Programmed Reality

Yesterday I got a 1964 dime in change.  The rarity of this occurrence is incalculable.  But how strange to think that it might also have something to do with the most profound event in our country's history.

Executive Order 11110.  Some say that it is what got President John F. Kennedy assassinated.  Others say it is a minor executive order of little significance.  I decided to take a break from investigating the nature of reality and research this little gem.

The transcript of the order appears below as well as a link to the more lengthy Executive Order 10289 which it amends.  Essentially, 10289 is a list of things that the Secretary of the Treasury is empowered to do without approval of the president.  In 1963, Kennedy added one thing to that list via EO 11110, namely the ability to issue Silver Certificates, which are U.S. Treasury Notes that can be redeemed for the equivalent in silver coins.

There is a great deal of confusion about many aspects of this story, such as what kind of notes could have been redeemed for silver, what 11110 actually said, what Kennedy's intentions were, etc.  Wikipedia entries on EO 11110, the Silver Certificate, United States Note, and Federal Reserve Note, are very inconsistent.  For example, the United States Note page says that "all ... types of circulating currency, silver certificates, Federal Reserve Notes, and United States Notes, were redeemable by individuals only for silver," whereas the Silver Certificate page implies that only those notes could have been redeemable in silver.  This is not a moot point because it is the difference between metal-backed currency and fiat currency, the evils of which has been prolifically documented (see for example G. Edward Griffin's excellent book, "The Creature from Jekyll Island").  It is really the core of the argument about Kennedy, 11110, and the conspiracy to assassinate him.  It is also, to me, fascinating that all of these currency types were floating around in circulation in 1963, the nuances of which were completely unknown to the general public in whose wallets they sat.  

Here is the fact, straight from the US Treasury: "Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything.  This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy."  It appears that since the US abandoned the gold standard in 1933, the same is true of United States Notes.  Therefore, 11110 only has to do with Silver Certificates, despite some sites claims to the contrary.

As a coin collector as a kid, I was very aware that something major happened in 1964 with respect to silver and the US Mint.  As I was told at the time, the value of silver exceeded the face value of the corresponding coins (dimes, quarters, half dollars) for the first time in 1964.  Hence, beginning in 1965, coins would be minted using copper and zinc instead of silver.  Suddenly, all 1964 and earlier coins were being hoarded by coin collectors and non-collectors alike.  Of course, it wasn't that silver was suddenly more valuable - it was that inflation had finally taken its toll and reduced the value of the dollar enough to drop the value of coins below their meltdown values.  Big deal, right?  It was bound to happen?

What is the number one suspect for the root cause of the inflation that created this situation?  Fiat currency, or currency NOT backed by something of real value, like heavy metals such as gold or silver.  Popular conspiracy theory says that the private banks that represent the Federal Reserve are the ones who have profited every year from the inflation that reduces the savings of the rest of us, and are the biggest proponents of fiat currency, which Federal Reserve Notes are.  Popular conspiracy theory also says that JFK was assassinated by a cabal that represents the very establishment that includes those same big financial interests.  Is it a coincidence that he was killed in 1963, just a few weeks after signing Executive Order 11110 that gave the US Treasury the right to decide on their own to print non-fiat money in the form of silver certificates?  Is it a coincidence that 4 months later, redemption of silver certificates for silver was halted forever and that that was the end of coins and paper money of real value?  Jim Marrs put all of this together in his best seller "Crossfire."  According to him, "Kennedy apparently reasoned that by returning to the constitution, which states that only Congress shall coin and regulate money, the soaring national debt could be reduced by not paying interest to the bankers of the Federal Reserve System, who print paper money then loan it to the government at interest. He moved in this area on June 4, 1963, by signing Executive Order 11110 which called for the issuance of $4,292,893,815 in United States Notes through the U.S. Treasury rather than the traditional Federal Reserve System."

