Morning epiphany

Despite the intuitive attractiveness of the ideal of markets unencumbered by regulations upon transactions between informed, consenting participants, such a state of affairs is impossible to implement morally, because many transactions have adverse effects on unknowing, nonconsenting third parties.

Time: a glacier, not a stream

Via Sean Carroll:

I Tweeted the following inscrutable remark. Probably best left unexplained, but upon reflection I can’t resist.

My consciousness freely travels up and down my world line, but sadly it only carries the memories appropriate to the moment it inhabits.

The point is that (some) people don’t think about the flow of time in the right way, and this leads to a couple of unfortunate consequences: a difficulty in understanding the psychology of time, and a scattering of entertaining but illogical science-fiction scenarios.

Modern physics suggests that we can look at the entire history of the universe as a single four-dimensional thing. That includes our own personal path through it, which defines our world line. This seemingly conflicts with our intuitive idea that we exist at a moment, and move through time. Of course there is no real conflict — just two different ways of looking at the same thing. There is a four-dimensional universe that includes all of our world line, from birth to death, once and for all; and each moment along that world line defines an instantaneous person with the perception that they are growing older, advancing through time.

The big questions

Given special relativity, by which events taking place at near-light speeds over nonzero spans of space can be described in multiple, contradictory, but equally correct sequences by various observers in different frames of reference, it might be a meaningless question to ask whether Han shot first.

Ninth and Prospect will be Avenged!

I live in a suburb of Cleveland, and work in the city proper–that’s probably the first time I’ve mentioned that in this blog. Anyway, parts of downtown are blocked off because a director of whom I have formed an opinion is shooting a quirky little indie film called (checks IMDB) “The Avengers.” Today, I ducked out of my internship early to check out the set on Prospect and East 9th Street where they’ve been blowing up cars all week (surreally enough, about two blocks down from the insurance company at which my father works). I saw some cool stuff, but saw nothing happen.

Most of the set on Huron was obscured by a white screen for moderating light, and platform for equipment I’m not going to guess the function of. It’s the sausage making-machinery of movie magic.

A security officer told us gawkers that the real action was happening at the other side of the street, on Prospect. A small contingent of us then set down a freakishly and nonthreatening clean alleyway (way to be on your best behavior, Cleveland!), and past some catering trucks. I was afraid crew would look at me weird if I took pictures of their food trailers, so I didn’t.

But when we got around to Prospect, there was no one close enough to give us weird looks; onlookers were sequestered a couple hundred feet from the staged wreckage of a Times Square battle involving Captain America (Chris Evans) and a foe yet to be confirmed, but which everyone who knows The Avengers comics* assumes are the Skrulls.

Here is my Sasquatch hunter-caliber photo of two men in contemporary Army fatigues walking away from the wreckage site. I saw several more on the Huron side of the set earlier.

Here are a few vehicles on site with New York-y markings. Thoroughness!

Nothing was happening, and my meter was running out, so I headed back down the nonthreatening alley. It was occupied by some extras in FDNY firefighter and EMT costumes. Some hipsters were engaging them in conversation; my social anxiety and the specter of a Meter Valkyrie kept me from doing the same.

I hope to make it down to the set again before Whedon wraps the Cleveland leg of filming at the end of the month, and file another report. With good fortune, the next one will have a more exciting takeaway than the fact I WAS WITHIN ONE CITY BLOCK OF JOSS WHEDON. We probably breathed the same air at some point, and if I were a superstitious man, that would mean something. But I’m not (my own views on heroic object veneration are close to this essay), and it doesn’t.

*I am not such a person. The only title I ever read as a kid was The Amazing Spider Man. Granted, it took place in the Marvel universe continuity–the same occupied by the Avengers–but there was never a crossover in the few years (months?) I followed it.

 

 

WE ARE SURROUNDED BY ANTIMATTER EVERYBODY PANIC

THE ONLY WAY OUT IS TO TUNNEL THROUGH THE EARTH AND BEG THE HYPERBORIANS FOR SAFE PASSAGE THROUGH THE FOURTH DIMENSION GIVE THEM ANYTHING THEY WANT OUR CIVILIZATION IS AT STAKE. PRIDE IS A LUXURY OF AN AGE OF INNOCENCE WE SHALL NEVER KNOW AGAIN. TELL US OF OUR DOOM, BBC!

