save your eyes by learning from my mistakes

Before graduate school, I did not expect I would ever be one of those people who
have to worry about their eyes going bad. Nor for that matter did my mother. My eyes were better than "perfect" one 20/15, the other 20/10, far and moderate, good enough near. I had access to quality medical advice (even regular friends in Harvard Medical School).


But... they are now a serious problem, and much worse for my mother.  There are important lessons learned.

One lesson was already out there -- don't be too proud to use sunglasses a lot when outdoors in UV. Don't think it doesn't apply to you. Certainly, WHENEVER you would use sunblock you should also use good sunglasses! Most people don't die of skin cancer, and people do need some sun on their skin, but in the US today MOST people end up needing cataract surgery ... and I now suspect that the minority who don't get it still suffer from the effects. Yes, it takes many years to evolve, but if I had been aware years ago of what I would encounter in my 60's (and of how the majority experiences as bad or worse), I would have taken the trouble. Costco sells extremely comfortable and effective sunglasses for about $40 now, which also help with issues of glare in ordinary vision anyway. It's not as if you have to wear them 24 hours a day or when sitting behind thick glass windows which block UV! The analogy to sunburn is helpful.

So my main problem right now is catarcts. My mother's is macular degeneration. Hers is much worse I know that UV slowly degrades the lens of the eye, and I now know more than I ever wanted to know about that condition.  But can UV also damage the retina, a more fundamental problem, not so solvable today?   I have heard her horror stories... but not studied that aspect as much.

But there are other lessons learned, somewhat more technical. I had a great discussion with Luda about this subject this morning, and it reminded me once again how lucky I am to be married to someone who understands so much, even though some of our discussions are so intense they can be downright scary to small children who overhear.

Where do I start with these technical things?

Let me start with heresy... whenever I think for myself and apply real intelligence, I end up believing something which is heresy to the world around me. Usually not simple-minded left-wing or right-wing heresies -- something more like what Gore once called "the radical middle." (More can be said about Gore but not here and now.)

The heresy here -- from both theory and experience, I really believe in adaptation.
I believe that eyes adapt to their environment much more than most doctors believe possible, even without considering the esoteric things which also affect vision.

At a certain point when going to Harvard (grad school and undergraduate), I ended up pouring huge amounts of energy and focus into starting at things near to my eyes -- computer printouts especially for debugging, but also some of the world's first CRT monitors and books. All much more, much more continuously than I did in high school, even in the courses I took at Princeton and Penn while I was in high school, because the latter was easier and more in balance with a lifestyle which got me out of doors (in the sun!) much more. Not so much UV at Harvard, but UV is not the only problem for eyes. I was rather shocked how radically and quickly my vision changed... STILL just as strong in resolution, but far more myopic in distance. From moderate to far sighted to myopic.
My far vision was still good enough for driving without glasses (and was tested of course regularly in past years!), but shifting form 20/10 to 20/30 for distance was a shock. It was some consolation that I could read small print no one else could.

OK, I really have to introduce some technical words here to be coherent. For each eye, there are two main variables we need to be aware of -- RESOLUTION (what you lose from cataracts and form macular degeneration) and FOCUS or FOCAL LENGTH. Until about 3 to 4 years ago, I always had spectacular resolution, more pixels I could see per solid angle of images coming into my eyes.
But at Harvard, my FOCAL LENGTH changed dramatically, from far to near, because of the way
I put energy into things near to my eyes, causing my system to adapt. Adaptation is not really a bad thing; "nature" wants us to be good at the things we actually care about doing.

But: was it really just 3 to 4 years ago that I started to get a resolution problem as well?

In fact, maybe 15 years ago, it got to be dicey whether I should drive with only 20/30 far distance.
I could still pass some of the DMV tests, but with effort, and in fact test results started to become unpredictable. I did go out and get "-2" glasses for driving.

Some people said: "Oh, now you have glasses. Why don't you just wear them all the time?"

Ouch! No way. Glasses CHANGE focal length; they do not help or hurt RESOLUTION.
It would have made my vision much worse if I just wore them all the time -- and I had friends who had experienced exactly that kind of worsening of vision! It's important to understand what is going on here.

SOME optical systems, like telescopes or binoculars or magnifying glasses, DO help with resolution. For example, if a telescope is "30X", that means that you get 30 times as much resolution -- like an array of 30 by 30 pixels coming to from a place where before only one pixel would get through. But the glasses they sell at the optometrist to wear on your face are all just "1X" -- no magnification. What they do is change focal length. They change what the distance is that you can see best from your eyes, the distance which comes into focus on your retina. My "-2" glasses for myopic people would "bring a far object closer." That doesn't mean I would get more pixels of resolution in seeing far cars as I drive; rather, I could bring the pixels I see into focus better. But if an object is CLOSER to my eyes than their present (short) focal length, it would actually bring them OUT of focus, and push my adaptation to be even more myopic! And it would hurt. My first optometrist was wise in prescribing glasses a bit weaker than "the optimum for far vision" for me, because he still wanted me to be able to feel pressure in myself to focus better at a longer focal length... when helps a little in adaptation to keep from absolute myopia.

 Does EVERYONE adapt like that? Is it important for everyone to consider what they are doing with their eyes when they spend too many hours looking at computer screens?  Well, some people adapt more than others. A long story.

But then about 3 to 4 years ago, I made another serious mistake, with another lesson learned.
As my resolution started to get a whole lot worse, due to cataracts (which I did not even think about at first!), I started to move my head closer to the computer screen, and move books or reports closer to my eyes, to get the intense and complete images I was used to using, a major part of scientific work. This caused the myopia to get worse, as well as cataracts! By last year, when I had a real professional eye exam, I needed a new prescription, -5, and my eyes were even then only CORRECTABLE to 20/30! I knew I needed an eye exam, because I could tell the vision was getting worse, and I started seeing "rainbows" around bright lights outside at night.

So now... I realize that the reduction in resolution probably occurred much earlier than that, a steady quiet blurring due to slow chemistry changes in the lens (NOT a disease like a germ!). If you ever see rainbows the way I did... you should know that you DO have a major degradation in resolution of vision due to UV damage. You already should feel bad that you did not use sunglasses much more... and should change immediately if you don't want it to get worse!

But here was my further mistake 3 to 4 years ago, which I saw clearly only this morning.
At Costco, I had seen simple reading glasses available without prescription, for "+2". I remember looking at them and thinking: "Those are not for me. Why don;t they have something cheap and easy like that for people like me, who are myopic and need more like -2? These are for the more stereotypical old people, who become more farsighted with age and need close objects to 'look' further, the exact opposite of what I need." But in fact, once I started having the resolution problem, I should have bought a pair of those glasses, and made a resolution: "Whenever I focus a lot on something a foot in front of my eyes or closer, I will wear these glasses, both to make it easier and to prevent more radical adaptation to more extreme myopia." +2 glasses would not be enough; HOW TO USE THEM was also crucial.

But here I am now. What now?

Last year, my (new high-level) optometrist said that my cataracts are only stage 2. Bieng correctable to 20/30 is truly awful, as are the constraints now which affect so much of my life... but I am still far better off than most people my age, and MUCH better off than my mother (who passed her 90th birthday a few years ago). Following standard advice, he advised against cataract surgery, because I still lead a relatively normal life (and can read, albeit in bright light less than a foot from my eyes),
and because there are some risks involved even now. (The greatest part of my mother's vision problems now are actually due to incompetent laser surgery they tried on her a few years ago!
Being a nice person, she did not sue for malpractice,  though I sure think she could have, from how she and my brother describe it.) Bad as it is, maybe I'm better off than most people, who end up having cataract surgery even despite the cautious practice of today.

Last year, being a perpetual skeptic, I looked further into these tradeoffs, with lots of literature search on the web.  It was hard to work my way around the "$25 per click" on serious medical journal articles, but I found ways. In the end, I learned that most cataract surgeries end up with something not much better than what I had last year, AND a continued rate of degeneration due to UV... just fine for folks who die in two years anyway, but very bad news for people who might live longer.  But I also learned that some research has also been successful.

This year -- it seems that there is just one specific TYPE of replacement lens, the EnVista system
from Bausch and Lomb, which offers real hope to people in my situation. They say it is "the only IOL certified by FDA to be glistening free," free from the main source of deterioration of vision of people AFTER they get cataracts. (There is also a common complication which is reduced in probability.)    Most people don't get that kind of IOL when they have cataract surgery; they are calm and relaxed and trust the normal medical process, and get screwed, sometimes very badly.
(The same thing happened to my mother when she first needed stents for her heart; I wish I had screamed louder for her to get the new kind which do not deteriorate as fast!) I hope my new optometrist whom I see today (the previous guy having moved on) is more up to date here --
and ironically, I trust him MORE because one of the "medical expose" sites says he got money from Bausch and Lomb related to Envista.  (I learned about EnVista quite independently form my own searches.) This IOL is still just a few years on the wider market, and one never knows for sure... but the high success and reduced risk observed so far augur well.  EnVista is NOT one of those "premium multifocal " lenses that some people pay extra for (not covered by insurance), but it sounds as if it leads to results like the vision I had before at the best, which is more than good enough.

