Sunday, January 25, 2015

Study Notes: Jan 18-24, 2015: "Parafanfiction and Oppositional Fandom" &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
Homework for the future: 


"Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Physics Wrong This Whole Time?"
  • "For nearly a century, 'reality' has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once." 
  • "The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet's interaction with its own ripples, which form what's known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles-- including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured." 
  • "To some researchers, the experiments suggest that quantum objects are as definite as droplets, and that they too are guided by pilot waves-- in this case, fluid-like undulations in space and time." 
  • Seth Lloyd: "Quantum mechanics is just counterintuitive and we just have to suck it up." 
  • "In principle, however, the pilot-wave theory is deterministic: The future evolves dynamically from the past, so that, if the exact state of all the particles in the universe were known at a given instant, their states at all future times could be calculated." 
  • "More than 30 years would pass before von Neumann's proof [against pilot-wave theory] was shown to be false, but by then the damage was done." 
  • "Acclimating to the weirdness of quantum mechanics has become a physicists' rite of passage. The old, deterministic alternative is not mentioned in most textbooks; most people in the field haven't heard of it." 
  • "When a droplet bounces along the surface of a liquid toward a pair of openings in a barrier, it passes randomly through one opening or the other while its 'pilot wave,' or the ripples on the liquid's surface, passes through both. After many repeat runs, a quantum-like interference pattern appears in the distribution of droplet trajectories." 
  • "Droplets can also seem to 'tunnel' through barriers, orbit each other in stable 'bound states,' and exhibit properties analogous to quantum spin and electromagnetic attraction. When confined to circular areas called corrals, they form concentric rings analogous to the standing waves generated by electrons in quantum corrals. They even annihilate with subsurface bubbles, an effect reminiscent of the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter particles." 
  • "In standard quantum mechanics, the [entanglement] effect is rationalized as the instantaneous collapse of the particles' join probability wave. But in the pilot-wave version of events, an interaction between two particles in a superfluid universe sets them on paths that stay correlated forever because the interaction permanently affects the contours of the superfluid." 
  • "In its current, immature state, the pilot-wave formulation of quantum mechanics only describes simple interactions between matter and electromagnetic fields, according to David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford in England, and cannot even capture the physics of an ordinary light bulb." 
  • David Wallace: "It is not by itself capable of representing very much physics. In my own view, this is the most severe problem for the theory, though, to be fair, it remains an active research area." 
  • "Pilot-wave theory has the reputation of being more cumbersome than standard quantum mechanics. Some researchers said that the theory has trouble dealing with identical particles, and that it becomes unwieldy when describing multiparticle interactions. They also claimed that it combines less elegantly with special relativity. But other specialists disagreed or said the approach is simply under-researched. It may just be a matter of effort to recast the predictions of quantum mechanics in the pilot-wave language." 

"New Quantum Theory Could Explain Flow of Time"
  • "Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium." 
  • "Objects reach equilibrium, or a state of uniform energy distribution, within an infinite amount of time by becoming quantum mechanically entangled with their surroundings." 
  • "An experimentally tested theorem by the Northern Irish physicist John Bell says there is no 'true' state of the particle; the probabilities are the only reality that can be ascribed to it." 
  • "Quantum uncertainty then gives rise to entanglement, the putative source of the arrow of time." 
  • "When two particles interact, they can no longer even be described by their own, independently evolving probabilities, called 'pure states.' Instead, they become entangled components of a more complicated probabilities distribution that describes both particles together. It might dictate, for example, that the particles spin in opposite directions. The system as a whole is in a pure state, but the state of each individual particle is 'mixed' with that of its acquaintance. The two could travel light-years apart, and the spin of each would remain correlated with that of the other, a feature Albert Einstein famously described as 'spooky action at a distance.'" I really have to do a story that maps to that concept. 
  • Seth Lloyd: "What's really going on is things are becoming more correlated with each other. The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations." 
