Perplexities

Her breakfasts were known to be splendid, and prepared with enough pepper to make me cry. At the first fiery bite I said, bathed in tears: Tonight I won’t need a full moon for my asshole to burn. Don’t complain she said. If it burns, it’s because you still have one, thanks be to God.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Cosmology

When the Hubble variable was discovered in 1926 it had a value of 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec. “During the past halfcentury this variable has gradually declined to 50.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec. The radius of the universe is inversely proportional to the magnitude of this variable. Accordingly the universe is expanding by a factor of 100 per century. Dividing this factor into the above ratio discloses that the expansion began here on earth in 1,015 AD. during the dark ages” Halton Arp (Extragalactic Astronomy, Science, 17 Dec. 1971, vol. 174, p. 1189).

What Halton Arp is referring to, is the “horizon problem.” It goes like this: no matter where you look in the universe, the background temperature is pretty much the same in every direction, but if we go by the assumption that a “big bang” actually had happened, then not enough time has elapsed since this event for radiation to zip across the universe and even out on the same universal level of temperature. (Every theory that stipulates an act of creation in more recent Arial is facing the same problem. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) calculated that the Universe had originated, according to the books of Moses, at 3877 BC., on a Sunday the 27th of April at 11.00 am. local central European time. Well, he had little choice, he was expected to be orthodox in his views. His aged mother had been indicted by the inquisition. Defending a “witch” could easily have exposed him for prosecution himself. Eventually he saved his mother from the stake, but not from being tortured.)

It sounds innocuous and is barely mentioned among the pundits, but so far, every attempt to explain away the horizon problem has landed us in one or other violation of natural laws if we don't make allowances for a much more ancient age of the Universe. In fact why should there be a beginning at all?

Well for starters there are Clausius' two laws of thermodynamics. In other words, time has a direction, it is apparently a one way lane from the past to the future. "The energy of the Universe is constant and the entropy of the Universe moves towards a maximum" (Rudolf Clausius 1822-1888). This maximum will be a condition of near to absolute zero degree (Kelvin) everywhere in the Universe, when all matter and all energy has turned to microwaves. On the other hand there is no cosmological model conceivable without this radiation humming in the background.

Entropy is quantified in units of energy per units of temperature. The reader may find it debatable whether reading and remembering this essay will really contribute something to a more ordered understanding, but even such hypothetical increase of order figures only as a miniscule fraction if held against the enormous increase of entropy this is causing somewhere else in the Universe. When reading away, the reader is converting his last dinner into heat. This heat disseminates into the surrounding air by convection and sweat, and the energy cannot be recycled. In a steam engine fuel is burned to heat the boiler and water goes up in steam. The steam pushes a piston until the amount of energy from the fuel which initially had heated the water is consumed. Given that the amount of available energy remains the same at any given time, it means that energy spent, is spent for good, and entropy has increased. So whatever pattern of order in the interplay of forces has evolved, the energy consumed in the process, has ultimately pushed entropy further to the inevitable maximum. If on the other hand energy is burned in order to wreck havoc and destruction, the result is exactly the same, an increase in entropy. Whether the evolution of the universe is leading to order or to chaos, entropy always increases.

m. s.

Republican Economy

Darkness is cheap and Scrooge liked it.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

In the Light of Benazir Buttho’s Assassination

The law in Pakistan makes education mandatory. Isn't that so everywhere? Not quite! In Pakistan the state doesn't spend a dime on public schools. Therefore a large proportion of the children, who as it so happens come mostly from the poorest and disenfranchised, observe the law by going to Koran schools, so called Madrasahs, where they literally learn nothing but chanting the Koran in a foreign language. Rarely has observing a beneficial law perverted a good intention to such extreme degree. Pakistan is a nuclear power! Can you imagine what this may mean, one day? Don't imagine! It's already happening.

m.s.

A Paradox?

War is the father of all and the king of all; Homer was wrong in saying: "Would that strife might perish from among gods and humans!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away (Heraclit 535-475 BC.). This is true: these days many more patients survive in our ER units because of the emergency techniques developed in the Vietnam war than there had been soldiers killed in Vietnam.

m.s.

Thank you, but no, thanks

I have received your new book (A Discourse on Inequality, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.

