I've been neglecting this blog of late, having been busy getting my new website online. It's up now, in all its glory. Along the way I've learnt a bit about CSS design, and the problems of cross-browser compatibility. Also learnt that the convention that many programmers (including me) adopt, when giving names to things, of concatenating words but giving each one an initial capital letter has, itself, a name. So that 'PreviousMonthSales' is described as being CamelCased (as opposed to lower- or upper-cased). For obvious reasons I suppose, but it was NewsToMe; maybe it would be better described as caMel cased.
Also been keeping up with a very interesting discussion in New Scientist concerning the existence (or possibly not) of free will. This is based on experimental evidence from the quantum behaviour of entangled photons, seen from viewpoints where Special Relativity comes into play, in particular SR's blurring of the order in which things happen. This would normally be a discussion held in the darker reaches of sci.physics.quantum.cranks etc. I wouldn't feel qualified to join in in either forum, but I will say that, although I accept the physicist's assertions about time - that is that moving clocks run slow and that if moving clocks do, then so do moving people, and their DNA - nevertheless all this talk of relative time leaves a sense of something being not quite right.
What I'd like to understand is, given that twin A, who journeys into space and back while their twin sibling B... oh, all right, lets call them Sam and Amanda, and assume that Sam travels into space as part of a Big Brother task, while Amanda remains behind in the house, moving as little as is possible for a nineteen-year old. So, when the twins are eventually reunited (phew!), they find to their surprise ("I love it!") that Sam is, to a degree dependant on for how long and at what speed she travelled, younger than her sister.
So far so good; this is the same phemonenon that permits normally short-lived elementary particles to eke out their lifespans when they appear to us as fast-moving particles arriving from outer space. The paradox only arises if one mistakenly imagines that the twins' histories over the period of Sam's journey is symmetrical (which isn't the case, because only Sam experienced the acceleration when her spaceship turned round and headed back to Earth). When Einstein first described the effect he didn't see any paradox in it; rather, he presented it as a necessary, although curious, consequence of SR. However, this begs the question as to, in what sense, the reunited twins are still 'synchronised'. They are said to occupy differing locations in 'space-time' and yet they do not appear to each other to shimmer (except rather pinkly) in a Star Trek transporter kind of way. When they speak to each other they don't have to wait for an intervening passage of time for the sound from one sister to 'catch up' with the other. Apart from their differing ages, nothing has changed. They will agree on whether or not an eviction has taken place.
All very strange. Perhaps the twins are forever entangled, having at one point in space-time been together, and are destined forever to remain so, in spite of any cosmic journeys they may take separately. I don't know.
Meanwhile, I snapped this lovely ice-rainbow from my window the other evening:
