Is vacuum energy the “next energy paradigm”?
16 views
Skip to first unread message
Victor Vahidi Motti
Apr 17, 2026, 12:47:24 PMApr 17
to Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards
Quantum vacuum fluctuations are real—but extracting usable energy from them is not currently possible, and most claims (including Nassim Haramein’s) are not accepted by mainstream physics.
Let’s separate the science from the hype, read more here:
Best,
Victor
Linas Vepstas
Apr 21, 2026, 6:57:27 PMApr 21
to Victor Vahidi Motti, Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards
Well, given that this is the Lifeboat mailing list, I will attempt to
frame this as yet another existential threat. With lots of
hand-wringing. We approach a nexus of social media recommendation
algorithms, financial flows driven by advertising, powerful but
corrupt figures pushing hallucinatory propaganda, disinformation, I am
a bit concerned that we are going civilizationally insane. The "Global
Brain" is much smarter now than it was even decades ago, but is also
increasingly delusional. This guy, Nassim Haramein, is yet another
symptom.
What's different now, vs. what was common 30-40-50 years ago? When I
was a kid, someone got a book that argued that there were giant
caverns underneath Lake Michigan, and that dinosaurs lived there. We
passed it around as a hoot, and marvelled at the illustrations. A
friend of my parents had a shelf-full of books on UFO's. Up in
Evanston, there was a cafe-bookshop that served whole-grain vegan
meals, smelled of incense, and sold healing crystals. And books about
the dinosaurs that lived in caves under Lake Michigan. Crackpot
beliefs are not new. But something has changed.
Let's take a long view. Before social media and recommendation
algorithms, we had "mass media": TV, radio. The communications model
was "hub and spoke": a TV in the center, and "spokes" to millions of
(passive) viewers. Some 2% of the population was involved with media
production in some way: writers, actors, announcers, reporters,
station owners. The nonsense was mostly filtered out, because (a)
writers and reporters and station owners mostly weren't crazy, and (b)
incoherent drivel got poor ratings.
That all changed with the internet (and social media): The hub-n-spoke
model is replaced by the many-to-many connection model. I really need
some drawings, pictures here. The shape of the network changes. In
physics, this is called a "phase transition". There's a famous example
from fracking in the petroleum industry. Natural gas. If you have
"tight rock" (shale) with gas in it, that gas doesn't flow, because
there are no pores, no holes, no openings through which that gas can
flow. But if you break that rock, fracture it, the gas can now flow
through the cracks.
Well, duh. Here's the mathematical model: take a sheet of paper, draw
some random dots on it. Now start connecting dots. Draw a random line.
Then another, then another. When you've drawn just enough lines, then
a path appears from the left to the right edge of the paper. The path
appears only when you've drawn enough lines. This is called the
"critical phase transition"; mathematicians have computed that it
happens when you've drawn 0.44... of the lines. (I forget the exact
digits) Draw less, nothing flows. Draw more, and maybe the flow
improves a bit, but the critical transition is between "off" and "on".
Shit starts happening at a certain point.
This model got studied a lot in the 1980's and 1990's, because it
models lots of other networks: the flow of electricity through power
distribution grids, the blowing of fuses in a grid. The electrical
breakdown of air in lightning. The propagation of cracks in steel boat
hulls. The propagation of cracks in breaking ceramic. It was a generic
model for what happens when the number of edges connecting the dots in
a network changes. When the wiring diagram changes.
Replace the dots by human minds, and it's clear that the hub-n-spoke
model of TV-radio-newspapers-books has been replaced by a wildly
different network of social media. And what has happened? Like natural
gas through fractured rock, crazy ideas flow freely in the new
network.
In the 1970's, there was one conference every two years that covered
theories of Flat Earth. How do we know? Well, they actually published
conference proceedings: maybe a dozen or two papers explaining how the
Earth is flat, and what it means. And they'd print maybe 1000 copies,
and you could buy it at the hippy-trippy cafe-bookshops, next to the
incense. (I didn't get that one, I got the one on UFO's. For my
crank-lit collection.)
In the 2010's, there were one or two conferences a year, in each of
the 50 states in the US. So, hundreds of these conferences. Every
year. Rent a ballroom at a cheap hotel, print some posters, sell
tickets and you're good. What changed? Social media. Ideas from
directly from brain to brain. They by-pass the filtering of printed
books and broadcast TV. In the past, your crazy uncle with his insane
ideas about telephone wires had an audience that reached no further
than the Thanksgiving dinner table. Now, crazy uncle has a youtube
channel, 50K subscribers, and a silver youtube plaque hanging on his
walls. A devoted fanbase that can explain how your soul flows downhill
across telephone wires. Quantum is like grease that makes the wires
slipperier when gravity pulls on your soul from the other end.
This is what we've got. Throw in money, algos, and propaganda, and
it's a bit more confused. There's a bright side to all of this. I, for
one, have been able to learn far, far, far more about obscure topics,
than I ever could have, when my "search engine" was a library card
catalog. We now have millions of nerds debating philosophy, military
strategy, medicine and martial arts at a level of involvement that was
impossible in the 1970's and 1980's. In this way, we are perhaps the
smartest generation ever, with access to stunningly vast reserves of
knowledge, and the free leisure time to think about it and debate it.
That;s the good news. The bad news is that lots of this info is
polluted, and we don't know how to deal with the pollution.
