Many Worlds Theory

A theory of art, or: How George R. R. Martin lost his way

April 7, 2014 by Matthew Rave

What is art? Why do I enjoy Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, yet my 12-year old son thinks it is wretched? Why are the first three Song of Ice and Fire books great, but the last two are mediocre at best?

I’m sure that there’s a long history of the philosophy of art, and I’d love to quote it here to give you some insight. Unfortunately, this is a subject that I know nothing about. Nothing. Literally. I haven’t even googled “philosophy of art” to see what comes up.

That’s because I already have my own theory. I share it now because I have enough hubris to think that it may speak to you, too.

In a nutshell: with art we want to see patterns, but also be surprised and have our expectations subverted.

Now, art has more purpose then what I’ve just described. Art can educate, or enlighten, or convey some specific emotion (Pain? Love?) But I’m concerned with what I see as the primary function of art: to entertain. I don’t listen to Mozart to learn anything; I don’t read Brandon Sanderson to gain insight into my own soul. And I certainly won’t pay $15 to go to an art museum for any purpose other than to entertain myself for an afternoon.

But what about non-fiction books, you say? Didn’t you read a three-volume biography of Winston Churchill last year?

Yes, I did. I read that biography as a form of entertainment. I find learning entertaining. I found the story fascinating. I wasn’t trying to educate myself, except tangentially; I have no pressing reason to know anything about the former prime minister.

But as for art, as entertainment: I think humans are biologically predisposed to enjoy patterns, but I also think we enjoy being surprised. It is in the confluence of these two (sometimes competing) factors that art resides.

Patterns

There is a kind of sweet-spot here: if patterns are too obvious they’re boring; if patterns are too complicated (or even non-existent) then that’s boring too. For every person there is an ideal pattern complexity for a given artistic medium, and it’s fascinating that these ideals seldom overlap.

Take patterns in novels. Novels exist on a spectrum of complexity:

Dr. Seuss

Nancy Drew

A Wrinkle in Time

The Da Vinci Code

Harry Potter

The Foundation Series

Dune

The Brothers Karamazov

Gravity’s Rainbow

Ulysses

You may disagree with the exact ordering but that’s not the point (it’s subjective anyway). To me, the ideal novel is somewhere around level 7 (Dune). I will almost always read something in the 6-8 range. I didn’t enjoy the Harry Potter series because it was too simple; likewise I found James Joyce’s Ulysses incomprehensible.

But other people disagree. An awful lot of people find the complexity level of the Da Vinci Code to be just right. And that’s great: I don’t mean to imply that my preference for more complexity is somehow better. And if you can “read” Ulysses for more than five minutes without laughing, then more power to you.

I don’t see it.

We are hard-wired by evolution to see patterns in everything, even if the patterns are spurious. We see faces on Mars. We see Jesus in cheese toast. People see meaning (even if it’s unintended) in Finnegan’s Wake. The thing is, our abilities are not the same. Where I see pattern, you see noise; where I see banality, you see complexity. That’s why our tastes differ. And our ability to see patterns depends on two things: raw processing ability, and content knowledge.

There’s a great scene in the movie Defending Your Life where an “unenlightened” soul tries food that a more “enlightened” person is eating. (The “enlightened” people use a lot more of their brain, you see.)

Albert Brooks: What are you eating?

Rip Torn: You wouldn’t like this.

Brooks: What is it? What does it taste like?

Torn: You’re curious, aren’t you? Good, I like that about you. Want to try?

Brooks: Yeah. Looks so weird. Oh, my God!

Torn: A little like horseshit, huh? As you get smarter, you begin to manipulate your senses. This tastes much different to me than it does to you.

Brooks: This is what smart people eat?

Now, I don’t think it’s controversial to declare that pattern-recognition ability differs from one entity to another. For example, I doubt that a ladybug can detect the difference between white noise and Metallica (sometimes I can’t, either). In my experience dogs don’t seem to respond much to music (others do think they might have a musical sense). I will go out on a limb and say that I can enjoy Dune whereas an eleven-year-old will not, because I have more ability to hold the patterns of such a book in my mind.

But wait. I don’t want this to be an elitist manifesto; I’m not better than the Joneses. So I will add that content knowledge and context are more important than raw processor speed. Dune is an adult book, with topics and themes that resonate with people who have more experience in the world. I was a smart eleven-year-old, and I read Dune back in 1980, but I didn’t get much out of it because a lot of it didn’t make much sense to me. It wasn’t a matter of complexity, but of experience.

Consider music. If you study music theory, you’ll be able to hear patterns and structures that others cannot; you may enjoy certain music when others do not. It has less to do with processing ability and more to do with content knowledge.

For example, I find much of modern music boring. Why? Because the chord progressions are banal (I-IV-V-I) and the rhythms unvarying (drum machine, anyone?) But obviously, a lot of people like such music, and in part it’s because of the simplicity. The chord progression I-IV-V-I is common enough that even the untrained ear can pick it out; it is a pattern that people recognize.

This also explains why certain music “grows on you”. The first time I listened to Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, in a laundry mat in Torrejón, Spain, I found the music off-putting and bizarre. But I listened to it again and again, probably because I was stubborn enough to think that eventually I would understand it. And I did. I find it today the single greatest piece of music ever written, in part because it is so familiar to me now that I hear its patterns and complexities almost instinctually. I daresay I have the whole thing memorized, and when I listen to it, it is almost as if I am recalling it in real time. The experience is sublime.

To you, it may taste like horseshit.

At the premiere of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 (Op. 130), the audience did not demand an encore of the final movement (the so-called Große Fuge). “Beethoven, enraged, was reported to have growled, ‘And why didn’t they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!’” The fugue itself was dismissed at the time as being repellent and incomprehensible. Did Beethoven have the ability to imagine complexities that were too complex for the average listener?

[Note: listen to this five times over five days. I guarantee that your experience the fifth time will be vastly different then the first.]

