamphlet that came with it in the box (which I read and "absorbed" when I was like 9). Essentially, the rotor in the near-vacuum bulb rotates because sunlight bounces off the white panels while being absorbed by the black panels, and thus the rotor gets a "push" from light. Piece of cake.

Until I stopped, puzzled, one day this week as I watched it from my desk. It was spinning *the wrong way.* It was spinning as though the light was pushing on the black side and being absorbed by the white side. I actually stopped it and let it start over, with the same result. Then, confused, I cheated and looked it up online (where I discovered the explanation in the box is wrong, and has been known to be wrong since 1876 - bad science-illiterate companies! No cookies for you!). There was no way I was going to come up with the concept of "thermal transpiration" (the real explanation) on my own, so I don't feel so bad about looking it up; I'm just amused that the curiosity and problem-solving mentality that I used to toss around with reckless abandon in my childhood still surfaces from time to time.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Wooo! A quantum computer chip now officially exists (and yes, Lisa, it employs a particle that exists in two states at the same time . . . until you look at it). On to quantum computers!

(To clarify the above comment to Lisa for everyone else, Lisa *hates* Schrodinger's Cat, the classic thought paradox involving quantum indeterminacy. She's actually told me to "shut up about the damn cat" and plugs her ears every time I mention it.) ;)

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

The World-Herald's final commentary on its editorial page today (the "official opinion" of the paper, as it were) earns a D for science education. While ridiculing government spending on "useless" projects, it references a San Francisco Chronicle article on a $25,000 report commissioned by the Air Force on teleportation. Then it repeats the tired "Beam me up, Scotty!" line that is printed over and over again any time teleportation is mentioned outside science fiction or physics conferences, closing with "Just who's kidding whom here?" I actually found the report, and it is indeed largely nonsense (with sections on teleporting macro-sized objects (i.e., people), which according to current theory is impossible, as well as "psychic teleportation), but the paper also references quantum teleportation, which is a well-known and demonstrated property of quantum mechanics. It's not science fiction, and is going to be a strong component of cryptography and computing in the near future. It's unfair to dismiss actual science out of hand because the name conjures up bad 60s science fiction special effects.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

At work tonight, while slogging through a document that definitely fell into the vaguely defined "unfun" category, I abruptly decided that I need a computer that can ignore temporal mechanics and access information from the past and future as well as the present. That way, I could just download the completed document from tomorrow and print it out. Then I realized that would create several nasty paradoxes (since technically no one would actually finish the document, it couldn't actually exist - damn grandfather paradox). Rather than abandon the prospect, however, I decided to incorporate the elements of the "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum theory, which postulates the creation of a new, parallel universe every time a quantum event occurs. So all I need is a quantum computer capable of accessing computer data from the same computer in a closely aligned parallel universe (and of course in the future); then I can download a copy of the completed document that an alternate me did. Then I decided that if I was going to do that anyway, why limit it to being lazy at work? Why not go ahead and download all the novels I'm going to write (which isn't nearly as dishonest as downloading unpublished future novels by other authors, 'cause I, or a version thereof, wrote them - can you steal from yourself?). Then I got to thinking about "stealing from yourself" and wondered if any of the alternate "me"s had the same idea (likely, especially since all of the alternate "me"s created after I had the idea would also have the idea by default), which made me wonder if any of them happened to live in a world where it was already possible, which brought up the possibility that an alternate me is already downloading the stuff I wrote. So listen up, alternate "me"s: I want royalties. :P Just leave a copy of something that will make me a millionaire in the C:\Temp\Alternate Reality\ folder I just created while you're downloading other stuff. Quid pro quo.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

What is reality?

Certainly something far too complex to sum up in a blog entry, but I was ruminating on it today after rewatching Identity (which I'm going to spoil, in case you haven't seen it) last night and reading an article on string theory in Discover today. These obviously aren't directly related (one is a fictional movie centering around mental illness and the other is a nonfictional accounting of the most current description of our universe), but in both cases they deal with the concept of reality being something other than what you can see. It's a classic case of the "brain in a vat" idea, which considers that, since what we perceive as "reality" is an interpretation of the sensory input directed to our brains, it's entirely possible for that input to be faked or misinterpreted so that what we see as reality is an illusion (The Matrix is the most popular pop culture reference to this).

