Wormholes Explained – Breaking Spacetime

If you saw a wormhole in reality, it would appear round, spherical, a bit like a black hole. Light from the other side passes through and gives you a window to a faraway place. Once crossed, the other side comes fully into view with your old home now receding into that shimmering spherical window. But are wormholes real, or are they just magic disguised as physics and maths? If they are real, how do they work and where can we find them? For most of human history, we thought space was pretty simple; a big flat stage where the events of the universe unfold. Even if you take down the set of planets and stars, there's still something left. That empty stage is space and it exists, unchanging and eternal. Einstein's theory of relativity changed that. It says that space and time make up that stage together, and they aren't the same everywhere. The things on the stage can affect the stage itself, stretching and warping it. If the old stage was like unmoving hardwood, Einstein's stage is more like a waterbed.
This kind of elastic space can be bent and maybe even torn and patched together, which could make wormholes possible. Let's see what that would look like in 2D. Our universe is like a big flat sheet, bent in just the right way, wormholes could connect two very, very distant spots with a short bridge that you could cross almost instantaneously. Enabling you to travel the universe even faster than the speed of light.

So, where can we find a wormhole? Presently, only on paper. General relativity says they might be possible, but that doesn't mean they have to exist. General relativity is a mathematical theory. It's a set of equations that have many possible answers, but not all maths describes reality. But they are theoretically possible and there are different kinds.
  • EINSTEIN ROSEN BRIDGES
The first kind of wormholes to be theorized were Einstein Rosen Bridges. They describe every black hole as a sort of portal to an infinite parallel universe.
Let's try to picture them in 2D again.

Empty space time is flat, but curved by objects on it. If we compress that object, space-time gets more curved around it. Eventually, space-time becomes so warped that it has no choice but to collapse into a black hole. A one-way barrier forms: the event horizon, which anything can enter but nothing can escape; trapped forever at the singularity at its core. But maybe there is no singularity here.

One possibility is that the other side of the event horizon looks a bit like our universe again but mirrored upside down, where time runs backwards.

In our universe things fall into the black hole. In the parallel universe, with backwards time, the mirror black hole is spewing things out a bit like a big bang.

This is called a white hole.
Unfortunately, Einstein-rosen bridges can't actually be crossed. It takes an infinite amount of time to cross over to the opposite universe and they crimp shut in the middle. If you go into a black hole, you won't become the stuff coming out of the white hole. You'll only become dead. So, to travel the cosmos in the blink of an eye, humans need a different kind of wormhole; a Traversable Wormhole.
  • VERY OLD STRING THEORY WORMHOLES
If string theory or one of its variations is the correct description of our universe, then we could be lucky and our universe might even have a tangled web of countless wormholes already.
Shortly after the Big Bang, Quantum fluctuations in the universe at the smallest scales far far smaller than an atom may have created many, many traversable wormholes. Threaded through them are strings, called cosmic strings. In the first billionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the ends of these tiny, tiny wormholes were pulled light-years apart; scattering them through the universe. If wormholes were made in the early universe, whether with cosmic strings or some other way, they could be all over; just waiting to be discovered. One might even be closer than we realize.
From the outside, black holes and wormholes can look very similar; leading some physicists to suggest the supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies are actually wormholes. It will be very hard to go all the way to the center of the Milky Way to find out though, but that's okay. There might be an equally extremely hard way to get our hands on a wormhole, we could try to make one.




  • MANMADE WORMHOLES
To be traversable and useful, there are a few properties we want a wormhole to have. First, it must obviously connect to distant parts of space-time. Like your bedroom and the bathroom, or Earth and Jupiter.
Second, it should not contain any event horizons, which would block two-way travel.

Third, it should be sufficiently sized so that the gravitational forces don't kill human travelers.

