For serious, dudes.
Check this. So for a long time now, we've thought space and time were this weird thing called space-time, a nifty little shorthand way of saying "light cones, spatial relations, and causality are intrinsically intertwined."
I call shenanigans!
I say to you - show me an objective second. Explain to me what a minute is, from an objective view. Oh right, you can't. Because our temporal reference frames are just that - referential. Informed by what's around us. Subjective.
The idea of time actually being a thing - even if it is wrapped in the sugary goodness of space (another concept I have issues with, but that's a whole other story, and involves the idea of the universe expanding at some exponent of c being kinda-sorta absurd to me) - seems ludicrous.
Details!
Okay, so. Let's say that right now, time stops for an arbitrarily long amount of "time." And then now, it starts up again. How do you know how much time passed? You can't. For all we know, time is like a twitchy teen hopped up on amphetamines, stopping and starting all the freakin' time.
Our perception of events is relative to all kinds of crazy things. It's based on how fast things are going, where we are, where the event happens, all that fun jazz. Light cones and such. You can do some crazy stuff with light-cones: you can set up scenarios that are hypothetically possible in our current understanding of the universe, wherein to one dude, two events are simultaneous; while to another event A precedes event B; and to a third, event B precedes event A.
"How can that happen?", you say incredulously, scratching your chin. "A must come before B, that's just sensical. It doesn't make sense for me to get a response to a message I haven't sent yet."
And there I agree with you - the causal chain is, in fact, a thing. To heck with Hume and all his causality-hating shenanigans, the causal chain is a for-serious thing, and that's Latin for necessary truthiness (synthetic a priori for the win, dudes and dudettes - but that's a discussion for another time [haha!]).
Okay, now we're getting into heady stuff, so I'ma cut the jokes and snark for a bit, for clarity's sake.
Here's the deal. Envision the universe as a machine, vaguely deterministic with a few variables thrown in being determined at run-time. At any given "moment," you can take a snapshot of the universe. Such a snapshot is a single link on the causal chain. It has a cause (the snapshot just before it on the chain), and an effect (the snapshot just after it).
This does not involve space in any way, shape, or form.
There's all kinds of thoughts that have to add up to get to this, like the idea that the universe can be modeled as a really complex program that "knows" all of its variables and objects it contains and their variables and so on and so forth. Basically, things like "spooky action at a distance" can happen because distance is irrelevant, the universe knows what's going on and it's all good, it can inform each particle of what the other is doing because it can access them.
But anyway.
Time, right. Time isn't a thing. There are moments, which have causes and effects. Our perception is just that - perception, and has no bearing on what's going on. We can perceive effects before causes, and it doesn't matter, because objectively, the cause comes before the effect.
Visual aid... thing of the causal chain like a string. Each infinitely small slice of the string (yay, calculus) is a moment. Now, make a loop in the string, so that it crosses over itself at a single point.
Here is, in my mind, what that represents. Let us call the moment immediately prior to the crossing point for the loop moment Alpha, and the moment immediately after the crossing point moment Omega.
There is, for all intents and purposes, no "time" between Alpha and Omega. But there is a long string of events that happen between them, which no longer have any physical presence. But they're there, because what we did in-between is send a message to our past self in moment Alpha, which then led not to moment Somewhere-In-The-Loop, but to Omega, due to influence from the looped portion of the causal chain.
...that example is kind of muddled. Let's try another one.
Let's say you build a machine that allows you to travel back in time. So you hop in your machine, rev the engine, and hop back to the strange world of 1892. What just happened, in this model?
There is a snapshot of the world that exists - actually, quite a lot - that correspond to that year. So say you pick one. So now you have a snapshot that you are going to travel to.
In terms of the causal chain, you are taking the moment that corresponds to the moment you are traveling to, copying it, and positing it as the next moment in the chain. You replace the effect of your current moment with the moment you copied from earlier in the chain. The moment is then modified to account for your existence, and - aside from that - continues on as it did.
The world you came from - the "present" - still exists in the causal chain (if previous events continue to exist, anyway; I'm still fuzzy on the idea of the universe having memory of its previous states). If you want to come back to 2010, you just do the same thing - you copy-paste the moment you left from and posit it as the next moment in the causal chain.
The whole notion that you can "travel in time" is ridiculous. Time's not a thing to travel in. Time is not a thing at all. But the causal chain is a thing, and snapshots along it are things, even if they aren't physically-accessible to us at the moment. The system - the universe - remembers past states, because we can look at the present state, observe what state it leads to, make deductions about universal rules, and work backwards from present state to previous states. That information is available, and still exists, if only in awkward and rather compressed form.
The question, "If time travel is possible, where are all the time travelers?", is stupid. It is indicative of a dogmatic approach to the concept of time. Time isn't a thing, people. Time travelers don't show up now or in the past because the "past" they travel to is later in the causal chain, because they've posited earlier snapshots in the chain as the next link after theirs on the chain.
...think of it like a linked list, alright? Each node is a snapshot, which points to the next node in sequence. But you can have nodes that point to nodes that aren't in absolute sequence.
So while normally node #382093-A points to node #382093-B, you could theoretically make it instead point to node #129710-F.
