₦airaland Forum

BlueRayDick:
Did I just read we lack intellectuals? Ol'boy this one Na dust yarn abeg. You probably need to expand Ur network, meet people and will be amazed at the number of Bright minds this country has ( some of which have even been poached by more responsible societies who know their value)

Just take time to go through Professor Ndubuisi Ekekwe's profile attached below, take a look at one of his proposals for tackling the fuel subsidy scam that's been going on for years in this country.

The man is just of the numerous think-tank u claim we don't have available.

The proposal is ingenious. What was Buhari's response to it?

Over 650 Russian scientists and science journalists have signed an open letter calling Russia’s war against Ukraine “unfair and senseless” and stating that there is no “rational justification” for the invasion, which began in the early hours of 24 February.

The Kremlin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered new sanctions from Europe and the US, and has also cast a doubt over several scientific collaborations with Russia, particularly in space.

Following the invasion, scientists in Russia swiftly circulated the letter, which was then published on TrV-Nauka – an independent Russian science news site.

The letter states that having unleashed war, Russia has “doomed itself” to international isolation and to the position of a “pariah country”.

“This means that we, scientists, will no longer be able to do our job normally: after all, conducting scientific research is unthinkable without full cooperation with colleagues from other countries,” the letter states, adding that the isolation would result in further “cultural and technological degradation” of Russia with the war with Ukraine representing a “step to nowhere”.

“We respect Ukrainian statehood, which rests on really working democratic institutions,” the letter states.

“We treat the European choice of our neighbours with understanding. We are convinced that all problems in relations between our countries can be resolved peacefully.”

The letter ends by calling for an “immediate halt” to the operation against Ukraine.

“We demand respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state,” the letter states. “We demand peace for our countries.

"Let’s do science, not war!”

Space programmes

Russia’s increasing international isolation could also impact international collaborations.

Following the announcement by US president Joe Biden of a tranche of new sanctions, NASA issued a media release stating that it was continuing to work with all international partners, including the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, for the “ongoing safe operations” of the International Space Station.

“The new export control measures will continue to allow US-Russia civil space cooperation,” the release continued.

“No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in orbit and ground station operations”.

Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin took a similarly measured line, noting on Twitter that “NASA confirmed its willingness to continue to cooperate with Roscosmos” before adding that “we continue to analyse the new US sanctions to detail our response”.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Thursday, however, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson questioned the future of scientific collaborations with Russia.

“I’ve been broadly in favour of continuing artistic and scientific collaboration,” noted Johnson.

“But in the current circumstances, it’s hard to see how even those can continue as normal.”

Several European-led missions are scheduled to be launched via Russian-built rockets later this year or in 2023.

The Rosalind Franklin rover, previously known as the ExoMars rover, is currently scheduled to take off in September from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan via a Proton-M rocket.

Designed to seek out evidence of past life on Mars, it is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos.

The orbital dynamics of Earth and Mars mean that launch windows only open for a short period every two years, to take advantage of the two planets’ closest approach to one another.

The rover’s launch has already been delayed from 2020 to 2022 amid parachute and electronics difficulties and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If it launches in September, it would reach Mars by April 2023 at the earliest, but additional postponements could mean a further two-year delay.

ESA is also expected to launch the €500m Euclid mission via a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2023 from Kourou in French Guiana.

Euclid is designed to explore the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, using a 1.2 m diameter telescope, a camera and a spectrometer to plot a 3D map of the distribution of more than two billion galaxies – a view that will stretch across 10 billion light-years, revealing details of the universe’s structure and its expansion.

ESA director general Josef Aschbacher took to Twitter to say he is “sad and worried as the aggression continues to worsen in Ukraine” and that they are continuing to monitor the “evolving” situation.

“Civil space cooperation remains a bridge,” noted Aschbacher. “ESA continues to work on all of its programmes, including on ISS & ExoMars launch campaign, in order to honour commitments with member states & partners”.

He adds that ESA member states will take “any decisions needed”. “But for now, support for our missions & colleagues continues until further notice.”

Meanwhile, the Germany Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF, noted that it is to stop all science and research collaboration with Russia, as well as vocational education and training.

International decisions

The Russian invasion is also having an impact on international meetings.

The International Congress of Mathematicians 2022 (ICM) is currently scheduled to be held in St. Petersburg from 6-14 July, but several mathematical societies have called for the International Mathematical Union (IMU), which is responsible for the event, to cancel.

The London Mathematical Society, for example, says it no longer plans to send delegates to the ICM.

“The Society strongly recommends that the IMU not hold the ICM in Russia in July 2022,” it noted in a statement.

“The IMU has been approached by several societies and individuals who raise serious and understandable concerns about the consequences of the conflict for the ICM,” the IMU said in a statement.

