Apparent confusion

Recent revelations of the apparent horizon, trumping the long held notion of the event horizon, is symptomatic of mathematical manipulation and resulting unverifiable constructs. The “theory of everything,” has to include the undeniable fact that physicists, given enough time, will cook up confusion and make it sound plausible. Once stated, the theory can be proven by experimentation – especially by the kind that creates infinite noise that affords any proof.

The assertion that black holes exist is a necessary condition to engage in hypothesizing their properties. After nearly a century, most are still looking for the underlying reasons for dark matter, energy and flow. None has been forthcoming – even in the presence of enterprising engineers hiding their detectors deep under-ground and far above-ground. Papers have to be published, prizes have to be won and egos have to be nourished. Story tellers have become super stars and the “science men,” have pushed the ignorant into the abyss.

The playground of physics has become dirty and it is no different from ignorant politicians attempting to cure the ills of the world.

The entropy of nations

Research from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) shows that the disparity in per capita energy consumption among nations has been decreasing – now approaching a maximum entropy condition, nestled half-way between perfect equality and inequality. The authors argue that this is likely the equilibrium condition for the status-quo.

To jostle nations out of this status-quo equilibrium requires something dramatically better. Alternatives have been threatening to upset the apple cart for long. Short sighted politicians and energy tycoons have been chasing the sun, wind and fire to get an upper hand on the energy equation. If extraterrestrials do exist, humans would be an unsurpassed reality comedy show on their TV sets. How stupid does one have to be to burn fossil fuels that reduce the air they need to live in a constrained greenhouse.

Intelligence is about breaking the status-quo equilibrium condition.

Entangled time

A recent paper from Cornell shows experimentally that time could be an illusion – a property fully internal to the system. Time materializes only in an entangled state, when an observer is entangled with the “clock,” – a mechanism to measure. Using an entangled state of the polarization of two photons, they show that one is able to gauge the evolution of the other, visualizing time. For an observer, outside the system, everything appears stagnant – with no concept of time.

Although conceptually difficult to internalize, the existence of time bothered many in the past. If time exists only if the observer is entangled with the measuring instrument, then, the paradox of increasingly meager life becomes even more ridiculous. If the split between past and future is an illusion, it means that such a distinction is only made by the entangled observer and not anything or anybody else. Such an observer, is in a sort of time jail, unable to escape. Every external participant is unaware of her motion in time.

Lack of time means no emotions or imagination. Did humans need time or was it just an accident? Did the internal clocks of biological systems entangle voluntarily with the universal clock? Was such an entanglement a necessary condition for the formation of life? Is it possible to break out of the constraints of time?

Did time create life or life create time?

Materials genome

Research from Duke indicates that the recently launched “Materials Genome Initiative,” is already beginning to yield results. Their study published in Physics describes a new Platinum group compounds with interesting properties. Humans are finally shaking off the perils of industrial revolution, when scale was the only consideration – mine, smelt, roll, build and sell – to the masses. Early automotive tycoons didn’t even want to color their end products as they feared loss of efficiency.

Lack of progress in materials sciences has held humans back in virtually every field. In computing, packing conventional silicon ever closer to increase speed has led to thermal and quantum tunneling limitations in chip design. In space travel, inelegant designs that use massive amounts of conventional fuel to propel heavy payloads into orbits, has been the norm for decades. In medicine, drug delivery continues to rely on decade long techniques that is akin to carpet bombing with little access to the brain. In transportation, traditional materials based designs are responsible for the highest number of deaths on the road and high energy use in other modalities. Century old building techniques and materials have led to energy inefficient homes aiding accelerating green house effect.

It is time to step back from mass manufacturing to intelligent materials based design in every field.

Social progress

Research from Harvard (1) provides an overall measurement of social progress for countries all around the world. Although there aren’t many surprises in the list, it does point to an overall disparity between social conscience and progress.


The most interesting observation in this empirical study is that no country was able to score in the top half of all dozen components measured including medical care, sanitation, shelter, safety, access to knowledge, information and higher education, wellness, ecosystem, personal rights and equity. This implies that progress in some of these dimensions are negatively correlated with others. Those seeking to design better future societies need to understand the causes of such correlations as well as have an overall view of portfolio management.

The source of negative correlations among factors of progress is likely temporal. The impact one can achieve by investing in certain dimensions is higher than others in the short run. However, such a skewed portfolio allocation may adversely affect overall progress in the long run. Very large countries such as India, pulling up the rear, is symptomatic of its lack of understanding of how to manage a portfolio of seemingly contradictory objectives. Focus on any one area at the cost of others may be useful to win elections for its leaders but it will likely keep it bottled up for decades.

Another large country, the US, albeit being on top, shows that it is necessarily sub-optimizing available opportunities. The immense talent available to it has been constrained by its increasing political and bureaucratic inertia, which if left unchecked, has the potential to bring the galloping nation to slow saunter. Although portfolio management principles are well understood, the current system prevents it from making optimal allocation decisions. The tendency to complicate policy decisions, either because of lack of understanding or for political gains, has created a regime that seems to be controlled by the incompetent.

Good performances by small countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland also imply that scale is a huge impediment to effecting beneficial policy changes. The real question for the countries down the list is how they can take advantage of their size and learn from the mistakes of those showing persistent under-performance.

(1) Michael Porter unveils new health and happiness index, the Guardian.

Untestable simplicity

Cosmology has been unable to advance any further understanding of the universe for nearly a century. However, aided by fancy mathematics and fancier machines, physicists have been successful in creating a false perception of knowledge progression during this time as they danced their way to Nobel prizes and professorships. Some have even been successful in making the field “approachable” for the common woman through lecture circuits, books, blogs, podcasts and countless TV appearances. Even sitcoms have become “socially responsible,” teaching the couch potatoes about black holes and time travel through the comedy of idiots representing wise men. The general and continuous lowering of standards, aiding entry based on popularity and not competence, has resulted in a crop of physicists who are good story tellers but not much else.

The collective groan heard across the physics departments in major universities when the LHC failed to detect exotic partners to the much anticipated Higgs Boson or the conspicuous absence of her bridesmaids, the SUSY particles, could only be attributed to broken strings on their mathematical violins and the possibility of curtailed funding to mend them. It is ironic that the “theory of everything,” was done in by the potent concoction of the particle soup – something that the man who made the last meaningful contribution to physics, warned against. The dangerous combination of declining imagination and accelerating technology to make finer and finer measurements of noise has resulted in the field coming to a grinding halt. To top it all off, mathematics, a tool that helped humanity build civilizations in the past has now turned into a trick to prove anything or to create theories that do not need to be proven.

Experimentalists have been “defending” the field against occasional excursions into imagination – such as the multiverse - on the premise that a theory, if not proposed along with predictions that can be experimentally tested, is not worthwhile. They steadfastly cling to such a practical notion that most are willing to accept any level of complexity in existing alternatives as long as something could be tested. This is indeed noble. However, judging from their contributions for the past hundred years, it is unclear if such a posture is valuable for humanity.

Simplicity, even at the cost of untestability, should dominate the discourse in physics.

Data loss?

A recent report in Current Biology Indicates that a large percentage of the data, supporting scientific publications, are lost due to lack of access to the original authors and obsolete data storage techniques. Underlying data to scientific publications are apparently lost at an astonishing rate of 17% per year. Current expectations of the life of data are significantly different from what was considered to be acceptable 20 years ago.

What is an acceptable span of life for data today? Do data remain relevant for ever? Should data have an expiry date? Data, as we all know, are the raw materials to insight generation but that does not necessarily mean that they should exist for ever. In a world of exponentially increasing data, the challenge is to extract any information content in them quickly and discard the rest. Storing data for ever is likely going to create problems in many different dimensions.