Now let's envision a flag being carried along the linked list. All this flag says is, "I am the present state of the universe." It gets passed along from moment to moment, following the path set by each node's pointer.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the machinery of the universe, the universe is constantly checking various event flags on what's going on. In moment #382093-A - whose current pointer heads to #382093-B - there is a flag raised: "Time-travel shenanigans. Change this node's pointer to 129710-F, please."
Now, the universe doesn't check ahead or behind for flags, it's doing all these calculations at run-time. So even if that flag popped up hundreds of nodes ago, it doesn't care that 382093-A has it until it gets to it (which is indicated by the "I am present state" flag carried by the nodes themselves).
What this is getting at is that time travel hasn't happened yet (unless it has... but whatever). Basically, time travel has to wait for that moment to have held the "I am the present state" flag in order for it to be a thing.
To make things even more interesting - because they're obviously not interesting enough yet - I would posit that the nature of the universe is such that future events don't exist yet. As I've mentioned earlier in this post, envision the universe as a machine doing all of these calculations at run-time: it needs the data to perform the calculations to determine the contents of the next moment. The forward-pointer of the moment with the "I am the present state" flag points to null until the calculations are performed. The moment then exists, and the universe moves forward, along with the flag being flipped in the appropriate places.
However! If you "travel backwards" in time (remember the whole copy-pasta posit the past as the future thing), the "future" still exists up to the moment you traveled into the "past." Those moments are essential to your traveling - they are part of the causal chain that led to you time-traveling in the first place - and thus are still accessible. Yes, you might be in 1892, but you're in a version of 1892 that has a causal dependence on 2010. 2010 is now in the past. So is the "real" 1892, for that matter; you're just in a copy of it, which would hopefully contain you (otherwise, if you just posit the "real" 1892 as the next moment, your net effect on the causal chain is... nada).
One day, I'm going to have to do a post dealing with the construction of a reasonable temporal grammar, so that we can avoid this silly nonsense of using air-quotes for "past" and "future."
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
It's Systemic, Stupid
Tonight, we're going to talk about my arch-nemesis, David Hume. Yeah, I know he's been dead for a couple centuries. Doesn't matter. You don't have to be alive to be my arch-nemesis! I'm very open-minded.
'sides, if he were alive, I'd probably poke him in the eye with a hot french fry. Such is the fate that awaits my enemies!
So Hume was a jackass and started this big ruckus about how causality isn't actually a thing, it's just "conjunction," which basically means that while event A comes before event B, in such a way that we perceive A to cause B, it doesn't. It just happens that, every time so far that we've observed A, we then observe B. The human mind draws a correlation that isn't really there.
Obviously, I call shenanigans... which, I think, is starting to become a theme of this blog, funnily enough. I apparently enjoy calling shenanigans.
So anyway. Hume's most infamous example is that of two billiard balls, one of which strikes another. Kinetic energy, physics, all that jazz comes into play, but you cannot point to anything contained within ball A - or even ball B, or anything at all, really - that is the causality. It's just not there. There is no thing in A that makes it a causal thing.
Which is, admittedly, an interesting observation. But I don't like where Hume takes it - that causality isn't real - because that just seems bonkers.
I have tried several times, over the past few years, to debunk this particular interpretation of the world. Only one of my professors has ever given me anything close to a satisfactory answer, and that relied on the PSR - the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Which basically said that we've gathered enough empirical evidence for causality to say that causality is a thing.
Hume's response to that, of course, is that that's bogus - we can't base belief in causality on causality! It's circular logic. Which is a position I totally agree with. You cannot rely on the PSR to find causality for you. You've got to do it another way.
The answer, I believe, is twofold: one part relies on metaphysics, and the other on changing our perception of what it means for a thing to be causal.
Metaphysics, per Kant, is defined as synthetic a priori. Synthetic, because the predicate is not contained in the subject; a priori, because you don't need empirical evidence to prove that the statement is true. Metaphysics is a problematic thing in philosophy-land, because there are cogent arguments that it's not even a thing that exists. Building our story of causality off of such shaky foundations isn't very cool, but I'm down with metaphysics, so long as we're not talking noumenal worlds and whatnot.
Stuff like math is in the domain of metaphysics. 5 + 7 = 12; twelve is not in the subject, and you don't need to have seen the solution to know what it is (that is, if I threw a math problem at you that you hadn't solved before, you could solve it, because of the principles of mathematics; the subject doesn't contain the predicate). Of course, one could argue that mathematics is just a bunch of tautologies in pretty packaging (and thus analytic, not synthetic)... but I digress.
So anyway. Metaphysics is one angle, because metaphysical statements are meaningful statements (not tautologous) and don't require empirical evidence. If we can make a definition of causality that is metaphysical, we've solved our problem.
But Hume raises a good point, in that objects themselves don't have causal power. I'm down with that, but we need to explain how causality can arise, then, if not from objects.
Thus we bring forth one of the most powerful concepts ever devised: systems.
Any statement regarding causality will only make sense in regards to a given system. For instance, in the real world, crashing two hydrogen atoms together releases a boatload of energy and produces a helium atom. Fusion is a causal process.
Systems have two primary components: objects that dwell within them, and rules that govern how those objects behave and interact. We do not, for instance, crash two hydrogen atoms together and get a banana. We get a helium atom and a bucket of energy. The universe - the system this event is happening in - has rules for what happens when you perform a particular action.
