The answer is 42!

I've got the answer! (to the question at the end of yesterday's post)

The answer is 42! Haha.

OK, the real answer is Blowin' in the Wind. Hahaha.

All joking aside—well, almost all joking aside—there is an amusing connection between the two preceding paragraphs. Can any readers of this blog explain it in the comments? If you need a hint see the first comment.

And did you realize that today is 10-10-10? That's completely unrelated. Or is it?

Quantum Reality

Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert, is an excellent discussion of what quantum mechanics has to say about the nature of reality. It turns out that physicists don't agree on the nature of reality. Dr. Herbert describes eight different possible quantum realities:

QR #1: The Copenhagen Interpretation, Part I - There is no deep reality. As Niels Bohr put it: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description." (p. 17)

QR #2: The Copenhagen Interpretation, Part II - Reality is created by observation. As John Wheeler put it: "No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon unless it is an observed phenomenon." (p. 18)

QR #3: Reality is an undivided wholeness. As David Bohm put it: "One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts." (p. 18) In other words, the observer cannot be considered separate and distinct from the object being observed.

QR #4: The many-worlds interpretation - Reality consists of a steadily increasing number of parallel universes. Proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957: "in the Everett picture, everything that can happen does happen." (p. 175) Sounds like Douglas Adams.

QR #5: Quantum logic - The world obeys a non-human kind of reasoning. As David Finkelstein put it: "Our classical ideas of logic [based on the ideas of Aristotle and Boole] are simply wrong in a basic practical way. The next step is to learn to think in the right way, to learn to think quantum-logically." (p. 21)

QR #6: Neorealism - The world is made of ordinary objects, that is, objects which possess attributes of their own whether they are observed or not. This was Einstein's view.

QR #7: Consciousness creates reality. This is a stronger version of QR #2. John von Neumann helped create this view. As his colleague Eugene Wigner put it: "It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness." (p. 25)

QR #8: The duplex world of Werner Heisenberg - The world is twofold, consisting of potentials and actualities. In the quantum world there exist only potentials, which become actualities in the real world during the "magic act of measurement."

The Copenhagen Interpretation is the dominant view in physics today. But all of these interpretations have credible proponents. Dr. Herbert says that all of these interpretations are consistent with all known experiments. Are they perhaps therefore somehow equivalent?

For more on Bohr, Heisenberg and the Copenhagen Interpretation, see my series of posts in 2008 about the play Copenhagen.

Let's consider what this means for humans. Are humans special? The "no" position is eloquently stated by Douglas Adams. The "yes" position is just as eloquently stated by Jaron Lanier and Herman Wouk.

I think most physicists—including Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynman—would agree with Adams. But not so fast. Doesn't QR #7 imply that humans are special? And see Copenhagen, part 4 where Niels Bohr says (in the playwright's words): "We put man back at the centre of the universe."

So, are humans special or not?

Dang. Stumped again. I'm sure the answer is right here in something that I've posted about, but it's just not coming to me. Maybe if I sleep on it the answer will come to me tomorrow.

UPDATE: I've got it!

Anything that happens happens

"Is There an Artificial God?" was the title of a talk given by Douglas Adams in 1998. It can be found in The Salmon of Doubt (p. 126 in the paperback edition) and online here. It relates to the concept of reality that I have blogged about.

Adams sums up his view as: "Anything that happens happens." He explains this in terms of the Four Ages of Sand. That is, sand to make glass lenses, silicon chips and fiber optic cable.

1. Telescopes - We discover the outer universe.
2. Microscopes - We discover the inner universe.
3. Computers - We discover computation.
4. The Internet - We discover new ways of communication.

In the First Age we discover that humans are insignificantly small. In the Second Age we discover that even with the microscope we still don't understand life. In the Third Age we discover that complexity can arise from the iteration of very simple processes.

The Fourth Age is something that we are just beginning to experience. We have always had one-to-one communications. We have long had one-to-many communications (mass media). Adams says that democracy is a clunky form of many-to-one communications. What is new is the ability to have many-to-many communications. We don't really know where this will take us, but it is sure to be full of surprises. Adams talks at length about the novelty (at the time) of someone typing on a computer and being able to control a Coke dispensing machine thousands of miles away. He would be fascinated by today's news of the Stuxnet worm.

Adams's thesis rests primarily on the Third Age and the fact that complexity can emerge from simplicity. He says that this is where life comes from. In his view life did not come from an intelligent designer, but emerged out of the simpler natural world through iterative processes analogous to how computers work, gradually becoming more and more complex.

A good example of this idea is the Mandelbrot Set. Infinite complexity arises out of something so simple that even I have programmed it, just to see how it works. Experience with computer programming helps one to understand Adams's point.

Computation is certainly a wonderful thing. To Stephen Wolfram and Max Tegmark it is everything. (See also the ideas of Nick Bostrom, linked in the Tegmark post.)

But we should keep in mind that there might be another view, as eloquently expressed by Jaron Lanier and Herman Wouk.

Well, what other luminaries can we consult for their views? How about Einstein? Funny you should ask. I just finished listening to the biography of Einstein that Nancy gave me last Christmas. See the next post.

The Language God Talks

Herman Wouk wrote the best historical novels ever about World War II: The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. They are exciting and gripping stories, yet factual and complete. Highly recommended. These two books were also made into two minseries, available on DVD.

It turns out that while writing those books Herman Wouk had several conversations with one of my heroes: Richard Feynman. I didn't know that before, but learned it from a new nonfiction book that Herman Wouk just published: The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion. The title of the book comes from Wouk's first meeting with Feynman: "...[Feynman] said as we were parting, 'Do you know calculus?' I admitted that I didn't. 'You had better learn it,' he said. 'It's the language God talks.' "

Wouk and Feynman were contemporaries, both born in New York City—Wouk in 1915 and Feynman in 1918. Both of their families were Jewish, and from the same city in Russia. Yet they did not meet until mid-life. The Language God Talks is dedicated: "To the memory of our fathers, Abraham Isaac Wouk and Melville Feynman, who emigrated from Minsk and gave us our lives in America."

Feynman turned his back on religion at about age ten. Wouk embraced religion in his 20s. The book is a "debate" that Wouk has with his good friend Feynman about science and religion. Feynman must have made quite an impression on Herman Wouk, because Feynman has been dead for 22 years, and Wouk is still debating with him.

Feyman once said in an interview: "The stage is too big for the drama." Meaning: the universe is too big a stage for human drama to be anything special. Wouk wrote The Language God Talks to dispute this statement.

Wouk never did learn calculus (although he tried), and he quotes a Jewish microbiologist who is also a Torah scholar as describing calculus as "His [God's] other language" (my emphasis). Wouk ends the debate with the word teiku (the question stands), and these words: "...forgive me, friend Nobel genius, you're as ignorant of religion as I am of calculus."

Even though Herman Wouk may be ignorant of calculus, The Language God Talks contains a good overview of science. For religion and the "struggle for good and evil" (Feynman's words for the human drama), Mr. Wouk draws on his World War II novels with their underlying theme of the Holocaust. How could a good and gracious God allow the Germans, an advanced people, to do such evil?

Herman Wouk's answer was in War and Remembrance, in a sermon by his character Aaron Jastrow in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The title of the sermon is "Heroes of the Iliad," but Jastrow (and Wouk) find the answer not in the Iliad but in the Book of Job. The sermon is reprinted and explained in The Language God Talks.

One additional interesting connection that I learned from The Language God Talks is that another person whom Herman Wouk talked to when he was writing his World War II novels was Dr. Raul Hilberg, a professor of political science at UVM from 1955 to 1991. I had not heard of Dr. Hilberg, but according to Wikipedia, he was "widely considered to be the world's preeminent Holocaust scholar." Mr. Wouk visited Dr. Hilberg at UVM and spoke at his retirement party in 1991. Dr. Hilberg lived in Williston until his death in 2007.

You can read the first few pages of The Language God Talks here:

Is God a mathematician?

You Are Not a Gadget

The book You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier is a fascinating counterpoint to some earlier posts on this blog.

Jaron Lanier is a technologist, one of the pioneers of virtual reality, who has come to question where our current technology is taking us. He asks the following basic, related, philosophical questions:

1. Are humans special?
2. What is the proper relationship between the individual and the group?

Jaron Lanier argues that humans are special, and that our current technology is problematic because it emphasizes the group to the exclusion of the individual.

This is the opposite of Stephen Wolfram: "...there is nothing fundamentally special about us [humans]." (A New Kind of Science, p. 844) It is the opposite of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (movie due out Sept. 1, 2010). I think Jaron Lanier's position is the opposite of most technologists. For a few examples, see any of my earlier blog posts with the label "reality" (and follow the links). I briefly mentioned Jaron Lanier in my first post on the reality question.

