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Monthly Archives March 2006

the future, the animal

I see a lot of thought in the speculative/futurist arena about how we will create machines that will make the next generation of humans obsolete (or the one after that, or somewhere down the line). There is much said in genetics and evolutionary biology about the percieved necessity (or lack thereof) of the “male species”, and of the essential selfish nature of the gene, to which we are all merely a method of reproducing. There is a lot of talk about the future where we are all useless, and machines run the world, as if running the world is the only use we have. There is fear of post-scarcity economics, as if capitolism is a warm maternal protection we cannot survive without.

All these ideas strike me as not only silly, but characteristic of a particular kind of social nhilism. We seem to have no sense of the meaning or purpose of ourselves as a species or society. We all have our individual causes, but we seem afraid to consider what it means to be human, and have a human purpose. I suppose these things seem the realm of religion – those atheists among us see no greater purpose, the religious see only God’s purpose.

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Posted 13 March 2006 § Philosphy ‡ Comments (1)

Light

Light chooses the shortest (in time) path through any system. This is why light bends when it enters into glass or some other substance with a different index of refraction – it is slowed by the substance, and chooses a quicker route to its final destination, shortening the distance traveled in the slower medium and increasing the distance traveled in the faster one.

All right, an analogy: You are at the beach when you see a drowning child 10 meters out in the water, and 50 meters down the beach. Your brain, smart blob of jelly it is, does a very clever calculation – should it run down the beach to the point where the child is 10 meters straight out into the water, or should it jump into the water right here and swim to the child? Knowing you move much faster on sand than in water, your brain correctly (more or less) calculates the correct ratio of sand running to water swimming, and plots a course angling across the sand and jumping into the water only 40 meters or so down the beach, then swmming at some new angle the 14 or so meters to the child. It balances the differing distances and travel speeds to give you a path of least time to your goal.

How does light, lacking a sophisticated brain like yours, know which path to take through a lens or prism or glass of ice cubes? How do we even know where the light went? Well, we measure it. Light is a quantum thing, and in quantum mechanics, measurement is determination. We don’t know where the light is until we measure it, and it is everywhere it could possibly be until we measure it. Seriously, this is how quantum mechanics works – the state of a particle or photon of light is undetermined until measurement. It could be anywhere, it could be traveling any path at all. In fact, it could be said to be traveling all paths, until measurement collapses the wave function and it has to choose which path it really took.

So which path does it end up having taken? The shortest one in time. Because that is the path that allows the particle to arrive at the measurment before all the other paths, therefore it is always the path that is determined by the measurement.

Here is something to think about – systems always try to occupy the lowest possible energy state. A ball wants to fall to the ground, and stay there, unmoving. An atom tries to keep all its electrons in the lowest energy states, stacking them up from lowest to highest. Protiens, capable of folding in thousands of ways to form thousands of unique shapes, choose the lowest energy configuration. Entropy increases in a free gas, how do the molecules in a gas know how to move to increase entropy? Maybe thats what gets them there first.

Posted 13 March 2006 § Philosphy ‡ Comments (1)