Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist from ASU, has just written a book called A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing.   I highly recommend you get yourself a copy.  I also really enjoyed the book’s promotional video.

Krauss finds something in nothing from ASU News on Vimeo.

Just the other day I posted a video where researchers in machine vision took a digital film of them roaming about a college campus and extracted a 3D model of the entire campus from the film images alone.  Depth information can be extracted based on the rate of how the colored pixels change relative to one another.  Pixels “further” in the distance change slower than those up close, and using computational algorithms you can use this basic idea to extract “space” from the images falling on the camera’s “eye”.

I’m a quest you see.  A quest I’ve been on for years.

“Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.”

- Albert Einstein

This is all part of a larger quest which came long before I became interested in physics.  You see, I started off reading the works of philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and others.  I wanted to understand what “I” consisted of.   I later realized Einstein was on this same quest, and in a way, I want to pick up where he left off, focusing on how the subjective sense of space and time are created by our brains, and help physicists figure out how to combine relativity theory with quantum physics.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

-Albert Einstein

I’ve spent the past few weeks studying quantum mechanics.  I keep reflecting on things like Schrodinger’s equation, and try to think of how to find a distinction between myself and the objective world.  Somehow I’ve always hoped to better understand objective reality through physics, but I can’t get over some major philosophical hurdles.  Einstein seemed to struggle with the same problem.  In this letter to his friend Max Born, he was trying to find a way to hold onto a concept of objective reality as separate from a particular observer.  After all, physics gets its name from physical.

I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold on to physical reality.  We are … all aware of the situation regarding what will turn out to be the basic foundational concepts in physics: the point-mass or the particle is surely not among them; the field, in the Faraday-Maxwell sense, might be, but not with certainty. But that which we conceive as existing (“real”) should somehow be localized in time and space. That is, the real in one part of space, A, should (in theory) somehow “exist” independently of that which is thought of as real in another part of space, B. If a physical system stretches over A and B, then what is present in B should somehow have an existence independent of what is present in A. What is actually present in B should thus not depend the type of measurement carried out in the part of space A; it should also be independent of whether or not a measurement is made in A.

If one adheres to this program, then one can hardly view the quantum-theoretical description as a complete representation of the physically real. If one attempts, nevertheless, so to view it, then one must assume that the physically real in B undergoes a sudden change because of a measurement in A. My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion.

However, if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I don’t see at all what physics is supposed to be describing. For what is thought to be a “system” is after all, just conventional, and I do not see how one is supposed to divide up the world objectively so that one can make statements about parts.

- Albert Einstein, in a personal letter to Max Born

The only way I can think to proceed is to fully understand quantum physics and relativity theory (which is coming along nicely these days for me), and then figure out the algorithms the brain is using to separate objects one from another, create a sense of existing within space, our sense of self, and how our sense of time comes to be.   It’s not an easy path, but it’s the only one I find fulfilling.  I’ve never wanted to write boring business software, or attend school, or work a job.  Unfortunately I’m forced to do these things.  But I always have Joseph Campbell’s quote in the back of my mind.

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls”

- Joseph Campbell

Let’s see where this road leads.

There’s a new symphony of science video out.  Have you seen it?  What!?  You haven’t?  Well here it is!

I don’t think I posted the last symphony of science video either.  It’s about quantum physics.  Nice!

Yesterday I wrote a post about space-time, giving an example of how strange things can be when dealing with special relativity.  If some of you have already read it, forgive me, for I wrote it at like 3 AM, and it had a few minor errors in it.  My brain was tired because I struggled for hours to get Latex working in my posts (it allows you to put math equations in blog posts).  Earlier today I went back and read over that post and thought, “Woah, that ain’t right.”   So if it confused you the first time, check it out again and see if it makes a little more sense now.  I have to remember that after I click “publish” on this site, it also emails it out to everyone on my list as well, and some of you get my posts that way.  I need to wait until the next day after I’m rested, and make sure I didn’t make any mistakes!

