BellGab.com Archive

Quote from: wr250 on July 07, 2014, 09:01:23 PM

That's me on the left

Quote from: jazmunda on July 07, 2014, 07:31:51 PM
Don't Skype us, we'll Skype you.

My people will be waiting to hear from your people.

Quote from: jazmunda on July 07, 2014, 07:31:51 PM
In all seriousness that was a fantastic interview and we'd be very happy to have you back. Perhaps in some parallel universe where Skype actually works.

We can only hope!

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 07, 2014, 06:57:26 PM
Oh sweet jesus thank god. Here I thought the earth was doomed in 5 billion years when the sun becomes a red giant, but all we merely have to do is convert Jupiter into energy and we can warp the earth to a new star system. And here I was all worried.

haha, right?

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 07, 2014, 06:57:26 PM
I see, so altering the geometry of the bubble was key. I couldn't find what White kept talking about and it was driving me nuts. I rather like the idea myself, and if it turns out to be viable it changes everything. While sending a spacecraft may be energy prohibitive, I wonder if sending a nanotechnological probe to another star system might be more realistic.

It's a complete game changer. The smaller they can make the probe they want to send, the better. And there's no telling what other tech and theory may still contribute to this. It's a very ambitious plan, even if it turns out to be nothing I think everyone's still rooting for it

That was awesome! So much fun

Thanks for having me on and I would love to take you guys up on your offer and come back on soon! I WAS SHORT CHANGED BY SKYPE!!

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 07, 2014, 03:05:34 PM
Harold White, for some reason that I've yet to uncover, believes that the energy necessary to create the Alcubierre warp field is much less than the usually cited titanic amounts. He keeps saying it in the various articles that have been coming out in conjunction with that concept ship he had an artist render but he hasn't said why. Does anyone know anything about that?

It's actually interesting and quite a good idea. In Alcubierre's original paper the bubble is taken to be spherical by definition. White found that changing the geometry of the bubble and it's time dependence also changes the energy requirements needed to set it up. White presented cases presumably found by numerically minimizing the initial energy condition that can produce a warp. The results are still huge but more reasonable than previously and have reduced the negative energy requirements substantially (but not eliminated them altogether iirc). I think the total initial energy is now something like the mass of jupiter converted directly to energy, which makes even White's modifications a non-starter. But it also means small scale tests can be done, which is what NASA is now interested in.

Quote from: zeebo on July 06, 2014, 06:28:39 PM
Ok I admit I have a bit of a bias towards the Alcubierre Drive, since it's just ... cool.   But there are some issues, like the colossal amounts of energy required and also I read somewhere that the massive gravitational forces at work would create temperatures higher than the surface of the sun - so bring your Coppertone, it's gonna get a bit toasty. 

Anyway here's a pretty good article from a year ago which includes a NASA video worth checking out, if you're interested.

Thanks for the link!

You've highlighted one of the big problems with this kind of technology, there's a massive blue shift of all infalling radiation so anything on the inside of the wall is going to be cooked. It was also shown that material particles can become stuck in the wall itself, and released when the drive is turned off (which is a problem all on it's own), turning into a giant effective accelerator. So you don't want to be in the path of this thing when it stops unless you have your sunblock on either! http://www.universetoday.com/93882/warp-drives-may-come-with-a-killer-downside/

How to deactivate the drive itself is a big problem, because the inside of the bubble and the outside are disconnected which means no signal can pass from inside to the outer universe at large, which makes problems in just turning the drive off. Alcubierre stated this as a major problem for the idea, not sure how this condition is modified in White's view.

There has also been some speculation whether this kind of drive will work at all. Basically the argument is like this, since space is flat (Minkowski) on the inside and outside, you can treat the bubble itself as a locally perturbed region of the universe, and the details of the bubble or whatever is inside don't really matter. Then since the external space is flat this perturbed region is subject to special relativity which restricts super-luminal travel. So it may be that the bubble wall has these strange effects on space-time around it but as a whole the velocity of the bubble is limited and so any ship based on this kind of warp drive is limited to sublight speeds. If this argument is true the whole situation is a non-starter.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 07, 2014, 03:43:54 AM
So, I have a special question. What are your thoughts on the Alcubierre drive? Just looking for an opinion.

