If I remember correctly, the Blue Gene set up has comparitively little ram. 3-D numerical simulations, like I do, almost always need a lot of ram in order to store the values of the field at all the grid points. O(N^3) indeed...
Oh, hey, I saw you had Einstein's equation written in latex as your sig, which I thought was really cool. Since I had latexed it recently for a semi-formal paper, I cut&pasted the classical bosonic string action - the Nambu-Goto action. It's the square root of the determinate of the metric on the string world-sheet. Essentially this gives the area of the world-sheet, which is under tension and thus wants to be minimized... Check out Clifford Johnson's D-Branes if you get the chance, it's really cool.
Bingo. Considering advances in string theory (T-duality -> large extra dimensional branes...), I'd say there's a good chance we won't even choose to exist in boring old 3+1 spacetime in 100 years. Observers that grow more complex in time form the largest subset of the mathematical ensemble, which is why what it is to exist is to be conscious observers. I've got a new paper -Statistical Metaphysics - about this stuff on my website, you should check it out.
We've known for a long time that whether you observe something to fall into a black hole or not depends on your reference frame. That is, if you are riding along with the object falling in, you will pass the event horizon with it and be crushed at the singularity in a finite amount of your time (proper time). However, if you observe something falling into the black hole from a safe distance beyond the event horizon, you will never see it fall in - although you also won't see anything after a short while, since the light from the infalling object becomes redshifted exponentially in time... (indeed black holes used to be called frozen stars for this reason). I am assuming that Hawking has shown working in a reference frame outside the black hole, that the faint radiation (the average wavelength is about the size of the black hole itself, and a solar mass black hole has a radius of about a kilometer) emerging from the black hole is affected by the wavefunction of the particles that have fallen in. I've also heard some people have doubts about using Euclidean path integral method (need to have time t go to i*t so that -t^2 -> t^2, i.e. time becomes another space like coordinate), and I'm looking forward to reading the paper. There are other papers out on this stuff - here's one by Stephens, 't Hooft and Whiting.
Hmmm, interesting question... (googling) OK oxygen is ~.1% of the sun, and the solar wind is 1-10 particles per cm^3 at the surface, and they travel at ~ 500km/sec. This gives about a 10^6 kilograms of oxygen streaming off per second, or say 10^13 kilograms per year. The earth's oceans mass about 4*pi*6,000km^2*1km*10^12kg/km^3 or 10^21 kilograms of water. So it would take 100 millions years for the sun to fill the earth's oceans via its cooled plasma, if the earth collected all the plasma and it had cooled of enough by then, neither of course would be even close to forfilled... But the Sun does radiate a healthy percentage of the oxygen in the solar system over the course of billions of years - although I'm almost certain that the sun did not create an appreciable amount of that oxygen - rather just remenants of some supernova in this arm of the galaxy some 5 billion years ago or so. I wonder if the plasma cools off enough to start forming water at the edge of the solar wind, 75 times further out than Pluto...
Oxygen is also one of the most common elements produced by stars larger than our sun - and so oxygen is the most common element in the earth's crust (googling...) at 46.6% percent. It's at a local minimum of the binding energy per nucleon plot.
And in many future worldlines of the universal wave function, it will have copious surface water once again. Just need to get out to the Oort cloud and start steering some comets...
Hey spincycle, just browsing through slashdot and your post caught my eye. I just happened to finish writing a paper last night on the nature of existence which you might find very interesting. Still needs to be polished up a little bit, but you can check it out at my website - www.physics.unc.edu/~tmgarret. Essentially I argue that all mathematical structures exist (you may have seen something on this in a recent Scientific American article by Max Tegmark - www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/). Then, if we can live forever by constantly upgrading our minds with neural implants and so on (and biological stuff telomere caps), we will become infinitely complex in the limit of infinite time. Thus the number of permutations of different observers is greater than any other type of information, explaining why we are observers... Might even be a correct theory - we'll see!
(Clarkian), is nearly upon us... Man made diamonds, aerogel, carbon nanotube space elevators, high temp superconductors, cloning, neural implants, photonics, spintronics, flexible organic leds. And we're just getting started...
I used to love going to Manifest when I was going to USC, but I can understand the decision. My 7 year old 110 disk CD player broke recently, and I was thinking about buying a replacement, but with exponential technological advance, I can now fit all that information in a tiny iPod. Ever onward then, I look forward to neural implants and sensory augmentation...
Hey guys, it's fine by me. By the way, the acceleration of complexity in the universe that you might have noticed isn't going to stop. Have a nice day.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember correctly, the Blue Gene set up has comparitively little ram. 3-D numerical simulations, like I do, almost always need a lot of ram in order to store the values of the field at all the grid points. O(N^3) indeed...
Bingo - just as genetic evolution is cleverer than you, so is memetic evolution.
