The memories of time

I got a weird Idea the other day....I think I'm procrastinating way too much...But still, here it is.

What is time? Does it flow? From the future to the past? What is change? How do we perceive change?

Has the past ever existed? or just our memory of it? I mean, what if the past never actually changed, continuously until it transformed into the present ? A typical answer would be,: ''well, I was there, I remember those days, and I also remember how I got here, how the time flowed transforming those days into today.''...sure you do. But the only thing left, the only thing you can actually proof is ''your memory'' of it. What you really have is the memory of once being there, the memory of time flowing, the memory of transforming, the memory of change.

And If you thing about it, your memories of changes, even if they are in agreement with a collective memory of change, even if a mob of people say the were somewhere yesterday, and then the time flowed until the night past, and then the day, and now they are here; Even if the events in the past have some consequences that you can see today, that would only prove that some of the events happened in a previous time so causality holds. But you can't prove that time actually passed, and that the events transformed to be the consequences we perceive today.

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Putting that aside, and for the sake of this blog, I would like to express my deep admiration for Quantum Theory,         I would like to flatter it's accomplishments: Like the super-accurate predictions it makes, and the fact that it is the best model we have of our world. This being said, I would also like to express my unconformity with the lack of a deterministic subatomic model... It just bothers me. 

I believe (believe, have faith in, a personal wish...) that a deterministic model can, will and must be created. Apart from weather God intended Nature to be, I bet we can come up with a deterministic model of the subatomic world. Is not here yet, that's true, but after all when we look back at the past, we see only one outcome from measurements, somehow, one and only one of the many possibilities got chosen. This gives me the feeling that with a lot, a lot  a lot of effort, in a couple of centuries perhaps, we will encounter limits to our current theories and we could consider aiming our efforts to a deterministic theory of the microscopic phenomena.

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Having this little reference to my personal expectations, I will assume that such Super-duper Deterministic Theory, or STD by it's initials in Spanish (Super-duper Teoria Deterministica...lol) exists. This will mean that given that the Universe exists at some point in it's phase space (PhS), our STD automatically, and unequivocally, will draw a line in the PhS, both in the direction of growing total entropy, and decreasing total entropy. i.e. future and past respectively.

Now, I'm not saying we will be able to calculate this line, and predict with infinite accuracy the future or stuff, although, with this STD such ''dream'' might become a real possibility again, is not in my interest to address such problem here. now. I just want to emphasize the fact that we only inhabit a universe in where the past is a straight line, and the future according to our STD will also be one and only one line.

(I might be brave/stupid enough to argue that: what we see as our future, with many possible paths in the PhS, will turn out to be a unique line if seen from further ahead in time, ahead enough so will consider it part of the past.)

Given that such line exists, its easy to see how all the phenomena are linked by the laws of physics. I mean, one event at some time can be tracked back to it's cause (or towards the future to see it's consequences), and the path that unites both events is full of physical interactions that continuously join them.

Once you get this picture, once you see how everything exists in this line, and once you comprehend that this is possible since our STD exists (As simple as that), I can start talking about the cool stuff.

So far I just stated that the existence of this STD, directly implies a unique line that extends from the past to the future containing all the events in the history of the Universe regardless of weather time flows or nor (Notice that I haven't talked yet about weather we need time to move from one point on this line to another, just that such line exists.)

Now, the cool (a little biased when affirming so...I know...) stuff I was referring to is this: We are not flowing in this line from the past to the future, we are not perceiving time flowing nor anything changes in time; Instead:

We are confined to a 3D cross section of our 4D universe, we are stuck here, and our perception of change is nothing but our memories of the past. A memory that exists simply because an STD exists. Our idea of time arises as a necessary explanation of the continuous evolution of events. My point is that, if the outcomes of all our actions are described by this STD, if the line in the PhS extends unequivocally to the future, that future is a reality, an unavoidable path, and no matter how slow or fast time flows, it will eventually come. This can be putted in another way: The existence of the future does not depend on time, or time flow, it exists because our STD says so, it exists because according to the physical interactions described by our STD can not not exist, can not exists differently.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you look back at the past, you only have memories about it, and you assume (that's right! you assume!) time passed, and now you are where you are. As an example, you might remember turning on your PC, opening your browser, typing in google: Most boring Blog Ever, clicking on this one, start reading a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about time, and then reaching the end of the blog. And finally, you jump to the conclusion that time flowed, things changed, stuff moved, and then you got to the present. If you really think it trough, you can't prove that you were in some past time, and then, after time passed by, you got to the present, since all you have is the memories of being there. And even if, like I said before, a whole crowd of people can give faith of such thing, all they rely on is their memories too. 