The biggest problem we have to solve, is keeping our wormholes open. No matter how we make wormholes, gravity tries to close them. Gravity wants to pinch it closed and cut the bridge; leaving only black holes at the ends. Whether it's a traversable wormhole with both ends in ours, or a wormhole to another universe, it will try to close unless we have something propping it open.

For very old string theory wormholes, that's the cosmic strings job.

For man-made wormholes, We need a new ingredient. Exotic matter. This isn't anything like we find on earth, or even antimatter. It's something totally new and different and exciting, with crazy properties like nothing that's ever been seen before. Exotic matter is stuff that has a negative mass.
Positive mass like people and planets and everything else in the universe, is attractive because of gravity. But negative mass would be repulsive; it would push you away. This makes a kind of anti-gravity the props open our wormholes. And exotic matter must exert enormous pressure to push space-time open, greater even than the pressure of the centers of neutron stars.
With exotic matter, we could weave space-time however we see fit. We may even have a candidate for this exotic matter, the vacuum of space itself.

Quantum fluctuations in empty space are constantly creating pairs of particles and antiparticles, only for them to be annihilated an instant later. The vacuum of space is boiling with them, and we can already manipulate them to produce an effect similar to the negative mass we're looking for.

We could use this to stabilize our wormholes. Once we're keeping it open, the ends would start together. So, we'd have to move them around to interesting places.
We could start by wiring the solar system; leaving one end of each wormhole in orbit around the earth. We could flick others into deep space. The earth could be a wormhole hub for a vast interstellar human civilization spread over light-years, but only a wormhole away.

However, wormholes have a dark side. Even opening a single wormhole, kind-of breaks the universe in fundamental ways, potentially creating time travel paradoxes,
and violating the causal structure of the universe.

Many scientists think that this not only means they should be impossible to make, but that it's impossible for them to exist at all. So, for now, we only know that wormholes exist in our hearts, and on paper in the form of equations.
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Also Read: Black Holes explained - From birth to death





How to make short notes for JEE?

Making a handbook or short notes is the best option for revising any topic in JEE preparation. Short notes help in the following ways-

  •  Making short notes helps a lot during revision sessions, especially when you need to revise a big topic in less time. 
  • While making short notes, you are doing revision of the most important points of the chapter.
  • It will help you revise topics one day before JEE. 

What to Include in Your Short Notes?

You can include all formulae, reactions, reaction mechanisms, important conditions, exceptions different types of tricks or some good questions and also the mistakes that you had committed so as to  them in future. Also, maintain a track of important questions in study material. This should be the basic outline of your short notes in each topic, they will consume some time but in end when you have whole syllabus to revise they will prove to be very very helpful and don’t forget to update them regularly. 

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The Fermi Paradox Part 2 - Solutions and Ideas - Where are all the aliens?


There are probably 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on Earth, in the observable universe. We know that there might be trillions of planets. So where are all the aliens? This is the Fermi Paradox. If you want to know more about it, Read part 1. Here we look at possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. So will we be destroyed or does a glorious future await us? Space travel is hard. Although possible, it's an enormous challenge to travel to other stars. Massive amounts of materials have to be put into orbit and assembled. A journey of maybe thousands of years needs to be survived by a population big enough to start from scratch. And the planet might be not as hospitable as it seems from afar. If we set a journey to other star, It was already extremely hard to set up a spaceship that could survive the trip. An interstellar invasion might be impossible to pull off.

Also, consider time: the Universe is very old.
On Earth there's been life for at least 3.6 billion years. Intelligent human life for about 250,000 years. But only for about a century have we had the technology to communicate over great distances. There might have been grand alien empires that stretched across thousands of systems and existed for millions of years and we might just have missed them. There might be grandiose ruins rotting away on distant worlds. 99% of all species on Earth have died out. It's easy to argue that this will be our fate sooner or later. Intelligent life may develop, spread over a few systems and die off, over and over again. But galactic civilizations might never meet.
 So maybe it's a unifying experience for life in the Universe to look at the stars and wonder "Where is everyone?"

