Friday Physics & Philosophy: The Physics of Free Will

Is free will only an illusion? And if so, what does that really mean?

It's time for some Friday deep thoughts, the melding of physics with giant philosophical questions...

By Stephen Skolnick on Physics Central

At the intersection of physics and philosophy, there's a question that's weighed on the minds of great thinkers for centuries: Is there truly such a thing as free will? When we make a choice, are we fundamentally any different than a calculator "choosing" which segments of its display to light up when the = button is pressed?

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Best Singularity Stories of 2014, Week 15

What is the world is a Multiverse?

When you think about our Universe, the scale of it is hard to conceive of. Each of us is just a simple human being, a little under two meters tall; a collection of just under 10^28 atoms.

Yet our Earth is — literally —more than a million times larger than us in all three dimensions: a nearly perfect sphere more than 10,000 kilometers in diameter.

But what we have access to is so much more than just the Earth. Just going another factor of a million larger than Earth — in all dimensions, again — we encompass all the bodies we know of in the Solar System. The Sun, all the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, centaurs and man-made probes are contained within a sphere of 10^10 km, a million times larger than the size of the Earth in every direction.

Supersonic Air Travel - Windows, Out. Screens, In

No matter what perks airlines take away from you, the one thing you can still count on is a genuine peek at the clouds at 35,000 feet. That might go away, too, one day, replaced with a virtual reality version of the iconic airplane window.

Spike Aerospace, a Boston engineering firm that’s developing a small supersonic jet, recently caused a stir when it announced its plane wouldn’t have any windows in the passenger cabin. Instead, thin screens installed on the walls of the aircraft would display live views captured by cameras mounted outside.

Machining Ethics

For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological development is inextricable from the idea of the accident. As he put it, each accident is ‘an inverted miracle… When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.’ Accidents mark the spots where anticipation met reality and came off worse. Yet each is also a spark of secular revelation: an opportunity to exceed the past, to make tomorrow’s worst better than today’s, and on occasion to promise ‘never again’.



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Our Dark Matter Halo

Discovery News - JAN 3, 2014 02:29 PM ET // BY IAN O'NEILL

During measurements of spacecraft flybys of Earth, very slight anomalies in spacecraft speed have been detected.

Dark mater: The stuff that possesses mass, yet refuses to interact with radiation, so we can't 'see' it. Its nature has eluded scientists for decades, but there could be a reservoir of the stuff sitting right on our doorstep — if the weird measurements made by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites are proven to be caused by a halo of the so-called non-baryonic matter around our planet.

During a presentation at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco in December, GPS expert Ben Harris (of the University of Texas at Arlington) described some tricky measurements of the Earth’s mass using the armada of GPS satellites that are in orbit around our planet. He noticed a mass discrepancy when compared with “official” mass measurements as quoted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

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Why are people so gullible? Choosing magic over physics.

Newton Blog - 11.17.13 by  Alex B. Berezow

Finally, the credulous reporter gets the help of a water diviner. Together, hand-in-hand, they use a divining rod to detect the presence of a water current under the ground. Indeed, the water diviner senses something. Exactly what, nobody knows. But this magical place gives him a headache, and he cautioned that if anybody built a house in the area, they would be dead within a year. Real estate agents, you've been warned.

Many Americans think of Europe as something of a magical realm. The food is tastier, the people are sexier, and some parts of Poland don't experience gravity. Wait, what?

European Journal, a fairly good television program produced by DW-TV, investigated what looks to be an "anti-gravity" spot in Poland. (See video beginning at the 21:00 mark.) On a road out in the Polish countryside, things appear to roll uphill, including bottles of water and even entire cars. What's going on? The people of Europe demand an answer for this very strange physical phenomenon.

Now, bear in mind that European Journal recently reported that radio waves were causing cancer in Sicily, so our expectations for the program's scientific acumen shouldn't be terribly high.

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Accelerating Toward Faster-Than-Light Travel

New York Times - 7.22.13 by Danny Hakim

“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds.”
“Nature can do it,” he said. “So the question is, can we do it?”

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory.

Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.



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First Hard Evidence for Other Universes?

Daily Galaxy - 6.1.13

"Dark Flow" sounds like a new SciFi Channel series. It's not! The dark flow is controversial because the distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for it. Its existence suggests that some structure beyond the visible universe -- outside our "horizon" -- is pulling on matter in our vicinity.

Is our universe merely one of billions? Evidence of the existence of 'multiverse' revealed for the first time by a cosmic map of background radiation data gathered by Planck telescope. This past week, the first 'hard evidence' that other universes exist has been claimed to have been found by cosmologists studying the Planck data. They have concluded that it shows anomalies that can only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes.

"Such ideas may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago," says George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University."But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe."

Scientists had predicted that it should be evenly distributed, but the map shows a stronger concentration in the south half of the sky and a 'cold spot' that cannot be explained by current understanding of physics. Laura Mersini-Houghton, theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Richard Holman, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, predicted that anomalies in radiation existed and were caused by the pull from other universes in 2005. Mersini-Houghton will be in Britain soon promoting this theory and, we expect, the hard evidence at the Hay Festival on May 31 and at Oxford on June 11.

