Tag Archives: science

Observing time

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Yesterday’s post, ‘Let’s Do the Time Warp Again’ is still messing with my head a bit. The idea of the Andromeda paradox suggests that if we are in motion compared to another bystander, our view of very distant events can be days apart.

I understood relativity with respect to travel, a twin in a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light goes to a distant galaxy. When he comes back to earth a few years later he would be younger than the twin left behind… demonstrating the relativity of time. But the idea that distant events can ‘happen’ at different times for people witnessing it from almost the same spot, simply because of their relative motion to each other is perplexing.

So then I suggested that we could re-witness an event by changing our motion such that we are moving quickly away from a very, very distant event, so that from that relative perspective the event hadn’t happened yet. I’m no physicist, the distances would have to be huge, and I don’t know what speeds would need to be achieved, but it seems pretty conceivable to me.

What’s messing with my head is that if this is possible, what does ‘now’ mean?

We have to wait 8 minutes for the sun’s light to reach us. When it reaches us, the sun is already 8 minutes older. We don’t see the sun now, we see its history. Our concept of now has a perpetual lag.

This then got me thinking about animals and their reaction times. Have you ever seen a video of a cat toying with a snake? A cat can avoid the bite of a snake, always reacting faster than we would be able to. How does a cat perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

How do birds fly in a murmuration? The flock changes direction in waves, so quickly that they can stay in formation despite hundreds of them having to coordinate with each other. How does a bird in a murmur perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

To a ten year old, 5 years is half a lifetime, to me it’s less than 1/11th of my life. Is it any wonder that as we get older, time seems to go by faster?

Like I said, these ideas are messing a bit with my head. They make me wonder what ‘now’ means and if in reality we share a ‘now’ with anyone? Is the mere act of observing ‘now’ just a relative glance of varying histories? And yet the only thing any of us ever experience beyond our memories and imagination… is now.

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

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“It’s just a jump to the left… it’s a jump to the ri-ight🎵”

…And that’s all it takes to witness two completely different views of what ‘right now’ means:

“The Andromeda paradox, proposed by physicist Roger Penrose, is a thought experiment in relativity that highlights how simultaneity depends on an observer’s motion. It imagines two people walking past each other on Earth: one toward the Andromeda galaxy and one away. Because of special relativity, the plane of simultaneity for each observer tilts slightly, meaning that the events they consider “happening right now” in Andromeda could differ by entire days. This illustrates that what is considered the present in distant regions of space is relative to an observer’s motion.” (ChatGPT)

Here is my thought experiment based on the Andromeda paradox:

If we were to witness a supernova of a star hundreds of light years away, could we send a rocket hurling at a high speed away from that event and capture the event happening again? Could we re-witness the supernova, a past event that happened many years ago, but from farther away? Would it be possible that from that perspective the event has not been witnessed yet, and so we can ‘get ahead of it’ focus our cameras on it, and wait for it to happen again, just for the first time from that relative perspective?

My head hurts a bit trying to make sense of this, but my hunch is that it would be possible. So instead of the Andromeda paradox, it’s more like the Andromeda mirror, bouncing back the same light but at a slightly later time than the present… which already is what a mirror does. 

Mental gymnastics

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I know it’s a very small percentage of people in the world that think the world is flat, but this group fascinates me. You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to live in 2026 and think that every scientist and millions of others are all conspiring to fool you. The mental gymnastics needed to ignore blatant evidence and then double down on thinly veiled lies and poorly contrived talking points has to far exceed the effort to actually look at the obvious evidence. How much must it hurt to admit you are wrong to continually have to fight logic, facts, and data that contradict your beliefs?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can marvel at Artemis II, travelling to the moon and back , and sharing incredible photos of this pale blue marble that we all live on. There is so much we still don’t know about the universe we live in, mysteries still to be solved… and here is a group of people who not only fight science with oblivious imagination, they hide from the enjoyment of seeing our globe from angles we have not enjoyed in decades, at resolutions we could not have previously imagined.

Maybe Artemis II will be the thing that has flat eathers ‘come around’ to the global reality… but stupidity defies logic, and I’m afraid the mental gymnastics will continue to work against people dedicated to sharing their ignorance in a loud, proud, uninformed, and uneducated way.


Meaning in the Universe

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I love this quote by Brian Cox,

There’s only one interesting question in philosophy. The interesting question is, what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? I think the answer is, paradoxically, whilst we are definitely physically insignificant, I’ve just said that the Earth is one planet, around one star, amongst 400 billion stars, in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies, in a small patch of the universe, right?

