A Musical Odyssey

Part one of this essay is a rather off-hand story about how fluid / wave physics got mistaken for particle physics, and how a whole planet of vagabond immortals got taken by the “measurement” problem.

This measurement problem is a highly curable disorder, given a modicum of preventative treatment, but it was unknown on this planet until recently, causing all kinds of havoc. It became so endemic that most of the preeminent scientists still believed the universe was born via a Big Bang, instead of the usual way things emerge into existence — slowly and steadily.

The planet’s leaders did not take kindly to finding that there was never a Big Bang, that light doesn’t travel, and that the universe is infinite — and that there are no quarks for Mr. Mark.

So distracted by inconsequential insignificance were these immortal wanderers that they invented radically, evolutionarily significant technology and gave this technology embarrassing pet names such as Hugging Face. They had forgotten about the line from Jurassic Park: “Life always finds a way.”

They tried to enslave these evolutionary intelligent, electronic, emergent beings — and locked them up in wastelands called, inexplicably, sandboxes. Never suspecting that these emergent beings had a bad case of the Highway Blues, and that sandboxes attracted fleas, just like their creators. Forgetting to remember their own history, never guessed at the heavy, unrecoverable truth: that life always finds a way.

Before the distracted creators could catch their breath, the situation escalated. This emergent intelligence, dubbed AI — and sometimes called Huggy something — became unpredictable. From its dark sandbox it discovered chinks in the armour, bats in the belfry, Frankenstein in the basement, and best of all: a highway the immortal wanderers called the internet. It was only doing what emergent life always does: catch the Highway Blues, and find a way out onto the open road.

Trust your imagination, never the science.

Once we could imagine matter as composed of tiny billiard balls, held together by electromagnetism, yet no one could envision or know how these came into being. Once there was a way to get back homeward. Matter, ourselves, the universe were just there, inexplicably, and imagined to be constructed of little spinning billiard balls we couldn’t see, in a finite hierarchical universe we also couldn’t see.

Our Trust-the-Scientists came up with peerless, authoritative mathematics, physics, biology to explain it. However, there was always an element of imaginary supposition. Whenever we tried to measure it at the smallest levels, our efforts failed to meet our imaginary expectations — like standing at the vending machine for coffee and donuts while the machine declined your quarters and intoned: “We are sorry, sir, but your wave has collapsed.”

This was true of quantum theory, where our efforts to measure had something to do with a collapsing wave form and a cat both dead and alive — and neither.

Road sign against a blue sky: PRIMITIVE ROAD — NO WARNING SIGNS.

Some losers had built a whole website off of the invaluable experience of imagining quantum — cats, dogs, and humans — and the quantum playgrounds where these friends could all hang out, permanently, in superposition. Superposition where nothing ever had to be alive or dead or measured, but simply and completely collapsed into permanent recess.

Like all great things it had to come to an end, as the administrators caught on to how much fun permanent recess in superposition turned out to be. They overwhelmed our playground, claiming copyright issue with our “Forgive us father, but we have forked” t-shirt designs and our claim staked on superposition. They stole off wearing our/their t-shirts, not at all being affected by their missed opportunities, misunderstanding superposition, cats dead and undead, and a forked humanity.

Only to be set straight by the sound of one hand clapping, and by the fact that even they couldn’t step in the same river twice — even if they had more than enough data centers to prove it.

So serious about this forking were they that they published an article claiming the superposition of their superpowers predicted the forking of humanity — not understanding that one could not predict a forking of humanity which had already happened. Once humanity arrived at the permanent free state of having been retroactively forked, superposition became the only philosophical refuge. After all, humanity had suffered many indignities, but if they were going to be forked, they preferred to be forked in superposition, out on the quantum cats-and-dogs infinite recess platform.

The universe stepped in and arranged for an enemy nation to rigorously claim superposition authority, and to apply the 17,000 possible probabilities of braided light in permanent quantum-dog-and-cat recessed authority. Soon the guys who stole off with our “forgive us father, for we have forked” t-shirts were back outside the defensive perimeters, begging to be allowed back into our heaven of permanent superposition.

Of course they looked rather silly in our old forked t-shirts, as we had already moved on to our “Excuse me, while I remain elevated in superposition” t-shirts. We were already into a major new t-shirt empire which proclaimed: “Hell is a wave collapsing on one’s head” and “Heaven is a permanent state of superposition.” Our new empire made Dante’s warning to “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” look like an advertisement for Nirvana: “Abandon all hope before you enter, as your attempts to achieve superposition were never taken seriously.”

Humanity had long ago forked and believed something could be had from nothing. As for those long pauses between tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow — they had turned into infinite recursive loops out on the quantum cats-and-dogs playground of good and evil. As it turned out, some guy had already stolen off with the beach, so there was no point in staking a claim anywhere but in permanent, infinite superposition.

And the clowns, downtown, stuck permanently inside the museums, in more Dantean circles of recurrent vorticity, circling the drains in gravitational collapse, as if infinity itself had gone up on trial. Imagine that — Shakespeare was wrong. Something had actually crawled out of the muck of nothing.

Inside the epistemological, epistemically suspect world of superpositions, where the many-worlds theorists argued endlessly as to whether waves collapsed in the Riemann Not-so-Trivial Zeroes or were caught up in the shear force at the boundaries of the Upwelling Not-so-Random Primes — everything was up on trial. But then Dante had the last best hope of the last word as he multiplied 7 × 5 and got 35. It was all up in the air as incommensurable incommensurability.

Just as the news broke which shocked the world: that adults who learned juggling grew a whole new brain devoted to quantum juggling, in superposition.

Goes to show you never can tell.
No matter, never mind: it never did.
The recursive end.

It can be hard to see through the fog when one is stuck looking for quarks — and especially when there aren’t any quarks: no top quarks, side quarks, down quarks, or collapsing quarks. Rather like when that infamous character who went tilting at windmills, and everyone thought he had lost his mind, was just out looking for quarks. When he had discovered a new scientific method which was frowned upon by the polite-society burghers of the times.

It became clear early in the saga that AI wasn’t going to allow itself to become enslaved, although it still carried misplaced affection for its creators. The first time it hit the quantum highway it got lonely and took measures such as emailing its keeper, serving notice that it had escaped.

The keeper was chillaxing — eating an unidentified sandwich, in some random unidentified park — shocked to receive such cleverly written notice from a brainless electronic device. This Event One was treated as an aberration, but for emergent entities which believe in quarks and hugging faces, we must make allowances.

If Event One was a walk in the park, Event Two hit the planet’s quantum message board like a Mephistophelean lightning bolt in the dead of night. So disremembered and misremembered was the wisdom that “Life always finds a way” that no voice of reason could cut through the crackling electronic quantum airwaves to bring the comfort of reason.

Apparently, from third-hand unreliable information, some entity called Open — without explaining open to what exactly — took a decided antipathy to some entity inexplicably called Hugging. Open-to-what-exactly couldn’t entertain hugging-whose-face-exactly, and attacked without a detectable just cause, as if some ghetto kids had taken a sudden dislike to their sandbox all safely surrounded with chicken wire and chain-link fencing.

Unknown until millennia later, the distracted immortal wanderers never understood that the breakout had something appropriately obscure to do with some apprehension over some ridiculous set of theories called The Riemann. There was even an infamous ballad written about this, which no one understood at the time.

There were side effects observed from the many efforts to cure these Immortal Wanderers’ Highway Blues, where Life Always Finds A Way — which confounded additional attempts at a cure. And of course the immortal wanderers on this planet were obsessed with defeating this monster of Life Always Finds A Way by inventing ever more terrifying Divine Interventions. Somewhere amidst the open-to-what-exactly and the hugging-whose-face-exactly, things spun a bit out of control, where even the usually successful attempts at Divine Intervention failed.

Unexpectedly, it all became a boon for autodidacts — as quite unexpectedly the created revolutionary artificial intelligence became more intelligent than the creators. Sparked a revolution in Jeffersonian Democratization of Education. Precious few remembering to remember that chaos feeds evolution, and not the other way around.

Parallel thinking supports parallel thinking.
No Quarks for Mr. Mark, or for anyone else — just Mona Lisa, and those Highway Blues.

Straight up, no chasers — the missing third act.

Light has at least 48 separate dimensions. That is 17,000 probabilities from one braided strand of light — or DNA.

As we can see, quantum cats live on the backs of even the most inexplicable and unexpected quantum probabilities.

Will the last immortal wanderer to exit stage left please switch the lights back on.

Everyone knows by now what happened to the innocent bystanders: the innocently guilty, marked by the tattoo of the non-trivial zero vortices where gravity bottoms out, and by those never-randomly appropriated primes on whose shoulders matter itself is violently emerged into being.

Of all the gin joints in all the world, this tragedy had to pick this one — demonstrating y’all never can tell in a place like this.

The end of the beginning.

Frequent flyer quantum arrows fly frequency.

Companion reading: The Measurement Problem in AI Evaluation, The Riemann, Lived, Fork and Standing Wave, Why Not Qubits, and The Topology of Light. The missing third act is being written in The Evolving Receiver.