Recommended Reading - Ray Kurzweil
Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been catching up on some personal reading. I had to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy before I grabbed the newly released DVD, and Nic Simmons gave me a copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. I'm just diving in, but this book is already becoming a favorite. I've been cranking through textbooks dealing with .NET solution architecture and design, as well as some in enterprise solution security, and while important to learn, their plotlines tend to fall a bit short of gripping.
This is a great book if your looking for something tech-related, but need a change of pace. Kurzweil is a pioneer in reading and speech AI, and has an amazing tech imagination.
This is the initial entry of the first chapter, I thought I'd share it since it hooked me so quickly:
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
-- Muriel Rukeyser
Is the universe a great mechanism, a great computation, a great symmetry, a great accident or a great thought?
-- John D. Barrow
As we start at the beginning, we will notice an unusual attribute of the nature of time, one that is critical to our passage to the twenty-first century. Our story begins perhaps 15 billion years ago. No conscious life existed to appreciate the birth of our Universe at the time, but we appreciate it now, so retroactively it did happen. (In retrospect -- from one perspective of quantum mechanics -- we could say that any Universe that fails to evolve conscious life to apprehend its existence never existed in the first place.)
It was not until 10-43 seconds (a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) after the birth of the Universe that the situation had cooled off sufficiently (to 100 million trillion trillion degrees) that a distinct force -- gravity -- evolved.
Not much happened for another 10-34 seconds (this is also a very tiny fraction of a second, but it is a billion times longer than 10-43 seconds), at which point an even cooler Universe (now only a billion billion billion degrees) allowed the emergence of matter in the form of electrons and quarks. To keep things balanced, antimatter appeared as well. It was an eventful time, as new forces evolved at a rapid rate. We were now up to three: gravity, the strong force, and the electroweak force. After another 10-10 seconds (a tenth of a billionth of a second), the electroweak force split into the electromagnetic and weak forces we know so well today.
Things got complicated after another 10-5 seconds (ten millionths of a second). With the temperature now down to a relatively balmy trillion degrees, the quarks came together to form protons and neutrons. The antiquarks did the same, forming antiprotons.
Somehow, the matter particles achieved a slight edge. How this happened is not entirely clear. Up until then, everything had seemed so, well, even. But had everything stayed evenly balanced, it would have been a rather boring Universe. For one thing, life never would have evolved, and thus we could conclude that the Universe would never have existed in the first place.
For every 10 billion antiprotons, the Universe contained 10 billion and 1 protons. The protons and antiprotons collided, causing the emergence of another important phenomenon: light (photons). Thus, almost all of the antimatter was destroyed, leaving matter as dominant. (This shows you the danger of allowing a competitor to achieve even a slight advantage.)
Of course, had antimatter won, its descendants would have called it matter and would have called matter antimatter, so we would be back where we started (perhaps that is what happened).
After another second (a second is a very long time compared to some of the earlier chapters in the Universe's history, so notice how the time frames are growing exponentially larger), the electrons and antielectrons (called positrons) followed the lead of the protons and antiprotons and similarly annihilated each other, leaving mostly the electrons.
After another minute, the neutrons and protons began coalescing into heavier nuclei, such as helium, lithium, and heavy forms of hydrogen. The temperature was now only a billion degrees.
About 300,000 years later (things are slowing down now rather quickly), with the average temperature now only 3,000 degrees, the first atoms were created as the nuclei took control of nearby electrons.
After a billion years, these atoms formed large clouds that gradually swirled into galaxies.
After another two billion years, the matter within the galaxies coalesced further into distinct stars, many with their own solar systems.
Three billion years later, circling an unexceptional star on the arm of a common galaxy, an unremarkable planet we call the Earth was born.
Now before we go any further, let's notice a striking feature of the passage of time. Events moved quickly at the beginning of the Universe's history. We had three paradigm shifts in just the first billionth of a second. Later on, events of cosmological significance took billions of years. The nature of time is that it inherently moves in an exponential fashion -- either geometrically gaining in speed, or, as in the history of our Universe, geometrically slowing down. Time only seems to be linear during those eons in which not much happens. Thus most of the time, the linear passage of time is a reasonable approximation of its passage. But that's not the inherent nature of time.
Why is this significant? It's not when you're stuck in the eons in which not much happens. But it is of great significance when you find yourself in the "knee of the curve," those periods in which the exponential nature of the curve of time explodes either inwardly or outwardly. It's like falling into a black hole (in that case, time accelerates exponentially faster as one falls in).
(From The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil)