Kinda sums it up ...

Random Walks/Winter's End

Random walks, you know, doing a meander enables one to see things. In this short clip, streams, telephone pole hardware, shorelines and a Worm Moon set the foreground to the background of early spring with bird song, insects and crocuses. Enjoy.

Advice ... from a trusted source :)

Advice ... from a trusted source :)

Of Fog ...

Resevoir Bubbles

Golfers

Zen Tree ...

It's about time ...

Bank of England

Alan Turing finally gets his due, this time, not only his picture but also several easter eggs, commemorating a visionary years ahead of his time, on England's upcoming 50 Pound note. Said note will be issued June 23rd on Alan Turing's B' Day. Awesome.

The Bank of England has revealed the design for the UK’s new £50 note featuring computer scientist and codebreaker Alan Turing. Turing was selected to appear on the note in July 2019 in recognition of his groundbreaking work in mathematics and computer science, as well as his role in cracking the Enigma code used by Germany in World War II.

The polymer note will enter circulation from June 23 this year, and incorporates a number of designs linked to Turing’s life and legacy. These include technical drawings for the bombe, a decryption device used during WWII; a string of ticker tape with Turing’s birthday rendered in binary (23 June 1912); a green and gold security foil resembling a microchip; and a table and mathematical formulae taken from one of Turing’s most famous papers.

The easter eggs rule. 

The note’s traditional security foil has been altered to resemble the design of a microchip, while the spiral sunflower patterns pay homage to Turing’s work in morphogenetics. Image: Bank of England

Turing’s birthday (23 June 1912) is rendered in binary on ticker tape, a format Turing thought could be used to enter data into machines. Image: Bank of England

Awesome to a fault.

Getting Stuck & then some :)

A bulldozer is seen next to the Ever Given container ship that became stuck after it ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal - prompting a wave of memes Photograph: Reuters

A disparity of size comes to mind here as a tiny bulldozer goes out to try to unstick the Ever Given, a huge cargo ship wedged in in the Suez Canal, thus holding up 12% of the world's trade 24/7. The Guardian and Austin Powers memes rule in trying to free up this monster to get the canal up and running again.

Online, the slow-moving crisis was quickly turned into a learning experience: memes 101. The overarching theme was futility: of work in the face of a never-ending number of things to do; of $1,400 stimulus checks in response to the coronavirus pandemic; of drinking in the face of “the incessant, crushing weight of existence”.

But it does get better, way better. :)

Quoting Snopes ... 

On March 23, 2021, shipping traffic through Egypt’s Suez Canal was grounded to a halt after a large vessel called the “Ever Given” got stuck in the passageway. Shortly after news broke about this blocked shipping route, an image started to circulate on social media that supposedly showed how the Ever Given, a nearly 200-foot wide, 224,000-ton vessel, had “drawn” a penis in its route movements shortly before it entered the Suez Canal:

This is a genuine image showing the Ever Given’s route before it got stuck in the Suez Canal. While it may resemble a rough drawing of a penis, there’s no evidence to indicate that this was “drawn” on purpose.

And here's the video showing how the Ever Given diagram came to be. :)

Austin Powers strikes yet again. 

Science ... designed to be questioned

 Very rare decay of a beauty meson involving an electron and positron observed at LHCb. Credit: CERN

Science ... designed to be questioned, the opposite of religion, designed to be obeyed, strikes yet again, this time dealing with the potential shortcomings of the Standard Model as forces and entities like Dark Matter cannot be explained using this existing theory of physics.

The Standard Model includes the matter particles (quarks and leptons), the force carrying particles (bosons), and the Higgs boson. Credit: Artwork courtesy of Sandbox Studio, Chicago for Symmetry

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that particles called beauty quarks, which are measured in the LHCb experiment, should decay into either muons or electrons in equal measure. However, the new result suggests that this may not be happening, which could point to the existence of new particles or interactions not explained by the Standard Model.

The updated measurement questions the laws of nature that treat electrons and their heavier cousins, muons, identically, except for small differences due to their different masses. 

Something's afoot yet again.

To assume is to err ...

Moore's Law has held up for 50 years regarding the effective doubling of compute speeds based on the doubling of chip density every two years, a prediction truly remarkable without question. With this being said, the number of variables involving said advancements is minuscule in comparison to predicting the vagaries of the stock market or trying to predict what society will be like in 5 years unless one is humble enough to hazard guesses as reality, as stated before, is quantum, where certitude is but a mirage yet people resist and assume, aka the ass of you and me, in spite of these hard truths. 