I'll come back to the rest but to get into it we should probably move over here - Zeebo just got started this way
http://bellgab.com/index.php?topic=4908.msg275559#msg275559
And I haven't yet had a chance to respond to that either so might kill 2 birds with one stone here

Will come back to the rest of your points as well later in the day once I've had a chance to think on them a bit.

Also, this too! Omg

Quote from: jazmunda on July 07, 2014, 03:14:48 AM
The GabCast returns LIVE on Monday 7/7 at 8pm EST/5pm PST.

We have a very special guest joining us for a discussion on all things sciencey. Joining us will be BellGabs own Agent : Orange. We will ask him why he has a space on either side of the colon in his username as well as why he has a predilection for avatars with superheroes in mundane everyday poses. We may also ask him a question or two about science.

Join us and listen and chat LIVE at http://ufoship.com

Contact us by email: thegabcastemail@gmail.com

You can follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegabcast or on Twitter: @TheGabCast

Quote from: jazmunda on July 07, 2014, 03:14:48 AM
The GabCast returns LIVE on Monday 7/7 at 8pm EST/5pm PST.

We have a very special guest joining us for a discussion on all things sciencey. Joining us will be BellGabs own Agent : Orange. We will ask him why he has a space on either side of the colon in his username as well as why he has a predilection for avatars with superheroes in mundane everyday poses. We may also ask him a question or two about science.

Join us and listen and chat LIVE at http://ufoship.com

Contact us by email: thegabcastemail@gmail.com

You can follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegabcast or on Twitter: @TheGabCast

Hope you will all listen and call in!

Quote from: jazmunda on July 07, 2014, 03:14:48 AM
The GabCast returns LIVE on Monday 7/7 at 8pm EST/5pm PST.

We have a very special guest joining us for a discussion on all things sciencey. Joining us will be BellGabs own Agent : Orange. We will ask him why he has a space on either side of the colon in his username as well as why he has a predilection for avatars with superheroes in mundane everyday poses. We may also ask him a question or two about science.

Join us and listen and chat LIVE at http://ufoship.com

Contact us by email: thegabcastemail@gmail.com

You can follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegabcast or on Twitter: @TheGabCast

Whoooooo!!!

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 07, 2014, 01:35:40 AM
Ah yes, you mean the Hoagland Constant, or The Speed of Bullshit. It's the rate at which crap constantly streams from my radio when Hoagland's on.

The speed of bullshit!!

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on July 06, 2014, 08:37:50 PM
Have either of you seen articles comparing/contrasting heat production from gravity (friction?compression?) vs heat production from breaking covalent bonds/reactions?

The calculations for the lifespan of the Sun based on the energy from chemical reactions and the lifespan of the Sun based on energy liberated from gravitational collapse were done by Newton and later on Lord Kelvin who treated the subject a bit more rigorously. It was found that the chemical assumption gives a much shorter lifespan, which was rejected. However, we now know that the Sun's energy comes from neither of these sources, and the Sun is really powered from the nuclear reactions that occur inside that are it's power source, the fusion of Hydrogen into heavier elements.

So you might be after something like this
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~hsg/134/lectures/ages-of-earth-sun.pdf

Quote from: zeebo on July 06, 2014, 06:28:39 PM
Ok I admit I have a bit of a bias towards the Alcubierre Drive, since it's just ... cool.   But there are some issues, like the colossal amounts of energy required and also I read somewhere that the massive gravitational forces at work would create temperatures higher than the surface of the sun - so bring your Coppertone, it's gonna get a bit toasty. 

Anyway here's a pretty good article from a year ago which includes a NASA video worth checking out, if you're interested.