We are stuck in a single point in the PhS-trajectory of our universe and our memories, those chemical bounds in our brains whose presence can also be tracked back (or forward) using the STD, are there only because there is no way there wound't be there. And at a certain point in this trajectory, as you would expect, only some of all the chemical bounds have been created, certainly not those ahead, only those in the past, which is nothing but the impossibility of foreseeing the future.

If you are getting serious about anything in science, you get to the point where you take a deep breath, gather some courage, and ask: what about it's falsifiability? can I attempt to prove my idea wrong, and fail? can I attempt to prove it at all?

Furthermore: what about the implications of this idea, what would be different if this idea was to be correct, and the old notion of time change wouldn't? What will be different? Is there any way of proving one right and one wrong?. 

Put in words of Ben Goldacre, the idea is just bad science. In words of Kuhn, outside the body of science. However, if you look at the normally accepted concept of time flow, you will see that it underlies every scientific concept, is well embedded into our scientific paradigm, just like absolute time and absolute space once did. And those were also bad science at the time, those were also not falsifiable concepts at the time. And even then, the lied inside every conjecture made in classical mechanics. All physical theories together, were not enough to offer any insight into this question; It was not until somebody carefully looked at the latest advances in Electrodynamics, which pointed directly to Einstein's well renowned conclusions, that these underling ideas became part of the arena, we were finally able to discern about the falsehood of an absolute time or space. 

So it took technological advances together with alternative explanations to clean that corner of our knowledge. These two are not here, not now. But who knows. Probably somebody trapped in a distant point in the PhS will remember learning about 21st century people struggling with stupid questions instead of planing a trip to Paris....they will also remember to have laughed at us. 

Cheers. I'm off to bed. It's 4 am....

Columbus Day

Hello again.

Today is October the 12th, 2011. If my memory isn't wrong, on the same day, in 1492 an Italian sailor spotted for the first time, in recorded-mainstream western history a piece of land never seen before.

A lot of things changes because of him, and his little ''capriccio'' of proving a new way to the indies. To say that some of them are good and some bad depends of the 3+1 coordinates where you where born, kinda aleatory isn't it?

It is, if you think about. But I didn't star this blog to bore you with my ill defined, yet not complete, version of morality. I wanted to think for a bit what are we celebrating for. Just to mention the facts, without judging them., can that be done? Sure. Can that be done by me? Ill give it a shot.

When Columbus put his eyes on this part of the earth, I'm sure he had no idea what the consequences were. Furthermore, he might have died not knowing he had discovered a whole new continent!. After all, the name of continent came to be America, not Colombia, which means Land of Colon/Columbus.

Let's start with the facts related to the New World, and it's future; Well I would start with the enslavement, and religious indoctrination that followed. The lost of their sovereignty, and the degradation of their cultural statuses to the level of barbarians. Was this wrong? Would it be wrong today? If you carry with you a key to the truth, wouldn't you do what you can to tell people about it? Why not to spread the good news? Why not to tell the Indians about the good news? Why not make them understand the greater purpose they have in life that you already know, and they don't!. The means to do that, might have been a bit extreme, but for the sake of the argument, Ill give them the benefit of doubt; I mean, being 3months by boat away, is a great limitation when it comes to maintaining standards of colonization (here I assume there were), and keeping the ''Conquista'' from becoming the blood shed we know today.

Being the carrier of such a great truth is not simple.What do you feel your duty is when you are right, and everybody else is wrong? I guess in a way, Spanish Conquistadores could have felt the same. They could have felt like missionaries. Missionaries on charge of spreading the ''European ways'', why not. And taking some gold as their well deserved salary...again...why not.