A semi-log plot of transistor counts for microprocessors against dates of introduction, nearly doubling every two years.

Acceleration is a given but some of the prognostications made by leading researchers give one pause as unlimited acceleration states the obvious, its unlimited but nature doesn't work that way.

This articulates acceleration beautifully but one should question this ...

Introducing The 10-Year Rule

“My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade.”

— Ray Kurzweil

To put this chart in context, 20 years from now, the rate of change will be 4x what is now. Said differently, for someone who is about 40 today, when they’re 60 in 2040, the rate of paradigm change will be 4x what it is now. They will experience a year of change (by today’s standards) in three months. For someone who is 10 today, when they’re 60, they’ll experience a year of change in 11 days.

What's not being said is the fact Kursweil's take is a model, a guesstimate baed on a limited amount of data, not reality. Climatologists modify their models endlessly whenever more data comes in as one cannot capture the entirety of the reality in which a given event exists. Chaos has proven this to be true as the law of initial conditions rule. 

A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3

Love the optimism but if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

The Medium piece about accelerating change is worth reading without question but at the same time, assumptions are being made at grand scale and we all know what that means, right? 

3 Modalities

Alignment 1

Bark

5G

The Camel's nose ...

Photograph: Sergei Bobylev/TASS/Getty Images

Years ago, when Lyndon Johnson was president, the problem of dealing with the continued presence of J. Edgar Hoover, the detested head of the FBI back in the day, had to be dealt with. Knowing Hoover kept dossiers on just about every pol in Washington, Johnson decided to keep Hoover in charge using this classic quote as to the reason why Hoover was kept on. "It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." Prudence won the day regarding that miserable human being but the question to ask here is not about Hoover but rather ... is the Camel's nose in the tent the start point for having the entire animal coming inside vis a vis AI and it's increasingly influential relationship regarding the future of dogfights as the military goes further into the 21st century?

THE DOGFIGHT HARDLY seemed fair.

Two F-16s engaged with an opposing F-16 at an altitude of 16,000 feet above rocky desert terrain. As the aircraft converged from opposite directions, the paired F-16s suddenly spun away from one another, forcing their foe to choose one to pursue. The F-16 that had been left alone then quickly changed course, maneuvering behind the enemy with textbook precision. A few seconds later, it launched a missile that destroyed the opposing jet before it could react.

The battle took place last month in a computer simulator. Here’s what made it special: All three aircraft were controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms. Those algorithms had learned how to react and perform aerial maneuvers partly through a state-of-the-art AI technique that involves testing different approaches thousands of times and seeing which work best.

The three-way battle offers a glimpse of how AI may control future fighter jets—and the likely challenges of deploying the technology.

Caveats

The workings of modern AI raise questions about how feasible it would be to deploy the technology, however. Pilots would be required to put their trust, and their lives, in the hands of algorithms that work in mysterious ways. Real fighter pilot trainees spend months learning the correct protocols for flying and fighting in tandem. With several jets wheeling around one another at high speed, the slightest error or miscommunication could prove catastrophic.

Skepticism

She’s skeptical that advanced AI is really needed for dogfights, where planes could be guided by a simpler set of hand-coded rules. She is also wary of the Pentagon’s rush to adopt AI, saying errors could erode faith in the technology. “The more the DOD fields bad AI, the less pilots, or anyone associated with these systems, will trust them,” she says.

The Camel's nose indeed.

According to this classic tale, one cold night, a camel asks his master if he can put his head in the tent for warmth. “By all means and welcome,” said the man; and the camel stretches his head into the tent. Soon after, the camel inquires if he may also bring his neck and front legs inside. Again, the master agrees.

Finally, the camel asks, “May I not stand wholly within?” With pity, the master beckons him into the warm tent. But when the camel comes forward it becomes clear that the tent is too small for them both. “I think,” the camel said, “that there is not room for both of us here. It will be best for you to stand outside, as you are the smaller; there will then be room enough for me.” And with that, the man is forced outside of his tent.

Any questions?

Jovian light show rules

This illustration depicts ultraviolet polar aurorae on Jupiter and Earth. While the diameter of the Jovian world is 10 times larger than that of Earth, both planets have markedly similar aurora.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/UVS/STScI/MODIS/WIC/IMAGE/ULiège

Juno comes through yet again, this time showing how Jovian auroras closely resembles earth's.