  • "The giants of 19th century thermodynamics viewed this process as a gradual dispersal of energy that increases the overall entropy, or disorder, of the universe. Today, Lloyd, Popescu and others in their field see the arrow of time differently. In their view, information becomes increasingly diffuse, but it never disappears completely. So, they assert, although entropy increases locally, the overall entropy of the universe stays constant at zero."
  • "Seth Lloyd: "The universe as a whole is in a pure state. But individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures." 
  • "According to the scientists, our ability to remember the past but not the future, another historically confounding manifestation of time's arrow, can also be understood as a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. When you read a message on a piece of paper, your brain becomes correlated with it through the photons that reach your eyes. Only from that moment on will you be capable of remembering what the message says."
  • Seth Lloyd: "The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings."

 "Dream Machine"
  • On the outskirts of Oxford lives a brilliant and distressingly thin physicist named David Deutsch, who believes in multiple universes and has conceived of an as-yet unbuildable computer to test their existence. His books have titles of colossal confidence ('The Fabric of Reality,' 'The Beginning of Infinity'). He rarely leaves his house. Many of his closest colleagues haven't seen him for years, except at occasional conferences via Skype." 
  • "Deutsch, who has never held a job, is essentially the founding father of quantum computing, a field that devises distinctly powerful computers based on the branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. With one millionth of the hardware of an ordinary laptop, a quantum computer could store as many bits of information as there are particles in the universe." 
  • "Ask a physicist what, practically, a quantum computer would be 'good for,' and he might tell the story of the nineteenth-century English scientist Michael Faraday, a seminal figure in the field of electromagnetism, who, when asked how an electromagnetic effect could be useful, answered that he didn't know but that he was sure that one day it could be taxed by the queen." 
  • "A number of respected thinkers in physics besides Deutsch support the Many Worlds Interpretation, though they are a minority, and primarily educated in England, where the intense interest in quantum computing has at times been termed the Oxford flu." 
  • "Physics advances by accepting absurdities." 
  • Richard Feynman: "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there." 
  • "Confess your confusion about quantum mechanics to a physicist and you will be told not to feel bad, because physicists find it confusing, too. If classical mechanics is George Eliot, quantum mechanics is Kafka." 
  • David Deutsch: "I love to give talks. I just don't like giving talks that people don't want to hear. It's wrong to set up the educational system that way. But that's not why I don't teach. I don't teach for visceral reasons-- I just dislike it. If I were a biologist, I would be a theoretical biologist, because I don't like the idea of cutting up frogs. Not for moral reasons but because it's disgusting. Similarly, talking to a group of people who don't want to be there is disgusting." 
  • "More than one of Deutsch's colleagues told me about a Japanese documentary film crew that had wanted to interview Deutsch at his house. The crew asked if they could clean up the house a bit. Deutsch didn't like the idea, so the film crew promised that after filming they would reconstruct the mess as it was before. They took extensive photographs, like investigators at a crime scene, and then cleaned up. After the interview, the crew carefully reconstructed the former 'disorder.' Deutsch said he could still find things, which was what he had been worried about." 
  • "Taped onto the walls of Deutsch's living room were a map of the world, a periodic table, a hand-drawn cartoon of Karl Popper, a poster of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a taxonomy of animals, a taxonomy of the characters in 'The Simpsons,' color printouts of pictures of McCain and Obama, with handwritten labels reading 'this one' and 'that one,' and two color prints of an actor who looked to me a bit like Hugh Grant. There were also old VHS tapes, an unused fireplace, a stationary exercise bike, and a large flat-screen television whose newness had no visible companion." 
  • "Deutsch described 'House' to me as 'a great program about epistemology, which, apart from fundamental physics, is really my core interest. It's a program about the myriad ways that knowledge can grow or can fail to grow.'" 
  • David Deutsch: "Everything's got to have a reason, and if he doesn't know the reason it's because he doesn't know it, not because there isn't one." 
