Today's Headache

Math makes my brain hurt, but there's a kind of mystical aspect to it that matches anything I've ever marveled at. Oceans, mountains, clouds, kids, critters - anything.

It's magic explained.

Down The Road

In 1916, Albert Einstein wrote down an equation describing the "stimulated emission of light". It was a tiny bit of his work that attracted no attention at the time. It just lay there for decades in a pile of other bits and pieces of quantum physics stuff.

40 years later, it became the foundation for a technology that led to the invention of the laser.

Neither Einstein nor the many nerds who followed were thinking, "Y'know what, I think barcodes and inventory control is what we should be working towards - and a digital music format would be cool too..."

Today, right about ⅓ of the world's entire GDP depends on some aspect of information technology - creating, processing, storing, retrieving and transmitting information - but if you had asked those nerds 50 or 60 or 70 years ago, "OK, so how does this benefit me right here and right now?", they wouldn't have had answers. And if instant gratification is your only criterion for whether or not you fund their work, you'd cut their budgets and the work would either be wasted, or delayed to the point of being lost - potentially for generations.

Twenty years before Einstein, an English physicist name JJ Thomson proved the existence of the electron, overturning 2,000 years of humans' "understanding" of the structure of atoms.

Neither of these discoveries had any practical application at the time.

Can you tell me what part of your existence right now isn't either dependent upon or tied in some way to electronics?

Support your local nerds

Today's Deep Thinking

What if the universe we know is actually a computer simulation, and there's nothing real but our imaginations?

Sorry not sorry, but to me, this is pretty good food for thought when you're sitting around smoking some really killer weed with your new best buddies in your dorm room at 3:00 on a random Tuesday, or if you watched The Matrix and concluded it was a documentary.

Also sorry not sorry, but how is this "new" "theory" anything other than a substitute for God?

All that said, I'll try to keep an open mind about "proving or disproving" the existence of this new god - or concept of god - or GOD.EXE - or whatever the fuck we're talking about here.

Shit just makes my head hurt.

Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the Universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop?

The expansive force of the Universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be – allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart.

A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of Universes, so we shouldn't be surprised that at least one Universe has turned out as ours. But another is that our Universe is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien species) fine-tuning the conditions.

The latter option is supported by a branch of science called information physics, which suggests that space-time and matter are not fundamental phenomena. Instead, the physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information, from which our experience of space-time emerges.

By comparison, temperature "emerges" from the collective movement of atoms. No single atom fundamentally has temperature.

This leads to the extraordinary possibility that our entire Universe might in fact be a computer simulation.

The idea is not that new. In 1989, the legendary physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, suggested that the Universe is fundamentally mathematical and it can be seen as emerging from information. He coined the famous aphorism "it from bit".

In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom from Oxford University in the UK formulated his simulation hypothesis. This argues that it is actually highly probable that we live in a simulation.

That's because an advanced civilization should reach a point where their technology is so sophisticated that simulations would be indistinguishable from reality, and the participants would not be aware that they were in a simulation.

Physicist Seth Lloyd from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US took the simulation hypothesis to the next level by suggesting that the entire Universe could be a giant quantum computer.

Empirical evidence

There is some evidence suggesting that our physical reality could be a simulated virtual reality rather than an objective world that exists independently of the observer.

Any virtual reality world will be based on information processing. That means everything is ultimately digitized or pixelated down to a minimum size that cannot be subdivided further: bits.

This appears to mimic our reality according to the theory of quantum mechanics, which rules the world of atoms and particles. It states there is a smallest, discrete unit of energy, length and time.

Similarly, elementary particles, which make up all the visible matter in the Universe, are the smallest units of matter. To put it simply, our world is pixelated.

The laws of physics that govern everything in the Universe also resemble computer code lines that a simulation would follow in the execution of the program. Moreover, mathematical equations, numbers, and geometric patterns are present everywhere – the world appears to be entirely mathematical.

Another curiosity in physics supporting the simulation hypothesis is the maximum speed limit in our Universe, which is the speed of light. In a virtual reality, this limit would correspond to the speed limit of the processor, or the processing power limit.

We know that an overloaded processor slows down computer processing in a simulation. Similarly, Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity shows that time slows in the vicinity of a black hole.

Perhaps the most supportive evidence of the simulation hypothesis comes from quantum mechanics. This suggest nature isn't "real": particles in determined states, such as specific locations, don't seem to exist unless you actually observe or measure them. Instead, they are in a mix of different states simultaneously. Similarly, virtual reality needs an observer or programmer for things to happen.

Quantum " entanglement" also allows two particles to be spookily connected so that if you manipulate one, you automatically and immediately also manipulate the other, no matter how far apart they are – with the effect being seemingly faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible.

This could, however, also be explained by the fact that within a virtual reality code, all "locations" (points) should be roughly equally far from a central processor. So while we may think two particles are millions of light years apart, they wouldn't be if they were created in a simulation.

Possible experiments

Assuming that the Universe is indeed a simulation, then what sort of experiments could we deploy from within the simulation to prove this?

It is reasonable to assume that a simulated Universe would contain a lot of information bits everywhere around us. These information bits represent the code itself. Hence, detecting these information bits will prove the simulation hypothesis.

The recently proposed mass-energy-information (M/E/I) equivalence principle – suggesting mass can be expressed as energy or information, or vice versa – states that information bits must have a small mass. This gives us something to search for.

I have postulated that information is in fact a fifth form of matter in the Universe. I've even calculated the expected information content per elementary particle. These studies led to the publication, in 2022, of an experimental protocol to test these predictions.

The experiment involves erasing the information contained inside elementary particles by letting them and their antiparticles (all particles have "anti" versions of themselves which are identical but have opposite charge) annihilate in a flash of energy – emitting "photons", or light particles.

I have predicted the exact range of expected frequencies of the resulting photons based on information physics. The experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and we have launched a crowdfunding site to achieve it.

There are other approaches too. The late physicist John Barrow has argued that a simulation would build up minor computational errors which the programmer would need to fix in order to keep it going.

He suggested we might experience such fixing as contradictory experimental results appearing suddenly, such as the constants of nature changing. So monitoring the values of these constants is another option.

The nature of our reality is one of the greatest mysteries out there. The more we take the simulation hypothesis seriously, the greater the chances we may one day prove or disprove it.

It Broke My Brain

I have children who try to explain this kind of thing to me. It never works - I just don't get it.

Up & Atom - Aristotle's Paradox

Today's Math Lesson

...and History, and Philosophy too.

There are no lost secrets of the ancients. And there's no universal conspiracy to keep the truth from us.

But there is a thing called Pattern-Seeking that evolution has embedded in our firmware. So, sometimes - usually way more often than we like to admit - we think we've found what we went looking for, when actually, we're fooling ourselves into believing we're not just smash-fitting a conclusion in order to sync up with a romantic hypothesis.

see also:

pareidolia 

the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

A Question

I heard today that Pi has now been

calculated to 62.8 trillion places.

Is there some kind of monumental change that occurs in the universe if we discover that the thing repeats at some point?

After almost 63 trillion places?

Today's Reddit

Hey, kids - let's math!

Today's Brain Buster

My anti-intellectual shit starts to leak out of my ears every time I try to sit through one of these math thingies.

I always feel the urge to fall back into that comfortable embrace of the old ignorance and superstition left over from the Dark Ages when people actually believed silly shit like, "Math is the language of Satan."

The old hag brewed up some willow bark tea and suddenly, my headache is gone - what sorcery is this!?!

The rube is always with us. They used to tell each other bullshit fairy stories and then run around looking for witches to burn. Now they watch DumFux News and run around electing idiots like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Anyway, even though it's pretty gosh darn cool in a very hip and nerdly way, there's no magic. There's no mystery of the ages. There's no god hiding in the shadows of lost knowledge, and no evil creature with supernatural powers plotting against us.

In the end, it really is just an odd coincidence that evolution makes us interpret as a mystical thing, imbuing it with agency and intent.

Maybe that's the key. We want it to be precise; we seem to need it to be perfect, but it isn't - because it can't be. Because there's no evolution without imperfection.

Like Frank said -

Without deviance from normality,
there can be no progress

The more things change.

A Little Math - A Little Engineering

And away we go.

I promise not to bitch about my taxes if I can count on you to teach my kids how to do that kinda thing.

So Simple

It still makes my head hurt

Today's GIF (via Twitter)

Bless you, Dr Mandelbrot.

Rolling a circle inside another three times its size - three times - by matthen pic.twitter.com/S3Lcu4tDnr

— Science GIFs⚛️ (@Learn_Things) April 26, 2018

 

Something To Remember

Median Net Worth in USAmerica Inc last year was about $80,000.

Average Net Worth was about $180,000.

There are about 550 billionaires, and something like 10 million millionaires up in this joint.

Some basic arithmetic makes it pretty easy to imagine how fucked up American Wealth Distribution has become.

Bill Gates walks into a soup kitchen, and the average net worth of the people in that room goes up into the hundreds of millions.

But you've still got Bill Gates and about 100 stone broke homeless people.

This is not a particularly rich country when 99% of the people are doing all the work while the other 1% get all the goodies.

It's The Math, Stupid

I get it, and I don't get it. Brainlock.

By The Numbers

Math is not invented - it is discovered.

New Math

Well, arithmetic anyway.

Number of days since doing laundry 
minus
Number of pairs of underwear
equals
Depth of my funk

Inversely proportional of course - the higher the number, the lower I am.

I figure over time, it would plot out like a Sine Curve and I'd be able to see where I am on the Mood Swing Cycle.

Slice-N-Dice

Getting a majority of the votes doesn't necessarily mean you get a majority representation.  

WaPo:

A recent analysis by political scientists John Sides and Eric McGhee suggests that Democrats are poised to win a majority of votes in U.S. House contests but walk away with a minority of seats — again. As I wrote last week, a big factor in this odd disparity is the way some Republican state legislatures have gerrymandered congressional districts in a way that gives them far more House seats than their popular vote totals would suggest.

For a refresher on how gerrymandering happens, recall that the Constitution mandates that every 10 years, seats in the U.S. House are doled out to states according to state populations, as determined by the decennial census. In 2010, for instance, it worked out that a state got one house seat for roughly every 710,000 inhabitants. States have to assign each of their House seats to a congressional district. This requires drawing a map that splits a state up into a number of geographic regions, each with a population of about 710,000.

In most states, this process is done by the state legislature with the approval of the governor. So you see where the potential for shenanigans starts to creep in: If the statehouse and governor's mansion are controlled by the same political party, there's not much to stop them from drawing congressional districts in a way that maximizes that party's representation in the U.S. Congress.

But first - is there a better name for a Political Scientist than "Sides"?

Anyway it seems the marketing geniuses have taken over the political process just like everything else.

Today's GIF

I guess I always thought some guys were sitting around doodling and noodling and think-tanking or whatever, and they eventually worked it out because they were trying to work it out.

This makes me think there might've been a coupla random stoners just chillin' by the side of the road, watching the oxcart traffic and, having nothing else to do and nothing to distract them, they started to notice something and yada yada yada - wow - Math, motherfucker!

Aaargh

I love hearing about this stuff, but I always end up with a headache.