In Identity (I warned you that I'm going to spoil it . . .), the main characters, portrayed as people stuck at a motel during a heavy rain storm, turn out to be the personalities constructed by a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder. The characters each believe they are real people and have complete histories and distinct personalities and goals, but are in fact constructs. When one of the personalities is informed by a psychiatrist that everything he believes is false and that he has not led the life he remembers, he at first acts with disbelief and then anger, as any of us would if we suddenly woke up in the body of a stranger and were told that everything we've experienced up to this point was a fantasy constructed by the stranger. It raises questions about whether the created personality is "real," whether we, if in that situation, could handle that knowledge and return to the fantasy world and whether our perception of ourselves would change if we knew ourselves to be an illusion. Are we really ourselves, or are we the personalities of a single individual? Are we the avatars in a massive Sims-like video game, interpreting our controllers' commands as our own free will? Are we snippets of code in some advanced computer simulation, programmed by scientists to think of ourselves as sentient and human as part of an experiment? Are we the dream of a slumbering consciousness, waiting to wink out of existence when our host awakens? And if any of these are true, how would we know? And would we want to know?

String theory assumes that what we see is real, of course. But it also postulates that what we don't see is just as real. More particularly, that our knowledge of the universe is so small as to be laughable, that the three spatial dimensions we perceive are only a subset of the 10 that exist, that the majority of our universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy that we can't see, only infer, and that our universe, as grand as it is, is just one of an infinite number floating in an 11-dimensional ocean. It faces a dilemma similar to the brain in a vat: we can infer much of the theory from pure mathematics, but very little of it can be experimentally determined. The scale on which much of string theory works (we're talking billionths the size of atoms) is so small that it's impossible to "see" (if only because we see by bouncing photons off an object) and nearly impossible to detect, and we lack the technology to test the parts of the theories that deal with higher dimensions. Not only that, but we lack the mental facilities to visualize the parts that deal with higher dimensions. We interpret reality through three spatial dimensions; asking us to visualize four spatial dimensions loses everyone but those mentally brilliant or mentally insane, and 10 is simply out of the question. What is clear is that "reality" as most people think of it is radically different from what it is, and we're only seeing a very small piece of it.

These are topics that actually excite me. I spent 40 minutes online tonight, hopping from article to article in Wikipedia exploring concepts of quantum mechanics, starting with the Casimir Effect, then jumping to quantum foam, zero-point energy and wave-particle duality before ending up with quantum entanglement. Who needs breasts when you have the fabric of reality to entertain you? ;)

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Living on a Balloon

Warning: Long post about geeky cosmology stuff. Skip it if you're not into that.

Amanda and I had a delightful discussion of the shape of the universe on Saturday, a topic near and dear to my heart, even though I know next to nothing about it (compared to actual scientists, anyway; I know more than 99% of average citizens). I actually have been trying to wrap my head around the intricacies of universal topology off and on for about a year now and failing miserably, a result of the difficulties inherent in three-dimensional beings attempting to visualize four-dimension space, in much the same way that we would have difficulty explaining the concept of a sphere to a two-dimensional being. Part of my problem is that we (the collective "we," including scientists) don't know what the shape of the universe is, although there are various models, including one I read about last night that posits the universe as a trumpet bell with an infinitely long spire protruding from the narrow end of the bell.

That aside, I was taught an analogy for our universe that may have tripped me up. We know that all galaxies are traveling away from each other, which seems counterintuitive: if you have a group of 10 people standing in a random pattern on a gym floor and they start moving they will have to travel closer to some people in order to travel further away from others (except for the people on the edges, but we're not counting those). It's possible, though, for all of them to move away from all the others if they stand still and the gym floor itself expands outward in all directions, which is a very rough analogy of the expansion of the universe. I learned this analogy using a balloon speckled with marker dots: as the balloon is inflated and grows larger, all of the dots (representing galaxies) travel away from each other and get farther apart. For awhile I had some vague picture of the expanding universe that troubled me because, like the people standing on the edge of the crowd in the above example, it seemed to me that there would be galaxies "out in front" of the expansion, which created the odd situation (in my mind) of a planet that had stars on only half of the night sky. That seemed intriguing but highly unlikely (especially considering I'd never heard anyone else mention it), so I gave it up and went to the balloon analogy, which I think I took too far.

With the balloon analogy, there is no galaxy "out in front" because the surface is spherical. The point of inflation aside (and not relevant to the discussion), an expanding balloon has no "singular important point," that is, all points on the balloon are as equal and important as all other points (there are no edges or "beginnings"). This is a more palatable model, although it created for me another problem: if you start at a point on the balloon and travel away from that point, in any direction, you eventually arrive back at that point. For awhile I just assumed that the model looked different in four dimensions and I wasn't visualizing it correctly. But then I read an article asking whether the universe is "multiply connected" (a term I hadn't heard before) that specifically mentions a universe with just such characteristics (although the universe is so large that it would take many times the lifetime of the universe to travel its circumference).

