I like television. I like to be able to watch many channels. I do not like it when my television does not work. We have Dish Network satellite television service. Recently our Dish Network box began to have some problems. I think there might be a cat in our Dish Network box. Upon calling Dish Network on Wednesday we were told the replacement box would not arrive until the following Monday. Thus began my thought experiments concerning the Dish Network box.

The problem with the box was that it would randomly decide to turn itself off and would then become locked in a reboot cycle loop whose end counter was a random number. The box might come back on after a single reboot or it might reboot for several hours without coming back to normal function. Unplugging the box for a while sometimes helped. As time went on, however, the trick of unplugging it and then plugging it back in seemed to become less effective.

With mounting frustration due to the inability to entertain our children with the slew of semi-educational programming they had come to love so much my wife made the comment on Sunday night that “it only works when we’re not looking at it.” Upon hearing this the first thought that came to my mind was that our Dish Network box behaved like the Invisible Boy’s powers in the movie “Mystery Men.” It’s a great movie. If you’ve never seen it I suggest you watch it. If you have watched it I suggest you watch it again.

The Invisible Boy’s power was, quite obviously, to turn invisible. You could have figured that one out for yourself. What you don’t know unless you’ve seen the movie is he can only become invisible when no one is watching him and can only stay invisible as long as no one looks at him. It sounds a little strange and useless at first but he puts it to very good effect in the movie. I’ve always wondered on what principle a power like that would work. What always came to mind was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and ­Schrödinger’s Cat-In-A-Box thought experiment. For those of you not in “the know” let me try to break it down as I understand it.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we change the outcome of an experiment simply by our observation of that experiment. You can kind of think of it as imagining that the outcome of a coin toss could have been vastly different if you had not actually watched the coin get tossed or observed how it landed. Well, as vastly different an outcome as a coin toss can get since it realistically can only come out one of two ways. Let’s not even get into a discussion concerning whether or not you can be sure the coin even landed if you did not observe it in any fashion.  It’s not a tree.  This isn’t a forest.  You get the picture.

­Schrödinger’s Cat is the famous thought experiment wherein you imagine a cat in a sealed box. Inside the box is also a poison that has a 50% chance of being released within an hour. Without being able to observe the cat you don’t know for certain whether or not the cat is still alive after the hour has ended. Essentially you have to conclude that the cat is both dead and alive until you open the box and complete the observation. Once you’ve opened the box and have seen what state the cat is in you have eliminated the opposite state. By simply observing the cat you have affected the outcome. Now back to the Invisible Boy.

Since he can only turn invisible when no one is watching him it seems that the Boy’s powers also rely on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. He can remain invisible if he wishes until someone observes him, at which time they affect the outcome and he becomes visible again.Triggered by my wife’s statement, I believe our Dish Network box is also operating on this Principle.

You can plug it in and listen to the fan start to run. It has power and you know it could be operating normally but until you turn on the television and observe it’s state the box is operating under an Uncertainty duality. It can be considered to be both operating normally and malfunctioning at the same time.  Unfortunately, as I stated earlier, the outcome of our observances has more and more frequently revealed that the box is not operating normally. Maybe if we would stop observing it the box would start behaving normally again.  That just blew your mind like it did mine, didn’t it?

I could blame Dish Network for giving us inferior equipment and not being able to send a replacement in a timely manner but I think I’ll go ahead and blame a couple of physicists who have been dead for around 40 years.

Finally, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger are probably spinning in their graves due to my complete butchery of some of their greatest works. Of course, we’ll never actually know whether or not they are spinning unless we dig them up at which point we will have observed them and affected the outcome of this little thought experiment. I prefer to think of them as simultaneously existing in both the spinning and non-spinning states.

Who needs a cat when you’ve got dead physicists?

“Mommy? If you attached our car to Daddy’s truck and attached Daddy’s truck to our house and attached our house to grandma’s house and attached grandma’s house to Jupiter and attached Jupiter to Saturn and attached Saturn to the sun…I love you bigger than that.”

