A trip down the weirdness path

I've been reading 'High Weirdness' by Erik Davis.  The books tag line:  Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies sums up the strangeness of the book.  In exploring these concepts, Erik Davis focuses on three of my favorite authors (Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K Dick and Terence Mckenna).  The book is dense, but I am really enjoying it. 

In discussing the strangeness of quantum physics, Erik Davis mentions that it was a 1976 issue of Analog magazine that first drew the public's attention to Hugh Everett's 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum foolery.  That lead me (in this world) to googling around in which I discovered that the 1976 issue with the aforementioned article was the December issue.  With that knowledge I ran to Ebay and found that I  could purchase that issue.  Of course I couldn't just buy that single issue when someone was selling a lot of 21 different issues, including the one I was looking for!

Analog December 1976 Cover by Rick Sternback

The article in question.

The other 20.

Dug this cover by Mike Hinge from February of 1977.

Anyways, I am looking forward to exploring these worlds of wonder.  Thanks Eric Davis for leading me down this path, I look forward to some further discoveries.    

"The possibility of 10^100+ universes, all imperfect copies of each other and all totally unaware of each other's presence, has awesome implications. Here is a system of parallel or alternate worlds beyond the manipulative skill of any science fiction writer. [editor's note:  I feel Robert Anton Wilson did a good job with this in his Schrodinger's Cat trilogy.]  In Schrodinger's experiment, for every cat that survives in our universe, in another universe one dies.  Not only does every quantum mechanical event in our universe cause an indefinite - a number so incomprehensibly large that it cannot even be called infinite! - number of divisions, but perhaps all possible realities exist simultaneously.  In such a garden of the forking paths, the solution to the dilemma of indeterminism may be a universe in which all possible outcomes of an experiment actually occur." - Analog December 1976 'Quantum Physics and Reality' by Michael Talbot and Lloyd Biggle Jr.

High weirdness indeed. 

Quantum Entanglement

Check out this video on Quantum Entanglement from the crew at PHD TV:

And if you would like to read a bit more on the topic, check out the article here on The Worlds of David Darling - Encyclopedia of Science.

Schrödinger's Cat - 60-Second Adventures in Thought

Inner Space and quantum Space

NASA gets itself a quantum computer.  What are their plans?

"According to physicist David Deutsch, a quantum system can work on a million computations at once while a standard desktop PC works on just one. Put another way, a 30-qubit system would be equal in processing power to a traditional 10 teraflop machine, which crunches trillions of operations each second.
These computers will help us find the most expedient solution to a complex problem. As such, they're poised to revolutionize the way we go about data analysis and optimization — including such realms as air traffic control, courier routing, protein modeling, weather prediction, database querying, and hacking tough encryption schemes."

Read the rest. 

(via IO9)


A Neuroscientist's Radical Theory of How Networks become Consciousness

"It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, thinks he might know the answer. According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works."

Read the rest on Wired.com

(via Grahamhancock.com)

something large, something small, and something else

Something rather large and mind boggling:


via (deepastronomy.com)

Something rather small and mind boggling:

A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics

"Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality..."

"...The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated, “scattering amplitudes,” which represent the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain other particles upon colliding. These numbers are what particle physicists calculate and test to high precision at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland."

Read more.

 Which kind of made me think of Inra's net. 

"Francis Harold Cook describes the metaphor of Indra's net from the perspective of the Huayan school in the book Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra:
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring." (via wikipedia).