robcoyne [dot] com

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

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

Advanced math physics today in a nutshell:

Dr. Hsu: “Does anyone know why physicists use so many coordinate systems? After all, the three dimensional world we live in can always be broken down into x, y, and z. Why do we need more than that?”

Me: “Because physicists are lazy.”

Dr. Hsu: “Yes, that is very right.”

You can’t tell from the dialogue, but Dr. Hsu is this old Chinese man (he’s got to be somewhere around 70) who pretty much knows everything about everything. Famous for his questions during thesis defenses (that are only very loosely related to the actual topic being discussed), and well known for his meandering lectures (read: the previous post), he’s a man who’s not afraid of a bit of brutal honesty. It’s true. Physicists. Are. Lazy. Not lazy in the traditional sense (I assure you most of us probably wash our clothes, and those that don’t have transcended into beings of pure energy and no longer need the primitive concept of clothing), but lazy in the sense of we don’t want to do any more than we have to.

It’s a wonderful truth.

If you had asked me 10 years ago what the hardest job on the planet was, I probably would have said “being President.” Fuck that! I was way off, just look at Bush. He might not be doing the job very well (read: “at all”) but if he can do it (which he clearly can’t) anybody can (anyone except McCain). After that, I probably would have settled on “being a scientist.” I figure it has all of the right qualities to make it a hard job: you have to deal with nerds all the time (because only nerds are scientists, of course), you never know whether or not what you’re doing is actually right until you’ve done it, and most importantly you’re always dealing with things that nobody understands… no matter how well you explain it to them.

After being “in the field” for awhile now (shut up, 5 years counts!), I have to say that I had no idea what I was talking about. Being a scientist is cake. Awesome cake. It is cake because scientists follow the Principle of Least Action, defined as follows:

Given a particular task, one can define a quantity (henceforth referred to as action) as the amount of work required to complete the task from scratch. Physicists tend to move in a way such that action is minimized. Unlike everyone else, it seems, who can’t seem to sort out what it is they need to be doing in the first place, never mind actually getting around to doing it.

Nice and simple. All there is to being a physicist is looking at the job you have to do, and finding out the easiest possible way of doing it. Have a complex equation to solve? Fuck it, have a computer do it for you. Have to prove something to convince your colleagues over in Mathematics that your theory isn’t flawed? To hell with that! Heuristic arguments and hand-waving “proofs” are all you need my friend! It’s a glamorous life; that of a Physicist. In the end, all we want is to get the right answer while simultaneously being as lazy as is humanly possible.

Sadly, not all tasks end up being quite that simple. Just because the path you take is that of least action doesn’t mean that your action has to be all that small. I’m looking at you Mr. “Show that Maxwell’s Equations are valid for a particular case in spherical coordinates, and then proceed derive the Poynting Vector.” That was the worst 13 pages of tedious mathematics I have ever spent on one exam problem…

Anyway. The moral of the story is be lazy. Period.

(Thank you Maupertuis!)

[P.S. Interestingly enough, in the absence of a potential the Lagrangian for classical mechanics is just the kinetic energy. By the work kinetic energy theorem, the total work done to an object starting from rest (referred to above as "scratch") is equal to the object's final kinetic energy. It should be no surprise that the Euler-Lagrange equations, drawn from Hamilton's Principle, yield the equations of motion from a differential equation involving the Lagrangian. Hence, in some ways, Hamilton's Principle (often referred to as the Principle of Least Action - although with arguable legitimacy) describes not only us, but the world we live in as well. Now why doesn't anyone believe me when I say my attitude is dictated by physical law?!]

Physics, pseudoscience jp hsu, lazy, Physics, pseudoscience

It’s time for a physics lesson! Don’t worry, we’ll keep it simple. We’re going to talk about work. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, think about it kind of like the energy you use or you receive by moving something over a certain distance. In that respect, it’s exactly what you’d think it is. If you carry a heavy box up the stairs, you do work, if you carry a lighter box up the stairs, you do less work. There. Nice and simple.

