Philosophy, Physics, Science

Unreal Reality at Faster-Than-Light Speeds

This blog is called Unreal Blog for a reason: Reality, as we perceive it, is very unreal. What that weird statement means depends on the context. Here’s one context: If you look at the night sky, whatever you see, the stars, the galaxies etc., are all from the past. More importantly, the way we perceive motion, especially at high speeds, is completely unreal, which is the basis of special relativity. Here’s is a video explaining what I mean by that. Loving created by yours faithfully…

The physics details of this animation have been published in International Journal of Modern Physics D. Vol. 16, No. 06, pp. 983-1000 (2007) as “Are Radio Sources and Gamma Ray Bursts Luminal Booms?“

The transcript of the narration follows. You don’t need it because you will see it as the subtitles in the video. But in this age of Google, may be it is advisable to have it.

Here is a question we are not allowed to ask: If something were to travel faster than the speed of light, what would it look like to us? We are asking this question only a thought experiment.

An object, a star perhaps, is moving from left to right at ten times the speed of light, covering a distance of 20 light years in two years. The distance of closest approach to us is ten light years. What would it look like, to us?

The light from the object when on the left takes 14 years to get to us. But a year later, the object is directly above us. And the light from that point in space takes only 10 years to reach us. So the object would appear directly above us before it appears on the left. Or on the right. In other words, what we would see is completely different from what is happening out there. We would see an object appearing, out of nowhere, about 10 [not 11] years after it passes the point of closest approach. Then, it would appear to split and move in opposite directions.

But if any physicists hear of this thought experiment, they would say, “Nothing can travel faster than light. Therefore the question doesn’t make any sense. Even as a thought experiment, it doesn’t get off the ground.”

So let’s rephrase the question. Let’s say there is no physical object, moving in this thought experiment. It is a long, very long, strip of lights. Like, say 20 light years long. We have lights one light second apart. We have programmed them to turn on in a sequence, one every tenth of a second, giving us the illusion that the object is moving at ten times the speed of light. Nothing, no physical object, is moving. There is only one frame of reference. Are we okay now?

Even this scenario may face some objection. Some cautious physicists may say that it is not merely physical objects that are banned from breaking the light barrier. No information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light either. Therefore, the lights cannot be turned on in the sequence as described because the clocks implied in this scenario cannot be synchronized over such distances.

So let’s actually do all the synchronization and programming of the lights all in one point in space, and then move them into position. Yes, moving them, accelerating and decelerating, will destroy the synchronization. Let’s say that we know the velocity profile of each clock. We can pre-compute and pre-correct all the time dilation effects and get the whole experiment set up. Are we good now?

For the ease of description, we are going to that an object is flying by, rather than some lights are being turned on.

Having done all this thought work, let’s run this experiment once again, more carefully this time. As the object is flying by, it emits lights. The light coming toward us, from different points in the path of the object, takes different amounts of time to reach us. The instant in time when the light from a point reaches us is when we see the object at that point in space. The first instant any light from the object reaches us is when it is near the point of closest approach. Let’s call this point the core. So what we see is the object appearing at the core, then splitting into two, and then two objects (let’s call them the phantom objects) moving away from each other, rapidly at first and then slowing down. Our best interpretation would be that there was an explosion at the core and the phantoms are the fragments.

Now the question is, are there such, loosely symmetric objects in the cosmos? There are. They are the radio lobes associated with the so-called Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN. Their common features are a core region, thought to be a host galaxy, and a pair of much larger, roughly symmetric lobes that appear when viewed in the radio frequency ranges.

In our animation, we have drawn the phantom objects with colors turning from blue to red. It is not an accident or aesthetic license. The wavelength of the light reaching us is indeed modified because of timings and the superposition of the waves. Let’s look at it once more, this time with the advancing wavefronts included. This picture, in fact, is identical to the sonic boom in supersonic motion, with the so-called Mach cone. We can see that at the first instant in time when we see the object, it is the surface of expanding cone that passes over us. The frequency at that point is infinity. Right after that, the frequency quickly drops to gamma rays, x-rays, through the visible spectrum and onto microwaves and radio waves. What we are experiencing is indeed a “luminal boom.”

Now, are there beasts like this in our universe? Yes, they are the Gamma Ray Bursts, or GRB. Discovered in the sixties (accidentally, when looking for the gamma ray signatures of enemy nuclear tests), they appear at random points in space. The gamma ray emission lasts only for a short time, and then it quickly changes into X-ray and an optical afterglow. And they do show a correlation with AGNs.

What we have come up with is a model for Gamma Ray Bursts and the radio lobes associated with Active Galactic Nuclei. But with a fatal flaw: the model is based on superluminal motion, which is not allowed. Technically, it violates Lorentz Invariance. But remember, we did not have any real motion in our thought experiment or the animations. It was only a strip of lights being turned on in rapid succession. What creates the phantom objects is just the sequence in which the light from different points in the strip reaches us. And what creates the GRB-like effect and its evolution to AGNs is the squeezing and spreading of the time intervals between successive wavefronts.

There are indeed other models that explain such phenomena as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), staying well within the bounds of special relativity.

Now we have a big question to answer. When we actually observe a phenomenon (GRB, for instance), are we supposed to peek behind what we see, and ask what is “really” happening? What is the “real” reality? Let’s draw a distinction between our perception and the causes behind them: Perceived Reality is the way we see things, like GRBs etc. The Absolute Reality is what is really going on – it may be a luminal boom, or may be something else. Which one does physics describe? The unequivocal answer from most of my physicist friends is the latter: Clearly it is the Absolute Reality. No question. But is it though?

It is in the perceived reality that we have space that contracts and time that dilates because of the finite speed of light. We can see it in the speed of the phantoms in our animation, which is much slower than that of the original object. We can also see that for the left phantom, the flow of time is reversed: We see later events first, and then the earlier once. Effects first and then the causes. Causality is indeed violated due to faster than light travel, but only in our perception, not in the absolute reality.

When we have space that contracts and time that dilates, we have to ask the question: What are they? What is space? What is time? The master himself had the answer.

Space is a cognitive model, a mental picture, created by our brain based on the electrical signals it gets from our senses. The signals themselves are created by the light falling on our retinas, or on the CCDs or films of our telescopes. Any limitation in that chain (from absolute reality transported by the information carrier, which is light, to our sensing apparatus) will have a manifestation on our cognitive model, which is space. Do we ascribe the effects of such limitations (the finite speed of light, for instance) to the properties of the cognitive model? Do we even have access to anything other than this model?

If it is the perceived reality (the space and time as we perceive) that our theories are describing, then the constraints in the chain of perception (the finite speed of light, for one) manifest themselves as its properties. If a blind bat were to create a theory of relativity based on the motion of bugs it echolocates in space, the speed of sound would become a primary property of its space. The bat would see, for instance, that nothing can fly away from it faster than the speed of sound. Clearly, that’s only in its perceived reality.

And, in a space created and theorized out of the light falling on our retinas or telescopes, is it a surprise that its speed is a fundamental constant? And that nothing can travel faster?

But if it is the absolute reality we are trying to describe, we have a much bigger problem. We have no clue what it is. In our little thought experiment, we could have an infinity of models generating the phantom objects. We could rule out some of the models based on our understanding (like breaching the speed of light, or the current theories about astrophysical phenomena). But at the heart of it, it is a model-based extrapolation from the projection of an unknowable reality into our sensory space. Nothing is as it looks like, in our universe. Our reality is, truly and completely, unreal.

So let’s ask the big question once more: Which reality does physics describe? The cognitive model that is our perceived reality? Or the absolute reality that houses the causes behind our perception?

It all sounds as though I am another one of those crackpots who want to prove Einstein wrong, doesn’t it? Well, I am not, really. But it will take a few more videos to fully explain why.

Let’s wrap up this video with a quote from another master:

“We are only at the beginning of the development of the human race, of the development of the human mind, of intelligent life — we have years and years in the future. It is our responsibility not to give the answer today as to what it is all about, to drive everybody down in that direction and to say: ‘This is a solution to it all,’ because we will be chained then to the limits of our present imagination.”

Richard Feynman

Now, tell me: Would you like to take the blue pill or the red pill?

Life and Death

How to Beat Terrorism

A recent conversation thread in one of my WhatsApp groups made me think about this topic once more. What is the right response to terrorism? Of course, this topic is much larger than the thought processes of a lonesome blogger, but I do have my views – as usual.