Voltaire (1755)

The first Secularist

And when you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, enter into your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father which is in secret.

Matthew, 6:5-6

Ernest Hemingway

He became the most famous writer of the century, but it was for everything except writing.

He killed at least one each of every animal in Africa. He caught at least one each of every big fish in the sea. Hemingway's lethal exploits were written up in the new picture magazines Life and Look, with photographs taken on the site of the massacre. Often Hemingway contributed the pose himself. He didn't actually kill every bull in Spain, but he liked watching. He wrote a book about it. He used simple sentences. He said the simple life of the instincts was better than too much thought.

In 1959 Hemmingway was back in Spain to watch the bulls bite the dust. Or else he was out in the Gulf Stream killing fish. Or else he was in Africa killing animals again. Hemmingway was always killing something. He called it an appetite for life.

Hemingway lived in Key West, in Cuba, and in all the world's best hotels, always talking about the good wine and the good food and the good season. But he no longer wrote good books, although the Nobel Prize followed one of his worst, The Old Man and the Sea.

In Africa, on the hunt for the few remaining animals he had not already killed, Hemingway had a plane crash and woke up to read his own obituaries. His next move was to have another plane crash. When he recovered from that one he went fishing. He could never have enough of killing living things.

Finally he did it to himself, with a shotgun.

Clive James

Our constitutional Dilemma

A: As a historian I have an idea what the originators of the electoral college may have had in mind - look at it in a context of horse drawn carriages and smoke signals as the fastest means of communication. But the election of the President of the United States is the election of the Union's head of state: he is everybody's president not just for the people in Milwaukee, Delaware, and Rhode Island. And if Missouri needs to speak for herself, she has her governor and local senate to do so. The President of the United States is my and every individual's president regardless how such individual may feel for his or her state. The electoral college has one and one purpose only, to elect the President, therefore it is obsolete and self-defeating in a time when the popular majority of all individuals can be known in the same night, even before closing the polls. In fact the elector's legal right to overrule the figures from his constituency is a slap in the face for everything democracy is standing for. The electoral college has the function and capacity to introduce bias in an affair where only the figures should count. So why do we continue to cling so tenaciously to this archaic institution? We don't go to work on horseback anymore!"

B: Different people elect presidents for different reasons, so do different groups of people ...

A: ... are you trying to tell me that the people in Tennessee have a different agenda when voting for a President than the people in California, hence you need the electors to put things right? Well, hard luck buddy, if the interest of the Californians is outweighing yours in sheer numbers, then there must be a reason for it, a reason which figures in the Union's gross annual income. Their interest simply deserves to enjoy the priority as mirrored in the majority figures.

B: Hey! Just imagine the whole world would be one big happy family under one state with popular majority rule, then the two groups with the lowest income, the peasant populations in China and India would be the ones pulling the weight and totaling out every other voter group - is that really what you want?

A: Why, have they no right to be represented?

B: Sure, but do you really think their interests weigh as much as the exponentially more productive interests of some much smaller groups? And this is limiting the argument only to the economic aspect. We even don't go to the cultural ramifications. Popular democracy can get us into the strangest places, my friend ... ."

m.s.

Dairy Maid Economy

In 1995 a British politician described the most recent changes in our economy as turning the under-educated labor-force from needless but decently paid jobs into subsidized redundancies, meaning that this actually would reduce the costs for the taxpayer. But his facial expression and a sudden pause between two phrases was a dead giveaway for what this means in terms of human dignity and motivation. And the reasoning is actually wrong. Those people did not receive their income from taxes, but from redundant branches of an admittedly obsolete industry which indeed meant smaller profits for the money lender, but was still capable of generating enough profit to balance the payroll. So their income contributed to the most important factor of any economy: domestic purchasing power. The only legitimate fuel of any economy, and it didn’t cost the taxpayer a penny. On the dole they contribute nothing, and we pay for it. In other words, they are laid off for the interests of an other minority group, which has the financial muscle to force their fellow human beings into redundancy for no better reason but to increase their own profits. And they dare telling us, Marx is passe?

m.s.

