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Tuesday 9December2003

Matrix Reloaded

My day starts with a peek at the Bejan Daruwalla column in The Times Of India. Today it said that I’ll be losing something precious. Well I ‘wasted’ a lot of time thinking what is that thing which I’ll be losing today. Its nearly 8pm, and it seems things are safe to my knowledge.. or have I really lost something.

The time has come to seriously question this fad of mine, which I myself consider fit for the weak, rustic kind of people. You know what I mean. I find it very hard to believe all this, and particularly hate the very idea that my future has been predecided. Nobody except for me has the right to do that. Well that was all a hot blooded me doing the talk. So don’t mind, if you are one of those waking up to Bejan Daruwalla column every morning.

I find it very difficult to accept this as a fact. People say it has been observed for all this while, and I’m turning a blind eye to it. The earliest mention to my knowledge is in the Bible, where the scribes predicted the birth of Messiah. Cause that borders around my religious beliefs, I readily accept it. But when it comes to accepting that in my day to day life.. I treat it just one of those…not soh educated kinds.. Well why this jaundiced attitude against a widely held belief.

So I’m inclined to give it one logical thought.

Arguments in favor

1. That I don’t know about it, doesn’t call for its non-existence.

Arguments against

1.        That I don’t know about it, doesn’t mean that it should actually exist.

This is how most of my arguments with my friends on this topic end.

  Ohhk.. lets approach the topic from a scientific viewpoint. I vaguely remember Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.. It talked about the accuracy with which we can locate a body, simultaneously tracking its velocity. So thought of doing a bit of google on the subject. It says .. More precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant and vice versa.

When expressed mathematically

                                      Δp* Δq >= h/4p

                      Where Δp is the uncertainty in the momentum of a particle

                      And    Δq is the uncertainty in the position of a particle.

So this is the uncertainty that is associated with subatomic particles.. Now thinking about how can we translate it to humans.. or the bigger ones there on the earth to make it more meaningful.   

I can definitely say that I’ll be writing this document for the next 1 second, for the next 2 seconds.. for the next 1 minute. I might think of having a tea later. So the probability that I’ll be doing the same documentation decreases. I haven’t taken the external factors into account. Though they would further decrease the probability of that event to occur. My tech lead who has already noticed me doing nothing for all these days might ask me to work on a bug fixing. Even considering myself in total oblivion, I find that the uncertainty about things increase as we move ahead in time.

So the function, can be interpreted this way.

         Δ p* Δq* (1/(f(Δt))) >= constant.

Where all the terms except Δt carry the original meaning, and  Δt is the time elapsed from the present instant.

And f(x) is an increasing function.

If we consider Δ p, Δq as two of the many attributes for the future state, we have a relation relating two attributes of future with time. So this says that we can predict our future to a definite accuracy depending upon this relation. But what if the constant is of the value, which makes it possible for all the intelligent events for a person to be of considerable probability with almost all of them with equal probabilities too.

That constant, lets name it matrix coefficient. So it’s for the matrix coefficient to decide if we can predict the future or not. So the question is again open-ended.

Again my mind floats to the column,

Ok…. Probably tomorrow it says something nice for me.

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