Of all the bad ideas that Judeo-Christian religion has spread around the world, perhaps none is more obnoxious and dangerous than the belief that man is God’s chosen species. Even many non-religious people believe that humans experience consciousness but animals do not. Others may feel that animal consciousness is a cute but inadequate shadow of human consciousness, the way Animal Planet’s “Puppy Bowl” is an adorable but ridiculous version of our great and advanced human achievement known as the Super Bowl.
Human consciousness is different from animal consciousness, but it is not special or privileged. Humans just have a huge cerebral cortex, which has evolved organically through natural selection. All of the things that make us feel special — the fact that we have language and music and art, we contemplate the meaning of life, and we document the lives of the Kardashians — are merely emergent by-products of this overgrown organic brain of ours. Animals may not ask questions of “why” and “how,” and they may not think in terms of nouns and verbs, but their experience is nevertheless a continuous string of questions about their surroundings: “what,” “where,” and even “who.”
Most Christians believe that the human body is the temple of the soul. The conscious human mind is somehow more than just the physical particles that make up the brain, because we have been endowed with a Special Ingredient (not to be confused with Special Sauce). Animals, meanwhile, have bodies and brains, but not souls, thus setting humans apart as a fundamentally unique species with preferred treatment by the Creator. This view is riddled with inconsistencies and raises countless questions. Consider the following:
1. The state of a person’s consciousness is dependent entirely on the physical state of the body. When you are ill, your consciousness suffers. If you suffer a blow to the head, you may pass out. Stimulant drugs make the mind race; psychedelics and dissociatives such as ketamine alter consciousness radically. What happens to the soul in these cases?
2. At no time does a person’s consciousness remain unaffected when the brain is under stress, even something as simple as a fever. No conscious state is immune to physical conditions in the body. Phineas Gage famously survived a metal rod passing through his skull, but it changed his personality. Did the rod change his soul as well?
3. People’s personalities are rarely the same from youth to old age, which is especially true in cases of dementia or Alzheimer’s. At what age is our consciousness most like the “real” soul? If I went to heaven, would I feel like I feel now, or when I was 18, or right before I died? When a person with Alzheimer’s goes to heaven, do they get their memories back?
4. As any pet owner knows, animals have distinct personalities, which may change over the pet’s lifetime, after an illness, etc. If animals don’t have souls (but people do), what accounts for this continuity?
5. A Christian would say that God gave me a soul, precisely so that I can make a free choice whether to accept his love or take up Buddhism instead. So what allows my cat to choose between Ocean Whitefish and Mariner’s Catch?
The soul might make a little sense if it were thought to be entirely independent of consciousness — that we actually don’t take our Earthly experience to heaven with us, that humans and animals alike join God in the form of “pure energy,” or whatever. But that isn’t what the teachings say. The Big Sell of Christianity and Islam is eternal life, being reunited with loved ones, and experiencing happiness forever. The problem is that eternal paradise, to be experienced and enjoyed at all, would require some form of consciousness. But nobody can say with any consistency what that consciousness (“the soul”) would be like.
It’s funny, if you asked whether a child has a soul, almost any Christian would say yes. Yet, an infant’s interaction with the environment is less coherent and engaged than, say, a squirrel’s. When a soldier and his dog are reunited, and the dog shows signs of incredible excitement and joy, we’re expected to believe that the dog has no soul. But a week-old human fetus does. I don’t get it.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
Conspiracy Theory Is The New Superstition
Technology has transformed society in innumerable ways, but one thing that never gets mentioned is how it has transformed ignorance. Two centuries ago (and still today in parts of the globe), if you had a poor education, your world was one of superstition. You planted crops for a harvest that your life literally depended upon, and you appealed to a supernatural deity to sustain you and your family for another season. If you were the curious type and had questions about nature, you may have sought answers from a religious leader. Non-religious superstitions prevailed as well: lucky horseshoes, old wives’ tales, ghosts, goblins, and demons, not to mention your occasional witch hunt or burning-at-the-stake.
Naturally, with the advent of public education and mass communication, superstition in the developed world has waned. People in First World countries don’t go through life without learning certain things, for example what those little specks of light in the night sky actually are. However, ignorance seems to be roaring back — in a different, more insidious form.
Conspiracy theories seem to be taking over the role formerly held by superstition. The best way I can illustrate this is through the incredible “chemtrails” theory. (I had never even heard of this until I made a few videos about “9/11 Truth” in 2011.) Some people believe that the government is keeping the masses under mind-control by spraying the skies with soporific chemicals that are released at high altitude by jet aircraft. That’s what those supposed “condensation trails” are, you see, that can stretch all the way across the sky. Have you ever noticed how sometimes the trail dissipates quickly, and other times it lingers for the better part of an hour? And have you also noticed that low-flying aircraft never release these trails of chemicals? It’s a huge conspiracy by the government, you see. The only reason why you think it isn’t a conspiracy is that your mind has been successfully zombi-fied by the government’s chemicals. (Somehow the believers of the theory are immune to the effects.)
Of course, there’s a perfectly rational explanation for condensation trails, and it’s available for anyone to read.
Centuries ago, a widespread superstition or old wives’ tale might have been killed off by the existence of a high-quality information source that anyone could read, at home. (Sadly, there hasn’t been a good old-fashioned witch hunt in my village for years.) Religion remains widespread, but only because it forms a major part of many people’s identities. Life is tough for a fringe superstition these days; there’s just too much reliable information, and it’s too easily accessed, for most people to go on believing in witches and such. What’s a person to do if he wants to wallow in ignorance?
Reject the information. This is the prime strategy of the conspiracy theorist: The information that would debunk the chemtrails theory, for example, is part of the conspiracy. The “official explanation” has been created by the conspirators to keep you from asking questions. This is how an ignorant person attempts to propagate his ignorance throughout society: by telling others that “official” information is a lie, by denegrating the sources of the information (“science is just another religion”), by denegrating those who accept mainstream ideas (“go back to sleep, you sheep”), by appealing to anti-authority sentiments, and by appealing to common sense through oversimplification. I wrote about these techniques in an essay called The Bullshit Syndrome and How to Spot It.*
In the modern world, superstition can even morph into conspiracy theory. A few years ago there was a film called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about how the “intelligent design” movement is being squelched by mainstream science. What was originally a superstition — God created all living things — has ended up being a vast conspiracy: God did create all living things, but “big science” (the term used in the film) has done everything to ensure that you think otherwise. Most recently, Rick Santorum announced that President Obama is a “snob” for advancing higher education. The word “elite” and “elitist” are interchangeably bandied about by politicians, who pander to voters by telling them they are naturally smarter than “Ivy League intellectuals.” Yeah, down with know-it-all snobs!
This trend is dangerous, but I don’t have a solution. In the past, ignorance went away when people were exposed to reliable information, but these days, information can have the opposite effect. It makes some people hunker down in their ignorance, as they confine themselves to echo-chamber talk-radio programs, blogs, and news sources. Perhaps ridicule and satire are the best way to go.
Note: This article was paid for by a generous grant from the elitists at the government, who don’t want you to think for yourself.
* In the “Bullshit” article I profiled an amateur physicist who believes that pi is exactly 4.0 and that green light doesn’t exist. Most of his articles are about how smarty-pants intellectuals don’t want you to understand how math or science really works. It turns out, he also believes that Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen, and that no commercial jets hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. And Wikipedia is the hugest conspiracy of all. None of this is surprising — these paranoid delusions are consistent with the profile I have described.
Naturally, with the advent of public education and mass communication, superstition in the developed world has waned. People in First World countries don’t go through life without learning certain things, for example what those little specks of light in the night sky actually are. However, ignorance seems to be roaring back — in a different, more insidious form.
Conspiracy theories seem to be taking over the role formerly held by superstition. The best way I can illustrate this is through the incredible “chemtrails” theory. (I had never even heard of this until I made a few videos about “9/11 Truth” in 2011.) Some people believe that the government is keeping the masses under mind-control by spraying the skies with soporific chemicals that are released at high altitude by jet aircraft. That’s what those supposed “condensation trails” are, you see, that can stretch all the way across the sky. Have you ever noticed how sometimes the trail dissipates quickly, and other times it lingers for the better part of an hour? And have you also noticed that low-flying aircraft never release these trails of chemicals? It’s a huge conspiracy by the government, you see. The only reason why you think it isn’t a conspiracy is that your mind has been successfully zombi-fied by the government’s chemicals. (Somehow the believers of the theory are immune to the effects.)
Of course, there’s a perfectly rational explanation for condensation trails, and it’s available for anyone to read.
Centuries ago, a widespread superstition or old wives’ tale might have been killed off by the existence of a high-quality information source that anyone could read, at home. (Sadly, there hasn’t been a good old-fashioned witch hunt in my village for years.) Religion remains widespread, but only because it forms a major part of many people’s identities. Life is tough for a fringe superstition these days; there’s just too much reliable information, and it’s too easily accessed, for most people to go on believing in witches and such. What’s a person to do if he wants to wallow in ignorance?
Reject the information. This is the prime strategy of the conspiracy theorist: The information that would debunk the chemtrails theory, for example, is part of the conspiracy. The “official explanation” has been created by the conspirators to keep you from asking questions. This is how an ignorant person attempts to propagate his ignorance throughout society: by telling others that “official” information is a lie, by denegrating the sources of the information (“science is just another religion”), by denegrating those who accept mainstream ideas (“go back to sleep, you sheep”), by appealing to anti-authority sentiments, and by appealing to common sense through oversimplification. I wrote about these techniques in an essay called The Bullshit Syndrome and How to Spot It.*
In the modern world, superstition can even morph into conspiracy theory. A few years ago there was a film called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about how the “intelligent design” movement is being squelched by mainstream science. What was originally a superstition — God created all living things — has ended up being a vast conspiracy: God did create all living things, but “big science” (the term used in the film) has done everything to ensure that you think otherwise. Most recently, Rick Santorum announced that President Obama is a “snob” for advancing higher education. The word “elite” and “elitist” are interchangeably bandied about by politicians, who pander to voters by telling them they are naturally smarter than “Ivy League intellectuals.” Yeah, down with know-it-all snobs!
This trend is dangerous, but I don’t have a solution. In the past, ignorance went away when people were exposed to reliable information, but these days, information can have the opposite effect. It makes some people hunker down in their ignorance, as they confine themselves to echo-chamber talk-radio programs, blogs, and news sources. Perhaps ridicule and satire are the best way to go.
Note: This article was paid for by a generous grant from the elitists at the government, who don’t want you to think for yourself.
* In the “Bullshit” article I profiled an amateur physicist who believes that pi is exactly 4.0 and that green light doesn’t exist. Most of his articles are about how smarty-pants intellectuals don’t want you to understand how math or science really works. It turns out, he also believes that Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen, and that no commercial jets hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. And Wikipedia is the hugest conspiracy of all. None of this is surprising — these paranoid delusions are consistent with the profile I have described.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Gravity Is Not A Rubber Sheet
Every physics demonstration of gravity uses the familiar “rubber sheet” model: We are shown a stretched piece of rubber, or perhaps the surface of a trampoline. A heavy ball is placed in the middle, distorting the sheet. Now a smaller ball, pushed in the general direction of the heavy ball, will follow a curved path, as if “attracted” by the mass. If given a particular kind of shove, it will circle around the heavy ball for a while, “orbiting” like a planet around a star. Thus the model demonstrates how an object with mass warps the fabric of space, causing the paths of other objects to curve in the direction of the larger object. Objects follow straight paths through space, but if that space happens to be curved by a massive object nearby, their paths will curve. Since Einstein, we’ve known that this is what causes gravitational attraction.
When I was first getting interested in physics, the rubber-sheet model of gravity bothered me. For one thing, it only works in gravity! It seemed that the rolling ball was just curving downhill. Tilt the sheet without warping it, and its path will curve the same way. In the weightlessness of the International Space Station, I figured, the model wouldn’t do anything. I didn’t like that gravity was required in order to demonstrate how gravity works. It was like a model that shows where wind comes from, but which only works when it’s windy.
Something else disturbed me. When the rubber-sheet model is presented in diagram form (in books, for example), the diagrams are often inconsistent. Empty space is depicted as a flat grid of straight lines, but when a massive object is added, some of the lines suddenly form circles. The graph-paper grid turns into a pushed-in dartboard or spider-web pattern, with circular elements representing potential orbits around the mass. Thinking that maybe I had discovered something, I wondered: At what point do the open-ended straight lines of empty space start joining together to form closed circles? If we took an empty region of space and gradually started adding mass to it, when would the circles appear? I was perplexed — the diagrams never show that transition, just the before and after!
What’s wrong with this picture?
The problem of course lies not in Einstein’s theory, but in the rubber-sheet model. It isn’t a perfect analogy for gravity.
It’s a coincidence that real gravity on Earth causes a rubber sheet to warp in a manner that suggests the warping of space. You could just as easily turn the model upside down, and push the ball up against the rubber sheet, and the sheet would be warped in the same way (just in the opposite direction). The rubber-sheet model of gravity is intended to demonstrate how a massive object causes space to curve, so it’s the warping of the sheet that’s important, not the direction.
When a two-dimensional surface is curved into a third dimension, its geometry changes. No longer do the laws of Euclid, which most of us learned in 9th grade, apply: The angles of a triangle do not add up to 90°, for example. In ordinary geometry, two parallel lines never meet; in the non-Euclidean geometry of a curved surface, parallel lines can meet. Imagine that you and a friend began walking from the equator to the north pole. Initially, your paths would be exactly parallel, but since the Earth’s surface curves, the paths would intersect at your destination. Similarly, if two objects were moving in parallel from empty space toward a star, their paths would eventually converge — even with no sideways forces acting upon them.