The best analogy I can conceive of is that of a massive program. The universe is this monstrous construct, filled to the brim with objects of ridiculous variety and capability. The interactions of those objects are governed by a series of relatively simple rules, given the complexity available to the objects in-system. The universe is "aware" of the states of each object within it; it can - and does - track all of this information seamlessly and flawlessly.
Causality is part of the ruleset the universe works with. It is as much a facet of our existence as gravity or electromagnetism. Just as the universe ensures that the gravity rule is applied to all relevant objects and their interactions, so, too, does it ensure that causality is applied.
Because, really, all causality is, is this: okay, event A happened. What happens next? The universe draws information from the objects involved in the event, performs whatever calculations need performing, then sends this information back, and the objects are modified accordingly.
If you were able to be aware of all the factors involved in a given event, aware of all the variables, and aware of the precise ways in which those variables and factors influenced the end result, you would be able to perfectly predict the outcome, with no need for knowing what it would actually be. Chaos theory and uncertainty principle and such aside, if you had omniscence regarding all factors in an event, you would know - without a shadow of a doubt - what the outcome would be.
Why? Because all causality is is the application of the universe's rules to a situation. If a billiard ball strikes another, the other must move, due to transfer of energy, kinetics, gravity, etc etc, all those wonderful billions of various factors - both huge and tiny - that play into it. The universe says so. And if you understood all of the factors involved, you can predict with absolute perfect certainty what the next link in the causal chain will look like.
With causality, it's not enough to just look at one object, or even two, or three. You have to understand the system this event is happening in, understand all the variables involved, understand that the universe isn't just a backdrop, but an active participant in everything that occurs.
One day, I am going to for-serious prove this, rather than just rant and rave about how wrong Hume is, and it'll be awesome.
'sides, if he were alive, I'd probably poke him in the eye with a hot french fry. Such is the fate that awaits my enemies!
So Hume was a jackass and started this big ruckus about how causality isn't actually a thing, it's just "conjunction," which basically means that while event A comes before event B, in such a way that we perceive A to cause B, it doesn't. It just happens that, every time so far that we've observed A, we then observe B. The human mind draws a correlation that isn't really there.
Obviously, I call shenanigans... which, I think, is starting to become a theme of this blog, funnily enough. I apparently enjoy calling shenanigans.
So anyway. Hume's most infamous example is that of two billiard balls, one of which strikes another. Kinetic energy, physics, all that jazz comes into play, but you cannot point to anything contained within ball A - or even ball B, or anything at all, really - that is the causality. It's just not there. There is no thing in A that makes it a causal thing.
Which is, admittedly, an interesting observation. But I don't like where Hume takes it - that causality isn't real - because that just seems bonkers.
I have tried several times, over the past few years, to debunk this particular interpretation of the world. Only one of my professors has ever given me anything close to a satisfactory answer, and that relied on the PSR - the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Which basically said that we've gathered enough empirical evidence for causality to say that causality is a thing.
Hume's response to that, of course, is that that's bogus - we can't base belief in causality on causality! It's circular logic. Which is a position I totally agree with. You cannot rely on the PSR to find causality for you. You've got to do it another way.
The answer, I believe, is twofold: one part relies on metaphysics, and the other on changing our perception of what it means for a thing to be causal.
Metaphysics, per Kant, is defined as synthetic a priori. Synthetic, because the predicate is not contained in the subject; a priori, because you don't need empirical evidence to prove that the statement is true. Metaphysics is a problematic thing in philosophy-land, because there are cogent arguments that it's not even a thing that exists. Building our story of causality off of such shaky foundations isn't very cool, but I'm down with metaphysics, so long as we're not talking noumenal worlds and whatnot.
Stuff like math is in the domain of metaphysics. 5 + 7 = 12; twelve is not in the subject, and you don't need to have seen the solution to know what it is (that is, if I threw a math problem at you that you hadn't solved before, you could solve it, because of the principles of mathematics; the subject doesn't contain the predicate). Of course, one could argue that mathematics is just a bunch of tautologies in pretty packaging (and thus analytic, not synthetic)... but I digress.
So anyway. Metaphysics is one angle, because metaphysical statements are meaningful statements (not tautologous) and don't require empirical evidence. If we can make a definition of causality that is metaphysical, we've solved our problem.
But Hume raises a good point, in that objects themselves don't have causal power. I'm down with that, but we need to explain how causality can arise, then, if not from objects.
Thus we bring forth one of the most powerful concepts ever devised: systems.
Any statement regarding causality will only make sense in regards to a given system. For instance, in the real world, crashing two hydrogen atoms together releases a boatload of energy and produces a helium atom. Fusion is a causal process.
Systems have two primary components: objects that dwell within them, and rules that govern how those objects behave and interact. We do not, for instance, crash two hydrogen atoms together and get a banana. We get a helium atom and a bucket of energy. The universe - the system this event is happening in - has rules for what happens when you perform a particular action.
The best analogy I can conceive of is that of a massive program. The universe is this monstrous construct, filled to the brim with objects of ridiculous variety and capability. The interactions of those objects are governed by a series of relatively simple rules, given the complexity available to the objects in-system. The universe is "aware" of the states of each object within it; it can - and does - track all of this information seamlessly and flawlessly.
Causality is part of the ruleset the universe works with. It is as much a facet of our existence as gravity or electromagnetism. Just as the universe ensures that the gravity rule is applied to all relevant objects and their interactions, so, too, does it ensure that causality is applied.