“The executive committee of the IMU is now assessing the situation, and will make a decision as soon as possible regarding how to proceed.

"We will communicate this decision to our members once it has been made without delay.”

Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/russian-scientists-condemn-ukraine-invasion-as-international-projects-and-meetings-thrown-into-doubt/

Interesting arguments.

BlueMann:

Lols, is that tweet really from the man holding the helm at No. 10 Downing Street?

Workch:
A whole lotta years ago, some caveman just had his whole fucking head bitten off by a tiger or bear or some shit, and other cavemen looked at this and went "well shit, that thing is a god, let's worship it." After a while of what was now the first ever religion, the tiger or bear or whatever just straight up died, or someone murdered it to death, and everyone looked at it and was like "well Bleep, guess that wasn't a god."

Then someone looked at a bird and went "well flying clearly is impossible, and that thing can fly, so it must be a god." And then like a cat ate the bird and so they were all like "okay, that wasn't god either."

Then the gods lived on mountains and in caves, until someone went up onto the mountains and into the caves and said "nope, no gods."

Then the gods lived across the oceans and on the clouds, until someone crossed the oceans and looked at the clouds and again, no gods.

Then the gods lived in the stars and the heavens, until someone did some maths and realised the stars and the heavens were balls of gas and rock floating about and shit.

The gods used to control the tides and the winds, the thunder and the rain, the flow of rivers and the formation of mountains. Now we can explain all of that.

Gods now live nowhere, they live in some alternate plane that we can never access. They don't control the tides and the winds directly, but they positioned the atoms correctly so that the tides and the winds would happen naturally. They don't come down from the sky on flaming chariots, but instead you can just sort of feel them in your heart, and occasionally they make some teams good enough at football than other team makes the playoffs this year.

'God' is a term people use to not have to think about things they can't explain, and every time someone else sits down and explains something, their god has one less place to be, one less thing to do. Now, some of the most famous explanations for what god must have done revolve around the fact that the whole fucking universe started and even though we know how, we don't quite know why yet, and so that 'why' must be 'a god', just like every other 'why' ever asked has at some point been 'goddidit'.

Well said.

How Could the Big Bang Arise From Nothing?

READER QUESTION: My understanding is that nothing comes from nothing.

For something to exist, there must be material or a component available, and for them to be available, there must be something else available.

Now my question: Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material? Peter, 80, Australia.

“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.”

So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe.

The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch.

All matter will eventually be consumed by monstrous black holes, which in their turn will evaporate away into the dimmest glimmers of light.

Space will expand ever outwards until even that dim light becomes too spread out to interact. Activity will cease.

Or will it? Strangely enough, some cosmologists believe a previous, cold dark empty universe like the one which lies in our far future could have been the source of our very own Big Bang.

The First Matter

But before we get to that, let’s take a look at how “material”—physical matter—first came about.

If we are aiming to explain the origins of stable matter made of atoms or molecules, there was certainly none of that around at the Big Bang—nor for hundreds of thousands of years afterwards.

We do in fact have a pretty detailed understanding of how the first atoms formed out of simpler particles once conditions cooled down enough for complex matter to be stable, and how these atoms were later fused into heavier elements inside stars.

But that understanding doesn’t address the question of whether something came from nothing.

So let’s think further back.

The first long-lived matter particles of any kind were protons and neutrons, which together make up the atomic nucleus.

These came into existence around one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang.

Before that point, there was really no material in any familiar sense of the word.

But physics lets us keep on tracing the timeline backwards—to physical processes which predate any stable matter.

This takes us to the so-called “grand unified epoch.”

By now, we are well into the realm of speculative physics, as we can’t produce enough energy in our experiments to probe the sort of processes that were going on at the time.

But a plausible hypothesis is that the physical world was made up of a soup of short-lived elementary particles, including quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

There was both matter and “antimatter” in roughly equal quantities: each type of matter particle, such as the quark, has an antimatter “mirror image” companion, which is near identical to itself, differing only in one aspect.

However, matter and antimatter annihilate in a flash of energy when they meet, meaning these particles were constantly created and destroyed.

But how did these particles come to exist in the first place?

Quantum field theory tells us that even a vacuum, supposedly corresponding to empty spacetime, is full of physical activity in the form of energy fluctuations.

These fluctuations can give rise to particles popping out, only to be disappear shortly after.

This may sound like a mathematical quirk rather than real physics, but such particles have been spotted in countless experiments.

The spacetime vacuum state is seething with particles constantly being created and destroyed, apparently “out of nothing.”

But perhaps all this really tells us is that the quantum vacuum is (despite its name) a something rather than a nothing.

The philosopher David Albert has memorably criticized accounts of the Big Bang which promise to get something from nothing in this way.

Suppose we ask: where did spacetime itself arise from? Then we can go on turning the clock yet further back, into the truly ancient “Planck epoch”—a period so early in the universe’s history that our best theories of physics break down.

