Everything's 2D and nothing's real

Here's some discoveries and theories that alone sure are interesting. But together ... They really have made my head spinn!

1 - 2D & 3D information in the universe
Jacob Beckenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has discovered that the information content of a black hole is proportional to the area of its event horizon, the border that separates “normal” space from the un-escapable interior.
Theorists have since shown that the quantum ripples of that surface can encode the information inside the black hole. I.e. the information inside a black hole is not unreachable or lost but projected on the event horizons surface.

2 - Unknown interference
A German experiment called GEO600 is trying to pick up evidence of gravitational waves. To measure this, a laser beam is sent out through a beam splitter, splitting the beam in two directions at right angle to each other. The two beams travel each a distance of 600 m, reflects back and are merged together again in the beam splitter. If a gravitational wave has passed the equipment interference is expected. This because a gravitational wave is expected to stretch space in one direction and squeeze it in another and by so making the beams travel different distances.
But the experiment is suffering from unknown noise in the merging pattern.
Quantum fluctuations (the temporary change in the amount of energy in a point in space) are ruled out, because thay are far to small to measured.

3 - We are 2D
Craig Hogan, physicist at Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia has an interesting idea. What if the universe has a border, like the black hole has its event horizon? If so, it would, according to Hogan, be built up by Planck-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. Together holding all information about the universe.
The Planck length is the smallest distance or size about which anything can be known in our universe, like pixels in the world of computer monitors, the small squares that make up the image on the screen. You can't get more information out of a picture than all it's pixels.
Since the information contained in the universe must match that of the surface, the Planck length may not be the smallest part inside the universe since the volume of the universe is larger than its surface.
Hogan has done his math and predicted what the noise of this “large” fluctuations in space-time would look like . And guess what? It fits the noise of the GEO600 experiment!
This could mean, says Hogan, that we live in a holographic projection. That nothing really happens here, but on the surface of the universe.

1+2+3+4 = ?
Is this comparable with our own computer simulations. Like 3d computer games experienced in two dimensions on computer and TV screens?
And if you add Nick Bostroms paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?” to the equation?

[ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.]

Sources:

• New Scientist, article, Our world may be a giant hologram (15 January 2009 by Marcus Chown)
• Nick Bostrom, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University, paper, Are you living in a computer simulation? (July 2001)

An idea of relative time

If you are in close orbit around a black hole, travelling very fast, and have your buddy on the phone (ok, let's pretend this is working - it's the principle I'm after), your voice will in his hear be veeery slooowww... pitched down. His voice, on the other hand will in your ear be something like an old record being played too fast - high pitched and fast. This is according to Einsteins theories. And I think proved by experiments under less dramatic circumstances.
The same would be true if you are cruizing the univers in a high velocity, maybe some percents from the speed of light. Or if you were standing on a really massive object talking to someone in an low gravity environment not moving very fast according to you.

Why is this?

I'm nor a mathemetican or a physicist. They could probably explain it very scientific.
But I have an alternative suggestion (well, I really don't know if it's an alternative, the same, something compleatly crazy or just stupid).

Let's take a look at our computers. In a computer there is a thing called clock frequence. It's like a clock, ticking really fast, that tells the computer to do a calculation. A personal computer of today makes about 2 billions of calculations per second.
If you are running to many applications or some application is demanding a lot of processing power you may have experience some lagging, ie. processes are running slow. This is because all calculations can't be achieved at the time needed.

So let's pretend our universe has a clock frequency (probably having something to do with the speed of light) and that everything happening in it, happens according to this frequency. On each tick of this clock all particles in our universe jumps one frame in time: An electron jumps, another particle splits into two, and so on.
Seen to the whole universe this is quite a lot of calculations!
There are places in the universe where not so many calculations are needed. Like some really dead part f space far, far away from everything. And there are relative small areas of space where a lot is to be calculated. Places where a lot of mass is present. Like in the vicinity of a black hole. And sometimes mass travels very far and have to interact with a lot of mass over time. The faster it's traveling the more mass it have to interact with.
Now we are back at the beginning of this post. Time runs slower for the fast travelling and the one near high gravity sources relatively to the observer (not affected by high gravity or fast travelling).

Could it be that the universe can't cope? That it needs to slow time down to manage. That the univers lags?

Think of the enormous amounts of calculations that is needed (fast) to describe what's happening if you were speeding your spaceship through space in near light speed.

What do you think, or know?
Please let me know.

Back on track

Finally i've taken up a habit that's been in hibernation for some years; fine art.
So here's the first image in a suite; Machine I.

Simulation loop

Just reading Douglas Hofstadtler's I am a strange loop. Highly recommended! (doubtless, although I'm just half way). It's about self-referential systems. About feedback in systems. Feedback in our brains creating the "I" we all experience so real. But is it?
An idea I've had swimming around in my cranium for some time got re-fueld:

Is it possible to day to create a simulation in which a simulation is running, simulating the first simulation? Simulating each other.

Or is this just a stupid and impossible idea?
Myself, a layman in computer simulation need feedback. If you have any thoughts abot this. Arguments, speculations or other comments, please comment.

The Death of Chart Music?

If there is a kind of music made for the sole purposes of making money and gaining fame – and another kind, made by true artists, touching peoples souls – then I have a theory of how to get rid of the first.

