Philosophy debates about Sexual Bias
Are women inherently irrational (or more irrational than men)?
If love is a rational emotion and must exist for reproduction, then why does it lead to such bad decisions?
How long until we get the next Ayn Rand?
Tuesday, August 06, 2013
Monday, July 15, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
The fatal flaw of the contemporary U.S. 'Libertarian'
The fundamental flaw with libertarian thought, which this Salon Article fails to adress, is not that they fail to study history, that is a common flaw of most ideologies. No, the fundamental flaw with libertarian thought is the belief that libertarians themselves are somehow elite, superior, or in any way more deserving of the privileges of liberty based upon some inherent merit.
They fail to recognize that liberty must be earned by participation and investment through duty and cooperation within society. The only independent objective gage of one's 'merit' is one's value to others. Until the 'libertarian' extremists realize that any wealth they amass is largely a result of the work of others, the justice system, and random chance, that ownership of capital resources is not the equivalent of ability, intelligence, or merit, and thus ownership of capital is no indication of superiority, but more a factor of unearned characteristics such as place and time of birth, inheritance, or luck, they will never begin to understand the necessity of social cooperation under law (a.k.a. 'statism') they consider so unpalatable.
It has less to do with compassion than with survival. Put in a fair competition, people who cooperate always out compete those who prefer individual conflict. Families, Teams, and Tribes, Communities, States, and Nations, are all a result of the fundamental undeniable MERIT of cooperative strategy. Social cooperation is the strength libertarians lack. Politically, locked into the ideal of individual liberty, they fail to see their own lack of merit.
The egalitarian ethic upon which our Constitution is founded, is not the presumption that all will become equal, only that all SHOULD be treated equally, given equal opportunity, and not limited by circumstances of birth, from reaching their potential. In providing just social structures, we not only increase our collective liberty, we maximize individual potential. That is the secret to success that elitists of all stripes fail to understand.
The way out is easy, however, all it really requires is maturity. Once one accepts one's own inevitable dimise, and finds a way to redefine their SELF as something greater than their individual body or life, then enlightenment can be obtained. The fundamental problem with that process is that most people become afraid when contemplating their death, and succumb to irrational thinking. Only rational enlightened self-interest, where SELF is defined in the broadest and most global scope, can create the opportunity for long-term survival. All else is folly.
They fail to recognize that liberty must be earned by participation and investment through duty and cooperation within society. The only independent objective gage of one's 'merit' is one's value to others. Until the 'libertarian' extremists realize that any wealth they amass is largely a result of the work of others, the justice system, and random chance, that ownership of capital resources is not the equivalent of ability, intelligence, or merit, and thus ownership of capital is no indication of superiority, but more a factor of unearned characteristics such as place and time of birth, inheritance, or luck, they will never begin to understand the necessity of social cooperation under law (a.k.a. 'statism') they consider so unpalatable.
It has less to do with compassion than with survival. Put in a fair competition, people who cooperate always out compete those who prefer individual conflict. Families, Teams, and Tribes, Communities, States, and Nations, are all a result of the fundamental undeniable MERIT of cooperative strategy. Social cooperation is the strength libertarians lack. Politically, locked into the ideal of individual liberty, they fail to see their own lack of merit.
The egalitarian ethic upon which our Constitution is founded, is not the presumption that all will become equal, only that all SHOULD be treated equally, given equal opportunity, and not limited by circumstances of birth, from reaching their potential. In providing just social structures, we not only increase our collective liberty, we maximize individual potential. That is the secret to success that elitists of all stripes fail to understand.
The way out is easy, however, all it really requires is maturity. Once one accepts one's own inevitable dimise, and finds a way to redefine their SELF as something greater than their individual body or life, then enlightenment can be obtained. The fundamental problem with that process is that most people become afraid when contemplating their death, and succumb to irrational thinking. Only rational enlightened self-interest, where SELF is defined in the broadest and most global scope, can create the opportunity for long-term survival. All else is folly.
