Revision as of 15:14, 27 May 2015

Things are bad. Really bad. You want to do the right thing and make the bad thing better. We wish life would be as simple as making the Monsters Under the Bed go away just by sticking heads in rooms. Sadly, that doesn’t work. We have to name the Monster, get the facts on it, make possible meanings of the data in the context, and assign significance to meanings made, so we can cast the proper spells to make it go away.

Monotheism

Fate

Science

Uncertainty principle

... accepting that uncertainty exists not due to a lack of knowledge but thanks to a fundamental law doesn’t sit well with some physicists. One famous dissenter was Einstein, who was contemptuous of the idea that unpredictability could be integral to the physical laws governing the universe. Oscar Dahlsten, a theoretical physicist from the University of Oxford, says that a lot of people still intuitively feel that the uncertainty principle should not hold up. Researchers have searched for a solution via “hidden variables”, which may be operating behind the scenes, making things look weirder than they actually are. So far, though, this approach has failed.

Stephanie Wehner and Esther Hänggi at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technology have taken a new tack, recasting the uncertainty principle in the language of information theory. What if the two properties of a single object that cannot be known simultaneously can be thought of as two streams of information encoded in the same particle? In the same way that you can’t know a particle’s momentum and location to an arbitrarily high level of accuracy, you also can’t completely decode both of these messages. If you figure out how to read message 1 more accurately, then your ability to decrypt message 2 becomes more limited.

Next Stephanie and Esther calculated what happens if they loosen the limits of the uncertainty principle in this scenario, allowing the messages to be better decoded and letting you access information that you wouldn’t have had when the uncertainty principle was in force. Wehner and Hänggi conclude that this is the same as getting more useful energy, or work, out of a system than is put in, which is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics ^[1].

The four horsemen

On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen ^[2]. All four authors have recently received a large amount of media attention for their writings against religion – some positive, and some negative. In this conversation the group trades stories of the public’s reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations. They discuss the tough questions about religion that face the world today, and propose new strategies for going forward.

The Four Horsemen is also an award winning independent feature documentary which "lifts the lid on how the world really works" ^[3].

Higgs-boson

On July 4, 2012 scientists at CERN announced that they found a particle that behaved the way they expect the Higgs boson to behave ^[4] as described in the standard model developed in the early 70s. The model comes from particle physics, a field filled with physicists dedicated to reducing our complicated universe to its most basic building blocks: 12 different matter particles and four forces ^[5]. The 12 particles are subdivided in six quarks and six leptons. Quarks make up protons and neutrons, and leptons include the electron and the electron neutrino, its neutrally charged counterpart. Scientists think leptons and quarks are indivisible; impossible to break apart into smaller particles. The standard model also acknowledges four forces: gravity, electromagnetic, strong and weak.

The standard model has been very effective, aside from its failure to fit in gravity and its missing piece, the Higgs boson, that was reported found by the CERN scientists. A new study by a group of scientists from the University of Southern Denmark raises the possibility that the data collected from the Large Hadron Collider could instead explain another type of subatomic particle. Mads Toudal Frandsen, a particle physicist, explained in a statement, "The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particular particle is the Higgs particle ... It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles" ^[6].

Polytheism

Whose is bigger?

Oh and my gods are bigger than yours ^[7], of course, all of them.

On witch burnings

I think I found why patriarchy feared witches in this snippet:

An old woman (who happens to be a witch) and a priest are sitting by the road having a conversation.

(The conversation starts on the classic subject of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?")

"Sixteen!"

"You've counted sixteen?" said Oats eventually.

"No, but it is as good an answer as any you'll get. And that's what you holy men discuss is it?"

"Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example."

"And what do they think? Against it, are they?"

"It is not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."

"Nope."

"Pardon?"

"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that--"

"No it ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes-"

"But they Starts with thinking about people as things…"

Unknowable

For the sake of a "universal filesystem" and life being too short to fight over names, I have made space for an "unknowable" directory, with a sub directory "prince of darkness" to file electric wiring schemes of english motorcycles in. You never know when *that* comes in handy.

References

1. ↑ Sorry Einstein, the universe needs quantum uncertainty http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6894v1
2. ↑ Playlist The Four Horsemen: Discussions with Richard Dawkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=SPCFE979715AE46A0E&v=9DKhc1pcDFM
3. ↑ Four horsemen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU
4. ↑ CERN Higgs-boson http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/higgs-boson
5. ↑ CERN The standard model http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/standard-model
6. ↑ God Particle Findings Were Inconclusive, According To New Analysis http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113275750/higgs-boson-findings-from-cern-inconclusive-110914/
7. ↑ Spitting Image - My God Is Bigger Than Your God https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRwXrcz-F9M