Today the music industry complains about loosing a lot of money on illegal copying and file sharing. Money that should go to promotion, distribution and the artists. So I ask myself, where is the money flow largest in the music industry? I guess it’s around chart music – popular and relatively short lived songs and artists. To generalize; music made for the sole purpose of making money and gaining fame.

If sharing and copying music was totally legalized, I think that this kind of music would be downloaded and copied the most, since it’s constantly being replaced by newer artists and hits up to date with trends and styles. Nobody would spend money on mp3’s or CD’s when the music will be out of date the next week. Legal copying and downloading would rule.

And the result? There will be no money in making commercial music. Not for the artists and not for the record companies, since nobody would pay for it.

Will this not happen to all of the music industry? I don’t think so. Who would like to pay for music if it was legal to copy and download for free? The answer, I think, will be people listing to music that means something to them, music touching souls, honest music by true artists. Music with a deeper purpose than of being a commercial product making people rich and famous. If you really like an artist you gladly give some money in return for the music. Maybe not all people, but a lot, I think, and hope.

Would not this make the world a better place?

Dostojevskij, Science Fiction and Humanity

Why is science fiction usually categorized as bad literature? And what is “good literature”?

Lets start with some personal reflections of the definitions of “good literature”.
I guess the definition of good literature varies depending on whom you ask. In school we get one message. The classics; Shakespeare, Dostojevskij, Voltaire, and so on, and of course, the Nobel Price winners. Yeah, they sure knew/know how to write. But what makes the establishment deem them so high? And why do people still read them?
I’m certainly no expert on literature and I haven’t studied the subject in any academic way. But I have read some of the “great authors” and other works of literature honored by professional critics and other experts. My personal guess is that those authors and acclaimed authors of today have/had a rare ability to address universal human topics in ways communicating over the centuries. The big human questions, feelings and doubts experienced by people are in the whole, approximately the same today as they were ages ago.
With the exception of skilled language (the technique), I believe “great writers”, to fulfill the above criteria, must have gained a lot of life experience to be able to address these topics in a competent ways.
So maybe what “great literature” does, is helping you understand yourself and the world around you, then and today, – based on the writers experience and observations. Experiences and observations from his or her past.
This is what I’m getting at. The past. Sure, as I said before, a lot of life as a human today is the same as it was even hundreds of years ago. And sure history sometimes repeats itself. This is important to remember. But the world has never before been as it is today. And it has never ever been as it will be tomorrow. And that is where we are all going.
Among the “great writers” there are a few exceptions, not leaning on the past, but I suppose you could debate whether or not they are among the “great authors”.
Anyway, Mary Shelley is one of them. Her novel Frankenstein was first published in 1831. Besides being an entertaining horror story, it shone some light on the moral issues of man being able to create life.
H. G. Wells and his first novel The Time Machine were published in 1895. A story about the implications of time travel, if it ever will be possible. Followed by The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896, where he addressed the coming misgivings of biophysics. Other stories by Wells addressing different “what ifs” and possible futures are The First Men in the Moon and the well-known The War of the Worlds.
This new type of literature, today called Science Fiction, gives us a better chance to control the future of mankind. It can prepare us and start debates far in advance. It can also inspire to brand new technologies and fields of study. A lot of things we now take for granted were originally ideas from science fiction literature; robots, GPS, mobile phones, computer servers, and so on. Have a look at this list at Technovelgy.com for more SF related inventions.
One of the more recent topics of SF literature (and movies) are virtual worlds and artificial intelligence.
And I bet a lot of scientists and developers in different areas read SF for new ideas.
Today the numbers of writers addressing possible futures are enormous compared to just some decades ago. But do they get the respect they deserve? I would say no, they don’t. In my opinion, giving humanity possible scenarios of the future and knowledge of possible new technologies that drastically may change our society, through literature accessible to the masses, are very good things to do. Thanks to movies like the Matrix and books like Permutation City by Greg Egan we can start to understand the implications of those technologies long before they are fully evolved and put into practice.

The question it’s all boiled down to: Why is what is considered “good literature” devoted to the language and experiences from the past? Why are futurism not deemed higher?

In the end, all we have left is the future.

Fight the system

In a previous post I had some thoughts about if we ever will be able to look outside the universe. Or if a simulated intelligence, in a virtual environment, ever will be aware of CPUs and circuitry.
Well it sure seems like a hard thing to do.

So how about relationships? Aren’t relationships like other systems? If so, they seem, on a higher level, above the physics rendering us, to be based on emotions, feelings and needs.
Is that why it’s so hard to change things in relationships - because you can’t see the system from above? Even when great effort is put into renewal, you still go by the old rules?
But let’s have a look into the really small systems.

According to quantum theory, it is impossible in principle to measure both the position and momentum of an object to within a certain degree of precision at the same time. Because if you do, you will alter it.
Great! That’s probably what your counselor will tell you too: alter it! Break free from the system of every day. Put something new into it. Go on a trip or something.
It seems that everything really is tied together somehow, doesn’t it? From the smallest to the largest. And isn’t that what scientists all over the world is looking for – the theory of everything. String theory? Well, Try one if you like…