It seems to me that terrorism or a terrorist attack has multiple, nuanced goals. It has an immediate goal of terrorizing the target group, community or society. The moment the attack is successful, this goal is accomplished, which is countered or minimized by rhetorics. This is why we hear political leaders talking about “cowardly” attacks which will not cow the brave citizens of whatever country. But the brave citizens do get cowed. I remember traveling around in Paris trains in 1996-97, right after a series of bomb attacks. Every time I heard a creak or a crack, I tensed up, even though I knew fully well that the probability of a bomb was smaller than getting hit by a car on the way to the train station.

Another way to mitigate the impact of the terrorist’s immediate goal would be legal response – catch them and bring them to justice. Increased security, though necessary, serves only to amplify the impact.

At a deeper level, terrorism has political goals. It aims to increase the polarization between the targeted and the host communities, to fester more hatred and animosity between them, which will eventually create more terrorists. Against this objective, almost all responses (such as carpet bans on travel “until we know what the hell is going on”) are wrong. Even more insidiously, it sows mistrust between communities of the same national, ethnic and racial origins, leading to religious violence, which would be ludicrously funny but for the death and misery it causes.

Let’s look at a specific incident to illustrate the point. Long time ago, during the Punjab separatist movement, there was this incident where they (the terrorists) stopped a train, separated the Hindu passengers and shot them. What were they trying to achieve? My theory is that they were looking for a bloody, violent response on their own community, which will engender a new generation of separatists. What is the right response though? I don’t have any concrete ideas, I just know that violent responses are wrong. When every move we may make is a wrong one, standing still may be the wisest course of action.

Standing still and taking another look, however, is precisely the one thing the hot-blooded youth of the community cannot do. But if they did take another look, they would see how ridiculous and comical the communal violence is: These two communities look the same, speak the same language, eat the same food, enjoy the same music. But for the accidental fact that they pray to different gods, they are the same. And why do they pray to different gods? Because of the totally accidental fact that their parents do. What is manifested in the bloody violence is, ultimately, our naïve and filial belief in the infallibility of our parents’ faith.

We can see such naïve beliefs everywhere, masquerading as patriotism or even common sense. We Hindus go around honestly believing that we are a non-violent, peace-loving community despite the obvious contradiction of gang rapes and cattle-related lynchings and the love for myths and movies that glorify violence. Indians are convinced of our moral rectitude when it comes to our territorial disputes with our neighbors, just as convinced as the neighbors are of theirs.

I know that the statements in the last paragraph will convince some of my friends that I am anti-Hindu or anti-India or whatever. They will probably brand me as unpatriotic to my ancestral connections. To them, let me say this: It’s not that I love my ancestral roots/tribe/community/religion any less than you do; just that I love the rest more equally than you. I believe that love for our fellow beings should supersede our blind affiliation to narrow, artificial, tribal divisions. Philanthropy, in its literal sense, trumps patriotism any day. At least, for me, it does.

So how do we beat terrorism? If we kill all the potential terrorists, we have won the battle against terrorism. But that is a hallow victory. Not convinced? Well, think of it this way. We can also win by killing all the potential victims because when all the targets are gone, terrorism stops. Winning is not all that matters. How we win also is important.

Terrorist attacks have at least one more aspect, the ideological one, which is big enough to merit a separate post.

Humor, Physics

The Physics of Romance

Let me give you a physics lesson. During your high school days, you may have learned that an atom has a nucleus and a bunch of electrons. The nucleus has protons and neutrons, which are like the basic building blocks of matter along with the electrons, they told you. Well, they lied to you. Neutrons and protons are not basic; they have smaller building blocks within, called quarks, which have some electric charge. More importantly, they have another kind of charge, which physicists call color, for no particular reason.

These color charges have a weird property. As you pull them apart, the attraction between them increases, which is totally unlike electric charges. So, if you try to pull two quarks apart beyond a very small distance, you have to put in so much energy that you start creating new pairs of quarks (a quantum weirdness, which we will ignore for now). You will never see a naked single quark. You will never see its true color. This quirk of quarks has a fancy name: Quark or Color Confinement. On the other hand, when quarks get closer together, they have little effect on each other. This also has a fancy name – Asymptotic Freedom.

