The Fabric of Reality

The traditional, classical, view of reality is that something only exists in one place, but what if objective reality was found not to exist? What if an object could be in more than one place at once? What if particles billions of miles away could communicate with each other faster than the time it takes for light to travel between them – or what if time could move in more than one direction?

Albert Einstein stated that if someone travelled into space at a sufficiency high speed and came back to Earth, they would experience less time than someone who stayed at home. So time, essentially, is relative, even at slower speeds.

There are limits to this theory because Einstein believed that nothing with mass could travel faster than light, but what if he was wrong? Could someone get back before they had left (time travel). It’s a bit like flying from London to New York on a supersonic jet and getting to the Big Apple before you’ve left old London town. Keep this thought in your head, but also consider another one.

In the 1920s it was thought that memories were stored in very specific locations in the brain. But in 1977, Karl Pribram, a Stanford University neurophysiologist, came to the opposite conclusion, namely that memories were not to be found in specific brain cells, but were more widely distributed throughout the brain. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense until he started to think in terms of holograms. Perhaps the human mind was functioning in a similar way?

If you are not familiar with holograms they are made by splitting a laser beam into two. One beam is bounced off an object and the second functions as a reference beam. If you cut a laser image of an object in two, each piece would contain the complete image, albeit at a slightly lower resolution. Hence, the possibility that each brain cell might be able to contain the same memory. If you think this is impossible, consider the fact that holographic storage is one way that computers could progress in the future. Quite what a neural equivalent of a laser reference beam could be is anyone’s guess, as is the ultimate nature of what the brain is perceiving.

In 2011 a Nobel Prize was awarded to work in relation to Dark Energy. This is a force believed to be responsible for the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Link this to some other astronomical ideas (for example, the belief that the universe is infinite) and you might arrive at the idea of a universe containing every conceivable combination of matter, which could mean other permutations of you reading this book. In other words, our universe is actually a multiverse. The universe is not the only one and neither are you. This idea is probably a bit of a stretch, partly because it’s unknown whether the universe is infinite or not and because there’s a big difference between a situation where everything must happen and one where anything could happen. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting way to give yourself a headache, a bit like trying to think about what infinite space – or it’s converse – or no outside beyond the universe would look like.

Going even further ‘out there’, perhaps there are not only things we cannot see, but there is another dimension hidden from human awareness. This takes us to the fringes of physics and into mainstream science fiction but, as we’ve seen, the two do sometimes collide. Take Black Holes, for instance. Technically nothing can escape from a Black Hole because to do so would require movement faster than light. But what if things could move far faster than light? Indeed, what if there was a tiny black hole inside every atom? What if travel, not only in time, but also between different universes, were possible? Perhaps the world really is inside a grain of sand.

As usual, someone has already thought of this and other strange possibilities.
For example, in Fritz Leiber’s book, The Big Time, war is waged across time. Perhaps inter-dimensional travel explains ghosts, although if this were the case, why do people only ever see visions of people from the past and never people from the future? What if memories were real and could exist outside of the brain or what if cracks in parallel universes allowed things to leak out? Maybe this would explain premonitions or deja vu? Indeed, what if nothing really exists? What if everything is just nothing except oscillating energy of various kinds that can exist in all places simultaneously?

Maybe our dreams or our intuitions are as real as reality ever gets.

Libraries

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had an 11-hour flight yesterday so I managed to polish off something called the Library Book (Profile Books). It’s a collection of short essays by people that are passionate about and wish to protect public libraries, including Julian Barnes, Caitlin Moran and Seth Godin. There wasn’t anything inside that I didn’t already know about in a sense, but it was good to have some key thoughts confirmed – such as not reducing the value of a library to the sum of the books on its shelves.

The book is full of good quotes but one I especially liked is this one by Caitlin Moran:

“A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a consumer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff’.

BTW, a fun aside was that the in-flight entertainment system broke down three times and some of the passengers almost had heart attacks at the thought of eleven hours with no access to a screen. What were they supposed to do? Should have brought a book I guess.

One final thought just in via email – a great list of 10 ways we can expect libraries to change in the future. Click right here (thanks Kaitlyn).

The Russians are coming

I’m lying face down in the Indian Ocean wondering where all the Chinese have gone. To be more precise, I’m in a bungalow on slits lying on a massage table at one end of which is a hole through which you can put your head and through which you can see the remnants of a coral reef and a few fish thanks to a glass plate inserted into part of the wooden floor. Did I mention I’m wearing black nylon women’s underwear? (I’ve had a few massages in my time, but I’ve never before been asked to wear nylon knickers under my towel, which is really pants if you know what I mean).

Anyway, the point of this story is that at the end of the massage the woman leans over and says “Good, but ouch.” I think she was referring to the strength of her massage technique and the fact that I’ve done something to the muscles in one of my arms, but perhaps she was referring to the world economy over the next couple of decades.
I’ll use that line somewhere one of these days.

Other observations. The resort – in the Maldives – is a real melting pot of nationalities, especially Indian’s, Arabs and a few Europeans, but at least one third of visitors are Russians, many of whom are the colour of freshly fallen snow. In the evenings, a local band plays traditional Russian folk songs. There are no American tourists anywhere to be seen.

I spoke to one of the resort staff and he said that before the 2012 coup, 80-85% of tourists were Chinese. I’m probably reading too much into this, but perhaps the Russians are a little more used to political turmoil?

And no, there are no pictures of my knickers.

Books (and a stat)

Two books I like the sound of. The first is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Essentially this is about the transition from an age of character (actions) to one of personality (style) where the pressure to entertain and sell oneself (and never to be nervous or unsure about oneself) is growing rapidly. Here’s the central idea of the book: “Introverts living under the extrovert ideal are like women living in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are.”

