the speed of thought compared to the speed of light

In Sharon of Two Salem, Book 3, there's a reference to how our perception of time passing by would be greatly slowed down if our thoughts moved at the speed of light (I can't quote the passage here, because it would be a spoiler).

The speed of light is 186,282.397 miles per second. This is going to take a few posts for ME to understand, so bear with me.

From Discover Magazine's website, "The Brain: What Is the Speed of Thought?" is found this information:

"Our nerves operate at many different speeds, reflecting the biological challenges of wiring all the parts of the body together. In some ways evolution has fine-tuned our brains to run like a digital superhighway, but in other ways it has left us with a Pony Express."

From the Wikipedia entry, "Nerve conduction velocity," there are indeed many speeds measured for impulses traveling through various neural pathways; the range is all the way from 0.5 meters per second to 120 m/s. Generally, though, "Largely generalized, normal conduction velocities for any given nerve will be in the range of 50–60 m/s." So for this calculation, we'll use 60 meters per second for the speed of thought. First we convert the speed of light to the metric system, which results in 299,792,458 meters per second. To see how that compares to the speed of transmission in neurons:

299,792,458 m/s (light)                                       X

___________________                          =                 ___________________

            60 m/s (thought)                                         1

...where X will give us how much faster light is than thought. Cross-multiply and divide, and X equals 4,996,541. This basically means that if our thoughts truly did move through our neurons at the speed of light, everything would be slowed down by a factor of almost FIVE MILLION times!

We'd get bored very quickly! More posts on this to follow...

summoning a lightning strike!

From volume one of Sharon of Two Salems, page 11:

"Squinting, she tried even harder to imagine electricity dropping down from space.

"A bolt of blue lightning plunged out of the hazy sky and struck the metal of her car’s hood. The engine roared to life. The lightning held on for a moment, then disappeared."

This is going to be a far stretch, between discussing real lightning and the possibility of someone being able to control it...with their mind!

There are a few problems with lightning called down from outer space in Sharon of Two Salems. First and foremost, lightning…as we know it…cannot exist in the vacuum of outer space. From the entry "Lightning Discharge" in Wikipedia is this description:

"Once a conductive channel bridges the ionized air between the negative charges in the cloud and the positive surface charges below, a massive electrical discharge follows. Neutralization of positive surface charges occurs first. An enormous current of positive charges races up the ionic channel towards the thundercloud. This is the 'return stroke' and it is the most luminous and noticeable part of the lightning discharge."

Air, therefore, is a necessary part of lightning. And, as described in Wikipedia, most of luminosity of a lightning strike comes from the charges that are traveling upward from the positively charged surface…so lightning does not travel downwards. Additionally, lightning only travels about ⅓ the speed of light. The star that the character, Sharon Miller, calls lightning from is approximately 129 light years from Earth. This would mean that even if lightning could travel through outer space, it would take 387 years to reach us!

No spoilers, but later in the book, scientists conclude that it can't really be true lightning that Sharon is generating. For all of the above reasons. Let's just consider the idea of PEOPLE generating any kind of electrical discharge using some unknown power of their minds…

From the Theoi Project website, "Zeus"

Armed with a lightning bolt in his left hand, the idea of someone being able to create lightning pretty much only belongs to the character, Zeus, from mythology. There have been many experiments done with people that claimed  psychic powers, but I'll have to keep searching for ones done with those who claim they could create electricity. I couldn't find anything!

instantaneous space travel?...how about wormholes?

A model of 'folded' space-time illustrates how a wormhole bridge might form with at least two mouths that are connected to a single throat or tube. Credit: edobric | Shutterstock

In Sharon of Two Salems: Vol. 2: Lightning Always Strikes Twice, on pages 1 and 2:

"...the old car...had already made two trips to the moon and back, and was even capable of instantaneous space travel. 

"The latter Sharon just barely understood; that it could be done only where the concentration of surrounding stars was great enough to create some kind of 'grid.' Once they explained that they had never traveled to the next galaxy over because there weren’t enough stars in between, she’d formed a primitive concept in her head of how it worked. The nitty-gritty physics part of it, though, she hadn’t even tried to comprehend."

