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Dose of philosophy (Part 3: The bouncing ball)

Friday, 9. October 2009, 13:42:22

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Ever seen the video song Return of Innocence by Enigma. The frames in that video are played in reverse order. Just imagine what would have happened if the original scenes were actually the same and not the reverse of what you saw. A girl aligns two pieces of bread and they both stick to each other into a single slice. A farmer uses his chain saw to connect all crops to their individual stems. So unfamiliar they seem, you soon figure out they are unreal and the editor has done some trick with the video scenes. But as I said in my last post, the nature of physics does not change whether you play the universe forward or reverse. For some time, let's keep aside the usual question of why the reversed scenes are not so usual in our universe if physics is same. Right now I will try to convince that though you will never be able to align two bread pieces with your hands, it is theoretical possible to connect them without making any modifications to the laws of physics.

I am taking example of a ball as I have given some thought to it. Suppose you leave a ball from your hands and let it bounce freely over a relatively flat surface. The ball takes some bounces on the floor, the height of bounces reduces with time and the interval between successive bounces becomes narrower and narrower. After some time, the ball stops bouncing further, rolls for a while on the floor and then finally comes to rest. I just had an interesting thought: if bouncing ball is to gas, then rolling ball is to liquid and the ball at rest is solid. Haha forget that.

Well what happened to the law of conservation of energy? Where did all the energy of ball went? I have some suggestions, you can make more if you have.. Firstly, if you analyze the bounces, at each point the ball hits the ground, it deforms momentarily. If the ball is well made, it regains all of its shape very soon, retrieves most of its energy, pushes the earth downwards and bounces back again. Though every kind of ball while deforming and reforming touches the earth for certain time. In this time, some of the energy is transferred to the earth in form of surface vibrations. Secondly, the air offers resistance while the ball is in the air. Here some of the momentum inside ball is gradually transfered to surrounding air particles making the ball lose kinetic energy. Thirdly, the ball produces shockwaves in adjacent area every time it hits the ground. You can see ants flying away from the area where ball bounces and also hear the waves when they reach your ears. All these factors contribute in slowing up the ball. Finally the entire energy in the ball gets consumed and it settles down to one place.

Now let's perform this experiment in reverse way inside some simulator. At increasing intervals, concentrate vibrations from floor's surface to the point where the ball is. You will find that the ball will be lifted over the ground. Arrange the flow of air such that the air particles move in the same direction wherever the ball is currently headed towards. The air particle will fill in momentum inside the ball and the ball will feel continuous push from surrounding. Similarly by replicating all the conditions in reverse order, the ball will be lifted up and up every consecutive bounce in the exactly of the reverse fashion as you left it. None of the laws I changed here. I didn't changed earth's gravitational attraction to repulsion. Yet the ball followed the path I intended.

Note: The actual air and surface movements will be very complex than what I described here and they won't be possible in any simulator. My aim is to keep the discussion simple but the overall idea of time reversal is same. Also the example of bouncing ball is a very simple one. You are free to apply the concept to any situation you can think of.

If you extend this idea further, you can see it is quite possible that the pieces of bread can stick in form of a single piece if you are able to exactly simulate all the environment conditions. You don't have to reverse flow of time, only reverse the events, the direction of all particles and you will get an illusion that time is running reverse.

An exercise for brain. Just think of the wildest things that are possible when events are reversed. To start with, the ambient light in my room will all reach the florescent light on top of me, they will have sufficient energy to ionized the gas within the tube, producing potential difference between the two electrodes of the tube, adding power to the thermal power station out of the city, the added power from all households will produce just enough heat to deoxidize carbon dioxide back to coal, and the process will go on.. The situation is even wilder if I apply it to my own behavior.. the atoms inside my brain will be running in a direction such that every moment I keep forgetting the thing that just happened, rejuvenating my just previous memories back, my eyes will add light and ears will add sound to their sources (that doesn't violate any law), I will feed all the plants in weird ways (I am vegetarian) and the plants will add fuel to sun in even weirder ways, my all motions will be reversed, I will be created old from ashes and water vapors with all the memories of things that didn't occur and finish up being a child, assisting the human species go back to previous generation.

These were the only two examples. If you keep on applying this theory to other situation like computer programs and black holes, you will soon loose your mind.

Now an important question: what will be running into my mind in the universe where all objects including me are running reversed? Will I see things are not behaving unusually? The important answer is NO. Remember, I am also part of the whole system. At any instant, all the memories I have will be that of things that are going to happen. But ridiculously, I will think of those unoccurred things as past. I will have no idea of things that actually happened. For example in this reverse universe (rhymes good :smile:, it is possible that I went alive from an accident that occurred an year back and am going to take this next hour untyping this blog. But what's in my brain is that I am feeling great to have typed this blog and I have no idea that I am going to die in an accident after one year. There's no way for me to find out which way the time is headed.

Well this was not an experimentation with thoughts, this is the actual situation in front of you :smile: So what's reality of the Matrix you are living in? Is time going reverse? Is universe heading towards Big Bang or towards Heat Death? Again.. the answer is even more intriguing, the time is neither running forward or reverse. Like we know that all the space is here around us, all the time (and not a single instant) is also here around us. We are a part of this space-time system. Nothing is moving. This space-time system is a rigid four-dimensional piece of block where all events are defined at each point. (Ya I know that Einstein said that space-time can be warped by matter or energy and there's no absolute space-time, it depends on the viewing subject).

It's very natural though to have notion of past and future for living organisms. I don't keep a thorough understanding but will try to explain the reason in my next blogs.

