World Science Festival!

Greene, Susskind, 't Hooft, oh my! Scientists from all over the world convene in New York this weekend, talking about all kinds of scintillating stuff: the mathematical universe, parallel universes, music and spontaneity, and (my favorite) the holographic principle. Plus the festival Street Fair in Washington Square Park on Sunday, which is free and open to the public.

I'm reading The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos to prepare. See you there!

Barthes on Einstein

Few subjects escape the cultural analysis of Roland Barthes in his seminal collection Mythologies, published in 1957, and Einstein is no exception. His essay "The Brain of Einstein" asserts that the publicly revered scientist's "brain is a mythical object," and that "Mythologically, Einstein is matter," a fabulously loaded double-entendre. (Mythologically, is Einstein energy, too (divided by the speed of light, of course)?)

Barthes goes on, with no little touch of sarcasm: "Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula," and no fewer than six times, uses the word 'magic' when referring to the myth of Einstein and his search for a unifying theory, concluding that "In this way [having not discovered the unifying theory] Einstein fulfills all the conditions of myth, which could not care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric security: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and unfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain and conscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, and mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with the 'fatality' of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without." (If only Wilczek's theory that matter is light had been available to Barthes, his essay may have expounded enthusiastically on this metaphor in regards to the " 'fatality' of the sacrosanct", no?)

Barthes' selection of Einstein's brain as a subject of myth is interesting, particularly in light of contemporary theories like the Holographic Principle, etc., which carry connotations far beyond what our conceptual aptitudes can handle (for the most part). Even the complex theoretical mathematics behind a hypothesis like string theory is nothing more than a signifier of the meaning of life, or at least of the origin of it. The Higgs boson, for example, carries enormous mythological heft, especially in the media's sensational treatment of its pursuit, something I'm sure bugs physicists; I've read in many places that the colloquial term "The God Particle" is reviled by scientists the world over.

Barthes also, interestingly, makes reference to Einstein, while still alive, having his brainwaves measured by electrodes while thinking about relativity. ("For that matter, what does 'to think of' mean, exactly?") If the mystery of consciousness resolves itself to be a form of matter, is Barthes here making the most prescient pun in the history of literature? I'm kidding, but it is interesting to attempt to apply Barthes' myth structure to this kind of wildly transcendent concept, and to wonder how he would have interpreted particle physics via the structuralist system.

As an aside, The New Yorker recently published a series of diary entries Barthes wrote during the weeks after his mother's death, lending a touching humanism to his critical oeuvre.

Foundational Questions Institute: "The Nature of Time"

Time is quixotic: the idea of it is fundamentally interesting because, on the surface, it's a man-made construction--calendars, clocks, time zones--designed for convenience, to enable a sophisticated working society to function. And, like most fundamental ideas, "time" is based on astronomy (the position and rotation of the earth around the sun) which in itself is, like our existence, a happy accidental byproduct of the formation of the universe. (An added quirk here is that, from a human perspective, space is time--the universe is so vast that light reaching us today is millions of years old.) So, does time really exist in the sense that the present is different from the past or future, or is it an illusion?

I suspect the latter, that "the past is present memory," to quote St. Augustine. According to Sean Carroll, a physicist at CIT, this places me squarely among the "presentists," a group championed by Julian Barbour and his seminal work The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. However, Carroll recently wrote a paper arguing that "the universe is described by a quantum state obeying ordinary time-dependent quantum mechanics," and earned a second-place finish in the Foundational Questions Institute's essay contest for his trouble (it's worth noting, though, that Barbour's entry placed first). Titled "What if Time really Exists?" (itself a nod at the scientific community's reluctance to incorporate it) his essay raises some interesting questions. For example: Schrodinger's deterministic wave equation posits that knowledge of the state of a system at any one time is sufficient to determine its future and past evolution in time; however, "what if time exists, and is eternal, and the state of the universe evolves with time obeying something like Schrodinger's equation?" Thanks to string theory, physicists can attempt to answer this question by interpreting certain implications of quantum gravity, namely, duality. Duality brings us back to Susskind's Holographic Principle, a concept that has its applications with time: if quantum gravity in ten dimensions is equivalent to ordinary quantum field theory in four dimensions, as demonstrated by Juan Malcadena's gauge/gravity duality, then there should exist a description of the universe "consisting simply of a quantum-mechanical state evolving with time." Right?

What remains to be reconciled is that quantum mechanics operates under the assumption that time is infinite in all directions, but, as it related to entropy, "within our observable universe, time has an arrow," meaning that time is irreversable. The catch is that within the Schrodinger equation, quantum time evolution is information-preserving, meaning "we can reliably reconstruct the past just as well as the future." Obviously, to any observer living in the last four hundred million years, this just isn't applicable (unless LaToya Jackson really does know something we don't). But, the idea remains that as time marches on, it doesn't morph into the future, the future was already there: I sit here typing, and now I'm typing again, and suddenly the future is the present, ad infinitum. Free will makes this concept more complex, but doesn't negate it; mortality makes it more philosophical, but not mystical.

Carroll concludes by saying that because entropy can grow into the future and into the past, "the very far past of our universe could be experiencing an arrow of time directed in the opposite sense to our own." In an infinite-dimenstion Hilbert space, that seems to throw a lot of cold water on creationism, to say the least. But it does make for interesting fodder where thought and consciousness is concerned, because it implies that everything, ever, still exists and (theoretically) could be accessed. Move over, SAP!

Carroll also has a book coming out this year: From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.

The Holographic Principle, Redux

There is some excellent work being done over at the British-German GEO600 experiment: New Scientist reports that the giant detector has identified some curious noise as "microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," which would support the framework of the holographic principle theory put forth by Gerard d'Hooft and Leonard Susskind (see my earlier post on how this idea is explored in Susskind's The Black Hole War). Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, says, "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." This would be a physical manifestation of concepts heretofore demonstrated only within the comforting boundaries of theoretical math--the mind boggles!

If the noise detected does represent quantum jitters, this has profound implications for the future of the unified theory: suddenly, analysis of information at Planck length might be feasible via its much-larger "projection," which "brings microscopic quantum structure within reach of current experiments." This is nothing short of AWESOME. Stay tuned.

Memory and the Holographic Principle

I had a remaining thought after reading The Black Hole War. The turning point of Susskind's resolution of the black hole information paradox involved something called the holographic principle. Basically, the holographic principle states that all information lies at the boundary of a region of space, one dimension removed from the space its information describes. This would mean that our universe was really a three-dimensional "hologram" thrown by a two-dimensional ring of encoded information circling the universe. I couldn't stop thinking about whether this could be a new and provocative way to express the idea of universal consciousness or of the brain's extra-sensory aptitude. In The ESP Enigma, Diane Hennacy Powell writes about how memory itself might be a psychic phenomena, not a strictly neurological one. If the entire description of the universe exists as bits of information on the perimeter, Powell's theory that "all of space and time is represented in our personal consciousness field, even though most of it is unconscious," makes perfect sense: hypothetically, every bit of information within the universe is stored on the two-dimensional perimeter, and somehow our brains are able to access it and convert "bits" into "thought." (After all, on the smallest possible level, everything is composed of the same fundamental particles--even empty space--so the idea might not be so far-fetched.)

Weird, I know, but food for thought.