Do I actually think the LHC poses a threat to human life?  I have no idea, since I’m not a particle physicist, but my suspicion is that we’ll still be here after it fires up.  Imagining the end of the world is one of my favorite mental hobbies, though, so one can always hope.

At the moment, we have two theories which account for everything and no way to bring them together. The Standard Model and Einstein’s General relativitiy. Enter Garrett Lisi. He got his PhD from UC San Diego in 1999 and has since been unaffiliated with an academic department. He surfs and snowboards and basically goes around not knowing where he is going to stay next month or how he will pay for it.

E8 (right) is the key. It is a complicated mathematical construct that I don’t really understand from my glance at the wikipedia entry. As is typical in higher math, you have to understand 20 other things first and I’ve never even heard of Lie algebras. However, the layman’s breakdown is that it is an 8-dimensional pattern that encapsulates the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object which itself has 248 dimensions [source]. Make sense? Anyhow, apparently this thing was only well understood this year, despite being discovered over a hundred years ago.

So Garrett Lisi recognized that each of the 248 points in E8 correspond to the various elementary particles and forces in our universe. This left 20 points that had to be filled in with theoretical particles. So now all Garrett has to do is develop a set of experiments to test his theory. The Large Hadron Collider will go online next year and if string theory is correct, probably end the world. However, if Garrett is correct, we’ll all be alive in 2009.

Phew. I can finally get some sleep. I was seriously worrying what’s going to happen when oil supplies start to run out given that the entire world economy depends on it. No more. Oh and global warming? Fahgetaboutit! A geek will save the day because he can think in terms of mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta — because .. wait for it .. his job demands it. Just to reassure us that he hasn’t just emerged from Gates’ backside, Clive does throw in an occasional aside as to how Gates is a drooling social bafoon — but don’t be fooled. This piece is little more than worshipping at the Gates throne.

Alternative Hypothesis

Gates is not a philanthropist because of some rare ability to count higher than the number of fingers and toes available to him. I propose there are four major reasons why he is doing charitable work:

1. Melinda Ann Gates née French: the lengths a man will go for a woman are unbounded
2. PR: public image of Microsoft has been slipping for well over a decade and putting a human face on it (instead of the nerdy face of a ridiculously rich techno-snob) is just good business
3. Historical precedence: Andrew Carnegie, J. D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, John D. MacArthur — the world may forget a CEO but when that CEO is a philanthropist, he will be remembered forever
4. Guilt: to have so much and to keep it all to yourself while there is so much suffering in the world is pretty hard for the conscious to bear

Clive’s thesis is fundamentally flawed. It’s not that because Gates is a geek that he is trying to end preventable disease in so-called developing nations (a term I take great issue with). Gates was already set on giving his money to something. Like any smart investor, he was doing a search on where his money could get the most gain. From his commencement speech at Harvard:

“Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it? For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have. During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.”

A more accurate thesis would be: more wise investors with a crapload of money will save the world.

Clive describes a psychological phenomenon whereby people give less and less to causes that involve more people. By nature, supposedly, we feel more compassion for the plight of a single person than for the plight of a group. How much money was donated to Hurricane Katrina victims? How much to victims of the tsunami in 2004? How much to victims and families of victims after 9/11? It seems to me that when people see a single victim of a disaster, they give more to that person, because when they see multiple victims, they feel that some authority should be taking notice of this and doing something about it. When that authority comes out and says, please help, they listen. Just like they listened for Katrina, the tsunami and 9/11. Just like they are not listening for Darfur, because there is no concerted media and political push for relief. There is the occasional story on Darfur and Bush drops a line here and there, but you don’t see Bush the elder and Clinton teaming up for commercials to help with this humanitarian crisis.

It doesn’t take a geek to save the world. In fact, geeks may very well end it if the Large Hadron Collider lives up to my expectations. Gates was in the right place at the right time to do something very important in the lives of millions of children in economically stymied countries (aka developing nations). Perhaps he should be applauded for that, but I don’t really think so. To whom much has been given, much will be expected. Gates should be thanked, and then he should be helped to finish the job.

A group of researchers led by Amos Ori at the Technion in Israel has developed a theoretical model that overcomes a major hurdle in the current time travel theory. First of all, time travel requires the existence of closed timelike curves (CTC, aka closed timelike loops). In relativity theory, every particle has a worldline that describes its position in space and time throughout its existence. If the particle is in orbit around a mass of very high density that is greatly curving spacetime, it is possible that the worldline of this particle curves back on itself not only in space, but in time. The major hurdle in current theory is that for a time machine to exist, it would have to have negative density (another interesting topic, but I’ll have to save it for some other time). So according to Ori’s new theory, all that is needed is for gravity to have already begun curving spacetime appropriately and then for us to create “a vacuum space that contains a region field with standard positive density material.”

I believe it was Stephen Hawking who once said that time travel is not possible, because if it were, we would have already been visited by tourists from the future. Of course, there have been a multitude of objections to this, and it appears that Hawking has reversed his position, now calling time travel “impractical”. Among the objections to this are that the visitors could have sufficiently concealed themselves to avoid our detection (perhaps through invisibility cloaks, courtesy of the Department of Mysteries at St. Andrews College). Or perhaps whenever we travel back in time, we create a new timeline that branches off from our own and we are currently on the main trunk of the timeline tree. Of course, all of this is speculation, but the really interesting part is that Ori’s theory gives a solid answer to Hawking’s objection. The CTC cannot exist until an area of space that warps time has been built. As Ori puts it:

“The machine is spacetime itself. Today, if we were to create a time machine – an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves – it might enable future generations to return to visit our time. We, apparently, cannot return to previous ages because our predecessors did not create this infrastructure for us.”

So perhaps one reason we have never been visited by the future is because we have not yet built the time machine that will allow it. Here’s my prediction for what will happen.

1. time machine is brought online
2. 10 seconds later a mouse steps out
3. 1 minute later a cat steps out
4. 10 minutes later a dog steps out
5. 1 hour later a monkey steps out
6. the scientists study these animals for weeks
7. not knowing what to do with them, and being scientists, they send the animals back into the time machine
8. the world ends, but this is only a coincidence. The actual cause was the Large Hadron Collider producing a glob of strange matter that began rapidly converting the entire planet.

Technion Press Release

So anyhow, another harbinger of doom is the recent progress in wet artificial life. I tend to think of artificial life as being computational in origin, since I’m constantly exposed to AI at school. WAL, as the name suggests, is not computational, but biological. It seems to me that once people are able to create life from scratch and begin to actually get a grasp on how it works, we’re in for trouble. Here is a nice little encouraging quote from Mark Bedau, COO of ProtoLife in Venice.

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it. We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

Indeed.

Discovery News: Artificial Life in 3-5 Years?