What be their characteristic haunts? How may they be recognized? How may they be stalked? How avoided? By what dire forces are they created? What dangers do they present? What songs do they sing? What instruction do they offer? and do Black Holes ever, ever disgorge their prey?
I’ve been having a lot of fun putting this talk together: we’ll cover the first proposal for a black hole (wasn’t Einstein, was the clergyman John Michel in 1784!), why they exist, how we see them (they are invisible after all, so that can be a bit tricky), and why we may owe our entire existence to one!
I gave a talk in June at the IARD 2022 conference in Prague on “Time dispersion in Quantum Electrodynamics”. I can’t improve on the abstract so give it here:
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) is often formulated in a way that appears fully relativistic. However since QED treats the three space dimensions as observables but time as a classical parameter, it is only partially relativistic. For instance, in the path integral formulation, the sum over paths includes paths that vary in space but not paths that vary in time. We apply covariance to extend QED to include time on the same basis as space. This implies dispersion in time, entanglement in time, full equivalence of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP) in time to the HUP in space, and so on. In the long time limit we recover standard QED. Further, entanglement in time has the welcome side effect of eliminating the ultraviolet divergences. We should see the effects at scales of attoseconds. With recent developments in attosecond physics and in quantum computing, these effects should now be visible. The results are therefore falsifiable. Since the promotion of time to an operator is done by a straightforward application of agreed and tested principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, falsification will have implications for those principles. Confirmation will have implications for attosecond physics, quantum computing and communications, and quantum gravity.
I’ve written the talk up as a paper and submitted to the IARD’s Conference Proceedings, where it is undergoing peer review. I’ve also submitted it to the physics archive, so Time dispersion in quantum electrodynamics is generally available.
It’s a long paper, 95 pages, but in defense of that it is a large subject. A quick check on bookfinder.com showed over 1000 textbooks on QED — and at 3 centimeters a book (based on my personal library) the literature — just the textbooks — runs over 30 meters! The problem I had was how to extend QED in time without breaking it. QED has, after all, been confirmed to extraordinary precision: is there room for time within QED?
The basic trick was to write the extension as the standard theory times a “time correction”. So if the time correction is small enough, we won’t have seen it by accident. Since the time corrections will normally be about an attosecond in size (an attosecond is to a second as a second is to the age of the universe), that’s not hard to show.
The other trick is to show that there are cases where we could see the effects of these “time corrections”. Since we can now see stuff at the attosecond level — provided we know where to look — that’s OK as well.
The illustration at the top of this post is a proposed test of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in time, which is particularly nice because in this case the effect can be made — in principle at least — as large as we like. But there are lots of other possibilities:
“With respect to the falsifiability of TQM [time correction to QED], the small size of the basic effect may be compensated for by the large number of experimental possibilities. If quantum mechanics should in fact be extended in the time direction then essentially any time dependent apparatus with time dependent detectors may provide a possible line of attack. By hypothesis, all quantum mechanical phenomena seen in space – interference, diffraction, uncertainty, entanglement, tunneling, … – apply in time as they do in space.
But what are the odds of this being true? I give five reasons (explained in detail in the text):
We have a version of QED which is manifestly covariant, treating all four dimensions equally. Simply being able to do this is interesting.
We have a clear explanation of why time normally appears asymmetric at the level of the observer (due to statistical effects at the scale of Avogadro’s number) while still at the particle level being completely symmetric.
We have a treatment which goes smoothly from the single to the multiple particle cases.
We do not see the ultra-violet divergences. We still have to normalize the loops, but we no longer have to regularize them: that drops out of the formalism.
And we have Gell-Mann’s principle: what is not forbidden is compulsory. If there is not a conservation principle or symmetry rule forbidding dispersion in time, it would be surprising not to see dispersion in time.