For the next couple of days I want to make some posts regarding reference frames and explore the strange things that happen when you accelerate relative to someone else.  You’ve probably heard about Einstein’s relativity theory, and one of its main premises is that the speed of light is constant, regardless of how you’re moving.  It’s the same in each and every reference frame.  Let’s move slowly and explore the implications of an idea like that, and see how it works.

We’ll take a very simple example of how events can happen at different times in different reference frames, going very very slowly, and dissecting the situation in detail.  We’ll begin by assuming we’re a woman named Anna, and we have two lamps in our hands which each have a button on them.  If we press that button, the lamps emit a strong flash of light.  Let’s hold up our lamps, one to the left, one to the right, both an equal distance from our head.  Now we’ll hit the buttons on each lamp at the exact same time.  What happens?

In order to avoid any weird confusions, let’s assume that our brain is infinitely fast and that we’re aware of everything going on around us, and we do not depend on sensory organs to get information about the world.  We don’t need eyes or ears, but we can just perceive what’s going on around us because we’re directly tapped into the space-time fabric.  In order to perceive the lamps we’re holding in front of us, we don’t have to wait for light to bounce off of them and fall on our eyes.  We simply feel and sense the distortion in the space-time fabric which they make.  We can also directly sense and feel the electro-magnetic waves of light pulsing through the space.  We’re kind of like a puppet master, where small strings are connected to each and every point in space, but our strings aren’t normal strings.  They feel every tiny vibration, no matter how small, and we don’t have to wait for the wave to propagate up the string to us in order to sense it.  The instant anything happens to those strings, any change or anything at all, we know about it.  I could use the analogy of a spider on the space-time web, but I don’t want to be a spider.  Alright, we’re fully connected and aware of everything.  This connection to our web is an analogy for a reference frame.  Our equations for a reference frame will represent those strings to each and every point around us.

Let’s hit our buttons.

The moment we press the buttons we sense the electricity pulsing through each lamp and then the lamps themselves light up.  Both emit electro-magnetic vibrations (the light waves), and we sense them moving through the space-time fabic, vibrating through each point in space toward us, both from our left side and our right side.  The two waves travel through space at the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second), and in a very very short time period they each connect with our left and right cheeks at exactly the same time.

So far everything is going as expected.  We’re beginning to feel adventurous.  We invite our friend Bob to join us, and he also possess this “spider” like ability to sense everything going on around him as well, connected to each and every point of space-time in his reference frame.  We decide to climb up on a moving train car which is moving to the east relative to Bob.

As we climb up on the train car, we notice some amazing things happening.  As the friction between our shoes and the train car applies a force on our body, accelerating us faster and faster, we feel ourselves being “disconnected” from our web of space-time strings, and we’re being connected to a new set of strings.  Every instant in time we’re being connected to a new set of strings until eventually our body reaches the same velocity as the train car and then things stabilize.   We’re now connected to a brand new set of strings.  We’ve entered a new reference frame.

Whew.  That made us dizzy for a second.  We notice that Bob has become thinner in the direction we’re moving.  His length has been contracted in the direction of motion of the train car.  In this case, he’s less wide and looks like a skinny bean pole.  We further notice that the electricity pulsing through his brain is moving slower than it was before we hopped on the train car.  We now decide to do the same experiment we did before with our lamps.  We hold them out to our left and right and press the buttons.  What do you think happens?  You might guess this.

Let’s say our train car is moving 75% the speed of light.  That’s pretty darn fast.  You might expect that because we’re moving so fast, the light wave coming out of our right-hand lamp would have to chase our moving body, whereas the other light wave coming from the lamp in our left-hand would come at us faster.   The light wave from the left-hand lamp should hit our cheek before the right-hand lamp.  As strange as this may seem, that’s not what happens in reality.  In real life, you’d press the buttons and we’d have the same experience as when we were on the ground – both waves strike our cheeks at exactly the same time.

So wait a minute.  Does light ignore the fact that we’re moving?  Sort of, but it’s a bit more subtle than that.  The speed of light will be the same for any reference frame.   As the spider-like puppet-master watching that electro-magnetic vibration pulse through space along one of our strings, we’ll always, ALWAYS, sense it moving at the speed of light.

Ok, but what about Bob?  He’s connected to space-time in his reference frame which is different from ours.  We left him on the ground.  How does this all work for him?   Well he watched us climb up on the train car and saw our body become tall and skinny like his did for us!  In his frame of reference, our body contracted in the direction of the train’s motion.  Also, he notices that the electricity pulsing through our brains is moving more slowly than his own.

So what about the lamps and the light beams we fired at our cheeks?  What does he perceive to happen?  Well we know that the speed of those light waves has to travel at the speed of light for him, just as they do for us.  He sees those same light waves, but they’re traveling through a different space (down different strings).  That’s one of the main assumptions of Einstein’s theory of relativity.  It’s really weird, but it’s how it works.  But this leaves us with a problem.  To Bob, we’re moving at 75% the speed of light to the East.  In his reference frame, the light pulse has to chase us down to catch up with our motion, just like in the third picture.  So what happens?   What’s the solution to this?   Bob doesn’t see us press the buttons at the same time.  To him, we pressed the button in our right hand first, and then pressed the left-hand button a bit later.  To Bob, it looks like we timed it to where we’d fire the right-hand button a little early so that both waves will hit our cheeks at the same time.  And that’s exactly what happens.  The light waves do hit our cheeks at the same time in Bob’s frame as well, but the light pulses were not fired from the lamps at the same time.  The right-hand light wave had to travel further and was emitted earlier.

Light is a pretty amazing phenomenon.  It seems to be a sort of four-dimensional vibration.  At least that’s how I understand it, but I have a lot to learn.  In my next post, I want to talk about the Lorentz contraction and time dilation, showing how things don’t have a set size or shape.  Until next time!

The other day I mentioned how I struggle to understand what “objective” space is, if such an idea even makes sense.  I figured it’d be nice to bring you guys in on my struggle, so I’ll be posting some real world examples using modern physics, showing you guys just how weird and bizarre thinking about space-time really is.  Before I begin though, if anything in this post is incorrect, please let me know.  I’ve noticed that some of you who read this blog are physicists, and have contacted me by email in the past, so feel free to email me or comment on any errors in this.  I’ll fix them, and hopefully you’ll help me understand all of this better!

In my last post, I embedded a Youtube video from the BBC program called What Is Reality.  In it Dr. Tegmark of MIT wrote some equations on a glass window, pointing out that these mathematical equations are a window which we can use to look at and understand the world at its deepest levels.  One of them was the Lorentz transformation, which describes how to deal with fast moving things (near light speed).

It relates the coordinate system and flow of time between two “reference frames”.  For example, say I’m standing here on Earth, and I exist in 3D space with the coordinates x, y, and z, and time flows according to t.  t = 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, and so on, moment by moment, just like we’re used to.  Initially you’re beside me in a space ship on a long runway, but then you rapidly accelerate and by the time you lift-off, let’s assume you’re moving 80% the speed of light (0.8c).  (A crazy example, but just bear with me).

As you accelerated relative to me up to 80% the speed of light, time itself was slowing down for you relative to me.  The electricity flowing through your brain, the blood flowing through your veins, the very flow of your conscious thought, all slowed down relative to me.  At the same time, from your perspective in the space ship, the big super-long runway is scrunching up shorter and shorter in the direction you’re accelerating.  It’s very weird, and once I actually work an example for you, you’ll see just how weird all of this is.

Let’s write out the Lorentz transformation in equation form.

(1)  

The variable v is the speed between the two reference frames and c is the speed of light.  x and t are position and time in the first frame, and x’ and t’ are position and time in the second frame.  Let’s now work a problem and examine it.  Here’s the problem:

According to Jason on Earth, a distant uninhabited Planet Y is 5 light years away.  Steve is in a spaceship moving away from Earth at 80% the speed of light, or 0.8c.  Steve’s on his way to check out the planet, but unfortunately for him, Greg didn’t care much for Planet Y, so he blew it up.  According to Jason’s astronomical logs on Earth, this happened 2 years after Steve passed Earth.  (We mustn’t forget that Jason had to wait a while for the light from the explosion to reach him.)  Call the the passing of Steve and Jason time zero for both.  (a) According to Steve, how far away is Planet Y when it explodes?  (b)  At what time did it explode?

Note that in this example, Steve doesn’t take off from Earth but is assumed to have been flying by at 0.8c from the get go.  To solve this problem we simply plug the numbers into the Lorentz transformation equation, but the answer is quite intriguing.

(2)  

A NEGATIVE time?  You may be thinking that’s a typo, but no, it’s not.  That’s really NEGATIVE 3.33 years.  What does all this mean?  It means that if after Steve sees the explosion, he were to calculate when the explosion happened from his frame of reference, it would have happened over three years before the event of him passing by me on Earth.   But I calculated it out and inferred that it happened two years after Steve passed by me Earth.  This may sound impossible but it’s actually correct. His reference frame is “aware” of the explosion over three years before my frame of reference is.

Let’s break all of this down, working it all out from both my perspective on Earth, and next for Steve on his spaceship.

Jason’s Perspective

From my perspective on Earth, everything is “normal”, so none of the math is terribly confusing.  Most of this problem is simple distance = rate * time stuff.  The planet explodes at t = 2 years after Steve’s passing by me.  At this time, Steve will have moved (0.8c)*(2 years) = 1.6 light years out toward the planet.  I see a distance between Steve and Planet Y of 5 ly – 1.6 ly = 3.4 light years and a relative velocity between Steve and the light of the explosion of 1.8c  (he’s moving at 0.8c toward the planet, and light is coming toward him at 1.0c from the planet).  So the light from the explosion will reach Steve in another t = 3.4 ly / 1.8c = 1.89 years — at the time, according to me, Jason, of 2 + 1.89 = 3.889 years.   The distance I now see between Steve and Planet Y (or the center of the debris) is 5 ly – (0.8c)*(3.889 years) = 1.889 ly.  In the meantime, I will know that less time has gone by on Steve’s clock.  In particular, .

Steve’s Perspective

Now on to Steve’s perspective.  The distance the planet is from him when he realizes that it has been blown away is shorter for him.  How much shorter?  You apply the Lorentz contraction:    Now the big question we have to solve is this:  If Planet Y moves toward Steve at 0.8c, and light from the explosion moves at him at 1.0c, how long will it take light to get 1.133 ly ahead of the planet?  The relative velocity between Planet Y and the light from the explosion is 0.2c, and   Solving for , we get 5.667 yrs.   If Steve’s clock reads 2.33 years when he first notices the explosion, and it took 5.667 years for that information to travel to him, the explosion must have happened at t’ = -3.33 years.

From this example you can see that objective events happen in different orders depending on your frame of reference (how you’re moving relative to one another).  In Steve’s frame there’s the explosion, and then he passes by me on Earth.  In my frame, Steve passes by, and then two years later Greg blew up the planet.  Both of us are correct.  When you accelerate, the flow of time changes, as well as properties of the space around you.

Currently I’m undergoing two different pursuits, but hope to tie them together.  The first pursuit is to figure out how the brain creates the subjective of sense of space from images falling on our eyes, and information being processed within our brains.  On the other hand, I work at understanding problems like the thought experiment above.  I hope to understand it well enough eventually to fuse the two together as best I can.  Most of the time, I just spin in circles, confused out of my mind.

I’ve mentioned many times on this blog that the way our brain represents space and the flow of time isn’t quite right.  This example illustrates that problem pretty well.  I struggle in vain to picture four dimensions in my mind, and see this fabric of space-time, and see the light-rays moving toward Steve, and also toward me, but I can’t even come close.  And when I try to picture things from each person’s perspective, I always want to assign a common time between the two of frames.  Some sort of “global” absolute time.  In the end, I just have to work these equations, and work more and more problems, in more and more varied situations, and get a better and better “feel” for what’s going on.

I’ve finally figured out how to embed math equations in my posts, so I want to start adding thought experiments like this in areas related to modern physics.  I’d like to maybe go into some of the basics of quantum mechanics, particle physics, nuclear physics, and all that good stuff.

As you all know, one of my main passions is decoding images into 3D environments.  I love researching machine vision and augmented reality.  Just check out how cool this stuff is.  In this next video, a guy creates a laser gun and points it at objects in his room.  Using AR, he creates this virtual HUD display, like he’s in some sort of giant mech-robot.  His program then uses visual information to measure the distance to the object he’s pointing at.  At the end of this little demo, a message appears above the robot’s head, it fires a laser blast at him, and he dodges it just in time.

In time I think everyone’s iPhones, mp3 players, and such will become far more powerful, allowing them to integrate with eye-glasses which support AR. This will let people watch movies, surf the web, and play interactive video games. Imagine if you controlled your desktop using devices like these used in this next video. Imagine spinning your windows around using your hands, bringing them closer or farther away from you.  Even more sophisticated, you could transform an entire room into a virtual experience, leaving windows in different areas of your room, picking them up, moving them, and so forth.  If you worked at it, I think you could use devices like the ones in this next video to revolutionize the desktop PC experience.  Using a mouse is a bit dated, I think.  AR technology allows much cooler alternatives.

Take LCD monitor displays.  They’re cool and all, but we won’t need them for much longer.  The problem with today’s handheld devices are their small displays.  Using AR glasses, you could have a much better experience.  You could watch movies on a virtual huge high-def screen, simulated by your glasses. The same applies to desktop PCs.  Why spend a fortune on a huge monitor when you could use AR glasses which project your desktop, movies, etc, onto a virtual canvas, placed anywhere you like within your room.  When you put on your glasses, it would appear.  It could be far more interactive, larger, and more vivid.

I thought of my parents in their living room.  My mom and dad both have their own TVs, stacked on top of one another.  They sit in recliners by one another and both watch different programs.  Each of them have headphones.  Imagine using AR instead!  They could transform that entire living room space into a huge TV/computer screen and both watch their own programs without interfering with one another.  They could each have multiple TV screens, surfing multiple channels.  Integrate that with your computer, or handheld device, and you have something pretty awesome there!  My mom wouldn’t have to suffer from headaches any longer.  She likes to sit in her recliner, but she finds laptops awkward on her lap, and when she has to look at a distant LCD monitor, it strains her eyes.  This would be a perfect solution for her.

I’m slightly envious of the students and professors from Queens University who made this next video. I was hoping to earn enough one day to build this exact setup. They’ve constructed a robot which flys around a pool table, capable of playing pool, but also able to show you what would happen were you to hit the ball in any particular way. They use augmented reality and physics.  You move your pool stick over the table, aim it at the cue-ball at a certain angle, move the stick back and forth, and so on, and while you do so, the computer shows you what would happen with lines and simulations.  This technology would help you master your billiards skills. Before too long, I’m sure there will be an iPhone AR app which will integrate with special glass which will be capable of doing this.  Put on those glasses and own your friends at billiards.  Master crazy trick shots and perform wonders!  Maybe I should write it?  I wonder if I’d make any money? It’d take me a little while to write it — maybe six months to a year or so.  I don’t know how to build the glasses though.  But I could write the app without any problems.  I think future iPhones would be powerful enough to handle the simulations and AR, but I’m not sure about current models.  I’d have to see.

I always wanted a robot like this because I could practice some difficult shot, and when I screwed it up, have the robot set the balls back up in their proper place.  Robots of the future will pamper us so much.  We’ll become so lazy!

