Castiglioncello

Last week I was in Castiglioncello. It is a small but very beautiful town in Tuscany, Italy, somewhere not far from Pisa. Between the plane and the train, I had time to detour and see the leaning tower.

 (also check this optical illusion inspired by the leaning tower.)

The reason of my visit to Castiglioncello was a physics conference :

It is organized every other year, mainly by Thomas Elze, a brilliant physicist and a dear friend who invited me. It takes place in Castello Pasquini:

Castello Pasquini

I will not list now all about 150 participants, excellent physicists from various countries and areas of research. I will mention for the moment just the Nobel prize winner Gerard 't Hooft, Tom Kibble, who also deserves a Nobel prize for co-discovering the Higgs boson, and the Fields medalist  Alain Connes. It was an excellent opportunity to finally meet in person other people, with whom I just communicated via Internet, or whom I knew only by their research papers, and also to meet again people whom I knew from other conferences.

Initially, I thought there was no beach, because people were sun bathing on the cliffs,

but asking a sandy girl, she pointed me to some stairs

leading to a real beach

It was so difficult to decide which of the talks to skip to visit Castiglioncello, or to swim in the sea. Luckily, I could swim in the night.

I staid at Hotel Leopoldo, where the breakfast was made by an excellent Romanian cook named Florin, and at the desk was a cute girl named Valentina.

At lunch, we ate at the restaurant Il Peschereccio.

Courtesy of Yaron Hadad.

A great place to have some drinks and eat a good pizza is Ghostbuster.

The conference dinner took place at Grand Hotel Villa Parisi,

a wonderful place owned by Francesca, a friendly beautiful girl.

Are sciences and arts perversions?

According to Wikipedia, perversion is

a type of human behavior that deviates from that which is understood to be orthodox or normal.

Now consider the human mind. We evolved so that we find food, make children, avoid predators etc. All these are just means that serve to our survival in a universe that is trying to kill us. Or, even better, they serve to the selfish gene, to its replication.

So, the human mind shouldn't care about things that don't serve this purpose. What evolutionary purpose can be in doing math and physics? Indulging yourself in such activities doesn't serve the purpose of your survival and replication. One may say that, at least for some, science is their job, they earn money, and they survive. But researchers know better that jobs in the industry are safer and better paid, and with better success rate. And better success at ladies (although artists are doing even better). But anyway, sciences and arts are recent, so they can't be the product of mutation and selection. So, science and arts are perversions of the original purpose of the brain.

While they are not the product of evolution, they may be a byproduct. In order to survive, our ancestors had to identify patterns around them, use these patterns to make predictions. To anticipate when a wild animal will attack them, to recognize comestible fruits, to identify a sexual partner with good potential, all these require pattern recognition and the ability to make predictions. And this is why we became intelligent. So, even if we are using our intelligence to other purposes like sciences, this is a byproduct of evolution.

Nature has a way to reward you when you do something good for your genes. This is why we like to eat and to have sex. This is why we feel proud and happy when our children accomplish tasks or acquire new skills. But the blind gene doesn't know the future, so she can't reward us for actually doing something good for her. Instead, she rewards us for guessing patterns. We feel happy when we guess a pattern, and especially when a long anticipated prediction is confirmed. We identify patterns in sounds and drawings too, so this is why we like music and other arts. Even literature, builds on our predictions and anticipation. During anticipation, the brain produces the drugs that will make us happy. Building anticipation and suspense is the craft of accumulating this happiness in the consumer of one's art.

We are surprised when we make predictions which we consider safe, and turn out to be wrong. Sometimes, the anticipation accumulates the feel-good drug, and the surprise makes it explode. So this is how we laugh. Jokes are just clever ways to manipulate us into making predictions that turn out to be wrong in an unexpected and usually harmless way.

OK, so evolution explains all these as perversions of our mind, as byproducts. However, we know that science helped us to survive better. As a result of science and of its progeny, technology, we live longer, in better conditions, we find and produce food easier, we can take care better of our children and it also helps the children of our children.

So, science really helps the replication of the selfish gene.

I can't help but asking, did the selfish gene have a secret plan all this time?

Black holes can't keep secrets

At first, math seemed to show that anything that enters a black hole, is lost forever. Later, it seemed that black holes evaporate, but the secrets remain lost. But maybe it is not so.

My new video at the FQXi contest is called Can a black hole keep a secret?, and can be seen and rated at http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2205:

To rate my video or those of my competitors, click "rate this video". You will be required to enter an email address to avoid duplicate votes. Then press "go" and vote.

You can check and rate other videos at FQXi Video Contest - Spring, 2014. You can submit your own video until August 22.

In the previous post, named The puzzle of quantum reality, in theaters near you, and at FQXi, I mentioned my other video, and my son's.

On youtube, my videos can be watched with subtitles, in English or in Romanian:
The puzzle of quantum reality
Can a black hole keep a secret?

The puzzle of quantum reality, in theaters near you, and at FQXi

I made a 7 minutes video introducing some puzzling aspects of quantum mechanics to a general audience. At the end it contains a proposed view which, at least to me, makes the things clearer, so I hope it can help others too.

My video, named The puzzle of quantum reality, can be seen and rated at http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2183:

To rate my video or those of my competitors, click "rate this video". You will be required to enter an email address to avoid duplicate votes.

I also compete against my son, whose video is at http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2176:

You can check and rate other videos, ranging from fun to informative, at FQXi Video Contest - Spring, 2014. You can submit your own video until August 22.

A confused sleeping beauty 2

This post contains a small twist of the original experiment discussed in the previous post, A confused sleeping beauty. The new version doesn't require putting anyone to sleep and removing her memories, because we replace memory removal with lack of information.

Confusing Sleeping Beauty without erasing her memory

Sleeping Beauty is no longer required to sleep, but she may still need to sleep, to remain beautiful.

Consider the following settings:

- We toss a fair coin.

- If it lands heads, we will ask once Sleeping Beauty her belief for the proposition that the question landed heads.

- If the coin lands tail, we ask her twice.

This is similar to the original experiment, but instead of erasing her memory, we just do the following:

- Before asking her any question, we toss the coin a large number of times.

- Then we ask Beauty, but not in the same order in which we tossed. For example, when we toss a coin, if it landed heads, we write down a question and don't ask it yet. If it landed tails, we write down two questions, and don't ask them yet. Then we shuffle the questions and we ask Beauty one at a time. We take care to keep track for each question to which toss is connected.

To prevent the possibility that she adjust her estimates by counting counting the number of heads and tails about which she was already asked, we don't tell her whether she guessed or not, until the end of the experiment.

We see that the most rational answer she can give is 1/3. On the other hand, of course she knows that the probability that when the coin was tossed it landed heads is 1/2.