So, this is a post for little grasshoppers of physics that want to understand the basic ideas of special relativity without going too much into the math…

Let’s start easy, with Bob the scientific fisherman. He’s in his boat, looking at the waves which his fishing line creates as it oscillates in the water. When his boat advances slowly, he realizes that the forward waves move more slowly with respect to him. Kind of, his boat is trying to catch the waves.

Bob the scientific fisherman thinks: “Sure, the waves move with respect to the water with a fixed velocity. I may move, also with respect to the water even faster than that, if I row hard. Then I can overtake the waves”. That’s true, and this is what happens when you break the sound barrier.

Bob thinks even more: “By measuring how fast do the waves escape from me, I may know my velocity with respect to the water… If I am at rest with respect to the water, the velocity of the waves will be homogeneous from my point of view

“While, if I move, it will not be homogeneous, the waves will escape from me with a velocity that will depend on the direction.”

Bob went home happy. He had caught no fishes, but had acquired some wisdom…

In space nobody will hear you cry… because there is no water, nor air. But there are waves out there, anyway. There is light, and we can apply the same idea. Water waves move on water. What does light move on? Just to give it a name, people used to call it aether. Michelson and Morley in 1887 designed a very beautiful experiment to measure the velocity of the Earth with respect to this aether, by measuring the speed of light in different directions, just as Bob wanted to measure the speed of the water-waves in different directions to find out his velocity with respect to the water.

The experiment of Michelson and Morley was a complete failure. The speed of light was the same, no matter which direction you looked at.

So, there were various options: (a) the Earth is really at rest with respect to the aether. That’s a funny option: we know that the Earth moves around the Sun, at approximately 30 km/s!! And the Sun moves with respect to the galactic center, even faster… What’s the other option? It is (b): the Earth drags the aether as it moves. So to speak, the aether which is near us moves with our same speed, but the aether far away from us does not.

This last option is discarded because of stellar aberration. Let us explain it in simple terms. It’s raining, and there is no wind. The rain drops just fall vertically. You’re standing in the street, just holding your umbrella vertically so as not to get wet. OK. Now, you start moving. You should lean the umbrella forward a little bit if you want to remain dry. If you move in the opposite direction, you have to lean the umbrella in the opposite direction.

Now, let us establish the terms of the metaphor. The light from a certain star is the rain, and the telescope is the umbrella. Let us say that, with the Earth at rest, you have to point your telescope in the vertical direction in order to catch the light from your star. Now, the Earth starts moving. Then, you have to “lean” your telescope a little bit, in order not to lose the star. If the Earth moves in the opposite direction, the telescope has to lean in the opposite direction. This is what happens really: when changing from summer to winter, the positions of the stars change a little bit, exactly as predicted by this little story.

So, we know the Earth doesn’t drag the aether as it moves! Our two options are, therefore, invalid. Now, the patent office employee enters the game. But that’s another story that we will tell soon…

The exposition and images are taken from a talk I gave to high school students in 2005, for the centennial of the SR paper at IES Ágora, in Madrid.

One of the key postulates of Einstein’s theory of special relativity is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. This means that whatever the energy of the photons making up the ray of light, its speed is always the same. It’s called Lorentz invariance, and it’s been on trial once again, courtesy of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) Collaboration.

In a paper published in Nature last month, Abdo and colleagues analysed the light coming from a distant and fleeting gamma ray burst to try and pick up any variation in the speed of its photons – and found no variation, at least down a limit.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are believed to be released during supernovae and are the brightest events occurring in the universe – despite the fact that most of them are billions of light years away from Earth. The radiation emitted during a GRB is extremely intense, typically releasing as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire lifetime. They are good candidates for measuring a variation in light speed due to the cosmological distances the light has to travel to reach us – even tiny variations in photon speed are amplified enough to be revealed in the sharp features of the light curve emitted during the burst.

Illustration of a Gamma-ray Burst

Researchers at the Fermi LAT Collaboration were alerted to a particularly interesting gamma-ray burst after it was picked up by both the Large Area Telescope and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, which are aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. This telescope is a joint project between NASA, the US Department of Energy and government agencies in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden, and is currently in low Earth orbit. A photon, with an energy of 31GeV, emitted less than a second after the start of the burst was singled out and used to find a limit for the variation of the speed of light.

In special relativity this limit should not exist, as there is no length at which the Lorentz invariance should be broken. However, some theoretical physicists think that at very small lengths it could in fact be violated. In order to formulate a “theory of everything”, they are attempting to reconcile gravitational effects with quantum mechanics and create a theory of quantum gravity. According to these theories, at the Planck scale (lengths of approximately 1.62 x 10^-33 cm) quantum mechanics should interact with gravity, influencing the nature of space-time and so changing the speed of light.

In the research conducted by the Fermi LAT Collaboration, however, Lorentz invariance was found by two independent methods to hold true down to the Planck length divided by 1.2. This is a blow to some quantum gravity theories that require the fabric of space-time to be altered on small scales.

While this may be bad news for some modern day physicists, it’s good news for Einstein – after over 100 years, his theory of special relativity still stands.

Reference: Nature doi:10.1038/nature08574

Image Credit: NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones

I’m currently trying to wrap my mind around Einstein’s Special and General Relativity. Not an easy task …

Remember the paradox of the pole and the barn? It’s a classical paradox in special relativity, I read it in Taylor and Wheeler’s book so many years back (the world was young, the mills were white… ainssss). OK, returning. Consider a guy running with a horizontal pole traversing a barn which has a front and a back gate, both open. Let the barn rest-length be exactly the same as the rest-length of the barn.

Now, let’s speed things up. The guy with the pole runs through the barn at a speed close to that of light. From his point of view, the barn is coming towards him, so its length must shrink. Ehm… OK. Now, let’s stand by the barn, at rest with respect to it. The guy is coming so fast… the pole is shrinking from our point of view.

The question comes now: does the pole fit inside the barn or not? Well. The solution is not easy, but it is everywhere on the web. If you know it, continue reading. If you don’t, fight with it for a while…

So, spoiler alert! I assume that you’ve realized what is the answer.

Short story: simultaneity. The events of the front of the pole going through the front door and the rear of the pole going through the back door are connected via a space-like interval, so there can be no causal connection between them. Therefore, they may happen in one order to one observer, and in the reverse order to another observer. This is indeed what happens, so the question “does the pole fit in the barn?” is not frame-independent.

OK, now for the twist. Imagine a couple, boy and girl for simplicity. They’re going to make love. Let us assume that the penis fits in the vagina exactly, when measured at rest. Assume that the velocity of the penentration is close to the speed of light (come on, a little bit of imagination!). Now, girls have no “back door” so… how is the paradox solved? From his point of view, the vagina is too short, the penis doesn’t fit. From her point of view, the penis is too short, it will never reach the bottom…

What happens, really?

Bonus: for some extra fun, check the top 10 reasons which forbid relativistic sex.

Here is the link for practice problems for Special Rel.  The problems on the quiz will be like these ones.

http://www.phys.vt.edu/~takeuchi/relativity/practice/

As I mentioned in class today, there will be two assessments for the Special Relativity section. The first is a summary of the Alien Parking Troubles. Here are the details:

Alien Summary: Due Monday November 16^th, 2009-

length: approximately ½ page
answer the following questions:
1. Will the Spaceship fit inside the hangar according to the reference frame of the Aliens? Why or why not?
2. Will the Spaceship fit inside the hangar according to the reference frame of the Earthlings? Why or why not?
3. What is the length of the spaceship after the Aliens have landed on Earth?
4. What is the length of the hangar after the Aliens have landed on Earth?
5. At (approximately) what time does the ship leave the hangar in the Alien’s Reference Frame?
6. At  (approximately) what time does the ship leave the hangar in the Earth’s Reference Frame?
7. How would this problem change if the Aliens were travelling at 2/5 c relative to the Earth? Or at 4/5 c relative to the Earth? Assume that all the other variables are the same.  Specifically, would the ship fit in the hangar in the Earth’s reference frame and would the ship fit in the hangar in the Alien’s reference frame?
8. What consequence(s) of special relativity does this problem demonstrate?

Quiz: Tuesday November 17^th, 2009

More details in the following days.

I have posted my solutions to the Alien Parking Troubles, #1-#13.

For #7-#10 I used math to figure out the times of the various “Events”.  You would not be expected to solve a problem in this way on the quiz.

Ms. Hutchison

Some religious apologists just can’t leave Galileo alone. They are unhappy about the fact that most people accept that the Church behaved badly in sentencing Galileo for heresy. (He got house arrest for the rest of his life and bans on his books, one of which was suppressed for 200 years). So in a manner which reminds me of modern day Stalinists trying to make excuses for the Stalin Terror, or to claim it wasn’t as bad as people believe, the apologists have been busy rewriting the history of the Galileo affair.

For example, they promote a document describing Galileo’s “imprisonment for his heretical ideas of a heliocentric solar sytem” as a myth! (see On the crushing of historical fables about religion, science and culture and Mythbusting: Historical fables about Christianity and Science).

In my previous post Blaming the victim I included this quote from the the Inquisition’s sentencing of Galileo which clearlyshows it is the apologists who promote myths:

“You have rendered yourself vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.”

Gobsmacked!

So, I have heard a few of these apologetics arguments against Galileo – but recently came across a new (to me) one that left me gobsmacked. This claims that according the Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory Galileo was wrong!

An example is this in a footnote from a 1991 article by the apologist philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga (see “Evolution, Neutrality, and Antecedent Probability: a Reply to Van Till and McMullen”):

“Consider even such an assured result as that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis. According to the usual interpretations of current relativity theory, there is no privileged frame of reference, no frame at absolute rest. But if that is true, then it isn’t even clear what it means to say that in fact, contrary to Copernicus, the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. That’s true in some frames of reference, but not in others; and in principle (apart from matters of convenience, and the like) there is no more to be said for the former than for the latter.”