New results from the Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument on NASA’s Juno mission reveal for the first time the birth of auroral dawn storms – the early morning brightening unique to Jupiter’s spectacular aurorae. These immense, transient displays of light occur at both Jovian poles and had previously been observed only by ground-based and Earth-orbiting observatories, notably NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Results of this study were published March 16 in the journal AGU Advances.

Seen below is the aurora happening in real time.

A study conducted by researchers from the Laboratory for Planetary and Atmospheric Physics of the University of Liege, shows for the first time global views of a dawn storm, a spectacular auroral phenomenon that occurs on Jupiter. Credit: University of Liège

This video clip depicts the evolution of a dawn storm in Jupiter’s polar aurorae. The imagery for the video was collected using data from the from the Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

Researchers found dawn storms are born on the nightside of the gas giant. As the planet rotates, the soon-to-be dawn storm rotates with it into the dayside, where these complex and intensely bright auroral features grow even more luminous, emitting anywhere from hundreds to thousands of gigawatts of ultraviolet light into space. The jump in brightness implies that dawn storms are dumping at least 10 times more energy into Jupiter's upper atmosphere than typical aurora.

“When we looked at the whole dawn storm sequence, we couldn’t help but notice that they are very similar to a type of terrestrial auroras called substorms,” said Zhonghua Yao, co-author of the study at the University of Liège.

As per the title, the Jovian light show rules. :)

No apology needed

No apology, no groveling, just shameless bastards trying to hold unto their position of power no matter what their transgression may be whether it involves corruption, theft of public monies or inappropriate behavior with women, it matters not to our so called leaders of 2021.

To whit.

Susan Wise Bauer’s editor reached out to her last year about updating her 2008 book The Art of the Public Grovel, about how politicians apologize when accused of sexual misdeeds. Given the #MeToo movement and claims against Donald Trump, her editor said, a new edition might sell well.

This time, it was Bauer’s turn to say sorry. “I just don’t know what I would write,” Bauer, a historian, recalls saying. “No one really apologizes anymore.”

Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—facing allegations from several women of sexual harassment—gave only a semi-apology for making some female aides “uncomfortable.” He denied he did anything wrong and argued the public should “wait for the facts.” He’s continued to maintain his innocence, ignoring growing calls from fellow Democrats to resign.

Cuomo is just the latest in a recent string of male political figures, from state lawmakers to members of Congress to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who have hotly denied allegations of sexual harassment, attacked their accusers, or claimed to be the victims of smear campaigns. Even when forced to retire or resign, these men have often declined to make a public apology or any kind of comments on their decision to end their political careers.

Brett Kavanaugh testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27, 2018; Senator Ted Cruz checking in for a flight at Cancun International Airport on Feb. 18.PHOTOGRAPHER: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES; CRUZ: MEGA/GC IMAGES

As a personal  aside, I wish I had questioned Brett as I know about alcoholism big time and this guy, IMHO, is a dry drunk without question. As for Ted, yours truly will reserve comment regarding that self serving shameless troll for now.

Smart move to the max

 Photograph: Diane Miller/Getty Images

What a smart move, cover canals with solar panels, thus killing two birds with one stone ...

1. Reducing evaporation and 
2. Generating water cooled power as solar panels lose power the hotter it gets. 

Brilliant without question.

PEANUT BUTTER AND jelly. Hall & Oates. Now there’s a duo that could literally and figuratively be even more powerful: solar panels and canals. What if instead of leaving canals open, letting the sun evaporate the water away, we covered them with panels that would both shade the precious liquid and hoover up solar energy? Maybe humanity can go for that.

Scientists in California just ran the numbers on what would happen if their state slapped solar panels on 4,000 miles of its canals, including the major California Aqueduct, and the results point to a potentially beautiful partnership. Their feasibility study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, finds that if applied statewide, the panels would save 63 billion gallons of water from evaporating each year. At the same time, solar panels across California’s exposed canals would provide 13 gigawatts of renewable power annually, about half of the new capacity the state needs to meet its decarbonization goals by the year 2030.

It gets better.

California’s water conveyance system is the world’s largest, serving 35 million people and 5.7 million acres of farmland. Seventy-five percent of available water is in the northern third of the state, while the bottom two-thirds of the state accounts for 80 percent of urban and agricultural demand. Shuttling all that water around requires pumps to make it flow uphill; accordingly, the water system is the state’s largest single consumer of electricity.

Solar-paneling canals would not only produce renewable energy for use across the state, it would run the water system itself. “By covering canals with solar panels, we can reduce evaporation and avoid disturbing natural and working lands, while providing renewable energy and other co-benefits,” says environmental engineer Brandi McKuin of the University of California, Merced, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, lead author on the paper.

