TRANSCRIPT SOURCE WAS ONCE HERE: http://members.fortunecity.com/templarser/flowtime.html

Roger Penrose : I think there's always something paradoxical about the way we seem to perceive time to pass and the way physics describes time.

Roger Penrose : Space-time is certainly different stuff from space because its 4 dimensional instead of 3-D (RP larfs!) which is a big diff. Time really has to be brought into the picture; this one thing which is space/time.

Physicist : Just imagine what this might be like: 3-D space implies a volume, and you can move any where in that volume. Once you add time as a 4th dimension, another axis, then this block of space/time would contain within it past, present and future, all at once. Time is frozen, all times exist together; so just as you can say "over here, over there" in 3-D space, you can talk about "over then", in 4-D space/time.

Roger Penrose : It's a way of looking at things if you like which physically we seem to be forced into. I say physically from the point of view of what the theory of rel. tells us. And Relativity is remarkably well tested, I mean, 14 places of decimal, it's just incredible. So we know that this theory does describe the universe to an extraordinarily precise degree, so we have to take it seriously. And that theory tells us that we have to regard space and time as one thing, it's all out there, it's one thing. In the same sense that space is out there, time is out there.

Narrator : Like the Medieval God's-view of time, Einstein's physics says that the future is already out there. The moments of our lives are just waiting for us to step into them.

Roger Penrose : But there's no more problem about the future being out there than saying that space is out there. You say, "Mars is out there", but why is that more comprehensible than saying "next week is out there"? It's just as far away in a certain sense.

Physicist : If you take this block of 4-D space/time literally, it means you have to abandon free will. It means not only is the future pre-ordained, but its already there, its already happened. There's no point in making any decisions, whatever you do has already happened. If I choose to drop this stone into a pond, I think of it being my own free choice, but of course in 4-D space/time I had no choice in dropping the stone ; the splash is already there in the future and so we lose all free will. If time travel was possible, you can imagine people coming back from the future to visit us; its no good us saying, "you cant exist - you haven't happened yet". They've come from a time which they consider to be their 'now' and for them we're in their path.

Roger Penrose : So this means that in a sense, the present past and future are out there, and that also gives us a very deterministic view of the world. We have no control of what happens in the future because its all laid out. I think the trouble that people have with this idea is that you think the future is under your control, to some degree, and so this means that if the future's laid out then in a sense its not under your control.

Physicist : Personally I'm very uncomfortable about the block universe idea. Now this may be just a gut feeling or just irrational, but can't accept the future's already 'out there'. I don't accept that I don't have any free will.

Roger Penrose : I think there is a positive side to this picture of space and time being laid out there as 4 dimensions, because it tells you that all times are there once and it can affect the way one thinks about people who have died. I mean, I remember thinking in this kind of way when my mother died. In some sense she was still there because her existence is still out there in space/time although in our time she is not alive. A colleague of mine had a son who died in tragic circumstances and I presented this idea to him and it helped his understanding also. This was before I heard that Einstein had a colleague died and he wrote to the man's wife that Bessa was still out there, and that somehow this was reassuring. I certainly think this way often, that space/time is laid out and that things in the past and things in the future are out there still.

Narrator : But almost at the same time that Relativity was gaining universal acceptance a radically different picture of the universe was emerging.

Physicist : The way out if you don't want to accept the block universe idea is quantum mechanics. Now, Quantum Mechanics is the second great discovery of the 20th century physics and that states that the future isn't predetermined and preordained.

Narrator : Quantum Mechanics was born out of a series of experiments whose results even today have no satisfactory explanation. Relativity works at the large scale where it provides exact predictions as to what will happen next. But when physicists started looking down at the atomic and sub-atomic level, the familiar laws failed. At this level, there were no certainties, only probabilities. How can the future of the universe be already out there if the future of a single molecule is so utterly unpredictable?

Physicist : Before we look to see what the atom is doing, not only is there a gap in our knowledge, the atom itself has not decided what to do. It had an infinite number of choices to make, it will be doing all those choices all at once, and its only when we look to see what is happening do we force it to make a choice. In Quantum Mechanics the future is not determined, and so Quantum Mechanics in a sense rescues us and rescues free will.

Roger Penrose : In a sense you don't have the future laid out in Quantum Mechanics So Quantum Mechanics. is basically different in the way we look at it. You do have this indeterminacy about the future and a necessary feature of this is its incompatibility with Special Relativity. So we have these 2 great theories, both of which are extremely accurate, tell us something about how the world operates, something very insightful and profound and accurate, but they're incompatible with each other. So there's no doubt there's something missing here. How important it is to how we 'feel' the passage of time is I think very important.

Narrator: The tragedy of modern physics is that it explains so much of the objective universe but at the cost of what we subjectively feel; about our conscious free will and our feeling that time does flow.

