Dr. Miranda Sierra AMA
Your opportunity to ask the most famous human hyperquantum physicist any question you'd like
Welcome to today’s holonet AMA! We are joined by Dr. Miranda Sierra: professor emeritus at MIT, expert on hyperquantum physics, and inventor of the Aegis. Submit your questions through the comment form below and we’ll have Dr. Sierra answer as many as she can.
Q1: What happens to the air at the location you teleport someone to?
Miranda Sierra: Depending on the application, it is usually teleported back simultaneously though at a lower fidelity than the forward teleport (it comes back colder because the high velocity molecules can escape during the time it takes for the algorithm to converge and there’s an entropy change). If this isn’t done you end up with Nitrogen and Oxygen molecule inclusions in the object being transported which can cause its structure to decay — a human would get an instantly fatal form of the bends. This is not an issue in the vast majority of space.
Q2: How did it feel when Human-Uutaruu contact started and suddenly there was a ton of new knowledge in your field?
MS: This is a great question. The Uutaruu scientists have been working on hyperquantum physics for something like 50,000 years longer than we have. Our species was making art on the walls of caves while theirs was exploring the galaxy. I felt all kinds of ways about it: curious about all the new things to learn, deflated by the fact that I was no longer at the forefront of my field, but also a sense of purpose given that I was one of the few humans capable of bringing this knowledge to our species. I love teaching and so continued that for another 20 years. I’m still not 100% fluent in all the results and its possible that I’ll never understand the ones that seem to require innate χ-ability.
Q3: How do the teleporters know where an object ends and the environment begins? What if the shape is really complicated? Like hair?
MS: This is actually a deep question and the theory behind it is related to something humans called causal emergence that was first proposed in the early 21st century. Let’s look at an example of Helium gas. Helium atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons but the theoretical description of its behavior in a tank of gas is easier to describe in terms of an ideal gas — trying to solve for the pressure using protons and neutrons would take a lot more computational power. In physics we say those particles are the wrong effective degrees of freedom at the scale of an ideal gas and we should switch to atoms. The universe also appears to do this — new effective degrees of freedom arise at these points where the computational load gets too high. At that point we say a new causal theory emerges, i.e. causal emergence. This produces minima in the effective information and since all information is encoded in the horizon states, these minima appear there at different scales (different coarse graining). The learning algorithms used by hyperquantum computers finds these minima. This means our macro scale concepts like “tank of helium gas” or “rock” or “person” are what the algorithm converges to and not “the atoms in our DNA”. However the total amount of information does contribute to how long it takes a hyperquantum computer to converge. It turns out our consciousness is the most computationally taxing component, not the complex structure of our proteins and nucleic acids. How the algorithm actually finds these local minima in the correlations of horizon states in a relatively short period of time was an open question until our contact with the Uutaruu — it turned out to be related to the information bottleneck in machine learning where irrelevant information is stripped away.
Q4: Are we living in a simulation?
MS: This is one of those philosophical questions that always seemed to just raise more — if we do live in a simulation, what are the laws of physics in the proposed “real” universe? I feel the reason it comes up so often is due to the fact that the astounding capabilities of devices built on the principles of hyperquantum physics feel like some kind of “root access” or “dev mode” for the universe, especially because of the use of the language of computers (bits, information, algorithm) to describe it. Any model should always be seen as a metaphor — sometimes it is useful to push the metaphor (Dirac’s prediction of antimatter), and sometimes you end up carrying very human baggage along with the metaphor (the aether).
Much like my answer to Q2, I have mixed feelings about the fact there’s no answer yet to a basic question. What is the nature of the universe? The Uutaruu as a species have been asking it for 50,000 years longer than we have and seem no closer. Others have been asking it for hundreds of millions. Is there an answer I will never see because I won’t live long enough? Or could an answer still come at any time?
I will say that effective theory tells us the answer to the question of whether we are living in a simulation is “No”. It is functionally no different from “Yes” in terms of consequences for physics, and brings none of the additional issues that “Yes” does. We are living in a deSitter patch of a possibly enormous multiverse like an amoeba in a drop of dew. Claiming our universe is a simulation is like a sentient amoeba claiming the dewdrop is on a slide under a microscope.
Q5: How does a hyperquantum drive teleport the hyperquantum computer itself?
MS: The first generation of hyperquantum engineers sometimes referred to this as “entanglement drag”— the ship starts the teleport process and the matter in the ship is dragged through as interactions at the destination cause the entangled wavefunction to collapse at that destination. They thought this because they were unable to stop a teleportation part way through— once the hyperquantum computer mapped the changes to the horizon state the system had to arrive at its destination before you could return it (nor could you hold a system in mid-teleport). However, the truth is that the system as a whole — the whole ship — still functions even though it is briefly represented entirely as pure horizon states. The laws of physics don’t change during the entire process — physical, chemical, and biological processes continue uninterrupted**. Note that this is why we don’t “disintegrate” and as re-appear as a clone as many 20th century philosophers believed when thinking about teleportation. We are fundamentally representations of information on the horizon and bits change when we breathe, walk, or eat. Teleportation is no different. I do want to add that those interactions at the destination are what cause the ship to rapidly transition from a pure horizon state into mixed horizon/pure bulk states at the destination. In that sense the old “entanglement drag” concept is at least partially right.
**MS: Edit to add: The process does function as an observation of the quantum states and can cause sub-exponential decay. The effect is at the scale of milliseconds, but a piece of carbon that is teleported multiple times can have detectably higher levels of C-14 than an identical piece that did not jump.
