10 ms·

Maps Of Matter

107 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

Tepix 5y ago
The essay claims we have a solid understanding of the basic rules of physics. I'm not a physicist but my impression is that we don't know a lot and are missing some essential parts. Black matter and black energy anyone? Perhaps our model of a world is missing a few dimensions which makes it hard to understand what is going on. Related: https://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/07/02/flatland-understanding-multiple-dimensions-from-our-third-dimensional-perspective/ https://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/07/02/flatland-und...
- tgragnato 5y ago
  > Speculative, and likely contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions; thoughtful, informed comments are welcome. Intended for a general scientifically curious audience, not requiring much detailed specialist background. I enjoyed the reading, it is well written. Like you, I think there is a bit too much speculation to consider it an article suitable for a "scientifically curious audience". From my point of view the parallels and the "connections" between phylogeny, elements, matter and physics make it very little pseudo-scientific and too metaphysical.
- andreareina 5y ago
  The more complete claim is that we understand the fundamental laws of physics as they pertain to everyday life. The qualifications are important. Fundamental because being able to predict the interactions of a handful of particles doesn't automatically lead to visibility of the large-scale behavior. An example of this is protein folding: we know how proteins fold, but finding out how to get a particular shape basically requires brute-forcing the search space. Everyday life excludes dark {matter,energy} as well as quantum gravity and anything that requires the energies of large particle accelerators to probe.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  You mean dark matter and dark energy. String theory posits 10+ dimensions but they would be extremely tiny (compactified is the term) and cyclic so all objects would travel through them in a modular way. Like, if you walked to the end of your bedroom, you'd have gone through these dimensions something like 10^100 times again and again like a clock hand going around. But experiments with gravity and light supposedly show no loss of energy or speed and other metrics, that would indicate some other hidden dimensions where energy could be absorbed/trapped. It's possible these other dimensions have extremely high vacuum states so they repel any incoming energy packets..but who really knows? In any case, we know plenty enough to start crafting new combinations of atoms to create room temperature superconductors. Fabrication techniques have to get better. We should be testing 10000000 compounds every day. If we had room temperature superconductors we could have CPUs, GPUs, and other such transistor based technology running at 1000s of GHz. The only reason we can't do that now is because of the heat given off by the resistance of the materials we are currently using to build these circuits! Overclocking culture used to put liquid nitrogen on Pentium 4s and get em up to 10+GHz. Fun but not sustainable. Just evidence that the thermal envelope is the true problem for current single core clock speeds. A room temperature superconductor would change computing forever. It is in my opinion, the thing we should be focusing all our material science and physics efforts on. Computers that are 1000s of times faster would allow us to take machine learning, and by extension, artificial intelligence, to a new frontier.
asplake 5y ago
> Put another way: the conventional use of “emergent” has a rather passive flavour. What I'm talking about is a much more active imaginative stance, the kind of stance taken by people like Bret Victor or Satoshi or Picasso. "generative"?
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I think generative art could be emergent in future, but as far as I'm aware it isn't currently. The best examples of designed emergence we have right now are cellular automata, like Conway's Game of Life, or Primordial particle systems (https://youtu.be/makaJpLvbow https://youtu.be/makaJpLvbow).
  - asplake 5y ago
    Yes, though word is much broader in application than that. See for example generative design [1]. Pattern languages also, and the deliberate juxtaposition of things as a creative catalyst. Sort of in line with the article I have two metaphors for that idea in the knowledge creation arena: “Throwing things into the Great Model Collider” and “One model to the tune of another”.
beaconstudios 5y ago
>With sufficiently good tweezers and a lot of patience you could reassemble a human being into a bicycle of comparable mass; and vice versa. Considering that there is no material distinction between a living person and a dead body, I would say that this view is perhaps overly reductive. The matter of the body is essential, but not sufficient; life is fundamentally a process driven by autopoietic processes, which you would need to initiate in order to have anything meaningful. Being is uninteresting without becoming, state without change is just dead.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  > Considering that there is no material distinction between a living person and a dead body When someone dies, information is lost. With cell death comes loss of structure. Unless we can use their existing DNA to repair the damage, the person will remain dead. And even if revived, their brain's memories might still have been severely compromised. Especially if, like what you hint at, the process of electricity flowing in the brain is the actual memory itself, an ongoing process. It's certainly possible that if the process is halted, the memory is lost. Just like DRAM. At the moment it's pretty much a mystery. But I agree, OP assumes a lot about structure over process. Zen says everything is a function, not an object. And by nesting functions, we get everything... Memory and consciousness really have no reason to be entirely structural. A lot of things actually don't. Our old computer memory technology was actually just delay line memory. Perhaps our brain works in a similar way to some extent. The universe itself, in most respects, is made out of stable processes that we abstract as objects. An atom is really just a process of energy flowing in a specific way through space over time, repetitively. Upset the process and you get a nuclear explosion which most of us would consider an event or process...not an object. So was the energy of the atom ever really an object in the first place? No, it was like a candle flame. Constantly kindling itself, of different oxygen and fuel from moment to moment. Yet we gave it a name and an identity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Yes I totally agree. My perspective comes from a mix of zen and systems/cybernetics; matter and other temporarily stable configurations like life are stable attractors in the state of energy flow. So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather than matter. The difference been transient energy like "events" and static-appearing things like matter is that the latter is constantly maintaining itself in a feedback loop. Believing it to be matter is a mistake, and one that leads you to misleading metaphysical beliefs like the idea in the article above, or that all qualities can be reduced to quantities, or all things can be understood by looking at the pieces that it is made of. It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics.
dnautics 5y ago
> What I'm talking about is a much more active imaginative stance, the kind of stance taken by people like Bret Victor or Satoshi or Picasso Is this entire essay basically just a physicist describing chemistry without understanding that chemistry is already there and has been for hundreds of years?
- Koshkin 5y ago
  I think the point of this article is (to start with chemistry and then) to go far beyond.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    it doesn't sound like the author really has a concept of how 'far beyond' chemists go as a matter of course. The study, classification, exploration and exploitation of emergent phenomena is built into the way chemists do things.
carapace 5y ago
(I hate to be that guy but a flywheel is an energy storage device, not a positive feedback loop.)
pianoben 5y ago
I just want to say that this website is beautiful. It's visually pleasing and spare. The HTML is purely semantic, and the CSS is no more than necessary. To me, this is an ideal web page. Hats off to the author!
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
I like that he is thinking in a bold way and hope it leads to something productive, but it seems like nearly all of this physics will be unverifiable and will remain theoretical. He's talking about physics at time scales and conditions that are not found naturally earth and that require a tremendous amount of energy to produce.