And if QED really should extend in time, there may be some significant uses:
High speed chemical and biological interactions, i.e. attosecond scale, should show effects of time dispersion. For instance, if molecules can sense into the future, it may affect their ability to find optimal configurations. There are potential applications for quantum communication and quantum computing. With TQM we have an additional channel to use for calculation/communication but also an additional channel to act as a source of decoherence.The implications for quantum gravity are particularly interesting: with manifest covariance, elimination of the ultra-violet divergences, some recent work by Horwitz, and earlier work by Verlinde, we appear to have all the pieces needed to construct a complete, covariant, and convergent theory of quantum gravity. Leaving the question of the odds of this being correct to one side, we note that recent advances in technique mean such a theory has a reasonable chance of being falsifiable as well.
My personal favorite effect is the possiblity of tunneling in time. The posited symmetry between time and space forces this, but does it mean?
The 79th World Science Fiction Convention (Discon III) is being held in DC in three days, running from 12/14/2021 through 12/19/2021. They had a long struggle deciding between real & virtual. They settled on real but with lots of virtual bits. I’m just pleased they decided to go forward. Full schedule is now online. Note the web page is a bit fragile & needs sometimes a bit of coaxing.
I’m giving two short talks and serving as panelist on three panels. Because of space problems, many of the talks are sharing an hour. Both my talks are 25 minutes:
Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, and Futures
From neural nets and genetic algorithms to facial recognition and deep fakes, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. What exactly do we mean by AI? How did AI get where it is today? What role will it play in our lives? What are the benefits and risks of AI? And when will we have real AI?
7PM Thursday December 16th, 2021. This is the top of the hour so should start at 7PM. Slides up on slideshare.
The Quantum Internet: Hype or the Next Step?
What do we mean by the quantum internet? Why do we need more than just quantum computing? What are quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, quantum sensors? How are these concepts entangled? What are the advantages of the quantum internet? key problems? Who will get to use it? And do we have just a bunch of interesting technologies that all have quantum in their name or can the whole be more than the sum of its parts?
10AM Sunday December 19th, 2021. This is the 2nd half of the hour so will probably start about 10:25AM. Slides up on slideshare.
And I’m doing three panels (all 50 minutes):
The State of Machine Learning
An artificial intelligence does not necessarily have to think like a human being. How do current AIs approach questions of cognition and meaningful analysis? What are other ways that an intelligent AI might perceive and understand the world?
Notes for participants: Examples. AI as a personal assistant, AI as a social benefit, AI as a threat, making sense of big data, autonomous vehicles, neural networks, automated facial recognition, behavioral analysis, racial bias in training data. The term xenosapience is used in some sf non AIs that do not think like people.
4PM Wednesday December 15th, 2021. Virtual
Balancing Story and Scientific Authenticity
Many readers love real science, or just the appearance of real science, in their science fiction. It is no small challenge to create compelling literature that also triggers a scientific sense of wonder. Panelists discuss how to do it right.
I’m moderating this & much looking forward to it. I have a lot of questions for the panelists:
How can getting the science right make the story better?
What are some of the best examples of getting the science right? Hal Clement — Mission of Gravity, Uncommon Sense, … — comes to mind of course, many others.
How to give readers the right amount of explanation? Obviously we want a bit more scientific detail in The Martian than in Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids! My own feeling is that Arthur Clarke was the all-time master of balancing science & wonder. Your selections for this?
What are some examples where the science was just so awful that it interfered with the story? Or the story died the death of painful exposition? (Venus Equilateral comes to mind; feel free to disagree of course!)
What are some of your own stories where you think, all modesty aside, that you got the science just about right! And what were some places where you had to do a bit of work to achieve the best balance?
What advice would you give a new writer on how to handle the science?
What advice would you give a reader on what to look for in a story’s treatment of science?
What differences are there in way you would handle different sciences? we often break the sciences down into soft and hard, is that valid?
How to handle alien sciences?
How do you like to prep the science?
11:30AM Thursday, December 16th, 2021. Virtual
International Space Program
Americans may not hear much about it, but there’s a thriving culture of space exploration and science outside of the United States. Come hear about some of the notable missions, developments, and discoveries of 2020 and 2021.
