After three years on Substack I've returned here as a place to write. I may do some site reorganization in future, or not.
The things I'm likely to be writing about are:
There's no mailing list (as yet) although I may send out an announcement to my old stubstack list.
In any case, I'm going to be writing entirely for my own entertainment and edification. If others find it useful, well and good. If not, I don't care.
The projects I've got in the works at the moment are the ever-elusive distinction between many worlds and collapse interpretations of QM, and and an oddball simulation of "Huygen's Clocks", which are simple pendulums that are linked by a common platform and which over time tend to synchronize with each other.
This post is mostly a test to ensure that the machinery for updating this blog still works: bit-rot is a real thing, and I've recently spent the better part of a month bringing some old firmware up to modern standards. This is not a cosmetic issue: the code from ten years ago wouldn't even compile, much less run, using modern tools.
I may move some content from World of Wonders over here in edited form, particularly the stuff on God or the Beyond or whatever one wants to call that aspect of reality that violates the law of non-contradiction, and yet still exists (which is a contradiction...)
And I may add a "short notes" feed: this blog was created for relatively long pieces, but it could also be useful for incoherent snippets of ideas. For example, consider the problem of information in quantum reality: prior to measurement, the information about the outcome of the experiment does not exist (at least not within the realm of classical reality.) After the experiment, it does.
Where does it come from?
That is: in a non-deterministic universe, information is necessarily not conserved. If it was, the information that allowed us to predict the outcome would exist before measurement, meaning the universe was not non-deterministic. So either information is not conserved--an idea that upsets information theorists--or the universe is deterministic.
In many worlds interpretations the time-evolution of the wavefunction is strictly unitary, which means information becomes invisible to us (unless we can cleverly make time run backwards, which can be done in certain contrived experimental situations) but it still exists. In collapse interpretations information is created out of nothing. So if one could prove strict information conservation (which is generally held to be true) one could rule out collapse interpretations.
And so on. These are esoterica better suited to the Journal of the Otherwise Unemployable than an informal blog, but they're what I'm interested in and I think there's some value to thinking out loud. Science is often done in relative obscurity, only seeing the light of day when it works out.
I'm aiming to correct that.
Now let's see if this thing still works... it didn't for a bunch of reasons, which I have now fixed.