Saturday, May 04, 2013
Time Crystals and perpetuum mobile
‘Time Crystals’ Could Upend Physicists’ Theory of Time
- 04.30.13
- 9:30 AM
Physicists plan to create a “time crystal” — a theoretical object that moves in a repeating pattern without using energy — inside a device called an ion trap. Image: Hartmut Häffner
In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion.
“Most research in physics is continuations of things that have gone before,” said Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This, he said, was “kind of outside the box.”
Wilczek’s idea met with a muted response from physicists. Here was a brilliant professor known for developing exotic theories that later entered the mainstream, including the existence of particles called axions and anyons, and discovering a property of nuclear forces known as asymptotic freedom (for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004). But perpetual motion, deemed impossible by the fundamental laws of physics, was hard to swallow. Did the work constitute a major breakthrough or faulty logic? Jakub Zakrzewski, a professor of physics and head of atomic optics at Jagiellonian University in Poland who wrote a perspective on the research that accompanied Wilczek’s publication, says: “I simply don’t know.”
Now, a technological advance has made it possible for physicists to test the idea. They plan to build a time crystal, not in the hope that this perpetuum mobile will generate an endless supply of energy (as inventors have striven in vain to do for more than a thousand years) but that it will yield a better theory of time itself.
A Crazy Concept
The idea came to Wilczek while he was preparing a class lecture in 2010. “I was thinking about the classification of crystals, and then it just occurred to me that it’s natural to think about space and time together,” he said. “So if you think about crystals in space, it’s very natural also to think about the classification of crystalline behavior in time.”
When matter crystallizes, its atoms spontaneously organize themselves into the rows, columns and stacks of a three-dimensional lattice. An atom occupies each “lattice point,” but the balance of forces between the atoms prevents them from inhabiting the space between. Because the atoms suddenly have a discrete, rather than continuous, set of choices for where to exist, crystals are said to break the spatial symmetry of nature — the usual rule that all places in space are equivalent. But what about the temporal symmetry of nature — the rule that stable objects stay the same throughout time?
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek often develops outlandish theories that eventually enter the mainstream. “Of course not everything I do works,” he says. Image: Frank Wilczek
Wilczek mulled over the possibility for months. Eventually, his equations indicated that atoms could indeed form a regularly repeating lattice in time, returning to their initial arrangement only after discrete (rather than continuous) intervals, thereby breaking time symmetry. Without consuming or producing energy, time crystals would be stable, in what physicists call their “ground state,” despite cyclical variations in structure that scientists say can be interpreted as perpetual motion.
“For a physicist, this is really a crazy concept to think of a ground state which is time-dependent,” said Hartmut Häffner, a quantum physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. “The definition of a ground state is that this is energy-zero. But if the state is time-dependent, that implies that the energy changes or something is changing. Something is moving around.”
How can something move, and keep moving forever, without expending energy? It seemed an absurd idea — a major break from the accepted laws of physics. But Wilczek’s papers on quantum andclassical time crystals (the latter co-authored by Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky) survived a panel of expert reviewers and were published in Physical Review Letters in October 2012. Wilczek didn’t claim to know whether objects that break the symmetry of time exist in nature, but he wanted experimentalists to try to make one.
“It’s like you draw targets and wait for arrows to hit them,” he said. “If there’s no logical barrier to this behavior being realized, then I expect it will be realized.”
The Big Test
In June, a group of physicists led by Xiang Zhang, a nanoengineer at Berkeley, and Tongcang Li, a physicist and postdoctoral researcher in Zhang’s group, proposed creating a time crystal in the form of a persistently rotating ring of charged atoms, or ions. (Li said he had been contemplating the idea before reading Wilczek’s papers.) The group’s article was published with Wilczek’s in Physical Review Letters.