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Dose of philosophy (Part 2: Time and Entropy)

Tuesday, 6. October 2009, 11:59:48

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For a while I was reading "The Fabric of Cosmos" by Brian Greene. In a chapter over the arrow of time, he discusses several important ideas. I was aware of more of these ideas since I read a similar chapter in Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". Here I want to discuss one of the most basic aspects of time that was the focus of both the authors in their writings.

When you think about time, one of the main questions that arise is why do we treat time so differently from space, the other dimension we know. Why do you differentiate time between past, present and future? We treat past as something that's unchangeable while on the other hand, future as open and unwritten.

As a matter of fact, science has never divided time into different classes. Along the entire history of development of physics, there were several laws and equations put forward by Newton, Einstein and their successors. None of these equations have two different versions, one for time running from past to future and one in reverse direction. In fact, there is no concept of running time at all. Time is treated as a dimension, as a reference just like space and not as an ever-changing variable. Then why do we feel there's something (the present) that's systematically hopping time frames one after another and leading us from past to future? Why do we humans see a wheel of time running but science never found it and scientist don't care to investigate it? Is the wheel of time real or a human illusion?

Before taking myself into that discussion (that's my next blog post), let me discuss a term in thermodynamics called entropy. Entropy is the degree of disorderedness or randomness in the system. For example, a pack of playing cards with all cards arranged from aces to kings in respective colors can be considered to have lowest entropy. As you shuffle these cards more and more, the order of cards will gradually get more random and the entropy of system will keep increasing and it will get difficult to make any order out of them. Actually that's the second law of thermodynamics: The entropy of a system increases with time. The first law is about conservation of energy. Note that it is possible but highly unlikely that the entropy of pack of cards will reduce significantly. I mean to say that the probability of finding that the cards previously randomly arranged get sequentially ordered after shuffling is 1 out of 52 factorial. That's almost impossible to find in a lifetime. Moreover, if you manually try to arrange these cards, then you also become a part of that thermodynamic system. And physicists have proved that by applying your mind into arranging, the entropy of your brain and outside environment will increase zillion times more than what will you reduce in the pack of card subsystem.

Hey.. but I said that there's no law that changes with the direction of time but the entropy one seems to consider the direction of time. Well the answer is that though the law says that the entropy increases with time, it does not say that entropy increases in one direction. I can say if the entropy of an isolated system is X at time instant t then there's high probability that entropy will be greater than X both in time t+dt and t-dt. In fact, the direction of time we feel is decided by the direction in which entropy of our brain increases. That's the punch line of my whole discussion. There are many aspects to this statement which I will explain in detail in my later blogs. For the moment, I think my explanations are getting more perplexing and looking to lose the touch of reality so I am finishing up right here.

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Dose of philosophy (Part 1: Analyzing Mind)

Monday, 5. October 2009, 18:27:46

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I am quite surprised when I see that most of the people around keep the same views on different matters. I believe that most people don't try to think in isolation, they mostly assume views under impressions, they don't want to think from the very basic level leaving all their presumptions behind. I can't see any other explanation for their tendency to have so similar opinions especially when mine differs from them. Probably that's the reason why I am thinking to post few blogs here to express what and how I think about things, most of these thoughts you will find quite radical, can easily bore anyone if I start verbally talking about them in a one-way conversation.

I gave some thought sometime in past to find a simple explanation for human mind. I started by taking analogy of a computer. The size and complication of a brain can provide some hint about its processing capability.

And what about the memory one has? Not all the memory you possess is currently alive and vibrant in your consciousness all at the same time. The memory has to be stored somewhere in you brain, say in some kind of chemical distribution. You must have experienced a time when you forgot someone's name and then after a long time of frustration you manage to remember it. But then how do you get so confident that the name you remembered is correct? Well because it was always stored there in your brain and that storage served as a reference when you checked for the correctness of thing you just remembered.

Similarly, as you gain more and more inputs from environment through your senses (eyes, ears, etc.), the input signals help in reordering these chemicals in your brain. Consequently these new reordered configurations make you gain new experiences. In fact these unique distributions of chemicals tell everything about you including your knowledge, skills and your personality. These chemicals govern what you are all about.

Though there are certain obvious differences when you compare a human brain with a computer. The brain is not solid-state, it's basically liquid in nature. So things are not 1 or 0. New memories and experiences suppress but don't erase older experiences. But then if you don't get chance to recite your old memories for a long duration, times come when they get so diminished you start making errors when you try to describe those experiences. That's the way you forget things.

What is consciousness then? In a TED talk, someone said that humans can imagine all sorts of things however absurd or unrealistic they seem. They can contemplate the meaning of infinity and then they can contemplate themselves contemplating the meaning of infinity. This sensing of what you are sensing, thinking about what you are thinking, imagining what you can imagine, this recursive process of thinking is grossly termed as consciousness. It's the feeling of oneness and self-awareness. It's the most natural and vital outcome of evolution.

In a book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which I haven't yet completely read, the author argues that a man with absolutely no inputs from external environment (sound, touch, etc.) since his birth will still have certain apriori knowledge of time and space. The man will know about emptiness and will experience the passage of time. I personally think his argument lacks many important considerations if I use the computer analogy. For example, the handicapped man's brain is still fetching heat from his body and exterior. If I freeze the environment to absolute zero (neglecting the brain damaging effect it will cause for the moment), I can say that this will stop all chemical reactions inside the brain making the man to loose the sense of time. Also same can be said if I stop oxygen supply to the brain which is also something from the external. With some confidence, I can very well say that it is the oxygen and temperature that's adding to the knowledge of the person and the space-time understanding cannot be said apriori. Actually, all I want to say is that it gets completely ridiculous when you start delving into functioning of brain beyond a certain point. So there's no point in arguing since there's no definite explanation.

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