A local blog, Say Hello to my Little Friend, makes the same argument in the post Einstein v the Church v Galileo? which declares “Galileo was wrong.”

“This new (well, new at the time, anyway) view of physics reduces Galileo’s claim about which view is literally correct, his or the church’s, to rubble. If Einstein is correct, then Galileo was wrong to say that it is objectively true that the earth moves around the sun, and that it is objectively false that the sun moves around the earth. Which – if either – of those to claims is correct depends wholly on the observational perspective. An observer on the earth will correctly report that the sun travels around the earth (or stated differently, relative to the earth, the sun travels around it), and a sun dweller (!!!) will correctly report that the earth travels around the sun. Neither is incorrect, but if one accuses the other of being objectively mistaken while he himself is objectively correct, he is simply wrong (as was Galileo). This is not a defence of the Church’s claim, as obviously the principle applies to both views equally.”

All this changes, of course, if there is a priveleged point from which the sun-earth relationshiop is supposed to be viewed from. Should there exist such a designated “viewing platform,” the question could be settled once and for all. If, for example, it turned out that the earth is the priveleged spot from which the relationship is meant to be observed, then the church was right all along, and a hack job has been done on the Galileo trial.”

The post concludes:

“So go ahead – keep using the Galileo case to show what silly scientific conclusions theologians come to – that is, if you’re happy to push your view of physics back half a century.”

Of course, this writer’s date for the publication of Special Relativity isn’t the only thing he got wrong.

Both these writers have taken an aspect of Special Relativity that says for bodies undergoing uniform motion it is impossible for an observer the ascribe motion. Like the passenger in a train (which has constant velocity) who can observe relative motion between her train and other trains without being able to tell for certain which is moving.

There is more to Special Relativity than this, of course. But, ironically, this aspect of relativity, which was formalised by Einstein, goes back to Galileo himself. Of course, just because there is not a “priveliged spot” and we can adopt any reference frame we wish (eg. the earth or the sun) does not negate the possibility of detecting relative motion. And detecting acceleration of orbiting bodies.

In his book The Fabric of the Cosmos Brian Greene describes how incorporation of time, as spacetime, into Special Relativity “provided an absolute criterion – one that all observers, regardless of their constant relative velocities, would agree on – for deciding whether or not something is accelerating.”

Orbiting bodies like planets and moons are accelerating.

Einstein’s comments on Galileo

Anyway, enough of this negativity. I have reproduced below the Foreword, written by Einstein, to a 2001 edition of Galileo’s famous book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. This is the book suppressed by the Church for 200 years. You can see that far from declaring Galileo wrong about heliocentricity, Einstein speaks very highly of Galileo’s contributions to science.

This is an authorised translation, from German, by Sonja Bargmann.

“Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is a mine of information for anyone interested in the cultural history of the Western world and its influence upon economic and political development.

… To begin with, the Dialogue gives an extremely lively and persuasive exposition of the then prevailing views on the structure of the cosmos in the large. The naïve picture of the earth as a flat disc, combined with obscure ideas about star-filled space and the motions of the celestial bodies, prevalent in the early Middle Ages, represented a deterioration of the much earlier conceptions of the Greeks, and in particular of Aristotle’s ideas and Ptolemy’s consistent spatial concept of the celestial bodies and their motions.

… In advocating and fighting for the Copernican theory Galileo was not only motivated by a striving to simplify the representation of the celestial motions. His aim was to substitute for a petrified and barren system of ideas the unbiased and strenuous quest for a deeper and more consistent comprehension of the physical and astronomical facts.

The form of dialogue used in his work may be partly due to Plato’s shining example; it enabled Galileo to apply his extraordinary literary talent to the sharp and vivid confrontation of opinion. To be sure, he wanted to avoid an open commitment in these controversial questions that would have delivered him to destruction by the Inquisition. Galileo had, in fact, been expressly forbidden to advocate the Copernican theory. Apart from its revolutionary factual content the Dialogue represents a down-right roguish attempt to comply with this order in appearance and yet in fact to disregard it. Unfortunately, it turned out that the Holy Inquisition was unable to appreciate adequately such subtle humor.

… It is difficult to us today to appreciate the imaginative power made manifest in the precise formulation of the concept of acceleration and in the recognition of its physical significance.

Once the conception of the center of the universe had, with good reason, been rejected, the idea of the immovable earth, and, generally, of an exceptional role of the earth, was deprived of its justification…

… Galileo takes great pains to demonstrate that the hypothesis of the rotation and revolution of the earth is not refuted by the fact that we do not observe any mechanical effects of these motions. Strictly speaking, such a demonstration was impossible because a complete theory of mechanics was lacking. I think it is just in the struggle with this problem that Galileo’s originality is demonstrated with particular force. Galileo is, of course, also concerned to show that the fixed stars are too remote for parallaxes produced by the yearly motion of the earth to be detectable with the measuring instruments of his time. This investigation also is ingenious, notwithstanding its primitiveness.

It was Galileo’s longing for a mechanical proof of the motion of the earth which misled him into formulating a wrong theory of the tides. The fascinating arguments in the last conversation would hardly have been accepted as proofs by Galileo, had his temperament not got the better of him. It is hard for me to resist the temptation to deal with this subject more fully.

The leitmotif which I recognize in Galileo’s work is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority. Only experience and careful reflection are accepted by him as criteria of truth. Nowadays it is hard for us to grasp how sinister and revolutionary such an attitude appeared at Galileo’s time, when merely to doubt the truth of opinions which had no basis but authority was considered a capital crime and punished accordingly. Actually we are by no means so far removed from such a situation even today as many of us would like to flatter ourselves; but in theory, at least, the principle of unbiased thought has won out, and most people are willing to pay lip service to this principle.

It has often been maintained that Galileo became the father of modern science by replacing the speculative, deductive method with the empirical, experimental method. I believe, however, that this interpretation would not stand close scrutiny. There is no empirical method without speculative concepts and systems; and there is no speculative thinking whose concepts do not reveal, on closer investigation, the empirical material from which they stem. To put into sharp contrast the empirical and the deductive attitude is misleading, and was entirely foreign to Galileo. Actually it was not until the nineteenth century that logical (mathematical) systems whose structures were completely independent of any empirical content had been cleanly extracted. Moreover, the experimental methods at Galileo’s disposal were so imperfect that only the boldest speculation could possibly bridge the gaps between the empirical data. (For example, there existed no means to measure times shorter than a second). The antithesis Empiricism vs. Rationalism does not appear as a controversial point in Galileo’s work. Galileo opposes the deductive methods of Aristotle and his adherents only when he considers their premises arbitrary or untenable, and he does not rebuke his opponents for the mere fact of using deductive methods. In the first dialogue, he emphasizes in several passages that according to Aristotle, too, even the most plausible deduction must be put aside if it is incompatible with empirical findings. And on the other hand, Galileo himself makes considerable use of logical deduction. His endeavors are not so much directed at “factual knowledge” as at “comprehension.” But to comprehend is essentially to draw conclusions from an already accepted logical system.”

Similar articles

…over the next 3 days or so.  It is not easy, so buckle up your seatbelts!

Visual Special Relativity

1-SpaceFight

Spacetime Part I Student    StandardGrid

2-AliensParking

3-Lightning Strike

Here are some good questions to try in order to prepare for Tuesday’s test:    p.307 #4-26 (even) (or all, if you really want to be prepared);  p.309 #39-45 (odd)  (Students who were in class on Friday note that these have been added);  p.226#9-31 (odd)  (Students who were in class on Friday note that some questions have been added here).

Assignment based on the Field Trip:

Write a one-page report that describes two neat new areas of physics learning that you discovered, and what you learned about them.  For those who were not on the trip, you can research two of these topics on ‘your Internet’.  Some of the topic I saw covered in the Physica Phantastica tent were:

cosmic rays             radioactive particles and cloud chambers             the Doppler effect and its use in astronomy              dark matter              gyroscopy                       superconductivity              origami and its use in physics             scientific models (with the specific example of  theories of gravity)                   polarization               quantum computers                 the Mars rover mission                 party tricks with liquid nitrogen                    

In the presentation by Richard Epp at the Princess Theatre, he talked about ”The Physics of Innovation”, which essentially meant how basic research in physics has led directly to all of the modern gadgets that we have, and the methods of generating electricity to power them.

1. Introduction

The song “’39” by the rock band Queen, written and sung by Brian May on the album A Night at the Opera, is the 39th song in the band’s album chronology. There has been debate as to the significance of the song’s title and suggestions that it may relate to some period in history. While many things did happen in the year 1939, it is apparent from the lyrics, that the song speaks of loss and sacrifice of some sort; there are no apparent historical references. But to best understand the song’s true meaning, we must focus on the singer and writer, Brian May.

Brian May, the lead guitarist of the band, Queen, is an astrophysicist and graduated from Imperial College London with degrees in Mathematics and Physics. He was already a graduate student when Queen became successful and eventually chose to abandon his graduate school career to pursue an extremely successful one in music; science’s loss was rock music’s gain. Thirty years after abandoning his academic career, Brian returned to Imperial College to complete his doctorate.

So now that we know a little something about this guitar and music giant, we wonder what has Brian said about this song? Brian describes the song as follows in an interview “The Guitar Greats” by John Tobler and Stuart Grundy:

“It’s a science fiction story. It’s the story about someone who goes away and leaves his family and… because of the time dilation effect, when you go away, the people on Earth have aged a lot more than he has when he comes home. He’s aged a year and they’ve aged 100 years. So, instead of coming back to his wife, he comes back to his daughter and he can see his wife in his daughter… a strange story. I think, also, I had in mind a story of Herman Hesse, which I think is called `The River’. A man leaves his hometown and has lots of travels and then comes back and observes his hometown from the other side of the river. He sees it in a different light, having been away and experienced all those different things. He sees it in a very illuminating way, `cause I felt a little bit like that about my home at the time as well, having been away and seen this vastly different world of rock music… totally different from the way I was brought up, and I had those feelings about home.”

This pretty much kills the history theme debate.

It must be noted that in the interview Brian says `The River’ but he is incorrect. The story that he is referring to is `The Poet’ and is found in the short story collection `Strange News From Another Star’ by the same author.

So we know now that “’39” is a science-fiction story that deals with the special relativistic effect of time dilation. Simply put, as objects approach the speed of light, time slows down, or is dilated, and this is the crux of the story. We can also treat the song as a Physics problem and ask ourselves, how fast were the Volunteers traveling?

2. The Song

Brian has, more or less, told us how to solve the problem in the Tobler and Grundy interview but, as Physicists, we will look for clues in the song to solve this question ourselves. Plus, just plugging the values into an equation will be cheating and we won’t appreciate the poetry of the music. To start with, we look at the Time Dilation equation, which is

where is the time experience by people on Earth and is the time experienced by the moving travelers. and are the speed at which the Volunteers are traveling and the speed of light respectfully. So as increases the traveler’s clock moves slower than a person’s clock on Earth.

Before we go plugging numbers into eq. (1), we should listen to the song. If for some unfortunate reason you are unable to do so, the song’s lyrics are as follows

In the year of ‘39 assembled here the Volunteers
In the days when the lands were few
Here the ship sailed out into the blue and sunny morn
The sweetest sight ever seen.

And the night followed day
And the story tellers say
That the score brave souls inside
For many a lonely day sailed across the milky seas
Ne’er looked back, never feared, never cried.

Don’t you hear my call though you’re many years away
Don’t you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I take your hand In the land that our grandchildren knew.

In the year of ‘39 came a ship in from the blue
The Volunteers came home that day
And they bring good news of a world so newly born
Though their hearts so heavily weigh
For the earth is old and grey, little darlin’ we’ll away
But my love this cannot be
For so many years have gone though
I’m older but a year Your mother’s eyes from your eyes cry to me.

Don’t you hear my call though you’re many years away
Don’t you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I take your hand In the land that our grandchildren knew.

Don’t you hear my call though you’re many years away
Don’t you hear me calling you
All your letters in the sand cannot heal me like your hand

For my life
Still ahead
Pity Me.

Now we can begin our analysis and solve this problem. Lines 1 and 18 read In the year of ‘39 assembled here the Volunteers … In the year of ‘39 came a ship in from the blue This tells us the duration of the Volunteers’ journey takes 100 years in Earth time. Thus years; just as Brian said. Line 24 goes, For so many years have gone though I’m older but a year This tells us that the protagonist of the song, has aged only a year. Thus year.

Plugging these values into eq. (1), gives us

and solving for , we get . So these guys were moving pretty fast, the speed of light. As we can see, being able to travel at those speeds would allow us to be a space-faring species but as the song demonstrates, there are some personal risks and sacrifice involved.

So now that we shown how our voyagers have been affected by their journey, we can analyze the poetry behind the song. The chorus goes

Don’t you hear my call though you’re many years away
Don’t you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew.

We now understand the pain that our traveler experiences. As his rocket travels away from Earth through space, though he can eventually return to Earth, his clock now ticks at a different rate to his loved one, due to the relativistic time dilation effect, and they become separated in time. He is a time traveler. Unfortunately for him, Special Relativity only allows time travel forward and not backward. So his loved one will always be separated from him.

In the year of ‘39 came a ship in from the blue
The Volunteers came home that day
And they bring good news of a world so newly born
Though their hearts so heavily weigh
For the earth is old and grey, little darlin’ we’ll away
But my love this cannot be
For so many years have gone though
I’m older but a year
Your mother’s eyes from your eyes cry to me.

Now our travel has returned home and his mission is a success, having found the new planet for the people of Earth to colonize. He sees a world that has changed in many ways and is no longer the way he left it. His one consolation is that he can see his beloved in his daughter.

For my life
Still ahead
Pity Me.

This sums up the sad ending. Our adventurer is still a young man but his youth and life are still ahead of him. Unfortunately, the life he knew is one hundred years in the past and there is no way to go back to it.

So maybe you’re a non-physicist, who wonders how physicists think. Maybe you aren’t really sure how those crazy physicists come up with all of these equations and theories seemingly from thin air. Maybe you’re getting a bit bored of F=ma posts¹. Well, I’m going to try my best to give you a bit of an inside look at some of the conceptual tools commonly used by physicists in a little series called: The Physicist’s Toolbox.

This week: Symmetry

Physicists are obsessed with symmetry, perhaps even more than people with an OCD. It’s human nature to look at something symmetric and call it beautiful. Even physicists call their theories and equations beautiful if they contain some kind of symmetry. The aesthetic attraction humans have towards symmetric things is not a surprise to me; the laws of the universe are founded on symmetry. It’s only natural that the things we see every day in our world reflect this symmetric undertone of the universe and we call these things beautiful.

…so what is symmetry, you ask?

You probably have a good idea of what symmetry is by just looking around your everyday life. You probably look in the mirror every morning and notice that our bodies are symmetric. If one draws a vertical line down the center of the human body, the right side is approximately the mirror reflection of the left side. This is called reflectional symmetry but it is one of many types of symmetry.

You can make the idea of symmetry more general by roughly saying that something is symmetric if you do something to it and it stays the same.  The “doing something” part, physicists like to call an operation. This could mean anything; reflection, rotation, translation, magnification, etc. So to be more specific, physicists say that some “thing” is symmetric under a specified operation.

Look at that picture of the square up above, for example. Ignore the colorful dots and just concentrate on the shape. If I rotate the square by any multiple of 90 degrees, it will look exactly the same as if I hadn’t done anything. So you could say that the square has rotational symmetry. The operation here is a rotation by an angle which is a multiple of 90 degrees. So an even better thing to say is that the square is symmetric under rotations by angles of multiples of 90 degrees.

…okay, but what does this have to do with physics, you ask?

This is the cool part. In physics, instead of looking at shapes of things and studying how the shape of something is symmetric under an operation, we go a bit further. We study how the rules of nature stay the same under a certain operation. Let’s look at a concrete example. Let’s say I do a little experiment: drop a ball from some height and time how long it takes to hit the ground. Then I take myself, the ball and the entire earth and move it ten feet to the left (in other words, I preform a translation on the system). Now I redo the same experiment. The ball should take exactly the same time to hit the ground if dropped from the same height. So, the rules of nature are symmetric under translation in space.

Since so many people have heard about Einstein’s Special Relativity, let’s use that as an example too. Einstein postulated that the speed of light is constant for all “inertial” observers. This is a statement of symmetry. It’s saying that if you preform an operation on an observer, the speed of light should stay the same for that observer. The profound insight was that this was even true for operations that changed the speed of the observer. These operations are called Boosts. (Note: I don’t mean acceleration. It’s not the same thing as a boost. I mean this as a mathematical concept.) So, if you consider two different observers, with different (constant) velocities, the speed of a light ray will be the same for each of them. Noticing that the constancy of the speed of light is symmetric under boosts leads to crazy results which you probably already know about (time dilation, length contraction, etc).

In fact, when physicists notice (or impose) types of symmetry in their theories, different laws of physics just fall out of the equations. Some of these are:

• Symmetry under spatial translation gives conservation of momentum
• Symmetry under time translation gives conservation of energy
• Symmetry under boosts gauge transformations gives conservation of charge (I plead temporary insanity)
• … and much more

Symmetry is has become such a useful tool that physicists have come to assume that physics theories should abide by some standard symmetries. This is partly the reason you hear crazy ideas like the world having ten dimensions. String theory starts with the assumption that there are “strings”, it then imposes symmetry arguments and what falls out is: the world has ten dimensions.

But what happens when symmetry breaks and the laws of nature become a bit lopsided? Hey it happens! Nature isn’t a perfectly spherical cow.

That’s when things get even more interesting…
_____
Update: An interesting TED talk on Symmetry.
_____

1. I shouldn’t even bother with F=ma posts anymore. Rhett at Dot Physics is totally owning everyone with his super interesting classical mechanics posts.

http://BeyondTheLivingaGatheringPlace.com “Sonia Novick features Mack McAleer & Peter Schenk the creators of this Quantum Physics software on Beyond the Living interact live on webcam chat or VIP hotline

“Sonia Novick features Mack McAleer & Peter Schenk the creators of this Quantum Physics software The 12th Project Awareness expansion Software on Beyond the Living & invites you to interact live on webcam chat or VIP hotline as you get a birdseye view behind the scenes with these “phenomenal creators”

Her web site is: http://BeyondTheLiving.info

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream

As a child, I had deep and profound experiences of Déjà vu to the point where I would purposefully try to act out of step with the sequence I knew was taking place in front of me.  Most often, any attempt to break the spell, to do anything which might stop the unexplained happenings which were affecting me was unsuccessful and even contributed to the effect.  I even went so far as to study C.G. Jung’s work on dream interpretation and to try practice lucid dreaming so that I could take an active role in my dreams and therefore in my waking life.  Performing a series of almost self-hypnotic practices as I lay in my bed just before sleep helped, as did writing my dreams down after awaking.  I reached a point of being able to, for example, remember the experience of controlling flight while in a dream.  I was able to achieve recognition that I could affect events unfolding up until the moment when my mind considered the fact that I was experiencing itself in a dream state.  Dreams seemed to be grouped into patterns and often were repeated nightly.  In my experience they were repeated to the point where I began in my conscious understanding to make sense of and interperate them.  Inexplicable dreams such as repeated and revisited dreams and nightmares were common.