8:30PM Thursday, December 16th, 2021. Physical (Diplomat Ballroom)
This year’s Philcon is going forward in person, in spite of Covid! It runs from Friday afternoon (11/19/2021) through Sunday afternoon (11/21/2021). Jabs & masks mandatory, but it will be great to see old friends in person. And make a few new as well. My science talk is:
The Quantum Internet: Hype or the next step
What do we mean by the quantum internet? Why do we need more than just quantum computing? What are quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, quantum sensors? How are these concepts entangled? What are the advantages of the quantum internet? key problems? Who will get to use it? And do we have just a bunch of interesting tech that all have quantum in their name or can the whole be more than the sum of its parts?
This will be 1 pm Saturday November 20th at Philcon 2021
I did this at this year’s Capclave. Went well: some pretty deep questions from the audience at the end, always a good sign. I’ve updated — quantum computing does not stand still! — and looking forward to presenting in a few days. The picture is of Google’s Sycamore Quantum Computer, which recently achieved “Quantum Supremacy”. I will explain what that means!
I’m doing three panels as well:
The Post-Lovecraftian Cthulhu
How have HP Lovecraft’s ideas evolved in the hands of subsequent writers?
At this point, post-Lovecraftian Cthulhu is 99+% of Cthulhu. There are a lot of interesting directions here: from more mythos (Derleth for instance), more grim humor (Stross), high tech reboots (Delta Green), and a deeper (pun intended) take on Lovecraft’s racism (Lovecraft Country, Ballad of Black Tom). And we have uses of Cthulhu in music, film & TV (of course!), theater, and even in real science (the elongated dark region on Pluto nee Yuggoth called Cthulhu Macula!) if we are willing to include songwriters, playwrights, & scientists as part of the dark horde of subsequent writers.
This with Darrell Schweitzer (my co-editor on Tales From the Miskatonic University Library) and Stephanie Burke (writer, cosplayer, and a remarkable presence). I proposed the topic so have been unable to avoid the scourage of moderation.
At 10pm Friday, 11/19/2021
A Beginner’s Guide to Time Travel Paradoxes
You know not to remove a major historical figure, hand Thomas Edison a cell phone, or kill your grandfather. But is it even possible to travel into the past without changing anything? So you go back to Chicago in 1920, and eat a hamburger in a diner. But, unbeknownst to you, that hamburger was destined to sit for six hours, spoil, and sicken someone else, who misses an important appointment, and… there goes the timestream. Would nature have a way of correcting this?
This with Michael Ventrella, George W. Young, and Russell Handelmann. Michael is currently editing a time travel anthology and is also moderating the panel. Michael’s a lot of fun; the other two I look forward to meeting.
At 2pm Saturday, 11/20/2021
Parsecs, Light Years, and the Speed of Plot
Warp? Hyperspace? Ion propulsion? Improbability drive? Is it necessary to sacrifice accuracy to maintain pacing? Our panelists science the heck out of “velocity equals distance divided by time” as used in fiction.
This with Tobias F. Cabral (moderator), Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Tom Purdom. All familiar & valued co-panelists!
Model-View-Controller using Ruby-on-Rails & PostgreSQL
So you want to build a website? Quickly! But able to grow to arbitrary size, if fortune smiles.
I’ve been working on just such a website, one which runs the manufacturing process for a world class optical switch manufacturer. They started in 2005 and are now the 2nd leading producer of optical switches. So zero to hero. They started with Ruby-on-Rails & are still running the original code. With a few hacks of course, many of which I built.
So, time for a talk on how to do this. The 2021 PostgreSQL Conference Webinars in the person of Lindsay Hooper was kind enough to extend an invite & I put something short together. I gave the talk earlier today as a webinar. Very happy with the way it came out; it provides a short introduction to how to get started on this, from the database perspective:
I show how to get started building a PostgreSQL-backed website using Ruby-on-Rails, what is meant by the Model-View-Controller architecture, why we want to use that, what tools you need to get started; how to work with the online tutorials; what kind of workflow to use, and which tasks to let Ruby-on-Rails handle versus which are better done by PostgreSQL.
The conference will be posting the video of the webinar in a few days. Meanwhile, I have exported the slides as a PDF up on slideshare.
And if you are wondering what the illo has to do with the talk, it’s a breakdown of the pieces of the Model-View-Controller architecture as it applies to Ruby-on-Rails/PostgreSQL. If you are going to do this, it is the map which is your world.
