Big Bang gives way to the Multiverse

I find it both fascinating and inspiring to observe the evolution of science in my lifetime. Rather than a world religiously bound to dogma, to live in a culture that prizes free inquiry, where truth is pursued regardless of where it may lead, is a wonderful privilege.

We are witnessing the slow-but-sure demise of the Big Bang as the ultimate origin of everything, and the birth of the theory of the Multiverse. We are simply following the math, and even though we may never observe another universe that exists in the same space but different dimension relative to the one which we inhabit, we will be able to prove or disprove its existence by experiment.

"The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention—it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously."

Aurelien Barrau, a French particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

"Will Proof of an Adjacent Universe Be the Next Great Discovery?"

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Couldn't your brain use some help?

Technology Review - 9.23.10 by Edward Boyden, Brian Allen, Doug Fritz

The last few decades have seen a surge of invention of technologies that enable the observation or perturbation of information in the brain. Functional MRI, which measures blood flow changes associated with brain activity, is being explored for purposes as diverse as lie detection, prediction of human decision making, and assessment of language recovery after stroke. Implanted electrical stimulators, which enable control of neural circuit activity, are borne by hundreds of thousands of people to treat conditions such as deafness, Parkinson's disease, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And new methods, such as the use of light to activate or silence specific neurons in the brain, are being widely utilized by researchers to reveal insights into how to control neural circuits to achieve therapeutically useful changes in brain dynamics. We are entering a neurotechnology renaissance, in which the toolbox for understanding the brain and engineering its functions is expanding in both scope and power at an unprecedented rate.

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The illusion of a unified mind

Seed Magazine - 9.21.10 by David Weisman

Credit: Flickr user jeffreymongrain

The experience of a unified mind and the possibility of an everlasting soul are connected. And there is scant evidence to support the existence of either.

There is a common idea: because the mind seems unified, it really is. Many go only a bit further and call that unified mind a “soul.” This step, from self to soul, is an ancient assumption which now forms a bedrock in many religions: a basis for life after death, for religious morality, and a little god within us, a support for a bigger God outside us.

For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind. Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing. Experiences certainly do feel unified, but to accept these feelings as reality is a mistake. Often, the way things feel has nothing to do with how they are.

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How conscious are you?

New York Times - 9.20.10 by Carlo Zimmer

One day in 2007, Dr. Giulio Tononi lay on a hospital stretcher as an anesthesiologist prepared him for surgery. For Dr. Tononi, it was a moment of intellectual exhilaration. He is a distinguished chair in consciousness science at the University of Wisconsin, and for much of his life he has been developing a theory of consciousness. Lying in the hospital, Dr. Tononi finally had a chance to become his own experiment.

The anesthesiologist was preparing to give Dr. Tononi one drug to render him unconscious, and another one to block muscle movements. Dr. Tononi suggested the anesthesiologist first tie a band around his arm to keep out the muscle-blocking drug. The anesthesiologist could then ask Dr. Tononi to lift his finger from time to time, so they could mark the moment he lost awareness.

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Not having enough kids? Build more robots!

This is how Japan will overcome its looming labor shortage.

PhysOrg.com - 9.15.10

The HRP-4 robot (left) walks beside its previous models during a press conference in Tsukuba, Japan. Its makers -- Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology -- hope the new "slim athlete" model is a step towards a robot that can help ease greying Japan's looming labour shortage.

The replacement of humans by machines in the workplace took another step on Wednesday, as Japanese researchers unveiled a model they hope could lead to humanoid menial workers.

Its makers, Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), hope the robot will be a step towards creating a model that can help ease greying Japan's looming labour shortage.

"We designed a working robot in the image of a lean but well-muscled track-and-field athlete," Noriyuki Kanehira, robotic systems manager at Kawada, told a news conference to unveil the blue-and-white "HRP-4."

Designed to help researchers develop models that could replace humans in repetitive manual labour, the latest "athlete" model in a near 10-year-old series updates the feminine, catwalk-strutting, karaoke-singing HRP-4C.

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Don't Fear the Singularity - An excellent talk by Michael Anissimov

Michael Anissimov: "Don't Fear the Singularity, but Be Careful: Friendly AI Design" at Foresight 2010 Conference from Foresight Institute on Vimeo.

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Quantum computers approaching

Financial Times - 9.16.10 by Clive Cookson

A new photonic chip that works on light rather than electricity has been built by an international research team, paving the way for the production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today’s devices.

Future quantum computers will, for example, be able to pull important information out of the biggest databases almost instantaneously. As the amount of electronic data stored worldwide grows exponentially, the technology will make it easier for people to search with precision for what they want.

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Who knows what you want before you ask? Your phone will, soon.

PCMag.com - 9.15.10 by Matthew Murray

SAN FRANCISCO—In his keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum here this morning, Intel vice president and chief technology officer Justin Rattner focused on "context-aware computing," in which devices anticipate your needs and desires and help fulfill them—before you even ask.

The goal, he said, of bringing this to currently popular devices is to "change the relationship so we think of these devices not as devices but as companions, things that are indispensable in our daily lives." He described future devices that will constantly learn about you and your preferences based on how you use the device.

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Our future: Wiped out by AI or live forever

Independent - 9.12.10 by Mike Hodgkinson

Ahead of the game: David Hanson with his animated robot head, Hertz

As night thickens around Marina Boulevard on a murky San Francisco evening, one thing is crystal-clear: the future is not what it used to be. The wildest, most mind-frazzling visions of the years ahead are no longer the sole preserve of science fiction. At least, it seems that way at a reception to mark the start of the 2010 Singularity Summit, the world's leading forum for serious discussion of incredible things to come.

Here, in a plush and spacious apartment not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, scientists, academics and futurists – bankrolled by the Silicon Valley dollar – are discussing what many among them believe to be an imminent and radical transformation of the human experience. This sea change, caused by monumental advances in technology, has a name: the singularity. It also has a dedicated and well-informed fanbase: the singularitarians.

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Computers are vanishing

New York Times - 9.4.10 by John Markoff

An image of a circuit with 17 memristors captured by an atomic force microscope.

THE personal computer is vanishing.

Computers once filled entire rooms, then sat in the closet, moved to our desks, and now nestle in our pockets. Soon, the computer may become invisible to us, hiding away in everyday objects.

A Silicon Valley announcement last week hinted at the way computing technology will transform the world in the coming decade. Hewlett-Packard scientists said they had begun commercializing a Lilliputian switch that is a simpler — and potentially smaller — alternative to the transistor that has been the Valley’s basic building block for the last half-century.

That means the number of 1’s and 0’s that can be stored on each microchip could continue to increase at an accelerating rate. As a consequence, each new generation of chip would continue to give designers of electronics the equivalent of a brand new canvas to paint on.

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Here You Have Email Trojan Proves We're Basically Still Stupid

Color us clueless.

In all the stories I've seen about the Here You Have email trojan, I must have missed the ones that gasped at the abject stupidity, after all our exposure to this phenomenon over the years, of the human race.

There's a telltale vagueness about these subject lines. Haven't we learned to be suspicious of that at all? Who in this age of digital savvy gets an email with the ultimate in generic subject lines "Here You Have," sees an attachment they never asked for or expected, AND THEN DOUBLE-CLICKS ON IT??? Apparently a whole lot of us.

And keep in mind, these emails didn't target the general email-using public, who we might expect to be less than brilliant when in comes to computer security issues. No, these emails went to company servers. Companies like Google, and NASA. What the heck??

This is highly discouraging to me as a futurist, I confess it.

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Google Instant - Search results as you type

This blog is about "documenting the approaching Singularity," which means that when it arrives, I want my blog to be a document that maps some of the innovations that brought us there. This development, for example, may prove to be, in hindsight, one of the steps toward artificial intelligence, or some form of transhumanism. See for yourself...



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Dr. Michio Kaku interviewed about UFOs (Video)

According to my favorite TV scientist, Dr. Michio Kaku, although most (95%) reported sightings of UFOs can be explained as natural phenomena or known aircraft, there's a troubling 5% that defies explanation. He also talks about what they might be. Interesting.



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Ready for a 7,000 km/h train?

Who wouldn't like to travel from LA to New York in 45 minutes? I've never had to travel from LA to New York, or the other way round either, but I'd want to do it just for the rush. The article below introduces ETT (Evacuated Tube Trains) that run at thousands of miles per hour in underground tubes that contain a vacuum.

The idea is that it's high time for a paradigm shift in transportation and that shift will be ETT:

..Such as a global network of maglev trains that travel faster than planes in air-less vacuum tubes. We’re talking about a mode of transportation that will take you from LA to New York in 45 minutes, cruising at six times the speed of sound.

I've spent the last couple of days getting from Norway to the Philippines. The total flight time amounted to 23 hours, on top of which came countless hours of waiting, standing in line, taking taxis and shuttles etc. There’s got to be a better way.

Over the last 50 years, a vast array of tech-intensive industries has seen tremendous progress in efficiency, both in terms of cost and time (two factors that often have a directly positive correlation). Mobile phones have become smaller, cheaper and more powerful. Internet is faster, cheaper and more prevalent than ever. There's a pattern here. Catch my drift?

In his book, the Singularity is near, Ray Kurzweil discusses the concept of paradigms and how once a technology’s potential is exhausted and cannot be further improved, a new technology takes its place, marking a paradigm shift. Computers used to run on simple transistors, which were in the beginning very big and slow, but as the technology evolved, they became cheaper, smaller and more efficient, until finally all the potential for improvement had been squeezed out of that particular technology and any further development to it was marginal. So a new technology, microprocessors, took its place with transistors on an integrated circuit. This technology too follows a similar pattern and each two years microchips become twice as powerful.

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Homebrewed bioscience increases terror fears

WSJ - 8.11.10 by Keith Johnson

Rapid advances in bioscience are raising alarms among terrorism experts that amateur scientists will soon be able to gin up deadly pathogens for nefarious uses.

Fears of bioterror have been on the rise since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, stoking tens of billions of dollars of government spending on defenses, and the White House and Congress continue to push for new measures.

But the fear of a mass-casualty terrorist attack using bioweapons has always been tempered by a single fact: Of the scores of plots uncovered during the past decade, none have featured biological weapons. Indeed, many experts doubt terrorists even have the technical capability to acquire and weaponize deadly bugs.

The new fear, though, is that scientific advances that enable amateur scientists to carry out once-exotic experiments, such as DNA cloning, could be put to criminal use. Many well-known figures are sounding the alarm over the revolution in biological science, which amounts to a proliferation of know-how—if not the actual pathogens.

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An ore you've never heard of could be oil's ultimate replacement

Everyone's heard of wind farms, solar panels, nuclear fusion and fuel cells. One of all of these have been in the news for years, promising to be the source of our future energy. None of them have yet proven to be a feasible replacement for oil. Conspiracy theorists, settle down. There are good reasons why none of these have done the job.

But here's one you probably have never heard of. In fact, it sort of sounds like a substance that might power the Enterprise (besides dilithium crystals). But it's a very serious contender that you'll likely hear a lot more about in the near future: Thorium.

Telegraph.co.uk has a provocative article from August 29:

"If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

"We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

"Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West."

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Getting inside your data

So much of our brains are devoted to seeing, it's no wonder we can understand things far better when we can see them. This technology opens us up to a much deeper understanding of difficult-to-visualize data by allowing researchers to "dive into data in unprecedented ways."

Researchers pushing the furthest boundaries of science and technology can spend a lot of time contemplating the intangible. The AlloSphere, a three-story-high globe that facilitates interactive 3-D visualizations of data, is designed to help. Located at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the facility enables scientists to dive into data in unprecedented ways. Inside the sphere, they can get their hands on the atoms making up the crystal structure of new solar-cell materials or enter a brain and hear its activity.

Standing on a bridge suspended across the sphere’s center, a visitor contemplates a visualization of the quantum wave function of a hydrogen atom’s electron. When viewed through 3-D glasses, the model appears to hang in the air.

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Moore's law will live on

Moore's Law, the phenomenon that has allowed computers to double in speed every 2 years (more precisely that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto an integrated circuit will at least double every 2 years) seems to be a kind of touchstone for whether you are a techno optimist or pessimist.

The nattering nabobs of negativism continue to predict its demise. "It won't last forever," they say. Perhaps not, but according to this article by Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log, it will probably live on for a nice little while thanks to the memristor...

"Will memristors save Moore's Law? The answer appears to be yes … that is, if you redefine Moore's Law, which has fueled the growth of the computer industry for four decades. Research groups say that memristors, a new type of memory device that's on the verge of going commercial, will dramatically enhance the storage capacity and usability of computers."

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