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!