Happy new year!
We don’t know who we are.
We don’t know why we are here.
We don’t know what death is.
(And yet we crave for life…)
We are happy only because we cry.
(And yet we crave for bliss…)
We seek health.
(And yet it is the pain that makes us think)
Deeply irrational beings we are!
In a deeply irrational cosmos!
One could call us crazy that we dance.
Within the silence of the void.
Does it really matter if we are?
Watch a movie backwards and you’ll likely get confused – but a quantum computer wouldn’t. That’s the conclusion of researcher Mile Gu at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University and collaborators.
In research published in Physical Review X, the international team showed that a quantum computer is less in thrall to the arrow of time than a classical computer. In some cases, it is as if the quantum computer doesn’t need to distinguish between cause and effect at all.
The new work is inspired by an influential discovery (known as causal asymmetry) made almost ten years ago by complexity scientists James Crutchfield and John Mahoney at the University of California, Davis. They showed that many statistical data sequences will have a built-in arrow of time. An observer who sees the data played from beginning to end, like the frames of a movie, can model what comes next using only a modest amount of memory about what occurred before. An observer who tries to model the system in reverse has a much harder task – potentially needing to track orders of magnitude more information.
“If causal asymmetry is only found in classical models, it suggests our perception of cause and effect, and thus time, can emerge from enforcing a classical explanation on events in a fundamentally quantum world”, researchers say. (1)
Look at the cosmos through the lenses of the irrational.
And you will discover a thrilling new perspective.
You are seeing…
Because you used to be blind…
You are alive…
Because you were dead…
You do exist.
Only because you never did…
You are everything.
Just because there is nothing…
The foundation stone of quantum mechanics doesn’t just describe the behavior of infinitesimal subatomic particles – it also governs the movement of the largest and most massive objects in the Universe, says a prominent astrophysicist.
Planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin was exploring the concept of astrophysical disks – sometimes called accretion disks; massive self-gravitating swirls of matter which form seemingly everywhere. Planets orbit stars forming solar systems, which in turn orbit super-massive black holes at galactic centers…
While these disks may start off with a circular shape, over epic stretches of time they can ripple and warp, exhibiting vast distortions that still can’t be definitively explained by astrophysicists. While investigating an area of quantum physics called perturbation theory to see how it could mathematically represent the forces in astrophysical disk evolution, explaining how these vast objects warp over aeons, Batygin discovered something remarkable.
In the theory, an astrophysical disk can be modeled as a series of concentric wires that slowly exchange orbital angular momentum among one another. “When we do this with all the material in a disk, we can get more and more meticulous, representing the disk as an ever-larger number of ever-thinner wires”, Batygin explains. “Eventually, you can approximate the number of wires in the disk to be infinite, which allows you to mathematically blur them together into a continuum. When I did this, astonishingly, the Schrödinger equation emerged in my calculations”. (1)
Who says atoms are something different than “macroscopic” elements of space? Who defines what is microscopic or macroscopic after all, except our subjective sense of relative size? All our science is based on seeing differences where there are none. And then trying to merge or reconcile these differences through an ‘elegant’ theory which can bring everything together…
A universe inside an atom.
A particle as big as a universe.
Consciousness inside nothingness.
Nothingness inside the mind of a wise man…
The less stones you through into the lake, the calmer its surface will be. And then and only then, will you be able to see the cause of everything in it. Reflected on the quiet surface, you see yourself. On a calm night, you smile.
And somewhere on the pristine surface a galaxy is born…
Kindness and selflessness are widespread among both humans and animals. Many people donate to charity and feel significantly happier as a direct result of doing so. In the animal kingdom, many species show kindness by refraining from violence when settling conflicts. Instead they may use comparatively harmless fighting conventions.
The benefits gained from receiving kindness are intuitively obvious. But the motivations for engaging in kindness are much less so. In fact, the very existence of kindness and altruism seems to contradict Darwin’s theory of evolution, based as it is on a competitive process of natural selection in which only the fittest survive.
For example, the selfless behaviour of sterile ants, who protect their colonies from dangerous predators, poses a problem that Darwin himself at first considered “insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory”.
So how could kind behaviour have evolved – and why was it not eliminated by natural selection? Many theorists have grappled with this problem over the years. The article reviews the most prominent ideas of science up to now. (1)
In essence, all theories which try to explain kindness actually refute it: in all of them there is some kind of benefit coming out of the kind action. And what scientists don’t understand is that this actually makes the action… not kind!
You are not good when you calculate things.
You are not a nice person when you know why you love someone.
You are not a saint when you can analyze exactly why you are…
Kindness is inherently illogical.
Being good is being insane.
Caring in a cosmos which seems void and dark.
Loving in a cosmos which seems pointless and evil.
And yet this insanity is the warmest thing in this cold universe…
Happy Christmas!
For no (apparent) reason…
Does the time of day matter when our body is infected by a parasite? According to new research from McGill University, it matters a great deal.
Our body works differently at different times of the day following our internal clocks. Researchers from McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute have now established that parasitic infections are also controlled by these clocks. The severity of a microbe’s infection will thus vary whether it is encountered during the day or at night, a discovery that scientists believe could pave the way to new treatment and prevention strategies for parasitic infections.
Scientists who studied Leishmania (a parasite that causes leishmaniasis and that is transmitted at night by the female sandfly) concluded that its infection was more effective in the early night, a time when the immune response to the parasite was the strongest. Simply put, the parasite thrives when it elicits a strong immune response, attracting inflammatory cells it uses to multiply (macrophages and neutrophils) to the infection site. (1)
What elegant mechanisms does nature has to restore balance.
People have always fought to build knowledge.
And yet…
Nature tries to warn us…
The strongest prejudice propagates better through a solid knowledgeable mind.
The darkest dogmas find fruitful ground in the most educated societies.
The more certain you are for yourself, the less you expect that you are wrong.
Knowledge does not exist but in our arrogant minds. And no matter how much we built it, Nature is there to destroy it. To remind us that the only solid knowledge is non-knowledge. That the cosmos is illogical. Full of things only the children see.
Trust the child inside you. Once you knew everything. Once you were in Paradise. And then you tried to learn. And then you tried to understand. And the paradise was lost. And the world became a darker place…
Let go.
And you will have everything within your grasp again.