A very significant set of dreams I had was of three separate pyramids; The first surrounded by desolation and desert as if I was witnessing the remains of the past, The second in the midst of vast jungle at the top of which could be seen a panorama of lush nature and beauty, and the third pyramid was made of glass and steel, inside which I wandered aimlessly until I was brought by my father to a room in which the rules of the game were presented to me as a giant chess match with peoples lives as the pieces.

It is in light of my attempts to interperate and affect my dream states when I was younger that I read C. G Jung’s work entitled Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.

The book approaches a subject which in past centuries would have been the domain of mysticism, religion, or alchemy and with an eye toward the attempts of modern physics to begin to offer a psychological explanation for events such as precognition, powerful coincidences, “big” dreams, déjà vu, and even prayer.  Personally, my experiences with déjà vu, the non-local power of thought, and the presence of meaningful coincidences has diminished as I have become more and more a part of the social and economic milieu which is adulthood.  Perhaps it is a lack of sleep, perhaps it is the full demands and responsibilities of home and family, perhaps it is just for lack of trying, but I no longer have access to what I once was certain was my own personal connection to the collective psyche.  In modern adult life we seem in most cases to compress or even repress our exposure to events which do not fit the typical day to day understanding of the world.  Our exposure to such experiences is limited into smaller and smaller isolated incidents such as the birth of a child, a wedding, or the death of a loved one.  But being so disconnected to life outside of our conscious minds we tend to find ourselves out of practice when it comes time to recognize the presence of meaning beyond ourselves.  Most people pass off as juvenile the connection to this part of life, until of course we find ourselves faced with the inexplicable.  If we are lucky, we can at some point in our lives come face to face with this experience.  Most people will however either ignore such an opportunity or will take solace in the religion in which they were raised, seeing the experience as a sign of the power of God.  For the most unlucky of us, we go though life altogether unaware of meaning outside of our consciousness, and have our first (and last) experience with it at the moment of our own deaths.  For the majority of people in this situation however, the opportunity to recognize meaning in death is ignored just as it was repeatedly in life.  For those people the future seems uncertain, and for them we should try not to unnecessarily swat mosquitoes.

It’s not however just extraordinary atypical experiences that present meaning to our consciousness.  Jung is most famous for his idea of the “collective unconscious”, a sort of shared network of experience which each individual psyche draws from and contributes to.  In this work on Synchronicity, written in tandem with Wolfgang Pauli, Jung uses the findings of quantum physics and special relativity to provide the backdrop for an attempt to understand both the typical experiences of the psyche and the atypical events which we often dismiss as either coincidence or randomness.

As Jung begins the work he states:

“Modern physics has altered our understanding of the universality of natural law.  Very small levels of physics demonstrate that causality is a relative law, that it is only statistically valid.  We understand that psychologically the experiences of multiple individuals produce a consensus ominum out of the majority of similar observations.”

Each of us shares and communicates information about the world which functions according to a set of laws, at least according to the majority of human experience.  There are of course always those rare experiences which are unique.  According to Jung we use words like “chance” or “coincidence” when describing events which do not fit within the sensible understanding of normal causality.  For Jung, these are “acausal” events we cannot explain as chance and ignore.  It is important that everything that happens is not either A) completely predicable and causal; or B) Completely random and the result of pure chance.  The fact that in general, existence is a mix of the two points to the fact that in the world it is the statistically valid which rules; it is the “predominance of the probable”  which seems to best describe reality.  In this world when we make statements of fact or observations from experience we can at most say that we know the statistically true.  Everything around us points to the dominance of it; nothing is absolute, yet everything isn’t relative.  As Jung says “It is the occurrence of the statistically improbable, rather than the statistically probable occasional randomness which points to the flaw in our predominant understanding of events.”

To well documented occurrences such as improbable sequences of occurrences (events, symbols, numbers, etc..); to the appearance of a series of events which are causally unconnected, but which each express similar meaning to an observer we ascribe the title of “meaningful coincidence”.  To events of this kind we attribute luck, both good and bad, without requiring or seeking out a full causal explanation.  Generally, as long as these events do not exceed the limits of probability we are comfortable with assuming the nature of reality.  However, the very existence of order instead of randomness, of laws instead of chaos is itself however something of an improbability.  Why something instead of nothing?  Why this reality instead of an alternative?  Why is the probable probable and the improbable improbable?  Various explanations throughout history from a “preexisting harmony” to the operation of fate, to the free exercise of matter in a void, to the constant battle of competing wills have all been used to attempt to explain why reality is the way it is.

In an attempt to begin to answer some of these questions Jung states that to the equation of space, time, and causality a fourth principle must be introduced, that of synchronicity, or the “acausal psychically conditioned relativity of space and time”.  In other words the existence of events which are simultaneous in either time across space or in space across time, but without a causal connection can be seen to exhibit a meaningful presence in relation to the psyche.  Like the effect that the observation of subatomic particles has on their position in space according to the principles of quantum physics, so to psychologically a person’s psyche does not just passively observe events unfolding according to a chain of cause and effect.  Instead, the psyche conditions the relativity of time and space.  Experiments with phenomenon such as ESP point to the influence of one’s positive or negative expectations, ones preconceptions or beliefs, and ones level of interest or boredom, in the outcome of events which are not the result of a causal connection and which do not necessarily require a proximity in space or in time in their effect.  Traditionally, the acausal effect of the psyche was reserved for beliefs such as the practice of magic or the power of prayer.

The experiments of JB Rhine with “Extra Sensory Perception” and “New Frontiers of Mind” for Jung provide evidence for the non-local (that is acausal across space and time) nature of the effect of the psyche on the results of the physical world.  Not to be confused with a belief in a sort of energy transfer, synchronicity is posited to be a kind of simultaneity.  In other words, the psyche, what we normally call “our mind”, but which for Jung is both our conscious mind and its unconscious state, is able to have an effect across space and time, not through some sort of energy moving at the speed of light, but though the relativity of space and time itself.  Just as an electron can be said to be in two locations at once across a spectrum of potentiality until such time as it is observed and the wave spectrum of potentiality collapses into a focal point in space; so to does the psyche inhabit an unconscious spectrum of potentiality until such time as the focal point of consciousness observes the unconscious.

“In themselves, space and time consist of nothing, they are hypostatized concepts born of discriminating activity of the conscious mind, and they form the indispensable co-ordinates for describing the behavior of bodies in motion.  They are, therefore, essentially psychic in origin, which is probably the reason that impelled Kant to regard them as a priori categories.  But if space and time are only apparently properties of bodies in motion and are created by the intellectual needs of the observer, then their relativization by the psychic conditions is no longer a matter for astonishment but is brought within the bounds of possibility.  This possibility presents itself when the psyche observes, not external bodies, but itself.” (pg 20)

As Jung suggests, an understanding of the nature of reality according to the findings of quantum physics and special relativity forms the basis on which an understanding of synchronicity is possible.  Synchronicity is not just the occurrence of two events at the same time, but the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but otherwise unrelated events.  Synchronicity is “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state – and in certain cases, vice versa..” (pg 25)  In other words it is a relationship, however subjective, between a psychic state and a corresponding external event.

We can see this in our dreams.  In a case such as lucid dreaming which I mentioned earlier the mind or psyche inhabits a spectrum of possibility such as flight until such time as the conscious mind observes itself dreaming.  But a question arises.  If in dreams the unconscious mind exists potentially across a statistical spectrum of space and time, does it necessarily cease to exist as such when consciousness collapses it into a single local point?  If it is possible to lucid dream is it possible to tap into the unconscious while awake?  Surely dreaming is just imagination right?  Surely all that we dream simply takes place among neurons in our brains right?  What then of experiences of people who dream or see premonitions of events?  What then of the waking experience of intuition where no reason can be given but which compels people to choose previously unknown possibilities?  If you’ve ever had, or been struck by the story of someone close to you who has had one of these experiences, it becomes more and more difficult to dismiss this line of thinking as just naive mysticism.

Jung relates examples from his experience analyzing patient’s dreams and psychic states, cases where material events inexplicably coincide with a patient’s dream imagery or psychic state.  Most often, it seems to Jung, the unconscious mind is able to manifest in situations where a patient has reached a dead end using their conscious mind to understand their situation.  Often the seeming impossibility of coincidence between say a dream of a volcano erupting and the realization that upon waking that there was a volcano eruption half way around the world, is enough to propel the patient past their preconceptions of what is possible and impossible and begin to open their mind to the unconscious.  Interestingly, Jung states that a person’s emotional state has a significant determining factor in the manifestation of the unconscious in our lives

“The observer can easily be influenced by an emotional state which alters space and time by “contraction.”  Every emotional state produces an alteration if consciousness… that is to say there is a certain narrowing of consciousness and a corresponding strengthening of the unconscious which, particularly in the case of strong effects, is noticeable even to the layman.  The tone of the unconscious is heightened, thereby creating a gradient for the unconscious to flow towards the conscious.” (pg 30)

Throughout history instruments such as astrology, or the Tarot, or the I Ching have been used as a material canvas or symbolic language by which the presence of non causal, synchronistic events might occur and be interpreted.  Each method, used for the purposes of creating randomness by which the non-randomness of the acausaly connected can appear, has numbers at their source.  It is Jung’s contention that numbers are formative part of reality.  In his words “numbers were as much found as invented.” (pg 41)  The basis of all divination, all dreams, all religion, all thought could said to be numbers.  The concept of numbers even belies our need to visualize, categorize, and observe reality.  First there was One.  And then two appeared, a splitting of the unity.  Then a third or fourth and so onward into infinity.  This process underlies every material or psychic construction to such a degree that reality, without these categories is by definition, inconceivable.  We have only to witness the still unexplained “miracle” of the first cell division at conception.  Two individuals, an egg and a sperm come together to create one cell, which divides into another, and so on…  Patterns of thought, individuals among species, organic DNA, and inorganic chemical structure all are examples of a simple numeric process repeated in variation to infinity.