As it happens, the rubber-sheet model would work in zero gravity, if you warped the sheet with some other force (say, by pushing the end of a broomstick against it), and if you got the rolling ball to remain on the surface somehow (perhaps with a bit of static electricity). In that case, the ball’s path would appear to curve as it attempted to follow a straight line on this non-flat surface. And two balls, nudged along parallel paths toward the depression, would approach each other as the surface under them began to curve.
As for the grid that’s often laid over the rubber sheet, it’s only there to help you see the shape of the surface. The straight or circular lines are a human invention; there is no such grid in space. The actual paths that objects trace through warped space are, well, the actual paths that they trace. These can be circles, ellipses, parabolas, or hyperbolas, depending on the trajectory of the object.
Planets and comets go their own way — they have no use for grid lines.
The rubber-sheet model does give a general idea of how gravity deflects the path of an object. But it’s a crude demonstration, as the Earth’s gravity fouls the geometric effect that the model is intended to demonstrate.* When you see the rolling ball get “attracted” to the larger ball, much of that deflection is just the ball rolling downhill, as it would on a tilted, flat surface. A true tabletop demonstration of gravity, where objects follow stable orbits along a surface due to geometry alone — would be interesting to watch. Until then, don’t take the conventional version too seriously.
* Consider what would happen if you rolled a ball inside the surface of a vertical tube in a frictionless vacuum. Under Earth’s gravity, the ball would inevitably spiral down to the floor. But in zero G, it would follow a circular path forever. This circular orbit, not the spiral, is the accurate representation of the “straight-line path” that would be followed on the surface due only to its geometry.
When I was first getting interested in physics, the rubber-sheet model of gravity bothered me. For one thing, it only works in gravity! It seemed that the rolling ball was just curving downhill. Tilt the sheet without warping it, and its path will curve the same way. In the weightlessness of the International Space Station, I figured, the model wouldn’t do anything. I didn’t like that gravity was required in order to demonstrate how gravity works. It was like a model that shows where wind comes from, but which only works when it’s windy.
Something else disturbed me. When the rubber-sheet model is presented in diagram form (in books, for example), the diagrams are often inconsistent. Empty space is depicted as a flat grid of straight lines, but when a massive object is added, some of the lines suddenly form circles. The graph-paper grid turns into a pushed-in dartboard or spider-web pattern, with circular elements representing potential orbits around the mass. Thinking that maybe I had discovered something, I wondered: At what point do the open-ended straight lines of empty space start joining together to form closed circles? If we took an empty region of space and gradually started adding mass to it, when would the circles appear? I was perplexed — the diagrams never show that transition, just the before and after!
What’s wrong with this picture?The problem of course lies not in Einstein’s theory, but in the rubber-sheet model. It isn’t a perfect analogy for gravity.
It’s a coincidence that real gravity on Earth causes a rubber sheet to warp in a manner that suggests the warping of space. You could just as easily turn the model upside down, and push the ball up against the rubber sheet, and the sheet would be warped in the same way (just in the opposite direction). The rubber-sheet model of gravity is intended to demonstrate how a massive object causes space to curve, so it’s the warping of the sheet that’s important, not the direction.
When a two-dimensional surface is curved into a third dimension, its geometry changes. No longer do the laws of Euclid, which most of us learned in 9th grade, apply: The angles of a triangle do not add up to 90°, for example. In ordinary geometry, two parallel lines never meet; in the non-Euclidean geometry of a curved surface, parallel lines can meet. Imagine that you and a friend began walking from the equator to the north pole. Initially, your paths would be exactly parallel, but since the Earth’s surface curves, the paths would intersect at your destination. Similarly, if two objects were moving in parallel from empty space toward a star, their paths would eventually converge — even with no sideways forces acting upon them.
As it happens, the rubber-sheet model would work in zero gravity, if you warped the sheet with some other force (say, by pushing the end of a broomstick against it), and if you got the rolling ball to remain on the surface somehow (perhaps with a bit of static electricity). In that case, the ball’s path would appear to curve as it attempted to follow a straight line on this non-flat surface. And two balls, nudged along parallel paths toward the depression, would approach each other as the surface under them began to curve.
As for the grid that’s often laid over the rubber sheet, it’s only there to help you see the shape of the surface. The straight or circular lines are a human invention; there is no such grid in space. The actual paths that objects trace through warped space are, well, the actual paths that they trace. These can be circles, ellipses, parabolas, or hyperbolas, depending on the trajectory of the object.
Planets and comets go their own way — they have no use for grid lines.The rubber-sheet model does give a general idea of how gravity deflects the path of an object. But it’s a crude demonstration, as the Earth’s gravity fouls the geometric effect that the model is intended to demonstrate.* When you see the rolling ball get “attracted” to the larger ball, much of that deflection is just the ball rolling downhill, as it would on a tilted, flat surface. A true tabletop demonstration of gravity, where objects follow stable orbits along a surface due to geometry alone — would be interesting to watch. Until then, don’t take the conventional version too seriously.
* Consider what would happen if you rolled a ball inside the surface of a vertical tube in a frictionless vacuum. Under Earth’s gravity, the ball would inevitably spiral down to the floor. But in zero G, it would follow a circular path forever. This circular orbit, not the spiral, is the accurate representation of the “straight-line path” that would be followed on the surface due only to its geometry.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Resolving the “Twin Paradox”
Fans of science-fiction space travel know that if someone goes on a rocket at close to the speed of light, he will age more slowly than someone back home. Returning to Earth and reuniting with a twin, he would find that the twin had aged more, perhaps by years. If the trip is long enough and gets really close to the speed of light, the returning traveler could find an Earth that’s millions of years in the future, maybe even devoid of human life. For many people, that’s the “twin paradox” — how could something this strange possibly happen?
Actually, twins aging differently isn’t the issue; no paradox there. The “paradox” lies in the fact that according to relativity (the very effect that causes the twins to age differently), the ideas of motion and rest are relative. Suppose rather than leaving from Earth, the experiment is done in deep space. Twin A takes off and leaves Twin B behind. But, once the twins are separated, who’s to say which twin is moving and which is at rest? After all, if you consider the picture from the perspective of either twin, it’s the other one that’s moving. Twin A sees Twin B receding rapidly in the rear-view mirror, just as if Twin B was the one who had taken off. In relativity, the question of moving vs. stationary depends upon the perspective of the observer. Shouldn’t this mean that the aging will be equal for both twins when they finally reunite? That’s the “twin paradox.”
The twin paradox isn’t really a paradox, because it can be resolved in several ways. For one thing, the situation isn’t symmetrical. One of the twins, Twin A, has to turn around at some point, whereas Twin B can just cool his heels. Physicists say that Twin B remains in an inertial reference frame — a state of constant motion (or rest), without any change in speed. Twin A, though, spends portions of his trip in two different inertial reference frames, one on the way out, and one on the way back, and in between he has to slow down, stop, and accelerate in the other direction. (Or, he could make a circular U-turn, but that still counts as an acceleration.) It’s clear how changing velocity affects the local passage of time, from the formula known as the Lorentz transformation: Higher velocities mean slower clocks, so as Twin A slows down, his onboard clock begins speeding up. Twin B’s velocity never changes, though. Therefore, it’s wrong to say the twins are moving in identical ways relative to the other.
