Various ideas

2003-05-14: Mainstream View on Physics

Disregard previous entry. I am now deeply convinced that "uncertainty principle" is a.. well, a principle of life. The thing that convinced me is that otherwise I'll have to accept the idea of god -- the universe as we know it could not have been created and could not work the way it works if not for some randomly happening things.

2002-01-30: Heretical View on Physics

I read some books and articles about physics lately and was surprised, that there are no convincing arguments about "uncertainty principle". May be that's because of the level of books I read, but nonetheless - I am still not convinced.

I guess I am what they call "a determinist" - I still believe that by knowing initial condition and all contributing factors it is possible to predict with 100% probability the outcome. But, and there is a huge "but", at the same time I believe that information storage and computation have to be performed outside of the observed system which is not possible as far as we can tell and so the conclusion is the same, as the one that comes out of "uncertainty principle".

But to me it makes a lot of difference -- I believe that if we manage for instance to produce a particle with known initial state and without any previous history and right in the middle of nowhere where there are no gravitation and no any other fields or particles - then we would be able to predict the state of that particle without measuring it. I tried to find any confirmation that scientists think the same way, but so far I can't find anything.

2001-10-05: Time Travel

Let's say that I'm staying in the clear sunny day on the top of Mt. Wilson. The air is clear and the photons bounce off my body all the time and go up up up. In just a fraction of a second they leave the Earth, then pass the Moon orbit and continue their journey across the universe carrying information about how exactly I pick my nose.

Now, let's say that I manage to instantly jump to some point far enough. Then I look through the telescope of super-high resolution at the Earth. What do I see? Myself, picking in the nose. What did I just do? I traveled through time. And if I jump even further - I can see the real "past" - Napoleon staying in the field thinking and bouncing photons off his body for example.

How far in the past we can go this way? Surprisingly it depends on the size of the object we are looking at. Theoretical limit would be something like that:

                             lens_diameter
maximal distance = -----------------------------------
                    2 * sin( PI * min / 2 / bounced )

                    lens_diameter * bounced
maximal distance = -------------------------
                           PI * min

Not surprisingly the bigger your lens is and the less information you need - the further you can see. For moving objects (or moving observer!) that equation does not work - because we start to have more information about the object without changing distance or the lens diameter. This by itself is the most interesting phenomenon, but I do not yet have a clear idea how to deal with it.

Now that we have distance, we can easily have the time for the case of instant jump:

maximum time travel distance = maximum observation distance / speed of light

2001-07-30: Ideal spying

Interesting conclusion for the case of "instant" change of any field. Let's say we have super sensitive matrix of elements that can precisely measure current vector of that field. Then, in fact, that single matrix has all the information that is available in all the universe. If it is sensitive enough - it can sense heartbeat of an alien mouse somewhere in another galaxy. It is all about sensitivity then.

2001-07-30: The same topic, a bit more practical

Assuming that the gravity field has the same properties as magnetic field we can simplify experiments. If it does not - nothing really changes in the experiment except that it would be extremely hard to conduct.

An interesting experiment (if it was not conducted before): take a magnet and two magnet sensors that can register direction to the magnet. Place photo element close to these two. Now quickly move the magnet a little bit. If magnetic field changes instantly - then sensors would sense the move before photo-element, if magnetic field change has limited speed - at the same time probably.

Sounds quite simple and doable, doesn't it? Magnet front could be reflective and laser beam could be reflected from it to the photo-element. The magnet can then be rotated or just moved to alter both light and magnetic field at the same time.

Now, whatever the result is it is interesting: let's say the magnetic field changes instantly (which I doubt, frankly) - then we discovered faster then light communication. And even if it does not - then obviously that means that there would be a front of change moving in all directions with the speed of light (presumably). There could be interesting tricks then if we combine these fronts - they should interfere.

For gravity it sounds even more intriguing - gravity change wave front would be a steep change in the fabric of the matter itself, at least according to what I understood in Einsteins's theory.. Hey, this is what stops ships from going above speed of light - they push their gravity wave too much, the faster they move the steeper the wave, the harder it is to climb to that wave. And at the speed of light the wave is just "vertical". Somewhat like sound barrier..

Is there a way to interfere something with that wave to make it less steep?

2001-07-12: Faster then Light Communication

Read "Science in Science Fiction" today and this is the experiment that came to my mind. Suppose we have a device sensitive enough to register gravitation of a relatively small mass. Now, suppose we combine that device with precious clock and some photometer.

Now, at some distance from that device we have nuclear bomb, at one moment we blow that bomb therefore changing some of its mass into energy and reducing gravitational force between that bomb and other objects.

I wonder what would be registered by our device: simultaneous drop in gravitational force and light from the explosion or gravitational change would be registered before the light. In that case we found a way to transfer information faster then light. In some sense - we got a signal from the future, that has not happened yet.

One more simple experiment could be to measure sun's gravitation constantly and look for especially big explosions on the sun - subtle variations in sun's gravitation and subtle variations in light intensity will work exactly as outlined above - we can check if gravitational changes are instant or still distributed with the speed of light.