The basic notion that more is better is not at all true for data. Scientific experiments such as the LHC create data at such a rate, it is virtually indistinguishable from random noise, unless one is looking for something specific. Large companies create so much data that many are coming to a grinding halt. The star of the data revolution has been googling its way into such endeavors as creating a human brain through artificial neural nets and curing death on the premise that there is nothing one cannot accomplish if data were available. Based on the artificial brain’s proclivity to seek cat videos on the internet they may be right on one account but not on others.

Data are very close to random noise. More of it is unlikely to solve problems.

Shilling out

A recent Nobel laureate has derided his fellow prize winner as “the catholic who has discovered that God does not exist.” He argues that humans are psychologically imbalanced and make irrational decisions. That is fair enough – one has to just observe our leaders in Washington to understand this is a truism. What he misses however is the simple idea that predicting irrational behavior of aggregate markets – a large number of idiots – is not easy. If this is not true, Yale would have amassed all of the world’s wealth by now. One could observe this is not the case – neither for the University nor for its illustrious champion. It is also not true for its foundation – one would imagine with such knowledge, the professor would have helped it a bit. Alas, alpha is not that easy to capture.

Market efficiency has been a lightening rod for many practioners, those who make money by moving money around for no other purpose. It is ironic that an economist of such stature will fall for the same. It is indeed puzzling that the Nobel committee will find such an argument compelling. Getting wrapped in psychology, albeit being good fodder for story telling, is not amenable to creating frameworks for the behavior of large and complex systems. Measuring real estate prices is one thing – many could do that, but imagining how complex systems function in aggregate is another. If one could indeed predict “bubbles,” why not do that routinely – and become the richest man on earth? Is it just the altruistic endeavors in education that is holding him back? or is it that practicing what is being professed is not as easy as it seams?

To make this clear, once and for all, all he has to do is to predict the next bubble and bet his entire career, home and savings on it. Then, perhaps, he can find some disciples.

Slow evolution

A recent book “The Ghosts of Evolution of Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Patterns and other Ecological Anachronisms” points out that Avocados appear to prefer designs that seem to rely on creatures who lived a few million years ago to perpetuate their seeds. Is this a case of a time warp or just incredibly slow evolutionary trajectories?

Avocados, clinging to a strategy that worked for many millions of years, may find themselves extinct, eventually. Is the speed of evolution an important attribute of survival? The fact that Avocados are still around implies processes that replicate transmission, albeit at lower efficiencies. This is an important learning for more advanced life forms as well. The fact that the form has survived does not mean that it is the fittest, it is just that natural laws have not gotten to them.

Humans should be worried.

Leaning PISA

Results from the recently concluded PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test show sobering results for US teenagers, lagging behind in Math, Science and Reading to their Asian counterparts in aggregate (although certain states such as MA and CT are on par or above). Although these are important metrics, there are more fundamental questions for education systems worldwide.

Is education about getting high scores in Math, Science and Reading? What’s the correlation of such high scores to eventual success – perhaps defined as the contribution to society – in the advancement of knowledge and humanity? What Math, Science and Reading are being tested – are they from last two centuries or something newer? How do such high scores correlate with the GDP growth of the countries associated with the star test-takers? What do the students who capture such superior scores eventually do with their lives?

What is education for? Is education about taking and performing in tests? Does education improve intelligence or does intelligence portends education? What has been the educational background of people who changed the world? Were they good test takers or something else? What are contemporary tests really testing – is it the ability to take tests, acquired knowledge or intelligence? How does culture affect measurement by tests? Do tests motivate students to learn? How does one learn? Is it from books and classes?

Educations systems, world-over, have gotten it completely wrong. In the East, they cram information into the brains of kids, essentially destroying any innate creative capabilities. In the West, they de-prioritize fundamental knowledge, creating students with stars in their eyes but with no hard skills to back it up. And PISA shows up – testing, ranking and reporting as if it means something. It doesn’t.

The only metric of a good education system is the end result. Does it produce individuals and teams who advance humanity? If not, it does not mean anything.