Will I schedule cataract surgery at the meeting today, or not? I still don't know, but it seems quite possible.

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

By the way... on adaptation, Luda asked me about the mechanism. I said:
"It's like what we discussed with Karl Pribram, whose last serious book discussed the visual system in great detail. We discussed it even more in person. There is tendency for people to naively ASSUME that there is a bottom-up hierarchy here, from molecules to cells in the retina to signals in the retina, to the thalamus, to layers in the cortex, all upwards. But in fact top-down FEEDBACK
from layer to layer is really essential to the basic facts of life, at all levels. The levels INTERACT.
(Oh do I know more about these details!)."

"The adaptation mechanism is stronger in some folks than ever. Let's discuss the various experiments on cats reared in darkness, and on the calcification of the pineal/epithalamus complex...." We did.

How much will the higher part of my visual system suffer if I POSTPONE the cataract surgery?
No one knows. Is it like weight, where it's easy to slide and harder and lengthier to come back?
That's certainly a factor in my decision.

TBD. But for you... try to avoid such situations!

Best of luck,

    Paul

Also, I should have added -- I saw the TV ads for OcuVite when I was beginning to worry. I checked into the claims, and ended up instead buying a little orange plastic jar of Lutein and Zeaannthin (sp?) from Costco. So now every day I take prilosec, grape seed extract, zeananthin and baby aspirin in the morning,,, except sometimes just prilosec. The evidence on l&z is encouraging, but not decisive; it wasn't decisive for me. If only I had worn sunglasses more, when I was younger! Cataracts are a slow process of decay, and maybe my vision would have remained stronger even at 40 and at 50 if I had started earlier with the basic sunglasses, with the rule about always using them whenever one would use sunblock. But I didn't use sunblock much back then either; back then, I wish I had used sunglasses at least when outside for more than 15 minutes between 10AM and 2PM, adjusted when peak sun is not noon.

I suppose UV is not the only possible cause of erosion, and folks who lack lutein in their diet may need that too, but simple sunglasses are the main thing.


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

Next day: lots of stuff happened at the doctor's visit, lots could be seen. As usual, some things can be posted and some I'd feel uncomfortable discussing even here.

The information packet and the video they showed me were somewhat disquieting. Maybe the video is available on the web, somewhere like u-tube.  (By the way, I took notes from my earlier days of scouring the web for information and trying to assemble a picture of this stuff. A posting by Slonin, a cataract surgeon describing his own experience, was very lucid and encouraging to me this past week,
along with the reports on EnVista, Envista MX60 in particular.)

The video really stressed the issue of multifocal (and accomodative) new plastic lenses to replace the lens on your eye, versus classical or monofocal lenses like EnVista.  For years, I felt somewhat limited by the way my eyes CHOSE to go near (go myopic) and thus be worse with far vision,
BUT DOES THIS TRADEOFF become much worse with classical plastic lenses? I hadn't really thought about that. I thought the problem was bad enough in my younger years, but I could live with it if my resolution returned to what it used to be; after all, I could drive without glasses back at age 40, even though I was myopic, because of my good visual resolution.  Slonin seemed happy. I sure hope it's that good, but I do worry a bit now. Was all the warning in that video just a way to push people to buy the more expensive multifocal lenses? I hope so. I don't plan to buy multifocals in any case, not so much because of the price tag ($7,000-$8,000  FROM ME, beyond what insurance would pay), but because I already decided against them based on what I saw in the literature on risk and deterioration. If the focal length problem is worse than I realized... the only effect is to make me wonder whether I made the right decision to start this process, and to damp down my hopes for how much better things will be after the cataract operations. But should I really waste energy on either of these things, when it is do far along? ... HEY FOLKS, AGAIN, YOU DON'T WANT TO BE HERE if all it takes is sunglasses from an earlier age!

Luda asks: is it really that simple? Why is it that half the US has cataract surgery by age 60 and almost all by 70? (Since I am 70 and could have gotten by easily without it, as of last week, could it be that no one is escaping this?) Well, what fraction of the US population uses effective sunglasses so much as I NOW do?

The sunglasses story reminds me of the trichinosis ("triganosis") story from when I was young,
in the year 1950. I remember talking with a neighbor, another young kid, about the warnings we had from adults never to eat raw hot dogs. "If you do, you really might get trigonosis. You don't really want to do THAT!"  One of us said -- "Hey, if was that bad... how many kids eat raw hot dogs at least a few times, and how many stories do you hear of kids struggling with an awful disease besides the other stuff we know about?" (We all had seen polio stories and evidence about polio and smallpox.)
So many years later, I bumped into a brief story... "About 30% of the population did get trichonosis then. The main symptoms are lethargy, inability to work well and focus.." Wow! If I had seen THAT back then... but fortunately, I listened and avoided raw hotdogs... I forget whether always or almost always. I avoided marijuana 100% clearly and distinctly, but about raw hotdogs at age 3, I forget.)

There are similar stories about kappa waves produced by the brain, and calcification of pineal/epithalamus system... but back to eyeballs.

I was surprised that the main menu presented to us in the information package was a choice of four options -- three laser-based and highlighted, and a traditional surgery option covered by insurance at the bottom of the list, so innocuous that Luda and I both didn't really notice it until a final meeting with a scheduler whom we peppered with questions. I hadn't seen a lot of stuff on cataract surgery by laser when I did my web search earlier on issues important to me (like how much my vision might start deteriorating again after the surgery!). Yesterday, after the doctor's appointment, I searched on that, and was relieved to read that it didn't sound necessary for folks like me.  I am on course now for the simple traditional cataract surgery covered by insurance. I probably won't back out because of fear about a focal length problem, but that's the main alternative.

Focal length -- three options for each eye: "near, far and middle." Lots of discussion about having one eye one choice, and another eye the other, to reduce the need for using glasses for the rest of my life after surgery -- with encouragement for lots of tests and a trial period using contact lenses to make sure it doesn't scramble the brain. Well, even before college, I had one eye more far (the right) and one more middle/near (the left), and my brain seems adaptable enough in this realm. So maybe I will go left-near and right-middle this time.

Regarding near versus far -- I was amused by the "lifestyle questionnaire": "which is more important to you, reading or golf?"   Not a hard question! If the worst thing that happens is that I will still need glasses when driving or reading someone's equations projected onto a conference screen, that will be reassuring. But they also listed computers as "middle," not near, so I need to check. It may be that "near, near" would work better. A nasty choice, really, but unavoidable for folks like me who put a premium on issues like risk and future deterioration.

Yesterday the doctor and his assistants did lots and lots of tests. (Some details I may include only in my journal version of this, on private hard disk.) Thank god, none of the scary painful squirting I remember from some quick glaucoma tests  in other places earlier. But four sets of eye drops in each eye by the end of the visit. Cornea in great shape, still much better than average; none of the bending or astigmatism which would have put me in a totally different category, requiring other choices and costs. Likewise the macula, despite the experience of my mother and her brother. (That was partly genetic, but they were also both more "sun worshippers" than I was. I'm glad I don't need to nail down all of what I don't know about that condition.) Likewise the retina itself.

The doctor was somewhat puzzled that everything but the transparency of the lens was in such good condition, because there WAS evidence (secondary, and then definite by test) that my left optic nerve is enlarged. The left eye became my dominant eye by the time I was in college, perhaps because it specialized in what I put the most energy into. (Long ago, at Chestnut Hill Academy, K-12 time, they did a pubic test of which eye was dominant, for the whole middle school, and I really confused them by not being consistent. Yesterday I was consistent. That was not self-consciousness at work in either case. My mother was once a great shot with a rifle, because being right-handed and left eyed worked well for that task.)

But all the usual explanations failed -- and there was no evidence of any need for anything but the traditional lens stuff.  He warned that deterioration of optic nerve or neural pathway would be irreversible. An assistant warned that deterioration or the surface cells of the cornea would also be irreversible. To her, I mentioned the research on blueberries for the brain proper, but confessed I know nothing about how that plays out in the eye.  So what is my enlarged dominant optic nerve doing? No sign of deterioration as such...

So next week, another preliminary appointment -- one more test they couldn't do yesterday, and lots of measurement "to let us know what your options ARE for lenses." The minimum for the traditional approach, and I sure hope I will not end up just squeezed out altogether.

If not, then a day at Fairfax Hospital later for the right eye, then another day for the left eye, with two additional postoperative visits. FIVE visits to come! The doctor's office is only 0.4 miles walking from a metro station (Greensboro), and how much should I keep putting a burden on Luda driving me back and forth?

All for now.

===========

Wait, there is a technical issue worth noting.

For any set of eyes... there is a focal length, an optimal distance for seeing objects. For example, I imagine it was 20 feet or more when I was young, maybe one to three feet now. Probably there is a formula somewhere which converts cryptic numbers like the "-5" for my glasses prescription to a statement of how far away an object should be for me to have best possible vision.

At that optimal distance, I have a certain amount of resolution -- how many pixels I see per solid angle of visual field.