  

What about the future of the Old World? Well it considerably changed....it was the equivalent of winning the lottery, finding oil in your backyard, solving one of Hilbert unsolved problems...the bad things are negligible. They got tons and tons of gold and silver, slaves by the thousands, fertile land by millions of acres (I know...mks), and the people who offered any resistance were poorly armed, and had no system of ownership (Opposed to the ''My flag stands, My home now'' European system).

(It's hard to find an convincing angle from which this might seem like a bad thing.) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAOQtp-3b48

I guess I have excessively gave the benefit of doubt in this blog. Hardly any of my non-existent followers (If you reed this, remember I said ''hardly'') will agree with me on what I said. But that's ok. I also grew up with history textbooks written in a whiny-style. I guess here come handy our natural disposition to dissipate the feelings in the bad memories, and do the opposite for the good times.

Let's just remember what happened, and commemorate the facts, not their judgment. Celebrate it if you thing they are good, but do not deny them if you don't like them.

Anyway, happy 12th of October.

Vacuum Industry

So yeah. Steve Jobs is dead, and although he was a great business man, founder of a multi-bilionare company; Comparing him to Newton, putting him above Tesla, saying that he changed the world, or revere him as if he was some sort of deity i.s. j.u.s.t. t.o.o. m.u.c.h....jezzz

Aaaanywhore, I had an a idea, long ago, about using my background preparation to go into the vacuum business. As plain as that.

Im not sure why should I talk about that, but I its been a while since I posted anything here, anything at all. And in spite of having on my repertoir a great bunch of other ideas (nobel price, here I come!...yeahhh right...pfff) Im still polishing the edges, and thinking about the details. This Vacuum Industry idea, seems to be short, and a good introduction to the rest of the blogs that are about to come. And in a sense, the Vacuum Industry idea is complete.

So, what is vacuum? Well philosophically, vacuum has always been consider to be an empty space, empty of all kinds of matter. In a more sophisticated way, a space where no molecules have left inside, no subatomic particles, no quarks, no EM radiation, no nothing. Of course, this turned out to be quite a challenge as I will explain later.

Why would anybody wanted to create vacuum? Yeah, this could have been a tough one a couple of years ago. To be honest, this is what I can think of.:

This is a very old painting, it depicts probably one of the earliest uses of vacuum chambers. The picture illustrates a biologist who proved that air is essential to life, by pumping out  the air in a glass bottle with a dove inside. After the dove dies, and everybody cries uncontrollably for the poor dove (like Steve Jobs non-blood-related deluded customers), he proofs his idea to be right.

The vacuum, as defined before, has never been achieved. Ideally, the pressure inside a chamber  in perfect vacuum, would be equal to 0. However, nowadays we know that the vast interplanetary regions have more or less 10 molecules per cm3, the interstellar regions 1 molecule per cm3, and the intergalactic regions 10^-6 molecules per cm3 (wikipedia). This means, that not even these far away regions exists in total vacuum.

Vacuum has some very useful characteristics. Vacuum chambers, and more precisely vacuum pumps, are widely used in almost every type of industry. With the growth of nanotechnologies, the necessity to evacuate impurities from the working space has become part of the routine. New technologies, like nuclear fusion, are very sensitive to impurities. These impurities appear even after the chamber has been evacuated, the reason is that the walls release, spontaneously, molecules to the medium. This rate of ''evaporation'' occurs all the time, with any material, under any circumstance. However, inside a fusion reactor, the temperature, the neutron bombardment, and the possible disruptions inside tokamaks can accelerate this process, making it a significant challenge for industry to stop it.

And why would I like to go into it? Well I designed a vacuum pump when I was 12 (one of my most productive years scientifically speaking, no kidding!) and I have been intrigued by these mechanisms since then. One of the most boring class on my past Master program, Vacuum technologies, was full of amazing new concepts (and boring descriptions of them). I didn't like the professor, but I love the patents. Its really amazing how advanced is the vacuum industry!.

