People, Start Using Your Brains

I usually reserve this blog for my personal theories on scientific problems but today I wanted to address something that I find troubling in science and in society in general: government funding.

First I want to say that I am a Canadian civil servant and that these are my personal opinions and not that of the government.

Being a civil servant I understand that all levels of government have a finite amount of money to spread around to their various departments and agencies. They are also limited in what they can give to various institutions be they public or private. The government can only bring in so much money and it can only spend so much money. So there are times when the government can give more and there are times when the government has to cut back on what they can give out. It is simple math.

Today, in 2013, we live in a time where government revenues are shrinking. This means that the government cannot give as much as it did before. However, it seems that everyone who is hit by the cut in government spending takes it as a government attack on their institution, department or agency. You can read it in the news quite regularly, “Government Cuts Threaten Research…” or “Government Cuts Threaten Arts…” or “Government Cuts Threaten Education…” People hit by these budget crunches don’t see the big picture but instead choose to believe that the government is against what they do, so that is the reason behind the cuts. It is a sad fact of life, but the government cannot keep funding at the same levels when its revenue goes down!

The facts of life living in a recession don’t seem to penetrate into the thoughts of many but I thought at least someone with a bit more education, a more logical thinker like a scientist might be able to put these facts together and not complain. I apparently was wrong. Here is a blog where the scientist complains about an “astonishing” budget cut of 7.2%, calling it, “…one of the largest assaults on academia in Canadian history…” Apparently the writer seems to think that the government is making these cuts out of spite from knuckle draggers that are jealous of the smart scientists or perhaps a lack of knowledge about all the important work their university is doing. Not true. What hasn’t occurred to this scientist is that the government doesn’t have a magic bucket of unlimited money to throw around and they were just one of the many departments throughout Canada that has seen their budgets decrease. The budget in my department has decreased by 2% to 7% every year now for at least 3 years so I am shocked that it took this long for his/her department to see cuts only this recently.

I don’t have a PhD in math but even I could figure out that the government can only give out a finite amount of money. It would be nice if people got their head out of the sand and realized that government funding is not infinite and the government is not targeting you as punishment. These budget cuts are also not "attacks" on science or free speech or thought or whatever other crazy idea you might have, it is simply a decrease in funding. The last time I looked, you could still speak your mind, research what you wanted, write what you wanted and do what you wanted in public (legally of course) without the fear of retribution.

So please, people, start using your brains!

The Uncertainty Principle and Its Absurdity

In the 1920`s, a man named Werner Heisenberg came up with the Uncertainty Principle while working on Quantum Physics. It states that if you know the position of a very small object such as an electron, it is impossible to figure out its velocity or vice versa; if you know the speed it was moving at, you cannot know its position. Either you know one variable or the other but not both at the same time. That is where the uncertainty comes from and this is one of the core principles of Quantum Theory.  

Since Quantum Physics works on the level of the very small, the speed of an object or the position of an object that is incredibly small needs to be measured by special “observation”. This isn’t the usual observation of just looking at an object with your eyes and a small ruler as objects this small are too small to see with conventional equipment. This “observation” must be done with the use of another object in order to be accurate. This usually involves a laser being pointed at the object, as lasers are incredibly accurate. Unfortunately, when you get to extremely small objects like molecules, the impact of the laser actually moves the molecule quite significantly upon impact. It’s almost like pointing a firehouse at a beach ball. You know where the object was at the time of impact, but since the object has been moved by the laser, you cannot find out the direction at which the object was originally moving as it has been changed with the laser. Essentially, if you "observe" an object this way, you change its direction or move it, thus making one of the two factors uncertain. When this happens, scientists can only guess at the unknown factor second factor and therein lies the uncertainty.

Scientists can lower the percentage of uncertainty by giving probabilities to each possible outcome. For example, if a particle is moving in an easterly direction, it has a high percentage chance that it will continue on in that direction. This probability is not one hundred percent because there is a small probability that the particle might come into contact with another object and change direction or it might be affected by another force.   

This uncertainty and probabilities with objects on the quantum level led scientists to believe that objects unobserved were not always where they should be at any given time; they only had a probability of being there until observed. That is, you might think that a molecule might be in a certain place, but until you made the measurement or “observation”, you could not be one hundred percent sure that was true. Therefore, there are only possibilities when it comes to an object being where it should be. That means a molecule could be where you believe it to be, but there was also a possibility that it was somewhere else. If it could be somewhere else, then it didn’t matter where in the universe it could be as one place was as good as another according to probability. The only difference was that the probability of it being somewhere else dropped the farther away you went.

With this idea in mind, scientists took this odd quirk and went even further.

If molecules could be anywhere in the universe, why not larger objects like your hairbrush or your table? If you weren’t directly observing something (and at this level “observing” actually means seeing an object, not pointing a laser at it), was it still there when you turned your back on it? Were kids right to be surprised when you play peek-a-boo? Is object permanence actually something real or is it just how we view the universe? We assume an object will still be where we left it unless it’s the car keys or a matching sock which we all know can be anywhere in the universe except where you expect them to be.

With the Uncertainty Principle taken to its ultimate conclusion, does anything truly exist if it is not observed? Do the stars actually exist if no one looked at them? Does my car go from my driveway to vacation on Mars when I am not looking at it?

To any rational person, these would seem strange questions to ask, as we have all learned at a very young age about object permanence. However, because of the Uncertainty Principle, people now ask these crazy questions and believe that this uncertainty of being in the same place as the last time you saw it is now possible.

To me, the Uncertainty Principle is a theory that has gotten out of hand and is not correct.

Scientists have taken the fact that our current technology cannot measure a particle’s speed and direction at the same time and overblown the theory into one that questions the very existence of the universe.

Since we cannot measure two factors at once with today’s technology, it does not mean we will never be able to do this in the future. Technology changes and improves constantly so one day there will be a way to measure both at the same time. This means that there will be no uncertainty involved. The Uncertainty Principle will prove to be invalid and one of the main pillars of Quantum Physics will be shown to be incorrect.

Time

Time. Does it really exist and what does it really mean to us human beings?

Time is something that is talked about, debated and misunderstood by many. However, time is also a very important part of our life as it continues on no matter what we do.

  

From the very beginnings of human existence, humans have noticed that time continues forward at the same pace, no matter what occurs. Night follows day, day follows night, the seasons change, the moon changes its appearance and people age. No matter how much people wished and hoped, events continued to move forward at the same pace. The rich, the powerful and even the mighty have tried to slow down time to stop from aging or to enjoy a moment more intensely, but this has not been possible. The only thing people have been able to do is to quantify time so that they do not waste what time on Earth they have.

By watching the weather change, our earliest ancestors were able to figure out the best time to plant and harvest food as well as when migratory animals would be around for them to hunt. Eventually people noticed that these seasons usually happened at pretty regular intervals and managed to come up with calendars that marked when the seasons began. They eventually based calendars on the number of times they saw the moon and broke each period into months. This evolved over hundreds of years into the calendars we now know of today because people figured out that the Earth revolves around the Sun on a regular basis, what we now call a “year” and that this time can be broken down into smaller units; months, weeks and days. Days can be further broken down into smaller sub-sets of hours, minutes and seconds. Even seconds can be broken down further into smaller and smaller units. With this quantification of time, people looked for different ways to measure time and inventors of all kinds have worked on the idea over the centuries.

An enormous amount of inventions have come out of humanity’s obsession with trying to measure time; watches, clocks, sextants, hour glasses, sun dials, and many, many more. However, all of these inventions, even our modern day atomic clocks, do not actually measure time. This is probably the most important thing to know about time and is generally misunderstood by many so I will write it again as plainly as possible: nothing measures time.

Now I know what you are thinking. How is that possible? Our current atomic clocks are said to be incredibly accurate recorders of time. Scientists around the world swear that the atomic clocks currently in use can “keep time” for thousands of years without needing to be readjusted. This is in contrast to early watches that had to be corrected constantly as the mechanism inside was made of metal that tended to fatigue or was affected by outside elements or were not maintained on a regular basis. However, these atomic clocks do not measure time; they measure the microwave vibrations that come from an isotope (usually cesium) that has been found to give off vibrations at a consistent and measurable way. This signal comes off as a “pulse” that can then be measured by the atomic clock. The pulses that come off the isotope have already been measured to see how much time occurs between them, so all the clock needs to do is count the pulses and then, since it knows how many of these pulses are in a second (In the case of cesium, there are 9,192,631,770 vibrations per second![1]), it calculates the seconds, minutes and days as they go by. This is not measuring time; it is a machine counting vibrations!  

Even so, scientists seem to have come up with the idea that these atomic clocks can actually measure time much like you can measure the speed of a river by dropping a device like a waterwheel into it. Atomic Clocks do not do this; they do not interact with the flow of time they only count pulses. Changes in these pulses do not show a change in the flow of time any more than pulling a battery out of your watch stops time. However, scientists have run experiments with atomic clocks to “show” changes in the flow of time.

In one famous experiment in 1971 by J.C. Hafele and R.E. Keating of the U.S. Naval Observatory[2], two atomic clocks, both perfectly in sync with one another at the beginning of the experiment, are put in two different situations. One clock is put on an airplane and another is left on the ground. The one on the airplane is flown around the world for three days, refuelling in mid-air so as to keep a constant speed. After the one on the airplane is brought back to the ground, both clocks are compared to one another and the clock that flew on an airplane is nanoseconds (which is one billionth or 10^-9 of second!) behind the one that remained on the ground when the plane flew east and was nanoseconds fast when the clock was flown in a westerly direction. This is now sited as “proof” that time slows down the faster you go relative to another object[3].

However, is this actually proof of a change in time itself?

No, I am afraid not.

Since atomic clocks do not actually measure time, just the vibrations of an isotope, many other explanations can be made for the change in “time” from one clock to another. For example, the change in altitude could explain the slight discrepancy, a change in temperature, a change in air pressure, changes in gravity[4] the extra pull of gravity that the airplane pulled as it took off, changes in humidity, etc. Any of these explanations can account for the slight discrepancy from one clock to another, and can even give the “Ether Theory”[5] a second life. Unfortunately scientists have taken this experiment as proof that atomic clocks measure time and that time slows down the faster you move.

Now, there are moments when time seems to slow down. In a car accident, your first kiss, waiting for the weekend to start, etc., but time does not actually slowdown in these examples, just your perception of it does. Scientists tend to believe that your mind is actually paying more attention in moments like this and hence, you live those moments in more detail than you would say, just eating breakfast.

However, this change in perception is not “proof” of time running at different speeds and neither are discrepancies in atomic clocks. In fact, if time really did run at different speeds, we should be able to see the effects. Pictures of outer space would have sections that were “warped” and the stars would look “smudged” as light travelled through sections of space where time ran at a different speed. As you walked through a city, you would notice people and objects moving at different speeds, just like you see fireworks go off before you hear the sound. Everything around you would be disjointed and hard to understand if time really was as flexible as scientists make it out to be.

So, is time really the 'flowing river' that scientists would have you believe? Is time as an object that can be detected or captured? No.

So what is time?

Time is a human construct made to keep track of events and to explain why things happen in the order that they do.

Think of it like the point in space where the two blades of scissors meet and do the cutting. There is a definitive point in space where the two blades meet but nothing is actually there.

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[1] Science Illustrated, July/August 2012, p. 62 - 63

[2] detailed in the article “Around-the-World Atomic Clocks: Predicted Relativistic Time Gains”, July 14, 1972 issue of the journal Science, volume 177

[3] see Einstein’s Theory of Relativity

[4] by the way, gravity is not uniform across the Earth, it actually changes from place to place and grows less and less the further away you move from the ground

[5] a theory that states that there is actually something in the empty vacuum of space, but since scientists weren’t sure what this was so they called the substance “Luminiferous ether”

Two Dimensional (2D) Objects

Two Dimensional Objects; do they really exist?

My answer is no; two dimensional (2D) objects cannot exist in the real world, only in mathematical calculations and in theoretical scenarios.

In order to exist, an object must be made of three dimensions; length, width and height. If you can see it or detect it, it must be a three dimensional object.

Now you may be thinking, aren’t the very words written on paper or even in this blog an example of 2D objects? Again, the answer is no.

If you take a piece of paper with writing on it and look at it from the edge, you probably won’t see the height of the ink as it rises above the paper, but it is there. The ink has height and rises from the paper, if it didn’t you wouldn’t be reading this sentence right now. Take that paper and place it under an electron microscope and the ink on the page will look like a mountain range.

Electronically, the words on your screen have a depth to them. You can't really see the depth by moving the moniter, but the depth is there.

Even though there is no possible way a 2D universe can exist with the current laws of physics, this hasn’t stopped people from thinking about a theoretical 2D universe. For example, an author by the name of Edwin A. Abbott wrote a book in 1884 named Flatland. This book introduced characters that lived in a two dimensional universe. In this universe the rain came from one direction, north, since there was no “up” for it to rain down on and people were triangles, squares, circles and straight lines. Somehow light exists in Flatland from somewhere as the residents actually view other residents and things happening around them. Since there is no “up”, the author cannot say the light comes from a sun or another light source so he never answers that question. Since people in three dimensions actually see things (and colours for that matter) after light reflects off of the surface of an object, the author doesn’t say how objects without a surface facing them (that is, without height) can be seen. The author also doesn’t say how anyone can tell a triangle from a square.  If the “person” can only see its edge, how can a figure be discerned? In fact, if a triangle person doesn’t have an edge, that is it doesn’t have any height at all, how can it see? The only place for the eyes would be in the centre of the object facing “up”. However, since there is no “up” or third dimension, how can eyes be placed there? If they could, they still couldn’t look all the way to what is beside it as this requires height. Also, in order for an object to move freely like the people described in Flatland, they would need to be independent of the ground; that is, they must be unattached or untethered. In order to be unattached, there must be space between the two objects and in order to have space this requires a third dimension; height. Finally, if 2D objects did become “people”, like in Flatland, how do they interact? Sound needs three dimensions in order to work, light wouldn’t work as it too needs three dimensions to work and sexual intercourse and general interaction would be impossible as each “person” has no height and therefore would pass through each other because there is no thickness to stop them from doing so. Things may be incredibly flat in Flatland, but they are not two dimensional.

However, for some reason, even great scientists have not figured out these problems with two dimensional objects. Even Albert Einstein used 2D objects in some of his “thought experiments.” For example, in a lecture before the Prussian Academy of Sciences on January 27, 1921, Einstein talked about how you could take a “disc” and put it on a spherical surface and then push that disc across the spherical surface forever as you would not reach anything to obstruct you. He calls this, “two-dimensional continuum that is finite, but unbounded.” Einstein then takes the disc that is on the sphere and, using an outside light source and a flat object below the sphere like a giant piece of paper, manages to create a shadow of the disc on the object below. His theory was that by manipulating the disc on the surface of the sphere, one changes the size and shape of the shadow formed by the disk. Einstein then goes on to say that this can be translated into the, “three-dimensional case.”

Huh?

By using the three dimensional sphere, a light source shining down on the sphere from above and an object below the sphere, you are actually already in three dimensions! Just because the main focus of your concept was on the sphere’s surface, does not negate the three dimensional objects you were using.

Today scientists use the concept of 2D objects to help them understand a three dimensional universe better. Scientists and those without a scientific background seem to like the idea of two dimensional objects as it ‘simplifies things’ when trying to deal with complex ideas. For example, how would gravity work in a two dimensional universe? There isn’t a “down”, so gravity cannot pull from below an object, so would there even be gravity? If there isn't an "up" and a "down", does gravity matters? Some scientists believe that gravity could still exist but that it can warp the universe like someone taking a piece of paper and rolling it into a torus or doughnut-shaped object. The creatures of this “two dimensional” universe would live on the surface.

Now first of all, paper is not two dimensional, it is three dimensional but if you start “curling” a two dimensional universe, it is no longer two dimensional, it is now three dimensional. Second of all, how can you step out of the two dimensional universe in order to curl it? You can only move in two directions, if you moved outside the universe to curl it, you automatically have another dimension.

Also, two dimensional brains would, by their very limited nature of just two dimensions, find thinking much more difficult as a third dimension adds volume and extra space for a brain to exist. I mean, if you took a three dimensional brain and pulled it apart molecule by molecule, took those molecules an formed a "sheet" or one incredibly thin layer, the sheer size would take up the size of a football field! Two dimensional “people” would have to be huge in order to incorporate the brain alone or suffer a vast lack of intelligence!

While scientists may be able to mathematically create a 2D universe, the reality is that it just doesn’t work. As I have shown above, there are far too many problems with a universe limited to two dimensions so much so that it is not truly two dimensional.

It might be fun to think up a two dimensional universe as a concept but like thinking of pigs that spontaneously sprout wings and fly to the moon, it is just not possible.