Available Light

Christmas has come and gone and so has New Year. The family arrived, hugged played games, talked, ate, unwrapped presents and gave some, talked, ate, hugged and left. Resolutions got made, though why exactly is a bit beyond me: just because the Earth has reached some arbitrarily defined point in it's annual journey around the Sun seems to me to be no good reason to take up jogging or leave off eating chocolate. As usually happens after the festive season I am briefly on holiday, sitting around in the house with the best view in New Zealand, taking photos, wandering around, thinking about swimming, wandering around a bit more and, mostly, reading books. One of the books I am reading is one I gave to Clemency as a joke on account of it's title. Marcus Chown certainly has a way with catchy monikers for his books. The last one of his I read was called The Never Ending Days of Being Dead , which seemed less like the title of a book about quantum physics, which it was, and more...

Imagine a slide projector with no slide in the carrier shining its light onto a blank white screen. You would see on the screen pure white light. Then you put a slide into the carrier, and a picture appears. What you have done by shining the light through the slide is filter out most of the light. White light coming from the bulb contains every visible colour, but where the slide is blue, all the light is filtered out except the blue bits, where it is red, everything is excluded except the red light, and so forth. So a picture is created not by adding light but by taking light away. The pure white light when there is no slide in the projector shows no picture; but in another sense, it shows every possible picture: the light required to make any conceivable photograph is there in that pure white light. As Bernard Haisch says, in The God Theory , "the white light is thus the source of infinite possibility, and you create the desired image by intelligent subtraction, causing the rea...

I have been reading about John Bell , an Irish physicist who died in 1990 and who gave the world Bell's Theorem . If you click on the Wikipedia link to the theorem it will all be explained to you. If the explanation leaves you a bit mystified, let me briefly explain. John Bell was addressing some of the wierder aspects of quantum physics - the bits of the theory that common sense tells you simply cannot be true. His theorem is a set of equations that would have to be valid if the ordinary, common sense view of the universe was actually the way the universe was made. He invited scientists to come up with a way of falsifying the theorem because if his hypothesis was shown, by experiment, to be false, it would mean the odd predictions of quantum, physics were correct, namely, that either a) things in the universe had no reality until someone observed them or b) the impression that the universe is composed of separate, distinct things is an illusion or c) both of the above. In the ea...

As we get progress through the education system we tend to get more and more specialised. Study of English becomes study of the Romantic Period becomes study of Wordsworth becomes study of the Prelude becomes study of the rhyming patterns in the first stanza becomes..... Truly. I knew a guy once whose PhD thesis was on the reproductive system of earwigs. And as we specialise we tend to talk less and less with people outside our own discipline, so that the end result of higher education is that we come to know more and more about less and less. Now that's OK, it serves our society pretty well, and all the quite important stuff carries on: the electric milk frothers still get invented and the Ipod covers get ever more colourful. But sometimes there are very important things which can get overlooked because they are by products of someone's specialised discipline and therefore "none of my concern" to the folks who actually discover them and know about them. Like the way ...

In this book the quantum physicist Amit Goswami promises much, but delivers little. Or to be more accurate, delivers quite a bit but not nearly as much as he tells you he is going to. He tells us that he is going to prove the existence of God and establish a new spiritual paradigm. Well..... Amit Goswami has, in the past, written a very conventional textbook on Quantum Physics and has several other titles to his credit, mostly dealing with his somewhat innovative cosmology. He's the Indian guy featuring in the movie What The Bleep Do We Know!? The subtitle, What Quantum Physics Tells Us About Our Origins And How We Should Live , is what sold the book to me, and the first section of the book is all about Quantum Physics or at least Goswami's version of it. This first section was, to me, worth the purchase price of the book, as Goswami makes comprehensible the down the rabbit hole reality which underlies the Newtonian physics we are used to encountering in daily life. Start lo...