107 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

The essay claims we have a solid understanding of the basic rules of physics. I'm not a physicist but my impression is that we don't know a lot and are missing some essential parts. Black matter and black energy anyone? Perhaps our model of a world is missing a few dimensions which makes it hard to understand what is going on. Related: https://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/07/02/flatland-understanding-multiple-dimensions-from-our-third-dimensional-perspective/ https://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/07/02/flatland-und...

tgragnato 5y ago
> Speculative, and likely contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions; thoughtful, informed comments are welcome. Intended for a general scientifically curious audience, not requiring much detailed specialist background. I enjoyed the reading, it is well written. Like you, I think there is a bit too much speculation to consider it an article suitable for a "scientifically curious audience". From my point of view the parallels and the "connections" between phylogeny, elements, matter and physics make it very little pseudo-scientific and too metaphysical.
andreareina 5y ago
The more complete claim is that we understand the fundamental laws of physics as they pertain to everyday life. The qualifications are important. Fundamental because being able to predict the interactions of a handful of particles doesn't automatically lead to visibility of the large-scale behavior. An example of this is protein folding: we know how proteins fold, but finding out how to get a particular shape basically requires brute-forcing the search space. Everyday life excludes dark {matter,energy} as well as quantum gravity and anything that requires the energies of large particle accelerators to probe.
goldenkey 5y ago
You mean dark matter and dark energy. String theory posits 10+ dimensions but they would be extremely tiny (compactified is the term) and cyclic so all objects would travel through them in a modular way. Like, if you walked to the end of your bedroom, you'd have gone through these dimensions something like 10^100 times again and again like a clock hand going around. But experiments with gravity and light supposedly show no loss of energy or speed and other metrics, that would indicate some other hidden dimensions where energy could be absorbed/trapped. It's possible these other dimensions have extremely high vacuum states so they repel any incoming energy packets..but who really knows? In any case, we know plenty enough to start crafting new combinations of atoms to create room temperature superconductors. Fabrication techniques have to get better. We should be testing 10000000 compounds every day. If we had room temperature superconductors we could have CPUs, GPUs, and other such transistor based technology running at 1000s of GHz. The only reason we can't do that now is because of the heat given off by the resistance of the materials we are currently using to build these circuits! Overclocking culture used to put liquid nitrogen on Pentium 4s and get em up to 10+GHz. Fun but not sustainable. Just evidence that the thermal envelope is the true problem for current single core clock speeds. A room temperature superconductor would change computing forever. It is in my opinion, the thing we should be focusing all our material science and physics efforts on. Computers that are 1000s of times faster would allow us to take machine learning, and by extension, artificial intelligence, to a new frontier.

asplake 5y ago

> Put another way: the conventional use of “emergent” has a rather passive flavour. What I'm talking about is a much more active imaginative stance, the kind of stance taken by people like Bret Victor or Satoshi or Picasso. "generative"?

beaconstudios 5y ago
I think generative art could be emergent in future, but as far as I'm aware it isn't currently. The best examples of designed emergence we have right now are cellular automata, like Conway's Game of Life, or Primordial particle systems (https://youtu.be/makaJpLvbow https://youtu.be/makaJpLvbow).
- asplake 5y ago
  Yes, though word is much broader in application than that. See for example generative design [1]. Pattern languages also, and the deliberate juxtaposition of things as a creative catalyst. Sort of in line with the article I have two metaphors for that idea in the knowledge creation arena: “Throwing things into the Great Model Collider” and “One model to the tune of another”.

beaconstudios 5y ago

>With sufficiently good tweezers and a lot of patience you could reassemble a human being into a bicycle of comparable mass; and vice versa. Considering that there is no material distinction between a living person and a dead body, I would say that this view is perhaps overly reductive. The matter of the body is essential, but not sufficient; life is fundamentally a process driven by autopoietic processes, which you would need to initiate in order to have anything meaningful. Being is uninteresting without becoming, state without change is just dead.

goldenkey 5y ago
> Considering that there is no material distinction between a living person and a dead body When someone dies, information is lost. With cell death comes loss of structure. Unless we can use their existing DNA to repair the damage, the person will remain dead. And even if revived, their brain's memories might still have been severely compromised. Especially if, like what you hint at, the process of electricity flowing in the brain is the actual memory itself, an ongoing process. It's certainly possible that if the process is halted, the memory is lost. Just like DRAM. At the moment it's pretty much a mystery. But I agree, OP assumes a lot about structure over process. Zen says everything is a function, not an object. And by nesting functions, we get everything... Memory and consciousness really have no reason to be entirely structural. A lot of things actually don't. Our old computer memory technology was actually just delay line memory. Perhaps our brain works in a similar way to some extent. The universe itself, in most respects, is made out of stable processes that we abstract as objects. An atom is really just a process of energy flowing in a specific way through space over time, repetitively. Upset the process and you get a nuclear explosion which most of us would consider an event or process...not an object. So was the energy of the atom ever really an object in the first place? No, it was like a candle flame. Constantly kindling itself, of different oxygen and fuel from moment to moment. Yet we gave it a name and an identity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Yes I totally agree. My perspective comes from a mix of zen and systems/cybernetics; matter and other temporarily stable configurations like life are stable attractors in the state of energy flow. So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather than matter. The difference been transient energy like "events" and static-appearing things like matter is that the latter is constantly maintaining itself in a feedback loop. Believing it to be matter is a mistake, and one that leads you to misleading metaphysical beliefs like the idea in the article above, or that all qualities can be reduced to quantities, or all things can be understood by looking at the pieces that it is made of. It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics.

dnautics 5y ago

> What I'm talking about is a much more active imaginative stance, the kind of stance taken by people like Bret Victor or Satoshi or Picasso Is this entire essay basically just a physicist describing chemistry without understanding that chemistry is already there and has been for hundreds of years?

Koshkin 5y ago
I think the point of this article is (to start with chemistry and then) to go far beyond.
- dnautics 5y ago
  it doesn't sound like the author really has a concept of how 'far beyond' chemists go as a matter of course. The study, classification, exploration and exploitation of emergent phenomena is built into the way chemists do things.

carapace 5y ago

(I hate to be that guy but a flywheel is an energy storage device, not a positive feedback loop.)

pianoben 5y ago

I just want to say that this website is beautiful. It's visually pleasing and spare. The HTML is purely semantic, and the CSS is no more than necessary. To me, this is an ideal web page. Hats off to the author!

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

I like that he is thinking in a bold way and hope it leads to something productive, but it seems like nearly all of this physics will be unverifiable and will remain theoretical. He's talking about physics at time scales and conditions that are not found naturally earth and that require a tremendous amount of energy to produce.