Thinking of which, I may run this idea by some of the physics professors at Missouri S&T, and see if they know anyone who could build the glasses and would be interested.  Our university has a lot of contacts.  Maybe someone would be interested?  Who knows.  AR glasses would be huge.  I just need a tiny camera which can take in data, and also a way to project the images onto the lenses.  It has to be a really high-def awesome camera or people won’t want to look out of the glasses, and the images must be clear or the AR objects we project into the virtual space will jerk and move about.  The glasses need to be light and stylish, with many varieties, since people will be wearing them all the time.

I’d like to build this entertainment/computer desktop experience within AR.  Using OpenCV object recognition, I could make it respond to hands, so you could interact with the AR objects, such as resizing your screens, interacting with your computer, and so forth. I’m fired up!  I’ll write the code, somebody build those glasses!  Contact me!  jason (at) jasonsummers.org.

Here on my blog, I’ve tried to indicate that the big trends of the future are machine intelligence, the biotech revolution, and nanotechnology.   I just recently learned that Michio Kaku, a famous physicist and cofounder of string theory, has put together three hour long specials for the BBC talking about the future of these areas.

Machine Intelligence:  this includes things like general AI, embedding our cognition within the external environment into machines, and virtual reality.  Computer chips are going to become so cheap that they will be embedded into everything around us, including the walls, roads, furniture, our clothing, and more.   Computers are going to become super-intelligent, far more intelligent than even us!  Robots will be walking around, understanding your speech, and interacting with you in the real world.  Giant artificial computer super-brains are going to be constructed, housing all human knowledge.  All of this will be accessible from any computing platform, like a super-Google but far more intelligent than just a search engine.  Combine all of this with augmented reality, and you have one helluva combination of upcoming awesomeness!  You can watch this first video here for free on Youtube!

Biotechnology:  Imagine a world without sickness, disease, or aging.  Imagine creating life in the lab, and building specialized living organisms to do our bidding.  If you combine our exponential growth in understanding of the fields of biology and genetics with new, ever more powerful computing, you get the biotech revolution.  It will be changing everything, vastly improving the quality of life for human beings.  Many who keep up with the biotech revolution believe that it’s not unlikely that within fifty to one-hundred years, humans will have ended aging and will have the possibility to live forever (absent accidents, such as a car wreck, and such).  There’s nothing in our human DNA which says we have to die.  Our bodies just break down over time, but we are VERY close to mastering biology and all those chemical processes of the body.  You can watch the second video below on Youtube.

Nanotechnology:  Using tiny machines far smaller than a human hair, we will be constructing everything from our food, appliances, to materials.  We will be building things atom by atom, snapping them together like legos.  This will allow us to build anything the laws of nature allow, giving us a complete mastery of reailty.  We’ll have solar panels which are far more powerful than today’s best, allowing clean abundant energy.  Though this isn’t nanotechnology, if properly funded, we’ll also soon have fusion power, allowing us to convert ocean water into HUGE amounts of energy.  Energy will be so cheap that it will probably be free.  Remember that device in Star Trek where they ask the computer for a cup of coffee and it’s assembled for them on demand?  It just appears in the appliance?  Those are nanofactories, and we’ll probably have those within one-hundred years as well.   Nanotechnology will be lifting everyone out of poverty, removing the haves the have nots.  Nobody will live in poverty.  We’ll have nanomachines working with our bodies, keeping us healthy, happy, and strong.  We’ll be able to eat as much as we want, of anything we want, never gain weight, and never plug up.  These nanodevices will also likely make their way into our brains, greatly advancing our memory and intelligence, and allowing us to plug into virtual reality, and live out our wildest fantasies.  People won’t have to go to school, or learn trades.  They’ll just connect to the super-mother-brain and download any skills or information they’re needing.  You can watch the third video below on Youtube.