The fictional physics in the book require that there has to be a certain concentration of stars in order for the three-dimensional grid that allows instantaneous space travel to occur. Three subatomic particles, unknown to Earth scientists, combine at the center of very large stars, and this is what causes the "grid" to connect to other nearby, large stars. In between the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy, however, the concentration of stars drops off rapidly and the grid stops forming at a certain low concentration.

This is truly fictional. The closest thing we know to even faster-than-light space travel is in the realm of theoretical physics, and it involves "wormholes." Even traveling through such a phenomenon would take at least a little bit of time...not "instantaneous" at all! 

This is how it's postulated that a wormhole might work (from "What is a Wormhole?" on space.com, by Nola Taylor Redd, April 13, 2015) --

"A wormhole is a theoretical passage through space-time that could create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe. Wormholes are predicted by the theory of general relativity. But be wary: wormholes bring with them the dangers of sudden collapse, high radiation and dangerous contact with exotic matter...

"In 1935, physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen used the theory of general relativity to propose the existence of 'bridges' through space-time. These paths, called Einstein-Rosen bridges or wormholes, connect two different points in space-time, theoretically creating a shortcut that could reduce travel time and distance... Wormholes contain two mouths, with a throat connecting the two. The mouths would most likely be spheroidal... Einstein's theory of general relativity mathematically predicts the existence of wormholes, but none have been discovered to date...

"Science fiction is filled with tales of traveling through wormholes. But the reality of such travel is more complicated, and not just because we've yet to spot one.

"The first problem is size. Primordial wormholes are predicted to exist on microscopic levels, about 10–33 centimeters. However, as the universe expands, it is possible that some may have been stretched to larger sizes.

"Another problem comes from stability. The predicted Einstein-Rosen wormholes would be useless for travel because they collapse quickly. But more recent research found that a wormhole containing 'exotic' matter could stay open and unchanging for longer periods of time.

"Exotic matter, which should not be confused with dark matter or antimatter, contains negative energy density and a large negative pressure. Such matter has only been seen in the behavior of certain vacuum states as part of quantum field theory.

"If a wormhole contained sufficient exotic matter, whether naturally occurring or artificially added, it could theoretically be used as a method of sending information or travelers through space.

"Wormholes may not only connect two separate regions within the universe, they could also connect two different universes...

"'A wormhole is not really a means of going back in time, it's a short cut, so that something that was far away is much closer,' NASA's Eric Christian wrote.

"Although adding exotic matter to a wormhole might stabilize it to the point that human passengers could travel safely through it, there is still the possibility that the addition of 'regular' matter would be sufficient to destabilize the portal.

"Today's technology is insufficient to enlarge or stabilize wormholes, even if they could be found. However, scientists continue to explore the concept as a method of space travel with the hope that technology will eventually be able to utilize them."

converting energy to matter

The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful proton smasher in the world, includes the ATLAS detector, one of the LHC’s four particle detectors. (image: CERN)

On page 169 of the third in the series (Sharon of Two Salems: All the World's a Stage) is the following passage:

BLAM, BLAM, BLAM! The discharges from outer space struck the enclosed trailer that Claire had quickly constructed.... Inside the trailer a dense battery grew, as the energy from Sharon’s lightning was converted to mass. It fell to Sharon to make the battery large enough to fill the U-Haul—and to do so quickly. Claire had calculated ten strikes would be just right, and if the last one was even a little bit too much, the excess energy would dissipate into the air, rather than letting the battery break the struts on the inside of the trailer.

What happens here takes a huge leap of imagination. The idea of someone being able to call lightning down from the sky with their mind will be discussed in another post (!), for there is some news to report on the other topic touched on here: the conversion of energy into mass.

