Gingerbread baking as aquantum phenomenon

Baking gingerbread is a christmas tradition in where I come from. Now a very peculiar thing happened to me while my wife was doing that, and it made me wonder the true spirit of the event. See, my wife put the gingerbread into the oven and asked me to wath that it does not burn. I wanted to clarify some things about it, so I asked her that is she sure that wathing will prevent it from burning. So I did what was told. I wathed, and she was right, the gingerbread did not burn. During the next round I found an interesting newspaper article, and forgot to look. The gingerbread ended up black.

I am amazed! This means two things. First of all, baking gingerbread in our kitchen oven must be a true quantum phenomenon. This alone is extremely surprising. But not only that, also it means the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, presented by Bohr and fellows (and which is nowadays considered as old-fashioned and misleading) has been proven right using a real-life experiment!

Of lazyness and comfort

Man's gratest inventions are result of his lazy nature and predisposition to seek comfort.

For instance being able to warm up your nice little cave and cook the food using fire, at the same time providing light for doing some decoration on the walls, is just comfortable, isn't it?

• A lazy man tired of dragging heavy items, invented the wheel
• A lazy man tired ot pulling wagons, invented domestic horse
• A lazy man carrying water buckets invented the water pipe system
• A lazy man that didn't enjoy the smell, inventedsewer system
• A lazy man that had terrible hand writing, invented typewriter

Next time you are being called lazy and inefficient, you can quote me by saying: Lazyness is a fundamental, built-in quality of man, and has caused man to create all the inventions so far. Had man been truly diligent, we would all still live in that cave and eat raw flesh, because it is possible to survive with that.

And yes, lazy we still arel, as there are still lots of new inventions to be made. Be lazy, and be proud of it!

Exoplanet

So they found an extrasolar planet where conditions are very much like ours in here. Now I'm not even sure how should I deal with that piece of news. Should I be excited? Why?

First of all, I don't think traveling to the planet is going to be possible. Although it is fairly close (352 light years away), it is still quite far. Let's do some calculation. One light year equals 10^16 kilometers. According to some references, he fastest spaceship human has built so far, has travelled 15 kilometers per second (which is terribly fast if I may say). Let's use that speed. We will divide 352*10^16 with the speed and get the travel time in seconds. The result is a bug number, which we again divide with 60*60*24*365 to get the travel time in years, instead of seconds.

The travel time will be 7441 million years. That's way longer than the age of human species. Not feasible. We will have to settle and study the planet remotely.

Why? Is the planet more interesting because it is like our planet? I know. The discovery encourages speculations of extraterrestrial life. But on what grounds? Is it more likely to find life on similar planets than earth than different planets? Is it likely to find life on exoplanets at all?

Every mathematician knows that making a statistical analysis becomes unreliable when N is small, and completely pointless when N = 1.

Colors of the world

We see our world in colors. That's very natural. It is so integral part of our world that we could not imagine a world without colors. When I was a kid my father took a lot of black and white photographs with his camera. I asked him that why do they look like that, with no colors and all. He explained that the color photographs require more complicated technology than black and white. The answer did not satisfy me - I claimed that wouldn't it be more simple to picture the world as it is rather than to filter some very carefully selected colors (like red, green, yellow and so on) of the picture out and leave some (like black and white) untouched. To me it seemed that it would require more advanced technology. i don't remember if my father could answer anything to that. Maybe I was a difficult kid with all my questions.

The true color of an item is actually a function of amplitude that it reflects for different frequencies of white light. White light of course is something that has an equal amount of all frequencies of light. The amount of different variations and combinations of colors is endless!


How does then human eye perceive color? The retina inside human eye has dedicated cells to react in three different wavelengths. Only three. This means that of all the different wavelengths most are totally ignored, or they are observed as combinations of colors. For instance if there is an object that reflects light at 500 nm wavelength, we most likely observe the object being cyan. However, we also observe the combination of blue and green lights as cyan color. With our eyes, we just can't see the difference.

The above leaves one question open: why? Why do we recognize some frequencies of light so well and some roughly? There must be a reason, and the reason must be in human evolutic history.

For evolution in general, it must have been quite important to distinguish green leaves from blue sky and water, to be able to navigate and move quickly, and to be able to find water. Originally it must have been a great asset in both hunting and escaping hunters. I imagine this skill must have developed quite early, after life moved from sea to land.

What about red then? What could have been the driving force to make us observe red light? When did that happen? Which animals are capable of observing red anyway? (For instance bulls do not, which means the matador's equipment could be practically any color, causing an equal effect.) Maybe red color has come to enhance the seeing capabilities, because most of the colors you find in nature (plants, rocks, sand, dirt) are in this specific area, so to be able to observe your surroundings it was very useful to recognise the frequency of the color more specifically, Now it was able to recognise for instance brown rock from green grass, and see where to go next.

The fact that human can observe three colors also lead to technical decisions: all video and image formats, television and camera hardware, transmission protocols etc. they are all based on the assumption that vision is composite of three colors. And this is the case when we talk about humans. Imagine that an alien race would come to earth that has a similar vision but perceives more colors, or colors of different wavelengts than us. They could not watch TV or movies, use our computer monitors, see color prints, or even those old-fashioned photographs properly!

Ladders of philosophy

A person can quite easily evolve his thinking capabilities in everyday life. Let's take an example. Taking out the garbage is ordinary physical work, while thinking about taking out the garbage is a small-scale philosophical experiment. Here a person has climbed one step on the philosophical ladder.

Next step in this ladder is to evaluate the thinking process, and during this evaluation, observe what is a person's motivation to use brain capacity to think about taking out the garbage. Obviously, the highest philosophical ladder is reached when one comes to the conclusion that thinking about thinking about taking out the garbage is a waste of brain capacity and falls into a state where there are no thoughts at all.

Not all persons understand the importance of climbing philosophical ladders. Such persons insist on sticking on the first stage on the example given above. Such persons, let's say for example a wife, will use first seemingly strong arguments, then brute force to convince that it is actually a good idea to take out the garbage, but in reality that kind of persons are just trying to limit one from improving his mental capability.

Three (?) phases of matter

(pic from www.stonecropgallery.com/artists/caleb.php)

At school I was taught that the matter has three phases: solid, liquid and gas. That was given as a truth, and it remained as such for a very long time. All the phases could be easily understood. The little physicist in me was satisfied. Everything was explained logically and for instance water, the most familiar and friendly of all elements, could be seen in all its states, and even transitions from one state to another can be observed visually. Everything made sense. How much I miss those days.

The first crack in my illusion of physical perfectness was caused by bubble gum. It was suddenly brought to my attention that there are materials that are neither solid nor liquid, but in between. They do not have a melting point, but the degree of "liquidness" does depend on the temperature. "Amorphous solids", someone explained to me. I was not satisfied with the explanation, I felt like I had been betrayed. But it did not end here, it was only getting worse.

Plasma was introduced. If you heat matter enough, electrons will have so much energy that they escape the orbit of the atoms, and the matter will become a mess of ionic nucleons and electrons. The mess is called plasma. But if you heat it even more, the nucleons will no longer stay together but the quarks will instead lose their connection. The quark plasma can not be created in your fireplace, not even in nuclear plants or bombs, but that was the temperature a couple of nanoseconds after the Big Bang.

From hot to cold. Satyendra Nath Bose presented a theory that in very cold conditions matter would start behaving very differently from normal. Bose-Einstein concentrate is again a new phase of matter.

A quick look to reference material reveals the horrible truth: if you count everything, there are nearly 20 different states of matter. It is completely up to you what to include in the list. It really depends on the matter we are speaking about, and who is listing. Chaotic.

I am now relying on quantum physicists to convince me that in fact there are no phases of matter at all, there is only energy. The so called "phases" are just an illusion that is caused by complex emergent properties of how different kinds of quantum fields interact with each other. And really what determines different melting points for different materials is - at the end - the properties of the world: Planck time and distance, cosmological constant, number of dimensions. Those determine all phases of matter, and all melting and vaporisation points. Mathematic simplicity.

That is what I would like to hear, it would bring back peace.

Modeling the universe

Let's play a little mind game. Imagine that you knew everything about physics and you had unlimited computer processing power. Using a computer program you could realistically model how particles interact with each other. What could you accomplish?

First of all, you could simulate all chemistry. Just given the formula, and you could calculate its melting and vaporizing temperatures and other characteristics. After all, chemistry is all particle physics. I guess that can be done even today, to some extent.

Next, you will model a couple million billion particles that are shaped like a vacuum cleaner. This experiment sucks, you think. Let's try something more interesting. You will model a life form - bacteria, and watch the life form fill the memory of your laptop. How nice.

How about modeling a human brain? Let's do it. After all we do have unlimited resources. The brain is modeled, but is very little fun, because you did not model a mouth for it to speak its thoughts. So you don't even know if your brain is  conscious. After a short while you get bored of your brain-experiment and stop the simulation, but after doing that, you stop and wonder that did you just kill someone.

You buy some more memory for your computer, as you intend to simulate the entire universe. Now this adding quite a lot of particle x, y and z coordinates and quantum states. As you would like to avoid this, you decide to model the singularity where it all started instead. It will be much easier that way. Your own personal universe starts developing.

Now assuming that the physics of the modeled world correspond to physics of our world, what's the difference between the modeled universe and our universe? Nothing, really.

But there are some requirements to the computer. The computer must be very large. Most likely it should weight more than the system it is modeling. So if it models the state of every particle in the universe, the computer would weight way more than our current universe. Also, the time that it takes for modeling will be at least same than time that is being modeled, which is the age of the universe. The performance of the computer... well, we run out both the prefixes of flops and the Planck constant.

And there is one more limitation. This modeled process should follow the principles of quantum mechanics, to be able to simulate our world. And due to those principles, it is impossible to measure anything without affecting it. If you wanted to really create a model of  universe, you should isolate it completely from outside world, to protect our modeled word quantum state from decoherence. You should start the simulation and never have any interaction to it. And that means you will never know if it works or not. Or if you take a peek, you, the modeled universe's Creator, will alter it.

Mirror

This is a puzzle that I created for my own amusement when I was about 10 years old:

A mirror is 2-dimensional, and it reflects a projection of 3-dimensional objects. Those two dimensions are: up-down and right-left. Now have a look at a mirror and raise your right hand. Your reflection seems to raise his left arm. If your T-shirt has some text, it also seems to have inverted from left-to-right to right-to-left, making it difficult to read. Conclusion: mirror seems to invert its left-right axis, but NOT its up-down axis. This is odd. How can it be? As scientists, we should make a hypothesis on what could cause this phenomenon ant test it!

Maybe mirrors have some kind of grid creating a polarization-like quality that explains this effect. Let's try to rotate the mirror 90 degrees. if this quality is in the mirror, then it should stop inverting left-right axis and start inverting up-down axis. A good scientist will always test his theory. After rotating the mirror, no change. No luck here, so this is obviously not the cause.

Another theory: maybe this is because of the alignment of human eyes: after all they are aligned horizontally and not vertically. Horizontally alighed eyes cause left-right to be inverted. If eyes would be aligned differently, the result would be different. Can this be tested? I close my other eye, no change. I even tilt my head so that my eyes are in different alignments, and still all text reads backwards, never upside-down.

After some thinking, naturally, I did come to a conclusion. What about you?

How speaking works

Exactly how does speaking work? What happens in human brain? Surely it requires a lot of processing power? To be able to speak meaningful sentences out fluently, one must be able to plan what to say next, organise the words of the current sentence into correct order and pronounce the current word correctly. And speaking can not take your whole attention, you must be able to for instance walk at the same time.


According to studies, following parts are most active when we speak:

• auditory cortex 
• lateral sulcus (producing spoken language)
• temporal lobe (meaning of heard words)
• Wernicke's area (language comprehension)
• Broca's area (speech generation)
• motor region

What does this mean? How do these areas work together to form speach? I assume it all goes like this: in the brain there are multiple processes. Lateral sulcus is working - together with memory - as a preparatory process: it works in advance and prepares the abstract ideas that we are about to speak out. These ideas are not yet at this stage connected to words. The next process, The next process works in temporal lobe, and it connects abstract ideas with words. This must be done together with language comprehension process, which is done to form correctly formed sentences. The next phase is forming speech mechanically, which is done in motoric area, controlled by Broca's area, where speeck is actually produced.

These processes all work in parallel, without planning the whole sentence beforehand. When you are speaking a certain word of a sentence, you will probably know what you are going to say in that sentence in abstract level, but you don't necessarily yet what the words will be, and in what order they will come, until they do.

Let us look at some everyday examples, for how they fit to the model we have created:

Synonyms.

Sometimes it happens that when one speaks, there are two equal synonyms to choose from, but unable to choose quickly enough, the spoken word will come out as a funny combination of the two synonyms. The speaking processes feedback mechanism will quickly detect this error and the speaker will correct the mistake. But what happened? An easyexplanation is that the word-choosing process was not quite finished when it had to output the net word to the speech generation process. This caused the word to change in the middle of being pronounced.

Lost for words.

The same applies when a suitable word can not be found even if one has the idea ready. The database query just does not seem to produce any results, or the results are in wrong language. In this situation the speaker will either use some fill words to buy some time for extended database search - or return the control to the preparatory process and re-form the sentence so that the specific word would not be needed.

Blackout.

This has happened to me, and I don't think I'm the only one. When completing a sentence,  there is no next sentence available in queue, or the next sentence does not seem to have anything to do with the one you just finished. I can imagine this as a synchronisation problem in Lateral sulcus: it is working too fast. the human communication transmission method has a very limited bandwidth, and the speed of thought must keep in sync in order for the opponent to understand the speech. I assume the blackout is a result of the monitor, which is observing our own speech and providing feedback to the processes of what our own speech sounds like, real-time. If the lateral sulcus notes that the speech in the feedback channel does not have anything to do with the idea or sentence currently being prepared, the process will halt.


A great article: Connections between thought and language

Famous two space ships problem

Following is an often-used example to illustrate similarities in gravity and acceleration.

There are two space ships. One of them is standing still on earth, and the other is in space, thrusting with constant force and therefore accelerating exactly at 9.807 m/s², which happens to be exactly the same as the gravity constant on earth. A person is standing in both of the rockets, but they were brought to the ship in a way that they do now know which ship it is. Assuming the passenger cabins are completely isolated from the environment (no windows, sound protected), would there be any means for the passenger to find out somehow which ship it is?

Let's try some classic Newton physics. Jumping around or throwihg around objects will feel exactly the same on both ships. No help there.

If classical physics does not help, what about relational physics then? Let's try to measure speed of light for instance. Maybe the moving ship will capture rays of light differently than the ship that stays still? Unfortunately not. Speed of light is constant and does not depend on the speed of the observer. Besides earth is also moving, very fast. Our galaxy is not staying still.

Butwhat happens when the accelerating ship starts to reach the speed of light? The Lorenz formula below can be used to calculate moving objects' relational mass.

Assume that after a while of thrusting, the velocity is 95% of light speed. The ship mass has become over 3 times its original mass. Maybe all the passenger needs to do is to weight some known object (like himself) regularly and if the weight increases, he will know that the ship is moving very fast. But no, even in the moving ship, the weight will measure the same. The inertial mass has no meaning for the moving object itself - it is a relational mass. It only has meaning for objects that observe its speed. But if the ship would crash into another ship with its full speed, it would feel its increased mass...