The second is It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway by David Satter. This is about Russia, its lost utopia, its nostalgia for community spirit, its demographic crisis and the rise of Putin. My take from reading a review of this book is that Russia is now primarily about lost empire and a desire to be feared.

A stat from the book (could have been another one on Russia, I can’t remember): When the Soviet Union fell apart its population stood at 150 million. By 2025 it will be between 121 million and 136 million according to the UN.

Precognition

This is fun – and slightly mind popping if true. A handful of psychologists, notably Michael Frank at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and Daryl Bem, at Cornell are conducting experiments into peoples’ ability to foretell the future or, more precisely, whether it’s possible for the future to influence the present.

In one experiment Bem asked people to briefly look at a list of words and remember them. They were then given an edited selection of the same list of words, which they were also asked to memorise. Weirdly, people were more likely to remember the edited selection of words during the initial test. In other words, later events appeared to influence earlier behaviour. Several studies have tried to repeat these results, one study succeeded but six others failed.

Source: New Scientist, 14.1.12 pages 39-41.

The future of Facebook

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? The valuation seems excessive – it’s more than Boeing is worth, but on some levels it could be seen as something of a bargain. Other tech companies such as Google and Apple are worth far more and many of the big trends are moving in Facebook’s direction. Global connectivity is increasing rapidly (from 1.6 billion online in 2010 to 3 billion in 2016 according to Boston Consulting) and the move to the mobile web also benefits Facebook hugely.

At the heart of Facebook’s success is surely a deep and long standing human desire to connect with other human beings. People like Facebook because Facebook makes finding new friends, or looking up old ones, easy. It’s also a fast and convenient way to stay in touch and share everything from party invitations to baby photos, which is probably why the website now accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online globally. Don’t forget that Facebook also knows an extradordinary amount about the minutiae of its users lives, which is why it’s able to target advertising so effectively (and why 85% of its revenue comes from advertising). The sheer number of Facebook users (currently 850 million and rising) and the amount of time users spend on the site (15.5 hours per month in 2011) means that Facebook is rapidly becoming the world’s de facto homepage with other companies increasingly linking to it because users have to login in using their real identities.

But what might go wrong for Facebook in the future?

The first problem the company faces is operational. How to scale a small start-up into a giant corporation? This shouldn’t be too difficult. The second problem is around regulation and this could be tricky. If Facebook continues to be successful it will, at some point, start to resemble a monopoly in the eyes of the US regulators, at which point there could be an anti-trust case. It happened to Microsoft and it could easily happen to Google and/or Facebook. The third problem concerns privacy. To date Facebook has been very clever about mapping the connections between people and what interests them and then selling this information on to third parties. Much of the time Facebook’s users have little or no idea that this is happening and those that do know don’t seem to care. But this could change.

The network effects that made Facebook so large so fast could act in reverse if users start to feel exploited financially or no longer trust what is increasingly seen as a rather arrogant and potentially autistic company. Recently, users were forced to adopt a new feature called Timeline and had to opt out if they did not like it. This created a few mutterings, as did the acquisition of Instagram and the use of facial recognition technology, but so far there are few signs of a serious Facebook fallout. But as the company grows larger there will be inevitable tensions between attracting users and getting them to part with their money. One also suspects that when it comes to privacy the company’s devotion to online openness will continue to cause it problems in the real world too.

The great innovations swindle

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. I’ve been trying to soak in the bath and the plug is broken so all the water has been rushing out. How do you break a plug? Simple. Replace a perfectly good and inexpensive plug on the end of a chain with a really complex and expensive series of rods and joints plumbed in behind the bath so you can’t get at it to fix it.

It’s much the same story everywhere else in and around the house. My new car has lights that when they break have to be replaced, either with a hugely expensive unit or one where you have  to dismantle half of the car to get at a bulb, which, of course, costs a fortune. Contrast this with my old car. If the light broke you just unscrewed the cover, the lens fell out and you put in a new bulb – which cost about two quid. It’s the same with the car keys. One has a push button start linked to a remote unit with a battery that keeps going flat. Last week all the electrics just stopped working for no reason and the car couldn’t be started. With the old car there was a metal key. No batteries and not much to go wrong.

Or take my dishwasher (please take my dishwasher…). Why I’ve got one is anyone’s guess. It takes longer to stack and remove the dishes than if I washed all the dishes by hand. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that when it finishes washing it beeps to let me know it’s finished. Fine. Not necessary, but fine. Only, it never stops beeping. It beeps until I stop whatever I’m doing (sleeping, for example) and attend to its desires. It’s all about it. I can hear it right now, laughing at me.

It’s all enough to make me write Future Files 2 about how the world is making some of us go slightly mad. I could, for example, also include the helpful suggestion from BT’s automated answering service that if I am having problems with my broadband connection I can go online to find out how to fix it. Are they serious?

BTW, I saw a good quote today in a bookshop window.

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted’
– Charles Saatchi.

On forecasting

I’m going through a pile of newspaper cuttings for the next issue of my What’s Next report and found this tiny morsel from an old issue of the FT lurking under a pile of New Scientist magazine cuttings.

Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgement, found that experts of any professional or practical persuasion make very poor forecasters. At best, expert predictions perform little better than randomly sticking a pin on a list of stocks or picking economic predictions out of a hat. So what can one do if what one wants to do is make good predictions?

The answer, according to Tetlock, is contained within an essay published a very long time ago by Isaiah Berlin, which itself harks back to the thinking of the Greek poet Archilochus. The secret, it seems, is to develop a cognitive style that is highly promiscuous, self-doubting, frantically curious and meddlesome. This will, on most occasions, work better than thinking that is based on a single worldview or a lone idea.

In other words, question everything.