But, what do I have to offer to this industry? is it just a teenage fixation? have I really though this through? .....Well, no. (If you thought this post couldn't get any more boring...you were wrong) I don't have any revolutionary concepts that could change or revolutionize that industry. But come on, like my Dad says: you shouldn't fall in love with the goal, but with the road. I think vacuum industry is an exciting challenging field, I wouldn't mind making a living out of it. It would be a great job for me!, and eventually, if the timing is right, a good revolutionary vacuum mechanism wouldn't hurt anybody...would it?.

Now, I haven't decided it yet, right now my concern is about this master degree. We will talk about this again, but not yet.

Im in the arena of life now, I gotta earn my way up.

Fight!

Gott Mit Uns?

Quick thoughts on the image posted in the awesome - Asimov2007 - blog a couple of days ago.

Gott Mit Uns?

1.) No God to start with that can "be with you".

2.) If there is one, the one we can't imagine (just like we can't imagine perfection without getting nonsensical), It wouldn't be with you either...obviously.

3.) If there is one, the one described in those thirty-something old books, he wouldn't have give away his seat, as "the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully (R. Dawkins)" to a bunch of fanatic Germans...just like that....=)

The Omnipresent Human-Factor

Since my fifth year of elementary school I have known that numbers are my thing. One way or another I have always identified myself with  math  rather than history, physics over literature, or informatics over geography. Apart from a couple of world wars, a few novels, or knowing in a map, where I am and where I wanted to go, I just found them dull, tasteless, insipid.

I guess from my early childhood, always tricked by how much my Dad knew (about everything), I start constructing the idea that the entire world, society included, could and must be approached in a precise  numerical way.

After graduating from high school, and reading Carl Sagan day and night, I got myself involved in a Physics major. I could read from the best modern scientists concepts like:  The Theory of Everything and so on. The world must be soon understandable, and approachable through mathematics....I thought. The straightforwardness of a mathematical definition, the simple yet devastating power stored in a rigorous mathematical proof, the reality offered by science in which there is only one way of being right and If you disagree, I can prove it. That black-&-white world was getting closer and closer to me. 

In this poetic reality imagination, in embraced, envy, hate, corruption, racism even religious fanatism are all cast away by the purifying power of mathematics, every man is equal, reason, knowledge and truth prevail over any other human-like labels. This magnificent world was opening itself to me, everything went smooth....until The Southwestern Company. 

The Southwestern Company is an American family of companies, based on Nashville, TN, USA. The company mainly recruits young students from all over the USA, and the world, to train them as door-to-door salesmen. Interesting concept.

On the autumn of 2008 I enrolled myself with them, and by the summer of 2009 I was 'ready' to go to the central valley,CA, and sell some god damn books....hell yeah!. At this point, as you can see, I had received the best motivation you can imagine.

By the end of the summer, I have had more than a 150 customers, I have worked under the worst circumstances you can imagine, but my spirit was stronger than ever, I mean....I survived it. My pockets were empty, but I felt I could achieve anything I wanted. I have learned ''the ways'' of a sales-man. I was sitting on the top of the world, and shooting for the stars....unstoppable.

A few months after arriving in Prague, my head cooled down, I went back to school, I had classes on GTR, and statistical physics, I learned about mathematical distributions and the Dirac delta function. I was back in the game, however, this time was different. That summer was like an infectious disease. I had been infected with it, I will only recover partially,  the poison was already inside...it was too late. The whole poison was this: nothing was black and white anymore...the greys have appeared.

The grey tones first showed up in Atrium Way, Nashville, TN. where I was trained for my summer of sales. There, the best salesman will give you an impressive apologetic favoring the creation of needs. Do people need to buy books?..YES, sometime they don't know it yet, but they definitely need them. And of course this was just part of the psycho-training so we wont give up on asking, looking for them to realize that they DO need them. What really happened was that we would use a series of tricks to induce their thoughts in a box, where the only reasonable way out is through buying. The tricks were verbal tricks (offering a,b,c, answers to the questions we ask them in the first place...the thing was: a,b and c were all good for us, and left no place for them to express their true desires), body language tricks, my favorites (eye contact, the angle you face them while sitting, the way and time you break eye contact, the way and place you pick to sit down, etc). ....it worked like magic. I couldn't believe my eyes, I could only think about learning and mastering all these techniques...I was going to rule the world.

At the end of the day, all the trainees have been given the tools to get anything we could possibly need. We could go one morning to work for 13 hours or more, and only carry one sample book and that's all. If you wanted water, you could just ask for it. Hungry?...knock the next door and ask for it. Need a bike?...knock next door and ask for it, a ride?..a car?..a house?. We got all of the above, and more than once per month!.

I had learn that a NO, cant be turned into a maybe, and from there to a yes. (sort of like Facebook). Opinion could be twisted into my advantage, actions can be seen from different perspectives, and there is no rule against picking the best perspective for my particular case. Rights & Wrongs were not absolute, immutable....they were just there, waiting for someone to offer a new perspective, and a judgment based on that perspective. And this had a deep repercussion on my scientific life as well.

At first, I thought these things will never permeate science. Science was different, Science was greater than man. Truth is recognized using the scientific method, theories will be tested through falsifiability as described by Popper, and Science will be build upon pure and solid basis......humans were merely pawns, watching how everything happened. But after the summer, I start detecting these subtle tricks all over the history of science, all over my classroom, my classmates, my professors, my exams, experiments, conferences, 'scientific diplomacy', and so on. I realized that all the human-like labels named at the beginning of the text were not only present here too, but they sometimes ruled, or outlaw any other noble actions. Workers were humans first, and scientists later. Science was not greater than men, Science happens between us, at our same level, after all, we were the ones who created it. It shared our weaknesses, our passions, our emotions, our prejudices. Someone once said, ''a team is like a chain: as strong as its weakest element'', and so its true for science, and other disciplines with a pure and idealistic philosophy like Yoga, or any organized religion, where we are the weakest element. Since imperfect human beings are the ones practicing it, all our essence will impregnate that world.

We can do a great job at repressing those inconvenient facets of ourselves, but we can only do that for some time. We have evolved to become the dominant species on this planet, but the path we took to get here didn't really require for us to loose these characteristics. Envy, has always powered industry, is one hell of a motivation! Racism, can be use as a way to unify a disperse group for later leadership, which as apes, I'm sure we find that useful. Judging someone by they way the look on the outside is a primitive reflex that help us avoid potential threats, if a tiger eats my friend, no way I will stay still and ask the next tiger I see if he is the same as his carnivorous fellow or not....I will run as quick as I can, and trow rocks at him form the tallest branch in my tree!.

The world we would like to live in, the one we have imagined, embraced and had fiercely defended, is not for us. We are the result of evolution, we are the result of the infamous race of life, a race that is dynamic, changing all the time, improvising all the time, killing the weak, keeping only the strong. And here we come, thinking the race has stopped, thinking we can just leave aside all the evolutive-features that have shaped our place in the alimentary chain, and start living in a perfect world, a utopic one, with utopic rules, full of beauty, decency, honesty, ruled by mathematics. We cant.....but we must try.2

I personally think that, the fact that we have ruled the world, is something to be proud of. Our adaptability is amazing, our adaptation is also great. I think, that this pause from the barbaric evolutive race is a privilege that, as the ruling organism, we can afford to have. Ideas, philosophies, culture, spirituality, and so on, are things that we can start conceiving. It doesn't matter if we are prepared or not to live in the perfect world, under perfect rules, it doesn't matter that our primitive facets will permeate these utopic bubbles, it just doesn't matter. I mean, we are not on top of the world because we were the fastest, or stronger, or the ones with the best camouflage, we made it till here because we have bigger brains, and the advantages of that are limitless! . And that is why I believe that our effort to embrace such utopic behaviors is going to have fruits, tasty, delicious fruits. None of us might live to taste them, but I'm sure the future is written in the sublime language of mathematics.

Dreamy Logic

So I passed my exam on probability. I scored 13 out of 15, I just messed up the part about the so called testing hypothesis =(. I feel happy.

In this post I wanted to share a couple of experiences that have been going on on my life , and somehow, they all seem to share some crucial aspects even when they are very different by definition.

It's like when a smell reminds you of the taste of something. I mean, by definition, smell and taste are different senses, and they are detected by different mechanisms (you would say at first), and still, our brain can compare these two types of signals...of course, when you think in terms of molecules of substance being detected by the cell-receptors in your nose and tongue, smell and taste don't look so different. But you have to admit that unless you know something about this molecular behavior, there is no apparent way of reconciling these two things, and its just weird to remember the taste of something by smelling something else.

Well, something like that has been happening to me in a slightly different context. I tried weed for the first time. And the experience I had was comparable to a dream.

I felt the very same things, though about the same things, and the shocking part, I used  the same type of logical approach when trying to solve a problem (a theoretical one...practical, more handy things usually brought me back to reality, they kinda make me wake up...if that makes any sense)

So apart from the weird sensation of me vibrating like a  membrane when hit by the sound waves in the music, or the feeling that everybody is watching you and you can't stop laughing about that, something worth mentioning actually happen....

The moment I excuse myself from the table, and went to the bathroom for a little bit of coolness, I start having an irrepressible rush of brilliant, novel, worth spreading on TED, set of ideas about pretty much every unsolved problem in physics I could think off !...and I was astonished with each one of them..... dazzled upon its beauty....I couldn't believe all this have been lying on my insignificant brain all this time!..trust me, you would've cried...it was the best time Ive had in a bathroom so far....=)

Sudenly I knew the QM wave function governing every particle in the universe, I knew how to derive it, how to solve it for every single case, I could visualize it....it wasn't a simple function, but it existed, and I had it in front of me!...

I got a solution to the Navier-Stokes  equations for fluid mechanics, I knew the solution, you just had to consider and extra thing that everybody else have been missing...till now, till me.

GTR wasn't right. Einstein field equations were close, but they have been manipulated in the wrong order. I had it done correctly, in my mind, in a matter of seconds...the solution was perfect, I start making ''computer'' simulations right away in my head, they all fitted, not dark matter needed, no dark energy....If you don't cry at this point you are a robot!

And these kind of ideas just kept coming to me...like I said before: An irrepressible rush.....It was a great time there...there, in the dreamy world.

There were also sad things. These ideas are only the few I remember, I kept forgetting most of them 10 seconds after they magically appear in my mind...it was very frustrating. Fortunately enough, I was able to record myself, describing them and getting desperate whenever I forget them (...of course I didn't forget everything about them...otherwise I couldn't grieve about forgetting them, most of the time, I knew I just forgot a great idea, but didn't know exactly about what.) That way I got a few left to tell you about.

The thing here is, that when I woke up next morning, and played the recording I found something incredibly odd. All the postulates of my ideas were correct, I knew about what I wanted to solve/accomplish, but from there on my logic was totally poor and wicked. I end up having solutions with strawberry pies as variables, policemen rearranging Einstein's equations, super glue aligning all the electron's spins, and all sort of weird and nonsense things!...I was so disappointed =(.

But at this point I knew it was OK. I mean , you hear people having weird experiences, talking to car plates, or whispering to the moon. So I stopped thinking about that, and continued with my day as if nothing had happened...

A few days ago I start wondering about the experience I had. I just didn't seem right the fact that my brain, a scientific one I would say, let such a  faulty arguments impregnate the beautiful, ordered, objective, and clear paradigm that science is. How is it possible that strawberries and covariant tensors were indifferent to me?. Why would I trust policemen when talking about GTR stuff ?. Why did I make such a stupid logical  conjectures!?. The more I though about it, the more disappointed I start feeling at my education....lol.

Finally, a couple of days ago, I had a dream. The dream started in the middle of a city which I knew perfectly, I was talking to a person I knew very well, I felt like we had a strong relation, I could trust that person. Somehow I didn't need any context, I knew it all. We were discussing about how our computers were talking to us all the time, not through a speaker, no...the very screen had a huge mouth and it would distore the image as it spoke. the computer was inviting us to visit the Governor. We were laughing because everybody knew there are no Governors in Mars!.....OK?.....ok....

Now, why didn't I just stoped the conversation there, asked about how can computer talk to us, how come we are on Marse...I don't know...the stuff any person would ask. Why wasn't I using my usual intellect there? Where was all the reality gone? How did I know that city or that person?...

