The upcoming technological singularity / 'Alternative' scientific theorization

[qwe]

the human species is at the point where we can choose to deliberately change our genome. we are merging with machines, psychologically and physically. AI is reaching our sophistication.

how is it silly, or nonsense, to say that at some point, we will no longer be able to predict the near future, because the rate of technological change is building on itself (aka, the technological singularity)? it's plain fact.

 

[kaywholed]

Who needs tech support when all you have to do is throw it out and buy a new one?

shut up and,
take my money!

 

[Foreigner]

^ AI is nowhere near our sophistication, actually. Storage capacity exceeds ours, and processing speed/multi-tasking exceeds ours, but diversity, novelty and random convergence are nowhere near what human beings can do. We need AI to reverse engineer our genome, otherwise it would take a painstakingly long time to do it.

A lot of hollywood propaganda makes people believe that the future will be high technology, but I seriously doubt it. Those depictions always involve the same human dramas playing out in a high tech society; but if you approach the matter scientifically and logically, it would be impossible for such a high level technology society to exist without having solved the social and power dynamics.

We are already reaching the limits of the Green Revolution and what our fossil fuel paradigm can provide. Base human natures like greed and power-dominance are gripping so tightly on progress that it's hard for it to develop in a natural course that benefits the whole species.

The future will be high level but probably not in the technological sense. We cannot sustain our current course by any stretch of the imagination. The earth's bounty will simply not provide. It's not that we lack the expertise - the experts with the solutions to our world's problems are all around us to redundant levels - it's that we lack the social cooperation. That is a biological and human evolutionary problem that technology cannot solve. Humans trying to get the better of other humans. If we could solve that by funneling all our competition into positive endeavors, we could achieve everything people are hoping for.

Either we all benefit or it's going to come apart.

 

[yougene]

^ To be fair, yougene, it's not a particularly valuable or attractive idea to highly practical people whose standard of a good idea is one that generates practical applications in the here and now. It has value to those of us who are dreamers, who still hold out hope for a great and glorious place for ourselves, our species, and/or our planet in the grand scheme of things. It has some value too, albeit less, to otherwise fairly hardnosed, here-and-now oriented people who just enjoy kicking around ideas for its own sake.

Maybe. I was addressing the ignorance of zero point energy. Not it's value as a subject matter.

 

[rangrz]

It's not "patent nonsense". It's called Zero-point energy.

How well do you understand relativistic quantum field theories? Like quantum electrodynamics, which is the theory that deals with the casimir effect and lamb shift. Well I don't claim to be a guru, I do study that stuff formally and in no way does it imply infinite energy. Further that energy is physically unable to be withdrawn to do work. (Doing so would require putting that physical system below it's ground state...which is an absurd notion and violates the basic principles of quantum mechanics)

From the general relativity side: Since energy and mass are equivalent. (Rather, since energy has mass) if one had an infinite amount of energy in a finite space, it would be infinitely dense. Which means it would result in a gravitational singularity...

 

[yougene]

How well do you understand relativistic quantum field theories? Like quantum electrodynamics, which is the theory that deals with the casimir effect and lamb shift. Well I don't claim to be a guru, I do study that stuff formally and in no way does it imply infinite energy.

It's not implied, it's pretty explicit.

Within a "formal" context appealing to authority(especially your own) is a red flag.

Further that energy is physically unable to be withdrawn to do work. (Doing so would require putting that physical system below it's ground state...which is an absurd notion and violates the basic principles of quantum mechanics)

Whether zero point energy can be harnessed is an unknown. Some scientific heuristics(e.g preservation of quantum mechanics) favor the notion that it cannot be harnessed. But that's all this notion of "absurdity" is. A heuristic, not a grounded assertion from which you can draw logical deductions.

From the general relativity side: Since energy and mass are equivalent. (Rather, since energy has mass) if one had an infinite amount of energy in a finite space, it would be infinitely dense. Which means it would result in a gravitational singularity...

Yet zero-point energy models successfully predict phenomena. This illuminates fragmentation between and limitations of current models not the validity of observed phenomena.

 

[rangrz]

^
IMO, an infinite energy prediction is going to be a mathematical artifact from an not quite perfect theoretical treatment. Hence the need to, and acceptance of, renormalization in QED to subtract the infinitys off.

Only that energy which is physically available to interact with outside systems, (I.e. measurable) is meaningful in any sense.

The models do predict phenomena, but these phenomena are not manifest as infinite energy available to do work. They successfully predict the casimir effect, which is extremely tiny.

 

[polymath]

I took part in a QFT course over a year ago, and I was able to understand how the fields (Klein-Gordon, Dirac, EM, etc.) were represented as a set of normal modes, which were then quantized as harmonic oscillators. Each of the infinite number of modes has a zero-point energy of ½ħω, which results in an infinite ground-state energy that has to be ignored. Then it went to interactions and Feynman diagrams and I didn't understand any more (maybe I didn't put enough effort in it). AFAIK in quantum chromodynamics all perturbation expansions diverge and result in infinities that can't be eliminated... Currently researching chaotic phenomena in thin liquid films, a more practical field and easier to understand...

 

[rangrz]

of the infinite
number of modes has a zero-point energy
of ½ħω, which results in an infinite
ground-state energy that has to be
ignored.

Exactly. It's just an artifact of the mathematical formalism, and does not reflect physical reality. Hence it must be ignored.

QCD is non-renomalizable, hence it can't be unified with electroweak theory.

You find chaotic flows/turbulence/other non laminar hydrodynamics easier to understand?! Damn son, QFT I can handle, that stuff? It hurts my brain.

 

[polymath]

You find chaotic flows/turbulence/other non laminar hydrodynamics easier to understand?! Damn son, QFT I can handle, that stuff? It hurts my brain.

If we're investigating a very thin layer of fluid, the Navier-Stokes equations can be simplified considerably, as the situation is essentially two-dimensional... Then one can investigate the resulting dynamical equation and the response of its solutions to small perturbations and calculate Lyapunov exponents etc. An easy introduction to the subject can be found here. The thin film instabilities may have applications in the field of self-organized nanostructures, see http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/903/1/LN11275_trimmed.pdf .

Dynamical instabilities are interesting in part because without them, the universe would have developed to be a homogeneous gas of constant density... The gravitational instability causes any small deviation from uniform density to grow and result in the formation of stars and other dense regions.

Oh, I'm boring everyone with insider physics talk, sorry...

 

[rangrz]

I'm (reasonably) familiar with the theories of hydrodynamics and the navier-stokes equation. (I got perfect on my magnetohydrodynamics exam a few a weeks ago) But I still find it more difficult than QFT.

Different stokes for different folks?

 

[-=SS=-]

You're looking in totally the wrong place for infinite energy. We live in an electrically driven cosmos, if we would only develop tech in this direction we would have all the power we would ever need. Forget quantum nonsense and mathematical abstractions.. practical solutions are required! Science is going to be turned upside down when the role electricity plays in space is fully realized.

"Throughout space there is energy. ... it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature." - Nikola Tesla

 

[rangrz]

Science is going to
be turned upside down when the role
electricity plays in space is fully realized

You mean like this?
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/maxeq.html
Considered amongst the most important and and beautiful work in science.

or this quantum nonsense?
scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/QuantumElectrodynamics.html

 

[polymath]

You're looking in totally the wrong place for infinite energy. We live in an electrically driven cosmos, if we would only develop tech in this direction we would have all the power we would ever need. Forget quantum nonsense and mathematical abstractions.. practical solutions are required! Science is going to be turned upside down when the role electricity plays in space is fully realized.

"Throughout space there is energy. ... it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature." - Nikola Tesla

The relative significance of different interactions depends on the length scale we're talking about... In the cosmological scale, electromagnetism has no significance compared to gravity. This is because almost all matter is electrically neutral on average.

 

[rangrz]

But it dominates from the atomic to planetary scales, is about equal on the stellar scale.

 

[-=SS=-]

The relative significance of different interactions depends on the length scale we're talking about... In the cosmological scale, electromagnetism has no significance compared to gravity. This is because almost all matter is electrically neutral on average.

This is totally wrong. EM in space is many magnitudes of order greater than anything gravity can perform, with the key exception of black holes (which are hypothetical, untested, mathematical creations). Gravity plays a role but it has been massively over exaggerated and its dominance in cosmological theory has resulted in an endless stream of nonsense sub-theories to patch up the flaws in the standard model., such as black holes, dark matter, dark energy..

Interstellar space is not electrically neutral. Evidence clearly indicates this, regardless of how much NASA and the dogmatic elitists deny it. Prime evidence is comets and their behaviour.

Nice summary of the matter: http://www.veronicasicoe.com/blog/2012/04/science-fact-vs-science-fiction/

 

[rangrz]

No SS, your outright wrong. The gravitational coupling between the Earth and Sun is vastly more than any electrodynamic interaction between the two.

Ditto between the Sun and the galatic center, and between the milky way and the local supercluster.

 

[P A]

^Do you have anything to add re. 'comets and their behavior?' I'm genuinely curious, since that stupid blog post is too silly for me to address directly, and, after all, physics is not my area of expertise.

 

[rangrz]

That blog article is indeed ridiculous. What to add re:comets. Well, Newtonian mechanics(which utterly disregards EMF and only deals with gravity) predicts their orbits astonishingly well. But there is no way to use Maxwell's equations to do so, nor could one do it with path integrals and Feynman diagrams as per QED.So, it.seems a theory of gravity explains it much much better than electromagnetic theory does.

Ergo, it should be self evident that gravity dominates these kind of phenomena.

 

[rangrz]

To add to the above, stars are excellent example of gravity overpowering EM. Briefly: A star works by gravitational inertial confinement fusion. So,in the core, we have all these protons, right? Now by fusion to 4He, we get a bunch of energy. But how does this happen? Protons are powerfully repulsed from each other on account of the +1electric charge. Well, the gravitational force in a star is of such a magnitude that it overcomes the repulsion. The two protons are forced very close together, then one of them undergoes inverse beta decay mitigated by the weak force(with mass and charge conservation from the emitted positron and neutrino) , into neutron and are then bound into a deuterium nucleus by the strong force. The emitted positron annihilate with an electron, emitting gamma rays for.1.022MeV. I.e. light/heat/energy. So now our deuterium nuclei, with a +1 EM charge, is still in a sea of protons with positive charge. Again, they are.electrically repelled. But just as before, the inwards pressure of the gravity overcomes this EM force and a proton gets bound to the Deuterium and we get 3He. Then it gets more complex and tldr, but still driven by gravity overpowering electrostatic repulsion.