Time Travel and Superposition in Dark

I was no more than four years old when our car got stuck on a snowy hill decades ago. Everyone but me went outside to push to get us out of the frozen road. More people gathered from other cars to help each other, and soon everyone was engaged in a small rescue operation. That certainly didn't mean I didn't help—as well as others pushing the car from the outside, I did the same from the inside. From the back seat, I put my hands on the front and pushed hard. In my defense, deep down I knew that what I was doing was kind of weird and useless. At the time, I just didn't know why. I was just ashamed sitting alone and doing nothing. Well, like they say, with age comes wisdom, and now I know that what I did was physically impossible, just like in the case of Baron Münchhausen—when he got himself and his horse he was sitting on out of a swamp by pulling his own hair upwards. And just like in an old expression about an absurd and impossible thing one can do—if I were to pull the bootstraps on my shoes up, lift myself into the air, and jump over the fence.

In science fiction, the word bootstrap is also used to portray the impossible task in all the paradoxes that are always hard to understand. Within time travel, the bootstrap paradox is a theoretical paradox that occurs when an object, information, or human is sent back in time and becomes trapped in the infinite cause-effect loop in which it no longer has a detectable point of origin. For a simple example, if I somehow send a copy of this very blog post to my younger self before I write it in the first place, the origin of the text becomes utterly unknown. It exists in the time loop, and I become just somebody who typed it in. Yet, the text will still have my own style of writing and my own thoughts written down and not somebody else's. Hopefully, you will not find this case implicitly weird, because weird in this blog post is yet to come.

I have been aware of the existence of Netflix's 'Dark' for a long time now, but due to its scientific background and complexity, I knew it required continuous binge time to watch it, and last weekend I finally decided the time was just right, and I swallowed all three seasons in just three days. Like no other TV show, it was solely based on time travel and quantum superposition, and... in a word, it was outstanding. With lots of characters to follow through both space and time, it did require full concentration, but thankfully, due to the fantastic direction, script, and performances of all involved, it was more than understandable and enjoyable, to say the least. It is impossible to continue this without spoilers, so if you are eager to watch it first, this is the point of this blog post to stop reading, and I advise it strongly.

Anyhow, Dark's premise is all about bootstrap paradoxes. There are multiple plotlines in the show heavily embedded in time loops, just like my example of this blog post traveling to the past. If that was weird, imagine what this kind of paradox, involving time travel of real people and their intertwined stories, could do to your sanity only as an observer. On top of that, season one passed with very few or no special effects, and there was no reason for that either. In Dark, all the post-time-travel effects are already embedded in the future, or the present, from where they traveled back in time. For example, Helge already had all visible face scars that were consequences of Ulrich's time travel. Also, the stories about the murdered woman on the bottom of the lake were already socially spread even before Katharina was murdered in her own time travel.

Even though Mikkel's time travel was the prime story behind Dark, where he ended up being a father to Jonas, the main protagonist, for me the strangest and most ingenious bootstrap paradox is Charlotte, who was born in the future, traveled to the past as a baby, and became a mother to Elisabeth, who in her own future became a mother to Charlotte herself. The endless loop between them lies in the fact that they are both mother and daughter to each other. And even this is not the weirdest bootstrap compared to the entire Nielsen family. Martha and Jonas' child, who is in the show and the strangest character of them all, in his own time travel became a father to Tronte, who was Martha's own grandfather. This practically means that Martha's son was his own great-great-grandfather. In the aftermath, most of the members of the Nielsen family are practically the result of a direct or inherited bootstrap paradox and have to thank their existence to time travel itself.

To be honest, I was so perturbed and unsettled with all the relationships by the end of season two that I was not sure how they would come out of this at all. There were so many open loops with no indications how it could go any further. At that point, I thought that this show would go down the drain very quickly, or they must come up with something even more out of the ordinary to continue the story. And then, at the very end, in the last episode, came another Martha, who stood by the dead Martha and answered Jonas' question about where she came from exactly with "Die Frage ist nicht aus welcher Zeit, sondern aus welcher Welt". Well, I am not fluent in German at all, but I know a word or two, and in this case I knew very much the difference between Zeit and Welt. In the outcome, even before the subtitle showed up, I was left staring at the screen with my mouth wide open.

The final season introduced even more time travelers, both new and doppelgangers, but more importantly, the story started to unveil now with the introduction of the cause and effect of the quantum superposition mirrored in the macro world(s) and character's actions. In the quantum world, superposition means particles can exist in different states and even multiple places at the same time. The weirdness comes if we try to observe the process. At that instant, superposition breaks into just one outcome of their many. Just like with the double-slit experiment of light behavior* or in binary superposition with Schrödinger's cat in the show explained by H.G. Tannhaus in one of the episodes.

The difference between the micro and macro worlds, with time travel involved, was that in the macro realm it was now 'possible' to act differently in the same time loop and in one pass to choose one outcome and in the other a different one. That allowed for the same superposition collapse, but in two time loops to create two different Jonas' and two different Marthas and to even further complicate the intertwining situations now with three worlds involved. In the ingeniously written ending of the show, as I expected, time travel loops were impossible to untangle, and the only outcome was, again with time travel interfering, to save one world at the expense of the other two and, by doing so, to prohibit any time travel in the original world.

The ending of two worlds disappearing was just perfect and beautiful, and the very last scene explains which of all the characters survive existence and which ones were only products of either direct or inherited bootstraps and therefore not possible to exist in the final world.

* Reality of Double-Slit Experiment
https://www.mpj.one/2022/11/reality-of-double-slit-experiment.html

Strange world of physics and time travel at MPJ:
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/physics
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/timetravel

Refs:

https://www.astronomytrek.com/the-bootstrap-paradox-explained/

Dark refs:

https://www.thisisbarry.com/film/netflix-dark-the-bootstrap-paradox/

https://invisibledragon.home.blog/2020/06/28/dark-and-the-bootstrap-paradox/

Reality of Double-Slit Experiment

More than two hundred years have passed since Thomas Young performed the famous double-slit experiment as a demonstration of the wave behavior of visible light, and still its revelation has puzzled our sanity ever since. In short, if we shoot a beam of light at a panel with two small slits (less than a millimeter apart), the photons—elementary particles that light is made of—have to figure out how to get through the slits to radiate out the other side. If they were truly particles, like in the macro world, they would project a solid image of two piles on the background wall behind the slits. If they travel similarly to the waves, like water does in the macro world, the image would resemble a wave-like interference pattern: alternating locations, equidistantly spaced, where particles leave a mark on the wall.

Thanks to the outcome of the experiment, we know that light is capable of doing both. It always travels in a wavelike fashion, even if we shoot photons in a row towards slits, one after another. The quantum mechanics explanation is that photons are in superposition, meaning they can exist in different states and even multiple places at the same time. The weirdness comes 'only' if we try to tag particles with pass-through detectors in order to detect which slit they are choosing to go through. At that instant, they break superposition and continue to travel as macro-objects, just like bullets.

This is very similar to the coin flipping or well-known Schrödinger's cat from the macroworld analogy. If we use quantum terminology, these two are in a simple binary superposition; they both have only two outcomes, the coin ending either head or tail or the cat's version being either dead or alive. Superposition in a double-slit experiment is way more complex as far as the photons being in multiple places at the same time between the slits and the detection wall.