.....Why my logic was wretched?....

That totally reminded me of the weed experience, I have come to the conclusion that logic wasn't as straightforward as it seems when you are awake...a whole new set of possibilities existed. Things could exist regardless of the logical possibility/impossibility status they have on the awake reality. If you check the different types of Omnipotence, you can come to the conclusion, that God's attribute of Omnipotence is logically impossible (as well as Omniscience) in this world, under this "logical paradigm". However, if logically incompatible phenomena could coexist in the same "reality", God, and all it's attributes would be non-sense. Such reality can be identified with the reality I just experienced, a reality where the rules of logic, the very cornerstone of our civilization, work in a different way. Check this out, and tell me:  how this contradiction has permeated our religions, our believes, our lives?

What should we do about this? What can we do?. Can we just rise a flag and claim this part of the Universe as a wrecked-logic-free-zone or something? Should we leave this wretched-logical things confined to our dreams and trips? Or the opposite!....Should we study it, I mean the fact that such pathological logical objects are available to us only in dreams and trips sets the bar really high from an experimentalist point of view, but still. Its a fascinating idea.

QM and Probability Theory

I've been preparing myself for over a week for my Statistics and Probability exam. I understand if you think that  I'm reaaaally stupid, but I feel great going to an exam and knowing that your head will not stop thinking about number and formulas, knowing that last night the only things in your dream were the formulas you  just learned...that sort of gives me confidence =).

I think at this point , my brain is thinking about numbers all the time, I have always been a big fan of Poker, specially the good old Texas Hold'em version. But, at this point I should not be invited to any game or I will stop the whole thing just to calculate all the probabilities Ive got to win the hand.....living hell. Proabilities are all over my head, however I'm not a the ''dreaming with formulas'' level.....that will take me another 3 days and a lot more caffeine. =).

Anyway, around two days ago I bumped into the know concept of complete set of events, defined over a probability space. You know...the sort of thing you find everyday while eating bread or not.

Right after this useful concept, there is the theorem that allows you to express any event, as the sum of conditional probabilities. I mean, if  $\{n_1, n_2, n_3,\dots , n_N \}$is a set of complete events in a probability space, then for any event A holds:

This is when I thought, this look just like the formula used in QM to decompose any vector to a given basis. That is:

Where, , is a basis for the space. (for the sake of simplicity, a finite one.) 

The good thing is that this similarity will make it easier to remember. However, I realized that the resemblance is only aesthetic. I mean, the vectors in QM do not represent probabilities themselves. you always need to multiply them by their complex conjugate, and only then you will obtain a probability (a probability density will be more precise). So  I can always use the fact that I remember one to construct the other, but I have to be aware that they are not the same formula written with a different notation. 

I have the vague notion that multiplying the second formula by its complex conjugate will give me the first formula...but I haven't worked it out.....yet

Update on the atomic dipoles

So I did my homework. Surfing the web, looking for some confirmation to the idea that the electron clouds may generate by themselves a kind of electric polarization. The results were not very satisfactory...a closer look to the spherical harmonics shows that they actually ARE symmetric on the polar angle. I guess i had the wrong idea in my head, I was probably thinking about the wave function itself, and forgetting to calculate the actual probability (I guess my QM ideas were in fact a little dusty after all).So , I guess electric dipoles will not appear by themselves in an atom when lowering the temperature as I thought. However, I did read about the so called Rydberg atoms, atoms with very high excitation energies, whose electron clouds resemble the hydrogen structure, and they behave as described by the Bohr model....quite interesting. It turns out that the higher their energies are, the better response they have to external electric fields. It make sense, since the high energies will separate the electrons away from the nucleus and making them more ''volatile'' when an external force acts upon them.

But enough of the self-pitifulness. I also found an interesting fact. Even if the atomic orbital are symmetrical in the polar angle, they do have a dependence on it. This dependence crates closed loops where the electron cloud is more dense than else. Sometimes it can create several rings around the atom creating a magnetic dipole moment.

Here are some drawins of an example of such case (n,l,m=7,6,0)

The cool part is that this magnetic dipole moment will appear without any external field!. Like I though it could happen with the electric counterpart.

