On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 08:53:19 -0500, Tom Roberts
wrote:


But it's clear to me that when sight reading new music I definitely process data
at much greater than 16 bits per second. Even playing from memory greatly
exceeds that rate.


July 15, 2013 Hyannis

Hello Tom,

Sometimes simple facts shed a great deal of light on
complicated issues.
You seem incredulous that human mental speed is only 16
bits/sec despite the fact that it was discovered by Edison
that the slowest you can run a movie film is 16 frames per
second. You seem to not comprehend the physical meaning of
that.
So since you are a musician and a piano player I thought
perhaps a musical explanation might have more meaning for
you. You’ve heard it said hundreds of times that the human
hearing range is "20 to 20,000 Hz". Well, deeper
investigation shows that lower number is not actually 20 it
is actually, again, the magic number 16. And the reason it
is 16 cps is EXACTLY the same reason that a movie camera has
to run at least 16 frames per second. It is because the
human brains "COGNITIVE" processing system only runs at 16
bits per second!
Furthermore. It turns out that if you use a small
piezoelectric pincher taped to the skin and start pinching
someone’s skin at a very slow rate and then increase the
rate…guess what….. when it reaches the magic number of 16
pinches per second it no longer feels like you’re being
pinched, it merely feels as if there is some constant level
of skin irritation on your arm!
Now these effects were discovered by Galton himself as long
ago as 1890 and have been studied intensely ever since.
Now in every case the magic number 16 only holds for
adults with average IQ of 100. If you test a half grown
child of 9: guess what… the magic number drops to half its
value namely 8 Hz. A hundred years of study by an army of
academic researchers in thousands of peer-reviewed papers
has long since established that this is due to normal
childhood brain growth! The magic frequency increases right
along in tandem with the human growth curve and stops at 16
Hz when you finally stop growing at age 18..
Moreover, for a fixed age, the frequency goes up or down
directly with IQ. In fact so-called "INTELLIGENCE" is
nothing more than a reference to your COGNITIVE mental speed
in bits per second. This is why mentally retarded people
have been called "mentally slow" for thousands of years. You
can actually measure someone’s IQ with a veritable speed
movie projector!
Okay, all of that is right off the shelf textbook
learning. What is really of interest here is the
"relativity" of mental speed itself. And it doesn’t seem to
me that it is rocket science to assert that the world looks
faster to someone who has low mental speed or vice versa but
the world looks slower to someone who has a high mental
speed. In fact it is quite obvious that the world must
"slow down" as you grow up. And sure enough, as I recollect
the world does look a lot slower now than it did when I was
two years old! And it has gotten a lot smaller too!

Okay Tom, so much for postage stamp collecting. It is
time to get back a Relativity. As you know I believe that
the world APPEARS to get smaller and slower as you grow up.
And I believe that you can write this as a Robertson-Walker
metric where a(t) is a (decreasing) scale factor:

ds^2 = a(t)^2 [-c^2 dt^2 + dx^2] (Conformal RW Metric)

and as you know I am already deeply indebted to you for
running this metric through Mathematica and discovering that
the Riemann Curvature Tensor for this metric is non-zero
because it contains terms in a/dot and a/dot/dot. If it
weren’t for you I would still be computing the 256
components of Riemann by hand for God’s sake!

But since all that, I have had some further twinges of
alarm about this metric. I mentioned in a previous post the
"Blue Shift" scare that I had for a brief moment when I
believed that the metric said that all of the stars in the
night sky would turn blue! A "blue shift in the head" as it
were. Interestingly, it turns out that that scare was
unwarranted since "there is no Hubble shift in a conformal
metric".
But other anxieties have begun to creep in to my view of
all this. For instance: Should this contracting and
slowing down of the Universe even obey a relativistic
metric? But then I realized that the speed of light is
always ONE in a conformal metric, and I breathed another
sigh of relief. In fact as a(t) finally comes down to one
as you approach adulthood, you are simply left with the
normal Lorentz metric, which of course we know is correct.

At any rate, even if you will never come to believe that
the world does APPEAR to slow down and get smaller as we
grow up, I would like you to take a look at the conformal
metric I have written down and tell me if you have any
objections to the following four assertions:

1. The speed of light is always ONE in a conformal metric
so that this metric causes no problem for SR.

2. Even though a(t) is decreasing and causing a
"contraction" of the Universe, we DO NOT SEE a
"Hubble Blue Shift" because the clock is speeding up
as the Universe contracts canceling out the frequency
shift.. So this is in accord with observational
experience also.

3, There is no mass in this universe, it is only an IMAGE
that is moving, therefore we don't have to worry about
violating dynamical properties such as E=mc^2, energy
or momentum continuity equations etc.

4. I believe that this "conformal contracting universe" is
not only a true description of reality, it appears to
me that this metric does not violate any KINEMATICAL
property of SR.

Would you disagree with any of these 4 assertions? As an
experienced relativity expert there is always the odd chance
that something mathematical might jump out at you as being a
ghastly faux pas!

George Hammond