A key question for everyone is: how much resolution do you lose when the object is NOT at the optimal distance form your unassisted eyes? For example, if it is twice as far away, or if it is half the distance, how much does your resolution suffer? More precisely, what are the "half resolution ratios?" What is the ratio x such that you only get half the resolution (actually, 1/4 as many pixels) when the object is located at a distance of x times that optimal ratio?  (There is a far x, objects so far you only get half the resolution, and a near x.)

WHAT I WISH I HAD is data on how "x" WILL CHANGE after EnVista is implanted into my eye,
VERSUS what it was before. HOW MUCH sacrifice will cataract surgery result in? I see lots of noisy words about how small the problem is and how big the problem is, but I don't see
useful clear numbers like this anywhere, in anything I have found. It is really sad to be in such total ignorance about something which could be quantified (and spelled out in plain English).

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

Aug 12, home from a second appointment to PREPARE for cataract surgery.

I was amazed just now... when I googled on

envista focal length near far,

the first hit was to this blog post! Some stuff is easier find than others on the wbe.

Tay -- more tests: a fancy machine (no squirts!) to evaluate glaucoma (not there), another to measure geometry of my eye for surgery purposes, and a final vision check with my glasses to verify it has indeed deteriorated as much as it seemed last week. Ten feet away from an eye chart, with my full strength glasses on,  in the chair I could only get to 20/20 with right eye and 20/50 with left, as before. (Later Luda noted that the glasses were dirty, and set for vision more than ten feet. Standing up with cleaned glasses, I could do better... but not SO much better. It is also posisble my eyes -- especially left -- are MORE myopic how than when I got the rescription, because of how I have kep reading closer to my face.)

Then the consultation with the doctor. He himself had -6 to -7 glasses, stronger than my driving glasses, and wears them all day. If he too reads a lot, I wonder whether wearing them all day explains why his myopia may be more severe than mine?

He said he could do envista, no problem at all, though he never has yet. They go with standard acrylon IOLs. I promised to email him some of the things I found on the web arguing strongly against that, and in favor of Envista.

More serious --0 the near versus intermediate versus far choice. An awful conundrum.
Most folks just get far, no problem. But I still remember the questionnaire asking which is more important to me -- reading versus playing golf. I guess I'm not most people. I told the final person, the surgical consultant, I really wanted more information. Since they have to special order envista, they really needed a definite choice before scheduling surgery. I asked... are there any real NUMBERS here, not juts fuzzy stuff that I don't trust? She looked and looked, and found a page from the material they had on CrystalLens (another Bausch and Lomb product, more expensive, multifocal.)
"Ignore the lens name.... see what near intermediate and far are, 20 inches to 20 feet is intermediate. "
Violating the strong recommendation to choose far... I chose intermediate for the right eye, nondominant. Surgery is now scheduled for the right eye for September 24.

Before that... what a mess! I must get a physical from my GP by then, to qualify for surgery. (Well, he wanted to see me again anyway.) They scheduled an appointment for "preop clearance" with a retinal specialist as well. Three types of eye drops to take before that surgery. An appoint scheduled the day after and a week after the operation. Another one-month visit will need to be scheduled. The left eye is not scheduled; I will see what I see through the right eye, and choose for the left based on that experience. Numbers are hard to find to assist that decision, but actually seeing what intermediate is myself should help a lot.

Will my vision really be better or worse after this? It seems to make sense, but right now I still have qualms.

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

Then: Mon, Aug 17: today they will do a check of my retina in a ret8ina specialist, to verify I am ready for cataract surgery.

Should I keep taking the lutein and zeanxanthin pills we get from Costco, which have much more of those special nutrients than the popular OcuVite? On a quick google search ... yes, like sunglasses, those too help prevent cataracts and macular degeneration both. For example, see:

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21646979

Yes, UV light contributes a lot to macular degeneration as well as cataracts.
It is no coincidence thar the really heavy sunworshippers in my mother's family ended up with
that condition. MODERATE sun exposure and lots of outdoor activity were good for my health...
 but I wish I had used both the protections, sunglasses an lutein/zeantantin (sp?) along with that.

A few days ago, on my final testing for cataract surgery, the doctor asked for my sources on Envista. I sent him:

Here are just a few of the many sources I read which pushed me towards going ahead with cataract surgery, and towards EnVista.

Last year, Dr. Friedlander said that with eyes correctable to 20/30, it would be better not to do the surgery, or wait... though he recommended I come back in a year in case of further deterioration. And so, last year, I read through many sources. (My eyes were good enough to do that, last year and this year!) I was especially interested in risks of deterioration of the IOL over many years. Do I still need to use sunglasses religiously?

My initial search was discouraging, and argued against surgery for me, as Friedlander said:

http://www.iolsafety.com/issues-under-discussion/glistenings

There were many other similar stories, when people looked really seriously at statistics on deterioration over many years. But then I found some good news with new materials:

http://ophthalmologytimes.modernmedicine.com/ophthalmologytimes/content/tags/bausch-lomb/new-generation-iol-glistening-free?page=full

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20656166

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22727297

http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v16/n3/full/6700066a.html

http://www.bausch.com/ecp/our-products/cataract-surgery/lens-systems/envista-iol#.Vc4CZvlVhBc

http://www.ophthalmologymanagement.com/articleviewer.aspx?articleID=109185

I said to Luda -- I'm not the kind of person who would normally buy a new line of car in the year of introduction. But if the logic looks right, and it is on the road for three or four years, it makes sense to me.  There are risks either way, with or without the surgery, but going ahead still seems like the right way to go. I look forward to being able to really see the television in our living room (about 10 feet from the couch), people's faces, and the computer screen without my having to lean forward and train my eyes to be even more myopic. Thank you very much for helping me.

Best regards,

  Paul

P.S. I am also very grateful to Irina for responding to my plea for real numbers in print to help me decide on focal length. I have pretty good web skills, but I have yet to find anything as clear as the page she showed us from the CrystalLens package, actually DEFINING "near," "intermediate" and "far."  CrystalLens, like EnVista a Bausch and Lomb product, certainly sounds good -- but reliability even more than cost pushed me more towards EnVista.

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

Update September 4:

Have had two additional preop visits to OTHER doctors -- requested by the opthamologist, maybe required by insurance companies. The retina doctor was very, very nice -- and warned that I am lucky that I don't need HER kind of more challenging laser eye surgery. (I guess I shouldn't overestimate the risk of laser cataract surgery, even though my mother had a bad experience with the other kind of laser eye surgery; but I am not opting for it.)

At Quaker meeting last week, a woman said (like many others) -- yes, it is great, and routine, just 15 to 20 minutes actual operation. She was very satisfied -- and had it twice. Twice? Oops. So I guess it was good I held out for the IOL which shows best promise of NOT deteriorating. But even so, also good I have decided not to give up sunglasses even after the operation.

And it does really hit me the implication that I am so strongly left-eyed though right handed, when I was more both-side-eyed back around 8th grade. I guess I really have cultivated right brain kinds of strengths at least since my "new foundation" since age 15.

 

status note on the real frontier of physics

In physics, as in AI, a combination of ego and curiosity and social pressure encourages communities to pretend they know more than they really do. I think back to the 1960's, when they showed me Minsky's "Mars robot," and told me of his promise to NASA to have human-level intelligence in a robot within 20 years or so of then. It's easy to make such promises when you don't even have a specific plan to execute, which requires time estimation for the stages. (Contrast that with my "hundred year" plan to get to the mouse level , presented at WCCI2014, and posted at arxiv, in computer science area. )

And so... we really need to straighten out the "realm of QED" (electric fields, magnetism and "point particles" which serve as sources and sinks of electric fields and magnetism) before we can get the other stuff right. In my view. Just as my WCCI paper offered four steps to the mouse level of intelligence, I now envision a three step possibility to straighten out, yes, the whole range covered by today's standard model pf physics: (1) more systematic application of time-symmetric physics to model quantum optics, and things which can be described by models like those used in quantum optics, and build the new devices which new understanding allows; (2) MQED, Markov QED, which extends that to the entire realm of things described by QED; (3) models based on topological solitons, with the special kinds of Higgs terms which predict topological solitons, which let us "see deeper than 3 femtometers and faster than 3 femtoseconds," to explain the existence of elementary particles without any need for regularization or renormalization in defining the models, based on a small-looking but far-reaching tweak to electroweak theory.

My recent papers on analog quantum computing, polarizers and such have all been focused on level one. Only recently have I understood the need and opportunity to do level two. Level three is more interesting to me (I too have some curiosity), and it is useful like the sight of a distant mountain peak in showing us the way forward.

I understand the political/social human need to work on level one for now, just as the politics is even more compelling to focus on "vector intelligence" (even lower than "convolutional networks!)
for the very nasty world of today's computer technology and would-be abusers. However, as the shape of MQED begins to become ever more clear in my mind, I am more drawn to that... and if the politics are hopeless anyway, why not push on to what **I** can understand that I did not before?