Because, really, all causality is, is this: okay, event A happened. What happens next? The universe draws information from the objects involved in the event, performs whatever calculations need performing, then sends this information back, and the objects are modified accordingly.
If you were able to be aware of all the factors involved in a given event, aware of all the variables, and aware of the precise ways in which those variables and factors influenced the end result, you would be able to perfectly predict the outcome, with no need for knowing what it would actually be. Chaos theory and uncertainty principle and such aside, if you had omniscence regarding all factors in an event, you would know - without a shadow of a doubt - what the outcome would be.
Why? Because all causality is is the application of the universe's rules to a situation. If a billiard ball strikes another, the other must move, due to transfer of energy, kinetics, gravity, etc etc, all those wonderful billions of various factors - both huge and tiny - that play into it. The universe says so. And if you understood all of the factors involved, you can predict with absolute perfect certainty what the next link in the causal chain will look like.
With causality, it's not enough to just look at one object, or even two, or three. You have to understand the system this event is happening in, understand all the variables involved, understand that the universe isn't just a backdrop, but an active participant in everything that occurs.
One day, I am going to for-serious prove this, rather than just rant and rave about how wrong Hume is, and it'll be awesome.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Xenobiology: No, Seriously, It's Not The Same
So I was watching Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman last night, and they were talking about like alien life and all that fun jazz, something about "shadow biosphere" consisting of local flora and fauna with fundamental genetic differences, creating life in the lab, etc etc.
In all these discussions, though, these folk seem to continue to make ridiculously huge assumptions. Like the idea that because we're based on four particular nucleotides (five, really, but that's not the point yet), that all life is going to be based on those nucleotides.
...lolwut?
Amino acids are almost assuredly wide and varied in number; the possible combinations that could be used in genetics is probably ridiculously staggering. Not only that! - but we can clearly see that there are alternatives to our standard nucleotides, since freaking RNA uses a replacement for thymine (namely uracil). Why the hell would we assume that alien genetics would see the same freaking materials we use?
And our assumptions get worse! We assume all kinds of crazy things about DNA to be held true across all instances of life. Double-helix, four nucleotides, with sugar/phosphate stuff providing the ladder. But hey, chemically, elements in the same family (or column or whatever the hell) tend to have similar properties. Bonding issues with electron shells and whatnot aside, you could probably reasonably replace the phosphorous in DNA with, say, arsenic! Or antimony! Or bismuth! Or freaking nitrogen!
Put these two concepts together. Envision, if you can, alien genetic structures that have six nucleotides with sugar/antimony ladders for their "DNA." Increased numbers of nucleotides give rise to increased possible combinations, leading to greater potential genetic diversity. I don't know what the antimony instead of phosphate does, but I'm sure it has some effect (I'm not a geneticist, for serious, nor a chemist).
But the important thing is the idea that the number of nucleotides could be different, and even the specific nucleotides could vary. Our genetic language has ACGT and sometimes U; for an alien species, they could be doing CDIGHL and sometimes RT (just making up letters, here).
Even more important than the specifics of alien genetics is the idea that xenobiology has the potentially to be pants-crappingly more complicated than modern science seems willing to admit or discuss. We have to use life on earth as a starting point, because that's all we have, but when it comes down to it, there is no way to tell just how freaking different life elsewhere can or will be.
Even the idea that alien life will use a DNA-analogue seems presumptuous. Our understanding of life is such that amino acids and such seem to be a necessary component, but we have no basis for that assumption other than that amino acids are a sufficient but unnecessary component. The real winner is finding the necessary but insufficient component, the piece that is the same across all life, regardless of the components it is made from. I don't think we can do that yet, given our limited access to life as it exists in the universe, but that's what we need to be looking for.
...okay, so after a short look on Wikipedia, apparently there is a divison between astrobiology and xenobiology, namely that astrobiology is looking for earth-like life elsewhere, while xenobiology is the reasonable one that is all "no, seriously guys, it could be anything." But still, that just means that astrobiologists are silly. Looking for earth-like life - and finding it - would be cool, but the chances of that happening seem... pretty small, to me.
In all these discussions, though, these folk seem to continue to make ridiculously huge assumptions. Like the idea that because we're based on four particular nucleotides (five, really, but that's not the point yet), that all life is going to be based on those nucleotides.
...lolwut?
Amino acids are almost assuredly wide and varied in number; the possible combinations that could be used in genetics is probably ridiculously staggering. Not only that! - but we can clearly see that there are alternatives to our standard nucleotides, since freaking RNA uses a replacement for thymine (namely uracil). Why the hell would we assume that alien genetics would see the same freaking materials we use?
And our assumptions get worse! We assume all kinds of crazy things about DNA to be held true across all instances of life. Double-helix, four nucleotides, with sugar/phosphate stuff providing the ladder. But hey, chemically, elements in the same family (or column or whatever the hell) tend to have similar properties. Bonding issues with electron shells and whatnot aside, you could probably reasonably replace the phosphorous in DNA with, say, arsenic! Or antimony! Or bismuth! Or freaking nitrogen!
Put these two concepts together. Envision, if you can, alien genetic structures that have six nucleotides with sugar/antimony ladders for their "DNA." Increased numbers of nucleotides give rise to increased possible combinations, leading to greater potential genetic diversity. I don't know what the antimony instead of phosphate does, but I'm sure it has some effect (I'm not a geneticist, for serious, nor a chemist).