Harvard asked for a bio/reflections for the next reunion. I had fun writing it, so I share here for any who are interested:
I recall my Harvard years with great pleasure: many excellent conversations & some courses that still stay with me. For a while I was a dual major in Anthropology & Physics but back then the overlap between these two disciplines was not great. I settled on Physics.
This was during the political upheavals of the Vietnam war; I with two friends founded the Party of the Radical Middle: the party of extreme common sense. If we had actually had any common sense we would have realized this party would be going nowhere. Still it was fun while it lasted.
Sophomore year final exams were interrupted by discovering I was coughing up blood. This turned out to be tuberculosis. At the time it seemed like a negative, but it turned out it kept me out of the draft & the Vietnam war until the draft was ended, two years later. Net positive.
I got my Harvard BA in Physics in 1972 (summa cum laude) and then a Masters in Physics from Princeton (1977).
For several years after that I was an assistant editor for Asimov’s SF Magazine, which started a life long involvement with the science fiction community.
After that I was the production manager (really the IT guy) for a startup scientific & medical press called Centrum. Many 100 hour weeks. Our first journals were, appropriately enough, the American Journal of Emergency Medicine & the International Journal of Disaster Medicine. My favorite Disaster article was one explaining how to triage at a disaster site, using a system of red, yellow, & green toe tags. If you find yourself with a red or green toe tag, steal your neighbor’s yellow toe tag: yellow toe tags get you the maximum attention (red toe tags get you morphine, green toe tags no attention at all).
I also learned how to lie to computers. This is an incredibly useful skill & has been the foundation of my subsequent career.
I got my start as an official IT consultant working at Bellcore, the joint development arm of the 7 baby bells. After a year or two, I wound up responsible for an entire computer center, with 30 mini-computers & perhaps 1500 users. Time to go independent.
Since then I have worked as a software and database developer, working in the medical, legal, advertising, financial, scientific, and other areas, with clients ranging from a high-risk perinatal laboratory to a cemetery (my company slogan is cradle to grave programming).
I currently work full time as the database department at a leading optical switch manufacturer (your web pages & email travel over switches I helped build).
Somewhat surprisingly, even tho the Washington DC Science Fiction community is hosting this year’s Worldcon, they are still doing their regular annual convention as well, Capclave 2021. Kudos for courage! And it is inperson as well (proof of vaccination required).
I’m doing a talk on the Quantum Internet this year at Capclave. I moderated a panel on the quantum internet at the most recent Balticon. Panel went well (video of the panel is up on youtube) thanks to my two fellow panelists Kevin Roche and Anne Gray. This is a great subject, so I figured a dedicated talk on this would be fun & helpful to people. Hence:
The Quantum Internet: Hype or the next step
What do we mean by the quantum internet? Why do we need more than just quantum computing? What are quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, quantum sensors? How are these concepts entangled? What are the advantages of the quantum internet? key problems? Who will get to use it? And do we have just a bunch of interesting tech that all have quantum in their name or can the whole be more than the sum of its parts?
This will be 4pm Saturday October 2nd, 2021 at Capclave
I’m doing two panels as well:
Horrors found in the Editor’s Slush
I’ve copyrighted this story so you cannot steal it and publish it under your name. “And their names were Adam and Eve.” The manuscript written in crayon. Threats if the editor rejects a story. Considering that writers want their stories to be published, they do seem to do everything possible to discourage editors. What are some of the horrors you found in submissions? What should new writers know to avoid?
The play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) premiered in January 1921. This play was the first to use the word robot for a scientifically created mechanical worker. Why has the concept of robots been so popular? How have robots evolved in fiction?
There is a decent chance that quantum mechanics applies in time in the same way it does in the three space dimensions. I say decent because Einstein’s relativity says we have to treat time like a space dimension. So if quantum mechanics applies in space — and it does! — then it has to apply in time as well.
And since in quantum mechanics all measurements are uncertain about position of an object in space, they therefore have to be uncertain about its position in time as well. Hey, blame Einstein, not me!
The effects are expected of order attoseconds. Now one attosecond is to a second as a second is to the age of the universe: not very long. But with current tech we can actually see times this short.