It is complicated

A recent article in Nature that shows Native Americans may have arrived 24,000 years ago and they are a mixture of two distinct populations – East Asians and Western Eurasians is interesting. Current technology on human genome may be more aptly applied in this manner rather than the misguided attempts at predicting the probability of disease.

Humans have been circling the Earth for long. Contemporary populations that subscribe to country, color or religion are akin to those who may find the meaning of life based on the color of ice-cream that was consumed yesterday. It is such a preposterous notion that a large percentage of the 7 billion current humans are driven by such ideas of cultural purity. They have figured out how to divide themselves so infinitesimally small that the preferred human in close proximity has nearly zero chance of carrying anything resembling them in her genes.

Is this lack of information or just a bug in the physical hardware that they are endowed? If it is the former, then the biggest productivity boost for humanity could come from disseminating information on migratory patterns for the last 50,000 years to all inhabitants. If it is the latter, then, God save us.

Free-less education

The rise in freelance lecturers in US educational institutions is concerning from many perspectives. The first question is why this is happening. If this is emanating from cost reduction (and profit enhancement), it is akin to short-sighted companies focused on next quarter’s EPS instead of better products and strategies. A related question is whether the decline in full-time tenure track faculty is a conscious effort to contain R&D (and perhaps costs).

The US business schools have been educating bean counters for many decades now. They equip them with the “latest tools,” fully capable of demonstrating maximum earnings in their companys’ income statements. Now, there are indications that the administrators of these venerable “not for profit” institutions are practicing what they have been teaching. Sure, reducing costs are important but if it adversely affects the products they make, in this case the graduates of these schools, it is going to come back and bite them later.

It is time that the universities in the country rise to the accountability of creating the best educated generation, yet. If they regress to the gimmicks of failing companies, they have only themselves to blame for the results.

Network dominance

A recent study in the Proceedings of Royal Academy: Biological Sciences shows that the breadth and depth of one’s network are important determinants of skills acquisition and retention. This makes intuitive sense but now data proves it as well. In the context of expanding electronic social networks, it will be interesting to assess the correlation between skills and network scope.

Human brains have always been terribly constrained in the absence of external stimuli. An interesting question is whether the quality of one’s network is as important as its size. Those with stringent criteria for network building with ex.ante biases are likely to build “pure” networks. Such networks, however, are unlikely to extend the thought processes of the participants. On the other hand, promiscuous network builders may build very large systems quickly but may derive little benefit from it as diversity may create a level of noise that is incomprehensible. Logically, then, there is an optimal network building strategy to maximize skills building.

The next battleground – social networks – present a challenging design problem for humans.

The value of time

A recent study from the Mayo clinic that shows extremely high mortality in patients who are over 75 years old who have elected to undergo dialysis is sobering. With over 40% of the sample population passing within six months and a high percentage unable to return home, one has to wonder if decision-making could be improved. This is indeed a difficult question, one that may not have a clear answer, but it is worthwhile to think about it.

If human life cannot be infinitely sustained, then, there is an optimal decision point to extinguish it. If the objective function is a combination of individual and societal utility, maximization of value would require a mutual decision. If human life is standardizable, allowing high substitutability, life would appear to be a wasting asset. In such a situation, life will unambiguously lose value with time and the option held by the individual and society mutually to terminate would be optimally exercised earlier than what current norms allow. Thus, modern societies need to postulate better exits for its members.

On the other hand, if science and technology slopes indicate a step-function change to improve the life span of humans by orders of magnitude, then, exercising the option to exit early is suboptimal – both for the individual and possibly for society. In a world of declining aggregate number of humans, such an exit is extremely expensive. Assuming substitutability, the value of a human life, then, is a function of stock and flow of humans as well as the forecasted lifespan of an individual.

Thus, the value of remaining time for an individual can be reliably forecasted using a few attributes such as total population, net rate of growth and the probability of extension of human lifespan in the near future.

Intelligent evolution

A recent article published in the journal of PLOS pathogens show data indicating that evolvability is an important characteristic of selection. This is a finding that points to the importance of optimal control in a multi-stage game of evolution. Random mutation and single stage selection always sounded too simplistic to many. Now, it appears that evolution is not necessarily that straight forward.