But the important thing is the idea that the number of nucleotides could be different, and even the specific nucleotides could vary. Our genetic language has ACGT and sometimes U; for an alien species, they could be doing CDIGHL and sometimes RT (just making up letters, here).
Even more important than the specifics of alien genetics is the idea that xenobiology has the potentially to be pants-crappingly more complicated than modern science seems willing to admit or discuss. We have to use life on earth as a starting point, because that's all we have, but when it comes down to it, there is no way to tell just how freaking different life elsewhere can or will be.
Even the idea that alien life will use a DNA-analogue seems presumptuous. Our understanding of life is such that amino acids and such seem to be a necessary component, but we have no basis for that assumption other than that amino acids are a sufficient but unnecessary component. The real winner is finding the necessary but insufficient component, the piece that is the same across all life, regardless of the components it is made from. I don't think we can do that yet, given our limited access to life as it exists in the universe, but that's what we need to be looking for.
...okay, so after a short look on Wikipedia, apparently there is a divison between astrobiology and xenobiology, namely that astrobiology is looking for earth-like life elsewhere, while xenobiology is the reasonable one that is all "no, seriously guys, it could be anything." But still, that just means that astrobiologists are silly. Looking for earth-like life - and finding it - would be cool, but the chances of that happening seem... pretty small, to me.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Antimatter Peek-a-boo
So I was at work the other day, contemplating some things I'd heard while watching that crazy-awesome science show with Morgan Freeman, and had a realization.
Big Bang, right? But theoretically, that event should've made an equal amount of matter and antimatter. We're all, "lolwut, where's teh antimatterz?", and the universe just kinda shrugs at us and says, "Figure it out, silly primates."
So we have this conundrum, which we gleefully ignore because we don't really have the tools yet to answer it.
Then we have the cosmological cons- I mean, dark matter/energy (did you see what I did there?). This stuff that is pushing the universe apart to counteract the power of gravity, with one little problem - we can't freakin' see it.
And so I say... oh really. Isn't that interesting?
Light, right? Photons and stuff. Electrons shifting through the various shells release very specific amounts of electromagnetic radiation, sometimes visible to us, in discrete energy amounts. Which could lead to a fun discussion of quantum mechanics, but not today. Okay, so electrons bouncing around causes light, which is visible to us. Yay.
Antimatter is, when it comes down to it, "just like matter," just with reversed polarity (somewhere, LeVar Burton screams for the pain to stop) - by which I mean, you've got a probability cloud of positrons orbiting around a nucleus of... antiprotons? Man, somebody's gotta come up with a better name. Right, so anyway, the stuff is basically the same, just with the signs reversed.
Except then we get into an interesting discussion regarding the interaction between matter and energy. E = MC^2, or so goes the simplified version of Einstein's most well-known theory. Energy and matter are interchangeable. Which would seem to indicate that, perhaps, just maybe, antimatter has its own thing going on - anti-energy.
But that's kind of tangential, and is getting a bit ahead of ourselves (that concept plays into how I envision an Alcubierre drive functioning, but I'll save that for later).
The important thing is antimatter chemical reactions and such. In normal matter, when electrons shift down-shell, they release energy, some of which we can see as light (which we discussed earlier). However, we have no idea (I don't think) of what happens when antimatter undergoes similar effects - do positrons shift up-shell when electrons would down-shift? Do they down-shift, too, but release anti-energy?
I propose that, regardless of what it's doing or how it's doing it, antimatter is effectively invisible to the human eye. By virtue of how light works, it seems sensible to me to say that such a thing as an anti-photon could exist, and that - if antimatter does, in fact, give off energy in any reasonable fashion - it would be such a particle/wave, and due to its very nature, humans would be unable to see it because the act of such vision would cause a matter/antimatter collision.
We haven't dealt with antimatter on a large enough scale to determine whether it has gravity or antigravity, but I would be willing to bet, at this point, that it probably has anti-gravitic properties (or at least appears to).
The point of this ridiculous diatribe in which I almost assuredly displayed an alarming misunderstanding of physics? I think that it would be reasonable to say that this dark matter/energy stuff physics is talking about nowadays is, in fact, all the antimatter that mysteriously went missing.
Yep. Seems pretty sensible to me.
Big Bang, right? But theoretically, that event should've made an equal amount of matter and antimatter. We're all, "lolwut, where's teh antimatterz?", and the universe just kinda shrugs at us and says, "Figure it out, silly primates."
So we have this conundrum, which we gleefully ignore because we don't really have the tools yet to answer it.
Then we have the cosmological cons- I mean, dark matter/energy (did you see what I did there?). This stuff that is pushing the universe apart to counteract the power of gravity, with one little problem - we can't freakin' see it.
And so I say... oh really. Isn't that interesting?
Light, right? Photons and stuff. Electrons shifting through the various shells release very specific amounts of electromagnetic radiation, sometimes visible to us, in discrete energy amounts. Which could lead to a fun discussion of quantum mechanics, but not today. Okay, so electrons bouncing around causes light, which is visible to us. Yay.
Antimatter is, when it comes down to it, "just like matter," just with reversed polarity (somewhere, LeVar Burton screams for the pain to stop) - by which I mean, you've got a probability cloud of positrons orbiting around a nucleus of... antiprotons? Man, somebody's gotta come up with a better name. Right, so anyway, the stuff is basically the same, just with the signs reversed.