However, the weirdness is only present at the quantum level of the microworld, and in the case of light in the double-slit phenomenon, the puzzle is not the nature of how light travels but rather why it behaves the way it does in the moment of being observed. Certainly, it creates profound questions for which we still have no definite answers. The most interesting one is, did we find the puzzle here that shows us how nature really works? What is the reality behind the engine in the quantum world? More important is even the question: is this reality objective throughout the universe, or is it subjective and created for the observer only?

Let's think about the reality problem for the moment first. This behavior of breaking superposition for the sake of the observer is very reminiscent of graphically demanding video games in which the reality is never objective—the scenes are always rendered for the gamer's sensory inputs. If you play those kinds of games and decide to enter a closed room through the door, the room and everything in it don't exist at all until you open the door. Only then does the CPU start creating it for you, and there's a certain superposition of the room and your actions in it that breaks to only one outcome, depending on what you do.

Now, double-slit is too complex to test it this way, but binary superposition could be simple enough to create in the lab in quantum equivalent and monitor what happens. This is what the experiment made by Massimiliano Proietti and his team at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh tried to perform on a small-scale quantum computer made up of three pairs of entangled photons. The idea is to experimentally test Wigner's thought experiment of an observer of the quantum outcome being also observed by a second observer. The resulting statements of the two observers are that their interpretations of the outcome contradict each other. The same happens in the lab, with entangled photons in the role of non-conscious observers—the inequality in the data is definitely violated, which points in the direction that quantum mechanics might indeed be incompatible with the assumption of objective facts. To put it simply, multiple observers of the same event can have different outcomes as the process in superposition breaks in different patterns. Just like in video games, the reality of nature could also be subjective and rendered for the observer's eyes only.

Of course this raises more questions, and the main one is what "observation" and "observer" really mean. In quantum mechanics, an observation is defined as the interaction of two quantum states that can collapse each other’s probability wave function. In one way or another, this also means that by observing something, we disturb it to the point of ruining the process we are trying to understand. If we add a philosophical point of view, we can also ask ourselves, does consciousness play a role in the observation process? There's an interesting philosophical thought experiment starting with the question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" followed by "Can something exist without being perceived by consciousness?"

Well, if you ask me, consciousness or not, if we go this path with reflection to the original double-slit experiment, it is all going toward the direction that the unobserved world only exists in a sort of superposition state, all possibilities of all possible outcomes only waiting for an observer to disrupt it to the point of the ultimate collapse as the result of the reaction between the two processes and the observer. The light is no different; its wave-like behavior is its own superposition, only waiting for somebody to play with. Preferably with lasers and Lego cubes, just like in the above YouTube video. Science is fun, perhaps because it is so mysterious from occasion to occasion. I know I had tons of fun creating this video with my son a couple of years ago. Please find more stories within the physics thread of the blog in the below link.

Strange world of physics at MPJ:
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/physics

Science refs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h75DGO3GrF4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-quantum-physics-reality-doesnt.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080

Is Infinity Real?

Sooner or later, computation hardware and artificial intelligence algorithms will inevitably reach the point of enough sophistication that the creation of a simulation of enormous proportions, for example, the size of the entire universe, will be effortless. So to speak. These god-like engineers of such future simulation will indeed face a decision point regarding which degree of limitation to create for their simulated entities or artificial intelligence units in order for them to never reach the point of finding the proof that their world is in fact nothing more than just a series of electrical or optical currents of one inconceivably powerful futuristic computer.

If created right, there's no doubt that the inner world of all those hypothetical units would seem to be as real to them as our own very reality is to us. So, considering the state of obvious, the question arises by itself: if our own reality is such a simulation and we are nothing but AI units within some alien quantum computer, what exactly is the limitation?

To me, it always has been infinity. My own limited mind always struggled with understanding what it really meant. Aristotle, who buzzed his head with infinity quite a lot, concluded that infinity is only potential in nature. We can always add a number to any number to the point of infinity or divide something into infinite parts, but in reality, he thought that it was impossible to exceed every definite magnitude for the simple reason that if it were possible, there would be something bigger than the heavens or something smaller than the atoms (Greek origin: άτομο, which means without volume and uncuttable).

Today we still can't find the proof of bigger or smaller volumes than we can see or understand. If we look up toward the heavens, we are pretty sure that we cannot see beyond the Big Bang or 14 billion light years in all directions due to the limitation of light speed. The same goes with understanding the smaller volumes of microcosm for which we think the current boundary is around the scale of 10e-12 Picometres due to the quantum limitation of observable micro space without disturbance by the observer.

All things considered, as proposed by mathematics, infinity might be just the other word for really, really big, or extremely small, or very old, or too far away. In every way, simply put, infinity might be just beyond our reach. Perhaps if we are really living in the simulation, this is our limitation, and we are pretty much designed in the realm of simulated physics to never reach it and to never learn what is behind the horizon. Ironically, the ultimate truth could be that there was nothing there. It might be where simulation ends and where alien software developers' backdoor is located. Their own reality could be entirely and unimaginably different.

But what if we are not living in a simulation? What if all the laws of physics were not invented by an ingenious developer and were instead real, perfectly natural, and not artificial in origin? Would we have a volume larger than heavens or smaller than quarks and strings? Or just maybe these two extremes are somehow connected and twisted in a loop with no need for infinity at all? Perhaps, ultimately, the size could be irrelevant and not a factor in all cosmic equations.
 
1 +  = ?

http://sten.astronomycafe.net/is-infinity-real/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity

https://infinityonline.valzorex.com/aristotle.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_(philosophy)
https://www.newscientist.com/...does-infinity-exist-in-the-real-world/

http://www.sosmath.com/calculus/limcon/limcon04/limcon04.html

Quantum Weirdness

Rarely do I get a chance and a real opportunity to revive an old article from the past and to update it to fit better in the present day. Actually, the quantum weirdness is still where it was four years ago—science is not something that changes overnight, especially with quantum mechanics, so I am not going to update the post with any new physics or breakthroughs. Instead, what's new and what pushed me to repost today is one extraordinary novel in the field. The book that kept me from sleeping last weekend was "Quantum Space" by Douglas Phillips, and in short, it is by far one of the best titles I read this year. It is one of those true sci-fi stories that follows the real science and, in this case, the weirdness of the quantum world I wrote about in this post, and I would add it is one of those articles I enjoyed writing the most in the history of the blog. But, before a couple of my glimpses at the book itself, followed by my warm recommendation, and especially if you want to read it yourself, please continue reading about physics itself. This one definitely requires some knowledge to understand it fully, so let's start with some weirdness of our own macrophysics first.

It's very well known that the world we live in is driven by two sets of rules, or physical laws. The one for big and the one for small. We don't need to be rocket scientists in order to observe our big world surrounding us and to notice all the laws we obey. For example, if we drop a book and a feather and let them both hit the floor separately, it is obvious that the book touches the floor first. However, if we put a feather ON the book and let them fall together, they will hit the carpet at the same time. Well, the book will still hit the carpet first, but if you try the experiment, you will know what I mean. This simple experiment was itching Galileo's mind centuries ago when he discovered one of the fundamental physics laws stating simply that the mass of the object has no influence on the speed of free falling. But we can ask ourselves next, why did the feather travel slower toward the floor if dropped alone? Because of the things we cannot see. The air is blocking it. To learn what is happening with the feather during the fall, we have to go beyond our eyes. We need science and experiments to discover why small molecules of the air would rather play with feathers than with heavy books.

