The Knight "Many Santas" Hypothesis

Work with me here.  This is something that popped into being inside my gray matter a few weeks ago.  Personally, I can't find any argument about how this is not a viable theory.  Although I confess that I did ummm... "borrow" some things from current pop culture.   But as Santa Claus is a character who has borrowed much else across the centuries I think it's appropriate.

So here it is: my hypothesis for why there are so many Santa Clauses, how Santa gets ALL that work done in a single night, how Santa knows everything about whether you've been bad or good.  And that ultimate question: does Santa Claus exist at all?

All right, here we go...

Santa Claus is a multi-universal entity. That's why we see so many of them at Christmas time. Most of the Santas you're seeing are from other universes who are in ours for awhile. Each Santa has a territory staked out, so it's always Santa who brings toys, they're just not necessarily Santa from our universe.  Santa is living, breathing proof that the "many worlds" theory is true.  He is the anthromorphic personification of quantum mechanics.

 

This is also why "Santa" takes so many forms wherever on Earth he's at. Father Christmas? Yup, he's from another universe too.  So is Julmoten (and HIS multiples), Papa Noel, and every other incarnation of a kindly old man who brings presents to good little girls and boys at Christmas.

Santas from across the Multiverse

Being a multiversal entity gives Santa access to all kinds of wild technology, some of which seems absolutely magical to us mere mortals.  This explains the flying sleigh.  Reindeer?  Those are mostly just for appearance's sake.  The real Santa's sleigh is a miracle of applied science that is as mundane to many others in the multiverse as a truck-pulled sleigh in a Christmas parade is for us today.

 

(That Santa?  Yup, he's a multiversal agent also.)

 

Every so often the Santas, all couple of million or so of them, congregate at the North Pole, which is the nexus of all those divergent universes. There the Council of Clauses set forth policy, handle legislation and otherwise provide leadership for all the Santas.

 

Who is that Santa Claus you see at the mall, or ringing a bell for charitable contributions? Is that the real Santa? The answer is no AND yes. Santa Claus is a mythic wave function given temporal form. If you share your Christmas list with one Santa, it's as if you've shared it with EVERY Santa.

 

And it goes without saying: all of those Santa Clauses operating in the world have a MUCH easier time than the government does in watching for who's been naughty or nice.

 

So be good and keep the faith, my friends. Yes Virginia, there most certainly IS a Santa Claus. And he is everywhere!

 

UPDATE: a kind reader sent us a photograph of one of the "Quantum Clauses".  This Santa is in the Reidsville, North Carolina, United States area:

 

 

 

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How much does a shadow weigh?

Work with me here.  It's way too late at night, I can't sleep and this is the kind of thing I think about at this hour.

Here's the problem: "Does a shadow have mass, and how much does it weigh if it does?"

Remember how in Peter Pan, when Pete loses his shadow and has to sew it back on when he finally catches it?  That's how this started (though why I was thinking of Peter Pan so randomly is beyond me).  So if Pan loses his shadow, and it gets away from him and he has to catch it and attach it back to himself, then...

Logically, the shadow must have mass.  Because Pan couldn't take hold of it if it didn't have mass.  Except it's impossible for a shadow to have mass, right?  Right?!

Okay, let's look at this from the angle of physics.  What is a shadow, exactly?  It's the absence or diminishing of light upon a surface because an object is between the surface and a source of light.  There is no "there" there for a shadow.  It just is.  It's the effect of an object with mass absorbing light energy.

But for more than a century now, we've known that per Einstein's equation E = mc² that energy and mass have an equivalence.  Matter is energy and energy is matter.  And among other things the addition of energy to a system increases the mass of that system.  So in our situation the light hitting Peter Pan is increasing his mass (although almost insignificantly so).

The system being discussed here is Peter Pan, his shadow, and the light cast upon the local environment.  The surface of Peter has increased mass and so does the wall (or whatever) that the light is hitting.  The shadow however is not absorbing energy.

With the local environment as a baseline, and the ultimate source of the mass being the sun or lamplight or some other source of light, the shadow has less mass than it would without being impeded by Peter's mass.  And not only that but the shadow both exists and has a mass of less than 0.  All without absorbing energy on its own.  It has existence and mass because of the mass/energy equivalence of its surroundings.

Therefore, a shadow does possess mass.  And despite the absence of light it does have corresponding weight.

So then, we can conclude that a shadow has weight.  And said weight is dependent upon the surface it is cast upon, the area of the shadow, the size of the object casting the shadow, and the size and strength of the source of light.

Which means that in theory, Peter Pan could have lost his shadow and had to sew or staple it back on.

Well, that settles that question then.  Me go back to sleep now.

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Large Hadron Collider could open up other universes this week (this may not end well)

In the process of investigating a good idea (said process being one that even Stephen Hawking said could destroy the Earth), those wacky boffins in Switzerland are preparing to generate in excess of 5 trillion volts of juice with their Large Hadron Collider in the next few days.  The result could be the creation of miniatures black holes.  But more than that: it could punch a hole through the normal dimension of space-time and allow a peek into universes other than our own.

Reed Richards, take note!

From the article at IGN.com...

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being fired up this week after a two-year hiatus and a group of scientists think the results could prove the existence of parallel universes.

A paper published by Dr.s Ahmed Farag Ali, Mir Faizal, and Mohammed M. Khalil in the journal Physics Letters B argues that the second run of the LHC produces or detects miniature black holes, which they argue could point to entire universes hidden away in higher dimensions folded into our reality.

“Normally, when people think of the multiverse, they think of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility is actualized," Faizal explained to Phys.org. "This is not what we mean by parallel universes. What we mean is real universes in extra dimensions."

One of the cooler things about this is that it could demonstrate a phenomenon called "gravity's rainbow", which among other things theorizes gravity "leaking" into our universe from others.

Hmmmm... dunno if this is such a good idea.  If memory serves, it was such experimentation that was the backstory of the classic video game Doom.  Do we seriously want a potential gateway to Hell getting opened up in the Swiss Alps?

Large Hadron Collider:
Where the sanest place... is behind a trigger.

Wonder if Black Mesa is in on any of that action.

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Lightspeed limit broken by neutrinos, reports CERN

Those clever boffins (as our British brethren love to call such technical folk) at CERN in Switzerland have really made a mess of things this time: they've recorded neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light.

If their determinations hold up, then a whole lotta physics is gonna have to be overhauled. Einstein held that the speed of light in a vacuum was an immutable, impassable barrier, and for most of the past century a lot of our understanding and technology has been based on that. And now... Einstein's model of relativity stands to be revisited, revised, and possibly amended considerably.

But as with all such announcements, a measure of temperance and consideration is warranted. Jon Butterworth has posted an excellent essay on The Guardian's website about the ramifications of CERN's findings, including how it's possible that neutrinos might not have broken the speed of light.

But if CERN's measurements hold up, this is gonna play all kinds of wacky havoc with causality. Hey, in the future I might even be able to post an entry on this blog before I even begin to type it! Neat, aye? :-P

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Physicists propose idea for "Time Teleportation"

For the past several weeks I've been telling my filmmaking partner "Weird" Ed about Primer: the indie sci-fi film from a few years ago and positivalutely the most genius movie about time travel that I've ever had the pleasure of watching.

Well, it turns out that filmmaker Shane Carruth might be on to something...

Two physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia have published their theory on the concept of "time teleportation". If you're too lazy to read the write-up on the Popular Science website, the gist of it is that Einstein's "spooky action" not only operates across distances of space but also across measures of time!

Whoa.

Okay well if nothing else, maybe this'll entice you as well to watch Primer, 'cuz that movie sure does a much better job at trying to make sense of this than I can at the moment.

'Course it also goes without saying that there are some scientists who prefer a more "brute-force" assault on the space-time continuum...

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A new model of quantum physics has begun formulating in my mind

It had been percolating across my gray matter for the past several weeks. It started when I found myself contemplating certain problems with the forces of gravity and electromagnetism.

About 3:30 a.m. this morning a possible solution was hit upon. Doesn't look like it's the re-invention of Wheeler foam. Not yet anyway. I can't help but think it's too much like that and at the same time it's more than a tad different.

