Will the real Reality please stand up...

I sometimes find myself in this recurring debate ... it's not terribly serious, it's the old one about waves and particles but in field theory.

I have long held the position that, in QM, what you can detect is what is (physically) real - everything else is just maths. I've thought this position is a form of empiricism.

In fundamental physics, what you detect is, oversimplifying a tad, particles.

But I keep running into people who will tell me
  "but hang on - just because you don't detect something, does not mean it does not exist."
Which is to say, the Universe exists outside our experience of it. That's, what?, realism? Existentialism?

The idea is that the field of Field Theory is more fundamental than what we detect as it gives rise to the particles. We may not be detecting fields - but we do detect their effects.

I'm thinking that, then, the only way to distinguish a "real" fundamental field from one that just happens to produce the right numbers is Occam's Razor ... and we may not even have that because many of the same people will expound on the physical reality of those "virtual particles" that mediate forces in particle physics while I'd call them "math" because they crop up as a step in a calculation process called "perturbation theory".

I could point out that "more fundamental" is not the same as saying "real". It could be a more fundamental maths.

One of my old professors points out that the concept of "reality" may not mean much in Quantum Mechanics ... that's a lot of help!

In QM, "steps in a calculation" have this way of biting you. For instance, there is a "sum over many paths" formulation for reflection famously demonstrated by Feynman which has the anle of reflection and incedence equal only on average (after all the other possible angles have added and subtracted out).

That's just a calculation - one where there are lots of intermediate steps. Does light really follow unequal angle paths? Well, it's easy to check - just remove the bit of the mirror where the angles would be equal and see. Sure enough, you get a reflection! It's dimmer, but it's there. The light that makes the reflection could not follow the rules you learned in secondary school.

You can take this further - but you get the point. So what is "real" here?

Equal Marriage (thoughts)

The trouble is that the word "marriage" has religious, social, and legal meanings now - and the different meanings get mixed up. When you get married there are three parts to the process to reflect this:
the religious ceremony: even civil weddings usually have some spiritual/symbolic aspect;
the legal ceremony: usually a hurried affair of signing the papers;
the social ceremony: i.e. the reception - speeches and so on.
Leave out any of them and you don't "feel married", as most of you who are married will no doubt attest. If you miss out two, people tend to really notice... and this is an emotional topic so feelings are important. The point is not just to get hold of some assorted legal benefits and obligations but to convince everyone who is important to you that this relationship is serious - you both really mean it this time!

Steps 1 and 2 have the same name ... we have to use the words "in law" or something to distinguish them. Either one would be a marriage - but you are only married in law if you do step 2.

Step 3 has a different name. It is not normally thought of as part of the marriage itself but if you leave it out the feeling is different: it feels like you don't really mean it. So - everybody does something.

The equality folk want step 2 to be the same contract for all couples. Since this step is, in real life, separate from step 1, you'd think there wouldn't be much fuss.

It would be so much easier if they [steps 1 and 2] had different names.

We could strike "marriage" from the law books and replace it by that different name. That would be logical and neatly gets government out of the marriage business.

There are some problems with this.

It doesn't feel the same - people don't want to get "civil unioned" they want to get "married". Probably just need a better name than "civil union" but why can't you just call yourself "married" if you feel like it?

This is what is actually going on: religious people want to reserve the word "marriage" so that not just anybody can claim to be married. Just like not just anyone can call themselves a lawyer or a doctor. But, instead of being about a professional standing, it is more about branding. People claiming to be married in religion are claiming a status for their relationship in the context of that religion. So it is more like not everyone can claim their touchscreen tablet computer device is an "iPad".

It is about the (market) position of that religion in society, their social identity is under threat, they want to protect it.

The unexpected artist

It's been a while - time to check back in.

I have been somewhat busy with acting. Yes... acting.
There is this acting workshop I do with Studio 111 in Mt Eden - I should have a show-reel from that in a few weeks - and my agent (Kam Talent) has been shoveling opportunities my way. It's all very bewildering since I never saw myself as part of the artistic crowd.

I'm still assembling my impressions for a proper post - stay tuned.

Reflections on Software Freedom and ethics.

"Everything is permissible, but not everything builds up".
-- 1 Corinthians 10:23

"Nothing is true, everything is permissible."
-- Hassan i Sabbah

We usually expect things like criminal law to reflect general social ideas about what constitutes criminal behavior. The trouble comes when special interests try to influence legislators to pass the cost of enforcing their interest to the public purse by turning anything against that interest into a criminal act in law ... particularly without regard for the popular conception for what constitutes a criminal act.

Where an act is not generally considered to be criminal - we may still restrict it if there is a general perception of greater-harm in allowing a few to misuse their freedom. So, some (many?) people are prepared to accept searches and restricted carry-on items at airports for fear that some may misuse their "freedom of carry" to, say, blow up the plane.

This is why we are subject to all that propaganda about how it is really bad to infringe media and software licence terms however draconian. Convincing people that copyright infringement really is a theft, in the same way that stealing a handbag or a car is theft, will make it easier for licence purveyors to justify, to the public, their restrictions ... and easier to shift the cost of enforcing those restrictions to the public purse in the form of criminal charges.

The fact is that changes in technology have made acts which have been more-or-less in the background, like lending a favorite book, or sharing a mix-tape, that have always been considered ethical, so much easier that old-style copyright restrictions become too expensive to enforce. You can't keep prosecuting your customers - and they can't pay the fines, so what are you to do?

