tag > Complexity
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Planck Epoch: What is time? What is space? What is finite? What is infinite?
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"Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
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A core assumption of neuro- and computer science is that computation is local & independent - that the brain is effectively separated from the 'outside world' by a thin box of bones. In reality, every 'box' is highly leaky and everything is deeply intertwingled.
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The Strange Mystery of the Pauli Effect
Austrian physicist, Nobel laureate, professor of theoretical physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and early pioneer in quantum mechanics, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli is largely considered to be one of the most brilliant physicists to have ever lived. He was the first to propose the existence of the neutrino in 1930, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945, was widely praised by Albert Einstein, won the Max Planck medal in 1958, and was instrumental to the development of many areas of theoretical physics and quantum theory. Pauli was highly respected among his peers, an impeccable scientific mind like no other, but he also had some rather strange ideas and oddness orbiting him, with one of these being what would later be called “The Pauli Effect.”
It began when people, including Pauli himself, noticed that whenever he was around in a lab there was an inordinate number of freak mishaps and malfunctions of equipment. Almost without fail, when Pauli entered a lab, things would break, electrical systems would malfunction or go haywire, beakers would crack, bunsen burners would fail to ignite, and various equipment would either stop working or experience some sort of disturbance, with even fires breaking out on occasion. Colleagues jokingly referred to it as “The Pauli Effect,” stating as one of its laws “a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room,” but as it continued it became very noticeable that it seemed to all be beyond coincidence and jokes. The effect even seemed to work through walls or across distances. One popular anecdote is that one time Pauli was passing the railway station of Göttingen, when at that moment several pieces of lab equipment at the nearby University of Göttingen exploded without any apparent reason. Similarly, another story has it that when Pauli was visiting Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study the Princeton University physics department’s massive cyclotron particle accelerator inexplicably burst into flames and burned for more than 6 hours before being put out.
As weird incidents like this increased in frequency, Pauli’s peers went from joking about it all to starting to believe there was something truly weird going on in the physicist’s presence, and that there was perhaps something to it. It is rumored that the experimental physicist Otto Stern once even banned Pauli from his lab for fear that he would break something or ruin an experiment. It is interesting to note how these serious, top level scientists were starting to elevate The Pauli Effect to a superstition, seeing it as beyond rational explanation. One science photographer by the name of David Fathi would once say of this:
I had a lot of problems trying to understand how some of the brightest minds of their time could give in to ideas that seem like pure superstition. But now I think that to work in a field like quantum physics, so abstract and far removed from common intuition, you probably have to be predisposed at thinking far out of the box, and you have to be creative and open to weird ideas.
Pauli himself began to seriously consider that there was some as yet unexplained phenomenon behind it all, convinced that it was all real. This was not a big jump for him, as he was already curious about parapsychology and subscribed to C. G. Jung’s ideas on synchronicity, which Jung described as “circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection,” as well as the hidden meaning of dreams. Pauli began to come up with some way to explain it all, theorizing that certain people had the ability to somehow affect technical equipment in their vicinity through forces not yet understood. Pauli was so convinced that this was a real mystery that he discussed it at length with Jung. One of his ideas was that this was due to a sort of psychokinesis, in which mental energy is projected to have an effect on physical surroundings. Pauli would say:
The existence of relatively constant psychic contents that survive personal ego…All we can observe is their effect on other living people, whose spiritual level and whose personal unconscious crucially influence the way these contents actually manifest themselves.
It is interesting that Pauli’s musings on this are some of the earlier ideas put forth on psychokinesis, in an era before it even had an official, agreed upon name. Pauli was never able to prove any of this, but he allegedly spent much time pondering it and writing of it in his journals. He often lamented that there was no way to prove any of this under strict lab conditions, that in the end it was mostly based on anecdotal evidence, and that it was probably doomed to forever remain misunderstood. However, he maintained that the Pauli Effect was real, that people could mentally influence surrounding objects and electronics right up until his death in 1958. So was this just superstition among scientists or was there anything to it at all? It is hard to know just how grounded this was in reality, but it remains a curious little piece of lore merging science and the paranormal, as well as a strange little historical curiosity.
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The complexities of the sun
The distance of where you are from the Sun is constantly changing because the Earth's orbit around the Sun is VERY irregular. Start by learning the three Milankovitch Cycles, then look into Solar Inertial Motion. None of this has anything to do with humans. None of this has anything to do with CO2. The models of the Solar System you grew up believing as a child were gross over simplifications. They conditioned you to believe that the Solar system has regular orbits, of which the Earth is one. Yet that is not the reality: not only the earth both tilts and wobbles as it orbits, but the orbit is an ellipse not a sphere, meaning the distance from the Sun is not constant. These are the three Milankovitch cycles. Then the combined mass of the planets also changes the centre of the Orbit, meaning the Sun appears to move rather than being in the fixed centre of the Solar System. This is called Solar Inertial Motion. And this is just the beginning of the story of irregularity in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, then there are cycles of Sun activity, making it stronger and weaker according to how many Solar Flares we are exposed to.
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Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that an irreversible change in information stored in a computer, such as merging two computational paths, dissipates a minimum amount of heat to its surroundings.
Scientists show how to erase information without using energy (2011)
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Control theory is a branch of applied mathematics that deals with the design of control policies for actuated dynamical systems.
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The geometry of your brain shapes its function: Brain activity may be more like "ripples in a pond" rather than signals sent on a telecommunications network.
Researchers have challenged the conventional "connectomic" view of the brain, suggesting that brain function may be more akin to ripples in a pond than signals in a telecommunication network. They found that their wave model, which uses information about the brain's shape, predicted activation patterns more accurately than neuronal connectivity data. While the study suggests a paradigm shift in understanding brain function, critics argue that the study doesn't consider the local brain activity patterns evoked by simple stimuli.
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Context is a fundamental condition for the error free transmission of reproducible and intelligible information. Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing exists in isolation, everything is intertwined. The more context we are aware of, the greater our understanding.
"A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that a scientist can comprehend, the greater are his chances of finding a truly adequate solution." - Russell L. Ackoff ("The Development of Operations Research as a Science". Operations Research, Volume 4, No. 3, pp. 265-295, www.jstor.org. June 1956.)
Illustration by Christophe Vorlet:
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"The Quantitative Comparison Between the Neuronal Network and the Cosmic Web"
"Our analysis showed that the distribution of the fluctuation within the cerebellum neural-net follows the same progression of the distribution of matter in the cosmic web"