So we’re definitely small, you can’t argue with that, we’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms. Our bodies were made in stars, right? So it’s all cooked over billions of years. And we’re in this pattern that can think, you have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself, which is us. And that sounds unlikely when you put it like that, that you can have a few things that were cooked in the hearts of stars, you stick them together in a pattern and suddenly it has some ideas and starts writing music.

There aren’t any other worlds where this happened, certainly in our galaxy. So it could be that this planet, notwithstanding its physical insignificance, is the only place where anything thinks.

Think about it… think about consciousness and thinking… without thought the entire universe has no meaning. And so, while we live on an insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe… we might also be the only significant part of all existence, or at the very least, in our own, known part of the universe.

We are simultaneously insignificant and potentially the most significant thing in the universe. Without consciousness there is no meaning to the universe, and while there might be a lot of evidence of life beyond our solar system, there is no guarantee the these other life forms have achieved the level of consciousness of humans.

This makes me question my own assumptions about consciousness and free will. I’ve previously said in my post, ‘Consciousness and Free Will’:

1. I don’t think consciousness is fundamental.
And;
2. Consciousness comes from an excess of processing time.

But maybe my first premise doesn’t need to be true for my second one to be true. Maybe consciousness is fundamental, but we need excess processing time in order to tap into it?

Maybe consciousness is essential to the existence of the universe, because without it, why should the universe even exist? If that question doesn’t create at least a little existential angst, I’m not sure what would?

Are we beings that became conscious so that we can add meaning to the entire universe, or is the universe somehow dependent on consciousness and we are simply living beings capable of tapping into this on some fuzzy frequency? A fuzzy frequency which also clouds our minds with a desire to seek beliefs that make sense of a consciousness far too great for us to truly understand?  Be it religion or physics, we are meaning seekers, and we might just be the most important meaning seekers in the entire universe.

 

Health advice rollercoaster

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Coffee is bad for you, no wait, it’s good for you! A glass of read wine a day is good for your heart health, no wait, any amount of alcohol is unhealthy! Drink fruit juice, it’s high in vitamins, no wait, there’s too much sugar and not enough fibre in the juice alone! Creatine can damage your liver, no wait, it just spikes the creatine marker for liver issues, it doesn’t actually mean your liver is having issues, just that you have to look at different markers if you supplement your creatine.

From what food to eat, to what vitamins and supplements you should and shouldn’t take together, to exercises that are guaranteed to give you results, it seem like there is always a constant stream of new, updated research and information about improving heath which contradicts something we’ve heard (and believed) previously.

Here are 2 rules to follow as you travel the health advice rollercoaster:

1. The science matters. How big is the sample size, how many other studies suggest the same thing?

2. The messaging. When the threat is over emphasized, the message needs to be taken with a grain of salt. When a product is being pitched, there is an underlying benefit to exaggerating, either the cost of not taking the product or the benefit of taking it. This doesn’t mean that what is being said is true or false, it just means you need a good dose of scepticism unless you’re actually referring back to the science yourself.

Ultimately, it comes down to one question, are you getting research or are you being sold something? It’s not that you shouldn’t question both but rather if it’s advertising, this scrutiny should be significantly greater. And, no matter what it is, you can be certain that it’s probably going to contradict something you’ve heard previously. There are going to be a lot more twists, turns, and loops on this roller coaster before we truly understand how our body works and what benefits it the most.

The case for limited free will (Part 1)

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Part 1

When I retire, and have more free time, I’m going to expand on this topic considerably. But for now I’m just sharing a 3-part premise.

There is a convincing argument against the idea of free will, and some very bright people argue that there is no such thing. I, on the other hand, believe we do have free will… but it is limited.

Go to the ‘free-will’ tag on my blog and you’ll see that I’ve shared this and other related idea before.

Right now I just want to put down a list of premises which, one day, I’ll defend, but for now, here they are:

  1. Consciousness is emergent. It is the product of excess processing time beyond what’s needed for survival.
  2. Free will is not fully free. Both the environment and more importantly our hardware affect our ability to think freely. Don’t believe me? Try to make a challenging decision when you have an agonizing tooth ache.
  3. Limited free will is also emergent and comes with consciousness. Despite the fact that there are constraints and limits to how free free will is, it’s still more free than no free will.

Consciousness is at the crux of the argument. Consciousness does not have a physical position in our physical world. You can’t point to a part of the brain and say, ‘there it is’. So arguing against free will based on physics falls apart.

Looking at an MRI or other brain scan after asking someone a question and being able to predict their answer before they say it is another argument against free will. However, that doesn’t tell us how our brain came to that decision, it only shows that our conscious mind doesn’t react or even necessarily fully understand our unconscious mind… but there is still an unconscious mind that made that decision. Deciding to discuss the conscious and unconscious mind as two separate things is a false division that is useful to talk about, but the reality is, we are of one mind… Even if we ourselves can’t fully grasp how our own consciousness works. 

Two things are happening in the MRI argument that are faulty when used in an argument against free will: First, there is a free will decision that happens, even if it’s before our conscious mind knows. Second, the fact that our hardware limits the decisions themselves and then also how we rationalize those decisions based on our (limited) decision-making, does not negate the fact that we still made the decision.

Well, there you have it, I said I wasn’t going to expand on these premises and I already started to. The thing to realize is that just because our free will has considerable limits, and constraints, doesn’t negate the fact that we are still making choices that are truly ours.

We have limited free will but still freer than not having free will at all.

Lie with confidence

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Be controversial but wrong, say it with confidence, and watch the likes and re-shares come your way. I had an Instagram video shared with me. The ‘influencer’ who posted it has over 600,000 followers and she claims to be an autoimmune specialist.

“You’ve got to see this,” she says, after saying that a man tested his blood before and after EMF (Electric and Magnetic Field) exposure. Then the clip changes to a guy looking at an image on a screen of what he claims to be red blood cells in “pretty perfect blood… I, mean these cells are absolutely amazing cells… it may even be hard actually to mess them up.”

Then they do a ‘phone test’ where the test subject sits between two cell phones, and has a third one between his legs on the chair, to test how “these EMF’s are affecting his ‘perfect blood’… Admitting that this is, “A bit of a risky game,” He then pricks his finger to draw a drop of blood after this supposed EMF exposure. They put a drop of the blood on a microscope plate and we switch views to see the screen again.

The contrast from the original image is comical. Worse yet the person is scrolling on the screen to a point that would go far beyond the edge of a drop of blood on a microscope plate. The difference in the slides is described as “A lot of inflammation. It’s all over.” After a very non-medical, exaggerated analysis, it concludes with, “None of this is good.”

When the video got to me it had 336,000 views and over 9,500 likes. And again, it was sent to me by someone who was concerned by this and wanted to share it.

We live in an era where confidence trumps competence. Be controversial and convincing and you are going to get not just attention, but believers. If I were to make a video debunking this, it wouldn’t get traction. Even scientists with large followings would likely not get 336,000 views on a debunking video.

So the inventive is huge. This influencer probably gained thousands of followers from this video. She made hundreds if not thousands of dollars from it going viral. And so it pays to put intentionally fake pseudo-scientific crap on the web. Just pick a controversial topic, lie with confidence, and watch the profits flow in. No backlash, no consequences, just greed, and incentives to continue to lie.

My fear? I see this getting worse, not better. AI will only serve to exaggerate the problem with more convincing lies that cater to wider audiences. It feels like as a society, we are actually getting dumber and social media is incentivized to make the problem exponentially worse.

Where else have we seen lying with confidence working? Everywhere from biased news outlets, to product advertising, to politics. Whether selling ideas, products, or partisanship, lying with confidence seems to gain far more traction than telling the truth.

_____

Update: After posting this, (and probably thanks to re-watching the above video a few times to get the quotes right), I opened Instagram and the first post had dramatic music and warned against wearing polyester on planes:

I took the screen shot and didn’t watch the rest of the video. People actually fall for this crap? 🤦‍♂️

Ground Truthing

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The term ‘ground truthing’ was shared with me last night by a friend, Neil. I had never heard the term before so did a quick MS365 Copilot request to learn more.

Ground truthing is the process of collecting data on-site (in the real world) to validate and calibrate information obtained from remote sensing technologies, models, or other indirect methods… It’s essentially a reality check to ensure that what the data suggests matches what’s actually happening on the ground.

While it is primarily used in Geography & Remote Sensing, Environmental Science, Agriculture, and Machine Learning & AI, I think it’s a term (or at least a practice) we are going to see a lot more use of in the future. More and more, when I receive information I’m immediately questioning if it’s real. Anything remotely controversial, or surprising, easily falls into a category of doubt… ‘I wonder if this is real or AI?’ But more recently, almost every video and article I see seems to sit in an uncanny valley of almost true or almost real. Before I accept new information, I have to ask myself, ‘Where can I verify this?’ In other words, ‘How can I ground truth this?’

Here is a simple example, in that the information is obviously false, but the deep fake is impressively realistic.