The community ALREADY uses many versions of QED, often using fuzziness and sleight of hand to avoid or even repress the embarrassing ambiguities and barnacles which occur even at the level of quantum optics, before electrons and nuclei and atoms are also modeled internal to the system.
Most prominent are KQED (Copenhagen QED, canonical QED as in texts like OLD Mandl, new Greiner, start of Weinberg) and FQED ("Feynmann path" QED), and CQED (circuit or cavity QED), all of which have variations, such as the many worlds version of KQED which inspired David Deutsch to develop the foundations of modern digital quantum computing. MQED would be yet another version, fully integrating the implications of the triphoton experiment which I proposed, whose outcome  turned out to be too horrifying for the establishment to permit to be published.
(Yes, people can work on the complex social dimensions of that, but I have other things to do.)

MQED would be similar in a way to the "Quantum Trajectory Simulation" (QTS) of Howard Carmichael, described in volume II of his classic text on statistical quantum optics. It would model its realm as a kind of hybrid system, similar in spirit to the hybrid systems so familiar in control theory,
EXCEPT that we are still talking about a Markov random field across space-time, as in my elementary models published on Bell's Theorem experiments. The hybrid description is a combination of  stochastic EVENTS at points in space-time, and in deterministic continuous PDE flows between those events. Predictions are based on predictions for the probability of SCENARIOS across space-time, where each event is a node, and where simple propagators convey information from one event to another. For practical experiments involving solid state objects in the system, we can use embedded propagators (like Schwinger's Nonequilibrium Green Functions, NEGF, or simplified versions of them) to simplify calculations.

A week or two, as I started to think about how to formalize and write up MQED, I first remembered what I learned earlier about the electron when working on stage 3.

To keep my cognitive map simple here, I even began to give names to the three stages.
 As I wrote my paper on photons going through polarizers, in IJBC, I felt a lot like Alice chasing a white rabbit and ending up in a weird wonderland, still three-dimensional but a lot closer to David Deutsch's weird world than I expected. So I have files at home labeled "white rabbit" (and "other rabbit"), chasing photons. The white rabbit is always checking his watch, a fitting activity for a carrier of time symmetry!  But then, reaching the electron (or ion) is like... following the rabbit to a conversation with the Mad Hatter (the most credible expert I know on applied QED?) sitting next to a March Hare -- better called a hedgehog.

I was so happy to realize I have been looking at a symbol of the hedgehog (a topological soliton of charge one) already for years, the little moldable plastic figure of Sonic the Hedgehog, on top of our coffee machine at home! For MQED the trick is not to get bogged down into all the details of three-stage modeling, but to exploit what we know about this fearsome little creature to come up with a workable model at the approximate level used in all forms of QED. The electron (and nucleus) as a perfect point particle -- good enough at the >3 femto level, even if not the full truth.

I was thinking... today the hedgehog, and later finally back to an audience with the scary Red Queen (nuclear force in all its awesome terrible potential, which there are many political reasons to be wary of).

But as I got a bit further... near the hedgehog..., in Alice... what about that cat? Whose cat is it anyway? And Tweedlee and tweedledum?  OK, interference, the Schrodinger cat, the two entangled photons... all must be accounted for. My Bell papers already dealt with the twins, but I knew that a more rational political strategy (even with social support) would send me next to print time-symmetric models of the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, Shih's Popper experiment, and methods used to produce triple entanglement by Zeilinger and by Shih.

I started worrying more about the cat. The essential difference between MQED and other QED is the use of probabilities rather than probability amplitudes to structure everything.  I had no problems with ordinary, local interference, as with a photon interfering with itself, because of the wave-like propagation between events. (Basically, Maxwell's Laws with boundary conditions yield a nice familiar embedded propagator for light going through a double slit.) But what about GLOBAL interference, the kind of thing one gets only with global probability amplitudes for entire configurations?

Suddenly I worried -- could it be that MQED and CQED already disagree, in the core, beyond just the collapse of the wave function (an unnecessary barnacle which could be removed from CQED as an appendix can be removed form a human body), already in quantum optics?

And so, a week or two ago, I decided: "Time to stop chasing hedgehogs, and full MQED. Time to get back to stage one after all..."

And so, I have today completed a first pass through review of quantum delay eraser, Zeilinger's paper on how he constructed GHZ states, and important work by Scully leading up to a lot of this. (Really, just Scully and Druhl and Scully and Zubairy.) Not so bad. Both the eraser and Scully's earlier picture of two interfering two-level atoms are easily handled with the MQED approach, using the obvious traditional embedded propagators. The one new thing is that beamsplitters can be modeled as simple classical objects. Even the GHZ paper uses polarizers and beamsplitters (and one lambda/2 plate,
also unitary, like beamsplitter, unlike polarizer); to get three entangled photons, the key is to use a nonlinear crystal to generate TWO pairs of entangled photons, and just filter from there. In another world, I would write this all up immediately..

But as I am more on my own, gratifying my own curiosity without so much delay or leverage
of collaborations (sigh), I went back to asking: given that, what of the global versus local interference issue? (Footnote: no entanglement puzzle; the Bell stuff already took care of that.) Should I plan for an all-optical experiment to test THAT distinction?

My conclusion for now is that I need not try, because there is no inconsistency within the realm of quantum optics. All interesting interference/entanglement experiments basically go back to a source like nonlinear crystal or a single laser stimulating multiple atoms, which ultimately resolve into simple detectors at the end of the line. Integration over scenarios with propagators resolves itself into the same predictions as with probability amplitude calculations similarly resolved to ultimate detectors. The analysis is just like the old Von Neumann regression of observers-within-observers familiar to folks in foundations of quantum mechanics.

And so... yes, it would ALSO be nice to write that up more completely (about five such items "TBD")... but now I finally feel ready to go back to that hedgehog. The hedgehog is a very tricky creature, but at the level of MQED that may actually simplify things. No BBO here.
All events involve a photon/light, already familiar. NEGF propagators for electrons are already rather familiar. (Do I need to reread Keldysh at some point? And even Supriyo Datta a fourth time?)

The challenge may be more one of proof -- of convincing at least me -- rather than formalizing MQED as such.

Perhaps Scully's NONINTERFERENCE of light from three-level atoms stimulated by a common laser may also be a step towards "the hedgehog," towards incorporating things beyond optics proper
into experiments which require that. (Endogenizing the atom.) But... there are lots of ways to approach the hedgehog, and maybe it's too early to say more.

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

Next morning:

I put the basic calculations/analyses for the two-level atom interference and the delayed choice quantum eraser in a notebook, X2015. Hard to do equations in blog posts -- but these were very simple. As with the Bell experiments, one can model at varying levels of detail but the simplest fits the more complex and shows what is going on. Basically, the laser source, Sl, a complex number
whose phase is the only uncertainty that matters, goes through propagators to the two atoms or the two BBO sites. (The paper by Kim et al, PRL year 2000, doesn't mention that the slits in figure 2 are NOT interference producers; they are just a way to make sure that the laser light only gets to two regions on the nonlinear crystal, A and B.) The obvious A and B terms just get added together.
The scenarios X (in notation of my Bell MRF papers) are defined by detectors, and nothing weird happens. The   "weirdness" of quantum eraser is really just a matter of picking out which scenarios match which... no real paradox, and an easy prediction in both cases.

As for the result on global interference... "OK, it's not all detectors." But polarizers can be modeled equivalently (for circuit/outcome purposes) as calcite polarizers, which are like birefringent
(unitary) operators followed by detectors on one side. Other objects with complicated master equations do need to be time-symmetrized, but that's all. Time symmetrization is certainly not inconsistent with the Schrodinger equation of many world quantum mechanics. Thus nothing in quantum optics proper allows to distinguish between a probabilistic theory like MQED versus that kind of quantum theory proper.

Moving on to the electron...

I have a paper on the F transform. A Next Task would simply be to show that it yields essentially the same predictions of atomic spectra as ordinary QED, with a bit of precision about how to handle self-energy for the Lamb shift -- all envisioned in my arxiv paper on extended Glauber-Sudarshan.
It basically resolves not familiar psi delta (propagator) psi terms.  Given what happened to my previous really Herculean efforts to explain much simpler things -- my own curiosity is satisfied,
and the desire to write it up for hypothetical others (none of whom got through the quantum optics stage) is reduced. Even my X2015 bits are compromised by the state of my eyes, giving less visual feedback to maintain legibility.

Will I write up more of why the F transform gives the right spectra here? Maybe. Or will I jump ahead.. building on unpublished collaborative work of Schwinger and Pons, posted on my gdrive, to think about how to reduce feature size and create nuclear effects of a somewhat more pervasive and dangerous sort? Maybe not. Not a safe area for home experimentation, after all. Not that the mind is without risks either.

There are a few other smaller things to catch up with first in any case.

What should we do about the serious risk of humans going extinct soon?

There is a major discussion list for the Lifeboat Foundation (see its web page!) on whether the human species will 'soon" go extinct (within a few decades or millennia), and what to do about it. Here is what I sent them this morning:

I have often wished I could make a nice color slide of a great scene from the Star Trek movie of 2009. Spock tells Kirk, "Captain, your plan has a 95% chance of failure -- and if it fails all humans will die." Kirk replies:"If you have a plan we can start right now with a higher probability of success, please tell me right now. Otherwise, doing nothing means a certainty that everyone dies; we need to do our best to make this one work."

That has been my view of human extinction until about a year ago. Some folks think that it is almost irrelevant that oxygen levels in deep waters of the Pacific are now on course to reach zero in 40 years -- zero oxygen levels plus unprecedented nutrients being washed into the oceans, fulfilling both conditions for an H2S mass extinction such as the earth already experienced 5-10 times in the past. (Before humans, but not before primates; the last one killed all primates, and they re-evolved form mice over many millions of years. Se Peter Ward..).

Many folks seem to believe that nuclear weapons no longer threaten as much as they did in the 1960's, or that the folks at risk of war starting today are far saner and more predictable than the Soviets were. And they feel religious faith that artificial intelligence, deep brain stimulation, and Artificial stupidity (or artificial sharia, as in IBM's new deal to merge those nonsustainable rule-based systems in the Middle East) could not possibly lead to extinction scenarios. 

But what do we do if we assess the net probability of human extinction as upwards of 95%? And if we see that this assessment fits the grim realities of Fermi's paradox as Brin once discussed on this list

(still discussed in his novel Existence)?

Well, it turns out that there is another way to look at this grim situation (other than denialism). 

Many Buddhists would say that this whole world was unreal anyway. No way am I ready to go that far... but there is an intermediate picture, between the Kirk/Spock picture and the Buddhist picture. A different Middle Way, if you will.

It comes form quantum physics and quantum weirdness.

Let me emphasize that I am NOT a seeker of weirdness. Quite the opposite. As far back as I can remember (at least to age 8, on this issue), I have been an intense devotee of Occam's Razor -- looking for the simplest possible coherent model capable of explaining the facts of experience. In physics, I am as conservative as one can get without being outright ignorant or schizophrenic; I still see hope for Einstein's clear nonmystical vision of explaining everything that exists in terms of partial differential equations over four dimensions ('three space, one time"), maybe with some well-defined "dice' (stochastic PDE) but none of the weirdness familiar in more mainstream versions of quantum theory such as canonical/Copenhagen or Feynman. However, unlike a certain very famous well-placed schizophrenic, I do not deny the hard core results of experiments like the "Bell's Theorem' experiments, which require that we change our ides about time if we want to be hard core objectivists.

 However... just how much do we have to change our views? 

I do not want to introduce more weirdness into everyday life, but I had a paper published a few months back in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos tracking in detail what happens to a photon as it goes through a polaroid polarizer (like your sunglasses!). There is no escaping the fact that there are multiple scenarios in play here -- whether we call them scenarios or paths or timelines or universes.

There is no escaping the fact that the patterns of organization we think of as "minds" or "consciousness" are attributes of such scenarios, not just of the "final" objective reality, however we call it.

Beyond third person science, my claim is that quantum computing capabilities are part of what we share AS PART OF THE NOOSPHERE, as the noosphere is an instance of what evolves in a much larger ecology than just earth. In a sense, then, in Brin's parlance,  the aliens are already here, as HALF of us, the so-called "spiritual" half.

It begins to feel like the scenario in a story by Anderson in the very-hard-core science fiction anthology Far Futures. Hundreds of world-lines running in parallel, like the strands of a quantum computer.  

 Even if only ten percent of those strands get behind strategies with a 5% chance of survival in each case, the overall system may see a near certainty of human survival (and earth achieving a certain status in its larger environment)... though individual strands face a high probability of being "z-ified." (See the Z term in my IJBC paper.) 

Again, this is the most hard core objectivist model pf physics consistent with established replicated third-party experiments. There are other possibilities which are weirder still, though I do not recommend taking them too seriously in the absence of qualifying empirical support. (That includes superstring theories or Zen.)  

It raises an interesting question: when is our probability of extinction so high that the main value of our strivings is the informational value of what we give to the noosphere, which straddles all these worldlines, and when is there enough chance of our line surviving (or of the quest for survival itself providing useful new information) that we put more energy into the kind of quest Kirk was engaged in in the movie (whatever the details)?

By the way, Plato and Zelazny also painted beautiful thought images which, like Anderson's metaphor, fit the new conservative physics.

The Z term describes how shadowy our entire 'world" or "universe" is.

Certain policies, like those Shelby, Lamar Smith or the Moslem Brotherhood, not only raise the probability of extinction on our time line, but of z-ification, retroactively turning our lives more into shadows,

weakening and attacking our past as well as our future.

=========

All this from thinking hard about the life of a photon, as it would appear 

in detail even in a conservative model of physics, and also in Feynman's model which is similar but weirder still. In technical terms, "interference may seem like a small effect -- until you learn how technology and natural selection can use it."

I have more stuff on that in quantum optics, and lots of new technology possibilities, but curiosity now drives me beyond, even further, to better modeling of electrons. And those little creatures are so much more powerful and esoteric than light and photons! Zitterbewegung of thoughts themselves in the quantum noosphere? But I do not yet understand; the biggest work for me personally right now is to try to understand.

Best of luck,

   Paul

Hard core realism: another shock of realization, zitterbewegung

In physics, I have several times discussed my shock last year in being forced to accept the
reality of "Plato's Cave" or else something even weirder in physics. That was my last blog posting.
Call that a "left wing realization," learning to accept empirical and mathematical reality
weirder than what my provincial common sense felt comfortable with. As bad as learning how to swim when you have spent your whole life on land.

Today is the opposite shock for me, learning to accept a kind of right-wing materialist heresy, which it seems is ALSO true and also takes a whole lot of swallowing. To accept and appreciate both Plato and Einstein, the "left wing" heresy of Plato's metaphor of the cave (or worse, but the cave is enough for me to assimilate for now) and the "right wing" heresy of Einstein's zitterbewegung. I long ago learned to accept time as just another dimension, neither left nor right but orthogonal to that line.

Zitterbewegung... !!

Einstein talked about that all the time, the core of his picture of the electron. It is somewhat connected to the view of De Broglie and Vigier, in their book on the linear and nonlinear wave and pilot waves and such, which I cite sometimes. (50s or 60?). I actually have letters form De Broglie to me in my few remaining old hard copy files, though I digitized and compressed them as I was departing NSF.  But Einstein's picture seemed a bit incredible,  My emerging view of the mathematics of the electron (as in my chapter in Chua's festschrift) was perhaps weirder (in a right wing sense) than De Broglie's but less weird than Einstein's.

Einstein's zitterbewegung idea...

The idea that the electron is something like a small hard core nonlinearity (like a vortex on the order of 3 femtoseconds wide) which zips around faster than the eye can see, like a competent feudal landlord surveying his domain -- the realm in which his pilot wave or wave function penetrates.
Zipping around and accelerating and decelerating at incredible speed, not emitting radiation except to sustain his fields, which would be impossible if the usual linear models were complete; however, the idea is that they are incomplete, that unknown nonlinear terms become dominant in the nonlinear core.  De Broglie did try to describe possible field theories with the required properties; I wentr further in my chapter for Chua's festschrift, but have better options in new papers in my files, for a later stage of our discussions.

But really... zipping around faster than the eye could see?

I accepted that the full bosonic density operator for the full electron (assuming any of the PDE models in Chua's festschrift or better new versions) would explain the "pilot wave" as a kind of envelope wave, not a real wave, like the low-frequency envelopes one sees in analyzing an AM radio signal. That was clear from the mathematics of classical-quantum correspondence (as in my arxiv paper extending the Glauber-Sudarshan P map). But zipping around faster than the eye can see...?

But this morning I know better. If I have enough fortitude. Do I? So soon? But logic is logic.

Yesterday I began by asking myself a basic question: for what solitons in 3-D space would we expect the full statistics (as in my extended P map) to predict something like double slit or two-channel interference, following a picture like that "AM wave picture?" It does seem to get back to zitterbewegung.

If you believe zitterbewegung,  then "seeing" the universe at small enough time scales would be like
slowing down a movie, in a way. What looked like one kind of continuous motion suddenly becomes something very different. Could such a thing possibly make sense? Is it logically plausible, even after we admit it violates some kind of provincial common sense? Must we stretch yet again, and accept something not as old or hoary or weird as Plato but still old and hoary and weird enough?

I had the advantage of remembering what happens when we look at 3 femtometers, in high energy electron-electron scattering, which simply does not agree with those beautiful predictions of QED (as in Bjorken and Drell) which they told us were so perfect in school. Perfect until the energies get to probe 3 femtometers. Probe an AM radio wave... and the 2000 hertz sound waves which appear as an envelope in an oscilloscope... are supplemented by something else, the real thing, the carrier and sideband waves at megahertz frequencies or higher. What if we probed the electron in time? Could
we suddenly get a very different picture there as well?