Jaron Lanier argues that our current path of technological design (e.g., Web 2.0) is leading us into a "new religion" (p. 32) that he calls cybernetic totalism where humans are slaves of technology instead of the other way around. He believes "that cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business." (p. 119) And especially bad for human creativity.

In contrast to cybernetic totalism, Mr. Lanier posits humanism and "an idea of progress that is centered on enriching the depth of communication instead of the acquisition of powers." (p. 179)

This book is not just about computers. Here are a few of the other interesting topics woven into this book:

• music
• advertising
• economics and money
• evolutionary biology
• language
• how the sense of smell is different from vision and hearing
• cephalopods

In the case of cephalopods (octopuses, squids and cuttlefishes), he is fascinated with how they communicate by morphing, something that humans can't do.

For more information about You Are Not a Gadget, see:

Jaron Lanier's web site about the book
Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World, a talk by Jaron Lanier at Zócalo Public Square at about the time the book was published in January 2010 (the talk is 54 minutes, followed by 18 minutes of questions and answers)

You Are Not a Gadget was published in 2010. Reviews:

Wall Street Journal 1/12/10 (Instapundit)
New York Times 1/14/10
Washington Post 1/14/10

UPDATE 6/04/10: In the Acknowledgements, Jaron Lanier writes "Superspecial thanks to early readers of the manuscript," one of whom was Neal Stephenson. I write about Neal Stephenson in this post: Snow Crash.

There is only mathematics

There is only mathematics; that is all that exists.

That is a quote from cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Discover magazine published an interview with Dr. Tegmark in their July issue. Within the first three questions the interview mentioned both the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Surely, You're Joking Mr. Feynman! Dr. Tegmark is an interesting guy!

What is reality? For Dr. Tegmark, it is mathematics, which is not unlike saying it is a computer simulation (follow the link for the ideas of Nick Bostrom).

UPDATE: The idea that there is only mathematics is not new. It goes back to Pythagoras, he of the Pythagorean Theorem. No writings of Pythagoras survive, but Aristotle wrote: "The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things." (source)

The Lie Group E8

Advances in mathematics sometimes lead to advances in science and technology. (Because significant parts of our world can be described mathematically--see previous post "What is reality?")

There was an interesting advance in mathematics in 2007. I admit that I don't understand the math here. It's way over my head. I understand just enough to see that this might be significant.

There is a branch of mathematics called Lie Groups which deals with symmetry. Symmetry is an important concept in physics. "It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry." (source)

One of the most complex Lie Groups is called E8. In 2007 a team of mathematicians succeeded in mapping E8. See this web site, which provides a good explanation of the achievement. (Brian, note that this project was at the cutting edge of both mathematics and computer science.)

It did not take long before a physicist connected the mapping of E8 to basic theories of the universe. See this interesting article. (Paper here.)

UPDATE 12/05/09: The physicist mentioned in the previous paragraph is Garrett Lisi. To see Garrett Lisi talk about his "exceptionally simple theory of everything" based on E8, see his talk on TED. Highly recommended.

What is reality?

I am intrigued by the question: What is reality? This is an old question, of course, going back at least to the Allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic.

One interesting aspect of this question is that while reality is not created by humans, much of reality can be accurately described by mathematics—which is created by humans. An example is quantum mechanics, without which we wouldn't have such things as blogs (because we wouldn't have computers or fiber optic communications lines or much else of modern technology).

There isn't any a priori reason to expect mathematics to describe any portion of reality. And yet it does. It is a beautiful and wonderful feature of our world. Einstein said: "Equations are more important to me [than politics], because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."

There are some who take this idea further, and postulate that our entire world is a computer simulation. Click here for links to one recent discussion of this idea. Jaron Lanier comments here.

Whenever I think about reality, I remember a science fiction book, now out of print, that I read as a teenager: Simulacron-3, by Daniel Galouye. This book was published in 1964, before the age of digital computers, and so the computers in this book are analog instead of digital, but the concept is the same.

If part or all of reality is mathematical or computational, does that take the fun out of it? Does it make our world deterministic and predictable? Not at all! Only in recent decades have we begun to understand this. The mathematics of nonlinear dynamical systems, popularly called chaos theory, shows that unpredictable random behavior can result from extremely simple mathematical systems. An excellent book on this topic is "Chaos," by James Gleick.

This post provides a brief introduction and some background. In the next post, I will comment on something new that recently caught my eye.