Monthly Archives: September 2011

A Supermarket Tragedy

a poem by Jarrod Hart (c.1999)

—-

From a look to the left and a glance to the right
Comes the cold grip of a horrible fright!
For what she can’t see causes horrible fear
…what she can’t see is utterly dear!

A second goes past and still nothing’s there;
Another look here another one there!
Oh come now, be serious, this can’t be so!
But frantic fast panic has nothing to show!

Silk fury now flies, far into the blue
And tears in her eyes show feelings too true…
She closes those eyes and feels for the sky
As she wonders, wonders… Lord why?

—-

He gives her the stength to stop spinning round
As she tests out her senses; feels for the ground
The dizziness passes, she looks down the aisle
Her child in the distance, bearing a smile…

The child was not gone, but simply misplaced
Mom quietly blushes, but inside she’s disgraced.
But our new mom will grow, with the knowledge so brave,
That life’s ride’s a transient on the crest of a wave…

And if we live ‘moments’ and feel to the hilt,
We gain independence from the pain they call guilt.

The end

Exceeding the Speed-Of-Light Explained Simply (and the Quantum riddle solved at no extra cost)

It has recently been in the news that some particle may have exceeded the legal speed limit for all things : 299,792,458 metres per second.

Of course, this will probably turn out to be a bad sum somewhere or perhaps waves ganging up, but the whole hubbub has raised my hackles, and here’s why.

Because Albert Einstein at no time said what they say he said (see here for example). They misunderstand relativity! Things can move at any speed we want, and I will try to explain the fuss now.

So let’s get to it!

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First, we have to consider the way space warps when we move.

The problems started when people realised that light always seems to have the same speed, regardless of the speed you were moving when you saw it. This seems to be a contradiction, because surely if you fly into the light ever faster, it will pass you ever faster?

Well the tests were pretty clear, this does not happen. The speed is always c.

For several years, people were unsure why – until they were told by Einstein in 1905. In the meantime, another ponderer of the problem (Lorentz) decided to write down the maths that are required to square the circle.

The so-called Lorentz equations show, unequivocally, that space and/or time need to warp in order for relative speeds of c not to be exceeded, even when two items are going very close to c in opposite directions to one another.

So something needed to give, and it was space and time!

So, newsflash! it was not Einstein that first published on space and time warping. His contribution (along with Henri Poincaré and a few others) was to explain how and why. His special theory showed that because there is no ‘preferred’ frame of reference, a speed limit on light was inevitable. The term ‘relativity’ come from this – basically he said, if everything is relative, nothing can be fixed.

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Ok, so we have some nice observations that nothing seems to go faster than the speed of light  – and we have a nice maths model that allows it. So why do I persist in saying things can go faster than the speed of light?

Let me show you…

There is a critical difference between ‘going’ faster than light and being ‘seen to be going’ faster than the speed of light, and that is where I am going with this.

So lets take this apart by asking how we actually define speed.

If a particle leaves point a and then gets to point b, we can divide the distance by the time taken and get the mean speed (or velocity to be pedantic).

The issue with relativistic speeds are that the clock cannot be in both point a and point b. So we need to do some fancy footwork with the maths to use one or other of the clocks. So far so good. This method will indeed never get a result > c.

The nature of space forbids it – if the Lorentz transformations that work so well are to be taken at face value, then for something to exceed c by this method of measurement, is much the same as a number exceeding infinity.

So all is still well. Until you ask, what about if the clock is the thing that travelled from a to b?

In this case, the transformations cancel! The faster the movement, the slower time goes for the clock, and you will see its ticks slow down, thus allowing its speed to exceed c.

The clock will cover the distance and appear to have tavelled at c on your own (stationary) clock, but the travelling clock will have ticked fewer times!

If you divide the distance by the time on the travelling clock, you see a speed that perfectly matches what you would expect should no limit apply. Indeed, the energy required to create the movement matches that expected from simple Newtonian mechanics.

The key point here is that while the clock travelled, the reader of the clock did not. If you do choose to travel with the clock, you will see it tick at normal speed, and see the limit apply – but see the rest of the universe magically shrink to make it so.

Some have argued that I am not comparing apples with apples, and that by using an observer in a different frame to the clock I am invalidating the logic.

To those who say that, I have to admit this is not done lightly. I have grown more confident that this inference is valid by considering questions such as the twin paradox over and over.

The twin paradox describes how one twin who travels somewhere at high speed and then returns will age less than his (or her) stationary twin.

Now if we consider a  trip to Proxima Centauri (our nearest neighbour) the transformations clearly show that if humans could bear the acceleration required (we can’t) and if we had the means to get to, say, 0.99c for most of the trip, that yes, the round-trip would take over 8 years and no laws would be broken. However the travellers themselves will experience time 7 times slower (7.089 to be precise). Thus they will have aged less than 8 years. So, once they get home and back-calculate their actual personal speed, it will exceed all the live measurements.

