Born to do Math: March 2017

Friday, 31 March 2017

Born to do Math 24 - LSD, SAT, & Stupid Ideas

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 24 - LSD, SAT, & Stupid Ideas

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 31, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did you go into the implications of the equivalence between what happens in heads and the universe at large? [Laughing]

Rick Rosner: I thought. That’s a good stupid idea. I will actually take the SAT on LSD because it is a stupid damn thing to do. I was just starting my career as being a specialist at doing stupid shit. That was one time that I took LSD.

SDJ: LSD messes with your head, your brain, with the information processing in it. So the “red” doesn’t necessarily mean red by standard experience.

RR: It does, but LSD doesn’t mess with—it doesn’t entirely mess with your associative structure. It just makes it crappy. There’s a lot of information processing that goes into translating what you see when you see somebody’s face. Your face has a bunch of subtle curves. Every facial feature has its own curves. You’re trying to translate emotions and what somebody’s emotional state is.

At some point, you’re add the auditory information by watching their lips. It is easier to understand what somebody is saying if you watch somebody talking at you. To some extent, you’re adding to the auditory information by watching their lips. It is easier to understand what somebody is saying if you’re watching them talk rather than just listening to them because you’re getting a lot of additional information.

On LSD, all of these little processors, little specialist subsystems in your brain, have their functioning knocked down by something in your brain, so you don’t get gentle curves when you look at somebody’s face. You get their face broken up into stupid polygons because that’s the best your brain can do at that point. You’re not getting smooth skin effects of light, shading, and glow of blood circulating beneath the skin and people can look like lizards.

They can be talking to you, but it is garbled mush. You know they’re saying words, but it is echoed, choppy – and so on.

[Attempted impersonation by Rick Rosner of LSD auditory alterations.]

SDJ: [Laughing]

RR: It’s been a long time.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 2012-2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Thursday, 30 March 2017

Born to do Math 23 - LSD & SAT

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 23 - LSD & SAT

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 30, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: [Laughing] You were taking the SAT while on it (LSD), the old harder SAT.

Rick Rosner: That was just a joke. I was 20. I read a book called Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot, which was one of the first books ever about the coming celebrity culture. It is about a semi-successful—well, it is about a professional football player who is injured in a game and has to spend the year recovering and doing like things that a minor celebrity does, like going on radio shows and making public appearances.

This thing was in ’78 or ’79. Celebrity culture was just coming online. The message that I took away from it—the message that you’re not supposed to take away from it is that everyone is horrible. The message that I got away from it was that the people who are most horrible got most of what they wanted. People who had moral qualms did worse than people that blatantly did anything that they wanted. The message that I took away was that I need to be more of an asshole.

I need to be unafraid to go out into the world and just behave like a schmuck and do stupid things for the sake of doing stupid things. Next semester, in college, I had to take the mandatory expository writing course that every freshman has to take. I was in my third semester as a freshman. We had to do spontaneous writing things in class. One thing that came to me was to write stream of consciousness of a dumb kid who finds himself on a Saturday morning trying to take the SAT while he is still tripping from acid that he took from the night before.

It was a fun writing exercise. But I thought, “Alright, I’m doing new stuff.”

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Wednesday, 29 March 2017

Born to do Math 22 – Associative Coding or Information

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 22 - Associative Coding or Information

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 29, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: It is something that is as close to codelessness as you can get or is codeless. By associative, I mean, in philosophy, the thing that people are always asked to picture is “red.” And how do you know that your red is the same as anybody else’s red? But the deal with red or any other thing in your mind is that what you know of it is based purely on association. There’s no base index to go to. God doesn’t have an index of things.

Where you can go and look up what “red” is, everything is bootstrapped and built via association. You think red. You think strawberries. You think apples. In the room I’m in, I’m looking at bricks and boxes that have parts. I am thinking of wavelengths and the inner ring of a rainbow. Then I am thinking of the words that come up with red. It is a giant net of associations that form the idea of red.

