Quantum Entanglement – Solved (with pseudocode)

February 6, 2010 7 Comments

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.”

 

entanglement

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Entropy and Puppies, like a Hand and a Glove

December 9, 2009 1 Comment

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.

shakespeareandleash185

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How to Walk Through a Door

September 27, 2009 2 Comments

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!

tunneling

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.

walkingthroughawall

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Just when you thought Physics couldn’t get any Stranger

September 7, 2009 1 Comment

Tachyons, entanglement, cold fusion, dark matter, galactic filaments.  Just when you thought physics couldn’t get any stranger…

– THE VERY COLD: Fractional Quantum Hall Effect: When electrons are magnetically confined and cooled to a third of a degree above absolute zero (See more here), they seem to break down into sub-particles that act in synchronization, but with fractional charges, like 1/3, or 3/7.

– THE VERY HIGH PRESSURE: Strange Matter: The standard model of physics includes 6 types of quarks, including the 2 (“up” and “down”) that make up ordinary matter.  Matter that consists of “strange” quarks, aka Strange Matter, would be 10 times as heavy as ordinary matter.  Does it exist?  Theoretically, at very high densities, such as the core of neutron stars, such matter may exist.  A 1998 space shuttle experiment seems to have detected some, but repeat experiments have not yielded the same results.

– THE VERY LARGE DIMENSIONAL: Multidimensional Space: String theories say that we live in a 10-dimensional space, mostly because it is the only way to make quantum mechanics and general relativity play nicely together.  That is, until physicist Garrett Lisi came along and showed how it could be done with eight dimensional space and objects called octonions.  String theorists were miffed, mostly because Lisi is not university affiliated and spends most of his time surfing in Hawaii.

– THE VERY HOT: Quark-Gloun Plasma: Heat up matter to 2 trillion degrees and neutrons and protons fall apart into a plasma of quarks called quark-gluon plasma.  In April of 2005, QGP appeared to have been created at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

My view on all this is that it is scientific business as usual.  100 years ago, we lived in a smaller world; a world described solely by Newtonian Mechanics, our ordinary everyday view of how the world works.  Then, along came relativity and quantum mechanics.  Technological advances in laboratory equipment and optics allowed us to push the limits of speed and validate Relativity, which ultimately showed that Newtonian Mechanics was just an approximation of the larger, more encompassing theory of Relativity at slow speeds.  Similarly we pushed the limits of probing the very small and validated Quantum Mechanics, which showed that Newtonian Mechanics was just an approximation of the larger, more encompassing theory of Quantum Mechanics at large scales.  In the 1960’s, we pushed the limits of heat and energy, discovered  and found that our Quantum Mechanical / Relativistic Theory of the world was really just an approximation at low temperatures of a larger theory that had to encompass Quantum Chromodynamics.  Now, we are pushing the limits of temperature, or the slowing down of particles, and discovering that there must be an even larger theory that describes the world, that explains the appearance of fractional charges at extremely low temperatures.  Why does this keep happening and where does it end?

Programmed Reality provides an explanation.  In fact, it actually provides two.

In one case, the programmers of our reality created a complex set of physical laws that we are slowly discovering.  Imagine a set of concentric spheres, with each successive level outward representing a higher level scientific theory of the world that encompasses faster speeds, higher temperatures, larger scales, colder temperatures, higher energies, etc.  How deep inside the sphere of knowledge are we now?  Don’t know, but this is a model that puts it in perspective.  It is a technological solution to the philosophy of Deism.

The second possibility is that as we humans push the limits of each successive sphere of physical laws that were created for us, the programmers put in place a patch that opens up the next shell of discovery, not unlike a game.  I prefer this model, for a number of reasons.  First of all, wouldn’t it be a lot more fun and interesting to interact with your creations, rather than start them on their evolutionary path and then pay no further attention?  Furthermore, this theory offers the perfect explanation for all of those scientific experiments that have generated anomalous results that have never been reproducible.  The programmers simply applied the patch before anyone else could reproduce the experiment.

