Free Tal, a conversation with an alien by Anonymous Page B

know exactly, with one hundred percent certainty where it would be in the next moment.
    They could know the future.
    Yes, now imagine your species in a few million years, designing massive computers the size of planets, calculating the position of all particles and their trajectories. If your computers became powerful enough, they could predict the exact configuration of the universe in the next moment, and if they could do that, since they know the exact configuration of that moment, they could predict the next moment, and from that information the next moment.  In other words, a sufficiently advanced civilization, with a sufficiently advanced computer, could know its exact future. They would know the future not due to divine will, but by their own technological creations.
    I could see that being an encroachment on the playground of the Gods, if you believe in them.
    Well yes, these last few arguments are philosophical, and your religion of science believes in experiment and logic.
    That is correct, and you mentioned a scientific explanation.

 
    Lux Aeterna
     
    Yes . And that scientific explanation will uncover the hidden dimension that I can observe. To understand the nature of this hidden dimension, you will need to understand one more thing, and that is the nature of light. For thousands of years, the central question concerning light was whether it was a wave or a particle. Did light exist as an unbroken wave of energy, or as little individual packets of energy?
    I belie ve quantum theory states that light is actually both.
    During Einstein's time, lacking the proper tools, scientists believed light to be a wave only. People think of Einstein primarily as the father of relativity, but it was his experiments with light that won him the Nobel Prize. Einstein, building on the research of great scientists such as Max Planck, showed that light was a particle; it could be broken down into single packets of energy, or quanta. Yet experiments up to then proved that light was a wave. It's hard to relate to light, so initially it doesn't seem so strange that it could be both, but this fact leads to some very odd conclusions. Often, before there is scientific proof, great thinkers come up with beautiful ideas. Even back in the 1700's Isaac Newton believed that though they seemed different, matter and energy were interchangeable. And Einstein's well know E equals MC squared implies a relationship between mass and energy. So it is not surprising that since light has a dual nature, matter must also have a dual nature.
    This does seems like a pretty radical idea that I never completely understood. Light can behave like a wave, but I don't see all the objects around me behaving like waves. I do not see myself as behaving as a wave.
    Think of a particle the way you think of a baseball. In the classical sense, you know where the baseball is when you look at it, it is in one place. You can also know how fast it is moving if you measure it. Now think of a wave. A wave is spread out over many coordinates of space. It has a wavelength and an amplitude, but it has no definite position that you could say is its only position. Another interesting point about waves is that you cannot add them as you do particles. If you take 10 baseballs, you can put them together and get something that is the size of 10 baseballs. You cannot do that with waves. Sometimes adding waves together gets you a bigger wave and sometimes they cancel each other out and you get smaller waves, or no waves at all.
    I understand the difference, but I don't see matter as waves. Matter is particles, atoms, molecules, and baseballs.
    How do y ou model the action of a system, like an electron or a bus? You can describe what you see: it is going fast, or slow, accelerating or decelerating, but these are approximations. In order to accurately model the actions of a system, you go beyond your senses, you use mathematics. For instance, Newton's second law states that force equals