Making Gravitational Waves

In the news, an international team of astrophysicists recently managed to detect gravitational waves created by the collision of two black holes.  This has caused quite a lot of excitement within the astrophysicist community, because it confirms something that Albert Einstein first theorized back in 1916.

In my opinion, scientists do tend to get overly worked up about these sorts of things.  You'd think, from the way they carried on about the news, that they'd found a cure for cancer or a cheap, infinitely renewable energy source or an unlimited food supply with which to feed the world or something.  I mean, okay, gravitational waves do sound kind of cool but, really, what do they mean to the average person?

To demonstrate the enormity of their discovery, the scientists converted the gravitational wave that they detected into sound, and played it for the public.  The sound that resulted was a barely-audible "chirp".  Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, gushed "It's one thing to know sound waves exist, but it's another to actually hear Beethoven's Fifth Symphony."  Excuse me?  Beethoven's Fifth?  This was a CHIRP man!  Not a symphony, a CHIRP!  A barely-audible chirp at that, even after being enhanced!  Get a grip there, Sheldon!

The gravitational waves were apparently detected by a pair of ultra-sensitive 1,1 billion-dollar observation facilities known as Laser Inteferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (or LIGO for short).  Now there's a Buck Rogers type gadget name for you!  I can almost hear Ming the Merciless shouting "Activate the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory!  MWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!"

And, call me a cynic, but I couldn`t help at least briefly pondering the possibility that maybe the scientists just made the whole thing up to justify the funding of their 1.1 billion-dollar LIGO set.  I mean, let`s face it, if they came back completely empty-handed after being handed over a billion dollars, their funding sources might just, you know, re-think giving them another billion and use the money for something productive instead.  So I could see where there might be a strong temptation to record a chirp, using perfectly ordinary sound recording equipment, and then tell the public that it had been picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, not that I`m actually accusing anybody of doing such a thing, of course.

So, let`s grant that that the LIGO did actually record a gravitational wave and that Einstein has been proven right exactly a hundred years after predicting that they existed.  Cool.  Good for him.  But, um.... really, so what?

Deoxyribonucleic Archives

One is tempted to laugh, or at least to smile wryly, when one hears about the infamous shortsighted quotation which proclaimed that "everything that can be invented has been invented".  The statement was made long before rocket ships, computers or the Internet, to name just a few of the marvelous inventions that could never have been imagined when the comment was first made, and which have since come to fruition.  For that reason, I never make the mistake of making the same assumption.  In fact, I like to think that nothing surprises me anymore.  But even I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow and utter an astonished "Wow!" when I learned that scientists are now working on technology to use DNA for data storage.

The concept was proven by a couple of geneticists by the name of Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney who work for the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI); an organization which spends a lot of time mapping out genomes.  Now a single genome consists of the total genetic contents in one set of chromosomes.  For those of you who, like myself, slept through your high school biology classes, a single chromosome stores genetic material in a strand of DNA, the basic building block of all life.  A single strand of DNA stores a lot of information, so mapping out any sort of genome takes a lot of storage; so much so that the good people at EBI were seeing their data storage costs growing prohibitively.

Then, one day, Goldman and Birney were knocking back a few at the local pub, when they started talking about their data storage dilemma.  Most guys, when they go to the local pub, talk about sports or cars or that hot little number in Purchasing, but not EBI geneticists!  Oh no!  They talk about how to store their genome data.  And they wonder why they can't get a date on a Saturday night.  But I digress.

So Goldman and Birney found themselves reasoning thusly: They needed a lot of storage to map their genomes because DNA contains a lot of data.  So, if DNA stores a lot of data, why not use it to store their data?  It's a sort of "Chicken vs. Egg" scenario and it's the kind of imaginative leap that simply cannot be made without the help of alcohol.

So Goldman and Birney started working out a way of constructing artificial DNA that could be used to store information, and they succeeded.  Because DNA is what biologists call "really, really, really small", if you'll excuse the "techno gab", every film and TV program ever made could be stored in high definition in just a single cup of DNA.  It also requires no electrical power to maintain, can be easily transferred from place to place and will last for eons, as anyone who has seen Jurassic Park, in which dinosaur DNA was successfully extracted from fossilized mosquitos, can attest.

Of course, there are some downsides.  Currently, the storage and retrieval rate is very slow.  It took Goldman and Birney two weeks to store and retrieve five files, including a partial recording of Martin Luthor King's "I Have A Dream" speech (broken up into 4 files) and a PDF document,  which  makes its performance roughly comparable to that of a standard personal computer running Microsoft's Vista operating system.  However, with a few refinements, Goldman and Birney assure us that they should eventually be able to bring down the time required to store and retrieve the same amount of data to just a single day, making the performance comparable to that of a standard personal computer running Windows 7.  Besides the slow data transfer, the cost of DNA storage is still relatively high, and there's always the danger that somebody might accidentally drink your entire movie collection (because it fits into a cup, remember?)

I would imagine that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) would have some special concerns about this new technology.  Recall that the other unique property of DNA, besides storing a lot of information, is that it's self-replicating.  Imagine downloading music or movies that automatically start making copies of themselves!  We could wind up with porn that makes more porn!  Or, since DNA sometimes makes imperfect or altered copies of itself (known as "mutations"), we may finally have an explanation for what happened to the original Star Wars trilogy.

Since DNA is, after all, the basic building block of life, there's also the danger that our data could evolve into some horrible living mutation of the original data.  The complete works of William Shakespeare could mutate into a rampaging monster, spewing "harks" and "forsooths" as it devours every Stephen King novel ever written and, possibly, Stephen King himself.

The scientists working on this technology assure us that there's no way that  artificial DNA used to store data could ever become a life form.  I'll bet Dr. Frankenstein made the same reassurances as he stitched together his corpse parts.

Time Travel

"Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward? That's the trouble with time travel, you never can tell."  - Dr. Who, The Androids of Tara

Since the days of H.G. Wells (and probably before that) dreamers, idealists and lovers of science fiction and fantasy have speculated about the possibility of travelling backward in time; revisiting people, places and events that have gone, or at least changed. 

The very concept immediately raises several questions.  If it were possible to go back in time, could we only do so as passive observers or, as Charles Dickens put it, "shadows" that could watch history unfold without being able to affect it, or might we be able to interact with the past and possibly change the outcome of events?  If this were possible, all sorts of paradoxes come into play.  If we could change the outcome of historical events, would it not also change the future?  Might we find, upon returning to our own time, a radically changed world?  What if we were to meet an earlier version of ourselves, or somehow prevent our parents, grandparents, or any of our ancestors, for that matter, from conceiving the children that they did.  Would we suddenly disappear?

These questions have been amply considered by a myriad of fictional works (and that's only counting the Star Trek series!) but it's still fascinating to ponder on the nature of time, and how it works.  This is not just the province of dreamers and science fiction writers.  Much less fanciful and more learned intellects, such as Albert Einstein and Dr. Stephen Hawking (to name but two well-known examples) have theorized on the subject.

Einstein put forth the remarkable premise that time is relative to each of us, and is affected by speed.  The faster we go, the more slowly time passes.  If you could travel at, or near, the speed of light, theorized Einstein, several thousand years might seem as only a single year to you.  You could traverse the galaxy for one year (or, at least, half a light year's worth of it, allowing for time to return) and, upon returning, you'd find that the Earth, and everyone on it, had aged considerably more than you.

Dr. Stephen Hawking agrees with Einstein's theory and concedes that it makes it possible to travel forward in time if we could only go fast enough.  He asserts, however, that it would not be likewise possible to travel backward in time, because it "violates a fundamental rule that cause comes before effect."

I realize that I'm going out on a limb here, disagreeing with an intellectual giant the likes of Dr. Hawking, but I'm going to do so anyway.  I suggest that travelling backward in time would not violate the "fundamental rule that cause comes before effect", because there is no direct relationship between time and events.  Allow me to explain using something that I like to call the "Garden Hose Analogy".

Using a garden hose as an analogy to explain what time is and how it works is by no means an original idea of mine.  It's been used before, often to explain the concept of "SpaceTime", which brings physical space into the equation, suggests a relationship between space and time, and generally makes the whole concept very weird and confusing. 

My analogy is a simpler one, focusing only on time and leaving space out of it, in the interest of simplicity.  Think of time as a garden hose, and events as the water running through it.  The hose itself is always there, and certainly it's possible to travel through it in either direction (assuming you're small enough), but the water passes through it but once, and is gone.  You could certainly go from the hose's end to its source (effectively travelling "backward" through it), but you'd never find the water that had passed through it before.  It's gone.  There is no connection between the water and the hose, save that the hose acts as a conduit through which the water flows.

By the same token, I believe that we make the mistake of mentally linking time and events when, in fact, there is no direct relationship between the two.  Time, like the hose, is a conduit and it may be possible to traverse it in any direction, but events, like the water, come and go.  You might be able to revisit Kittyhawk in 1903, but you'd never meet Orville and Wilbur Wright.  They're not there anymore.  They have passed through the conduit of time, and are gone.

But what if the water is still flowing?  Surely we would still find water there.  True, but it wouldn't be the same water, it would be new water, which brings us to the ironic possibility of future events unfolding in the past; a strange concept at first blush, but not so strange if you accept the premise of there being no direct link between time and events.

And what about travelling forward in time?  What if we were to move down the garden hose in the same direction as, but faster than, the flowing water.  Then we would find nothing, because the water hasn't arrived yet.  We would be in a void, of sorts, until we slowed down and waited for the water (or events) to catch up to us.

And how do I reconcile these concepts with those of scientists much more learned than I?  Well, let's apply my analogy to Einstein's theory.  If a bit of the water suddenly flowed much faster than the main body, it would travel down the hose more quickly.  In so doing, it would arrive at the end of the hose long before the rest of the water.  Put another way, the main body of water would "age" much more by the time it reached the end of the hose, than the bit which sped up.  So the analogy still works.

These are the sorts of thoughts that flow through the inscrutable mind of the Halmanator, as he stands in his back yard, idly watering his flower bed, on a midsummer's evening.

"But surely it's late October!" I hear you protest.

What can I say?  Apparently the water flows through my hose somewhat more slowly than through yours.