Hubble Trouble (1)

Hubble, from the University of Chicago, observed for the first time in 1929 that galaxies are flying away from us. Many candles later, the constant attributed to his name, is still being refined. Now, it appears that there is a revision to the constant, perhaps as much as 8% downward. This is not the first time physicists realized that they are yet to understand how things work. Complexity typically portends lack of understanding and the current state of affairs in high energy physics, albeit data emanating from big steel in Geneva like water from a faulty fire hydrant, is stagnant. Physicists and engineers are a dangerous combination, the former dreaming up complexity and the latter standing ready to prove anything thrown at them by steel and concrete. But this is unlikely to lead anywhere. It appears that one does have to have 1.5 brains to break out of the stalemate - and we have not had a specimen for 100 years and it is unclear if we will ever do.


Predicting the behavior of complex non-linear systems is dangerous. Making uncertain observations and attempting to prove those by creating dark stuff is even more dangerous, for this will lead the next generation down rabbit holes to the wonderland. Hanging mirrors to measure reverberations to the diameter of a proton, indeed, is a great accomplishment. But one has to note that engineers have always been good at proving hypotheses but replicability could be more challenging. The best way to proceed when one cannot understand over 94% of the observations is to ask if the underlying theories are correct. That's what we do in most fields.


As they revise the Hubble constant, perhaps, it is time to rethink how research is done in high energy Physics.


(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/recharged-debate-over-speed-expansion-universe-could-lead-new-physics

Open research

Recent news (1) that the European Commission will soon join the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation to launch an open research publication platform is encouraging. Increasingly, university based research, peer reviewed or not, are shown to be suffering from inherent biases - both of the author and her peers. Academics, tenured or not, seem to have a clean objective function - driven largely by volume and in the vast publication enterprise, replicability is certainly an afterthought. Open research, thus, has to expand beyond conventional research if it has to capture useful insights from those who never climbed the high mountain.


Research and manufacturing have become synonymous. The latter takes raw materials and create commoditized widgets and the former takes raw data and create research papers with no new insights and if there were, they are typically not replicatable. The peers, who approve of the production, seem to form a colony of conformists, ready to approve papers that support the highly subscribed ideas and marginalize anything new. Academics and politicians share many common characteristics as both of them live in a bubble with their "peers," and have little interest to ever look outside the window to see how the world actually works.


Open research, if it encompasses the world at large, providing an avenue for new ideas to float through, could be a game changer. But then, those behind it are all controlled by their "peers."


(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/european-commission-considering-leap-open-access-publishing

The economics of health

The economics of health has been complex. Diverse stakeholders - patients, providers, manufacturers and payors - who all seem to have a partial picture of the whole problem, have made it more difficult to solve. To top it all off, policy makers, with little understanding of this complex picture, seem to trade in photo ops and healthcare acts.

The value accruing to society is an important and possibly the only consideration of policy. The evaluation of policy choices will require an understanding of the value of the foundational units - the individuals, themselves. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the value of an individual is not the discounted stream of utility to society and thus healthcare systems around the world, making decisions on a fixed value of a human, are misguided. Since the individual is perfectly capable of changing the future stream of utility, she can only be considered to be a basket of interacting options. Thus, any policy that forces the individual to prematurely exercise such options is unambiguously suboptimal.  Additionally, policies that reduce the flexibility afforded to the individual to pursue new ideas will devalue the options held by the individual. This automatically reduces the value of the individual, both to herself and to society.

For example, any policy that can be shown to reduce the incentive of an individual to move from one job to a more attractive one, will have a deleterious effect on aggregate utility. Any policy that does not allow an individual to climb out of a low value position, either due to a capital constraint or due to failing health, will reduce aggregate utility. Any policy that does not provide incentives to prevent health problems for individuals will automatically increase the expected future costs in the system. Any policy that does not allow market forces to move the complex system to an optimal position by sharing the economics among the various participants will have a negative value to society.

Politicians are likely the worst people to create and implement healthcare policies. It has been known for ever that "healthcare is this complex." It will take a bit more than theatrics and politics.

Natural Intelligence

Recent news that researchers could now encode 215 petabytes of data in a single gram of human DNA (1) and possibly all the information created from human inception in a container of DNA that weighs couple of pickup trucks, is a constant reminder that Nature works in a dimension, possibly incomprehensible to humans. Recently, humans have been worrying about the growth of noise at an accelerating clip with over a zettabyte a year. Although some call this data and even information, an apt description of it is noise, as much of it is useless to advance knowledge.

More importantly, the capacity of data storage revealed by the DNA structure tells us that the status-quo technologies that some believe will propel us to the proverbial singularity are mere toys of insignificance. The only possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that extra-terrestrials find our level of development too premature to make contact. Evolution has been slow and biological systems seem to have taken almost 4 billion years to cobble together something that could start to think about knowledge replication and perpetuation. But the technology afforded to humans is too crude and likely in the wrong direction to make a significant leap toward harnessing high dimensional energy and tunneling through spacetime.

Those who are actively seeking "artificial intelligence" in Silicon may be well advised to return to studying natural storage and processing that appear to be fully integrated and freely exhibiting quantum states.

(1) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/dna-could-store-all-worlds-data-one-room