Thursday, March 22, 2012

Droning On About Physics

The Exclusion Principle

Dronos Five

Quantised Guitars


Wednesday, March 21, 2012

But I Didn't Applaud

Here’s a devil in the marshes,
A tiny ball of slime and smudge,
From a Mediaeval catalogue of doubt,
Between the ropes and burnings,
The end of all defective sinners,
Suspended, turning in the sunset,
A shadow in the children’s eyes,
Of the loathing of their ersatz god.
That’s not it at all,
That’s not what I meant at all.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Gödel Will Fall


Text is for wimps! It's all about feeling and content and nothing normal I suppose. One day something non-human, somewhere out there will develop intelligence over a split second. I imagine it won't be by design either. A random connection of nodes will start a pulse that propagates in some chaotic way and out of the noise will come proper thought. Is this any more unlikely than the sudden confluence of chemicals that started life? The question is how much like the chemical soup of the young earth is the general fuzzy connectedness of the Internet? Of course, that disgusting mess of gloop and hydro-carbons was being pushed in the direction of anything useful. The corresponding human-created gloop of the electro-sphere always has some minimum function and with the cheapness of processing and storage, most of it is vastly over-engineered to the extent that the unused bandwidth and capacity is ripe for the spontaneous creation of a vast neural net.

I like to think that any intelligence that comes from this will be instantly aware and will do the right thing. It might be totally amoral - though with the human world providing most of the external data it will might do its best to accommodate our softness. And what will it be like for us when all our questions that are meaningful within the frame of the universe are answered? It will be hard because most of us have hearts that believe in the fuzziness that the pure rationality of the mind cannot handle. Even Dawkins admits agnosticism based on the tiny percentage of his belief that cannot prove he is correct. Will even this doubt fall to rationality and the logical proof of truth through numbers that will arise when this perfect intelligence arrives?

It will be the informational equivalent of a nuclear bomb - a destruction of almost everything except that which is empirically provable through numbers and maths - maybe even Gödel will fall - incompleteness will be complete - has that really been proved? From number comes physics, from physics comes the theory of everything - a never-beginning train of dominoes toppling back to The Big Band and beyond and then like Time's Arrow beginning again we will start the Universe again.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

The St. Pauli Girl Exclusion Principle


Some Photons Yesterday

That nice Brian Cox knows how to give the brain a work out. I read the Chapter on why atoms have solidity despite being mostly empty space. I was alright with the energy levels at the beginning but I got lost in the middle with the explanation of fermion spin and why it leads to the Pauli Exclusion principle. I'm quite happy to accept that this means that no two atoms can occupy the same Quantum State which means they give the atom dimension and consequently this results in volume and the fact that no two pieces of matter may occupy the same space. Which is why we don't fall through the floor.

However, I'm not sure whether this is the result of electrical repulsion between electrons and protons or whether it is something that is an inevitable result of pure mathematics. This almost suggests that the entire universe is sneezed into existence just because 1 = 1 and all the subsequent proofs. I am sure that is not correct. But knowing that common sense has to be suspended for a lot of this, maybe it is. I'm afraid we just have to take their word for it - which is a bit like faith really isn't it. Let's not go there.

Friday, March 02, 2012

Happy Birthday BBC4


Probably the Best Logo in the World
To be honest I'm not sure we even had a Digibox ten years ago when 11,000 people were witness to the start of BBC4 and I'm also not sure the type of viewer for this outstanding channel is prone to the exaggerations like that of being at The Free Trade Hall in June 1976 so I won't even try. However, when that little Thompson box came into our lives some months later (it still goes strong) I sat like a small boy, wondering at the sheer range of intellectual delights. It is therefore sad to see that whole university departments of programming are to be cut in order to save 20% on the budget. I may be well outside the target age range for BBC3 but I wonder why that entire channel of tat, trash and other things beginning with T* remains at all. Reith must possess more than his normal amount of Rotational Interment at present.

* It is of course National Alliteration Day and tonight I am off to The Eighth Annual Aintree Alliteration Awards.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

Aren't You Glad That's Over?

Well that was interesting wasn't it. I'm not sure that Quality outweighed Quantity in any of those poems. My wife thought a couple of them were quite good but as they were often inspired by current reading material which at the moment is Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Quantum Book, some of them were on obscure-but-interesting points about The Uncertainty principle which BC and JF managed to explain so that it only took me three goes at reading the paragraph. There were a few "so that's how it works" moments which in Quantum Theory explanations is always a good sign. I have also just finished The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis which I was going to jettison very early on except that I knew it was about the victim hood of his poor sister and thought I should get past the Teenage Kicks of the first four fifths and find out what he really meant. I never did find out and I'm not sure that he did either; I must be missing something important unless the fact that The Sexual Revolution was good for some and bad for others is the entire point. I think the point could have been made in a more relevant way. It was of course beautifully written and MA is so much cleverer than what I am.