Quintessential Horizons

Quintessential thoughts on science, spirituality, subjective quagmires and objective reality.

Sunday, July 25, 2004

Energetic Monkeys!

This week I could possibly write a lot. I am not claiming to have done any ground breaking research nor did I do anything like reading "My pet goat". But still pretty interesting thoughts. Of late I am having this huge mental block, which I can possibly define as, the phenomena by virtue of which a person cannot think. The referees' silence is nothing but a space -time singularity. The idea is about the "Law of conservation of Energy". Nobody knows why energy has to be conserved, albeit being a very commonly observed fact. Naive thinking is the cause, for taking something profound as energy, for granted. I remember my high school physics teacher Mr. Naik, when he was teaching Newton's second law, followed by the definition of force. After writing the equation, F = ma on the chalk board, he said "my dear students force is ma, the mama, the mother of physics". Sure, force is very important but more important is how a force comes into picture. Mr. Naik was a smart man and he knew when to stop talking. I am an idiot and so I am taking it further. Everybody now knows that the Lagrangian is the progenitor of force, and the energy enters through the Lagrangian. Why the hell is it like that ? This was the same question Lagrange asked to himself and kept on asking until he was dead! People had to wait till the advent of Quantum Mechanics to get a fairly satisfactory answer through the path integral formalism dealing with the Feynman sum over histories.


You might have read or heard something about number theory, groups and stuff like that. There is something called "Closure property " when we deal with Abelian groups. The property states that, any operation on the elements of the group will result in an element belonging to the same group. Law of conservation of Energy is one such property. It is one fact which make us believe that the Law of Physics is the same universally. In other words Physics is like a group. That makes people think of the possibility of unifying the seemingly different forces. So now everything is simple. Just find that group and we are done! In order to formulate the theory we need to solve the problem, for which we have to ask questions. More important, what kind of questions? Well some people who are very smart realized this and started asking. For a single reason or for singularity reasons they started with the black holes. One such intetelligent fella who took up the cause thirty years ago and successfully solved some of the mysteries surrounding black holes is Prof. Stephan Hawking. July 21, 2004 Hawking had something to say, which was quite contrary to what he had said before. This is what I want to elaborate.
Here is Prof. Hawking's Dublin speech.

The problem is called "The blackhole information Loss Paradox" . The black hole emits Hawking radiation obervable by an observer at infinity. But not all the mass that falls into it will be out in the form of Hawking radiation(No 100% efficient process in the universe!). The black hole, over a very long period of time evaporates, leaving part of the information of the swallowed mass missing. Now since the black hole is not there (eventually), in order to account for the missing information people conjectured various possibilities. One among them is the idea of parallel universes(to account for he missing loss of information). Now Hawking comes up with an idea, almost taking a U turn from his previous stance. No information is lost, because the missing information is coming out from the black hole to our universe itself, but in a mangled form. So no parallel universe anymore. Potential project of Wachowski brothers doomed! Hawking's 1974 original paper was simple enough for even idiots like me to understand. I am expecting troubles(mangled proof) with the paper which is going to be published next month. Mangling is consistent with the notion of second law of thermodynamics. But it takes its toll to convince the critics(karmodynamics?). There are too many people out there who are very sceptical of this whole idea of black holes, expanding universe and stuff like that. These kinds of developments in science will atleast temporarily fuel their hidden agenda. Recently my landlord had a yard sale, after which he gave me the books which were left over. One of the books titled American History or something like that starts with Adam and Eve!
My car seems to have a problem every summer. Some thing is wrong with the alternator. Battery won't charge. So it's there in the Walmart parking lot. Result: I have to walk from Hancock to Houghton, which takes exactly 45 minutes. Who is that two by two joker Physics grad who says walking is fun?
Adam and Eve, that reminds me of people agitating against gay marriages. They argue that its not a natural union. Well they are wrong.
Here is why. So! there are lesbian monkeys in Japan. Can there be anything more natural to human beings than monkeys?




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