It is work in progress and I am firstly just trying to make the article a little bit more readable and clear (the original entry was very technical and perhaps not so easy read) – I hope my efforts can be of some use for the Greater Good!

Now, if we look around us and sum up all the matter we can see in galaxies, stars, gas clouds etc. we can use mathematical models (Einstein’s equations) to model how things should move and then compare it to what we actually observe.
We could, for example, observe a galaxy through one of the many powerful telescopes we now have at our disposal, measure the amount of mass in it and check if it moves in a way consistent with all that mass.

Scientists have done just that. And they have found, to their great surprise, that many of these galaxies don’t quite move the way they are expected to.
Instead they move (rotate, to be specific) in a way which seem to indicate that there’s more mass in them than we can see…

So what’s going on? Are Einstein’s equations, or indeed most of our assumptions about “how stuff works”, wrong?

Well, Einstein’s equations and our assumptions could certainly be wrong but so far they have withstood everything we’ve thrown at them and results predicted by theory (i.e. worked out on paper) have matched actual observations with mind blowing accuracy.

So let’s not assume they’re all wrong, that would almost be “too easy”.

That really only leaves one other possibility; that there is mass out there in the galaxies, or in the universe as a whole, that we just can’t see…

Enter Dark Matter.

To clarify; “Visible” matter is everything that interacts with stuff around it and which generates effects that we can ultimately observe as some sort of light. A shining star is a pretty obvious example and another are moons and interstellar gas clouds that absorb or reflect light and radiation and therefore give away their presence.

We ourselves are made up of visible matter.

Invisible matter on the other hand would be something that has mass, in other words has an effect on gravity, but that does not react with anything visible. Think about it this way; these things (whatever they are) could pass through something as big as the sun without as much as slowing down or causing even a single photon in the star’s interior to blink. They’re just there and the rest of us (who belong to the “visible matter” part of the Universe) are none the wiser.

That is, until we take a closer look and detect their gravitational effects such as their effect on galaxies that don’t quite move the way we would expect them to.

There are a number of theories about Dark Matter, of course, each with their strengths and weaknesses but fundamentally they all center around the idea that the structure of the universe we see today condensed out in some way as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang. And,  once again, the theories require there to be more matter present in the universe than what we can see.

Physicists don’t really know what Dark Matter is or even how to detect it directly; after all it does not  seem to react with anything other than through gravity. There are also many different candidates for what Dark Matter could be made of, depending on which theory you believe in; there is something called “Hot Dark Matter” for which a very light elementary particle called the Neutrino might be a candidate. Then there is “Cold Dark Matter” which could be anything from exotic – yet unknown – elementary particles called “WIMP”s (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) to masses of very faint objects, like small planets and black holes.

As always the only way to settle on a theory is to test its predictions and then test them again…and again. Which of course, is exactly what physicists and cosmologists are doing.

Finding Dark Matter, conclusively, would be a tremendous achievement. It would mean that we would have tested the accuracy of some of our theories, like Einstein’s and Quantum Mechanics, in a truly monumental domain; that of the large scale behaviour of our own universe.
Not finding it, on the other hand, or proving the theory wrong, would be just as monumental although it would, of course, mean that we would have to go back to the drawing board…

Some of the latest experiments (at the time of writing) claim to have found traces of Cold Dark Matter…these are exciting times for science indeed!

If there is one thing my dear father would not have wanted it is a tear jerking and pompous speech at his funeral, tenebrously recited and quickly forgotten.

Therefore this will not be one.

Neither will it be one that sings his professional praise and speaks of the many awards and recognitions he received for his humanitarian work, and of what a great man he was.
Others have done so in abundance (see for example here)

No, these words are as much to him as they are about him.

Last night (the night before his funeral) I went through all the photos I could find of him. He had meticulously digitized all his photographs from decades ago until recently and I had, luckily, copied them. Amongst these pictures, which really are moments seen through his eyes, there are also many pictures of him from his childhood, his student days, his early career, family life and these last, sombre but also very heart warming, years.

A recurring theme in these photos, and one I want to dwell on a little, is head gear…
My dad liked a good hat as much as the next hat loving person but did not in fact stop there; any item, whether intended as an item of cranial clothing or not, could easily find its way on to his head, and this sometimes to the great embarrassment of the rest of us.
One could never quite know what to expect when he was coming to pick one up from the airport; what curiosity (and accompanying plaque) would adorn his head this time..!?

He had, or has had, Borsalino hats, a Stetson cowboy hat, “nisseluer”, “oloflue” and a plethora of others that I don’t even know how to classify (and that includes once having worn a metal cheese dome in a classy restaurant…oh what embarrassment that was…)
He even walked in to a shop exclusively for the clergy in Rome and bought himself a Monseigneur hat in the finest rabbit fur! He wore it too, I might add.

He had these, and he wore them, because it was who he was; a man who delighted in fun and enjoyed the enjoyable. My dad, Harald, was a man who quite simply loved to love life, and he wore his hats (and other items) to show it.

Those pictures, those memories, of the fun loving, smiling, man who loved so much is what I want to keep and what I want you to keep in your hearts. Even when the cancer had sunk its claws deep in him and he was weakened and suffered so much did he maintain his lovable sense of mischief and cheek.

That was who he was, that was the man who was my father.

I want to leave you with one little poignant anecdote; when he was very ill, in a hospital in France, he told me a story that I didn’t really fully appreciate until now; He told me how as a young doctor he had been working on one of the islands in the south-west of Norway. On this island one of his patients was an elderly lady who now lived alone but who had moved there when she married.
She had told him how she was always the stranger on that island; always the “outsider” despite having lived there for perhaps as much as fifty years.
My dad said to me, and I remember the expression on his face when he did, that he never wanted to end up like that; like a stranger somewhere in a strange place.

Therefore he came back here and now he has found peace in the town where he grew up, followed to his last resting place near his parents by family and friends.
He came here not as a stranger, but as one of you.

You could imagine speeding the sequence up or down, the result would be the same and you could always watch the wave gently spread outwards and pass the float.

From the float’s point of view the wave is seen approaching, passing underneath and then continuing outwards and away.

The reason, of course, why we can observe this is that light, that which transmits the information about the moving wave to us, or to the float, moves so fast…faster than anything else in the universe. So it is always ahead of the wave travelling across the pond.

Now, imagine that we are instead observing a wave of light as it propagates outwards from a light source, perhaps a bulb that we switch on. Can we observe the wave of light, like we observe the wave of water?

No, we can’t. Nothing can go faster than light so no signal can be emitted from a photon to reach us before it (the photon) reaches us. No matter how fast, or slow, light travels, assuming that it is defined by it being that which travels at the cosmic speed limit we can never observe it’s actual journey, the ripples it makes as the waves travel through space.

A flash of light will always just be a flash of light, not a slowly approaching wave.

This is because light lives in an achronal (“timeless”) world; the only thing that can reach its future is itself and its past consist only of itself (and the process that created it.)

The structure of our universe and the very concept of past and present; all these things are beautifully connected.

Now start spinning around, while you look up, and feel the tug of inertia on your arms. Above your head the stars seem to be spinning too, of course.

Make the following mental connection; you are spinning around and you can fell that as a physical effect on your body. Above you the stars are also spinning around you.

Relatively, the stars might be rotating and you might be standing still. But if they did, would you still feel the tug on your arms?

Let’s re iterate that; if all motion is relative, wouldn’t my arms be pulled out regardless of who spins around whom?

According to Newton I can detect if I am rotating because my arms seem to be pulled outwards due to their inertia and the amount by which this pull is experienced is proportional to how quickly I rotate. Furthermore, according to Newton, I can do this in complete ignorance of the rest of the universe. Intuitively that makes sense; surely it makes little difference if  there is a moon or a sun or a planet called Jupiter or one hundred billion galaxies, around me. Or does it..?

Well, according to Einstein, and Mach, it certainly does; In accordance with Mach’s principle all motion is relative so even our sense of inertia from our spinning around is relative to every piece of mass in the rest of the universe. Or, to put this monumental statement in perspective; if there is no universe around then your washing machine’s spin cycle has no effect for there is nothing relative to which it can be in motion!

So, to return to our little “Gedankeneksperiment” about our excursion in a nightly field; would our arms seem to be pulled out if it were the stars, and not us that rotated?

Again, Netwon’s answer would be “Nay!” He would argue that “it is the inertia of your arms that cause the effect you sense so if you instead stand still and the stars rotate around you then you would not feel it. Hence, you could determine if it is you or the stars which rotate by simply measuring the presence of this intertial tug”.

Einstein, and Mach, however would oppose Newton and state that “Aber ja, they would! All motion is relative, so even inertia is relative and your experience of it would be the same regardless of who rotates around whom”.

The results from an experiment called “Gravity Probe B” have just been published and this experiment (more info here) has been able to demonstrate a very important aspect of this particular effect by showing that the rotation of the earth causes a measurable effect on an object close to it. A number of near-perfect spheres spin around an axis and their rotation “wobbles” a tiny amount due to the earth’s rotating mass nearby. The important point to make is that this effect, this wobble, is independent of if it is the earth rotating around the sphere or the sphere rotating around earth. That the presence of a rotating mass should have an effect like this is completely non-Newtonian and can only be explained and described by taking Mach and Einstein’s relativity principles into account.

Furthermore this strengthens the idea that motion is indeed relative and, yes, you would feel your arms being pulled if you look up and see the stars rotate, regardless.

Stop for a moment and digest that last statement; if you look up and see the stars rotate you will feel a tug on your arms. If you look up and the stars are stationary with respect to you there will be no pull. Your sense of inertia and your motion relative to the distant stars are linked… 

The Jazz about Black Holes, but none of the maths

A Black Hole is often described as the remains of a very, very, heavy star that has come to the end of it’s life and finally given up the fight to counter the monumental pull of gravity from it’s own mass. Subsequent to a – perhaps cataclysmic – last gasp of breath the star’s remains are pulled together and becomes infinitely compressed into nothingness, leaving behind only that mysterious gateway to “the other side”; the Black Hole1.

The surface of the black hole (for lack of a better term) is something called the “event horizon” which separates the interior of the black hole from our universe so completely that, once something crosses over it, there is no turning back and it (whatever it was) is forever lost. The following figure attempts to illustrate this;

a black hole and it's horizon

A star is obviously something very complex; just imagine trying to describe everything that is happening inside a star with all its complex interactions between particles, radiation, gravity and magnetic fields. Astrophysicists use massive numerical simulations and computers to model even a relatively small star, like our sun. For a star to be massive enough to collapse to become a black hole it needs to be at least twenty times the mass of our sun, so that’s even more stuff going on. However, when a star like that dies and collapses on itself to become a black hole something strange happens to all that complexity; once the event horizon has closed up and cut the interior off from our universe, what we are left with, the black hole, is an incredibly simple object. In fact, there are only three numbers left required to describe everything that goes on with the black hole!2

This has profound implications and it’s called the Black Hole Information Paradox; no matter how much information required to describe the matter that formed the Black Hole, or subsequently stumbles into it, ultimately the Black Hole itself, at least as far as its presence in our universe is concerned, is an incredibly simple object.

What happens to all that information and complexity? And why does it matter?

It matters because of something called entropy.

We can view entropy as a measure of how distinguishable different arrangements of a system are. Consider for example at a “system” consisting of two separate piles; one of sugar and one of salt. Firstly, note that the exact position of a grain of sugar or a grain of salt in each of their respective piles is quite irrelevant to the overall shape and behaviour of a pile. We could label each individual grain uniquely and then imagine the enormous amount of ways that we could re arrange these labelled grains within their piles without any practically measurable difference to the piles. The number of ways we can do this is proportional to the entropy of our piles. The two piles considered together have an even greater entropy, obviously at least as big as the sum of the two individual piles.

Now, imagine we mix the two piles together into one big sugar-salt pile…

The number of ways we can now re arrange this new pile, swapping the position of not just pairs of sugar- or salt -grains but also of sugar and salt pairs, has grown enormously by us doing this mixing. Entropy has grown by us mixing the two piles.

In addition to that we have done something that is irreversible; there is no realistic chance that we can continue mixing the salt and sugar pile at random and end up with two perfectly separated piles again3!

What has happened is that a process, the mixing of the two piles, has taken place and the outcome is something that has a much higher entropy than when we started out. We are also indicating that no process, i.e. further mixing, can lower the entropy (or at least it is extremely unlikely, borderline impossible, see footnote.) So as mentioned above; we can’t continue mixing the sugar-salt pile to somehow separate the sugar and salt again.

But of course we can separate sugar and salt into two separate piles again you say! We could for example pick each grain out manually, it’ll just take a lot of time. Or perhaps we can use the fact that the two compounds have slightly different densities and use some sort of centrifuge to do the separation, or a chemical process…

Well, that is true, but no matter what you do the total entropy of the universe will only ever increase. I.e, the effort you have to put in to separate the mixed pile into two, lower entropy, piles, will generate more entropy somewhere else (in the muscles of your fingers as you pick one grain at the time perhaps…) and the total will still be higher than what you started out with..always!

This is a Law of Nature, assumed (and so far observed) to hold true in our universe and it’s called The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Hereafter I’ll just call it SLT…

Ok, let’s not loose sight of what we started out with, namely black holes. What have piles of sugar and salt got to do with them?

Well, let’s say that our star is like the sugar pile, say, and the black hole (either the one formed from the star collapsing or one that it stumbled into) is the pile of salt.

The process of mixing the two is the creation of the black hole or the unlucky star being consumed by it. It doesn’t really matter which.

By SLT we now know (or take for granted) that the outcome of either process must leave the universe in a state of higher entropy than what we started out with.

Unfortunately we are immediately faced with a monumental problem; the black hole seems to have almost no entropy at all, and regardless of what happens to it this entropy doesn’t seem to change either! It being so incredibly simple and having so few numbers required to describe it is one problem, and the other problem is that the black hole is black, i.e. nothing escapes from it. We can’t see what is happening inside it and so we have no way of “labelling individual grains of salt” and therefore calculating an entropy that might get us out of this pickle.

Instead, classically4, the black hole radiates nothing and therefore has zero temperature and, by definition, something that has zero temperature has the lowest possible entropy!

Since the simplicity and blackness of the black hole is unaffected by what falls into it this “mixing” process with the black hole always results in a massive reduction of the universal entropy, something that is in gross violation of SLT!

You might argue, at this point, that there could be some mystery process taking place that we just couldn’t observe or that called upon esoteric mechanisms involving strings or fairies that ensured no Law was broken.

Well, physicists are simple people who like simple things and one thing they definitely don’t like is to have to involve special cases or “mysteries”. To a physicist the fundamental Laws of Nature should behave the same no matter where in the universe you are or what you are doing.

So there must be something a little closer to home and a little less magical that explains this.

The first part of a solution to this problem comes in the observation that there is one thing about black holes that doesn’t ever seem to decrease; its mass. The black hole’s insatiable appetite for matter makes it grow and no classical5 process can slim it down. So, if we can somehow connect entropy with its mass then we might be on the right path…

Classically there is a limit to how far we can take this though and so it required the help of Quantum Mechanics to fully present a, plausible, solution to the Black Hole Entropy problem.

This solution was first put forward by Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein and is aptly called Bekenstein-Hawking radiation

Despite it being technically involved, it is quite simple in principle; black holes do indeed radiate, and are therefore not completely black and what they radiate spews masses of entropy back into the universe, thereby restoring the balance and obeying the SLT.

Without going into too much technical detail, let us just list a couple of very important things about this radiation;

• it is independent of the past history of the black hole (i.e. of from whence it came, or what has since fallen into it) – it only depends on its total mass.
• it carries no information about the internal goings on of the black hole. Again; it only depends on the total mass and that is something we can observer by the effect it has on gravitation (so we don’t need to look inside for that.) This is important since the black hole’s interior is still isolated from our universe by the event horizon so we can’t have any dependency on any “secret” interior details.
• it is very low energy and very (very) high in entropy (this comes from the fact that it is highly randomized)

That last point is, effectively, the saving grace for our Black Hole and the Mystery of the Disappearing Entropy; the black hole produces ample entropy through the radiation it emits.

It is worth noting that this radiation far from turns the black hole into a shiny object; for most realistically sized black holes the temperature corresponding to this radiation is so low that it hardly registers and in some cases it would even be lower than the temperature of the surrounding cosmic background radiation (which is only about three degrees Kelvin above the absolute zero) which means that the black hole will absorb more than it emits (remember that heat goes from warmer to colder areas.)

In a sense we can view a Black Hole as the ultimate garbage compactor that chews up a seemingly infinite amount of information and leaves us with nothing but a lot of entropy. In addition, over its lifetime, it chucks back out highly randomized, low energy, radiation with very high entropy to add to the growth.

By the way, by emitting photons no matter how cold and dull they are, the black hole will inevitably loose mass6 and get lighter. So if, and only if, Hawking and Bekenstein were right the black hole would eventually evaporate away!

As the universe evolves more and more high grade, (relatively) low entropy, matter would be swallowed by the massive Black Holes sitting at the centers of galaxies, or by those hungrily orbiting stars elsewhere, and slowly spit back out as low grade, high entropy, radiation.

Gradually everything is churned through the blender and the universe becomes a dull, cold place filled with Black Holes that eventually, so Hawking, completely disappear in one last gasp of high energy radiation.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy describes the Restaurant at the End of the Universe as a spectacular venue where the universe’s last moments play out in magnificent splendour to the delight of high paying guests.

In reality they would probably have to bring their own entertainment or else it would likely be the dullest experience, ever…

So the ease of access to the dataverse, and an open and unprejudiced one at that, to everyone and everywhere and a simple way to share new discoveries of patterns and relations in will be crucial to allow us to unlock new discoveries in unlikely places.

Google leads the way for “Data Mining for Everyone” with such tools as Google Trends but what about a web based front end to something more complex, like RapidMiner, using simple point-and-click UI components and in-browser scripting? There is a vast collective brain out there but it needs ways to interact with it’s environment. There are no real technology obstacles to allowing this and who knows what great things can come from it….

So let everybody play in the cloud…

That is; the value chain from your top level stakeholder (Voice of the Customer, Product Owner, executive Sponsor or whatever you want to call them) has to be Agile. If anywhere along the path the cogs run at mismatched speeds the clock won’t tick.

And until you have embraced the #1 principle of “Customer First” you can scrap anything else and certainly you should not sell yourself as “Agile”….

To do this you have to, as always, start with good manners at home; your entire team from Top to Bottom has to make it their #1 priority to deliver a product that adds value to The Customer. The trick is to define that customer and since not everybody can or should worry about what the executives want we need to create a chain of customers that links everybody, ultimately, to the End Product. If each link in the chain cares only about delivering something that makes sense to their customer (i.e. something which is visible and incrementally adds value to the customer) then, by extension, the last customer in the chain will be happy.

The tools programmer’s customer is an artist (or level designer), the level designer’s customer is the creative director, the creative director’s customer is…you get the idea.

So, if somebody on your team doesn’t have a customer (which could also just mean that they don’t communicate with their customer, even if they have one) then your chain could break and you need to fix it.

Remember: A chain of Happy Customers makes for Good Product… :p

However, to use faith as a fundamental guiding principle to find truth is a dangerous path to take.

For truth is a strange principle; for something to be true it must not be false. And for something to not be false it must be possible to prove conclusively that there is nothing anywhere at anytime that can make it false. This is essentially the idea behind scientific method and we could perhaps sum it up by saying that; truth can only be approached, but never reached. There is always the possibility that there is something else “around the next bend” that might disprove our neat view of reality.

This is why science invests billions of Euros into building the LHC in Geneva; because we want to test our theories to see if they are still correct up to the next n’th decimal or if we’ve hit a crossroads and need to go back to the drawing board.

Conversely, to be guided by faith is to abandon this simple principle altogether and to instead take as a priori given certain ideas and theories and put on them the stamp of truth. It is so to speak to cross the event horizon and enter a domain from which one can never return.

Whereas faith might seed the idea and drive it through to become something manifest in the face of disbelief it can not, and must not, be allowed to rule beyond this initial entrepeneurial phase. The search for truth, and not the blind acceptance of it, is what is important.

This is why it can be so frustrating when one finds oneselves caught in discussions with people who try to argue for scientific proof of this that and the other faith; homeopaths and other alternative mediciners, creationists and astrologers.

They say I just have faith in accademic science, just like they just have faith in their beliefs and hence they can as much claim a stake in the truth as I can. They argue that I have “faith” in Quantum Mechanics and that it is as blind as the beliefs I claim they hold (but of course, their’s are true…)

They are completely missing the basic principle; Good Science can never claim as they do to know that anything is 100% true.
And I don’t “believe” in Quantum Mechanics, I don’t even know that it’s correct; but I do know that QED can accurately predict the outcome of a great deal of experiments and natural phenomenons. I also know that it is not unified with gravity and that therefore it seems unlikely that it should be able to provide a complete picture of what we can actually see around us. I therefore know that it is not Truth, just a very good candidate for a model with explaning powers within a certain energy range of our observed universe. I also accept that we must always test it’s boundaries (as we must with any theory, no matter how promising) and never stop searching for that one case that breaks it all.

That is very different from a scenario where I would start out by assuming that Quantum Mechanics is Absolutely True and that everything that is not in accordance with it must therefore be wrong….now that would be faith.