Faun Flynn: I very much think there's a flow to time. If you consider what music would be like if there was no flow to time. You couldn't have music if you didn't have memory, or if you didn't have an expectation generated by that memory. You'd have an isolated note in the 'now'. Music unfolds in time in such a way that we have a memory of what we've heard, and this memory conditions to what we expect. This of course is something that everybody is familiar with, because if you hear ( 7 note scale played on piano) you have a very strong expectation that the next note will be (plays final octave note of scale) . Music is a distillation or a side-effect of that mental faculty we employ to perceive time, and things changing in time.

Roger Penrose : The question of the passage of time is something the scientists have rather set aside, and taking the view that its not really physics, it's a subjective issue; and subjective questions are not part of science. Now when you start talking about phenomena like one's own perception of the passage of time, then that is a subjective thing. And that's almost a taboo subject for science because it's subjective. The physical world at least according to Relativity, is out there, and there is no flow of time, it's just there; whereas our feeling (we have this feeling of the passage of time) are intimately connected to our perceptions.

Physicist : We have this subjective feeling, that time goes by, but physicists would argue this is just an illusion.

Roger Penrose : Yes I think physicists would agree that the feeling of time passing is simply an illusion, something that is not real. It has something to do with our perceptions.

Narrator : Illusion or not, our perceptions emerge somewhere between the cosmic scale of Relativity where the flow of time is frozen and the quantum scale, where flow descends to uncertainty. Our world is on a scale governed by a mixture of chance and necessity.

Roger Penrose : My view is that there is some large scale quantum activity going on in the brain. Physics does not say that Quantum Mechanics takes place in small areas, but also take place over larger areas. I think this has to do with the consciousness. I think we need a new way to look at time, not either Quantum Mechanics or Relativity.

Narrator : If Quantum Mechanics is taking place in the brain then the same randomness of outcome and unpredictability might explain our ability to make sometime random choices. Opening up the future to the possibility of change would provide the first step of restoring to physics the flow of time it currently denies.

Physicist : I don't think time flows, I feel that time flows, but I feel we can only understand this if we have a better understanding of how consciousness works. I think human consciousness probably has the secrets as to how and why we think of time as going by.

Roger Penrose : I don't think we have the tools, I don't think we have the physical picture to accommodate these things yet. We're not very close to it.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-145621

SNIP: ...The June 20th issue of The New York Review of Books contains a devastating portrayal, by the art critic Richard Dorment, of the activities of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and its (now dissolved) sister institution, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. The foundation was established, according to Warhol’s will, to provide for the “advancement of the visual arts,” and was to be funded by the sale of a large number of works the artist left to his estate. The board was assembled for the purpose of deciding whether a given work was an original Warhol. As I’ll explain, that task is hardly straightforward.

Dorment’s fundamental accusation is that members of these overlapping organizations were in a position to profit from the authentication process, and that this affected their decisions. Whether these accusations hold up or not, the Warhol situation epitomizes a curious fact about the art world since the postmodern period.

Postmodernism in the arts repudiated many of the basic teachings of modernism: the myth of individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. Yet arts institutions continued to operate throughout the postmodern period, and do so right up to the present moment, as though that critique never happened. Museums, foundations, government endowments, and university art departments all effortlessly absorbed a movement which was more or less devoted to destroying their conception of the arts. They treated the postmodernists exactly the way they’d treated the modernists.

As the ur-postmodernist, Warhol’s entire artistic practice and persona stood, quite intentionally, in opposition to modernist ideas. He was the very antithesis of a Van Gogh, a Picasso, a Pollock. Where they (it was held) re-made the world visually and emotionally in the smithies of their tortured souls (to paraphrase James Joyce), Warhol blithely swiped subject matter from mass media. He presented himself as a kind of empty mirror for the images that were already all around us in advertising or entertainment or packaging. And his persona was famously cool and withdrawn, or even blank: just the opposite of the outsized, impassioned personalities of Picasso or Pollock.

Nevertheless, like the arts establishment generally, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board proceeded as if the postmodern era that Warhol crystallized never happened at all. The board stamped, in indelible ink, works it rejected as original Warhols. Their decisions make a substantial difference in the art’s value. [...] Why is that? If modernism died in actual art practice, why did the art market and museum system go on as though nothing had ever happened? [...]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...eus-exist/

GARY GUTTING: "...Further, as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned. Socrates and Plato criticized certain poetic treatments, which showed Zeus and the gods in an unworthy light. But they never questioned the very existence of the gods, and Socrates regularly followed the dictates of his daimon, a personal divine guide. There were many questions about the true nature of the divine, but few about its existence.

Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? [...] Most of us do not find our world so filled with the divine, and we may be inclined to dismiss the Greeks’ “experiences” as over-interpretations. But how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do? What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life? If we cannot eliminate this as a real possibility, shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?

Let’s consider some objections...."

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/weird_sc...t_partner/

A.C. LEE: Although H.P. Lovecraft has exerted a towering influence on the development of science fiction and horror, until recently, Brian Kim Stefans argues in an essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, his work hasn’t held much interest for literary critics or philosophers.

Stefans thinks Lovecraft’s “singularly fraught metaphysical universe,” and his refusal of an authoritative “panoptic vision” of the world, spoiled both his own attempts at a novel andthe efforts of literary critics looking for a tidy interpretive framework through which to engage and explain him. But Stefans hears a Lovecraftian echo in the work of a loose grouping of young philosophers, the so-called “speculative realists,” a connection made explicit in “Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy,” by Graham Harman.

Harman sees Lovecraft’s “failures” precisely as “virtues.” Where 20th century philosophy was marked by the “linguistic turn” and various attempts at reductionism, and accordingly mixed results, Lovecraft insisted on and reveled in identifying both the limits of language and the unexplainable gaps in reality. Harman, according to Stefans, hopes to make Lovecraft “a foot soldier” in a war “against bland, realist empiricism” in the vein of Hume and Kant. --The Stone

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2014...ort.com%2F

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...101414.php

Big Data analytics are helping to provide answers to many complex problems in science and society, but they have not contributed to a better understanding climate science, despite an abundance of climate data. When it comes to analyzing the climate system, Big Data methods alone are not enough and sound scientific theory must guide data modeling techniques and results interpretation, according to an insightful article in Big Data, the highly innovative, peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Big Data website.

In "A Big Data Guide to Understanding Climate Change: The Case for Theory-Guided Data Science," James Faghmous, PhD and Vipin Kumar, PhD, The University of Minnesota--Twin Cities, explore the challenges and opportunities for mining large climate datasets and the subtle differences that are needed compared to traditional Big Data methods if accurate conclusions are to be drawn. The authors discuss the importance of combining scientific theory and First Principles with Big Data analytics and use examples from existing research to illustrate their novel approach.

"This paper is a great example of leveraging the abundance of climate data with powerful analytical methods, scientific theory, and solid data engineering to explain and predict important climate change phenomena," says Big Data Editor-in-Chief Vasant Dhar, Co-Director, Center for Business Analytics, Stern School of Business, New York University.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...101514.php

As medical personnel and public health officials are responding to the first reported cases of Ebola Virus in the United States, many of the safety and treatment procedures for treating the virus and preventing its spread are being reexamined. One of the tenets for minimizing the risk of spreading the disease has been a 21-day quarantine period for individuals who might have been exposed to the virus. But a new study by Charles Haas, PhD, a professor in Drexel's College of Engineering, suggests that 21 days might not be enough to completely prevent spread of the virus.

Haas's study "On the Quarantine Period for Ebola Virus," recently published in PLOS Currents: Outbreaks looks at the murky basis for our knowledge about the virus, namely previous outbreaks in Africa in 1976 (Zaire) and 2000 (Uganda) as well as the first 9 months of the current outbreak.

In both cases, data gathered by the World Health Organization reported a 2-21 day incubation period for the virus –meaning that after 21 days if the individual hasn't presented symptoms they are likely not to be infected or contagious. This is likely the genesis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 21-day quarantine period, but there is little indication from the CDC as to what other considerations played into this policy.

"Twenty-one days has been regarded as the appropriate quarantine period for holding individuals potentially exposed to Ebola Virus to reduce risk of contagion, but there does not appear to be a systemic discussion of the basis for this period," said Haas, who is the head of the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at Drexel.

Haas suggests that a broader look at risk factors and costs and benefits should be considered when setting this standard. With any scientific data of this nature there is a standard deviation in results –a percentage by which they may vary. In the case of Ebola's incubation period the range of results generated from the Zaire and Uganda data varied little. This might have contributed to the health organizations' certainty that a 21-day quarantine period was a safe course of action.

But looking more broadly at data from other Ebola outbreaks, in Congo in 1995 and recent reports from the outbreak in West Africa, the range of deviation is between 0.1 and 12 percent, according to Haas. This means that there could be up to a 12 percent chance that someone could be infected even after the 21-day quarantine.

"While the 21-day quarantine value, currently used, may have arisen from reasonable interpretation of early outbreak data, this work suggests reconsideration is in order and that 21 days might not be sufficiently protective of public health," Haas said.

Haas, who has extensive background in analyzing risk of transmitting biological pathogens, explains that these quarantine periods must be determined by looking at the cost of enforcing the quarantine versus the cost of releasing exposed individuals. Looking at the potential tradeoff between costs and benefits as the quarantine time is extended should guide public health officials in determining the appropriate time. Obviously, with more contagious and potentially deadly diseases the cost of making a mistake on the short side when determining a quarantine is extremely high.

"Clearly for pathogens that have a high degree of transmissibility and/or a high degree of severity, the quarantine time should be greater than for agents with lower transmissibility and/or severity. The purpose of this paper is not to estimate where the balancing point should be, but to suggest a method for determining the balancing point."

http://news.osu.edu/news/2014/10/15/astr...ke-planet/

SNIP Our view of other solar systems just got a little more familiar, with the discovery of a planet 25,000 light-years away that resembles our own Uranus. Astronomers have discovered hundreds of planets around the Milky Way, including rocky planets similar to Earth and gas planets similar to Jupiter. But there is a third type of planet in our solar system—part gas, part ice—and this is the first time anyone has spotted a twin for our so-called “ice giant” planets, Uranus and Neptune....