  • "Just as an object's weight depends on the force of gravity in which it's measured, the degree of computational complexity depended on the computer on which it was measured. One could find out how complex a task was to perform on a particular computer, but that didn't say how complex a task was fundamentally, in reference to the universe. Unless there really was such a thing as a universal computer, there was no way a description of complexity could be fundamental." 
  • Artur Ekert: "My tutorials at his place would start at around 8 P.M., when David would be having his lunch. We'd stay talking and working until the wee hours of the morning. He likes just talking things over. I would leave at 3 or 4 A.M., and then David would start properly working afterwards. If we came up with something, we would write the paper, but sometimes we wouldn't write the paper, and if someone else also came up with the solution we'd say, 'Good, now we don't have to write it up.'"
  • Undoing the prime factorization of cryptography is described as being akin to unscrambling an egg. 
  • "He [Artur Ekert] now leads a center in Singapore, where the government has made quantum-computing research one of its top goals." 
  • "In 2009, Google announced that it had been working on quantum-computing algorithms for three years, with the aim of having a computer that could quickly identify particular things or people from among vast stores of video and images-- David Deutsch, say, from among millions of untagged photographs." 
  • "In the early nineteenth century, a 'computer' was any person who computed: someone who did the math for building a bridge, for example." 
  • "Babbage was prone to serious mental breakdowns, and... his bent of mind was so odd that he once wrote to Alfred Lord Tennyson correcting his math (Babbage suggested rewriting 'Every minute dies a man / Every minute one is born' as 'Every moment dies a man / Every moment one and a sixteenth is born,' further noting that although the exact figure was 1.167, 'something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of meter')..."
  • "If one reads quantum-mechanical equations literally, superposition is ontological, not epistemological; it's not that we don't know which state the cat is in, but that the cat really is in both states at once. Superposition is like Freud's description of true ambivalence: not feeling unsure, but feeling opposite extremes of conviction at once," 
  • "As quantum mechanics has taught us, things are inexorably changed by our trying to ascertain anything about them." 
  • "Oxford's eight-qubit quantum computer has significantly less computational power than an abacus, but fifty to a hundred qubits could make something as powerful as any laptop."
  • "As a further bonus, in Many Worlds theory randomness goes away, too. A ten-per-cent chance of an atom decaying is not arbitrary at all, but rather refers to the certainty that the atom will decay in ten per cent of the universes branched from that point." 
  • "What we want is for a theory to conform to reality, and, in order to find out whether it does, you need to see what the theory actually says. Which with the deepest theories is actually quite difficult, because they violate our intuitions."
  •  "Every innovator starts out with the world view of the subject as it was before his innovation. So he [Everett] can't be blamed for regarding his theory as an interpretation." 
  • David Deutsch: "Once there are actual quantum computers, and a journalist can go to the actual labs and ask how does that actual machine work, the physicists in question will then either talk some obfuscatory nonsense, or will explain it in terms of parallel universes. Which will be newsworthy. Many Worlds will then become part of our culture. Really, it has nothing to do with making the computers. But psychologically it has everything to do with making them." 
  • "It's tempting to view Deutsch as a visionary in his devotion to the Many Worlds Interpretation, for the simple reason that he has been a visionary before." 
  • "Schoelkopf and his colleague Michel Devoret, who leads a separate team, took me to a large room of black lab benches, inscrutable equipment, and not particularly fancy monitors. The aesthetic was inadvertent steampunk. The dust in the room made me sneeze. 'We don't like the janitors to come sweep for fear they'll disturb something." 
  • The Collapse of the Physicist, according to Schoelkopf: "It's about where to collapse the discussion of the problem." 
  • "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never liked detective stories that built their drama by deploying clues over time. Conan Doyle wanted to write stories in which all the ingredients for solving the crime were there from the beginning, and in which the drama would be, as in the Poe stories that he cited as precedents, in the mental workings of his ideal ratiocinator." 
