Antithesis of Wisdom...

Topics: Biology, Civics, Climate Change, Existentialism, Entropy, Mars, Politics

Chimpanzees look up to those they consider to be more prestigious, echoing the way that young people admire celebrities such as David Beckham and Cheryl Cole, according to a new study. Researchers found that apes copy the actions of those they consider to have high status within their group.

Professor Whiten commented, “Teenagers look to pop stars as social models, copying their clothing, mannerisms and speech. Adults are inspired by prominent members of their society, such as successful professionals. Our study shows that chimpanzees are similarly selective in their choice of trend setters.” [1]

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Abstract

Humans follow the example of prestigious, high-status individuals much more readily than that of others, such as when we copy the behavior of village elders, community leaders, or celebrities. This tendency has been declared uniquely human, yet remains untested in other species. Experimental studies of animal learning have typically focused on the learning mechanism rather than on social issues, such as who learns from whom. The latter, however, is essential to understanding how habits spread. Here we report that when given opportunities to watch alternative solutions to a foraging problem performed by two different models of their own species, chimpanzees preferentially copy the method shown by the older, higher-ranking individual with a prior track-record of success. Since both solutions were equally difficult, shown an equal number of times by each model and resulted in equal rewards, we interpret this outcome as evidence that the preferred model in each of the two groups tested enjoyed a significant degree of prestige in terms of whose example other chimpanzees chose to follow. Such prestige-based cultural transmission is a phenomenon shared with our own species. If similar biases operate in wild animal populations, the adoption of culturally transmitted innovations may be significantly shaped by the characteristics of performers. [2]

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Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica is often referred to as the "Doomsday glacier" because of its sheer size and position as "'backstop' for four other glaciers which holds an additional 10-13 feet of sea level rise." [3] Add the two feet of sea level Thwaites holds and Florida may have a little more to fear than the denials of their republican senators on the impact of climate change.

I've used the term fascism before, not because it's powerful but because it's stupid. The basis of its appeal is fear: fear of the "other," fear of the future, fear particularly of a supposed loss of birth numbers, therefore future voters and numerical power. So-called "white" supremacy has always been a math game of bad algebra and pure ignorance.

But it does not benefit the crowd proudly without Melanin, intellect and possessing MAGA hats: the celebrity chimps with all the bananas above them they worship use the faux demarcation points of politically constructed cultural differences to rob blind the very people that become their shock troops. Rigging elections is not beneath the 1% simians, as they've motivated their rubes that their "white" team won, despite the lack of sharing of spoils after said rigging, Russian interference or not. Socialism is thrown up as demon while demons rob rubes. They ask for "trick-down" bananas" and get feces. Smoking causing cancer must be denied. Humans causing climate impact MUST be denied until the last drop of oil; the last fracking of methane. Then, the royal chimpanzees will wall themselves up as sea levels rise, soundproof beyond "weeping and gnashing of teeth." They'll have extra bananas to live on as the rest of the planet starves. Eventually, their impressive supplies will run out. Perhaps they'll resort to the cannibalism as the Jamestown colonists did in desperation, eating their own children first. Eventually they will see their last sunrise in splendid, decaying mansions atop a canopy of the forest they razed. Currently, their high potentate Orange Orangutan cannot discriminate "orange" and "origin"; that his own father was born in the Bronx and not the Germany and thinks windmills causes cancer.

Homo sapiens, (Latin: “wise man”) the species to which all modern human beings belong. Homo sapiens is one of several species grouped into the genus Homo, but it is the only one that is not extinct. [YET] See also human evolution. Source: Britannica

Entropy - the measure of a system's thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work. Because work is obtained from ordered molecular motion, the amount of entropy is also a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system. Encyclopedia Britannica

Having stupid citizens also serves a more ‘noble’ purpose. Although most of us want to be treated as intelligent beings, it is also in the interest of ruling parties – be they political or religious – to have an overall stupid population, dumb enough to make them controllable. Education and knowledge are being pushed aside in favour of technical training. Governments are more interested in a highly-skilled labour force than in critical and intelligent citizens. The media feed the population with ready-made entertainment and information, thus forming people’s minds according to what is preferable for the overall functioning of society. Zoereei, Homo stultus

Mars may have been a living world once. We still study it. We wish to terraform it. Mars as a world still takes 687 days to complete its year. It will take 365.25 days for Earth to complete its year...whether we're here, or not.