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Say Hi to the Multiverse

Scientific American - 6.1.13 by Natalie Wolchover and Simons Science News

New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis

Image: Simons Foundation

On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly contradictory implications of recent experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

“The universe is inevitable,” he declared. “The universe is impossible.”

The spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012 confirmed a nearly 50-year-old theory of how elementary particles acquire mass, which enables them to form big structures such as galaxies and humans. “The fact that it was seen more or less where we expected to find it is a triumph for experiment, it’s a triumph for theory, and it’s an indication that physics works,” Arkani-Hamed told the crowd.

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2013 Will Bring New Physics

POPSCI - 1.1.13 by Sean Carroll

If the previous era was about understanding the physics of everyday stuff, the next will be dominated by the attempt to grasp more elusive realms, including one of the most mysterious of all: dark matter.

On July 4, 2012, a panel of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced the discovery of a new particle, the long-anticipated Higgs boson (or something very much like it). The Higgs is the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that accounts for everything we experience in our lives, from rocks to puppies to stars and planets. After decades of searching and billions of dollars, the Higgs discovery marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, which scientists will embark upon in 2013.


If the previous era was about understanding the physics of everyday stuff, the next will be dominated by the attempt to grasp more elusive realms, including one of the most mysterious of all: dark matter. Astronomers have verified that the universe has about five times more matter than we can account for with the “ordinary” particles we’ve discovered here on Earth. The rest is dark matter. Physicists haven’t observed it directly yet, but they’re getting much closer.

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So What's Left to Discover in Physics?

ScienceBlogs - November 16, 2012, by Ethan

Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate — albeit not incredibly precisely — which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go. In other words, unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for having found the Higgs Boson and nothing else, meaning that there’s no window into what lies beyond the Standard Model via traditional experimental particle physics.

But that by no means is the same thing as saying “the Standard Model is all there is.” There are a large number of observations that tell us quite clearly that there’s very likely more to the Universe than just the quarks, leptons, and bosons of the Standard Model. While experiments are telling us that low-energy supersymmetry and extra dimensions probably don’t exist (and the LHC will either turn them up or even further constrain them towards the point of irrelevance), there are plenty of pieces of evidence that there is more to existence than these particles and their interactions.

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Dark Matter - The Unspottable Spotted?

Inside Science - November 8, 2012 by Mike Lucibella

Credit: NASA

An apparent signal from the middle of our galaxy could be the evidence physicists have long been seeking for dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to represent the missing mass in the universe.

However, at the just-concluded International Fermi Symposium in Monterey, Calif., researchers were also unable to completely rule out the possibility that a problem with their telescope is the cause of the unexpected energy signature.

Roughly 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible, and for decades scientists have been searching for an explanation. In April scientists first saw what could be the holy grail of astrophysics, an apparent signal from particles of this dark matter.



Physicists examining data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope found an unexpected spike in very high-energy particles of light, known as gamma-ray photons, coming from the galaxy's center. Multiple independent teams have since analyzed the data and offered different explanations, but no one has yet been able to definitively say if what they're seeing is a dark matter signal, or some error in the telescope.

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Earth's Strange Gravitational Anomaly to be Probed

POPSCI - November 2, 2012 by Rebecca Boyle

STE-QUEST Planned Orbit This map shows the ground track of the STE-QUEST satellite's 16-hour orbit. Jorge Paramos and Gerald Hechenblaikner/via arXiv

Something strange happens to spacecraft swinging past Earth for a gravity boost--they suddenly speed up, and their trajectories change in unexpected ways. It’s a tiny change, but enough that physicists have started to take notice. The European Space Agency is planning a new mission that could measure this gravity anomaly and figure out if a new, unknown physics is at work.



Before heading out to far-flung destinations in the solar system, spacecraft often slingshot around the Earth, so the planet’s gravity provides a boost to send them on their way. In several cases in the 1990s and early 2000s, scientists saw an unexplained change in spacecraft velocities after their closest Earth-shaves. They didn't see it in action, in part because the satellites weren't logged into the Deep Space Network when it happened and even when they were, there’s a 10-second delay between data acquisitions. But they knew it did happen because the spacecraft trajectories changed.

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Maybe We CAN Tell if We're in a Simulation

MIT Technology Review - October 10, 2012

One of modern physics' most cherished ideas is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong nuclear force, how it binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons, how these form nuclei that themselves interact. This is the universe at its most fundamental.

So an interesting pursuit is to simulate quantum chromodynamics on a computer to see what kind of complexity arises. The promise is that simulating physics on such a fundamental level is more or less equivalent to simulating the universe itself.



There are one or two challenges of course. The physics is mind-bogglingly complex and operates on a vanishingly small scale. So even using the world's most powerful supercomputers, physicists have only managed to simulate tiny corners of the cosmos just a few femtometers across. (A femtometer is 10^-15 metres.