Thinking this through, the situation is a bit peculiar. How does Twin A and his mechanical onboard clock “know” that they had turned around? Suppose Twin B, rather than staying put, secretly takes off in the other direction, goes even faster, turns around, and races back to the starting point, just in time to meet the returning Twin A. In that case, Twin B would age slower than Twin A — who, having just gone on a fast trip that included turning around, expects to meet an older Twin B. Instead he finds a younger Twin B. How does Twin B (and his clock) know that he had gone farther and faster than Twin A?
The solution all comes down to the turning-around part: acceleration. When you’re in an inertial reference frame, you can’t tell whether you’re moving or not. You could be sitting in your living room, or you could be on a rocket ship going 99% the speed of light. Close your eyes and the situations are indistinguishable. However, when you’re slowing down or speeding up, or making a turn, you can definitely tell that something’s going on. You feel a pull toward one direction, just as you do in a car with the brakes applied. This acceleration* is what causes a clock (biological or otherwise) to slow down. For Twin B who secretly went on a really fast trip, his larger accelerations slowed down his biological clock even more than Twin A’s, who now needs a facelift to look as young as his twin again.
When you add gravity into the mix, it gets even stranger. Twin A — rather than turning on the reverse-thrust engine to slow down and turn around — could instead have a close call with a massive star, and like Halley’s comet, take a tight orbit around and be fired back toward his starting point. In such a situation, the ship is in free fall with respect to the star, and counter-intuitively, doesn’t feel the acceleration as it gets slung back toward Twin B. Our traveler could continue his game of three-dimensional billiards in the weightless environment of his ship, even as it hooks sharply around the star. If there were no windows, he might not even know when he was passing behind and starting to head back. Yet incredibly, the curvature of space from the star’s gravity would slow down time aboard the ship. While the traveling twin works on his weightless billiards game, the stay-at-home twin would have the time to master not only billiards but also croquet and miniature golf, much to Twin A’s later envy.
The “twin paradox” is one of those cases where the universe just works out perfectly right, out of sheer mathematical consistency. Relative velocity determines the rate at which clocks tick; Einstein showed that this malleability of time is necessary in a universe where the speed of light is measured the same by all observers. Therefore, changing velocity (accelerating) changes the local rate at which time passes. All of this can be calculated from the Lorentz transformation. But a star’s gravity will also slow down time for Twin A and his ship, by exactly the same amount as if he had used his engines to slow down and turn around. The curvature of space due to gravity — by having the ability to sling a spaceship around and back in the other direction, on momentum alone — simply has to make an adjustment to the ship’s onboard clocks. Otherwise the math wouldn’t work out. And then we’d have a real paradox.
Anything in our universe with mass slows down clocks in its wake. For the Earth, the effect is not only measurable, it needs to be built into your GPS to avoid large, cumulative errors that would render it useless. Thanks to Einstein’s discovery, you can reliably arrive at your destination. Isn’t it nice when things work out?
* The term “acceleration” refers to both slowing down and speeding up. Slowing down is simply accelerating in the opposite direction.
Actually, twins aging differently isn’t the issue; no paradox there. The “paradox” lies in the fact that according to relativity (the very effect that causes the twins to age differently), the ideas of motion and rest are relative. Suppose rather than leaving from Earth, the experiment is done in deep space. Twin A takes off and leaves Twin B behind. But, once the twins are separated, who’s to say which twin is moving and which is at rest? After all, if you consider the picture from the perspective of either twin, it’s the other one that’s moving. Twin A sees Twin B receding rapidly in the rear-view mirror, just as if Twin B was the one who had taken off. In relativity, the question of moving vs. stationary depends upon the perspective of the observer. Shouldn’t this mean that the aging will be equal for both twins when they finally reunite? That’s the “twin paradox.”
Thinking this through, the situation is a bit peculiar. How does Twin A and his mechanical onboard clock “know” that they had turned around? Suppose Twin B, rather than staying put, secretly takes off in the other direction, goes even faster, turns around, and races back to the starting point, just in time to meet the returning Twin A. In that case, Twin B would age slower than Twin A — who, having just gone on a fast trip that included turning around, expects to meet an older Twin B. Instead he finds a younger Twin B. How does Twin B (and his clock) know that he had gone farther and faster than Twin A?
The solution all comes down to the turning-around part: acceleration. When you’re in an inertial reference frame, you can’t tell whether you’re moving or not. You could be sitting in your living room, or you could be on a rocket ship going 99% the speed of light. Close your eyes and the situations are indistinguishable. However, when you’re slowing down or speeding up, or making a turn, you can definitely tell that something’s going on. You feel a pull toward one direction, just as you do in a car with the brakes applied. This acceleration* is what causes a clock (biological or otherwise) to slow down. For Twin B who secretly went on a really fast trip, his larger accelerations slowed down his biological clock even more than Twin A’s, who now needs a facelift to look as young as his twin again.
When you add gravity into the mix, it gets even stranger. Twin A — rather than turning on the reverse-thrust engine to slow down and turn around — could instead have a close call with a massive star, and like Halley’s comet, take a tight orbit around and be fired back toward his starting point. In such a situation, the ship is in free fall with respect to the star, and counter-intuitively, doesn’t feel the acceleration as it gets slung back toward Twin B. Our traveler could continue his game of three-dimensional billiards in the weightless environment of his ship, even as it hooks sharply around the star. If there were no windows, he might not even know when he was passing behind and starting to head back. Yet incredibly, the curvature of space from the star’s gravity would slow down time aboard the ship. While the traveling twin works on his weightless billiards game, the stay-at-home twin would have the time to master not only billiards but also croquet and miniature golf, much to Twin A’s later envy.The “twin paradox” is one of those cases where the universe just works out perfectly right, out of sheer mathematical consistency. Relative velocity determines the rate at which clocks tick; Einstein showed that this malleability of time is necessary in a universe where the speed of light is measured the same by all observers. Therefore, changing velocity (accelerating) changes the local rate at which time passes. All of this can be calculated from the Lorentz transformation. But a star’s gravity will also slow down time for Twin A and his ship, by exactly the same amount as if he had used his engines to slow down and turn around. The curvature of space due to gravity — by having the ability to sling a spaceship around and back in the other direction, on momentum alone — simply has to make an adjustment to the ship’s onboard clocks. Otherwise the math wouldn’t work out. And then we’d have a real paradox.
Anything in our universe with mass slows down clocks in its wake. For the Earth, the effect is not only measurable, it needs to be built into your GPS to avoid large, cumulative errors that would render it useless. Thanks to Einstein’s discovery, you can reliably arrive at your destination. Isn’t it nice when things work out?