Taking this logic and applying it to our study of the psyche we can postulate that if the unconscious exists as a field of statistical probability and consciousness exists as a single focal point it should be possible to express the relationship in terms of numbers. If our psyche and everything that exists have at their source numbers, we can also postulate that that it should be possible that dreams, thoughts, people, animals, objects, planets, galaxies, and “God” express their relationship in terms of numbers.  We see then the possibility that we have within us the means for an intimate connection with all that exists.  These ideas are of course ancient and lay at the root of most human cultures.  Jung, however was one of the first to begin to apply the lessons of modern science to the understanding the psyche, of the world at large, and of our place within it.  From his single focal point on the idea of synchronicity, which Jung advanced at the very end of his career and life, a large horizon of possibility opened up for future decades and centuries of the evolution of our understanding of reality.

Looking back on the experiences of déjà vu in my youth I wish I had learned to incorporate those moments into my life instead of consciously seeking to reject them.  I wonder if  the dreams of the three pyramids weren’t symbols of paths I was to take in the future: my education, my marriage, and my work.  I wonder if the pyramid in the desert wasn’t Egypt to which I traveled when I was in college, I wonder if the pyramid in the jungle wasn’t Coba in the Mayan Riviera in Mexico which I visited on my honeymoon.  Finally I still wonder if the dream of the pyramid of glass and steel wasn’t an archetypal representation of how I would spend hours, days, and years inside man made towers laboring at seemingly abstract and innocuous numbers.

]]> http://bjbootz.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/time-travel-and-media-theory/ Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:25:47 +0000 bjbootz http://bjbootz.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/time-travel-and-media-theory/

Original Image sourced from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dickuhne/71015015/sizes/m/

*this is a paper I wrote for university this semester just passed- an attempt to correlate the random shite that spews from my brain in a vaguely coherent fashion*

MEDIA HYPE AND THE POLITICAL ATTENTION ECONOMY

The pervasive and ubiquitous nature of media hype validates the notion that it is a fundamental means by which a media event garnishes the user’s attention. The immediately manifest example of this is the case presented by political communication. In particular, the 2008 US election provides an exemplar situation of the importance of media hype and the impact that pre-emptive media attention had on the final result. It is through this specific media event that the nature of media hype as an attention device will be investigated.

This paper will undertake a slightly alternative approach as a means of examining some of the fundamental processes that shape our understanding of and negotiation with media hype. It will present the fundamental theory of general relativity and the spacetime continuum as an instrumental allegory for conceptualising the way media hype develops and operates. By equating media and communication theory with explicitly ‘scientific’ theory, attention is drawn to the crucial temporal and spatial implications of media hype and our interaction with it. The paper will demonstrate the inherent correlation identifiable between general relativity and media hype and how this can serve as a useful way of conceptualising media hype. The mediascape within in which media hype operates will also be examined and quantified and the way in which this space has been altered particularly through the use of ‘new media’. The existence of space also births the opportunity for the existence of ‘noise’ and coupled with the potential of the collective intelligence will be considered particularly in terms of their political ramifications.

‘General relativity’ is a theory that was developed in an attempt to comprehend the apparent effect that the gravity of objects with a significant mass appeared to have on ‘physical’ and time and space (Plabenski & Krasinski 2007 p1). It builds upon ‘special relativity’ that in essence dictates that the speed of light is constant for every observer. Each observer operates in his or her own inertial frame of reference and everything in his or her immediate vicinity belongs to that frame. The crucial difference however is that motion is relative to each frame of reference. To the observer viewing another inertial frame of reference, the procession of time and motion of the secondary observer will appear distorted.  Critical to the theory is the fourth-dimensional continuum of spacetime formulated by Hermann Minkowski to essentially place the occurrence of ‘events’ in space. For the purposes of general relativity, spacetime is visualised as a malleable, flat sheet. When objects are placed upon that sheet, their gravitational field will indent and distort spacetime, an occurrence most evident in the way it distorts the passage of light.

The passage of light is the crux of the analogy. As it is in the ‘physical’ world, light is essentially the transmission of information for without the reception of light from an event, in effect that event has not occurred in the inertial frame of the observer. If we equate that observer to the media user and the transmission of light to the transmission of information, we can draw a parallel between an event’s occurrence in the physical world and in media space. Likewise Minowski’s four-dimensional spacetime continuum equates to the topological, cybernetic media system (discussed hereafter). The effect of social and political entities upon the topological mediascape is represented by the effect that gravitational fields have on the spacetime plane.

Hypothetically, if you could somehow manage to accelerate faster than the speed of light, it is considered not impossible to travel time (in relation to the observer watching your movement) (Graunbaum  p70). Given that light is the transmission of information: what results when that information is transmitted faster than the occurrence of a given event, in this case, a media event? This notion demonstrates the phenomenon that is media hype. Media hype involves the projection of an event before it occurs before itself in the psyche of a given collective. This projection can initiate from the proprietors of a media event or from the consciousness of the users, either way this projection is a consciously constructed representation of the product. 

The disregard for ‘real’ time and space is proclaimed as one of the defining characteristics of new media information exchange (Abrahamson et al., 1988 p4-5). But rather than a disregard, I would propose that new media in fact appropriates these two fundamental elements with which we negotiate environments. Spaces induced by media use are inherently, all though not exclusively, intangible and therefore initially are generally not assigned equal value in terms of their substantiality as their concrete counterparts. However, understanding the very ‘real’ and dynamic nature of these spaces is crucial to grasping the extent of their influence, particularly within the domain of political communication.

Pertinent to this understanding is to recognise the indivisible, symbiotic relationship not only between media time and media space, but also to the ‘physical’ world. In this context the physical world is not only that which exists in the corporeal realm, but the social and political entities whose actuality we readily accept. For instance, although they are not tangible, we accept that our relationships exist and have bearing on our environment. Historically media space has been ‘characterised by a dangerous distance from the world of the flesh’ (Terranova, p42), associated with a dichotomy of irrefutable virtuality/reality. This misconception has resulted in the dismissal of the crucial ‘physical’ component in media space.  To overcome the limitations of this dichotomy, it is more constructive to visualise media space as a complex, cybernetic, topological system.  Here the ‘topological formations’ are formed by the flow of information fed into the system by the presence of the aforementioned ‘physical’ entities. Thus the constant interplay of virtual/real components interact together to create meaning and thus create space. This idea is intensified by Couldry and McCarthy:

‘..the artefactual existence of media forms within social space, the links that media objects forge between spaces, and the (no less real) cultural visions of a physical space transcended by technology and emergent virtual pathways of communication.’ (MediaSpace, p2)

Where there is space however, there is an opportunity for infection. Infection in terms of communication theory is termed ‘noise’ i.e. they are the peripheral actors that corrupt a message and alter whatever it may have originally intended to have been.  Noise inherently thrives within and cultivates the topological media scape and carries with it the ability to change our perception of the ‘physical’ world.   Despite the negative implications of corruption, noise provides the opportunity for the manipulation of representation and therefore meaning. Evidently the control of meaning is essential to the production of political messages. B. Axford presents the term ‘technologically enhanced politics’ (New Media and Politics, p53) to illustrate the copulation between political entities and the affordances of new media to inject the desired agenda into representations of media events. In the technologically enhanced political arena, the image and representation is placed in greater esteem than policy and thus the aestheticisation of political life is of paramount importance. This significance of promotion in politics is no more evident than in the astonishingly vast amount of capital injected into the media campaigns of the leading candidates of the 2008 US election. On television advertising alone Barack Obama and John McCain spent US$250 million and US$128 million respectively (Kaid, p418), even more remarkable when considered the average length of a sound byte has been reduced from 42 to less than ten seconds (Axford, p52).

Reciprocally the realm of spatial noise does not fall solely within the domain of carefully constructed media representations but also encompasses attempts to pre-emptively deconstruct a media event’s reception before it has ‘occurred’. In this way the media space is pre-cultivated to negotiate and interact with an event in a certain way. Given the dominance of the image in new media culture, the mediascape is saturated across all platforms with visual references to a given political entity. The most pertinent example of this was perhaps the development of the Obama 08 iPhone application (Kaid p419). The iPhone, the supreme advocate of the cybernetic ethos, provided the opportunity to seamlessly and constantly inject the visual iconography of the Obama 08 Campaign into the user’s daily life. Because of this incessant pre-conditioning, when the event does actually occur, in this case the Obama’s victory, it is received with a pre-cursing agenda or at the very least resigned acceptance. The user is so accustomed to the saturation of Obama within their own political microhabitat, when he assumed the presidency; the occurrence of the event had in effect already taken place before it had in ‘reality’.

This appropriation of time presents itself in a crucial and unique fashion in the dynamic, topological mediascape: in simultaneity. Although simultaneity would suggest a disregard for time and space, as mentioned previously it merely appropriates our negotiation with it. The very structure of the network implies an eradication of hierarchy and the democratisation of access and information value. This also entails a democratisation of the user’s experience of time. Given the user’s access and exposure to media ‘events’ that occur on the new mediascape particularly when mediated through social networking, this gives the impression of everything occurring simultaneously. Paul Virilio extends this further into the field of political communication. He believes that this simultaneity results in a sense of fatalism in the user experience. If everything occurs concurrently, there is no room for cause and effect and therefore a sense of inevitability ensues. Inevitability facilitates the breeding ground for media hype. A resignation to or pre-acceptance of a political outcome, in this case the outcome of the 2008 US election, already occurs before itself in the user experience. The continuous projection of the media event through online discussion and engagement embeds itself firmly in the collective psyche long before it has ‘actually’ taken place. 

