On very rare occasions, if you take a moment to truly see.. you might catch a glimpse of everything that she used to be. A woman who set aside herself to be a devoted daughter-in-law, a nurturing mother, a loving wife. When the light falls … Continue reading Everything that she used to be
“Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is.” “I don’t follow.” “It’s a lose-lose proposition. There’s no winning strategy.” “What do you mean, strategy? It’s a birthday.” Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I’d tried to explain it … Continue reading Why you shouldn’t tell anyone your birthday.
This is how you break down the wall:
Start with two beings. They can be human if you like, but that’s hardly a prerequisite. All that matters is that they know how to talk among themselves.
Separate them. Let them see each other, let them speak. Perhaps a window between their cages. Perhaps an audio feed. Let them practice the art of conversation in their own chosen way.
Hurt them.
It may take a while to figure out how. Some may shrink from fire, others from toxic gas or liquid. Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches and grenades, but shriek in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.
You leave them an escape hatch, of course. That’s the very point of the exercise: give one of your subjects the means to end the pain, but give the other the information required to use it. To one you might present a single shape, while showing the other a whole selection. The pain will stop when the being with the menu chooses the item its partner has seen. So let the games begin. Watch your subjects squirm. If—when—they trip the off switch, you’ll know at least some of the information they exchanged; and if you record everything that passed between them, you’ll start to get some idea of how they exchanged it.
When they solve one puzzle, give them a new one. Mix things up. Switch their roles. See how they do at circles versus squares. Try them out on factorials and Fibonnaccis. Continue until Rosetta Stone results.
This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.
I am an extremely slow reader.
There is always a book I’m reading “currently” but how long that “currently” is going to last is anyone’s guess. I sometimes read 30-50 pages every day and sometimes I can only manage 10, but I do love reading and try to find time for reading every day, no matter how glacial my pace.
Here are my brief reviews for the 12 books I managed to finish in 2019:
بے کراں رات کے سناٹے میں
آتشیں سائے ، لہو کے دریا
صدیوں پہلے کے کسی ناگ کی پھنکار کی گونج
چیختے دھاڑتے لاوے کی تپش
تیرہ و تار سی جھلسی ہوئی گمنام حیات
زیروبم ہے کسی مدقوق کی سانسوں کا تمناؤں کا
شاخ بے برگ کی لرزش کسی طوفاں کی خبر دیتی ہے
واہمہ ہے یا حقیقت یا گرانباری خواب
ہیولے ہیں کہ ہیں عفریت کے فرسودہ نظام
یہ کہیں میں تو نہیں ؟
شاعر نامعلوم
In the infinite darkness of the night,
Crimson shadows and rivers of blood,
The hiss of a snake from centuries ago,
The swelter of clamoring lava,
This pitch-black, scorched, and nameless life
Like the undulation of diseased breath and hopes
The tremor of the leafless branch heralds the storm
Just a premonition, reality or the burden of my dreams?
Are these silhouettes or is this a haunting from antiquity?
Or is this all just me?
Translation : Raza
Maybe survival isn’t a “1” or “0” question the answer to which can only be either a yes or no.
Maybe it’s like a bar of health in a video game. And as we lose people and things we care about that bar drops. And we slowly lose our will to live. So if it’s like that I’d prefer if my bar is at 80% even if I have lost some people I love. I wouldn’t want to lose the rest and get my bar down to say 20%. Because that just means that one day something will happen that will drive me off the edge, because I’m already on the verge.
So in that sense you should really never say “I’ve experienced that before and I survived so I guess it’s ok if it happens again” – No it’s not okay and even if it happened to you before I hope it doesn’t again and I hope your bar stays at 80%.
Raza
Let us imagine we inhabit a strange country where everyone is perfectly flat. Following Edwin Abbott, a Shakespearean scholar who lived in Victorian England, we call it Flatland. Some of us are squares; some are triangles; some have more complex shapes. We scurry about, in and out of our flat buildings, occupied with our flat businesses and dalliances. Everyone in Flatland has width and length, but no height whatever. We know about left-right and forward-back, but have no hint, not a trace of comprehension, about up-down – except for flat mathematicians. They say, ‘Listen, it’s really very easy. Imagine left-right. Imagine forward-back. Okay, so far? Now imagine another dimension, at right angles to the other two.’ And we say, ‘What are you talking about? “At right angles to the other two!” There are only two dimensions. Point to that third dimension. Where is it?’ So the mathematicians, disheartened, amble off. Nobody listens to mathematicians.