You can kind of get the idea that our thinking is purely associative if you break down the structure by doing something stupid like taking LSD. You haven’t done that. But I have, when I was young and stupid. LSD kind of breaks down or hampers the really grainy, the really small-scale, processing ability of your brain in real-time. And it makes it harder for your brain to process information.

So you lose some of the associative information. So if you look at a square grid of floor tiles, say, you might see this occasionally when you’re not getting enough information about the spatial relationships. The tiles get swimmy and wavy. And to some extent don’t maintain the rectangular grid that you’re used to because you’re not processing information well-enough to have all of the spatial associations that into forming that grid. LSD takes 19 hours, is a pain-in-the-ass [Laughing] and is one of the least recreational drugs.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Tuesday, 28 March 2017

Born to do Math 21 – Codeless Information

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 21 - Codeless Information

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 28, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Then I was thinking, “What if there could be something like codeless information that is purely associative?” Maybe, that’s more efficient.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s different than minimized information as well, or minimized code. So in general, the previous models of artificial intelligence, or simply computer code, were super long in trying to code for every single possible problem. So that you could have an appropriate solution to it. At the same time, the more modern ones minimize that, and allow the computer to learn for itself based on its much simpler set of algorithms.

So instead of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lines of codes., you have a couple hundred. Google DeepMind with this minimized model has great success. What you’re talking about something even further, it is codeless code.

RR: I don’t know because I don’t know much about the Google deal. I don’t know much about anything. But when you allow a system to build its own set of equivalences, which seems to be what Google translate is about. There may be no zero code way to do stuff, but this “minimized code” that you’re talking about.

SDJ: I made the term. I invented term [Laughing]. I did not use it from a professional.

RR: There may be—instead of having explicitly codified code, computers don’t comprehend anything they’re processing. They work according to rules. But if there are systems that work on more global grasping of stuff. That may incorporate a more efficient, more explicit, less code heavy form of associative coding or information, or something that approaches codelessness.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Monday, 27 March 2017

Born to do Math 20 – ‘Code, Where Art Thou?’

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 20 - 'Code, Where Art Thou?'

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 27, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: It seems—because – ugh – for the universe to be an information processor you’ve got an entirely different universe overlaid over the universe we experience. We experience the universe as matter. We experience the universe as matter. We experience it as a physical world. But if the universe information being processed, then that information is itself a picture of the world, and probably not the universe that we experience.

But a whole other construct made of that information. And to have to mediate between the physical world we experience, the code that would mediate between that and whatever world is pictured by the information that we don’t experience as information, but that we experience as matter and space. That seems to be a huge burden, an impossible burden, for you to hang that much secret code.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It seems the same with our own minds.

RR: Yea! Where is all of that code, we don’t see the world. Our brains model the world, so we don’t see our dendrites or any kind of information map. We see the results of that map, which is a picture of the world. But we’re not seeing the world. We’re seeing a model of the world that has been constructed in our brains with thought plus sensory information. So it is a complete overlay.

You’ve got our brains, which is a whole physical environment. Then we’ve got this world that is connected to the brain, but it presents us with a whole different set of images and thoughts. That interface is—well, if that interface has to be based on code, that’s a lot, a lot of code.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Sunday, 26 March 2017

Born to do Math 19 – “Welcome to the Universe”

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math - "Welcome to the Universe"

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 26, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking for like 20 minutes on our irregularly regular Skype calls. So you wanted to talk about math, physics, and IC. I said, “Okay.” We went from there. All sorts of interesting topic arose from it.

Rick Rosner: I am reading Welcome to the Universe, which is Neil Tysons’s, and to other guys’, book. It is a bunch of easy physics for the lay person. It is a nice way to trigger thoughts about physics. It also bums me out because it presents Big Bang physics as this perfectly established and proven bulwark against any other possible interpretation of the universe. And there was a tweet string from scientist Katie Mack.

