Prediction: Quantum Gravity = Radiometer

A crooks radiometer is an interesting little device which, when left in the sun or in subjected to infrared heat will begin to turn. Initially it was thought to be an effect of light bouncing off the white side (causing 2x photon pressure) and being absorbed by the black (pushing back with 1x). This would cause it to spin. However, that's not enough of a force to make it actually spin and it would turn towards the black side when it properly spins towards the white.


Osborne Reynolds found that a porous plate kept hotter on one side will cause the gas to flow through the plate from cooler to the hotter side. Maxwell (father of modern physics) suggested that the edges of the radiometer can be seen as making the plates of the radiometer porous.

Another suggestion was that the hotter side would when hit with a molecule would transfer more heat and cause a bouncing effect greater than when it hit the colder side. However, the faster bouncing particles make it harder for other particles to hit that side too and this ends up with the values canceling out and the vane moving nowhere. Later, Einstein showed that the two do not actually exactly cancel exactly at the edges of the vanes (much like Maxwell's pores for Reynold's force).

Which brings us to my prediction. I predict that it will not be a stretch to explain the end result of a good theory of quantum gravity in terms of a Crooke's Radiometer.

As they both the radiometer and quantum gravity do what they shouldn't do because of a broken symmetry. What should be pressures canceling out and not exerting any force ends up not quite canceling out and things doing some very nice things. Similarly this sort of broken symmetry is found within the standard model of particle physics where the weak force only works on the left-handed quarks and leptons and not their mirror opposites. Although the laws of nature are symmetric the actual outcome of the applications of the laws doesn't always cancel out exactly (much like the edges of the vanes of a radiometer). If you put together a radiometer, it shouldn't matter which way you put the vanes because the pressures are going to cancel out. However if you put all or most of the white sides on the counterclockwise side (I've never heard that term but it should make sense) it will turn counterclockwise when subjected to some heat energies because everything doesn't actually cancel as the generally symmetric laws of physics would suggest. Similarly, without this energy it won't turn (and not just because of the second law (of thermodynamics)) but because the symmetry is perfect without the added energy.

Likewise, when you remove a lot of the energy from a substance the laws of physics suddenly change as they become superconductive and electrons don't loose their energy, magnetic fields don't work, and photons gain masses. If spacetime works like a superconductor and rather than messing up magnetic fields it messes up weak nuclear force then the laws of physics should be similar to the laws of physics we observe. Neutrons and positrons are composed of three quarks which spin around quickly (most of the mass of the particles comes from E=MC^2 as the spinning and moving particles have mass). Protons consisting of two ups and a down and neutrons consisting of one up and two down quarks (ups have a charge of +2/3 and downs -1/3, so neutrons cancel and protons get a +1). This spinning bit of quarks seems a bit like a radiometer.*

So in the end, everything interesting is interesting because it is broken. In the Crooke's radiometer we see the force of a broken symmetry (the word symmetry should be a palindrome, but then so should palindrome) making something that shouldn't spin start spinning and in particle physics things which shouldn't have mass, clump together, break apart, do what they do when they shouldn't because somehow the symmetry of particle physics is similarly broken.

A perfect universe is one that doesn't exist. Our universe is one that shouldn't. In theory, theory and practice should be the same thing... in practice they aren't.


*yes the entire paragraph was to say that they both spun and therefore "looked the same".

PZ Myers Fail.

PZ Myers of Pharyngula in a recent post made the point that the genome is not a computer program. He did so in response to some creationist who was beyond stupid.

From Wikipedia,

The terms computer program, software program, or just program are the instructions for a computer.[1] A computer requires programs to function, and a computer program does nothing unless its instructions are executed by a central processor.[2] Computer programs refer to either an executable program or the source code from which an executable program is derived (e.g., compiled).

Computer source code is often written by professionals known as computer programmers. Source code is written in a programming language that follows one of two main paradigms: imperative or declarative. Source code may be converted into an executable image by a compiler. Once an executable image is requested to be run, the central processor executes the program, instruction by instruction, until termination. Alternatively, computer programs may be executed immediately with the aid of an interpreter, generated by other computer programs, or may be embedded directly into hardware.

Computer programs may be categorized along functional lines: system software and application software. And many computer programs may run simultaneously on a single computer, a process known as multitasking.

PZ made the comments (in the post and comments of the post):

It's probably (analogies are always dangerous) better to think of gene products as like small autonomous agents that carry out bits of chemistry in the economy of the cell. There is no central authority, no guiding plan. Order emerges in the interactions of these agents, not by an encoded program within the strands of DNA.

Programs do that. It's not a programming paradigm you'd run into often but think of the processing done by a processor is all hard coded? There's actually a program in there telling things how to function how to carryout the little functions. There's no specific bit of code doing anything until requested it just responds to the signals within the processor.

Why else isn't DNA a program?

You can compare the genome as a data set to the data stored by a computer, and that's legit -- we know how much storage space you need to pack away the sequence. It is not in any way comparable to software.

Clearly you can compare it with the data. You can download the human genome here.

Nah, you guys who argue that a genome is a computer program aren't persuading me at all. You're missing the whole point, that the genome is incomplete and does not specify or regulate much of anything without major contributions from its environment. If there is a computation engine in the cell, it's the cytoplasm.

Computer programs are incomplete. They don't regulate much of anything without major contributions from the environment. If there's a computation engine in the computer, it's the processor.

A computer program contains the operators that work on data from the environment. The genome does not. The genome is part of the data that the cytoplasm manipulates.

No programs do not. The program contains a character or two which is interpreted by the compiler and assembled into a some assembly code (which is really just binary code in a bit more user friendly language) which is then loaded (on execution) into memory and understood by the processor (because the processor is programmed to understand such code), without that understanding the compiler and the processor are screwed. The program itself doesn't manipulate any data; it tells the system what data to change.

A genetic circuit is an excellent example of what I'm talking about! They are utterly dependent on cell signaling and signal transduction for their function. In those diagrams, all those little lines connecting the modules are the important parts -- and that connectivity illustrates patterns of interaction between genes.

And what part of "i++" is understood natively by the computer? The underlying understanding of what "++" should denote is very important as far as the execution is concerned. It depends on the datatype the variable. The expression can change a lot.

Perhaps this clarification will help reconcile me to all the computer people who object to my dismissal.

Yes, please.

We can talk about the cell as an analog to a computer program; there's an interesting literature treating development as a trajectory followed by a swarm of state machines. I can buy that.

We can talk about the processor like that too, it needs it's own internal firmware to know how to interpret the stuff it needs to interpret.

What I specifically object to here is the strange isolation of DNA as "the program," an excessively reductionist view. It isn't and can't contain a program. The information there is inadequate -- we tend to ignore all the information that is also inherited from the cytoplasm, and the fact that there is epigenetic modification of the genome in the history of a developmental lineage. That's also part of the "program," and it's just as indispensable as the nucleotide sequence.

It is only reductionist if you somehow have a reduced view of what a computer actually does. The information of a program itself is not enough to make it do anything. If we tried to to run something from a different OS or on a non X86 processor it wouldn't do anything (productive). Without the information in the processor, the OS, the BIOS... nothing is going to execute properly.

Computer programs also suffer epigenetic modification in the form of buffer overflows which are often used to hack computer systems. The data is fed into the upper part where variables are stored while executed in memory. If the array is unchecked, it can start spilling over into the other data and eventually into the program lower down. If accidental, it could easily result in a program crash as gobbledygook is being run as computer code. Whereas, if malicious, it could result in executing code with malicious intent. Some computer viruses are programed to exploit such flaws, which is sort of similar to what allows viruses to take over a cell.

Another thing to consider: DNA came last, protein/RNA/metabolic intermediates came first. The predecessors to the progenote did all of the things we characterize as the product of a program, without a genome.

The same is true for programs. Before we had the programing languages we have today we had more limited one. We had to code in assembly to make the first compilers and before that punch the stuff out in binary... and before that make it in hardware!

It's an analogy. It's not suppose to be perfect. However, it doesn't suffer from a disanalogy stark enough to warrant outright rejection. You could explain computers in the language of biology or explain biology in the language of computers.

The real clincher, if you replaced the DNA in an embryo with different DNA so long as the cytoplasm processor could still read and execute the program it would do so. You could replace a rat genome with a mouse genome and put it in a rat womb and have it give birth to a mouse. That's a program!

Sure, it may seem like a dynamically linked list (.dll file) of function calls used by programs in the OS, or a firmware code for the processor storing how to execute certain signals, or even a trigger based interpreted language. Those are still all programs.

A program is basically anything that tells something what to do when it does what it does.