Every square creature in Flatland sees another square as merely a short line segment, the side of the square nearest to him. He can see the other side of the square only by taking a short walk. But the inside of a square is forever mysterious, unless some terrible accident or autopsy breaches the sides and exposes the interior parts.
One day a three-dimensional creature – shaped like an apple, say – comes upon Flatland, hovering above it. Observing a particularly attractive and congenial-looking square entering its flat house, the apple decides, in a gesture of interdimensional amity, to say hello. ‘How are you?’ asks the visitor from the third dimension. ‘I am a visitor from the third dimension.’ The wretched square looks about his closed house and sees no one. What is worse, to him it appears that the greeting, entering from above, is emanating from his own flat body, a voice from within. A little insanity, he perhaps reminds himself gamely, runs in the family.
Exasperated at being judged a psychological aberration, the apple descends into Flatland. Now a three-dimensional creature can exist, in Flatland, only partially; only a cross section can be seen, only the points of contact with the plane surface of Flatland. An apple slithering through Flatland would appear first as a point and then as progressively larger, roughly circular slices. The square sees a point appearing in a closed room in his two-dimensional world and slowly growing into a near circle. A creature of strange and changing shape has appeared from nowhere.
Rebuffed, unhappy at the obtuseness of the very flat, the apple bumps the square and sends him aloft, fluttering and spinning into that mysterious third dimension. At first the square can make no sense of what is happening; it is utterly outside his experience. But eventually he realizes that he is viewing Flatland from a peculiar vantage point: ‘above’. He can see into closed rooms. He can see into his flat fellows. He is viewing his universe from a unique and devastating perspective. Traveling through another dimension provides, as an incidental benefit, a kind of X-ray vision. Eventually, like a falling leaf, our square slowly descends to the surface. From the point of view of his fellow Flatlanders, he has unaccountably disappeared from a closed room and then distressingly materialized from nowhere. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ they say, ‘what’s happened to you?’ ‘I think,’ he finds himself replying, ‘I was “up.” ’ They pat him on his sides and comfort him. Delusions always ran in his family.
In India there are many gods, and each god has many manifestations. The Chola bronzes, cast in the eleventh century, include several different incarnations of the god Shiva. The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King, has four hands. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, will billions of years from now be utterly destroyed.
These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas. Very likely, the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, but it is by no means clear that it will continue to expand forever. The expansion may gradually slow, stop and reverse itself. If there is less than a certain critical amount of matter in the universe, the gravitation of the receding galaxies will be insufficient to stop the expansion, and the universe will run away forever. But if there is more matter than we can see – hidden away in black holes, say, or in hot but invisible gas between the galaxies – then the universe will hold together gravitationally and partake of a very Indian succession of cycles, expansion followed by contraction, universe upon universe, Cosmos without end. If we live in such an oscillating universe, then the Big Bang is not the creation of the Cosmos but merely the end of the previous cycle, the destruction of the last incarnation of the Cosmos.*
Neither of these modern cosmologies may be altogether to our liking. In one, the universe is created, somehow, ten or twenty billion years ago and expands forever, the galaxies mutually receding until the last one disappears over our cosmic horizon. Then the galactic astronomers are out of business, the stars cool and die, matter itself decays and the universe becomes a thin cold haze of elementary particles. In the other, the oscillating universe, the Cosmos has no beginning and no end, and we are in the midst of an infinite cycle of cosmic deaths and rebirths with no information trickling through the cusps of the oscillation. Nothing of the galaxies, stars, planets, life forms or civilizations evolved in the previous incarnation of the universe oozes into the cusp, flutters past the Big Bang, to be known in our present universe. The fate of the universe in either cosmology may seem a little depressing, but we may take solace in the time scales involved. These events will occupy tens of billions of years, or more. Human beings and our descendants, whoever they might be, can accomplish a great deal in tens of billions of years, before the Cosmos dies.