Uncertainty One on One

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) stated that short light-waves of high energy can measure the location of an electron with a certain degree of precision, yet the procedure will severely disturb the electron's impulse. Measuring the impulse of an electron with a longer light-wave will leave the impulse less disturbed, since long-waved light contains less energy, but then the electron's location eludes precise measurement, and diverges in a wave of statistical possibilities along the electron's orbit. From this Heisenberg drew the conclusion of a fundamental uncertainty in the correlation between impulse and location.

A precise simultaneous measurement of location and impulse is just not possible, because the measuring light wave can only be short or long, not both at the same time.

In other words. There is a physical fact, the correlation between impulse and position of an object so small that the agent we use to investigate and measure interferes and in the process destroys one of the two data and with it the correlation itself. And that’s all there is to it. The moment we measure it, the correlation ceases to exist.

The philosophical question is: was there a correlation to start with? If a measurement is not even possible how are we to justify the stipulation that there is a correlation in the first place?

Simple!

We can choose to measure either of the two data correlating and we will always get a result. Therefore the correlation exists, it is just hidden from direct observation.

m.s.

Cold War

It was a new concept and given the most recent developments in our blessed post-cold-war world, a successful concept. That it should lead to one side's "victory" was a flaw in the execution. It left behind a world which is clearly less manageable and less secure with numberless hot little wars flaring up everywhere.

m.s.

Save the Planet

Where has the optimism of the fifties gone? We agonize over how to save the planet and prevent climate change, and permit ourselves to be exploited on the sly by the national revenue, instead of thinking more productively (and profitably) about technologies and architectural solutions that will help us to survive when the climate change is going to kick in anyway. A glass dome over the metropolis, cities on the ocean floor, shuttles gliding on magnetic rails and catapulted into deep space from tunneled ramps, this sort of thing, Genetics are the trump card. We still can do it.

(Instead the taxpayer is asked to subsidize the cutting down of rainforests and to deprive subsistence farmers of their arable soil in order to produce “bio-fuel.” Has this administration completely gone mad?)

m.s.

Schrödinger’s Cat

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.

Heraclit (535-475 BC.)

The first time I have seen photographs of real life atoms - iron atoms which were moved about to form a logo for IBM - I was surprised about the mountain like shapes, like from an illustration of Schrödinger’s wave function.

The Austrian Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) thought to explain the movement of an electron in an atom as a wave. Not only that but Schrödinger showed that these electron-waves don't even move. The waves are stationary. Each time you check where an electron is you will find it in a different place, but that doesn't mean it is moving in between the checks. The equation at the heart of his publication became known as Schrödinger's wave function.

A radioactive atom is characterized by the probability of its decay over a given period of time. Common sense would reason that at any given point in time there are only two possibilities, either the atom has decayed, or it has not. But quantum physics tells a different story, the atom is understood to inhabit both states simultaneously. In 1935, Schrödinger published a series of three papers in which he used the "Cat Paradox" in analogy to quantum mechanics. In his own words:

“A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none. If it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If this arrangement is left alone for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if no atom has decayed, or otherwise would be poisoned. However before the box is opened, the wave-function expresses this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared into equal parts.”

This was put to the test. A team of physicists - Christopher Monroe, Dawn Meekhof, Brian King and Dave Wineland - confined a charged beryllium atom in a tiny electromagnetic cage and then cooled it with a laser to its lowest energy state. In this state the position of the atom and its "spin" (a quantum property that is only metaphorically analogous to spin in the ordinary sense) could be ascertained within a very high degree of accuracy, though limited by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The next step was to stimulate the atom with a laser just enough to change its wave function. According to the new wave function of the atom, it now had a fifty percent probability of being in a "spin-up" state in its initial position and an equal probability of being in a "spin-down" state in a position as much as 80 nanometers away, which is a vast distance in the atomic realm. And lo and behold, the atom was indeed in two different places as well as in two different spin states at the same time, the atomic analog of a cat both being alive and dead.

The piece of clinching evidence was the observation of an interference pattern. It is a telltale sign that the single beryllium atom had produced two distinct wave functions which now interfered with each other.

So far so good. But what could be the meaning of this? Because it is not the fuzzy state we are after, what we want to know is what happens when everything returns to normal, when we, so to speak, open the box, and look what happened to the cat.