I'll probably be pondering it at length throughout the rest of the day. Particularly as I am reclining in the chair at my friendly neighborhood dentist's office later this morning.

For now though, my beef with gravity and electromagnetism is satisfied. Until I no doubt wind up chucking the theory out because of one tiny little incongruency that will certainly invalidate the whole thing...

(Why can't I have a normal mind like everyone else?)

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Inertial mass could be separate from gravitational mass

The wacky world of quantum mechanics has claimed another victim from the world of common sense. Specifically the equivalence principle long understood to mean that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein was the first to publish about it, building on work already established by Galileo and Newton.

New kids on the block Endre Kajari and his crew at the University of Ulm in Germany have now arrived to bust that all up. They have shown that in the realm of quantum physics, there can be wild variations between gravitational mass and inertial mass.

From the article at MIT's Technology Review...

Their thinking begins by pointing out the important distinction between kinematics, which is concerned purely with motion not how it arises, and dynamics which focuses on the origin of motion. In the classical world, this has no bearing on the effects of inertial and gravitational mass.

However, in the quantum world, the way states are prepared has huge significance. They point out, for example, that the wave function of a particle in a box does not depend on mass at all whereas the energy wave function of a harmonic oscillator depends on the square root of the mass.

That leads to an interesting idea: that it is possible to create combinations of gravitational and electromagnetic boxes and oscillators in which inertial and gravitational mass play different roles.

It turns out that physicists already play with exactly this kind of set up: the so-called atom trampoline, in which a matter wave falls under the influence of gravity but is bounced by an electromagnetic force. They calculate that the energy eigenvalues of the atom are proportional to the (gravitational mass)^2/3 but to the (inertial mass)^-1/3.

That's an amazing result. The kind of energy spectroscopy of atoms or Bose Einstein Condensates that can spot this difference ought to be achievable, if not now, then very soon within the next few years.

If successful, these kinds of investigations will provide an entirely new way of studying the nature of mass and, perhaps more importantly, of investigating the puzzling relationship between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Dare we say "intertial drives" or at least "inertial dampeners"? Hyperspace, here we come! :-P

Seriously though: this is very, very cool stuff and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

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Pssst... hey, wanna know a secret?

Guess what? You're immortal! You aren't going to die. Your life is a quantum wave function that from your point of view is infinite. You may see others die and it's altogether possible that they may see you die but that is merely relational to the observer. The fact of the matter is, as an observer of your own wave function you can see neither its beginning or its end.

Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise, either. They're only seeing their respective wave functions. What the heck do they know?

Mind ya, immortality can be a bit boring after awhile. I can't help you there. But no doubt you'll find something to keep you occupied.

Me? I'm going off to become a shrimp boat captain.

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Physicists create "negatively-strange antihypermatter"

Someday in our foreseeable future, our children will be learning about chemistry with a periodic table that looks something like this...

...no thanks to researchers conducting experiments with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

According to this article at The Register (which reads disturbingly too much like a quantum physics essay written by Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange) the "topflight international reverse-alchemy boffins say they have managed to transmute gold into an entirely new form of 'negatively strange' antihypernucleic antimatter, ultra-bizarre stuff which cannot possibly occur naturally - except perhaps inside the cores of collapsed stars."

In layman's terms it's a new form of matter whose strangeness is less than zero but probably not too boring.

I'm currently hopped-up on allergy medicine, and I still have no idea what the hell all of that means.

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Prepare to have your mind blown

From the shortest possible distance (the Planck Length) to the edge of the observable universe (93 billion light years) and everything in between, this incredible Flash presentation puts it all into perspective...

Thanks to Shane Thacker for such a humbling and breathtaking find.

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Is the LHC's own future sabotaging itself?

See if you can wrap your noggin around this one: the Large Hadron Collider - that super-powered high-energy thingamabob at CERN in Switzerland that previously had been predicted would destroy the world - is now theorized to be the first observed occurrence of the "grandfather paradox" of time travel!

