Future of physics

The future of physics and cosmology was discussed at length at a recent conference held by the foundational physics research institute FQXi, particularly considering what may be ultimately possible and impossible for physics.

Theoretical physics has been progressing in many areas but there is still a strong need for observational evidence and/or alternative theories to support or disprove the existing ones. Luckily, much anticipated experimental evidence may be available in the next few years from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Planck Satellite, Pierre Auger Observatory and other observational astrophysics projects. For example, the Planck Satellite aims to look farther back in time than has been seen so far with the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), earlier than the 400,000 year old universe. It is theorized that B-modes, primordial gravitational waves from inflation, may be visible in the very early universe, which would provide additional proof of the inflationary phase occurring directly after the big bang.

Composition of dark energy to be known soon?
Another specific example for which observational evidence may be obtained in the next few years is regarding the composition of dark energy, whether it is vacuum energy made up of axion particles as one multiverse theory predicts or quintessence made up of supersymmetric WIMPs.

Many outstanding physics questions
Some other key issues are how our universe was created in the first place (a quantum theory of creation), proof for multiverse theories and possibly detecting bubble universe collisions, more about post-big bang inflation, why there is so much more antimatter than matter (the antimatter problem), why the weak force is 10³² times stronger than gravity (vs. say a more acceptable 3-4 orders of magnitude; the hierarchy problem), the existence, size and parameters of any additional dimensions of space, not to mention the usual unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics in a quantum theory of gravity, and finally the vexing Boltzmann brain problem, that consciousness could potentially arise from nothing but quantum fluctuations.

Next-gen astrophysics tools critical
Much progress has been made with accelerators, space-based telescopes, terrestrial array telescopes, and adaptive optics but the next era of astrophysics tools could be even more revolutionary. Accelerators are an expensive $5 billion or more and take years if not decades for fundraising, permitting, building and rendering operational. One alternative could be different kinds of accelerators which are smaller, quicker and cheaper to build, notably plasma wakefield accelerators, laser accelerators, and benchtop accelerators. Another way for tools to evolve could be with computational astrophysics and simulations such as MICA's Newtonian N-body simulation (featured by UgoTrade). As computing power continues to grow, accelerator and telescope datasets could be the inputs to large-scale simulation, prediction and test. As nearly every other science has moved into informatics and rigorous math-based prediction, simulation and experimentation, so too could astrophysics, fostering much quicker cycles and a tighter linkage between theoretical and experimental physics.

The FQXi community
Curiosity-driven physics researchers, especially those investigating risky areas on the boundaries of institutional acceptance are encouraged to apply for FQXi grants, and those understanding the value of fundamental physics research funding are encouraged to participate as donors and in the FQXi website community.

NOTE: The author is an advisor to FQXi.

Foundations of bio-info tech convergence

The most important thing that became clear at last week’s 2nd annual Unither Nanomedical & Telemedical Technology Conference is that many different foundational technologies are starting to be in place for bio-info tech convergence. Ray Kurzweil and others herald the eventual re-engineering of humans into technology that can learn and evolve as fast as infotech but may not realize pathways for bio-info tech convergence are already underway.

Boundaries and definitions of organic and inorganic, natural and synthesized, biological and electronic are blurring into a variety of permutations.

It is almost becoming anachronistic to talk about bio-info convergence when the focus in some fields has already progressed to resolving the problems at hand with the available tools which may include any variety of organic, inorganic and hybrid models.

Three key areas with developments underway:

1. Nanoparticle drug delivery systems
With 5 million people receiving some sort of cancer radiation therapy worldwide each year, and cancer quickly becoming a major killer in developing as well as industrialized countries, improvements in diagnosis and treatment are sought. The nextgen standard could be nanoparticle drug delivery systems (diagnosis is still too challenging of a problem in comparison), which could be used independently or in combination with existing radiation technologies to ameliorate treatment. Many different types of nanoparticles (carbon nanotubes, calcium phosphate, gold and various magnetic nanoparticles) and related technologies such as minimally invasive nanoXrays are under development.

