OK, I know I’ve been spending a lot of time on the internet lately, but I didn’t expect this…
Here’s a useful link to keep checking if you’re worried about the LHC:
After reading my brother’s review of The Dark Knight and after noticing that it’s already No. 4 on the IMDb all-time top 250, I couldn’t wait to watch it myself.
But it turns out there’s a national conspiracy to prevent Delhi University students from watching this flick. The movie is being screened at every PVR cinema hall in Delhi except for the three that are close to the University. And the Naraina hall which is the one that’s next closest “can’t be reached due to communication problems” according to the lady on the phone which means I can’t book tickets!
I’ve begun blogging on physics at Quantum Spectacles along with Prof. Tarun Saini from the Indian Institute of Science. I’m er… trying to keep things simple for now but I don’t know where it’ll go. Subscribe to the feed!
A while back, I wrote a little story called Ralph’s Simulation which involved the LHC and the destruction of the world (Just to set the record straight: I’m all for the LHC starting up and think that any concerns about the safety of the LHC are ludicrous. But then again, I’m all for Armageddon as well). In a usual round of ego-googling, I queried “Ralph’s Simulation” and got back just two results – one being the story itself and the other, this:
[PDF] Tracking Studies of LHC Collimation System at SLAC
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – View as HTML
Benchmark to Ralph’s Simulation of. Phase I Collimation System. Injection energy: 450 Gev. # impacts. # absorbed. <impact parameter>. spread of impact …
uslarp.lbl.gov/workshops/041019/talks/041020/AM/Col/041020_Col_Cai.pdf – Similar pages – Note this
Ooooh…
Drive
Incubus’ “Drive” has just been promoted to the title of my all-time favorite track after spending more than a year at position two. I would recommend anyone who already hasn’t, to listen to the song. Every time the guitar goes cha chang chang cha, each note screams “NOW!” and “THIS MOMENT!”, kind of a relief for someone who’s often lost either in the past or the future.
Anthropic Computing
You turn on your computer, run a program to factorise 821048312498274193841 which works by making a random guess as to what the factors are. If the guess is right, the program ends and you’re done. If it’s wrong, it activates a shotgun that blows your head off.
This is the extent to which computer scientists would go to solve one of the most important mathematical problems of the century.
NP-complete problems are those whose solutions can be verified quickly but for which finding the solution takes a very very long time. The existence of efficient (fast) algorithms for this class of problems is a major open problem (the Clay Mathematical Institute lists it as a Millennium Problem with a 1 million dollar bounty!). Finding such a solution for even one problem in the class would imply that a solution exists for all others. However, most computer scientists believe that such solutions do not exist. Scott Aaronson is famous for proposing the intractability of NP-complete problems as a law of nature, with the same level of reverence as given to say, the second law of thermodynamics.
In his paper NP-Complete problems and Physical Reality, Aaronson presents “Anthropic Computing” as “any model of computation in which the probability of one’s own existence might depend on a computer’s output”. If the many-world’s interpretation of quantum mechanics is indeed true (that’s a big IF), by performing the “shotgun-computation”, you will instantaneously end-up in a universe where the computer guessed the answer correctly and hence didn’t blow your head off. Neat.
But I guess that would imply that if NP-hardness is taken as a physical law, then the many-world’s interpretation can’t be true.
A qualification: Factorisation isn’t actually an NP-complete problem. Peter Shor showed that integers can be factorised in polynomial time on a quantum computer.
Name change
After my first course in quantum mechanics, I’ve (re)discovered that the universe isn’t clockwork after all. And I think I did good to take the red pill. So a name change for the blog is on the cards…
- You worry more about graduate school than about breakfast
(“Pass the toast please.”
“No they don’t need the GRE General tests”
“Huh?” )
- A good friend tells you the only element in your system is sarcasm (she forgets coffee!)
- You pick chits for your University Practical exam and get the experiments you’re least prepared for – 6 times in a row!