Another dimension to regard in the multifaceted notion of media space is collective intelligence. The championed proponent of Web 2.0 is the concept of interactivity and it through this process of information exchange that new knowledge is formulated and added to the communal information reservoir. The blogosphere is the obvious example of a situation where through the interaction and exchange of user information, more content and therefore more ‘intelligence’ is produced.  But this goes beyond merely creating more content and serves to consolidate Anderson’s ‘imagined community’, a task that were previously the domain of mass communication broadcasters. Pierre Levy skilfully documents this shift by proclaiming ‘the new humanism’ (Levy, Collective Intelligence, p1) where we have evolved from the old humanist mantra; ‘I think’ to today’s ‘we think’.

I would extend this notion further to encompass the notion ‘we cultivate’. In order for media hype to ensue, the transmission of information needs to precede the occurrence of an event and embed itself within a collective psyche. It is implicit in the very nature of network dynamics that the audience is not merely passively receptive to the proprietors of a media event but actively contributing to the propagation of media hype. The most immediately apparent way within which information is pre-emptively transmitted throughout the collective consciousness is by means of viral media. Viral media has been traditionally manufactured and distributed by the user but counter intuitively (and often covertly) by media proprietors. It is postulated that a pivotal moment in deciding the end result of the 2008 election was Katie Couric’s interview CBS Evening Show interview with Sarah Palin (Wegner &MacManus p427). Palin’s lacklustre performance was circulated ab nauseum not only on broadcast networks but also within the blogosphere and user producer facilitators like youtube.  Spoofs of the performance (perhaps most notably Tina Fey’s parody of Palin) were copied, manipulated, appropriated but most importantly spread throughout the data sphere and thus firmly implementing a user-generated representation in the collective user consciousness.

The cultivation of collective political intelligence as demonstrated by the 2008 US election is not limited to party promoters. The Drudge Report is an influential aggregated source of political blogs that documented 798 million views during the month of October before the US elections were held (Kaid p420). The formidability of collective intelligence has ironically affected the proprietors of media events to counteractively respond by subsuming the modes of communication traditionally the domain of the information recipients. Perlmutter documents the case of Obama’s 2008 personal blog post regarding his defence for Democrats who voted for John Roberts’s nomination in the Supreme Court (Blogwars p187). The post was reportedly reflected upon for weeks thereafter as the use of a democratic and communal information channel seemingly equated Obama with ‘the people’ and therefore effectively pre-emptively embedding himself within the collective consciousness before the elections had occurred. 

It is crucial to keep in mind that media hype is generated through the input and exchange of information into the mediascape. Given the inherent democratic structure of the dynamic network, it is also important to remember that the generation of this information is not limited to the realm of media proprietors but also emanates through the exchange of information amongst users that comprise the entire collective consciousness. Hence, the attention is not confined to the engagement between user and media event but extends to encompass attention between individual nodes of the network. It is through this mutual awareness and attention to the network that media hype is developed and sustained and in turn it is through the media hype that attention to the media event is recruited and persists. The political attention economy is sustained by this mutual awareness and attention. Furthermore this mutual awareness emanates from a mediated spatial awareness that is wrought by the presence of political entities. Modulation of this space emanates from our attention to and hence interaction with these social and political factors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Abrahamson  J.B, Arterton F.C, Orren G.R.

1988 The Electronic Commonwealth, Basic Books Inc. New York

Anderson, Benedict.

1983 Imagined communities : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Verso,  New York

Axford, B.

2000 New Media and Politics. Sage Publications Ltd, London

Courldry, Nick.  McCarthy, Anna

2004 Mediaspace : place, scale, and culture in a media age , Routledge, New York

Graunbaum, Adolft                 

1968 Geometry and Chronometry in Philosophical Perspective,  University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Kaid, Lynda Lee

2008 Changing and Staying the Same: Communication in Campaign 2008, Journalism Studies, Routledge, London

Krasinski, Andrzej. Plebanski, Jerzy

2006 An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology, Cambridge University Press

Levy, Pierre

1988 Collective Intelligence Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Media Age (translated by Robert Bononno), Plenum Trade, New York

Perlmutter, David D.

2008 Blogwars, Oxford University Press inc, New York

Terranova, Tiziana

2004 Network Culture: politics for the information age, Pluto Press, London

Let’s understand the simultaneously born mind.
Crowley was the conduit, that is he never realized the law that would
manifest his angel of light. Einstein who took a walk up the garden path, did. The point
is that men now bow down to the lesser light. It is why men fear other men getting their
hands on nuclear power. This is because men do not realize that the point of origin and
the point of annihliation are the same point. this would totally negate the power of
the lesser light. something that needs to manifest itself in the here and now.

Crowley used the rite of the dark mother, (his wife took on the personna of Aiwass,
and the book was dictated to him through her. He used black magick. What he did
after was to study the book the rest of his life. this angel of light came to position
himself over mankind, it is exactly why Crowley wrote the Equinox of the gods.
Crowley was not a hippie, he went to extremes, he ate his own feces, he re ate his vomit, and
made himself enjoy it. He was putting everything in reverse. If you had read Crowley
you would understand why he did what he did and what his true motives were. Crowley
would laugh that you called him a hippie. He was far from a peace, dove, victory sign
child of love. He put everthing in reverse. I can see why everyone lives in such
darkness. But the darkest hour is just before dawn. Crowley put everything in reverse to go against love, to go against the natural order. To go against I
shall be that which I shall be.

Now crowley understood it was a lesser light and not the light of love. The light of
will is the lesser light. Love under will is subverting will under love. He purposely did
the reverse. Remember he was extracting this light from the abyss and as such he
was using Abara ha adabara, he had reversed the verbal usage, and he reversed
the word, he inverted purposely inverted it to extract the light that was brought to
a standstill. And in order to extract the light from carbon consciousness he needed to
reverse the law of light into matter. When he acheived this the angel of this light
manifested, and manifested in the physical as everything does as a law. E =mc squared.
Another mind was able to recognize the physical law in that way.

all of you people are to understand the spirit?? This angel of light manifested
itself as E=mc squared, the proof was in the Tungooska event. I have already explained
all of this.

The point of all of this is to conquer the limit we call death. Men now bow down to
this lesser light. Crowley was into metaphysics, and by the verbal anouncement as I speak
I create, he loosed this angel of a lesser light. He himself did not recognize the
manifestation, if he had, he himself would have brought forth the theory of relativity. Most avatars or men of great spirit manifest the law that they bring
forth by the word of their own mouth. Crowley was the beast, he was the ignorant
servant, who helped bring about the recognition of a law that manifested after he
had opened the door and called it forth, giving credence to it by respectfully
calling the angel by it’s proper name.

so now we come to simultaneously borne mind. Einstein had been working on his thesis
and he was sweeping the floor when he had an epiphany. In fact in his autobiography, he states
quite seriously that he had an epiphany, the likes of which he would never have again.
This was not the immaculate concept. Never the less the law that divides, (the 72 names
of god) pillar of fire in Exodus, that separated the israelites from the egyptians is what
solomon used to bound this angel of the lesser light in the second heaven. Crowley
reversed the process. What he found was the key, he took the caph from the qoph and
replaced it with the Heh. He found the key to unlock the chains that had bound satan in the second heaven.

Fear is the key, fear seems to stop everyone from looking in the right direction. It’s simple
enough to find. All of the mechanics were in place thanks to Newton. Crowley need only
reverse them. There is a correlation between what Crowley did and
what Einstein did. In fact they were both giving and receiving at the exact moment. A
split second in time. And once crowley wrote down all of the semantics and Einstein wrote
his special theory of relativity, it was now a written word. And then we have the mushroom
cloud on June 30, 1908 at exact 7:17 am. The actual physical manifestation of a angel of the lesser light as a law, thought of, spoken of, and now seen.
Thought word deed, the act of creation.

I really don’t have to go through it all again. No one here can refute it. You might call me
crazy but I understand it totally. Irrefuteably. The angel of the lesser light was bound
hand and foot in the second heaven, we like to call it the land of the dead or the
bardo state. This was his domain, so he had to keep the idea or belief of the limit of death
among the sons of the earth. Now he can only bring all matter back to it’s point of origin,
which he would rather call the point of annihilation.

Crowley went in reverse. No wonder most of the entities in this world know nothing but the sides of the pit. He put everything in reverse. Up until this point, the
occult had made very little headway. That’s why those who think they are the head
(ainsoph) are truly the tail. At least Crowley had an understanding of what he was trying
to do. He was trying to commune with an angel, and he knew it was not god. And
when he put everything in reverse, so did einstein. After all creation is taking light and
bringing it to a standstill, aka matter. So while Crowley reversed the heavenly plane to unlock the door to the abyss,
Einstein seen it manifest on the physical. The release of this lesser light changed
human history, but we do not have to bow down to this light. It has made every man
on earth fear the limit of death. And that is exactly what satan wants, he wants everyone
to believe in the limit of death. So how do you destroy the power of death?? Death
only gets it’s power from your own individual belief in it. Satan ruled over the
bardo state, or the state we call death for a thousand years, bound hand and foot
he know the light of death. He has brought it back with him, to swallow up
everyone, and enslave them in his light.