Was the book/feather experiment weird to you? I am sure it was at least a little weird if you were seeing it for the first time. We simply accept things for granted. What we cannot see, like the air and its little ingredients in the above experiment, we tend to exclude from our perception. If this was a little strange and intriguing, let's go further to the world of the even smaller and compare it to the world of the big. For example, in a mind experiment, we have a 9mm gun and shoot toward the wall with two holes in it, both with a diameter of 9mm or a little bigger. If you are an Olympic champion in shooting, you will, of course, need only two bullets, one for each hole. In the world of little, if we use a gun that shoots electrons toward a wall with two adequate holes in it, you would probably think that we would need two electrons to hit both holes, right? Nope, we need only one. Believe it or not, one electron goes through both holes, and we don't even need to aim too perfectly. No, it doesn't split up in two and use each half to pass the holes. It goes through both holes at the same time. In fact, if we had three or more holes on the wall, one single electron would go through each one and, at the same time, use all possible paths toward the destination. Perhaps the best illustration of what happens in this experiment is presented by the "Stephen Hawking's Grand Design" documentary made by Discovery Channel.

And you thought the feather on the book was weird...

However, this is just another interpretation of the famous double-slit experiment, and even though the first theories about the duality of particles/waves originated way back with Thomas Young and his scientific paper about the properties of light in 1799, perhaps the best-known theory was proposed by Richard Feynman during the forties of the 20th century. The beginning of the last century will be remembered by the birth of quantum mechanics, part of the physics trying to describe all the laws responsible for what is happening in the inner world, or the world where the very fabric of our universe is located. Feynman confirmed Young's light theory that subatomic particles (as we call them today) and energy waves are more or less the same. Electrons are among them. In simple words, they are capable of traveling as particles (and acting as bullets in our giant world by traveling within the straight line from point A to point B) or avoiding obstacles by transforming into waves and vice versa. However, after all these years, due to the fact that we are way too big to monitor the quantum world directly, we still have no clue why and how subatomic particles choose to travel either as a wave or as a particle of the material world. For example, in a previous double-slit experiment, if we tried to add a source of photons and "light" the holes where electrons are "passing through", trying to find out what happens on the surface of the wall and how they "choose" to be either particles or waves, we only added disturbance in the system, and electrons simply stopped transforming into waves and started going through the holes like simple bullets, with many of them crashing into the wall in case of missing the holes. It's almost like they know that somebody is watching them and that they don't like to expose their secret of how they vanish into thin air, forming waves and materializing back after the wall. That skill would be something special in every magician's performance.

Feather experiment on the Moon, by Apollo 15's commander David Scott

As you probably noticed, this post is part of the "Beth's Q&A" thread, and even though quantum mechanics is not directly mentioned in Beth's and my chats, it is simply not possible anymore to stay with the standard or particle model of mainstream physics and to look to the inner world only by researching its particle-type properties. Like with me and possibly with many scientists out here (and to be fair, I am not the scientist, just a modest observer), a set of laws responsible for the entire microscopic world seems to be "under construction" today more than ever. The idea for this post came to me a couple of months ago, when Beth asked me exactly this: "Somewhere, sometime, someone figured out the inside of the atom. Quarks, they call them. What we used to call the proton and nucleus of the atom. Why can't we still call them as before? Why did a new name come into play? Who discovered quarks, and how? Did they use the electron microscope? Did they use math? Tell me what you know of quarks. How did that come about? I am interested in the electron microscope and quarks or anything else hiding in an atom. The item that was never to be broken down, as it was taught to me".

Quarked! - How did the quarks get their names?**

Before we dive into more weirdness of the quantum world, let's check a little current terminology regarding atoms with all their parts, including quarks as the smallest items within. The word "átomos" originates from the Greek word ἄτομος, and it was made by Democritus, an ancient Greek philosopher who, around the year 450 BCE, formulated the first atomic theory, or the nature of matter we are made of. Translated from Greek, "atom" means something basic and uncuttable into smaller pieces. Almost two millennia passed since Democritus, and finally, in the year 1911, it was discovered that an atom, after all, is made of even smaller particles. Ever since then, we know that an atom is now made of a nucleus with a positive electric charge surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons orbiting the nucleus. The smallest atom is the simplest isotope of hydrogen-1, with a nucleus of just one proton orbited by one electron. The heaviest atom made by nature found on Earth is Plutonium-244, the most stable isotope of Plutonium, with 94 protons and 150 neutrons in its nucleus and a cloud of 94 electrons in the orbit. For 50 years, protons, neutrons, and electrons were the tiniest particles known to the world. Then in the year 1968, the very year when I was born, experimental physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center confirmed the existence of 6 different types of quarks. Much like electrons, they have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, color charge, mass, and spin. Two of them with the lowest mass are the most stable, and they are simply called Up and Down. Scientists are not very intuitive when it comes to naming stuff—the other four quarks are called Strange, Charm, Bottom, and Top. I wonder how exactly one of them behaved in Accelerator's results in order to get the name 'Charm'. On the other end, I like this much more than naming scientific stuff with only Greek letters. Anyway, within the standard model of particle physics, quarks are building blocks in the universe, and many particles are made out of quarks. Quarks can't live in solitude, only in combination with other quarks, and they are tied up with a strong nuclear force, which is extremely hard to break. A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is a combination of two down quarks and one up quark. They orbit around each other and form an entity we call a particle. The bottom line now is that, as far as we know, quarks and electrons are fundamental particles, and we don't have any proof that they are made out of even smaller internal structures.

However, we have a pretty good idea what's inside. Strings. Now comes the part of real weirdness. Are you ready to dive into a rabbit hole? It will not lead you into Wonderland, but it is certainly one of the biggest scientific adventures.

Stephen Hawking, Grand Design***

Actually, it's not easy to describe what strings are in scientifically popular terms, but I will try anyway. In the standard model, besides six quarks and an electron, there are more fundamental particles. There are two more particles with negative charges similar to electrons called 'muons' and 'tauons.' Compared to electrons, they are much heavier in size (if we can speak about size when it comes to fundamental particles). Finally, there are three types of neutrinos, or particles that are neutral in electric charge. So far, we have encountered 12 fundamental particles. But there are more. As far as we know today, there are four fundamental forces as well (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces), and each force is produced by fundamental particles that act as carriers of the force. The photon is, for example, a carrier for electromagnetism; the strong force is carried by eight particles known as 'gluons'; the weak force uses three particles, the W+, the W-, and the Z; and finally, gravity is supposed to be taken care of by the fundamental particle called 'graviton'. Standard model predicted existence of all these fundamental particles, including Higgs boson we talked about last year in post Beth's Q&A - The God Particle. Each one except for the graviton. All efforts to include gravity in the theory so far have failed due to difficulties in describing it on a great scale within quantum mechanics. Step by step, over the years, new theories arrived, tending to fill in the blank or to replace the standard model entirely. There are several string theories that are 'under development', with the best candidate called 'M-theory', formulated in the last decade of the last century. In short, strings are single-dimensional objects we find within fundamental particles, or, to be precise, particles are nothing more than just different manifestations of the string. Strings can move and oscillate in different ways. If it oscillates a certain way, then its name is electron. If it oscillates some other way, we call it a photon, or a quark, or a neutrino, or... a graviton. In a nutshell, if string theory is correct, the entire universe is made of strings! However, the mathematical model of a string theory, such as M-theory, is far more complex than we can possibly imagine. Even though string theory can be seen as an extension to the standard model, its background is far more different than with the universe described by the particle model. Compared to the space-time continuum we live in as a four-dimensional universe described by the standard model, in M-theory there are 7 dimensions more. Those dimensions are tiny and undetectable by big objects like us living in large three-spatial dimensions, but within the quantum world there are objects capable of spreading their existence and occupying up to 9 dimensions. Furthermore, the theory predicts that additional tiny dimensions can be curved in a large number of ways, and even a slightly different position or curvature of at least one dimension would lead to dramatic changes of the whole system or entire universe. For example, if somehow we forced one dimension to curve a little bit more, the effect could, for instance, be different oscillations of strings, which would result in slightly different properties of fundamental particles, and electrons could start behaving differently and start having different electric charges. This example is highly speculative, but the point is that with different shapes of dimensional systems, the set of physical laws in the system would be completely different.