So we can now tell if the position of a particle is uncertain in time. It’s “now” might be really a bit fuzzy: with a bit of “future” and a bit of “past” mixed in.
I’m working on getting some experimentalists interested in this & have started the next paper in the series “Time Dispersion in Quantum Electrodynamics” to help them crank out estimates effects for various experimental configurations. Much stoked!
It may be more than a few attoseconds before the first results are in, but at this point it should be just a matter of time! And it might be very practical, with real-world applications in biophysics, attosecond-scale chemistry, and quantum computing.
For the record, the abstract of the paper is:
Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP) apply along the time dimension in the same way it applies along the three space dimensions? Relativity says it should; current practice says no. With recent advances in measurement at the attosecond scale it is now possible to decide this question experimentally.
The most direct test is to measure the time-of-arrival of a quantum particle: if the HUP applies in time, then the dispersion in the time-of-arrival will be measurably increased.
We develop an appropriate metric of time-of-arrival in the standard case; extend this to include the case where there is uncertainty in time; then compare. There is – as expected – increased uncertainty in the time-of-arrival if the HUP applies along the time axis. The results are fully constrained by Lorentz covariance, therefore uniquely defined, therefore falsifiable.
So we have an experimental question on our hands. Any definite resolution would have significant implications with respect to the role of time in quantum mechanics and relativity. A positive result would also have significant practical applications in the areas of quantum communication, attosecond physics (e.g. protein folding), and quantum computing.
The 2021 Baltimore Science Fiction Convention (Balticon) runs this coming weekend. Virtual but real, if you get my drift. Convention is free; the programming looks very strong. Poke around & check off the interesting ones: I had great trouble keeping my choices down to one per time slot.
From neural nets and genetic algorithms to facial recognition and deep fakes, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. What exactly do we mean by AI and how did it get where it is today? What are the benefits and risks of AI and how should we manage it going forwards?
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws formed one of the earliest ethics systems for robots and artificially-created beings, but aren’t necessarily accurate or complete. A hundred years after Asimov’s birth, what approaches are being taken in the practical development of robots? What is “real AI” and how far away are we from it?
With Anne Gray aka netmouse (moderator), Aaron M. Roth and Marie Vibbert
What do we mean by the quantum internet? What are quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, quantum sensors, and linked quantum computers? What are the advantages and key problems? Who will get to use it? And do we have just a bunch of interesting tech that all have quantum in their name or can the whole be more than the sum of the parts?
I’m moderating this one with Anne Gray and Kevin Roche (who is the quantum computing evangelist at IBM).
How is it that something like the coronavirus can be completely inert one moment and then spawning millions of copies of itself the next? How did intracellular obligate parasites — organisms that can’t survive without a host — manage to evolve into existence in the first place? What of transposons (jumping genes), viroids (the smallest infectious pathogens known), and the dreaded “giant” viruses? Join us as we dart back and forth across the line that separates life & death in biology!
I’m moderating this one as well, with the panelists: Dr. Jim Prego, Doug Dluzen, Anna Kashina, Pam Garrettson.
Does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP) apply along the time dimension in the same way it applies along the three space dimensions? Relativity says it should; current practice says no. With recent advances in measurement at the attosecond scale it is now possible to decide this question experimentally. The most direct test is to measure the time-of-arrival of a quantum particle: if the HUP applies in time, then the dispersion in the time-of-arrival will be measurably increased. We develop an appropriate metric of time-of-arrival in the standard case; extend this to include the case where there is uncertainty in time; then compare. There is — as expected — increased uncertainty in the time-of-arrival if the HUP applies along the time axis. The results are fully constrained by Lorentz covariance, therefore uniquely defined, therefore falsifiable. And therefore we have an experimental question on our hands. Any definite resolution would have significant implications with respect to the role of time in quantum mechanics and relativity. A positive result would also have significant practical applications in the areas of quantum communication, attosecond physics (e.g. protein folding), and quantum computing.
Announcement, Invisibility, Multiverse, Philcon, Relativity, SF Cons, Theories of Time | John Ashmead | 
November 14, 2022 6:47 pm | 
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