More specifically:

The work done by any constant force F can be written simply as the dot product between that force and the displacement vector that describes the path traveled (in your freshman year, this is generally just a straight line). When you get a little more advanced, you can define the total work as an integral, dotting the force with a line element (dr). The complete line segment describes the path you took to get from point A to point B.

Now there is a special case of this phenomena. When the force is conservative (meaning there is no friction, for the sake of this discussion) then the total work done between points A and B is path-independent. What this means is that no matter what path you take to get from point A to point B, the total amount of work that you do is the same!

This is not the case for non-conservative forces.

There. Physics lesson over. Now onto the real juice of this post! We (and by “we” I mean “my classmates and I”) were sitting in Advanced Mathematical Physics today, and we were going to be talking about differential and integral operations. No big deal. Basically it’s a class about vector calculus. That shouldn’t be too bad, I’ve got five years of this stuff under my belt, and the last few classes I’ve taken have been absolutely loaded with high level application of these concepts.

Somehow, JP Hsu managed to confuse me. Here’s how the class was broken down (topic by topic, pulling right from my notes:

1. Introduction to differential and integral operations
2. Aside: Definition of a field
3. Scalar fields
4. Vector fields
5. History lesson regarding how Faraday invented fields
6. Discussion about Maxwell’s Equations
7. Imagining six-vectors (Ex,Ey,Ez,Bx,By,Bz) at every point in space (ala Dyson)
8. Definition of field lines
9. Mathemagic (in which Hsu got halfway through a proof, got confused, and gave us the answer)
10. Real numbers versus complex numbers
11. Hamilton’s generalization (quaterions)
12. 2×2 Matrices (Pauli-Spin matrices and abstraction in mathematics)
13. Hypercomplex numbers
14. Integral Operations [Wait... what? That's right. 13 topics (and 8 pages of notes) later we're just getting back to one of the topics we started the class with? Anyway...]
15. Line integrals, surface integrals, volume integrals
16. 4-volumes
17. Generalizing volume in 4-d spacetime
18. Complications of unification between quantum theory and relativity
19. Probability interpretation of wave functions, and the process of normalization
20. Boundary conditions of space and time
21. Div, grad, and curl [This section actually started right as class ended, he had us stay 5 extra minutes so he could say something about them]

Now that’s a long list… and I was already familiar with just about everything on it. You can see that the flow of thought (with a couple of exceptions where he switched directions) makes sense (more or less). The only problem is, that the path we took to get from the beginning to the end was so damned confusing that we all had a hard time understanding what he was trying to teach us.

So after class, I have a chat with Kaptain Khanna and Space, and we decided that teaching is not path independent. Though you are travelling from point A (the beginning of class) to point B (the end of class), the amount of understanding one gets is inversely related to the length of the path taken to get there (where path is meant to imply the path taken by the lecture, not the actual passage of time).

Not only that, when you follow certain odd paths, you actually end up in a region of spacial-understanding that is not where you expected to be. Specifically, there is some strange non-zero curl of the knowledge-field surrounding point B, such that you may spiral around understanding, but never truly settle into it (i.e. div(B)=0). This can be true even when points A and B are well-understood by the students.

The moral of this story? I don’t know, it took too long to get here. All I know is that Advanced Mathmematical Physics is going to be the end of me in one way or another.

Physics, pseudoscience, teaching class, confusion, jp hsu, kaptain khanna, Physics, pseudoscience

The following is taken from the appendix of a final lab report entitled “Robertson-Walker Cosmology with Loop Quantum Gravity” in which we performed computational experiments revolving around how the cosmological constant affects the expansion of the universe. This is the story of Kaptain Khanna I referenced in my previous post (LaTeX code included for figures =P)

* * * * * *

Alright, so this isn’t really a derivation, nor is it really a serious appendix, but after nearly 50 pages of lab report we wanted to throw in something special. You might get a kick out of this, or you might not, but in any event it helps explain what we talk about while we’re up in 306 working on your homework.

The Khanian tensor was born one day while we were chatting up in 306 between E&M and GR. We have - in the past - come up with rather detailed theories in which we describe abstract, “real life” stuff with physics logic and terminology. Perhaps the most “famous” of them all is OUR theory of GR. However, instead of General Relativity, our GR stands for GAME Relativity. Meaning it is a theory of video games and how they are all connected. This is a small part of our ToE, which is our Theory of Entertainment (NOT a Theory of Everything).

In any event, we got to chatting, and we determined that since you have such a massive control over the powers of time and space, that we would attempt to derive some mathematical interpretations of them. What we ultimately came up with was what we called the “Khanian tensor,” which was originally written simply as something like:

\kappa_{\mu\nu}

But then we realized that this was an incorrect formulation, and that this did not fully represent your powers. Since you have the ability to warp space and time, we sought to model your tensor after something that represents curvature. While it does describe curvature, this was more analogous to the Ricci tensor, which is formed through a contraction of the Riemann curvature tensor. That’s when it hit us: the Khanian tensor is analogous to the Riemann curvature tensor and this was simply a two-index contraction of it.

Ultimately (through a couple hundred pages of tedious imaginary math) we derived the following formulation:

\kappa_{\rho c}^{j\lambda}

Note that this does not follow the same form as the Riemann curvature tensor. Although it has four indexes and represents curvature, it has two contravariant components and covariant components. Note that each contra- or covariant pair contains one Latin and one Greek index. This implies a mix of spacial and temporal dependence.

We spent quite some time analyzing this tensor. It was only after (imaginary) months of research that determined something quite amazing. Each Greek-Latin paring forms initials. When you take the Latin index and combine it with the Latin-equivalent of the Greek index you get JL and RC. We were quick to realize that those were OUR initials!

This was a suprising find, somehow we were closely tied to the Khanian tensor. It was almost as if there was some kind of association between us and the Khanian. We soon realized that it signified that the Khanian was derived from a space time that we could manipulate. Hence we named it the Rosh-Loyne space time, by a contraction of our first and last names.

It was from this purely mathematical derivation that we stumbled upon the superhero: Kaptain Khanna! We realized that we both has special powers derived from our ability to warp Rosh-Loyne space time. Josh had the ability to control space, and Rob had the ability to control time. However, we could not combine our abilities to gain full control over the dynamics of the space time continuum.

One day, when trying to perfect control over their abilities something happened. There was a flash of light which quickly collapsed into a small oscillating sphere of inky blackness that visually warped the space around it. Slowly, the small black dot began to grow and as it did wind started to pick up around where we were standing. We were concerned to say the least, we thought that we had somehow created a non-evaporating black hole! We were surprised to see that after only an instant (it seemed like ages), the black hole disappeared.

There was a loud crack as a figure folded out of space time itself! And the figure spoke to us! It said…

By your dimensions combined, I am Kaptain Khanna!

We were flabbergasted, but we soon learned that we were chosen to serve along side Kaptain Khanna, protecting the universe from uncouth physical theories that seek to destroy the very fabric of physics itself! Kaptain Khanna had a great many enemies, like “The String,” and “The Super symmetric Man.” He also had an arch nemesis…

Abstract Analysis on nth-Order, Higher Dimensional, Foliated Manifolds Man!

Obviously his name is quite a mouthful, so we shortened it to “Higher Dimensional Man.” Kaptain Khanna told us that he draws his power from the curvature of four-dimensional space time, and Higher Dimensional Man has the ability to embed Kaptain Khanna into a higher dimension, making space time flat and rendering him powerless. It was our job to help Kaptain Khanna protect the universe from the analytical tyranny of these villains!

And that how the Khanian tensor in Rosh-Loyne space time ultimately led us to our destinies as superheroes.

pseudoscience exerpts, josh liberty, kaptain khanna, pseudoscience

I’ve never been a tinkerer, and in that respect I vary from a lot of the prototypical scientist or engineer. I remember reading on personality profiles when I was younger that the best scientists were people who “were curious in their youth, and are often those who enjoy working with their hands.” The examples of which almost always described kids who would take apart their radio or VCR and build something else out of it. I think it’s fairly common for these types of people to go into science and engineering (especially the latter) because it makes a lot of sense. If you enjoyed taking apart electronics when you were a child, then a field that allows you to play around with that kind of stuff is no doubt very intriguing.

Thankfully that is not the only type of person that makes a good scientist, because although I’ve got the curiosity down pat I never took apart any of my electronics when I was younger. I had a small electronics bench that my father got me (a little toy that you could use to make alarms, and buzzers, and small light shows) but I was never particularly attached to it. Back then, I was too lazy and too spoiled to bother trying to understand what was going on. As such, I never made anything cool because I didn’t know how. These days, I’ve started to mature to a point where I do want to learn this kind of stuff. So I think in that respect, when I’m older, I’ll probably do the same thing that my father did for my children - give them these kinds of toys to play with in hopes that they will be a bit more proactive about their curiosity than I was.

All of that is beside the point though, as I have diverged from the reason I originally started this post. My curiosity has always been much more internal - in my head. Having suffered through most of my childhood with low self esteem, I always kept things to myself, and even today I find that when I have a new idea I want to keep it close until I’ve worked out all the kinks, because of some undeveloped - nearly primal fear - of being judged and ridiculed by people when I come up with it. With time, this tendency to keep everything in made me very dependent on my inner monologue, and nowadays I’d like to think I have a pretty robust imagination. Even if I’m not the most creative person in the world when it comes to writing fiction, or making art, I have a very easy time of visualizing things in my head. Often, when I’m solving a problem I’ll reach out in front of me, and make gestures in the air of manipulating some kind of invisible diagram. That’s because - in my head - I’m trying to get a feel for whatever problem it is I’m trying to solve.

This type of curiosity has manifested itself into what I’d like to think is a new-age kind of tinkering (or perhaps - in many ways - and old-age kind of tinkering). I tinker with ideas, all in my head. It’s nothing particularly fantastic (I won’t say that I perform elaborate thought experiments in my head like Einstein, for example) but it’s always things I find interesting, and a little bit “out there”! These things have gotten me a little bit of a reputation as strange, at least with my friends, because I’ll often use them to get across more significant physical points.

Take this conversation I had with some roommates of mine:

“I’m going to explain Quantum Chromodynamics to you,” I said to my roommates, two of which were fine-art majors, and one of which was studying English. They all groaned in response. “But, I’m going to do it in such a way that you won’t even realize you’re learning about it!”

They chuckled, and said that I was right because it was always so boring when somebody tried to explain science to them.

“First, let me see where you are in your understanding of how atoms work. You’re all familiar with atoms, right?” I asked, genuinely.

“Yeah,” they replied.

“And how about what makes up an atom? Protons, neutrons, and electrons?” I inquired.

“Eh, yeah, we’ve heard of them,” came the response with some grumbles about high school chemistry courses.

“Good. That’s all you need to know. QCD is the theory that governs how protons and neutrons interact. If you’ve ever heard anything about it, you’ve probably heard words like Quarks, Gluons, Pions and so on tossed around. These words are really just fancy things scientists like me throw around to make us feel better about ourselves.” I could feel it already, they were losing interest, because I was starting to go off in the same direction science discussions always did. I had them now, they were about to get hooked.

“But that’s a lie!” I shouted suddenly, in a very loud voice, “it’s a lie because we don’t want you - the layperson - to understand what’s really going on. You see, QCD isn’t a theory of these silly particles! Scientists would have you believe that inside each proton and neutron are quarks, but that’s not the case at all. It’s tiny little men!” I exclaimed to an exasperated laugh from my audience, “tiny little men with gumdrops! And these men exchange force between each other by throwing the gumdrops back and forth.”

This clearly threw them for a loop, and they simply assumed that I was just pulling their leg, but caught in my little web of deception, they allowed me to continue.

