The first line, #include <stdio.h> is a directive to the program compiler. It means to get this file stdio.h and include it in the file. What that file does is include functionality for reading and writing to the standard input and output locations. On the computer we were using, the standard input was the keyboard and the standard output was the screen.
The functionality from this file stdio.h that we used was this function called “printf”. Using this, we could print words on the screen.
Below that is what is called the entry point, main()
That is where execution of the program’s instructions begins. And for this routine called main, we start and end with curly braces.
Tristan defines 3 integer variables, t9, z1, and total. He chose the names.
He assigns the variables to hold values next. t9 holds 60, z1 holds 290. And he assigns total to hold the sum of the values in t9 and z1. Then he prints out a string that has at the end the value in the variable total.
When a star is large enough and collapses upon itself, it becomes so dense that it becomes a black hole, a supermassive super-dense object from which no light can escape once it passes a critical threshold known as its event horizon.
The fact that nothing can escape once it goes into the black hole can appear very troubling to a physicist, because that seems to contradict the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in an isolated system that isn’t stable, entropy will increase over time. A black hole would violate this law because information about the parts of objects falling into a black hole apparently would be lost, including information about the objects’ entropy.
This problem was addressed by Stephen Hawking, who described Hawking radiation. Particles and their anti-particles spontaneously arise throughout all of space all of the time, and then quickly annihilate each other. These are called virtual particles because they continually appear and disappear like phantoms. Hawking showed that near the event horizon of a black hole, one of these particles could get sucked in and the other could escape, remaining a real particle permanently. Such a particle would be a sort of radiation unique to black holes, and would be drawing upon the well of energy in the space-time of the event horizon, such that the black hole would eventually evaporate from this radiation.
Then this phenomenon was described even more deeply by Gerardus ‘t Hooft, who devised the Holographic principle. He showed how a particle going into a black hole gave a boost to the gravity of the black hole as it got close to the even horizon, generating a little bump in the event horizon that uniquely described the particle that went in. And these bumps completely determined the characteristics of Hawking radiation particles being emitted. So the information going into the black hole, including information describing the entropy of the particles, was not being destroyed. It was encoded entirely in the shape of the black hole’s event horizon. The event horizon was in fact a hologram describing all that the black hole contained.
This revelation, that to be influenced by forces from any 3-dimensional volume is in fact better described as being influenced by the information encoded in the volume’s surface, was tremendously useful, and it has suggested answers to more and more fundamental questions. Most importantly, it was applied to the event horizon of our own universe, the curtain of light that appears in every direction, 13.75 billion light years distant. The holographic theory of the universe holds that this vast bumpy curtain encodes all the information that the universe contains. From different places in the universe, the event horizon’s bumps look different, and indeed are different than over there, encoding the information for this particular spherical volume of space-time instead of that one.
This has some significant implications. First of all, it lowers the maximum amount of entropy that the universe can contain. A planck length, about 10-35 meters, is the shortest distance that in quantum physics could be said to have any meaning. All the matter and energy of the universe can contain some maximum number of degrees of freedom in its configuration, some maximum entropy, physically limited by classical quantum physics to one bit of information per planck-length cube of volume. But in the holographic principle, in a black hole for example, those bits are encoded on a surface, not in the volume. There would necessarily be a lot less room for information. And in an event horizon like that of our universe, things would be expected to be noticeably more blurry than the scale of the planck length.
In fact, we would predict that the smallest observable length to have any concrete meaning would be in the area of 10-22 meters. And that, it just so happens, is how far the GEO600 graviton detector is able to see before encountering white noise.
Now this isn’t proof of a holographic universe, because it’s just noise that this instrument is detecting, minute perturbations in the distances between lasers. It could be noise from some other source, or just faulty equipment. But there’s another experiment on the way to test it. Another unit, planck-time, is the time it takes for light to travel one planck length. It is 10-43 seconds. Craig Hogan, a particle astrophysicist at Fermilab in Illinois, is building the most accurate clock ever. He aims to reach the barrier with his clock below which time should not be able to be measured in a holographic universe.
Hogan is building two quantum logic clocks, one on top of the other. If indeed the nature of the universe is holographic, then his two laser beams which are split apart and then put back together will not quite be in step with each other, and he will be able to detect their interference. He may even be able to peer just deep enough with his Holometer to get some measurement of the pixelation of the universe, if it is there.
Now aside from these attempts at direct measurement, there is another sort of evidence that I find very compelling. And that is the resolution of the humorously named “fine-tuning problem.” Basically the combined weight from the mass of the virtual particles from the expected vacuum energy of the universe is so very much that it ought to collapse in on itself. Even the vacuum energy of a small region of space should be enough to collapse the whole universe. The expected amount of vacuum energy is so stupendously, colossally wrong that this very very big problem is given the tongue-in-cheek name “the fine-tuning problem.”
Using quantum field theory, we have a very high estimate for the number of degrees of freedom for all energy in the universe. Where L is the diameter of the universe and ℓ is the planck length, the number of degrees of freedom is (L/ℓ)3. But in the holographic theory of the universe, we would arrive at one planck energy quantum per volume of size L2ℓ. This just happens to be the upper limit for the universe before it would collapse.
And so we are able to make the reasonable conjecture about the nature of dark energy that we couldn’t make in quantum field theory. Dark energy is the vacuum energy of space-time.
The space program SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Mostly, it consists of massive radio telescopes pointed at the sky, and computers combing through massive amounts of data.
It has been commented, though, that radio technology might not be the communication medium of choice for some other technological civilization. One other possibility is that if anybody else was out there, they would be using laser beams, possibly attached to their heads.
In 2006, the Optical Seti Telescope was inaugurated at Harvard, and the search for sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads began in earnest.
The search criteria to differentiate signal from noise was that the signal would be very short pulses of light coming from stars that are like our sun and nearby. This would make sense if civilizations were pinging us, directing intense lasers in our direction with the intent of getting our attention. Perhaps if a civilization was doing this, aiming very powerful lasers at every star in the sky in an attempt to communicate, this telescope could detect such a signal. No such signal was observed by this telescope, but SETI scientist Ragbir Bhathal at the University of Western Sydney tentatively says he saw what might have been a laser once, and has been carefully watching for it to show up again. Even if he does see it again, though, it might only mean the discovery of a laser-like natural phenomena of certain types of stars.
Now a bit about light. The bluer the light, the more energy it has, the redder the light, the less energy it has. Light is composed of particles called photons, and is produced by atoms, which are composed of protons and neutrons in a dense central nucleus, orbited by electrons. The electrons move in paths, called orbitals, about the nucleus. Much like blowing over the lip of a bottle creates the same note no matter how hard you blow, until you blow really hard and the air passes over the opening fast enough to jump the bottle up to the next higher octave, electrons orbit the nucleus in set orbitals, and abruptly jump up from one orbital to the next when the atom takes in enough energy. And then when the electron calms down, it lowers to the original orbital, releasing a photon. The wavelength of the photon corresponds to how much difference in energy there is for that particular atom between those two electron orbitals.
So different elements produce different colors of light when they get excited by things like heat or electricity. This is how we can tell what elemental composition stars have. We split up the light coming from the star into spectral lines with a prism tool called a spectrograph. Those lines tell us what elements are emitting light, and their relative intensities tell us how much, relatively, there is of each one in that star.
A laser is a light amplification of a stimulated emission of radiation. In a laser, a purified substance is excited with energy, typically electricity or heat, until it shines. What colors it shines depends on its element, as I explained above. The trick with a laser is to get all these atoms of some element shining one particular color, over a critical threshold past which more atoms are putting out the color than absorbing it. The light shines into an optical cavity, which absorbs and re-emits this wavelength of light, where it gains power and only has a single avenue of escape. What comes out is a laser beam.
Lasers come in all the colors that atoms can emit. All the spectral lines of the elements on the periodic table are all the colors of lasers that we have ever made. And they’re all the colors that we have seen in spectroscopes when observing the biggest, brightest things in the sky, stars.
But there might be other colors, because there might be other elements.
Avast Ye! Heavy Elements Ahoy!
It has been theorized since the 60′s that there might be more stable elements than we know about. For example, the element with an atomic number of 160, unhexnilium, might be stable. But making such an element would be very difficult. You couldn’t just smash two mercury ions together to create it, because they wouldn’t hold nearly enough neutrons. That isotope would undergo radioactive decay and come apart as soon as it was made. Something clever would have to be done.
But if it were to be done, and a significant amount of this element unhexnilium was synthesized, it might just be an ideal substance to use for a laser beam. Why? Because it could produce unique colors. A spectrograph could pick it out from natural sources of other light like stars with absolute certainty, since this element is unlikely to occur naturally in the universe at all.
I have read that these elements’ orbitals beyond the super-actinides can be derived using the Dirac equation.
I don’t exactly know how to do that, but if it can be done, then could perhaps this telescope at Harvard filter for these spectral lines rather than just look for lasers aimed directly at us? It seems possible to me in my somewhat uninformed opinion that such a search might be better able to detect communiques meant to talk amongst themselves rather than just attempts by other civilizations to contact alien life. Such transmissions would be expected to be more typical, right? These telescopes have been called photon buckets, and they are really looking for a drop in the bucket. So it seems to me that it might be fruitful to look for a drop that is almost certainly not natural in origin.
I think this video by animator Josh Wheldon sums the problem up nicely.
As life goes on, my atoms are replaced by other atoms, and I remain myself. But what if this process of replacement didn’t go so slowly? As in, all of my atoms replaced at once right here with identical atoms of the same elements, in the same configuration. Well, I would answer that with the confident statement that I am still me; I’m the pattern that the atoms are arranged in, not the atoms myself. I am a state of matter, not a lump of it.
But what if the replacement didn’t happen right here, but instead was performed over there? These atoms get disassembled and analyzed, and that same configuration is reproduced over there? That is the definition of a Star Trek style matter beam. Well, my intuition would extend to this being simply a case of teleportation. I was here, now I’m over there.
So if that’s true, then what if the me that is here is analyzed without being disintegrated, until 5 minutes later? What do I experience, in that situation? After a tipsy Scotsman says the word “Energize,” do I remain in place until I die 5 minutes later, or do I awaken over there? Or, somehow, both?
To continue to follow this logic down the rabbit-hole is to reveal that I have committed a blunder, begging the question. I ask “Well, which do I experience?” as if I have a self that continues from one moment to the next. I feel that I do… but previous experience is no guarantee of future results. Though unlikely, in the next instant we could cease to exist due to some catastrophe. And, though unlikely, the one instance of my current physical state could also go up by one to be two instances.
Just as I went from zero of me to one of me when my neurons formed the necessary connections to support self-awareness as an infant, somebody would be getting born. But which one? Again, that is to beg the question, which one. It reveals another assumption. Each moment in the present is a gift. We can’t rely on physical causation, continuation of patterns in a state similar to what they were in the last moment, and call that inheritance a legacy of identity. We are who we are now, and the past is what it must be to lead up to the present moment. I become neither the person in the far side of the transporter or the person who remains in place. I cease to be along with the present moment, and they receive the torch as their moment comes, persons with awareness fortunate enough to be allowed to exist by the whimsical laws of causality of the universe.
I find that I cannot logically justify the continuation of identity from moment to moment. So why justify saving for retirement? Who is that old guy who is going to get all my money? Why not spend it? (Actuaries take note. Low savings rates in the U.S. relative to Japan might be because of these philosophical concerns. Kids here watched Star Trek in the 60′s and savings rates plummeted.) I save my money because I feel like it, alright? Because even if I can’t justify it, I say that I exist. Hell, I shout it. Family, friends, fellow sentient beings of the universe, we state our conviction that we exist, that our lives are precious. The world will turn and stars will burn, and never will any refutation be returned to us.
But what is the point of all this, you might ask. We don’t have matter transporters, after all. This isn’t Star Trek. We are born, and eventually we die. There are either zero or one instances of our particular configuration, and the philosophical issues of the transfer of that number from one or the other value are culturally pretty well-understood. Well, okay, we don’t have some technology yet that can make copies, but this is important, because there are companies that freeze people at the moment that they die, with the expectation that they will be able to thaw them someday, fix whatever was wrong with them at that time, and resuscitate them. It is useful to think of this freezing as a transporter, not over a dimension of distance, but over the dimension of time.
Take the case of Dora Kent. In 1987, Saul Kent, board member of the cryonics company Alcor, had his 83-year-old mother transported from the nursing home to the Alcor facility. According to Alcor, she died of natural causes at the facility, and was preserved. Well, her head was preserved. The coroner’s office examined her body, but never got the head, which was moved to an undisclosed location. Alcor claims that the coroners were mistaken that the cause of death was homicide by administration of barbiturates, and states that this was administered after death to slow brain metabolism so that her brain could suffer as little damage as possible as it was cooled. However, the book Mothermelters by Alan Kunzman adds some troubling details to this account.
The nurse at the nursing home stated in her interview that Dora was having one of her better days when the two Alcor employees came to pick her up. She was well enough to sit in her chair in the rec room, more lucid than usual. The Alcor employees, wearing lab coats and driving an Ambulance pushed in a gurney and informed the staff that they were picking up Dora. Dora stated that she was going with them, only on the condition that she would be brought to her son Saul’s home. The employees said that yes, she was going to his home. This never happened. She went to the Alcor cryogenic facility, and if Alcor is to be believed, passed away in short order, before any medical assistance could be obtained. And the barbiturate cocktail was just part of their freezing protocol.
The whole thing stinks, and it’s pretty clear that Saul ended his mother’s life with the barbiturate cocktail, froze her, and cut off her head. So why would he do this? Well, as a board member of Alcor, he probably sees this process as a transporter, but across time instead of space. She’ll be revived eventually. And he thinks that if he didn’t end her metabolic function with the cocktail and freeze her, her Alzheimer’s disease would have ravaged her brain to the point that there would no longer have been any part of her identity left to save. To him, I suspect the decision was the moral equivalent of deciding whether Scotty should beam her up, to a place where they could cure her Alzheimer’s and extend her life, though he wouldn’t get to see her anymore, versus keeping her with him where in a few weeks or months all that was her in her brain would be permanently gone. With time as just another dimension, the same as distance.
But I just do not buy that. Doing that was murder. And it is because I say so, because if it isn’t, then I don’t get to declare that I exist, that my little flame here and now has value. Like the lingering copy of me at the starting platform of the matter teleporter pleading for more time in those final 5 minutes, I don’t want to permit that my state here and now could be morally equivocated about, that based on certain contingencies I might be what Hitler termed an “extra person.” As I demonstrated above, the assertion is logically groundless, but screw it, it is my assertion to make anyways, and I stand by it. I exist. We all do. This mystery of consciousness that arises from our synapses is our mystery to own. As long as your mom draws breath, you don’t fill her veins with barbiturates and make her heart and breathing stop. You don’t get to do that.
This is Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation. He has strategies for the development of therapies that will treat the cellular damage that causes the eventual development of aging pathology. The implication of his work is a dramatic postponement of noticeable amounts of aging through the periodic removal of some of the aging damage. Another implication is that because technical progress in this field will only continue, if people alive today can just make it to the development of the first round of therapies, they will have a good chance at still being alive and well when the second generation of improved therapies are developed, and so on, until our technological ability to maintain the body has achieved “actuarial escape velocity.”
I was rather incredulous when first hearing about his work, but eager to see him succeed. Not wanting to be taken for a ride, I began to dig into the details, to look for contradictory points of view. What I found was that while there were some people willing to state their objections to his projects’ feasibility solely on the principle of the thing, there was not one scientist working in a particular specialty who would say that what he intended to do within the domain of that specialty was bound to run into trouble.
So, after learning about how aging happens and gaining confidence in the cellular damage model of aging, I educated myself on each of the areas of cellular damage that lead to aging. And to my surprise I could not form any objections to the feasibility of these strategies for repairing them. The research themes are described in detail at http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes. There was still much work to be done, but the picture began to emerge that in each category, a working therapy could and would eventually be developed.
The number of lives per day that stand to be saved by this is remarkable. 100,000. Per day. At the time I began looking into this earlier this year, Dr. Aubrey de Grey had founded the Methuselah Foundation and then split off the SENS Foundation from it to do the in-house research, leaving the Methuselah Foundation the task of funding the research of others that could meet their research objectives, and operating the Mouse M-Prize competition. (The M-Prize is awarded to researchers who set new records in therapies that increase mouse longevity.) The Methuselah Foundation was taking in a couple million a year in charitable donations, and Aubrey was spending it on active research by himself and about a half dozen scientists in his employ, and in grants to other researchers around the world to do work that coincided with his goals. In-house progress was and still is at a relatively modest pace, compared to what it could be.
In future posts, I’ll delve into what exactly these rejuvenation therapies are and where they stand. Basically, I saw that they were doing a lot of great work, but only had a few people on it and didn’t have a big budget, so they were constrained. And I asked myself if I could do anything for them, anything that brought these therapies about even 1 day sooner. After all, 100,000 people die of aging related pathology every day. I reached the conclusion that yes, I can do something for the Methuselah Foundation.
In 2007, Aubrey de Grey and Chris Phoenix published this paper, A model of aging as accumulated damage matches observed mortality patterns and predicts the life-extending effects of prospective interventions. In this paper, Chris outlines his reliability model of aging. It models individuals’ diminishing biological reserve as aging damage accumulates, their diminishing ability to overcome environmental challenges and survive each year. The model fits the national mortality data, but it doesn’t drill down by damage type. Damage is all just damage in this model. What I realized is that if this model were to be refined to show how much of age-related mortality was caused by pathology resulting from which category of accumulated cellular damage, and Chris’ cure schedules were restated to be reductions in damage load in the specific categories, according to expert estimates on when each of these therapies will become available, then we could have a predictive model of the real-world impact of the work that the SENS Foundation is doing.
I’ve worked as a reliability engineer before, and made reliability models. They weren’t of the human body, though. The systems being modeled were things like helicopters. But the principle is the same, namely that stakeholders in the good repair of a fleet of platforms will pay for modeling efforts like this, so that they can predict what aging-related damage is coming up, and how to be prepared for it.
And who are the stakeholders in human longevity? Well, the market participants are life-insurance companies, who stand to gain from longevity increases, pension funds, who stand to lose, and investment banks, who buy long or short on longevity, underwriting the systematic longevity risk of these market participants. The investment banks do this by trading in a new financial instrument called a longevity swap. It is these banks in particular who would be eager for modeling efforts to understand expected future changes in longevity so that they could price their longevity swaps properly. Where I have decided I cand help the SENS Foundation is by adding a new category of revenue. After all, SENS is the organization with the silo of data and expertise that would make such pricing models as up-to-date and accurate as they can be. If I were an investment banker and it was my money about to be on the other end of a $60billion pension fund swap deal with an auto manufacturer, you bet I would want that confidence.
On September 15, 11:56pm, Willow Grace Paparella was born. She was 9 weeks early. The good news is that she is beautiful, and has done very well this last month. The great news is that she might just be able to come home this friday!
Baby girl, we are all ready for you here! My wife has spent the last month mostly in the NICU, working at breastfeeding around the clock. Breastfeeding beats everything else, in terms of how quickly babies grow, and especially in terms of conferred secondary immune response.
Direct breastfeeding is best, because this way none of Liz’ secretory immunoglobulin A antibodies are denatured in the freezing and thawing process. These sIgA molecules, by the way, move across the mucosa because of the secretory attachment to the IgA molecule, and attach to the lining of the nose, mouth, and throat. There they bind to and disrupt whatever antigens they correspond to. And this leads to the second reason why direct breastfeeding is best. Even if frozen milk didn’t degrade these antibodies, it would put them in a holding pen for as long as the milk was frozen. Liz produces proportionally more immune molecules according to whatever her immune system is stimulated by at the time she produces the milk. Delay the consumption of the milk, and Willow is getting out-of-date defenses.
Now in addition to the immunoglobulin molecules, Liz also gives Willow leukocytes, about 5 million per milliliter. These are mostly macrophages, bacteria-eaters. But about 10% of them are memory T cells, antibody-producing cells, and killer T cells. These are the sorts of cells necessary to have any hope of fighting off a virus and remembering the immune response to it. There is evidence, based off of animal studies, that some of these cells manage to get incorporated into Willow’s nascent immune response (Wold and Adlerberth, 1998). The cells need to still be alive for that to happen, of course, so direct is best.
This is why Liz has really done the best thing by staying up at the NICU for these last several weeks. She had to be physically present to give our little girl her best shot at growing and to protect her with the best possible boost to her immune response. And by staying in the envionment where Willow lives right now, she exposed her own immune response to whatever antigens sneaked into the NICU, responded within her own body to them, and conferred the right sIgA’s at the right time to Willow to fight them off.
So to everybody who has brought food, watched our kiddos, and generally helped out, thank you. You’ve really helped Willow to get a good start in life, and you’ve helped us to do what we can to protect her.
