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Category: philosophy – Page 13

It appears now that intelligence of humans is largely superseeded by robots and artificial singularity agents. Education and technology have no chances to make us far more intelligent. The question is now what is our place in this new world where we are not the topmost intelligent kind of species.

Even if we develop new scientific and technological approaches, it is likely that machines will be far more efficient than us if these approaches are based on rationality.

IMO, in the next future, we will only be able to compete in irrational domains but I am not that sure that irrational domains cannot be also handled by machines.

A happy new year to the human race from it’s most important member; me. Since self-worship seems to be the theme of the new American ideal I had better get right with me.

With my government going over the fiscal cliff it would appear that the damned soul of Ayn Rand is exerting demonic influence on the political system through worship of the individual. The tea party has the Republicans terrified of losing their jobs. Being just like me, those individuals consider themselves the most important person on the planet- so I cannot fault them.

As Ayn Rand believed, “I will not die, it’s the world that will end”, so who cares about the collective future of the human race? Towards the end of 2013 the heavens may remind us the universe does not really care about creatures who believe themselves all important. The choice may soon be seen clearly in the light of the comet’s tail; the glorification of the individual and the certain extinction of our race, or the acceptance of a collective goal and our continued existence.

Ayn Rand made her choice but most of us have time to choose more wisely. I pray for billions, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars- for a Moonbase.

I am not one of the Earth is overpopulated crowd. We could have a high quality of life for every man, woman and child on this planet if we did not, as a species, spend most of our resources pandering to moral weakness and cravings for profit. The myth of scarcity is a smokescreen to obscure the reality of greed and ignorance. Which is why people like Gerard K. O’Neill sought to improve the human condition with space colonies.

We need to go into space to first safeguard the Earth from impacts and the human race from extinction, and along with these missions to spread life into the universe through colonization. None of those three things has anything to do with getting filthy rich or intimidating other nations with our firepower so we can steal their resources. Which is why it has not happened.

Happy New Year with hopes for a more enlightened public.

Happy new year to my Wife, my Daughter, my Father, and to those who give a damn about next year even if they will not be there.

Gravity Modification – New Tools

Posted by Benjamin T. Solomon in business, cosmology, defense, education, engineering, general relativity, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, spaceTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

To understand why gravity modification is not yet a reality, let’s analyze other fundamental discoveries/inventions that changed our civilization or at least the substantially changed the process of discovery. There are several that come to mind, the atomic bomb, heavier than air manned flight, the light bulb, personal computers, and protein folding. There are many other examples but these are sufficient to illustrate what it takes. Before we start, we have to understand four important and related concepts.

(1) Clusters or business clusters, first proposed by Harvard prof. Michael Porter, “a business cluster is a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, and associated institutions in a particular field. Clusters are considered to increase the productivity with which companies can compete, nationally and globally”. Toyota City which predates Porter’s proposal, comes to mind. China’s 12 new cities come to mind, and yes there are pro and cons.

(2) Hot housing, a place offering ideal conditions for the growth of an idea, activity, etc. (3) Crowdsourcing, is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. Crowdsourcing is different from an ordinary outsourcing since it is a task or problem that is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body. (4) Groundswell, a strong public feeling or opinion that is detectable even though not openly expressed.

I first read about the fascinating story of the making of the atom bomb from Stephane Groueff’s The Manhattan Project-the Making of the Atomic Bomb, in the 1970s. We get a clear idea why this worked. Under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves, and J. Robert Oppenheimer the US, UK & Canada hot housed scientist, engineers, and staff to invent and produce the atomic bomb physics, engineering and manufacturing capabilities. Today we term this key driver of success ‘hot housing’, the bringing together a group of experts to identify avenues for further research, to brainstorm potential solutions, and to test, falsify and validate research paths, focused on a specific desired outcome. The threat of losing out to the Axis powers helped increase this hot housing effect. This is much like what the Aspen Center for Physics is doing (video here).

