omnispace

The Singuarity

"The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed from the astrophysics of black holes. The phrase has varied meanings; as used by Vernor Vinge and Raymond Kurzweil, it refers to the idea that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030. The Singularity is both a potentially wonderful, but also terribly scary idea. The "point" of the Singularity is essentially when all of these trends go out of control. They move beyond our event horizon, and we can no longer follow along in any linear manner. Technological change is instant. And what if the machines decide we are no longer relevant? Now, if one is well versed in other metaphysical models than the materialist transhumanist ones, there are some striking similaries to find. The Singularity is potentially like a technological ascension. Just notice for a moment that a number of the technologies that are envisioned simply couldn't be released into the world today. The world would be destroyed very quickly, mostly because there would be some wackos who would push the wrong button. Imagine if the plans for a do-it-yourself hydrogen bomb were available on the Internet, and anybody who could use a screwdriver could build one out of $50 worth of parts from Home Depot. It would be a matter of days before some crazy guy would decide that it is a cool idea to nuke your city, just to see what would happen. Nano-tech can be like that too. One big mistake with self-replicating nano-machines and you turn the whole world into grey goo. Humanity at large is obviously not of a mental state to be able to handle that kind of power and responsibility. ray kurzweil

Quantum chromodynamics [QDC]

Here is a collection of the most recent visualizations of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the underlying theory of the strong interactions. As a key component of the Standard Model of the Universe, QCD describes the interactions between quarks and gluons as they compose particles such as the proton or neutron. State of the art order a4-improved lattice operators are used in creating the animations, including the three-loop improved lattice gauge action and the five-loop improved lattice field strength tensor. The animaton at right was featured in Prof. Frank Wilczek's 2004 Nobel Prize Lecture.

The animation above illustrates the typical four-dimensional structure of gluon-field configurations averaged over in describing the vacuum properties of QCD. The volume of the box is 2.4 by 2.4 by 3.6 fm, big enough to hold a couple of protons. Contrary to the concept of an empty vacuum, QCD induces chromo-electric and chromo-magnetic fields throughout space-time in its lowest energy state. After a few sweeps of smoothing the gluon field (50 sweeps of APE smearing), a lumpy structure reminiscent of a lava lamp is revealed. This is the QCD Lava Lamp. The action density (top) and the topological charge density (right) are displayed. The former is similar to an energy density while the latter is a measure of the winding of the gluon field lines in the QCD vacuum.

The animation above shows the suppression of the QCD vacuum from the region between a quark-antiquark pair illustrated by the coloured spheres. The separation of the quarks varies from 0.125 fm to 2.25 fm, the latter being about 1.3 times the diameter of a proton. The surface plot illustrates the reduction of the vacuum action density in a plane passing through the centers of the quark-antiquark pair. The vector field illustrates the gradient of this reduction. The tube joining the two quarks reveals the positions in space where the vacuum action is maximally expelled and corresponds to the famous "flux tube" of QCD. As the separation between the quarks changes the tube gets longer but the diameter remains approximately constant. As it costs energy to expel the vacuum field fluctuations, a linear confinement potential is felt between quarks.

The manner in which QCD vacuum fluctuations are expelled from the interior region of a baryon like the proton is animated above. The positions of the three quarks composing the proton are illustrated by the coloured spheres. The surface plot illustrates the reduction of the vacuum action density in a plane passing through the centers of the quarks. The vector field illustrates the gradient of this reduction. The positions in space where the vacuum action is maximally expelled from the interior of the proton are also illustrated, exposing the presence of flux tubes. A key point of interest is the distance at which the flux-tube formation occurs. The animation indicates that the transition to flux-tube formation occurs when the distance of the quarks from the centre of the triangle (< r >) is greater than 0.5 fm. The average inter-quark distance (< d >) is also indicated. Again, the diameter of the flux tubes remains approximately constant as the quarks move to large separations. As it costs energy to expel the vacuum field fluctuations, a linear confinement potential is felt between quarks in baryons as well as mesons. derek leinweber