Recently, I was thinking about crystals as illustrations. Not an uncommon thought; our imaginations are captured by their unique properties, and these properties make them interesting comparisons. A crystal’s beauty and unique properties stem from special construction on the atomic scale. Its smallest parts are arranged in a repeating, orderly manner that forms a lattice. Although some crystals gain value from impurities, the finest have none at all. In fact, their lattice structures are perfect, with neither foreign materials, nor missing elements. It is this particular example of perfection that is interesting.
Where’s the Wave Collapser?
This little video illustrates one of the big confounding questions in physics. The question is how to understand the role of conscious observation in resolving a quantum state. The problem has been around for a long time, and Erwin Schrödinger came up with this famous illustration to highlight the question. Towards the end, the video describes a higher-level perspective about the question. Continue reading
Heartless Terminators
In the movie Terminator 2, young John Connor tells the Terminator not to kill people. In response, the machine asks why. Although the answer seems obvious, the boy has a difficult time giving an explanation. Instead, he simply reiterates the command without a reason. The Terminator’s obedience to this becomes a hallmark feature of the movie, as well as the next. But it is not until later in T2 that the issue is really confronted. Continue reading
Sudden Phase Change
Imagine a basin of calm, liquid water. Perfectly still and pure. All of a sudden it is jostled, or a speck of dust falls in, and it freezes in a moment. The water must have started below freezing, yet it was liquid. This seeming contradiction can occur when very pure water is carefully lowered below freezing, so ice crystals never have a chance to form. The result is “supercooled” water. Supercooled water may remain liquid while cooled quite far below freezing. It’s easy to make in the lab or at home, and sometimes occurs in nature.
While the water is still liquid, it seems contradictory: below freezing, yet not frozen. If water below freezing is supposed to be frozen, why is this so easy to demonstrate? It just seems wrong. Continue reading
Seeing More in the Watchmen (pt. 2)
In a previous post, Seeing More in the Watchmen, I touched on some of the spiritual references in the book, and tied them together under theme of “who watches the watchmen”. That’s kind of the “theme question” for the story, in that it come up over and over. The question itself goes back to Plato, and it was originally argued that society’s watchmen must police themselves. The fallacy of that argument is illustrated nicely by the Watchmen novel.
After looking at the question, and proposing that an answer is found in the story itself, the next step was to look at what this implies about the nature of the One who watches the Watchmen. This is where things get interesting.
Seeing More in the Watchmen
I read the graphic novel “Watchmen”, and was struck from the first page by the amount of spiritual content. Not just obvious things, like The Comedian’s eulogy, the verses at the end of some chapters, or even Jon walking on water, but some of the more subtle things.
A Parable of Faiths
Long ago, a ship traveling far out at sea became stranded in the open waters. It quickly became obvious the ship was going nowhere. Since this happened in the days before radio and far away from other shipping traffic, there was no hope of anyone coming to their rescue. But in the far distance, the passengers could just make out an island. As time passed with no other option, the passengers realized their only hope for survival lay in reaching that island.
They set to work devising a way to get there.
Kelvin's Clouds 