Mum - This Border Collie is Ending Sentences With a Preposition!

I had one more thought on the whole eyeball-shrinking thing. I calculated (well some clever person on The Internet did) yesterday that the focal length of a lens shrinks in exact proportion to the radii of focus of the eye. I didn't bother with the variability of the refractive index of the lens. The RI of a substance describes how light is affected when it travels through that media- and is the relation between the speed of light in a vacuum - c - and the speed of light in the substance - v. So RI = c/v.

Now, for our diminutive heroes, the refractive index of their tiny lenses will depend on how they were shrunk. Discussion of these methods is obviously beyond my intelligence but I can see that, as the light is not shrunk and the matter in the lens is, there is distinct possibility that light travelling through a shrunken lens will have a speed lower than that of light in a full-sized lens. And this does indeed change the focal length not in proportion to the radii of curvature because it changes the refractive index. 

It could be even worse. Any mechanism we might develop to shrink things will probably involve some technique rooted in the mysterious and badly-behaved realms of Quantum Theory and other, as-yet-undiscovered physical theories - possibly manipulating mass after harnessing the power of The Higgs Boson - humour me - I know this is all tosh - like questioning the grammar of a talking dog. This might result in complete changes to the properties of the matter affected - transparency may be changed to opacity and we would not be able to see at all. Though if matter was affected to that extent I suspect that shrunken life might not be viable at all. What about the viscosity of the liquid in blood. Would the heart be unable to provide enough pressure to keep the blood flowing?

Enough of this rubbish. It's the weekend. Let's dance.

Droning On About Physics

The Exclusion Principle

Dronos Five

Quantised Guitars

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.

Sixteen Million Litres of Dry-Cleaning Fluid Can't be Wrong

Some Neutrinos Yesterday

Well that was a surprise wasn't it? Really - faster than light hey. Not convinced myself but then again from the tone of the scientists reporting, neither are they. I was amused by the response of Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University who said "Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered. As a card-carrying cynic I might put forward the theory that some concrete-carting contractor who built the tunnel has signed off some measurement wrongly but as theare probably made relative to each other rather than to the track on which they travel I think we can dismiss my ill-informed ramblings on the subject.I actually thought that seeing neutrinos was something rather difficult and now I discover that you can measure how long they take to travel somewhere. I should really pay attention to modern physics.