Traveling close to the speed of light you would hardly age at all, but your friends and your relatives back home would be aging at the usual rate. When you returned from your relativistic journey, what a difference there would be between your friends and you, they having aged decades, say, and you having aged hardly at all! Traveling close to the speed of light is a kind of elixir of life. Because time slows down close to the speed of light, special relativity provides us with a means of going to the stars. But is it possible, in terms of practical engineering, to travel close to the speed of light? Is a starship feasible?
Fast interstellar spaceflight – with the ship velocity approaching the speed of light – is an objective not for a hundred years but for a thousand or ten thousand. But it is in principle possible. A kind of interstellar ramjet has been proposed by R. W. Bussard which scoops up the diffuse matter, mostly hydrogen atoms, that floats between the stars, accelerates it into a fusion engine and ejects it out the back. The hydrogen would be used both as fuel and as reaction mass. But in deep space there is only about one atom in every ten cubic centimeters, a volume the size of a grape. For the ramjet to work, it needs a frontal scoop hundreds of kilometers across. When the ship reaches relativistic velocities, the hydrogen atoms will be moving with respect to the spaceship at close to the speed of light. If adequate precautions are not taken, the spaceship and its passengers will be fried by these induced cosmic rays. One proposed solution uses a laser to strip the electrons off the interstellar atoms and make them electrically charged while they are still some distance away, and an extremely strong magnetic field to deflect the charged atoms into the scoop and away from the rest of the spacecraft. This is engineering on a scale so far unprecedented on Earth. We are talking of engines the size of small worlds.
But let us spend a moment thinking about such a ship. The Earth gravitationally attracts us with a certain force, which if we are falling we experience as an acceleration. Were we to fall out of a tree – and many of our proto-human ancestors must have done so – we would plummet faster and faster, increasing our fall speed by ten meters (or thirty-two feet) per second, every second. This acceleration, which characterizes the force of gravity holding us to the Earth’s surface, is called 1 g, g for Earth gravity. We are comfortable with accelerations of 1 g; we have grown up with 1 g. If we lived in an interstellar spacecraft that could accelerate at 1 g, we would find ourselves in a perfectly natural environment. In fact, the equivalence between gravitational forces and the forces we would feel in an accelerating spaceship is a major feature of Einstein’s later general theory of relativity. With a continuous 1 g acceleration, after one year in space we would be traveling very close to the speed of light [(0.01 km/sec2 ) x (3 x 107 sec) = 3 x 105 km/sec].
Suppose that such a spacecraft accelerates at 1 g, approaching more and more closely to the speed of light until the midpoint of the journey; and then is turned around and decelerates at 1 g until arriving at its destination. For most of the trip the velocity would be very close to the speed of light and time would slow down enormously. A nearby mission objective, a sun that may have planets, is Barnard’s Star, about six light-years away. It could be reached in about eight years as measured by clocks aboard the ship; the center of the Milky Way, in twenty-one years; M31, the Andromeda galaxy, in twenty-eight years. Of course, people left behind on Earth would see things differently. Instead of twenty-one years to the center of the Galaxy, they would measure an elapsed time of 30,000 years. When we got home, few of our friends would be left to greet us. In principle, such a journey, mounting the decimal points ever closer to the speed of light, would even permit us to circumnavigate the known universe in some fifty-six years ship time. We would return tens of billions of years in our future – to find the Earth a charred cinder and the Sun dead. Relativistic spaceflight makes the universe accessible to advanced civilizations, but only to those who go on the journey. There seems to be no way for information to travel back to those left behind any faster than the speed of light.
Space travel and time travel are connected. We can travel fast into space only by traveling fast into the future. But what of the past? Could we return to the past and change it? Could we make events turn out differently from what the history books assert? We travel slowly into the future all the time, at the rate of one day every day. With relativistic spaceflight we could travel fast into the future. But many physicists believe that a voyage into the past is impossible. Even if you had a device that could travel backwards in time, they say, you would be unable to do anything that would make any difference. If you journeyed into the past and prevented your parents from meeting, then you would never have been born – which is something of a contradiction, since you clearly exist. Like the proof of the irrationality of the square root of two, like the discussion of simultaneity in special relativity, this is an argument in which the premise is challenged because the conclusion seems absurd. But other physicists propose that two alternative histories, two equally valid realities, could exist side by side – the one you know and the one in which you were never born.