That may not sound like much but the significant point is that the simulation is essentially indistinguishable from the real thing (at least as far as we understand it).

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How to Detect Gravitational Vibrations

NASA - October 18, 2012

A pioneering technology capable of atomic-level precision is now being developed to detect what so far has remained imperceptible: gravitational waves or ripples in space-time caused by cataclysmic events including even the Big Bang itself.

A team of researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Stanford University in California, and AOSense, Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif., recently won funding under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to advance atom-optics technologies. Some believe this emerging, highly precise measurement technology is a technological panacea for everything from measuring gravitational waves to steering submarines and airplanes.

"I've been following this technology for a decade," said Bernie Seery, a Goddard executive who was instrumental in establishing Goddard's strategic partnership with Stanford University and AOSense two years ago. "The technology has come of age and I'm delighted NASA has chosen this effort for a NIAC award," he said.



The NIAC program supports potentially revolutionary, high-risk technologies and mission concepts that could advance NASA's objectives. "With this funding and other support, we can move ahead more quickly now, Seery said, adding that the U.S. military has invested heavily in the technology to dramatically improve navigation. "It opens up a wealth of possibilities."

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Matrix Reloaded - Can it be proved that we live in a matrix?

io9 - October 10, 2012 by George Dvorsky

Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull of such a feat. And indeed, a philosophical claim is one thing, actually proving it is quite another. But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix. And they think they know what it is.



According to Silas Beane and his team at the University of Bonn in Germany, a simulation of the universe should still have constraints, no matter how powerful. These limitations, they argue, would be observed by the people within the simulation as a kind of constraint on physical processes.

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The Really BIG Question: What is Reality?

New Scientist - Special Issue

(Image: Carol & Mike Werner/Visuals Unlimited/Getty)

WHEN you woke up this morning, you found the world largely as you left it. You were still you; the room in which you awoke was the same one you went to sleep in. The outside world had not been rearranged. History was unchanged and the future remained unknowable. In other words, you woke up to reality. But what is reality?

The more we probe it, the harder it becomes to comprehend. In the eight articles on this page we take a tour of our fundamental understanding of the world around us, starting with an attempt to define reality and ending with the idea that whatever reality is, it isn’t what it seems. Hold on to your hats.



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So, Time Really Does Go Forward?

The Economist - September 1, 2012

TIME seems to flow inexorably in one direction. Superficially, that is because things deteriorate with age—and this, in turn, is because there are innumerably fewer ways to arrange particles in an orderly fashion than in a jumbled mess. Any change in an existing arrangement is therefore likely to increase its disorder.

Dig a little deeper, though, and time’s arrow becomes mysterious. A particle cannot, by itself, become disordered, so when you examine its behaviour in isolation the past and the future are hard to distinguish. If you film its movement and then give the film to someone else, he will not be able to work out just from the particle’s behaviour which way to run the film through the projector. Essentially, the two ways of doing so are symmetrical. Or so physicists used to think until hints to the contrary emerged in the 1960s. Now a group of researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, near Stanford University in California, have found the first physical evidence that backs those indications up.

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Dark Matter Found Near the Sun

Dark matter. What the hell is it? We don't know, but it's pretty close by...

University of Zurich - August 9, 2012

Astronomers at the University of Zürich and the ETH Zürich, together with other international researchers, have found large amounts of invisible "dark matter" near the Sun. Their results are consistent with the theory that the Milky Way Galaxy is surrounded by a massive "halo" of dark matter, but this is the first study of its kind to use a method rigorously tested against mock data from high quality simulations. The authors also find tantalising hints of a new dark matter component in our Galaxy.

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Is Time Literally Running Out?

The Daily Galaxy - June 16, 2012

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.

Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".
The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years - and everything will grind to a halt - has been proposed by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain. The corollary to this radical end to time itself is an alternative explanation for "dark energy" - the mysterious antigravitational force that has been suggested to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.


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Yes, you too can understand the Higgs boson

Ever wonder what all the hype is about when you hear about the search of the Higgs boson? Wonder no more! I love it when someone can break down a complex subject and make it super easy to understand. This guy does it excellently!



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Escaping Neutrons May Prove the Multiverse

POPSCI - 1.23.12 by Clay Dillow

The notion of multiple universes is one that cosmologists like to theorize about but generally don’t relish proving, mainly because doing so would be very difficult. But a team of researchers that showed a few years ago how matter might travel between our universe and others now think they ought to be able to observe this phenomenon in action using existing technology, lending credence to the multiverse theory. All they need is a neutron bottle, some neutrons, and a year.

The experiments would require bottling neutrons in an ultracold state, a process that physicists have been performing for years to measure how quickly neutrons decay. These bottles--made of ordinary matter imbued with magnetic fields--are able to trap these super-cooled neutrons and keep them moving slowly enough that they can be observed. Physicists can measure the rate at which these trapped neutrons strike the walls of the bottle and how quickly this rate declines as the neutrons decay.

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