This era occurred only one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

At this point, space and time themselves became subject to quantum fluctuations.

Physicists ordinarily work separately with quantum mechanics, which rules the microworld of particles, and with general relativity, which applies on large, cosmic scales.

But to truly understand the Planck epoch, we need a complete theory of quantum gravity, merging the two.

We still don’t have a perfect theory of quantum gravity, but there are attempts, like string theory and loop quantum gravity.

In these attempts, ordinary space and time are typically seen as emergent, like the waves on the surface of a deep ocean.

What we experience as space and time are the product of quantum processes operating at a deeper, microscopic level – processes that don’t make much sense to us as creatures rooted in the macroscopic world.

In the Planck epoch, our ordinary understanding of space and time breaks down, so we can’t any longer rely on our ordinary understanding of cause and effect either.

Despite this, all candidate theories of quantum gravity describe something physical that was going on in the Planck epoch—some quantum precursor of ordinary space and time.

But where did that come from?

Even if causality no longer applies in any ordinary fashion, it might still be possible to explain one component of the Planck-epoch universe in terms of another.

Unfortunately, by now even our best physics fails completely to provide answers. Until we make further progress towards a “theory of everything,” we won’t be able to give any definitive answer.

The most we can say with confidence at this stage is that physics has so far found no confirmed instances of something arising from nothing.

Cycles From Almost Nothing

To truly answer the question of how something could arise from nothing, we would need to explain the quantum state of the entire universe at the beginning of the Planck epoch.

All attempts to do this remain highly speculative. Some of them appeal to supernatural forces like a designer.

But other candidate explanations remain within the realm of physics—such as a multiverse, which contains an infinite number of parallel universes, or cyclical models of the universe, being born and reborn again.

The 2020 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose has proposed one intriguing but controversial model for a cyclical universe dubbed “conformal cyclic cosmology.”

Penrose was inspired by an interesting mathematical connection between a very hot, dense, small state of the universe—as it was at the Big Bang—and an extremely cold, empty, expanded state of the universe—as it will be in the far future.

His radical theory to explain this correspondence is that those states become mathematically identical when taken to their limits.

Paradoxical though it might seem, a total absence of matter might have managed to give rise to all the matter we see around us in our universe.

In this view, the Big Bang arises from an almost nothing.

That’s what’s left over when all the matter in a universe has been consumed into black holes, which have in turn boiled away into photons—lost in a void.

The whole universe thus arises from something that, viewed from another physical perspective, is as close as one can get to nothing at all.

But that nothing is still a kind of something. It is still a physical universe, however empty.

How can the very same state be a cold, empty universe from one perspective and a hot dense universe from another?

The answer lies in a complex mathematical procedure called “conformal rescaling,” a geometrical transformation which in effect alters the size of an object but leaves its shape unchanged.

Penrose showed how the cold dense state and the hot dense state could be related by such rescaling so that they match with respect to the shapes of their spacetimes—although not to their sizes.

It is, admittedly, difficult to grasp how two objects can be identical in this way when they have different sizes—but Penrose argues size as a concept ceases to make sense in such extreme physical environments.

In conformal cyclic cosmology, the direction of explanation goes from old and cold to young and hot: the hot dense state exists because of the cold empty state.

But this “because” is not the familiar one—of a cause followed in time by its effect. It is not only size that ceases to be relevant in these extreme states: time does too.

The cold dense state and the hot dense state are in effect located on different timelines.

The cold empty state would continue on forever from the perspective of an observer in its own temporal geometry, but the hot dense state it gives rise to effectively inhabits a new timeline all its own.

It may help to understand the hot dense state as produced from the cold empty state in some non-causal way.

Perhaps we should say that the hot dense state emerges from, or is grounded in, or realized by the cold, empty state.

These are distinctively metaphysical ideas which have been explored by philosophers of science extensively, especially in the context of quantum gravity where ordinary cause and effect seem to break down.

At the limits of our knowledge, physics and philosophy become hard to disentangle.

Experimental Evidence?

Conformal cyclic cosmology offers some detailed, albeit speculative, answers to the question of where our Big Bang came from.

But even if Penrose’s vision is vindicated by the future progress of cosmology, we might think that we still wouldn’t have answered a deeper philosophical question—a question about where physical reality itself came from.

How did the whole system of cycles come about?

Then we finally end up with the pure question of why there is something rather than nothing—one of the biggest questions of metaphysics.

But our focus here is on explanations which remain within the realm of physics.

There are three broad options to the deeper question of how the cycles began. It could have no physical explanation at all.

Or there could be endlessly repeating cycles, each a universe in its own right, with the initial quantum state of each universe explained by some feature of the universe before.