I have focused unduly on music, but the same ideas apply to other arts as well. For example, the appeal of paintings by Jackson Pollock may have something to do with fractal dimension (a measure of complexity). Pollock knew nothing about fractals, but he instinctively splattered paint in a way that is “pleasing” in some mathematical sense. His paintings had quantifiable complexity, and that complexity fell in the range that humans find appealing. His paintings only appear random at first glance.

There is obviously room for experiment here. Is there a quantifiable difference in complexity between Bartok and Lady Gaga, or between Ulysses and Harry Potter? Do a person’s tastes in music (or art, or literature) settle onto a single uniform “complexity level”? For example, if I enjoy Bartok, then would I tend to prefer a jazz piece that has a similar level of complexity? Am I just whistling Dixie, here?

Subverting Expectations

But art also, ideally, involves something else. It involves

SURPRISE

which is to say, breaking the rules, breaking the obvious patterns

into patterns of a different kind.

I don’t just want to see patterns in my literature or artwork or music, but I want to see novel patterns, a herd of horses of a different color. I want to be surprised. And the best kind of surprise is when you realize that there was a pattern there all along, but you just didn’t notice it. It’s humbling, and marvelous. It’s like—

—when George Taylor falls to his knees in front of the half-submerged Statue of Liberty, cursing humanity—

—when you discover exactly who murdered Roger Ackroyd—

—when in the glorious 9^th three instrumental themes are recounted and discarded, and then the human voice breaks free, because instruments alone cannot do justice to the final ode—

—when you notice the tiny legs of Icarus in the water, and the indifference of the wide world—

—when the chorus of demons judges the singer, and finds him wanting, with a devil put aside for him—

Bohemian Rhapsody is a comic-horror-opera grafted onto a Styx-style power love ballad, and that makes all the difference.

These are patterns turned upside-down, subverted in the best possible way. It is the subversion of the plot twist, the delight of the unexpected, the imp of the perverse, that turn art from mere pattern-production into something more profound.

But how do you truly surprise someone in art? Context makes all the difference.

When the movie Psycho first appeared in 1960, audiences were shocked. After all, Janet Leigh was billed as the star…and she dies 30 minutes into the film! Can you do that? Is that allowed?

The movie doesn’t really impact viewers today (I’ve never met someone born after 1980 who liked the film). I think that’s because people have been jaded by movies like Friday the 13^th and Halloween…once you let a certain amount of gore out of the box, you can’t put it back in. To scare audiences today, you need to keep upping the ante…and of course you also have to know who Janet Leigh is.

Context makes all the difference.

People were said to have rioted at the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Right of Spring”. This would be unfathomable today…

Context makes all the difference.

When The Sixth Sense first came out, people loved the movie because of its twist ending. Ironically, the twist that made the director M. Night Shyamalan famous also guaranteed that he’d never have a good movie again. Why? Because we are all looking for a twist now. This meta-knowledge ruins the experience; it can’t really be a twist unless you’re not expecting it to happen. I thought The Village was awful because, knowing who the director was, I was looking to figure out what “the twist” was from the very first moments…

Context makes all the difference.

Here’s how you make good art: you layer your work with different patterns, of differing complexities. This is called “having something for everyone!” A complex story can have simple themes; a complex symphony can have the I-IV-V-I chord progression. Then, on top of the patterns and complexities, you need to have something new, something unexpected. Basically, you need to throw the Red Wedding in there somewhere. Which brings me to the question: Why are the first three Song of Ice and Fire books great, but the last two are mediocre at best?

Answer: no Red Wedding. Here’s a minor spoiler: in A Feast for Crows, nothing really happens. The entire book can be skipped without anyone losing any plot threads. (Seriously.) A Dance with Dragons is marginally better, and there are a few shockers towards the end, but the sense that the series has an overall pattern is diminishing. Major spoiler alert. Take Daenerys’ story arc. At the end of A Dance with Dragons she is basically in the exact same position as she was three books earlier: no followers, no kingdom, no armies, no clue. It’s as if nothing happened. The plot of the series has ground to a halt, and the reader doesn’t really have confidence (after the A Feast for Crows debacle) that the writer’s-block inflicted author can ever get back on track. We’ll see.

Hey, George: subvert our expectations. Write a book in less than five years!

In fact, I’ve changed my mind. Art is 99% perspiration. I need to get back to the book that I’m writing:

Find out more on Facebook, Twitter, or via email: SargassoNova (at) gmail.com.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, Bartok, Beethoven, Bohemian Rhapsody, Defending Your Life, Dune, fractals, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Grosse Fugue, Jackson Pollock, M. Night Shyamalan, philosophy, Psycho | 11 Comments »

A haiku

March 27, 2014 by Matthew Rave

This haiku ends with

Silence of five syllables

Posted in Poem | Tagged Haiku, Musashi | 2 Comments »

This is Something that Happened

March 24, 2014 by Matthew Rave

Get away, you beast, for this man

does not come tutored by your sister;

he comes to view your punishments.

—Dante, Inferno, Canto XII, lines 16–20

There was a pause in the conversation—one of those sudden strange lulls that seem to have meaning, but are actually just coincidences. Mr. Herbert didn’t like coincidences of any kind, so he said the first thing that popped into his mind.

“Why don’t we bury politicians alive?”

The married couple, Mrs. and Mr. Quain, looked at each other knowingly, and it didn’t take much perception to surmise what they were thinking. See, George, I told you he was weird. Yes, Gladys, I see what you mean. Have some more of the kale salad. Why, I don’t mind if I do.

The fourth person at the table, Mr. Muraña, didn’t react at all to Mr. Herbert’s absurd declaration. He kept sawing at his overdone steak with a huge serrated steak knife. The sawing was surprisingly delicate, as if Mr. Muraña was preparing tissue samples to be placed between glass slides.

“I said, why don’t we bury politicians alive?”

“We heard you the first time,” said Mr. Quain.

“Oh, George, be nice.”