PublicEye.org says it is all a lot of nonsense, in an article by Edward Flaherty.  According to Flaherty, 11110 was only Kennedy delegating the right to the US Treasury to approve the issuance of silver certificates without the need for his approval as well.  He claims that "The purpose of the order was to facilitate the reduction of certificates in circulation, not to increase them."  Really?  How exactly does facilitating the issuance of silver certificates help reduce those in circulation?  You're suspect, Ed!  So, I was curious about Ed and found out that he appears to be a pro-Fed lackey and spends most of his time debunking non-economists.  What does he really know of Kennedy's intentions?  Then again, what do the conspiracy theorists know of Kennedy's intentions in issuing EO 11110?  Sadly, there isn't much available on Kennedy's real opinions of the Fed or his motives behind 11110.  There may be some hints, however.  In a news conference in June 7, 1962, Kennedy said "if I were anxious to get control of the Federal Reserve, the matter comes up in 1963.".  His Comptroller of the Currency for the United States Department of the Treasury, James Saxon, chartered a large number (369) of new national banks (competitors of the Federal Reserve System) and was known to be frequently at odds with the Fed.  Other than that, there is precious little of fact.  So, we are left somewhere in between the pro-conspiracy camp and the debunkers.  

Executive Order 11110 did indeed facilitate the issuance of silver certificates that were probably at odds with the policies of the Fed.  However, it was hardly an attempt to abolish the Fed, as some claim.  So, the shroud of mystery surrounding the JFK murder and the financial elite will not be broken by this late night blogger.  But, I did get a dime with a melt value of $1.38 out of the deal.

Transcript of Executive Order 11110:

------------------------
AMENDMENT OF EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 10289 AS AMENDED, RELATING TO THE PERFORMANCE OF CERTAIN FUNCTIONS AFFECTING THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY.

By virtue of the authority vested in me by section 301 of title 3 of the United States Code, it is ordered as follows:

SECTION 1. Executive Order No. 10289 of September 19, 1951, as amended, is hereby further amended

- (a) By adding at the end of paragraph 1 thereof the following subparagraph (j):

(j) The authority vested in the President by paragraph (b) of section 43 of the Act of May 12, 1933, as amended (31 U.S.C. 821 (b)), to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury not then held for redemption of any outstanding silver certificates, to prescribe the denominations of such silver certificates, and to coin standard silver dollars and subsidiary silver currency for their redemption,

and (b) By revoking subparagraphs (b) and (c) of paragraph 2 thereof.

SECTION 2. The amendment made by this Order shall not affect any act done, or any right accruing or accrued or any suit or proceeding had or commenced in any civil or criminal cause prior to the date of this Order but all such liabilities shall continue and may be enforced as if said amendments had not been made.

JOHN F. KENNEDY THE WHITE HOUSE, June 4, 1963
---------------------------

As Executive Order 11110 is an amendment to Executive Order 10289, interested readers may view that one here

Tags: jfk, john f. kennedy, executive order 11110, federal reserve, silver certificate
Categories: General

One of the keys to understanding our reality is found in a very unusual and anomalous experiment done over 200 years ago by Thomas Young.  The philosophical debate that resulted from this experiment and its successors during the quantum era of the 20th century may hold the key to understanding everything - from bona fide scientific anomalies to cold fusion and bigfoot sightings.

If you are unfamiliar with this experiment, please watch the Dr. Quantum cartoon on the Double Slit Experiment.  It provides a good explanation of two paradoxes that have puzzled scientists for many years.  In summary, here is the conundrum:

1. If you fire electrons at a screen through a single slit in an otherwise impenetrable barrier, there will be a resulting pattern on the screen as you might expect - a single band of points.

2. If you fire electrons at a screen through a barrier with two slits, the pattern that will build up on the screen is not one of two bands of points, but rather an entire interference pattern, as if the electrons were actually waves instead of particles.  

This is one paradox - that electrons (and all other particles) have dual personalities in that they can act like both waves and particles.  Further, the personality that emerges matches the type of experiment that you are doing.  If you are testing to see if the electron acts like a particle, it will.  If you are testing to see if the electron acts like a wave, it will.  

3. Even if the electrons are fired one at a time, eliminating the possibility of electrons interfering with each other, over time, the same pattern emerges.

4. If you put a measuring device at the slit, thereby observing which slit each electron passes through, the interference pattern disappears.  

This is the more mysterious paradox - that the mere act of observation changes the result of the experiment.  The implications of this are huge because they imply that our conscious actions create or modify reality.

Dr. Programmed Reality will now provide the definitive explanation that Dr. Quantum could not:

1. Electrons, along with photons, all other particles, and ultimately everything, are really nothing but information.  That information describes how the electron (for example) behaves under all circumstances, what probabilities it will travel in any particular direction, and how it will reveal its presence to our senses.  That information, plus the rules of reality, fully determine how it can appear sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave.  Because it is really neither - it is JUST information that is used to give us the sensory impression of one of those personalities under various circumstances.  Paradox 1 solved.