Houdini understood that men would be put in an untenable position. He was one of the
greatest escape artists that ever lived. He escaped many different self imposed prisons,
because the name of god is (I shall be that which I shall be) the correct interpretation
being “I can live through this experience.” And the whole scope of the lesser light is
total destruction. Not just death, but annihilation. How to overcome the point of
annihilation?? Understand that the point of origin is the point of annihilation

Love is greater than will, because love allows all of nature to prosper. Will
dictates it therefore continually usurps and destroys. Because of Will over
love, the womb can not produce unconditionally. The womb when allowed to produce
freely and uncondtionally becomes the Holy Shekinah or the presences of God on
earth. Bringing forth as the uncondtional womb, the holy Shekinah does not
point in the direction “Why not that?” it creates from all directions at once
as the random equation of natural selection. This is was and always will be
the immaculate concept.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 31 Days of Moustache: Albert Einstein (mikeyfilmmaker.blogspot.com)
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Postulat yang dikemukakan Einstein pada tahun 1905 sebenarnya cukup sederhana, yaitu:

1. Prinsip relativitas
   Semua kerangka inersial adalah ekuivalen. Tidak ada kerangka inersial yang lebih utama dibandingkan kerangka inersial lainnya. Dengan kata lain, tidak ada kerangka acuan yang absolut. Postulat ini mengatakan bahwa jika suatu hukum fisika berlaku di suatu kerangka inersial, maka hukum tersebut juga akan berlaku di seluruh kerangka inersial yang lain (hukum fisika tidak prefer kepada suatu kerangka inersial tertentu). Jika seorang observer berdiri dalam sebuah kereta tak berjendela (sedemikian sehingga dia tidak bisa melihat ke luar kereta) yang sedang bergerak dengan kecepatan konstan terhadap tanah, kemudian mengamati suatu fenomena di dalam kereta tersebut, misalnya lintasan sebuah benda yang menggelinding di lantai kereta, dia tidak akan tahu apakah keretanya sedang bergerak terhadap tanah atau tidak, karena tidak akan ada perbedaan antara fenomena yang terjadi dalam kereta tersebut dengan jika itu terjadi di tanah. Lebih ekstrim lagi, dia tidak akan bisa membuat eksperimen di dalam kereta yang dapat menentukan kecepatan kereta relatif terhadap tanah.
2. Universalitas dari laju cahaya
   Semua kerangka inersial mengukur laju cahaya adalah , dengan nilai numeriknya adalah (sebuah aproksimasi), tanpa tergantung pada gerakan sumber cahayanya. Ini adalah postulat yang cukup aneh dan agak bertentangan dengan intuisi kita. Misal observer melihat seberkas cahaya dengan laju ke kanan. Kemudian observer yang bergerak konstan dengan laju ke kiri relatif terhadap bukannya melihat berkas cahaya tersebut dengan laju , melainkan tetap sebesar . Atau pada kondisi lain, misalkan seorang observer melihat suatu sumber cahaya yang diam memancarkan cahaya ke segala arah. Dia akan melihat sebuah bola cahaya mengembang dengan laju dan sumber cahaya sebagai pusat bolanya. Jika sumber cahaya lain bergerak dengan kecepatan konstan relatif terhadap observer tadi, maka yang akan dia lihat tetaplah bola cahaya mengembang ke segala arah dengan laju dan sumber cahaya itu sebagai pusat bolanya. Ini terjadi karena laju cahaya tetap konstan relatif terhadap semua kerangka inersial, seperti yang telah digambarkan secara eksplisit oleh Einstein melalui postulat keduanya ini.

Postulat aneh ini berasal dari hukum Elektrodinamika Maxwell. Dari keempat persamaan Maxwell dapat kita turunkan nilai dari laju cahaya, yaitu , dengan dan adalah permitivitas listrik dan permeabilitas magnetik di ruang vakum. Karena nilai ini konstan, maka timbul masalah. Terhadap kerangka acuan mana laju cahaya tersebut bernilai sebesar itu? Apakah ada suatu kerangka acuan absolut untuk cahaya, sedemikian sehingga cahaya merambat dengan laju relatif terhadap kerangka istimewa itu? Dari sini muncul konsep ether, yaitu suatu medium yang dihipotesiskan ada sebagai tempat perambatan cahaya. Jadi jika gelombang bunyi memerlukan medium untuk merambat, cahaya dihipotesiskan memerlukan medium juga, yaitu ether.

Akan tetapi konsep ether ini ternyata harus segera dibuang. Secara teoritis, jika kita mengasumsikan keempat persamaan Maxwell tersebut berlaku untuk semua kerangka inersial, maka nilai cepat rambat cahaya harus bernilai sama untuk semua kerangka inersial tersebut. Itu artinya konsep ether sebenarnya tidak perlu. Secara eksperimen juga banyak yang menentang keberadaan ether. Eksperimen yang terkenal tentang ini adalah hasil kerja Michelson dan Morley. Berarti lengkap sudah tanda-tanda keruntuhan konsep ether ini.

Postulat kedua Einstein juga mengisyaratkan bahwa adalah nilai kecepatan maksimum dari semua benda di alam. Tidak peduli seberapa cepat suatu sumber cahaya bergerak relatif terhadap suatu observer, observer tersebut tetap akan melihat cahaya merambat dengan laju . Adanya nilai maksimum untuk kecepatan ini mengharuskan kita untuk merevisi transformasi Galileo, yaitu transformasi koordinat antara observer yang satu dengan observer yang lain.

Menurut intuisi sehari-hari, jika suatu observer melihat suatu benda bergerak dengan menempuh jarak tertentu, maka observer yang lain belum tentu melihat benda tersebut menempuh jarak yang sama. Contoh yang ekstrim dari hal ini adalah jika seseorang yang berjalan di taman melihat pulpen di kantongnya diam terhadapnya (jarak yang ditempuh pulpen nol), maka orang yang sedang duduk di bangku taman akan melihat pulpen tersebut bergerak menempuh suatu jarak tertentu. Ini berarti secara alamiah kita sudah menerima bahwa ruang itu tidak absolut, yaitu jika suatu kuantitas jarak diukur oleh seorang observer, tidak mengharuskan observer lain mengukurnya dengan besar yang sama.

Di lain sisi, naluri alamiah kita sepakat bahwa jika suatu observer mengukur waktu antara dua peristiwa, maka observer lain pasti akan mendapat hasil pengukuran yang sama. Singkatnya, waktu adalah besaran absolut. Ketidakabsolutan ruang dan keabsolutan waktu ini sudah tergambar secara sangat eksplisit pada transformasi Galileo.

Masalahnya, postulat kedua Einstein mengharuskan laju cahaya adalah sama bagi semua observer. Jika suatu observer mengukur jarak dan waktu tempuh dari suatu cahaya yang merambat dan membagi dua kuantitas itu, maka dia akan mendapat nilai laju cahaya, yaitu . Jika observer lain juga mengukur jarak dan waktu tempuh dari cahaya tersebut berdasarkan versi dia, dan membaginya, maka dia harus mendapat nilai yang sama, . Karena jarak yang diukur oleh dua observer tersebut berbeda (ketidakabsolutan ruang), maka seharusnya waktu yang mereka ukur juga harus berbeda, agar mendapat hasil pembagian antara keduanya sama sebesar . Ini artinya waktu itu tidak absolut, seperti halnya ruang. Sehingga semua konsep yang berakar dari keabsolutan waktu harus direvisi.

Dalam menganalisis masalah-masalah di relativitas khusus, kita akan banyak menjumpai konstanta kecepatan cahaya . Biasanya untuk mempermudah perhitungan, kebanyakan orang membuat perjanjian tentang nilai dari besaran ini. Daripada kita selalu menuliskan yang nantinya akan membuat repot jika banyak bermunculan di analisis kita, kita dapat mengesetnya menjadi satu.

Sesederhana itukah? Ya. Filosofi dari pengesetan nilai ini adalah kita menyamakan dimensi panjang dan waktu, karena panjang dan waktu  dihubungkan oleh . Jika dimensinya sama, maka kita dapat menganggap bahwa waktu itu adalah besaran panjang juga.

Perhatikan bahwa satu satuan panjang ditentukan oleh jarak yang ditempuh cahaya dalam ruang vakum selama detik. Jadi besaran panjang ditentukan oleh bagaimana kuantitas waktu didefinisikan. Sedangkan pada pengesetan di atas, kita mengeset besaran waktu agar satu satuan waktu sama dengan satu satuan panjang. Atau dengan kata lain, besaran waktu ditentukan oleh bagaimana kuantitas panjang didefinisikan. Tampak bahwa kita sedang menemukan suatu paradoks: Kita mengeset satu-satuan panjang agar sebanding dengan satu satuan waktu, di mana satu satuan waktu itu harus kita tentukan agar sebanding dengan satu satuan panjang. Bagaimana memecahkan permasalahan di atas? (This paradox is due to Rudy Handoko, my lovely junior at TOFI)

Ingat bahwa satuan panjang dan satuan waktu hanyalah konsensus kita. Jika kita mengeset satu detik adalah periode getaran atom Cesium, maka tidaklah salah jika kita mengeset satuan baru untuk waktu, yaitu satu detik adalah periode getaran atom Cesium. Sifat randomness dari pemilihan satu satuan waktu ini memegang peranan penting dalam pemecahan paradoks tadi.

Dengan mengeset , kita dapat mengatakan bahwa kecepatan cahaya adalah (tanpa satuan), dan karena kecepatan setiap benda tidak bisa melebihi kecepatan cahaya, maka dapat kita katakan bahwa kecepatan setiap benda selalu kurang dari . Misal, kecepatan mobil itu adalah . Kita akan terbiasa dengan statement-statement seperti ini nanti, setelah kita terbiasa melakukan perhitungan terkait permasalahan-permasalahan relativitas.

Dalam fisika kita sering melakukan observasi. Jika sebuah fenomena dilihat oleh seorang observer, maka secara intuitif kita tahu bahwa observer lain belum tentu melihat fenomena tersebut secara identik. Untuk itu, jika kita menerangkan suatu fenomena, yang harus dikatakan pertama adalah relatif terhadap observer mana keterangan itu dibuat. Ini adalah prinsip relativitas yang paling obvious di antara prinsip-prinsip lainnya.