* The term “acceleration” refers to both slowing down and speeding up. Slowing down is simply accelerating in the opposite direction.
Monday, February 6, 2012
The Zero Universe
The world is like a great theater where we watch history unfold. This colossal story features a cast of billions, who not only witness the arc of its epic plot, but also actively take part in its creation. Look around you; it’s raucous and noisy inside this theater we call “the world.” But, if it were possible for us to step outside the theater and take a look, there would be nothing.
Inside, the theater is a mind-boggling swirl of information, actions, and reactions; from the outside, as seen by a cosmic Google Earth beyond space and time, it’s completely empty. I am not just making a cute metaphor here — this is a real feature of our universe, with profound implications.
It seems that in the final analysis, when all things are considered, the universe adds up to exactly zero. For one example (there are others at the bottom), consider the relationship between space and time. Bear with me as I review an idea from high-school geometry. If we have a triangle that includes a 90° angle, we can use the Pythagorean theorem to determine the length of the diagonal from the length of the right-angle sides:
a2 + b2 = c2
where a and b are the lengths of the right-angle sides, and c is the length of the diagonal. A nifty geometrical diagram proves why this is true. If you make a square box along each of the three sides, then each box has an area of the length of that side, squared. The area of the smaller squares adds up to the area of the largest square: If a = 3 and b = 4, then c = 5.
The Pythagorean theorem works in three dimensions, too. If you see a blimp in the sky, you can calculate the exact straight-line distance to the blimp by knowing its altitude above the ground (the value z), as well as how far east-west (x) and north-south (y) you'd have to go to get right under the blimp:
x2 + y2 + z2 = d2
where d is the distance to the blimp. I don't have a 3D diagram, but you can prove it for yourself with a little effort.
Now it gets interesting. This trick extends to four dimensions. Time is typically cited as the fourth dimension. Does the decidedly non-geometric idea of time work into the Pythagorean theorem? Incredibly, it does — but first, you have to convert the time measurement into a distance-like measurement. Then, the total distance you’re calculating is the spacetime distance in the bizarre four-dimensional world where east-west, north-south, up-down, and earlier-later mean the same thing, only in eight different directions. Represented by the letter s, spacetime distance (also known as a Minkowski interval) is determined by an amazing formula. Let’s break it down:
x2 + y2 + z2 – (ct)2 = s2
As before, x is the distance (for example) to the east, y is north, and z is up, but we’ve added a fourth term for time (t), which gets multiplied by a constant, c. Notice the minus sign before the term for time. When it comes to distance through spacetime, elapsed time counteracts spatial distance, and vice versa: If we travel a distance through space, and do it in a very short interval of time,* the distance traversed is effectively reduced. This is why a space traveler could reach stars across the galaxy within their lifetime if they got close enough to the speed of light. Time goes in the opposite “direction” of space!
That constant, represented by c? It’s the same c that represents the speed of light in equations such as E = mc2. What better number to convert units of time (seconds) into a distance-like measurement — after all, we know that for light, there are 186,000 miles per second. See what Einstein did there? The speed of light is more than just a speed; it’s a universal conversion factor that turns time into a distance-like measurement. By treating time as a negative and multiplying it by c, we can exchange time and space in our formulas as readily as nature exchanges them. That’s what special relativity is all about.
This extra meaning of the speed of light has interesting consequences. If you could look out the window of a rocket going at the speed of light, you wouldn’t “c” a thing — the entire universe would vanish to a point through Lorentz contraction. In order for space and time to enter into what we call “reality,” they must be measured by an observer, something not traveling at the speed c. In the real world, that’s anything with mass. For any observer with mass (make your own couch-potato joke), zero spacetime distance separates into the components familiar to us: a measurable amount of space and a measurable amount of time.
It’s as if the presence of mass causes “zero” to pull apart into the familiar ideas of spatial distance and temporal duration, like taffy. But since the universe is by definition everything there is, you have to be inside the universe to witness this incredible stretching apart of zero, to experience space and time as different things. If you were taking in the all-seeing “God’s-eye view” from a timeless, spaceless, massless perspective outside, you would see the same thing the speed-of-light traveler sees — nothing. To witness the action, you have to be inside the theater, in your seat.
Space and time cancel out to exactly zero for the universe as a whole. But that’s just one example of the zero-sum nature of the physical world. A few others:
• The mass–energy of everything in the universe is exactly balanced by the universe’s gravitational energy. The latter is expressed as a negative number, just as time is in the spacetime formula. A while back Alex Filippenko, who’s a familiar smiling face to science-TV geeks, co-wrote an essay about how this means the universe may have come from “nothing at all.” Like the pulling apart of space and time, mass–energy and gravitational energy were also pulled apart in the Big Bang.
• For similar reasons, the net charge of the universe is generally believed to be zero, with the number of positively charged particles equaling the number of negative. (This is unproven.)
• Certain pairs of phenomena, like electricity and magnetism or mass and the curvature of space, are linked such that they seem to keep each other in check. The great physicist John Wheeler was fascinated by these “automatic” connections, pointing out how they are constrained together by zero sums, the way the ends of a see-saw are always the same total distance from horizontal. “That this principle should pervade physics, as it does,” he asked in 1986, “is that the only way that nature has to signal to us a construction without a plan, a blueprint for physics that is the very epitome of austerity?”
On the one hand, it’s surprising that quantities totaling zero show up again and again in nature. But on the other it makes sense, if the universe is a closed system incorporating everything there is. As a teen I remember being into the Taoist idea of Yin and Yang — I thought that in the final analysis, the universe as a whole couldn’t be anything but perfectly balanced. On a level deeper than I imagined, I may have been right.
* Slow speeds (which mean long elapsed times) cause the time part of the formula to overwhelm the space part, resulting in large spacetime distances. Spacetime distances only get small when you approach the speed of light, for example, covering 186,000 miles in 1.1 seconds — then the (negative) time part almost cancels the space part.
Inside, the theater is a mind-boggling swirl of information, actions, and reactions; from the outside, as seen by a cosmic Google Earth beyond space and time, it’s completely empty. I am not just making a cute metaphor here — this is a real feature of our universe, with profound implications.
It seems that in the final analysis, when all things are considered, the universe adds up to exactly zero. For one example (there are others at the bottom), consider the relationship between space and time. Bear with me as I review an idea from high-school geometry. If we have a triangle that includes a 90° angle, we can use the Pythagorean theorem to determine the length of the diagonal from the length of the right-angle sides:
a2 + b2 = c2
where a and b are the lengths of the right-angle sides, and c is the length of the diagonal. A nifty geometrical diagram proves why this is true. If you make a square box along each of the three sides, then each box has an area of the length of that side, squared. The area of the smaller squares adds up to the area of the largest square: If a = 3 and b = 4, then c = 5.
The Pythagorean theorem works in three dimensions, too. If you see a blimp in the sky, you can calculate the exact straight-line distance to the blimp by knowing its altitude above the ground (the value z), as well as how far east-west (x) and north-south (y) you'd have to go to get right under the blimp:
x2 + y2 + z2 = d2
where d is the distance to the blimp. I don't have a 3D diagram, but you can prove it for yourself with a little effort.
Now it gets interesting. This trick extends to four dimensions. Time is typically cited as the fourth dimension. Does the decidedly non-geometric idea of time work into the Pythagorean theorem? Incredibly, it does — but first, you have to convert the time measurement into a distance-like measurement. Then, the total distance you’re calculating is the spacetime distance in the bizarre four-dimensional world where east-west, north-south, up-down, and earlier-later mean the same thing, only in eight different directions. Represented by the letter s, spacetime distance (also known as a Minkowski interval) is determined by an amazing formula. Let’s break it down:
x2 + y2 + z2 – (ct)2 = s2
As before, x is the distance (for example) to the east, y is north, and z is up, but we’ve added a fourth term for time (t), which gets multiplied by a constant, c. Notice the minus sign before the term for time. When it comes to distance through spacetime, elapsed time counteracts spatial distance, and vice versa: If we travel a distance through space, and do it in a very short interval of time,* the distance traversed is effectively reduced. This is why a space traveler could reach stars across the galaxy within their lifetime if they got close enough to the speed of light. Time goes in the opposite “direction” of space!
That constant, represented by c? It’s the same c that represents the speed of light in equations such as E = mc2. What better number to convert units of time (seconds) into a distance-like measurement — after all, we know that for light, there are 186,000 miles per second. See what Einstein did there? The speed of light is more than just a speed; it’s a universal conversion factor that turns time into a distance-like measurement. By treating time as a negative and multiplying it by c, we can exchange time and space in our formulas as readily as nature exchanges them. That’s what special relativity is all about.
This extra meaning of the speed of light has interesting consequences. If you could look out the window of a rocket going at the speed of light, you wouldn’t “c” a thing — the entire universe would vanish to a point through Lorentz contraction. In order for space and time to enter into what we call “reality,” they must be measured by an observer, something not traveling at the speed c. In the real world, that’s anything with mass. For any observer with mass (make your own couch-potato joke), zero spacetime distance separates into the components familiar to us: a measurable amount of space and a measurable amount of time.
It’s as if the presence of mass causes “zero” to pull apart into the familiar ideas of spatial distance and temporal duration, like taffy. But since the universe is by definition everything there is, you have to be inside the universe to witness this incredible stretching apart of zero, to experience space and time as different things. If you were taking in the all-seeing “God’s-eye view” from a timeless, spaceless, massless perspective outside, you would see the same thing the speed-of-light traveler sees — nothing. To witness the action, you have to be inside the theater, in your seat.
Space and time cancel out to exactly zero for the universe as a whole. But that’s just one example of the zero-sum nature of the physical world. A few others:
• The mass–energy of everything in the universe is exactly balanced by the universe’s gravitational energy. The latter is expressed as a negative number, just as time is in the spacetime formula. A while back Alex Filippenko, who’s a familiar smiling face to science-TV geeks, co-wrote an essay about how this means the universe may have come from “nothing at all.” Like the pulling apart of space and time, mass–energy and gravitational energy were also pulled apart in the Big Bang.
• For similar reasons, the net charge of the universe is generally believed to be zero, with the number of positively charged particles equaling the number of negative. (This is unproven.)
• Certain pairs of phenomena, like electricity and magnetism or mass and the curvature of space, are linked such that they seem to keep each other in check. The great physicist John Wheeler was fascinated by these “automatic” connections, pointing out how they are constrained together by zero sums, the way the ends of a see-saw are always the same total distance from horizontal. “That this principle should pervade physics, as it does,” he asked in 1986, “is that the only way that nature has to signal to us a construction without a plan, a blueprint for physics that is the very epitome of austerity?”
On the one hand, it’s surprising that quantities totaling zero show up again and again in nature. But on the other it makes sense, if the universe is a closed system incorporating everything there is. As a teen I remember being into the Taoist idea of Yin and Yang — I thought that in the final analysis, the universe as a whole couldn’t be anything but perfectly balanced. On a level deeper than I imagined, I may have been right.
* Slow speeds (which mean long elapsed times) cause the time part of the formula to overwhelm the space part, resulting in large spacetime distances. Spacetime distances only get small when you approach the speed of light, for example, covering 186,000 miles in 1.1 seconds — then the (negative) time part almost cancels the space part.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Bell's Bizarre Theorem
The discoveries of quantum physics are about to become even stranger.
For many decades, physicists have known that if you prepare two particles in a particular way such that they are “entangled,” then even if you subsequently separate those particles by many miles, they can seem to influence each other. Measuring one particle will result in the other particle having a predictable value. It’s as if you put two coins in a box, shook that box, and then cut the box in half and drove them to opposite parts of the state. Our intuition tells us the coins should be either heads or tails independently of each other. But, if these coins acted like entangled particles, then determining that one coin was “heads” would guarantee that the other one was “tails,” or vice versa. It’s just another routine example of quantum weirdness; it was predicted from theory, and it’s been experimentally confirmed many times since.
Physicists are divided on the explanation for the entanglement phenomenon. There’s the possibility that particles simply carry information with them that determines their properties, these properties always being opposite in entangled particles. Two “entangled coins,” as it were, are always heads/tails, never heads/heads or tails/tails. The problem with this explanation is that a particle would have to possess an inordinate (perhaps infinite) amount of information for this to work. Physicists can measure various properties along any number of coordinate axes — and with entangled particles, they always come up opposite. Every single time. How can an electron carry with it all of this information? The consensus is that it can’t, at least not in such simple terms.
Another possible explanation is that the entangled particles are able to communicate with each other somehow. As you’re measuring one particle, it “tells” its entangled twin what property is being measured and what the result is. The problem here is that this communication would have to exceed the speed of light — by a factor of at least 10,000 according to one experiment — and Einstein showed that this isn’t possible, at least, not in our familiar space and time. So, some physicists have speculated that there’s an undiscovered “communication backchannel” that allows two far-separated particles to talk to each other.
In the 1960s, the Irish physicist John Bell showed that one of the above two scenarios must be false. Bell’s theorem mathematically proves that either (1) a particle does not intrinsically carry with it a specific value of a specific property, meaning that it must violate an assumed principle known as counterfactual definiteness, or (2) information must be able to travel faster than light — one object can exert an influence that jumps across space to affect another object directly. This is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” the violation of the assumed principle known as locality. Basically, Bell’s theorem shows that there may be counterfactual definiteness, or there may be locality, but not both. One of the assumed principles must be wrong.
Just last week, an experiment was announced that may end this debate once and for all. Researchers will be able to put “nonlocality,” the jumping-across-space of information, to a definitive test. If it fails — and many (including myself) expect it to — it will be another setback for the realists, that faction of quantum physicists who believe that every fundamental particle has specific information encoded into it, as if predetermined by God on the day of Creation, which we human observers (and our instruments) can only passively discover, like looking at a coin in a box.