That's a really interesting article. There are still many issues with the Alcubierre drive, and I'm not sure if White's modifications will be enough. Still, fascinating that such things are being considered at all, let alone directly tested.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:18:19 PM
Oh hell, I can express how that happens mathematically. I call it the Unified Suck Theory. G=F²(19.5-N-D). Whereas G=George, F=the face on Mars, and N equals whatever the hell the Numbers Lady arbitrarily plugs in, and D=the average amount that Ed Dames turns out wrong. The solution always ends up negative. It's in the data, just look at the data.

I love that 19.5 worked it's way in there too

Quote from: pate on July 06, 2014, 02:17:05 PM
If you write the story, I'll buy and read it!  Short or novel length...

I second!!

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:02:16 PM
Yes, it's entirely untestable by its nature . . . for ourselves. But then that's what you'd want out of a participant in a simulation. If they knew it was a simulation, then they'd behave differently. But I was more focused on how easy it would be the create such a simulation. When we do create AI, which is probably in our relatively near future, we probably will put one in a snow globe and see what it does unless there's some ethical reason not to. In that case, the idea is testable and falsifiable because we've become God to the AI in the snow globe.

I would say this scenario doesn't prove the same is happening to us, it is not proof that we are AI inside our own jar but is certainly suggestive that such things are possible. I guess to go farther you have to also demonstrate that the AI is equivalent to a human.

The situation has significantly changed from building a simulation of the universe to tricking an AI into believing a reality simulation. The nice thing about simulating a universe wholesale is that there are consequences to it including the distribution of cosmic rays in such a simulation. In such a case a simulation can be detected. There are ways of eliminating this with enough hypothetical computing power which will make the situation untestable. Then  I can't offer much more than "I refute it thus" while kicking something nearby.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:02:16 PM
Much like the universe within a hypothetical multiverse. You can't ever observe the multiverse, nor measure it, and if the interior of black holes are any indicator then the laws of physics break down outside the boundaries of this universe. Yet the multiverse is there because a few competing theories introduce it mathematically entirely on the basis of philosophy. The point they make is that there must be something outside to cause an effect within, such as the big bang. In other words a jaruniverse.

The multiverse isn't an ad-hoc philosophical concept introduced into cosmology, it comes directly from a certain class of inflationary model (Linde's work on chaotic inflation started this). It is a consequence of using certain inflationary potentials, and these potentials have observational consequences that influence the properties of the cosmic microwave background, and these can in principle be measured, which is what the now-contested BICEP2 results did earlier this year in March or so. Whether or not those observations hold up under the yoke of reproducibility we shall see. It is a jarniverse in that sense but it's one of the first (as opposed to the second) kind, which has observational signatures of being in a jar. In other words it's possible to tell if you're living in a multiverse or not.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics also brings up a multiverse but it's a different kind of beast, and in that case it is a philosophical component added in after the fact. But I should also say that the many-worlds interpretation is known to have problems and introduces more baggage than it's really worth. It is an interesting alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation of QM but even that is not widely accepted anymore. 

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:02:16 PM
Same thing with blackholes, since you can't go in, and nothing other than Hawking radiation comes out, and the laws of physics break down at it's event horizon . . . then you're studying an unknowable, unmeasureable, unobservable object entirely on the basis that it's clearly there so you have to explain it somehow.

The center of black holes and the origin of the universe at t=0 are two places where our physics break down. But this is because of the physical theories we're using and not facts of nature, they are deficiencies in our language we use to describe nature. With a better description (quantum gravity) these singularities would presumably go away. The nature of gravity is key to what happens in a black hole and this can be tested by examinations of the shape of accretion disks, radius of the innermost particle orbit and the lensing properties of black holes. All of this stuff is measureable and the conditions around the hole actually have a lot to do with what's going on inside (ie a charged and spinning black hole behaves differently than a non-rotating black hole). So there are consequences to the interior conditions. The central singularity is not directly observable but it's physical properties have direct consequences on the geometry of the event horizon(s). So what we can measure directly constrains what can be.