But there is no reason to assume aliens are like us, or that our logic applies to them. It might just be that our means of communication are extremely primitive and outdated. Imagine sitting in a house with a Morse code transmitter: you'd keep sending messages but nobody would answer, and you would feel pretty lonely. Maybe we're still undetectable for intelligent species and we'll remain so until we learn to communicate properly. And even if we met aliens we might be too different to be able to communicate with them in a meaningful way.
Imagine the smartest squirrel you can, no matter how hard you try, you won't be able to explain our society to it.
After all, from the squirrel's perspective, a tree is all that a sophisticated intelligence like itself needs to survive. So humans cutting down whole forests is madness; but we don't destroy forests because we hate squirrels. We just want the resources. The squirrel's wishes and the squirrel's survival are of no concern to us.
A Type 3 civilization in need of resources may treat us in a similar way. They might just evaporate our oceans to make collecting whatever they need easier. One of the aliens might think for a second "Oh, tiny little apes! They built really cute concrete structures, oh well now they're dead." before activating warp speed.

But if there is a civilization out there that wants to eliminate other species, it's far more likely that it will be motivated by culture rather than by economics. And anyway it will be more effective to automate the process by constructing the perfect weapon, a self replicating space probe made from nano-machines. They operate on a molecular level: incredibly fast and deadly,
with the power to attack and dismantle anything in an instant. You only need to give them four instructions.

1) One, find a planet with life.

2) Two, disassemble everything on this planet into its component parts.

3) Three, use the resources to build new space probes.

4) Four, repeat.

A doomsday machine like this could render a galaxy sterile in a few million years. But why would you fly light years to gather resources or commit genocide?

The speed of light is actually... not very fast.
If someone could travel at the speed of light, it will still take 100,000 years to cross the milky way once, and you'll probably travel way slower. There might be way more enjoyable things than destroying civilizations and building empires.

An interesting concept is the Matrioshka Brain.
Matrioshka brain
A mega-structure surrounding a star, a computer of such computing power that an entire species could upload their consciousness and exist in a simulated universe. Potentially, one could experience an eternity of pure ecstasies without ever being bored or sad, a perfect life. If built around a red dwarf, this computer could be powered for up to ten trillion years. Who would want to conquer the galaxy or make contact with other life forms, if this were an option? All these solutions to the Fermi Paradox have one problem. We don't know where the borders of technology are. We could be close to the limit or nowhere near it. And super technology awaits us, granting us immortality, transporting us to other galaxies, elevating us to the level of gods. One thing we do have to acknowledge is that we really don't know anything.
Humans have spent more than 90% of their existence as hunter-gatherers. 500 years ago we thought we were the center of the universe. 200 years ago we stopped using human labors as the main source of the energy. 30 years ago we had apocalyptic weapons pointed at each other because of political disagreements. In the galactic time scale we are embryos. We've come far, but still have a long way to go. The mindset that we really are the center of the universe is still strong in humans, so it's easy to make arrogant assumptions about life in the universe. But in the end, there's only one way to find out, right?
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What if you stopped sleeping?

Ah! Sleep You can never have enough of it, it seems. Sometimes we wish we never had to deal with this morning struggle...
But what if you just never went to bed?
What if you figured out how to keep yourself awake forever?
How long could this sleepless "forever" last?
Could you ever be productive without charging every night?
When would your friends start telling you to get some rest?
What exactly would happen to your body?
This is AG, and Here's what would happen if you stopped sleeping.



How often have you needed just a few more hours to finish a project, get ready for a date, or... enjoy your day off?

If you took sleep out of your daily routine, you'd have all 24 hours of the day to do everything you never had time for.

