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! :-)