Do it for god's sake. Makes so much sense to do this without question.

By 2045 ...

Children of Men, a film about a dark future where fertility is but a dream and civilization is on the brink of chaos, takes place in 2027, but ... by 2045, this dire prediction of the lack of fertility could happen for real if Shanna Swan's take on the fate of reproduction proves to be correct. 

The end of humankind? It may be coming sooner than we think, thanks to hormone-disrupting chemicals that are decimating fertility at an alarming rate around the globe. A new book called Countdown, by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, finds that sperm counts have dropped almost 60% since 1973. Following the trajectory we are on, Swan’s research suggests sperm counts could reach zero by 2045. Zero. Let that sink in. That would mean no babies. No reproduction. No more humans. Forgive me for asking: why isn’t the UN calling an emergency meeting on this right now?

The chemicals to blame for this crisis are found in everything from plastic containers and food wrapping, to waterproof clothes and fragrances in cleaning products, to soaps and shampoos, to electronics and carpeting. Some of them, called PFAS, are known as “forever chemicals”, because they don’t breakdown in the environment or the human body. They just accumulate and accumulate – doing more and more damage, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Now, it seems, humanity is reaching a breaking point.

Remember, we did this to ourselves.

Eye Candy of the scientific kind

Eye candy of the scientific kind ... rules. Check out AstroAnarchy to see why this rings true. 

Losing to China

Bill Maher's take on China struck a nerve with yours truly because it's the truth. While we bloviate about personal slights, culture wars and religion, China's building stuff like we use to do prior to Ronnie Reagan using deregulation to gut US manufacturing in order to gin profits to stockholders while, in effect, creating modern China. Ross Perot was right, give countries the tools to build stuff and ... for a while, America makes out until said tools are used to compete, something that's happening to us as we speak. Can the US come back, yes, but it will take guts to make it happen. Let's hope it will. before it's too late. 

End of rant for now.

Oblivious to a fault

Photograph: Fred Dufour/Getty Images

Have you ever had the experience of a walking texter, you know, the kind who's oblivious to their surroundings until they look up and you, and they, have to do a walk around because of this doofus imposing their will in a public space, an action akin to people not leashing their dogs, especially jumpers able to soil your clothes and piss you off to no end. Seems there's a scientific basis as to why this act is a total pain in the ass to us non-texting rubes.

SAVE FOR THE Macarena, the most aggravating dance a human can perform is that thing where you’re walking down the street and have to out-maneuver a pedestrian who’s texting. At first, it seems like they’re going to crash into you. Then they finally look up from their phone, at which point you have to figure out who’s going to swerve left or right. You both swerve left and realize that won’t work, so you both swerve right, and that goes on and on until you finally get mad enough to yell at them.

Call it the Smartphone Six-Step. Grab your partner, do-si-do, and toss them into the street.

We’ve all danced that infuriating dance, but now scientists have shown just how big of a mess a phone-distracted pedestrian can make not just for you but for a crowd at large. Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Nagaoka University of Technology set up “bidirectional flow experiments” in which two groups of 27 people (one team wearing yellow beanies, the other wearing red) walked head-on. In each experiment, one of the groups included three people looking at smartphones. The researchers placed these distracted walkers either at the front, middle, or back of the pack, while cameras above tracked everyone’s routes and speeds.

Each crowd has some leaders in front, and each of these is scanning the movements of their counterparts headed in the other direction to avoid collision. This interaction between leaders is known as mutual anticipation. “If it is me and you, at the same time I try to predict where you will be in the future, and you try to predict where I will be in the future,” says University of Tokyo computer scientist Claudio Feliciani, coauthor of a new paper describing the experiments in the journal Science Advances. Basically, you’re making split-second assumptions about how that person will behave and how you should respond appropriately. “And that's the mechanism that makes it possible to have this kind of collective pattern formation,” Feliciani adds.

If you’re lost in your phone, though, this interpersonal relationship—however fleeting—breaks down. The person who’s approaching you is monitoring your movements and anticipating your behavior, but you’re not reciprocating. You’re adrift, and that means the people following behind you are as well. When you finally make contact with a person in the approaching crowd, you fall into the Smartphone Six-Step, and the effects of that hesitation ripple back through your followers like a multicar pileup.

A total PITA without question.

Evolution yet again

 Artificial life evolution, can this happen? Interesting question is it not? Seems people have talked about this notion beginning in the 1950's when computing was but a dream save for visionaries like Alan Turing and John VonNewman, among significant others.