Only the fuel reserve set the limits how long the ship could accelerate. There is no other limit. And no matter how close to the speed of light the ship reaches, still, there is no way for the passenger to notice any difference.

Now, if you made it this far, here's something different to think. In the first ship, which force creates the push towards the floor? Yes, gravity. Generated by the planet. There is a field, or little particles if you will, that penetrate even the ship's thick walls that causes all atoms to draw themselves towards eachother. This appears as gravity.

What about the other case? What causes the push towards the floor in the other ship? There are no gravitational sources (at least none significant so we can ignore that) We know that the ship is accelerating, but how do the objects inside the ship know that? What is the coordinate system tied into? it could as well be tied into the ship, in which case the objects in the ship would be floating in zero gravity. But it is not. It seems like the coordinate system system was tied into a point outside of the ship - in the universe itself. So what is the zero point of the coordinate system? What creates this coordinate system, and what creates the force?

Answer to this is the Higgs field. The coordinate system is tied to the average center point of the universe, and the Higgs field itself causes all objects to resist sudden movements. This is what we experience as "mass".

Best wishes for LHC folks at CERN. Hope you catch the Higgs Boson soon! :-)

Newton, Photon and the black hole

As you all know, photons travel at the speed of light. That is naturally because photons are light. Light at both meanings of the word: they represent the light you see, but also they weight nothing. Their mass is zero. And that is actually the reason that particles of light can travel the speed of light !

All right. So now we have discussed about the mass of photons - or rather the fact that there is none. Now to another subject. Everybody knows what gravitation means. We can all feel it (except those few of us who happen to orbit the earth at the moment) It is a force between two objects that have a mass. Directly copied from the wiki page referred above, magnitude of this force depends on the mass of the two objects, and it can be calculated using the following formula:


where:

• F is the magnitude of the gravitational force between the two point masses,
• G is the gravitational constant,
• m1 is the mass of the first point mass,
• m2 is the mass of the second point mass, and
• r is the distance between the two point masses.

To put it short, the greater the mass, the greater the force. For instance earth is drawn towards the sun with a pretty good force. This prevents the earth from floating away, which I think is a good thing. Now as you can clearly see, an object that has no mass, would be completely immune to gravitation. Like a photon. On contrast, neutrinos are almost massless, but not completely, so they are affected by gravity.

Conclusion. So photons always travel directly in empty space - at the speed of light - because they are not drawn by any gravitational forces. This is why they can easily escape great objects such as planets, stars, black hol...

Now hold on a second. Black holes are black because photons because photons can not escape. it creates such great gravitational field that even photons stay. But what about the formula above? Didn't I just prove photons immune to gravitation? Don't they teach physics to photons?

The logic here seems solid, every part seems confirmed and there is a reference. So where did I go wrong?

Life's work misunderstood

Sometimes it happens that a scientist's work is understood wrong, or otherwise gets twisted and turned upside down. Here some examples.

Edison's chair

Edison studied electricity, we all know that. At his time there was an active debate between direct and alternate current. Now Edison was in favor of direct current, because of its safety. He saw alternate current very dangerous to all living creatures, and therefore tried to lob political decision-makers for choosing direct current when building the power grid. In order to make a point, he invented the electric chair, wishing it would turn everybody's mind. It did not. Instead, the elecrtic chair was an immediate sales hit, and one was ordered to almost every prison in the US, and alternate current was still selected, for performance reasons.

Big Bang
During early discussionsof cosmology, the term "Big Bang" was invented by Fred Hoyle, who's purpose was to show how ridiculous the idea was. Instead the term became popular. Today the theory is widely accepted, and has a cool name.

Shrödinger's cat

Erwin Schrödinger, yes, he belongs in this list! He developed the basis of quantum physics as they are used today. He proposed that the state of a particle is not constant, but actually a probability function, which changes when the state is measured. Now when he wanted to discuss some paradoxes with his colleagues (for instance Einstein) he used an example, nowadays called the "Schrödinger's Cat". The paradox was of course then explained and the problem solved nicely, but the cat thingy was a little bit too catchy for an example. What do we remember from Shrödinger today? His equasion? His commitment to forming the basis of quantum physics? No, the damn cat...

Einstein failed tobe wrong
After a succesful publication of his relativity theory, Einstein studied cosmology. Now he did not believe in the "Big Bang" theory or the growing universe. Instead, using his relativity theory, he started to calculate how the universe, as we see it using our telescopes, can exist and stay static. Now Einstein found soon out that it could not. Had the galaxies just been statically in their places, they would start collapsing and soon crash into a black hole. Now einstein, having gone through his calculations over and over again, got tired and added an extra parameter into his equation, which made it stable. He called the cosmological constant. The constant was some kind of pressure, coming from inside the universe itself, that would hold the universe still and keep it from collapsing. After some time, when it had become quite clear that the cosmos does not stay still, but is in fact expanding, he realised the mistake called this shortcut his life's biggest mistake.

But this is not the end of the story. Long after Einstein had died, other people realised that when you look really carefully, the universe is not only expanding, but actually expanding at an increasing speed. Now what is causing the exponential expansion? A kind of pressure that comes from inside the universe itself. Amount of the pressure is called the cosmological constant. Einstein was right after all, although he never came to know it himself.

Terms and definitions

Every technical documentation has a chapter for terms, acronyms and definitions. This blog is no exception. Yes I know this is not a technical document, not a whitepaper nor a blueprint, but I am an engineer. That means I want to make things clear and organized. So here we go:

Philosophy:

You might have heard phrases like "art of thinking" or something like that. Forget about all that nonsense, as it does not really mean anything. In fact classic philosophy is nothing but a super-science that actually contains schools for mathematics, physics, logic, chemistry, politics, metaphysics, social studies, and the list goes on and on. As you can see all natural sciences are automatically covered here, so for instance quantum physics and cosmology are part of philosophy, by this definition.

Merchants and salesmen: not philosophists. it is true that it is no other than Arabic merchants that took the modern number zero in use, from pure business need. But zero was actually invented before that, and what merchants innovated was actually a symbol for it, which made it easy to write and communicate. Practical people those merchants indeed, but we are going to leave them out from the philosophists category.

Clergy: not counted in as philosophists. Some priests might of course practice philosophy, like monk Roger Bacon, when he wanted to find out what light and rainbow were actually made of. His colleagues did not approve his hobby, and improsoned him for practicing black magic. For this reason priests not considered as philosophists, and teology not considered as philosophy. However, the study of religions (through psychology, history, anthropology, sociology etc.) is philosophy.

Medicine: Doctors have isolated themselves in their own discussion forums for a long, long time ago. Even if medicine has tight links to chemistry, doctors have subcontracted that competence from scientists. Even today, you are going to a very different school to study chemistry whether you want to put the chemical into a human body, or somewhere else. Therefore doctors are not considered as philosophists and practicing medicine not philosophy.

Engineer:

An engineer is a person who has evolved from a locomotive operator. He has a passion for all moving mechanical gadgets that have flashing lights and preferably make some kind of noise. Like trains do. As a young person he used to break up every toy he had just to find out what kind of parts it is made of, how it works and to find out whether he could put it backtogether. When an engineer grows up, he will enjoy nothing more than creating new gadgets of the above described kind.

This person owes everything to the philosophists, because without them, he would not have the foundation for making new gadgets. This is often forgotten from the engineers, who think philosophists are not creating things, they are just discussing things and writing a book or two on occasion.

Philosophists owe much to the engineers. Engineers have given philosophists tools to push further and further to the limits of understanding the world. This is often forgotten by the scientists and philosophists, who think engineers work short-sighted and focus on profit rather than common good. A computer is a good example. It was innovated by a philosophist, and productized by an engineer. Few philosophist would refuse to work without one nowadays.