Ridiculing each others’ position has taken much of the air time for debating evolution. There is no theory (let alone hypothesis) that could NOT be modified with new data and insights. Those bowing to the super creators of religion fight endless wars with the super scientists, who have figured it all out. Well, in physics about 4%, in biology less and in economics lesser. Flexibility of mind is much more valuable than conventional belief systems. As much of the world turn around predictable axes, the rest have to attempt to move thoughts forward.

If evolution, indeed, is a multi-stage game and selection shows optimal control, then, one has to question contemporary ideas. If evolution is intelligent, what may not be?

Horizontal innovation

Recent research from MIT shows structural and mechanical guidance from snails and clams improve the designs of robots. This is in a favorable direction of the application of Mathematics, informed by optimal designs from Biology. Vertical specialization has been substantially dampening breakthrough innovation in both engineering and medicine. Synergistic cooperation between mathematicians and biologists could steepen the innovation trajectory in both.

Engineers have been utilizing data in creative ways for centuries. This is a discipline that has invented and utilized much of the analytics, currently rediscovered by scientists. The basic notion that biological systems are too complex to be systematically analyzed using data, kept the discipline back for decades. Now, human genome and big data seem to have broken the shackles.

However, one has to be careful jumping into “big noise,” with presumed success. There will be setbacks and some may declare victory prematurely at the first sign of success. There is significant potential here but it would require professionals with limited horizontal view to trade their egos for a chance of higher success.

Involuntary terraforming

News that a new species of bacteria was found in two category 4 clean room facilities used for assembling payloads for space in two different parts of the World illustrate the difficulties of executing sterilized exploration. This coupled with the fact that earthly organisms were found on Mars probes indicate that the first inhabitants of the planet continue to fool their somewhat more evolved cousins. This is concerning, as humans have a forgettable history of negatively influencing areas they have explored in the past.

Physical exploration of space appears too archaic in the presence of improving technologies for remote viewing. More importantly, the fascination to physically explore the Solar system, apparently to find life, may have to be tempered based on the recent hypothesis that there are at least 8 billion Earth like planets orbiting Sun like stars in the Milky Way alone. Human exploration of the Solar system for extraterrestrial life is a bit like riding a bicycle around the house in an effort to find Lions or some other majestic animals. It is unlikely.

It is time we rethought micro space exploration. The expected information gain from such exploits is close to zero.

Maximum MOM

India’s successful launch of the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is good news. After a few weeks in the Earth’s orbit, the orbiter will be heading out to the famed red planet. The journey, however, is fraught with danger with only the ESA making it in the first attempt.

Ref: NewScientist

A larger question is why India (and before that Japan, China and the ESA) attempted to develop their own technology for the Mars mission. After the US and Russia have already demonstrated viable technologies to reach the orbit and then land on Mars, it is unclear why reinventing such technologies is an economically good decision.

The utility a country derives from developing its own Mars mission may have four parts.

Public Pride (PuP) = Pride from achieving something for humanity

Private Pride (PrP) = Pride from showcasing the country’s accomplishments

Public Data (PuD) = Data and information that will be disseminated publicly

Private Data (PrD) = Data and information that will be held confidential

V = PuP + PrP + PuD + PrD

If the total cost of the mission is C, the the return to the country is (V-C)/C. However, since the true economic value of pride is close to zero, the country’s real return from such missions is low. It can, however, boost this return by acquiring such technologies from countries that have already demonstrated viability.

For example, in India’s case, if it is able to swallow the less valuable pride, then it could buy the technology (from the US or Russia) for just PrD. By doing so, it loses PrP but the selling country will likely subsidize PuP and PuD. In this case, its return from the mission is (PuP+PuD)/PrD. This is likely substantially higher than developing the technology on its own. At the very least, the cost will likely be an order of magnitude less.

More generally, society can maximize return on space investments if follower countries (after a single country has accomplished the goal) simply buys the technology from the leader to execute missions.