And then... I post this at about 5AM, from thoughts about 4AM in bed... (about one minute of thought this all is, except for memories of yesterday)... I realized: maybe this experiment is not a matter of "what if." The movie has ALREADY been slowed down. This May in Princeton, I heard the results of the world's most advanced experimental work to "slow down the movie," to record fluctuations in electric current down at the femtosecond level. (People did this before with optics, but for electrical currents, it required use of a high-speed electro-optic nonlinear crystal.) In a previous blog post, I even gave the address in Konstanz of Alfred who did the work.

Based on the magnitude of the currents he observed, Alfred calculated energies on the order of 10 watts per cubic centimeter, or 10 megawatts per cubic meter, "in free space." It would be truly delightful, from the viewpoint of energy economics, if that turned out to be a real source of energy,
and then if we could somehow extract it. (I have ideas about how, IF it is a real energy source.)
This is nothing at all like the "Zero Point Energy" or "Casimir energy"  one reads about in some other places, which I view as a theoretical epicycle. This is empirical, and different. But what is it?

Perhaps... not the most exciting to an economist.. it is "merely" our first empirical window into zitterbewegung, which requires rewriting our models to even a more drastic degree, as we get to femtosecond electronics and below. A whole new world. Weird, in a right-wing sort of way.
Weird like Einstein.  Weird just for the smallest things.

Time to adapt and try to start with the new models?

=====================  30 minutes later:

No, time to work on deciding whether I really believe it or not. The rules change at this time scale, but have to make sense. If the PDE are quasilinear still (as in the standard model of physics and the variations of it I have been working with, before gravity is considered -- though gravity is nonquasilinear), there is of course still the speed of light limit on information flow. 300 meters per microsecond... maybe...

========================== later still

It's natural to ask: :How much of the energy of the electron is in the core, and how much in the "pilot wave"?

But again, it is so much a statistical phenomenon that static images are not always reliable. It's always important to remember the analogy to AM radio waves. What's more... even in a static image... the question "where is the energy?" turns out to be meaningless.

This is due to a fundamental mathematical property of field theory (even classical Hamiltonian field theory) which they never told me in my courses... maybe because it was too embarrassing, or maybe because I took the wrong courses.

Even when you have a definite classical field theory, with a definite Lagrangian and Hamiltonian... no, you cannot really answer the question "WHERE is the energy?"  How could that be? Because Hamiltonians are only well-defined to WITHIN A NULL FORM. Whenever you write down a Hamiltonian, there is an infinite set of OTHER Hamiltonians which are mathematically equivalent in terms of anything one can predict in classical field theory -- the possible solutions for the fields over space-time or any specific thing which depends on them. A null form is just a function of the fields whose integral over space is guaranteed to be zero. (Remember integration by parts?)

This is somewhat embarrassing for gravity. Even if decide you agree with general relativity exactly, and you decide to couple gravity with the New Standard Model by using the well-known classical coupling defined by folks like Moshe Carmelli... even then, it suddenly MATTERS which of the equivalent Hamiltonians you use! And no, pure reason cannot tell you which one is right; even trying to do it that way is like the worst of medieval theology. It's an empirical issue.

For zitterbewegung, we do not know which is right of the equivalent Hamiltonians. What matters is the actual behavior, and the equivalent Hamiltonians work like alternative coordinate systems, all valid. If your intuition starts telling you the phenomenon makes sense in one frame but not another, that suggests a hole in your intuition. Certainly it is that way for the "radius" of a simple topological soliton like BPS, where we can SEE some paradoxes for intuition in a well-defined family of solutions. So perhaps the energy is more in the core for one frame, and more in the "pilot" (the envelope) in another. Move from 3D space to stochastic Fock space, and it gets even less trivial.

Still, if things vary by a factor of a billion, some of the usual expectations of how electrons behave may be off by a billionth. If we ask IN GENERAL what kinds of solitions give rise to interference behavior... the mathematics probably allow situations with less contrast between levels...

-----

Also, re Alfred's work... it is WAY too early for any of us to be dogmatic about what he is REALLY measuring and seeing and why. It may well be a MIX of things, and a situation where disentangling the measurement device and what is measured will take a lot of time. It may also be interesting to compare, say, how it looks at 5 femtoseconds versus half a femtosecond, to help us guess the truth at even shorter time scales. What we DO see, however, is that things do not look the same at those time scales, and we should not be constrained by imagining that they do.

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

Added 7/21/2015:

Change of plans.

Lately I have often compared the photon to the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, or to a rabbit in general. I compare the electron... more to Sonic the Hedgehog (for many reasons, from ziterbewegung to Skyrme though it is not a skyrmion)... and I now feel some reverance for the little plastic figure on Sonic which Luda has been putting on our coffee maker for years
to give signals about cleaning.  Sonic (and Stitch of Lilo and Stitch) are still nice metaphors and part of our reality, from microscopic to macroscopic.. and Alfred's crystals should never be neglected...
How much is studying the electron's behavior like getting past Alice's rabbit to reaching the Mad Hatter? If I ever get to the real nucleus, will it be a Red Queen? We know whose cat is in this story.

But as of today, I have made a resolution for myself to go back to chasing rabbits until they are tamed further in some respects. No study of electron behavior until certain issues in photon behavior are further clarified at a basic level. I need to get into more detail of HOW people have generated three-photon entanglement (linked to all four key groups, the groups of Yanhua Shih, Zeilinger, Zeilinger's student and Fuli Li potentially). The roles of interference in fibers in Zeilinger's group and of beam splitters, certainly call for more modeling. And I also need to look for utterly nonclassical David-Deutsch style formulations for my time-symmetric triphoton example. And I even need to look closely again at Shih's Popper experiment, and its more recent versions -- which might actually be a lot more radical than triphoton!! Maybe. These are what we need most of all in the theory domain for real progress in nongravitational basic physics. Gravity is something else, not my specialty or karma as yet.

When do I go back to chasing electrons? Depends on progress with photons. Could be years from now, or hours.

musings about where we all are

It was less than a year ago that I had "an epiphany" (well, more a eureka kind of experience, not the way I usually make breakthroughs)... about "where we exist," where our consciousness actually lies in the greater physical universe we inhabit.

Until then... I was grounded in a kind of "common sense," like almost everyone else on earth. I long ago gave up the "common sense" which says that"down is down" and thus that the world is flat.
I had outgrown the kind of "common sense" which is unable to accept the idea that time is just another physical dimension. But I still tacitly assumed the idea that "we," our consciousness," is basically just a pattern or form of the matter which comprises our universe. Crudely, "yeah, we are just globs in the universe, mainly occupying some volume of that universe." I later realized that there are more kinds of matter and life than I noticed at first, but the basic principle was still there. It's like the Rosicrucians who say: "We do not believe in anything supernatural. It's just that the laws of nature are a bit bigger than most of you seem to recognize as yet."

That's where I was. I knew about the many-worlds theories of quantum mechanics, which say that
 the cosmos or multiverse is infinite dimensional, made up of more universes co-existing in parallel than our universe has stars. But I didn't believe them. I knew we could explain what we see in physics in an ultraconservative model, a model so simple even Einstein might accept it (maybe, if he doesn't mind the possibility of just a few dice in there).

BUT THEN: this past year, as I worked out how such an ultraconservative model actually plays out, in some simple experiments in optics ("what does a photon do when it goes through your sunglasses?"), the shock came. In a string of thought... comparing that photon in a polarizer to me in the polarizing environment of the US government at the time...  I realized that CONSCIOUSNESS is a pattern or form pertaining to SCENARIOS within that universe, not to ultimate outcomes as such.

Thus IN PRACTICE, we humans get to live in a world of parallel universes -- really, parallel SCENARIOS -- rather than the one true objective reality.  I am still assimilating what this really means for our lives.

My immediate responses: Plato's idea that we are like shadows projected onto the walls of a cave is a lot closer to truth than I expected. "Changing the past" was totally impossible, inherently, in the old view of consciousness; the old view was like "the Oxford standard theory of time travel" in the novels Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis, or like the theory implicit in the novel Chronoliths.
There is lots of science fiction about changing the past, but it is mostly ... not so clear in its assumptions. The new story reminded me more of a chapter by Poul Anderson in the Far Futures collection (maybe sci fi, maybe imaginative futurism). It also reminded me of Zelazny's Amber series, and a few threads in the Dune sequence. Another cosmos altogether from what I had assumed.

Yet old habits die hard. When we talk about survival of the human species, I have agonized a lot about "what is the probability that we go extinct within a few thousand years?" That's a complicated theme in itself... but... it ignores the fact that the future of our timeline is not the same as the future of humanity. What if we start thinking of our timeline as just one of the threads in a larger system, like a thread within a quantum computer as conceived by David Deutsch?

Before last year, ever so much of my life revolved around elaboration and understanding of two mathematical objects, which I call J and lambda. There are important English and Chinese words which partially translate key aspects of these central mathematical objects -- words like hope and fear, qi, prana, cathexis, charisma, values, prices, whatever.  Knowing the mathematical core is very important in many spheres, to making correct decisions among other things. But decisions today are so ignorant and scary that the issue of extinction is quite serious. (Shelby doesn't quite get it that he is actually murdering his own grandchildren as he displays his unquestionable power to do so.)

But now, there is another "simple" scalar object, the Z term in the new physics, which might be translated as the "destiny" or "judgment" term. It appears in my article recently published in International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, and in the article submitted to QIP. Just as my lambda in ADP can be described as an extension or generalization of old lambda vectors very familiar in linear programming and microeconomics, this new Z is an extension of things very familiar in thermodynamics (but no, not so much like the Z of Feynmann path physics).

Does it "feel like" Anderson's story? Will our suicidal actions end up dialing down the Z of our timeline, to he point where information exchanged with other timelines is our main useful product here?

I wonder.

I wonder in some detail, but there are limits even to my willingness to go too far in print.

Best of luck,

     Paul

Where the hydrogen fuel cell car came from -- and is it gone forever?

You may recall the Clinton-Gore Partnership for a Next Generation Vehicle, and the belief that hydrogen fuel cell cars are our best hope for a sustainable future.  Some folks in Congress have ideas for how to get that back on track. I recently wrote to one of them, on the real story of where that idea came from... and on what hopes we now have. Slightly sanitized:

I apologize for not reaching out to you more, for a quiet private discussion of what we really know on the issue of hydrogen fuel cells. I have lived the issue for more than 30 years, and have a voluminous electronic library on that subject, with many documents that never made it to publication.

When I was lead analyst for transportation at EIA, basically no one had ever heard of PEM fuel cells. There was a review report on fuel cells funded by Jordy's group at DOE basic energy sciences; the chapter on PEM, by Appleby, emphasized several basic show-stoppers that would have to be answered by breakthroughs to make them potentially useful. As the money for PEM fuel cells expanded, Appleby became more active on them, but I still remember his relatively late talk at National Hydrogen Association (which he pioneered behind the scenes) arguing that a different type of fuel cell, the alkaline fuel cell, which virtually got lost in the big government funding efforts, had far more hope to be useful.

I was one of the three people who actually led the way in bringing PEM fuels out of obscurity, when they were a small program in obscurity at Los Alamos, into the national limelight. I was an incredible learning experience for me at the front lines of this to see how legitimate good intentions, harnessed to a huge national interest, can get modified by today's big donor and stakeholder system, in a way that gets negative value for money, defeats the original objectives, and can even become obsolete due to new opportunities elsewhere. 

Ironically, I learned of the small Los Alamos effort from the "first new conference on return to the Moon," about 1980. The folks who designed the Apollo moon buggy had a section on new small and efficient steam reformer for methanol they had developed, and on how it opens up the door to using methanol as a carrier of hydrogen for PEM fuel cell cars on earth. That was basically part of a $1 million per year earmark program out of another part of DOE, closer to Phil Patterson, who was then a friend in the DOE EERE section.

After I learned more, I wrote a paper for the SAE session led by Barry McNutt (of the DOE policy office), which was important in stimulating initial interest in many quarters, as well as intense opposition form a certain oil company consulting operation. The three people who lifted this idea out of its initial obscurity were me, Al Sobey (Then Division Director for Advanced Products at GM), and Father George of Georgetown, who got an earmark for a PEM fuel cell bus. The initial paper was enough to arouse the interest of Bob Williams, for example (who cited it for a long time, acknowledging what got his group started), but also was the platform for my later efforts involving GM, the Reagan/Bush White Houses, and then later some friends in Tennessee who contacted Gore's group and played a crucial role in the PNGV initiative (for which I was one of the speakers at the White House inaugural event).

The Ballard company of Canada plays a crucial role in most stories of how PEM fuel cells could become useful in cars, but Ballard himself was deeply disappointed when the politrics under Gore started pulling things off track, away from reality and away from economic sense.

One of the biggest problems was the political pressure to shift away from methanol as a hydrogen carrier to hydrogen or natural gas, under very heavy political and ideological pressure, which Gore caved into. the fuel problem was an inconvenient truth of the first magnitude.

Back when LANL proposed a true steam reformer, with only 15 percent energy loss from methanol to hydrogen on board a car, that was one thing. But when the natural gas lobby sold him on the idea that "a reformer isn't really a reformer, that's just a semantic problem we will will be happy to correct for you", and then Gore touted a natural gas combustion-to-hydrogen system with 40 percent losses as the great scientific breakthrough of the century,  the doom of PNGV became inevitable. (Though I ran the small NSF branch of the PNGV initiative, under very different terms, through SBIR,  far more successful for far less money.)  Would it really be a great breakthrough for energy efficiency and sustainability to just add 40% to the energy losses in vehicles? What's next? An even greater breakthrough which triples energy losses, enriching favored stakeholders?

But wouldn't it be just great if prominent experts hired by those stakeholders told you not to worry your pretty little head about such technicalities, just trust THEM? (And enrich them.)

Hydrogen was another phenomenon. I have to admit that I was blind-sided by the political success (for many years) of the hydrogen PEM car movement. That's because working at EIA I had access on data on the cost of making fuels (hydrogen is always MADE on earth), and couldn't imagine people fighting to pay ten times as much per btu or per mile. If you start from coal or natural gas or biomass, it's crystal clear that you get a lot more methanol, more cheaply, with less environmental degradation, than taking it by way of hydrogen. I have seen the demos of those bright creative ideas for converting wind energy to hydrogen, and from there back to electricity... losing half the energy in the process, when a simple battery costing less loses only about 10%. What's the environmental imperative to waste energy?   

Of course, methanol has a chicken and egg challenge, but hydrogen has far worse, so what could possess people to support hydrogen?

Many folks I know came around to the belief that the oil industry decided to support the hydrogen+PEM mantra, because it was a good way to get troublemakers sent off to hydrogen monasteries where it would always be "tomorrow" and "demos" but never get in the way of the real world of hard core gasoline. Many chief economists of oil companies said that methanol would be a better way, but the PR people and the international political operations people are far more visible in Washington than the real economists. It may not be a coincidence that the DC folk decided that the Exxon Reston people should be shipped away to a place less visible in this area. (Some were my friends back in EIA days, though I left DOE for good in 1989.)

Romm of the DOE hydrogen effort did a great job in exposing something that really cried out to be exposed. 

There was one other serious problem with PEM fuel cells. I get part of the blame myself for not catching it earlier. I was really new to government back when this started. I read the LANL reports, and noticed a problem with hydrogen peroxide formation. "Don't worry," said the guy from LANL, "That's a pretty straightforward technical problem, and we think we have ways we can solve it, if we are funded to do so." Best information available to me now says they still haven't solved it. There is a kind of "abstract true efficiency" of maybe 60% for these fuel cells, versus a "present whole systems efficiency of 35%." 

That 35% is what you should actually compare to the Atkins engine in the Prius, or the Volt equivalent -- just over 30%. The PEM offers maybe 4 points more efficiency... but only versus pure hydrogen; all hydrogen carrying systems ever developed would have losses large enough to make PEM fuel cell cars WORSE than existing PHEVs like Volt and Prius, even just considering efficiency from gas station to wheels. (Sobey's current wells to wheels calculations show PEM cars as far worse.")

Note what I am saying here: existing cheaper hybrid cars give more miles per BTU of fuel from the gas station, for a wide variety of cheaper fuels at the gas station.

What of CO2? Carbon neutral biofuels (such as algae fuel) do just as well as hydrogen based systems by that criterion as well.

We have enough really pressing challenges already to shift the cars to viable sustainable technology, without wasting scarce money and energy on things which would make the problems worse!

At NSF, I did my best to be "above the fray" on these issues, subject to not totally throwing money away. So the last thing I did with fuel cells was fund a project at Penn State, under Sen and Irquidi-MacDonald demonstrating a path to creating a carbon-tolerant ALKALINE fuel cell, with REAL efficiency of 60%. (Their final report is posted at arxiv.org.) If that works, then, combined with the LANL steam reformer, it really could get almost double the miles per gallon of methanol as a Prius operating on liquid fuel. If anyone in Congressa wants to do something with fuel cells in transportation with a real chance of being useful someday,  THAT would be the best starting point. Risky, hard but possible.

By the way, as I walked out of the White House grounds for the PNGV inauguration, Henry Kelley gave me a quiet "word to the wise" or "sad feedback". Roughly, "You have to understand that our goal is to sell this program. Talking about the unmet technical challenges is not part of that. We need supporters here, for this program." At NSF, we did fund work aimed at unsolved technical problems here, but in all fairness the fundamental problems in batteries (which we also funded) turned out to be more tractable, at least in the political environment. 

Later, when I informed a colleague at NSF of the (limited by encouraging) success at Penn State, he replied, "But you don't understand. The money of for PEM fuel cells. That's been decided at higher levels. I can't do alkalines just because they WORK." Unfortunately, technical mismanagement by micromanagement became much worse than that after that, and that guy retired in response.

Sadly, the best technical option to do what PEM was supposed to do, but better, is a kind of advanced Stirling engine, which Sobey is very much on top of, even though he retired from GM. He has asked me to visit Michigan, Kettering, at their expense, to discuss it. 

There is a clear path to 50-55 percent efficiency, but combined with incredible fuel flexibility and immediate manufacturability in existing underutilized engine factories. But the inventor is very deeply pissed off at the immoral things DOE tried to do to him earlier (trying to steal his technology and give it to big stakeholders who didn't understand it) that it will be hard to actually get it. The technical reality is very clear, and his past inventions and patent prove that to my satisfaction and to that of Sobey, but making up for past DOE arrogance may or may not be an unsurmountable problem.

It's a v ery good thing that Secretary Paul Chu cancelled the big hydrogen initiative, as it was, under Obama.

Anyway, I am sorry this is so long.

I would be happy to come visit any time, and listen quietly to your questions. I have fond memories of that coffee place I went to every day, along the corridor from Dirksen to Hart at ground level, back when I worked for Specter's office.

Perrsonally, I am much more worried about climate change than anyone else you have met (and I know that is a strong statement), but I don't see hydrogen PEM as a way to address the urgency and size of the problem. 

Best regards,

Paul

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Additional comment: in September 2007, I worked with MIT to organize a workshop on a new approach to accelerating development of new batteries, using new methods which might have had a chance to revisit some of the key technical issues of PEM fuel cells with more hope of success.  But when it came time in 2009 to actually implement a new battery initiative... a certainly friendly guy from DOE helped out in a pinch, and moved things in a radically different direction, not unlike what infuriated Johansson.   He also made sure that DOE treated the inventor of the first rechargeable lithium-air battery (which passed cycling tests at Argonne for more than 100 cycles, with a clear path to do more) was treated the same way that Johansson was. (For more on that battery, see www.excellatron.com.)

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Another additional comment: news from Greece is very worrisome, and logically connected to the concerns above.  Six days ago, I posted a comment on this to the Energy Consensus group which addresses issues of energy security in the US, above all:

Will we be able to develop any of the technologies we need soon enough, completely enough, to prevent the nasty kind of supercrash that folks like Forrester envisioned years ago -- complicated by nuclear and environmental things which would turn it into an extinction event?

I try hard not to be pessimistic, but our chances of survival will be a lot less if we don't face up to how tough the situation really is. And it mostly seems to keep getting worse; it still reminds me of a science fiction novel, The City at the End of Time, by Bear, in which one rampart falls after another, but by bit. Events in the Middle East are part of it, but certainly not the whole main event in themselves.

One piece of bad news --  it does not look as if China will be pointing the way to transportation energy security after all. Yes, the BYD Qin and its siblings has real potential to make huge inroads versus GM and Ford, through another :sudden tipping point in the market, but even so it will take a long time before PHEVs take up half of the new car market in the US, and twenty years more before the auto fleet turns over. A few little things will be happening in the world before then...

But in China: Methanol Policy Forum 2014 has an update which is much less encouraging than the talks in the previous forum were.

In the previous forum, it was noted that new cars can have GEM60 flexibility at VERY little cost -- only the choice of hoses and gaskets, not other changes in engines or even controls.  If an entire NATION could get 60% of its liquid fuels from corrosive sources (flexibly), the immediate benefits to energy security would be huge. Brazil shifted from circa 1/4 GE fuel flexibility to circa 3/4 in just a year or tw0, showing how quick and easy and painless the transition can be, if there is a decision to do it. Plainly, there was not such a resolve in China. The new administration under Xi Jinping (with NDRC guidance) has also cut back on China's version of renewable fuel standards and incenives for electrification.

Why? That's hard to know. The previous number two guy, Li, was a great supporter of... his own name... and maybe it is as simple as loss of a champion, for electricity. But what of coal and methanol? Don't they have some clout in China?

What of the military in China? Clancy's novel Threat Vector has major limitations, but I hope some of those people are smart enough to read it. I assume they note the point that China's biggest vulnerability in a conflict with the US is the ease of anyone cutting off the straits of Malacca and blocking the oil which China is hopelessly dependent on still. Don't they appreciate the externalities here, just for their national security? Or are they weaker in China than we imagine?

But a lot may be simply mindset. The presentation for China was very positive in its rhetoric (as is habitual in government propaganda worldwide). They say they are expanding many-fold the early successful test demos using methanol fuel.  But when you start with just a few thousand vehicle,s it takes a lot more than a couple of doublings to amount to anything. It reminds me of the ways in which the Electrification Coalition plans for us to spend billions in nice politically correct demo projects in urban areas, making lots of connections with local pols, and how they even fooled Fred Smith into supporting their ambitions...  when Brazil showed how the real auto industry could move a whole lot faster without any of the waste, the barnacles, of such politicized approaches. So maybe the mindset in China favors such approaches, and maybe the Chinese military does never understand that they could actually move as fats as Brazil on GEM60 flexibility if they simply chose to.  Some people call the OPen Fuel Standard bills which came to our Congress a "socialist style mandate" but they are no more socialist than standards for digital TV; they would allow a vast market-based approach, to move us ahead by decades in any area where we desperately need to buy more time... and so market-based that China does not seem to see what a great option it would be even for them. Natoinwide GEM60 flexibility would be a huge boon to folks ready to sell a broad range of alternate fuels, on a competitive market-based basis.

In the face of governments screwing up all over the world, I certainly have remembered the "good parts" of Atlas Shrugged, which suggests a different pathway to trying to save something. Saving a small economy in the Rockies really wouldn't save even that valley from the H2S pollution coming our way, but at least SOME of the critical new technology might come on line... the sooner the better.

I was very amused a couple of years ago to see how the positive parts of Atlas Shrugged might possible be as realistic concretely as the bad real parts about the agents of ruthless corporate welfare in Washington. More precisely -- a new engine developed in part as a spinoff of a guy who was former division director for advanced products at GM, which could be used in time to fund more radical technologies 'way beyond the government's appetite for risk. It's a real-life story, and I have given lots of slides on the main high-level details. But at the end of the day -- the most crucial player, a guy named Lennart Johansson, reminds me of the stories I have heard about Albert Einstein; folks I have met who knew Einstein well say he was of course as brilliant and unique as we imagine, but also downright autistic. It's something about dominance of the right side of the brain  giving great powers of visualization and science, but absolute insanity in human relations. I am convinced he could demonstrate a manufacturable 50-to-55 percent efficient Stirling engine in less than three years, as he claims,  and I know the basics of how he would do it (lots of due diligence), but it seems unlikely that he would accept anything less than a total gift of $10 million in exchange for almost nothing. Properly led, the technology could make him a billionaire (which he could be well on track to being by now, based on deals he was offered) -- but I guess I can console myself with the thought that his personality is ever so similar to that of the Koch brother's father, and maybe it's just as well that we don't double that particular empire. Also, while this engine would allow us to cut in half the cost of electricity form large solar farms, it might also delay the ultimate dominance of electrification, by providing a high efficiency alternative, similar in a way to diesel but with much less environmental issues and absolute fuel flexibility.  

So what has been lost?

The news this week is not so encouraging for the world economy. Many say that the predicted crash of banks in Greece may only be a few days away now. So many people fantasize that this is only about Greece or only about the euro, but employment in Spain is already a nonsustainable sitruation, France is hurting, and the real issue is continent-wide aggregate demand and depression. 

 **IF** a new Stirling engine had allowed solar electricity from large solar farms at an unsubsized cot of 10 cents per kwh or less, and if there had then been more reason to push the options decsribed in nss.org/EU,, then the risk of depression in the EU wuld be far less, euro or no euro (though it's a lot easier to save with a euro in place). So many self-proclaimed grand statesmen of the economy fail to understand how huge an impact could come form more profitable investment in just one sector, energy. If feed-in tariffs at 15 cents per kwh (and higher tariffs abolished) kicked in AND if the new 10 cents or less technology became available, the private sector could move very quickly to invest many billions, and create the jobs which are urgently needed in southern Europe WITHOUT sending more money to governments like that of Greece. But alas... because of one autistic old guy... and the pride of the world in not accommodating him... well, it doesn't look good in the near-term for the EU economy either.

Or for China. The new measures announced there sound a lot like trying to imitate what the Fed did for the US over the past few years. Maybe their failure to move efficiently on fuel flexibility is due to the old syndrome of having too much faith in folks slavishly following what they learned in schools in the US, without as much creativity as the stated policy calls for.

And then here... some on the right are saying our economic problems are all due to the failures of the fed.  But the Fed has been clear for a long time that they have only limited ability to prevent depression when fiscal policy itself is screwed up. As sequestration starts to loom very large... and none of the really plausible, sustainable paths to prevent it seem politically feasible (closing those nonproductive tax loopholes most coveted by vested interests, or deeper cuts in cost per value in medical expenses)... of course we should not assume the fed can save us. Maybe vast new private energy investments beyond the existing limited fracking kinds of stuff could so it... again like nss.org/EU... but only if we develop the requisite technology, which also does not seem in the cards. Even improving the technology per dollar ratio for agencies like NASA seems to be anathema to very powerful vested interests, and if we don't make massive changes in such areas soon..

Well, who knows?

Though some hope still exists, and I try to follow up on some of them... the most optimistic movie I have seen this year was Interstellar...