new experiment as important as Michelson and Morley

The chart above was handed to me by Prof. Yanhua Shih and his graduate student Peng Tao at my first day attending the SPIE conference in Baltimore in April 2015. The day after, I gave my SPIE leadership award talk on neural networks in one session, and a talk related to the new experiment in the workshop on quantum information technology.
   The curve represents the predictions of time-symmetric physics -- of any of a set of new local realistic models I developed last year. The dots represent the actual measured data. These were the first results for the continuous-angle triphoton experiment (triple entanglement), which had never been performed before on earth,In that experiment, the predictions of time-symmetric physics disagree decisively from those of the traditional forms of quantum mechanics assuming collapse of the wave function.
    When Yanhua showed me these results, I stated in my talks that this triphoton experiment, in general, is as important as the Michelson and Morley experiment was. But it defies conventional thinking. It took some time to really explain it -- and Luda took on the actual task of translating it from my way of thinking to conventional language and thinking, as was essential to the peer-reviewed publication in the past few months in the journal Quantum Information Processing, in the special issue dedicated to Howard Brandt, a central player behind the scenes in IS work on quantum information science and technology.
   Because realism (literally, the belief in objective reality) and heresy are both far less accepted now than they were 100 years ago, we may have to wait before other leading labs replicate the experiment, and address the many issues described in our paper. But it really does change everything, and open lots of doors which will be closed forever if we do not go further with it.
   

Musk raises the bar on Mars

 One of the serious space policy lists sent out a posting "Musk raises the bar on Mars."

My initial reaction: "Trump says that his followers are so loyal that he could shoot someone on the streets of New York and they would still support him. Is Elon Musk now showing he could promise to open a Star Wars cantina on Mars, and get lots of support from gullible customers asking to pay for tickets today?"  I strongly support most of the causes Musk supports, but am a bit concerned about reality.

But it turns out that Mars is the big PR theme of the day in Washington DC, mainly because folks looking for billions of dollars believe it's a good PR strategy. Others on the same list questioned how real those policy debates are now.

My reply:

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HI, Jerry!

I am happy this morning to see some folks asking some of the right questions about where we are going in the long-term in space.

For example -- could settlement of Mars ever become economically viable/sustainable?

What worries me most here is that people in power in DC are so utterly unwilling to take that kind of question seriously, except for a 

contingent who simply want to zero out all space activity (a justified position when the rest of us don't provide a convincing answer to the question). Maybe the vote in New Hampshire has emboldened me a little to feel there are still a few folks who actually want to do things right... and cut out the really gross corruption and misdirection which makes it hard to pay really serious attention to the question of sustainability of space activities. But at the same time, in the presidential debates, I still notice how many candidates complained about "all that reality stuff getting in the way."

Getting to reality -- settlement of Mars MIGHT or MIGHT NOT be economically viable or sustainable, DEPENDING on what else is accomplished in terms of OTHER infrastructure, markets and technology. In some contexts, Mars settlements are sustainable. In other contexts, they aren't. In a way... in a weird way... I would actually mostly/almost  agree with the idea that the core mission of NASA should be to maximize the probability that settlement of Mars becomes sustainable and viable. But:

   (1) Why just Mars? From the viewpoint of philosophy... of the meaning of life... ANY sustainable human settlement of space should count. When we are at that high level of defining what we want, the core mission should really be sustainable human settlement of space, period, INCLUDING Mars but not restricted to Mars only. (Who needs humans in space? Who needs humans on earth? Humans, that's us. A very basic starting point.)

  (2) TO ACTUALLY ACHIEVE the goal of sustainable human settlement of Mars, or anywhere else, we really need a kind of rational long-term strategic "plan" (or "decision tree") which maximizes the probability that we create the context which makes it economically feasible, or at least plausible. I agree with the folks on this list who say that we simply aren't there yet. We haven't done what we need to do.   A major charge to Mars with inadequate preparation and infrastructure would be a lot like Lyndon JOhnson's fast charge to the moon, which cut out so much of JFK's infrastructure building and resulted in flags, footprints, disillusionment and budget cuts.

What does it really take to get to economic settlement of Mars of anywhere else in the solar system? My general analysis, based on real economics rather than iron triangle PR,  is at:

P. Werbos, Towards a Rational Strategy for the Human Settlement of Space, Futures, Volume 41, Issue 8, October 2009

In a way... talking about the economic settlement of Mars today would be like talking about the economic settlement of Nevada in the 1600's, before the East Coast had much of an independent settlement itself. If we do things right, Mars will be one important and growing part of a larger interconnected solar system economy, not an isolated bubble. But then again, it would be great if NASA or anyone else could really develop the technology needed to build such bubbles, or "terraria for humans," as they tried to do but failed on in... Arizona, was it?

In sum: we do not have the technology and infrastructure yet EITHER for export-driven sustainable settlement on Mars, or for closed system "terrarium" type settlement. To develop that technology and infrastructure is ever so important for the human species, but to ASSUME it and act as if the problem doesn't exist... would be a way to seal our doom. Really. No hyperbole.  

Best of luck,

    Paul

=================

I also attached a policy paper by myself and Ed McCullough detailing what we think a new rational policy would be for NASA. That was unanimously approved by the IEEE Committee on Transportation and Aerospace Policy, but on the way upstairs... well, DC is DC. I hope someone lives up to his or her promise to fix it.