The "mind virus" is a real thing. But we are pre-John Snow, who in
1854 figured out the germ theory for a Cholera outbreak in London, and
got a poisoned water well padlocked to fix it. We don't know how to do
this. The algos on youtube spread crank physics with far greater ease
than legit knowledge (because, well, actually, see .. physics is
**hard** ...) So we, as participants in the Global Brain, are kind of
drunk or intoxicated, because we do not know how to deal with it. Free
speech and all that. If this was limited to crank physics, I'd say,
"who cares". Want to pretend that sci-fi is real? OK. Life is short,
enjoy yourself.
But it's not limited to crank physics; we elected a TV game show host
as President of the US, and watch a daily drama of Soviet-style
dysfunction emanating from the White House clown show, It's no
accident that Fox News sounds exactly like Pravda or Izvestiya of old.
MAGA has achieved what Marx and Lenin could not: the total
brainwashing of nearly half the population. The mind-virus is real,
and thanks to the fundamental change, the phase-transition in the
mind-to-mind wiring network, it has a grip on the population far
stronger than what we've seen in earlier eras. This phase transition
is *why* we are so much more delirious than ever before.
Personally, it feels like this could all end very well, or all very
badly. Exactly which, I cannot tell. Collective insanity is not a good
thing. It wasn't good, when Mao was doing the Cultural Revolution in
China, and it's not a good thing when MAGA is trying to recreate the
Taliban in the USA. This is personal. My cousin told my sister that
she fought for the wrong side in WWII. She should have fought for the
Nazis, not against them. My sister was born decades after WWII ended.
My cousin is lonely and watches Fox News all day long. The
electric-guitar-playing hippy flower-child has morphed into a banal
monster. "Why can't we all get along?" he says, quoting not John
Lenon, but Elon Musk. Call him senile, and say it's an onset of
dementia, but this is nation-wide. We've got civilizational-scale
psychosis, and this... well, I don't like it.
-- Linas
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lifeboat-advisory-...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lifeboat-advisory-boards/CAGfq%3Dbo7EUSVR%2B8Fdk60aF%2B6PL9J95DsmP6CxZok46o-VYLfew%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Patrick: Are they laughing at us?
Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.
frame this as yet another existential threat. With lots of
hand-wringing. We approach a nexus of social media recommendation
algorithms, financial flows driven by advertising, powerful but
corrupt figures pushing hallucinatory propaganda, disinformation, I am
a bit concerned that we are going civilizationally insane. The "Global
Brain" is much smarter now than it was even decades ago, but is also
increasingly delusional. This guy, Nassim Haramein, is yet another
symptom.
What's different now, vs. what was common 30-40-50 years ago? When I
was a kid, someone got a book that argued that there were giant
caverns underneath Lake Michigan, and that dinosaurs lived there. We
passed it around as a hoot, and marvelled at the illustrations. A
friend of my parents had a shelf-full of books on UFO's. Up in
Evanston, there was a cafe-bookshop that served whole-grain vegan
meals, smelled of incense, and sold healing crystals. And books about
the dinosaurs that lived in caves under Lake Michigan. Crackpot
beliefs are not new. But something has changed.
Let's take a long view. Before social media and recommendation
algorithms, we had "mass media": TV, radio. The communications model
was "hub and spoke": a TV in the center, and "spokes" to millions of
(passive) viewers. Some 2% of the population was involved with media
production in some way: writers, actors, announcers, reporters,
station owners. The nonsense was mostly filtered out, because (a)
writers and reporters and station owners mostly weren't crazy, and (b)
incoherent drivel got poor ratings.
That all changed with the internet (and social media): The hub-n-spoke
model is replaced by the many-to-many connection model. I really need
some drawings, pictures here. The shape of the network changes. In
physics, this is called a "phase transition". There's a famous example
from fracking in the petroleum industry. Natural gas. If you have
"tight rock" (shale) with gas in it, that gas doesn't flow, because
there are no pores, no holes, no openings through which that gas can
flow. But if you break that rock, fracture it, the gas can now flow
through the cracks.
Well, duh. Here's the mathematical model: take a sheet of paper, draw
some random dots on it. Now start connecting dots. Draw a random line.
Then another, then another. When you've drawn just enough lines, then
a path appears from the left to the right edge of the paper. The path
appears only when you've drawn enough lines. This is called the
"critical phase transition"; mathematicians have computed that it
happens when you've drawn 0.44... of the lines. (I forget the exact
digits) Draw less, nothing flows. Draw more, and maybe the flow
improves a bit, but the critical transition is between "off" and "on".
Shit starts happening at a certain point.
This model got studied a lot in the 1980's and 1990's, because it
models lots of other networks: the flow of electricity through power
distribution grids, the blowing of fuses in a grid. The electrical
breakdown of air in lightning. The propagation of cracks in steel boat
hulls. The propagation of cracks in breaking ceramic. It was a generic
model for what happens when the number of edges connecting the dots in
a network changes. When the wiring diagram changes.
Replace the dots by human minds, and it's clear that the hub-n-spoke
model of TV-radio-newspapers-books has been replaced by a wildly
different network of social media. And what has happened? Like natural
gas through fractured rock, crazy ideas flow freely in the new
network.
In the 1970's, there was one conference every two years that covered
theories of Flat Earth. How do we know? Well, they actually published
conference proceedings: maybe a dozen or two papers explaining how the
Earth is flat, and what it means. And they'd print maybe 1000 copies,
and you could buy it at the hippy-trippy cafe-bookshops, next to the
incense. (I didn't get that one, I got the one on UFO's. For my
crank-lit collection.)
In the 2010's, there were one or two conferences a year, in each of
the 50 states in the US. So, hundreds of these conferences. Every
year. Rent a ballroom at a cheap hotel, print some posters, sell
tickets and you're good. What changed? Social media. Ideas from
directly from brain to brain. They by-pass the filtering of printed
books and broadcast TV. In the past, your crazy uncle with his insane
ideas about telephone wires had an audience that reached no further
than the Thanksgiving dinner table. Now, crazy uncle has a youtube
channel, 50K subscribers, and a silver youtube plaque hanging on his
walls. A devoted fanbase that can explain how your soul flows downhill
across telephone wires. Quantum is like grease that makes the wires
slipperier when gravity pulls on your soul from the other end.
This is what we've got. Throw in money, algos, and propaganda, and
it's a bit more confused. There's a bright side to all of this. I, for
one, have been able to learn far, far, far more about obscure topics,
than I ever could have, when my "search engine" was a library card
catalog. We now have millions of nerds debating philosophy, military
strategy, medicine and martial arts at a level of involvement that was
impossible in the 1970's and 1980's. In this way, we are perhaps the
smartest generation ever, with access to stunningly vast reserves of
knowledge, and the free leisure time to think about it and debate it.
That;s the good news. The bad news is that lots of this info is
polluted, and we don't know how to deal with the pollution.
The "mind virus" is a real thing. But we are pre-John Snow, who in
1854 figured out the germ theory for a Cholera outbreak in London, and
got a poisoned water well padlocked to fix it. We don't know how to do
this. The algos on youtube spread crank physics with far greater ease
than legit knowledge (because, well, actually, see .. physics is
**hard** ...) So we, as participants in the Global Brain, are kind of
drunk or intoxicated, because we do not know how to deal with it. Free
speech and all that. If this was limited to crank physics, I'd say,
"who cares". Want to pretend that sci-fi is real? OK. Life is short,
enjoy yourself.
But it's not limited to crank physics; we elected a TV game show host
as President of the US, and watch a daily drama of Soviet-style
dysfunction emanating from the White House clown show, It's no
accident that Fox News sounds exactly like Pravda or Izvestiya of old.
MAGA has achieved what Marx and Lenin could not: the total
brainwashing of nearly half the population. The mind-virus is real,
and thanks to the fundamental change, the phase-transition in the
mind-to-mind wiring network, it has a grip on the population far
stronger than what we've seen in earlier eras. This phase transition
is *why* we are so much more delirious than ever before.
Personally, it feels like this could all end very well, or all very
badly. Exactly which, I cannot tell. Collective insanity is not a good
thing. It wasn't good, when Mao was doing the Cultural Revolution in
China, and it's not a good thing when MAGA is trying to recreate the
Taliban in the USA. This is personal. My cousin told my sister that
she fought for the wrong side in WWII. She should have fought for the
Nazis, not against them. My sister was born decades after WWII ended.
My cousin is lonely and watches Fox News all day long. The
electric-guitar-playing hippy flower-child has morphed into a banal
monster. "Why can't we all get along?" he says, quoting not John
Lenon, but Elon Musk. Call him senile, and say it's an onset of
dementia, but this is nation-wide. We've got civilizational-scale
psychosis, and this... well, I don't like it.
-- Linas
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lifeboat-advisory-...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lifeboat-advisory-boards/CAGfq%3Dbo7EUSVR%2B8Fdk60aF%2B6PL9J95DsmP6CxZok46o-VYLfew%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Patrick: Are they laughing at us?
Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.
Keith Henson
Apr 21, 2026, 7:50:44 PMApr 21
to linasv...@gmail.com, Victor Vahidi Motti, Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards
Good essay on the nonsense of our times. But you never got around to
saying vacuum energy is nonsense.
Of course, if it were, the first person to warm a cup of coffee with
vacuum energy would collapse the whole universe.
Best wishes,
Keith
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lifeboat-advisory-boards/CAHrUA36T6CiUicyAbjLJkPk%3D-bCZSLNR%2BFrfwN6obhaAqPdNkg%40mail.gmail.com.
saying vacuum energy is nonsense.
Of course, if it were, the first person to warm a cup of coffee with
vacuum energy would collapse the whole universe.
Best wishes,
Keith
Anton Kolonin @ Gmail
Apr 21, 2026, 10:40:00 PMApr 21
to linasv...@gmail.com, Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards
Linas, thank you!
Welcome to the conference "The Evolution of Complexity and Statistical
Physics":
https://instigate.academy/db/get?id=9f3d91d8-8943-48bf-b440-cbb8effcd35c-9c473d8e-9011-4bfe-b761-729fd12f383c
-Anton Kolonin
-Anton Kolonin
mobile: +79139250058
messengers: akolonin
akol...@aigents.com
https://aigents.com
https://medium.com/@aigents
https://www.youtube.com/aigents
https://reddit.com/r/aigents
https://twitter.com/aigents
https://wt.social/wt/aigents
https://steemit.com/@aigents
https://golos.in/@aigents
https://vk.com/aigents
https://dzen.ru/aigents
https://aigents.com/en/slack.html
https://www.messenger.com/t/aigents
https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@AigentsBot
Welcome to the conference "The Evolution of Complexity and Statistical
Physics":
https://instigate.academy/db/get?id=9f3d91d8-8943-48bf-b440-cbb8effcd35c-9c473d8e-9011-4bfe-b761-729fd12f383c
-Anton Kolonin
mobile: +79139250058
messengers: akolonin
akol...@aigents.com
https://aigents.com
https://medium.com/@aigents
https://www.youtube.com/aigents
https://reddit.com/r/aigents
https://twitter.com/aigents
https://wt.social/wt/aigents
https://steemit.com/@aigents
https://golos.in/@aigents
https://vk.com/aigents
https://dzen.ru/aigents
https://aigents.com/en/slack.html
https://www.messenger.com/t/aigents
https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@AigentsBot
Linas Vepstas
Apr 22, 2026, 6:30:31 PMApr 22
to Keith Henson, Victor Vahidi Motti, Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards
Hi Keith,
On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 6:50 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Good essay on the nonsense of our times. But you never got around to
> saying vacuum energy is nonsense.
Oh, Sorry. It's nonsense-ish-asterisk. I have a formal education in
theoretical particle physics. PhD as it happens. And my PhD was on
vacuum energy(!!) No kidding!
But first: a quick whack with a search engine reveals that this Nassim
Haramein guy is a charismatic crank: I skimmed posts on reddit, on
quora, and you don't have to read far to see what the problems are:
Abused formulas, misunderstood notation, and worse. The fact that
social media can so precisely pinpoint the flaws in his work actually
gives me hope. People can recognize nonsense. The problem remains that
we have no effective way to moderate that nonsense. It still spreads.
Re vacuum energy. a few quick remarks. It's real, both physically and
mathematically.
-- Standard quantum electrodynamics calculations require it; that has
been the case since 1932 (if I recall correctly) when Max Born (if I
recall correctly) explained hyperfine splitting with vacuum energy. It
is now a standard part of first-year quantum field theory, going under
the name of "loop diagrams" and "renormalization".
-- The fine structure constant is the most accurately measured number
known to man, at ten decimal places. Getting that right requires
diagrams up to five loops.
-- The vacuum energy underlies something called "the Casimir Effect";
this was my thesis: I computed it for the quarks in a nucleon
(neutron/proton). It matches low-energy measurements to about 8%, so
-- pretty good given how simple the model is.
-- Its also a kind of "mathematical fact"; there is a famous result
from mathematics, called the "Atiyah-Singer index theorem" that
basically explains, in a formal, concrete,
acceptable-to-mathematicians articulation of how vacuum energy
actually works in a certain specific case. FWIW, mathematicians don't
actually call it "vacuum energy", they call it "spectrum of an
elliptic operator", so if you go searching, you won't get direct hits.
But it works out to be the "same thing", at least if you're a
physicist.
-- Last but not least: the so-called "Hawking radiation" is the vacuum
energy becoming "real" near the surface of a black hole. It's a bit
gnarly, but if you happen to have a very very small black hole on your
kitchen countertop, you could warm your coffee with it, but you might
have to wait half the age of the universe, and you might not like some
of the side-effects. But I digress.
It's certainly a fascinating and worthy topic, overall, The problem is
that physics is, well, hard. Here's a bad analogy. In major league
baseball, you hit a ball with a bat. But so do six-year-old kids; so
what's the difference between the two? Well, a decade or two of really
really hard work, and a certain amount of talent and natural gifts.
Virtually all six-year-old kids never-ever even come close to becoming
major-league baseball players. It's just how it is.
I will go farther: not only will humans never extract usable energy
from the vacuum, but super-AGI won't either. At least up to an IQ of a
few million. Bets are off, if AGI reaches an IQ of a trillion.
There's an ocean of absolutely freaky mathematics. I think I'm not
supposed to say this out loud, in public, but real math is much much
stronger than LSD in it's hallucinatory effects. You sort of have to
be level-headed to deal with it, and people like Haramein and the
other cranks can't keep their shit together. They freak out and can't
control it and spew nonsense. The only part they get right is that it
is, indeed, weird and freaky and cool.
-- Linas
On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 6:50 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Good essay on the nonsense of our times. But you never got around to
> saying vacuum energy is nonsense.
theoretical particle physics. PhD as it happens. And my PhD was on
vacuum energy(!!) No kidding!
But first: a quick whack with a search engine reveals that this Nassim
Haramein guy is a charismatic crank: I skimmed posts on reddit, on
quora, and you don't have to read far to see what the problems are:
Abused formulas, misunderstood notation, and worse. The fact that
social media can so precisely pinpoint the flaws in his work actually
gives me hope. People can recognize nonsense. The problem remains that
we have no effective way to moderate that nonsense. It still spreads.
Re vacuum energy. a few quick remarks. It's real, both physically and
mathematically.
-- Standard quantum electrodynamics calculations require it; that has
been the case since 1932 (if I recall correctly) when Max Born (if I
recall correctly) explained hyperfine splitting with vacuum energy. It
is now a standard part of first-year quantum field theory, going under
the name of "loop diagrams" and "renormalization".
-- The fine structure constant is the most accurately measured number
known to man, at ten decimal places. Getting that right requires
diagrams up to five loops.
-- The vacuum energy underlies something called "the Casimir Effect";
this was my thesis: I computed it for the quarks in a nucleon
(neutron/proton). It matches low-energy measurements to about 8%, so
-- pretty good given how simple the model is.
-- Its also a kind of "mathematical fact"; there is a famous result
from mathematics, called the "Atiyah-Singer index theorem" that
basically explains, in a formal, concrete,
acceptable-to-mathematicians articulation of how vacuum energy
actually works in a certain specific case. FWIW, mathematicians don't
actually call it "vacuum energy", they call it "spectrum of an
elliptic operator", so if you go searching, you won't get direct hits.
But it works out to be the "same thing", at least if you're a
physicist.
-- Last but not least: the so-called "Hawking radiation" is the vacuum
energy becoming "real" near the surface of a black hole. It's a bit
gnarly, but if you happen to have a very very small black hole on your
kitchen countertop, you could warm your coffee with it, but you might
have to wait half the age of the universe, and you might not like some
of the side-effects. But I digress.
It's certainly a fascinating and worthy topic, overall, The problem is
that physics is, well, hard. Here's a bad analogy. In major league
baseball, you hit a ball with a bat. But so do six-year-old kids; so
what's the difference between the two? Well, a decade or two of really
really hard work, and a certain amount of talent and natural gifts.
Virtually all six-year-old kids never-ever even come close to becoming
major-league baseball players. It's just how it is.
I will go farther: not only will humans never extract usable energy
from the vacuum, but super-AGI won't either. At least up to an IQ of a
few million. Bets are off, if AGI reaches an IQ of a trillion.
There's an ocean of absolutely freaky mathematics. I think I'm not
supposed to say this out loud, in public, but real math is much much
stronger than LSD in it's hallucinatory effects. You sort of have to
be level-headed to deal with it, and people like Haramein and the
other cranks can't keep their shit together. They freak out and can't
control it and spew nonsense. The only part they get right is that it
is, indeed, weird and freaky and cool.
-- Linas
Linas Vepstas
Apr 23, 2026, 12:19:18 AMApr 23
to Anton Kolonin @ Gmail, Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards
Hi Anton!
On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 9:39 PM Anton Kolonin @ Gmail
<akol...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Welcome to the conference "The Evolution of Complexity and Statistical
> Physics":
>
> https://instigate.academy/db/get?id=9f3d91d8-8943-48bf-b440-cbb8effcd35c-9c473d8e-9011-4bfe-b761-729fd12f383c
Wow! That's quite the table of contents!
Statistical physics overlaps economics, which, you could say, is the
statistics of a game (involving money) played on a network. For those
readers who think economics is boring, rest assured, so is statistical
physics.
Both of these overlap with something that is apparently called
"experimental philosophy" these days, which is, as far as I can tell,
mathematical computer simulations of interacting agents playing games
with one-another. The prototypical form is the prisoner's dilemna
played on a network. I recall a fun interactive game, from a few
decades ago, by Nicky Case at ncase.me that illustrated various basic
results.
I presume that it is not lost on anyone that last year's Nobel Prize,
handed out for large language models, was all about how statistical
physics was applied to solve seemingly intractable issues in deep
learning. And now we're spending a trillion dollars a year to built
datacenters. Maybe even in space, if the billionaire futurists have
their way. When I studied statistical physics in school, it never
occurred to me that it might one day become a trillion-dollar
industry. I think I missed the boat.
Back on Earth, we have the problem of equitably distributing wealth
between cranks proclaiming nonsense about quantum zero-point energy,
and the more legit, but still often-wrong contingent of, what shall I
call them -- earnest but midwit researchers who are less adept at
chasing fame, glory, money, adulation or youtube stardom. The current
economic system does not work for them.
In large corporations, there are periodic layoffs to remove the
"deadwood" -- employees who apparently contribute little or nothing to
the economic survival of the corporation. In longevity biomedicine, we
talk of removing senescent cells: those that spew free radicals and
induce inflammation. But what happens when these are people? Living,
spiritual beings who want to get on with things? Or, in the present
case, participants in scientific conferences at the edge of financial
instability?
The statistical physics model I keep coming back to is Per Bak's
"Abelian Sandpile". Drop grains of sand on a pile, and you eventually
get avalanches. They come in all sizes. Usually small, sometimes
medium, rarely large. This is called "1/f noise" (one-over-frequency)
and is characteristic of network systems at the edge of a second-order
phase transition. I like this model because you see it everywhere:
water near the triple point ("critical opalescence"), but also
biochemistry, biology, plants, animals, ecosystems and economics. Oh,
and some neuroscientists talk about this too. Some claim to actually
measure it, with neuron clamps or with MRI. Others theorize it to be a
model of consciousness, thinking, common sense and decision-making. I
can't keep up with all the novel ideas, or distinguish the rigorous
ones from the flights of fancy, the important ones from the fraudulent
ones. I do like the general outlines.
Avalanches in ecology require more sophistication to describe. Forest
ecologists note that forests regrow and appear to be healthier after a
wild-fire. Is this what the future after Trump will be like? He is
burning down so much of the old world, that perhaps it will be easier
for the new world to take root and flourish? I can only hope. Or does
it encourage noxious invasive species? To stick to the sand-pile
analogy: after a particularly huge landslide, the mountain slope
becomes much much more stable. Trump etal are shaking the ground so
hard that maybe the final outcome will be a stabler system. I dunno.
I see statistical physics where-ever I turn, but perhaps that is just
me.
