Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

This reasoning is IMHO flawed and overly optimistic.  It’s an interesting idea to compare the complexity of these two systems by comparing their bit representations.  I think the idea has merit, at a very rough level — that is I think you can compare the complexity of a genome to the complexity of a piece of software on a rough order-of-magnitude scale. The biggest flaw in Kurzweil’s argument is that he magically throws in a factor of 16x improvement in his favor by saying the genome can be “compressed.”  Well, software executables can be compressed too, a fact that Kurzweil conveniently ignores.  So I’d follow his reasoning to say that a human brain simulator probably needs about 10 – 100 million lines of code.  (I’m deliberately including 0 significant digits here to indicate the roughness of this approximation.)  This puts a human brain simulator on par with the some of world’s most sophisticated software projects so far, which seems about right, at least to an order of magnitude or so.

Strong reactions

PZ Myers published a wrathful condemnation of Kurzweil’s argument titled “Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain.”  If you sift through the name-calling you see that Myers assumes a specific tactic in building the brain simulator: starting with the human genome and deriving the brain’s functionality from it.  This strategy will certainly work, once we have solved the protein-folding problem, and more generally have the ability to do quantum chemical simulations of kilogram-sized masses of organic chemicals.  Which is to say it’s theoretically possible (we might be living in a software simulation of our universe for all we know), but completely intractable with current technology.  For comparison, our best quantum chemical simulations if you push them top out at maybe a dozen atoms right now.  So being able to simulate an entire kilogram of organic matter is nowhere in sight.

Tactics to simulation

I agree with Myers that we are nowhere near being able to interpret the genome well enough to understand how it makes a brain.  But we probably don’t need to in order to simulate a brain.  By analogy, consider the Super Nintendo (SNES) Emulator, which is another kind of simulator many of us have experience with.

SNES emulators let you play all the old Nintendo games but on a modern computer instead of original SNES hardware.  Let’s say somebody handed you a box and a stack of cartridges and told you to build a Nintendo simulator.  What would you do?  Well, clearly you could open up the SNES box and reverse engineer the circuit boards to figure out all the wiring.  You’d probably figure out that the CPU was important — a variant on the 65816, which was essentially the 16-bit version of the 6502 some of us grew up with in our Commodore 64s and Atari 800s.  So you could (theoretically) crack open the 65816 CPU chip itself, put it the through an electron microscope and understand every transistor it used to interpret the instructions. In this way you could reliably create an emulator which completely replicated every aspect of the SNES. Such a simulation would replicate all of its bugs, timing quirks and everything, but it would work and be extremely expensive to simulate.

This is analogous to the tactic PZ Myers seems to be assuming Kurzweil would take to simulating a human brain. But Kurzweil would actually start at a much higher level of abstraction.  Simulating every protein in every neuron is like building an SNES emulator by simulating every transistor in the original Nintendo’s hardware. The key to getting those SNES games to work does not lie in replicating the design of the CPU which interprets the instructions.  The key is figuring out how to run those instructions on modern hardware.  By moving up through levels of abstraction, we can simulate the system much more cheaply and easily, although there’s a chance edge-case behavior won’t be captured properly.  (What if our world is a simulation and we bump into the edge-cases?)

Similarly, the key to simulating a human brain anytime soon does not lie in understanding every chemical pathway in human neurons.  Although if we did understand neurons at this level, we would have a great head start at simulating a brain.  Success in simulating a human brain will come by recognizing higher levels of abstraction in neuronal function.  We have known for a very long time that neurons communicate by “firing” electrical signals which are transmitted chemically at synapses.  The details of these behaviors are complex and determined by a great many interdependent chemical systems, but it seems highly likely that we can replicate the key behaviors of human neurons at this level of abstraction without needing to understand everything underneath supporting them.  If we can replicate the firing behavior of neurons in sufficient detail, we don’t care what the proteins underlying them are doing.  The key question here of course is what is “sufficient detail.”  I expect that question is one that researchers who are genuinely interested in reverse-engineering the brain will actually focus their attention on.

Once we can simulate the firing behavior of neurons, simulating a brain becomes much more of an engineering problem than a scientific one.  Still it’s going to be a massive engineering challenge, and gathering the input data will probably require a bunch of new science.  Then the philosophers can debate the meaning of free-will if our brains are Turing-complete.