Except then we get into an interesting discussion regarding the interaction between matter and energy. E = MC^2, or so goes the simplified version of Einstein's most well-known theory. Energy and matter are interchangeable. Which would seem to indicate that, perhaps, just maybe, antimatter has its own thing going on - anti-energy.
But that's kind of tangential, and is getting a bit ahead of ourselves (that concept plays into how I envision an Alcubierre drive functioning, but I'll save that for later).
The important thing is antimatter chemical reactions and such. In normal matter, when electrons shift down-shell, they release energy, some of which we can see as light (which we discussed earlier). However, we have no idea (I don't think) of what happens when antimatter undergoes similar effects - do positrons shift up-shell when electrons would down-shift? Do they down-shift, too, but release anti-energy?
I propose that, regardless of what it's doing or how it's doing it, antimatter is effectively invisible to the human eye. By virtue of how light works, it seems sensible to me to say that such a thing as an anti-photon could exist, and that - if antimatter does, in fact, give off energy in any reasonable fashion - it would be such a particle/wave, and due to its very nature, humans would be unable to see it because the act of such vision would cause a matter/antimatter collision.
We haven't dealt with antimatter on a large enough scale to determine whether it has gravity or antigravity, but I would be willing to bet, at this point, that it probably has anti-gravitic properties (or at least appears to).
The point of this ridiculous diatribe in which I almost assuredly displayed an alarming misunderstanding of physics? I think that it would be reasonable to say that this dark matter/energy stuff physics is talking about nowadays is, in fact, all the antimatter that mysteriously went missing.
Yep. Seems pretty sensible to me.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Squares and Colors
Let's talk game balance.
In order to really have this discussion, we need a reasonable lexicon, an understanding of the history of tabletop gaming, and a firm grasp of design theory.
So let's talk lexicon, right? First step in attempting to resolve a perceived issue is to break things down to bare principles, build a lexicon for all of those parts, and then start questioning assumptions.
So what the hell is balance, anyway? Why don't we fiddle with a metaphor for a bit, and see where that gets us.
Let's say that we have two boards for two games. One board is alternating white-and-black, with each player one of the colors. Both colors have an identical piece on the board, with the exact same capabilities - say movement and the ability to capture the other piece.
Pretty damn boring.
Let's say the other board is all kinds of crazy. The board itself is a kaleidoscope of colors, with no clear rhyme or reason to the pattern - some spaces on the board are tiny and misshapen triangles, while others are huge and pentagonal-shaped. Each player has a collection of pieces of an assortment of colors, labeled in some manner so that each player knows which piece is theirs. All of the pieces are unique and have weird capabilities, like being able to nuke all pieces on the same color space by self-sacrifice, crazy movement capability, whatever. Each player has an essentially random number of pieces, with random capabilities.
Interesting... I don't think the second board (let's call it "Color Game", or CG) is sufficiently antithetical to the first one (let's call that one "Square Game", or SG). Let's see if we can induce such a status in CG.
Rather than a random number of pieces with random capabilities, let us say that each player's allotment of pieces is determined by the number of articles of clothing the player is wearing. The relative power of each piece is determined by the article of clothing that birthed it - so a really big, poofy, tye-dyed dress would give you some ridiculous monster of a piece, while a plain white sock gets you a nigh-useless pawn-equivalent.
Let's get even crazier - let's say that, in particular, women's garments are always significantly better than normal pieces (the game designer says that this is to encourage women to play the game, of course). So dresses, brassieres, and say high-heel shoes are just plain better piece-makers than t-shirts or jeans.
Then let's say that certain game elements are decided by other weird things. Who goes first is determined by which player is the most east-facing (rather than a coin flip, as in SG). If some of the board has different illumination than other parts (say a nearby window allows sunshine on a quarter of the board), pieces in shade get a strength boost.
Okay, enough crazy, I think. Let's contemplate.
Okay. Let's say we have two groups of players - let's call them "hardcore" and "casual." The hardcore player will do whatever he can to optimize the situation to his advantage; the casual player just wants to play.
In Square Game, the casual and hardcore players are even. There are no rules minutae to manipulate, no crazy circumstances to exploit. It's just the board, your piece, and your opponent's. It is a level playing field - raw skill determines the outcome.
In Color Game, the hardcore player will do whatever it takes to win. Even if he's a guy, he'll wear high-heels and ensure that the game is played by an east-facing window, to ensure he goes first and to ensure some amount of sunlight - but not too much, of course: the board will be positioned such that, when the game is played, the hardcore player has the sunlit-advantage.
In both games, the casual player just sits down at the table and does their best.
SG-players will complain that CG is ridiculously unbalanced and broken. Too many variables to manipulate, too many circumstantial modifiers. SG is clean, clear-cut; easy to learn, difficult to master, they might say.
Meanwhile, CG-players will mock SG for its simplicity, for its lack of depth and vision, for the inability of players to learn its ins and outs and to truly master the game.
Hardcore players of both games will find ways to mock the casual players of their game. In SG, there will be a commonly-accepted and expected opening gambit, to which a retort will be found, and so on and so forth; deviating from the expected opening moveset will open oneself up to mockery and "learn to play noob." In CG, casual players will be exploited for their unwillingness to cross-dress, their lack of concern for cardinal directions, and their inattention to the state of the sun at the time the game is played.