Mr. Herbert feigned a smile. “I am serious. Here’s my proposal.” He gulped the rest of his wine—a cloyingly sweet port which suited him just fine. “OK, so we have elections, right? There are always plenty of candidates. The problem is, none of the candidates are ever any good. Idiots, the lot of them. So here’s what we do: on election day, at around 8pm, say, we bury all the candidates alive. Just trundle them all up in a bunch of coffins and stick ‘em six feet under. And then, get this, when the election returns come in, we dig up the winner only. Good riddance to the rest, I say.” He popped a cherry tomato into his fleshy mouth.

Mrs. Quain was pretending she didn’t hear any of Mr. Herbert’s idea, chewing her kale with grim determination. Mr. Quain was less subtle.

“I thought we were having a serious conversation,” he huffed.

“I am serious.”

Mr. Muraña raised a hand and snapped a finger. This being a restaurant with two Michelin stars, a waiter or waitress (it was impossible to tell which) immediately refilled his glass of water. He then resumed his steak sawing.

“Well,” said Mr. Quain, “we were discussing Heidegger’s Being and Time. At least, I thought we were. Then you bring up this nonsense—”

“Is this a sort of game to you, George?” Mr. Herbert asked.

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I mean, I change the subject, and you get all indignant?”

Mrs. Quain smiled faintly, as if she had thought of something naughty. Her husband said: “I’m not indignant!”

“I don’t want to talk about Heidegger any more. So I changed the subject.”

“To something ludicrous!”

Mr. Herbert lifted a blue-and-white napkin and wiped non-existent crumbs from his lips. “Not as ridiculous as your analysis of Being and Time.”

Mr. Quain was nonplussed. He appealed to Mr. Muraña, as if Mr. Muraña were a referee who could adjudicate a thorny issue. “What say you, Reyes?”

Mr. Muraña looked up. “About Being and Time, or about burying people alive? As to the first, I think the book is overrated, as is Heidegger, truth be told. I think that the informational content of the book is close to zero. It reminds of new age nonsense, such as Deepak Chopra. You see in the book whatever you want to see. It is a kind of Rorschach test. The language is convoluted, almost labyrinthine. Page after page on the difference between Being, and Being-in.” Mr. Muraña put his serrated knife down carefully, perpendicular to and on top of his fork, making a cruciform as if to ward off evil spirits. “As to the second, well, I don’t think you have thought your plan completely through, Mr. Herbert. When did you say you would bury the politicians? 8pm, no?”

“That’s right.”

Mrs. and Mr. Quain looked at each other again. She was softly shaking her head; he was turning vermillion.

“Well,” continued Mr. Muraña, “assume that the election returns come in around 11. All the politicians would be dead. You cannot survive three hours buried alive. You would suffocate.”

Mr. Herbert looked as though he were about to retort.

“Now look here,” Mr. Quain said, “let’s get back to Heidegger—”

Mrs. Quain rolled her eyes and muttered, “You did spend so much time slogging through it…”

“The thing I like about Heidegger is that he distinguished between factual properties, on the one hand, and ‘Being’ on the other, which is not a property,” Mr. Quain said somewhat pompously.

“Do you even know what that means?” Mr. Herbert asked.

“Of course. Let me explain. See Reyes over there?” Mr. Muraña raised his water glass in salute. “He is a man. That’s one of his properties. But his existence is not in and of itself a property. The term ‘man’ is a category. The term ‘being’ is an existential. It is factual to say he is a man. It is ‘factical’ to say that he is ‘being’ right now. Do you get it?”

“George,” Mrs. Quain said, “I don’t even think Heidegger would have gotten that.”

Mr. Herbert shrugged. “I didn’t want to get into all that ontological inquiry versus ontic inquiry over dinner. I wanted to talk about something a bit more fun. Now, Mr. Muraña, as to the suffocation problem—”

“I am a woman, you know,” Ms. Muraña said. She swatted away a non-existent fly.

“—the way I see it is, we could put these ventilation tubes down into the coffins. Let them breath just fine. We can plug them up later when the results come in on CNN.”

“You’re a woman?” Mr. Quain said, the same way one might enunciate the phrase The volcano is exploding?

“Oh of course she is,” Mrs. Quain said. “You really don’t have a finely tuned gaydar, do you, George?”

A waiter or waitress arrived with dessert: a Meyer lemon donut with cereal milk. Everyone took a plate; Ms. Muraña also asked for strong coffee.

“We should go further,” Ms. Muraña said. “Why not? I propose that we bury the accused. Just during jury deliberations, you know. Bury these people alive, with ventilation, as you say. Let the juries or judge deliberate. Then if they are acquitted, we dig them up. Otherwise—” She smiled.

“Only for heinous crimes, surely” Mrs. Quain said, sipping her cereal milk.

“Not you too!” Mr. Quain gasped.

“Of course,” Ms. Muraña said. “Rape, murder, maybe tax evasion.”

“I like it!” Mr. Herbert said, biting into his donut.

Mr. Quain decided that the only way to get the conversation back on track was to plow ahead, and pretend that his wife, his neighbor, and his (apparently) female boss had all gone temporarily bananas. “Anyway, I am struck by Heidegger’s final thesis: that time is temporal. Now, you see that if—”

Mrs. Quain suddenly became a minotaur.

First, her head snapped up, as if her mind were now controlled by a powerful sorcerer, within range but out of sight. Her eyes rolled back, showing blood-shot whites but no pupils. Veins in her neck started to bulge. Her chest expanded; her blouse and bra popped off in shreds. She stood up violently, knocking her chair backward. Several drinks were spilled. She then shook her head rapidly, almost comically, as if to say no no no no no no no.

Her limbs grew in length and girth. Her skin tone darkened, and wiry black hair grew all over. Her skirt fell away; her panties became tatters; a huge uncircumcised penis (fully erect) now protruded from between her legs.