Q6: How can the hyperquantum drive store all the information about the ship and the hyperquantum drive — the same drive that’s storing all the information about the ship and the drive? Isn’t that a recursive paradox?
MS: There is a common misconception that a hyperquantum drive, when computing a jump, needs to store every quantum state of the system that’s jumping. The information is always stored in the object itself — the most efficient representation. One way to think about this is that the singularities in an Uutaruu singularity drive represent the maximum amount of information that can be stored in a spacetime volume — you can see how they can’t store the information about the ship outside as well as their internal degrees of freedom because it would violate the Bekenstein bound. What the drive is doing is changing bits to put the vehicle into a pure horizon state at the right coarse graining (see Q3) so that it can write the appropriate spatially translated state. Since spatial translations are a symmetry of our universe, this actually takes a pretty small amount of information relative to the total in the ship — especially at the appropriate coarse graining. The amount of information represented by the ship (and crew!) does impact the length of time it takes the algorithms to converge — essentially the more stuff and the more complex the stuff, the larger the space the algorithm needs to explore before it converges.
Q7: Why doesn’t faster than light travel violate causality?
MS: The short technical answer is that SO(3,1) is a symmetry of our bulk spacetime states but not of the horizon states which is SO(2,1) so special relativity doesn’t apply. This basically says that the 3D speed — a boosted frame relative to another coming from a transformation in SO(3,1) — and the 2D horizon “speed” is an apples to oranges comparison. Our apparent faster than light velocity is projected onto the horizon, which is always in the direction of the local gravitational field vector — typically labelled the z-axis. There is a very real sense this is a “fake” direction — a volume of 3D space has a perfect representation that lives on a 2D surface at the boundary. A huge z-component of velocity in the bulk maps to zero velocity on the horizon. There still is a limit in that the x- and y-components cannot be faster than the speed of light due to the SO(2,1) symmetry. A lateral move (e.g. a point to point teleport on the surface of the Earth) does travel at less than the speed of light. That’s why a typical interstellar route involves multiple jump points — you can only deviate from the local gravitational field vector such that your projected velocity on the effective horizon is less than c. A path is planned to jump from a point where the local field vector is in one direction to a point where it’s in another direction so that you can change your heading and move towards your destination. It’s also why they are building our intergalactic space port at the L2 point — small changes in location give you multiple different directions of the gravitational field vector allowing you to jump in any direction. It’s reminiscent of sailing with the z-direction being analogous to the direction of the wind.
The causality restrictions of special relativity essentially have a loophole — that there is no “special frame” for a displacement that’s faster than the speed of light. The causality violations come from the fact that a faster than light vehicle in 4D spacetime can be boosted to another co-moving frame producing the ability to send signals backwards in time. However for a teleporting vehicle, you can’t do the same 4D spacetime boosts because there is a special frame — the horizon frame — that doesn’t have those boosts in its symmetry group.
Q8: What’s it like talking to an Uutaruu?
MS: For me, it’s a bit like writing and constructing a sentence in your head except someone else is doing it. Trying to respond in the same way — constructing a sentence in your head — is usually a mess. It’s best to just speak your response out loud so they can glean your response from the thoughts in your head going into your speech. Other people think in different ways so the experience for them is different. Over the next couple decades there is likely to be a lot more contact so you’ll get a chance to experience it yourself!
Q9: Do you feel like humans are being kept in a cage by the other species in the galaxy?
MS: Ah, intergalactic politics! The one thing I’ll say is that some of the other species in the galaxy have been here for hundreds of millions of years and have technology beyond our comprehension — there’s not much we humans could do about being kept in our conservate status even if we wanted to escape. Personally, I think it’s a remarkably enlightened way to go about things. We’re a baby species, galactically speaking, and we’ve been given a safe home to grow up in.
Q10: What happens to something blocked by the aegis?
MS: It depends on how it’s trying to get in. People like to say things trying to pass through the aegis field boundary are disintegrated, but that’s just a colloquialism — one that I’ve used myself many times. This is a technical AMA, so I’m going to give you the technical answer. You cannot destroy horizon state information. It is instead re-mapped randomly to the boundary. And yes that means the FBI agents of the old United States government that tried to raid my lab had their information spread across the boundary of the aegis field. For space vehicles, instead of re-mapping the information, the vehicle re-maps itself to a different location and the object or energy goes into the empty space left behind as it normally would. This is faster because the algorithm is already seeded with the correct data. If you try to use a modern hyperquantum algorithm to teleport something into a spacetime volume protected by an aegis field, your algorithm will not be able to converge to sufficient precision — so the teleportation does not occur. This is a kind of safety mechanism for modern algorithms — you don’t want to teleport to your doom. Older teleportation algorithms, ones that would teleport less complex structures (with tons of errors!) back during World War III, used a much more relaxed threshold for convergence. Effectively the algorithm would “converge” and the teleported mass-energy is then re-mapped to the boundary by the aegis just as if it had physically crossed it.
Q11: Do you think we’ll ever use encryption again?
MS: Probably not. Any encryption could be instantly broken by a two-qubit hyperquantum computer. The best place to store information securely is as a physical object inside an aegis field (e.g. the libraries of the memory banks) or in a conscious mind as long as there are no Uutaruu around. The Uutaruu believe that in theory computation and consciousness converge into a single concept in the limit of infinite computational resources — which would imply that hyperquantum computers might eventually be able to “decrypt” your consciousness.
© Jason Smith