I could stridently insist that natural selection is the only way that complex life can evolve, but that’s not strictly true. We can already design computers that can learn and reason and—almost—convince an observer that their behavior might be human. It’s not unreasonable that in 100 or 200 years, our computer systems will be effectively sentient: human-like robots, similar to Star Trek’s Commander Data. Alien civilizations that are considerably more advanced than us are likely already capable of such creations. The possibility—likelihood, even—of such robotic life has implications for our predictions about life on alien planets.

But what if it were all different? What would life look like if it did know where it was going?

CRAB-POCALYPSE: In the Soviet sci-fi novel Crabs on the Island, a self-replicating robot overruns an island with hordes of mutated copies of itself. The story raises the question: Would biological laws check the growth and evolution of artificially created beings?kirian / Shutterstock

The 1950s physicist Anatoly Dneprov wrote quirky and characteristically Soviet science fiction. His novel Crabs on the Island tells the story of two engineers conducting an experiment in cybernetics on a deserted island. A single self-replicating robot (a “crab”) is released, and forages for the raw materials to build other robots. Soon the island is overrun with baby robot crabs. But the crabs begin to mutate. Some are larger than others, and ruthlessly cannibalize the smaller robots for spare parts to build even larger robots. How would such an experiment end? Catastrophically, of course, as is consistent with the genre, with robot crabs spreading exponentially across the entire island.

But there is no certitude. Quantum and the only constant being that of change rules, even over super AI.

How likely is it that this universe of interconnected computers would be doing nothing but communicating, reproducing, and carrying out their singular goal? Possibly not very. If such an alien world of artificially intelligent organisms really exists, there are some things it cannot avoid—no matter how intelligent or how well designed. On the one hand, artificial intelligence cannot improve without change, and change brings the risk of mutation. On the other hand, even the cleverest strategy is potentially open to exploitation—game theory cannot be discounted, even by a computer of sci-fi-level superintelligence.

The Tao rules ...

Percolation test

Credit: Kotryna Zukauskaite

Connections, relationships, or the ability to see how deep connections among said relationships occur  describes genius to yours truly without question. Seems the connection meme is a big deal with SA as well.

A branch of mathematics called percolation theory offers a surprising answer: just a few people can make all the difference. As users join a new network, isolated pockets of connected phones slowly emerge. But full east-to-west or north-to-south communication appears all of a sudden as the density of users passes a critical and sharp threshold. Scientists describe such a rapid change in a network's connectivity as a phase transition—the same concept used to explain abrupt changes in the state of a material such as the melting of ice or the boiling of water.

AKA phase transitions from water to ice is percolation theory writ large from this writer's perspective.

Credit: Jen Christiansen (graphic); Wee People font, ProPublica and Alberto Cairo (figure drawings)

It gets better.

Percolation theory examines the consequences of randomly creating or removing links in such networks, which mathematicians conceive of as a collection of nodes (represented by points) linked by “edges” (lines). Each node represents an object such as a phone or a person, and the edges represent a specific relation between two of them. The fundamental insight of percolation theory, which dates back to the 1950s, is that as the number of links in a network gradually increases, a global cluster of connected nodes will suddenly emerge.

Credit: Jen Christiansen (graphic); Wee People font, ProPublica and Alberto Cairo (figure drawings)

Awesome article to the max. Read SA's detailed piece The Mathematics of How Connections Become Global in its entiredty to learn why chaos and phase transitions rule. 

Had to add another :)

Credit: Jen Christiansen (graphic); Wee People font, ProPublica and Alberto Cairo (figure drawings)

Rational Discourse ...

 Implausible indeed. :)

2012 ...

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay 

AI became real in 2012 when a tiny group of coders finally succeeded in building a neural net that actually worked. For years, this tech remained illusive but no longer. In the wonderful Wired article titled The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy, the high level stakes auction as to what entity would gain access to this transformative technology would change computing and society forever.

That fall—before lying down in the back of the bus from Toronto to New York, taking the train 2,700 miles to Truckee, California, at the crest of the Sierra Nevadas, and then stretching across the back seat of a taxi for the hour-long drive to South Lake Tahoe—Hinton had created a new company. It included only two other people, both young graduate students in his lab at the university. It made no products. It had no plans to make a product. And its website offered nothing but a name, DNN-research, which was even less inviting than the sparse page. The 64-year-​old Hinton—who seemed so at home in academia, with his tousled gray hair, wool sweaters, and two-steps-ahead‑of‑you sense of humor—wasn’t even sure he wanted to start a company until his two students talked him into it. But as he arrived in South Lake Tahoe, some of the biggest tech companies in the world were gearing up for a contest to acquire his newborn startup. 

