I are Lee Mingde and you is crazy.
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Sunday, May 29, 2005
Is it time to die?I have a friend who once said that one does not have to live so cautiously because everything is fated. If it is time for you to die, you will die no matter how careful you are. If it is not, then you simply will not die and there would be no point in being so careful.
There was another fellow who also used this argument when I told him that his smoking habit might eventually kill him. He replied that a car might hit him tomorrow, regardless of whether he smoked. On the other hand, there have been cases of smokers living to a ripe old age. While what he said is not impossible, his line of reasoning is clearly fallacious. This sort of argument akin to saying that determinism implies the absence of responsibility.
If we apply this argument to any actions by any individual, we would arrive at ridiculous conclusions. We can say that if a murderer kills someone, he is not responsible for his actions because he is fated to kill the victim and that it is time for the victim to die. (In fact, the friend whom I mentioned in the first paragraph agreed to this statement.) If this is true, then there is no need for law enforcement. No one is responsible for anything. Things happen because it is fate. The future is fixed.
The future is fixed because the universe is deterministic. There are many kinds of determinism and I shall not go into that. When I use the word determinism here, I am using it in a very broad sense. In this case, determinism means that events of the future do not happen randomly, they are caused by events preceding it, i.e. events in the present and the past. Simply put, cause and effect. It should be quite easy to see why the future is fixed. Everything that is happening now, on the cosmic and the subatomic scale, will cause the universe to turn out in a particular way the next moment in time. Of course, this keeps going on and on. There is no room for the universe to be drastically unpredictable. The laws of physics are pretty strict about that.
Since everything we think and do are predetermined, caused by factors in the past such as upbringing, education, mass media, butterfly flapping wings, etc., then surely we can not be held responsible for our thoughts and action, can we? We have no choice, no free will, therefore no responsibilities. This is incorrect because while the future is predetermined, we do not know how it is predetermined. We do not have true free will but we do have illusionary free will.
When we toss a coin, the outcome is already determined by the way we toss it, the force applied and the mass of the coin. However, since we have no knowledge of these parameters, it is reasonable to view the outcome as a probabilistic distribution. When information is limited, statistics becomes important in predicting the outcome of any event.
Therefore, it is not alright to smoke tonnes of cigarettes a day because statistically, smoking is highly correlated to lung cancer and premature death. In fact, we can say smoking causes death. Even though a person can die in a car accident before developing cancer, a rational person would realize that it is far more probable that he die of smoking-related complications.
Similarly, we do not know when a person is "fated" to die. But we do know that if you stab him with a knife, there is a very high chance that he will die. In this way, any man who stabs someone has to take responsibility for his actions. And we should imprison criminals because they are a lot less likely to inflict harm on others when they are in jail. If anyone tries to argue that he had no choice because everything is fated, then we can say that it is fate that we arrest him. Cause and effect, it is that simple.
If it is rational to think that we can do whatever we want irresponsibly because our lives are all predestined, then we should all just not do anything at all, not even eat or drink. If we are not fated to die, then we will not starve to death. If we are fated to get rich, then we will be billionaires just by staring at the wall. People who think like that should impale themselves and test their theory. If they die, it does not matter since they would not be able to avoid it anyway. If not, good for them!
So people out there who blame the universe for their misfortunes, please stop complaining and do something about it. Your future is fixed but you do not know how. As far as you are concerned, it has not happened yet, you can influence the outcome by your present actions. Of course, whether you choose to believe me is your choice, although I dare say that your choice is already predetermined!
Posted at 2:07 PM0 Comments:
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Nightcrawler vs Newton & EinsteinThere is a character in X-men named Nightcrawler who has the ability to teleport himself from one point in space to another. From the X2 movie, it seems like not only can he translate himself in space instantaneously, he can also ignore all the rules of Newtonian mechanics.
When Nightcrawler teleports a metre forward, how far did he move? Was it one metre relative to his previous position? Not necessarily. For all we know, he could have been moving at a hundred miles an hour (relative to an arbitrary point) the moment before he teleported. A more correct way of seeing this would be that he teleported one metre from his previous position in the inertial reference frame where he was stationary just before he teleported. For the not-scientifically-inclined, an inertial reference frame can be roughly explained as a point-of-view that is not accelerating.
According to Newton's Laws of Motion, an object that is not subjected to any force will continue moving with the same velocity (i.e. same speed and direction) - no matter viewed from any inertial reference frame. This is where Nightcrawler amazingly accelerates without any force applied to him. He can disappear while stationary and reappear somewhere else with a velocity (and angular velocity) greater than zero. This clearly violates the conservation of linear (and angular) momentum. He can also teleport great distances upwards, against gravity, meaning he just gained potential energy from nothing, violating conservation of energy.
It is as if Nightcrawler can choose to exit from his teleportation being stationary in a different inertial reference frame as the one he was in when he entered. If that is the case, then he is very powerful indeed. He can never die from falling off a building because before he hits the ground with enormous speed, he can just lose all his momentum by teleporting. He can also fight without even moving his limbs. He can be standing there one moment and the next moment, his whole body can be flying at his opponent at any speed he chooses when he teleports.
Applying Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, Nightcrawler's ability to change velocities without having to pay for it has profound implications. Nightcrawler can effectively accelerate himself to any speed, even close to speed of light or beyond. That means he can time travel. The instantaneity of his teleportation is also a kind of time travel since he effectively broke the light-speed barrier.
Of course ,the strangest part of his power is he can somehow appear in a place where there already is matter. Where did all the matter go? Did the air just disappear when he appears?
Naturally, we never get to see him time travel in the stories. Just like we will never see Magneto manipulate matter at the molecular level even though the primary force between virtually everything is electromagnetic. People with super powers always have limited imagination - or little knowledge of physics.
Posted at 1:15 PM0 Comments:
