Entanglement

So I've been listening to Apparatjik - the side project of Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman, including memebers from a-ha and Mew - and their new album, We Are Here (on iTunes). They're pretty darned weird, pretty darned experimental, and pretty darned good. Try to imagine a fusion of a techno Mika, early-Coldplay (especially some of the guitar riffs), and the trippyness of Animal Collective. And also something techno and cerebral and different. My personal favorites on the album are "Datascroller", "Look Kids", and "Deadbeat", although the most accessable song on the album might be "Snow Crystals".

One thing I'll touch on is a central theme of the album - on the tracks "Arrow & Bow" and "Electric Eye", a strange term is used - "Sub-Particle Entanglement Theory". It sounds like something that they just made up, to give a cerebral effect on the album. However, entanglement is a real thing - a certain theory not quite understood by anyone. Albert Einstein himself refused to deal with it, dismissing it as "spooky action at a distance", even though his theory of relativity suggested it.

I won't, of course, get into any of the real math or physics about it - I don't understand any of that. But the theory goes a bit like this, in common terms: if you take two very small particles, and "spin" them a certain way (I would explain what this means, but it makes my head hurt), they become practically one and the same, while still being seperate particles. Anything that you do to one particle, "spin" it, blow it up, dress it in a tux, will happen identically to the other particle - instantaneously, no matter how far apart. The two particles are "entangled".

Now, this might not seem like anything groundbreaking on the surface. But the real idea here is that everything in the universe seems to follow one common speed limit - the speed of light. Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2 dictates that when objects get close to the speed of light, they gain mass, and therefore take more energy to move. In theory, when a object is moving at the speed of light, it would take an infinite amount of energy to move, which is impossible. This applies to not only physical objects, but things like radio waves and light - information. They all cannot pass the speed of light .

But now, with engtanglement, the two particles act on each other instantaneously - meaning that information about one is passed to the other, bypassing the speed of light. If we could make these entangled particles act as, say, a television, you could get TV on the Sun instantaneously as it was being broadcast, while radio waves would take a whole 8 minutes to reach the sun. This might not seem signifigant, but if you're talking about interstellar distances, it could provide the communication needed to reach the astronauts orbiting a sun on the other side of the galaxy - instantaneously.

Hope I didn't loose anybody there.

Anyway, I just thought it was cool that they referenced that and all. I totally recommend Apparatjik, if you're willing to listen to something less than normal. Also, if you want to read more into entanglement and other stuff like that, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is a comprehensible and relatively (no pun intended) simple insight into the universe.


Song of the Day: Snow Crystals - Apparatjik
Word of the Day: Entanglement

This blog is a BLOG

So this is a blog. Chyeah. All kinds of wonderful things are discussed here - music, sports, teenagerhood, love, hipsters, sarcasm, life. From yours truly, a teenage guy trying to get his act together.

So I'm pretty much at a loss on what to cover here. World Cup, maybe? The only opinion I have on the wonderful vuvuzelas (vuvuzela? vuvuzelae?) is that it sounds way to much like vulva to be taken seriously. Which is why I laugh at people who get angry at them.

Also, I watched part of the Portugal-North Korea match today in French, in which the Koreans' goal was hardly a demilitarized zone - Portugal won 7-0, six of those goals coming in the second half, one of which coming between the legs of the Korean goalie, another of which coming off of a sweet (lucky) neck juggle by Christiano Ronaldo. I'm not going to make any of the obligatory Kim Jong Il-shoots-the-goalie jokes, but I'll be curious to see the reaction that the native North Korean fans give to the team returning to the country, since it'll be televised by -- oh, wait. Nevermind.

I'll leave it at that for today. Summer in four days. Going to a John Green book event on Thursday.



Word of the Day: Hourglass

Song of the Day: Resistance St. - What Made Milwaukee Famous (link goes here)