Questions Of Science

The problem with reading a copy of New Scientist on a short flight is that it rekindles the lost academic potential within you - it's a slim chance at the best of times but some 25 years ago science was my best hope of a career. Now I struggle to spell Avagadro let alone remember the man of Turin's famous number but that's life, I suppose.

So I pose a little question - which of the four fundamental forces in nature baffles scientists most as the other three can be explained by the exchange of force-carrying particles? Let me put you out of your misery - it's gravity. Einstein explained it as the force which arises from the smooth warping of space-time by massive objects. Does that sound double dutch to you? I hope so. For the layman, the explanation of 'smooth' is anything which behaves according to a nice equation however much the said equation looks like a set of scripts from a Dead Sea Scroll.

Gravity is the one force which cannot be explained by quantum theory. There have been approximations and strings but realistically they are merely theories which have yet to be proven by any physical evidence.

I put forward another natural phenonemon which defies 'particular' definition and constantly elludes the wit of man - coincidence. This is the happenstance of two seemingly unrelated events occurring from which we may may infer a connection, however tenuous. Well that's my definition anyway. I am talking about the bizarre oddment of me being in Berlin and reading about the premier of 'I,Robot' on the plane over and then literally bumping into Will Smith on the pavement outside the Four Seasons Hotel less than a few hours later. Finer analysis would have shown that the article was in the BA magazine, advertising the route to Berlin where the premier of 'I,Robot' was taking place because Audi were a major sponsor - so the scene was set, the stars aligned. If I happened to be walking along the road at roughly the time Will, as he likes to be called, was going to the cinema with his family then I would bump into him.

That can be explained when using probability theory and the two itineraries (Will's and mine) - we happened to be in the same place at the same time so it may have been more likely we would have bumped into one another. But consider this - and yes I get political here because I am sick to death of it and I cannot stand the man - that Peter Mandelson is invited to have a free holiday on the luxurious, multi-million dollar boat of a very significant player in the world of films and downloads (we are talking David Geffen of Dreamworks here) and less than a week later officials are told to draft laws to punish illegal downloaders of content, even if it is the people who post the content who are doing the real wrongs.

But Peter defies the statistical evidence much more than this. On the same holiday, he has a chance meeting with Colonel Gaddafi's lush looking son and next thing we know the Lockerbie bomber is freed. Fancy that. It reminds us of other rather coincidental events - like the Hinduja Brothers wanting UK passports so there is a donation to the Dome Fund. Or perhaps that Peter spends time on a Russian aluminium tycoon's yacht and then there is an EU vote in favour of lowering tariffs on importing the self same commodity making the self same oligarch incredibly more wealthy. By an an even more science-defying coincidence, the very pages in Peter's diaries covering the dates of the first meeting with the self same oligarch are 'lost' while he is moving back from Brussels and having a gall bladder issue solved.

I wish I had the scientific nous to define a theory to govern all this but it elludes a feeble brain like mine. My curse is to wonder why a twice disgraced dodgy dealer is allowed back into Government as an unelected offical and peer of the realm and then gets to run the country. That is the one thing you cannot put down to the strange law of coincidence - this was premeditated stupidity on behalf of the weakest PM we have had since Chamberlain.

One thing which is not a coincidence is that on the weekend that Gordon Brown chose to continue his holiday and not to open a centre for injured troops we found out that the tally of dead heroes in Afghanistan rose to 204 and the toll of injured troops was over 900 in the last three months alone.

Science can be baffling - the obvious can be even more baffling.

Time On My Hands

While idling between appointments and having some time both on my hands and mind, I am pondering the idea of time travel.

The Time Travel Conundrum

I find it an absurd notion that time travel is possible - not because I don't believe that if you splat particles together at incredibly high speeds in the space-time continuum you can't knock one backwards; if eminent scientists say this is possible, then it must be so and I have read 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat' which is a fine read if you are of the nerd-orientation.

No, my feeble brain is more logical. If time is an infinite line that we travel along, albeit in one direction (due to the Entropy thingy after 380,000 years - see my earlier blog), if time travel was possible at some point in the future, then indeed we would know about it.

Much like 'The Terminator', starring a muscular US Politician, if people can already travel in time we would know about it. I know nit-pickers would say that maybe the time travellers have not travelled far enough back in time to tell us yet or indeed they have but they came and went unobserved, but I would suggest that's not the point.

The Loop of Time

Quantum Physics itself says that the mere act of observing an event changes the outcome - so the observer is part of the system that determines the outcome just by looking at it. In the same way, time travellers cannot enter the world unobserved as their presence has an effect. The Loop of Time mind bender says that if I should travel back in time to a point in the past where I existed, my very presence would interfere with my current self and therefore change the future and so all events leading up to the point I travelled back would be different - which means something would have changed before I travelled back. Which means I could not travel back in the same state I arrived there - oh you get my drift. You set off a loop of events that eventually disappear up ones own backside. By extending the argument, even if I travelled back in time to any point before I travelled back, I would alter the state of the world all the way back to the point I started to travel backwards - so I could not have travelled back in that state.

For this reason, time travel as we view it on TV could not take place - even consuming some air when you arrived back would forever change the world, just the act of arriving back would change the world. There are more plausible explanations that involve every event having an infinite number of outcomes and what we observe today is the continuum of one strand, so if we travelled back we might just as well end up on some other strand of reality. But events are occurring every micro-nano-milli second of time and so why do we ever observe the results of just one possible outcome? Don't look at me, I asked the question. But maybe it is to do with that nasty old 'Arrow of Time' again.

Anyway, there is another absurdity - should I ever travel back in time and change the world, theoretically I will forever be caught in that loop and live like Bill Murray in 'Groundhog Day' forever more, for each time I reach the point in my life I decided to travel back, I would indeed go back and start the loop again. The follow on question would be - do I age in the process? Of course the daft answer is that I would take with me a device to beam me back out again, but that poses equally illogical questions.

I Must Get Cleverer

The simple fact is I am not clever enough to understand all this but in my little world, the concept of time travel as in Sci-Fi TV or films is pretty much hokum. So as a supplementary point to my blog on 'The Arrow of Time', I would argue even if we cracked time travel, we could not use it to change events.

Pondering time over, it's time to travel.