- Li'l Al: "The operation has to be done at FTL so that we don’t get caught and spend a pento in a local
Minkovsky space-time. Have you checked the walls of this banking institution, Steve?"
Baby Face: "Not personally, no. I'm not an experimentalist. I just do theory."
Li'l Al: "Oh. I thought you had a background in engineering too."
Baby Face: "Well, I did a couple of labs back in my freshmen years, but I'm a bit rusty now. No. Just
numbers. I was never one to get my hands dirty anyways. However, that is largely irrelevant to our
discussion. I have calculated that in order to support the building, and if we include a fudge-factor of three
for security, the walls would have to be two meters wide. That's within a 95% confidence interval. Those
are some thick walls!"
Li'l Al: "Really? Well I'm not gonna argue with THE authority in Math today. If it's good enough for you,
you can be sure that your peers will not challenge it."
Butch: "Yeah that’s fine and dandy, but let’s get back to the non-trivial subject at hand. How are we going
to get through them walls?"
Li'l Al: "Oh, come on Butch! Where have you been since Complementarity? You make it sound like an
impossible task. Mathematical Physics certainly puts many options at our disposal. I think that we should
quantum-tunnel through the seemingly impossible barrier first one way then the other. Why, we could be
in and out like a soliton, without making waves. Can you imagine the look on the faces of those non-
specialist coppers? They would wonder how someone could clean the bank without breaking in." (The
group chuckles.)
Bugsy: "That wouldn’t be so bad, except that there is no theoretical way to prevent all those phonons
from dispersing. I can already imagine some nosy old lady snitching on us because of the racket. Nah! I
prefer the wormhole alternative. I think it’s simple, symmetric, and..."
Li'l Al: "Please review that idea for the team, Bugs, so that we’re all on the same wavelength."
Bugsy: "Sure! Nothing fancy, really. Just your ordinary wormhole stuff from your sophomore years. We
locate a black hole entrance, jump through its event horizon, and disappear into the parallel universe that
has the specific alternate history where the bank has a billion dollars in the vault. We don’t want to spend
all that energy and end up with a null hypothesis. The whole operation can be done in imaginary time,
say, in minus 10 minutes. We could be eating breakfast this morning with a billion dollars at the table. We
could do the whole operation before we hold this meeting."
Baby face: "It’s an attractive proposal, Bugs, but remember why we rejected the wormhole option? We
can't guarantee that we can get back to this particular alternate history. That’s why I have been more
inclined to go with the warp-space teleporter. Now there you have a fool-proof, c++ mechanism to stay
within this universe."
Butch: "Too bulky! I really think it unnecessary to alert the pigs to our portable accelerator. We can do it
more inconspicuously by going about it at FTL.
Li'l Al: "FTL? You're not serious, are you, Butch? FTL violates causality. Certainly we are not quite at DOE
yet! Tachyons have no experimental basis. They are still in their theoretical phase. It could backfire on us.
Besides, it has already been settled. Special Relativity forbids FTL. That's a non-starter right there."
Butch: "You know, Al! It pisses me off that you do not even attempt to keep up with the literature! You’re
light years behind. The principle is NOT that nothing can travel FTL. The principle is that information
cannot travel FTL! Phase velocity is a fact of nature! It has already been confirmed that phase velocity
travels faster than light. So you're spinning your quarks, Al, talking about stuff you don't understand.
You're walking on a tangent, confusing yourself with group velocity!"
Bugsy: "Well, Butch, you seem to be behind on news too! I'm sorry to tell you that Group velocity has also
been confirmed to travel FTL."
Butch: "That's bullshit! The problem with you is that..."
Baby Face: "Okay guys! That's enough! Let's get back on track. I insist that the teleporter is our best
option because we are not limited by speed. It can get us in and out at the speed of thought. You think,
and you're there! It leaves FTL biting the dust! We could even enhance the speed by taking advantage of
inflation. We contract the space in front and expand the space in the rear of the teleporter and..."
Bugsy: "I don't mean to cut you short, Steve, but... can I offer another proposal that we haven't kicked
around yet?"
Baby Face: "Sure! Why not? I guess no one gives a damn about my Alcubierre driven teleporter, so I
might as well chuck the idea in the basket!"
Bugsy: "Well, I was thinking that we can do the job by applying the Casimir Effect. We place two metal
plates on opposite sides of the bank and siphon the money out of the vault using negative energy."
Butch: "Yeah! Unfortunately, you'll be sucking the walls of the bank together with the dough! What if
some dark matter or dark energy gets in your way? If you're going to rob a bank in such a primitive
manner, you might as well go with tunneling. We convert the burlap bags into waves and have them seep
to the other side of the wall."
Li'l Al: "Nah! For that matter an even better option is annihilation. We just bang the loot bags together at
the right energy, make 'em disappear, and then reverse the process to bring them back at our hideout."
Butch: "It pisses me off, Al, that you don’t even make an effort to keep up with the literature. Then we go
round and round in circles like a Flatlander on a finite, but unbounded sphere. Don't you know that
annihilation does not convert the bags into nothin'. It converts them into energy. Otherwise we wouldn't
be able to get them back!"
