This should blow your mind…
After you get your breath back think of this: Imagine a wave like that in a 4D surface of space-time… any object on our reality may be the result of such a phenomena.
Category Archives: science
Why do we die?
Just reading this excellent book of history of science and knowledge called “The upright thinkers” by Leonard Mlodinov and read what Max Plank thought about revolutionary new ideas. Plank said “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and new generation grows up that is familiar with it“.
This resonates with some of my own observations about how human mind works. A child mind is like a fluid, just prepared, cement mixture, getting more like a set cement stone as we age. We get to be stony and unable to adapt. This gets so bad that in the end both the body and the mind becomes a drag to the current reality and the universe simply discards us.
Interesting is that in the bible, Jesus says that God expects us to be like children. I’m pretty sure he (or they if he was invented) was thinking of the same phenomena of low adaptivity as we age. On the bright side this shows though also the the path to the immortality… You guess, stay adaptive, meaning you have to be able to drop all you know and embrace new ideas if they prove to explain how the reality works!
The other observation is that all conservatory ideals seem (at least for now) deemed to fail. Simply the universe can’t be stopped from changing, we have to adapt or end up in the garbage.
RIP: John Nash, another “Beautiful Mind” gone
John Nash and his wife Alicia have died in a car accident.
I’ve learned about Jon Nash and his accomplishments in mathematics and game theory from the Hollywood movie “A Beautiful Mind” as many other of us.
That is why I’ll use some of the scenes I found favorite and touching. Of course the movie introduce images of actions which never happened exactly like that in the reality, but that is not the point. The point is to make the deep thoughts this man acquired about our reality available to all of us, a window and a chance to understand them and to help build better lives for each of us.
The scene from the movie where Nash gets the idea about effects of collaborative actions in the game theory or “Nash Equilibrium”
The “Pen ceremony” (didn’t really happen but is a touching event in the movie)
And The Real Jon Nash
Safe flying with Automation
Another 150 souls vanished in little pieces on the slopes of a mountain. Can we prevent such things in future? I believe so and here is how.
All new modern airliners can be flown automatically from take-of to landing. The pilots are there for backup reasons and mostly to alleviate our fear of machines (too intelligent machines maybe). So, how can we use this capabilities without alienating people and with high effectiveness.
We can use the idea of “kill switch” which other industries use where when something bas is spotted you can hit a button to stop a process or in this case to start one.
The main issue in those case is that you can never rely 100% on people. Ill minds can be anywhere as this disaster shown, passengers can go rogue, crew can go rogue and ground personnel can also go rogue. The only way we can solve this is to have anyone, I mean anyone on the plane as passenger, crew member of ground personnel be able to hit a “kill switch” and when that happens the aircraft computers will go in a “land on one of the closest known (pre programmed)” airports and until the aircraft is not safe on the runway nothing in the world can change that in any way.
The aircraft automation will simply land the plane and all the controls on board of the aircraft will simply be ineffective until the aircraft has safely landed on the runway.
The aircraft will send continuously its position parameters and intent to its ground personnel and new destination airport.
Looks a simple use case, but due to the current “psychology” of man must dominate machines some changes should be done to the aircraft in order to allow full automated flights.
Keep in mind that this system must be a specialized one to do one and one thing only, detect a abnormality in the flight path, or being “hinted” by the “kill switch” in order to take over and do a single task only, safely land the aircraft. From the moment it is triggered nothing in the world will be able to disable it or influence it in any way until the aircraft is safely on the ground.
Of course there will be resistance on such a system but I personally feel better if it would exists in the flight I’m on and there is a button just next to my seat which if I push I can get safely on the ground. and yes that will cost me a lot of money but not my life!
Emergency Automated Landing? or EAL?
About Gemanwings disaster: The Guardian
Thorium the energy source of the future
Energy is crucial for us and our future. What sources of energy do we have?
Stars are the initiators of energy and precursors of life but they also stored caches of energy for us to use and evolve as intelligent beings.
Fusion of light elements seem to be the stuff reserved for the mighty Stars but here on Earth fission seem to be what the Stars cached for us to get and use.
As many others, I’ve been oblivious of the fact that there is a technology which was tried 50 years ago when the U235 reactors were developed and which should have been our to use by now.
Yet, it seem that our ignorance and political interests focused only on the moment, lead us on the wrong path 50 years ago by building the current water based reactors which are plagued by many issues.
Still, even in this cases nuclear is still the best way to go about our energy needs of the future when we account for all issues we find with all types of energy we now use.
I strongly think we have the duty to maximize the efficiency of all aspects our our lives and minimize the amount of energy we use for each activity we do, however we will need to do more activities in the future, a lot more and all of us must have access to the same abilities in order to step into the future which awaits us out there.
Thorium breeder (LFTR) reactors were simply caned years ago, I think it is time we start building them.
I’m a strong advocate for this technology. To see why, please visit the http://energyfromthorium.com web site or watch the presentation bellow.