Korean rocket and Navy LENR illustrate pathways to NUC/AI extinction

Posted to scientific advisory board of Lifeboat Foundation, discussing possibilities for extinction of human species:

==================================

There are actually many specific pathways or credible scenarios or real time-tracks leading from where we are to the clusters of human species extinction which I label as "NUC/AI" for short. (H2S is also still in play, but two items are enough to analyze in one post.)

Probably you already know about the new North Korean rocket launch, and its link to their recent "H bomb" test. I recently received several inputs on the new Navy LENR activities, which are just as important; one of the inputs was the link:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/spawar-space-and-naval-warfare-lenr-proof/

The Korean rocket does relate to various "NUC" type extinction possibilities, but it calls out for some discussion here and now on this list because of how it relates to the bad-AI issue we have discussed here a bit. The discussion was a bit fuzzy, and it helps to anchor a bit in something concrete.

There are ways for the US to react to the Korean rocket which would play directly into the AI extinction scenario, following the very serious Terminator script. Since some of you really demand evidence (which is a very good thing), I would ask you to please scan the simple colorful slides at:

 http://www.werbos.com/SPIE_NN_2015_AI_BI_to_NN_CI.pdf

which in turn are substantiated by the citations in the accompanying paper, for which the link and background are posted at the top of http://www.werbos.com/Mind.htm.

One of these slides illustrates the work of S.N. Balakrishnan of Missouri, who implemented one of the RLADP neural network algorithms I developed in the 1970s (DHP), and showed that it reduced error in hit-to-kill missile interception applications by more than an order of magnitude. It was a long and entertaining path, and I will resist the temptation to elaborate. Just two stories: 

(1) in 2009, I attended a briefing at the Marshall Institute for Congressional staff (which I was) on missile defense, and couldn't help smiling when the technical guy with the Lockheed representative said: "What you folks need to understand is how much more real the opportunities for missile interception are now. Yes, back in the days of the Patriot missile, we only hit about one or two in a hundred, but thanks to this guy S.N. Balakrishnan, we can do it much more reliably. His mathematics is a bit weird, and we are struggling to understand it, but a whole new world has opened up to protect us...

(2) Many people believe it is a top security priority not to let the world know, and thus not discuss the very limited surface details I am posting here today. But ALSO a few years ago... the Chinese arranged two major speaking tours, one by Balakrishnan and one by me, curiously all at the same places, one of them being Harbin (the main center of hard military aerospace activities in China of they types they don't mind Russians knowing about). No way they don't know. They can do web searches as well as any of us. I came on official NSF travel, after full approvals and checking on the rules, and had no security clearance; however, there were amusing little cameos where a couple of people just assumed I must have some CIA connection, and I work actively to forget some bits of that. China is also certainly not the only country which knows. (Balakrishnan has bent over backwards to hold back stuff, respect important security concerns, and even offer a few primrose paths to the web searchers.) When we go to nutty extremes in holding back, we hurt ourselves and our own consciousness more than we reduce proliferation; some of you think of the very serious nonsense about Clinton emails, but I think more about the historical introduction chapter in The Skyrme Model by Makhankov, Rybakov and Sanyuk, who recount how classification in the UK made certain nuclear information widely disseminated in Russia but almost unknown in the West.  

I will refrain from boring you with discussions near SPAWAR linking to Iron Dome, Russians and a friend in blue uniform who really looked like a character from the Terminator movies, and really had an option to make the whole thing come true.

All that being true, one obvious option with Korea's rocket launch would be to use it as a test of antimissile interception capabilities. With a previous Korean launch, that was discussed quite actively in the press, but not this time. Should we seek a UN security council resolution authorizing the US to intercept any Korean launches until and unless  they stop being such serious NUC outlaws (and violators of strong past commitments) that they no longer add to the NUC extinction pathway (not directly but opening up a path to an avalanche)?

In fact, Iron Dome has already displayed major capabilities, already saving many many lives in a situation where lack of such a defense might already have led us into a nuclear war. 

But: (1) Is the Bala/Iron-Dome level of missile defense technology really safe (versus the AI risk)?; (2) If we start to need even better defense, as larger NUC risks grow in the world, just how much more is both possible and safe along the same pathway?

In my view, the technology deployed so far is reasonably safe. It is an example of what I call "vector intelligence," which can handle much more complexity than the earlier reinforcement learning schemes of folks like Minsky/Selfridge and Barto/Sutton/Anderson, but is still limited, and can't optimise more than about one vehicle with about a dozen state variables in a highly nonlinear environment. (And yes, we have stability proofs. One even in Automatica this past year, albeit for a level weaker than DHP.) 

On the other hand, with more missiles launched (or with the task of coordinating whole fleets of drones), more complexity comes into it. "Theater missile defense," exactly as in the highly realistic Skynet scenario, is what I once viewed as "a beautiful testbed demonstrating the value of rising to a higher quantum level of intelligence." It is, and we know how to do it. But I am very grateful to the guy from Boeing, who in their Executive Dining Room in 1991, strongly urged me to go see Terminator II: "You may not like that kind of movie, but you really have to. It is your absolute duty, given what  you are doing and what you are doing with us right now." More of the story is at 

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2009/10/could-terminator-ii-come-true-true.html.

