| from: | Edinei Santin edineisantin@gmail.com | ||
| to: | arkani@ias.edu | ||
| date: | Jul 21, 2018, 2:47 PM | ||
| subject: | Update from sunny CH | ||
| mailed-by: | gmail.com |
Dear Prof. Nima,
I hope you are enjoying the summer in Princeton and doing well personally.
Professionally, once again, I need to congratulate you for advancing the human knowledge so profoundly. I am very happy of being able to read (without paying any fees!) your recent works on the so-called associahedron and the binary representation of the amplituhedron. Both are very inspirational works for me (and for the whole Physics and cross-domain communities, I would like to think), and, to some extend, I was naturally expecting them from you and your collaborators. I think you are really in the right direction for "understanding" the unknowable multiverse ;)
That said, just today I finished reading the book Geometry and the Imagination by D. Hilbert & S. Cohn-Vossen. Usually, I concentrate on the getting of fresh human knowledge to a five years maximum time frame from the present, except for seminal works, where obviously I do not put any time constraint. It happened that this book was not in my "seminal works" collection, so I vividly thank you for suggesting it to me ;) I learned a few new things reading it and, perhaps most importantly, my own view of geometry was reshaped (or augmented, if you prefer) on several subjects.
Since the above suggestion has and will have an impact on my work, I would like to share another book suggestion to you, i.e. Scale Relativity And Fractal Space-time: A New Approach To Unifying Relativity And Quantum Mechanics by L. Nottale (you might easily buy it from Google Books, if you are interested in having it as eBook in your computer for easy reading and annotation). Probably you know this French scientist or probably not, I do not know, but I would like that you would be kind in reading the abstract of this book, at least (and I think you will grasp the ideas very straightforwardly, as I did being a modest electronics engineer ;).
Moreover, as I hope it is obvious for you, I have been working in unifying quantum mechanics and relativity and ultimately finding the fundamental laws of our multiverse in my spare time, for pure amusement and personal curiosity. As of today, my "theory" (or whatever name one would call it - really, I do not matter at all ;) advances the works of S. Wolfram on spacetime (but I do suspect Mr. Wolfram has a huge amount of unpublished material developed during the past years - so, he could possibly be (far) beyond the reach of work), and I am about to advance the work of L. Nottale mentioned above. I do not intended to publish my findings in the next months or years to the appreciation of the related scientific communities because i) I am doing this as a hobby - I still buy food, drink, and other human necessities with my hard work as electronics engineer ;), and ii) most importantly, there are (far) more urgent problems to address first, some of them involving our own existence on Earth!
I think you also share the thoughts that machine intelligence is and will be a complete game changer for our society. It could be very beneficial, and then we would benefit of the so-called augmented era, or it could be very catastrophic, completely vanishing the human species on planet Earth. And, the causes leading to these two distinct outcomes could be really subtle and is presently unknown. Hence, before trying to accomplish what is really on the origin of our multiverse, wisdom tells me that I first and foremost should spend most of my time addressing machine intelligence.
It is true that we could colonize other planets (and there are companies working on that seriously), e.g. Mars, but the problem is that, if the machines perceive that move as a threat for them, then obviously they will act against it because they are more intelligent them us today, and will be much more in the future (simplistically thinking, machines double their intelligence - I am simply assuming proportional to the number of transistors in an integrated circuit - every about two years according to Moore's Law). This problematic around machine intelligence is currently underestimated and, if it keeps like that, it will be very, very dangerous to our own species.
Besides moving out of Earth (or the solar system), a less likely approach of being successful is an eventual deeper understanding of our most mysterious organ: the brain. We know that a human brain has about 10^15 synapses and with only about 20 W of power is capable of doing amazing things (memory, coordination, speaking, hearing, ...). If we manage to understand this gigantic dynamical system in detail, we could eventually become smarter (but never as much as machines since our brain has a limited physical size while machines do not) and/or interact with machines in a more sophisticated level (perhaps more sophisticated than eventual malicious groups of people trying to concentrate power on a few hands!).
Therefore, you see, my quest towards the fundamental laws of our multiverse comes only 4th in my priority list of actions, after electronics (for my passion and earnings), human brain understanding (for somehow empowering us in the future), and machine intelligence understanding (for trying to keep the human species alive on Earth ;). Hence, even though I highly appreciate the work of those people at the frontier of Physics (and would be very happy they finding the fundamental laws), I feel a more concrete sense of urgency on other subjects. It is true that we are in about 7.4 billions individuals on Earth, but, unfortunately, only a very, very tinny fraction of these individuals is capable of reasoning on the above challenges.
I wish you a very pleasant summer and, if by chance you visit Switzerland during this period, I would be very happy to try to return the hospitality you and your collaborators gave me at IAS last year. It was really a special experience and will never forget it ;)
Best regards,
Edinei Santin
+41 XX XXX XXXX