Li'l Al: "The one who needs straightening out is you! It has been already experimentally determined that if
you take negative energy and positive energy you end up with zero energy! You're the one who is still one
step away from graduating!"
Baby Face: "Okay guys knock it off! Perhaps the best option, now that I think of it, is to infinitely curve the
space around the bank with a non-rotating black hole. They won't see us coming because the light will
curve around them."
Bugsy: "You've gotta be kiddin' me, Baby Face! Haven't you heard that the people at WMAP have already
established that space is no longer curved. Get it through your thick skull: Space is flat! The cops will be
seeing us like I see you this very second!"
Baby Face: "Hey. Watch your pions, Kip! You gotta lotta color, but no charm. You don’t even have a
Nobel. So don’t come pushing me around as if you had some authority around here. You can predict all
you want, but in the end we'll just have to test your hypothesis."
| Water cooler theorists |
Where do the mathematical physicists get all these supernatural and irrational physical interpreta-
tions for the phenomena they observe? Is it something they smoked?
I say it has to do with the entire education system. The freshmen that enter sacred monasteries like
Harvard and Cambridge are privileged mommy’s boys who never had to work in their lives. They
have no street-smartness, no capacity to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The blue bloods
doing ‘research’ and theoretics in universities around the world never had to tackle and solve a
real problem. They never have to produce the goose that lays the golden eggs. They don’t have to
report to a boss that writes a yearly review and grades them on the basis of merits. And then you
find them at the chats and forums talking authoritatively about absolute nonsense. Can you even
imagine a government, a business, or a Mafia run by theoretical physicists? Such a hypothetical
organization would border on surrealism. Just try to imagine a gang of mathematicians planning a
bank heist. Now, honestly. Would they ever really get around to doing the job?
| The Scene: A dark, humid basement at the Physics Department in California Institute of Technology (CalTech). Four of the world's foremost relativists – Alan Guth (a.k.a. Li'l Al), Stephen Hawking (a.k.a. Baby Face), Roger Penrose (a.k.a. Butch), and Kip Thorne (a.k.a. Bugsy) – are planning a heist at the local First National Bank. |
| Sherlock Bill |
| on the trail of Mathematical Physics |
- ________________________________________________________________________________________
- Last modified 02/01/08
- Copyright © by Nila Gaede 2008
| Of course, the jail is empty! What did you expect? Did you really expect these relativists to ever get around to robbing the bank? They're still in that dark, humid basement of theirs, brainstorming yet more fantastic explanations for the simple phenomena of Nature! |
Li'l Al: "Look guys. Why don't we just travel to the past and rob the bank in 1960 and kill the guards'
grandfathers? That way when we come back there won't be anyone to see us do it."
Butch: "If it were that easy, I would prefer to go back and kill your grandfather. Don't you know that we
can't travel to the past! We can only travel to the future. What type of time tunnels did you study at that
relativity think tank of yours anyways?"
Bugsy: "I'm beginning to think that we may just need to rely on string theory to do this job. It's just too
risky the way we're going about it, you know, with now obsolete Classical Quantum Mechanics and
relativity. We can be entangled by any variable, and that's not very comforting. I suggest that it would be
best if we take a one Planck-length long string and shorten it a bit until it fits through the key hole. Then
we feed it some energy and allow it to form a closed string. We repeat this amply verified process until we
weave a chain mail canvas. We can use this method to either pull one bill or one bag at a time, or have the
entire vault slide into our hands through this hammock."
Li'l Al: "Well, hold it, Bugs! We might as well forget the strings altogether and just play around with string
dimensions. Why don't we enter through the 11th or 26th dimension? Since it's curled so infinitesimally
small, no one will notice our presence."
Baby Face: "Yeah, the trouble is that the loot may be squashed in the process. Ask yourself.. what if the
dimension of width should happen to shrink on us instead of the 11th? Then what? What would happen
to the dollar bills in the bag? That's a big risk! We do all the work for nothin'!"
Butch: "Gentlemen? Have we considered the wonders of EPR? I was just thinking that maybe we could
induce reverse spin on the atoms comprising the vault with a remote electromagnet. We can then pull the
entire box through the window like a corkscrew."
Bugsy: "Roger, we already looked at that option, remember? We rejected that hypothesis on the basis
that there are hidden variables we cannot control."
Li'l Al: "You're crazy, Bugs! It's already been established that there are no hidden variables during EPR.
EPR is a product of many worlds. I personally believe that the signals arrive from the future!"
Baby Face: "Hold it people! I think I got it! All the while we're brainstorming all of these proven methods
and we had the solution in front of our noses. Why didn't I think of it earlier? Why we can just apply
Uncertainty and get away with murder. It is a fact that the vault does not simultaneously have a precise
momentum and position. Right? The more we know about one, the less we know about the other. So all
we have to do is attain a perfect measurement of momentum. Then, for sure no one will have any idea
where the vault is. We can make it disappear before their very eyes simply by taking a measurement!"
Butch: "It certainly is thought-provoking. However, we would have no idea where the vault is either.
Naaaah! I suggest that we try it in a more practical way. We enter the bank as regular customers and Bugs
generates an interference pattern on the vault and makes it disappear from view. While the officials are
looking for the vault, we cover one of the windows like we would block a slit in the slit experiment and..."
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