Category: Uncategorized

Quantum Music

A pure quantum musical state would then be made up of a linear combination of the 7 notes with a specific probability associated with each. And a quantum melody would be the evolution of such a state over time.

An audience listening to such a melody would have a bizarre experience. In the classical world, every member of the audience hears the same sequence of notes. But when a quantum musical state is observed, it can collapse into any one of the notes that make it up. The note that is formed is entirely random but the probability that it occurs depends on the precise linear makeup of the state.

this sounds like a greg egan novel.

Predicting innovation

a patent set’s average forward citations within the first 3 years after publication, and the average date of publication, were the best predictors of technological improvement. Magee hopes the method may be used much like a rating system. Such ratings could be useful for investors looking for the next big breakthrough, as well as scientific labs that are contemplating new research directions

Rebooting civilization

Could we? most likely not, but if so:

For a society to stand any chance of industrialising, it would have to focus its efforts in certain, very favorable natural environments: not the coal-island of 18th-century Britain, but perhaps areas of Scandinavia or Canada that combine fast-flowing streams for hydroelectric power and large areas of forest that can be harvested sustainably for thermal energy

2015-08-31:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? While Feynman’s sentence is all good and true, it isn’t particularly useful in an immediate pragmatic sense. I wrote a book recently which was intended as a guidebook for rebooting civilization after an apocalypse, looking at the key technologies and central scientific principles that underpin our lives – the behind-the-scenes fundamentals that we all just take for granted today – and what enabled society to progress through the centuries of history. I argue how the greatest invention of history is the scientific method itself – the knowledge-generation machinery that we have been using for over 350 years now to come to understand how the world works. So if you could preserve only one single sentence, I would push for: ‘The natural world is not governed by whimsical gods, but is essentially mechanical and can therefore be understood and then predicted by people, using careful observation, experimentation, and measurement, and importantly by testing your explanations to try to refute them.’ It’s this reiterative process of refinement that sets science apart from any other system for explaining how the world works.