Monday, January 09, 2012

Lost in Hilbert Space

In an SF story I was once writing I needed to get the hero out of his closed prison cell. In the old physics, he could simply have blown a hole in the wall with some explosives – but of course, the guards never let him have any.

In physics terms, the scientist is trapped by inter-molecular forces in the cell walls. An explosion simply dumps energy which disrupts these bonds – the fragments (and our hero) burst free.

But how to make things work with the new physics?

My first thought was new fields. So I started to look at the inflation field of the early universe , or some of the new stuff in supersymmetry. This is still something I continue to research but I’ve come to believe they don’t really help. The coupling between new fields and the potential barrier would still be via energy transfer so it’s just another explosion – I’ve no idea what a controlled local inflation field would do but it doesn’t seem very survivable.

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

This article is really an extended joke, the 'victim' being Michael Lockwood whose "Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" doesn't seem to say too much which is new.

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Back in Reading, finishing up some documentation for the client at this moment. Alex is in process of geting a Plusnet phone service and WiFi broadband network installed here.

At this moment the phone works while the broadband should be up within a couple of days. I'm getting my Internet connectivity as I write this from my HTC smartphone which can be configured as a WiFi hotspot, backhauling via its 3G connection.

Not bad, but it doesn't beat copper.