In the Beginning, #2

Thinking about the 'why anything' problem I mentioned before, it occurred to me today that the idea of zero in the mathematical sense is a purely abstract mental construction: I don't think there's any convincing evidence for it being meaningful in describing anything physically real, only for counting objects (which are themselves arbitrary discretisations of the space-time continuum) or for succinctly describing the situation where opposing forces are conveniently balanced*. That seems to back up the assertion that it's not a good analogy for general nothing.

*A vacuum isn't zero matter either; it's (probably) quantum foam, a suggestion which I find most compellingly supported by the Casimir effect and Hawking radiation (although the latter is somewhat controversial).

Basically I think my answer to the question is that something and nothing (in the sense one thinks of when one says "why something rather than nothing") are not actually in the same class; one is a physical entity, the other a mathematical construct (maths is generally very good at describing reality, but it still remains a description, not the same thing). It's this error of comparison which renders the question meaningless (rather like "why the square root of minus one, not butterscotch flavour?").

If we do away with zero as a physical reality, it seems tempting to suggest we should also do away with its inverse, infinity. Perhaps that could help explain why the speed of light is finite? It seems like it must also have implications for black holes.

The remaining physical question - which is not necessarily simplified - appears to be "why is the universe not homogenous?"

p.s. After writing this I had a wander on Wikipedia looking for related items and found this, which I'm not sure I completely agree with, but which is nonetheless clearly a related chain of thought. Interesting that it comes out just as I'm considering the issue...

Poetry

I have a very scattered sort of mind which tends to bubble over with ideas unless I railroad it into one specific task - and even then it sort of vents out the side whenever I take a break. (I sometimes wonder whether I'd benefit from Ritalin... unfortunately it's a lot harder to get a diagnosis for ADHD these days).

Most of the bubblings take the form of game ideas, but occasionally they come up as fragments of stories or poems - I thought I'd add some length to this post by sharing some of the bits of blank verse that turn up in the margins of my lecture notes. The titles are fairly arbitrary.

City
Beneath my bed
A wandering dog
Three stars.
Inconstant fluorescence
Sour horns
Death
A monument?
Cities are the gravestones of forests.

Bed
Awake?
Superficial reaction; cold
Lazy-
Sheets-
Lover-
... sleep.

Tradition
Unspoken accord
like library-silence
Enraptured
(to history?)
I am not my parents!

In other news, we finished the meditation course at CBC. Six weeks ago, if someone had told me I'd be interested in taking the introductory Buddhism course at this point, I would have laughed them out of the building. I choose to take an optimistic view and consider this as an indication that I'm more open-minded than I thought. Buddhism (at least the FWBO style) turns out to be far less mystical and far more practical than I believed... it's certainly interesting enough to merit further study.

Quote of the day is from Pema Chödrön:
"We question without the intention of finding permanent solutions."

NTL

Sometime around October last year, NTL decided to start charging an additional fee for the privilege of paying them by cheque. That rather annoyed me - I invariably forget to keep track of direct debits - but I acquiesced and set up the thing. They failed to draw the debit in November, and then decided to charge a £10 late payment fee when I didn't psychically realise this and send them a cheque anyway. I called them and cleared that up, and then didn't receive any further communications from them in December or January, so assumed everything was OK... until a couple of days ago, when I received a bill for all three months and a nasty letter threatening to cut off my service. Oh, and another late charge.

Was it wrong of me to assume that since they hadn't said anything, things were working properly? :

I called them again and got the second late charge cleared, and sent them a cheque for the rest of the amount - as well as restarting the direct debit - but yesterday my cable modem died and hasn't come back. So after today's lectures I shall be back on the phone to them. If it wasn't for the fact that they've been so nice about free speed upgrades in the past, I'd be close to shouting point by now...

This is a very whingy post, mostly because I have anxiety issues about telephone calls and this situation is forcing me to make lots of them. While technically I'm sure this is good for me, it's still a pain in the gluteus.

Valentine's Day

I went to listen to Aubrey talking to Pugwash (the bioethics society) on Monday. For all that I've heard the arguments before, it was entertaining as always - if you've never heard him explain the reasons for doing something about aging, I recommend going along if there's a talk near you.

kdice has been absorbing far too much of my time recently (especially considering that I seem to be very bad at it - I'm Transhumanist there). It's making me all the more interested in the idea of writing some web-enabled games of my own - maybe with more skill and less chance than kdice. Once I've finished my Part II project (sometime in May) I'm going to reward myself by getting a dedicated server set up (probably with these guys) so if I still haven't acquired a sense of urgency about revision by then, that's likely to be when I actually have a chance to do some real game design.

Speaking of said Part II project, I would like to say "Aaaaargh! Maths hard!" and then make no further comment for now... it's been a couple of weeks and I'm still learning the underlying maths I'll need to get started. ^^; I haven't done any actual mathematics for about three years, so I'm not really surprised that I'm rusty, but I'm slightly alarmed that I'm this rusty.

Laura and I are going to spend this afternoon exploring two of the museums in Cambridge, the Archaeology & Anthropology Museum and the Sedgwick. This is our Valentine's Day outing... and a chance to reassert our geekiness ;)

In the Beginning

I've been pondering the question of "where did we come from" recently. I'm not talking about humanity, obviously, but rather the more fundamental question of where the universe came from. The Big Bang theory doesn't actually answer that question - it provides a useful model for the very first few moments of the universe's existence, but it doesn't offer any answer to the question of why or how - i.e. it merely pushes the question back to "where did the Big Bang come from" (or perhaps more helpfully "what caused the Big Bang").

It's only as I write this entry that I realise what a ridiculous phrase "Big Bang" is. Wikipedia informs me the name was coined sarcastically by Fred Hoyle to describe the theory (in opposition to his own steady state model). Somehow I'm not surprised to discover it was originally a pejorative label...

I've seen various suggestions to answer that question - brane theory, etc. - but all only extend the causal regression, rather than tackling directly the question "why something, rather than nothing". I find that curiously many people seem to consider this question "scientifically [not tackleable]"; that point of view may be true but it certainly seems to be a pessimistic starting point.

We tend to believe 'ex nihilo nihil fit' (from nothing nothing is made), and this is certainly the other part of the paradox (the first part being the existence of the universe). I'm quite happy to agree with Ayn Rand that 'existence exists', and simple logic tells us that no thing can be extracted from the empty set (a common concept of 'nothing'). I began to wonder, however, why we should consider the type of nothing that pre-dates existence (which I will hereafter refer to for convenience as 'the pre-universe') as the same kind of nothing as the empty set.

Let's consider the fact that in quantum theory (which generally seems to be a better model of reality than our classical, intuitive predictions) the initial state of a value is commonly not zero, but rather 'undefined'; the value only becomes one or zero after some measurement or interaction. This leads me to the thinking (which I admit I cannot defend with any rigour, but hope you will humour me anyway) that perhaps the 'undefined' state is a much more natural place to begin than a 'zero' state as one typically imagines the pre-universe. In a rather abstract way, one could think of the pre-universe as an array of qubits, all of undefined value. As time has passed, those qubits have fallen into the defined values that describe our particular universe.

This might seem like a very vague and unhelpful place to begin a scientific enquiry - even a thought experiment - but consider that three thought-provoking points can already be drawn from the idea described:

1. If the pre-universe was all that existed (as it presumably must be, since the presence of anything else would push the question back to the origin of that other) it cannot exchange anything with any 'external' entity. If a metric exists for something that cannot be created or destroyed within the pre-universe, the total of that metric must remain constant. This sounds intriguingly like conservation of energy.
2. The concept that the original state of the universe was undefined, and that therefore it is becoming increasingly defined over time, offers an alternative to the many-worlds type interpretations of quantum events. Any given quantum event where a 'random choice' occurs may be a genuine choice; analogous to the irreversible collapse of a single qubit of the universe from an undefined state to a defined one.
3. String theory is frequently criticised because it describes not one universe, ours, but rather a vast range of universes. This seems less problematic if our universe fell out of an undefined state by random chance - a slightly different result for the final choices in that falling-out would be expected to lead to a similar universe, and hence one potentially also describable by the same or a very similar theory.

Perhaps one day I'll have the time to study enough maths and physics to explore this idea in more detail... if you have any such training, please do post your comments, I'd be very interested to hear them. (Of course comments are also welcome if you don't have any such training!)

As predicted, not a whole lot of updates are getting posted, but I thought I'd write something down rather than have people start celebrating my death prematurely.

I've been running a Tor node for a while now, because I think that freedom of speech and privacy are important issues which people take for granted too often. Recently I discovered all Tor exit nodes get blacklisted from an IRC network (naming no names) I wanted to visit, and what's more, they aren't willing to make exceptions... so for now I have bowed out and switched off exiting via my box. That annoys me though - once I have some cash I'll rent a dedicated server to set up as a proper Tor node.

One of my relatives has just discovered they have cancer, which makes me all the more hopeful that the recent news about dichloroacetate turns out to lead to a real therapy. I'm not getting my hopes up though - after all, there are peripheral cells in many tumours that aren't anaerobic.

More positively, my first Flash game is slowly (very slowly at the moment) approaching completion. There should be an update on that topic this coming weekend. I'll probably let Newgrounds host it for me...

First however I have to finish the talk on free will I'll be giving on Wednesday. I still haven't firmly decided where my own opinion lies. I wonder whether I have any choice in the matter...