There are two schools of thinking. The so called Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds proposal of Hugh Everett. When a Copenhagenist opens the box he will find a cat that is either dead or alive but will claim that this is the result of opening the box (sic!) and that before, when nobody was looking, the cat was neither alive nor dead, just a fuzzy, furry cloud of probabilities which “collapsed” to the outcome we actually observe when we lift the lid. We seem to be back to Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) and the idea that trees only fall when somebody is looking. But this is not quite so.

The experiment clearly has proven the reality of the fuzzy intermittent state before the final outcome. Quantum events are split second affairs way beneath the threshold of our faculties of perception. If we could actually see quantum events the objects of the world surrounding us would constantly pulsate between a halo of fuzziness in our peripheral vision, and sudden sharpness of contour, which only occurs when we actually fix our gaze on the object. It doesn’t mean that looking at it actually makes the tree falling, it only ascertains that it has fallen. The contention merely asserts that it takes looking to do so, while without looking the “normal” state of affairs is fuzziness.

But this is not the way how Dr Hugh Everett III (1930-1982) liked to see it. When he opens the box, he will find, just like his colleague from Copenhagen, a cat either dead or alive. However he will maintain that the act of opening the box has no effect on the outcome because Schrödinger’s equation gives a “superposition” of all possible outcomes and these do exist all the time according to Everett’s own reformulation of quantum theory, published in 1957. According to him, opening the box actualizes what had been lurking there as one of the two possibilities all along, our end of a forking in two separate timelines or “worlds,” each as real and possible as the opposite. The cat has split in two, one dead, one alive. But the cat is not the only one affected. Box and observer have doubled as well together with the whole set of accompanying circumstances that have seen the observer to confine a cat in the quantum limbo of Schroedinger’s box. Once faced with the alternatives the world continues into two different directions simultaneously. But where is the other cat?

Where is the other observer? Where is the other me who has decided not to write this essay?

According to Everett it is all happening right here, unobservable from our direction in time but a fully present superposition on its own branch. For some unexplained reason the opposite outcome “decohers” from our observation and remains invisible to the observer and his doppelganger on the other branch of the experiment. Everett went by the assumption that Schrödinger’s wave-function is a real physical object, as real as my house key, and therefore observations or measurements based on it apply at any time for every observer anywhere; in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, before as well as after opening the box. This is the central assumption of “many-worlds.”

Everett’s proposal has obvious cosmological advantages.

It is the only scientific explanation that makes the appearance of mind and intelligence inevitable. Usually we have to content ourselves with the notion that our existence is a possible outcome of evolution but not a necessity. In Everett’s Universe it is inevitable because every quantum event generates the whole gamut of possible outcomes. What can happen, must happen, and alternative outcomes continually branch out into different directions.

But how do we decide whether the fuzzy state before observation is leading to a “collapse” or a “split?” A viable theory is supposed to provide some or other decent prediction of possible observations.

Everett’s theory makes a very definite prediction. Gravity must come in quantized waves rather than exist as the classical background field of general relativity. Yet so far no gravity waves have been detected. Neither has anyone yet observed the existence of gravitons. But in a Universe of classic gravity stars would bind not only to the observed galaxies but also to the host of unobserved parallel worlds. As far back in 1798, Henry Cavendish, had measured the torque produced by the gravitational force on two separated lead spheres suspended from a torsion fiber to determine the value of Newton's gravitational constant. Had the suspended lead spheres been gravitationally influenced by their parallel doublets in the parallel laboratories of parallel Henry Cavendishs then the torsion would have been the averaged sum of all these contributions, which was not observed. In retrospect Cavendish established that Everett’s other worlds are not detectable.

I have a problem with this explanation. What if the value of Newton’s constant is actually reflecting this interaction with the unobserved parallel worlds. If we don’t know, or suspect it, the constant is what it is. Everett thought so, too, and took it as proof that this inability to observe any interaction between the different worlds verifies that the “universal wave-function” is perfectly linear. Even a slight non-linear effect would open possibilities of communication and even (time-)travel to the other branches. But who is to say there is no possible interaction if the two possible outcomes of a fuzzy state actualize?

I am a bit troubled here, because the same experiment that verifies the fuzziness of the intermittent state for Schrödinger’s cat before we open the box shows that:

a) the split between the two possible outcomes has already occurred, and

b) that the two states are interfering with each other.

