Catmachine

I get the feeling that I have already mentioned the whole issue of waking up just before the alarm clock goes off in this blog. It's exactly the kind of thing that it would have occurred to me to write about in the early days when I was doing it regularly. Back in that heady time I used to get up at 6.30am, tap away at the keyboard and then hit PUBLISH POST without a second thought. Given that I'd so recently dragged myself up out of sleep it isn't at all surprising that I'd end up writing about alarm clocks. Nowadays I plan things more and write a blog entry over a couple of days so alarm clocks aren't so fresh in my mind. It's odd when it happens though, this preemptive waking. Depending upon how deeply you've been asleep you snap or drift into wakefulness and wonder what it is that has roused you. Sometimes it almost seems as if you heard an alarm clock going off in the next room or at least dreamed that you heard one. And then it actually goes off...

Have you ever wondered what it's like to die? I'm not talking about the famous tunnel of light reported by near death experience patients ; by definition that isn't what it's like to die otherwise those describing it wouldn't have been able to pass on their report. If this is the case, then it could very well be impossible to know; however, I'd like to make an informed guess. Ever since I've been writing this blog on a regular basis I've touched on topics like the nature of consciousness, time, space and reality. It shouldn't be that difficult to cobble together a basic description of the dying of the light. I'm not really that concerned with the actual cause of death, provided it's not being run over by a steamroller or evaporated by a nuclear explosion. I'm more interested in deaths of the slipping away variety. I'm going to start talking about noses here for a paragraph or so. It's not as much of a non sequitur as it m...

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it" Niels Bohr So, smelling is quantum. No really. As mentioned in an earlier blog entry , it turns out that the underlying biological mechanism that allows us to smell relies on quantum tunnelling to get the job done. It seems to me that if one neurological mechanism - and quite an old one at that - uses the very structure of reality itself to function, then it's likely they all do. But what would the implications be if we discover that our very thoughts are subject to the new physics? As is so often the case I have to put in a disclaimer; I Am Not A Scientist . I am someone interested in science; someone who, upon reading about the latest bleeding edges of physics in the quest for ultimate truth, starts performing thought experiments based on his very dim understanding of what he's just read. So bear in mind that I may very well be talking rubbish. Don't slouch, Albert I am not shocked by quantum...

It is odd how sometimes we can get so wound up over nothing. Literally. How often have you heard someone say that they're afraid of the dark or hate the cold? A visitor from another reality whose only experience of this one is our communication could be forgiven for thinking that these qualities, along with their cousin silence, were active, sometimes malignant, presences in our universe. Even some primitive human philosophers used to think of cold and dark as distinct properties, yins to the yangs of heat and light. But of course they're not. They're not anything, because they don't exist. Far from being the opposite of heat and light, they are simply their absence. If anything heat and light are the interlopers, streams of subatomic particles (or waves depending upon which side of the quantum bed you got up this morning) bombarding matter, buffeting it. This constant assault is the price we pay for being warm and for being able to see. The natural state of the unive...

"The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it [but] as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me ... immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents." Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past There seems to be nothing quite like smell (and its twin brother taste) for stirring up the memory in a way and to such a powerful extent that none of the remaining senses are able to. At the moment I seem to be stopped in my tracks by this experience on an almost daily basis. I step out of the building onto the frosty campus and am instantly thrown back to any one of a number of past winters; in the playground at school, on this very same campus some twenty years previously, visiting my grandmother fo...

Quite why anyone would actually want to go back in time and shoot their own grandfather is beyond me. It's said so glibly and yet I'm forced to think that even if I possessed a time machine and a desire for grandpatricide, I would have absolutely no idea how to go about procuring a gun. Nevertheless this rather bloodthirsty scenario is often cited as a clinching proof of the impossibility of time travel. I'm not so sure. I feel sure it could be solved given the application of Many Worlds Theory (MWT). Broadly put, Many Worlds Theory states that everything that can happen, did happen. That is not to say that the universe is watching and decides to split in two every time you toss a coin; it's more that at a very basic quantum level everything happens. We can work upwards from that. This means that Schrödinger's famous cat is alive in one universe and dead in another - no spooky co-existence in both states until observed is necessary. Mind you, I wouldn't be ...