2. The great cosmic Program that appears to control our reality (see my book "The Universe - Solved!" for evidence), is also fully aware of the state of consciousness of every free-willed observer in our reality.  As a result, the behavior exhibited by an electron under observation can easily be made to be a function of the observation being made.  Paradox 2 solved.

If you don't believe that, here is the piece of pseudo-code that could represent the part of The Program that controls the outcomes of such experiments (each state of each object consists of all spatial coordinates, plus time, and directional vectors):

while(time!=EndTime) {
   ...
   for n=1 to AllParticlesInTheUniverse {
   ...
      Object=Particle(n)
      CurrentState(Object)=AcquireState(Object);
      ObservationState(Object)=CollectObservationalIntent(AllObservers(Object));
      NextState(Object)=CalculateNextState(CurrentState(Object), ObservationState(Object));
      ApplyNextState(NextState(Object));
   next n
   }
}

It's all there - full control of the outcome of any experiment based on the objects under test and the observational status of all observers.  Any known quantum mechanical paradox fully explained by 1970s-vintage pseudocode without the need for the hand waving of collapsing wave functions or zillions of parallel realities.

Tags: double slit experiment, wave/particle duality, quantum mechanics, wave function, program, thomas young, information, programmed reality
Categories: Physics | Programmed Reality | Quantum Mechanics | Science

So Craig Venter created synthetic life.  How cool is that?  I mean, really, this has been sort of a biologists holy grail for as long as I can remember.  Of course, Dr. Venter's detractors are quick to point out that Synthia, the name given to this synthetic organism, was not really built from scratch, but sort of assembled from sub-living components and injected into a cell where it could replicate.  Either way, it is a huge step in the direction of man-made life forms.  If I were to meet Dr. Venter, the conversation might go something like this:

Jim: So, Dr. Venter, help me understand how man-made your little creation really is.  I've read some articles that state that while your achievement is most impressive, the cytoplasm that the genome was transplanted to was not man made.

Craig: True dat, Jim.  But we all need an environment to live in, and a cell is no different.  The organism was certainly man made, even if its environment already existed.

Jim: But wait a minute.  Aren't we all man-made?  Wasn't that the message in those sex education classes I took in high school?  

Craig: No, the difference is that this is effectively a new species, created synthetically.  

Jim: So, how different is that from a clone?  Are they also created synthetically?

Craig: Sort of, but a clone isn't a new species.

Jim: How about genetically modified organisms then?  New species created synthetically?  

Craig: Yes, but they were a modification made to an existing living organism, not a synthetically created one.

Jim: What about that robot that cleans my floor?  Isn't that a synthetically created organism?

Craig: Well, maybe, in some sense, but can it replicate itself?

Jim: Ah, but that is just a matter of programming.  Factory robots can build cars, why couldn't they be programmed to build other factory robots?

Craig: That wouldn't be biological replication, like cell division.

Jim: You mean, just because the robots are made of silicon instead of carbon?  Seems kind of arbitrary to me.

Craig: OK, you're kind of getting on my nerves, robot-boy.  The point is that this is the first synthetically created biological organism.

Jim: Um, that's really cool and all, but we can build all kinds of junk with nanotech, including synthetic meat, and little self-replicating machines.  

Craig: Neither of which are alive.

Jim: Define alive.

Craig: Well, generally life is anything that exhibits growth, metabolism, motion, reproduction, and homeostasis.

Jim: So, a drone bee isn't alive because it can't reproduce?

Craig: Of course, there are exceptions.

Jim: What about fire, crystals, or the earth itself.  All of those exhibit your life-defining properties.  Are they alive?

Craig: Dude, we're getting way off topic here.  Let's get back to synthetic organisms.

Jim: OK, let's take a different tack.  Physicist Paul Davies said that Google is smarter than any human on the planet.  Is Google alive?  What about computer networks that can reconfigure themselves intelligently.

Craig: Those items aren't really alive because they have to be programmed.

Jim: Yeah, and what's that little code in Synthia's DNA?

Craig: Uhhh...

Jim: And how do you know that you aren't synthetic?  Is it at all possible that your world and all of your perceptions could be completely under programmed control?

Craig: I suppose it could be possible.  But I highly doubt it.

Jim: Doubt based on what? All of your preconceived notions about reality?

Craig: OK, let's say we are under programmed control.  So what?

Jim: Well, that implies a creator.  Which in turn implies that our bodies are a creation.  Which makes us just as synthetic as Synthia.  The only difference is that you created Synthia, while we might have been created by some highly advanced geek in an other reality.

Craig: Been watching a few Wachowski Brothers movies, Jim?

Jim: Guilty as charged, Craig.

Tags: craig venter, synthetic life, artificial life, synthia, robots, ai, artificial intelligence, programmed reality, nanotech, matrix, synthetic, artificial, venter, biologists
Categories: AI | Future Tech | Life | Nanotech | Programmed Reality | Robotics | Science

DNA is a self-replicating nucleic acid that supposedly encodes the instructions for building and maintaining cells of an organism.  With an ordered grouping of over a billion chemical base pairs which are identical for each cell in the organism, the unique DNA for a particular individual looks kind of like statements in a programming language.  This concept is not lost on Dr. Stephen Meyer (Ph.D., history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University), who posits that the source of information must be intelligent and therefore DNA, as information, is evidence of Intelligent Design.  He argues that all hypotheses that account for the development of this digital code, such as self-organization and RNA-first, have failed.  In a well publicized debate with Dr. Peter Atkins (Ph.D., theoretical chemistry, University of Leicester), a well known atheist and secular humanist, Atkins counters that information can come from natural mechanisms.  Sadly, Atkins resorts to insults and name calling, so the debate is kind of tainted, and he never got a chance to present his main argument in a methodical way because he let his anger get the best of him.  But it raised some very interesting questions, which I don't think either side of the argument has really gotten to the bottom of.

ID'ers trot out the Second Law of Thermodynamics and state that the fact that simple molecules can't self replicate without violating that Law proves Intelligent Design.  But it doesn't really.  The Second Law applies to the whole system, including many instances of increased disorder weighed against the fewer instances of increased order.  Net net, disorder TENDs to increase, but that doesn't mean that there can't be isolated examples of increased order in the universe. That seems to leave the door open to the possibility that one such example might be the creation of self-replicating molecules.

Another point of contention is about the nature of information, such as DNA.  Meyer is wrong if he is making a blanket assertion that information can only come from intelligence.  I could argue that, given a long enough period of time, if you leave a typewriter outdoors, hailstones will ultimately hit the keys in an order that creates recognizable poetry.  So the question boils down to this - was there enough time and proper conditions for evolutionary processes to create the self-replicating DNA molecule from non-self replicating molecules necessary for creating the mechanism for life?  

The math doesn't look good for the atheists.  Dr. Robert L. Piccioni, Ph.D., Physics from Stanford says that the odds of 3 billion randomly arranged base-pairs matching human DNA is about the same as drawing the ace of spades one billion times in a row from randomly shuffled decks of cards.  Harold Morowitz, a renowned physicist from Yale University and author of Origin of Cellular Life  (1993), declared that the odds for any kind of spontaneous generation of life from a combination of the standard life building blocks is one chance in 10E100000000000 (you read that right, that's 1 followed by 100,000,000,000 zeros).  Famed British Royal Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, proposed that such odds were one chance in 10E40000, or roughly "the same as the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could assemble a 747."  By the way, scientists generally set their "Impossibility Standard" at one chance in 10E50 (1 in a 100,000 billion, billion, billion, billion, billion).  So, the likelihood that life formed via combinatorial chemical evolution (the only theory that scientists really have) is, for all intents and purposes, zero.

Atkins, Dawkins, and other secular humanists insist that materialism and naturalism are pre-supposed and that there is no argument for the introduction of the logic of intelligence into science.  That sounds to me to be pretty closed minded, and closes the door a priori on certain avenues of inquiry.  Imagine if that mentality were applied to string theory, a theory which has no experimental evidence to start with.  One has to wonder why science is so illogically selective with respect to the disciplines that it accepts into its closed little world.

My interest in this goes beyond this specific debate.  I have a hobby of collecting evidence that our reality is programmed.  I'm not sure yet whether DNA has a place in that collection yet.  It will definitely need a little more thought.

 

Tags: dna, intelligent design, creationism, evolution, life, primordial soup, rna, intelligence, self replication, science
Categories: Life | Philosophy | Programmed Reality | Science

We used to be taught that the universe was everything there is.  But, over the past few years, it is beginning to have a new meaning.  The universe is now meant to be everything that we can possibly see or experience.  Let me illustrate with a story.  Imagine our protagonist Jack happily living in his little universe.  His astronomer buddies have used their most advanced equipment to peer into the deepest depths of space and have detected things a few billion light years away in all directions.  There could be things beyond that “practical observational horizon”, but we are limited by the state of the art of equipment in the year 2010. 

However, there is another horizon beyond “a” which denotes the point at which it would be impossible to see beyond, due to the speed of light.  The light from objects at that distance has been traveling toward us since the beginning of the big bang.  This is our theoretical horizon, beyond which we can never see or detect anything no matter how advanced our equipment becomes.  It should be noted, that this statement presumes that nothing travels faster than the speed of light and even if it did, we would not be able to detect it.  Despite a century of hard evidence supporting Einstein’s famous assumption regarding the limitations of the speed of light, there are a number of physicists who don’t rule out the possibility that this barrier could someday be broken.  But that’s a topic for another post.  Setting such arguments aside, there is then a “theoretical observational horizon,” also known as the Hubble Volume, which is generally accepted to be about 42 billion light years in diameter.  But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing beyond the Hubble Volume.  In fact, the inflationary theory of the big bang allows for quite a bit of the material from the big bang to exist beyond that horizon because the inflationary period was superluminal. (We were just saying...?)  But, for all practical purposes, the Hubble Volume contains all that you can ever know about.  By convention, astronomers call that "The Universe." 

By definition, a Universe depends on what is identified to be its center.  So, for example, Jill, standing on a planet 1 light year away from Jack, actually lives in a slightly different Universe.  One which has one horizon one light year further away from Jack's in the opposite direction and another horizon one light year closer than Jack's in the direction toward Jack.  So Jack has some stuff in his Universe that Jill doesn't have and vice versa.

The choice of a light year between Jack and Jill's positions was arbitrary.  They could be standing next to each other and still have slightly different Hubble Volumes.  In fact, when you get down to it, we all live in different Universes.

 

Tags: cosmology, hubble volume, universe, multiverse
Categories: Cosmology | Science

Last month, Lord Martin Rees, the president of Britain's Royal Society and "astronomer to the Queen of England", hosted the National Science Academy's first conference on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, which was attended by such scientific illuminaries as physicist Paul Davies, SETI founder and astrophysicist extraordinaire Frank Drake.  And the resulting sound bite of the week is "World-Leading Physicist Says 'They Could Exist in Forms We Can't Conceive'"?  

Really?  That's it?  That's news?  That's what we get from the world's leading thinkers on cosmology?

Sorry for my tone, but it's about time these guys got caught up with science fiction writers from 50 years ago.  Check out a 1959 movie called "Invisible Invaders."  Or at a minimum, take Carl Sagan's brainchild from the late 70's, "Contact" (film treatment in 1979, book in 1985, and movie in 1997) featuring a highly advanced extraterrestrial race who can appear to us in any form they want.  I'm sure there were many other writers who considered that a civilization advanced enough to cross millions of light years of space, might be advanced enough to learn how to cloak.  I certainly pondered that idea as a kid.  

No doubt, these guys are a bright bunch.  But not necessarily seeing the forest for the trees.  Take SETI, for example.

We tend to assign attributes of our own civilization and our own values to other potential civilizations.  But there is really no reason to assume that once life forms on a particular planet that it will evolve into a life form that is eager to communicate.  One could argue that the intelligence of dolphins, elephants, and humans are roughly equivalent (turn the clock back 50,000 years and look at what we assume about the behavior of each species; is there much difference?)  We don’t see dolphins building SETI dishes.  Using Drake's own equation for counting the number of ET civilizations that we might be able to communicate with, we need to consider the duration of a civilization communicating with electromagnetic radiation in the radio spectrum.  One can make the assumption that it might be similar to ours and in the range of 50-100 years.  But this is a big assumption.  Maybe ET modulates magnetic fields, or seismic waves, maybe they got fully wired for broadband internet before discovering radio wave propagation, maybe they communicate via telepathy, or entanglement, or some form of communication that is completely unknown to us.  Expecting them to have a period of radio wave technology that just happens to overlap ours is probably quite unlikely.  When I made reasonable assumptions for the factors in the Drake Equation in my book "The Universe - Solved!", I got the result of .08 overlapping radio wave civilizations per galaxy, making it unlikely that SETI will find anything before funding dries up.

On the other hand, modifying the Drake Equation to estimate the likelihood of ET visitation, I came to the following conclusion: If 50% of intelligent life forms can make it to Type III status, there should be thousands of migrating/colonizing/traveling species in our neighborhood.  On the other hand, would they even care about us?  When we take a walk through a field, do we attempt to communicate with the ants in an anthill?  If the field is ready to be leveled in order to make room for a housing development, do we attempt to save the ants?  No.  Why not?  Because they are so far beneath our intellect level or our perceived level of net worth, that such endeavors are simply not worth our time.  Now imagine what a Type II or III civilization might be like.  Consider how far we have progressed (some might say, regressed) as a society since the hunter/gatherer stage of human evolution 10,000 years ago.  Further, consider that we are accelerating in this progression exponentially.  So, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to even imagine where we might be in 10,000 years.  Telepathic communication, control of time and space, simultaneous access to parallel universes, full merge with AI?  Some futurists predict these things in hundreds of years, not 10,000.  Furthermore, since 100 million years represents less than 1% of the lifetime of our galaxy, it is not unrealistic to assume that Type III civilizations may be 100’s of millions of years advanced compared to our own society.  Given the foregoing discussion, it is easy to make an argument that it is highly unlikely that ETs are zipping about in our atmosphere in vehicles that appear to be no more than 50 years ahead of our technology (they supposedly crash, after all).  The only possible “True ET” explanation is that extremely advanced species either intentionally appear in a form that makes us realize that they are here (not unlike the father figure in the Carl Sagan movie “Contact”) or they don't appear to us at all.  The above section was taken from my book and written in 2007.

Lord Martin Rees, you should have saved yourself the expense of a conference and picked up a copy of "Contact" and "The Universe - Solved!"

Tags: astronomy, cosmology, extraterrestrial, et, alien, kardashev, ufo, disclosure, frank drake, drake equation, carl sagan, contact
Categories: Cosmology | General | Philosophy | Science

I am always amazed at how such bright physicists discuss scientific anomalies, like quantum entanglement, pronounce that "that's just the way it is" and never seriously consider an obvious answer and solution to all such anomalies - namely that perhaps our reality is under programmed control. 

For the quantum entanglement anomaly, I think you will see what I mean.  Imagine that our world is like a video game.  As with existing commercial games, which use "physics engines", the players (us) are subject to the rules of physics, as are subatomic particles.  However, suppose there is a rule in the engine that says that when two particles interact, their behavior is synchronized going forward.  Simple to program.  The pseudocode would look something like:

for all particles (i)
     for all particles (j)
          if distance(particle.i, particle.j) < EntanglementThreshold then
               Synchronize(particle.i, particle.j)
          else
          end if
     next j
next i

After that event, at each cycle through the main program loop, whatever one particle does, its synchronized counterparts also do.  Since the program operates outside of the artificial laws of physics, those particles can be placed anywhere in the program's reality space and they will always stay synchronized.  Yet their motion and other interactions may be subject to the usual physics engine.  This is very easy to program, and, coupled with all of the other evidence that our reality is under programmed control (the programmer is the intelligent creator), offers a perfect explanation.  More and more scientists are considering these ideas (e.g. Craig Hogan, Brian Whitworth, Andrei Linde) although the thought center is more in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and artificial intelligence.  I wonder if the reason more physicists haven't caught on is that they fear that such concepts might make them obsolete. 

They needn't worry.  Their jobs are still to probe the workings of the "cosmic program."

 

Tags: entanglement, programmed reality, pseudocode, physics engine, gaming
Categories: Gaming | Particle Physics | Programmed Reality | Quantum Mechanics | Science

Ah yes, the good old 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The idea that the total disorder of a system, e.g. the universe, always increases.  Or that heat always flows from hot to cold.  It's why coffee always gets cold, why money seems to dissipate at a casino, why time flows forward, why Murphy had a law, why cats and dogs don't tend to clean up the house.

Ultimately, due to this rather depressing physical law, the universe will die by "heat death," where it reaches a state of absolute zero, no more heat, no motion of particles.  Don't worry, that's not predicted for another 10^100 (or, a Googol) years.  But, I always wondered, is it always always the case, or can entropy decrease in certain circumstances?

Got a spare fortnight? Google "violations of the second law of thermodynamics."  Personally, I rather like Maxwell's idea that it is a statistical argument, not an absolute one. "Maxwell's Demon" is that hypothetical device that funnels hot molecules in one directions and cold ones in the opposite, thereby reversing the normal flow of heat.  Could a nanotech device do that some day?  Yes, I know that there has to be energy put into the system for the device to do its work, thereby increasing the size of the system upon which the 2nd law holds.  But, even without the demon, aren't there statistical instances of 2nd Law violation in a closed system?  Not unlike the infinitesimal probability that someone's constituent atoms suddenly line up in such a manner that they can walk through a door (see recent blog topic), so could a system become more coherent as time moves to the future.