  • David Deutsch: "I remember being told, when I was still a small child, that in ancient times it was still possible to know everything that was known. I was also told that nowadays so much is known that no one could conceivably learn more than a tiny fraction of it, even in a long lifetime. The latter proposition surprised and disappointed me. In fact, I refused to believe it." 
  • "Deutsch is adept at dodging questions about where he gets his ideas. He joked to me that they came from going to parties, though I had the sense that it had been years since he'd been to one." 
  • David Deutsch: "So Brahms lived on black coffee and forced himself to write a certain number of lines of music a day. Look, I can't stop you from writing an article about a weird English guy who thinks there are parallel universes. But I think that style of thinking is kind of a put-down to the reader. It's almost like saying, If you're not weird in these ways, you've got no hope as a creative thinker. That's not true. The weirdness is only superficial." 
  • David Deutsch: "He [Freud] did a good service to the world. He made it O.K. to speak about the mechanisms of he mind, some of which we may not be aware of. His actual theory was all false, there's hardly a single true thing he said, but that's not so bad. He was a pioneer, one of the first who tried to think about things rationally." 

"Five Practical Uses for 'Spooky' Quantum Mechanics"
  • "The precision of atomic clocks relies partially on then number of atoms used. Kept in a vacuum chamber, each atom independently measures time and keeps an eye on the random local differences between itself and its neighbors. If scientists can cram 100 times more atoms into an atomic clock, it becomes 10 times more precise-- but there is a limit on how many atoms you can squeeze in." 
  • "Entangled clocks could even be linked to form a worldwide network that would measure time independent of location."
  • "One leading theory suggests that birds like the European robin use the spooky action to keep on track when they migrate. The method involves a light-sensitive protein called cryptochrome, which may contain entangled electrons. As photons enter the eye, they hit the cryptochrome molecules and can deliver enough energy to break them apart, forming two reactive molecules, or radicals, with unpaired but still untangled electrons. The magnetic field surrounding the bird influences how long these cryptochrome radicals last. Cells in the bird's retina are thought to be very sensitive to the presence of the entangled radicals, allowing the animals to effectively 'see' a magnetic map based on the molecules." 
  • "There is another option: Birds' magnetic sensitivity could be due to small crystals of magnetic minerals in their beaks." 
  • "The magnetic compass could also be applicable to certain lizards, crustaceans, insects and even some mammals." 

"Parafanction and Oppositional Fandom" 
  • Parafiction is "work that straddles the line between truth and fiction. It's the art of truthiness-- it purports to be real and accomplishes certain things by hoaxing the audience but it also depends upon the revelation of its fakeness. It's not JUST a hoax that accomplishes by trickery, it's ALSO A REVEALED HOAX, which accomplishes by the revelation of the truth." 
  • Sam Keeper then goes on to describe the Yes Men, and how they exemplify parafiction. You should check out the article itself for the full thing. 
  • "This is how parafiction works. It first establishes certain ideas through the hoaxing of the audience-- an audience that included the BBC!-- and then it reinforces those ideas through the revelation of the deception." 
  • "So, just to recap, the catalogue for this exhibition... is itself a parafictional object claiming to represent a nonexistent show about parafictional objects [ellipsis original]."
  • "What's this thing called parafanfiction? Well, that term refers to a particular subset of parafictional art that claims to be fanfiction of, or some other record of, an external media object that does not actually exist. The most notable examples of this are the Homestuck Anime and Squiddles, both of which are spinoffs of the actual Homestuck hypercomic. The idea with those projects is to fabricate an entire alternate reality whee Homestuck is an anime and the in-comic show Squiddles actually exists. The fans participating in these projects create objects ostensibly taken directly from the shows in question-- screencaps, pictures of old VHS tapes, GameBoy Advance cartridges, gif edits, and so on and so forth-- in order to sell the idea that these shows actually exist."
  • "Now, I'm really interested these days in the way that transformative works serve to undermine the binary division between creator/consumer and to screw up the idea that successful creative workers are successful primarily due to skill alone, as opposed to luck, available resources, social circles, more luck, &c, &c.. The divisions are particularly visible within a show and fandom like that of Sherlock, which is objectively speaking big-budget fanfiction... And yet the fans of the show, particularly fans that ship John Watson and Sherlock, are consistently pathologized by show runners and sensationalist corporate media hacks alike. While their actions are objectively 100% the same god damn thing, one class of creator is canonized and consecrated, while another is ostracised and villified." 
  • "Consecrated art is indistinguishable from unconsecrated work without outside intervention. Our perceptions of what is legitimate are subject to manipulation." 

"Creating As The World Falls Down"
  • "The sequence is unnerving in part simply for the intrusion of elements of the Labyrinth environment into the mundane setting of Sarah's room, and perhaps that alone is enough to explain my consistent feeling of discomfort during the scene. Special shoutout in particular to the moment where she opens the door, expecting to see the hallway, and instead comes face to face with the blasted wasteland and the bustling figure of the junk woman... There's also, I think the recognition that at no other point does Sarah come closer to failing in her quest, and the implications of that are fascinating to me." 
  • "This reading [that the film is 'about growing up and setting aside fantasies'] only makes sense if you assume that the endpoint of maturity means moving beyond fantasy. This reading doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you consider that the film is made by a bunch of people who made puppets for a living."
  • "There's another way of reading the major moments of the film: we could see it as setting aside self-invented distractions that stop the protagonist from moving forward with her life as not just an adult but an adult with creative agency."
  • The shattering of glass in various scenes "suggests that the scenes should be read together. And they are generally understood to represent not just magical but psychological and symbolic hurdles which Sarah must overcome." 
  • "I really think the scene in the room represents the act of hiding from tough aspects of life in a nest of material excess. Sarah is being literally covered in junk here, with the implication, perhaps, that given time she will transform into the same kind of subtly malevolent creature as the junk woman." 
  • "And what's more, they're assuredly not simply 'childish' things that she must set aside! One of the key items here is a tube of lipstick, remember, which she dazedly applies to herself while staring into the mirror that doubles the reflecting wall of the masked ball in the crystal ball." 
  • "So what we see here is not a setting aside of childish things but a setting aside of constructed illusions and distractions from the conclusion of the quest." 
  • "In contrast to a person who simply consumes objects or rehearses existing material, Sarah grows over the course of the film into someone who challenges her own illusions and ultimately comes to understand her own power over the narrative she seems caught within. Her realization at the end of the film that Jareth has no power over her represents, too, the realization that she is not merely playing a part and reciting set lines. Rather, she has the ability to actualize them and expose the way in which they are meaningful to her. She is not just a cosplayer, acting out scenes from the Labyrinth book, she actively embodies the character and transforms her through the manipulation of the text. Sarah is a fanfiction writer, a manipulator of fairy tales, a creator of transformative works." Okay, that is kind of an awesome interpretation, and I need to explore that idea several hundred times. 
  • "It's hard to say much about the Labyrinth book because we only get occasional glimpses at it, but if you look closely you can see that the text within is not as neat as one might expect. To my eyes, it almost seems handwritten. And certainly there are visible marks on the margins that suggests someone has been taking notes on the text."

Miscellany
  • Aquinas: "Any proposition is said to be self-evident in itself, if its predicate is contained in the notion of the subject: although, to one who knows not the definition of the subject, it happens that such a proposition is not self-evident. For instance, this proposition, 'Man is a rational being,' is, in its very nature, self-evident, since who says 'man,' says 'a rational being': and yet to one who knows not what a man is, this proposition is not self-evident. Hence it is that, as Boethius says (De Hebdom.), certain axioms or propositions are universally self-evident to all; and such are those propositions whose terms are known to all, as, 'Every whole is greater than its part,' and 'Things equal to one and the same are equal to one another.' But some propositions are self-evident only to the wise, who understand the meaning of the terms of such propositions..."
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)