Oh, hey, I saw you had Einstein's equation written in latex as your sig, which I thought was really cool. Since I had latexed it recently for a semi-formal paper, I cut&pasted the classical bosonic string action - the Nambu-Goto action. It's the square root of the determinate of the metric on the string world-sheet. Essentially this gives the area of the world-sheet, which is under tension and thus wants to be minimized... Check out Clifford Johnson's D-Branes if you get the chance, it's really cool.
\begin{equation}
S_o = -T \int d\tau d\sigma \left[ \left( \frac{\partial X^{\mu}}{\partial \sigma}
\frac{\partial X^{\mu}}{\partial \tau}\right)^2
-\left( \frac{\partial X^{\mu}}{\partial \sigma} \right)^2
\left( \frac{\partial X_{\mu}}{\partial \tau} \right)^2\right]^{1/2}\notag
\end{equation}
Shazam!
Bingo. Considering advances in string theory (T-duality -> large extra dimensional branes...), I'd say there's a good chance we won't even choose to exist in boring old 3+1 spacetime in 100 years. Observers that grow more complex in time form the largest subset of the mathematical ensemble, which is why what it is to exist is to be conscious observers. I've got a new paper -Statistical Metaphysics - about this stuff on my website, you should check it out.
We've known for a long time that whether you observe something to fall into a black hole or not depends on your reference frame. That is, if you are riding along with the object falling in, you will pass the event horizon with it and be crushed at the singularity in a finite amount of your time (proper time). However, if you observe something falling into the black hole from a safe distance beyond the event horizon, you will never see it fall in - although you also won't see anything after a short while, since the light from the infalling object becomes redshifted exponentially in time... (indeed black holes used to be called frozen stars for this reason). I am assuming that Hawking has shown working in a reference frame outside the black hole, that the faint radiation (the average wavelength is about the size of the black hole itself, and a solar mass black hole has a radius of about a kilometer) emerging from the black hole is affected by the wavefunction of the particles that have fallen in. I've also heard some people have doubts about using Euclidean path integral method (need to have time t go to i*t so that -t^2 -> t^2, i.e. time becomes another space like coordinate), and I'm looking forward to reading the paper. There are other papers out on this stuff - here's one by Stephens, 't Hooft and Whiting.
Hmmm, interesting question... (googling) OK oxygen is ~.1% of the sun, and the solar wind is 1-10 particles per cm^3 at the surface, and they travel at ~ 500km/sec. This gives about a 10^6 kilograms of oxygen streaming off per second, or say 10^13 kilograms per year. The earth's oceans mass about 4*pi*6,000km^2*1km*10^12kg/km^3 or 10^21 kilograms of water. So it would take 100 millions years for the sun to fill the earth's oceans via its cooled plasma, if the earth collected all the plasma and it had cooled of enough by then, neither of course would be even close to forfilled... But the Sun does radiate a healthy percentage of the oxygen in the solar system over the course of billions of years - although I'm almost certain that the sun did not create an appreciable amount of that oxygen - rather just remenants of some supernova in this arm of the galaxy some 5 billion years ago or so. I wonder if the plasma cools off enough to start forming water at the edge of the solar wind, 75 times further out than Pluto...
Oxygen is also one of the most common elements produced by stars larger than our sun - and so oxygen is the most common element in the earth's crust (googling...) at 46.6% percent. It's at a local minimum of the binding energy per nucleon plot.
And in many future worldlines of the universal wave function, it will have copious surface water once again. Just need to get out to the Oort cloud and start steering some comets...
Hey spincycle, just browsing through slashdot and your post caught my eye. I just happened to finish writing a paper last night on the nature of existence which you might find very interesting. Still needs to be polished up a little bit, but you can check it out at my website - www.physics.unc.edu/~tmgarret. Essentially I argue that all mathematical structures exist (you may have seen something on this in a recent Scientific American article by Max Tegmark - www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/). Then, if we can live forever by constantly upgrading our minds with neural implants and so on (and biological stuff telomere caps), we will become infinitely complex in the limit of infinite time. Thus the number of permutations of different observers is greater than any other type of information, explaining why we are observers... Might even be a correct theory - we'll see!
Indubitably!
(Clarkian), is nearly upon us... Man made diamonds, aerogel, carbon nanotube space elevators, high temp superconductors, cloning, neural implants, photonics, spintronics, flexible organic leds. And we're just getting started...
I used to love going to Manifest when I was going to USC, but I can understand the decision. My 7 year old 110 disk CD player broke recently, and I was thinking about buying a replacement, but with exponential technological advance, I can now fit all that information in a tiny iPod. Ever onward then, I look forward to neural implants and sensory augmentation...
Hey guys, it's fine by me. By the way, the acceleration of complexity in the universe that you might have noticed isn't going to stop. Have a nice day.