Or there could be one single cycle, and one single repeating universe, with the beginning of that cycle explained by some feature of its own end.

The latter two approaches avoid the need for any uncaused events—and this gives them a distinctive appeal.

Nothing would be left unexplained by physics.

Penrose envisages a sequence of endless new cycles for reasons partly linked to his own preferred interpretation of quantum theory.

In quantum mechanics, a physical system exists in a superposition of many different states at the same time, and only “picks one” randomly, when we measure it.

For Penrose, each cycle involves random quantum events turning out a different way—meaning each cycle will differ from those before and after it.

This is actually good news for experimental physicists, because it might allow us to glimpse the old universe that gave rise to ours through faint traces, or anomalies, in the leftover radiation from the Big Bang seen by the Planck satellite.

Penrose and his collaborators believe they may have spotted these traces already, attributing patterns in the Planck data to radiation from supermassive black holes in the previous universe.

However, their claimed observations have been challenged by other physicists and the jury remains out.

Endless new cycles are key to Penrose’s own vision.

But there is a natural way to convert conformal cyclic cosmology from a multi-cycle to a one-cycle form.

Then physical reality consists in a single cycling around through the Big Bang to a maximally empty state in the far future—and then around again to the very same Big Bang, giving rise to the very same universe all over again.

This latter possibility is consistent with another interpretation of quantum mechanics, dubbed the many-worlds interpretation.

The many-worlds interpretation tells us that each time we measure a system that is in superposition, this measurement doesn’t randomly select a state.

Instead, the measurement result we see is just one possibility—the one that plays out in our own universe.

The other measurement results all play out in other universes in a multiverse, effectively cut off from our own.

So no matter how small the chance of something occurring, if it has a non-zero chance then it occurs in some quantum parallel world.

There are people just like you out there in other worlds who have won the lottery, or have been swept up into the clouds by a freak typhoon, or have spontaneously ignited, or have done all three simultaneously.

Some people believe such parallel universes may also be observable in cosmological data, as imprints caused by another universe colliding with ours.

Many-worlds quantum theory gives a new twist on conformal cyclic cosmology, though not one that Penrose agrees with.

Our Big Bang might be the rebirth of one single quantum multiverse, containing infinitely many different universes all occurring together.

Everything possible happens—then it happens again and again and again.

An Ancient Myth

For a philosopher of science, Penrose’s vision is fascinating.

It opens up new possibilities for explaining the Big Bang, taking our explanations beyond ordinary cause and effect.

It is therefore a great test case for exploring the different ways physics can explain our world. It deserves more attention from philosophers.

For a lover of myth, Penrose’s vision is beautiful.

In Penrose’s preferred multi-cycle form, it promises endless new worlds born from the ashes of their ancestors.

In its one-cycle form, it is a striking modern re-invocation of the ancient idea of the ouroboros, or world-serpent.

In Norse mythology, the serpent Jörmungandr is a child of Loki, a clever trickster, and the giant Angrboda. Jörmungandr consumes its own tail, and the circle created sustains the balance of the world.

But the ouroboros myth has been documented all over the world— including as far back as ancient Egypt.

The ouroboros of the one cyclic universe is majestic indeed.

It contains within its belly our own universe, as well as every one of the weird and wonderful alternative possible universes allowed by quantum physics—and at the point where its head meets its tail, it is completely empty yet also coursing with energy at temperatures of a hundred thousand million billion trillion degrees Celsius.

Even Loki, the shapeshifter, would be impressed.

Source: https://singularityhub.com/2022/01/09/how-could-the-big-bang-arise-from-nothing/

The Oba of Benin, Oba Ewuare II, will on Saturday take physical possession of two other bronzes from Cambridge and Aberdeen in the United Kingdom (UK).

This is contained in statement yesterday in Benin City, the Edo State capital, by the Secretary to the Benin Traditional Council, Frank Irobor.

Irabor said the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Catriona Laing, would return the artefacts to Oba of Benin in his palace in adherence to the directive of President Muhammadu Buhari.

“The general public is hereby invited to join His Royal Majesty in receiving the Benin Bronzes of Okpa (Cockerel) and the Bronze burst of an Oba (Uhunilao) both from Jesus College, Cambridge in Britain and Aberdeen in Scotland, respectively.

“The general public is invited to the physical handing over of the Benin Bronze artefacts to the Oba of Benin.

“All invited guests are to be seated by 11.00 a.m,” the statement said.

Source: https://thenationonlineng.net/uk-to-return-another-looted-artefacts-to-oba-of-benin-saturday/

Cc: Mynd44, lalasticlala, bigfrancis21

DeadPresidents:
Lol

Ten Hag is not Ten Haag

Where is Ten Haag in the photo?

It seems Ajax coach is set to join manure in the summer.

Amoto94:
Chelsea have been more successful with low sum signings when compared to the high sum ones

Yes, that's true.