Interestingly, throughout the years, scientists have fooled themselves into thinking that the discovery of everything was right around the corner.  In the mid-20th century, the ultimate goal was the Unified Field Theory.  Now, it is called a TOE, or Theory of Everything.

Let’s stop thinking we’re about to reach the end of scientific inquiry and call each successive theory a TOM, or Theory of More.

Because the only true TOE is Programmed Reality.  QED.

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Navigating the Quantum Froth

August 16, 2009 1 Comment

Evidence for Programmed Reality is starting to pour in from all fields.  The latest comes from Gamma-ray imaging from deep space.  Here’s the deal:

Extremely high energy photons are known as gamma rays and are generated only in really cool places like Cern and supermassive black holes that power galaxies.  The cosmologically-originated gamma rays tend to come in bursts and there are special telescopes, such as MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope) that detect and measure these bursts.  According to all known laws of physics, all photons no matter their energy level travel at exactly the same speed, namely the speed of light.  Problem is that several gamma ray detectors have noticed that gamma rays from distant galaxies arrive on earth at slightly different times, which makes no sense.

Unless you consider that space is quantized.  Then, the photons have to work their way through the quantum “froth” and the low energy photons can do it easier than the high energy ones, much like radio waves through a low pass filter.  So says Italian physicist Giovanni Amelino-Camelia.  A couple references on this theory include an FXQi article and a recent article from New Scientist.

The reason this effect isn’t normally noticed is that the influence of quantized spacetime is so small, conventional experiments will not demonstrate its impact.  However, as we probe deeper into space and increase the sensitivity of our instruments, we ultimately get to a point where we measure things that demonstrate that the status quo in physics is just an approximation, much as Newtonian physics is just an approximation of Relativistic physics at slow speeds or Quantum Mechanics at large scales.  The recent quantization noise in the GEO600 Gravity Wave Detector is a case in point.  Because it is the most sensitive instrument of its kind, it has reached a resolution limitation that may indicate the granularity of the universe.  With MAGIC, a similar situation exists.  Because it is highly sensitive, it can detect signals whose origin are so far away that they allow for propagation deviations to occur over such a vast region of space.  The 4 minute anomaly that MAGIC observed occurs over 500 million light years.  That means that it is detecting a deviation of 1 part in about 65000000000000 (65 trillion), which apparently is enough to break known laws of physics.

I’m interested in this because the underlying reason for this may very well be the quantization of space.  If so, this and the GEO600 experiments are the first to detect it.  And, for anyone who hasn’t read “The Universe – Solved!” or meandered through this website, I ask the question:

Why might reality be quantized and not continuous?

It takes an infinite amount of resources to create a continuous reality, but a finite amount to create a quantized reality.  By resources, I refer to bits, the information that it takes to model reality.  In order to program a virtual reality, there must be quantization.  It is impossible to develop a program with unlimited resolution.  So the very fact that our reality is quantized may be considered strong evidence that reality is programmed.

What other reason could there be?

 

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Mysteries of the Moon Explained

July 7, 2009 3 Comments

Think we understand that big object in the night sky?  Guess again.  The moon is full of mysteries, some of which baffle scientists more the more we learn about it.  Admittedly, the source of many of these reports has not been fully verified, and I don’t have the time to do the full research.  But hey, this is a blog and by definition, I can take liberties with my sources and talk about whatever I want, right?

For example, rocks from the moon and the earth reportedly have very different minerals; the earth has high concentrations of iron, the moon does not.  This implies that they were not formed from the same source, nor was the moon once part of the earth, as previously thought.

Some lunar rocks supposedly contain brass (a man-made alloy not found naturally), mica, and pure titanium.  Stranger still, Uranium 236 and Neptunium 237, elemental isotopes not found in nature on earth, have been found in rock samples.