The state of research on this science is in its infancy. Right now, it's going to take an experiment with the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva) that will use an enormous amount of energy to hopefully produce an almost immeasurably small amount of mass. From Science Daily:

First proton collisions at world's largest science experiment should start in early June

Date:

April 28, 2015

Source:

Southern Methodist University

Summary:

First collisions of protons at the world's largest science experiment should start the first or second week of June. The LHC restarted is second run in early April. There are no significant signs of new physics yet, but DeRoeck said it will take only one significant deviation in the data to change everything.

To make it clear why this will help in this area of research, the following explanation is from an article posted a year ago on the website of London's Imperial College:

Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest

Imperial physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. 

In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial’s Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934. 

Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of turning light into matter ever predicted. The calculation was found to be theoretically sound but Breit and Wheeler said that they never expected anybody to physically demonstrate their prediction. It has never been observed in the laboratory and past experiments to test it have required the addition of massive high-energy particles... 

The new research, published in Nature Photonics, shows for the first time how Breit and Wheeler’s theory could be proven in practice. This ‘photon-photon collider’, which would convert light directly into matter using technology that is already available, would be a new type of high-energy physics experiment. This experiment would recreate a process that was important in the first 100 seconds of the universe and that is also seen in gamma ray bursts, which are the biggest explosions in the universe and one of physics’ greatest unsolved mysteries.

 

more thoughts on computerized glasses

The computerized glasses that Claire makes for Sharon are able to do something that we can only hope will eventually be a feature of the glasses that will be on the market:

Promotional image via Magic Leap

From the third book of Sharon of Two Salems, page 40:

“How many fountains do you think have ever been here in City Hall Park?” she asked Ellen, taking her glasses off to get an unobstructed view of the park without words and names of things floating everywhere.

“I think your friend knows the answer to that better than I do,” Ellen laughed, jostling her baby as she talked. “Claire, is that something you’ve come across in your studies—how many fountains there were here?”

Claire cleared her throat a little too loudly, causing Sharon to look over at her. That didn’t even sound human, she thought.

Claire stared at Sharon and tapped the corner of her thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

Oh, she wants me to put my glasses back on. As Sharon did so, she turned back to Ellen and said apologetically, “I’m really blind without these.”

The second they were on, Claire said, “In 1842, the Croton Fountain was built there.” She pointed to a plaque set in the stone walkway, not far from where they stood. Immediately a colossal fountain appeared in Sharon’s glasses.

She stepped back and stifled a gasp. It partially enveloped a side of the present-day fountain, was much larger, and had spectacular jets of water. It looks like a painting, though, Sharon thought, and the water isn’t moving.

It'll be one thing to have text displayed in the first version of Google Glass, but what about images displayed related to the location one is at? And not only just that, but also having the images "stay in place" (relative to the landscape) as the wearer moves his/her head around?

I found this on Gizmodo: "How Magic Leap Is Secretly Creating a New Alternate Reality." At the time the article was written last November, they were already speculating this kind of visual phenomenon (the animation above is from Magic Leap).

The writer, Sean Hollister, says:

If the results of my digging are correct, this is what Magic Leap intends to build: a Google Glass on steroids that can seamlessly blend computer-generated graphics with the real world. A headset packed with fiber optic projectors, crazy lenses, and loads of cameras. An augmented reality that you'll actually believe in.

Having this kind of functionality would revolutionize museum tours, and turn outdoor environments into museums as well (as happened for Sharon in the excerpt above, when a painting of the fountain that used to exist is superimposed over its original location). Conceivably, voice commands and eye movements could make the tour interactive.

Go to Magic Leap's website! The images they have there are SPECTACULAR. To be honest with you, I can't wait!

virtual reality suits, continued...contacts or headset glasses?

Also from the first book of Sharon of Two Salems, on page 102:

"You’ll want to do your face last because as soon as the face part is activated, you’ll be looking out through the robotic form’s eyes, and that will line up your eardrums at the same time for sound.”

Sharon is being instructed how to put on the virtual reality suit, which in this case consists of invisible force fields. Since this is the first time she's put it on, they've tinted the VR suit a transparent purple to make it easier for her to put it on. What she sees is a mold of her own body, except she's looking at the inside of it. 