Since then, a single critic — Patrick Bruno, a theoretical physicist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France — has voiced dissent in the academic literature. Bruno thinks Wilczek and company mistakenly identified time-dependent behavior of objects in excited energetic states, rather than their ground states. There is nothing surprising about objects with surplus energy moving in a cyclical fashion, with the motion decaying as the energy dissipates. To be a time crystal, an object must exhibit perpetual motion in its ground state.
Bruno’s comment and Wilczek’s reply appeared in Physical Review Letters in March 2013. Bruno demonstrated that a lower energy state is possible in a model system that Wilczek had proposed as a hypothetical example of a quantum time crystal. Wilczek said that although the example is not a time crystal, he doesn’t think the error “calls into question the basic concepts.”
“I proved that example is not correct,” Bruno said. “But I have no general proof — so far, at least.”
The debate will probably not be settled on theoretical grounds. “The ball is really in the hands of our very clever experimental colleagues,” Zakrzewski said.
An international team led by Berkeley scientists is preparing an elaborate lab experiment, although it may take “anywhere between three and infinity years” to complete, depending on funding or unforeseen technical difficulties, said Häffner, who is co-principal investigator with Zhang. The hope is that time crystals will push physics beyond the precise but seemingly imperfect laws of quantum mechanics and lead the way to a grander theory.
“I’m very interested in seeing if I can make a new contribution following Einstein,” Li said. “He said that quantum mechanics is not complete.”
To Build an Ion Ring
In Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity (the body of laws governing gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe), the dimensions of time and space are woven together into the same fabric, known as space-time. But in quantum mechanics (the laws governing interactions on the subatomic scale), the time dimension is represented in a different way than the three dimensions of space — “a disturbing, aesthetically unpleasant asymmetry,” Zakrzewski said.
The different treatments of time may be one source of incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics, at least one of which must be altered for there to be an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity (widely viewed as a major goal of theoretical physics). Which concept of time is right?
If time crystals are able to break time symmetry in the same way that conventional crystals break space symmetry, “it tells you that in nature those two quantities seem to have similar properties, and that ultimately should reflect itself in a theory,” Häffner said. This would suggest that quantum mechanics is inadequate, and that a better quantum theory might treat time and space as two threads of the same fabric.
An illustration of the time crystal experiment planned at UC-Berkeley. Electric fields will be used to corral calcium ions into a 100-micron-wide “trap,” where they will form a crystalline ring. The scientists believe a static magnetic field will cause the ring to rotate. Image: Hartmut Häffner
The Berkeley-led team will attempt to build a time crystal by injecting 100 calcium ions into a small chamber surrounded by electrodes. The electric field generated by the electrodes will corral the ions in a “trap” 100 microns wide, or roughly the width of a human hair. The scientists must precisely calibrate the electrodes to smooth out the field. Because like charges repel, the ions will space themselves evenly around the outer edge of the trap, forming a crystalline ring.
At first, the ions will vibrate in an excited state, but diode lasers like those found in DVD players will be used to gradually scatter away their extra kinetic energy. According to the group’s calculations, the ion ring should settle into its ground state when the ions are laser-cooled to around one-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. Access to this temperature regime had long been obstructed by background heat emanating from trap electrodes, but in September, a breakthrough technique for cleaning surface contaminants off electrodes enabled a 100-fold reduction in ion trap background heat. “That’s exactly the factor we need to bring this experiment into reach,” Häffner said.
Next, the researchers will switch on a static magnetic field in the trap, which their theory says should induce the ions to start rotating (and continue doing so indefinitely). If all goes as planned, the ions will cycle around to their starting point at fixed intervals, forming a regularly repeating lattice in time that breaks temporal symmetry.
To see the ring’s rotation, the scientists will zap one of the ions with a laser, effectively tagging it by putting it into a different electronic state than the other 99 ions. It will stay bright (and reveal its new location) when the others are darkened by a second laser.
If the bright ion is circling the ring at a steady rate, then the scientists will have demonstrated, for the first time, that the translational symmetry of time can be broken. “It will really challenge our understanding,” Li said. “But first we need to prove that it does indeed exist.”