SG is nothing but balance. CG is anything but.
This warrants further contemplation, I think. I'll work on figuring out where this example is going.
In order to really have this discussion, we need a reasonable lexicon, an understanding of the history of tabletop gaming, and a firm grasp of design theory.
So let's talk lexicon, right? First step in attempting to resolve a perceived issue is to break things down to bare principles, build a lexicon for all of those parts, and then start questioning assumptions.
So what the hell is balance, anyway? Why don't we fiddle with a metaphor for a bit, and see where that gets us.
Let's say that we have two boards for two games. One board is alternating white-and-black, with each player one of the colors. Both colors have an identical piece on the board, with the exact same capabilities - say movement and the ability to capture the other piece.
Pretty damn boring.
Let's say the other board is all kinds of crazy. The board itself is a kaleidoscope of colors, with no clear rhyme or reason to the pattern - some spaces on the board are tiny and misshapen triangles, while others are huge and pentagonal-shaped. Each player has a collection of pieces of an assortment of colors, labeled in some manner so that each player knows which piece is theirs. All of the pieces are unique and have weird capabilities, like being able to nuke all pieces on the same color space by self-sacrifice, crazy movement capability, whatever. Each player has an essentially random number of pieces, with random capabilities.
Interesting... I don't think the second board (let's call it "Color Game", or CG) is sufficiently antithetical to the first one (let's call that one "Square Game", or SG). Let's see if we can induce such a status in CG.
Rather than a random number of pieces with random capabilities, let us say that each player's allotment of pieces is determined by the number of articles of clothing the player is wearing. The relative power of each piece is determined by the article of clothing that birthed it - so a really big, poofy, tye-dyed dress would give you some ridiculous monster of a piece, while a plain white sock gets you a nigh-useless pawn-equivalent.
Let's get even crazier - let's say that, in particular, women's garments are always significantly better than normal pieces (the game designer says that this is to encourage women to play the game, of course). So dresses, brassieres, and say high-heel shoes are just plain better piece-makers than t-shirts or jeans.
Then let's say that certain game elements are decided by other weird things. Who goes first is determined by which player is the most east-facing (rather than a coin flip, as in SG). If some of the board has different illumination than other parts (say a nearby window allows sunshine on a quarter of the board), pieces in shade get a strength boost.
Okay, enough crazy, I think. Let's contemplate.
Okay. Let's say we have two groups of players - let's call them "hardcore" and "casual." The hardcore player will do whatever he can to optimize the situation to his advantage; the casual player just wants to play.
In Square Game, the casual and hardcore players are even. There are no rules minutae to manipulate, no crazy circumstances to exploit. It's just the board, your piece, and your opponent's. It is a level playing field - raw skill determines the outcome.
In Color Game, the hardcore player will do whatever it takes to win. Even if he's a guy, he'll wear high-heels and ensure that the game is played by an east-facing window, to ensure he goes first and to ensure some amount of sunlight - but not too much, of course: the board will be positioned such that, when the game is played, the hardcore player has the sunlit-advantage.
In both games, the casual player just sits down at the table and does their best.
SG-players will complain that CG is ridiculously unbalanced and broken. Too many variables to manipulate, too many circumstantial modifiers. SG is clean, clear-cut; easy to learn, difficult to master, they might say.
Meanwhile, CG-players will mock SG for its simplicity, for its lack of depth and vision, for the inability of players to learn its ins and outs and to truly master the game.
Hardcore players of both games will find ways to mock the casual players of their game. In SG, there will be a commonly-accepted and expected opening gambit, to which a retort will be found, and so on and so forth; deviating from the expected opening moveset will open oneself up to mockery and "learn to play noob." In CG, casual players will be exploited for their unwillingness to cross-dress, their lack of concern for cardinal directions, and their inattention to the state of the sun at the time the game is played.
SG is nothing but balance. CG is anything but.
This warrants further contemplation, I think. I'll work on figuring out where this example is going.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Grey Earth
So, here's a thought. Grey goo, right? Nanobots with a single tiny error in their code/instructions can totally wreak havoc on the local biosphere, basically ending life as we know it in a matter of days, if that.
Think about that for a second. Nanotech gives us access to machinery that can self-replicate at such a speed as to wipe out the entirety of the biomass of the earth in the geological blink of an eye. That's pretty fascinating.
What else is fascinating is when you take a look at that and say, "huh, I wonder what you could do with that." My thought, upon pondering it further, was - why the hell not apply that principle to other planets?
Boom. Terraforming.
Produce a nanobot that converts whatever the hell materials are present on the planet you want to terraform into materials and elements necessary for Earth-based life. Basically, recreate early-Earth lifeforms, but do so with technology that can replicate faster than you can blink.
The best part is that you could almost assuredly produce nanobots capable of predetermined evolution: oh, hey, oxygen levels are at human optimum, but there's no ozone layer? Awesome, 20% of nanobot population, change gears and "evolve" into ozone-respiration mode. Too much nitrogen around? 10% of pop, go into nitrogen-consumption mode. Give the nanobots optimal levels for various elements, equip them with the necessary information/technology to modify their operations so that they can adapt themselves to the local environment, and bam - almost-instant Earth-like planet.