The future is so awesome, it’s beyond words.  To all terrorists, religious extremists, and those in power:  Don’t kill humanity off and stop this.  Don’t blow up the world in a nuclear holocaust.  Don’t pollute our planet so bad that we all die before this happens.  Don’t use this technology for wars and weaponry.  Life can be so amazing if we’ll just get along and work together.  Quit fighting over petty things that don’t matter.  Fund this technology so we can all live in abundance, perfect health, and have wild experiences in virtual reality!

I can’t say how long before we see this come into full fruition, but we’ll soon be entering an age of atomically precise manufacturing.  We will build our products using “nanofactories”.  If we want something, we will download a blueprint and construct it using raw-materials.  Countless tiny machines will build the products, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. For example, if you want a new laptop computer, you will simply go online, download the blueprint, and then have your nanofactory appliance build it for you.  The same will apply for food, or anything you can presently hold in your hands.

But you may be wondering how the blueprints will be created?  How will people share the physical things they create as easily as we share videos on Youtube today?   What if you wanted to share a flat-screen TV, or a Playstation console?  How about a hot bowl of soup, a hardback book, or a set of power tools?  How will blueprints be created for these things?  Enter molecular disassemblers!

In his book Engines of Creation 2.0: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Eric Drexler tells how all of this is going to work.

“Molecular computers will control molecular assemblers, providing the swift flow of instructions needed to direct the placement of vast numbers of atoms.  Nanocomputers with molecular memory devices will also store data generated by a process that is the opposite of assembly.

Assemblers will help engineers synthesize things; their relatives, disassemblers, will help scientists and engineers analyze things.  The case for assemblers rests on the ability of enzymes and chemical reactions to form bonds, and of machines to control the process. The case for disassemblers rests on the ability of enzymes and chemical reactions to break bonds, and of machines to control the process.  Enzymes, acids, oxidizers, alkali metals, ions, and reactive groups of atoms called free radicals — all can break bonds and remove groups of atoms.  Because nothing is absolutely immune to corrosion, it seems that molecular tools will be able to take anything apart, a few atoms at a time.  What is more, a nanomachine could (at need or convenience) apply mechanical force as well, in effect prying groups of atoms free.

A nanomachine able to do this, while recording what it removes layer by layer, is a disassembler.  Assemblers, disassemblers, and nanocomputers will work together.  For example, a nanocomputer system will be able to direct the disassembly of an object, record its structure, and then direct the assembly of perfect copies.  And this gives some hint of the power of nanotechnology.”

- Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0 – The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

This same technology will get rid of all our trash problems, and will rid our world of pollution.  You won’t throw things away; you’ll have them disassembled back into raw materials.  We’ll keep reusing the same atoms for everything.  We’ll be digging up our trash which we’ve buried in the past, and mining important raw materials for use in our new products!

See how important computers are?  They’re not only allowing us to simulate brains, create medicines and cures for diseases, and play in virtual reality, they will also be lifting our world completely out of poverty.  There will no longer be the haves and the have nots.  Everything will be so cheap that it will pretty much be free.  And it’s not all that far away.  Surely within a few generations.  I’ll see a lot of it during my lifetime.  As a physicist, I can specialize in nanotechnology, and it’s currently one of the hottest fields out there – and for good reason!

And won’t these machines suck up huge amounts of energy to produce these products?  No, not at all.  Very little energy to do both processes.  In fact, these nanomachines will SAVE energy compared to what we’re currently using.  Also, to top it off, they will allow us to build solar panels that can harvest energy WAYYYYY more sunlight than our current solar panels.  We’ll no longer need dangerous energy sources such as nuclear energy, or the dirty burning of fossil fuels.  We’ll shoot solar panels up into space and harvest all the energy we need.  We’ll have plenty of energy, and people will be free from poverty and want.