2. Implanted monitors and body area networking
The most obvious case of human-device integration is pacemakers (500,000 are implanted worldwide annually). The latest versions feature one-way broadcast with the devices communicating information externally to physicians for remote monitoring; wireless heart sensors currently have an installed base in the U.S. of over 150,000. Human wireless sensing is further conceptualized as body area networking, which mainly means sensors that are internal or external to the body transmitting data one-way. The IEEE working standard for this communication is 802.15.6. The next steps would be enabling two-way broadcast, bringing some light processing on-board the implanted or external body sensors and later, augmentation. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are developing in lockstep.

3. Powering implants: one idea is the ATP chip
One of the biggest challenges with devices implanted in the body is energy; providing adequate ongoing power to the device. Power trumps the other two concerns: bandwidth and biocompatibility. Many interesting methods of power generation are being investigated including thermal and vibrational energy, RF, light/PV, biochemical energy and the ATP chip, possibly getting nanodevices to produce ATP from naturally circulating glucose.

Apparently no one is yet considering the human bacterial biome as a therapeutic or augmentation platform but this could be another interesting means of bio-info tech convergence.

Science fiction invention tracking

Science fiction has served as inspiration for real world design so many times that it would be useful to have a wiki with a rigorous index of innovations proposed in science fiction and a column for tracking their appearance in real life. At minimum, it could inspire the realization of imagined technologies not available yet. There is occasional anecdotal mention of the implementation of SciFiTech but no comprehensive list of ideas.

Everyday life is replete with examples, conceptual if not all fully realized. Heinlein’s remote communications device is the cell phone. Stephenson’s metaverse is virtual worlds like Second Life, where teleportation is possible. The molecular synthesizer or nanofabber is imagined for every home like Stephenson’s matter compiler, but no solution is envisioned yet for the deke (matter decompiler/recycler). The Internet was conceived in many science fiction tales (including Vinge’s “True Names”). The space elevator. FTL (faster than light travel). Immortality. Uploading and rembodiment. Distributed intelligence (Accelerando, Slant, Permutation City). Post-material scarcity. Transhumanism, posthumanism (To Hold Infinity). Multiple self-copies (Golden Age, Kiln People). A deeper contemplation of multiple permanent self-copies (digital or otherwise) and their interactions would be interesting, as would a more profound examination of the struggle for resource control across the universe informed by the ways in which society is currently evolving.

Concepts contemplated in great depth in science fiction (for example, Karl Schroeder’s (Lady of Mazes) rich virtual reality narratives with full upload copies of friends and family available for consultation and communication) become simplified in the early stages of their real life realization (Karl Shroeder’s narratives become Charlene Li’s “you’re friends are with you all the time [via Loopt, Latitude]”).

Daemon's bot-mediated reality

In the entertaining and new paradigm-defining ARG thriller Daemon, Daniel Suarez makes some interesting philosophical claims at a broader level. One is that democracy may not be viable in a technologically advanced society. This could be the case, but is more likely to be true due to other tweaked and adjusted political models, hopefully with the support and participation of a larger portion of the population, superseding the special-interest group democracies of today.

Power and counterbalances evolve in lockstep
The claim in Daemon regarding democracy and more generally about a society composed of unmodified humans is that individuals or small groups wield too much ability to destroy. This could be true, terrorism is a familiar current example, where a few people can impact many others, but a more likely possible future is that responses and countermeasures evolve in lockstep with any new power-wielding phenomenon. For example, top-down and bottom-up ubiquitous satellite surveillance, cams and sensor networks are problematic in many ways but a potential counterbalance to terrorism. Another classic example is that a society in which a nanovirus could circulate worldwide and dissolve all rubber tires overnight (a rather dramatic response to petroleum dependency!) might also have the norm of downloading open-source security patches from the web for quick printing via personal nanofab.

