Be The Jam

laziness is the mother of invention

Agatha Christie

Living in the woods has to some extent made me more resourceful and this is, I suppose, inevitable; having to carry all my water to my home has naturally made me much more careful with this resource. Having to cook over an open fire combined with a desire to eat well has meant that I have learnt to make bread over a fire, design an adjustable pot hanger and all manner of other inventions that make my life easier. The application of the mind to the problems at hand that marks out the human mind from that of the beast and is responsible for our evolution to the top of the food chain. Invention has followed invention, innovation has followed innovation and now here we are wired into the world wide web, curing diseases, learning to understand the human condition,  flying in the skies and sending probes far into the darker reaches of space. It might perhaps seem strange at this time when human endeavor is reaching beyond far beyond the barriers that would have seemed possible only a generation or two ago for someone to choose to regress, to live in the woods, to battle with fire, water and cold. Some times I ask myself what on earth I think I'm doing spending my time out in the hills when I could be be doing something more relevant, more cutting edge, more demanding. A possible  justification for this current lifestyle can possibly come from the new perspective on the world that comes from living largely apart from society yet interacting with it.

Sometimes the answer can be staring you in the face.

A physicist friend of mine once explained to me that the difficulty of understanding the universe is compounded by the fact that we are part of the universe, it is difficult to understand the nature of something whilst being inside of it. Take for example a house, we all have a  fairly good understanding of the way in which a house works, walls on the sides, roof on top to keep heat in / rain out, wires for electricity, pipes for water etc etc. Imagine then that you have spent your entire life inside a house, no one has told you how the outside world works, there are no other houses to be seen from the windows and you don't have TV or a radio. In this situation the image that you built up of how a house worked and what it looked like would most likely differ greatly from the truth.

Similarly stepping away from the rat race for a while affords one the opportunity to examine it and put it into a wider context and, in my case at least, decide not to have anything more to do with it if at all possible thank you very much. Whilst this is of interest and use to myself it seemed to me until today that the perspective that I have gained is not really of any value to the rest of the world as a whole. The one caveat to this might be that this experience has led to some quite interesting late night philosophical conversations and the sharing of knowledge has some inherent value to it.

This morning I was listening to some physicists talking to Melvin Bragg on radio 4 about the speed of light, I wasn't paying full attention but the gyst of the conversation was that the speed of light can theoretically be breached by tachyons but that the limit at which information can be sent is at the speed of light. However, there is some uncertainty about the speed of thoughts. It seems that some people, notably twins, can sense when something bad has happened to the other or when the other is in danger. What is missing is any actuate data on the speed at which such information is passed from one twin to the other. The problem of how to communicate faster than the speed of light remains.

The physicists have been looking at the problem too closely, what they need is to get away from the white coats and equations for a moment and  view the problem from a new perspective, from the perspective say of someone who has been living in the woods and is used to creating practical solutions to everyday problems. Using just two twins, a cave, a torch, a rope, really rather a considerable amount of water and a hungry crocodile I believe that I can prove that thoughts can travel faster than the speed of light! Not only that but I can also build a coded communications device that would be undecipherable by others.

Problem one: proving that thoughts travel faster than light.

Ask the man in the pub what the speed of light is and he will probably answer 1,079,252,848.8 km/h and to a certain extent he would be right, but to an extent much more useful to my hypothesis he would be wrong. Light can travel at 1,079,252,848.8 km/h but often it chooses not to, for instance when traveling through water it travel more slowly, this is why light refracts in water. This might seem insignificant but consider the top speed of your car, it can travel at that speed but how often does it? Hmmm? What we really need to find is the speed of light as is applicable to everyday situations. In our everyday situation we have two twins, a brother and sister who, due to a total lack of imagination we shall call Lad and Lass. Lass is having a picnic on a nice sunny afternoon in a meadow, Lad has gone exploring and is dangling from a rope in a massive underground mineshaft. directly underneath Lass. Now for the science. If Lad shines his torch directly upwards we can find the applicable speed of light (a) by measuring the length of time it takes between the torch being turned on and Lass seeing the light. The torch light starts out traveling at  1,079,252,848.8 km/h but once it hits the granite of the roof of the mine shaft it stops and Lass never sees the light!

so a = 0kph

As we have already established twins can sense when the other is in danger, so lets get Lad to shine the torch straight down this time. When Lad turns the torch on this time he can see down to the bottom of the mine shaft, at the bottom of the mine shaft is the very hungry crocodile, lets start adding the water. As the water level starts to rise so the hungry crocodile starts to get closer to Lad, Lad turns off the torch and tries to climb out of the mineshaft but sadly breaks both of his legs. This time when he turns his torch on to look the crocodile is even closer, he is now in danger. Now to find the speed of thought (t) we need to time how long it takes Lass to sense her brother is in danger. However long it takes the message to get to Lass it will be faster than the applicable speed of light which is 0. Thus we can see that thought travels faster than the applicable speed of light.

Whilst Lad has helped us prove that thought is faster than the speed of light and so is most likely due a mention in the next edition of New Scientist he is in immanent danger, Lass knows he at risk but does not know the nature of the risk or even where he is. This is where the communication device comes in.

When Lad turns the torch on he can see that he is in mortal danger, when he turns it off he can no longer see the danger so he can fluctuate between the two states, peril and no peril. If he flicks the torch on briefly he will briefly be aware of his peril and so will his sister, longer view of the risk and Lass receives a longer blast of the sensation that Lad is in danger. By using long and short blasts of telepathic communtication Lad can communicate with his sister via Morse code and tell her of his predicament and she can call cave rescue.

"What's that Lassie, your brother's down a mine shaft?"

It's amazing what goes through your mind after a few months without tv.