So what would such a result mean? Since it would prove that entangled particles cannot be communicating with each other, it would bizarrely suggest that properties of particles “pop into existence” when they are measured. Like a microscopic Schrödinger’s cat, a particle could possess the property of intrinsic spin in two different directions at once, but when this property is measured, nature somehow “selects” one of them. And literally at the same time, nature also “selects” the spin of its entangled twin to be in the other direction, which becomes clear when we actually do the measurement. (A YouTube video that I worked on discusses one way to imagine this.)
But if measured properties don’t pre-exist in a particle, and separated objects aren’t communicating nonlocally (i.e., faster than light), there’s still the question of how an entangled twin “knows” what value to take upon measurement. Maybe it’s because the entangled objects aren’t actually separated. As discussed in the recent episode of PBS’s Nova called “What Is Space?” there’s significant debate on what spatial separation really means. Experiments suggest that we may need to think of space not as a fundamental feature of the world, but rather as a phenomenon that emerges from a deeper process.
To me, quantum entanglement makes more sense when you resist the temptation to think of twin particles as being “different” objects, one “here” and one “there.” Instead, they’re opposite versions of a single object of some kind, two sides of the same coin, if you will. We don’t detect this thing directly, and it isn’t located either here or there particularly,* but whatever “it” is, it makes its appearance to us as two separate particles with some mirror-image properties.
The separate-ness between these particles is definitely something we perceive in the world. However, it may be a feature of our world — not the particle pair’s world. Which is about as profound as it gets.
* For example, the holographic principle of string theory and quantum gravity suggests that the entangled twins are encoded as information on a two-dimensional surface, and do not fundamentally reside in three-dimensional space at all.
For many decades, physicists have known that if you prepare two particles in a particular way such that they are “entangled,” then even if you subsequently separate those particles by many miles, they can seem to influence each other. Measuring one particle will result in the other particle having a predictable value. It’s as if you put two coins in a box, shook that box, and then cut the box in half and drove them to opposite parts of the state. Our intuition tells us the coins should be either heads or tails independently of each other. But, if these coins acted like entangled particles, then determining that one coin was “heads” would guarantee that the other one was “tails,” or vice versa. It’s just another routine example of quantum weirdness; it was predicted from theory, and it’s been experimentally confirmed many times since.
Physicists are divided on the explanation for the entanglement phenomenon. There’s the possibility that particles simply carry information with them that determines their properties, these properties always being opposite in entangled particles. Two “entangled coins,” as it were, are always heads/tails, never heads/heads or tails/tails. The problem with this explanation is that a particle would have to possess an inordinate (perhaps infinite) amount of information for this to work. Physicists can measure various properties along any number of coordinate axes — and with entangled particles, they always come up opposite. Every single time. How can an electron carry with it all of this information? The consensus is that it can’t, at least not in such simple terms.
Another possible explanation is that the entangled particles are able to communicate with each other somehow. As you’re measuring one particle, it “tells” its entangled twin what property is being measured and what the result is. The problem here is that this communication would have to exceed the speed of light — by a factor of at least 10,000 according to one experiment — and Einstein showed that this isn’t possible, at least, not in our familiar space and time. So, some physicists have speculated that there’s an undiscovered “communication backchannel” that allows two far-separated particles to talk to each other.
In the 1960s, the Irish physicist John Bell showed that one of the above two scenarios must be false. Bell’s theorem mathematically proves that either (1) a particle does not intrinsically carry with it a specific value of a specific property, meaning that it must violate an assumed principle known as counterfactual definiteness, or (2) information must be able to travel faster than light — one object can exert an influence that jumps across space to affect another object directly. This is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” the violation of the assumed principle known as locality. Basically, Bell’s theorem shows that there may be counterfactual definiteness, or there may be locality, but not both. One of the assumed principles must be wrong.
Just last week, an experiment was announced that may end this debate once and for all. Researchers will be able to put “nonlocality,” the jumping-across-space of information, to a definitive test. If it fails — and many (including myself) expect it to — it will be another setback for the realists, that faction of quantum physicists who believe that every fundamental particle has specific information encoded into it, as if predetermined by God on the day of Creation, which we human observers (and our instruments) can only passively discover, like looking at a coin in a box.
So what would such a result mean? Since it would prove that entangled particles cannot be communicating with each other, it would bizarrely suggest that properties of particles “pop into existence” when they are measured. Like a microscopic Schrödinger’s cat, a particle could possess the property of intrinsic spin in two different directions at once, but when this property is measured, nature somehow “selects” one of them. And literally at the same time, nature also “selects” the spin of its entangled twin to be in the other direction, which becomes clear when we actually do the measurement. (A YouTube video that I worked on discusses one way to imagine this.)
But if measured properties don’t pre-exist in a particle, and separated objects aren’t communicating nonlocally (i.e., faster than light), there’s still the question of how an entangled twin “knows” what value to take upon measurement. Maybe it’s because the entangled objects aren’t actually separated. As discussed in the recent episode of PBS’s Nova called “What Is Space?” there’s significant debate on what spatial separation really means. Experiments suggest that we may need to think of space not as a fundamental feature of the world, but rather as a phenomenon that emerges from a deeper process.
To me, quantum entanglement makes more sense when you resist the temptation to think of twin particles as being “different” objects, one “here” and one “there.” Instead, they’re opposite versions of a single object of some kind, two sides of the same coin, if you will. We don’t detect this thing directly, and it isn’t located either here or there particularly,* but whatever “it” is, it makes its appearance to us as two separate particles with some mirror-image properties.
The separate-ness between these particles is definitely something we perceive in the world. However, it may be a feature of our world — not the particle pair’s world. Which is about as profound as it gets.
* For example, the holographic principle of string theory and quantum gravity suggests that the entangled twins are encoded as information on a two-dimensional surface, and do not fundamentally reside in three-dimensional space at all.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Wikipedia Is My Religion
It is said that people are drawn to religion because it makes them feel that they are a part of something greater than themselves. Religion makes people feel that they belong — to a community, yes, but also to some Grand Whole. Admittedly, I spent many years feeling disconnected from this Big Picture. When the Internet and YouTube came along, I had the opportunity to express my views and reach out, to have a much more influential hand at stirring the Drink of Humanity, as it were. But I never achieved that feeling of being "a part of something greater than ourselves" until I became a Wikipedia editor a couple of years ago.
Here's how I saw Wikipedia previously: It was an uneven, sometimes reliable (but often not) collection of information managed largely by amateurs, useful for getting a general idea of a topic, but not for research or any serious purpose. Most major articles seemed organized well enough, so I figured there must be a system in place to oversee the editing process. I had heard that anyone could edit Wikipedia, but I assumed that if you submitted an edit, it went to some kind of authorities for approval, and maybe your edit would show up in the article and maybe it wouldn't.