Her head transformed last. Mrs. Quain’s eyes began to bleed, as if her tears were made of blood; her lips cracked and bled as well. Her formerly perfect teeth became dull and yellow and fetid. Her nose doubled in size, then flattened and became decided bovine. Her forehead puddled forward, as if viscous, then hardened into an elongated shape: definitely the head of a bull. Her eyes shrunk in size and receded into a furry face. Steam escaped her lips.

Now fully naked and close to seven feet tall, the minotaur that was Mrs. Quain bellowed: an almost primal roar that caused everyone in the restaurant to startle. As if by magic, a huge battleaxe appeared in her hairy arms.

“Είμαι Μινώταυρος!”

Mr. Quain was cowering on the floor at his wife’s feet. Mr. Herbert was standing some twenty feet away, trying to decide whether to exit the room entirely. Ms. Muraña had picked up her steak knife and was holding it without enthusiasm, as if she realized its efficacy was nil.

“Αυτό είναι ένα σύμπαν στο οποίο συμβαίνει αυτό!” Mrs. Quain swung her axe at the table, cleaving it in twain.

There was a stampede towards the door. Mr. Herbert was one of the first to leave, no doubt thinking of burying minotaurs alive. Mr. Quain was a babbling, incoherent mess. Port wine and tears and cereal milk mixed as they dripped down his face. He had shit himself.

Only Ms. Muraña retained any kind of composure, although ‘composure’ here is a relative term. She had wet herself, and had bitten her lower lip until it bled, but by sheer force of will she had stood her ground and not backed away. Paradoxically, the fierce look on her face and her aggressive stance made her appear more feminine.

Why did she stand her ground, that day, when confronted with the minotaur? That is, of course, the question. It is not for us to speculate, or judge.

“Είναι ένας τρόπος που οδηγεί από το αρχέγονο χρόνο για να την έννοια του να είναι εκεί! Μήπως το ίδιο το ίδιο χρονικό διάστημα, όπως αποκαλύπτουν τον ορίζοντα της ύπαρξης!” Mrs. Quain sprang forward and swung the axe at Ms. Muraña.

In abject terror, Ms. Muraña flung her knife to the side. It skittered across the marble floor.

Ms. Muraña was decapitated cleanly, her head sloughing off like mashed potatoes piled too high. Through some autonomic response, she raised her hands and clutched at where her head used to be, as if feeling for her soul.

The corpse that used to be Ms. Muraña slumped to the ground.

This is something that happened.

In some universe, this occurred.

***************************************************

If you enjoyed this story, you may also enjoy my book Why Is There Anything? which is available for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

I am also currently collaborating on a multi-volume novel of speculative hard science fiction and futuristic deep-space horror called Sargasso Nova. Publication of the first installment will be January 2015; further details will be released on Facebook, Twitter, or via email: SargassoNova (at) gmail.com.

Posted in Fiction | Tagged Fiction | 8 Comments »

Big Bang Discovery Opens Doors to the “Multiverse”

March 19, 2014 by Matthew Rave

The big news of late is the discovery of gravitational waves from the very earliest time after the Big Bang. What hasn’t been widely reported is that this represents a huge bit of indirect evidence that multiple universes really do exist.

Here’s more:

Big Bang Discovery Opens Doors to the “Multiverse”.

la-sci-sn-gravitational-waves-inflation-big-ba-001

(Harvard University / EPA)

Posted in Many-worlds Interpretation, Physics, Uncategorized | Tagged astronomy, Big Bang theory, many-worlds interpretation | 10 Comments »

There’s no philosophy in quantum mechanics

March 18, 2014 by Matthew Rave

The conventional wisdom among people who know a little bit of quantum mechanics is that quantum mechanics is weird.

The conventional wisdom is wrong. Quantum mechanics is not weird. Interpretations of quantum mechanics are weird.

My thinking on this has changed over the years. In high school I read everything I could about the “weirdness” of our universe: Schrödinger’s cat, wave-particle duality, the collapse of the wave function, many-worlds theory, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Then a strange thing happened: I went to college. I studied physics. And guess what? None of that stuff gets more than the briefest mention in the physics classroom. Why?

Because those things are beside the point. Quantum mechanics works. How you interpret quantum mechanics is your problem.

There’s a dichotomy here which is the source of most people’s confusion. Theories are different from interpretations of theories. A theory is a mathematical model that allows us to make predictions. An interpretation is a philosophical construct that allows us to sleep at night; it is a squishy heuristic that helps us unimaginative humans make sense of the math before us. Theories get things done. Interpretations never helped anybody, not really.

An abandoned shack.

Let’s say that in an abandoned shack you discovered a notebook with the word “PHYSICS” written by hand over and over, thousands of times, apparently filling every page. You haven’t looked at the last few pages, but your theory is that these pages will also have the word “PHYSICS” written out. Each time you turn a page, your theory is validated: “PHYSICS” is there, as predicted.

Next to this notebook is another that looks just like it. You open the first page, and are not surprised to see “PHYSICS PHYSICS PHYSICS” again. What’s going on? Did some crazy person live in this shack? Such speculation doesn’t really matter, since you can still hypothesize that “PHYSICS” fills this notebook as well. In fact, you have a stronger theory: every notebook in this shack is filled with “PHYSICS”.

You perform an experiment: you turn the page. “PHYSICS PHYSICS PHYSICS”. The experiment supports your theory. You find more notebooks; same results. Every notebook in the shack is filled, apparently, with “PHYSICS”. But guess what? There are dozens of possible interpretations. And in the absence of further data, you can never know which one is “correct”.

Maybe the shack was once inhabited by a crazy person, who wrote “PHYSICS” precisely 250,001 times in a futile attempt at summoning Cthulhu from his ancient slumber.

Maybe a student misspelled “physics” on a test, and her cruel teacher punished her in the most depraved way possible.

Maybe Matt Damon filled the notebooks, in a method-acting attempt to get into the mindset of an OCD scientist.

Which of these interpretations is the “truth”? Without further data you cannot really say. Arguing about which is right and which is wrong is futile at best, and annoying at worst.