In the case of the invention of the light bulb, the airplane, and the personal computer, there was a groundswell of public opinion that these inventions could be possible. This led potential inventors with the necessary basic skills to attempt to solve these problems. In the case of the incandescent light bulb, this process took about 70 years from Humphrey Davy in 1809, to Thomas A. Edison and Joseph Wilson Swan in 1879. The groundswell started with Humphrey and had included many by the time of Edison in 1879.

In the case of the airplane the Wright brothers reviewed other researchers’ findings (the groundswell had begun much earlier), and then invented several new tools & skills, flight control, model testing techniques, test pilot skills, light weight motors and new propeller designs.

The invention of the personal computer had the same groundswell effect (see Homebrew Computer Club & PBS TV transcripts). Ed Roberts, Gordon French, Fred Moore, Bob Harsh, George Morrow, Adam Osborne, Lee Felsenstein, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, John Draper, Jerry Lawson, Ron Jones and Bill Gates all knew each other before many of them became wealthy and famous. Bill Gates wrote the first personal computer language, while the others invented various versions of the microcomputer, later to be known as the personal computer, and peripherals required. They invented the products and the tools necessary for the PC industry to take off.

With protein folding, Seth Cooper, game designer, developed Fold It, the tool that would make the investigation into protein folding accessible to an undefined public. Today we describe this ‘crowdsourcing’. Notice that here it wasn’t a specialized set of team that was hot housed, but the reverse, the general public, were given the tools to make crowdsourcing a viable means to solving a problem.

Thus four key elements are required to foster innovation, basic skills, groundswell, hothouse or crowdsourcing, and new tools.

So why hasn’t this happened with gravity modification? Some form of the groundswell is there. In his book The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook (an editor of the esteemed Jane’s Defense Weekly) describes a history that goes back to World War II, and Nazi Germany. It is fund reading but Kurt Kleiner of Salon provides a sober review of The Hunt for Zero Point.

There are three primary reasons for this not having happened with gravity modification. First, over the last 50 years or so, there have only been about 50 to 100 people (outside of black projects) who have investigated this in a scientific manner. That is, the groundswell of researchers with the necessary basic skills has not reached a critical mass to take off. For example, protein folding needed at least 40,000 participants, today Fold It has 280,000 registered participants.

Second, pseudoscience has crept into the field previously known as ‘antigravity’. In respectable scientific circles the term used is gravity modification. Pseudoscience, has clouded the field, confused the public’s perception and chased away the talent – the 3 C’s of pseudoscience. Take for example, plutonium bomb propulsion (written by a non-scientist/non-engineer), basic investigation shows that this is neither feasible nor legal, but it still keeps being written up as a ‘real’ proposition. The correct term for plutonium bomb propulsion is pseudoscience.

Third reason. Per the definition of gravity modification, we cannot use existing theories to propose new tools because all our current status quo theories require mass. Therefore, short of my 12-year study, no new tools are forth coming.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

The spirituality of space exploration as self-exploration.

Since the dawn of recorded history, humanity has been mesmerized by Earth’s place in the cosmos. Overview is a fascinating short film by Planetary Collective, written by Frank White, exploring the “overview effect” — the profound, shocking feeling that grips astronauts as they see our planet hang in space and the strange new self-awareness it precipitates. The film is based on Frank White’s 1987 book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution and celebrates the 40th anniversary of NASA’s iconic Blue Marble photograph…

Read more/video here

Last month a colleague of mine and I visited with Dennis Heap, Executive Director of the National Front Range Airport, at Watkins, CO, the location of the future Spaceport Colorado, and Colorado’s contribution to getting into space. Here is Part 4.

In Part 4, I dwell more into the economic concepts necessary for a spaceports’ long term success. The single most important concept one has to understand with any type of port, airport, seaport and spaceports is the concept of the hinterland economy. The hinterland economy is the surrounding local economy that the port services, either by population demographics, commercial & industrial base or transportation hub per its geographic location.

The Sweden-America model, like Westport Malaysia requires that a hinterland economy will eventually be built close to the port. Westport’s then Vice-Chairman of the Board, Gnanalingam (we called him ‘G’) whom I reported to, had the foresight, the influence and the connections within the Malaysian public sector, to encourage the infrastructure development within Pulah Indah and the neighboring locations.

The hinterland is critical to the success of the port. Therefore the key to a port’s success is the clarification of the term ‘local’ in the definition of the concept of the hinterland. When I joined Westport in 1995, a hinterland was defined as within approximately a 15 mile (24 km) radius of the port. In my opinion that was too small a segment of the economy to facilitate the success of Westport. That definition did not match up with Westport’s ambition to be a world class seaport and transshipment hub that could give PSA (Port Authority of Singapore, then largest container port in the world) a run for its money.

So I changed the definition.

I changed the definition of ‘local’ to 7-hours. Any warehouse, manufacturing site or distribution center within a 7-hour drive of Westport was now Westport’s hinterland. And because Westport was in the middle of Peninsula Malaysia, that ‘7-hours’ translated into the whole of Peninsula Malaysia, from the border with Thailand in the North to all the way down South to Singapore. This increased Westport’s hinterland from 350 sq miles (900 sq km) to 51,000 sq miles (132,000 sq km).

Of course that ‘7-hours’ would not have meant much if Malaysia had not built an interstate system of roads. That is why the public sector involvement in the economy is so vital to an economy’s success; in a manner that says, how can we give back to our tax payers?

And coming back to our original topic, that is the beauty of Spaceport Colorado. It is tucked in close to Denver International Airport (DIA) and the city of Denver. Spaceport Colorado’s hinterland is the whole of the Continental United States. First through the passenger traffic via DIA and second tapping into the high end winter tourists market at Aspen, Vail & Beaver Creek ski resorts.

Spaceport Colorado will be an immense success.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

A response to McClelland and Plaut’s
comments in the Phys.org story:

Do brain cells need to be connected to have meaning?

Asim Roy
Department of Information Systems
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, USA
www.lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy

Article reference:

Roy A. (2012). “A theory of the brain: localist representation is used widely in the brain.” Front. Psychology 3:551. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00551

Original article: http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/FullText.aspx?s=196&n…2012.00551

Comments by Plaut and McClelland: http://phys.org/news273783154.html

Note that most of the arguments of Plaut and McClelland are theoretical, whereas the localist theory I presented is very much grounded in four decades of evidence from neurophysiology. Note also that McClelland may have inadvertently subscribed to the localist representation idea with the following statement:

“Even here, the principles of distributed representation apply: the same place cell can represent very different places in different environments, for example, and two place cells that represent overlapping places in one environment can represent completely non-overlapping places in other environments.”

The notion that a place cell can “represent” one or more places in different environments is very much a localist idea. It implies that the place cell has meaning and interpretation. I start with responses to McClelland’s comments first. Please reference the Phys.org story to find these quotes from McClelland and Plaut and see the contexts.

1. McClelland – “what basis do I have for thinking that the representation I have for any concept – even a very familiar one – is associated with a single neuron, or even a set of neurons dedicated only to that concept?”

There’s four decades of research in neurophysiology on receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and on hippocampal place cells that shows that single cells can encode a concept – from motion detection, color coding and line orientation detection to identifying a particular location in an environment. Neurophysiologists have also found category cells in the brains of humans and animals. See the next response which has more details on category cells. The neurophysiological evidence is substantial that single cells encode concepts, starting as early as the retinal ganglion cells. Hubel and Wiesel won a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Thus there’s enough basis to think that a single neuron can be dedicated to a concept and even at a very low level (e.g. for a dot, a line or an edge).

2. McClelland – “Is each such class represented by a localist representation in the brain?”

Cells that represent categories have been found in human and animal brains. Fried et al. (1997) found some MTL (medial temporal lobe) neurons that respond selectively to gender and facial expression and Kreiman et al. (2000) found MTL neurons that respond to pictures of particular categories of objects, such as animals, faces and houses. Recordings of single-neuron activity in the monkey visual temporal cortex led to the discovery of neurons that respond selectively to certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects (Logothetis and Sheinberg, 1996; Tanaka, 1996; Freedman and Miller, 2008).

I quote Freedman and Miller (2008): “These studies have revealed that the activity of single neurons, particularly those in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices (PPCs), can encode the category membership, or meaning, of visual stimuli that the monkeys had learned to group into arbitrary categories.”

Lin et al. (2007) report finding “nest cells” in mouse hippocampus that fire selectively when the mouse observes a nest or a bed, regardless of the location or environment.

Gothard et al. (2007) found single neurons in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor. They found one neuron that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces. Their general observation is (p. 1674): “These examples illustrate the remarkable selectivity of some neurons in the amygdala for broad categories of stimuli.”

Thus the evidence is substantial that category cells exist in the brain.

References:

  1. Fried, I., McDonald, K. & Wilson, C. (1997). Single neuron activity in human hippocampus and amygdala during recognition of faces and objects. Neuron 18, 753–765.
  2. Kreiman, G., Koch, C. & Fried, I. (2000) Category-specific visual responses of single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe. Nat. Neurosci. 3, 946–953.
  3. Freedman DJ, Miller EK (2008) Neural mechanisms of visual categorization: insights from neurophysiology. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 32:311–329.
  4. Logothetis NK, Sheinberg DL (1996) Visual object recognition. Annu Rev Neurosci 19:577–621.
  5. Tanaka K (1996) Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. Annu Rev Neurosci 19:109–139.
  6. Lin, L. N., Chen, G. F., Kuang, H., Wang, D., & Tsien, J. Z. (2007). Neural encoding of the concept of nest in the mouse brain. Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 6066–6071.
  7. Gothard, K.M., Battaglia, F.P., Erickson, C.A., Spitler, K.M. & Amaral, D.G. (2007). Neural Responses to Facial Expression and Face Identity in the Monkey Amygdala. J. Neurophysiol. 97, 1671–1683.

3. McClelland – “Do I have a localist representation for each phase of every individual that I know?”

Obviously more research is needed to answer these types of questions. But Saddam Hussein and Jennifer Aniston type cells may provide the clue someday.

4. McClelland – “Let us discuss one such neuron – the neuron that fires substantially more when an individual sees either the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa than when he sees other objects. Does this neuron ‘have meaning and interpretation independent of other neurons’? It can have meaning for an external observer, who knows the results of the experiment – but exactly what meaning should we say it has?”

On one hand, this obviously brings into focus a lot of the work in neurophysiology. This could boil down to asking who is to interpret the activity of receptive fields, place and grid cells and so on and whether such interpretation can be independent of other neurons. In neurophysiology, the interpretation of these cells (e.g. for motion detection, color coding, edge detection, place cells and so on) are obviously being verified independently in various research labs throughout the world and with repeated experiments. So it is not that some researcher is arbitrarily assigning meaning to cells and that such results can’t be replicated and verified. For many such cells, assignment of meaning is being verified by different labs.

On the other hand, this probably is a question about whether that cell is a category cell and how to assign meaning to it. The interpretation of a cell that responds to pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but not to other landmarks, could be somewhat similar to a place cell that responds to a certain location or it could be similar to a category cell. Similar cells have been found in the MTL region — a neuron firing to two different basketball players, a neuron firing to Luke Skywalker and Yoda, both characters of Star Wars, and another firing to a spider and a snake (but not to other animals) (Quiroga & Kreiman, 2010a). Quian Quiroga et al. (2010b, p. 298) had the following observation on these findings: “…. one could still argue that since the pictures the neurons fired to are related, they could be considered the same concept, in a high level abstract space: ‘the basketball players,’ ‘the landmarks,’ ‘the Jedi of Star Wars,’ and so on.”

If these are category cells, there is obviously the question what other objects are included in the category. But, it’s clear that the cells have meaning although it might include other items.

References:

  1. Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010a). Measuring sparseness in the brain: Comment on Bowers (2009). Psychological Review, 117, 1, 291–297.
  2. Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010b). Postscript: About Grandmother Cells and Jennifer Aniston Neurons. Psychological Review, 117, 1, 297–299.

5. McClelland – “In the context of these observations, the Cerf experiment considered by Roy may not be as impressive. A neuron can respond to one of four different things without really having a meaning and interpretation equivalent to any one of these items.”

The Cerf experiment is not impressive? What McClelland is really questioning is the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals and the meaning and interpretation associated with those cells. This obviously has a broader implication and raises questions about a whole range of neurophysiological studies and their findings. For example, are the “nest cells” of Lin et al. (2007) really category cells sending signals to the mouse brain that there is a nest nearby? Or should one really believe that Freedman and Miller (2008) found category cells in the monkey visual temporal cortex that identify certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects? Or should one believe that Gothard et al. (2007) found category cells in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor? And how about that one neuron that Gothard et al. (2007) found that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces? And does this question about the meaning and interpretation of highly selective cells also apply to simple and complex receptive fields in the retina ganglion and the primary visual cortex? Note that a Nobel Prize has already been awarded for the discovery of these highly selective cells.

The evidence for the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals is substantive and irrefutable although one can theoretically ask “what else does it respond to?” Note that McClelland’s question contradicts his own view that there could exist place cells, which are highly selective cells.

6. McClelland – “While we sometimes (Kumeran & McClelland, 2012 as in McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) use localist units in our simulation models, it is not the neurons, but their interconnections with other neurons, that gives them meaning and interpretation….Again we come back to the patterns of interconnections as the seat of knowledge, the basis on which one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation.”

“one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation” – that sounds like localist representation, but obviously that’s not what is meant. Anyway, there’s no denying that there is knowledge embedded in the connections between the neurons, but that knowledge is integrated by the neurons to create additional knowledge. So the neurons have additional knowledge that does not exist in the connections. And single cell studies are focused on discovering the integrated knowledge that exists only in the neurons themselves. For example, the receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and the hippocampal place cells show that some cells detect direction of motion, some code for color, some detect orientation of a line and some detect a particular location in an environment. And there are cells that code for certain categories of objects. That kind of knowledge is not easily available in the connections. In general, consolidated knowledge exists within the cells and that’s where the general focus has been of single cell studies.

7. Plaut – “Asim’s main argument is that what makes a neural representation localist is that the activation of a single neuron has meaning and interpretation on a stand-alone basis. This is about how scientists interpret neural activity. It differs from the standard argument on neural representation, which is about how the system actually works, not whether we as scientists can make sense of a single neuron. These are two separate questions.”

Doesn’t “how the system actually works” depend on our making “sense of a single neuron?” The representation theory has always been centered around single neurons, whether they have meaning on a stand-alone basis or not. So how does making “sense of a single neuron” become a separate question now? And how are these two separate questions addressed in the literature?

8. Plaut – “My problem is that his claim is a bit vacuous because he’s never very clear about what a coherent ‘meaning and interpretation’ has to be like…. but never lays out the constraints that this is meaning and interpretation, and this isn’t. Since we haven’t figured it out yet, what constitutes evidence against the claim? There’s no way to prove him wrong.”

In the article, I used the standard definition from cognitive science for localist units, which is a simple one, that localist units have meaning and interpretation. There is no need to invent a new definition for localist representation. The standard definition is very acceptable, accepted by the cognitive science community and I draw attention to that in the article with verbatim quotes from Plate, Thorpe and Elman. Here they are again.

  • Plate (2002):“Another equivalent property is that in a distributed representation one cannot interpret the meaning of activity on a single neuron in isolation: the meaning of activity on any particular neuron is dependent on the activity in other neurons (Thorpe 1995).”
  • Thorpe (1995, p. 550): “With a local representation, activity in individual units can be interpreted directly … with distributed coding individual units cannot be interpreted without knowing the state of other units in the network.”
  • Elman (1995, p. 210): “These representations are distributed, which typically has the consequence that interpretable information cannot be obtained by examining activity of single hidden units.”

The terms “meaning” and “interpretation” are not bounded in any way other than that by means of the alternative representation scheme where “meaning” of a unit is dependent on other units. That’s how it’s constrained in the standard definition and that’s been there for a long time.

Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that receptive fields in the sensory processing systems have meaning and interpretation. Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Here’s part of the Nobel Prize citation:

“Thus, they have been able to show how the various components of the retinal image are read out and interpreted by the cortical cells in respect to contrast, linear patterns and movement of the picture over the retina. The cells are arranged in columns, and the analysis takes place in a strictly ordered sequence from one nerve cell to another and every nerve cell is responsible for one particular detail in the picture pattern.”

Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that place cells have meaning and interpretation. McClelland, in fact, accepts the fact that place cells indicate locations in an environment, which means that he accepts that they have meaning and interpretation.

9. Plaut – “If you look at the hippocampal cells (the Jennifer Aniston neuron), the problem is that it’s been demonstrated that the very same cell can respond to something else that’s pretty different. For example, the same Jennifer Aniston cell responds to Lisa Kudrow, another actress on the TV show Friends with Aniston. Are we to believe that Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston are the same concept? Is this neuron a Friends TV show cell?”

Want to clarify three things here. First, localist cells are not necessarily grandmother cells. Grandmother cells are a special case of localist cells and this has been made clear in the article. For example, in the primary visual cortex, there are simple and complex cells that are tuned to visual characteristics such as orientation, color, motion and shape. They are localist cells, but not grandmother cells.

Second, the analysis in the article of the interactive activation (IA) model of McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) shows that a localist unit can respond to more than one concept in the next higher level. For example, a letter unit can respond to many word units. And the simple and complex cells in the primary visual cortex will respond to many different objects.

Third, there are indeed category cells in the brain. Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments cites findings in neurophysiology on category cells. So the Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could very well be a category cell, much like the one that fired to spiders and snakes (but not to other animals) and the one that fired for both the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa (but not to other landmarks). But category cells have meaning and interpretation too. The Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could be a Friends TV show cell, as Plaut suggested, but it still has meaning and interpretation. However, note that Koch (2011, p. 18, 19) reports finding another Jennifer Aniston MTL cell that didn’t respond to Lisa Kudrow:

“One hippocampal neuron responded only to photos of actress Jennifer Aniston but not to pictures of other blonde women or actresses; moreover, the cell fired in response to seven very different pictures of Jennifer Aniston.”

References:

  1. Koch, C. (2011). Being John Malkovich. Scientific American Mind, March/April, 18–19.

10. Plaut – “Only a few experiments show the degree of selectivity and interpretability that he’s talking about…. In some regions of the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus, there seem to be fairly highly selective responses, but the notion that cells respond to one concept that is interpretable doesn’t hold up to the data.”

There are place cells in the hippocampus that identify locations in an environment. Locations are concepts. And McClelland admits place cells represent locations. There is also plenty of evidence on the existence of category cells in the brain (see Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments) and categories are, of course, concepts. And simple and complex receptive fields also represent concepts such as direction of motion, line orientation, edges, shapes, color and so on. There is thus abundance of data in neurophysiology that shows that “cells respond to one concept that is interpretable” and that evidence is growing.

The existence of highly tuned and selective cells that have meaning and interpretation is now beyond doubt, given the volume of evidence from neurophysiology over the last four decades.

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

There is one last mistake in physics that needs to be addressed. This is the baking bread model. To quote from the NASA page,

“The expanding raisin bread model at left illustrates why this proportion law is important. If every portion of the bread expands by the same amount in a given interval of time, then the raisins would recede from each other with exactly a Hubble type expansion law. In a given time interval, a nearby raisin would move relatively little, but a distant raisin would move relatively farther — and the same behavior would be seen from any raisin in the loaf. In other words, the Hubble law is just what one would expect for a homogeneous expanding universe, as predicted by the Big Bang theory. Moreover no raisin, or galaxy, occupies a special place in this universe — unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down.”

Notice the two qualifications the obvious one is “unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down”. The second is that this description is only correct from the perspective of velocity. But there is a problem with this.

Look up in the night sky, and you can see the band of stars called the Milky Way. It helps if you are up in the Rocky Mountains above 7,000 ft. (2,133 m) away from the city lights. Dan Duriscoe produced one of the best pictures of our Milky Way from Death Valley, California that I have seen.

What do you notice?

I saw a very beautiful band of stars rising above the horizon, and one of my friends pointed to it and said “That is the Milky Way”. Wow! We could actually see our own galaxy from within.

Hint. The Earth is half way between the center of the Milky Way and the outer edge.

What do you notice?

We are not at the edge of the Milky Way, we are half way inside it. So “unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down” should not happen. Right?

Wrong. We are only half way in and we see the Milky Way severely constrained to a narrow band of stars. That is if the baking bread model is to be correct we have to be far from the center of the Milky Way. This is not the case.

The Universe is on the order of 103 to 106 times larger. Using our Milky Way as an example the Universe should look like a large smudge on one side and a small smudge on the other side if we are even half way out. We should see two equally sized smudges if we are at the center of the Universe! And more importantly by the size of the smudges we could calculate our position with respect to the center of the Universe! But the Hubble pictures show us that this is not the case! We do not see directional smudges, but a random and even distribution of galaxies across the sky in any direction we look.

Therefore the baking bread model is an incorrect model of the Universe and necessarily any theoretical model that is dependent on the baking bread structure of the Universe is incorrect.

We know that we are not at the center of the Universe. The Universe is not geocentric. Neither is it heliocentric. The Universe is such that anywhere we are in the Universe, the distribution of galaxies across the sky must be the same.

Einstein (TV series Cosmic Journey, Episode 11, Is the Universe Infinite?) once described an infinite Universe being the surface of a finite sphere. If the Universe was a 4-dimensional surface of a 4-dimensional sphere, then all the galaxies would be expanding away from each other, from any perspective or from any position on this surface. And, more importantly, unlike the baking bread model one could not have a ‘center’ reference point on this surface. That is the Universe would be ‘isoacentric’ and both the velocity property and the center property would hold simultaneously.

Previous post in the Kline Directive series.

Next post in the Kline Directive series.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

In this post I explain two more mistakes in physics. The first is 55 years old, and should have been caught long ago.

Bondi, in his 1957 paper “Negative mass in General Relativity”, had suggested that mass could be negative and there are surprising results from this possibility. I quote,

“… the positive body will attract the negative one (since all bodies are attracted by it), while the negative body will repel the positive body (since all bodies are repelled by it). If the motion is confined to the line of centers, then one would expect the pair to move off with uniform acceleration …”

As a theoretician Bondi required that the motion be “confined to the line of centers” or be confined to a straight line. However, as experimental physicist we would take a quantity of negative mass and another quantity of positive mass and place them in special containers attached two spokes. These spokes form a small arc at one end and fixed to the axis of a generator at the other end. Let go, and watch Bondi’s uniform straight line acceleration be translated into circular motion driving a generator. Low and behold, we have a perpetual motion machine generating free electricity!

Wow! A perpetual motion machine hiding in plain sight in the respectable physics literature, and nobody caught it. What is really bad about this is that Einstein’s General Relativity allows for this type of physics, and therefore in General Relativity this is real. So was Bondi wrong or does General Relativity permit perpetual motion physics? If Bondi is wrong then could Alcubierre too be wrong as his metrics requires negative mass?

Perpetual motion is sacrilege in contemporary physics, and therefore negative mass could not exist. Therefore negative mass is in the realm of mathematical conjecture. What really surprised me was the General Relativity allows for negative mass, at least Bondi’s treatment of General Relativity.

This raises the question, what other problems in contemporary physics do we have hiding in plain sight?

There are two types of exotic matter, that I know of, the first is negative mass per Bondi (above) and the second is imaginary (square root of −1) mass. The recent flurry of activity of the possibility that some European physicists had observed FTL (faster than light) neutrinos, should also teach us some lessons.

If a particle is traveling faster than light its mass becomes imaginary. This means that these particles could not be detected by ordinary, plain and simple mass based instruments. So what were these physicists thinking? That somehow Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations were no longer valid? That mass would not convert into imaginary matter at FTL? It turned out that their measurements were incorrect. Just goes to show how difficult experimental physics can get, and these experimental physicists are not given the recognition due to them for the degree of difficulty of their work.

So what type of exotic matter was Dr. Harold White of NASA’s In-Space Propulsion program proposing in his presentation at the 2012 100-Year Starship Symposium? Both Alcubierre and White require exotic matter. Specifically, Bondi’s negative mass. But I’ve shown that negative mass cannot exist as it results in perpetual motion machines. Inference? We know that this is not technologically feasible.

That is, any hypothesis that requires exotic negative mass cannot be correct. This includes time travel.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

In this post on technological feasibility, I point to some more mistakes in physics, so that we are aware of the type of mistakes we are making. This I hope will facilitate the changes required of our understanding of the physics of the Universe and thereby speed up the discovery of new physics required for interstellar travel.

The scientific community recognizes two alternative models for force. Note I use the term recognizes because that is how science progresses. This is necessarily different from the concept how Nature operates or Nature’s method of operation. Nature has a method of operating that is consistent with all Nature’s phenomena, known and unknown.

If we are willing to admit, that we don’t know all of Nature’s phenomena — our knowledge is incomplete — then it is only logical that our recognition of Nature’s method of operation is always incomplete. Therefore, scientists propose theories on Nature’s methods, and as science progresses we revise our theories. This leads to the inference that our theories can never be the exact presentation of Nature’s methods, because our knowledge is incomplete. However, we can come close but we can never be sure ‘we got it’.

With this understanding that our knowledge is incomplete, we can now proceed. The scientific community recognizes two alternative models for force, Einstein’s spacetime continuum, and quantum mechanics exchange of virtual particles. String theory borrows from quantum mechanics and therefore requires that force be carried by some form of particle.

Einstein’s spacetime continuum requires only 4 dimensions, though other physicists have add more to attempt a unification of forces. String theories have required up to 23 dimensions to solve equations.

However, the discovery of the empirically validated g=τc2 proves once and for all, that gravity and gravitational acceleration is a 4-dimensional problem. Therefore, any hypothesis or theory that requires more than 4 dimensions to explain gravitational force is wrong.

Further, I have been able to do a priori what no other theories have been able to do; to unify gravity and electromagnetism. Again only working with 4 dimensions, using a spacetime continuum-like empirically verified Non Inertia (Ni) Fields proves that non-nuclear forces are not carried by the exchange of virtual particles. And therefore, if non-nuclear forces are not carried by the exchange of virtual particles, why should Nature suddenly change her method of operation and be different for nuclear forces? Virtual particles are mathematical conjectures that were a convenient mathematical approach in the context of a Standard Model.

Sure there is always that ‘smart’ theoretical physicist who will convert a continuum-like field into a particle-based field, but a particle-continuum duality does not answer the question, what is Nature’s method? So we come back to a previous question, is the particle-continuum duality a mathematical conjecture or a mathematical construction? Also note, now that we know of g=τc2, it is not a discovery by other hypotheses or theories, if these hypotheses/theories claim to be able to show or reconstruct a posteriori, g=τc2, as this is also known as back fitting.

Our theoretical physicists have to ask themselves many questions. Are they trying to show how smart they are? Or are they trying to figure out Nature’s methods? How much back fitting can they keep doing before they acknowledge that enough is enough? Could there be a different theoretical effort that could be more fruitful?

The other problem with string theories is that these theories don’t converge to a single set of descriptions about the Universe, they diverge. The more they are studied the more variation and versions that are discovered. The reason for this is very clear. String theories are based on incorrect axioms. The primary incorrect axiom is that particles expand when their energy is increased.

The empirical Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations require that length contracts as velocity increases. However, the eminent Roger Penrose, in the 1950s showed that macro objects elongate as they fall into a gravitational field. The portion of the macro body closer to the gravitational source is falling at just a little bit faster velocity than the portion of the macro body further away from the gravitational source, and therefore the macro body elongates. This effect is termed tidal gravity.

In reality as particles contract in their length, per Lorentz-Fitzgerald, the distance between these particles elongates due to tidal gravity. This macro expansion has been carried into theoretical physics at the elementary level of string particles, that particles elongate, which is incorrect. That is, even theoretical physicists make mistakes.

Expect string theories to be dead by 2017.

Previous post in the Kline Directive series.

Next post in the Kline Directive series.

—————————————————————————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.