bascule

Well, here I am being lame and reposting another blog entry of mine, but it's something I consider to be of monumental importance. The human mind has been a black box since the dawn of our existence, and once we open up that box and begin to tinker inside we will dramatically increase the rate at which the rate of change is increasing. Are you prepared?

Seems kinda lame to pimp my blog, but I thought I'd share my latest entry with you all:

Tear gas

That was poorly worded. There are two down converters, one connected to either of the two possible paths coming from the beam splitter. So you have the two beams coming from the beam splitter being duplicated by the down converters and sent to both A and C. And yes, otherwise you have the idea correct.

Changes in the curvature of space (i.e. gravity waves) propagate at c

We'll get there, especially once we have rapid prototyping machines approaching the functionality of the Von Neumann Universal Constructor. Imagine, for example, a particle accelerator encompassing the entire circumference of the moon (~10,000km), powered by a massive solar array. That'd likely do the trick. Give it 100 years

You know, I like bits and pieces of your underlying ideas, but I have no idea how and why you're trying to tie the Vesica Attractor into everything. Explaining things is hard; perhaps you should take some lessons from Brian Greene

The CMB was predicted, but before the group that predicted it had the opportunity to finish constructing the equipment they needed to observe it, it was discovered by accident by AT&T when they launched the first microwave communication satellites and noticed an annoying crackling in the background. They hired Penzias and Wilson to locate the source of the problem, which they did using the Horn Antenna at the Crawford Hill Bell Labs, and the rest is history.

Nanotechnology and/or Neurotechnology

The down converter generates two entangled photons which are half as energetic from a single source photon. As far as I can tell, it should be as simple as stopping the photons headed to A before their entangled partners generate the interference pattern at C. Anything which causes them to exhibit particle-like instead of wave-like behavior should do it.

Space is flat, therefore it has to end! That logic worked great in the past Although it's looking more and more like space actually is flat, but obviously we can't prove that definitively yet

Pretty much. The rate at which the universe expands is increasing from the push of dark energy. Some other force would have to begin to work against that before the universe could contract.

String theory says that both matter (hadrons/leptons) and energy (bosons) are made of little 1 dimensional vibrating strings

This was partially proposed in this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=10803 And it really got me thinking. So here's a quick proposal. We have locations A, B, and C, with AB and BC being equidistant (let's say they're one light day each) Our goal will be to quasi-instantaneously transmit a message between A and C. B is a setup containing the following: A laser emitting single photons at short and regular intervals, fired through a beam splitter which in turn passes either path through down converters. The photons streaming out of this device travel a day until they reach their destinations. C directs the two possible beam paths across each other, generating an interference pattern so long as A doesn't attempt to garner 'which path' information from its two beams. Now, the process of interpreting the results is somewhat messy as we have to wait and see if an interference pattern forms at C or not, but it looks like given this you have a simple way of instantaneously transmitting a yes/no 1/0 message across space; A can selectively and insantaneously destroy the interference pattern by observing which path information from the entangled photons, or choose not to observe them and allow the interference pattern to form. Doesn't this work? I've always been told entanglement can't be used to send information faster than the speed of light, but it would seem to me that using this approach you can instantaneously tell what someone else did on the other side of the universe. You still have to wait for the photons to cross space at the speed of light, but once they do they would appear to be able to serve as a non-local medium for communication. Thoroughly impractical, perhaps, but not impossible?

I would transfer my consciousness into a Von Neumann Universal Constructor

The problem is this: Consciousness is complicated, and hard to understand That is all. The material implementation is inconsequential; we merely need to figure out the mathematical model.

It happens to me randomly, and hasn't ever been instigated by an event like a sneeze afaik

A soul as explained this way has always seemed to me like a poltergeist that can selectively pass through certain things while possessing the ability to pick others up. If the soul is transcendental and immaterial then what is its interface with the body and why can we not sense soul/body interaction? Asking whether or not a deterministic universe destroys free will is a stupid question. Intelligent entities possess the ability to predict the future from sensory data and alter the outcome as they see fit. Whether or not this process is deterministic is moot (from a compatibilist perspective) as free will enters the realm when we compute a potential future then weigh the consequences of various actions we can take to alter it based on our past experience.

You can't deduce an interference pattern from a single photon. You need several over a period of time in order to begin to notice it. Also, in order for photons to be entangled they have to start at the same place. So communication is still bounded by the speed of the photon, namely the speed of light.

Not so much parallel universes as extra dimensions. String theory speculates that the interference comes from extradimensional particles entangled as part of the same p-brane. Good, because she's wrong. Gravity propagates at the speed of light, at least according to GR and the best experimental evidence to date. Otherwise you would have a means of sending information (albeit in an EXTREMELY difficult impractical/improbable process) faster than the speed of light, which is a big no no according to GR.

"Spooky" action resulting from quantum entanglement does occur faster than light, however it cannot be used to send information. (or rather, it can, but it will always require something else travelling at the speed of light or slower) However, fire two entangled photons in opposite directions, and have a double slit for one to pass through a kilometer, an AU, a light year, or a parsec away... if you try to garner 'which path' information from the entangled photon, it will destroy the interference pattern for the other photon instantaneously. Such behavior is said to be non-local and thus not subject to the limitations of the speed of light (which is a limitation of movement over a distance) Quantum physics would say the interference pattern demonstrated by one-particle-at-a-time double slit experiments is the result of the interference between the probability waves for the two slits. Einstein predicts that gravity waves (or any gravitational effects) are also bound by the speed of light. If you could somehow magically teleport the sun away to the other side of the universe, we wouldn't know or care until 8 minutes, when we would notice the sun blipping out of the sky and its gravitational effects vanishing. At least one experiment has claimed to have verified this intrinsic limit: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3232 However several subsequent papers have called their result into question. All we can really claim is that GR predicts the effects of gravity propagate at the speed of light, but this is still lacking proper experimental verification.

Yup, it's crap floating in your vitreous humor, nothing to see here folks (except little floating squigglies)

The global consciousness will unite in 2012 and bring an end to existence as we know it anyway...

Inertia opposes acceleration, not velocity. You need to exert a force to change velocity, but you don't to keep it constant (unless you're opposing a different force such as gravity)