Speculist contributor Kathy Hanson (who also blogs at Beyond Words) has been involved in the long, slow process of selling out to the mainstream media over the past few years. Stephen and I totally approve of this, of course, as we are constantly trying to pimp out FastForward Radio to some big media outlet — so far with less success than Kathy has had.
A shot was heard around the world on Wednesday. But no bullets or guns were used. The projectile was a beam of photons fired through the Large Hadron Collider’s 17-mile ring of tunnel. And the only noise involved was the cheering of elated scientists, including two graduate students from Iowa State University, celebrating how well the complicated systems worked for the first firing of the most powerful particle accelerator ever built.
Kathy reports that her current gig has her focusing a lot on hard science stories, so we’re looking forward to more of these.
Much more significantly, by outlining an energy plan as comprehensive the one that Barack Obama outlined last week, John McCain is now in the running for one of these:
As we announced on the most recent edition of FastForward Radio, we will be awarding the presidential candidate who outlines the most speculicious program — that is, the plan with the most Speculist appeal — with a FastForward Radio coffee mug. Remaining zealously apolitical, we will not be endorsing any candidates for President, but we are pleased to provide a significant motivation to both candidates to get focused on positive future scenarios, especially those driven by emerging technologies and emerging possibilities.
While McCain did not put a timeline on his plan to get us off what I’m going to call hostile foreign oil (not necessarily all foreign oil) he did specifically mention one of our favorite approaches to energy independence: flex fuels. He also had some intriguing things to say about retraining the workforce in a global economy. We’ll take a look at McCain’s speech on Sunday’s podcast and decide whether he has taken the lead in the race for the mug or whether Obama still has the edge.
And a reminder to both Senator Obama and Senator McCain — if either happen to be reading this — any use by either of you of the phrase “space elevator” ought to just about clinch this thing. So don’t be shy.
Check out FutureCars.com. They provide a fairly comprehensive overview of future automobile technologies with an emphasis on future fuels. Plus, they provide a good run-down on the various ways that the flying car scenario might be realized, including this summary of the challenges that need to be overcome:
A flying car should:
be able to utilize the current infrastructures for both cars and airplanes
feature a flight system that does not require the owner to have a pilot’s license
meet all FAA regulations
be fuel efficient and economically viable for the average car buyer
be powered by renewable fuels
That’s a pretty good summary. I would venture to guess that we will solve our energy problems and have some fairly sophisticated AI in place before we see a true flying car. A machine that flies but that requires no more highly developed skills than those required to operate an automboile is going to have to be highly automated.
Appeals court smacks down judge for relying on Wikipedia
References to information at Wikipedia have shown up in various inappropriate places, from homework assignments to college term papers. But there’s one place that it seems everyone can agree that it doesn’t belong: the US court system. The US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, ruling in an immigration case, has agreed with the Board of Immigration Appeals in finding that a reliance on information in Wikipedia is insufficient grounds for a ruling. Nevertheless, it sent the case back to the Board, requesting that it clarify its decision.
This relates, I believe, to our recent FastForward Radio discussion about whether judges or lawyers will one day be replaced by automated systems. Clearly, any such systems that come online will require more reliable data sources that Wikipedia.
Of course, we cite Wikipedia all the time at the Speculist, but then most of what we write doesn’t subsequently become law.
Last summer, a condemned house in Houston, Texas was sucked into a small wormhole, its wooden facade slowly slurped though another dimension and spit out into an alley behind the backyard. This bizarre mashup of real estate and theoretical physics was created by local artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, who saw in the abandoned house an opportunity to remind people how fragile the fabric of spacetime really is.
Follow the link above to see where the wormhole comes out.
I’m not sure which is more remarkable, the fact that a project such as this would be carried out in the middle of some nondescript neighborhood, or the subject matter that the artists chose to depict. It’s not a slam-dunk for the latter — in my neighborhood, you get a nasty-gram from the HOA if one of your bushes dies or if paint starts to chip in some corner of your house’s exterior that you didn’t even know was visible from the street or anyone else’s house.
I can’t imagine what they would do if something like this were to appear on one of our streets. Of course, it would have to happen fast. (As in, overnight.)
Methuselah Foundation needs your help now – we are supporting a project named “Undergrads Fighting Age Related Disease” which has been submitted as part of the American Express Members Project initiative.
2. Log in either as an Amex Card Member or as a Guest Member on the top right side (any US resident can vote)
[ Note: Commenter Lauri, below, says that in fact anyone can vote, not just US residents.]
3. Complete the Registration Form, which will give you your login ID
Via our DNC 08 correspondent Michael Darling, here’s an intriguing Ted Talk by journalist / publisher / big thinker Kevin Kelly at last year’s eg conference:
Kelly asserts that less than 5000 days into the history of the world wide web, we should have learned that we need to get better at believing in the impossible. Many of the items we take for granted on the Internet today were technologically and (perhaps more importantly) economically inconceivable just a couple of decades ago.
His model going forward is that we should understand that there is only one machine; and he points out that it’s the most reliable machine ever built. Zero downtime. Uninterrupted for more than 5000 days. All of our laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, etc. are all just windows into this one machine.
Kelly notes that the size and complexity of this One Machine is roughly equal to a single human brain, with the big difference being that this particular brain is doubling in size and capacity every two years. At that rate, the One Machine will have the processing power of 6 billion human brains in 30 years, and will supersede the processing power of all humanity by the year 2040.