Damn. That’s a lot of love, boy.

I’ll wait until you’re bigger to tell you I love you infinity plus one.

Also, the Sun so completely dwarfs all those other objects that it’s silly to waste all the breath attaching them when you could shortcut with “I love you bigger than the Sun” and be done with it. But I won’t tell you that, because who doesn’t need that tiny, wee bit of bonus, Jupiter-sized love? Great Atlas-buoyed heavens, I know I do.

NASA’s Education Materials Finder is a tool to help teachers find NASA resources (since there are A LOT!). The Resource Finder lets the user search by grade range, types of resources, and content area.

I also love that it shows you the number of resources available. For example, when I searched for K-4/Video Learning Clips/life science there are 36 materials found- very slick!

This is a great tools since the volume of resources on NASA.gov is almost overwhelming.

While at Skepchicamp 2010, one of the woo-busting physics theory demonstrations I performed was that of walking barefoot on broken glass shards.  Here’s a close up of the action…

This is a standard carnival trick, also used by various New Age gurus to display their supposed mystical, paranormal, or supernatural powers to their gullible followers.  Sorry folks, no woo is required to explain this (pardon the pun) impressive feat.  This is some video shot by a few of my students earlier this year when we were discussing the physics theory of pressure…

It can all be explained with a simple understanding of basic physics theory: by walking flat-footed on the shards, I spread my body weight evenly over the entire surface area of my feet, which means that I’m touching a large number of glass shards at once. Thus, since my weight is distributed over so many points, the pressure (force per unit area) at any one of those points is so small that it isn’t enough to stab or cut through my skin.

Thus, through a simple application of Occam’s Razor, we can conclude that nothing paranormal is required to explain what’s going on, just good physics theory!

Last night’s sleep was full of even more crazy dreams.  Normally I wouldn’t fuss so much about posting these, but for me it’s so unusual to actually remember my dreams that to have 3 days in a row of near lucidity is something else.  At one point in one of the dreams I remembered that I couldn’t do something because of real-world dinner plans I have for today.  Strangely, that didn’t tip me off enough that I was dreaming.

I have a suspicion that since my mate and I have had sore throats the past couple nights, and since I have been aching from busy nights at work, if I’m not reaching the deep sleep state as I normally do.  Maybe that’s why I’ve been remembering my dreams more.  Since I have a couple days off, let’s see if things change.

In other news, I had forgotten just how short Chapter 3 of ITOW is.  It basically deals with how science has been meeting magick as conventional expectations in physics theory failed and scientific theories have been gradually getting more “out there.”  Seeing as this is the case I’ll just keep practicing the exercises and move on to Chapter 4.

Scientists in charge of the world’s largest physics theory experiment are dialing it down to half-power for the next two years, then shutting it off altogether for a whole year after that to upgrade the copper stabilizers. Otherwise, they fear it will tear itself apart.

CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, had to shut off the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva just days after its activation in September 2008 due to an electrical fault that caused a gas leak. It didn’t get back up and running properly for more than a year.

The goal of the LHC project is to “cross the streams” of subatomic protons to break open the building blocks of matter and re-create the conditions that existed right after the Big Bang. Some feared its operation would create a dark hole that would devour the Earth. But as we can see, the men in lab coats know exactly wheat they’re doing. Trust.

Source: The U.K. Independent, via io9

Pumpkin Pi

Since it is March 14 (3-14), it is officially Pi Day, the day nerds, geeks, and dorks (like me, right, Patience?) celebrate the awesomeness of Pi:

3.
1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510
5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679
8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128
4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196
4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091
4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273
7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436
7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094
3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548
0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912
9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798
6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132
0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872
1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235
4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960
5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859
5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881
7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303
5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 8823537875 9375195778
1857780532 1712268066 1300192787 6611195909 2164201989

Pi to 1000 decimal places, courtesy of the University of Exeter School of physics theory.  (Yes, they had it to more than that, but did you really read it or just look at how long it was?)

I’m sure my friend Katherine will tell me what exactly you cannot do without pi, but I do know that I will make a pie this afternoon/evening to celebrate!

Just to pick the flavor now…

Shame on you all my physicist friends who read my last post and didn’t reply! I was expected to have at least a classic answer (which is really easy to provide one) and then go through it to generalise to quantum field theory and have a lot of more fun!  However, having no comments for that post after two weeks means the visitors are not interested in the Sina’s Award! Anyway, I’m not gonna give up! This post will, probably, be the most challenging one I’ve ever published on science. However, due to the insignificant number of visitors, I’m publishing this entry only for my own future reference. Therefore, if it is read by anyone except me myself, you might find it a little bit unclear, since I’m not planning to explain every detail for myself!

Roger Penrose, in his book, The Road to Reality, has a chapter under the title “Gravity’s role in quantum state reduction”. He argues why he believes that the quantum mechanics we already have is just an approximation of the real behaviour of the nature. He brings a lot of interesting arguments to show that there are some clues to think that a more precise quantum mechanics should be non-linear! I absolutely recommend anyone to go through this chapter.

On the other hand, relatively long time ago, I’d just told you about an awesome paper by Abrams and Lloyd which generally speaking says if quantum mechanics was non-linear then we could, in principle, have computers which are capable of solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time!!!

For the non-computer scientists who read this post, if there are any, I should emphasise that a world in which NP-complete problems are solvable polynomially would be a ridiculously boring place! In fact there wouldn’t be any room for human being! “Artificial intelligence software would be perfect since they could easily do exhaustive searches in a large tree of possibilities.” “Whenever a scientist has some experimental data, the computers would be able to automatically obtain the simplest theory (under any reasonable measure of simplicity we choose) that best explains these measurements. ” Therefore, all the scientists could be replaced by computers. “There would be no privacy in the digital domain. Any encryption scheme would have a trivial decoding algorithm. There would be no digital cash and no SSL, RSA, or PGP.”† I believe you can even find more ridiculous consequences of being in a world in which there exists a creature that we have absolutely no significance over it!

Although this is very sad, but it could be another clue to think quantum mechanics should be non-linear! Think of the problem of natural computation. I think all I want to say is in the title of my weblog! Just “let the nature calculate for you”! Imagine solving a dynamics problem in classical scale. Say calculating the maximum height of an apple thrown in (+ve) y direction!  One way is just writing down the equations and solve them to find the maximum height and the other is to actually throw an apply and see how high it goes. The second is an example of natural computation. You use the nature to find a value for you. Feynman in his famous paper (1982) questioned that we cannot (efficiently) simulate the quantum world on a classical computer. Because nature behaves quantumly in its roots. I believe the same argument (and its reversed version) is hold for the ultimate theory of everything! If the NP-complete problems are solvable polynomially using a ‘non-linear quantum mechanical computer’, maybe it is because nature behaves non-linearly in the quantum scales! As I mentioned before, there are even more non-computer science clues to think about a non-linear quantum mechanics seriously! With a non-linear quantum mechanics even general theory of relativity would be compatible with this new paradigm! Therefore, maybe this time we can really have a theory of everything! And as I mentioned before it would be the end of world for humans!

———————————–

† One of the best texts on complexity theory could be found here. I’ve copied a few sentences from that.

Static electricity is an electrifying experience! Sometimes, when you come in contact with a piece of metal, you can receive an electric shock, particularly if you are wearing rubber shoes (like sneakers or runners). Why?

Well, the reason is that you are storing an unbalanced charge. If you remember from our previous studies of the atom, most atoms have no net charge; they have the same number of protons as electrons, and thus have an overall charge of zero. How do you get an excess of charge? Well, that means you have more or less electrons than protons (you can’t gain more protons without changing your nuclear structure, so you must gain or lose electrons.)  and thus you are charge imbalanced. As soon as you touch (or even come close enough that a spark can jump to) another object, the charge will move so that it is more evenly balanced across the two objects. This is called static discharge and can be quite painful! In fact, the average human body can store approximately 3.5 kV of static charge!

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