To put it simply, if laws of the universe can be changed by, for example, God, and if string theory in the form of M-theory is correct, he would do that by some almighty computer capable of curving dimensions. A combination of changes in the curvature of miniature 7 dimensions could be able to change, for example, the value of pi, and instead of being 3.14159265359..., it could be a different number. It is unknown what that would mean further, but in the universe where pi is, for example, 5, the circle would be something entirely different, and the pupils in schools learning about it would probably look very different than in our universe. However, there is still no direct experimental evidence that string theory itself is the correct description of nature and the true theory of everything most scientists dream of.

Completing superstring theory

But if laws of the universe after creation are unchangeable (not even by the gods) and if M-theory is true, is it possible that some natural phenomenon exists out there capable of giving birth to different universes by randomly producing the shape of their inner cosmos? Yep, there is one. Appropriately called "The Big Bang". The moment of creation of everything we are familiar with, including time. In the first couple of moments, when the process was very young, we can safely say that it all worked completely under the quantum mechanics and laws of the microcosmos, and it is not far from common sense to expect that, like in a double-slit experiment, all particles during the first moments of their existence used all possible paths in their travel toward the final destination. Within M-theory, this might mean that all possible versions of universes emerged as the result, and the one we exist in is just one of many. Furthermore, theory also predicts that within one universe all positive energy (planets, stars, life, matter, and antimatter in general) is balanced by the negative energy stored in the gravitational attraction that exists between all the positive-energy particles. If this is correct, then the total energy within one universe might be zero and therefore possible to be created out of nothing only by quantum fluctuations of the primordial singularity. Quantum fluctuations are a very well-known phenomenon that is experimentally confirmed in the form of virtual particles that arise from vacuum (particle-antiparticle pairs) and cancel each other almost immediately (unless this happens on the event horizon of a black hole, where one of the particles was immediately captured by the black hole, leaving the other alive in the form of Hawking radiation).

I am sure that 'M-theory' will stay just a theory for many more years to come, as proving the existence of strings, multi-dimensions, multi-universes, supersymmetry, etc. must be very hard with our current technology, but theories improve over time as well as technology, and perhaps we will have our answer relatively soon. However, the quantum world with all its weirdness is very much real, and many predictions, no matter how strange, are already proven. For example, quantum entanglement on top of it. This is the ability of two particles (or more) that usually originate from the same source to have the same properties like momentum, spin, polarization, etc., so that even after they are separated in space, when an action is performed on one particle, the other particle responds immediately. This was experimentally confirmed with two photons separated by 143 kilometers across two Canary Islands and soon should be used in an experiment between the ISS and Earth in the form of a first wireless Quantum Communications Network and for the first time perform the connection between two points separated by more than 400 km.

D-Wave quantum computer

Finally, let's just mention one potential application of quantum superposition (the ability of a particle to exist partly in all its particular theoretically possible states simultaneously). Compared to a digital computer, where one bit can hold information in the form of either 0 or 1, one qubit (quantum computer alternative) can hold either 0, 1, or anything in between at the same time. The idea is to use this property and build a quantum computer capable of performing millions of operations at the same time. Still in the early years of development and far before commercial use, quantum computers with up to 512 qubits developed in D-Wave, one of the leading companies dedicated to the future quantum computer market is making chips specially manufactured for quantum computation. Maybe it is still too early to say, but I have a feeling that quantum mechanics is mature enough and ready for practical applications, especially in the field of communications and IT. Along with nanotechnology, this would someday in the near future be one of those truly breakthrough discoveries capable of changing the world entirely.

At the very end, let me continue the story with a few short notices about "Quantum Space", amazing science fiction by Douglas Phillips and his first novel in the series. If you read the entire post and didn't have much knowledge about the science itself, I am sure by now you are better prepared to read the book and enjoy it much more. Of course, Douglas did a pretty good job with his characters explaining the science as well, perhaps on a much better level than I did, so there are no worries about understanding the quantum mechanics to follow the book. Much of it is still the unproven theory, so it's harder to distinguish science from fiction anyway. Nevertheless, for the fiction as far-fetched as it is, and even though the theory is weird by its nature, I found it to be, well, believable is maybe not the right word, but definitely intriguing. I loved the idea of expanding the microdimension and the way of solving the Fermi paradox within the storyline. The characters and the writing are also great, so in all the effort to write spoilerless reviews, all I can say is that I will eagerly wait next year for the sequels.

Image ref:
https://futurism.com/brane-science-complex-notions-of-superstring-theory/

Quantum Space
http://douglasphillipsbooks.com/books

*Stephen Hawking's Grand Design: Action of Electrons
http://www.discoveryuk.com/web/stephen-hawkings-grand-design-action-of-electrons

** Quarked!
http://www.quarked.org/askmarks/answer24.html

*** Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov: The Grand Design
http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X
http://www.amazon.com/Velika-zamisao-Stiven-Hoking/dp/4095178361 (serbian edition)

Refs:
http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Average-Velocity
http://pratthomeschool.blogspot.com/2010/10/geometry-lesson.html
http://www.superstringtheory.com/
http://www.nuclecu.unam.mx/~alberto/physics/string.html
http://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/physicists-quantum-photons-08092012/
http://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/quantum-entanglement-iss
http://www.discoveryuk.com/web/stephen-hawkings-grand-design/videos/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Chasing Ghosts of the Universe

You probably heard that matter is pretty much an empty space. It's true. Everything is made of tiny particles with nuclei in their centers and clouds of electrons orbiting around. If we take hydrogen (H), for example, the smallest atom with just one proton in the nucleus orbited by just one electron, and if we scale the proton to be the size of a basketball, the orbit of the electron in diameter would be something about 15 km. Both the nucleus and electrons are electromagnetically charged, keeping everything in stable equilibrium, and also inside the nucleus, two more fundamental forces—strong and weak nuclear interactions—are keeping all the matter and energy in line. However, the smallest atom in the universe is not the smallest standalone system we know of. According to the standard model, all atoms and complex molecules found in nature or artificially produced are made of fundamental particles. Something we cannot cut into smaller pieces. Electron is one of them. But there are more. So far, as far as we know, if we count all of those basic particles inside protons or neutrons and those that represent force carriers in addition to the "god" particle that makes all the mass possible, there are exactly 17 of them. But one of them deserves its own story to tell. Its nickname is "the ghost particle," and it is literally capable of passing through any mountain like it is made of cheese.