Childhood's End theme: bot-mediated reality
A second interesting aspect of Dameon is the exploration of the ‘Childhood’s End’ theme – that humans in their present state are incapable of operating a sustainable society and that order can only be achieved through outside intervention, also that present humanity is just a step in the evolutionary chain on the way to the next tier of intelligence. In Daemon there is a new kind of order which is more distributed and possibly sustainable but not really different in providing a better society for all but just in installing new hierarchies of video game-style leveling–up together with the usual story of enfranchising the disenfranchised, as ascribed by one person. Individual actions are snapshots and disconnected from their import.

Forget Reality TV - nextgen is Augmented Reality TV: botnet replaces Judge Judy, ARG players determine real-life actions and events

New world order in our hands
Daemon is laudable for taking on the grand challenge of envisioning how a new world order could evolve though a mediated narrowly intelligent botnet and artificial reality gaming overlay to the physical world. The key point is that we are already steps away from this world and that the building block pieces are in place now (e.g.; GPS networks, pervasive botnets); it is up to us to determine whether the future incarnation is positive or negative, whether it reinforces or destabilizes current interests and influences and how societal and individual actions are motivated and executed.

Show me the hardware apps!

There is a lot of energy focused on hardware hacking and composable controllable ubiquitous computing but there do not seem to be any usable consumer applications yet. Paul Saffo is somewhat of an ideological leader for the movement in calling ubiquitous sensors the next wave of infotech innovation, on the order of the PC revolution. Mashup culture is becoming more pervasive and the hardware hacking community is getting busy tinkering, inventing and collaborating online and IRL, particularly through Make, Hacker Spaces (165 worldwide), Dorkbot (80 worldwide), Fab Labs (26 worldwide), RepRap and the TechShop.

Where can I get some stuff to try it myself?

Hardware componentry and kits are available from many vendors such as Bug Labs, SparkFun Electronics, Gumstix, MakerSHED, Adafruit Industries and Digi-Key. Some standard building blocks include the Arduino computing platform (which even has a microcontroller board for wearables, the LilyPad) and the BUGbase Hiro P Edition. The TikiTag also looks quite interesting as an RFID reader that can be used to create web services linking physical world objects with the Internet.

Hardware hacking is reinventing everything
The best thing about hardware hacking is that every aspect is up for reinvention, including at minimum, interfaces, signal processing, form factor and power. Additional interfaces are coming, voice (earlier this week, IBM announced a synthesized voice that is nearly indistinguishable from human), haptic (like Anarkik3D) and projection are the most obvious. Another novel interface could be a hack for the rudimentary manipulation of household objects with the Wii hand-held controller. Signal processing could include more options for shifting between and integrating digital and analog signals, Paul Saffo suggests a return to analog computing but hybridization and rapid switching could become standard. Form factors in various stages of maturity include any range of computing via implant (brain-computer interfaces), wearable, adjacent or distributed architecture. Power is a challenging problem to solve; some interesting innovations could emerge from energy-harvesting techniques such as piezoelectronics, optical Wi-Fi and thermoelectrics, converting, respectively, sound waves, light and heat to energy.

Youth mentoring adults

As Don Tapscott suggests in Grown Up Digital, for perhaps the first time in history, youth knows more about something - social media and other technologies - than adults. So it could be quite valuable for youth to mentor adults, despite the issue that most adults do not perceive a need for this. Adults may start to think that they should hire a social media consultant for business purposes, e.g.; “How should I be using The Twitter for my product?” or “Oh, virtual worlds are for more than gaming? I could actually run my worldwide customer community groups at an in-world sim for about 300% lower cost?” but most adults have not yet appreciated the pervasive personal and professional impact that social media could have on their lives.

Mentoring 2.0
A more experiential concept and format of mentoring than it is traditionally conceived together with the conventional 1:1 conversations could be most effective. Traditionally, it would certainly be informative to hear youth’s views on all manner of personal, community and global concerns, and to learn from the way youth makes decisions; one example is contemporary youth having many more options and a deeper consideration of the trade-offs between options (e.g.; work on my Internet startup or my homework; stay working for a startup or go to college).

Experiential mentoring

The new mentoring’s interaction medium should be experience not dialogue.

For example, the venue could be a café setting with youth and adults and their laptops, mobile and other devices with Wi-Fi and refreshments. Everyone is just hanging out, not formally interacting, not in 1:1 match-ups but in small groups where everyone might feel more comfortable. Adults could see what tech is being used and how, and ask youth about it and try to understand it and install and try the apps on their machines and think about how they would apply it to their personal and professional contexts. The mentoring could be two-way, with both groups benefiting.

Personal environmental measurement

Quantified self-tracking is the regular collection of any data that can be measured about the self such as biological, physical, behavioral or environmental information. Additional steps may include the graphical display of the data and a feedback loop of introspection and self-experimentation.

So far a lot of quantified self-tracking has focused on measuring personal biomarkers (genomic and other biological data such as cholesterol, blood pressure, hormone levels, etc.) and behavior (exercise, calorie expenditure, sleep, weight, nutritional intake, time management, memory improvement systems, sexual activity, baby kicks from the womb, etc.). In addition to measuring these biomarkers and behaviors, another important area to evaluate is one’s environment, trying to answer…how toxic is my environment and what can I do about it? What is the quality of the general indoor and outdoor area around me and how are the specific products I use impacting me?

1) Measuring one’s personal environment
Two key personal environmental monitoring efforts are the UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing’s participatory urban sensing project which uploads location data from GPS-enabled mobile phones to a central repository and generates Personal Environmental Impact Reports. A second effort is OpenSpime’s Internet-connected geosensors, being developed to capture ongoing real-time readings of pollution and other air quality indicators and automatically log the information to a collective display built on Google Maps.

2) Measuring one’s chemical body burden
Assessing body burden, or chemical body load counts is measuring the cumulative impact of exposure to toxic substances in the environment. Personalized chemical testing services generally focus on pollutants, evaluating the levels of selected pesticides, flame retardants, PCBs, dioxins and other substances. One example is the environmental scan conducted by Axys Analytical Services for David Duncan in the ExperimentalMan project. Environmental screening may also be conducted by hair analysis tests that assess exposure to toxic substances and perform nutritional analysis.

3) Measuring the toxicity of one’s personal care products
The toxicity level of personal care products such as soap, shampoo and cosmetics can be queried from the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database.

Future Phone

Compared to the cell phone of tomorrow – the omni-function imbedded or external mini-peripheral perhaps with the processing and communications capability of today’s supercomputers – the contemporary smartphone may look even more primitive than 20-year old cell phone bricks look today. The future phone may not even be visible.

The contemporary cell phone has many features: voice and data communications, a camera, music player, contacts, calendar, data storage and games to name a few. Texting, VOIP and data links have reduced the imperative of traditional voice telephony to a mere offering in the feature suite. The many functions of the cell phone could easily keep proliferating.

Other obvious features
Miniaturized headsets could become earring-sized objects for external wear or internal implantation. Subvocalization technology could allow everyone to talk silently and privately all the time without disturbing others; one side effect could be that world intelligence units attempt to develop throat-reading skills. 3D projection technology could be used for a visible full-size keyboard and navigation, video, gaming and entertainment applications.

Detachable components
Cell phone components could be retractable or detachable, such as clipping the handsfree headset into the handset body for storage. The accelerometer (now standard componentry of the iPhone and G1) could be detached and popped into a belt or armband for exercise or sleep measurement or elder monitoring. USB ports could be pulled out for universal connectivity to external hardware. The camera could pop out to an unobtrusive ear, forehead or hat anchor-point to capture continuous streaming video as a life-cam rig, accompanied by continuous audio recording. Life-cammed AV could be streamed via the net to a storage location, ideally in a tagged, parsed and abstracted form.

Positively-unobtrusive technology
Once mobile processing is more rigorous and automated data access occurs through machine environment sensing, positively-unobtrusive technology can happen.

Positively-unobtrusive technology is when one’s data environment makes unobtrusive suggestions for better navigating a situation.

An example would be using facial recognition, location recognition and a contacts database search to display critical information on a smart contact lens such as the approaching person’s name, kids’ ages and summary of last conversation.

The farther future: sensors, microscopy, spectroscopy
In the longer-term, the cell phone could contain an all-purpose sensor, a microscope, spectroscope and other features. The sensor could provide both health and environmental monitoring, tracking biomarker readings (e.g.; cardiac event, blood pressure, breathing, metabolism, etc.) and ambient air quality and toxin exposure, serving as an early warning system. Microscope-on-a-chip and spectroscope-on-a-chip technology could be used for advanced diagnostics, using physical port or wireless connectivity to read recyclable or disposable cartridges of blood prick slide samples for mobile diagnosis or to determine the composition of any physical sample. Energy may be supplied via solar power (like the Nokia Morph concept phone), ambient body-heat recharging or other thermoelectric mechanism. Carbon-offsetting, organic interfaces and other componentry may be standard.

Heard from the future…

• I don’t feel like myself in this upload anymore
• I only got 98% fidelity in my revivification
• You must be a newbie, you never get full reload on a reviv
  
• I don’t want to be so present to my experience
• I don’t want to remember all my memories, I want to edit out x, y, z and enhance a, b, c and…
• I don’t want all my actions (and possibly thoughts) recorded by public cameras and sensor nodes
• Why did I reembody as a (man, dog, robot, hummingbird, bee, network node, airplane, etc.)?
• What is the construct "I"?
• Is this virtual world virtual? Where is the real virtual world?
• I think that AI over there is a few methods short of a class library

Future of health social networks

Peer-based health networks are poised to become a powerful member of the health care ecosystem with an expanding role, possibly having influence in policy, ethics, regulation, research and finance. It will be interesting to see how health social network identity develops and is expressed since a health social network is simultaneously an aggregation of individuals and an institution with its own leadership, goals and agenda.

In other sectors, social networks have sought to maintain neutrality by “only providing the platform,” for example peer-to-peer finance sites like Prosper. It is too early to forecast what will happen with health social networks, but PatientsLikeMe as the flagship example has an on-site research staff and appears to be quite involved in administering and orchestrating the patient community, with a collaborative stance towards traditional medicine.

Internet-expert Clay Shirky notes the progressive stages of social network activity which seem to be unfolding in lockstep in health social networks: initially sharing, then collaborating, and finally organizing for collective action. In addition to external collective action, the internal peer support of health social networks could evolve into positive-impact peer pressure, for example, health social network users competing to lower key biomarker scores like cholesterol and blood pressure, using third-party test uploads from LabCorp to measure and validate the results.

Health social networks could develop into large-scale online aggregated communities with market power, providing visibility into demanded research and remedies and directing and funding research priorities.

Health social networks can facilitate long-tail medicine, allowing small groups of cure-seekers and interested researchers to meet.

One future example could be the CureTogether migraine community raising $50,000 in crowd-sourced funding, reviewing and approving grant applications, open-sourcing the research findings on the website, developing remedies and testing them in patient-run clinical trails; this is a new twist on the OpenBasicResearch.org idea. Health social networks could become a key quantitative indicator and independent barometer of demand for medical research, a useful input to the research agenda-setting of the NSF, pharmaceutical companies and academia.

Note: The author is an advisor to CureTogether. The concept of long-tail medicine is described in more depth on p. 26 of Emerging Patient-Driven Healthcare Models.