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Today.

Today was a day of breakthroughs.

It started innocently enough, with an early bird wake up call at the ungodly hour of 10:30am. A text message from a colleague inquiring about lunch plans was a good way to start the day, and little did I know that it would only get better from there. As the day progressed, I just about finished up my general relativity assignment (in which I spoke like a pirate, and wrote a short story about Captain Kirk and the USS Enterprise), and snagged a delicious cup of coffee from everyone’s favorite coffee shop all before heading off to GR at 3:30.

It was then that the cogs began to spin.

A mere hour and fifteen minutes later, I had another 10 pages of immaculately taken notes, and a head full of ideas on how to resolve some of the field’s most terrible contradictions. Take, for example, some of the biggest issues with Loop Quantum Gravity. For those of you who don’t know, LQG is one of the biggest opponents to String Theory as a quantum theory of gravity (it has about 8% of the market share, where String Theory has 90% and everything else has about 2%). It remedies the singularity problem by showing (in an interesting way) that gravity becomes repulsive on very small length scales (we’re talking Planck-scale here, so don’t even think about trying to reduce your weight during your annual physical). This has the interesting side effect of turning the “Big Bang” into a “Big Bounce” where a “previous universe” collapsed to a near-singularity, and then expanded again into what we’re living in right now.

Sound cool right? Definitely. The only thing is, how do you explain the fact that - according to our most recent estimates of Hubble’s constant - not only is the universe decidedly not collapsing, but worse off it might actually be accelerating in it’s expanse! This means we’re probably not going to end up dealing with a “Big Crunch” which - while good for anything still alive at that point - is bad for LQG. After all, how do you explain that in one universe, there wasn’t enough energy to keep it expanding so it collapsed, but when the same universe went around again for a second (or third, or forth, or nth) time, it suddenly had more than enough energy than it needed? Conservation of energy has something to say about that, and you know what? So do I.

It’s all the fault of a giant, multidimensional pencil! It’s grievous graphite has destroyed our universe and sentenced us (or at least our great^358,483,294,895 grandchildren) to the cold death of the universe! (Though, to be fair, unless we’ve moved into a new solar system by then, we should be more worried about being enveloped by the sun).

Let’s go on a little thought adventure. Picture the universe not as a strangely complex 4-dimensional object suspended in nothingness (nor as an absurd 10, 11, or 13 dimensional object suspended in a sea of 10^(way too many to ever test) possible universes), but rather as a two-dimensional plane. Now, imagine if you will that the customary theory of multiple universes extends here, wherein we might find a number of two dimensional planes representing different universes. Perhaps they overlay one another as would the pages of a book.

Now, what I want you to do is make a model of this on your desk. Go ahead, take a second. It’s not too hard. Grab four or five sheets of paper, layer them on top of another, and then grab a soda because you’re done. Next, I want you to find the nearest pencil (if you don’t have one a pen will do). Now, hold the paper in such a way that you can punch the pencil through it without damaging anything.

Now punch the pencil through the paper.

No. You’re going to want to use the sharp end, try again.

Okay good.

Did you hurt yourself?

That’s okay, I’ll wait.

…

Alright, hopefully you put a band-aid on that. You really shouldn’t have put the paper on your thigh. I mean, where did you think the pencil was going to go? I’m trying to illustrate a point, not show by some freak twist of reality that paper will somehow be strong enough to stop a speeding pencil. Geeze. Anyway, if you remove the pencil (and ignore the blood stains) what you’ll notice is that the paper bends down. That’s what happened to our universe! All sorts of dark energy must be bleeding into the universe from our neighboring universes because some douchebag created a rift between the universe because they stabbed us with a giant pencil!

I hope they stabbed themselves in their leg too.

That wasn’t all though. Through a combined discussion with Josh and Jamison I determined that a space rhinoceros’s favorite food is tachyons, and that they can interact with them because thanks to a charm in Exalted they can move faster than the speed of light. Which means - assuming the minimum requirements for Wind-Racing Essence Infusion - a space rhinoceros must have a stamina of at least 67,061,659. This means that if a Lunar were to take the form of one, they would have a ludicrous lethal soak of 33,530,830 (since Exalts get to round up).