According to two physicists, the LHC's mission to produce the hypothesized and long-sought Higgs boson is damned to failure by its own future. The reason? Because the Higgs boson "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather". And according to Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, this "predestination" from the Higgs particle goes far beyond screwing up a laboratory experiment: the failure of the United States government to finish building the Superconducting Supercollider is cited as possible evidence that the Higgs boson is wrecking havoc across spacetime from the future.

Here's that link again, if you still dare to look further into the abyss.

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"Time telescope" could magnify communications capability

It's a very rare moment when I read something for the first time that goes almost completely over the top of my head. This is one of them: researchers are building a "time telescope" that can compress data into smaller chunks of time, that is then transmitted via fiber optics. Hit the link if you want to feel your brains getting twisted.

Of course, there are going to be some who will say that time is going too fast already, but I digress... :-P

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Physicist rewarded for work on "veiled reality"

In 1939, a young French student named Bernard d'Espagnat began considering that behind the empirical world of mass and energy, there might be something even more fundamental to our universe than we can measure. Reality, d'Espagnat came to argue, is only the sum of what we have observed... and may be a thin veneer over what is truly at work in the cosmos.

Seventy years, twenty books and many journal articles later on what he refers to as "veiled reality", Bernard d'Espagnat has been awarded the Templeton Prize: a yearly reward of $1.4 million to that "honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works."

If you've an interest in things like physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, the above-linked article is extremely intriguing. I am certainly feeling compelled to go hunt for some of d'Espagnat's work, after reading it.

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Scientists teleport matter across a meter distance!

(Okay, for us stubborn Americans we're inclined to say "yard" instead of "meter" but since this is dealing with physics I'm going to use the metric system out of principle!)

Teleportation of matter has been achieved over a distance of one meter, scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland along with colleagues at the University of Michigan have announced. 'Course, the matter in question was a single atom, but to transmit the information of its quantum state from one location to another - via that spooky "entangling" thingy - is still a huge milestone to have achieved. And if you read the Fox News story, it does sound suspiciously like the "beaming" used in the Star Trek franchise, right down to the "Heisenberg Compensators".

But if I were an editor on the Fox News website, I would have chosen a better picture to accompany this story...

...they actually used a still of the "transporter malfunction" scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture - the most violent teleportation accident ever depicted on screen - to go with the article.

That is not a particularly encouraging juxtaposition :-P

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Universe is a giant hologram, evidence indicates

So... does the world really exist? Do you exist? Do I exist for that matter? Believe it or not, according to bleeding-edge quantum physics our reality may be a massive illusion. Physicists have discovered that the entire cosmos is structured like a hologram at its most basic level.

Then again, to those who are students of the Bible, this probably comes as no surprise anyway...

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

-- Genesis 1:3

Einstein established a long time ago that matter was frozen energy (i.e. light). So I could see how that would perfectly jibe with the "universe as hologram" theory.

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Large Hadron Collider: Scientific marvel or portal to Hell?

This one is way too wacky to pass up commenting on...

The Large Hadron Collider is a few hours away from getting turned on for the first time. This is a humongous particle accelerator (also happens to be the biggest machine yet built) that scientists are hoping will help answer some questions about the fundamental nature of physics.

All well and good. Except some people are afraid that the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) is going destroy the planet. The biggest fear is that it's going to spawn a black hole that'll suck down the entire Earth. At least one lawsuit has been filed on those grounds, seeking to impose an injunction against the LHC's activation.

And then there is the tale going around that the LHC has an even more nefarious purpose. That it is going to be used to open up a portal to an unknown dimension. Or even a known one.

Namely, Hell itself...

Yup, some folks are claiming online that when the guys at CERN in Switzerland get the Large Hadron Collider going, the "bottomless pit" talked about in the Bible's Book of Revelation is going to throw out the welcome mat and all kinds of unholy terror is going to come forth, just like in the videogame Doom.

Personally, I doubt it.

Because I'm betting that the LHC will either...

1. Work just fine, and perhaps even be used to find the elusive Higgs boson.

or

2. As the award-winning documentary film Hellboy has shown, it will open a doorway to the realm of the Ogdru Jahad, which will bring about the end of the world.

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Theophysical conundrum: Time, sin, and the universe

Here's something that I've been wondering about for awhile now (actually going on three years). Maybe it's time to let others ponder it too...

We're told in Genesis 5:1 that "When Adam had lived 130 years..." (as the New International Version words it) that he gave birth to his son Seth. This is the first time in scripture that we are told that a person had lived a certain number of years. A few verses later it says that Adam lived 930 years, and then he died.

But are those the years total that Adam lived... or only the years following the Fall, and the entrance of sin into the world?

Because compared to the other antedeluvians, who were born after the Fall, Adam had a fairly equal lifespan. But if the 930 years is the total amount of time that Adam lived, from his creation until death, then Adam was short-changed by God in addition to the punishment of eventual physical demise. Either that, or it suggests that Adam had a finite lifespan from the very beginning whether he sinned or not: a notion strongly contradicted by the Bible.

Could it be that when the Bible gives us the years Adam lived, that these are only the years after the Fall? Because it otherwise makes no sense to give an age for something that is inherently ageless. Unless something happens to that thing or person that does bestow age upon it.

So here's what I'm thinking might have happened...

The time before the Fall was, in terms of quantum physics, an entirely different universe than the one we know of today. It was one that had the quality of being a procession of events, but it was not one that had the quality of time as we understand it. The chief characteristic of time in our universe is entropy: the disordered breakdown and decay of all matter and energy. But that might not have been the way things always were. There's also no way of knowing what that previous universe - the "sinless universe" - was like based on what we can observe today: it's like the ultimate black hole information paradox.

So if this is true, it's possible that per our understanding (though that would certainly break down in the context of the physics of this previous universe) that Adam and Eve could have lived hundreds or thousands of years in a perfect state before the Fall. Maybe a lot more than that. Conversely, they could have sinned just weeks or days or conceivably even minutes following their creation.

Thinking along those lines, Adam could have been alone without a wife for a very long "time" before Eve was brought to him. There's just now way of knowing though. Not from our perspective. But that's possible, too.

And then, only after the Fall... which would have also been the introduction of entropy into the universe, and the beginning of the physical realm as we have come to understand it... would it be appropriate to assign a chronological age to Adam.

Does this mean that Adam possibly edges-out or even blows away Methuselah for oldest human to ever live? No it doesn't, because we're still only talking about age after the beginning of an entropic universe: Methuselah still keeps that title, with no foreseeable competition anytime soon.

Yes, I really do meditate upon simultaneous matters of deep theology and quantum mechanics in the course of my daily musings. It's almost enough to drive one insane. Wait a sec...

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God as defined by quantum physics

Here is my current proposal for a quantum mechanics definition of God:

In reference to a system encompassing the totality of the physical universe, God is that outside observer which has the unique properties of comprehending the position and momentum of every particle and all energy within the system without violating the observer effect and simultaneously across all points throughout the spacetime of that system.

I think that such a definition easily allows for the occurrence of un-scientific phenomenon as "miracles", since if God is comprehending all quantum behavior throughout every point and moment of the universe's existence, that this means He can pretty much do whatever He wants to with the universe. He can manipulate the quantum state of anything, including altering mass and energy so that water turns into wine. What's more, such a definition might not violate the laws of physics at all. It seems to fit comfortably among them, even.

I might and probably will revise this later on, but right now that's the current model that I'm going by.

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SCHRODINGER'S BEDROOM ... now with full credits!

Over the weekend I finally, finally, found time to do an "updated" version of Schrodinger's Bedroom. This was the short film that I made last year as an entry for the short-lived Fox "reality" show On The Lot. It had already been uploaded to YouTube, but that was the version that was submitted for the competition, and unfortunately because of the limit on length that was in the rules I didn't have time to put proper credits in this film. That's always bugged me. So now I get to fix this and let it be, in my mind, a true and proper film that gives a nod toward everybody who helped make it.

So without further ado, here is Schrodinger's Bedroom starring Dawn Swartz, Chris Otto, Selassie Amana, Ed Woody, Olivia Woody, Doug Smith, Tyler Richardson, Melody Hallman Daniel, Chad Austin, Veronica Jones, and a cameo appearance by the director :-)

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