“Now, these little men with gumdrops govern ALL interactions, not just QCD ones. After all, there are only two types of forces, really… at the subatomic level: attractive and repulsive forces. Repulsive forces are generated when the gumdrops are hard. After all, it’s natural that if I were to throw a heavy ball at you, the momentum of the ball when you caught it (assuming you caught it squarely) would push you away from me. Likewise, attractive forces are generated when the gumdrops are soft and sticky. I throw the gumdrop at you, but it sticks to my hand and gets stretched out. Then, when you catch it, it sticks to your hand. The elasticity in the gumdrop pulls us together, creating an attractive force.”

They were all laughing now, and I had them.

“You see, protons and neutrons each have three of these little men inside of them, and these little men have different colored gumdrops. The colors don’t really matter, but for the sake of clarity let us say that they are red, green, and blue. All of these gumdrops are sticky, so they create an attractive force between all the little men. They’re all stuck inside the proton or the neutron! These gumdrops are so sticky that they act like glue, and even if the little men don’t like each other, and don’t want to be in the same place, the gumdrops hold them together.”

At this point, I had kept up a facade of seriousness, and they all had big grins on their face, appreciating my act.

“The theory goes deeper than this,” I explained, “but I can see that you’re all getting tired of my explanation, so I’ll stop it there.”

“That’s was pretty good,” they said, “but you didn’t actually teach us about QCD, so you’re a liar.” They were feeling pretty good about themselves, I imagine.

“Oh, but I did!” I exclaimed with a smile. “You see, the real theory goes like this: there are three quarks of different types that make up a proton or a neutron - these are the little men - some of them share like charge, and so they repel each other - the fact that some of the men don’t like one another - but the attractive force between them outweighs this. The quarks inside of the proton or the neutron exchange small particles called gluons - hence the reference to the glue - which I replaced with gumdrops. Each gluon carries a charge that we refer to as “color charge” and there are three basic types of it: red, green and blue - the colors of the gumdrops. The gluons are a lot stronger than the repulsive force from charge, so they’re all stuck inside of the nucleon. I wasn’t lying when I said the theory was more developed, but I figured enough was enough.” In truth, I just hadn’t worked out the details of a more complicated Little-Men-With-Gumdrops theory to work out pion interaction between nucleons.

“Oh yeah,” they said, “I guess you’re right.”

“In the end, I gave you the basic understanding of how QCD works and you didn’t even realize it, because you were distracted by the gumdrops!“

In the end that quote - you were distracted by the gumdrops - got put on a sticky note that adorned a particular door frame upon which we stuck quotes that we liked. It was all in quite fun, and since then I’ve developed the “theory” (LM-GUT, or Little Men Gumdrop Unified Theory, or something of the sort) even further. It’s great fun to come up with silly little things like this, and I do it quite often. A colleague and I came up with an overarching theory of “Game Relativity” linking together video games of all sorts into a kind of Grand Unified Theory of Entertainment. The same colleague and I have invented a league of superheroes and supervillians based on our professors, the best of which goes by the name of Kaptain Khanna, whom is summoned a’la Captain Planet thanks to the special rings that my colleague (Space) and myself (Time) have.

Josh: “Space!”

Me: “Time!”

KK: “By your dimensions combined, I am Kaptain Khanna!”

It’s really pretty fuckin’ silly, but since Dr. Khanna is the department expert on Relativity, Quantum Gravity, and Spacetime, we figured that it was fitting. We even wrote up a 2 page origin story and attached it to the back end of our Advanced Laboratory Class final report. The department really got a kick out of that.

I guess all I really wanted to illustrate is that you don’t need to be a tinkerer to be a good scientist. I hope to explore more of these ideas through this blog, so that perhaps I can finally come out of my shell and share some of these neat things with the rest of the world.