She talked about the misery of—she’s a working scientist. Every known physicist has lunatics trying to submit their alternate theories of the universe to them. She talked about the misery of that for her, having to tell people to fuck off. For people themselves who labor in delusion for decades, that whole thing is depressing because what we’re trying to produce and present is an alternate view of the universe as an information processor with characteristics that - some of which – are inconsistent with orthodox Big Bang theory.

SDJ: It is not willy-nilly. It is based on or building on previous work don for decades in digital physics, which many mainstream have already done.

RR: Yea, but I mean, it is still enough of an alternative thing. The Welcome to the Universe book shows the theoretically predictive curve of the isotropism of the Cosmic Microwave Background – how clumpy it is. How clumpy it would be considered to be with Big bang theory, then they showed the experimental results and the degree to which the experimental results and predictive curve match is just crazily huge, and super precise.

It might be the most precisely matched curve between theoretical and experimental predictions and results in all of physics. I’ve never seen the curve before, which just speaks to my ignorance. The curve is so wiggly and kind of arbitrary looking. Yet it is a theoretical curve, and they plot the experimental points, and they match dead-on to 1 part in 10^8^th or some crap. The idea that you’ve got a theory that somehow says, “Well, that’s not exactly what’s going on,” with that sort of evidence is a little demoralizing.

It makes one think, or it makes me think, that I’m one of those crazy guys with a bullshit theory. On the other hand, I don’t think all of our thinking over the past – I don’t know – is worthless. But you do have to address certain things. In about 1974, physicist John Wheel talked about “It from Bit” in his huge book Gravitation. It from Bit is the idea that the universe is an information processor and it is working through some code the way computers work through code.

When you think about how much code goes into computation, especially when he was writing in 1974, a modern video game’s computation has millions, if not tens of millions, of lines of code that mediate between players, actions, and visual experience, and circuits being flipped, microcircuits being flipped from 0 to 1, in a computer. You’ve got the tens of millions of lines of code. The people who have written the game.

Then you’ve got compiler code that writes that into a more ground-level code to talk to the individual flappable bits of a computer, and who knows how many other layers of code that have to be passed through between the players thumb on the controller, through the computer, to the TV, and back into the player’s eyes. It is so much code. If you’ve got It from Bit going on in the universe, in a digital universe and its code.

Where is it? Where is it hidden? Where is all of the code?

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Saturday, 25 March 2017

Born to do Math 18 – Choices in Worlds

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 18 - Choices in Worlds

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 25, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: The universe - reflects what has clustered together and how it’s clustered together reflects – if you want to look at this way choices among multiple possible worlds, which isn’t a really helpful way of looking at it. The universe could’ve clustered in any number of ways. Maybe, anomalies in density. Maybe, different parts of the universe getting hit with photons more than other parts based on light emitting bodies like stars.

Things are pushed into clusters, collapse into clusters. The cluster you have 10^80^th or so atoms in the universe. You have 10^58^th stars or so in the universe. You a have 10^11^th galaxies. At some point, there was some choice within a galaxy, say, about how exactly its matter and its 10^11^th stars will be divvied up, whether molecule A or hydrogen atom A was going to end up falling into a dust cloud that would form this star.;

Or whether that hydrogen atom falls into another cloud that will condense into another star. There’s some choice in that clustering contains information. By just saying that, it doesn’t tell you that much. It’s also a good bet that memory in the universe—that the universe is able to store information by moving large structures to the outskirts of the universe where the time moves more slowly.

Close to an apparent T=0, there’s less interaction and things are frozen in a relativistic sense because time is dilated and there may be ways to do that time dilation thing within galaxies via gravitationally collapsed object. It may be able to hold onto stuff until its needed by tossing it into a black hole. But the whole idea of the universe understanding itself, the universe containing the information it contains runs into the problem of anthropomorphization.