As a nit-picky point and an aside not germaine to the main issue I should also say that the event horizon is not a physical singularity, it is a coordinate singularity and can be transformed away by judicious choice of coordinate system. Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates and Kruskal-Szerkeres coordinates both get rid of event horizons (for non-rotating black holes) and remain physically meaningful up to the singularity. You can also find that event horizons are not physical singularities from calculating the curvature scalar right from GR.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:02:16 PM
I'm applying that reasoning to simulating a human mind. The standard way we look at science? Definitely not. But Ph.D. does stand for Doctor of Philosophy, and science itself still at it's most basic level, especially when dealing with unknowables, is still very much dependent on philosophy.

Science is meant to connect to the world we can measure and observe, and the consequences of these measurements. It is testable in these terms and theories are right or wrong based on their description of the world. This feedback system doesn't really exist for philosophy on it's own which is unhindered by the observable, which is one of the reasons why it's easy to wander into the wilderness with philosophical arguments. In my view they are not separate issues, but one is constrained by what can be measured and observed, the other is not. A theory which describes some aspect of the world and does not offer a prediction for measurement or a way to falsify it's claims is untestable and by that yardstick can't be answered by scientific process.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:02:16 PM
I don't mean to provoke an argument. Nobody knows the answers to these things. I'm just stimulating thought.

I really don't mean to read as stand-offish, I do apologize if I gave that impression! Don't get me wrong I'm digging this exchange. But I have a sense of sarcasm that carries much better in person than in the printed word and without a well-placed emoticon that can sometimes confuse the issue.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:02:16 PM
I believe I'm rational through faith in my senses like everyone else. I like testable theories too. Problem is, not everything is testable and the universe (or what's outside it) presents us with untestables as a matter of fact and nature. Yet those untestables end up at the forefront of physics. Sort of weird how that happened.

Again I would argue this and hopefully I've been clear in my reasoning above. Even supersymmetry and string theory have observational consequences, the question there is if they are practical to observe or not, and even there positive progress is being made.

Quote from: pate on July 06, 2014, 05:42:34 AM
GN: Hey, didja know there was a movie I saw with Jim Carey (good friend of mine) called "The Truman Shew"?  It sounds just like that, amahzing!

bahaha! Georch proves reality is external to myself, no way could I dream up anything that sucks that bad.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 06, 2014, 02:24:27 AM
You actually only need one person for the simulation. You.
...
In which case the simulation requirements become much more realistic. Then it's just an AI in a snow globe. If all it knows is the interior of the snow globe, then rationality is entirely defined by what was put inside the snow globe with it.

You are affected by objects further away from you than the radius of the hypothetical snow globe, such as receiving signals from the stars and distant galaxies by their spectra. If all interaction with the "outside" is manufactured perfectly to deceive you, then no distribution of cosmic rays will settle the issue. the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable and falls well outside my expertise.

My only recourse is pretty much to say that since such an idea can't be proven or disproven, it adds nothing to our understanding of external reality - whatever that is, presumably your jarbrain occupies some kind of physical space - and the whole notion is generally at odds with what I would consider a parsimonious explanation. It's like using the concept of an external reality (the space in which your hypothetical jarbrain lives in) to refute the external reality you perceive through your senses.

Perhaps if I were a slightly more cleverly devised script, I could present an argument around this notion. But alas, I am limited by the way the ninth-dimensional hive intelligence wrote me.

I, for one, am just a cleverly written script.

http://youtu.be/uiDSojOxqiE

The first precessing magnetar has been found. Neat for me because I know one of the guys that worked on this personally.

This compact star with a superstrong magnetic field is precessing like a top as it spins. The first time this has been seen with a magnetar. Tells details of the magnetic field inside the star and also about it's shape and what it's made out of.

http://phys.org/news/2014-07-satellite-x-ray-reveal-neutron-star.html

Quote from: zeebo on July 03, 2014, 04:50:25 PM
Pretty amazing pic of our garden-variety sun

http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/sundisk072912.html

I can't stop staring at this. The detail in this picture is amazing. This is the chromosphere in H-alpha light I think. Looks like long grass all over the surface.
http://www.universetoday.com/40631/parts-of-the-sun/

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 03, 2014, 03:27:15 PM
Yeah, who'd have thought cosmic ray behavior could possibly hold the key to the big question.

I was thinking, there might not be any point to creating the simulation by time it's possible to do it. If you've already figured out how the universe works through centuries of research in physics, then what would the purpose of the model be? Therefore it may not be created simply because by the time you can build the computer and figure out how to render everything accurately the model would just be a really expensive endeavor with no research purpose. It would just be a toy.

Oddly, that's the basic tenet of all religions: the universe is God's ant farm. 

Presumably by that time humans will have evolved into Grays and will want to muck about with a simulation of their own evolution.

OMG...

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 03, 2014, 12:15:36 AM

You may be right, I just have trouble with the notion that something in the universe might not be mathematically expressible somehow.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with this statement 100%. I do believe that if it can be studied it can ultimately be quantified in some way. But that is not sufficient to ensure it can be computed practically. Maybe it is feasible at some point, but I can think of many factors that might keep it from the realm of possibility even with future tech. Lattice methods or any other technique we come up with to simulate the entire universe are approximations and they may just not give enough, or we may require infinite energy or computing power. It may be like trying to run faster than c.

It strikes me as a problem because it adds a lot of baggage (solipsism) and gives back a small amount of predictive capability. Combined with the problem of falsifying the idea it makes some red flags go up for me. It's very interesting and it makes for some great discussion, and will keep me glued to the latest news about cosmic ray research for the rest of my life.

Quote from: Camazotz Automat on July 02, 2014, 08:38:05 PM
I didn't learn of the green flash until I was in my twenties. Up until then, I might have thought someone was mixing up their superheroes.

But then I read A Flash of Green, a stand alone novel by John D. MacDonald.  It was a great read and it talked about the phenomenon.

A movie version was released in 1984. I saw it in the 90s and it was good, if you like that sort of thing, and I do.  This is one of those VHS tapes, that if you come across at a thrift store, grab it and sell it on Amazon, where they list for forty or more dollars.

Now that I think of it, there's a good amount of weather in JDM's books.

That's awesome! Now I want to read this book

G'day eh

*gush*
http://youtu.be/NjSFR40SY58

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 02, 2014, 03:58:51 AM
I should probably pre-elaborate on that statement. We have an issue: that the universe got its parameters so right. If they'd have been different it would have resulted in a very different universe than this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe

It seems like every time we come up with a better explanation, all of the natural-ness problems go away. Quarks make it obvious why there are so many baryons and what their properties are. The big bang tells us why galaxy redshift and distance are proportional to one another. Inflation handily kills the flatness and isotropy problems. It doesn't take looking too far over the next hill to speculate that grad students 100 years from now will marvel at how utterly obvious it was to clear away the fine tuning problems that we talk about today if only we had been a tiny bit more clever.

My argument here is that the fact that the parameters seem so fine-tuned might just be the sign that revolution is near

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 02, 2014, 03:26:40 AM
Great points. I think ultimately we suffer from a lack of a GUT. We really need to figure out the disconnect between relativity and quantum theory before we can even begin to think of approaching the possibility of simulating an entire universe.

Yes, I agree. But in the meantime blind speculation will have to do

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 02, 2014, 03:26:40 AM
That said, nothing says we don't have millions of years of computer and technological development ahead of us. I'd be hard pressed to say that there won't come a day where we understand enough for a simulation, and there's really no time limit on Nick Bostrom's hypothesis. And if we can't figure it out, it's a good bet that artificially intelligent computers can. Other questions being, what is an accurate simulation of a universe? In comparison to what? What is inaccurate? Would we know about it if it was?