A stamina value that high would allow them to move faster than the speed of light according to the charm’s use, thus allowing them to interact with tachyons. This opens up a whole new group of questions though, like “if they can eat tachyons, what the hell are they doing gobbling up the particle pairs formed at the border of black holes?”

Huey’s theory on Hawking Radiation might be in grave danger.

All of this before 6:00 too. What a great day.

[Edit: Of course, just so we're all on the same page, don't cite any of this in a scientific paper. I'm pretty sure it'll get you laughed at, in the same way Josh and I laughed at each other for discussing it this afternoon.]

Tabletop RPGs, pseudoscience exalted, Geek, jamison, josh, pseudoscience

I kept waking up the missus, so I retired to the living room where I could write this post without worrying about risking her wrath. You see, my wonderful girlfriend is a bit of a bipolar sleeper, and it’s sometimes difficult to get a read on what kind of night she’s going to have. Most of the time, a rhinoceros could crash through the wall and wrestle violently with a grizzly bear that tore its way up through the pipes and she’d sleep right through it. Other times - like this night in particular - even the most subtle change in the brightness of my monitor will send her shooting up in bed faster than you can say “I swear I wasn’t looking at porn!”

It’s that kind of strange inconsistency that seems to be governing my life right now. Between the roller coaster ride that is the grad school application process, and my total lack of time to do anything constructive anymore, things are pretty unpredictable. That’s alright though, if I learned anything from my quantum mechanics class, it’s that just because we don’t know all the details about a system, doesn’t mean it won’t all work out in the end anyway. I just hope nobody comes along and collapses my grad school wave function into a series of rejection letters. That would suck.

The first person I catch looking over my shoulder at my applications gets my fist tunneled through their face.

In other news, I’m thinking about taking this blog public at some point in the near future. (That felt so strange to type, knowing that next to nobody is able to read this right now). As per usual with these types of things, Josh (the non-physics one) has inspired (read: goaded) me into taking down the electrified fence protecting this blog, allowing me to once again let my thoughts flow freely through the intertubes. I’m going to miss the attack-iguanas though. They’re so cute!

My biggest concern about the whole deprivitizing process is the unspoken expectation that I actually produce content. I should probably take another page out of Josh’s book and provide some regular features. I know he’s doing Monday reviews, and the Friday-Five, and so on, and I can’t help but concede that as a pretty good idea. I don’t think I’ll run anything quite so regimented, but a number of dedicated fall back subjects that I can reliably post about from week to week (and enjoy doing so) would be a great help for turning this into what I ultimately wanted it to be in the first place: a repository for my thoughts on the world.

Speaking of thoughts, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bill Nye recently. I think of all the figures on television when I was growing up, and all the fantastic shows that shaped me as a child, the one man with whom I connected the most was Bill Nye. To this day I still remember the theme song, and I was always impressed with his rigor and easy to understand explanations, especially when compared to that hack Beakman. In fact, as Kristen and I were watching an episode of Time Warp on the Discovery Channel and I couldn’t stop thinking about crazy old Billy Nye and all the fantastic times we had together. Holding that thought for a moment, I have to take a brief aside to say the following on the subject of Time Warp:

What a horrendously addictive, but wholly substance-less show! Seriously. They do awesome stuff, and catch it on high-speed cameras. What more could you want? I’ll tell you: show hosts that know what the fuck is going on. Ugh! I couldn’t stop myself from correcting all the little mistakes they kept making when they tried to talk about Physics. Freshmen-level Physics at that! Honestly, I couldn’t tell if it was really because they didn’t know what the script they were reading meant, or if they were just trying to dumb it down for the average Joe, but either way, if I’m watching a show that tries to imply that it contains some degree of rigor… I’d like my hosts to get it right. Augh! Frustrating as hell. Still awesome though. Very awesome.

Anyway, aside over. Back to Bill Nye.