Once her eyes touch the eyeball shapes of the form, it as if she's put contacts on and she sees only the visual information coming through the suit...the visuals also correspond to which direction she looks. 

So, again, we have to take a step back because we're nowhere near developing a force field that can transmit information from another environment, much less even one that can protect someone from shock waves (see this Wired Magazine article, "That Boeing Force Field? It Probably Won’t Ever Work"). Let's look at where the VISUALS for virtual reality suits actually are at this point, though:

1. From the website for Manufacturing Global: "...Smart contact lenses may do a lot more interesting things down the road, and Google has been researching the capabilities for quite some time. Now it has a new patent related to making them." (The patent describes the micro-architecture of the proposed lenses, but doesn't explain what each thing does.)
2. Virtual reality glasses, or headsets, have been out for a longer time, and have come a long way from the early models. See "Why Samsung’s Gear VR is a virtual reality game-changer." From the article: "You’d think they had just discovered electricity or an alternative universe. In some ways, they had. The teens jumped around, yelped with excitement, and didn’t want to stop playing a few basic flight games and watching movies in the virtual reality theater."                                                 
                                              
   An attendee tries an Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR headset during the French telecom Orange annual company's innovations show in Paris Oct. 2, 2014. (REUTERS/Charles Platiau)
    
3. And, of course, Google Glass has been mentioned in a previous post. The difference between previous prototypes of Google Glass and Google's contact lenses in #1, above, may in fact be that the contacts will still be designed to see THROUGH, with information superimposed in the wearer's field of vision. But what will stop Google from adding a feature where the contacts become opaque, and the wearer is seeing only the virtual reality set he or she is interacting with?

the first of several posts on virtual reality suits

From the first book of Sharon of Two Salems, on page 101:

“Here’s the VR suit,” Alice said.

“Where?” Sharon asked.

“It’s invisible—it’s just a force field that wraps around your body. And that section of floor moves in all four directions as you walk on it. It will also tilt and incline with the same angle of the floor the virtual reality robotic form is walking on at that moment. Here, why don’t you try it?”

Sharon steeled herself and gingerly stepped onto the square area. Nothing happened. So far, so good, she thought.

“Now try walking,” Alice instructed.

Sharon took a shaky step forward. The foot behind her slid backward, though, and she found herself in exactly the same place in the center of the panel.

Feeling a little braver, she walked normally. The material of the panel moved right along with her steps, and she stayed exactly in the same place. She even turned a little, and it easily accommodated that movement.

A virtual reality setup that includes being able to walk in place--while the visuals through the glasses show the participant walking to a new location--is in development.

The Virtuix Omni™ evolves virtual reality one step further, allowing anyone to stand up and traverse virtual worlds with the natural use of their own feet. Walking and running in virtual reality creates an unprecedented sense of immersion. 

It will be interesting to see the final product. Here are some more details:

The Omni uses a concave platform that enables a smooth, natural gait and an immersive walking and running motion. Comfortable Omni shoes allow for extended gameplay and fast-paced battlefield action. A robust support ring and unattached support harness provide maximum safety and versatility for rapid, unconstrained movements. Walk, run, jump, and turn swiftly and smoothly in 360 degrees without restraints. 

 In Sharon of Two Salems, force fields surrounding the body provide the "safety net" so that the person in the suit can't fall off of the panel. However, we're still a ways from creating something remotely like a force field, much less one that would cushion up gently to one's arms and legs. 

It will be interesting to find out how the safety features on the Omni work to prevent falling, including the "unattached support harness," as they get ready to roll out this product. 

A vacuum for radioactive emissions?

On page 120 of the second volume of Sharon of Two Salems:

She looked down at her robotic form, and it had no colors emanating from it to the orb. Her form could function in close proximity to the sphere because it depended on plain old electricity to run. That part still didn’t make sense to Sharon. If the orb was vacuuming up something as powerful as radioactive emissions, why weren’t the lesser forms of electromagnetic radiation being sucked up, too? However, this was a good thing; their electrically powered robotic forms wouldn’t function if the orb suddenly started absorbing regular old electricity as well.

The assumption in this paragraph is that there could be some undiscovered field of physics that would allow for radioactive emissions pouring in all directions from a source to be somehow deflected or "bent"...without affecting other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Also the assumption is that the orb absorbing the radioactivity wouldn't affect physical matter, either.

It is know that very heavy objects in deep space (such as a compact cluster of galaxies) can cause a phenomenon called "gravitational lensing." The light from objects behind the heavy mass is actually bent as it passes by. To us here on Earth, looking through our telescopes at places in space this is occurring at results in us seeing a visual distortion of the object behind. Here's a classic example:

Strong gravitational lens LRG 3-757

From Wikipedia:

What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above, the gravity of a luminous red galaxy (LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More typically, such light bending results in two discernible images of the distant galaxy, but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a horseshoe -- a nearly complete ring.

The "orbs" in Sharon of Two Salems have been written to be about as big as a super large beach ball. If something that size could not only bend rays of radioactivity but suck them into itself as well, it would be more powerful than the strongest gravitational lenses we can see in space. Remember, we can still see the objects behind the "lenses"--but in the story, the radioactivity is completely diverted to the orb and consumed by it (the latter will be a topic for a future blog post).

The orb would have to be gravitationally more powerful than the largest objects (or clusters of objects) in space, yet smaller than a car. In this universe, I (the author) have to admit that's physically impossible. Not only would radiation be swept up into it, but light and physical objects as well. In fact, it would be a black hole...easily sucking up the entire earth, all the other planets and their moons, and the sun. It's "event horizon" would extend well beyond the reaches of the Kuiper Belt, and it would probably consume those space rocks as well.

But it is fiction we're talking about...I just haven't thought of a good MADE-UP way to explain it...

Computerized glasses?

In Sharon of Two Salems: All the World's a Stage (volume 3) --

“Nothing.” Sharon focused once more on the names of stores and roads that floated by in the field of vision of her new glasses. “Are these like those prototype glasses Google is working on?”

And then a little later, the sound in them is explained to Sharon:

“Your glasses are also stereo speakers, specifically they are located in the temple arms.”

However, she suffers from sensory overload after wearing them for a while:

Sharon had her glasses off to rest her eyes from the multitude of words that hovered over the buildings, streets, and stores in the area.    

Now back to real life. "Google Glass" is the prototype that Google has been working on for quite some time. 

(Google Glass logo)

This Wikipedia article has a good summary of the research and development. This is where the state of the project stands currently:

According to Google, Project Glass was ready to "graduate" from Google Labs, the experimental phase of the project.^{[BBC reference]}

The device is currently not available for sale, but Google remains committed to developing the next model. 

The main concerns that have been raised about Google Glass relates to privacy, since they are...and new models will continue to be...capable of recording video and sound. I'm not going to discuss that here, since some of the characters in my novel  had violated a great deal of privacy by hacking into people's personal computers and into some of the most powerful computers in the world, by this point in the story (I may discuss that particular subject in a future post).

As I wrote my novel and tried to imagine what wearing glasses like these would be like, it occurred to me how distracting it could become if too much information was visible in one's field of vision. After a while, I added the feature of my fictional version of the glasses having voice control to turn off some of the features. 

Nevertheless, the problem remains one of distraction. Walking could be problematic if one is reading information off of their glasses. True multi-taskers are rare, and we've all experienced what it's like talking to someone who's on facebook or texting and not REALLY listening...

Questions I still have about Google Glass:

1. Is the text and imagery that's projected onto the glass always in focus for the wearer? For example, if their eyes focus on something a few inches away and then suddenly on the sunset, does the focus of the projected imagery remain clear and readable?
2. Are there already apps for Google Glass that allow names of locations to "hover" over them as the wearer physically approaches these places?
3. (a fun question) Can interactive games be designed that would allow projected animations on the glass "react" to things the viewer sees in his or her field of vision?