News Flash: Time Exists

Source: XKCD (Randall Munroe)

As I wrote in "Meaning is not Ubiquitous", people like to find "meaning" and correlations in things where there really isn't any. At the other end of the spectrum, some people like to take basic - very real - things and turn them into some sort of human construction. Not only is this egocentric, it goes against everything that is known about physics. I found this on the Internet today:

"Will time end? Time is an abstract concept created by humans. It doesn't exist and therefore never started, so it cannot end." (It's been modified slightly from its original form to protect the guilty.)

Let's start with the first postulate there: that time isn't real, that it is a human construct. Physics is essentially based on functions that take the time coordinate as an input (and some other things) and produce a position or some attribute as an output. If time isn't real, physics breaks down and there is no universe. No universe? No humans to create the system. Everything about science is based on time flowing in one direction (at least in the unrolled dimension) and the absence of cycles in time. Animals and tiny organisms, extant long before humans came to be on the earth, had to do things at certain times to stay alive. It is quite safe to say that animals such as bears change their behavior based on the time (e.g. hibernating).

Now, let's take on the proposition that time never started. Big-bang cosmology, the accepted theory in its field, depends quite heavily on there being a zero point in time (the bang). We can use super-telescopes to look far out and far back to see how matter became more advanced as time moved away from that one creation moment. The WMAP image, possibly the most important image in science, by existing proves that the Big Bang happened and that time has a beginning.

Finally, the declaration that time cannot end. The "reasoning" behind it is empty, but it's not necessarily wrong. Space is expanding (out from one beginning point), and time seems to be continuing. For time to end, spacetime would have to stop expanding or be destroyed, which may or may not be possible. We shall see, or rather the universe will see - we will most likely be long gone.

Meaning is not Ubiquitous

A few days ago, I saw the last episode of The Prisoner, called "Fall Out." In it, a whole bunch of crazy stuff happened that didn't resolve the plot at all. I tried to figure it out for a while, and eventually turned to the Internet for help. Though I found a few fascinating fan pages, nobody could solidly say what it was supposed to mean. Even the best one I could find had some critical holes.

Then it hit me: it doesn't mean anything. This might sound a little postmodern, but people think that everything has meaning when in reality a lot of occurrences are truly coincidences, simple white noise. It is known that the writer of Fall Out wanted to be done with the series (he had received a lot of evidently annoying fan mail already) and therefore probably destroyed the plot in a blazing glob of nonsense, basically saying "ha, here's what it all means!" and presenting total insanity.

Another thought I had was that logic was somehow distorted to make this all work. (Perhaps some kind of meta-logic?) Then I realized that such an idea is just taking the arbitrary nature up another level and that allowing the rules of logic to be bent takes it out of the real world and makes it all pointless.

Side note: I would be very happy to play a puzzle game in which meta-logic and postulate distortion happen, assuming it was well thought out.

So, in short, Fall Out means nothing and there isn't guaranteed to be meaning in any given place. It's possible and quite easy to produce total nonsense from mental fluctuation, and trying to interpret it according to the real world is a waste of time.

I Can See!

I went to the optometrist to pick up my new glasses today. I haven't worn glasses, contacts, or optical correction of any kind for almost a year now; they had stopped helping. I guess I had just gotten used to the world being hard to see. I was pretty much unable to read text more than five feet in front of me (allowing, of course, for larger font sizes).

Now that I have glasses, it's really amazing what I was missing. The world has so much detail! My back will no longer cause pain when I sit far forward to read at my computer. Oh, the things you miss when you get used to not having them!

The Real End of Driver's Ed

Today, I did the last behind-the-wheel and observational driving lessons necessary to get a driver's license. I now will never have to see anybody involved in driver's ed again, which is actually kind of sad because I liked a lot of the people in my class.

Anyway, now all I have to do to get my license is turn 16 (in 6 months 3 days) and have 50 total hours of driving logged on my permit. These are both achievable goals.

I did a lot of other, far more interesting things today, but I probably shouldn't talk about them because HIPAA!

The End of Driver's Ed Class

Today was the last meeting of my driver's education class. We did very little; it was just a celebratory pizza-eating day. However, today does mark the end of an important (but short) passage in my life.

Driving is a great freedom; it will allow me to expand my teaching/coaching business by getting around to more clients. Of course, I can't actually get my license until a few months after I turn 16, so I do need an adult with a driver's license to be in the car with me while I drive.

I am well on my way to the necessary 50 hours. Driving home from the chess club is an excellent source of night driving. I'm guessing I have maybe 1 hour of night driving done and almost 5 hours total.

Summer Classes Begin

Since I want to always have things to do, I'll be taking two online classes at Black Hawk College this summer. In fact, they have already started - just today.

Speech 101 (Principles of Speech Communication) is required to graduate, but that's not why I'm taking it. I just finished freshman year at Rivermont Collegiate, which included Speech I. Since Speech II is receiving the Ax of New Headmaster's Executive Decision, I wanted to continue my speaking education because it's very important to communicate verbally with customers, business associates, and people in general. My experience doing YouTube should help here.

Economics 270 (International Business and Communication) is an elective I'm taking to continue the studies I started in ECON 222. It seems to focus less on actual economics and more on business negotiations with people around the world. I'm taking this mainly because I took Chinese at Rivermont this year and learned a lot about the difference in culture. These should turn out to be useful skills; China and Japan are super important world figures.

Driver's ed is wrapping up, so these fit together perfectly to usurp my summer vacation!

Let He Who Has Understanding

Last night, I read the passage in the Revelation in which reference is made to "he who has understanding." It states that only that person/entity is able to calculate who the "beast" (the Antichrist) is based on a number, 666 (sometimes rendered 616). One way to turn names into numbers is gematria, Hebrew numerology, the forms of which are so numerous and generally so entropical that they could be used to "prove" anything.

An interesting observation was made in a discussion of this verse: If it requires understanding to do the calculations, then it shouldn't be terribly obvious who it is referring to. Some might use this as an excuse to go crazy with obscure gematria, but I have another idea. Gematria and hashes in general are irreversible (in that you can't be sure you got the original value even with a collision), but there's one computational basis in which any operation can be reversed: quantum physics.

It would certainly require quite a bit of understanding to break a hash using a quantum computer. I have no idea what the input would be or what hash "666" is an output of, but that could be brute-forced too, with things like Grover's quantum search algorithm and quantum parallelism a la Deutsch. The universe keeps uncountable numbers - vast complex matrices - as a "scratch pad" when advancing time, inaccessible to us. There could be a wealth of knowledge about the universe and the destiny of the human soul bound in these stealthy numbers.