Hell, with sufficient technology, you could possibly even get these things to modify tectonics, produce oceans, induce magnetic fields in celestial bodies with appropriate cores. It might take awhile, but given the premise of the "grey goo" problem, it would take... what, weeks? Months? Hell, years, if we're still pre-FTL at that point? What does it matter, when it takes us longer than that to get to there?
There are downsides to this approach, of course. Any local flora and fauna would almost certainly be destroyed in the process, much as the "grey goo" problem anticipates nanobots basically eating the Earth in a matter of hours. But if we were to hit, say, Mars with this?...
There's probably a lot more calculation that would have to go into it that I'm glossing over. Taking Mars as an example, you'd have to take into account the polar ice caps, figure out how the nanobots would deal with that, and incorporate it into the information you feed them. I'm not sure if we're at the point, yet, where we could even reasonably anticipate what would happen there. Not only that, but the nanobots would have to be designed in such a way as to give off waste products - in this case, the elements we want present, extracted/refined from the elements being worked with on-site.
But to me, these sound like reasonable hurdles, if we were really serious about the idea. It seems to me that nanobot-based terraforming would be an elegant solution to the whole terraforming problem. No human intervention required, just figure out the data, and let the bots loose.
So yeah, that's my fun thought for the day.
Think about that for a second. Nanotech gives us access to machinery that can self-replicate at such a speed as to wipe out the entirety of the biomass of the earth in the geological blink of an eye. That's pretty fascinating.
What else is fascinating is when you take a look at that and say, "huh, I wonder what you could do with that." My thought, upon pondering it further, was - why the hell not apply that principle to other planets?
Boom. Terraforming.
Produce a nanobot that converts whatever the hell materials are present on the planet you want to terraform into materials and elements necessary for Earth-based life. Basically, recreate early-Earth lifeforms, but do so with technology that can replicate faster than you can blink.
The best part is that you could almost assuredly produce nanobots capable of predetermined evolution: oh, hey, oxygen levels are at human optimum, but there's no ozone layer? Awesome, 20% of nanobot population, change gears and "evolve" into ozone-respiration mode. Too much nitrogen around? 10% of pop, go into nitrogen-consumption mode. Give the nanobots optimal levels for various elements, equip them with the necessary information/technology to modify their operations so that they can adapt themselves to the local environment, and bam - almost-instant Earth-like planet.
Hell, with sufficient technology, you could possibly even get these things to modify tectonics, produce oceans, induce magnetic fields in celestial bodies with appropriate cores. It might take awhile, but given the premise of the "grey goo" problem, it would take... what, weeks? Months? Hell, years, if we're still pre-FTL at that point? What does it matter, when it takes us longer than that to get to there?
There are downsides to this approach, of course. Any local flora and fauna would almost certainly be destroyed in the process, much as the "grey goo" problem anticipates nanobots basically eating the Earth in a matter of hours. But if we were to hit, say, Mars with this?...
There's probably a lot more calculation that would have to go into it that I'm glossing over. Taking Mars as an example, you'd have to take into account the polar ice caps, figure out how the nanobots would deal with that, and incorporate it into the information you feed them. I'm not sure if we're at the point, yet, where we could even reasonably anticipate what would happen there. Not only that, but the nanobots would have to be designed in such a way as to give off waste products - in this case, the elements we want present, extracted/refined from the elements being worked with on-site.
But to me, these sound like reasonable hurdles, if we were really serious about the idea. It seems to me that nanobot-based terraforming would be an elegant solution to the whole terraforming problem. No human intervention required, just figure out the data, and let the bots loose.
So yeah, that's my fun thought for the day.
Introduction
There comes a time when an individual feels the need to differentiate between his written works.
Such a time has come, for me.
On the Beach of Dreams will continue as my online journal, as it has now for many years. Likewise, The Dream that Time Dreams will be where I post my short stories, poetry, and other such literary stuff.
In the Fields of Time serves a wholly different function. There are times when I feel a thought, and expound upon it in my mind, but have no reasonable outlet for it - while I could write about it in my journals, such a change of pace seems jarring to me. Better instead that such thoughts are separate, kept elsewhere; in this way, the proper theme of my primary blog can be kept, while I can still air out other ideas that don't fit it.
My interests are many and varied. I will possibly wind up discussing things covering a wide variety of fields. Perhaps over time, a focus will appear - and perhaps that may be a subconscious purpose to this new blog: a way to discover what seems to grab my attention consistently. Perhaps in this way I can better find a direction for myself.
Hopefully that makes clear the purpose of this particular blog.
Such a time has come, for me.
On the Beach of Dreams will continue as my online journal, as it has now for many years. Likewise, The Dream that Time Dreams will be where I post my short stories, poetry, and other such literary stuff.
In the Fields of Time serves a wholly different function. There are times when I feel a thought, and expound upon it in my mind, but have no reasonable outlet for it - while I could write about it in my journals, such a change of pace seems jarring to me. Better instead that such thoughts are separate, kept elsewhere; in this way, the proper theme of my primary blog can be kept, while I can still air out other ideas that don't fit it.
My interests are many and varied. I will possibly wind up discussing things covering a wide variety of fields. Perhaps over time, a focus will appear - and perhaps that may be a subconscious purpose to this new blog: a way to discover what seems to grab my attention consistently. Perhaps in this way I can better find a direction for myself.
Hopefully that makes clear the purpose of this particular blog.
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