Until that happens, some physicists will remain deeply skeptical. “I personally think it’s not possible to detect motion in the ground state,” Bruno said. “They may be able to make a ring of ions in a toroidal trap and do some interesting physics with that, but they will not see their ever-ticking clock as they claim.”
Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Why Atheists Make Better Warriors
Stunning Videos Reveal the true nature of 'supernatural' powers, as a martial artist makes the mistake of believing his own myth.
A book called Put 'Em Down, Take 'Em Out!: Knife Fighting Techniques From Folsom Prison is one of the scariest things I've ever read,
"It's probably true that certain human accomplishments depend upon people's neurotic needs for achievement or their lust for money or power. A lot of art comes from a place of being captivated by selfish illusions. And if a person were to permanently dispel the illusion of the self, he might not write great novels or start the next Apple. Buddhahood might be incompatible with being the next Nabokov or Steve Jobs. Luckily, no one has ever had to choose between becoming a great artist or entrepreneur, or the next Buddha." - Sam HarrisYour mind will be active in any case, no matter how much you meditate. The goal is not to be without thought, but to be aware of the character of your experience in each moment and not suffer unnecessarily. Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.
Sam Harris is best known as a vocal opponent of religious faith. But he is also a student of martial arts and armed self-defense, and a practitioner of daily silent meditation.
In the May issue of The Atlantic, Graeme Wood recounts the experience of learning meditation and Brazilian jiu-jitsu with him. Harris is finishing his next book, Waking Up: Science, Skepticism, Spirituality, about self-transcendence in the absence of religion. Following their encounter, Wood caught up with Harris to discuss violence, faith, and meditation.
Would you rather be attacked by one person with a knife, or several unarmed individuals equally intent on killing you?
Both situations are invitations to a track meet: You want to run. One of my teachers, Mark Mikita, specializes in knife fighting, mostly derived from the Filipino martial arts, and one of his teachers told him: "If you train with me for ten years, and someone pulls a knife on you, and you just turn and run, then your training has been successful." The problems of a knife and multiple attackers are similar, in that they rarely end well for a person who is alone and unarmed.
Even if you know how to defend yourself against one person, fighting several people is a hugely different situation. You could be a Golden Gloves champion, but while you confront your first attacker, you'll have one or more people taking your flank. Underestimating the gravity of this problem is one of the more dangerous illusions that martial artists acquire. It is true that uncommitted or unsophisticated attackers might approach you serially, and if you have good skills, you might prevail over one at a time. But if you're swarmed by several people at once, it becomes a problem for which no martial art has a solution. Only having a weapon makes you likely to prevail.
Similarly, a knife attack is always a disaster for an unarmed person. Somebody who gets out of 10 years in a maximum-security prison has basically gone to graduate school for shanking people. A person who is seriously intent upon killing you with a knife is not going to attack in the way you've learned to expect from martial-arts class. Most martial artists have done knife-defense drills where their partners attack in a very stereotyped way--lunging forward with a single thrust and leaving their arm out there so that you can perform the technique. This is just a pantomime of combat, and it is dangerously misleading.
The reality of a knife attack is that even if you stop 50% of the thrusts and slashes, you will be taking damage with every other move. And getting cut with a knife of any size is physiologically horrible in a way that few people realize. It is arguably worse than getting shot. A bullet is a tiny ball of metal that may or may not hit something vital. Unless you're shooting someone in the brainstem or heart, you're basically waiting for blood loss to incapacitate him. A knife--especially in the hands of someone who knows how to use it--cuts through everything it touches, and it's not going to malfunction or run out of bullets. It is also much harder to wrestle a blade out of a person's hand, because you can grab a gun without getting your fingers cut off.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Veronica Mars Movie Raises $5.7-million on Kickstarter
They broke all the KickStarter Records, most donors (over 90,000), most money for a movie project. Most radical fun. Can't wait for the movie in 2014!
Veronica Mars (AKA Kristen Bell) ROCKS!