This has bothered me endlessly. Although taken for granted in some sci-fi books (the Enders Game saga for example) this clear ‘breakage of the c-limit’ is not discussed openly anywhere.

Still uncertain why people were ignoring this, I read a lot (fun tomes like this one) learned more maths (Riemann rules!) and also started to look at the wider implications of the assertion.

On the one hand, the implications are not dramatic, because instant interstellar communication is still clearly excluded, but that whole issue of needing a 4 years flight to get to Proxima Centauri is just wrong. If we can get closer to c we can indeed go very far into the universe, although our life stories will be strangely punctuated, just as in the Ender books.

But what about the implications for the other big festering boil on the body of theories that is physics today – quantum theory?

Well, if one is bold enough to assert that it is only measurement that is kept below c and not ‘local reality’, then one can allow for infinite speed.

In this scenario, we are saying measurement is simply mapping reality through a sort of hyperbolic lense such that infinity resembles a limit. Modelling space with hyperbolic geometry is really not as unreasonable as all that, I don’t know why we are so hung up on Euclid.

With infinite speed at our disposal, things get really interesting.

We get things like photons arriving at their destination the same tme they leave their source. Crazy of course… but is it?

Have we not heard physicists ask – how is it the photon ‘knows’ which slit is blocked in the famous double slit experiment? It knows because it was  spread out in space all the way from it’s source to it’s final point of absorption.

If you hate infinities and want to stick with Lorentz, you can equally argue that, for the photon, going exactly at c, time would stand still. Either way, the photon feels like it is everywhere en route at once.

If the photon is indeed smeared out, it probably can interfere with itself. Furthermore, it is fitting that what we see is a ‘wave’ when we try to ‘measure’ this thing.

A wave pattern is the sort of thing I would expect to see when cross sectioning something spread in time and space.

Please tell me I’m wrong so I can get back to worrying about something useful. No, don’t tell me – show me – please! 😉

Pet Peeve of the Week: Starfield simulations are always wrong, and here’s why…

Ok, if you don’t know what a starfield simulation is, lets sort you now – look at the video below first.

Ok, for those of you without youtube, think then of the screen savers on early windows PC’s – you may recall the screensaver that makes it look like you are flying through space – this “stars flying by” visual is the thing I am talking about. If you are interested, you can presently download this screensaver here.

Now when this screen saver came out, I’ll admit I was still a bit of a nerd – with a thing for both astronomy and for computers, so I set out to make my own. What I learned along the way initially puzzled me then annoyed me and then made me give up in disgust.

Ok, so before I tell you the ‘big secret’ of what annoyed me so, take a look at this animation:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJO88Qhxwv4]

I think you’ll agree it’s quite good – yes the stars are not perhaps as pretty in their distribution as some of the pictures from the Hubble (see below) but that is quite forgiveable.

Despite the boring uniformity of the stars, I want to draw your attention to the complexity involved in creating this animation. Just ‘guessing’ the paths of the stars by having them start small, somewhere near the middle, and then gradually grow and swing to one of the edges will not do. I tried this, trust me, it looked crap.

No, it turns out the only way to make this look decent is to do the honest thing and create a virtual 3-d world and then place the stars in it, then fly the camera through the space and have the computer figure out the paths for all the stars. Sound tricky? Well it bloody well was in 1995 when I tried it, though I reckon it’s easier now. I used POV-Ray to render hundreds of stills and then tried to create a loop to make an animated gif. It was only like 200-200 pixels and it took days to render but it eventually finished and looked – absolutely nothing like the windows screen saver.

You see, I made the school-boy error of distributing stars ‘realistically’ in my 3-D space – I put them proper distances apart, randomly, and I gave them realistic ‘sizes’ (relative to the inter-star distance). Instantly I had my first problem. The stars were all too small to even be detected by the renderer. Ok, so it turns out stars don’t work like normal things, their apparent size is not due to their actual size but a combination of their brightness and their distance. Fine. So I had to make them far bigger so they could be seen (which is utterly wrong wrong wrong to my purist heart).

Ok, so now I had spots. Did we get that sense of flight? No.

The next issue was that you needed only a few stars to create a ‘busy frame’ (say 20 stars), but most of them were stupendously far away and would stubbornly refuse to budge. The only option was the put absolutely bazillions of stars in the field so that at least a few were nearby enough for you to ‘swoosh’ lavishly past. Of course, to get that many stars, the whole view has to be completely plastered with stars – to the point of being a plain white screen. So I had to do another fudge – I had to create a sort of ‘fog’ that filtered distant light. This meant the viewer would only see nearby stars. Wrong wrong wrong again!!!! I happen to know from my own space travels (on spaceship earth) that we can see rather far without trouble, and thus this fog effect is a terrible hash.