As I was saying, Kristen and I were watching Time Warp and my thoughts drifted back to Bill Nye, which reminded me of a conversation I had last semester with Subir - a colleage of mine who’s now working towards his PhD at Columbia. We were sitting in the Computational Physics lab here at Uni, and Subir turned to me and said “you know Rob, you have the gift. I think you could be a great spokesman for Physics.” At the time he invoked the name Brian Greene - the well known String Theorist who has released a couple of hugely popularized novels - but as the conversation continued on, Bill Nye - among others - were thrown out there as well.

At this point, I think it’s important to point out that Bill Nye and popular physicists are on two entirely different levels. Both contribute to science in their own unique ways, but scientists like Brian Green, Stephen Hawking, and the myriad of others recognizable by the laypersons of the world have the magic knack of making high level Physics simple, interesting, and easy to understand. Bill Nye, the Mythbusters, even Mr. Wizard bring something else to the table: they bring charisma (sometimes) and (more importantly) enthusiasm (which is great for getting those children excited in the physik).

On one hand, you have the ultracomplicated made simple and interesting, and on the other hand you have the dull and boring made exciting and engaging, and as Kristen and I sat and watched two grown men dance on Oobleck in super-slow motion, I turned to her and said…

“I want to be Bill Nye.”

That’s not the end of the story though. I don’t just want to be Bill Nye, I want to be Brian Greene too. I want to do both, and that’s where this long, winding, senseless path finally culminates: I think my regular content is going to be putting physics - real physics - out on the table, and make it engaging and interesting, regardless of its level.

And that’s all I’ve got for now. This long assed post (which was started over an hour ago, and should have been a lot shorter if I was going to stick true to the title) got way out of hand, and I really need to hit the sack. But now you (and by you I mean the two people who have access to this right now) have a small preview of what I’m going to try to do with this. Who knows, maybe if I get a savvy lab coat I can even put my camcorder to good use.

And with that folks, my EEE and I say good night.

P.S. I just had to finish proofreading this right when an episode of South Park came on the TV.. Now I won’t get to bed until three. Dammit! Curse you television for distracting me so!

Blog News, General, Physics, Self-Reflection josh, kristen, Physics, ramble, reflection, television

Since the dawn of time, man has sought to understand the nature of the universe. From the discovery of fire to the exploration of space, innovation and resourcefulness has pushed the boundaries of our potential. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, mankind is perched upon the cusp of a new frontier. The Large Hadron Collider promises to unlock the secrets of the most fundamental forces of nature. Deep inside the serpentine tunnels of this most momentous achievement, the very fabric of reality lies waiting to be seen. Yet all is not well…

Scientists would have you believe that there is no danger. Others seem convinced that the LHC is meddling with forces beyond the reach of man, and doing so could bring about the end of the human race. You’ve heard the stories… stranglets, dark energy, black holes… all dismissed as baseless, or at the very least, improbable by the so-called experts in the fields. That should be enough, right? These scientists are the brightest minds of our era, surely they know what they’re doing…

…but what if they don’t?

And so begins the prelude to LHC, a sci-fi, action movie written by yours truly, with the help of Josh “Space” Liberty, with contributions from JD “The Agent” Champagne. It’s a brilliant plot we’ve hatched to make money (since we’re all doomed to failure in physics), and we think that now is the perfect time. With the LHC temporarily offline due to problems with the magnets, the world is ready to believe that it could truly bring about the end of all that we know and cherish. This movie will explore that concept in the most creative way possible: WITH ZOMBIES!

Alright. Premise: The LHC has three primary things that has people concerned; strangelets, dark matter/dark energy, and black holes. We’re going to break it down such that stranglets=dark matter, dark energy is created through the interaction, and black holes follow the standard rules (it’s unlikely that they’ll form, and if they do they’ll evaporate shortly thereafter). These three things conspire to bring about (and ultimately defeat) a zombie horde driven by the power of physics.