Homo Stultus - foolish man, stupid man: the chimps are exonerated.

1. Chimpanzee trend-setters: New study shows that chimps 'ape' the prestigious, University of St. Andrews, 2010, Phys.org
2. Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees, Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin E. Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, Frans B. M. de Waal, PLOS Journal
3. A glacier the size of Florida is on track to change the course of human civilization. Pakalolo, Daily Kos

The Arrow of Time...

Schematic of the experimental setup. (A) Heat flows from the hot to the cold spin (at thermal contact) when both are initially uncorrelated. This corresponds to the standard thermodynamic arrow of time. For initially quantum correlated spins, heat is spontaneously transferred from the cold to the hot spin. The arrow of time is here reversed. (B) View of the magnetometer used in our NMR experiment. A superconducting magnet, producing a high intensity magnetic field (B0) in the longitudinal direction, is immersed in a thermally shielded vessel in liquid He, surrounded by liquid N in another vacuum separated chamber. The sample is placed at the center of the magnet within the radio frequency coil of the probe head inside a 5mm glass tube. (C) Experimental pulse sequence for the partial thermalization process. The blue (red) circle represents x (y) rotations by the indicated angle. The orange connections represents a free evolution under the scalar coupling, HJHC = (πh/2)JσzHσzC , between the 1H and 13C nuclear spins during the time indicated above the symbol. We have performed 22 samplings of the interaction time τ in the interval 0 to 2.32 ms. Credit: arXiv:1711.03323 [quant-ph]

Topics: Entropy, Spacetime, Thermodynamics

Abstract

The second law permits the prediction of the direction of natural processes, thus defining a thermodynamic arrow of time. However, standard thermodynamics presupposes the absence of initial correlations between interacting systems. We here experimentally demonstrate the reversal of the arrow of time for two initially quantum correlated spins-1/2, prepared in local thermal states at different temperatures, employing a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance setup. We observe a spontaneous heat flow from the cold to the hot system. This process is enabled by a trade off between correlations and entropy that we quantify with information-theoretical quantities.

The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy, or disorder, tends to increase over time, which is why everything in the world around us appears to unfold forward in time. But it also explains why hot tea grows cold rather than hot. In this new effort, the researchers found an exception to this rule that works in a way that doesn't violate the rules of physics as they have been defined.

The idea of entangled particles has been in the news a lot lately as researchers around the world attempt to use it for various purposes—but there is another lesser-known property of particles that is similar in nature, but slightly different. It is when particles become correlated, which means they become linked in ways that do not happen in the larger world. Like entanglement, correlated particles share information, though it is not as strong of a bond. In this new experiment, the researchers used this property to change the direction of the arrow of time.

Experiment shows that arrow of time is a relative concept, not an absolute one
Bob Yirka, Phys.org

Reversing the thermodynamic arrow of time using quantum correlations
Kaonan Micadei,^{1, ∗} John P. S. Peterson,^{2, ∗} Alexandre M. Souza,² Roberto S. Sarthour,² Ivan S. Oliveira,² Gabriel T. Landi,³ Tiago B. Batalhão,^{4, 5} Roberto M. Serra,^{1, 6, †} and Eric Lutz^{7, ‡}
Physics arXiv

The Great Filter...

Image Source: Week in Weird, Chris Silva

Topics: Drake Equation, Fermi Paradox, Entropy, Space Exploration, SETI

There seems to be a strong inclination for Eschatology, or literally the study of "end things." A great deal of ink is devoted to it in books, blogs and Internet memes.

The Apostle Paul - the sub after Judas - et al believed they would see the end of things in their own lifetimes. The Jehovah's Witnesses' founder Charles Taze Russell devoted a great deal of thought to the subject. Millerites - derived from former Baptist preacher William Miller set a date for the end-of-the-age as October 22, 1844. This became known as the "Great Disappointment." Even Jesus hedged his bets in ancient tradition (seems to have been more a matter of business than romance), and there's an ever-growing list of predictions that (spoiler alert) weren't quite accurate.

Filters do a tremendous work, especially in fermentation. For anyone with inkjet printers, Subtractive Color Mixing employs the primary colors cyan, magenta and yellow. You can even do a lab on it.