What's a few yawns and some minor tiredness if it meant you never had to waste any more time lying in bed for no good reason?
Strangely, science understands relatively little about why we sleep, or how it evolve in the first place. After all, laying unconscious in dormant for hours on in, while predators lurk, hardly seems advantagious or smart.
Turns out, there are plenty of good reasons to sleep. The average person spends one
third of their life lying in bed, eyes shut, snoring away. It Sounds like a waste of valuable time. But not for your body. While you sleep, your body releases hormones and repairs tissues, replacing your old cells with new ones.
If you worked out that day, you need a good sleep to let your muscles grow and your fat burn.

So what happens if you don't sleep?




Not much at first. After just 24 hours you'd feel completely fine. In fact, you'd feel better than "fine". You may feel some extra energy, motivation and positivity. That's because sleeplessness stimulates the mesolimbic pathway in your brain. This pathway would release dopamine - and you'd feel happy and full of energy. 
But don't be fooled by all that happiness - it's not going to last long. It Sounds appealing, but it's a slippery slope.
Soon after reaching the 24-hour mark, all your reactions would slow down. Your brain would start to forget what you were doing. Outwardly, you'd appear to be drunk. Now what about two days without sleep?
At that point your body would start shutting down. It would stop metabolizing glucose properly, leaving you with no energy supply. You'd start looking very pale - like a character from the Middle Ages.Your eyes would turn red, and then more bad news - your wrinkles would become more visible.
On day three, that's when the real fun begins.
Starved of REM sleep, your brain would bring all your dreams... and nightmares to life. At around the 72-hour mark you'd start breaking down your own protein. So say goodbye to all that muscle mass you worked so hard to build up. Your body would keep using up all the energy sources it could find. After about two weeks, your immune system would be so weak, you could die from the common flu. Eventually, three weeks after your last sleep, you'd probably die of a heart attack.
If you've got a little extra muscle or fat on your body, you could stay alive just a little bit longer. But I don't recommend that anyone try this at home anyway. So grab yourself a pillow, and take a siesta. If it seems like you're always tired, make sure you're getting the prescribed 6-8 hours of sleep per night.

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Is Masturbation Good For You?

Surveys shows that 95% of men and around 72% of women have masturbated in their life.

But with rumours that it's unhealthy, can cause blindness, and even infertility, can masturbation be good for you?
Feeling yourself isn't just for single people. 70% of men and 40% of women in relationships reported masturbating within
the 4 weeks leading up to a recent survey.
After all, it feels good.
 Not only is dopamine released, which helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centres, reducing feelings of stress, but other endorphins released during orgasm can decrease your perception of pain. For women polishing the pearl can reduce menstrual cramping. And of course with the help of the hormone prolactin, which is linked to sleep, you're likely to feel exhausted and catch some much needed Zs.
Feel like you're coming down with a cold? One study found that in males, components of the immune system are activated during masturbation, increasing the number of white blood cells in the bloodstream. Solo sessions might also help men reduce cancer, with high ejaculation frequency correlating with a decreased risk of total prostate cancer.

Though it's unclear why, researchers hypothesize that increased ejaculation means potential carcinogenic secretions in the prostate are excreted more regularly, de-creasing their negative impact on the body. 
But why have humans and animals evolved to masturbate if it's seemingly a waste of energy or semen in men?


 Well, it turns out that self-love can actually improve the quality of sperm. A study showed that recent, male masturbation
reduced the number of sperm inseminated at the next copulation, but not the number retained by the female. From this, it was concluded that masturbation is a male strategy to improve the fitness of their sperm, as younger sperm have a higher likelihood of insemination. 
Not only that but masturbation can improve your sexual performance. Both women and men have pelvic floor uscles that stretch from your pubic bone to your tailbone. As we age, these muscles weaken, causing sexual dysfunction in women and erectile dysfunction in men. But stroking the penis or clitoris can activate the bulbocavernosis reflex, resulting in pelvic floor muscles contracting. It's essentially a workout for your sex muscles. Nitric oxide levels also diminish with age and can contribute to a decreased sex drive but masturbation can help maintain it in your blood throughout your life.
But while masturbating does have physiological benefits, it's important to mix up your technique. Using the same way
to get off every time can make you sexually
unresponsive to other types of stimulation.
This could lead to decreased sexual arousal,
or performance when it comes time to do the deed with a real life partner--so make sure you mix it up!
 At the end of the day, masturbation is a safe and healthy activity, so put on some music, light those candles, and have yourself a good night. 
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What if you fell into Jupiter?