These points are broken down into three important sections:

1. Strangelets
   Strangelets are the theorized “stable” form of nucleons that interact with regular matter to form strangelets. For the sake of this movie, we’re going to warp the truth a bit and say that strangelets only interact with certain types of material… namely the squishy insides of humans. Like alpha-radiation, stranglet-radiation (strange waves, perhaps?) can be blocked by a thin layer of material, such as your skin. As such, “infection” from the stranglets cannot be passed through the air, it must be internal-to-internal contact (such as through a bite, exchange of blood, etc). Infection itself is a process that can take several hours to several days (depending on the resiliency of the body), wherein strangelets slowly corrupt material surrounding the wound, spreading to the brain. Tissue that has been corrupted slowly ceases to function normally, and assuming one is completely overtaken by it, causes death. (This is of course step one to making zombies… kill them! The next step is animating them, which comes later). In general, strangelets are attracted to normal matter, but since any hosts are killed in the process of being corrupted, there is little chance of the contagion being passed around, save for exchange of bodily fluids with the infected area. This sets the stage for the second element of our movie: dark energy.
2. Dark Energy
   Now, in the process of it’s reaction, the LHC generates a massive dark-energy field that encompasses the globe. Dark Energy, in some circles, is thought to be a mysterious form of energy that can help explain the accelerated expansion of the universe. In this way, it has the property of “expanding” spacetime. This will become important later. For now, what you need to know is that this dark energy field has little effect on normal matter, and is largely unnoticeable. However, dark energy excites strangelets, and allows them to undergo simple motion. Bodies consumed by strangelets, feel a force because of this, and the random excitation functions as stimulus for the dead flesh. Strange-matter, function under muscle memory, is free to move, resulting in zombies that wander around aimlessly (as one would expect). However, when in the presence of normal matter (in the form of say, our uncorrupted heroes), the random motion, coupled with the muscle memory and the attraction between normal matter and strange matter, causes the zombies to attack any living beings that are uncorrupted. Their “strange-core” tries to get as close to the “matter-core” of people, and this manifests in a apparent desire to consume human flesh, thus revealing the squishy interior and spreading the contagion. Part two of zombie making is now complete! We’ve reanimated our corpses, and we now have a zombie movie. All’s that left is to explain the final fear: black holes
3. Black Holes
   Now, interestingly enough, this fear will ultimately result in saving the human race. It’s a well known “fact” that there is a tiny chance the LHC could form microscopic black holes (read: crazy people say so). These black holes (under normal circumstances) would evaporate before they could accrete, so they would likely be harmless. However, we’re going to take advantage of the fact that a black hole of nearly any size also has the added property of creating a vast gravitational well, which would - albeit temporarily - cause a “compression” in space time. If done properly, this compression could balance out the expansion of spacetime from the dark energy, essentially nullifying the process. As such, a black hole could be created to generate an intense gravitational field, eliminating the force animating the zombies. In addition, it would likely destroy the LHC: two birds with one stone. The only problem is that black holes won’t be made under normal operating conditions, so our heroes must find a way to overload the system such that the energy is so great that it will make a black hole of exactly the right size… one that is large enough to cancel the dark energy, but not too large such that it will destroy the Earth.

Alright. We’re looking pretty good. We have antagonists (zombies), a problem (LHC), and a solution (black holes). All of which are loosely based around real physics, but taken in such a way that it’s more amusing satire than real scifi. In this way, it’s supposed to be a Army of Darkness-style romp through the intensely unlikely, written by scientists, for scientists to laugh at. Incidentally, it also plays off a number of fears held by the largely uninformed, so it has the potential to be huge. Bruce Campbell totally needs a role, as a hero, or a cameo. Either way, the film needs his epicness.