Jika dua observer inersial yang saling diam (dalam artian inersial di sini kita tidak membicarakan dua observer yang saling berakselerasi beriringan sehingga keduanya melihat saling diam) melihat suatu fenomena yang sama, maka keduanya akan memiliki interpretasi fisis yang sama terhadap fenomena tersebut. Keduanya akan setuju dalam hal besar kecepatan, energi, massa, momentum, dan kuantitas-kuantitas fisis yang lain. Namun mereka bisa saja berbeda pendapat dalam hal arah kecepatan, dan posisi relatif dari fenomena itu. Hal ini tidak berlaku untuk dua observer yang saling bergerak. Mereka akan menghitung besar kecepatan yang berbeda, energi yang berbeda, bahkan massa juga akan berbeda. Kita akan tunjukkan hal ini nanti.

Misalkan sebuah mobil bergerak dengan kecepatan ke timur relatif terhadap bumi. Kemudian dua orang dan berdiri (keduanya saling diam terhadap bumi dan diasumsikan merupakan observer yang inersial) dengan jarak masing-masing 100 meter dan 200 meter di selatan mobil tersebut, pada . Jelas bahwa dan akan melihat mobil itu bergerak ke timur, dan mereka seharusnya mendapatkan nilai yang sama untuk besar kecepatan mobil. Namun jika kita memasukkan efek paralaks, yaitu benda yang lebih jauh akan tampak lebih kecil dibandingkan jika jaraknya lebih dekat, maka akan melihat jarak tempuh mobil lebih kecil daripada yang dilihat oleh pada selang waktu yang sama. Sehingga akan melihat besar kecepatan mobil lebih kecil daripada yang dilihat oleh .

Dalam contoh di atas, dan mengamati besar kecepatan yang berbeda walaupun keduanya saling diam. Ini karena kedua observer itu memasukkan efek paralaks dalam pengamatan mereka. Dalam observasi seharusnya seorang observer mengetahui mana yang seolah-olah terlihat dan mana yang sebenarnya terjadi. Jika kedua observer tersebut membuat sistem koordinat mereka masing-masing (dan ini memang cara terbaik dari seorang observer untuk mengamati suatu fenomena), dengan titik pusat koordinatnya adalah di tempat mereka berdiri, dan keduanya membuat arah sumbu positif ke timur dan sumbu positif ke utara, maka menurut lintasan mobil tersebut adalah garis , sedangkan menurut adalah garis . Jika efek paralaks dimasukkan dalam perhitungan, maka dan harus ingat bahwa skala koordinat mereka juga terpengaruh efek tersebut, sehingga keduanya tetap akan mengamati besar kecepatan mobil itu dengan nilai yang sama.

Kebingungan ini sebagian besar bersumber dari asumsi bahwa sebuah observer adalah sebuah detektor titik yang mengamati suatu peristiwa. Untuk itu kita juga akan sering menggunakan kata “kerangka acuan” untuk menghindari kerancuan ini. Kerangka acuan adalah kumpulan dari semua observer titik yang saling diam. Dalam contoh di atas kerangka acuan yang dipakai adalah bumi, dan kita menyorot dua dari sekian banyak observer yang saling diam dalam kerangka acuan bumi, yaitu dan .

Masalah selanjutnya adalah jika kita ingin membuat suatu sistem koordinat dalam suatu kerangka acuan. Dalam contoh di atas, jika kita memakai kerangka acuannya adalah bumi, maka kita harus tentukan di mana titik pusat dari sistem koordinat tersebut. Apakah di tempat berdiri, atau di tempat berdiri, atau di suatu tempat yang lain? Kemudian ke mana sumbu-sumbu koordinatnya harus diarahkan? Jawabannya adalah bebas. Alam ini tidak tahu di mana kita meletakkan titik pusat dan mengarahkan sumbu-sumbu dari sistem koordinat dalam kerangka acuan kita. Hal ini hanya mengubah interpretasi koordinat dari suatu fenomena, dan tidak mengubah aspek fisisnya.

Kemudian jika dalam suatu kerangka acuan kita membuat sistem koordinat , dan membuat sistem baru yang berbeda dari dalam hal posisi titik pusat dan arah sumbu-sumbunya, maka dengan mudah kita dapat menggunakan transformasi koordinat antara dua sistem tersebut, untuk memastikan bahwa keduanya konsisten dalam menjelaskan suatu fenomena yang sama.

Sekarang kita kembangkan pembicaraan untuk dua kerangka yang saling bergerak dengan kecepatan konstan. Maka dengan mudah kita lihat bahwa transformasi koordinat antara kedua kerangka tersebut akan berbeda dalam waktu yang berbeda, karena titik pusat dan/atau arah sumbu-sumbu dari sistem koordinat kerangka yang satu akan berubah terhadap waktu menurut kerangka yang lain. Dengan kata lain transformasi koordinatnya adalah fungsi waktu.

Misal kerangka melihat kerangka lain bergerak dengan kecepatan konstan (ini berarti keduanya adalah kerangka inersial). Kita pilih sumbu dan positif searah dengan (ini legal karena kita dengan bebas dapat memilih arah dari sumbu-sumbu koordinat), sumbu dan masing-masing searah dengan sumbu dan . Titik pusat koordinat mereka dipilih sedemikian sehingga pada saat titik pusat keduanya berimpit. Secara matematis, ini berarti saat . Transformasi koordinat antara keduanya (yang kemudian terkenal dengan nama transformasi Galileo) jelas sebagai berikut.

Transformasi Galileo ini menghubungkan koordinat pada suatu kerangka inersial dengan kerangka inersial yang lain. Jika kita menurunkan transformasi tersebut dua kali, akan kita dapatkan bahwa percepatan di kedua kerangka inersial adalah sama. Ini berarti percepatan adalah kuantitas absolut di semua kerangka acuan inersial. Karena massa juga tidak bergantung pada pemilihan kerangka acuan, maka gaya juga adalah kuantitas yang absolut di semua kerangka acuan inersial.

Para Curso Einstein de Outubro-Novembro clique aqui 

For the lecutres “Einstein for Everyone” , click here

Paradoxically the Web (meaning internet + mobile phones + GPS + all the other systems and gadgets of the new media network)  produces practical effects that suggest the squeezing of Einstein between Bohr and Heisenberg, blending their theories in a remarkable virtual reality. The phenomenon called “foreverism”  -june 2009 trendwatching- condenses in a single word a wide spectrum from the “never ripe creations”  to the necessity of the internet users to apprehend space and time in their machines, engulfing simultaneously features such as “here + there + everywhere”  together with “present + past + future”.

As Suzana Cohen has so appropriately described in her blog, provoking my comment there, such a fluid tendency induces comparisons involving the conjunction of unmixable authorities of Modern Physics: Einstein, with the Special Theory of Relativity (space-time fusion), and Bohr-Heisenberg with the Quantum Mechanics (quantum entanglement supporting a non-local reality).

In the referred post Suzana mentions the aim of many internet users to have HERE and NOW all their friends of the present (monitoring and observing their steps by GPS on their mobile’s screens) as well as the past  fellows that they haven’t seen for decades (on the social network sites). You don’t  have to go further to affirm that a sort of SPACE-TIME FUSION is really happening there,  inside a single machine.

On the other hand, the virtual presence of such a powerful observer -as a participant of the social networks- is also inevitably spread out on the whole Planet,  and to a certain extent, within a NON-LOCAL REALITY resembling  that proposed by Quantum Mechanics (quantum entanglement). This reflects an “instantaneous omnipresence” throughout the Web.

While the speed of light is still kept as a preserved limit (in nature) and the non-locality is still a virtual feature (in the Web), this subject ought to be thought and developed: Our newest “fluid trend” demands the simultaneity of being  forEVER-EVERyWHERE. This induces us to forge a new concept of  “forEVERyWHEREism”, merging SPACETIME+NONLOCALITY in a single machine, for the real world of the fortunate Web users.

Just a problem given by my colleague. Need to think thousand times to answer it to say it’s difficult. Peace bro ^^

Let be a nonzero null vector defined on -dimensional Minkowski space. If a vector satisfies , prove that

1. is either spacelike or null.
2. If is a null, then for some constant .
3. The set of vectors which satisfies is a -dimensional vector space . And a set whose elements null vectors is a one-dimensional vector subspace of .

Solution:

1. Suppose is timelike, then there exists a frame such that takes a form . Since is a null, then it must have a nonzero time component. Then, . It’s a contradiction.
2. Since is a null, then there exists a frame such that it takes a form for some constant , and it is the zeroth and th-components of , with . Since is a null and satisfies , it also must take a form in , for some constant , and the position of is the same as the position of in . Thus it is very easy to see that this relation holds, , with . We can guarantee that since the vector is nonzero.
3. From a relation for the first question, and for the second, it’s such an easy to prove.

Here again is the link to the Virginia Tech. website where I got the sample problems for space-time diagrams that I used on the test.   There are notes here, too, and solutions for the problems.   http://www.phys.vt.edu/~takeuchi/relativity/notes/

Misal kita memiliki sebuah cermin cekung dengan jari-jari kelengkungan . Sebuah objek berada di antara titik dengan pusat cermin. Maka kita akan tahu di mana letak bayangan / image dari objek tersebut (lihat gambar).

Sebuah cermin cekung dengan sebuah objek di depan cermin beserta bayangannya

Misal karena suatu hal si objek bergerak mendekati pusat cermin dengan kecepatan tertentu. Untuk setiap waktu , tampak bahwa jarak yang ditempuh oleh bayangan adalah lebih besar daripada jarak yang ditempuh oleh objek (lihat gambar).

Jarak yang ditempuh bayangan lebih besar daripada jarak yang ditempuh objek

Jika diset mendekati kecepatan cahaya , maka ada kemungkinan kecepatan bayangannya lebih besar dari kecepatan cahaya. Padahal kita tahu bahwa kecepatan maksimum setiap benda adalah kecepatan cahaya.

Bagaimana solusinya?