Monthly Archives: April 2018

Let’s look into the future with an antiparticle telescope

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I have this belief that antiparticles such as positrons are actually particles traveling back in time. There are a lot of reasons for this such as the fact that their time evolution contains a minus in front of the t.

However there are not a lot of antiparticles in this universe dominated by normal matter (for reasons I will not get into right now). I think this is one of the possible arguments to why we only see into the past and not the future – there is only the most tenuous influence from the future, and not something humans can perceive. Plus we are constructed from particles evolving forward with time and everything around us is just normal matter, also traveling forward.

You can also see this as a vast amount of information flowing from the past to the future but only a few bits traveling the other direction.

One can think of particles and antiparticles and being like corkscrews in time; the difference being whether they have left or right handed rotation. This is also like a clock turning clockwise or anti clockwise. And for example if a gamma ray turns into an electron-positron pair, one can also picture that as a positron traveling back in time, colliding with a gamma ray and bouncing forward in time phase reversed as an electron.

Anyway I think it might be interesting to test this by building a space based telescope that can create a 2D image from the arrival of antiparticles and another coincident one creating an image from the arrival of particles.

The question is whether these two images will actually show more or less the same view of the universe, or if the antiparticle generated image will show a more evolved state of the cosmos. Interesting to propose. I hope that someone has the influence to make such a project happen.

(Also if it’s happening and I don’t know about it, let me know!)

Mathematics struggles to describe physics

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TLDR mathematical representations of physical things are not the things themselves – they are insufficiently abstract, and may introduce nonsense which needs to be “discovered” and fixed later.
 
It occurs to me (and is often done in various ways) that one should be able to write all physical laws as an abstract function that defines the “physical system” in question, that when passed through a (possibly non linear) abstract functional (function of a function, or “operator”) gives the result equal to zero.
 
Then later we can argue about what basis is best to use for a particular application to represent the function and functional, knowing that choosing bases and origins may introduce fake degrees of freedom, where we then have to say the answer is such and such times some generator of a bunch of group invariance nonsense.
 
For example in quantum physics we might begin by saying a single particle has the wave function Ψ. As soon as we say its Ψ(x,y,z,t) we are already on a loser because we fixed four bases and four origins which have to be “unfixed” later. And for a start that means it’s not Lorenz invariant.
 
But even before then we are still assuming non-physical things by saying Ψ is a complex number. Because actually it should be normalized over the interval of interest in order to give correct probability values – so it’s in a projective space; and also there should be no absolute phase; or if gauge invariance applies, then we should’t be fixing local phase either by assuming the 12 o’clock phase position of one location is the same as every other – especially in the context of space time curvature.
 
The above discussion show that the usual assumptions about Ψ introduce at least two and possibly an infinite number of spurious mathematical degrees of freedom in the representation of reality.
 
General relativity while a wonder of beauty, is also terrible, in that it only fixes the second derivative of the metric, and the Ricci tensor is a reduction of the Riemann curvature tensor, so any solution that represents a particular space time is just one of an infinite family of equivalent solutions which also satisfy the same equations and describe the same physics, even if you stick to one coordinate system.
 
If the math hadn’t introduced non-physical degrees of freedom then Higgs wouldn’t have had to discover/introduce the Higgs field and boson because it would have already been present in the solutions.
 
I could jokingly claim that the history of physics is a history of people not realizing they are assuming extra degrees of freedom in their equations, and making great discoveries about physics later, which are actually in fact discoveries about math.

European privacy laws make no sense for companies that use machine learning

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The new European GDPR personal privacy data laws allow users to ask any company to delete all their personal data and to provide a copy on demand. Non-compliance leads to harsh penalties.

Those laws don’t make any sense (in that it is impossible to comply) for companies that are developing any kind of machine learning / neural networks / artificial intelligence that learn global models of any kind from attributes gathered from multiple users. This is why:

Lawyers expect that personal data is localized and understandable. But increasingly we are aggregating personal data into all kinds of computer models about users where that data becomes diffuse and incomprehensible.

Just think of it as someone asking you to forget they ever existed and to roll yourself back to whatever you would have been like if you had never had any contact with them, and also they want an exhaustive list of the personal neural mental data you are currently holding on them in a form that they can understand.

It’s important for users to know that, as technology is progressing, their data is being utilized in ways that cannot be undone, and that a request for the stored data is becoming impossible to fulfill. However lawyers and regulators should also understand that aggregating personal data in machine learning algorithms can be an effective form of anonymization.

How to remove all Adobe software from your Mac

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No AdobeAdobe likes to take over your computer, especially if you have installed a number of products, or enrolled in Creative Cloud. There will be many Adobe processes running all the time and various ones running at startup or login. Adobe is well known for creating buggy products with security vulnerabilities, like Flash, and running many processes that bog down your machine. I just wanted to be rid of them altogether. Here’s what worked for me on a MacBook with OSX 10.13.4.

The goal is to get the following results at the terminal command line: find ~/Library | grep -i adobe returns no results; ps aux | grep -i adobe returns only the ps command itself; find /Applications | grep -i adobe returns only other applications that reference Adobe in some passive way (in my case Xcode has some Flash related libraries); and most importantly launchctl list | grep -i adobe returns no results.

The first thing that I personally had to do was to pay over $100 to terminate my Creative Cloud contract with Adobe. Hopefully you don’t have to do that.

To begin this journey, ensure that no applications are running except for a finder window and a terminal window, and maybe this blog entry copied to a text file (not PDF), or printed.

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