QUANTUM MECHANICS!!! 0_0

Ok to tell the truth, I wasn't being a good student and fell asleep for most of the video presentation on quantum mechanics. With that being said this post will probably be lamer than a 34 year old living in his grandmother's basement... or Mr. Gridnic's powerpoint slide transitions. (Just kidding, they are amazing btw!) And it won't be as long as the "Solid!" blog (you win this time! >:O) However, I did manage to soak in some information in between the periods of head bobbing and constantly staring at my paper. So, just like the other blogs, I will rant on about how quantum mechanics is the most mind blowing and reality bending theory ever. In the beginning of class we learned about how electrons move to higher energy levels using energy. The electrons then move back to its original energy level and gives off photon energy. This process we learned is called a quantum jump. At first I believed this was plausible and didn't find anything odd about it but when we learned that electrons cannot occupy space in between energy levels, many including I, became stupefied because that eliminates the possibility that electrons can move to higher energy levels. One thing that came up was teleportation, but can teleportation really happen? Even though this seems totally out there, it explains a lot about how atoms give off photon energy. One thing that seemed scary for me was how much of the position of an electron and even life relies on probability. An example gave in class was the cat in the box model. It was scary to find out that there are so many parallel universes and in half of those, the cat was already dead. What the model also provided was the explanation to why scientists can't physically examine an electron because the sole act of observing would alter the results. Quantum mechanics seems so preposterous and yet it explains a lot of how the atom behaves. In the end (after I woke up), the presentation lead to many philosophical questions and comments and something about walking through walls.

Did you know...?

At the end of this video, we are given an open ended question;

so what does it all mean?

Many things can be concluded from watching this video but many come as no surprise. For starters, China becoming a world power was no surprise. With their booming economy and rising population, it seems almost inevitable that they become an international power. Another is how rapidly the world's population is growing. According to the work of Thomas R. Malthus in his essay The Principle of Population, written in 1798, he explains the fundamental concept of unlimited population growth and how it is tied to the human population. With this in mind it comes as no surprise that the world's population is growing in exponential times. An interesting part of the video that caught my attention was how fast a piece of technology spread to an audience of 50 million; however, this also came as no surprise as well. As we live in the information age and as ads from improved telecommunication become more abundant, more and more recent technology get caught on faster and faster. What I and probably many people come to realize by watching this video is that as human population grows exponentially, technology does as well. And as technology grows, such as improved medical care, so do the human population. As years go by, it comes to no surprise that the relationship between humans and AI become more close. An example of this is the statistic that 1 in every 8 couples in the last year met each other online. Today people carry around mini computers in their pant's pocket and phones that can do way more than just make calls. No wonder the number of internet devices started exceeding a billion in this year. This sort of human and machine symbiotic relationship leads to an event called 'Singularity', a term expressed in Raymond Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. It expresses how one day Artificial Intelligence will far surpass the computational capabilities of the human population around the year 2045; which is also relatively the same time period the video predicts as well. It comes as no surprise that humans will rely more heavily on technology as the years come. Even in the 1967 short film "1999 AD" it predicts machines managing everyday human life e.g.; automatically preparing meals for families based on an individual's nutritional needs, providing exercise regiments to maintain an individual's muscle tone and so on.

Many of the statistics expressed in this video come as no surprise; however, a couple of statistics are very shifty. For starters 25% of India's population with the highest IQ is greater than the population of the US because of the fact that India's population is 4X as much as the US. This information doesn't conclude that India is a smarter country than the US or anything but just states that they again have a higher population. It's also questionable whether or not to say that China will become the number one English speaking country in the world. That is like saying the US is the number one Spanish speaking country in the world just because Spanish is a widely taught language in US schools. FYI: 1/3 of the US population is enough to match the population of Mexico. To also answer the question: To whom were these questions addressed B.G. (Before Google)?, 3 years before the domain Google.com launched, Yahoo! already gained more than a million hits and just a year before that, Mosaic, a graphical web browser, was released.

BTW (By the way), it also comes as no surprise that 694,000 songs were probably downloaded illegally during the presentation of the video. You can thank the music copyright infringement in China for a lot of that. This video has nice music btw.

(Youtube links to the short film 1999 AD at bottom)