Preparing for this talk has been a lot of fun.  I’m guessing it will be fun to deliver as well.  (I’m writing this to be posted immediately after my talk, so I can’t know for sure yet!)  The whole process reminds me how much I love my career — the huge impact I can have on making people’s lives better.  This particular talk was a very good reminder to me how much I rely on my training as a scientist to perform this job.

This kind of information and much more is available from a cool web site called Space Weather.  For example, did you know that just a week ago an asteroid got as close to the Earth as the moon is?  It was just a 27 m in size, so not earth destroying.  But these encounters are happening all the time.  Browsing around SpaceWeather a bit more and you’ll find great pictures of the sun like this one.  Or the current interplanetary magnetic field measured in nanoTeslas.

All in all, fun stuff.

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance.  Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could destroy the planet by creating small black-holes that might suck in the entire earth.  As the good folks at CERN re-assure us, everything is fine.  I pretty much believe this.  That is to say, I’m pretty sure LHC will not destroy all life as we know it.  Pretty sure.  Otherwise, we’ve all got a few more hours to live.

So long as my buddy Stephen Hawking’s theories about black holes are true, we’re fine.  They’ll dissipate by themselves and will not suck in the planet.  But to be clear, we are testing this theory.  (I just heard a scientist on the radio trip all over himself as he tried to spurt out a believable
"there really is no chance these black-holes will devour the entire
earth.")

Last year I wrote about a then-briefly-popular idea that all the world we see is actually a computer simulation.  (Pointless personal anecdaote — I had this idea in grade-school and tried to marry it with special relativity’s universal speed-limit in terms of a primitively digitized simulation where exceeding the speed of light would cause objects to skip pixels during a single time step.  Anyway.)  It’s all as if our whole universe is a game of The Sims on some hyper-intelligent alien teenager’s computer.  In a fairly religious way, this idea is unrefutable.  It’s like a virtual machine trying to hack its host operating system.  Can’t do it.

Some theories of simulated worlds hold that what we experience is a simplification of real physical laws.  If this is true, high-energy experiments like LHC could probe the limits of these simplifications.  It could cause an exception to get thrown in the simulation code.  Us clever scientists set up some extremely complex scenario that caused one of the simulation’s assumptions to fail.  What happens when the simulation crashes?  Maybe it’s a dialog box saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore."  Maybe it’s a universe-scale Blue screen of death.  Teenager’s response?  Maybe Abort.  How different is that from our whole planet getting sucked into a black hole?

Don’t panic.

Ever since Maxwell unified the theories of electricity and magnetism in
1864, physicists have been working towards a single model that can explain all observed forces.  It took another hundred years or so for
us to understand how the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are really the same thing, and a grand unified theory is close to merging in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the strong nuclear force.  The only thing left now is to merge in gravity.  String theory is a popular contender for a so-called “theory of everything” which explains quantum gravity. Progress here is slow, but finding a theory which combines general relativity and quantum mechanics is widely regarded as one of the big unanswered questions in physics.  Personally, I’m not all that excited by it.  I think we have bigger fish to fry.

Let’s say we find a Theory of Everything that explains quantum gravity in addition to merging electricity, magnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces.  What changes when we figure this out?  Of course, we
can’t really know until we have the answer.  But consider the merging
of the electromagnetic force and the weak magnetic force into the
electro-weak force.  They look different under just about every condition we will ever encounter.  It’s only when the temperature exceeds about 10^15 Kelvin that they start to look the same.  For comparison, the middle of the sun is relatively frigid at 10^7 degrees.  So my guess is that when we figure this out, it isn’t going to lead to any new
practical understandings about the world around us.

The theoretical basis for most everything that we experience on a daily basis was figured out in the early 20th century with quantum mechanics.  It provides a theoretical foundation which reduces essentially all of chemistry to solving mathematical equations.  Admittedly these are horrendously difficult equations that even modern computers can only approximate for relatively small molecules.  But the theory is there.  And with chemistry solved, we have a theoretical basis for all of biology, and everything to do with life.  Not to say there aren’t interesting problems to solve there and plenty we don’t understand, but on some level, it’s all applications of an understood theory.

I completely realize this is a simplification of the state of science,
but this is what I thought when I was an undergrad.  This realization
and disillusionment drove me away from science towards my career in
software, which I love because of its ability to directly improve people’s lives on a massive scale.

But now as I write about things like the fate of humanity, the nature of consciousness and how to save the world, I see two huge gaps in what science can explain.  For context, here’s a quote that I love:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’

Whoever finds the Higgs Boson, or explains quantum gravity will yell “Eureka!” at the top of their lungs.  Two things that make me say “that’s funny” about about how physics explains the world today are:

• quantum randomness
• the big bang

I’ll spare the details for now and write more on each of these later.  (I’ve written some about quantum randomness and the nature of free will before.)  But for now I’ll summarize by saying these are a couple of areas where the standard explanation really doesn’t sit well with me.  Moreover, I think a better understanding of these issues would do a lot to answer questions that have troubled humanity since the birth of consciousness.

Simplified Simulation or Complete, Accurate Model?

The simulations Bostrom describes would not be precise to the subatomic level, but rather use abstractions to simplify the computation.  Instead of simulating every electron, proton, neutron, quark, etc in each person’s body and everything around us, it might only simulate synapses and neurons in our brains.  Such short-cuts would be extremely useful to accomplish the goals he describes of virtually resurrecting ancestors.  (A convenient version of heaven.)  Just simulating the brains of the inhabitants of a virtual world is drastically easier than accurately simulating an entire universe down to the subatomic level.  For many purposes, including the ones we are likely to engage in anytime soon, it is sufficient. 

The software to run a simplified simulation like this would put its designer in an interesting predicament whenever the simulatees decide to build a new particle accelerator or perform some other experiment that pushes the limits of their understanding of fundamental physics.  Would a dialog box appear on the simulation screen asking the designer to make decisions about how to treat a new class of quark that had never been observed?  Then once the designer answers this question the simulation moves on?  Moreover, so many trappings of modern life are the result of applications of scientific breakthroughs like this?  For example, we could have never built semiconductors and thus computers without a solid understanding of quantum mechanics since they take advantage of quantum effects.  So closing the dialog box would require not only require describing the results of this experiment, but also coding up a bunch of new high-level abstractions that represent things like semi-conductors.  The simulation would need to know when it could use the molecular mechanics model, and when it would have to substitute a more detailed model or a coding abstraction that simplifies the results of more base laws.

If we lived in such a simplified simulation, it seems likely that chinks in the armor of reality would periodically appear.  Modern science has few inconsistencies like this.  (The big bang and quantum randomness being the two biggest two exceptions IMHO.)  I would wager that if we live in a simulation it is a completely accurate physical model that started with the big bang and covers the entire universe including our own evolution from primordial soup.  It’s not clear to me whether or not our universe has enough matter/energy to build a computer powerful enough to run such a simulation.  I should dig up my notes from Yael Maguire’s excellent talk at Foo Camp on the fundamental limits of computation to be sure, but I know it would chew through at least solar systems worth of our universe if not galaxies or more to simulate a comparable universe.  It seems more likely to me that if our world is simulated then the “host world” is governed by a different set of physical laws.  This point is debatable and important, but I’ll assume from here that the host world is governed by different laws.

Motivations of the Simulation Designers and Implications for Personal Morality

As the NY Times article points out, the simulators might just be bored, doing the equivalent of playing video games with us.  Or they might be scientific researchers investigating how changes to fundamental laws affect how worlds evolve.  Whatever their goals are in running a simulation of this scale, they are almost certainly interested in the complexity that we are creating here and now.  But how should we behave?

Robin Hanson suggests that as individuals living in a simulation we should try to lead the most interesting, impactful lives that we can.  This goal attempts to optimize for the case that the simulators will pick individuals from this simulated society to do something special with.  I think it extremely unlikely that the designers care about individuals at all.  If they’re looking at anything, I’d bet it’s entire societies.  So, if we are living in a simulation, I argue that we should do our best to advance technology as an insurance policy against extinction.  I have written a fair bit about the transhuman morals that such a guiding principal implies, but basically it boils down to being a geek and/or a hippie – advance technology as fast as possible and conserve natural resources so that the world doesn’t end before we reach the next level of technology.  Thinking that somebody might hit the “stop” button on the entire simulation puts a new twist on the idea of the world ending because as a society we failed to reach a certain level of technological sophistication.

A Simulation Argument for Truth in Mathematical Beauty and Simplicity

If our world is a simulation running inside a massive computing device, then something must have programmed this simulation.  The programmers of the simulation chose the physical laws that we live by, perhaps to see what would happen.  This puts an interesting spin on evaluating fundamental physical laws.  Which of these two equations below is more likely to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation designer wrote the code?  These are two different mathematical representations of P.A.M. Dirac’s eponymous equation, which is AFAIK believed to be a completely accurate representation of our physical world.

By this logic, the second one is almost certainly closer to how the simulation programmer understood the concept.  This perspective puts an interesting twist on Occam’s razor – the principal that the simpler explanation is probably true.  My grandfather believed that the simpler a physical law was, the more likely it was to be correct.  In this way he saw a certain beauty in math and physics.  If our world exists only as a simulation, then the simpler a physical law is, the more likely it is to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation was coded.

There’s an evolutionary advantage to cooking food — it kills parasites, bacteria and other food-borne diseases while doing little to decrease the nutritional value of the food.  So it makes sense that we would have evolved a predisposition to eating cooked food, and it seems likely this happened in the form of liking the taste of smoked food.  The genome helped to encourage food-safety rules for us that our brains hadn’t yet worked out.  The fact that smoky food is carcinogenic is a little sad.  I’m guessing it points to the fact that we’ve been subtly encouraged to eat this food for maybe only a couple hundred of thousands of years, which isn’t long enough for our digestive systems to learn how to render safe the multitude of different compounds found in smoke.  That and the fact that most cancers like this happen so late in life as to be essentially irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint — once you’ve had your kids and raised them, it doesn’t much matter what happens to your body.

This also hearkens back to a time when humans knew how to use fire, but had not fully mastered it.  I’m convinced this is why we love to stare at a fire for hours on end. It is pacifying in a lizard-brain kind of way.  (How many times have you watched that chicken go around just now?) There almost certainly was a time when humans knew how to use fire, but not make it.  They gained benefits from it through cooking or heating, but had to get very lucky to capture it from the wild say  after a natural lightning strike.  As such, it was extremely important to the whole tribe that somebody was always watching the fire to make sure it didn’t go out.

If you’d like to follow along the antics of cooking large mammals over open flames, I’ll be posting regular updates to my food and recipe blog, Add Garlic.  There’s also a “recipe” for spit-roast chicken here.

My girlfriend’s condition has gotten worse in recent months, to the point where immuno-suppresents seem reasonable.  But instead, she’s opted to do something much more difficult and follow the advice of a naturopath.  She’s agreed to eliminate basically all tasty foods from her diet for some unreasonably long period of time.  After weeks of eating nothing but rice and steamed vegetables (I’m exaggerating, but not much) she’ll slowly start adding foods in one at a time to see what might be causing an negative reaction.  It’s an elimination diet — a fairly common practice which is pretty easy to visualize but takes care and dedication to do properly.

Why suffer through this process instead of just taking some pills and getting better?  Because it promises
to understand and solve the cause of the problem, rather than just cover up the symptoms.  I admire her strength and wisdom in this choice.  Until then, we’ll be making lots of use of the veggie steamer.  (My veggie steamer actually looks a lot more like this one, but mine has the fabulous retro-luddite feature of a knob to set how long to cook for instead of digital controls.)

First, a little computer science background.  Turing completeness is the idea that a computing system has the same capabilities as a universal Turing machine.  This theoretical machine moves along a long tape which has various symbols on it that the machine can read and write.  The machine itself is always in one internal state, but will change to different states based on its programming and input.  It is programmed by a huge state transition table which says "if you’re in state X, and you’re reading symbol Y, then write symbol Z, move left n spaces, and switch to state W" for all possible states and symbols.  It turns out that with a long enough tape and enough states this device can do just about anything you think of a computer being able to do.  In fact, computer scientists have shown that every modern computer system is functionally equivalent to a Turing machine.  That is to say all modern computers are Turing complete.  It’s useful because it’s simple enough to prove theorems about.  Some important things we know about Turing machines and anything which is functionally equivalent to one:

• Turing machines are deterministic — given a set of inputs they’ll always reach the same output.
• It’s impossible to reliably predict whether or not a program on a Turing machine will ever finish.

I see two ways to interpret the question of whether or not a human brain is Turing complete.  The first one is "Can a human brain perform the same functions as a Turing machine?"  I think that given a pen, paper, and enough patience the answer is clearly yes.  But that’s not the question that interests me.

As a transhumanist, the interesting question for me is "Can a Turing-complete computer perform the same functions as a human brain?"  This question is important to me because if the answer is yes, then it is possible for a computer to simulate a human personality.  That is to say uploading of a human consciousness into a computer is possible.  I’m going to dodge the detailed analysis of this question today, and get back to it in a later article.  For now, let’s assume the answer is "Yes" and see what that implies about free will.

Remember that theorem that says Turing machines are deterministic?  That is, once you start it going with a given set of inputs, that it’s always going to reach the same answer?  If this were true for us as humans, then we would have no free will — our actions would be entirely determined by our current state and our surroundings.  We might think we are making choices, but in fact a fast computer could run the same calculation and tell us what our answer would be before we thought we had decided.  So by this logic if uploading is possible, then humans have no free will.  Troubling, eh?

Fortunately, I think the above analysis has a flaw.  Let’s dive down a little deeper into neurochemistry.  Neurons fire as a result of electro-chemical processes.  Basic chemistry tells us that the rates of chemical reactions are deterministic based on concentrations of the relevant input chemicals.  But if you took stat-mech then you learned that these predicted rates are actually just statistical averages and that they’re only accurate if the brazillions of molecules involved happen to collide with each other at a constant frequency as they randomly bounce around in solution.  And quantum mechanics tells us that this apparently random bouncing around is in fact, to Einstein’s chagrin, truly random — god does play dice with the universe.  (I’m not sure I completely buy this, but I’ll have to save that for another article too.  Yes, I know that the Bell inequalities were experimentally observed in the 1980’s but it still sits funny with me.  Sorry grandpa.  More on this later.)  Because of this randomness, the instantaneous rate of any chemical reaction will vary randomly, while still averaging around the classically predicted rate.  So the upshot is that neurons don’t behave completely deterministically, but that the exact timing of neurons firing has a truly (quantum) random component to it.

Now this implies quite firmly that our brains cannot be simulated by a Turing machine since Turing machines can’t act randomly, and thus wouldn’t be able to properly simulate the randomness of neurons firing.  But if we modify a Turing machine slightly so that a spot on its tape read a different random symbol each time you check, I think we’re good.  Given this, it seems reasonable that a modern computer that has a source of truly random data could simulate a brain.  Some have argued that we need quantum computers to simulate consciousness, but I don’t think so.  (Again, more on this later.)

Computers are pretty good at generating psuedo-random data internally, and by listening to the outside world (hard drive vibration, microphones, etc) can generate what is probably actually random data.  If true randomness is really important, we can build small accessory cards that sample thermal noise on
a resistor and produce large volumes of truly (quantum) random data.  Some advanced cryptographic systems do this today.  So it’s totally possible today to build this modified Turing machine that also incorporates random input.

Now our transhuman dilemma is solved.  The essence of free will lies in the quantum randomness of electro-chemical processes in our brain.  Moreover, it will be possible to upload our personalities into computers, complete with our free wills in tact, by incorporating random processes into the hardware that simulates our brains.  If the computers we upload into are only psuedo-random (as almost all software is today), we will appear to have free will, in fact we will believe that we have it, but we will in fact be total robots.  Now, who can come up with a Turing test for free will?

[[Thanks to Barry Brummit.  This article is a rehash of a couple good conversations we had over New Year's and this morning after yoga practice.]]

I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard hold out would always say "This ain’t rain.  Back where I come from we have real rain and this ain’t it."  Well last night I feel confident there was a 100% chance of rain.  It was a full on  storm.  Things broke.

In one night we got a record 2.2" of rain with winds gusting to 74 mph.  Roads were closed everywhere.  Power flickered all night.  Things banged loudly.  My neighbor’s basement flooded because water was coming up through the drain!  By work I saw a manhole cover that looked like a beautiful fountain with jets of water squirting up through the holes.  My rug in my basement got fairly wet, as far as I can tell because of water coming down the chimney!!  It was a bad time to realize that the last time I pulled my fileserver out to work on it I didn’t plug it into a UPS.  Oops.