That isn't how Wikipedia works at all. Anyone, anywhere can edit Wikipedia, and change it, right now.* You don't even need to create an account or sign in. Furthermore, there are no "authorities." There are administrators, which are volunteer editors who have been promoted by other editors to perform certain functions, such as banning repeat vandals, and there is also a paid office staff who generally don't get involved in editing. All of the articles are managed by the community of editors, who check each other's edits on a completely equal footing. Since getting involved, I've been continually amazed by how effective this system is.
Wikipedia has a bad reputation as a serious source of information — but it should not be used for that purpose. Instead, it should be used as a gateway to information. One of the things that makes the system work so well is that any addition to the encyclopedia, at least in principle, needs to be backed up by a "reliable source," so if you're looking for a serious reference for research, start with the article and then follow the sources. Reliable sourcing doesn't always happen on Wikipedia, but with major articles that are watched by a lot of editors, as well as highly controversial articles, it almost always does (and it's getting better all the time). Take the article on 7 World Trade Center, for example. Naturally, it is a magnet for conspiracy theorists, who have been trying to tweak the facts therein for years. Without exception, though, dubious and poorly referenced edits are reverted by the community. Fringe theories, according to a key Wikipedia guideline, are not to be given "undue weight" in articles describing the mainstream position. As a result, you'll see very little "9/11 Truth" in the 7WTC article, although there is a link to the article that discusses these theories at length.
Naturally, conspiracy theorists hate Wikipedia. It represents everything they detest — the squelching of alternative ideas and opinions, by some vague assumed authority, in favor of the monolithic mainstream view. For an enthusiast of reality like myself, though, Wikipedia offers an easy way to distinguish educated, informed, scholarly views on a topic (explained in detail and thoroughly referenced) from fringe theories by a small number of not-so-scholarly folks. This is because anyone caught pushing a fringe point of view is quickly ostracized on Wikipedia. Furthermore, blatant acts of vandalism are immediately reverted; at any moment, there are dozens of editors watching the recent changes page, competing to see who can be the first to expunge the addition of the word "penis" from the Salma Hayek article, or whatever. Typically this happens within about 15 seconds.
I've been impressed by the civility of the Wikipedia community as well. Unlike the comments on YouTube, which truly are the worst of the worst in terms of Internet discussions, Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly friendly, helpful, and impartial. If they have an opinion on a controversy, they tend not to reveal that opinion. Experienced editors I had never communicated with took me under their wing, guiding me and defending me from attackers. When I lapsed into sarcasm in one contentious discussion, another editor called me out for this behavior. In short, editing Wikipedia is for grown-ups — if you aren't one, either you become one fast, or you just go away.
Even after making just a few edits to Wikipedia, I felt transformed — and here's where the "religious" aspect comes in. To make one simple improvement to one Wikipedia article is to contribute to a massive global project. It's likely Wikipedia will be around for a very long time, and that single improvement may last well beyond your corporeal life on Earth. You will have been a part of something greater than yourself, at the same time leaving your mark on the world, making it just a little better than you found it. Isn't that the best of what religion has to offer?
* Articles on celebrities and other frequently vandalized pages tend to be protected, which means they can't be edited by users with no editing history. However, the requirements to qualify for editing these pages are minimal.
Here's how I saw Wikipedia previously: It was an uneven, sometimes reliable (but often not) collection of information managed largely by amateurs, useful for getting a general idea of a topic, but not for research or any serious purpose. Most major articles seemed organized well enough, so I figured there must be a system in place to oversee the editing process. I had heard that anyone could edit Wikipedia, but I assumed that if you submitted an edit, it went to some kind of authorities for approval, and maybe your edit would show up in the article and maybe it wouldn't.
That isn't how Wikipedia works at all. Anyone, anywhere can edit Wikipedia, and change it, right now.* You don't even need to create an account or sign in. Furthermore, there are no "authorities." There are administrators, which are volunteer editors who have been promoted by other editors to perform certain functions, such as banning repeat vandals, and there is also a paid office staff who generally don't get involved in editing. All of the articles are managed by the community of editors, who check each other's edits on a completely equal footing. Since getting involved, I've been continually amazed by how effective this system is.
Wikipedia has a bad reputation as a serious source of information — but it should not be used for that purpose. Instead, it should be used as a gateway to information. One of the things that makes the system work so well is that any addition to the encyclopedia, at least in principle, needs to be backed up by a "reliable source," so if you're looking for a serious reference for research, start with the article and then follow the sources. Reliable sourcing doesn't always happen on Wikipedia, but with major articles that are watched by a lot of editors, as well as highly controversial articles, it almost always does (and it's getting better all the time). Take the article on 7 World Trade Center, for example. Naturally, it is a magnet for conspiracy theorists, who have been trying to tweak the facts therein for years. Without exception, though, dubious and poorly referenced edits are reverted by the community. Fringe theories, according to a key Wikipedia guideline, are not to be given "undue weight" in articles describing the mainstream position. As a result, you'll see very little "9/11 Truth" in the 7WTC article, although there is a link to the article that discusses these theories at length.
Naturally, conspiracy theorists hate Wikipedia. It represents everything they detest — the squelching of alternative ideas and opinions, by some vague assumed authority, in favor of the monolithic mainstream view. For an enthusiast of reality like myself, though, Wikipedia offers an easy way to distinguish educated, informed, scholarly views on a topic (explained in detail and thoroughly referenced) from fringe theories by a small number of not-so-scholarly folks. This is because anyone caught pushing a fringe point of view is quickly ostracized on Wikipedia. Furthermore, blatant acts of vandalism are immediately reverted; at any moment, there are dozens of editors watching the recent changes page, competing to see who can be the first to expunge the addition of the word "penis" from the Salma Hayek article, or whatever. Typically this happens within about 15 seconds.
I've been impressed by the civility of the Wikipedia community as well. Unlike the comments on YouTube, which truly are the worst of the worst in terms of Internet discussions, Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly friendly, helpful, and impartial. If they have an opinion on a controversy, they tend not to reveal that opinion. Experienced editors I had never communicated with took me under their wing, guiding me and defending me from attackers. When I lapsed into sarcasm in one contentious discussion, another editor called me out for this behavior. In short, editing Wikipedia is for grown-ups — if you aren't one, either you become one fast, or you just go away.
Even after making just a few edits to Wikipedia, I felt transformed — and here's where the "religious" aspect comes in. To make one simple improvement to one Wikipedia article is to contribute to a massive global project. It's likely Wikipedia will be around for a very long time, and that single improvement may last well beyond your corporeal life on Earth. You will have been a part of something greater than yourself, at the same time leaving your mark on the world, making it just a little better than you found it. Isn't that the best of what religion has to offer?
* Articles on celebrities and other frequently vandalized pages tend to be protected, which means they can't be edited by users with no editing history. However, the requirements to qualify for editing these pages are minimal.
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