- You blank out when the teacher who caught you reading “Fermat’s Last Theorem” at the back bench in her electronics class, takes your viva for the lab exam
- You get goose-pimples while pondering gravity-induced-neutron-interferometry, NP-completeness and quantum non-locality
- You swear by Linux but use Windows when no one’s looking [EDIT: not any more... no, really]
- You have your own stash of xkcd.com imitations in your drawer
- You wonder how juvenile you were when you chose a cheesy username like lumeno
- You have no clue why you’re telling everyone this
(16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008 )
Clarke’s Three Laws:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
A short story entry that won the first prize at the Science Fiction Writing Competition of the National Science Festival held here in college.
Ralph was excited to find the announcement in the morning newspaper – the first ever “Inter-Galactic Simulation Contest”. As a college student at the prestigious University of Andromeda on Planet Xing, Ralph was honing his skills on simulation technology – a quickly growing field in which the universe’s best scientists strived to make simulations of intelligent civillizations.
The contest rules were clearly outlined in the announcement:
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Simulated entities must be self-conscious
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The simulation must last at least three Xingonian years
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A maximum of three programmer interventions are allowed
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A minimum of one thousand output strings per second that resonate deep existential angst must be produced from the third year onwards
The second requirement troubled Ralph. It was common knowledge among simulation scientists that intelligent life simulations have never lasted more than three Xingonian years; the civillization tended to self-destroy. This seemed to be an inherent limit in intelligent civillization simulations (ICS).
Nevertheless, Ralph decided to enter his latest ICS project into the contest. It had been running smoothly for nearly 2.8 Xingonian years.
Ralph had decided to call it Earth.
Earth was being supported by the most advanced Quantum Supercomputers at the University of Andromeda. The initiation of Earth simulation was set at a point which the simulated “Earthlings” referred to as the Ice Age.
Earth ICS soon came to be regarded as one of the leading candidates for the contest. It overshot the number of existential angst output strings required by a factor of hundred. Better yet, the civillization appeared to be stable and Ralph hadn’t used even one of the allowed programmer interventions. (A programmer intervention was when the project head manually effected a change in the simulation. This was usually done if and when the ICS became unstable and tended towards self-destruction.)
It was around running time 2.85 Xingonian years that Ralph decided to make his first intervention. Ralph felt that the progress of science and technology was rather dull. So, at around 1905 AD Earth-time, Raplh sparked up an otherwise unimpressive clerk in the Swiss Patent Office with a universal truth – the Principle of Relativity. Although Ralph did this with the best of intentions, it turned out that Einstein’s E=mc2 that followed from relativity soon gave rise to the atomic age and new tensions betwen global superpowers.
Ralph watched in horror as nuclear arms started piling up in his simulation. He needed to make an intervention again – that too only 0.001 Xingonian years after his first!
Ralph’s second intervention made sure that the Cold War remained cold. As the years progressed and Ralph’s simulation hit the 2.9 mark, new dangers started to surface, the most pertinent of which were Global Warming and the Large Hadron Collider.
He didn’t have to worry about the first; it would destroy the simulation only well after the three year requirement. But the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator being built at CERN in Europe, was an immediate threat! The true laws of physics required that when the LHC switched on in May 2008, micro-black-holes would form in the accelerator due to the high energy collisions and devour the entire Earth simulation.
The Earth physicists had missed out this point.
Circa February 2008, Ralph was racking his brains trying to figure out how he should intervene to prevent the LHC initiation when a major glitch came up. An unassuming Earth boy who was participating in a SciFi Writing Competition had unwittingly initiated an infinite self-referential loop in the simulation. In his existential exasperation, the boy had decided to write a story about how an Andromedan named Ralph made a simulation called Earth in which an Earth boy wrote a story about how an Andromedan named Ralph made a simulation called Earth in which an Earth boy wrote a story about how… ad infinitum.
The self-reference took over the Earth as all processing stopped and the Earth simulation came to a grinding halt. It had run for 2.97 Xingonian years. Dismayed, Ralph wondered whether the three year limit was fundamental to the universe itself…
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