Does time come in packets? No big deal. It’s that arrow of time we all have to worry about...
Wouldn’t you love to know a tad ahead of real time? Even by the merest nanosecond? Place your bets just before the card is served or the wheel of fortune spins, and you’re richer than Bill Gates. But who wants that? You wake up scanning the Dow Jones charts and, oops, you’re devalued or overvalued by several billion. Less vexing, I say, to be in a stable state of relative Marin County poverty. A simple decision each month: pay the mortgage or service the Porsche.
It’s the centenary of Quantum Metaphysics, so a good time to ponder the mysteries of time. Many laws seem to work when the sign of t is reversed in the formal equations, yet, deep down we all feel that horror of increasing entropy. Even the more precise “non-decreasing in a closed system” formulation of the second law of thermodynamics is scant consolation. Was it George or T. S. Elliot who wrote the saddest of all lines: “I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled?” (Bet you didn’t know George was a notorious cross dresser.)
And even Bill Gates can’t bribe this relentless arrow of time until, according to Stephen Hawking, Time’s Brief Historian, the cosmos stops expanding.
I was tempted to call this column Max(Planck,Me) but modesty invaded. His major contribution, the swine, was to eliminate the beauty of continuous variables. The world, as far as we are allowed to observe it, comes in little jerks (no, not Bill Gates again?), also known misleadingly as “quantum leaps.”
Of course, mathematics, the calculus especially, has always hovered uneasily between ideal, creamy-smooth functions and taking the ratios of phantom, not-quite zero dy’s and dx’s. By the way, the macho boast by Newton (who ranks with Wagner in my list of despicable heroes) to Leibniz was “My infinitesimals are bigger than yours.”
Well, after 400 years, in spite of many epistemological ups and downs, the calculus still does its job and gets us to the moon. Swept under the carpet are the nagging foundational insecurities. As I once told Goedel, “Don’t rock the sand.” Or was it “Don’t sand the rock?”
Similarly, 100 years after Max removed our solid plank, many quantum mysteries half-haunt us. But what the hell, the stuff seems to work. The very Pentium chip with whom I am interacting is confirmation.
Sorry, Al (Einstein) and Dave (Bohm), we do know for sure that God plays dice. I met Her in Reno last week. Furthermore, She was asked to leave when Her dice were determined to be “loaded” and influencing remote throws in Las Vegas.
If there’s column room, I would like to clarify the zoology of physics. Not the ongoing fauna/flora of elementary particles (we know them all now, surely, apart from Higg’s elusive boson), but the diverse creatures invoked to titillate the public.
There’s a natural confusion between Schrödinger’s demon, Maxwell’s ass, and Buridan’s cat, which I hasten to clarify.
Schrödinger really did put a demonic kitten in a sealed box. The box was divided down the middle by a screen containing a tiny hinged cat flap. Each compartment has a bale of Farmer Brown’s hay floating around (the so-called Brownian motion). The bales are of equal mass and remain, subject to the Pauli exclusion rules, equidistant from the flap. The cat operates the flap, hoping to entice the left bale into the right compartment or vice versa. The cat dies through wave-collapse and lack of oxygen. Discuss.
Worth Re-Citing
“As a young man, Maxwell worried whether nature was more like a book or more like a magazine. For if it is the magazine of nature we are attempting to read, ‘nothing is more foolish than to suppose that one part can throw light on another.’ Maxwell bet on the book, and became one of the great unifiers in the history of physics.” — Peter Lipton (Times Literary Supplement, March 19, 1999) reviewing The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell, by Peter M. Harman (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Stan Kelly-Bootle has been computing on and off since 1953 when he graduated from Cambridge University in Pure Mathematics and hacked on EDSAC I (the first true stored-program computer). He is a contributing editor for Linux Journal and a Jolt Judge for Software Development Magazine. With the demise of UNIX Review/Performance Computing, his 16-year-old Devil’s Advocate column has moved online to <www.sarcheck.com>. His many books include 680x0 Programming by Example, Mastering Turbo C, Lern Yerself Scouse, The Devil’s DP Dictionary, The Computer Contradictory, and Unix Complete. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, his songs have been recorded by Cilla Black, Judy Collins, the Dubliners, and himself. Stan welcomes email via skb@atmail.net and his website <http://www.feniks.com/skb/>. Stan’s ramblings can also be found at <www.unixreview.com>.