Physics, Self-Reflection, teaching gumdrops, kaptain khanna, Physics, pseudoscience

It occurred to me, as I sat upstairs in the unfinished addition to my house straining out loose flecks of solidified latex from the cans of paint we store up there, that sports idolatry bears remarkable resemblance to something I’ve studied on more than one occassion over the years of my schooling. In fact, I remember in my third year of Uni, sitting in my first Quantum Mechanics class and being exposed to the fundamental facets of quantum theory, including - most importantly for this discussion - the quantization of atomic energy levels. As time went on, so did my understanding of the phenomena. With each passing exam, with each paper written, I started to develop “quantum-intuition” which - to this day - I still say is little more than a trick we play on ourselves to pretend that we understand something that is mostly incomprehensible. More recently, in a Quantum Field Theory class, we discussed the origin of the Lamb Shift (one-loop expansions for QED). All of these things, over the course of one’s education, add up to create a significantly more complex view of the Hydrogen atom than say, J.J. Thompson’s plum-pudding model.

Anyway, all of this is relatively unimportant, as most of the nitty-gritty details tend to be. What’s really important is how this ties into a discussion I was listening to on WEEI (the local sports-radio station) regarding the great Michael Jordan, and the (some say, but most don’t) equally great Kobe Bryant (incidentally, I think the comparison is impossible). I propose to you now the hypothesis that sports idolatry functions like the energy levels in the hydrogen atom, with discrete levels of worship, each of which can be broken down into a subset of graduated states corresponding to the perceived epicness (yes, I just said EPIC) of each level included in the set; a so-called “Jordan/Kobe-Shift” (named for the two players involved in the discussion that generated this post). This theory breaks down into three fundamental axioms that I’ve built from experimental observations.

1. As worship level increases, individual worship levels become closer and closer together. This means that as one becomes more legendary, the difference in the “tiers” upon which he (or she) is placed by the fans becomes finer. This axiom stems from the perpetual discussion between fans regarding “high echelon” players, and the differences between them. Statments illustrating this axiom generally involve a supporter claiming that two players are at the same level, but one is better than the other for a finite number of reasons, usually given emphatically, and without qualitative evidence to back it up. For example: “I agree that both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant are both top-tier players - the best of their times - but Michael Jordan is better because of x, y, and z.” Where x, y and z are constrained to exist in the set of expressions between “because he won more Championship rings when he was the player who carried the team,” and “because he’s Michael-fucking-Jordan!“Physical parallel: Quantized Energy States of the Hydrogen Atom.
2. No two players can exist in the same worship state; that is to say that worship-states are degenerate with respect to hero-number. Illustrated best by the Hank-Aaron Exclusion Principle, no ordinary system of sports legends can contain two players of precisely equal caliber. Fans will always argue that one is better than the other, regardless of what statistics might say. Arguments that revolve around this axiom typically involve the liberal use of “intangibles” (traits that can not be proven experimentally) and personal preference. Unlike in physics, this form of subjective reasoning is perfectly acceptable (and infuriatingly common) in this discipline. To illustrate this aspect of the theory consider this example: San Francisco fans will argue that because of the statistics, and the lack of proof of cheating, Barry Bonds is the best home run hitter that ever lived. The rest of the world cites an example of an “intangible” - that Bonds used performance enhancing drugs - to say that this claim is false, and that Hank Aaron is - and forever will be - the home run hero. It is made clear by the San Francisco fans in this example that not only does subjective reasoning have a home in this study, but a lack of the ability to think logically and critically, and a complete lack of moral responsibility do as well.This is not the only extension of this axiom however. When the degree of epicness (yep, I said EPIC once again!) reaches a level beyond standard human comprehension, this axiom breaks down, and worship levels populated by players at that level collapse into one another, becoming indiscernible. Degeneracy pressure fails to keep the players separate, after which point they represent the pinnacle of worship for all future generations to come. This conglomerate state contains all of the truly great players - Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Jerry Rice, Joe Montana, Michael Jordon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and so many more - once a player reaches this state fans will always identify them as a member of this state, and will not attempt to qualify differences between them. Such a feat is impossible, and anyone that tries will subsequently be tracked down and shot by a mob of ultra-conservative wildebeest.Physical parrallel: Fermionic Degeneracy and the Pauli Exclusion Principle
   