Wow, the news is quite shocking! Mubarak was an easygoing guy and a Muslim devout. I remember him very well during his PG and UG days (in 2008) then in Biomedical Science Department, UI.

Jodera:
It all boils down to consistent performances. Apart from late Stephen Keshi, no indigenous coach have given consistent performances for Nigeria in recent times. So we can't just give a coach time for giving sake. Moreover, one of the reasons Rohr lasted was also because he was consistent in performances(it was just like after Afcon 2019 we started seeing poor performances), else he too would have been sacked since

That's true.

Judging from the content of the attached photo, do you think Eguavoen deserves to be given some years to build a solid Super Eagles team especially if Nigeria can defeat Ghana next month and qualify for the World Cup?

Insightful.

kkins25:
You know, The idea that stones have consciousness is not new at all.. I was reading this in a book written by late - ahmm-ahmm- fvck-fvck-fvck- i cant Remember- Any way, the author who claims to be possessed by an entity that identifies as "Seth" gives her revelations and one of them being "consciousness is reality itself" - to paraphrase it.

my mind right now - BOOOOOOMMMMMM.. I abandon the book but i think i should open it again.


ohh oh oh, the author is Jane roberts. my memory just completed search i guess.
ahm, the book was called - ahh they are so many of them but my good picks are: seth material, evolution of the soul, personally reality, and something in the likes of " mass reality of something"....
Amazing!!!!!

Yes, everything has consciousness in distinct forms, and consciousness should be an inherent property of matter, just like mass, charge, and spin.

I wonder how consciousness can be incorporated mathematically in Physics.

kkins25:
You know, what really fascinates me about recent discoveries, is that they corroborate mystic ideologies of the ancient wise men. i mean, i recently saw a scientific speculation where the universe may have its "twin" just in the opposite direction to ours with respect to the big bang.

for example, reaction =action is the classic as above, so below.

this guys where working with mostly their minds. like, Where the hell did this magis go? died of due to war?

the level of knowledge they had concerning the universe leaves me astounded. Our ancestors may not be as daft as we proclaim them to be.

Interesting. The notion that the Universe may have a twin is quite deep.

I posit the Universe arose from nothing, which is a vacuum created in the early stages predating the existence of the Universe when there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter that annihilated each other.

This means in that vacuum, the matter existing exactly balanced the antimatter existing, giving rise to nothing, and quantum fluctuations in that nothing led to the creation of the Universe.

Check the attached photo.

The idea that everything from spoons to stones is conscious is gaining academic credibility

Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.

This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist” view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.

“Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?” says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

“Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense.

"Our intuitive reaction isn’t necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality.”

David Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995, demonstrating that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness.

Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have provided a framework for solving this problem.


Both lead to seemingly intractable complications.

“Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.”
The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter.

It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work. “It’s very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness,” says Chalmers. “Physics is just structure.

It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.” Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter—but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world.

Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff.

These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’ subjective experiences.

This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.

Panpsychism doesn’t necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious. “Panpsychists usually don’t take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as a whole,” writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York University’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email.

“Rather, the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their own very simple form of consciousness.”

But, then again, panpsychism could very well imply that conscious tables exist: One interpretation of the theory holds that “any system is conscious,” says Chalmers.

“Rocks will be conscious, spoons will be conscious, the Earth will be conscious. Any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness.”

Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard problem” paper.

Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study.

There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and popular articles taking panpsychism seriously.

One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism.

Tononi argues that something will have a form of “consciousness” if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Because it applies to all structures—not just the human brain—Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.

Goff, who has written an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s.

Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers.

This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.

“Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume,” says Goff.

“Eddington”—the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the early 20th century—“argued there’s a gap in our picture of the universe.

We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap.”

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”
In Eddington’s view, Goff writes in an email, it’s “”silly” to suppose that that underlying nature has nothing to do with consciousness and then to wonder where consciousness comes from.”

Stephen Hawking has previously asked: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Goff adds: “The Russell-Eddington proposal is that it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.”

The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the “combination problem”: Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness?

Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn’t answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.

Any theory that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which complex systems—from inanimate objects to plants to ants—count as conscious.

An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious.

This, says Goff, isn’t the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it’s more like seeing it as a “cosmic mess.”

Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles.

Goff believes quantum entanglement—the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they’re separated by such immense distances there can’t be a causal signal between them—suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.

Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness.

“The more I think about [any theory], the less plausible it becomes,” says Chalmers. “One starts as a materialist, then turns into a dualist, then a panpsychist, then an idealist,” he adds, echoing his paper on the subject.

Idealism holds that physical matter does not exist at all and conscious experience is the only thing there is. From that perspective, panpsychism is quite moderate.

