Using Me!

Just so busy.

I haven’t had time to update the page for a while for which I apologise. The continuation of my Quantum Physics theme will happen very soon I promise.  Right now all my time is taken up with work and the legal entanglements of buying a house. Add on top of that the fact that I’ve been on call for work for 3 of the last 4 weeks and my attempts to get at least 5 hours of badminton in per week to try and trim this waistline down and there’s not much time left over for the intensive work that the posts require. I have to make sure they are readable for the average person that may arrive here with no knowledge of Physics.

On a vaguely less pathetic note did anyone see Newsnight last night? Is the government in a pickle of what? Paxman tore the Treasury official to pieces over the absence of a public spending review this side of the next election! To paraphase… the government has promised more spending and won’t reveal where the money is coming from. We are all collectively in a massive debt and it cannot come from nowhere. Either costs have to be cut – in defense, schools, roads, hospitals or whatever you choose, or we all have to pay more tax. If we don’t and the national debt rises above 75% of GDP then we risk losing our A+ credit rating as a country and that is a downward spiral we do not even want to contemplate. Gilt rates would fall, bank investment would fall, money would leave the country like rats abandoning a sinking ship and that would put the entire economy in peril. Exchange rates and Interest Rates would shift to accomodate this and all to our detriment.

Also of interest in the news today was that among Gordon ‘oh crap the shit hit the fan’ Brown’s eleven new bills for parliament is one seemingly innocuous one which guarantees the right of children to not fall below the poverty line. Yes, that is indeed very peculiar. You really did read that right. If the bill goes through then children will have the right to not be in whatever is considered poverty. The accepted measure, for the purposes of the bill, is that any child who’s parents have a total income less than 60% of the median of household income in the UK will be considered to be ‘in poverty’. This has been deliberately introduced as a law and not as a principle to work towards to spite the Conservatives who will be responsible for paying the penalties from Government funds should they win the next General Election (as seems likely). David Cameron has not stated that his party will endorse this principle ergo Labour makes it a law to force them to adhere to it in the knowledge that they won’t have to pay for it and then can attack the new Conservative government for not meeting the targets they themselves set! It’s absolute madness.

It is a ridiculous measure. In some areas of the country 60% of median income is more than enough. In others a larger income may be insufficient. But then if the parents are slackers and don’t choose to go out and do jobs they could do and just slack on benefits why should you and I pay taxes to not only give them benefits but then pay them penalties for them falling short of this abstract figure?

And what happens if median income shifts downwards? More children will be in the same or more need but will not be recognised as such. And if the median shifts upwards because just a small fraction of people earn a vast amount of money then children who do not need more specifically will be classes as in Poverty and we will be paying out to them! This is a free market and this is a capatilist democracy (in principle even if not in reality) so if you can’t afford to have children then DO NOT ****ING HAVE ANY. If you want to have children and can’t afford to raise them then you are ****ING doing them a disservice. You are bringing them into an environment that you cannot support them in. SO DO NOT DO IT! If you do have children and you cannot look after them properly because you lack the wit or intelligence or the will to provide for their needs then you should expect to have them taken off of you and given to families that can take care of them. You should NOT expect me and the rest of the hard workers and talented people in the country to pay for you to sit on your asses and F**K.

There is that really awful film where the main character is a total dunce in the army and wakes up centuries later as the most intelligent person on the planet. That is where we are headed. Girls on council estates with IQ’s under 80 having multiple children before they are 20 while educated people with careers and wealth have 1 or 2 kids in their 30’s or 40’s. I hate to sound like I endorse Eugenics but people should in some way have to prove they have the ability to support their children before they are allowed to have them! That is not Eugenics nor is it Fascism – you know what it is? It is Utilitarianism. It is Humanism. It is also sodding common sense.

Grammar Geek

I encountered this phrase today and it bothered me. Such a trivial thing but it strikes me as wrong:

“The paperwork needs raising.”

One of the first thoughts I had was that it is Anthropomorphic – the paperwork has no needs. In the alternate phrase, “The paperwork needs to be raised”, the need is attributed to a third party – something that the passive form of the particle in the original doesn’t convey so well if at all. On the other hand ‘He needs helping’ cannot be blamed for being Anthropomorphic but still it seems clumsy compared to ‘He needs to be helped’.

Importantly both ‘helping’ and ‘raising’ are definitively forms of verbs. If we replaced those with ‘training’ the construction works fine because some ‘training’ is a noun. In the sense of a person who can have needs it works. ‘He’ can certainly ‘need’ a ‘noun’. That’s the problem with ‘-ing’ words, they’re not all the same!

So in the case of an inanimate subject that we do not wish to give feelings to we would have to consider ‘needs verb-ing’ as the Gerundive form of the verb’s participle. A Gerundive is where something ‘must’ act, e.g. I must eat. English has many ways to express this, ‘I have to eat’, ‘I need to eat’, but the basic translation of a Latin Gerundive we were always taught is ‘I must eat’. The others are an artistic license that, although very useful for making a translation easy to read, are not truly Gerundives. One would be quite willing to say ‘The paperwork must be raised’ but one would never say ‘The paperwork must raising’.

So where one would anthropomorphosise and the proper interpretation as a gerundive doesn’t make sense then the phrase is wrong.

Good:

• The paperwork must be raised
• The picture needs to be raised
• He needs to be helped
• He needs some help
• He needs training

Bad:

• The ceiling needs raising
• The litter needs picking up
• He needs helping

We might all understand what the original phrase means but that can’t stop it being wrong. Of course language evolves but I’m all for slowing down the change!

While trying to work this out I discovered that my grasp on proper grammar is not what it should be. For example, did you know that the ‘of’ in ‘Take your feet off of the chair’ is wrong? ‘Take your feet off the chair’ is correct!

At least Latin simplified things by including all the information about a word’s use inside it. The ending of a word told you whether it was singular or plural, vocative or accusative, gerundive or particle. English and most other languages required multiple words to convey the same sense and in so doing confuses the learner.

Litigious Electric Jews

There is the most ridiculous story in The Times newspaper today about an Orthodox Jewish couple who are suing the owners of the block of flats they live in. They claim that they are trapped in their appartment on Friday and Sunday nights because of the sensor-activated lights in the communal areas. They will not use any Electricity on these days and feel that activating the lights breaks that practice. So they’re suing under the Equality Act 2006 and the Human Rights Act 1998.

I really don’t care what beliefs people hold but I’m glad that the Law enables people to hold any belief they want to, so long as it does no harm. Of course I think that most religious beliefs are nonsense – the rest being interesting in an evolutionary manner, something I’ll discuss another time. However I don’t believe the Law should protect your right to protection under those beliefs. If that were the case then Creationists would simply be able to sue schools for teaching Evolution and I could make up a belief system that prohibited the use of computers on Wednesdays and then I could sue my employer for requiring me to use one. i.e. The enforcement under law of protection of rights is categorically farcical as a concept.

Within every community there are of course the sensible and the daft. Leslie Bunder, editor of SomethingJewish.com, is quoted as saying, “It’s a bit arrogant. It’s an embarassment, it’s giving reasonable Jews a bad name.”

Anyway, what about this rule (belief)? The prohibition of concern here is that about doing no work on the Sabbath. Specifically not creating Fire. Chanie Alperowitz, the director of an Orthodox Jewish group claims, “When using electricity, one causes a fire as there are sparks created by electricity.”

REALLY?! And what kind of schooling do these people have to think such preposterousness!?

What is fire? It is the name we give to the heat and light produced by the rapid oxidisation of a material, combustion.

What is an electric spark? It is a flow of electric current, electrons, between two objects at different potentials. There is heat and light but there is no combustion. Yes lightning can cause a fire but it is not itself fire. And anyway the tiny sparks in light switches don’t cause fires (often) and even if they did it would not be because you did any work to cause it. I can hardly be considered to have been trying to do some work if my house catches fire due to a lightning bolt…

So, yes, it’s simple. Electricity is not Fire. So all you Orthodox Jews out there please do whatever you like with Electricity on the Sabbath – it’s not work and it’s not fire.

The ultimate irony will be if their court date is a Friday.

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Reality and Computation

What is to follow will be a very long piece that I am going to break down into separate sections. My rough plan indicates about ten posts will be needed! I hope readers will find it worth working through the necessary mass of topic introduction and discussion to get to the meat of my points. So here goes!

1. The Forces of Nature and Laws of Physics.

Before I begin let me just say that I do not intend to provide many, if any, references for what I say in the following posts. The technical content of what follows is there only to provide an overview of the way the universe works. Anyone with an interest in greater detail, the equations and so on is encouraged to search the internet for more information. There is a lot out there I assure you. I cannot guarantee that everything I say is 100% accurate but I only aim to describe the general features of the Physics that follows in order to get to a more Philosophical discussion. I will provide (to come) a few general links at the end of each part of this article to get the interested reader off on the right foot.

In order to get to the realm of Quantum Mechanics which is where I want to be a recap of the discovery of the fundamental forces of nature and the forumlation of our best Physics Theories would be useful:

There are just 4 known forces in Nature, some known of for a long time and some only for a relatively brief part of scientific history. The first to be formulated was of course Gravity. Newton and the apocryphal apple falling from a tree. Force = Mass x Acceleration, F=ma and his laws, such as a Body at rest will remain at rest unless a force acts on it.

In 1864 Maxwell published the paper on Electromagnetism for which he is remembered. In it he combined Electricity and Magnetism into one field. Through his work and the work he built upon we now recognise Electric and Magnetic fields as part of the same phenomenon and thus there are four and not five forces in nature.

Evidence that a new theory was required to describe the universe on small scales was building up in the 19th century but it was not until 1905 that it became tangible with Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize winning paper on The Photoelectric Effect, which started the ball rolling. Sometime later the term Quantum Mechanics entered the mainstream to describe this new branch of Physics.

Thereafter Einstein went on to publish his papers on first Special and then General Relativity. The latter is a complete description of Gravity. Newton’s notion of Gravity and the laws of motion he drew up turn out to be a very close approximation to General Relativity where the accelerations, gravitational fields or velocities are small.

Much later Physicists discovered the ‘Weak Force’ which operates at the atomic level and is responsible for some aspects of Radioactivity. Around 1968 this was incorporated with Maxwell’s Electromagnetic theory in ElectroWeak Theory – a single description of Electromagnetism and the Weak Force.

Somewhere around this time, or perhaps earlier, it must have become apparent that the fundamental forces of nature were being unified. What had appeared to be different phenomena were able to be described in one set of mathematics. But no one was able to see a way of unifying Gravity with any of the other forces.

From the 1970’s onwards it was realised that there must be a 5th force, named the Strong Force, which prevents elemental particles from flying apart. It is described, as part of the Standard Model, by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) which is the most complete form of Quantum Mechanical Theory.

In the continuing pursuit of unification of these theories Physicists hope to combine the Electroweak Theory with QCD to make a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and then to combine that with Gravity to form a Theory of Everything (ToE). How incredible indeed it would be if we could describe every interaction between everything in the universe with one self-contained theory!

The final part here should be skipped for the sake of your sanity unless you want to hear about GUT’s or ToE’s in my opinion…

The current contender for the GUT is the ‘Standard Model’ (SM). This is an internally self-consistent set of rules that combines descriptions of both the ElectroWeak and Strong Forces as mathematical fields, using Quantum Field Theory. It has made several predictions which have all been shown to be correct and has one more prediction which is yet to be confirmed. It requires a Higgs Boson to work. This particle has such a huge energy that we have not been able to produce them in our particle colliders. Until now. Once the Large Hadron Collider goes online at CERN it is hoped that the energies will be reached that could allow us to detect the Higgs for the first time.

In the SM the Higgs Boson has the crucial role of giving all the other fundamental particles their masses. For this reason alone I find I hope the prediction fails and no Higgs is found. I just cannot understand why a particle is required to give mass to everything else. Mass (or Mass-Energy) seems so fundamental to me that I can’t envisage how making particles queue up to find out their mass assignments makes any helpful contribution to understanding the Universe. Sorry for such cynicism… of course it’s a field and the particles gain mass through interaction with this field. However in order for each particle to get a different mass surely it has to have some other intrinsic property that interacts with the field to get the known masses? It’s like saying the fundamental property of matter is ‘mass potential’ but they only realise that potential through interacting with the field. It seems to add an extra layer of abstraction. I was under the impression that in String or Quantum Loop theories a particle is a construction – differing vibrations on a string in the former – and this construction would require energy, i.e. Mass! Not ‘mass potential’.

Furthermore the SM is utterly inelegant. General Relativity can be written down in a few lines but the SM takes a small book to write it all down! More objections to the SM can be found here.

Part 2 will follow soon in which I will discuss probably the most important and confusing experiment in all of Quantum Physics…

Working on it!

Damned Spymaster has overwhelmed my Twitter Feed. Hopefully I’ve tuned it down properly now. The damn application offers you rewards for Tweeting about tiny events in the game but they’re just too silly to go on with.

Anyway I’m working on a massive article on the nature of the universe, self, consciousness, the state of particle physics and much more besides. Right now the draft is in ten parts so look out for a flurry of posting very soon.