A couple friends and I wanted to experience the weather so we put on full snowboarding / mountaineering outfits and wandered out.  We ended up spending a good chunk of the evening standing on a rooftop patio with a great view of the city, watching the city be destroyed.  Explosions filled the night from lightning and transformers blowing.  We could always tell which ones were lightning because the flashes were white and brief.  Whenever a transformer would blow, there would be a pulsing glow that would linger for a second or two.  They were also typically bright green, although we did see one or two redding purple ones.  I’m pretty sure the green blasts were from large amounts of copper wire burning very quickly in a  giant short-circuit.  I’m not sure what metal they’d use in transformers that burns reddish purple.  Occasionally we saw what must have been a whole substation go because the glow would last 3 or 4 seconds.  For some reason we were cheering.  After one such explosion, we saw all of Bellevue go dark, only to light up again half a second later.

It was amazing.

At some point we realized that the street’s own transformer was at eye level less than 20′ from where we were standing.  When we finally connected the large explosions in the distance to the utility pole mounted bomb next to us, we decided to go inside.  Show’s over.  Don’t wanna die tonight.

I find this amazing for a couple of reasons.  First, it drives home the artificial nature of trans-fats.  I’ve thought of them as similar to saturated fats in a lot of ways — things that are everywhere but should be avoided.  But thinking about what it would mean to not use them in a restaurant makes clear that they’re not so omnipresent.  No crisco vegetable shortening, and no margarine.  Other than that, what ingredients have trans fats in them?  Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil — I’ve never used that.  Have you?

I do want to mention olive oil a bit.  Olive oil is primarily a monounsaturated fat, which is a very healthy kind of oil.  Heating a monounsaturated oil like can turn it into a trans-fat.  Some have concluded from this that cooking with olive oil is unhealthy, and I admit I’ve spread this rumor too.  But from the little research I’ve managed to dig up (1, 2) this process doesn’t occur enough to be a real issue in traditional cooking settings.  I will say this research is thin and minds may change.

I’d like to say a bit about the chemistry involved here.  Trans-fats refers to the configuration of carbons on either side of a double-bond, or a place where the fat is unsaturated — it’s a trans rather than a cis configuration.  Cis fats have marked bends, while trans fats have kinks in otherwise straight chains. I’m guessing the reduced mobility of the unsaturated fats caused by
their bends are related to their health benefits, but I’m not sure.  Here are two monounsaturated fats, in cis and trans forms:

Cis fatty acid: oleic acid

Trans fatty acid: elaidic acid

Also, most of what I’ve been reading assumes that hydrogenation is the only way that trans fats can occur, which is wrong.  Industrial hydrogenation converts unsaturated double-bonds to single bonds, preferentially in the trans configuration.  But other chemical processes can do this too.  Cows naturally produce small quantities of trans fats.

This law is a great example the government taking a broader interest in society values than any individual constituent would.  The government pays for health care, so in this case they do have a direct interest in improving public health, and will likely see a benefit from this, so it’s not a perfect example of the principal I’m expounding.  In general, I think it’s the government’s responsibility to legislate things that are for the "long-term good of society" (in quotes because I recognize that it’s hard to define or agree upon).  This burden falls uniquely on the government when there’s nobody else who clearly benefits from this kind of legislation.  Environmental protection is a classic example of this — do things that won’t directly help us or our kids but rather our great grand-kids.  The Lorax spoke for the trees for the trees had tongues.  Today, NGOs tend to do that speaking, and sometimes the government listens.  I’m surprised, impressed and proud of New York for this bold move!

First, there was the fact that there was no penalty for having a heavy bridge.  Many bridge designs for similar circumstances use a hundred or two hundred sticks.  Our team made it a goal to use as many of the 1000 sticks as we could glue together in time.  It was ugly.  It was heavy.  It was not well designed.  But it was strong.  Another team brought an iron due to the increased glue-melting capacity managed to use 998 of their sticks.  It was formidable.  But it had a fatal flaw common to many other bridges…

Then there was the scale.  In order to weigh how much load was being placed on the bridges, the contestants stood on a bathroom scale placed on the bridge.  And for whatever reason (maybe to help with stability) the bathroom scale was placed on a cutting board.  Here’s our rag-tag bridge being tested in this manner:

(photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

You’ll notice that the weight is fairly evenly distributed along about 13" of the 15" gap.  This significantly changes the design goals from a traditional truss bridge.  Other bridge contests put a point load in the middle, which is not too dissimilar to a real bridge — it tends to try to buckle in the middle.  But in this setup, the bridge is just being crushed vertically. 

Most of the bridges were fairly strong against vertical crushing.  In fact, the only bridges that failed in this capacity seemed to do so because they weren’t centered properly — one side had just an inch or two on the block and it snapped off.  But the others all failed by sheering.  Being imperfect humans, the weights were shifting forwards and backwards a fair bit — perpendicular to the axis of the bridge.  Very few of the bridges had any diagonal bracing against this.  The top, bottom and sides can all be perfectly strong, but if the corner joints fail to hold a 90 degree angle, it parallelograms into flatness.  In my observation, this is how every properly centered bridge failed.

It’s an interesting social phenomenon seeing the same design mistake in every bridge.  It’s understandable for many reasons.  First off, real truss bridges that hold cars don’t have any bracing in this direction.  They couldn’t.  The braces would get in the way of the cars.  Most model bridges don’t either.  If your load isn’t active along the side-to-side axis, it’s not a huge deal.

Also, it’s rather difficult to get bracing in at those angles.  For us it was something of an afterthought.  We looked at it when it was somewhat assembled (23 minutes in) and said "we need diagonal braces!"  But the popsicle sticks weren’t well suited to attaching at the odd angles necessary.  Keeping with the design philosophy of the team, I heaped a bunch of glue on the end of a reinforced double-thick stick and slid it into the middle of the bridge.  Then I dribbled glue onto the other end until it seemed like it might hold.  I repeated this process a few times, and got some nice burns in the process.  (I wish I had a picture down the interior of our bridge.  Maybe I’ll add one.)

It’s hard to know how much this helped, but our bridge was quite strong.  It held Jen and Eric at the same time!

(photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

First, a minor quip from page 3 where they confuse atomic number and atomic mass.  There is no element #184.  That’s tungsten’s atomic mass.  For tungsten, Z=74.

The most fundamental problem with the paper is that I can’t find any explanation of how the gamma rays they’re dealing with are even entangled in the first place.  All they say is "Since one electron produces several photons instantaneously, such photons are entangled according to Quantum Mechanics."  (p.3)  This is indicative of a basic problem with their treatment of entanglement throughout their writing — they write as if particles themselves get entangled, which isn’t really accurate.  Some measurable aspect of particles can get entangled — for example, a pair of electrons might have their spin-states entangled, but the electrons themselves aren’t entangled.  In this case we might guess that it’s the polarization of the gammas which is entangled, but they don’t call that out.  And that’s critical for understanding how it would get transferred to electrons in the crystals.  Polarization of the gamma effects the spin of the electron when it gets bumped into the valence band, maybe?  Definitely something they need to be explicit about.

They do cite a whole separate paper they wrote about entanglement with these gammas.  This paper has also not been peer-reviewed and is never cited by anybody else.  This article also doesn’t explain why the gammas given off in this radioactive decay process should be entangled except except by saying "It is well known that low energy photon pairs from atomic radiative cascade are entangled" and citing two other papers.  One of these papers has nothing to do with radioactive decay and the other one (I think it’s here but I’m not sure) has nothing to do with quantum entanglement.  Nice.  They really need to draw some connection about what aspect of these gamma particles is entangled and why.

Overall they seem to treat QE as if it’s some kind of magic pixie dust that happens whenever 2 particles get created simultaneously and that it offers these particles magical properties to defy the normal rules of science.  Moreover, in their analysis these magical properties can be easily conveyed to other particles, whereas in the real world entangled states are extremely fragile.  They explain this by citing research into quantum computing that explains how in very carefully controlled circumstances, entanglement can be transferred from one particle to another.  In reality, entangled states are very fragile — the wave functions collapse very easily, and it almost never gets transferred between particles.  In their world, it’s fairly automatic.