But no, I do not intend to go there. I do at times worry whether other people might someday catch up... have we just bought a little time, and are we out of the woods yet?

Fortunately, there is another way to substantially improve missile defense, well justified in today's world (and hopefully something we could work with Russians on as allies of a sort, as Reagan wanted to do in this area)... and that is good old space-based boost intercept. Just a few weeks ago, I was happy to see some really nice reviews out there on the web, which I bumped into when checking on high-energy and exotic lasers. Livermore really had a nice story. Some guys at Boeing really are excited about it. When I came back from Marshall's briefing, I asked a friend (a key guy on Senate defense appropriations subcommittee) their view; they said: "Story sounds great, but the numbers are wrong.  Cost per hour of protection is too high." Having once been a student of Tom Schelling (who advised McNamara on the economics of defense), I fully understood what he meant instantly. But I also understood ... since we DO have the technology and design (integrated by Ray Chase in a variety of key papers and sources) for RLVs with $500/kg-LEO (and with some GEO capabilities), we COULD bring that cost way down, and really afford to deploy space-based missile defense. In my view, that would be a great and safe thing, making all the world much safer, and providing really huge side benefits (which we list again and again in space policy papers). For example, it is the necessary enabler for 9-cents-per-kwh switchable space solar power, per the plan put together in the most recent book by John Mankins.

Unfortunately, the same bad guys that Hillary Clinton, Trump and Sanders complain about are also putting a hard freeze right now on our hopes of deploying or even continuing to have that RLV options. There are very scary specific stories about bad things done by really bad guys in DC. But "speak of the devil and he may appear." I won't go there either now. 

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So... that's the Korean rocket... where it leads us... but what of the LENR case?

There are actually many specific, diverse clusters of pathways leading to extinction by misuse of nuclear technologies. One of them is the "lone wolf nuc" development. Since the Navy, US News and NASA have already let one of the cats out of the bag more than I am even capable of by any mundane channel, I chose to reply to the new information:

===================================

To X:

I have known that LENR works for some time. Here is some background, a link

and some extensions. Please do click to see the video...

taken when Lamar Smith's guy (Pramod Khargonekar, who told me that day that his deals with Smith bothered many people but "hey, they get us money") insisted that cold fusion be the main theme of the speech given on the occasion of my retirement:

(another email sent to a couple of friends on September 8, 2015)

Your probably know that a guy named Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist of NASA, has been very effective in getting the word out worldwide on cold fusion. 

I do worry about the nuclear proliferation aspects, but at this point it's my calculation that the underlying science is important enough and the cat is out of the bag enough, that's it time to let a bit more out of the bad. Of course, it helps that I retired from the US government on February 15 -- in part because of policy changes and personality conflicts in the NSF Engineering Directorate which led me to conclude it would not be a good use of my special abilities to stay there. 

I did not do anything with cold fusion since about 1990, but Kargonekar, being ever so friendly, decided to bring in a guy involved with the cold fusion story to make that the highlight of the parting speech for my retirement. But it didn't work out precisely as he imagined. Here is a 15 minute video

which left some of the NSF people open-jawed:

http://1drv.ms/1Gdu0zI

Somewhat more seriously, here is a folder of documents I scanned as part of compressing my files (throwing away lots of paper both at home and in the office) in my final months:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzYEn42Vg7DKQWJ4MDRhaDYwaW8&

The "CF" cold fusion file includes such things as lab notes from the Pons/Schwinger collaboration, and the report of the NSF workshop of 1990 or so.

That stream of technology is actually just a first step towards a higher frequency coherent technology related to further steps which in my view are important to even more remarkable future technology. Wild as this is, it is the tip of an iceberg. 

By the way, this is all on the cloud - but life being what it is, and my life expectancy being finite, 

it might be reasonable to make backup copies not dependent on my machines and cloud areas.

------------

..... (some further nuclear stuff) ..... 

I had good personal contact with the guy at Lockheed behind this LENR stuff, who collaborated with Macgregor of Livermore, but the "black wall" later got in the way. 

It is a nasty dilemma, that technology which humanity might need to survive long-term seems to pose ever more lethal risks short-term. Sometimes I think about the Babylon 5 episodes where they judge humanity is not ready yet for real longevity... more realistic than what I hear in the debates these days.  

===================

Best of luck,

      Paul

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Here on this blog, maybe I should also add a little news n the H2S front.

One space guy asked: "if this is real, why don't I see it in the press?" I have posted the logic, but not tried to appear on reality TV. A life style choice. More seriously, when I discussed the issue last with the most serious ..

university specialist (much published in Science) I have worked with in this area... he said that I am late to the party. A whole lot of people realize the H2S extinction thing is likely to kill us, but, in view of the active censorship  driven by folks like Lamar Smith, Cheney and Koch brothers, penetrating much deeper than TV watchers realize... they are pretty much giving up. After all, Antarctica is the Big One, and we are still 40 years away from the start of the major oxygen crunch, according to best data... 