Of course, I’m not advocating for blindly supporting the technology, please learn about it and support when you are ready to do so…
Canadian company on Thorium reactors http://www.thoriumpowercanada.com/
Nothing is Everything
If you lookup the word “Nothing” on a dictionary you may find something like this:
Nonexistence; nonentity; absence of being; nihility
I found this definition by searching on dict.org website. So we all think we know what Nothing “is”. But do we know all its implications? What are its characteristics? Will things be different if “nothing” is really “absence of being”?
Some time ago I’ve stumbled over this exploded car picture (bellow). It looked intriguing and funny but something was missing… No kidding you’d say the darn thing is disassembled, what’s missing is “to be assembled”.
Exploded Car Picture (from: http://www.merchantcircle.com)
Yes, true the missing “part” is “to be assembled”. But wait “to be assembled” is not “something” right? It IS Nothing. You can’t touch it, you can’t feel it, but it has a great impact on the usability of the car. Or, more general said, the state in which the set of entities making the car, exists at any moment is deeply impacted by this “Nothing”.
So, something which is not material or energetic has a great impact on the usage of the car. Can we say the “Nothing” has an essential impact in the usability of the car? Based on the dictionary definition and any common sense “Nothing” should have NO impact on things. But here we are we just realized that it has a huge importance on almost all things which are made of components. But then, this idea is wired in itself. How come “Nothing” can impact anything?
In physics there is one dimension which is used to measure “complexity”, it is called “Entropy“. The Entropy of a system can increase when the system is more complex or can decrease when a system is less complex. A fully ordered system (whatever that means) is considered to have minimal (numerical) value.
If we consider the example with the exploded car, then it becomes clear that there will be a difference in entropy, when comparing the assembled product, with the disassembled set of components. You may argue about any “liquids” like oil, grease, etc. but let’s consider those as being present in the exploded picture as well (for the sake of making the point). So, even if we can’t touch or feel the “Nothing” it seem we can measure certain characteristics of it.
You may ask yourself what’s the meaning of this? What is it useful for? How will it impact me? To get a glimpse on this “utility” thing please remember that only not that much time ago, we had no idea what “electricity” was. Today, there are enough of us which still have no idea what “electricity” is but do pretty well in using it.
The issue with this, is that things you don’t know about can still have an impact on you, like it or not. It is said the “the things you don’t know about can kill you” and there are enough examples of this saying.
The main insight in this case is that, it seem our universe is made mostly out of this “Nothing” stuff, and the entropy concept can actually measure it. The other insight is that this “Nothing” seem to be responsible of the existence of all things including life. Also maybe even more important “Nothing” is the “mater” form which “Information” is made. And since our minds are pure informational entities (my strong belief) “Nothing” is “Everything” for us. It is in fact us. This does not implies though that we are Nothing, but only that we can’t exists without the Nothing. It can’t get weirder than this, right?
So, “Nothing” must be of some importance after all… wired… isn’t it?
The “Nothing” concept is another pillar on the model of the universe I’m pursuing.
A Fractal Reality
For some time scientists found more and more proof that the universe we live in seem to have a “Fractal nature”, but what is a fractal anyway?
From Wikipedia: “A fractal is a mathematical set that typically displays self-similar patterns”.
Wolfram Science: A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self-similarity, in a somewhat technical sense, on all scales.
If you look at a tree then you can see that its branches look like smaller versions of the tree itself. The new born have common characteristics with their parents like, they have same number of limbs similar shape etc…
Here is how Wolfram Science defines a fractal: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Fractal.html
And here is the Wikipedia definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
And of course there is a Fractal Foundation: http://fractalfoundation.org/
One important characteristic of fractal structures is that they can be built by using very simple rules repeated again and again…
Even though one may think so, Fractals does not necessary imply infinities as the process of generation can be stopped at any level.
Bellow is an excellent example of what “pure mathematical fractals” may look like. The movie was generated by a computer (just pure calculations in a machine) by using a mathematical structure called the Mandelbrot Set after the name of the mathematician who studied it first.
Or this 3D model of the same type of mathematical structure:
This is the second pillar on my model of reality.
The first pillar is the Many dimensions of the Universe.
I hope that this model of the universe may allow for reconciliation between Science and other ways people now use to deal with the reality.
Many dimensions of the Universe
The current scientific beliefs about our reality, implies more dimensions of space than the three we already know “up-down”,”left-right”,”forward-backward” or for people used with physics notations that is(x,y,z).
Understanding the implications of such a belief can be pretty hard to imagine for anyone which encounters this type of thinking for the first time.
I found those two clips on the net which allows anyone to get a “sneak peak” on what the “real” may actually be.
“Dr. Quantum” explaining “The flatland”
Or, if you prefer Carl Sagan, checkout this excellent presentation about “the fourth dimension”
If you think these “crazy” ideas are new you may be surprised to find out of that at about 1883 Edwin Abbott wrote Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions imagining a two dimension world…
This article is but first from a larger series on fundamental knowledge about the universe, which I hope it will lead to a new way to put together this “Lego” of already known ideas, in order to provide a (I hope) new way to explain reality and provide a bridge between various ways we all perceive it.