The article also mentioned a possible characteristic of such a universe that I hadn't considered (but that excited me - yes, cosmology excites me; are you surprised I'm single?). In such a universe (one shaped like a balloon), the light from a star would continue traveling around and around and around that universe, setting up the possibility that our universe is much smaller than it appears and all of the trillions of stars and galaxies are actually a much smaller number of stars and galaxies seen multiple times (like an object reflected in the mirrors of a fun house) during different times of their development. This creates the possibility of peering out into the night sky and seeing our own galaxy/system/planet in its earlier development. Alas, the same article says this is highly unlikely, but it's still an interesting concept (I need to work that into a book somewhere).

That underscores the point that the stars we see in the night sky aren't the way they are now; we're actually peering into the past by however many years the light from the star has been traveling before it reached us, in some cases billions and billions of years. If we could travel faster than light, we could pop out to 10 light years, peer back at Earth and see how things were 10 years ago (by "intercepting" the light traveling away from Earth). It also means that any signals we might ever receive from other planets may be from worlds that died millions of years ago. And 10 billion years from now, a planet that is currently 10 billion light years from Earth may be watching reruns of "Baywatch."

Anyway, where was I? Um, yeah, shape of the universe. I dunno what it is (I guess I'll do some more reading). I've read several suggested models, but reading them and understanding them are two different things (bloody extra dimensions). Parting shot: this topic reminded me of Olbers' Paradox (something I'd read about years ago and then forgotten). Olbers' Paradox puts forth the question "if the universe contains an infinite or near-infinite number of stars, every line of site from Earth should, eventually, end on the surface of a star, causing the night sky to shine brightly; why, therefore, is it dark?" The common solution to the paradox is that, because stars didn't start forming until billions of years after the Big Bang (after the universe had expanded to a great size), many galaxies are so far away from us that the light from their stars hasn't reached us yet (which at first implied to me that eventually the night sky will be one big bright light, but I guess the more likely solution is that the stars nearer to us will die out and go dark by the time the light from the distant galaxies reaches us; this, of course, happening billions of years in the future, long after we're gone).

Wow, that was a lot of rambling. Yay for geeks. :)

Labels: quantum mechanics, science

Is It Thursday or Friday?

My schedule is so odd that sometimes it's hard to tell. For me it's still Thursday, but the clock says Friday (albeit very early Friday). When I'm on my normal (non-driving-impaired) schedule, I don't actually get off work until just into the next day, but alas they still only pay me for one day at a time. Speaking of work, it was busy tonight, far busier than normal (which I actually don't mind - job security and all that, you know). It did keep me from catching up on my reading like I did last night. I finished off my latest Discover magazine, which had some really good articles this month. One in particular on amorphous metals that I found absolutely fascinating (amorphous metals are alloys that lack a crystalline structure and as a consequence can be twice as strong as titanium and possess a variety of other interesting traits, such as being made into a "foam" that's 99% air).

Another on the blossoming field of neuroethics, or the science of brain biology's effects on ethical decisions. One of the main points in that article was the concept that the way our neural pathways form makes it very difficult for us to "look outside the box" regarding an opinion that we have already formed. As a result, in a debate or argument, we automatically think that the person with the opposing viewpoint is stupid or willfully ignorant of what we view as an obvious truth, but in reality the other person actually may not be capable of stepping outside his/her viewpoint due to neurological reasons (and the same for us). Humans will rationalize out flaws and holes in our arguments to absurd lengths rather than abandon a strongly held opinion, due to, according to the authors, our brain structure. The study's authors backed it up with MRI scans and test data, but the field is in its infancy so I'm going to withhold judgment. Although, in my debates with other opinionated people, I've seen people deadlock the way the article describes (which is why there are certain people with whom I simply will not debate), I also know that my own personal opinions changed almost 180 degrees during and right after college, to the point where I want to go back and smack my 20-year-old self for defending a point of view that I now find distasteful (and in retrospect I can clearly see the flaws in the arguments that my 20-year-old self offered, but my 20-year-old self couldn't). So maybe the theory needs more work, or maybe I'm just one of the rare people who can "look outside the box" and change viewpoints after adulthood. In any case, I really enjoyed the issue. Of course, I also enjoyed the article on the ekpyrotic theory of the Universe and its relation with quantum mechanics. Yes, I'm a science geek.

Labels: quantum mechanics, science