So what's new in the world of random geekery?
Well, the world of mathematics still puzzles me greatly and in particular what I would call the double negative paradox.
In Maths 2--2 = +4. What? Plus four? How can this be? Surely its counter-intuitive that subtracting a negative from a positive gives a negative answer. Even worse is -2 x -2 = +4. What is going on!
No-one has yet been able to explain to me in simple everyday language how this works. Can you?
*
I read recently that CERN or someone like that have managed to teleport a photon from earth onto the International Space Station I think.
What?
How could they possibly know that it was the same photon?
Does this mean that Scotty style beaming up is just round the corner?
*
I had a day dream the other day that the moon had become a Google asset and was covered in a ginormous hangar housing even more internet storage tapes. Ridiculously far-fetched I know but just how big can the internet get and how much room and energy in the real world will its storage take? The world's biggest Maths problem took up 200 terabytes before it was solved!
*
The Mental Floss site of paradoxes is truly mind- coring. Consider the Bootstrap Paradox, a time travel problem. See what you make of it!
Imagine that a time traveller buys a copy of Hamlet from a bookstore, travels back in time to Elizabethan London, and hands the book to Shakespeare, who then copies it out and claims it as his own work. Over the centuries that follow, Hamlet is reprinted and reproduced countless times until finally a copy of it ends up back in the same original bookstore, where the time traveller finds it, buys it, and takes it back to Shakespeare. Who, then, wrote Hamlet?
*
Another area that fuddles my lobes concerns light and vision: what would have happened to our culture if we had grown up in darkness? Would we have eyes? Would we echo locate like bats? Would we even have different faces? Then again how could any form of life evolve in darkness on Earth? We are all the spawn of light aren't we? Without light we would not be here. Or?
The teleporting thing is really inaccurate reporting. What happened was that information was transmitted not an object. It was an experiment in using Quantum Entanglement. This is a real but not understood phenomenon where two entangled particles seem to 'know' about each other nomatter how far apart they are. A change to one produces a change in the other instantly (no speed of light limit) regardless of distance. This wouldn't be Star Trek's transporter but it would be its subspace radio! Einstein called the effect 'spooky'!
ReplyDeleteWas a photon involved and is it a peice of information?
DeleteTwo entangled photons. Their orientation was the information.
DeleteRegarding the time-travel paradox - it isn't one. If Shakespeare hadn't written Hamlet, it wouldn't exist in book form for the time traveller to take back in time. However, let's just say it did. The theory is that when you go back in time, you create another time line. So the time line you came from continues unaltered, but you've essentially created an alternate universe that diverges from your own from the point you arrived in the past. However, the notion of time travel (sadly) is bunkum. The future doesn't exist until it happens, so no one could come from the future to visit 2017. If the future DOES already exist, then we're already dead, and just an echo of things that are long gone.
ReplyDeleteNot entirely sure that time travel isn't an option. General Relativity might allow for it to happen (you can distort space and time is the same 'stuff'). Then again, Thermodynamics might rule it out (you can only go forwards). You're right about the multiple universe thing sidestepping the time paradox issue. Scope for those who might like to go back and kill an ancestor!
ReplyDeleteFor time travel to be possible, the past, present and future would have to co-exist at the same time. That means my future self (and everybody else's) 20 years from now exists somewhere at this very moment, which is clearly impossible as I haven't yet lived those 20 years. If you go further into the future, we're already dead, which means our perception of ourselves at this moment is an illusion, an echo of something that expired a long time ago. It would mean that entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics) has already reached its eventual end, instead of being a gradual process that is ongoing until it does. Believe me, nobody wishes that time travel could be a possibility more than me. The fact is though, that time is really an abstract concept by which we measure our lives - there is really only one big NOW and we're building the road to what we call 'tomorrow' as we go (like Gromit with his railway tracks in The Wrong Trousers). It might be theoretically possible to view the past if a way was invented to capture light waves of events that have already happened, but we wouldn't be able to interact in those events, or to change them. As for the future, we haven't yet lived it so it can't possibly exist. The new old folks' home that an 80 year old Kevin D will live in one day hasn't been built yet, and won't until it is. A shame, but there it is.
ReplyDeleteI'm really not sure that reality makes as much sense as that. I agree that what you say makes absolute sense but what we learn of Physics tends to indicate that absolute sense is really not how reality works. The more we learn, the weirder it gets. But you're right, it does seem inconceivable that all of history has already happened and is out there waiting for us to trip over it. Choice would be non-existent.
ReplyDeleteDo we, CAN we, know just how much sense reality makes though? However, sometimes we have to describe reality as if it makes sense, in order just to have a starting point from which to discuss things. It seems to me that in order to accept the time travel as a possibility hypothesis, time has to be considered similar to a DVD, already recorded so that we can dip in and out of it at any point. Like you say though, if that's the case, none of us have any choice in what has happened, is happening, or will happen to us - and that's difficult to accept.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on that but I suppose if multiverse theory was true then all possible universes could be out there, which would be a bit like time travel if you could enter another one, where it was only at its Roman Empire phase! Also, if time travel is ever invented, wouldn't they have come back to tell us by now? It is always possible of course that we're all missing the big picture.
ReplyDeleteCome back this conversation a little late after my family invading the house for a long weekend. Fascinating stuff. My baby Grandson says the future looks like potty training! I've often wondered if each second is a universe in itself endlessly replacing itself with a new one.
ReplyDelete