Monday, October 23, 2006

Anthropics

You know your branch of academics is in trouble when its dirty laundry is aired in the New Yorker. The recent article on the state of string theory is a pretty good example. I've always sort of felt that the string theorists needed to pull themselves in just a little bit, since you need truly Star Trek gadgets to test even the least of their predictions. No, scratch that, you need gadgets a few magnitudes beyond the energies harnessed in Star Trek.

But on the other hand, I don't think the anthropic principle, and particularly the multiple-universe incarnation thereof, should bring out so much ugliness in the anti-string theory crowd. It's just a tad disingenuous. Anthropic principles are not limited to string theory. In one way or another, the anthropic dilemma has been with us since Einstein-Bell, and before that. It's the nature of the quantum beast. It's why the standard model of modern physics splits things into objective, Einsteinian reality, and bizarre, Daoistic subatomic reality. The two realms rarely intersect, except at the terminii of universes, inside the event horizon, and, apparently, in the complexity of the human mind.

I say the last one half-jokingly, but in truth, there seems to be something to this, at least to my sleep-deprived mind trapped here in the airport. What if what looks like an anthropic principle in modern physics is just the manifestation of a lower order of physical law? What if the very existence of complexity, when it exceeds a certain limit, affects the behavior of elementary particles in a way analagous to the way mass affects space-time? If mass is tied to complexity, it would explain the relationship between anthropics and quantum observations.

Mass and complexity would seem to have a one-way relationship; you can have mass without complexity but it'd be pretty hard to have a critical mass of complexity without a relatively dense mass. You could argue that certain primitive forms of material, gluon plasmas and the like, can sustain complexity, but the energy needed to maintain exotics is too high- to have enough time to reach some sort of critical level of complexity in such material you'd need more energy than is present in the visible universe. Mass and complexity are very good friends, but it does not at first glance appear that it's a two-way street.

Until you take into account that complexity allows mass to avoid losing density through energy release. Your brain, a complex organ, allows your body to walk across the street without losing mass due to energy, or collision with little old ladies in Lincoln Towncars. Feedback mechanisms in stars work the same way, most of the time, except for those times they fail spectacularly.

We won't sidetrack into the secret lives of stars and stellar masses. But complexity can help mass out. Complexity navigates the multiple worlds and finds the best one; mass gathers all potential to itself. As things get more massive, they get more inevitable, until you get to something like a primordial black hole, or, if you add sentient complexity to the mix, an intelligent agent that is possible everywhere, from which there can be no ultimate escape. It's a shame that just when you think you have a good grip on some cosmological problem, Yahweh has to make an appearance. Hi, Yahweh.

Seriously, though, what if the complexity of galaxies and the visible universe *is* some sort of possible-universes-scheme by the sentient black holes to encompass all possible realities. This sentence makes me sound like I should be committed, so I'll stop there, or maybe write a short story about it. Ziggy Stardust and the Black Hole Archons.

But we can, I think, safely play with the assumption that complexity is tied with mass. Mass gathers all that potential where complexity can occur.

To bring all this back to tying mass and complexity with subatomic systems, it would be interesting to see if the existence of complex systems force strings into new harmonics, as the complex systems suck up the local information available to the strings. The harmonics may just be adjusting to the complexity of the observational system. The string harmonic would be like a gerbil hyperventilating while stuck in a locked airtight room with a string theorist, with fifty magnitudes difference in proportion.

Seriously, though, these sorts of tests are devilish to pull off, because quantum states do not like staying in the state they are observed in. Someone managed an experiment something like this late last century using lasers and Bose condensates and space robots, but I'll be damned if I can remember how the hell it worked.

Ah well, so much for the link between quantum physics, mass, and complexity. It's time to return to the social sciences before landing, so I can throw myself into areas I might still be competitive in, even at the ancient age of thirty-one.

Totally off topic, but after so long in the wild, flying in a plane is a whole new experience, like being trapped in a vast beast of limitless power. The pressurization of the compressors, the throttle on the tarmac- it really feels like the tightening of muscles before a leap. A thousand mile leap into the air. We humans do have some cool tricks, and the JetBlue Airbus 320 I'm on is one of them.

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