The Great Filter is a post I saw on Facebook from io9 that looks at the Fermi Paradox and tries to answer it with the likely possibility that evolved intelligence is its own Entropy as I've stated in previous posts. We may well be past that, and capable of becoming a space faring species with a lot of real estate to explore.

It's an admittedly positive spin. In light of the current xenophobia and the delicate balance of income inequality, strained resources; domestic and international terrorism, it is my hope we all are past the filter and get to an advanced level of maturity...quickly.

io9:
The Great Filter theory suggests humans have already conquered the threat of extinction
George Dvorsky

Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser...

Topics: Entropy, Information, James C. Maxwell, Mark G. Raizen, Thermodynamics

Thought experiments that long puzzled the thermodynamics community are now being performed in the lab—and they’re forging a deeper understanding of the second law.

Almost 25 years ago, Rolf Landauer argued in the pages of this magazine that information is physical (see Physics Today, May 1991, page 23). It is stored in physical systems such as books and memory sticks, transmitted by physical means—for instance, via electrical or optical signals—and processed in physical devices. Therefore, he concluded, it must obey the laws of physics, in particular the laws of thermodynamics.

But what is information? A simple, intuitive answer is “what you don’t already know.” If someone tells you that Earth is spherical, you surely would not learn much; the message has low information content. However, if you are told that the price of oil will double tomorrow, then, assuming that to be true, you would learn a great deal; the message has high information content.

Mathematically, a system’s information content can be quantified by the so-called information entropy H, introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948. The larger the information entropy, the greater the information content.1 Consider the simplest possible information-storage device: a system with two distinct states—for example, up and down, left and right, or magnetized and unmagnetized. If the system is known with certainty to be in a particular state, then no new information can be gained by probing the system, and the information entropy is zero.

Figure 3. Bringing Maxwell’s demon to life. A pair of laser beams can be tuned to atomic transitions and configured to create a one-way potential barrier; atoms may cross unimpeded in one direction—right to left in this figure—but not in the other. (a) When the barrier is introduced at the periphery of a V-shaped magnetic trap, the atoms that cross the barrier will be those that have converted nearly all their kinetic energy to potential energy—in other words, the cold ones. (b–c) By slowly sweeping the barrier across the trap, one can sort cold atoms (blue) from hot ones (red), reminiscent of James Clerk Maxwell’s famous thought experiment, or cool an entire atomic ensemble. Because the cold atoms do work against the optical barrier as it moves, their kinetic energy remains small even as they return to the deep portion of the potential well. (Adapted from ref. 8 , M. G. Raizen.)

Citation: Phys. Today 68, 9, 30 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2912

However, owing to remarkable technological progress achieved in recent decades, experiments with atoms and small particles have now become feasible. Maxwell’s demon, Szilard’s engine, and Landauer’s erasure principle can now be rigorously studied in lab experiments.

One of the first such experiments was performed by Mark Raizen and coworkers at the University of Texas at Austin. 8 They confined an ensemble of atoms in a magnetic trap, as shown schematically in figure 3. Initially, all the atoms are in the same internal state. The group then introduced a one-way optical barrier, composed of two laser beams arranged side by side: One beam promotes atoms to an excited state, and the other is tuned such that it has no effect on excited atoms but repels atoms in the ground state. An atom (red) approaching from the excitation-beam side gets promoted to an excited state, passes unimpeded through the second beam, and then relaxes to the ground state by emitting a photon. An atom approaching from the other side, by contrast, encounters the repelling beam first and is turned around—it can’t get through. The two beams behave as an atom diode.

Physics Today: Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser
Eric Lutz and Sergio Ciliberto

8. G. N. Price et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 093004 (2008); http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.093004
M. G. Raizen, Science 324, 1403 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1171506

Entropy and Life...

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

Quanta Magazine: A New Physics Theory of Life, Natalie Wolchover
AIP Paper: Statistical physics of self-replication
Jeremy L. England
Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Einstein, Entropy and Information...

...as explained by one of the smartest physicists I know!

James Clerk Maxwell formulated the equations that describe electricity and magnetism. He was Einstein's hero! Both are the reason why we're in the age of laptops and I-phones.

Physics Colloquium, University of Texas Physics Department. Mark has a process that's a little more efficient than Steven Chu's (yes, THAT Steven Chu). It's worth your time to watch this presentation, and seek out colloquium wherever you are. Science is open, and a social endeavor.

Something I used to enjoy in Texas, that I admittedly miss...