3. Players in similar states are differentiated by a measurable worship-difference generated by perceived epicness (that’s number three!). Players in the same echelon performance-wise (generally determined stasticially) are once again separated into graduated subsets, the so-called Jordan/Kobe-Shift. The best example I can think of lies in baseball (because that’s where my heart is). Look at Mariano Rivera and Dennis Eckersley. They are both clearly two of the best relievers ever to have played the game of baseball (If you disagree, then clearly you’re not well-enough informed to be reading this post). However, despite the fact that they exist in the same echelon (the best), they are not quite equal, Mariano Rivera definitely has an edge (which is painful to say, because I’m a born-and-bred Red Sox fan who has a soft spot in his heart for Eck).Physical Parallel: The Lamb Shift

It should be noted that the system otherwise functions like standard atomic levels would. When excited, players can perform well above their typical level but typically relax back down to their original state. This is best seen in people who perform above their career averages in postseason games, or have moments of greatness in an otherwise dismal career (two one-hit-wonders to look up: Bobo Holloman and Bumpus Jones).

The most amusing part of all of this though, is the practices people maintain when arguing these points. If you don’t listen to sports-talk radio, I suggest you give it a try and give a listen to what the fans really have to say.

pseudoscience bullshit, pseudoscience, sports

It’s the end of the school year here at University, and along with that comes the standard burdens that accompany it: finals, reports, projects, and moving out of your closet-sized apartments to make your way back home. Of course, if any of you out there reading this are men, or happen to be living with men, you also know that this means that it’s clean up time, so you don’t get charged for the plethora of stains, scrapes, tears, or generally unsightly oozes that have built up in your apartment over the course of the year. Naturally, this translates directly to hiding said stains, scrapes, tears, and generally unsightly oozes in whatever way possible, rather than cleaning them up directly. After all, a wise man once said “out of sight, out of mind.” How do I know it was a man, you ask? That’s easy… because no sensible woman would ever come up with a motto that promoted that kind of behavior.

In any event, if you’re lucky enough to live with a physicist, you’re in good shape. If we’ve learned nothing else over the course of our tenure at university, it’s how to conveniently hide things. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and see exactly how good we are at it…

Freshman year: You’re taking introductory mechanics, and despite the fact that the course is labeled as “calculus based” you’ve masterfully hidden any hint of calculus behind an onslaught of shoddy algebra.

Sophomore year: Now it’s time for your first really hard-core math courses (Intermediate Mathematical Physics for myself), and as a result, you’ve developed a keen ability to hide (and/or lose, depending on how you look at it) any sense of physical intuition, and instead learned how to depend solely on the math.

Junior year: Quantum mechanics. This time you’ve hidden all traces of common sense.

Senior year: Advanced Electromagnetism… aside from hiding momentum in odd places (like the electromagnetic field), you’ve somehow managed to hide 98% of the world’s visible processes in Maxwell’s Equations. Regrettably, you’ve also forgotten how to get them back out.

Grad school: You’ve reached the penultimate form of hiding things, because you’ve taken a Quantum Field Theory class and you’ve learned all about renormalization.

So clearly, if you’re in a situation where you need to clean up, all you really need is a physicist. Even if they don’t pull out the big guns and roll all of your mess up into the invisible pockets of higher dimensions, they’ll find practical ways to make it look like you didn’t put that hole in the wall. Hell, if they can sweep infinities under the rug, what are a few pounds of dust bunnies or a room full of shattered sheetrock? If you’re not lucky enough to have a physicist available, then consult your nearest mathematician. They typically keep a physicist or two handy for cases when they’re trying to communicate with stupid people.

And to physicists: accept your fate. Become one with your inner Swiffer-Ninja. After all, you’re already underappreciated masochists by the very nature of your field, what difference would a few hours of practical application make in the long run?

Besides, what good is all your training if you never have a chance to use it?

pseudoscience Physics, pseudoscience