Entangled States

Time Traveling?

One of the great paradoxes in physics is the “arrow of time”. The vast majority of mathematical expressions that describe the world we live in work equally well if time is going either forward or backward. Newton’s Laws give their solutions either way as do the simple and elegant field equations of electromagnetism and gravitation. (Entropy is the signal counter example.)

The odd thing about this is that even though classical physics says we should be able to go back and forth in time, we can’t. Or at least it doesn’t appear that we can and we certainly don’t observe many time travelers coming back from the future to observe historically interesting events (like the present election). The lack of time travelers is probably the most compelling proof (when seen in light of the Copernican Principle) that time travel is, for our intents and purposes, impossible.

The situation in quantum physics is similar but has an interesting twist. Early on in the exploration of the wave nature of matter it became clear that there was nothing to forbid matter from having a mirror image that we generally call “anti-matter”. Most subatomic particles have anti-particles. The proton has the anti-proton. The electron has the positron. The neutrinos have the anti-neutrinos. Some particles, like the photon, are their own anti-particle.

Mathematically we can describe an anti-matter particle as the time-reflection of the normal matter particle. A positron is the mathematical equivalent of an electron traveling backwards in time. This is rather interesting in of itself though we’re not sure if it means anything beyond simply being a neat math trick. Though it could help, if there is a preferred directionality to time (the arrow of time), to explain why we see so much matter and so little anti-matter. (There should be an exact balance between the two according to the simplest explanations of the Big Bang, but since we think things are more complicated than that people haven’t read too much into the imbalance and certainly no one has seriously suggested (as far as I know) that the imbalance is a result of the arrow of time.)

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I’m reading NT Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope”. Early on in the book, Wright discusses our common tendency to put our hope for a better life into heaven rather than on insisting making into an earthly reality. He points out that the words in the Lord’s Prayer “Thy Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven” are a powerful reminder that what Christians really believe is that in the future the heavenly “now” will become the earthly reality, with Heaven subsuming Earth into a transformed existence. It’s not that Earth passes away. It is that our Hope is founded on the belief that Earth is joined to the Heavenly reality, God’s reality, and that by so doing the Earth is remade.

Wright says “Easter was when Hope in person surprised whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.”

The idea is that the Jesus of our future has come back to be revealed to us in the Easter moment. In other words Jesus is a time traveler - in at least a poetic sense - though possibly in a theologically and maybe physically literally sense as well.

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When matter and anti-matter collide the resulting explosion has the effect of converting the sum total of their rest mass into energy (E=mc^2) I tend to imagine this conversion into pure energy as an act of destruction because nothing of the previous state remains. Yet what it really represents is a liberation of the potential energy (energy being by definition the ability to change the state of system) that has been trapped in the mass of the particles.

So, thinking mostly allegorically and speculatively:

If Jesus coming back into our time were to do that, then his “collision” with our reality would be similar. Energy and light would be released. Most importantly there would be change simply due to the interaction between objects moving in different directions in time. The Easter event then could be seen as the hinge moment in our history when we received the necessary energy to begin to remake the Universe.

Not sure how far you can push this, but it’s certainly, to me, a neat thing to think about on a Friday afternoon that is the Eve of All Saints.

Dias de los Muertos

We just set up the altar for our Day of the Dead remembrence on All Souls. It came out pretty well.

Now people from the congregations will add pictures and momentos of the loved ones they've lost.

Pictures taken via entanglement

This experimental verification of a method for taking a "picture" of something without needing reflection of particles to "see it" was announced this month:

"Quantum imaging involves sending one of a pair of entangled photons  towards an object while holding on to the other.

For a long while nobody was quite sure what benefit you might get from this entanglement. Some physicists speculated that it could be possible to produce reflection-free images by measuring the entangled twin that you hang on to, even if the other photon never returns.

What Lloyd calculated was that illuminating an object with entangled photons can increase the signal to noise ratio of the reflected signal by a factor of 2^e, where e is the number of bits of entanglement. That’s an exponential improvement.

Now he and a few pals have gone and done the experiment and shown that Lloyd was right on the money.  They sent photons towards an object and used the reflection to determine whether the object was present or absent.

When they used entangled photons, this process was much more efficient.

The result is effectively the first quantum image taken with entangled photons."

Read the full article here.

Neat!

The Universe Is Not Expanding Uniformly

Well; this is "interesting"...

"A few weeks ago, researchers announced the discovery of a 'dark flow' of invisible matter tugging at distant galaxy clusters at the edge of the universe. Now comes more evidence of unseen and unknown forces in the cosmos, but this time its closer to home. A group of researchers have discovered that our particular part of the Universe — out to a distance of 400 million light years — is not expanding uniformly in all directions as expected. To be exact, the expansion is faster in one half of the sky than in the other. 'It's as if, in addition to the expansion, our 'neighbourhood' in the Universe has an extra kick in a certain direction,' says Mike Hudson from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. 'We expected the expansion to become more uniform on increasingly larger scales, but that's not what we found.' If confirmed, their findings will result in a new understanding of the origin of structure in the universe and possible revisions to the standard cosmological model."

Read the full article here.

One of the basic principles in Cosmology is that there is no preferred direction, or in other words, at cosmological scales the Universe looks the same (in terms of gross observations) in every direction when viewed from every point in the sky.

This would seem to call that into question.

I suppose you could argue that we need to increase the size of what we've thought of as the cosmological length scale; perhaps the inflationary Universe's much larger size than what we can actually see if now necessary.

Or it could be that the cosmological principle of homogeneity is broken. Which would be really interesting...

(All of course assuming this is verified.)

Sometime you shouldn't, even though you can...

There's a very provocative piece in the NYTimes this morning by Richard Dooling on what may, in fact, be the underlying cause of the present financial crisis.

He quotes Warren Buffet as saying "Beware of geeks bearing formulas" to begin and then goes on to say that it's entirely possible that Wall Street, by hiring the best and brightest minds to find new ways to monetize and re-monitize the same asset again and again may have built a house of cards that is now collapsing around us.

Dooling, quoting Freeman Dyson, writes

"‘I have felt it myself,’ [Dyson] warned. ‘The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.’

The Wall Street geeks, the quantitative analysts (‘quants’) and masters of ‘algo trading’ probably felt the same irresistible lure of ‘illimitable power’ when they discovered ‘evolutionary algorithms’ that allowed them to create vast empires of wealth by deriving the dependence structures of portfolio credit derivatives.

...Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, ‘Open the bank vault doors, Hal.’"

Read the full article here.

When I was in college and thinking about a career in Astronomy, my advisor took me aside and explained that, back then, there were only about 2000 or so full time astronomers in the United States. He politely pointed out that I was unlikely to be one of them in the future. He went on to suggest that I consider honing my computer skills and then doing what a number of folks who had trained in astronomy had done; getting a job on Wall Street. Apparently the modeling algorithms used to predict the Stock Market are very similar to the Monte-Carlo algorithms used to model stellar atmospheres. It was a relatively easy thing to use ones expertise in our field and then translate to the other.

Lots of folks made the shift.

I'm wondering how many of them took the basic business ethics classes that are required of a regular old MBA-type? Would requiring that have made a difference?

I'm still here...

It’s been pretty quiet on this blog. I apologize for that. I’m still here and still trying to find some time to write.

I suppose it’s good news that I haven’t found time to say anything. We’ve been so busy at the Cathedral this fall with a large increase in new members (especially in our spanish-language congregation) that we’re all scrambling to keep a lid on all the pots that are wonderfully boiling over. Between that and getting ready for diocesan convention, there’s not been a whole lot of time to do much thinking, and even less writing.

And besides all that, I’m probably doing the same thing a whole bunch of you are doing; watching the stock market meltdown and worrying about what the coming year is going to bring for those of us in the non-profit world.