The pixie dust theme continues with their explanation for what’s going on within the oven which is the signaling mechanism in their FTL communicator.  "Entangled electrons, as the experiments show, do not appear to exit from the traps as the temperature increases except at very discrete and narrow characteristic trap emptying temperatures."  No citation or further explanation.  QE electrons just kinda do things differently from all other electrons in the world.  Because they’re special, I guess.

The data are pretty sketch too.  They never plot the temperature of their ovens — seems kinda important IMHO.  But at this point, there’s not much point in complaining.  There’s no explanation (beyond pixie dust) for why the random changes in luminescence would replay themselves while increasing and decreasing temperature.  As if the macroscopic object had a memory of what it did at a previous temperature because of its special QE electrons.  No attempt to explain this at an atomic level except to refer to the "particular behavior of the entangled electrons in the traps."

Sigh.  I’m glad the professori emeriti are having fun in their near-retirement.  It’s not the first time I’ve been duped by a research paper.  I remember in college taking a class on scientific ethics and wanting to cite a fascinating paper (I think it’s this one) about research into a longevity gene that was conferred truly amazing properties onto mice and fish, until I noticed the paper was published on April 1st.  But it had lots of references to other articles, so I started checking them.  This was in 1993 or so, so I had to go to the library.  I couldn’t find most of the journals they cited — maybe they didn’t exist or maybe our library just didn’t carry them.  But one was in a reputable journal I recognized, and it was about a critical piece of science that led to this research.  Excitedly I pulled out the thick bound volume from the shelf and started leafing towards the page.  I expected a full page ad or a table-of-contents page or something, but no there was a real article describing the first discovery of this gene.  And then I noticed that this article too was published on April 1st.  Sigh.  The paper was due the next day, and this article was a big part of my argument.  And it was a class on ethics.  What a quandary.  I was up late that night.

Intercontinental quantum liaisons between entangled electrons in ion traps of thermoluminescent crystals

The fact that they shipped an entangled crystal across the pacific to perform the experiment sounds like pure drama to me.  The interesting part is that they seem to have found a mechanism to do something to one particle that produces a detectable change in its entangled pair.

Li’l background on quantum mechanics and entanglement: Two particles are entangled when their states are correlated (generally exactly opposite) but both uncertain.  To take a macroscopic example, imagine flipping a coin in a way where the flip was truly random, and covering it up before there was any observation of which side it landed on.  In a quantum sense, the coin is literally both heads and tails until somebody looks — its wavefunction is a superposition of both states.  Once somebody observes its state, the wavefunction collapses to one state or the other. 

Entanglement would happen if we could somehow cut it in half without looking at it, and sending one half of the cut coin to Paris.  (There are many real-world microscopic processes that produce pairs of particles that are entangled like this, conceptually at least.)  Then we each (here in Seattle and over in Paris) have half a coin which is both Heads and Tails at the same time.  But once either one of us looks at the coin, the other coin’s wavefunction instantly collapses as well to the same state. 

The paradox here is that it seems like doing something here in Seattle has an instantaneous (faster-than-light) effect on something in Paris.  Faster than light communication brings the fabric of reality into question because it allows messages to arrive before they are sent and could allow seemingly impossible things like time-travel.  Fortunately special relativity tells us this is impossible, so our fabric is fine.  Since the collapse of a wavefunction into one of two states that you haven’t observed yet doesn’t actually convey any useful information, this also isn’t a problem.

As I said, I haven’t fully digested this article, but Desbrandes and Van Gent are claiming to have found a way to convey useful information using entanglement.  They claim that after creating a pair of entangled crystals, that changing the temperature of one of them causes a measurable effect in the other one.  This sounds like instantaneous communication, regardless of how far apart the two parties are.  How’s it work?  I wish I knew.

When we think about special relativity and things moving at near light speed, the word "simultaneous" loses meaning.  Time gets warped, and you have to consider it in a frame of reference — Twin’s paradox and all that.  So if simultaneity isn’t straightforward, then what is meant by the "instantaneous" collapse of wavefunctions also becomes unclear.  But AFAIK nobody thinks propagation of wavefunction collapse happens at lightspeed so…  who knows?  Not me.  Not yet anyway.