However, I was getting somewhere with the sim. It looked like dots moving now. They did not get any bigger as they got closer, but they did move faster and get brighter, due to the fog. But damn, all the ‘nice’ starfield sims did have the stars actually getting bigger, so now I increased the size of the stars again – so big that the stars were literally only a few dozen diameters apart and hey presto, it now looked good.

binary stars

Stars are not happy bedfellows!

Now think about that – the stars were only a few dozen diameters apart. The earth is actually about one-hundred sun-diameters from the sun; so what we are talking about it a super dense space, rammed with stars. Wrong wrong wrong. Stars that close tend to get involved in all-out gravity war (see the picture!)

So it occurs to me that the nerdy folks who have a hand in creating those ‘nice looking’ simulations are probably aware of their dirty little crimes. These simulations are not simulations at all, they are but an ‘artist’s renditions‘. Now that is an insult of great proportion to any red-blooded computer programmer. All I can say is, you should have formatted that floppy when you realised what you were doing and moved on with your life. It’s too late now – I know your crimes and will not let you sleep easy tonight.

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Update, 2011…

Ok, I have that out of my system. The question is (it should be burning your lips): what does superfast space flight look like then?

To answer this well, you simply need to put more effort into the simulation – you need to consider the great asymmetries in the star distributions – think how small they really are, then think about their clusters, then spiral arms, then galaxies, then clusters of galaxies, then…

I have referenced this video before and I do it again unashamedly – take a look, because they have already done what I suggest…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0]

I think the makers should get a Nobel prize.

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Update 2012…

Ah, I am not alone in my nerd-dom. Now you can fly around in a pretty darn impressive virtual universe and see for yourself how the stars really actaully fly past. Happily, the results are not at all like most starfield simulators. You can fly vast distances with the sky literally ‘unmoved’. It is only once you come near a star or star cluster that those few will move, and only when you are moving stupidly fast yourself (like 2 parsecs per second) in a dense part of a galaxy, will you get anything like the old Windows starfield effect. My inner nerd feels justified. You can run the simulator on your own PC, get it at:

http://en.spaceengine.org/

Or read about it at io9:

http://io9.com/5924776/new-simulation-is-as-close-to-traveling-through-space-as-it-gets

Amazingly, this has been in the works for some time – this video from the sim was uploaded in 2009 already, it gets to the starry stuff in the second half:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qDnoHRBItg]

Energy Drink Misinformation

Zero calorie ‘energy’ drinks piss me off. Why?

A zero calorie energy drink is a flat-out contradiction. 

Think about it. What is a calorie? If you don’t know, look it up. Yes, exactly, it is a measure of… energy content! WTF?

What I want to know is this: how come we let big business redefine our language to their own greedy ends? I mean the people who make low-calorie energy drinks know they have no energy in them, so why are they called energy drinks?

I think its because energy is a misunderstood concept and they are taking advantage of this.

Understanding what energy is (and more importantly isn’t) will allow people to more accurately decide things correctly – like whether it’s a good idea to try hike 100 miles across a desert armed only with zero calorie energy drinks.

So for background, please take a look at my article on energy designed for people with too little time to read a whole book, or even a pamplet.

Now, the specific issue here is that people are confusing energy sources with stimulants. Sure, the sugary versions do actually supply some energy, but no more than a can of Coke – but these guys are not charging those absurd prices for sugar – those prices, and claims, are for the drugs. Compounds like caffeine affect our nervous system and interfere with our built-in protection systems, systems that make us feel tired after effort, mechanisms that force us to get the sleep we need in order to rest our muscles and reboot our brains.

The issue here is that the word stimulant is not as easy to sell as ‘energy’, and the English language does allow us to mix up feeling ‘energetic’ with feeling alert and ready for action.  The nerdy scientific truth issue here is that tired people actually still actually have plenty of energy (especially if they are prosperous about the middle) it is just their inclination to use that energy that changes.

So next time you feel tired but need to keep going, by all means get a ‘so-called’ energy drink but remember it is mainly just a drug. The next time you hit a wall 20 miles into a marathon, remember to get some real energy.

 

 

Postscript

So is messing with you body’s tiredness systems bad? Not necessarily! We must also resist overreacting and committing another crime – resorting to the naturalistic fallacy that messing with nature is fundamentally a bad idea. I quite like it when medical science messes with natural things like smallpox and malaria for example. Stimulants are not all bad, keeping alert can keep us safe when driving, and used in moderation can actually help us focus through tedious study or exams.

An itch scratched…

Tennyson said:

‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

I propose a more general theorem, to which I believe the above a corollary:

‘Tis better to have itched and scratched
Than never to have itched at all.

——————————————–

Consider:

A weekend spent fixing something broken is more satisfying than a weekend spend idle – with nothing broken.