While reading the Quantum Reality article in last week’s ScienceNews, I was inspired to dig a little deeper and found this review of work by G. Chiribella, G. D’Ariano, and P. Perinotti last year. It points up a fundamental flaw in my previous attempts to understand quantum mechanics — that there are “events” and “observers”. […]

This is a bit of a ramble, a collection of thoughts, perhaps not in the usual order … Security and Fairness We like to know we’re going to eat and have a place to sleep and have those pretty much in equality with our neighbors. Being Right, Competition, Greed and Secrets But we also need […]

It never ceases to amaze me that people continue to insist their own notion of God is the only valid one, despite the absolute abundance over the millenia of claims of different people having received direct, personal, but very different, dispensations from God.  It would seem that God, at the very least, thinks no one […]

Before the Beginning was the Void.  Then was the Law: something must change.  And the Law was called entropy, aka time.  So, the Void changed into Something.  And at the next execution of the Law (planck time tick), the Something also changed.  And on, and on, ’til nowabouts … Stars following the first generation formed […]

The photon is said to be the massless carrier of the electromagnetic force, having only energy, polarity, and direction. In information terms, it might be described by 1 bit for spin and a direction vector representing the counts of right and left turns at the vertices of equilateral triangles on the surface of the sphere […]

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Stephen M. Barr, in Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, distinguishes between science and religion on the basis that faith in a religious dogma is a justifiable method of acquiring knowledge of the universe, at the same time claiming that science’s corresponding belief is that only knowledge […]

At the end of last year my son recommended an approach to Lucid Dreaming which includes setting dream targets and then recording your dreams every day. Amazingly, it seems to work! Last night’s dreaming encompassed 3 questions: 1) If the Big Bang started from a zero dimensional point, that would look like a black hole […]

As Hurricane Irene settles in on us, I recollect rehearing last week the Dimensions edition of “Through the Wormhole” and subsequently dreaming of a multidimensional tesseract-looking unfolding of spacetime. Since then the imaginings have wandered back to one dimensionality, but with line segments of length 1 and no time dimension, just the continuous operation of […]

After noticing in my previous post that the highest energy photon would be the smallest black hole, I continued wondering about the smallest possible mass. And after dancing around the obvious non-starter of a no energy photon, because zero energy would be equivalent to infinite wavelength, it occurred that it could be descriptive of the […]

I got to wondering a couple of weeks ago, what is mass? What is the smallest possible amount of mass that theoretically could exist? It is thought the least massive particles we are aware of are the lightest of the 3 “flavors” of neutrino, in the range of 1/2 to 1 electron-volt. Then in the […]