Perhaps time itself has many potential dimensions, despite the fact that we are condemned to experience only one of them. Suppose you could go back into the past and change it – by persuading Queen Isabella not to support Christopher Columbus, for example. Then, it is argued, you would have set into motion a different sequence of historical events, which those you left behind in our time line would never know about. If that kind of time travel were possible, then every imaginable alternative history might in some sense really exist.
History consists for the most part of a complex bundle of deeply interwoven threads, social, cultural and economic forces that are not easily unraveled. The countless small, unpredictable and random events that flow on continually often have no long-range consequences. But some, those occurring at critical junctures or branch points, may change the pattern of history. There may be cases where profound changes can be made by relatively trivial adjustments. The farther in the past such an event is, the more powerful may be its influence – because the longer the lever arm of time becomes.
A polio virus is a tiny microorganmism. We encounter many of them every day. But only rarely, fortunately, does one of them infect one of us and cause this dread disease. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States, had polio. Because the disease was crippling, it may have provided Roosevelt with a greater compassion for the underdog; or perhaps it improved his striving for success. If Roosevelt’s personality had been different, or if he had never had the ambition to be President of the United States, the great depression of the 1930’s, World War II and the development of nuclear weapons might just possibly have turned out differently. The future of the world might have been altered. But a virus is an insignificant thing, only a millionth of a centimeter across. It is hardly anything at all.
On the other hand, suppose our time traveler had persuaded Queen Isabella that Columbus’ geography was faulty, that from Eratosthenes’ estimate of the circumference of the Earth, Columbus could never reach Asia. Almost certainly some other European would have come along within a few decades and sailed west to the New World. Improvements in navigation, the lure of the spice trade and competition among rival European powers made the discovery of America around 1500 more or less inevitable. Of course, there would today be no nation of Colombia, or District of Columbia or Columbus, Ohio, or Columbia University in the Americas. But the overall course of history might have turned out more or less the same. In order to affect the future profoundly, a time traveler would probably have to intervene in a number of carefully chosen events, to change the weave of history.
An explanation for the decline of ancient science has been put forward by the historian of science, Benjamin Farrington: The mercantile tradition, which led to Ionian science, also led to a slave economy. The owning of slaves was the road to wealth and power. Polycrates’ fortifications were built by slaves. Athens in the time of Pericles, Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All the brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few. What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders – politely called ‘gentle-men’ in some societies – who have the leisure to do science. Accordingly, almost no one did science. The Ionians were perfectly able to make machines of some elegance. But the availability of slaves undermined the economic motive for the development of technology. Thus the mercantile tradition contributed to the great Ionian awakening around 600 B.C., and, through slavery, may have been the cause of its decline some two centuries later. There are great ironies here.
Plato and Aristotle were comfortable in a slave society. They offered justifications for oppression. They served tyrants. They taught the alienation of the body from the mind (a natural enough ideal in a slave society); they separated matter from thought; they divorced the Earth from the heavens – divisions that were to dominate Western thinking for more than twenty centuries. Plato, who believed that ‘all things are full of gods,’ actually used the metaphor of slavery to connect his politics with his cosmology. He is said to have urged the burning of all the books of Democritus (he had a similar recommendation for the books of Homer), perhaps because Democritus did not acknowledge immortal souls or immortal gods or Pythagorean mysticism, or because he believed in an infinite number of worlds. Of the seventy-three books Democritus is said to have written, covering all of human knowledge, not a single work survives. All we know is from fragments, chiefly on ethics, and secondhand accounts. The same is true of almost all the other ancient Ionian scientists.
In the recognition by Pythagoras and Plato that the Cosmos is knowable, that there is a mathematical underpinning to nature, they greatly advanced the cause of science. But in the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. After a long mystical sleep in which the tools of scientific inquiry lay moldering, the Ionian approach, in some cases transmitted through scholars at the Alexandrian Library, was finally rediscovered. The Western world reawakened. Experiment and open inquiry became once more respectable. Forgotten books and fragments were again read. Leonardo and Columbus and Copernicus were inspired by or independently retraced parts of this ancient Greek tradition. There is in our time much Ionian science, although not in politics and religion, and a fair amount of courageous free inquiry. But there are also appalling superstitions and deadly ethical ambiguities. We are flawed by ancient contradictions.
Raza Adil Rizvi's Blog 