Chalmers quotes his colleague, the philosopher John Perry, who says: “If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administration.”

Source: https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/

musicwriter:
Finally, the rule of thumb is that the word "Christ" predate your Jesus. There are so many older "saviors", "messiahs" known by history before your Jesus, therefore Jesus has to be a fraud.

Bro, please I'm still waiting to hear from you.

The puzzle of the 'lost' angular momentum

In a closed physical system, the sum of all angular momentum remains constant, according to an important physical law of conservation.

Angular momentum does not necessarily need to involve "real" bodily rotation in this context: Magnetic materials even have angular momentum when, seen from outside, they are at rest.

Physicists Albert Einstein and Wander Johannes de Haas were able to prove that in 1915.

If such a magnetized material is now bombarded with short pulses of laser light, it loses its magnetic order extremely quickly.

Within femtoseconds—a millionth of a billionth second—it becomes demagnetized. The electrons' angular momentum in the material—also called spin—thus decreases abruptly, much faster than the material can set itself in rotation.

According to the conservation principle, however, the angular momentum cannot simply be lost.

So, where is the spin angular momentum transferred to in such an extremely short time?

The solution to the puzzle was now published in the scientific journal Nature.

In the study, a team led by Konstanz researchers investigated the demagnetization of nickel crystals using ultrafast electron diffraction—a highly precise measuring method in terms of time and space that can make the course of structural changes visible at the atomic level.

They were able to show that the electrons of the crystal transfer their angular momentum to the atoms of the crystal lattice within a few hundred femtoseconds during demagnetization.

Much like the passengers on a merry-go-round, the atoms are set in motion on tiny circuits and thus balance the angular momentum.

It is only much later and more slowly that the macroscopic rotation effect named after Einstein and de Haas begins, which can be measured mechanically.

These findings show new ways of controlling angular momentum extremely quickly, opening up new possibilities for improving magnetic information technologies or new research directions in spintronics.

Magnetism in metallic solids

Magnetic phenomena have become an indispensable part of modern technology. They play an important role especially in information processing and data storage.

"The speed and efficiency of existing technologies is often limited by the comparatively long duration of magnetic switching processes," explains Professor Peter Baum, experimental physicist at the University of Konstanz and one of the heads of the study.

All the more interesting for materials research, therefore, is a surprising phenomenon that can be observed in nickel, among other things: ultrafast demagnetization caused by bombardment with laser pulses.

Just like iron, nickel physically belongs to the ferromagnetic materials.

Permanent magnets as we know them from our everyday lives can be made from these materials, for example refrigerator magnets.

The permanent magnetization results from a parallel arrangement of the magnetic moments of neighboring particles of the material.

"To illustrate this, we can imagine the magnetic moments as small arrows that all point in the same direction," explains Professor Ulrich Nowak, theoretical physicist at the University of Konstanz and also one of the project leaders.

Physically, the angular momentum or spin of the electrons of the ferromagnetic material is the cause for these "arrows" and their direction.

Ultrafast demagnetization via laser

Through bombardment with laser light, the perfect alignment of the magnetic moments can be destroyed within a very short time. "A laser pulse of under 100 femtoseconds is enough to do so.

Such laser pulses belong to the shortest human-made events that exist," explains Ulrich Nowak and continues: "The laser pulse heats the material to such an extent that the 'arrows'—to stay with the image—are swirled around.

In the end, one half points one way and the second half points the other way."

This is where the law of conservation of angular momentum comes into play, because the change in direction of the "arrows" changes the spin of the electrons and thus the angular momentum.

However, since the sum of all angular momentum in the material must be maintained, the spin cannot simply disappear.

Instead, it must be transferred somewhere else in some form.

How this can happen within femtoseconds was unclear until now and only contradictory theoretical considerations on this phenomenon existed.

How the puzzle was solved

To solve the physical puzzle, close cooperation between theorists and experimentalists was needed: Based on a hypothesis by the two Konstanz professors Peter Baum and Ulrich Nowak, a team from theoretical physics first used computer simulations to work out a series of predictions about possible atomic movements during ultrafast demagnetization.

The experimental physicists then verified these predictions through experiments with femtosecond lasers and ultrashort pulses of electrons.

Professor Wolfgang Kreuzpaintner's team at the Technical University of Munich provided the ultrathin nickel crystals.

"For our experiment, we first magnetized our nickel crystal in a specific direction and then demagnetized it with a femtosecond laser pulse in an ultrafast way," says Peter Baum, describing the basic set-up of the experiment.

Meanwhile, the researchers led by first author Dr. Sonja Tauchert observed the crystal using ultrafast electron diffraction.

This method makes it possible to obtain information about the temporal changes in the structure of materials—and to do so with atomic spatial precision and a temporal resolution in the femtosecond range.

The resulting sequences of diffraction patterns—atomic slow-motion recordings of demagnetization, so to speak—could then be interpreted using the computer-assisted predictions of the theorists.

"Our experiments and simulations showed that the angular momentum of the electrons is transferred locally to the atoms of the crystal lattice on the same time scale on which the magnetic order of the crystal is lost," explains Ulrich Nowak.

At first, a few atoms begin to move in circular orbits around their original resting position.

Through interaction with neighboring atoms, this movement and thus the angular momentum is very quickly transferred to all other atoms.

Finally, the entire crystal lattice uniformly oscillates in tiny circular orbits. Physicist generally refer to such a collective lattice vibration as "phonon."

In the special case described, these phonons are circularly polarized and therefore carry angular momentum.

Spintronics

"This not only solved an old mystery in solid-state physics, but simultaneously provided experimental proof that polarized lattice vibrations can indeed transport angular momentum—very effectively and in an ultrafast way," says Peter Baum.

"The Einstein-de-Haas effect has an intermediate step on atomic dimensions," he adds.

Such effects might be used to control magnetic materials using laser light and potentially create more efficient alternatives to conventional electronics.

"We hope that this will enable us to produce improved components in the future.

Unlike current electronic circuits, these would work with spin transport instead of charge transport, which would be significantly more energy-efficient," explains Ulrich Nowak.

"By demonstrating that lattice vibrations can transport a spin, we open up a new, potentially promising path towards novel devices in spintronics."

Source: https://phys.org/news/2022-02-puzzle-lost-angular-momentum.html

Equations built giants like Google. Who’ll find the next billion-dollar bit of maths?

Obscure, generations-old theorems have been transformative in tech, and there are still plenty out there to be used

In 1998, a computer science PhD student called Larry Page submitted a patent for internet search based on an obscure piece of mathematics.

The method, known today as PageRank, allowed the most relevant webpages to be found much more rapidly and accurately than ever before.

The patent, initially owned by Stanford, was sold in 2005 for shares that are today worth more than $1bn. Page’s company, Google, has a net worth of well over $1tr.

It wasn’t Page, or Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin, who created the mathematics described in the patent.

The equation they used is at least 100 years old, building on properties of matrices (mathematical structures akin to a spreadsheet of numbers).

Similar methods were used by Chinese mathematicians more than two millennia ago.

Page and Brin’s insight was to realise that by calculating what is known as the stationary distribution of a matrix describing connections on the world wide web, they could find the most popular sites more rapidly.

Applying the correct equation can suddenly solve an important practical problem, and completely change the world we live in.

The PageRank story is neither the first nor the most recent example of a little-known piece of mathematics transforming tech.

In 2015, three engineers used the idea of gradient descent, dating back to the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy in the mid-19th century, to increase the time viewers spent watching YouTube by 2,000%.

Their equation transformed the service from a place we went to for a few funny clips to a major consumer of our viewing time.

From the 1990s onwards, the financial industry has been built on variations of the diffusion equation, attributed to a variety of mathematicians including Einstein.

Professional gamblers make use of logistic regression, developed by the Oxford statistician Sir David Cox in the 50s, to ensure they win at the expense of those punters who are less maths-savvy.

There is good reason to expect that there are more billion-dollar equations out there: generations-old mathematical theorems with the potential for new applications.

The question is where to look for the next one.

A few candidates can be found in mathematical work in the latter part of the 20th century.

One comes in the form of fractals, patterns that are self-similar, repeating on many different levels, like the branches of a tree or the shape of a broccoli head.

Mathematicians developed a comprehensive theory of fractals in the 80s, and there was some excitement about applications that could store data more efficiently.

Interest died out until recently, when a small community of computer scientists started showing how mathematical fractals can produce the most amazing, weird and wonderful patterns.

Another field of mathematics still looking for a money-making application is chaos theory, the best-known example of which is the butterfly effect: if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, we need to know about it in order to predict a storm in the North Atlantic.

More generally, the theory tells us that, in order to accurately predict storms (or political events), we need to know about every tiny air disturbance on the entire planet. An impossible task.

But chaos theory also points towards repeatable patterns.

The Lorenz attractor is a model of the weather that, despite being chaotic, does produce somewhat regular and recognisable patterns. Given the uncertainty of the times we live in, it may be time to revive these ideas.

Some of my own research has focused on self-propelled particle models, which describe movements similar to those of bird flocks and fish schools.

I now apply these models to better coordinate tactical formations in football and to scout players who move in ways that create more space for themselves and their teammates.

Another related model is current reinforced random walks, which capture how ants build trails, and the structure of slime mould transportation networks.

This model could take us from today’s computers – which have central processing units (CPUs) that make computations and separate memory chips to store information – to new forms of computation in which computation and memory are part of the same process.

Like ant trails and slime mould, these new computers would benefit from being decentralised. Difficult computational problems, in particular in AI and computer vision, could be broken down in to smaller sub-problems and solved more rapidly.

Whenever there is a breakthrough application of an equation, we see a whole range of copycat imitations.

The current boom in artificial intelligence is primarily driven by just two equations – gradient descent and logistic regression – put together to create what is known as a neural network.

But history shows that the next big leap forward doesn’t come from repeatedly using the same mathematical trick.

It comes instead from a completely new idea, read from the more obscure pages of the book of mathematics.

The challenge of finding the next billion-dollar equation is not simply one of knowing every page of that book.

Page spotted the right problem to solve at the right time, and he persuaded the more theoretically inclined Brin to help him find the maths to help them.

You don’t need to be a mathematical genius yourself in order to put the subject to good use. You just need to have a feeling for what equations are, and what they can and can’t do.

Mathematics still holds many hidden intellectual and financial riches. It is up to all of us to try to find them. The search for the next billion-dollar equation is on.

Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/24/equations-google-billion-dollar-bits-of-maths

KnownUnknown:
Okay, maybe you rustled up enough dough for a bigger laptop. You would need a more than a mini laptop for all your jobs and your MSc/PhD.

Lols, of course I've used many laptops in the past, including a mini laptop, Mr F = MB lols

KnownUnknown:
You must be pretty busy between your job as a tech writer, physicist, and theoretical physicist all performed on a mini laptop. Sleep tight and may you have lucid dreams.

You wish you were as “jobless” as I am.

Lols, afi mini laptop na. It appears you're delusional.

KnownUnknown:
That’s cool but I’m still waiting for the equations and explanation or choice about your favored theory.

They're not meant to be posted casually on Nairaland. Physics is serious work for me, and what you ask for isn't meant for this community.

I don't even plan to post any articles or works I did in the past or am doing at the moment on Nairaland.

KnownUnknown:
You don’t seem to be lacking time at the moment.

After the day's job and having just finished watching the AFCON semifinal match, the next thing is to have a good night sleep, not keep a vigil engaging in Nairaland's cyclical arguments that never end.

Only jobless people do that.

KnownUnknown:
F = MA is so embarrassing!! I’ll never live this down. How dare I write F =ma as F = MA. Totally unforgivable.

Now explain a theoretical physics equation like F = MA F = ma.

When you don't know SS1 Physics (SI units, kinematics, vectors and scalars), but you're discussing Advanced Physics ignorantly with a physicist. Lols, Nairaland na funny place

KnownUnknown:
Congratulations, you copied from some source and corrected simple typos.
Theoretical Physics equations aren’t as easily searchable otherwise you would have posted some already.

Nairaland is indeed a funny place. Where else can you easily converse with a theoretical physicist?

Lols. This man is incurably ignorant and irredeemably stupid.

Check the post you quoted again and learn what scalars and vectors are to know why I typed the symbol, a, in bold.

You just keep embarrassing yourself in public.

It's even better for me to stop engaging you, Mr F = MA. MA ko MB ni

KnownUnknown:
[s]Where do you do your research?
Which universities are you associated with?
Have you published any papers?[/s]
Can you post some of your equations and what they prove?
Are you leaning toward Quantum Loop Theory or String Theory? Why?
[s]Do you do this Theoretical Physics in Nigeria?[/s]

It seems you're more stupid than I thought. So, if I'm working on some researches and writing some books, I should release my works in public when they're yet to be published.

Instead of wasting my time with cyclical arguments on Nairaland, it's better to organize my ideas, develop them scientifically, and put them in the form of a research paper to be published in a journal for scrutiny and peer review or in the form of a book.

KnownUnknown:
You don’t have to tell me not to believe your posts. Prima facie, they are simply unbelievable.

And how is this my business?

KnownUnknown:
Lol. F = ma doesn’t exist in physics says the theoretical physicist.

Mysticism. Have I redeemed myself in your eyes now that mysthycism has been spelt without a typo?

No, there's nothing like F = MA in Physics as stated above.

It's good you changed it to the correct equation, F = ma, which is even more correctly put as F = m a

To prevent ambiguity and confusion, the correct use of symbols is crucial in Physics.

And a, the symbol for acceleration, is different from A, the symbol for area or A magnetic vector potential or A, the S.I. unit of electric current (Ampere).

Judging from your posts and comments, it's clear you don't even know the basics in Physics.

Nairaland is a funny place.

KnownUnknown:
Where do you do your research?
Which universities are you associated with?
Have you published any papers?
Can you post some of your equations and what they prove?
Are you leaning toward Quantum Loop Theory or String Theory? Why?
Do you do this Theoretical Physics in Nigeria?

And why should I answer these questions when I already told you my posts are not meant to be believed?

Why should I release personal details about myself on an anonymous forum? To what end?