We see things because we receive perceptual information through our senses and then we process it through thought and brain cells that are connected in such a way that they clarify what we’re seeing, which is sub-thought. And memory and various expert subsystems that provides various interpretations and clarifications about what we see. And we’re highly evolved beings with highly evolved toolkits in our brains. And if we say the universe is made of information, the universe has to understand that information, but there are no mechanisms along the lines of what we have in our brains for the brain to understand itself in any way that might be familiar to us.

Because the universe consists of chaotically boiling stars and swirling galaxies, and it’s not an evolved brain. It doesn’t have evolved structures for thinking. |Yet we’re still claiming that it is made of information, and thanks to the physics of the universe the universe is able to share information with itself and able to maintain order. So that sets out the problem: Where is the information? How does the universe understand it? How does the universe process t?

All without evolved structures for that.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Friday, 24 March 2017

Born to do Math 17 - "It From Bit"

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 17 - "It From Bit"

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 24, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: We’re trying to figure out where the information in the universe is, and we know some stuff. But it is not completely helpful stuff. When people started talking in the 70s, Wheeler and other people, there is this famous book called Gravitation. It is a 10-pound book. An awesome book about gravitation. There’s this one page about “It from Bit.” That, somehow, there’s a way to look at the universe as a computer, as a codifier of information, as a processor of information.

It is like the way the computers process information. However, if the universe consists of information, it has to do certain things that when we look at how those things are done in computers they are very systematic and regimented. But when you look at how things are in the universe, stars boil for billions of years, then explode, then boil some more, then they explode again, and then they explode again.

And they bubble down until they blow off their skin again and again in novas, until you’re left with this core of stuff that might be neutronium, or might be carbon-oxygen, or it might be a ball of iron slowly cooling because it can’t do fusion anymore, but it doesn’t look like those things are really good engines of the systematic storing of information. So you have to look at two things. Where the universe might store information, and how the universe might store information that is generated through mess, non-systematic processes.

The way a fusion goes on in stars is systematic. It’s a well-understood process, but it takes place among 10^58^th atoms in a typical star, just swirling in this big chaotic mess, and there’s nothing, even though the physics is well-structured. The actual process is this chaotic swirl of nearly 10^60^th atoms and who knows how many photons, all ping-ponging off of each other. It really doesn’t seem to be a good way to store information.

So we know some stuff. We know there’s information in the clusters. The universe has forms at various scales. The smallest cluster being, if you don’t count quarks and protons – and you should, I think, but the smallest clusters beyond that would be nuclei. Protons and neutrons clustered in atomic nuclei. Beyond that, you have molecules bound by electromagnetic van der Waals forces that can—things that can stick together because of electromagnetic forces.

Past that scale, all you have are clusters gravitationally – asteroids, planets, stars, solar systems, and whatever groupings, sub-galactic groups there might be within galaxies. Then clusters and superclusters of galaxies, and then you get into the very largest structures like filaments, which are like strings of galaxies and some other junk across billions of light years. So there’s information there.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Thursday, 23 March 2017

Born to do Math 16 - Photons, Molecules, and Atoms

In-Sight Publishing
Born to do Math 16 - Photons, Molecules, and Atoms

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 23, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: One more thing I was thinking about with regard to information in the universe. Inside of a computer, things have definite values and things represent specific. When you think about things going on in a computer, you think about every flip from a 1 to a 0 equals a definite change in some linear and very regimented process, which results in rigid calculations in the computer. But when you look at how we perceive the world, let’s try to perceive an orange as an example.

Light bounces off the orange and hits your eye, and you get enough photons off the orange and you’re able to perceive it as an orange, but it doesn’t particularly matter which molecules in the orange’s skin and which rods or cones, or whatever, in the back of your eye absorb the photons. As long as photons come off the orange and hit enough receptor cells in your eye, you’re going to perceive an orange.