Behavioral flexibility

A recent study in The American Naturalist suggests that animals show an equal level of behavioral unpredictability as humans. Observations of adult male mosquitofish over a period of time also seem to indicate that some individuals are more unpredictable compared to others. The authors hypothesize that such unpredictability represents behavioral flexibility that facilitates learning or creates confusion for predators.

These observations have implications for modern organizations also. Large enterprises implement organizational constraints to reduce behavioral volatility of its employees – in how they work, execute tasks, get trained and deliver products and services. They also measure time and effort at detailed task level and they generally view volatility in such metrics as undesirable. These actions by companies may be decreasing the ability of their employees to experiment and learn. The long term impact of this could include declining innovation rate, lack of job satisfaction and stagnant productivity.

Unpredictability and behavioral flexibility may have a positive impact on the viability and growth of organizations.

Ref: Flexibility : Flexible Companies for the Uncertain World.

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781439816325

NIFting LIFE

Recent news that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has surpassed a critical benchmark – obtaining more energy than provided in a fusion experiment is a significant milestone toward free energy, an outcome that will help solve two tactical problems faced by the Earth, environmental degradation and colliding asteroid vaporization. No cost energy production has become a critical need in a system, wobbling toward extinction, either by the actions of its inhabitants or by space debris that envelop it like fruit flies around a rotten apple.

Lasers focused on a target container for hydrogen fusion – a mini Sun

Ref: BBC News

NIF, plagued by technical difficulties, has been behind on its own goals. But it seems to have accomplished what it set out to do a full year before. If the results are verified and replicated, they successfully demonstrate the concept of sustainable hot fusion with energy accretion. This should boost efforts to scale up fusion into practical power generation.

Ref: LIFE at LLNL

The aptly named, Laser Internal Fusion Energy (LIFE) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been making conceptual power plant designs based on NIF experiments and it appears that we are moving ever closer to reality. Although the goal is to deliver fusion based commercial energy by 2020, recent advancements may allow an accelerated deployment.

Fusion, the only known source for clean energy, may ultimately help humans sneak out of disaster, just in time.

Music to the inventors

Research from Michigan State University shows a high positive correlation between involvement in arts and crafts in childhood (<14 years) to innovation (measured by patents) and business creation later in life. Training and early participation in music, creative writing, photography and other such artistic areas appear to positively influence out-of-the-box thinking, a critical attribute of innovation and new business creation.

It has long been argued that the superiority of the US in innovation is related to its flexible education system that focuses more on whole brain development. Although US may not top other countries in test scores in hard sciences, it does produce a high level of creativity per capita, far in excess of any other country. There is a clear trade off between early specialization in sciences and later creativity. Well known technical institutes around the world, understandably proud of their ability to create a large number of engineers and doctors at will, may be missing a trick. The world may need less human robots in the future, highly efficient in applying what they are taught and it may need more creative individuals who can innovate and create new businesses. An education system focused on creating employees is significantly less valuable than one nourishing inventors and entrepreneurs.

Arts and crafts – that propelled the human psyche out of a dreadful life focused on food and sex – may ultimately give a more substantial makeover for humans.

Option value of organs

A recent study in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology argues that assigning a benefit, say $10,000, to a kidney donor could increase available organs for kidney transplantation by 5%. Although the price elasticity of kidneys is unclear, it seems logical to assume a normal market equilibrium. Ethical issues aside, the owner of an organ may be sub optimizing decisions by not exercising the put option optimally.

Organs are wasting assets, the market value of which are declining over time. The utility one gains from her organs is a function of remaining lifetime – with the asset lost in a catastrophic end. The net value of the asset is the difference between the two, that may show a U shaped curve. The put option held by the owner on her organs has an optimal exercise horizon prior to death. This is especially true if the organ is not essential to life, or acceptable backups exist as in the case of donating one out of the two functioning kidneys.

Tangible economic incentives, if applied correctly, can induce optimal exercise, with beneficial societal impacts.