Knowledge Liquidity and Inertial Guidance System

You might be wondering, how does these two even relate? Actually there is a story (or should we say history). Once upon a time I was reading this article on general relativity in some scientific magazine. It was about how Einstein could come up with this idea. And it had the description of some of his thought experiments. As a student from Bangladesh, where most of the experiment actually we do with this single apparatus called ‘mind’, I am very much in a habit of these sort of thought experiments. So, I said to myself, “Here is a thought experiment! We should have more of these Einstein guys here, because this is what we specialize in! It must be fun.” And there it goes-

A guy is standing on top of the North Pole with a gyroscope in his hand. Another fellow is standing somewhere on equator with a gyroscope in the right hand and another gyroscope in the left hand. Once the first guy puts lifts his gyroscope over his head and the next time the second guy is doing some wired maneuver with his two gyroscopes and so and so…

I said,”wait wait! What the hell is the ‘Gyroscope’! I have never seen it; even our physics book didn’t mention it ever!” To cut the long story short. There and then I felt the peril of being in a poor country. Yes, all the credit goes to the poverty, but now I am not going into that.

And after that, every now and then I hear about this gyro-thing. In ‘Wings of Fire’ by A.P.J Abdul Kalam, in some article about the navigation system of rocket and submarines, in helicopters, aircrafts, even in some auto image-stabilizing cameras, there is gyroscope!

So, just three years ago I had this hard time with gyroscopes. Even the Wikipedia article was of at most 15 lines! But now, another ‘thought experimenter’ can simply see gyroscope in action on YouTube, read all the theory on Wikipedia or any other site. And simply know that, it’s all about the conservation of angular momentum. The liquidity of knowledge increased indeed!

Now, here is an interesting note about angular momentum. At the level of quantum mechanics it is quantized! I mean an electron cannot just have any momentum. The momentum has to be some integral multiple of h over 2 pi. For the illustration purpose, say you are a spin baller (cricket). Now if the ball was a quantum scale object, which it is not, you would not spin it at any arbitrary rotation. It would have to be some integral multiple of some constant! Now, we are familiar with the concept of resolution. I mean of course you cannot even make a ball of arbitrary size. It has to be some integral multiple of atoms/molecules. In that sense the momentum also cannot be just any value!

As if, Mother Nature is doing this simulation with our existence on a digital computer with a finite precision. I mean, if you had to represent the momentum of cricket ball in a computer register your precision would be limited by the number of bits of that machine! Surprisingly, nature also has this limitation of finite resolution. So, the tag line is, ‘even if you have a very big cricket ball, you cannot just spin it with ‘any’ momentum. There is this natural limit of the ‘resolution’. As a result it is kind of easy for computer science guys to feel the essence of the discrete nature of quantum mechanics (or, we should say ‘the discrete nature of nature itself’). Much of the advancement of the ‘theory of computation’ was due to the struggle of scientists for understanding this sort of ‘quantization’ (which is ’digitization’ on the ‘nature machine’).


*I hope to write a sort of technical review of this quantum nature for ‘non technical persons’ very soon. And there is this other topic about Reversible Computing and Energy of computation. Oh, I wish I had more time…. :(