I also saw a video of Physicist Brian Cox saying that comet ATLAS 3i was definitely a spaceship. I didn’t bother fact checking it, I new it was fake, but enough of his followers questioned these kinds of videos that Brain came out on social media to say this:

“I keep seeing AI shite of me popping up on YouTube. The general rule is that if I appear to say something that you agree with and you are a UFO nobber, flat earth bell end or think comet ATLAS 3i is a spaceship, it’s fake.”

Where it gets more complicated is where actual facts are taken and then exaggerated. On the same theme of science and space, I recently saw a video that was talking about the theory that our entire universe might be in a massive black hole. From Copilot:

Some physicists propose that our universe might exist inside a black hole. This idea stems from the observation that black holes warp space and time so intensely that they could create a new, self-contained universe within. The consistent spin direction of many galaxies could be a result of the angular momentum inherited from the parent black hole, influencing the structure and motion of matter in our universe.

This is indeed a theory that is being considered by some scientists and I find it very interesting. So when a video comes up on my social media stream about it, I watch it. But when 20 seconds in I hear the narrator say that this is now considered true, I can’t even get myself to watch to the end of the video. These kind of videos really piss me off. I am angered that someone would create a video based on factual, interesting and novel ideas, but exaggerate the information and outright lie about it for the sake of views, clicks, and likes.

All 3 of these examples are actually easy, because my BS detector goes off. Where I’m concerned now is where that detector does not go off. What happens when the lies are more subtle, when the information is more nuanced? For example, do I really understand the issues happening in one of the many global conflicts right now? What’s the bias of the news or broadcasting station sharing the information? Where do I get more authentic information? How do I go about ground truthing what I’ve heard? Can I even get access to information ‘from the ground’?

It’s getting to the point where I have to question almost everything I hear. Is it real, what is the source, and where can I verify this? I hadn’t heard the term ground truthing before last night, but I realize that I’ve already started doing it, and I’m going to be doing a whole lot more of it in the future.

Avoid this, try this, buy this

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I am getting sick and tired of social media ads these days. They are following a recipe designed to make you less knowledgeable, more stressed, and frankly dumber. Here are the two main formulas, or should I say ingredients, in these tasteless ads:

Either:

“Don’t eat these 3 items that are killing you.” Followed by a list that includes seed oils, or certain nuts, or another common item in your kitchen. Before plugging a product, or casually naming a name brand item while suggesting alternatives.

Or:

“Doctors hate me.” Followed by an exercise program or diet that has made the person ultra fit without ‘traditional’ medicines and practices. What,you need is our callisthenics program, Tai Chi, ‘Just 9 minutes a day’, or the Butt Blaster 3000.

It’s ‘Avoid this – it’s killing you!’ And then a product plug. Or it’s ’Transform your body, it’s easier than you think… if you buy into what I’m selling.’

And none of these are 30 seconds long. They are all longer format where they attempt to suck you in, feeling invested in the video for a minute or two before the secret to a better or healthier you is revealed.

But there is no real science behind what is claimed. Or worse yet, there are some factual aspects that are proven but irrelevant. “Did you know that ingredient XYZ in product ABC causes cancer?’ You didn’t, so you watch the video. But what isn’t shared is that the dangerous amount of that item would be 10,000 times the dose you would get from eating product ABC… and it only ever showed a link to cancer when that massive dose was fed to mice for continuous days or weeks.

These ads scare you with ‘facts’ that aren’t actually scary, or make promises that a program or product will change your life with a sample size of one person who is telling you how ‘This worked for me and it will work for you too’.

Fear and false promises are being sold on a grand scale and this formula is just showing up more and more. I guess from the amount of ads like this that I’ve seen, the formula is working.

(I’m sure everyone who tries Tia Chi looks like this at 62! 🤦‍♂️)

So vast

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This morning I watched a video that explained that to get to the next galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, it would take 2.5 million years travelling at the speed of light. Imagine that, travelling 300,000km per second for millions of years. And then you’ve only reached the first of trillions of galaxies… Not billions, but trillions of galaxies in our universe.

It’s so hard to make sense of these numbers. I understand what they mean, but I can’t really comprehend the scale. For example, let’s break down the idea of traveling 300,000km in a second. That means travelling 18 million kilometres in a minute, or 1,080 million kilometres in an hour, or 1 billion & 920 million kilometres in one day.

And at that speed it would still take 2.5 million years to get to the next galaxy.

I understand what the numbers mean, I just struggle to fathom the scale in a way my brain can grasp beyond saying, ‘That’s really far,’ and ‘The universe is really, really big.’ No matter how much I cognitively try to grasp how ‘really big’ our universe is, I know that in reality it’s magnitudes bigger than I can comprehend. This is truly mind boggling.