IdeaFestival

Time before time

Cocktail Party Physics writes up a very nice summary of a panel of some of the world's top physicists discussing time at the recent World Science Festival in New York City, describing the differences between relativistic and quantum versions of time, why it appears to move in only one direction and what might have come before the big bang. Sean Carroll, who has a forthcoming book on the subject, was a panelist and had this to say on that:

Scientists have gotten used to the idea that when people ask us 'What happened before the big bang?' we give St. Augusta's answer: we say there was no such thing as before the big bang. But in very recent times, beyond Einstein, we're realizing that we have absolutely no justification for saying that that's true. We have to more beyond Einstein to understand what happened at the big bang. And the answer might be that the universe can into existence at the big bang: there's nothing before. Or it might not. There could be something before the big bang...cosmologists, people who are working on quantum gravity, are very interested in what we've learned since Einstein to answer these questions and go back and answer St. Augusta's question.

Incidentally, the World Science Festival was co-founded by former IdeaFestival presenter, theoretical physicist and a favorite author of mine, Brian Greene, who has a few words to say on the subject in The Fabric of the Cosmos. I highly recommend it.

Have a wonderful time if you're celebrating the Fourth of July this weekend!

Wayne

Cosmology, David Albert, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, George Ellis, Michael Heller, Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll

"Tales from the Encrypt"

Could our final wishes be stymied by the secrets that protect our increasingly digital lives?

Fatherhood has changed Cory Doctorow. But in pondering how fantastically successful he has been at keeping his data private, he wonders if the people closest to him might be equally as successful in unlocking it. Granted some of us have much more at stake in the orderly unwinding of our affairs, but his problem in devising a way to keep his private data secure, now and then, struck a thoroughly modern chord. As it turns out, we're really, really accomplished at locking data down. Still,

What I found surprising all through this process was the lack of any kind of standard process for managing key escrow as part of estate planning. Military-grade crypto has been in civilian hands for decades now, and yet every lawyer I spoke to about this was baffled (and the cypherpunks I spoke to were baffling – given to insanely complex schemes that suggested to me that their executors were going to be spending months unwinding their keys before they could get on with the business of their estates, and woe betide their survivors, who'd be left in the cold while all this was taking place).

Give the whole Guardian piece a read.

Wayne

"What's very dangerous is not to evolve"

In touting his new hit product, Kindle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may indeed be channeling his inner Steve Jobs. The device could do for text what the iPod has done for music. But there's a much bigger lesson to be learned, according to Fast Company, which offers a description of the future of books that pits the two biggest media titans against each other in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Except for consumers there are no winners - yet. It may even be early in the game. But "what's very dangerous," Bezos concludes, "is not to evolve."

Wayne

Coding deception

If chess is the measure of the mind, what's an artificially intelligent machine have to do to be considered a human equal? After all, in 1997 machine defeated former grandmaster Garry Kasparov using brute computation, and AI has since conquered draughts, Othello, backgammon and Scrabble according to the Financial Times article, "Machines that can outwit the smartest brains." Though the mind doesn't, obviously and thankfully, use strict logic, coding rules-based actions has become sufficiently advanced that the best human players of tactical board and card games have fallen prey to cleverly coded synthetic intelligence. Only the human play at the ancient game of Go remains unconquered.

AI is clearly making progress.

Ever since HAL was sonorously creeping out everyone in the theater, we've had this tendency to move the goalposts to avoid the idea that an artificial intelligence might someday match our wetware. "It is," the main organic character in the FT piece says, "whatever computers can't do yet."

If that's the case, then I wonder if coding deception might be the last synthetic frontier.

Wayne

Fault and fissure in the human heart

From the series Speaking of Faith, this episode is highly recommended. Using his perspective as deep sea explorer and revolutionizer of plate tectonics, geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon has also lived in an intentional community caring for people with mental disabilities for many years, and has developed a rich perspective on human fragility and suffering based, in part, on his scientific understanding of a still-evolving world. Fault lines in the Earth and human spirit, though weak in themselves, make a better future possible. They rarely waste a hurt.

Wayne

Speaking of Faith

Tickling my reptilian brain

From a piece on neuromarketing, this randy suggestion: “Conventional research only gets you so far because it’s rationalisation after the event, and most decision-making is done subconsciously. We set out to measure physical changes people cannot consciously control.”

Not so fast.

Let's get to know one another first, OK? Love me for my prefrontal cortex.

Wayne

Hat tip: Futurismic

neuroscience, neuromarketing

Enceladus' Briny Breath

Move over, Ganymede and Europa. Salt in Saturn's E ring and evidence in the form of spectacular geysers on the moon itself suggests that Enceladus could have an underground ocean. The video below also contains some of the best photographic images of the moon from Cassini's imaging team, CICLOPS. Have a look.

Wayne

Buy discounted all-access pass, meet Anthony Bourdain

Remember that the first 85 people to purchase a discounted all-access pass to IF'09 will be invited to meet Anthony Bourdain following his event.

Wayne

Anthony Bourdain

Bird brains, quantum biology, today's big idea

New evidence suggests that body-temperature quantum entanglement in birds can leave them in an altered chemical state that they can sense. Thus equipped, they manage the migratory route by "seeing" the Earth's magnetic field. Entangled states have also seem to be a by-product of photosynthesis.

This is news.

Should these ideas prove out, they have implications for how we think of life. I wonder, for example, how coauthor of the book Biocentrism, astronomer and IF'09 speaker Bob Berman might address the suggestion that "nature seems to have created the conditions in which entanglement thrives" in the second link above.

Wayne

biocentrism

Generative architecture and the cold dead body of Euclid

Have a look at some of these "generative scapes" on the blog of Portuguese architect Paulo Guerreiro, whose interest in these forms reminded me of a recent discussion between modern art curator Paola Antonelli and creator of fractal geometry, Benoit Mandebrot, about the intersection between mathematics and art. See this video exchange in SEED's Salon series.

The key idea: our perceptions of what makes for the modern object has changed, and for a very good reason. "Sticks to cylinders or cubes or parallelepipeds" are no longer the idealized, and ideal, structure, but architects and designers are playing, instead, with fractals and generative algorithms and examining the architecture and just-so subtleties of biology. I have real soft spot for mid-century modern, but as Antonelli and Benoit pointed out in their discussion, Euclid died at the hands of a particularly perceptive mathematics.

No doubt as-yet undiscovered tools will make for other modern objects, but that's part of the fun, isn't it? Until then, enjoy.

Wayne