What about lowering temperature to the point where superconductivity occurs?  Isn't that less random than non-superconductivity.  One might argue that the energy that it takes to become superconductive exceeds the resulting decrease in entropy.  However, I would argue that since the transition from conductive to superconductive occurs abruptly, there must be a time period, arbitrarily small, during which you would watch entropy decrease.

There are those who cite life and evolution as examples of building order out of chaos.  Sounds reasonable to me, and the arguments against the idea sound circular and defensive.  However, it all seems to net out in the end.  Take a puppy, for instance.  Evolutionary processes worked for millions of years to create the domestic dog.  Entropy-decreasing processes seem to responsible for the formation of a puppy from its original constituents, sperm and an egg.  But then the puppy spends years ripping up your carpet, chewing the legs of the furniture and ripping your favorite magazines into little pieces; in short, increasing the disorder of the universe.  Net effect?  Zero. 

Tags: thermodynamics, entropy, heat death, nanotech, superconductivity, life, evolution
Categories: Cosmology | Life | Nanotech | Physics | Science

I had a brainstorm the other day on how we might someday be able to walk through a door.  And I don't mean from a metaphysical standpoint, I mean really physically walk through the door.  If you think about it, there really should be a way to make it happen.  After all, our bodies and the door are almost 100% empty space.  I would argue that Programmed Reality says it is completely empty space, but that topic will have to be for another post.

An electron, in Newtonian mechanics, can be stuck on one side of an impenetrable barrier.  In QM, however, its wave function can be partly on one side of a barrier and partly on the other side at the same time, which allows for the possibility of “tunneling,” a common effect in semiconductors.  In fact, were it not for the wave function nature of QM, transistors, and therefore cell phones, computers, satellites, and all other sorts of modern technologies would not even exist!

Interestingly, this theory does not only apply to subatomic particles, but also to macroscopic objects like me, you, and Donald Trump’s hair.  Since our bodies are composed of particles, each of which are just wave functions, your body is simply the superposition of these zillions of wave functions, thereby creating its own “macroscopic” wave function.  Theoretically, for this reason, you have a finite probability of passing through a wooden door, much like the electron tunneling effect.  But, don’t try it.  Because, when you sum up all of your constituent particles’ wave functions, there is a mathematical tendency for the probabilities of large-scale anomalous quantum effects to be extremely small.  It is analogous to flipping pennies.  The odds that a single penny comes up heads (electron passes through the barrier) is 50-50, but the odds that 1000 pennies all come up heads (you pass through the door) is 2^^1000 (equivalent to a 1 followed by 301 zeros, an impossible to imagine large number) to 1.  And you have a helluva lot more than 1000 subatomic particles in your body.

But what if those particles in our bodies and/or the door were made to be coherent?  That is, in our penny analogy, all pennies behave the same behavior.  Impossible?  Not so fast, Einstein.  LASERs are a great example of coherence, where all photons are of the same frequency and are in phase.  Aren't particles of matter just a different form of particle from the photons and could they be organized to be coherent as well?

Turns out that is exactly the case and it is known as Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling.  U of Illinois researchers have demonstrated such an effect with electrons (real matter) in a nanowire.  Superconductors, superfluidity, Bose–Einstein condensates are examples of properties that seem to defy conventional physics by having their constituents occupy coherent states.  Macroscopic Quantum Coherence is a predicted property, yet to be observed in the laboratory, but probably inevitable, whereby all atoms in the piece of matter observing that property are in-phase and are described by a single quantum wavefunction.  Well, that wavefunction allows for the possibility of matter being anywhere, or "tunneling" through a thin enough membrane of material.  Let's say that, not unlike a laser, we could get all of the atoms in our bodies to be coherent.  Might it not be possible to "tunnel" through a thin membrane of coherent material?  

Effectively, we would have walked through a door!

Yes, I know that all of the different atoms in our bodies might not be made to be coherent with each other.  Then again, think about radio waves of different frequencies.  In general, they can't be in phase with each other, except at one particular point.  Fourier analysis of a waveform with a discontinuity, like a step function or a delta function, has, at the point of the discontinuity, all frequencies in phase.  Could there ultimately be a way to accomplish that with the mere several dozen atomic frequencies present in our bodies (And who cares if that stray bit of Uranium in your spleen is left behind on the other side of the door.  Would you really miss it?)  So maybe the trick is to pulse the coherence into your body just as you walk through the door.

Then there is the problem of how to get each planar sliver of your body to have the same tunneling capability sequentially.  Like, so you don't end up with a door stuck in your chest, all Jeff Goldblum-like.  Seems to me that maybe it's just a matter of applying continuous pulses of coherence into your body as you walk through the door.  For each planar sliver, one of the pulses will eventually make you progress to the next sliver.  Just hope the machine doesn't break down midway through.

So, there you have it.  One, ultra high frequency multi-atomic coherence pulser.  And you're walking through walls.  

Tags: tunneling, quantum coherence, quantum mechanics
Categories: Future Tech | Nanotech | Physics | Quantum Mechanics | Science

Apologies to the physics, transhumanism, nanotech, and AI enthusiasts out there, but every once in a while I get the urge to blog about something completely unrelated to the main themes of this site.  Usually, it is to get something off my chest, or to make a prediction (e.g. see "Do the Math - Hillary Can't Win").  This time it is about another one of my passions - trading.

I read something posted by a reputable brokerage house the other day; an article warning investors of the dangers of trading leveraged ETFs.  I did a little research and found that all brokerage houses are sending similar warnings to their customers, likely due to clueless investors who lose their shirts trading things they don't understand and then whining to the SEC to make it stop.

ETFs are Exchange Traded Funds, similar to Mutual Funds in that they represent a collection of stocks, bonds, or other financial instruments, but different in that the can be traded on exchanges just like stocks.  There are all kinds of ETFs, ones that follow market indexes, ones that track currencies, commodities, bond markets, ones that follow different geographical regions, ones that go up when the market goes down (Bear ETFs), and so on.  Like Mutual Funds, there are also leveraged ETFs, or ETFs that move more than the underlying index moves.  For example, an ETF may be a S&P 2X fund, which means when the S&P Index moves 1% in one direction, the ETF will typically move 2%, or twice as much.  These are the risky ones, according to the SEC and brokers.  Why?  Because of something that I'm going to call "leakage." I haven't seen that word used yet, but it seems fitting and descriptive.

According to the analysis, lets say an underlying index goes from 100 to 105, or up 5%.  A 2X leveraged ETF based on that same index would therefore go up 10%.  So, if it was trading at 100, it would go up to 110.  Now, let's say that the index drops back to where it started from, from 105 to 100, for a drop of 4.762%.  According to the leverage model, the ETF should drop twice that amount or 9.524% from 110 down to 99.52.  So it seems that because of the up and down price action of the market, the leveraged ETF has actually "leaked" .48%.  Imagine a market that continuously fluctuates - then the ETF would slowly leak away its value.  Sounds scary, doesn't it, especially for those who realize how much the market fluctuates day to day.
So, out go all the warning notices.

But something doesn't seem right to me.

First of all, for every buyer, there is a seller.  For every position in the market, there is an opposite position.  So, if a long position on a leveraged ETF slowly leaks away its value, where does that money go?  (And no, it doesn't automatically transfer into the accounts of the cigar smoking Illuminati.)  Does that mean that shorting leveraged ETFs will slowly make money, like a money  tree?  Or like grey goo slowly gobbling up the earth (I threw that in so that nanotechies find this article when it gets indexed in Google).  No, doesn't make sense.

When you think about it, any financial instrument that is leveraged, such as a stock with a "Beta" greater than 1, would succumb to this process.  In fact, leveraged ETFs are often composed of stocks with Beta > 1.  If I remember right from linear algebra, a process can be broken down into a superposition of processes.  In other words, if an ETF leaks, so must the high-Beta stocks on which it is based.  But again, this makes no sense at all.  If I own 100 shares of stocks and it fluctuates wildly, the only two ways I could get leakage is if my number of shares leak (which of course they don't - you buy 100, you always have 100), or the value of the company leaks (which of course it doesn't).  

So, I'm sorry financial wizards, but while it is nice to warn the masses about the dangers of leveraged trading, your arguments don't hold water on the ETF issue.  If anyone can explain to me where the leakage goes, I'll gladly post the rebuttal and/or remove my post.

Tags: trading, etfs, investments, leakage, leverage
Categories: Math