Neutrons and protons have three quarks each, which roam free within a tiny space, giving the impression of them (neutrons and protons) being fundamental particles, within the confines of which they (the quarks) act totally cool, and don’t even feel the presence of one another.  The moment you try to pry one out though, the system of three quarks resists fiercely. If you insist and try harder, you do pry something out. You never get one quark though, but a pair which soon becomes a big ugly mess. And, if you were into that kind of stuff (as my old friends at CERN are), you would spend the rest of your days trying to figure out what happened.

What does it all have to do with romance? Well, not much really. But you wouldn’t have read this far if I hadn’t put that word in the title, would you? It is just that certain developments in my personal life have made me look inward and think. Now, don’t get too inquisitive, don’t pry 🙂

To me, any kind of thought process is best carried out through analogies and patterns, however contrived and tortured they may seem to normal people. Here is an example of such a desperate search for patterns, and another misanthropic one. And one about life itself. I think it is the sign of a true scientist, but then again, it is only my opinion – a rather self-serving one at that.

Back to romancing the quark – I think some people, maybe you, enjoy the same kind of relaxed ease or asymptotic freedom as long as the color force of romance is weak. This ease makes you romantically desirable. But the moment the romantic force begins to make itself felt, you tense up. Unholy thoughts and feelings, such as insecurity and jealousy, begin to pop up, much like the pair production when quarks try to escape their confinement. The descending darkness makes you dislike yourself. And of course, when you don’t like yourself, nobody else is going to like you either and you soon end up in your romantic singlet confinement, after having spawned a stable pairing or an unstable mess for the object of your affection. You are then free once again to enjoy your asymptotic ease, and the cycle continues. Such is the life of a quark, asymptotically free and universally desired, but eternally confined to singlet states devoid of color and romance. That, my friend, is the physics behind romance.

Disclaimer: This study was conducted with a sample size of one and no control group. Make of it what you will.

Parenting

My Little Girl

My little speech when my little girl turned 21, and my little video, archiving on my blog. Apparently, these little things make most parents cry. Here’s hoping that some children also might find them touching. And give their parents a call, perhaps?

If I have learned one thing in the last 25 years or so, it is this: Never go right after or right before Kavita when it comes to public speaking. The comparison is never going to be good for me. 🙂

But that lesson notwithstanding, this day is special, and I will take one for the daughter this time. Let me start by wishing my daughter, Anita of the house Thulasidas, the first of her name, a very happy birthday, and a year full of wonder and happiness ahead. Today marks your transition to adulthood, with all the independence and responsibilities that it entails. Yeah, it sucks, but you are going to love it. 🙂

At this point, the father is probably supposed to recount cute stories. I have a nice video to do that. I made it for Anita when she turned 16, but as every year passes, it seems more and more appropriate. I will show it later.

As you know, I am educator now. So I educate; I pontificate; I profess. I would like to share a few words on parenting, for the young parents here, or those who plan to be, later in life. Parenting is a balancing act, an almost impossible one. You have to love your child, but not spoil them. You have to provide for them, which means work and time away from them, and you have to find the right balance. You have to foster the right values and character in them, which means strictness. Otherwise they may grow up unprepared into an unforgiving world. But not too much, or you will be robbing them of their childhood as well.

Of all these lessons of parenting, the hardest is this one right here. Your child will one day grow up, take wing and fly away. From your home, from your life. I did it. So has Anita. So will Neil. When that time comes, you will hold the door open for them, and step aside. If they don’t step out, you will have to kick them out. But when they leave, emptiness and pain will follow, through which you will smile. You will hope that, in time, your pride in their accomplishments will fill the void, assuage the pain, and bind and heal the cuts in your soul. I know it did for my father. So, if you do it right, when the time for this hard lesson comes in their life, at the very least, your children will remember you.

And you will hope that they will find their way back home. To your life. Someday. Again, I did it. So you will keep the door open, and leave the light on. And wait. And wait.

But today is not about the parent. It’s about the child. The child who as turned into a beautiful, intelligent, articulate, multi-talented and independent young woman. Lucky that you took after your mother, isn’t it? I just want to tell my little girl – how proud I am of you, and how much I love you. Though you think you already know…

Life and Death, Philosophy

Mud and Me

Life and death has been a recurring theme on my blog. Confronted with our mortality, a common stance we assume is one of anger. Hearing of such a stance recently, I thought I would expand on my notion of gratitude in this writeup, liberally paraphrased from Shelly Kagan’s lectures on this subject.