The solar system is known to be about 4.5 billion years old, the oldest earth rock is 3.7 billion years old, yet some lunar rocks have been dated to an ages ranging from 4.5 to 5.3 billion years.  The lunar soil is a billion years older than its rocks and of a different composition.

Instruments left behind from Apollo missions detected a “wind of water” in 1971.

Some moon rocks are magnetized, although the moon has no magnetic fields.  Where did the magnetic property of the rocks come from?

Measurements indicate that the moon is less dense at the core than at the crust, which is counter to conventional “geo-logic.”

No one really understands where the moon came from.  Due to differences in composition, it can’t have come from the earth, nor from the same material from which the earth was created. Impacts on the moon (meteors or artificial objects crashed into the surface) have resulted in the measurement of a “ringing” reverberation, sometimes for hours before dying down.  Such an effect typically only occurs in a hollow object, leading some to speculated that the moon is hollow at its core.  No cosmological process can explain this.

The moon is the only satellite to revolve around its planet in a near circular orbit where one side always faces it.

The moon takes up the same angular size in the sky as the sun; hence the possibility of perfect solar eclipses.  No other planet-moon combination comes close.

Most all other satellites orbit their planet in line with the planets ecliptic plane.  But the moon is off by 5 degrees.  Why?

The scientific community has been struggling with these anomalies for many years.  A little internet research and one can easily find creative scientific explanations for most of the above anomalies. Unfortunately, they do not all peacefully coexist.

Programmed Reality has another explanation.  The moon is simply a programmed part of our reality, like everything else.  Its size was selected to create eclipses, its distance to facilitate exploration and generate tides and resultant tidal tables to make boating courses a little more complex.  Reasons for other anomalies have yet to be discovered, but serve to provoke investigation and discourse.  And, of course, without its beautiful prominence in the sky, we might never have known Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” and the name of Frank Zappa’s daughter.

Moon Apollo mission

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Gravity is Strange – Unless you understand Programmed Reality

June 22, 2009 1 Comment

Physicists tell us that gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of nature.  And yet it behaves quite differently than the other three.  A New Scientist article breaks down the oddities, a few of which are reproduced here:

– Gravity only pulls.  It doesn’t appear to have an opposing effect, like other forces do.  Notwithstanding the possibility that dark energy is an example of “opposite polarity” gravity, possibly due to unseen dimensions, there appears to be no solid evidence of it as there is with all other forces.

– The strength of other forces are comparable in magnitude, while gravity checks in at 40 orders of magnitude weaker.

– The fine-tuned universe, a favorite topic of this site, includes some amazing gravity-based characteristics.  The balance of early universe expansion and gravitational strength had to balance to within 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000 in order for life to form.

The Anthropic Principle explains all this via a combination of the existance of zillions (uncountably large number) of parallel universes with the idea that we can only exist in the one where all the variables line up perfectly for matter and life to form.  But that seems to me to be a pretty complex argument with a few embedded leaps of faith that make most religions look highly logical in comparison.

Then there is the Programmed Reality theory, which as usual, offers a perfect explanation without the need for the hand-waving Anthropic Principle and the “Many Worlds”
interpretation of quantum mechanics.  Gravity is not like other forces, so let’s not keeping trying to “force” it to be (pardon the pun.)  Instead, it is there to keep us grounded on the planet in which we play out our reality, offering the perfect balance of “pull” to keep every fly ball from flying out of the stadium (regardless of the illegal substance abuse of the hitter), to make kite flying a real possibility, and to enable a large number of other enriching activities.  While, at the same time, being weak enough to allow basketball players to dunk and planes to fly, and to enable a large number of other enriching activities.  Our scientists will continue the investigate the nature of gravity via increasingly complex projects like the LHC, unpeeling the layers of complexity that the programmers put in place to keep scientific endeavor, research, and employment moving forward.

Newton's apple  Warped spacetime

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String Stars – You Heard It Here First!