You probably guessed, this will be a short story about neutrinos, the most elusive particles in the universe we can play with. They are products of radioactive beta decay in heavy nuclei where a proton or neutron decays into other subatomic particles, i.e., if a proton decays in a process known as 'beta plus decay', it transforms into a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. In the moment of its creation, even if it happens in the center of the sun, it escapes the entire star immediately. There are many different beta decay types, and I mentioned just one; others help as classified neutrinos. Just like with other fundamental particles that come in three flavors—the charged leptons (electron, muon, tau), the up-type quarks (up, charm, top), and the down-type quarks (down, strange, bottom), bottom)—neutrinos can also be different in mass and property. The one created in the previous example with the creation of positrons is called an electron neutrino, but if anti-tau or anti-muons are created in the process, neutrinos that emerge on the other side of the decay will be tau or muon neutrinos, respectively. A neutrino, no matter which type it is, belongs to leptons as well. This means it is not affected by strong nuclear force at all, and it only interacts with weak nuclear force, and because it is a particle with mass, it also follows gravity as well. To simply illustrate its ghostly manner, I will just note that its tiny mass is about 4 millionths of the electron mass (and electron mass is 1837 times less heavy than the entire mass of hydrogen). Furthermore, it is not electromagnetically charged and therefore not affected by this fundamental force as well. In other words, if you like to watch horror movies or believe in ghosts, the obvious conclusion is that they are made of neutrinos. That would perfectly explain how ghosts travel through walls and doors just like Patrick Swayze did in the movie "Ghost" a couple of decades ago.

Well, kidding aside, and thankfully for these neutrino features, they are really one ghostly particle that is extremely hard to either control or detect. However, this phantom behavior of theirs immediately triggers some extraordinary ideas. If we could embed messages into neutrinos and control the path of their beam, we might literally send them through anything. If some neutrino-based portable device is possible to be built and you are located, for example, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and you want to send a message to Beijing, China, you would have to point your neutrino device slightly toward the center of the Earth*, and neutrinos would reach the receiver with the speed of light all the way through the planet. But before we glimpse into the obvious possibility of whether or not it is possible to use neutrinos in some sort of communication, let's check some more facts about them.

Basically, neutrinos, strictly speaking, belong to the radiation realm. They are indeed carriers of radioactive energy. The same as alpha and beta particles, gamma rays, muon radiations, and tons of other types of particles floating around the universe as a result of different types of particle decays or some other processes in the universe. Actually, we are living in a soup of radioactive energy on a daily basis from various sources, as pretty much everything in the universe is decaying or decomposing toward the ultimate fate of the universe, which will in the end be just one giant soup of basic ingredients, if the everlasting expansion of the universe is the correct theory, that is. Therefore, the choice between usage of paper and plastic bags has nothing green in the potential answer. Either way, both bags will eventually decompose. Just give them enough time. Humans are also radioactive; we also emit radioactive particles thanks to the radioactive food we are consuming. Technically speaking, all food is radioactive because all organic food contains carbon-14, or radiocarbon, as it is nicknamed. Many other radioactive elements can be found in other products, and the most notable one is potassium-40. This one is actually a radioactive isotope that undergoes all three types of beta decay. In one of them it emits neutrinos as well. So, if you like eating bananas, rest assured that you are one of the neutrino producers, as well as bananas are very rich in potassium. Believe it or not, large container shipments full of bananas at ports or airports regularly trigger radiation alarms. Well, if you have not eaten the entire container full of bananas, you are safe. Radiation from a couple of bananas is harmless, way below the edge, and potassium is actually very good for you, and if you emit a neutrino here and there, nobody will notice. Believe me. Well, on second thought, don't believe me. Even though neutrinos are very hard to detect, there is still, after all, a way to do it.

Neutrinos are tiny particles, but a few of them, on rare occasions, still collide with the atom nucleus of the material they are passing through. And by few, I mean the literal meaning of the word. The Sun is producing an extremely large number of neutrinos—60 billion per square centimeter are passing through Earth and... us each second. That is maybe around 100 trillionneutrinos passing average humans. To detect that few, several extremely large detectors are created, and one of them is shown in the above image: Super-Kamiokande under Mount Ikeno in Japan. It utilizes Cherenkov radiation, optically equivalent to a sonic boom, to detect collisions. If a neutrino collides with the electron or nuclei of water, the neutrino only changes direction, but the particle that was struck recoils in sudden motion and faster than the speed of light in water (which is slower than the maximum speed of light in a vacuum). This creates a flash of light, which is amplified with photodetectors (those round bulbs all over the water pool). This flash provides information on the direction and type of the neutrino. SK is located in the old zinc mine 1 km below the surface in order to exclude all other radiation from reaching the water and ensure that only neutrinos are detected. To illustrate the small number of neutrinos detected with this approach, state the fact that the total number of collisions detected from supernova SN1987A in Kamiokande was only 19 out of trillions of neutrinos emitted by the supernova. A small number of neutrinos are regularly detected from the Sun, and their number is way smaller than predicted by the number of estimated nuclear reactions in the star, which provides proof that neutrinos are able to change their flavor during their travel, and as it seems, especially during their travel through solid matter. Different numbers of solar neutrinos are detected during the night as they pass a long way through the solid matter of the entire planet Earth, while during daylight they need to penetrate only those 1000 meters to reach the mine chamber.

Poor detection of neutrinos due to their weak interaction with matter is only the start of bad news regarding the potential communication device we are trying to build. More difficulties follow. For example, artificial production of desirable types of neutrinos is either with nuclear reactions or in particle accelerators, which are either too large or too dangerous to build. Encoded information in beamed neutrinos can also be lost with their oscillation between flavors during travel. Creating desirable beams and paths is still not perfect, and last but not least, there is too much noise on the way, as billions and billions of other neutrinos are also there, either created in stars, supernovas, or those created in the very beginning during the Big Bang. Even so, scientists with powerful proton accelerators developed a procedure to develop stable beams of neutrinos or anti-neutrinos**, which are then directed toward near and/or distant detectors. Two experiments emerged with potential scientific value: in the first, a neutrino beam at Fermilab was sent with a short, encoded message through 240 meters of rock toward the MINERvA neutrino detector, and the word "neutrino", which was binary encoded within the beam sequence, was successfully decoded. The second and most challenging one was performed in Japan. Within the "T2K experiment", both neutrino and anti-neutrino beams are created in the J-PARC laboratory and sent toward the 295 km distant Super-Kamiokande. Both are successfully detected and, in return, opened the first working neutrino beamline over large distances.

So in both theory and practice, neutrino communication might be possible, and current experiments confirm it with working proof of concepts made in large neutrino observatories and accelerators. Actually, it resembles the state of computers as they were some half a century ago, when they were large and limited in mathematical computation and built with bulky vacuum tubes. With the invention of semiconductors and transistors, everything changed, and the result is pretty much in front of you, either on your desk, lap, or palm. Perhaps a similar breakthrough is waiting to be invented so we could equip our smartphones of the future with neutrino messaging when we would be finally able to send texts to Mars from our living room without enormous satellite dishes. Who knows, maybe the search for extraterrestrials would gain a completely new angle, and perhaps many of those neutrinos that are passing through our bodies right now could be complex messages from E.T., and neutrino communication in the future might be our ticket into the Milky Way alien internet. Universe's WiFi. So to speak.

Speaking about E.T. and science fiction in general, this neutrino story reminded me about two more things I love to share in conclusion for this post. The first one is John Cramer, an experimental and theoretical physicist and professor at the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle. Some seven or eight years ago, Cramer intended to perform an experiment with two quantum entangled laser beams pointed in different directions. He was trying to prove that by fiddling with one beam that was sent into a circuitous detour miles away through optical cable, it would be detectable on the second beam that ended in a detector much earlier in a different location. Detection of this form of laser beam fiddling would be an indication that quantum entanglement is a phenomenon not only between spatially distant particles but also distant in time. When asked what he expects in the outcome, John Cramer, being a science fiction author as well, said, "If this experiment we're doing works, then I will follow up and push it as hard as possible. And if it doesn't work, I will write a science-fiction novel where it does work. It's a win-win situation."

The second thing, and in the recent tradition of MPJ and its "books" thread, what partially hinted at this post is the great novel "Signal", written by Patrick Lee, with the entire plot triggered by the neutrino-based portable device capable of catching radio waves from the future by harvesting neutrinos that move against the direction of time. The device is able to hook into radio stations 10 hours ahead. Just try to imagine all the implications and applications of this kind of fictitious device. If you can't, I am encouraging you to grab Patrick's novel and read it. I literally swallowed it and, during reading, eagerly waited for another chapter. I really can't emphasize what is better, the thriller plot, the sci-fi, or the intense writing. I will say no more.

Image refs:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-neutrino-detectors-look-so-cool
http://irfu.cea.fr/Sphn/Phocea/Vie_des_labos/Ast/
http://www.patrickleefiction.com/
http://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/fundamental-particles/antineutrino/
http://particleadventure.org/neutrinos.html

In text refs:
* http://www.antipodesmap.com/
** http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/november-2012/how-to-make-a-neutrino-beam

Refs:
http://physics.info/standard/practice.shtml
http://chemistry.about.com/od/foodcookingchemistry/tp/Radioactive-Foods.htm
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/life-is-rad
http://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/03/2.html
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/neutrinos/neutrino-types/
http://timeblimp.com/?page_id=1033
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2007/07/17/4350992-backward-research-goes-forward
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/cramer.html

Schrödinger's Cat and Intelligent Movies

In short it goes like this: "There's a cat in a box... That has, like, a 50/50 chance of living because there's a vial of poison that's also in the box. Regular physics would say that it's one or the other. That the cat is either alive or dead, but quantum physics says that both realities exist simultaneously. It's only when you open the box that they collapse into one single event." This quote is me paraphrasing James Ward Byrkit, writer and director of the movie "Coherence", which I've just watched. Although Erwin Schrödinger, back in 1935, when he first wrote his famous thought experiment, invented a pretty complex radioactive trap for the poor cat inside the box, I think that "vial of poison" and James' full description in the script is one of the best interpretations of the quantum paradox there is. The quantum weirdness is one of the most intriguing areas in science that has been buzzing our minds for about a century now. I wrote about it a little last year in the post Quantum Weirdness, and when it comes to science, it was one of the posts I enjoyed writing the most in the past.

About 90 years ago, Niels Bohr, the greatest Danish physicist of all time, described quantum mechanics with perhaps the best explanation ever since. He said something like this: "A quantum particle doesn't exist in one state or another but in all of its possible states at once. It's only when we observe its state that a quantum particle is essentially forced to choose one probability, and that's the state that we observe. Since it may be forced into a different observable state each time, this explains why a quantum particle behaves erratically."* Well, describing the quantum behavior has been a challenge ever since, and because of Bohr, who managed to do it first, all other explanations combined we call today "The Copenhagen Interpretation". Schrödinger's cat is just Erwin's metaphorical attempt to put it closely into our world of big, which we should understand better. But we will get back to the 'cat' later.

And relax, this is not going to be a scientific post or some nerdy brainstorming and (usually) utopistic ideas of mine. Instead it will be about movies. Yep. Just a short glimpse of one of my favorite directions within the sci-fi genre of movies. The one where, just like with reading books, you don't need any big productions, fancy and state-of-the-art visual effects, expensive sets and VFX, or famous actors to create great entertainment. This is a genre I like to call sci-fi for the brains. Like in the movie "Coherence", the plot is placed down to the real people, or to be precise, into familiar settings. There are no spaceships or vividly animated aliens or any villains for that matter. All you need is your imagination and a little background knowledge, and that's all.

I will show you now three movies. I recommend them warmly and without spoiling the films too much for all of you who still didn't have the chance to watch them. A couple of days before "Coherence", I saw the blockbuster "Edge of Tomorrow". I liked it a lot, of course, but still, even with a great cast and effects, the story is nothing exclusive or new. It also provides expected closure and leaves no room for too much thinking or brainstorming over the story. On the other side, "Coherence", with its relatively anonymous cast and script that can easily fit within the set in some small theater or school gym, tried to exploit the very cat of Mr. Schrödinger's and provide one more Copenhagen interpretation, only this time with people in main roles and our own personalities instead of "a vial of poison". It all started with a simple dinner party and with ordinary people who eventually realized what might happen when you open the box. Is the cat alive or dead, or, to be precise, what is really happening when different possibilities emerge out of the box at the same time? Try to find out at the end of the movie. It's not what you might expect and what we got used to in regular movies, but not every story has a happy ending. I guess in this one, the ending is like in quantum mechanics and like the cat from the century before, "Coherence" has both a happy ending and ... not. You have to see it to understand. That's all I will say.

The second sci-fi jewel in the same subgenre is "The Man from Earth", written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman back in 2007. The science behind this one is biology and how, in its most divergent (and also on the edge of impossible) path, it might affect the very history of mankind. Or to be precise, explained it. The story focuses on John Oldman, the man who, due to some biological anomaly, hasn't aged ever since he was born in Cro-Magnon tribal society 14000 years ago. Like any other science fiction, the movie doesn't try too much to explain the reasons for his presence and instead portrays his struggle to fit, ability to learn throughout time and adapt to different parts of the world, and his everlasting craving to tell somebody his story. And this film is exactly what it is about—finally, the "old man", Oldman, currently a university professor who's about to leave and start another loop, decides to share everything with a group of his peer colleagues. Well, he will learn that impossible stories like his one are not possible to be accepted that easily or at all. But the audience behind the screen will get great entertainment and possible solutions for some parts of our own history, and especially religiosity and its main figures during the eons. Including Buddha and Christ. Oh yes, and don't expect the sword fights, mad scientists, or any action at all, like it was in "Highlander" and its almost stupid plot with cutting heads off for the "prize". The set of this movie is only one small living room. The only thing you have to do is sharpen your brain cells before clicking the "Play" button.

Finally, the last one is "Primer", an extraordinary film written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth. Shane was also playing the main character in the movie, and the entire project finished with only $7,000. It's hard to say what science is behind this one. Probably the best bet is to use the word "fringe" for this, as the main theme and background technology is "time travel". The script is based on one of the oldest time travel paradigms. The one that doesn't include parallel universes, and instead the time traveler is ending up in his very own universe where the danger of the "butterfly effect" can ripple the time stream and change everything. This is the most intelligent script and movie I have seen so far, and before I watched, I read some reviews and remember this one: "Anybody who claims they fully understand what’s going on in ‘Primer’ after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar". Well, I am not either, and to be completely honest, I didn't manage to follow the entire story and understand it after the first (and last) watching, but more or less I got almost the whole picture from that only session.

The key point in understanding the science (fiction) behind "Primer" is to comprehend what is happening with the guy who enters the time machine and, when he does in the first place, why his major concern is to make sure that his parallel copy enters the box no matter what. The problem with this is well speculated in the article from Discover Magazine I read once, and in short, if time travel into the past is possible, nature must have some mechanism in order to prevent inconsistent events like in this case, the non-entering of the box by the time traveler after the loop is initiated. Confused? Maybe to better understand this paradox, take a look at this image***:

The hazard is obvious: if the "original" in its own blue timeline didn't enter the box at 6PM, the green parallel timeline would not exist in the first place. In other words, if "double" meets "original" and stops him from entering the box, the paradox is obvious, and we can only imagine what happens if that "butterfly" occurs. That's why "the science fiction behind time travel" in recent years actively rejects this approach and involves another universe being the destination for time travelers instead of the origin universe, which would explain the consistency of traveling into the past. Of course, we might ask what would happen if ALL "originals" from ALL universes decided to time travel? Whatever universe they arrive in, the copy of them will be needed to enter the box in the destination universe, and we have the same problem again; let's call it the "Multiverse Butterfly Effect"... Anyway, if you didn't see "Primer" or want to watch it again, try to comprehend this image first. It will help a lot.

These three movies, even though from the same genre and subgenre, differ in the background science used, and I can't truly compare them with each other. So I can't favorite one of them, but these are the movies I like to give thoughts to again and again... They are not really made for just entertainment and, for me, are more memorable than regular sci-fis.

Images and article refs:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schroedingers_cat_film.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat
* http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/.../quantum-suicide4.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/
http://coherencethemovie.com/
** http://www.amazon.com/Wanted-Schrodingers-Magnet
http://manfromearth.com/
http://www.primermovie.com/
***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
http://www.myvisionmyway.com/the-man-from-earth-minimalist-poster.html

Are We Holograms?

Most of the famous movies and novels that are dealing with remarkable and bold scientific ideas in existence, like plotting the script behind the most intriguing property in the latest string theory called the "holographic principle", lack one main attraction I am always looking for in science fiction. The plausibility of the story. To get to the wider audience, science behind is somehow always pushed below the main layer, and the result is either too philosophical, ridiculous, or unnecessary complex (like planting humans for energy in 'Matrix' by AIs) or simple love story, like in case of "The Thirteenth Floor", or other simple and proven Good-vs-Bad chases in virtual realities, like those portrayed in Caprica.

The Thirteenth Floor*

But, if I had to choose one of those Hollywood fictions, maybe you would be surprised if I preferred "The Thirteenth Floor" over all the others I had a chance to watch or read. For one simple reason. Like with the holographic principle in string theories, producers identified one very true prediction in such realities and embedded it in the film and its poster ad as well—the boundary that represents the very end of the world. In the movie, both virtual characters learn about their worlds not being the real deal by discovering their own artificial horizons where all the roads inevitably and ultimately end. Almost like in the Middle Ages when the Earth was considered to be flat and there was a point where it eventually ended or in the myth with Earth carried by four elephants standing on a turtle floating in a never-ending ocean. Like many times before, the science fiction behind this might not be too far from the truth at all, and if you think that centuries after the flat Earth myth, we finally learned that Earth is spherical and doesn't have an end along with our endless and ever-expanding universe, well, think again. With new findings and several published papers within ongoing string theory research, especially within holographic principle research of black hole event horizons, a new and exciting (or disturbing, looking at it from our own perspective) plausible reality might be considered the accurate one. And yes, with the new theory, our own universe now has an end in the form of one tiny two-dimensional bubble where we all might actually be located in our true form, and the universe, as we perceive it, is just a figment of our imagination or, to be precise, a hologram made out of some other reality residing in the outer bubble we simply know as the cosmological horizon.

Plausible?

Like with the end of the road in the movie, theoretical physicists hit the wall sometimes when they try to describe some astronomical processes. Exactly this was the case when Stephen Hawking discovered black hole radiation. Hawking radiation is made out of a pair of virtual particles emerging from a vacuum where the positive particle manages to escape the event horizon while the negative one gets absorbed by the black hole, resulting in the black hole losing energy and eventually evaporating. In other words, radiation from a black hole seems to not originate from the inside of the black hole at all. If this is true, then all the information of the matter swallowed by the black hole is lost forever, and that in fact contradicts quantum mechanics, which dictates that nothing, including information, can ever be lost. At the time, this problem, called the black hole information paradox, divided leading scientists to the point of a simple bet, where nobody was absolutely sure what was going on in the mysterious holes. There was even a book, published six years ago, conveniently named “The Black Hole War” by Leonard Susskind, committed to this paradox in physics.

Holographic Principle to Multiverse Reality**

Of course, paradoxes are only there to indicate that something is wrong, either with fundamentals or with the theories. In this case it's either something wrong with quantum mechanics and its math, and information can be lost in black holes, or this is impossible and some new (or one of the existing) theory is still waiting to be proven and accepted by mainstream science. You can find many of proposed solutions in below links, from the one where information still, by some unknown process, find the way to leak along with radiation of virtual particles through the one, that I preferred in the past, where black hole in the other end forms a baby universe with all the information transferred to the newly created cosmos to the most hypothetical one in which something happens at the very last moments of black hole evaporation, similar to the supernovae explosion with all the information finally burst out or ... in the more exotic realm ... and what is the newest approach and recently backed with new evidence, that all the information actually got copied in the tiny two-dimensional film of the event horizon and maybe never entered the black hole in the first place by some black hole quantum mechanism. If we use the life metaphor, the content of a black hole holds only corpses, while information, like a soul, left the body in the moment of death, or in this case, when it irretrievably fell into singularity. Actually, this approach is now widely accepted among string theorists, and it is appropriately named the "holographic principle", which all new string theories now include.

The scientific explanation for this principle is "the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region". String theory, proposed by Juan Martín Maldacena, Gerard ’t Hooft, and Leonard Susskind with the holographic principle included, suggests that not only with black holes but everywhere in the universe, all the information needed to describe a closed system or volume of space with any physical process inside can be fully encoded within the two-dimensional surface surrounding it. If this is correct, then we can go further and conclude that all the physical processes in the monitoring system are actually happening on the surface instead of in its three-dimensional representation, and our familiar space-time continuum might be just a (holographic) projection of the two-dimensional entities and events. On the larger scale, this theory allows that the entire universe can be understood as the reality of a two-dimensional information structure encoded within the cosmological horizon, while the three spatial dimensions we live in are only its representation at macroscopic scales and at low energies described by cosmological holography.

In other words, it might mean that there is a two-dimensional me (and you) at the end of the universe, more than 13 billion light-years away, encoded somewhere in the cosmological horizon, that is a full description of myself and controlling all my actions (and reactions) over here. Strangely enough, recently more evidence has been suggested in scientific research by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his team. What they did was to perform a mathematical calculation of the internal energy of a black hole based on the predictions of string theory. By using the proposed holographic principle, they compared the results with the calculated internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity and found the amazing fact that they match completely. They, of course, used a model of a hypothetical universe, which is not a representation of our own, but still, this is the most valuable "proof" in favor of holographic theory. And not just that, if these calculations are right, this practically means that one complex universe with gravity included (that still fails to be understood fully) can be explained and compared by the flat universe with no gravity force whatsoever.

The holographic universe is, of course, highly hypothetical and hard to comprehend, but the main principle is solid; calculations are there, math exists, and it brings both a solution to the information paradox in black hole physics and a way to simplify our future modeling of astronomical systems. With a possibility to exclude gravity out of the equation, the holographic principle is already nicknamed the "21st-century Rosetta Stone" in the world of mathematics, and if proven accurate, we could be a bit closer to the final understanding of how nature really works. But, like any other new breakthrough discovery, it could open many more questions on the way, and the obvious one is if the main reality is in the information surface, how does it work? How does life fit in? Is it also located on the surface and projected like everything else, or perhaps living creatures are something else that works independently?

Images and article refs:
* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
** https://community.emc.com/people/ble/blog/2011/11/06/holographic-principle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2013/12/do-black-holes-destroy-information/

Refs:
http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
http://rt.com/news/space-evidence-universe-hologram-195/
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/03-our-universe-may-be-a-giant-hologram
http://astroengine.com/2009/01/20/is-the-universe-a-holographic-projection/
http://www.universetoday.com/107172/why-our-universe-is-not-a-hologram/
http://physics.about.com/od/astronomy/f/hawkrad.htm
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity

History of (d)SLR

The year was 1975 when I was browsing a small dusty workshop located next to the garage in our backyard. It was a perfect combination; I was about to turn 7 years old, eager to explore the darkest corner of my childhood realm, and the dark workshop was the most mysterious chamber in our entire family estate, no bigger than four cubic meters, occupied by a heavy and old greenish oak cabinet with a couple of drawers and compartments filled with tons of different tools, mechanical devices, and various interesting stuff whose origin and purpose I didn't know. It was, more or less, the year when I started to break things in order to find out what was inside or to find out how something works, foolishly believing that I would be perfectly able to put things back together.

Well, from this point of view in time, I can't remember if there was at least one mechanical device I "inspected" in such a manner that I successfully restored after unscrewing all the bolts and junctures or by simply breaking the metal hood. One thing is for sure, though. What I found that summer morning in the workshop I definitely never managed to restore. I simply succeeded in dismantling the old thing beyond any possibility for repair. But the knowledge I gained from what I found inside was priceless. It was something I had never seen before. When I broke the hard metal hood of an old binocular I found hidden in one old bag stored in the old oak, at first glance I thought I had found a treasure. Two shiny, perfectly aligned, and beautifully shaped objects smiled at me from the inside of the optical instrument. I was too young to understand what their purpose was, but in the following days I learned everything about it. That very day I discovered a prism. Two of them.

Needless to say, I instantly became attached to my newest discovery to the point that I kept them with me all the time. I was carrying them to the school and bragging about their almost magical abilities of bending light in different directions. Well, I wasn't any different from any other kid at that age. Only in this case with a little twist. Guess what the twist is? I still have one of them (above photo).

Leica IIIa, rangefinder camera, 1935-38 (responsible for the kiss photo**)

After almost 40 years, one prism survived and is more or less in the expected shape after four decades, still playing with photons the same as years before. But this is not the end of the story about this particular prism. The history of the little thing goes even more into the past. Actually this binocular belonged to my grandfather, who brought it directly from World War II. Some 30 years before I found it hidden in an old cabinet, my grandfather was experiencing the final year of his captivity in one of those German camps for military personnel imprisoned back in the year of 1941. After German capitulation, he was traveling half of Europe on foot, trying to find his way home, carrying these binoculars with him. Sometimes, I wonder what exactly little prism saw in these turbulent years, changing who knows how many owners during the war, and how many untold stories are lost forever and hidden in little crystals now perhaps more than 80 years old.

But to get back to the title story, basically the technology behind the acronym is connected to the camera's solution of how the photographer's eye is monitoring the shooting object. In the history of photo cameras, way back in the 19th century, the first professional cameras were designed with two objective lenses, perfectly aligned and with the same focal length, one for taking the light to the photographic film and the other toward the viewfinder. The single-lens system was a natural step forward, where a mirror-prism system mounted between the lens and film forced light to make a couple of sharp turns and to end directly at the viewfinder. The result is obvious: the framed image shown in front of your eye is the one forming the final picture after the mirror is lifted up and the photographic film is lit during the desired exposure time. What is also obvious is that the more quality the objective lens, mirror, pentaprism, and eyepiece are manufactured with, the better the image you see in the viewfinder before the final moment of triggering the shutter mechanism. The other non-optical part of analog-era SLR photo cameras directly responsible for the quality of the final product is, of course, the sensitivity of photographic film as well as the quality of embedded microscopically small light-sensitive silver-based crystals responsible for the contrast and resolution of the film. Back then, in the analog era, the photographing process didn't end by clicking the button. The film needed to be chemically developed, and with another optical/chemical process of illumination, the negative taken images are finally transferred to the photo paper.

If you were a photo enthusiast back in the seventies and eighties of the previous century like my father was, you might imagine that having a proper camera along with a photo laboratory with a darkroom was not a very cheap hobby. But thousands of images were worth all the effort. My favorite memories from those days were all connected to spending hours in a dark photo room with a red light producing pictures on paper. The moment of the image appearing on the surface of photo paper submerged in a dilute solution, followed by washing the photograph with fixer liquid and water, was my favorite part. I was typically in charge of these final steps in the process along with hanging wet photos for final drying. In this part of Europe in those times, the best amateurish and semi-professional cameras and all the equipment needed for a photo laboratory for hobbyists, with all the chemicals and supporting devices, came from East Germany and Russia. My father owned a couple of those-day cameras, and the one I remember the most was the Zenit E/EM (pictured to the left), manufactured a couple of years before the Olympics in Moscow in 1980. Zenit was made by KMZ (Красногорский завод), a leading Russian enterprise in the area of optical and electro-optical engineering, and you would be amazed how nice photos this little fellow made 25-30 years ago.

In conclusion, after a little history and technicalities, in the final chapter of this blog post, let's talk a little about digital SRLs. Basically, optical systems used in old cameras are the same. Two things changed, though. The quality of manufacturing of all optical parts in nowadays photo cameras is far more advanced than before, and all aspects of the final image are increased to the edge. There is a software term in the early digital era called WYSIWYG, meaning "What You See Is What You Get", which initially referred to printing documents looking the same as seen on the display of your computer. I guess the photo industry today reached the same goal, and with not even too expensive lenses and moderate DSLR cameras, final photos reached the quality of the image appearing in viewfinders or the one seen with your naked eye. The second major change is in the simple fact that all the chemical industry and paper photos are replaced by pure digital systems. Film is removed by a light sensor in the form of an electronic chip filled with a matrix of millions of tiny analog-to-digital converter dots capable of instantly saving an image into a fast memory card. Perhaps the third change is the fact that each DSLR device today is also a specialized computer, and compared to old systems, they are now able to perform various post-processing procedures to assist you with intelligent zooming, face recognition, adapting to shooting conditions, filming entire video clips, and maintaining a detailed database of taken images.

Nikon D5200 dSLR and Zenit EM SLR*

Considering all the features of one DSLR, I can surely say that this one device replaces my father's entire environment, from the camera through the darkroom for developing photographs to the bulk photo albums where final photos are stored. And all that with a smaller price, and what's more important, with far more space for creativity and for taking photos in a professional manner. To me, today's worldwide market is taken by two big players, Canon and Nikon, Japanese multinational corporations, both specialized in the manufacture of imaging and optical products, especially in the market of digital SLR cameras. It wasn't easy to choose one of their models, and I took several days of browsing stores and reading about all the specifications, but I eventually chose the Nikon D5200 that fits all the requests and budget I had in my mind.

At the very end let's speculate a little about how the future of photo cameras might look. Will it be further development and improvement in optical and digital systems or with the upcoming ultimate speed of future computer circuits or with the introduced quantum computers that the digital system will "evolve back" to the analog world? It remains to be seen. One thing is for sure though: miniaturization of optical systems is still not possible by the simple fact that the more photons you get in the sensor, the better the image is saved, and in this case, size really matters.

Ref:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/viewfinders.shtml

*
http://www.theothermartintaylor.com/moveabletype/archives/cameras/000005.html
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/dslr-cameras/d5200.html

**
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2313418/Times-Square-kiss