That ought to get us to the singularity if nothing else does.
Kelly suggests that the next 5000 days will be all about giving the machine a body. As we have noted in our many discussions of rapid replication, we’re heading towards a scenario in which the most valuable component of any manufactured item is the information that describes it. Kelly argues that physical objects become even more valuable as information objects when they are connected into the One Machine. So a shoe becomes a chip with heels; a car becomes a chip with wheels.
nd watching as every bit gets sucked into the one machine. Right now there’s a lot of data that isn’t part of this machine, but that will change.
Kelly also talks about the restructuring of the web. We started with an Internet that linked computers. Then we went to a web that links pages. The third stage will be the linking of data itself. In such a setup, this page would be automatically linked to other pages that talk about Kevin Kelly or the next 5000 days of the web. Google and RSS and various kinds of tagging already provide a hint as to how something like this semantic web will work — and it will, in fact, probably grow out of these things.
The whole idea reminds me a lot of the notion of hypertext as it was discussed and written about when I was in grad school 20 years ago or so. For me, one of the big disappointments of the world wide web was that you actually had to build the links from one page to another. The great vision was for an underlying infrastructure that would automatically make the links, and which would surprise us by making connections that were not as obvious as the top-level ones. I wasn’t wrong to want that, just wrong to expect it 20-30 years before it was slated to show up.
Beyond the semantic Internet, and some time after the next 5000 days, we will see the the Internet of things, where physical objects, not just chips grafted on to them, are connected into the web. At that point, the line between the cyber world and the real world starts to break down in a totally unexpected way. We’ve had this model for a long time of a new, separate reality emerging in cyberspace, one that eventually becomes as robust or even more robust than the physical world of the substrate which contains it. That model may yet prove to be true, but it doesn’t stop what Kelly is describing from happening — having that cyber world reach up and embed itself in the real world.
Ultimately, we may no longer know which world contains the other.
But then at that point, we won’t care. Our world will be the web at that point, and we will be the web. We will be the One Machine, just as, in a very real sense, we are now.
In the latest issue of Nature News, Postdoctoral Fellow Nadav Katz explains how his team [took] a “weak” measurement of a quantum particle, which triggered a partial collapse. Katz then “undid the damage we’d done,” altering certain properties of the particle and performing the same weak measurement again. The particle was returned to its original quantum state just as if no measurement had ever been taken.
Because theorists had believed since 1926 that a measurement of a quantum particle inevitably forced a collapse, it was said that in a way, measurements created reality as we understand it. Katz, however, says being able to reverse the collapse “tells us that we really can’t assume that measurements create reality because it is possible to erase the effects of a measurement and start again.”
Because quantum stuff always sounds so goofy anyway, it’s hard to get a handle on just how significant this discovery may be. What we think of as “reality” * is the realization of trillions upon trillions of quantum events. Quantum particles exist in this extended, smeared out, many-places-and-states-at-the-same-time wave-form hyper-reality until they get observed or measured and then it turns out that — Hey! It wasn’t really in lots of different states, after all. It was there and it did that. Reality as we know it is the sum of all those there’s and that’s produced by all those collapsing waveforms.
We don’t actually know much about how or why this is the case. The idea that observation or measurement can be interacting with physical reality to produce results is so patently bizarre that there’s a tendency either to:
1. Conveniently ignore that that’s what’s going on
or
2. Turn it into some kind of spooky mystical thing
The first option is the path of cowards. The universe is weird. Let’s deal with it. The second option is a dead end. As soon as we declare the strangeness to be magical, we’re finished having a rational conversation about it (which we might not have been having anyway, but at least we were trying.)
So here’s the thing. Let’s analogize what’s happening when a particle goes from an uncollapsed state to a collapsed state. Think of your iTunes when you’re doing a random shuffle. A song sitting there on the disk is one of the many possible states of the Song I Am Currently Listening To. When a particular song is picked, the waveform of the entire music library gets collapsed down to just that one song. (It’s just an analogy, okay? Stick with me.)
So the iPod plays me a Muddy Waters tune and then starts throwing some Blue Man Group my way. The transition is just a little too jarring, so I take the controls, find some Van Morrison, and (for now) put BMG back into the uncollapsed state. Everybody with me so far? Good.
Here’s the problem with that analogy. Tunes playing on an iPod lack a characteristic that we normally associate with quantum waves in the process of collapse. Quantum collapse takes place along something we call the arrow of time — or may in fact the the thing that defines it. Observation or measurement of quantum states helps push time along. Once we seal the deal as to what a particular outcome was, it’s finished. Or at least it’s supposed to be. But now Katz is showing us something else.
In other words, what Katz has done — if I grasp the thing correctly, and I’m sure someone will tell me at great length why I don’t — is not to shut down Blue Man Group and play some other song. He is setting things up so that Blue Man Group never played.
It’s not exactly time travel, nor is it even precisely time reversal, but those two concepts come as close as anything I can think of to what this experiment implies. This may be more weirdness of the universe that we’re just going to have to get used to, or it may have implications about some very powerful technologies that we will someday have access to. It’s hard to say right now.
But I’ll tell you one thing. If we really are living in a computer simulation, Nadav Katz has stumbled across an intriguing snippet of source code.