Yet I saw a new map yesterday from the ARCTIC which is also disturbing. No, even the Arctic and the North Atlantic combined would probably not produce and emit enough H2S to outso the smaller great extinction

(the paleocene discontinuity) which killed all proto-primates and other big mammals on earth but was not enough to kill the mice. The Big One (PT) could kill them all. But even so, the news... I think it was Science News...

clearly shows lowest ice ever in the Arctic, WITH the remaining ice mainly concentrated near the shores of 

Greenland and far north Canada... suggesting the kind of freeze of fresh water runoff we also see around the Antarctic. On first glance, it seems... Antarctic has ALREADY seen shutdown of the biggest "lung of the planet" (souther thermohaline current, THC), while the Arctic is smaller... and might not be cut off... yet... though the new map suggests ... maybe, maybe not. HOWEVER: once cutoff occurs (or occurred?) in the Arctic, 

the possibility for bad stuff happening is much quicker, due in part to depth of the water and direct runoff.

Could we smell it in our lifetimes? Maybe. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad, if we survive it, insofar as an early whiff might possibly wake a few folks up. Then again, people voting for oil/Cruz show that panic by itself is not enough...    

Overcoming fatal flaw in progressivism and evolution

Overcoming fatal flaw in progressivism and evolution

Faith in progress has mostly been a positive force in human society, especially when it led to some exuberance in the 1960s. But only lately have I started to hear about “progressivism” as a kind of secular religion, though at times it becomes a religious religion. The key tenet: Even if we don’t pay to much attention to the details, we can be sure that progress in science and technology will always be the path forward to an ever better state of life. In its most extreme forms – progressivism, like sharia Islam, tries to exclude dialogue which questions its basic premises. I see more promise in a variety of spiritual progressivism, developed by Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin describes “evolution” as a process which can take us ever onwards and upwards.

Problem number one: the trilobite (or trilobyte?). Never forget the trilobyte. Really serious students of evolutionary biology noticed long ago that evolutionary “progress” often leads to a dead end and extinction.  Detailed quantitative studies, decades ago (Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, by R. May), showed that the natural process of evolution simply is not a reliable path upwards. To the extent that real mainstream science understood the natural process of evolution in the twentieth century – it was less a matter of guaranteed progress and more a process of guaranteed entropy, viewed as a path towards disorder eventually going to a “heat death” (or lifeless rocks in space). Current politics on earth seem much more like that, like the phenomenon of old age.  

The politics of technology are very much a key part of this story, because wrong directions (entropy) in the development of technology are central to all three of the clear threats of human extinction in sight today (which I have referred to as “H2S/NUC/AI” for short).  Faith that all new technology and all new knowledge get us closer to survival... would be comforting, but it is perhaps even more dangerous to humanity than the mindless faith that there is no such thing as climate change.

Based on life experience, I would agree with Teilhard, Jung and Verdansky that there exists something real and active out there like what they called “noosphere” or “collective mind”. (I can’t get myself to write “unconscious”, since that is misleading. When a young male full of testosterone responds very intensely to a female stimulus which he tries to ignore, it is a bit misleading to describe him as “unconscious” of the stimulus, no matter what he actually says or does about it. Unless he is really crazy.)

In fact: how could there be any hope at all for the human species, given the growing entropy and new risks and lack of the conscious response needed to solve the complex problems?

In my view... the only hope lies in the implications of a theory which most people do not understand but which I find very compelling. (In a way, this is like my post on FTL travel, where hope – i.e., a nonzero probability of success – is totally dependent on the possibility that one of the theories of physics which would allow it might be true.) In this case, the theory is that our noosphere... the noosphere of earth... is not just a product of local entropy, but is a member of a much larger species, constructed from dark matter or something more exotic, which has evolved a certain kind of specific anti-entropic trait analogous to the traits in human bodies which allow them a longer lifetime than most other species. Only by fully expressing those noosphere-level traits do we have a chance of avoiding “old age” very soon. (Some of the scary, aged, creaking zombie brains I see on TV remind me of this every day...). As a crude approximation... I see these three most fundamental... inner imperatives?... to be something like “the spirit of benevolence/love” (ala Yeshua, on the spiritual level, expressed by angels who start with “fear not...”), “the spirit of truth” (no denigration of mathematics or the scientific method, or repression of core realities of free thought and free speech, is tenable under this constraint) and rational impedance matching (RIM). RIM is the hardest for me, and very tricky. It includes sincere efforts, for example, to avoid writing so many details that it hurts people’s brains... something I have found it hard to learn... and it includes real respect for privacy, more than what progressivists like Brin can respect, and it includes not telling wild children how to build bombs which could blow up the entire earth.  (It is related to the issues of balancing sparsity and connectivity in neural networks.) It is awkward and problematic, requiring lots and lots of heavy analysis, but without it... the present entropy of low-consciousness policies is ever more worrisome. 

But these inner disciplines are not enough... besides a proper formal structure (like the US or German Constitutions of the time I write), there are certain key essential elements of “corporate culture” (as in the book by Ashkenasy et al, which I cite in my article in Bainbridge’s book on Leadership in S&T). The “legal corruption” in the US today is an example of a mid-level problem severe enough to end up in deaths of all humans on earth if it is not corrected. (No exaggeration: studying scenarios for H2S/NUC/AI... it is quite real.)

=======================

========================

But then:  let me conclude with some humor, as I track the political process in the US (a narrow but serious spiritual duty, in my view).

In the recent” town hall” quasidebate, a CNN reporter asked Clinton: “Do you really believe all that about a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get you?” She replied: “Don’t you. Let’s be real...”  Some people thought she may be too paranoid. I sadly worry that she may not be paranoid enough. For example, some folks without a DC background ask: “How could we trust a candidate who is under FBI investigation?” My response: “How can we trust candidates who support folks like Lamar Smith in empowering them to use the FBI as their own personal hit squad to attack rivals, and try to enforce a new rule that folks in Cheney’s obedient network dictate even to the President how to handle sensitive strategic information? How does the judgment of Cheney’s unelected cronies get to override the right of a Secretary of State to make strategic judgments?” The problem with Benghazi was that Clinton gave TOO MUCH ground to those folks. She and Sanders seem to think that the problem of corruption is all about election money and legislation... while seeming blind to the vast corruption and re-management of the actual administrative apparatus. I certainly remember the shock on the face of a new government hire saying: “I still don’t know what to do... they tell us we have to follow a certain reporting chain which is kind of extreme in not being what they told us in the law and in the Constitution. But I can see how they have re-engineered the whistleblowing function too...”

-------

And then...

There are lots of amusing ways to try to be in touch with the personal and also the collective unconscious.  Jung’s “synchronicity” is certainly part of that.

I was rather struck, consciously, when, after one of those Sanders/Clinton exchanges, a face appeared... “Bernie...

the greatest scam of the twentieth century.” OK, it was a commercial for a movie about Bernie Madoff, but the timing and the feeling of the face and so on... is it an authentic psychological shadow of how many people feel? TBD. And then... I realized that the new big teddy bear commercial really reflects a side or view of Trump... which has more power in the collective unconscious than many would expect. (Beautiful women all over him... big, orangeish, fluffy... leaving a question about depth of understanding...). I then wondered: are there any others like that? The New York State commercial... Clinton and that commercial project real New York values much more than Trump’s events... incredible efficiency and cleanliness and progress compared to those others... yet where are the people? Hopefully not subsumed by a threatening possible disaster like Watson. (I even posted a brief, direct comment on the site of “Watson for President.”) This is related to the people worried about “does she care about people like me?” And finally, there is also a commercial with a guy being shot at on the phone to his mother...  “please vote for my baby. He is a bit challenged, but..” Guess which candidate lines up with the commercial for Spectre, trying to take control of the world in a grossly cynical way (promoting a corporate and spiritual culture guaranteed.... to provoke more than you kind folks might ever imagine... like my recent blog post on the 900 pound gorilla, which sanitized the possible future world-line).

Minor detail... one more very small but startling (to me) bit of evidence on the time stuff I talked about before.

Best of luck. We still all very much need it.  

killer drones: reply to guy who wants to prosecute their developers

Some international discussions have raised the question: should the international community try to prosecute those who use and develop killer drones, as they contribute to the "bad AI" or "Terminator" risk to survival of our species? 

My response: 

[This suggestion] brings me back to the very severe  "damned if you do, damned if you don't" dilemmas which have left me relatively paralyzed since July 2014. 

Some of you have long been familiar with that kind of dilemma. I remember circa 1975 when I was a new assistant professor going to a conference where a guy from the State Department was looking for people to fund on "research into defining the national interest." The basic idea was... nations play hard to win sometimes, but later on often find that "winning" was actually losing and vice-versa. It would be nice to get past that. Mathematically, a person's underlying utility function U(R), representing what they like for its own sake, may be very different from the correct value of J(R), the so-called "value function" assessing how good the present situation really is when future consequences are fully accounted for. Research on how to assess J(R) more accurately... is a serious area of research. As one special case... how do we assess progress J(R) towards reducing (or raising) the probability that the human species goes extinct within the next 10,000 years or so, if we focus for now on that particular ultimate value U(R)?

And so... when you think of a specific action like this Wiesenthal Center ... the unintended consequences get to be very, very tricky in the world we now live in.

Would the idea be to prosecute all members of the "Chair force," the folks who have jobs working for places like the air force sitting in offices in rural US operating drones by wire, much like folks spending all day on the Play Station? The other day, I read that more new pilots were being trained to be chair force pilots than pilots of actual airplanes. 

What about people actually developing the next generation of drones, particularly new more autonomous drones which do not require so much chair force, and which get to be more and more similar to the aerial drones depicted in the movie Terminator III Judgement Day?

(It was an awful movie, esthetically, but still justified for folks serious about extinction to watch.

I was both turned off and amused at times by scenes which then looked like a dog fight between Hilary Clinton and Arnold Schwartzenegger...  but Hilary is older now, and I suppose Trump has taken over a lot of the image which was Schwartzenegger. The technology descriptions were brief but specific enough to be thought-provoking.) Strictly speaking, it is the autonomous drones, not drones in general, which relate to the "end game" of human extinction by wrong AI. 

Here is where it gets to be especially tricky.

What if an idealistic group works hard to find out and inform the whole world which group really is closest to the most dangerous and powerful form of drone autonomy, which could kill all humans on earth? Should they publicize that very widely and try to stop those activities somehow?

Unfortunately, there are so many power-crazed leaders and narcissists in so many nations all over the world that the effect may be to substantially accelerate the movement in that direction, even if, yes, logic says clearly it may kill all people on earth including all the descendants of those very same leaders and the people behind them. 

Many technology people aware of the dilemmas of their jobs now are putting hope into Elon Musk's new AI center, intending to "reduce the risk of AI by making all tools universally available." Again, I do not believe that universal availability of autonomous drones would make for more peace any more than universal availability of cannons did... and these things are a lot more dangerous than cannons!!!

But the dilemma goes even further. "Sterility memes" like the Watson computer system may help avert the risk of artificial intelligence, but putting the entire physical world (aka future planned internet of things) under the control of an implacable glorified voicemail system... poses a very serious risk which I have sometimes called "artificial stupidity" (AS). It may sound funny, just as H2S reminds some folks of stinky smells ... but certain types of control systems really can crash a complex nonlinear system like the web of human economy and life.    

The daily news lately reminds me ever more of the AS kind of risk...

Best of luck,

     Paul

P.S. I have also agreed with my son that "Captain America: the Winter Soldier" is worth thinking about seriously in this connection. At www.werbos.com/Mind.htm, I post slides from a talk at SPIE last year which got into some specifics, and even a few of the technical details. 

Faster Than Light Travel: Now There Is a Way Forward

Faster Than Light Travel: Now There Is a Way Forward

Many years ago, when NASA decided it should fund a blue-sky open-ended effort to look for workable concepts for faster than light (FTL) travel, Marc Millis, who ran the program, invited me to be the National Science Foundation partner. At that time, it was basically too speculative for NSF, and even for me. The goal was a worthy goal,  and one might ask: “How can we ever have any hope of finding an answer if we don’t devote at least SOME effort to thinking about the question?” At that time, however, my response to the question was: “We won’t ever have any real chance at this until and unless we make a whole lot of progress in updating our very basic understanding of basic physics. Until we do more of that, it is premature to expect any kind of specific, concrete way forward.”

But now – that has changed, at least for me. I have done a lot to update my knowledge of basic physics this past year, and, as part of that – I now see a reasonable, more concrete way forward to TRY to achieve FTL. When it comes down to political and economic constraints – I can’t guarantee that humans will ever learn to tie their shoelaces, but from an objective scientific viewpoint, I do see a way forward on FTL which is far more solid and plausible than earlier approaches (though the new approach draws heavily on previous work). Until I get to publish all the many aspects of what I have learned this past year, is it premature for me to say what it adds up to? Maybe, but I can’t be sure I will live long enough to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s as normal practice demands.

1. Space-Bending spacecraft in general versus other approaches *****************************

The most mainstream approach to achieving FTL starts with the question: “Now that Einstein has shown that space can be bent, can we bend space in a way that lets us build FTL spacecraft?”  That is the approach I will discuss here, but probably I should briefly review more of what this means.

There are other folks who like to hope for “hyperspace craft,” which assume that our cosmos has more than just the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time, linked to each other as Einstein described (3+1-D).  In fact, many very serious mainstream physicists argue strongly for superstring theories or brane theories which assume the existence of such additional dimensions. However, I view that as speculative stuff, because I see no real empirical data at all yet in science to give us any practical understanding of what those additional dimensions would really be like, if they exist at all.  Yes, that is a valid area for research, to try to get past speculation, but for a concrete way forward now I would only assume the 3+1-D dimensions that we now know well. (That also applies to concepts like exploiting the “digital universe” as in the wonderful novel Moving Mars by Greg Bear.)

To bend space in 3+1-D, one needs a mathematical model of bending space. Einstein’s General Relativity (GR) is the obvious model, but FTL is not so easy in GR. Thus it makes a lot of sense to support research which really probes GR for possible changes, possible gaps in the theory, especially the kind of gaps which might make FTL easier. It still makes a lot of sense to intensify such efforts ... but at present, it looks ever more speculative that gaps will be found. A year or two ago, there seemed to be growing hope that a model like Moffat’s model of gravity might supersede GR, even though some of the key terms look suspiciously odd. GR requires the weird concepts of dark energy and dark matter to explain some of the basic observations we made a few years ago, but Moffat’s model was predicting them without dark matter or dark energy. But new information has come in on dark matter and dark energy, and the complexities of Moffat’s model no longer seem helpful of justified. And so, the practical way forward now is to aim for space-bending spacecraft, bending space exactly in accord with what GR allows.

How mainstream can one get? In fact, the famous guys at CalTech talk both about space-bending spacecraft and about wormholes as mainstream, GR-based approaches to FTL. The spacecraft approach and the wormhole approach are somewhat related; one might even view the spacecraft approach as a step towards wormhole capabilities (just as low cost RLV may be viewed as a prerequisite to “space elevators”, for those folks who like space elevators more than RLVs).

2. A New Way Forward with space-bending spacecraft ****************************************

The word “Alcubierre” is maybe the best google search term to get into the serious literature on how to build space-bending FTL spacecraft. It all goes back to Alcubierre himself, who found a solution to the equations of GR (i.e. a state of the world allowed according to GR, a design) in which space is bent around a spacecraft enough to allow it to travel faster than light. The Alcubierre solution generated a lot of rightful excitement, but it entailed two overwhelming obstacles, which kept it from being a practical way forward for now, even for folks like me who usually support high-risk high-benefit technologies: (1) it requires the use of “exotic matter,” i.e. matter or energy whose mass/energy density is negative; and (2) it requires a huge amount of that.

There was great excitement a few years ago when a physicist at NASA published a variation of the Alcubierre solution which appeared to get (2) under control. With a new design, much less exotic matter is needed. I have not looked up the details, but I remember an email from someone involved in that saying something vaguely like: “Before, we needed a hunk of exotic matter as big as Jupiter. Now we only need something as big as the Edmonton Mall, something we could actually build.” (We could even AFFORD to build something as big as the Edmonton Mall in space, if our politicians would allow us to build the low-cost RLV which previous work at Boeing, at AF and at NASA has validated, using off-the shelf technology and data!)  That was nice – but at the time I sadly grinned: “Too bad we don’t have ANY exotic matter, not even a thimble full, let alone a Mall full.”

But now, it looks better. Maybe even much better. There is a way forward to check and even to do if the checks work. If I still had a government funding mandate, and were allowed to go international and so on... but whatever.

“Where is there ANY exotic matter?”  I did give Marc Millis a recommendation to give special priority to that question....

Folks like Puthoff funded by Marc Millis offered a possible answer: “Why not squeeze the vacuum?”  Strictly speaking, exotic matter/energy does not really require that energy density be zero in an ABSOLUTE sense. It only requires that we create a zone of energy or matter where the average energy is LESS THAN the average density of the outer space we are traveling through. Many mainstream physicists believe that ordinary outer space is already at a very high level of energy density, because of “zero point fluctuations (ZPE).” For example, even Weinberg’s authoritative book the Quantum Theory of Fields,  has section explaining and endorsing ZPE as a way to explain the Casimir effect. “Squeezing the vacuum,” they suggest, is baiscally just a matter of excluding those vacuum fluctuations from a region of space.

As it happens, I don’t believe in that mainstream Feynmann ZPE theory. The logic seems very clear to me, but, since it is heresy and since new heresy takes many years to percolate through the ever more complex and bureaucratic systems of our world, I simply posted a paper giving the logic at vixra.org this year. For those capable of logic, that should be enough, but for those who must watt for endorsements from Ginsparg or from the President of Liberty University, it is too early. The ZPE theory implies that there is a truly immense amount of energy out there in the vacuum of outer space, something like 10**120 somethings per cubic centimeter of free space.

But could there still be some vacuum energy out there in reality, at a level we could use?

That is what I find most exciting here. At an elite workshop at Princeton in May 2015, I was delighted to learn about the work of the group of Alfred Leitenstorfer, which has since been published in a number of credible places like Nature and Science and PRL. My vixra paper gives specific citations. I disagree with their conclusion that they have measured vacuum energy as large as what ZPE implies; if they lower the temperature of their measurement crystal (EOX), I predict a much lower energy density, energy density more like that of dark matter and dark energy (also discussed in the vixra paper). But that energy density is already very large and very serious!

 By combining a more general Boltzmann equation in the space of density operators, together with any variant of electroweak theory capable of explaining the existence of elementary particles, I predict a vacuum density of subquantal fluctuation of the well-established B and W fields roughly on the same order as what is needed to explain observations on dark energy. (The vixra paper cites a recent review of that data.) That is a substantial energy density; recall that dark matter is many times denser than ordinary matter.

Of course, “way forward” does not mean “yes we can.” Lots of numbers to be checked, and not lightly. For example, consider that the energy density of light now on its way out from the sun, not yet beyond Pluto, is a VERY tiny fraction of the mass-energy of our solar system, but still of some use to technology (the very basis of all earth life!). The subquantal B/W component of dark matter may likewise be “small and big at the same time.”  There is an amusing possibility that we will find that FTL is practical in a way WITHIN spiral arms, but much more difficult across Rifts. Leitenstorfer’s group appears sanguine about the possibility of “squeezing the vacuum’; lots of approaches may work, but I suspect it will take a lot of effort and reasonable creativity to find the most cost-effective way.  The EOX technology is probably one part of what it will take. But there is a way forward. (Perhaps also... or in parallel... quantum separators and coherent baryon number changers may also feed into strengthening such new technology, e.g. providing more energy... and perhaps someday I will post that last work of Schwinger, which is risky but maybe important on this path.)

Best of luck...

MQED2: New Thoughts on the Issue of How to Reformulate QED to Fit New Experiment

MQED2: New Thoughts on the Issue of How to Reformulate QED to Fit New Experiment

I must limit my typing today because of red eye due to trauma to left front side of head at parking lot of Trader Joe just a few days ago.

Last night I  revisited the issue of how to clean up the formulation of QED, as discussed in my recent posting at vixra.org, which was essentially an extended journal entry following up on one aspect of the new paper by Luda and myself published in Quantum Information Processing. That posting was based on a whole lot of analysis, much of which is robust and unavoidable. Nevertheless, we are called not only to implement the various aspects of that paper, but also to reconsider, in parallel, “does it have to be so complex?” “Could we do the work somehow, in a way which seems closer to older formulations of QED?”

At some point, a straw man equation popped into my head:

                                                                                (1)

along with the thought: “I really do not know whether this is ultimately a viable model, but analysis of why and why not, and exploration of issues such as symmetry exploitation, AND of the considerations which I tried to crystallize in this way, may lead to an alternative MQED, whether equivalent of not to MQED1 (which is not the immediate issue on this subtrack).

Most narrowly, equation 1 came from analogy to our very simple master equation model for light going through a polaroid polarizer, in my joint paper with Luda in QIP. THAT master equation was grossly time-asymmetric, expressing the traditional idea of collapse of the wave function, but in this case the Hermitian character of the interaction Hamiltonian H_I results in a time-symmetric model. Equation 1 could be thought of as an “interaction picture in density matrices”; we know that the older interaction picture for wave functions “does not exist” (e.g. our yet unpublished, unposted paper on MEWT,

“upgrade”...), but we also know that shifting from wave functions to density matrices has solved a lot of other problems, and allows the use of extended Glauber-Sudarshan mapping to disambiguate the system.  This is a different system from the usual Schrodinger equation in any case – closely related but different.

With limited time, can I even state (let alone explain) the important other considerations which fed into this?

In the stream of thought which asks: “Do we have to change so much from traditional Y dot = i H Y”, there is the ‘hope’:

“Can’t we just keep the old dynamics for free space? Isn’t the complication all connected to RESERVOIRS (as defined in quantum optics books like Walls and Milburn)?” Ah, but there is nonlinearity here. If we ground MQED on a realistic base, the free space master equations which result from that nonlinearity in the extended P mapping (analyzed long ago in my earlier papers, generally at arxiv) result in a dynamic operator H which is not Hermitian, and which implies a grossly time-asymmetric flow of information. It is essential, in order to meet what the new experiment shows, that even the “free space dynamics” be time-symmetric.  It may indeed be possible to explore the idea of using that asymmetric H as part of a larger system to compute Pr⁺ ... somehow... and somehow clean up the result... but it is important here that MQED is a statistical emergent outcome in any case, and that the cleaning up/time-symmetry (and parity symmetry, essential to the emergent fermi symmetry) which results from taking the limit as r goes to zero, allows a simpler, cleaner version at the level of MQED, the level where we do not account for the nonzero radius of the charged particles being modeled.

As a minor note... the validity of the canonical expansion which ends up with the usual Feynmann graphs (devoid of n-photon lines for n>1) depends on the “unitarity” of Y dot = i H Y, which is not powerful enough to describe these situations, or give a proper interface to the inevitable reservoirs.  We really do have to think about n-photon states explicitly.  

IN effect... the reservoir imposes one very large and clear nonlinearity, but the internal nonlinear effects also impose a nonlinear, which symmetrizes things in a way not so different from what a reservoir does. Equation 1 expresses an idea that “an actual elementary particle, ultimately ala De Broglie, acts as a reservoir for itself!”

This is all just a start to a line of thought ... well, I put in the caveats at the start. It is so incomplete right now that I type it only... to consolidate memory, and account for worst case contingencies re my health.  (Strictly speaking, I had not planned to revisit any of this, but various things happened in the past few days...)

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Added later:

1. Again, the paper at vixra has priority over the previous day’s mulling above, especially over equation 1, which may or may not lead anywhere.

2. A key point here is that any MQED, LIKE the earlier MRF and CMRF models, must obey the basic rules of a time-symmetric model. That means, to be consistent with the experimental results favoring the rules of time-symmetric models as defined in our published papers, the dynamics must be time-symmetric at all times (reservoir or no) EXCEPT at points of injection of positive-time (or negative time) free energy from the outside. Also, equation 1 does not factor trivially; that would be true of the usual [H,r] model, not this one.  HOWEVER: there is no guarantee that a model as simple as equation 1 can work in the way that MQED1 can. If we seek simplicity as in free space dynamics involving just r... well, we can deduce what may be possible...

But because that eye issue is still there I will not elaborate right now. Will just lie quietly... 

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Still later... lying quietly, thoughts pop into the mind, even though I am not at all TRYING to develop an MQED2 alternative. 

To find such an alternative... it helps to pose a very specific question, e.g. "is it possible to develop a model which qualifies as an MQED, as defined in the vixra paper, but which ALSO uses equation 1 or the usual [H,rho] dynamic equation or some other forward-time-looking dynamics in rho? Possible or not? 

An obvious approach is to focus on the same key examples which led to MQED1... simple two-level atoms, like a part of the behavior of hydrogen or helium, informed in part by Carmichael's work on resonance flourescence.

But... why?

Left eye is a little better today. Luda has very sharp pictures from this morning, and a few days ago. Not all better, but improved enough (and similar enough to pictures of "red eye" on the web) that I will not urgently run to See Clearly but will stay a few days more on recovery regime... not full bed rest but no heavy lifting, no things which create too much blood flow to the head (though some of the reports on CNN do risk that)... no eye strain, no air of the kind which might risk infection (e.g. metro), no extended bending over. Blah, but not the worst thing. Still, am sad I have to postpone reading "The Money Behind Ted Cruz"  in Bloomberg Business Week, and will totally repress the thoughts I feel I would say to Bernie Sanders if I had access (as I actually did in 2009!)...