What you're seeing isn't a watercolor painting in motion, in fact, it's the planet Jupiter. For the most part, this gas giant is a mystery.

So what would happen if you wanted to discover it for yourself and jumped right onto the planet?

Or should we say into? 

Because Jupiter doesn't have a surface, just a seemingly endless stretch of atmosphere.
Would you fall straight through?
What would you see?
And How would it make you feel?
Today I am going to write what will happen if you fall into Jupiter.
 If you attempted to jump into Jupiter wearing a standard space suit, it'd be over for you pretty quickly. First of all, you wouldn't even make it to the planet. Roughly 300,000 km (200,000 miles) from Jupiter, radiation would penetrate your suit and you'd die.

But that's a boring What If. 

I'll give you a special space suit that can survive the fall... for now.

Here's where the real fun begins.

At first, you'll be falling from the top of the
atmosphere at nearly 180,000 km/h (110,000 mph).  This is a lot faster than you'd fall from the top of Earth's atmosphere because, Jupiter's gravity is much stronger than Earth's. You'll still be able to see the Sun, but don't expect it to heat you up.  At about 250 km (155 miles) down you'd reach the ammonia clouds and experience -150 C (-240 F) temperatures.
Now, get ready for the most epic whirlpool of your life. Jupiter's clouds create powerful winds: up to 482 km/h (300 mph). You'd feel as if you were in one giant, colorful tornado. That's because Jupiter is the fastest rotating planet in our Solar System. One day on the planet is equal to 9.5 Earth hours. Let's go down about 120 km (74 miles) more. Congratulations! This is the deepest that any exploration has ever sailed into the gas giant. In 1995, NASA's Galileo probe made it this far, before it was destroyed by the pressure of Jupiter's atmosphere.
But don't worry, that's not happening to you. You've got the suit! The further you travel, the darker it will get, until it's completely pitch black. The only source of light you'll have will be from the lightning storms happening all around you. At this point, the temperature will start to increase, and it might even feel comfortable if it weren't for the immense physical pressure you'll be feeling. The pressure you'd experience is more than 1,000 times higher than on the surface of the Earth. The only way you'd be able to survive, is if your space suit was built like the deepest diving submarine of all time. By now, you've been falling for 12 hours and, let's be honest: you're getting a little bored. You'd probably want to radio someone to come and get you. Well, too bad. That's an impossibility inside Jupiter; since radio waves get absorbed this deep into the planet's atmosphere. You'll just have to keep falling. The temperature will keep rising, and so will the pressure. As you reach the inner layers of Jupiter, there'll be parts that you'll be able to swim through. A substance that's not quite liquid or gas, known as supercritical fluid. Moving through this strange material, the temperature will get even hotter. Eventually, it'll be equivalent to the surface of the Sun. If that isn't enough, you'll also be experiencing pressure equal to 2 million times the pressure on Earth. Metallic hydrogen will begin to form, and you'll be surrounded by it.
Spurce: Harvard
This relatively unknown substance can be a dense liquid that you won't be able to escape from. If you do manage to escape, you'd be falling through it for thousands of kilometers, until you reach Jupiter's core, possibly a solid object.
Some scientists predict it is, due to the immense pressure at this level in the planet. Regardless of what it is, if you somehow did manage to survive all this, you'd be stuck from all the atmospheric pressure. Not a very rewarding trip. Maybe we should leave the planet as a beautiful mystery. But, if you do ever manage to fall into the planet and get stuck, let's hope you have a few more Interesting Articles to keep you company.

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Are you a mind with a body or a body with a mind?

Look at your hand. How do you know it's really yours?
It seems obvious, unless you've experienced the rubber hand illusion.

In this experiment, a dummy hand is placed
in front of you and your real hand is hidden
behind a screen. Both are simultaneously stroked with a paint brush. No matter how much you remind yourself the dummy hand isn't yours, you eventually start to feel like it is, and inevitably flinch when it's threatened with a knife.

That may just be a temporary trick, but it speaks to a larger truth: our bodies, the physical,  biological parts of us, and our minds, the thinking, conscious aspects, have a complicated, tangled relationship.

Which one primarily defines you
or your self?

Are you a physical body that only experiences thoughts and emotions as a result of biochemical interactions in the brain?

That would be a body with a mind.

Or is there some non-physical part of you
that's pulling the strings but could live outside  of your biological body?

That would be a mind with a body.

That takes us to an old question of whether the body and mind are two separate things.

In a famous thought experiment, 16th-century philosopher René Descartes pointed out that even if all our physical sensations were just a hallucinatory dream,
our mind and thoughts  would still be there.
That, for him, was the ultimate proof of our existence. And it led him to conclude that
the conscious mind is something separate
from the material body that forms the core of our identity. The notion of a non-physical consciousness echoes the belief of many religions in an immaterial soul for which the body is only a temporary shell.

If we accept this, another problem emerges.

How can a non-physical mind have
any interaction with the physical body?

If the mind has no shape, weight, or motion,
how can it move your muscles?

Or if we assume it can, why can your mind
only move your body and not others?

Some thinkers have found creative ways
to get around this dilemma. For example, the French priest  and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche claimed that when we think about reaching for a fork, it's actually god who moves our hand. Another priest philosopher named George Berkeley concluded that the material world is an illusion, existing only as mental perceptions.

This question of mind versus body isn't just the domain of philosophers. With the development of psychology and neuroscience, scientists have weighed in, as well. Many modern scientists reject the idea that there's any distinction  between the mind and body. Neuroscience suggests that our bodies, along with their physical senses, are deeply integrated  with the activity in our brains to form what we call consciousness. From the day we're born, our mental development is formed through our body's interaction with the external world.
Every sight, sound, and touch create new maps and representations in the brain that eventually become responsible for regulating our experience of self. And we have other senses, besides the typical five, such as the sense of balance and a sense of the relative location of our body parts. The rubber hand illusion, and similar virtual reality experiments, show that our senses can easily mislead us in our judgment of self. They also suggest that our bodies and external sensations are inseparable from  our subjective consciousness.

If this is true, then perhaps Descartes' experiment was mistaken from the start.
After all, if we close our eyes in a silent room, the feeling of having a body
isn't something we can just imagine away.

This question of mind and body becomes particularly interesting at a time when we're considering future technologies, such as neural prosthetics and wearable robots that could become extended parts of our bodies. Or the slightly more radical idea of mind uploading, which dangles the possibility  of immortal life without a body by transferring a human 
consciousness into a computer.

If the body is deeply mapped in the brain, then by extending our sense of self to new wearable devices, our brains may eventually adapt to a restructured version with new sensory representations. Or perhaps uploading our consciousness into a computer might not even be possible unless we can also simulate a body capable of delivering physical sensations.

The idea that our bodies are part of our consciousness and vice versa also isn't new.
It's found extensively in Buddhist thought,
as well as the writings of philosophers from Heidegger to Aristotle.

But for now, we're still left with the open question of what exactly our self is.

Are we a mind equipped with a physical body as Descartes suggested?

Or a complex organism  that's gained consciousness over millions of years of evolution thanks to a bigger brain and
more neurons than our distant ancestors?

Or something else entirely that
no one's yet dreamt up?
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Solution of the toughest logic puzzle ever - the three gods riddle

Click here for the riddle

Solution

First, ask the god standing in the middle, "If I were to ask you if the god to your left is Random, would you say ja?"

If the god says ja, then there are two possibilities: either the god to his left is Random, and the god speaking is either True or False; or the god speaking is Random. Either way, you know the god to his right is not Random.

Similarly, if the god says da, then there are two possibilities: either the god to his right is Random, and the god speaking is True or False; or the god speaking is Random. In this case, you know the god to the left is not Random.

The next step is to approach the god that you know is not Random, and figure out if he is True or False. Because you still do not know the meanings of ja and da, you need to do this by using the same hypothetical structure, asking, "If I were to ask you if you are True, would you say ja?" If the god is True, they will answer ja. If the god is False, they will answer da. (False's response in this case is essentially either: "no I would not say yes," even though he would; or "yes I would say no," even though he wouldn't.)

Finally, now that you have identified a god as either True or False, you can use the same question structure one last time to identify the other gods (you need to stick to it because you still don't know the meanings of ja and da). Simply ask, "If I were to ask you if the god in the middle is Random, would you say ja?" If the answer is ja, then the god in the middle is Random, and the third god is either True or False (the opposite of the one you have already identified). If the answer is da, then the god in the middle is True or False, and the third god is Random.

Congratulations! You have identified the three gods despite their stubborn refusal to speak English. Interestingly enough, you must not waste a question to figure out what ja and da mean, otherwise you would not have enough questions left to identify all three gods. So you leave the archipelago that these gods rule over, and the knights and knaves who worship them, with promises of good fortune and prosperity.

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The hardest logic puzzle ever - The three gods riddle

You encounter three gods. you realize a few things through divine intervention.

First, you know that one of the three gods always tells the truth, another always lies, and the third will respond to questions randomly. Therefore, let us call the gods True, False, and Random.

The gods speak a different language. They understand all languages perfectly well, but only answer questions with either ja or da, the words for yes and no. You do not know which god is which, and you do not know which word means yes and which word means no.

Finally, you have an existential problem on your hands. You may ask three yes-or-no questions, each one directed to only one god, and only that god will answer with either ja or da. If you can determine the identities of the three gods, they will send you on your way with their blessing, and you can be assured of a prosperous and fulfilled life. If you fail to determine the identities of the gods, however, they will be less generous in their treatment. The volcano pit smokes and glows red beside you.

With your three questions, how do you figure out which god is True, which is False, and which is Random?

Hint

To get to this island volcano with the three gods, we took a trip through other islands populated with knights and knaves. These previous encounters will give you the tools you need to identify the gods.

Click here for solution

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Is Your Red The Same as My Red?

This appears blue.
This appears yellow.
And this appears green.
Those of us with normal color vision can probably agree. But that doesn't change the fact that color is an illusion. Color, as we know it, does not exist in the outside world, beyond us, like gravity or protons do. Instead, color is created inside our heads. Our brains convert a certain range of the electromagnetic spectrum into color. I can measure the wavelength of radiation, but I can't measure or observe the experience of a color inside your mind. So, how do I know that when you and me look at a strawberry, and, in my brain, this perception occurs, which I call "red," that, in your brain, a perception like this doesn't occur, which you have, of course, also learned to call red. We both call it red.
We communicate effectively and walk away, never knowing just how different each of our internal experiences really were. Of course, we already know that not everybody sees color in exactly the same way. One example would be color blindness. But we can diagnose and discuss these differences because people with the conditions fail to see things that most of us can.
Conceivably though, there could be ways of seeing that we use that cause colors to look differently in different people's minds, without altering their performances on any tests we could come up with. Of course, if that were the case, wouldn't some people think other colors look better than others? Or that some colors were more complimentary of others? Well, yeah, but doesn't that already happen? This matters because it shows how fundamentally, in terms of our perceptions, we are all alone in our minds.
 Let's say I met an alien from a far away solar system who, lucky enough, could speak English, but had never, and could never, feel pain. I could explain to the alien that pain is sent through A delta and C fibers to the spinal chord. The alien could learn every single cell and pathway and process and chemical involved in the feeling of pain. The alien could pass a biology exam about pain and believe that pain, to us, generally is a bad thing. But no matter how much he learned, the alien would never actually feel pain. Philosophers call these ineffable, raw feelings "Qualia." And our inability to connect physical phenomenon to these raw feelings, our inability to explain and share our own internal qualia is known as the "Explanatory Gap." 
This gap is confronted when describing color to someone who's been blind their entire life. Tommy Edison has never been able to see. He has a YouTube channel where he describes what being blind is like. It's an amazing channel. In one video he talks about colors and how strange and foreign of a concept it seems to him. Sighted people try to explain, for instance, that red is "hot," and blue is "cold." But to someone who has never seen a single color, that just seems weird. And, as he explains, it has never caused him to finally see a color.
 Some philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia may be private and ineffable simply because of a failure of our own language, not because they are necessarily always going to be impossible to share. There may be an alien race that communicates in a language that causes colors to appear in your brain without your retina having to be involved at all. Or without you having to have ever needed to actually see the color yourself. Perhaps, even in English, he says, given millions and billions of words used in just the right way, it may be possible to adequately describe a color such that a blind person could see it for the first time. Or you could figure out that, once-and-for-all, yes or no, in fact, you and your friend do not see the same red.
 But for now it remains the case that we
have no way of knowing if my red is the same as your red. Maybe one day our language will allow us to share and find out, or maybe it never will. I know it's frustrating to not have an answer, but the mere fact that you guys can ask me about my internal experiences, and the mere fact that I can ask my friends and we can all collectively wonder at the concept of qualia is quite incredible, and also quite human.

Animals can do all sorts of clever things
that we do. They can use tools, problem solve, communicate, cooperate, exhibit curiosity, plan for the future, and although we can't know for sure, many animals certainly act as if they feel emotions - loneliness, fear, joy. Apes have even been taught to use language to talk to us humans. It's a sort of sign language that they've used to do everything from answer questions, to express emotion, or even produce novel thoughts. Unlike any other animal, these apes are able to understand language and form responses at about the level of a 2.5 year old human child. But, there is something that no signing-ape has ever done. No ape has ever asked a question.
For as long as we've been able to use sign
language to communicate with apes, they have never wondered out loud about anything that we might know that they
don't. Of course, this does not mean that apes, and plenty of other animals, aren't curious. They obviously are. But, what is suggests is that they lack a "Theory of Mind." An understanding that other people have separate minds. That they have knowledge, access to information that you might not have. Even us humans aren't born with a "theory of mind," and there's a famous experiment to test when a human child
first develops a "theory of mind." It is called
the "Sally-Anne" test.

During the test, researchers tell children
a story about Sally and Anne. Sally and Anne
have a box and a basket in their room.
They also happen to have a delicious cookie. Now, Sally takes the cookie and puts it inside
the box, and then Sally leaves the room. While Sally is gone, Anne comes over to the box, takes the cookie out and puts the cookie
inside the basket. Now, when Sally comes back, the researchers ask the children "where will Sally look for the cookie?" Obviously, Sally will look in the box. That's where she left it. She has no way of knowing what Anne did while she was gone. But until the age of about 4, children will insist that Sally will check the basket because, after all,
that's where the cookie is. The child saw
Anne move the cookie, so why wouldn't Sally also know? Young children fail to realize that Sally's mental representation of the situation, her access to information,
can be different than their own. And apes who know sign language, but never
ask us questions, are doing the same thing.
They're failing to recognize that other individuals have similar cognitive abilities and can be used as sources of information.
So, we are all alone with our perceptions.
We are alone in our own minds. We can both agree that chocolate tastes good. But I cannot climb into your consciousness and experience what chocolate tastes like to you. I can never know if my red looks the same as your red.

But I can ask.

So, stay human, stay curious and let the entire world know that you are.

Thanks for reading

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