Random thoughts at 2 a.m.: I have been playing poker all night and it’s 2 a.m., so this post may make no sense when I wake up in the morning…
If we take a single spin 1/2 particle, and put it in a magnetic field, the spin precesses. We can use this to form a sort of clock by preparing the spin in a particular state and then measuring the spin along a particular direction. Of course this clock only has two value 0 or 1. So a universe with a single spin has a single bit clock. But this clearly doesn’t approximate our univerese. What do we need? More spins! So add more spins. Now we get clocks that count in some binary fashion. So we can more accurately measure a time with more spins. Look: if we add more spins we gain accuracy in keeping track of time.
Now look at relativity. If our clock has a very small mass, and it is all that exists in the universe, we will read a time which is nearly that of clocks which are infinitely distant. But add more clocks and the mass increases. Now we have a clock with a larger mass. And the larger mass will cause the clock to run slow compared to a clock at infinity. But this means that such a clock can be used to measure the time at infinity much more accurately.
Are these two effects really one and the same?
**Update** Yep, it’s morning and this makes no sense. Although the two effects scale similarly in the non-relativistic regime.
Bow Down Before Giblets
I will tell you once and only once that Fafblog is the best blog currently running. In fact it is so good that I think it may be written by someone with the last name of Wiggin.
The Book Queue
Packing for the move to Santa Fe has begun! So far I have 28 boxes of books stacked in my room. Everytime I look at them my back hurts.
Beside my bed I keep a queue of books that I am reading or have recently purchased and am planning on reading. Here is the final state of my South Pasadena book queue:
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
- Counter-Clock World by Philip K Dick
- Adventures in Group Theory by David Joyner
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
- Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
- The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand
- Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
- A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time edited by Barry Malzberg
- Turing (A Novel About Computation) by Christos H. Papadimitriou
- Modern Elementary Particle Physics by Gordon Kane
- The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
- The Year’s Best SF 8 edited by David G. Hartwell
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- Great Sky River by Gregory Benford
- Tides of Light by Gregory Benford
- Furious Gulf by Gregory Benford
- Sailing Bright Eternity by Gregory Benford
- A Brief History of Economic Genius by Paul Strathern
- Go To by Steve Lohr
- Earthshaking Science by Susan Elizabeth Hough
- Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
- The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
- Against Infinity by Gregory Benford
- Eyes of the Calculor by Sean McMullen
- Starfarers by Poul Anderson
- Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon
- The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkien
- Charisma by Steven Barnes
- A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
- Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
- Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan
- Cyteen: The Betrayal by C.J. Cherryh
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
- Atomic Physics: an exploration through problems and solutions by Dmitry Budker, Derek F. Kimball, and David P. DeMille
- Ilium by Dan Simmons
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order by George Johnson
- Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons
- Are Universes Thicker than Blackberries? by Martin Gardner
- Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith
Ack! What a queue! Some of these books are in various states of being read, and a few, like Gravity’s Rainbow, I’ve read before, but are on a second read-around.
I have a month off and these all go in two special boxes and will travel with me on my trip around the west. How many will I get through before I start at SFI? Let the betting begin at zero.
What Light Through Yonder Nite Sky Breaks
Last night we went to the boondocks (or as close an approximation as we could get to the boondocks, living in L.A.) to watch the Perseid meteor shower.
“For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” – Vincent van Gogh
Driving back, I was thinking about how amazing it is that we can even do cosmology! What an amazing setup that we can look back in time by collecting light from more and more distance objects. Our universe didn’t have to be this way: it could have been action at a distance, instantaneous transformer of information, etc. And then how would we do cosmology?
Alta Is Not Your Grandpa
Alta has finally built a top-to-bottom high speed quad. I believe this is morally equivalent to the breaking of the Seventh Seal.
If I Were a Censor
Banned: use of the word “final” and “theory” in the same sentence.
Notice the Dates
On arXiv today we find quant-ph/9804008:
from : Andrew Gray [view email]
Date (v1): Thu, 2 Apr 1998 18:51:30 GMT (27kb)
Date (revised v2): Sun, 8 Aug 2004 18:25:20 GMT (0kb,I)
A Design for a Quantum Time Machine
Authors: Andrew Gray
Comments: This paper has been withdrawn
This paper has been retracted, for obvious reasons.
Oye! Harsh!
Elections destroy any positive karma…today I thought of a new bumper sticker:
Reagan died because of research Bush denied.
Ouch! Oye!
Baez Decrypts
John Baez’s description of Hawking’s talk at GR17 is the best scientific commentary on the talk I’ve come across. It’s a notch above all of these descriptions I’ve read which are of the form: I don’t like Euclidean quantum gravity, but I do know [insert other theory of quantum gravity here], and we already knew [insert claim here]. Which is fine for learning about [insert claim here] but doesn’t really tell me anything about what Hawking was trying to say!
Northern New Mexico
From George Johnson’s New York Times July 3, 2004 article “Los Alamos’s Super-Secret Heritage Shows Some Cracks:”
When science is conducted in secrecy it takes on the air of magic.
From its beginnings as an outpost of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos has operated in a state where the ideal of science as the free exchange of information has been indefinitely suspended, replaced by a conviction that there is safety in ignorance, that life is more secure when certain powerful ideas are kept among a few.
Peace through the nonproliferation of knowledge, another of the ingrained absurdities of the nuclear age.
Which reminds me of why cryptography (and quantum cryptography in particular) is so disturbing to me: does the universe really allow for the hording of information? Our unsharing universe? Of course, the type of knowledge Johnson is talking about, “scientific knowledge”, does appear to be open to everyone: you don’t get exclusive rights to the science when you discover it. But what if the universe didn’t even work that way? What if the mere discovery of some new bit of science closed the door for all others investigating the same phenomenon?