We may still be fundamentally limited in the way we can simulate physical processes. This entire hypothesis relies on the lattice formulation because it saves time and makes certain problems in quantum mechanics (like renormalization) simpler in certain circumstances. The problem comes about that in some cases like GR and QED there is no way to self consistently make the small scale behavior transition neatly into the large scale behavior that we know of. Maybe this happens because the lattice calculations are just insufficient to capture the phenomena they're trying to simulate. They result in nonsense - that's what I mean by my vague language like "inaccurate" and "inconsistent".

If you cannot do the calculations on a lattice you have to do the fully continuous calculations (or make the unit cells smaller than the planck scale), and I would suggest that by the time you (or our AI descendents in the far far future) gather enough sillicon or other computable material in one place to do a full calculation the mass of the computer components themselves will be large enough to collapse into a black hole

I'm half kidding in the above argument but my point is that it may just be impossible so I think that option is as valid as any of the other three.

That leads into one of my other problems with the simulation idea which is it's almost impossible to falsify. If the distribution of cosmic rays on the sky or by energy is not suggestive of some certain lattice spacing, there's nothing to stop someone from saying that the world may still be a simulation just done on some other kind of geometric lattice instead, and then it becomes a fight against a hydra, cutting off one head only to make two grow in it's place (no, I mean triangular lattices! No, icosahedral! No, 4D penrose tilings! Ad infinitum).

So we now have a situation which cannot be realistically constrained by observation, are off the path of predictive power and back in the philosophical desert. Then anything is on the table.

In that case, maybe the fact that math describes nature at all is enough to make an argument for simulation.

Quote from: SciFiAuthor on July 02, 2014, 12:42:43 AM

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/11/universe-computer-simulation

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

In short, he argues that one of these three things must be true:

1. Human or all alien civilizations destroy themselves (all of them must do it) before they reach the ability to fully simulate a universe with computers, including sentient entities within it.

2. All civilizations, alien or human, must either not develop a universe simulation out of ethical concerns, or reach a state of resource exhaustion restraining them from further technological development.

3. It is overwhelmingly likely that we live in a computer simulation. The odds of us being the first, *real* universe are astronomically small.

As much as I'd like to, I can't shoot this argument down. And, well, the guy that controls the parameters of the universe simulation, probably some overweight IT guy with a video game addiction and an inability to pick up chicks, would fit the generally accepted attributes of a "god". An even more frightening prospect being that if it is a simulation, and if our social development was pre-programmed, then all religions are simultaneously correct and intentional and so is atheism.

Now that is a very interesting discussion. But allow me to be the cynic and add to the list of possibilities

4. It is not possible to perform a lattice calculation of all the phenomena necessary to simulate a consistent and physically realistic universe

There are many problems with lattice approaches and one has to be very careful that in the limit of infinitely small lattice spacing the continuum limit is reproduced which it rarely is in most cases. It is even a struggle to make contact with reality using lattice QCD sometimes. So I don't think it's as simple as saying we can represent everything on a lattice, maybe the universe just isn't like that. You lose Lorentz invariance when you do relativity on a lattice for example which makes a big problem if you're trying to represent a world like the one we seem to live in. There are other reasons why I'd question this proposal too. It doesn't really seem to be falsifiable and introduces a whole lot of other problems.

It's still a really neat idea. I do like that there are observational consequences to it, so this can (in principle) be tested.

Quote from: jazmunda on July 01, 2014, 12:49:26 AM
That's an interesting, valid and most likely correct observation. I wonder if Art finally got a non-BellGab accredited lawyer to look over the contract.

Skeeter, Daryl & Daryl?

Never seen a green flash at sunset, but I always watch for it

http://www.bishopmuseum.org/planetarium/greenflash.html

http://youtu.be/WTvIenot5ck