Ryan Westafer

“closer to nature”

So close, but so far away.

Last year, NPR’s Science Friday marked SETI’s 25th birthday. This sparked a few thoughts…

What if we’ve already got evidence of “extraterrestrial intelligence” in every signal we observe?

How would contemporary science explain that?  This idea stemmed from consideration of the signal characteristics I would expect to receive from a super-intelligent being or civilization:

• Coding: pseudo-noise. An optimal universal signal might indeed have characteristics of noise. It might be so spread-spectrum that it would be felt at all scales: from the shockwaves of supernovae to the invisible rainfall of high energy cosmic rays.  It would have very large uncertainty products; large negentropy.
• Content: survival. What sort of signal would “someone” exert the effort to craft and produce? I’d argue that it would likely be a necessary one. A signal conveying recipe(s) for life might be a good start.
• Radiation: omnidirectional. If the universe expands, the signal ought to have evolved with the expansion of the universe… i.e. it ought to have been present all along, imparted to and diffused among all the initial components, rather than being emitted from an already distant location to our present-day Earth.

Are we all extraterrestrials?

OK, that’s a weird statement; but surely I am not here on this planet of my own plan & design.  Explaining, would some scientists agree that are we all created by an unknowable universal energy (information) source?  The biomolecular chemistry which enables terrestrial life at the cellular level is powered by the most natural and universal behaviors of stochastic motion, diffusion, and equilibrium.  We are fundamentally driven by signals of indeterminate origin and assumed to be “noise.”  From such stochastic processes we can obtain “order” in the limit of distributions and averages.

Contemporary scientific theories suggest that all the structure we perceive originated in a singular event of pure (scalar) power comprising everything: time, space, etc.  This creation singularity, maybe mapped through the point (as in crystal dispersion diagrams), represents the ultimate “degeneracy” (mathematical sense…) point, from which structure condenses (emerges).  It’s amazing that, for all the triumphs of science, it seems even the most gifted of scientists cannot trace information through the singularity and must accept this limitation on a sort of faith.  Moreover, it seems that life is universal… it’s a beautiful solution interwoven throughout (and dependent upon) the entire universe; a sort of inherent gift balancing the “messy,” yet essential, random/thermal component.

One might ask why we don’t see evidence of life elsewhere… perhaps that is because life is fractal, and our very measurements have their bases within that fractal, making observable things in some sense self-similar.  We know measurements to be inner products, and thus, projections of the world onto the world around us.  This also relates to mutual information in communications theory: a source and receiver should speak the same language, having that information in common.  But, I suspect, thanks to an interplay of heat and waves, that the fractal has a “forward” direction in which we find new variations on old observations.

And I can’t help but note: this whole “extraterrestrial” creator thing seems like a secular perspective of God – that which cannot be seen but is omnipresent and ultimately responsible for all phenomena.  We as humans perceive only things our amazing but limited senses permit.  Yet we do find new perspectives – rearrangements of state – and this might be likened to looking through a kaleidoscope.

And of course I have comments on the expert commentary during the Science Friday broadcast:

• We’re looking for a “radar signal?” A “series of pulses?” We expect the signal to be polarized? We expect the signal to be modulated?I suspect an intelligent and dense signal would in fact vary all of these parameters… looking pretty random and confusing to us.
• A “focused laser beam” would be detectable “thousands of light years away” … if only one could sufficiently reduce the random angular variance in the transmitter…  and create a large enough effective aperture… and… and…

NOTE: the following is a correct procedure to access the disk image, but I was unable to recover any media from before the factory reset.  I’m not sure whether this is due to a deletion/erasure technicality with Apple’s implementation of flash storage media, the fuse filesystem, etc.

The AT&T store factory reset our iPhone 3Gs, and all the photos, etc. were deleted. Unfortunately, iTunes had not been syncing any of the photos since Dec. 2009! So, we had to run a recovery operation.
You can readily find tutorials for jailbreaking & downloading the disk image of an iPhone. Once you have the disk image, you can use photorec, part of the testdisk suite, to recover photos, etc. from the disk image… assuming they resided in areas of the filesystem which were never overwritten… just deleted.
A key command, which is often cited for other phones, and not the 3Gs, is:
dd if=/dev/rdisk0 bs=4096KB | ssh -C YourRemoteUserName@Your.Remote.IP.Address 'dd of=iphone-dump.img' bs=4096KB

Group theoretic expressions of optical singularities in photonic crystals
by Wheeldon, Jeffrey F., Ph.D., University of Ottawa (Canada), 2009, 268 pages; AAT NR51824
(PDF costs 37.00 USD for members of academic institutions.)

I contacted Jeffrey Wheeldon, and he seemed interested that his work could be relevant in that way. However, I’m not sure anything will come of the connection. Regardless, it so happens that Maxwell actually published a “molecular vortex model” which was later refined in his “On the Physical Lines of Force,” so the father of E/M has already opened the door.

This resonates with several viewpoints I sometimes think about: the wave structure of matter (atoms from waves), the conveyance of angular momentum (photons) among singularities (hearts of atoms), and others.

So I pose a question (thesis topic anyone?): “Would a 3-D extension of Wheeldon’s 2-D treatment of singularities in linear photonic crystals correspond to a structure of matter?” The scope would require much refinement.

While the claim may be a stretch for anyone, perhaps even Dr. Wheeldon, the applicability of group theory to the conditions on optical vortices in in photonic crystals just screams “standard model” to me. We shall see…

Dispersion in 1st Brillouin Zone

On the “momentum masquerade” …

Tonight I was planning a phononic crystal (PnC) photomask and lamenting photolithography feature size limitations.  Couldn’t we use the aliasing effect of the lattice to equivalently work with smaller wavelengths in a larger structure?  After all, wavenumbers above the Brillouin zone boundary are “folded” into the first Brillouin zone.  Our physical structure samples the solutions of greater momentum.

I’ve long wondered where this momentum aliasing effect fits into physics. Even a fundamental minimum length, e.g. the Planck length, would imply a great universal masquerade of momenta.  Such a view seems to agree with a few principles of a “holographic” universe.

Have a look at this 2004 paper pointing out Quantum Field Theory’s inherent momentum masquerade.  A key component is nonlinearity and convolution due to the appearance of products under the Fourier transform.

The Aliasing Problem in Lattice Field Theory

There could be many unusual perspectives on this point, but I can’t give any time to them now.  One involves CPT symmetry and the effect of time reversal on a dispersion relation.

[Side Notes]

At first look there is a curious contradiction between the dispersion and the assumption of time harmonic modes.  Each point on dispersion plots such as the one provided above is a solution to a “quasi time-invariant” eigenproblem, if that phrase makes sense.  More concretely, the time dependence has been factored out, and is singly parameterized by the eigenvalue (frequency).  How can a time harmonic signal exhibit the envelope attenuation necessitated by the Kramers Kronig relations for this dispersive medium?  We might plot this graph in 3D, with complex eigenvalues to help solve this seeming contradiction.  That’s right.  For physical signals, we can solve the complex eigenproblem where damping is allowed.  We then allow various losses.  But couldn’t this also be allowed by linear superposition of time harmonic modes?  We can form arbitrary signals (solutions) by superposing many time harmonic ones.  So maybe there is no contradiction and this method has arbitrarily reduced the problem to a basis of perfectly periodic solutions, with the caveat that all solutions are required. This notion is further validated by the “nonlocality” of the Kramers-Kronig relations which may be implemented by the Hilbert transform over all frequencies.