Gratitude is best described in mystical terms, where we have a generous, benevolent giver (namely God) and a receiver (such as ourselves). A mystic poem that Kagan quoted goes like this (paraphrasing again, of course): God was a bit bored, so he created the universe and all the beauty in it, like the sun and the stars, beaches and mountains, forests and lakes, snow and waterfalls, and so on. At the end of this creation, God wanted an audience. So he looked at some mud on the ground and said, “Sit up and see all this beauty that I have created.” And I sat up and looked. Then I saw. I saw the beauty, not only in love and life and pleasure and happiness and everything nice and great, but also in loss and grief and misery and struggles, in all things bad and mean as well.

I cannot even begin to tell you how grateful I am that I got to be the mud that sat up and saw it all. All this beauty. So much of it that it hurts if we allow ourselves to see it. I got to experience the pleasures and the pride, and the pangs and the anguish. I got a glimpse of God’s own thoughts, written in these immense volumes of beauty. Imagine, if my parents had gotten amorous a minute earlier or later, I wouldn’t have been, and all this beauty would have been lost to me. How can I be anything but grateful for this singular fortune, this supreme gift?

What does it matter that my awareness of all this beauty will cease in 20 or so years? Or tomorrow? I see it now. My experience at this point in time is etched in eternity. It is mine. For now. And for ever.

This little bit about eternity is my dim understanding of an old song, but it is also an oblique commentary on the different outlooks of life. The western outlook is that life is a gift to be appreciated, a container to be filled with as many great things that we can muster in this short blink during which it lasts.

But we, of the East, beg to differ. We view life as a burden or suffering (as in Buddhism), or as a difficult patch in the cycle of life and death. We deal with it by not getting too attached to life and its pleasures.

When I say “we,” I am not sure I include myself in it. Well, may be I do. I see the beauty in detachment as well, in actions performed devoid of any attachment to their fruits or glory, in kindness for its own sake, in a life lived to its fullest, but oriented toward a salvation that is the very antithesis of life. I see beauty in our petty fights and our noble gestures, in our worldly worries and our heavenly pursuits. In everything that adds a little piece to this grand collage, a little square to this magnificent Persian rug, a little shade to this dome of many-colored glass, staining the white radiance of eternity. And I am grateful that I get to see it all.

Life and Death, Philosophy

Binding Books

When I was about 15, oh so long ago now, I had this crazy hobby of book binding, which is like the process of turning a paperback into a hardcover, or adding a hardcover to an exercise book. With the mild OCD that I have, I do get a bit carried away with such things, and no books around me or in my dad’s collection were spared. I collaborated with a local printing press to access their cutting machine and local stationery stores to research on various techniques and acquire supplies. My crowning moment was when I did a “full-calico” binding on a rather useless book that my dad had recently purchased.
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Life and Death, Work and Life

Pointlessness

When my mother gave birth to me, it was a touch-and-go sitiuation. I was created with an abnormally huge head, which I would like to insist is filled with a brain the size of a small planet. Whether because of the head or some other medical reason, my mother had to undergo an emergency c-section. Remember, this was more than half a century ago in a remote hill station near Munnar in Kerala.
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Life and Death

Childhood Friend

When I was a child, I had a friend in the neighborhood. A smart (and slightly nerdy) kid, not unlike myself. We used to hang out, play badminton and do physics experiments. By the time we were teenagers, we kind of drifted apart, as our paths diverged. Later on, I went the IIT-USA, global-citizen-route and ended up in Singapore. He, of more modest ambitions, stayed back at home, and got a job roughly similar to what my father used to do. I kept hearing of him, although I never really ran into him. He got married, probably had a couple of kids, and everything must have been going smoothly, even a bit dully. But a couple of years ago he suddenly died of leukemia.

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Life and Death

American School Shooting

Another day, another American school shooting. The predictable aftermath will be “thoughts and prayers” (although people use different words now because of the current climate of skepticism), another pointless debate over gun laws, and a few “never agains” and “never forgets”. Instead of those exercises in futility, I thought I would write about some other curious aspects of America’s deadly romance with guns.

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