So far so good.  Now, another thrilling (on my standards) idea came to my mind. When you plot the same atom with a change in the magnetic number m, form =0 to =6 or =-6, you get, what seems to me, circular coils around the toroidas direction, just like in a tokamak.(n,l,m=7,6,6)

Will this resemblance with toroidal coils will behave anything like a tokamak? will create a toroidal magnetic field? what would the magnetic dipole moment be?....just wondering.

Atomic Dipoles

So here I am, writing again, trying to think what to say in order to meet the high expectancies I build in the first post (Big mistake). I kinda explicitly said that I fin all of the ideas interesting, and that is true, the thing is, I kinda wanted to imply, that they may not seem so cool to you.....but WTF, since nobody read this, I will give it a shot...

Last week, during the visit of the Colombian ambassador in Prague, about 30 Colombian fellows gathered after the meeting and went together for a beer in Strahovsky Klaster (very nice place btw). During the conversation, somebody mention one of Colombian typical 'sports', Tejo. We were discussing how there are world championships of such discipline (If it is a discipline at all...) and teams from different countries get drunk while trying to explode gunpowder bags located about 20 mts away swinging through the air metallic discs. But that is the OK part of it. After a while, people stared confessing how bad they are at Tejo, how they have blown up the roof of the place, how professionals attach their own disk to their belts using a powerful magnet, or how foreigns thought somebody called ''mecha'' has died of a gunshot (my favorite..).

Between laughs I kept thinking about that little magnet. And apparently the players not only use it as an easy way to store their precious discs while not playing (Or a way to wake up hangover and still have it with them), but apparently they put the magnet so somehow the metallic disc will gain an extra symmetrical property (placing the magnet concentric with the disc) thus allowing better performances. As the only guy who liked physics in there, it was my responsibility to clarify things, so I explained how most of the day to day metals, interact with magnetic fields in the atomic scale aligning their little magnetic dipoles as a response to the external field, creating then, their own magnetic field. I tried to make clear that as soon as the external field will disappear, the magnetization of the disc will also disappear, and therefore the expected extra symmetrical property. In the best of the cases, regions with different magnetization will appear, but still, the symmetry will disappear....It felt nice.

During the next day or two, I kept thinking about the argument I used, about how the little dipoles tend to align in an external magnetic field, and so on. I start remembering the dusty ideas from QM about the exited states of the atoms, Spherical Harmonics, the Bose-Einstein condensate....and then the idea strike me.

Imagine a molecule at room temperature. The molecule will be jumping from one exited state to another, and the different energies will loose importance when they are averaged over time or over the ensemble. However as we lower the temperature the states will start ''jumping down'' the energy scale.  Low enough to appreciate the effect of the polarization created by the electron cloud itself (since the Spherical Harmonics are not symmetrical in the polar coordinate). I mean, there will be no need of an external field to create such polarization.

It may seem very obvious just by looking at the first spherical harmonics. But I guess I have never realized that. I wonder if there is any way to measure that little polarization...I mean, is not like I cant think about one, but rather,have anybody done it? I know you can calculate it doing integrals over the wave function and so on. But..like always...just wondering......just wondering.

Pilot

It was almost midnight, I still had a little bit more than 8 hours of work, the night looked long, the chair seemed uncomfortable and my mind was starting to die out of boredom. My future seemed grey, my dreams unreachable and even if If reach them, they would seem worthless. I realize my spirit was dying and I had to do something about it. I spend the rest of my night-shift thinking what to do, how to change, how to power my thoughts, how to canalize all the random ideas that sometimes hit me. By 5 am I had found a solution.

Two days later, another night-shift was about to start, another 9 hours of mindless work were ahead of me. but this time I had with me a small pad full of random thoughts on the broadest spectrum of things, from going into the Vacuum Industry , to a different and equivalent approach to Asimov's three laws of robotics. I was armed and ready to fire. I felt a nice warmth in my veins, and my spirit felt satisfied.

From now on I have been keeping track of all the little ideas that hit me from time to time during the day. I certainly find all of them interesting, but of course, I might be a little biased while affirming so. I would like then to star sharing some of them here.