Also, considering our bodies are nanomachines, built using the DNA blueprint system, we’ll be able to decode it, and fix our bodies and any problems we encounter.  Little robots will go into your blood capillaries and repair your body from the inside, keeping you healthy and strong.  You won’t have to waste energy running on a treadmill to say in shape.  You’ll always feel good and strong.  These same nanomachines will be able to build muscles in your body, and women can augment their breasts, change their hair length, or whatever they want.

“Molecular assemblers will bring a revolution without parallel since the development of ribosomes, the primitive assemblers in the cell.  The resulting nanotechnology can help life spread beyond Earth — a step without parallel since life spread beyond the seas.  It can help mind emerge in machines — a step without parallel since mind emerged in primates.  And it can let our minds renew and remake our bodies — a step without any parallel at all.

These revolutions will bring dangers and opportunities too vast for the human imagination to grasp.  Yet the principles of change that have applied to molecules, cells, beasts, minds, and machines should endure even in an age of biotechnology, nanomachines, and artificial minds.  The same principles that have applied at sea, on land, and in the air should endure as we spread Earth’s life toward the stars.”

- Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0

There will be new struggles, but the old miseries of death, disease, boredom, and poverty will be conquered.  Hopefully we’ll be able to use our technology to remove our violent instincts as well, so we don’t use this powerful technology to kill ourselves.  Or maybe people will vent those passions in virtual reality warfare.  I don’t know.  But if we can get over these final hurdles, the human race will be safe.  I sometimes lose hope, but overall, I think we’ll make it.

Future generations will have so much fun.  As I’ve said before, I hope cures come out allowing me to live several hundred years, at least.  I want to see all of this happen.  I want to plug into VR and have some fun!  And can you imagine being able to work with the mother brain, which has all human knowledge stored in it, to create your VR world?  You just talk to it, making demands, and it creates anything you ask, working out all the complicated details.  You can go to construct your dream home and specify all that you want.  “I want statues over here.  I want a giant fountain here.  I want a lake with a dock here.  I want this area to be carpeted.  No, no red carpet.  Go with white.  This is too rough, something softer.”  The computer responds, “As you wish.”  Everything that we’ve ever created, thought of, or dreamt up, all will be available for use.  And the super computer will make it all work together.  It will know you better than you know yourself, for it will have learned what humans like and don’t like after interacting with billions of humans for hundreds, and later thousands of years.

The Christian concept of heaven sounds shallow compared to this.  We don’t need deities to get there.  We just need to work for a bit longer on our technology.

Lately I’ve been discussing emergence and self-organization.  Turns out the BBC created an entire hour-long program on the subject.  It’s entitled The Secret Life Of Chaos.  Nice!  You can watch it below.

Albert Einstein is one of the most misrepresented individuals to ever live.  Take this video for instance.

There’s a lot I could say about this video, and the message that it’s trying to get across, but I’ll hold myself back and simply say that this never happened.  Einstein was an agnostic.  His conception of God was similar to Spinoza’s.

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

- Albert Einstein

If you’ve never studied Benedict Spinoza’s philosophy, or his conception of God, you’ll have to read Part I of his Ethics.  Wikipedia summarizes it as follows,

In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent “organism”. Spinoza taught that everything is but a wave in an endless ocean, and that what happens to one wave will affect other waves. Thus Spinozism teaches a form of determinism and ecology and supports this as a basis for morality^.

Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way. Spinozism is closely related to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga.  Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable.

Spinoza’s metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there is only one substance, which is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. He calls this substance “God“, or “Nature“. In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is “Deus sive Natura”). For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what’s the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).

Source:  Wikipedia

Einstein wasn’t an atheist either.  He made this perfectly clear.

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”

- Albert Einstein

In the quotation below, Einstein elaborates on his conception of God.

“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”

- Albert Einstein

I hate seeing people misrepresented.  If you’re religious and believe in God and your holy book, that’s fine with me.  You can believe whatever you want to believe.  But don’t make up lies about great thinkers, and then claim they held a worldview similar to your own.   Christians can claim Einstein believed in God, but the real Einstein thought this about the Bible,

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

-Albert Einstein