i-eclectica.org

Neatorama reader Jerrold wrote about the new LED light system of the CN Tower in Toronto:

The world’s tallest free-standing structure got a makeover, and officially debuted it’s new flare in Toronto last night.

1300 LEDs, millions of combinations, and energy saving. Toronto, the largest city in Canada, now has a new, customizable skyline!

Comments from the film makers

Mr Roberts finds himself awoken inexplicably in a white room. A man sits before him at a desk and in between them stands a black button. If Mr Roberts pushes it, he will receive a briefcase filled with millions of dollars. Or he can take the key to the door and leave penniless. The catch? Pushing the button will result in the death of a human being. What would you do?

EDIT 1: Sone people have observed a similarity in the premise of this film and an revival episode of The Twilight Zone in 1986. Please note (1) We had never seen the episode and only learnt of it long after we’d finished the film (2) The Twilight Zone weren’t the first to do it. It’s an old premise called the ‘Faustian Bargain’, around since the 16th century (deal with the ‘devil’) (3) Our film is similar in premise, but different in plot, characters, dialogue, aesthetics, setting, moral meaning, religious undertone, twist etc. Please have the respect to not accuse us of plagiarism.

EDIT 2: Firstly, thanks YouTube for the feature! Secondly, thanks to all of you for watching and commenting! I’ll just take the time to say that we have no particular religious affiliation; this is a fictional work and its ideas are designed to encourage thought and debate, not comment on any particular theology. If it encourages healthy and friendly discussion, we’ve done our job!

Our first professional short film. We made it for $200 and shot it on the stage of our old school in Melbourne, Australia. Fortunately, professional actor Robert Grubb agreed to act in it for free after reading the script. This film took nearly a year to put together, working on it in stages and creating the ‘white’ effect on a home PC. Please note that the younger actor, unlike Robert Grubb, has no formal acting training whatsoever.

DVD available (with “making of”) from our website.

Amazing what people come up with. Geekend reports that some math-and-woodcraft savant has built a binary adding machine made of wood and powered by falling marbles. Check out also the marble machine build by the same guy .

To not give with my previous post on Mark Richards an impression of one-dimensionality, I thought I’d like to post a few more photos representing his work (like the previous ones, they are all taken from his website).

The first set is a sample from a series called ‘Hawaiian Cruises’.

The next set represents examples from a number of different categories, all of them focused on people.

The quantum revolution rolls on! Our rational and structural worldview has been questioned for a while now: particles can be at two place at once (and even move in two different directions at once), they can be entangled in a way that makes them react simultaneously even outside the boundaries of time and space and, importantly, they only spring into existence through us observing them (otherwise they are just part of an ‘ocean’ of potentiality and probability).

The good thing is: that’s not just theory. One of the many New Scientist magazine articles on this subject was published last week under the title Reality Check; it not only gave some background on quantum theory but also talked about experiments proving some of its assumptions as correct or, more precisely, proving wrong our assumption about what we think reality is.

Since the 1920s, an often passionate discussion has pursued around what constitutes reality. One camp, with Einstein himself and his theories of relativity at its centre, proposes that reality exists independently of our observations; it’s a reality bound by space-time and containing real, already existing properties. The other camp, the one of quantum theory, arising from the minds of such physicists as Planck, Bohr, Schroedinger or Heisenberg, assumes that there is no such thing as an objective reality, but instead just probabilities of existence, becoming temporarily concrete through our observations (see a brief history of the development of quantum theory on the left - image from New Scientist).

The above mentioned article looks at a number of attempts to resolve the conflict. John Bell, like Einstein, believed in the intuitive idea of ‘local realism’ which, as already mentioned, states two assumptions: a particle cannot be instantly influenced by a distant event, and its properties exist independently of any measurement. Bell in the mid 1960s devised a mathematical formula that, when tested, could prove whether this ‘local realism’ assumption is true; Alain Aspect in the early 1980s performed experimental tests that proved it to be wrong. What these tests though didn’t decide was which part of Bell’s and Einstein’s assumption was wrong: that the ‘local’ does not allow for instant influences from a distance beyond its boundaries, or that real particle properties exist independently of our observation - or, of course: that both assumptions are wrong.

Proposing a possible answer, Anthony Leggett in 2003 proposed a test of both, realism and non-locality. A couple of months ago, an Austrian research team led by Anton Zeilinger and Markus Aspelmeyer published the research results of their experiments testing the Leggett formula, stating the strong evidential possibility that there is nothing inherently real about the properties of an object we measure. It is us creating reality.

What does that mean not just for Einstein’s theories of relativity and gravity but also for the search of a ‘theory of everything’ which tries to unite Einstein’s theories with quantum physics? Or in a more general sense: what does it mean for our intuitive understanding of reality and its relationship to that of quantum mechanics? I personally tend to feel that we are asking the wrong questions, we limit our possible understanding by being too fixated on those two models of reality. Most likely there is a different approach that goes beyond both and also any current attempts to unify both theories.

In this context, I find quite reassuring the New Scientist’s reference to David Deutsch’s proposal that all current efforts are based on the ‘delusion’ that we have a basic grasp on quantum theory and therefore just need to prove it right through experiments. Deutsch seems to assume that the quantum worldview is correct, but also that a theory unifying quantum theory and relativity is possible IF we manage to focus on a much deeper and fundamental level of research. And while I am not a scientist I wholeheartedly agree. Maybe science is dealing with a paradox which consequently can only be solved by looking beyond the boundaries of its components. How could that happen? Well, science has to find that answer , but I’m cautiously confident it will. Will there be a final answer? I doubt it. What we will have instead will be an endless journey of preliminary ones posing new questions - which seems to be the nature of what we call ‘knowledge’.

Web links in relation to the article:

• Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute
• Alain Aspect, Institute of Optics
• Markus Aspelmeyer, University of Vienna
• Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna research group
• Anthony Leggett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Vlatko Vedral, University of Leeds
• David Deutsch homepage