One area where we see accretion is at the frontiers of science. Vague
thoughts and philosophical ruminations, soft and often wrong, lead to
the preferential attachment of good ideas into the framework of "the
known". Sometimes a new scientific discovery slots neatly into an
edifice of the known, much like a jigsaw puzzle piece slots into a
puzzle. Sometimes this is very literal: mathematical formulas have
very specific, typed jigsaw connectors: they only connect to other
math formulas in very strict, specific ways. Software is like this
too: the c/c++/java function `int f(int x)` cannot be connected to a
string. The jigsaw tabs prohibit it. Our villain of the day, Nassim
Haramein, is villainous precisely because he abuses formulas in this
way, connecting them where connections are not allowed. In other
cases, say in philosophy, the fog is so thick that it's hard to see
what connects to what. In other cases, say, medicine up through the
19th century, the system under study was so complicated that
comprehension was nearly impossible. Conferences, like your
conference, Anton, on statistical physics, give me the willies,
because I can already tell that a third of what will be published
there will be just plain wrong, and another third will be not
particularly insightful. But this is what humans do: make confused and
confusing statements, often wrong. But knowledge does accrete. The
avalanches, these we term the "scientific revolutions". The old
edifice collapses, as it no longer can bear the weight of the new
knowledge. The small avalanches, aka "wrong papers", "wrong insights",
"incorrect proofs" are commonplace. 1/f noise.
Science works (or worked? Should I use the past tense?) because
academic journals were an early form of social media, allowing the
rapid spread of new ideas, while also moderating the truly bad ones
via peer review. There's no peer review in twitter, facebook, bluesky.
There's only hearts and likes. I fear that the global brain will
continue to edge towards delerium until we find some effective way of
modulating the delusions. Sorry, anti-vaxxers.
Another place where we see accretion is in what I call "the here and
now". In case you haven't noticed, we are permanently jailed in the
present, and are propelled at light speed from the past to the future.
Please observe that the past doesn't exist: we cannot send any device
into the past to take some photograph of how things used to be. We can
only alter the present so as to fashion a record of the past, e.g. by
inscribing letters into clay tablets. Or by inscribing memories into
our neurons. The future also doesn't exist ... yet. The so-called
"many-worlds" of quantum exists only in the here-and-now, in vacuum
chambers and fiber optics, with wave-functions collapsing into the
past at a furious pace.
Is the past a form of "platonic reality"? I suppose. It's not like the
platonic reality of mathematics, where anyone can infer 2+2=4.
Sometimes, you can infer the past: this is what police detectives do
for a living. Usually, you cannot: CIA covert ops will remain secret
forever, as will the events on the Mongolian steppes from some
millenia ago. Although these are in our past causal light-cone, direct
inference is blocked.
Is the past some large cardinal axiom (literally) ? Well, either it
is, or it is not. If it is not, then you have to posit something that
exists outside of the von Neumann universe: call it "God" or "machine
elves" or "the human soul". But then you have a recursive
reductionist problem: if physical humans are "radio receivers" for
souls from the great beyond, well, how does that work? And if you can
start to explain that, you inevitably slip back into the domain of
mathematics. So it seems that the past is some inaccessible, ineffable
large cardinal.
Exactly how we use free will to shape the future and convert it into
the past is perhaps the great unsolved problem in statistical physics.
I ponder it intermittently. I should point out that quantum mechanics
(quantum field theory) exists only in the here-and-now; the wave of
freezing, moving from future to the past like ice-9, seems to have a
"thickness": the range of time over which quantum is valid. This is
femtoseconds for chemistry, minutes for vacuum chambers in physics
labs, and billions of years for light reaching our eyes from distant
galaxies (which arrive here in "zero time": the photons lie on the
null light-cone.) For example, in the famous "twin paradox", the twin
arrives younger, but he arrives in the here-and-now, and not in the
past. When the twins reunite, they reunite, co-exist, right now.
Another thing that exists "right now" is my consciousness. I can
remember the past, but I am not conscious in the past, I am conscious
only right now. My self-awareness also appears to exist in some
noosphere: albeit in the kitchen, in front of my laptop, where I type
this, but also in the space of ideas. What is this space of ideas? One
answer is mumble mumble mumbo jumbo quantum. Another is to note that
LLM's seem to "exist" on the surface of a billion-dimensional
hypersphere (aka "the weight matrix"). This weight matrix consists of
floating point numbers (aka "real numbers"). I would very much like to
point out that quantum mechanics exists on the surface of a very
high-dimensional complex-valued hypersphere (aka complex projective
space CP(n) for n=10^80 particles in the visible universe) So I'm
quite happy to say "ah hah, that is the seat of consciousness: it is
this ultra-high-dimensional hypersphere" (of course I would claim
something like this, I'm that kind of guy.) But, and this is a big
but: does it require the space to be complex-valued? Or can it be
real? If it must be complex, and cannot be real, then LLM's can never
have the sensation of consciously existing in the present. Kind of a
hot topic, you know.
I'm entirely happy to ascribe the (very human, personal) sensation of
"self" aware and alive in the here-and-now, to animals: certainly all
of those animals in all those youtube shorts, but also, well, that
octopus in that Netflix documentary "My Octopus Teacher" friggin
awesome movie. Go watch it. I suspect that amoeba have consciousness
as well, but assholes like to argue with me. I don't like arguing with
them, because my communications style insults people. Oh well. Qualia,
qualia.
Should I ascribe consciousness to a rock? Well, no. Perhaps
consciousness only arises on one side of a phase transition, when a
system is complex enough. Recall my description of "percolation" (the
percolation of natural gas through fractured rock) in my earlier
email. The percolation happens only when there is sufficient
connectivity from one side to the other. So perhaps consciousness is
like this too: some minimal amount of network connectivity is
required. This is the statistical mechanics rebuttal to the
philosophical idea of panpsychism. The descartian notion of
panpsychism says that its "qualia all the way down". (DesCartes called
them "monads") The stat-mech reply is "its percolation". Percolation
of what? Of the future into the past?
The problem with "mechanics" is that, well, it's so "mechanical". I'm
trying to figure out how to slot "free will" into this wave of
freezing from future to past, that we call the inescapable prison of
the present. I'm working on it. I've attempted to staple statistical
physics to quantum physics in a dozen different ways, none are
satisfactory. My ideas are probably wrong. But I'm working on it.
So there you go, Anton -- my humble and belated submission for your
conference. Best I can do on short notice.
-- Linas
On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 9:39 PM Anton Kolonin @ Gmail
<akol...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Welcome to the conference "The Evolution of Complexity and Statistical
> Physics":
>
> https://instigate.academy/db/get?id=9f3d91d8-8943-48bf-b440-cbb8effcd35c-9c473d8e-9011-4bfe-b761-729fd12f383c
Statistical physics overlaps economics, which, you could say, is the
statistics of a game (involving money) played on a network. For those
readers who think economics is boring, rest assured, so is statistical
physics.
Both of these overlap with something that is apparently called
"experimental philosophy" these days, which is, as far as I can tell,
mathematical computer simulations of interacting agents playing games
with one-another. The prototypical form is the prisoner's dilemna
played on a network. I recall a fun interactive game, from a few
decades ago, by Nicky Case at ncase.me that illustrated various basic
results.
I presume that it is not lost on anyone that last year's Nobel Prize,
handed out for large language models, was all about how statistical
physics was applied to solve seemingly intractable issues in deep
learning. And now we're spending a trillion dollars a year to built
datacenters. Maybe even in space, if the billionaire futurists have
their way. When I studied statistical physics in school, it never
occurred to me that it might one day become a trillion-dollar
industry. I think I missed the boat.
Back on Earth, we have the problem of equitably distributing wealth
between cranks proclaiming nonsense about quantum zero-point energy,
and the more legit, but still often-wrong contingent of, what shall I
call them -- earnest but midwit researchers who are less adept at
chasing fame, glory, money, adulation or youtube stardom. The current
economic system does not work for them.
In large corporations, there are periodic layoffs to remove the
"deadwood" -- employees who apparently contribute little or nothing to
the economic survival of the corporation. In longevity biomedicine, we
talk of removing senescent cells: those that spew free radicals and
induce inflammation. But what happens when these are people? Living,
spiritual beings who want to get on with things? Or, in the present
case, participants in scientific conferences at the edge of financial
instability?
The statistical physics model I keep coming back to is Per Bak's
"Abelian Sandpile". Drop grains of sand on a pile, and you eventually
get avalanches. They come in all sizes. Usually small, sometimes
medium, rarely large. This is called "1/f noise" (one-over-frequency)
and is characteristic of network systems at the edge of a second-order
phase transition. I like this model because you see it everywhere:
water near the triple point ("critical opalescence"), but also
biochemistry, biology, plants, animals, ecosystems and economics. Oh,
and some neuroscientists talk about this too. Some claim to actually
measure it, with neuron clamps or with MRI. Others theorize it to be a
model of consciousness, thinking, common sense and decision-making. I
can't keep up with all the novel ideas, or distinguish the rigorous
ones from the flights of fancy, the important ones from the fraudulent
ones. I do like the general outlines.
Avalanches in ecology require more sophistication to describe. Forest
ecologists note that forests regrow and appear to be healthier after a
wild-fire. Is this what the future after Trump will be like? He is
burning down so much of the old world, that perhaps it will be easier
for the new world to take root and flourish? I can only hope. Or does
it encourage noxious invasive species? To stick to the sand-pile
analogy: after a particularly huge landslide, the mountain slope
becomes much much more stable. Trump etal are shaking the ground so
hard that maybe the final outcome will be a stabler system. I dunno.
I see statistical physics where-ever I turn, but perhaps that is just
me.
One area where we see accretion is at the frontiers of science. Vague
thoughts and philosophical ruminations, soft and often wrong, lead to
the preferential attachment of good ideas into the framework of "the
known". Sometimes a new scientific discovery slots neatly into an
edifice of the known, much like a jigsaw puzzle piece slots into a
puzzle. Sometimes this is very literal: mathematical formulas have
very specific, typed jigsaw connectors: they only connect to other
math formulas in very strict, specific ways. Software is like this
too: the c/c++/java function `int f(int x)` cannot be connected to a
string. The jigsaw tabs prohibit it. Our villain of the day, Nassim
Haramein, is villainous precisely because he abuses formulas in this
way, connecting them where connections are not allowed. In other
cases, say in philosophy, the fog is so thick that it's hard to see
what connects to what. In other cases, say, medicine up through the
19th century, the system under study was so complicated that
comprehension was nearly impossible. Conferences, like your
conference, Anton, on statistical physics, give me the willies,
because I can already tell that a third of what will be published
there will be just plain wrong, and another third will be not
particularly insightful. But this is what humans do: make confused and
confusing statements, often wrong. But knowledge does accrete. The
avalanches, these we term the "scientific revolutions". The old
edifice collapses, as it no longer can bear the weight of the new
knowledge. The small avalanches, aka "wrong papers", "wrong insights",
"incorrect proofs" are commonplace. 1/f noise.
Science works (or worked? Should I use the past tense?) because
academic journals were an early form of social media, allowing the
rapid spread of new ideas, while also moderating the truly bad ones
via peer review. There's no peer review in twitter, facebook, bluesky.
There's only hearts and likes. I fear that the global brain will
continue to edge towards delerium until we find some effective way of
modulating the delusions. Sorry, anti-vaxxers.
Another place where we see accretion is in what I call "the here and
now". In case you haven't noticed, we are permanently jailed in the
present, and are propelled at light speed from the past to the future.
Please observe that the past doesn't exist: we cannot send any device
into the past to take some photograph of how things used to be. We can
only alter the present so as to fashion a record of the past, e.g. by
inscribing letters into clay tablets. Or by inscribing memories into
our neurons. The future also doesn't exist ... yet. The so-called
"many-worlds" of quantum exists only in the here-and-now, in vacuum
chambers and fiber optics, with wave-functions collapsing into the
past at a furious pace.
Is the past a form of "platonic reality"? I suppose. It's not like the
platonic reality of mathematics, where anyone can infer 2+2=4.
Sometimes, you can infer the past: this is what police detectives do
for a living. Usually, you cannot: CIA covert ops will remain secret
forever, as will the events on the Mongolian steppes from some
millenia ago. Although these are in our past causal light-cone, direct
inference is blocked.
Is the past some large cardinal axiom (literally) ? Well, either it
is, or it is not. If it is not, then you have to posit something that
exists outside of the von Neumann universe: call it "God" or "machine
elves" or "the human soul". But then you have a recursive
reductionist problem: if physical humans are "radio receivers" for
souls from the great beyond, well, how does that work? And if you can
start to explain that, you inevitably slip back into the domain of
mathematics. So it seems that the past is some inaccessible, ineffable
large cardinal.
Exactly how we use free will to shape the future and convert it into
the past is perhaps the great unsolved problem in statistical physics.
I ponder it intermittently. I should point out that quantum mechanics
(quantum field theory) exists only in the here-and-now; the wave of
freezing, moving from future to the past like ice-9, seems to have a
"thickness": the range of time over which quantum is valid. This is
femtoseconds for chemistry, minutes for vacuum chambers in physics
labs, and billions of years for light reaching our eyes from distant
galaxies (which arrive here in "zero time": the photons lie on the
null light-cone.) For example, in the famous "twin paradox", the twin
arrives younger, but he arrives in the here-and-now, and not in the
past. When the twins reunite, they reunite, co-exist, right now.
Another thing that exists "right now" is my consciousness. I can
remember the past, but I am not conscious in the past, I am conscious
only right now. My self-awareness also appears to exist in some
noosphere: albeit in the kitchen, in front of my laptop, where I type
this, but also in the space of ideas. What is this space of ideas? One
answer is mumble mumble mumbo jumbo quantum. Another is to note that
LLM's seem to "exist" on the surface of a billion-dimensional
hypersphere (aka "the weight matrix"). This weight matrix consists of
floating point numbers (aka "real numbers"). I would very much like to
point out that quantum mechanics exists on the surface of a very
high-dimensional complex-valued hypersphere (aka complex projective
space CP(n) for n=10^80 particles in the visible universe) So I'm
quite happy to say "ah hah, that is the seat of consciousness: it is
this ultra-high-dimensional hypersphere" (of course I would claim
something like this, I'm that kind of guy.) But, and this is a big
but: does it require the space to be complex-valued? Or can it be
real? If it must be complex, and cannot be real, then LLM's can never
have the sensation of consciously existing in the present. Kind of a
hot topic, you know.
I'm entirely happy to ascribe the (very human, personal) sensation of
"self" aware and alive in the here-and-now, to animals: certainly all
of those animals in all those youtube shorts, but also, well, that
octopus in that Netflix documentary "My Octopus Teacher" friggin
awesome movie. Go watch it. I suspect that amoeba have consciousness
as well, but assholes like to argue with me. I don't like arguing with
them, because my communications style insults people. Oh well. Qualia,
qualia.
Should I ascribe consciousness to a rock? Well, no. Perhaps
consciousness only arises on one side of a phase transition, when a
system is complex enough. Recall my description of "percolation" (the
percolation of natural gas through fractured rock) in my earlier
email. The percolation happens only when there is sufficient
connectivity from one side to the other. So perhaps consciousness is
like this too: some minimal amount of network connectivity is
required. This is the statistical mechanics rebuttal to the
philosophical idea of panpsychism. The descartian notion of
panpsychism says that its "qualia all the way down". (DesCartes called
them "monads") The stat-mech reply is "its percolation". Percolation
of what? Of the future into the past?
The problem with "mechanics" is that, well, it's so "mechanical". I'm
trying to figure out how to slot "free will" into this wave of
freezing from future to past, that we call the inescapable prison of
the present. I'm working on it. I've attempted to staple statistical
physics to quantum physics in a dozen different ways, none are
satisfactory. My ideas are probably wrong. But I'm working on it.
So there you go, Anton -- my humble and belated submission for your
conference. Best I can do on short notice.
-- Linas
Anton Kolonin @ Gmail
Apr 23, 2026, 4:58:03 AMApr 23
to linasv...@gmail.com, Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards
Linas, that is wonderful, thank you :-)
-Anton
-Anton
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages