Saturday, June 18, 2011
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
"I try not to talk about these things too often, but Stephen Hawking, speaking loosely and probably after knocking back one-too-many, has publicly suggested the possibility of time travel. He reaffirms that travel into the past is impossible, so there's no need to quibble on that point. However, he posits the potential to travel forward, relying on Einstein's theory that objects nearing the speed of light progress through time at a "relatively" slower rate than objects on Earth. That is, a person moving at 98% of the speed of light for 20 years would find the Earth had "aged" 7,500 years.
Yet this is not due to a traveler having stepped outside a "stream" of time and reinserting himself in an extant, "future" age already in place and waiting to be discovered. Rather, in accordance with static theories of time as a non-progressive measurement of "aging," it simply reveals the unified application of time's effect on various objects in a consistent manner, according to their relative conditions (i.e., speed). So, there is no future world (or infinite worlds) already in place, merely awaiting our arrival. Time is simply the observation of material entropy and the extinction of potential possibilities (i.e., thoughts and actions) through the free-willed choice of particular decisions during a single, ever-present moment.
Steve is so sloppy about these things sometimes." [Emphasis mine, the better to highlight the special]
Saturday, April 03, 2010
It was on a Friday morning
That they took me from the cell
And I saw they had a carpenter
To crucify as well.
You can blame it on to Pilate,
You can blame it on the Jews
You can blame it on the Devil.
It’s God who I accuse.
“It’s God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.
You can blame it on to Adam,
You can blame it on to Eve.
You can blame it on the apple,
But that I can't believe.
It was God that made the Devil
And the woman and the man,
And there wouldn't be an apple
If it wasn't in the plan.
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.
"Now Barabbas was a killer
And they let Barabbas go,
But you are being crucified
For nothing that I know,
And your God is up in Heaven
And He doesn't do a thing,
With a million angels watching
And they never move a wing."
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.
“To hell with Jehovah"
To the carpenter I said
" I wish that a carpenter
Had made the world instead.
Goodbye and good luck to you;
Our ways will soon divide.
Remember me tomorrow
The man you hung beside.”
“It’s God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.
Sydney Carter
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Stream of consciousness
I have a paper to draft and a number of characters to learn before tomorrow, so clearly the best thing to be done is write twaddle for 20 minutes. I've have been unconscionably lazy today:
"My husband" remarked Mrs Sumner, wife of the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, when introduced to [Frederick, later Lord] Lindemann ('the Prof') "my husband always says that with a First in Greats you can get up science in a fortnight"(After the Victorians, page p.374)
5. Oh, and speaking of many worlds and it's enthusiasts, does anyone else think that equation 11 of Tegmark (2000) [1] is inconsistent with the claim that the brain is "too warm" for quantum computation to take place, and are in fact evidence that the brain is not warm enough? This isn't something I care about very much, and I certainly not familiar with the literature to offer constructive criticism on this point, but a coherence time proportional to a positive exponent of temperature strikes me as unusual to say the least. [There is a reason why experimentalists get through quite so much liquid helium...]