Something here seems to be missing. There are facts - the nature of things - and there are reasons - the way we like to look at things. But what are we looking at when we look at Schrödinger’s feline?

m.s.

up

Where does the Lake go, when the Geese fly to Canada?

I am not sure, whether brash John Ruskin (1819-1900) really answered to Berkeley’s philosophy when he said: “To get rid of all the ambiguities and troublesome words at once, be it observed that the word ‘blue’ does not mean the ‘sensation’ caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the ‘power’ of producing that sensation. And this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding. It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound, which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary” (Ruskin Of The Pathetic Fallacy).

As beseems a cleric, Berkeley had great faith in his god.

Like everybody else the good bishop was longing for something real to sink in his teeth. And what does guarantee more authenticity and immediacy of perception than the Ideas in the mind? It was the problem Plotinus had already wrestled with fifteen hundred years earlier. So what if perception was the real thing, the actual constituent? If perception establishes existence and not the other way around? But if so, how would it be possible to do science and investigate phenomena? Would not everything around us warp and bend to our wishes and fears like in a psychedelic dream? Bishop Berkeley was a man of the cloth, so the answer seemed obvious.

It must be the Great Perceiver Himself before whose eyes we have found grace, and who knows our names. Nothing can exist without a mind - “His” mind - perceiving it. It was a brand new and wonderful proof for the existence of God. It didn’t matter to Berkeley to burden the Old Potter’s already busy schedule with incessant omnipresence. Unlike the deity of Isaac Newton, who is merely needed to drop the ball and kick off the game, Berkeley made God work for his money real hard. He wouldn’t be able to step aside even for a cigarette break, without causing the whole Universe to collapse. In order to sustain Berkeley’s philosophy, His full attention and undivided assistance is a condition. It is the key to the stability of the world surrounding us. Let’s not heckle the good bishop on the question whose mind before the first day of creation could possibly have been around to endow God himself with existence. His wife, Mrs. Asheroth perhaps? Or an infinite number of turtles perceiving each other - - very carefully? Berkeley could dismiss it simply with a gesture towards the cart loads of believers who every Sunday go to Church and work on their perceptions.

Berkeley for atheists is of course a slightly different proposition.

Sustaining perception is provided by me, you, your daughter and my dog, but to do science becomes a tricky business. Billions of minds guarantee existence but not unity of perception. You see a buss, I see a restaurant, and in actual fact it is neither but a lady of the night in the disguise of my neighbor’s wife. If all by myself I can of course see a lake and go away and the lake is still there, because the geese crossing the sky above continue perceiving it. But where does the lake go when the geese fly to Canada? Sounds almost like Zen, doesn’t it?

The question whether trees only fall when somebody is looking has gained a new significance in the light of the “Copenhagen Interpretation” (see Schrödinger's Cat above). But does it really mean trees fall only when looked at or is it not rather that a tree in a fuzzy state between the possibilities of its existence - standing or fallen - will “sharpen up” one way or the other when we look?

m.s.

Hegel's Law

Hegel is not exactly my favorite philosopher. His so called dialectics - the progressing from a thesis to the antithesis which leads to a synthesis of the two positions and then progresses to a new antithesis which is leading to the next synthesis and so on and so forth - may generally be dismissed as sheer bogus, but it is drawn from an actual observation which therefore deserves to be called Hegel’s law: “Whenever you instigate something considered beneficial you can be sure that this very action is going to set in motion a number of unforeseen factors that achieve exactly the opposite.”

(Somebody thought to point out that this law is working both ways, so that every evil can and does also lead to benefits. But this is actually a fallacy. When you think of it you will find very few if any people who deliberately and intentionally do evil. We all think we do good or at least act with the best of intentions. And that's what Hegel's law is addressing. There is no ‘both ways.’)

m.s.

Archeology from the Future

In a distant future - say, two millennia from now - it should be easy to date my skeletal remains. I was born when the world powers were testing hydrogen bombs in the open atmosphere; so every bone from that period contains deposits of strontium, a fallout product of nuclear explosions. Younger people, born in the seventies and later, will be recognizable by their dentures - there have been significant advances in dental care. (My childhood was still marred by black spotted teeth and gaps in the incisors.) An other clue are new materials in hip-replacements.

m.s.