The general plot is as follows, after a brief prelude chronicling the initial infection (a technician with an open wound is servicing the LHC during beam-on and gets corrupted, include a cool graphic of the strangelets corrupting his blood). The initial infection begins to spread when he attacks another scientist in the break room. Fade out, and play credits perhaps, as we move across the globe to UMass Dartmouth, where we ultimately settle into one of the lecture halls, where a professor (I’m thinking Dr. Khanna) is lecturing about general relativity. The lecture should not be an obvious plot point, but he can be explaining the concept of black holes, and their intense gravity wells. Class ends, and Dr. Khanna references an exciting research opportunity, as one of his collaborators from the LHC is visiting to give a colloquia. Josh and Rob (our unknowing heroes) decide to skip it, in order to study for a big test coming up.

Long story short, the speaker is in the final stages of infection and after the presentation, he infects some members of UMD. This continues while Josh and Rob and a couple of other students are doing their studying. Dr. Khanna (uncorrupted) comes in to check on them, sees that they’re doing fine and wanders off to his office. A zombie wanders in and attacks, freaking out Josh and Rob take off with the rest of the students, or something…

Enter standard zombie-movie plot. Nothing too special here. Josh and Rob are ready for zombie invasion (as we’ve discussed). They save the girls, protect their friends, a few perish, but it continues. Suspense bit, as well as some action. Ultimately, with Dr. Khanna’s help, they figure out what’s going on, and they realize that the LHC is the source. They need to get there and stop it. Dr. Khanna shows them a special project he’s working on: a quantum teleporter that works on the concept of tunneling. It attenuates the subject’s deBroglie wavelength such that tunneling through large distances becomes possible. It directs the wave function, and “teleports” the user to wherever they want to go.

Most people make it through unharmed, but of course the zombies are closing in, and an explosion disrupts the machine as the last person makes it through. A readout next to the machine displays the probability of making it to the other side (four sig-figs, rounding up). The last person to make it through steps in with a chance of 100%, then it flickers to 99.9999%, back to 100%, then to 99%, 98%, 90%. Red lights start flashing, it continues to drop, 80%, 60%, 40%, claxons go off. The teleportation activates and the last person ends up embedded in the Earth. Dead.

Fight through the LHC, which has been overcome by zombies. Meet a small packet of scientists and technicians who are resisting the zombies, and explain their plan. The LHC safeguards would need to be disabled in order to create a beam of the required energy, so different people work on doing different things. At the end, they realize they miscalcuated and somebody has to sacrifice themselves by going down into the beam-on area and changing something manually. The plan works, and the black hole is formed.

The creation of the black hole should have dramatic special effects. A slowed-down, up-close view of the proton beams coming together, a violent explosion, then an assymetric collapse of the resulting flash into a swirling black ball, with bits of energy spiraling into it. The slow collapse of the collision chamber, as well as damage to the surrounding structure.

The person (as well as the beam emitter) gets sucked in, and zombies begin to collapse from the lack of dark energy. “It’s working!” someone will shout, and after that “we need to get out of here! the entire place is coming down!” There’s a dramatic escape scene, including the relativistic effects of time dilation and length contraction. A couple scientists fall behind, but the heroes that are left escape.

Finally, there’s a wide view of the LHC collapsing into itself. Large chunks of earth get torn up and spiral into the black hole, it’s all very dramatic. Then the blackhole evaporates, and things fall to the ground, leaving a large crater. Cut to the epilogue, with the disposal of infected bodies and the elimination of the LHC-project. End on a scene of an animal picking at a corrupted corpse, and staggering off into a sewer or forest or something. Probably a rat in new york city picking at a bum, or something.

Opportunities for sequel enter here. Wildlife that has died from corruption (which is spread through carrion animals and scavengers) are reanimated by a new dark energy source: the SSC, which should be mentioned once or twice in the original. The US restarts the project under the false pretense of a government buyout to save the stock market. The animals attack humans, enter sequel. That one ends it once and for all, and there shouldn’t be any more beyond that. Make sure there are plenty of plot points in the first movie that can be explained through the second, linking the two, but nothing that would prevent the first movie from standing on it’s own.

There. I think it’s freaking golden… All that is left is to write it!

Step 1) Write the movie
Step 2) …
Step 3) Profit

Seems logical, right?

pseudoscience josh, kaptain khanna, movie, pseudoscience, rob, space, time