Business is pretty Darwinian - the fitness landscape changes and you have to mutate to survive. You shift your costs and generally play for time, hoping the change is transient or that you can find a working strategy. Those who try to add further restrictions, criminalize aspects of sharing etc. are gambling that the changes are transient - they are pulling their heads in, battening down the hatches. It has worked before I guess. But, this time they have it badly wrong: they are gambling that sharing is a temporary social aberration. It isn't. The temporary condition was always going to be the restricted sharing model that they have been able to exploit for so long.

We are in a transition period - a period of marked diversification. We should expect the field to thin out as those strategies which are unsuccessful in meeting the challenges of the new technologies die out, and reveal new species of service provider.

And then the next change happens.

Prostate C and Fearmongering

Close up on now - raving on about prostate testing. Some guy is trying to get all the male viewers to go have a prostate test ... just in case. "I gat it, and got really scared, you should be scared too!" He's using bullying tactics to encourage men to go to the doctor. But if it saves lives, is that a bad thing?

I don't think they (Close Up) are making a good case. They point out that you are dumb not to get tested regularly because a "massive" 500 men a year are dying of prostate cancer.

Back-of-envelope - the male NZ population is about 2,200,000 so the annual chance of dying of prostate cancer (per year) is about 0.023%.

This means you'd have a 1.3% chance of dying from prostate cancer over about 60 years of adult life.

The advocate asserted that the $45 per visit to have the test "could be the best $45 you've ever spent" ... how likely is that? If I went to the doctor every month, that is $32000 over 60 years - the chance that was $32000 wasted is 98.7% isn't it?

But that's a bogus calculation ...the emphasis of the program is on the wrong stats. and on the wrong problem:

The stats:
... about a third of all the people who die in NZ, die of cancer.
Reducing cancer rates is a good national goal.

13% of (detected) cancer cases are prostate cancer - 2471/18615 cases.
(this won't include people who have non-terminal cancer who do not seek medical help.)

51 people a day are diagnosed with cancer, and there are 21 deaths.

So the 500 prostate deaths are 6.5% of all cancer deaths. (actually 7.1% = 561 deaths)
... if you are diagnosed, there is a 561/2471=23% chance you'll die of it - erk: roll a d4!
However, these are skewed by the people who waited long after symptoms to seek medical help.

And this is the real problem: the men are leaving it too long!

What the program has left off is how often one should get a prostate test to have a decent chance of detecting the cancer before it's too late.

So I looked it up: it is medically not recommended to give all men a prostate test (like we do with women and cervical or breast cancer).

While we now have some evidence that regular testing may prevent prostate cancer deaths, there are concerns that many men may be diagnosed and treated unnecessarily as a result of being screened, with a high cost to their health and quality of life. 

Men who show symptoms (broadly: trouble urinating - look it up) should certainly seek medical help though.

The Australia / New Zealand Urological society does suggest that men get the test once after they turn 40 - which can be a digital rectal exam (the doctor sticks a finger up your bum) and/or a blood test. This is to assess your risk for the next 15 or so years.

If you are going to the doctor anyway - the cost is going to be minimal: changing the cost-benefit calculation at the top in favor of having the test done.

So how scared should men be about prostate cancer? Not very.
I did mine a few years back.

Heliocentric experiments

I have recently been challenged to come up with an experiment that demonstrated the heleocentricity of the Earth-Sun system (that the Earth goes around the Sun) like experiments such as Foucault's Pendulum demonstrated the rotation of the Earth.

Demonstrating that you are accelerating is not as easy as Newton supposed. For instance, if you are sitting in a room and noticed that you were being pushed back in your chair, your cup slides towards you across the table and the lamp hangs from the ceiling at an angle, you could surmise that you are accelerating. OR that the room is tilting. OR that another mass has moved into position (somehow) to change the total gravitational field. OR that an invisible spirit is playing a joke on you. See what I mean?

There is nothing special, in physics, about heleocentricism - it is just another frame of reference. Its not even inertial since the Sun, with the entire solar system, accelerates around the local center of mass of the Galaxy and that about the local galactic cluster.

We only teach it in class because students seldom have the math to handle the arbitrariness of reference frames and because we favor, for philosophical reasons, those ideas that have the least amount of extraneous assumptions and fiddly bits.

So what am I to do?

Fortunately the phrasing of the challenge gives me a way forward ... you see, all the same arguments are valid for a spinning/not-spinning Earth. Classically we figure the Earth is spinning in the sense that we can show how coriolis and centrifgal effects vary over the surface. The spinning Earth is the least fiddly model that accurately accounts for what we can measure.

One of the consequences that leads to Foucault's pendulum also means it is easier to launch a satellite into a particular orbit if we have to account for the angular momentum of the Earth as it spins.

We have spacecraft that have visited the inner planets, and observation platforms about the Sun. In order to get them there, we have had to account for the orbital angular momentum of the Earth as it turns about the Sun. Here, then, is the experiment equivalent to the likes of Foucault's pendulum, that demonstrates heleocentricity in much the same way that other experiments demonstrate a spinning Earth.

That time again

I tend to get depressed this time of year... right on the day too. This is, of course the anniversary of Corwin's accident. It does not seem to have faded... though it is not as sharp as it was. Sort of a dull ache.
The memorial is still up :/