February 22, 2009 1 Comment

I remember the days when we were all amazed at the concept of a white dwarf star; the final evolutionary state of most stars after their gravitational collapse.  It can’t collapse any further due to something called electron degeneracy pressure.  I always visualized it by imagining atoms jammed together to the point where their electron shells were nearly touching.  A white dwarf’s density was such that a teaspoonful would weigh as much as an elephant.  They are about the size of the earth.

But there was an even more bizarre concept – the neutron star.  Still more dense, it was proposed by Baade and Zwicky in 1933, a year after the neutron was discovered.  For a star that has more mass than the Chandrasekhar limit, or 1.44 solar masses, when it collapses at the end of its life, its density is even enough to overcome the forces that hold a white dwarf together.  In the late 60’s, one was actually observed and by the 70’s, the concept was considered to be well accepted by most astronomers.  Neutron stars can’t collapse any further due to the Pauli exclusion principle.  I always visualized it by imagining neutrons jammed together to the point where they were nearly touching.  A neutron star is maybe a billion times denser than a white dwarf.  They are about the size of Manhattan.

But then, I thought, what if the mass of the star was so large that even the neutrons collapsed into their constituents, quarks?  Well, I don’t know if anyone else had such an idea and now, doing a little web research, I can’t seem to put my finger on when such a concept was first proposed.  But I’m starting to see a buzz about quark stars.  In 2008, astrophysicists Denis Leahy and Rachid Ouyed proposed the quark star as the result of super-supernovae (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080603-aas-neutron-quark.html).  And now, astrophysicists from the University of Hong Kong have presented evidence of a quark star in super-supernova SN 1987A (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126964.700-quark-star-may-hold-secret-to-early-universe.html)

So, now I wonder, what next?  Quarks probably have their own sub-quark constituents.  String theorists say quarks are made of vibrating strings.  If so, could a massive enough star, or a dense enough hunk of matter overcome “quark degeneracy” and collapse into a “String Star?”  A star consisting of string material that is so compressed it can vibrate anymore?

So I searched the web and am proud to say that I have found no such proposal.  So, I hereby claim it.  Someday, someone will lay claim to discovering a string star.  You heard it here, first.  🙂

 

string theory

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Wacky Ideas from my Past – #1 The Invisibility Cloak

April 3, 2008 3 Comments

When I was a geeky teenager, I remember dreaming up these wild inventions that I though could revolutionize the world in some way.  Since that was 30 years ago, I thought it might be kind of fun to take stock of the likelihood of these ideas it today’s time.  Please try not to laugh.  Here was idea #1 – The Invisible Cloaking Device…

My thought was this – how cool would it be to be somewhere and put on a jacket and just become invisible.  Of course, the back pages of Popular Mechanics always had see-through glasses but of course, they were a gaff.  But I wondered if the cloaking concept could really work.  I didn’t see why not.  The way I figured it, if they could make transistors that were pretty much microscopic, and LED’s that were based on transistors, why not little cameras that were just as small?  All you had to do is put zillions of these cameras all over your cloak as well as zillions of LEDs.  But the LEDs had to be able to generate any color of light.  And each point of the cloak would have many cameras pointing in each direction, the signals of which were collected at a central computer.  The computer would figure out what part of the cloak was at the exact opposite position for each camera and each direction of view.  And so, that signal would get routed to the LED so as to generate the image that was the same as if you were looking through the cloak.  An engineering nightmare to be sure, especially in determining the position of every point of the coat.

So imagine how excited I was in 2006 when I first heard of experiments being done with cloaking devices.  Unfortunately, however, the technology is still woefully weak.  As shown in the figure below, you have to put a camera directly behind the subject and a combiner device between the viewer and the subject and it only works in one direction.  So, nobody is going to get fooled any time soon.

But still, the resulting effect is kind of cool.  See below…

So when will we have true invisibility?  I have seen projections of 10-20 years for single color with a cloak of a well-defined shape.  “Sometime this century” for a Harry Potter type invisible cloak.  I think that nanotech will facilitate the process by enabling microscopic devices that can image in all directions and are self aware of their position.  So, I say…

2030

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