A thin band of antimatter particles called antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time.

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth’s magnetic field could trap antimatter. The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped “normal” matter. The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) – launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System – so-called cosmic rays.

These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth’s atmosphere, creating showers of particles. Many of the cosmic ray particles or these “daughter” particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth’s magnetic field traps them. Among Pamela’s goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.

The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos. The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place – at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they “annihilate” in a flash of light.

 

Monday Morning Surrealism

Andre masson, "Antille 2," 1943

What if you’re somebody’s shadow?

Two days ago, I discussed several theories which call for universes parallel to our own. Brian Greene, writing in Discover Magazine, floats another one even queerer than the three I mentioned. Whereas the other worlds in my last post were causally isolated from our own, this hypothesis posits that all the events in our universe are the “holographic” projection of another distant cosmos. I haven’t given this theory enough benefit of the doubt to even call myself “skeptical” of it yet, but it’s still kind of trippy to think about:

The strangest version of all parallel universe proposals is one that emerged gradually over 30 years of theoretical studies on the quantum properties of black holes. The work culminated in the last decade, and it suggests, remarkably, that all we experience is nothing but a holographic projection of processes taking place on some distant surface that surrounds us. You can pinch yourself, and what you feel will be real, but it mirrors a parallel process taking place in a different, distant reality.

Plato likened our view of the world to that of an ancient forebear watching shadows meander across a dimly lit cave wall. He imagined our perceptions to be but a faint inkling of a far richer reality that flickers beyond reach. Two millennia later, Plato’s cave may be more than a metaphor. To turn his suggestion on its head, reality—not its mere shadow—may take place on a distant boundary surface, while everything we witness in the three common spatial dimensions is a projection of that faraway unfolding. Reality, that is, may be akin to a hologram. Or, really, a holographic movie.

The journey to this peculiar possibility combines developments deep and far-flung—insights from general relativity; from research on black holes; from thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and, most recently, string theory. The thread linking these diverse areas is the nature of information in a quantum universe.

Physicists Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking established that, for a black hole, the information storage capacity is determined not by the volume of its interior but by the area of its surface. But when the math says that a black hole’s store of information is measured by its surface area, does that merely reflect a numerical accounting, or does it mean that the black hole’s surface is where the information is actually stored? It’s a deep issue and has been pursued for decades by some of the most renowned physicists. The answer depends on whether you view the black hole from the outside or from the inside—and from the outside, there’s good reason to believe that information is indeed stored at the event horizon. This doesn’t merely highlight a peculiar feature of black holes. Black holes don’t just tell us about how black holes store information. 
Black holes inform us about information storage 
in any context.

Think of any region of space, such as the room in which you’re reading. Imagine that whatever happens in the region amounts to information processing—information regarding how things are right now is transformed by the laws of physics into information regarding how they will be in a second or a minute or an hour. Since the physical processes we witness, as well as those by which we’re governed, seemingly take place within the region, it’s natural to expect that the information those processes carry is also found within the region. But for black holes, we’ve found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there’s a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft stressed that the lesson should be general: Since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there’s reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three-dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggest, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional 
physical processes.

If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much as a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here and that distant reality there would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two—I’ll call them Holographic Parallel Universes—would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and 
my shadow.

I can’t help but wonder what repercussions this theory would have on our discussions of causality, agency, and “free will” if it were proven plausible, let alone true.

It would be a victory for determinists, no doubt, but I can’t imagine what we would do with it. Most contemporary literature by determinists I’ve read has been less concerned with actually proving the reality of physical necessity (for example their failure to really sieze the Rietdijik-Putnam argument is especially striking) with demonstrating we do not have to abandon commonsense moral intuitions with the specious doctrines of libertarianism. But holographic cosmology would surely inspire some interesting papers. I don’t have a clear enough head right now to imagine what they would contain; but it could be a fun thought exercise for Sunday.