Of course, new data may turn up. We might find out that the notebooks are 75 years old, ruling out our Matt Damon interpretation. That interpretation is no longer a valid interpretation of the data.

Which brings me to my next point: there is no official arbiter of what constitutes a theory versus what constitutes an interpretation. Different philosophers and scientists have used the words differently at different times. All you can hope for is that a particular author is consistent in his/her use of the terms. I personally use the word “interpretation” to describe competing theories that cannot currently be differentiated by any known scientific experiment. If two different interpretations make different, testable predictions, then they are promoted to being totally different theories. (Caveat: others use the words slightly differently. Deal with it.)

So what does this have to do with quantum mechanics?

Quantum mechanics is an entirely mathematical theory. Its postulates are logical, concise, and powerful. We can use quantum mechanics to invent cell phones, computers, lasers, and iPods. Quantum mechanics doesn’t care if you “understand what it really means”, or not. It is arguably the most successful and powerful theory to come out of the 20^th century.

Now, the mathematics of quantum mechanics are abstract and hard to visualize. Nevertheless, people insist on trying to visualize anyway. And the result is all kinds of weirdness: Schrödinger’s cat, wave-particle duality, the collapse of the wave function, many-worlds theory, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. These ideas are all mental hoops that people have jumped through to explain some unambiguous, concrete, abstract linear algebra. The math is just math, and it works; what it means is anyone’s guess.

There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s no philosophy in quantum mechanics.

There’s no philosophy in quantum mechanics!

Don’t like the many-worlds interpretation? Fine. Be a Copenhagenist. Don’t like pilot waves? Great. Stick to your pet idea about superluminal communication. Just remember that all of these competing interpretations make the exact same predictions, so for all practical purposes they are the same. Some people go so far as to say, just shut up and calculate. [Note added 3-19-14: there are problems with pilot wave theories that in my view rule them out as being a valid interpretations of quantum mechanics. But there are hoops people can jump through to try and “force” pilot wave theories to be consistent with, say, Bell’s theorem. My broader point is that there are multiple interpretations of QM and that all have followers to this day, but that none of the interpretations really have any distinct implications for our lives.]

I don’t usually go that far. I actually think that the many-worlds interpretation is a testable theory, not an interpretation (hence the name of this blog). I think many-worlds is falsifiable. (If we ever observe a wave function collapsing, then many-worlds will have to be discarded.) But I don’t think that will happen: many-worlds is too elegant, and too powerful, to not be true.

But we’ll see.

If you think it’s absurd that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time…if you think that it’s crazy to hypothesize other universes…if you think that God does not play dice with the universe…don’t blame quantum mechanics. Blame the philosophers who try to interpret it.

Quantum mechanics works. Otherwise, you’d be reading this on an actual piece of paper.

Posted in Many-worlds Interpretation, Physics | Tagged abandoned shack, many-worlds interpretation, Matt Damon, philosophy, quantum mechanics | 36 Comments »

The Lego Movie: a parable about the multiverse?

February 20, 2014 by Matthew Rave

WARNING: Spoilers abound!

Do not read further if you haven’t seen the wonderful, awesome The Lego Movie!

There are two kinds of good movies. The first kind is a movie you enjoy while watching; you appreciate the acting, the writing, the set design. You come out of the theater thinking, that was good. I’d recommend that. In the past six months, I’ve seen many of these so-called Good Movies of the 1^st Kind. Examples include The Dallas Buyer’s Club, Rush, Captain Phillips, the second Hobbit movie, and the second Hunger Games movie. I liked them all.

A metaphor for the everyman

But then there is a Good Movie of the 2^nd Kind—a movie which leaves you jacked up on adrenaline, with a big goofy smile on your face, and ideas buzzing around the inside of your head. A movie where you come out of the theater thinking, when am I going to go see that again? I need to see that again. What just happened?

Don’t get me wrong; a GM2^ndK is not necessarily a happy, fun movie. Saving Private Ryan was for me a GM2^ndK; for weeks I could not get the first half hour (Omaha Beach) out of my head. Schindler’s List was also a GM2^ndK. So was A Clockwork Orange, and Magnolia, and Paths of Glory.

So, too, The Lego Movie.

Unless you’ve seen the movie, you won’t believe it. You won’t have the context, the conceptual framework, the raw materials from which to grasp the idea: that The Lego Movie is as profound and philosophical as any movie you’ve (probably) ever seen.

Oh sure, the movie is beautiful to look at. The animation is unique and charmingly quantized and pixilated. The pace is frenetic, action packed. The worlds depicted are stunning, goofy and marvelous. The jokes are non-stop: I laughed out loud two or three times a minute for 100 straight minutes.

So, I liked the movie. But this post wasn’t meant to be a movie review.

My broader point is that the movie resonated with me, personally, philosophically, because it so closely matches my own world view.

SPOILERS! PROCEED NO FURTHER, YE WHO HAVEN’T WATCHED!

The message of the movie is that there are two (seemingly) diametrically opposed ways of playing with Legos. In the first camp are the conformists, who follow instructions to the letter, never have an original thought, and prefer a world of rigidity and order. The head conformist is Lord Business, who wants to spray Krazy Glue on every Lego in the universe so that nothing ever changes.

To me, Lord Business represents the Abrahamic God, the God of the Old Testament. The God of one single, rigid construction, exactly the way He designed it. Don’t go against God’s plan (or the plan of Lord Business). There is only one way the world (or worlds) can be, and if you oppose that plan—if you don’t follow the instructions—then you have committed heresy. You will be melted. There’s no place for you in such a conformist world.

The God of Abraham

The other way of playing with Legos is the way children play with them: with unbridled imagination. Sure, you can buy a Millennium Falcon Lego set and construct it as the instructions describe. But you can ignore the instructions, too, and your play is just as valid. Want to put Batman on the Millennium Falcon? Sure; go for it. Want to have Superman and Gandalf team up to battle a robot pirate? Why not? If you can imagine it, then you can do it, just as long as some adult doesn’t come down and spray the pieces with glue.

That’s what organized religion does: it sprays us with glue.

To me the world of organized religion is limiting, stifling. The idea that there’s an omnipotent being that controls every aspect of everything is not comforting to me; it is horrifying. Theologians mumble about free will and wave their hands reassuringly, but what good is free will if you’re still constricted by God’s plan? If God has everything worked out, then you’re stuck to the world with Krazy Glue; your life is supposed to be lived in a single way and you’ll never be able to ignore the instructions. You’ll never get to ride Unikitty into Middle Zealand and have tea with the Green Lantern. Sorry, but you’re an average, run-of-the-mill Lego piece and that’s all you’ll ever be.

But imagine: suppose that there are an infinite number of universes, each with its own parameters, its own structure. In such a multiverse, anything you can imagine is true. There are still rules (each universe obeys its own laws of physics, just as Legos cannot escape their own block-like, quantized nature) but beyond those rules, anything goes. And imagine there is no Lord Business that commands you to think in a certain way. Imagine if you had the freedom to do as you will.

Here’s a table, to make the metaphor(s) more explicit:

In the movie…	…is a metaphor for
A Lego person	a human
The Lego world you’re in	the universe you’re in
All of the possible Lego Worlds	the multiverse
Quantized nature of Lego blocks	the laws of physics
Krazy Glue	God’s plan
Lord Builder (the Father)	a rigid conformist deity
The Child	the deity that any of us could be, using imagination
Instructions	Rigid moral codes
“Everything is awesome”	“Everything is awesome”

We are indeed trapped in the universe that we find ourselves in (we can’t get away from our quantized nature, alas) but we can at least imagine the other worlds, and dream, and find inspiration from them. We can live our lives the way we like. This isn’t anarchy; it’s freedom. This world view doesn’t preclude morality; we shouldn’t put our hands into other people’s Lego Worlds, and mess the pieces up, and break their Lego constructions. But we should be able to look at other people’s constructions, and value them, even love them. If you want to have Batman marry Han Solo, and have them ride off into the Old West sunset (riding on Unikitty, no doubt) then I shouldn’t judge. There is no Lord Business. There is only what you can build, and what I can build, and what you can imagine, and what I can imagine. We should not judge each other but embrace each other’s constructions. Everyone’s trapped by the laws of physics, but no one’s trapped in their own minds; there are no laws that can ever force our imaginations to conform.

If God exists, then he’s a child, and wants us to play in all the worlds, and be free. He wouldn’t even own a tube of Krazy Glue.

Posted in Many-worlds Interpretation | Tagged Batman, gay marriage, God, Krazy Glue, Lego Movie, Legos, many-worlds, many-worlds interpretation, MWI, philosophy, religion | 8 Comments »

Black hole misconceptions or: Why Dr. Who is not science fiction

February 5, 2014 by Matthew Rave

I was watching Dr. Who the other day and came across a physics mistake so common I thought I’d address it here. The mistake is this:

Black holes suck you in like a vacuum cleaner!

The setup: in Dr. Who [2.8] “The Impossible Planet”, the good Doctor and Rose meet the crew of a ship who are on “an expedition [to] the mysterious planet Krop Tor, impossibly in orbit around a black hole.” [Wikipedia] That phrase “impossibly in orbit” made me almost spit out my drink while watching the show.

Black holes have event horizons. I get it. Even light cannot escape. I get that, too. But why does that mean I cannot orbit a black hole?

OK, time for a little general relativity. Einstein figured out, between 1905 and 1915, that gravity is “just” a warping of space-time. Matter causes the space-time around it to curve; the curvature of space-time determines how matter moves (insofar as objects in the absence of gravitational forces follow geodesics). The formulas that link the distribution of matter to the curvature of space are Einstein’s equations:

This expression is compact and might seem relatively simple, but it’s not. Gαβ and Tαβ are components of tensors, which are like vectors, but worse; they’re really 4×4 matrices. So this equation is not one equation, but 16 different equations, since α and β can take on any of four values each.

What do all those letters stand for? Gαβ is a component of the Einstein tensor, which tells you about how space-time is curved; the indices α and β can be any of four values in a 4D space-time. (If you’re mathematically inclined, the Einstein tensor can be related to the Ricci scalar, the Ricci tensor, and the Riemann tensor.) Tαβ is a component of the stress-energy tensor, which basically describes how matter/momentum/energy/stress/strain is distributed in a region of space-time. So here’s another way to visualize Einstein’s equations:

The cause (mass) is on the right; the effect (the curvature of space-time) is on the left.

So what does this have to do with black holes?

One of the first solutions discovered to the Einstein equations is called the Schwarzschild solution, which applies to a spherically symmetric gravitational source. The solution gives you a “metric” (essentially, a geometry) that is almost the same as “flat” space-time, except for a pesky (1–2GM/c²r) term. But that pesky term has a strange implication: when that term equals zero, the solution “blows up” (i.e. becomes infinite). Space becomes so curved that you essentially have a hole in the fabric of space-time itself.

When does this happen? It happens when R = 2GM/c², as one line of algebra will show. This is called the Schwarzschild radius. The Einstein equations predict that something weird and horrifying happens when a mass is squeezed down to the size of its Schwarzschild radius. Current understanding is that the mass would then keep going, and squeeze itself into a point of zero radius. Literally, zero. (I did say it was weird and horrifying).

Incidentally, the Schwarzschild radius is exactly the radius you’d get if you set the escape speed for an object equal to the speed of light. So this means that not even light can escape this super-squeezed object.

And here’s where various misconceptions start to creep in.

Another name for the Schwarzschild radius is the event horizon. It’s a boundary of no return: if you cross it, you can never go back. But that’s all it is: a boundary. There is not necessarily anything physical at the event horizon. You might never know that you had crossed it. Remember, all the mass is at the center.

Here’s how I “picture” a black hole:

Now, if I am outside the event horizon, what would I see? Well, nothing from inside the event horizon could reach me (hence the term “black”) but I might see Hawking radiation. I would certainly see gravitational lensing: the bending of distant light around a black hole. Here’s a cool picture of gravitational lensing in action (artists conception only!) from Wikipedia:

Let’s say the Sun were a black hole. Its event horizon would be around 3 km. As long as we never got closer than 3km, we could do what we like. We could fly in, fly out, orbit the black hole as we please.

Would the black hole “suck us in”? Sure, in the same way that the Sun sucks us in already. There is a strong pull of the Sun on the Earth. And there would be a strong pull on our hypothetical spaceship. But change the Sun to a black hole, and the pull would not get any stronger. That is the key point that most people miss: black hole gravity is not somehow “stronger” than ordinary gravity. There is just gravity; that’s it. Change the Sun to a black hole, and the Earth would continue in its orbit, and nothing would be any different. Except for, maybe, the lack of light.

Why was the planet Krop Tor’s orbit impossible? Astronomical black holes (created by stellar collapse) have a lot of mass; when there’s a lot of mass hanging around, things tend to orbit them. That’s what you’d expect. It would only be impossible if somehow the orbit crossed the event horizon multiple times during its trajectory. But of course, the show didn’t mention this.

I want to end my rant on GR with a suggestion: that there are two kinds of sci-fi: science fiction, and “sciency” fiction. The first kind tries to get the science right, and makes an effort to be possible (if not plausible). The second kind throws sciency words around in an effort to appeal to a certain demographic. Basically, “sciency” fiction is fantasy, set in outer space. When seen in this light, Dr. Who has more in common with Lord of the Rings than it does with 2001.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Lord of the Rings, and I love Dr. Who. Just don’t call it science fiction.

Posted in Physics | Tagged black holes, Dr. Who, Einstein, general relativity, Physics | 7 Comments »

Don’t cut yourself on Occam’s razor

January 13, 2014 by Matthew Rave

One of the most common criticisms of the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is that it is absurdly complicated, and therefore violates Occam’s razor. Most people’s first reaction, on hearing of MWI, think that the theory is (to quote Martin Gardner) “bizarre”, “monstrous”, “fantastic”, “radical”, “appalling”, “nonsense”, “frivolous”, and “low”. And many people seem to think that theorists who ascribe to MWI have their heads in the clouds to believe such nonsense. MWI seems to be taken, in fact, as evidence that physics has lost its way—as if (supposedly) blind belief in such frivolity is indicative of a philosophical rot that pervades theorists like me.

Theoretical physics today, to some

There are so many refutations of such criticisms that I don’t know where to start. First of all, although MWI is popular, it is by no means canon, and I daresay that a majority of physicists reject it still. So there! We’re not all sheep. Still, MWI has become almost mainstream (especially with cosmologists) so maybe it’s the cosmologists and the ivory-tower theorists who should be singled out for criticism?

People who think this have probably never met a theoretical physicist before in their life. Getting such people to agree is like herding cats; every theory one puts forth (in a journal article or in a conference talk) is debated, criticized—dare I say, attacked. And that is as it should be. There is not, contrary to popular belief, some holy scripture that every theorist quotes verbatim. We are all different, and have basically come to interpret quantum mechanics in our own personal way…not at the behest of some lord on high.

How do I know this? Because I was never taught about interpretations of quantum mechanics. Ever. Everything I know about such things, I learned on my own since graduation. Thinking of taking a quantum mechanics class at your local university? Guess what: they will probably not talk about MWI, or the Copenhagen interpretation, or Schrodinger’s f***ing cat. Why not? Because those are philosophy topics, not physics. You can do quantum mechanics without ever interpreting a single thing. There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s no philosophy in quantum mechanics. It is a purely mathematical theory, that undeniably works, and most people just leave it at that. The idea that thousands of physicists subscribe to one particular world-view just because they constitute a single monolithic conformist society is ludicrous. Invite a physicist to lunch if you don’t believe me.

But I still haven’t addressed the idea that MWI is obviously absurd. It is absurd, right? I mean, come on!

But wait. Let’s think back to the Copernican revolution. It’s obvious that the Earth is stationary, no? I bet people thought that Copernicus and Galileo and their ilk were bizarre, monstrous, fantastic, radical, appalling, nonsensical, frivolous, and low.

And what about the idea that there are billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars? We forget now, but this idea was radical when first presented and wasn’t settled until the 1920’s. Why are we OK with a multiplicity of stars, but not a multiplicity of universes? Why aren’t people complaining about the absurd notion (fact) that there are more stars in the observable universe than there are grains of sand on Earth’s beaches?

Whoa.

So, Occam’s razor. MWI just seems to have too much baggage, right? For a lot of people MWI is too high a cost to bear to have a mathematically simple interpretation of quantum mechanics. And let’s be clear: MWI is a simpler theory than (say) the Copenhagen interpretation (CI). For you can start with three postulates, and add a fourth about wave-function collapse, and you get CI. Or you can start with just three, and say nothing of wave-function collapse, and you get MWI. Which interpretation seems simpler now? MWI is a consequence of accepting the three basic postulates of quantum mechanics. If you don’t like that, then you must introduce a fourth postulate ex nihilo to make yourself feel better.

But wait! you say. 10¹⁰⁰ universes doesn’t seem simpler. It’s a huge number! It’s ridiculous!

OK. You wanna go there? I’ll turn the argument around. By that rationale, you probably believe that there are only a finite number of integers, because any finite number is simpler than infinity. There. That makes sense, right?

The truth is that an infinite set is often simpler than a single member of that set. Take the natural numbers. I can write a computer program in BASIC that writes every natural number. Here it is:

10 x=1

20 PRINT x

30 x=x+1

40 GOTO 20

On the other hand, if I want to print out the number

5679200359662711389685023885761799

then my computer program is longer:

10 PRINT “5679200359662711389685023885761799”

Count the keystrokes. The second program requires more typing. And note that the first (simpler) program will eventually print this number—the long arbitrary program is “contained” within the first.

In information theory, the information “content” of something is related to its algorithmic complexity—roughly speaking, how easy it is to write a computer program that “specifies” the object. By that measure, “all the natural numbers” is a simpler concept than the number

5679200359662711389685023885761799

Similarly, “all possible universes” is a much simpler concept than one specific arbitrary universe. You want to recreate this universe? Good luck…you’ll have to specify the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. That’s a long computer program. However, if you just say “create all possible universes” then eventually this one will pop up…

Do I believe in the MWI? Yes. Why? It’s not because I was indoctrinated into such belief; I don’t think a single professor in graduate school ever mentioned MWI. It’s because I’ve looked at the evidence over a number of years, and (tentatively) decided that it fits the data best. That is the only reason to ever believe something, ever. It fits the data best. But I stress that my conclusion is tentative because, hey, it’s science. There is no dogma. There is just stuff that we are 99.44% sure of.

Like evolution by natural selection, or heliocentrism, or the existence of ghosts. I mean, seeing’s believing, right?

[Note: more Americans believe in ghosts than evolution. Sigh.]

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy my book Why Is There Anything? which is available for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Posted in Many-worlds Interpretation | Tagged many-worlds interpretation, Physics | 66 Comments »

Your tears move millions

January 7, 2014 by Matthew Rave

“Somewhere in the multiverse, you are loved. Somewhere you are hated. Somewhere, you are loved by everyone. Somewhere, you are hated by everyone. God exists, and He does not; the same is true for Allah, and Buddha, and Zeus, Odin, Cthulhu, and the Green Lantern. Somewhere, you are Wonder Woman’s arch villain. Somewhere else, there are no villains, because perfect goodness has found its expression as a mathematical absolute. You cry, and you do not cry; your tears move millions or are forgotten forever.

“And somewhere else, namely here, you are exactly who and what you are. You are loved by those that love you, and you may or may not love them in return. You believe in God, or do not believe; you think that there are other universes, or think that this universe is all that ever was and ever will be. This is the universe you are stuck with. Love it. Hate it. It’s all you’ll ever know.

“And what about goodness? What about justice? Can you live with the idea that in some places, at some times, pure evil has dominion, and good has been forever banished? Are those universes plausible? Or are they phantoms, highly improbable, like the vanishing cracks of a broken teapot?

“Think on this: the ultimate question, “why is there anything?” is perhaps unanswerable, mostly because it requires us to speculate about the unknowable. The fly knows nothing about what’s outside the bottle; Scarlett O’Hara knows nothing about Margaret Mitchell; Plato, in his easy chair, knows nothing about the world as we know it today; the falcon cannot hear the falconer; and you know nothing about life in the fractal part of the æther. And so too, if God exists, we know nothing of him/her/it/them. We know what is before us, what can be observed, measured, quantified, understood. We can speculate all we like; we can even draw inferences from some of our observations, but in the end we can never be sure.

“All we can do is be 51% sure.

“And have faith that in 51% of the universes, goodness prevails.”

From my book Why Is There Anything? which is available for download on the Kindle.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

If Bilbo had a car…

December 11, 2013 by Matthew Rave

Consider this map of Middle Earth:

There’s a scale there, on the left, and the source is none other than J. R. R. Tolkien himself, so we can trust the source. You can verify for yourself, but I reckon Bilbo’s journey to Esgaroth (and then the Lonely Mountain) to be something like 880 miles, and an equal amount on the way back. This leads to my first discovery…

Bilbo’s journey was like walking from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., and back again.

By car, it should have taken 12 hours and 40 minutes to get to Smaug’s hoard, and an equal amount of time to return (assuming Bilbo had access to No Doz). Basically, Bilbo had a long Thanksgiving drive.

What about Frodo’s longer journey to pitch the One Ring into some lava? As the eagle flies, the Shire to Mt. Doom is about 1100 miles, which leads to…

Frodo’s journey (as the eagle flies) was like walking from Baltimore to Miami.

Of course Frodo’s actual journey was a tad more circuitous. Breaking the journey into legs (Shire to Rivendell, Rivendell to Moria, etc.) I get that it was more like 1450 miles, or…

Frodo’s actual journey was like walking from Little Rock, AR to Boston.

By car, assuming that Frodo drives at a reasonable pace and makes only a few stops, it would take 21.5 hours for Frodo to get to Mordor and chuck the ring-thingy into that volcano. (Of course Sam might take a shift driving, and Gollum might be willing to run into the occasional 7-11 to buy snacks.) Frodo’s deus ex machina trip out of Mordor by eagle is a little like getting an unexpected trip back home via helicopter.

There are other games you can play with the map, to give yourself a sense of scale. The Shire is about 21,000 square miles, leading to…

The Shire is about the size of West Virginia.

Insert your own joke here.

Bubba Baggins

Then you find that Mordor (which is suspiciously square in shape!) is about 118,000 square miles, or…

Mordor is about the same size and shape as New Mexico.

This cannot be mere coincidence. Aren’t their climates similar? Isn’t the Trinity nuclear test site analogous to Mt. Doom? Doesn’t New Mexico have George R. R. Martin, who looks very similar to the Mouth of Sauron?

Please don’t ask us about the Winds of Winter!

I’ll end my speculations on this note. “Middle Earth” is an anagram for “Milder Death”, which explains why…well…it explains nothing. Never mind.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cartography, GRRM, The Hobbit, Tolkien | 4 Comments »

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Many Worlds Theory

In one universe, this blog is about quantum mechanics. In another universe, it is not.

A theory of art, or: How George R. R. Martin lost his way

A haiku

This is Something that Happened

Big Bang Discovery Opens Doors to the “Multiverse”

There’s no philosophy in quantum mechanics

The Lego Movie: a parable about the multiverse?

Black hole misconceptions or: Why Dr. Who is not science fiction

Don’t cut yourself on Occam’s razor

Your tears move millions

If Bilbo had a car…

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