TWO MONTHS EARLIER, Hinton and his students had changed the way machines saw the world. They built what was called a neural network, a mathematical system modeled on the web of neurons in the brain, and it could identify common objects—like flowers, dogs, and cars—with an accuracy that had previously seemed impossible. As Hinton and his students showed, a neural network could learn this very human skill by analyzing vast amounts of data. He called this “deep learning,” and its potential was enormous. It promised to transform not just computer vision but everything from talking digital assistants to driverless cars to drug discovery.

The idea of a neural network dated back to the 1950s, but the early pioneers had never gotten it working as well as they’d hoped. By the new millennium, most researchers had given up on the idea, convinced it was a technological dead end and bewildered by the 50-​year-​old conceit that these mathematical systems somehow mimicked the human brain. When submitting research papers to academic journals, those who still explored the technology would often disguise it as something else, replacing the words “neural network” with language less likely to offend their fellow scientists.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Hinton, however, never quit pursuing his dream.

Hinton remained one of the few who believed it would one day fulfill its promise, delivering machines that could not only recognize objects but identify spoken words, understand natural language, carry on a conversation, and maybe even solve problems humans couldn’t solve on their own, providing new and more incisive ways of exploring the mysteries of biology, medicine, geology, and other sciences. It was an eccentric stance even inside his own university, which spent years denying his standing request to hire another professor who could work alongside him in this long and winding struggle to build machines that learned on their own. “One crazy person working on this was enough,” he imagined their thinking went. But with a nine-​page paper that Hinton and his students unveiled in the fall of 2012, detailing their breakthrough, they announced to the world that neural networks were indeed as powerful as Hinton had long claimed they would be.

Read Wired's long & detailed piece on the start of AI, a story reminding one of the intensity of a high stakes poker game finally resulting as to what entity got the gold ring, thus cementing their stake as the major player in an open ended tech fraught with potential and danger of the third kind.

Threading the needle & then some

A traversable wormhole would be a shortcut through space. (ESO/L. Calçada

Seems traversable wormholes are possible but how traversable remains the question of the day.

Wormholes are an old idea in general relativity. It's based on work by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who tried to figure out how elementary particles might behave in curved spacetime. Their idea treated particle-antiparticle pairs as two ends of a spacetime tube.

This Einstein-Rosen Bridge would look like a black hole on one end, and an anti-black hole, or white hole, on the other end.

At small scales gravity must have a quantum nature. Credit: The Wolfram Physics Project

But all is not lost. We know that Einstein's theory must break down at quantum scales because it is a classical theory. Presumably, there is some quantum theory of gravity that supplants general relativity.

We don't yet have a complete quantum gravity model, but we do have several approximate models that will point us in the right direction.

One of these models is known as the Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell theory. It is so named because it includes aspects of Einstein's theory of gravity, Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, and Dirac's theory of quantum particles. Recently a team found a wormhole solution to the Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell equations.

The team found that their wormhole solution was fully traversable. What's more, the solution doesn't require any negative-energy states. In principle, that would allow you to travel through the wormhole without needing negative mass. The only catch is that you would need to be in a quantum state. So microscopic clumps of atoms could travel through this wormhole, but not people.

End result ...

While this is interesting work, it is just a toy model. There are lots of solutions to Einstein’s equations that can’t exist for reasons beyond gravity. The team plans to explore their idea further to see if their solution is yet another impossible idea, or whether there might be a way to create this kind of quantum wormhole. And if this idea does work, it will still be easier to pass through the eye of a needle than it will be to enter the distant heavens.

It's still worth a shot, right? :)

What an ecological crisis looks like ...

The central business district in Beijing on Monday, when the capital was engulfed in a sandstorm.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Munge comes to mind here, especially when businesses ramp up to make money while continuing to degrade the environment. A sea change is needed in terms of how to maintain a modern society while protecting the planet becomes key as the existential threat of climate change to civilization continues to accelerate as we speak.

“Beijing is what an ecological crisis looks like,” Li Shuo, the policy director for Greenpeace China, wrote on Twitter.

In an interview, Mr. Li said Monday’s storm was “the result of land and ecological degradation in the north and west of Beijing.” He added that industrial pollutants around Beijing had so far this year exceeded the yearly average of the last four years.

 Along the Third Ring Road near the CCTV tower. Credit... Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Any questions?