There might be 10^40^th different ways to perceive that orange based on which molecules emitted the photons that you saw, and which receptor cells in your eye picked up those photons. So I wonder, “Is the universe a setup where every single interaction—

The inside of the Sun is a mess. The Sun is 100 times the diameter of Earth, and it’s this big superhot swirling hot maelstrom of gazillions of interactions with everything smushed together super tight and exchanging energy all of the time, and is pretty dense for being as hot as it is, and so rich in kinetic chaos and relatively dense that it takes a photon that has been generated at the center of the Sun, where fusion is going on, 170,000 years to bounce its way out to the surface of the Sun.

So it is a giant scramble of chaotic interactions. The question can arise, “Does every single one of those interactions super-signify something?” For every interaction, the 10 to the who knows how many, 30^th, 40^th, 50^th interactions per second, does each one of those interactions trigger a different version of some kind of many worlds thing? Is the universe different based on every little teeny interaction based on the mass of interactions going on all of the time? Or is there a rough or is it a general accumulation of interactions that roughly contains the information that the universe contains?

For instance, to move away from the Sun, you have a flashlight, it sputters out photons at a steady rate. You can imagine individual photons being emitted one second. You don’t know exactly where they’re exactly going. They’re going somewhere in the flashlights beam. They either illuminate something in the beam locally and then move on. But does it matter to the matter in the universe and the information in the universe which specific atom shining the specific flashlight at a screen?

That’s the only thing between the flashlight’s beam and space. The photon hits an atom in the screen, is momentarily absorbed and then emitted. The atom that absorbed and emitted it goes back to the way it was. The photon goes off at a certain angle. The angle might matter, but does it matter as long as the angle is more or less the same. Does it matter that a 100 million atoms in the screen temporarily absorbed and then emitted that photon?

If you have a bunch of photons going off at once, does it matter which out of the 10^30^th molecules in that screen – which particular subset of molecules are temporarily being transformed and being returned to the way they were by the stream of photons? Or is it a rough thing where the information is contained in the aggregate impression that is created, which is a beam shining on a screen as opposed to millions of specific interactions?

The same way it doesn’t matter which particular photons and atoms and receptor molecules are involved with you perceiving an orange. It is a general thing. It is a general impression and that’s something we’ll have to figure out. The end of that thing there.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

Wednesday, 22 March 2017

Born to do Math 15 – 5 Brothers-4 Sisters & 4 Sisters-5 Brothers

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 15 - 5 Brothers-4 Sisters & 4 Sisters-5 Brothers

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 22, 2017

[Beginning of recorded material]

One more thing I was thinking about with regard to information in the universe. Inside of a computer, things have definite values and things represent specific. When you think about things going on in a computer, you think about every flip from a 1 to a 0 equals a definite change in some linear and very regimented process, which results in rigid calculations in the computer. But when you look at how we perceive the world, let’s try to perceive an orange as an example.

Light bounces off the orange and hits your eye, and you get enough photons off the orange and you’re able to perceive it as an orange, but it doesn’t particularly matter which orange in the orange’s skin.

[End of recorded material]

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Photons carry the energy from electromagnetic interactions, and I think, it just takes small, not imbalances, but asymmetries. Asymmetries does not seem like the right word either—it just takes a small shift, a one part in 10^40^th, in the characteristics of electromagnetic interactions. That would be enough to account for gravitation. That could be something as simple as taking self-repulsion or self-attraction of electromagnetic interactions.

But I don’t know—whatever it’s called, I’m talking out of my butt. So imagine a universe where you have 5 of each. So that should be a next attractive universe in my lame way of trying to understand stuff because each proton, because opposites attract, is attracted by 5 of the other thing, but only repelled by 4 of its own thing. It is like being in a family with 5 brothers and 4 sisters.

Each member of the family always has more of the other sexed sibling regardless of which sex you’re talking about. Each boy has 4 brothers and 5 sisters. Each girl has 4 sisters and 5 brothers. If you’re able to pull out some self-repulsion out of the next attraction versus repulsion, that might be enough to account for gravity, or some other trick that leaves gravitation in the hands of the electromagnetic interaction.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.