Child prodigies never cease to amaze me. In all probability there’ve always been prodigies in various fields. However, today they easily get much more exposure and quickly become world famous because of the internet. I love seeing and hearing young people with a great musical genius. It’s inspiring! It gives us a glimpse into the vastness of human potential.

I just wanted to share a few video clips with you, showing three very young people who are so good at what they do it completely blows my mind. Most musicians could work hard for 40 years to improve their skills and still not become as good as these kids – who aren’t even teenagers yet!

Watch. Listen. Be inspired!

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The greatest tool mankind has for commencement is knowledge and wisdom. What I’m about to describe is probably utopia, but should still be a goal we actively try to accomplish.

Currently, mankind is continuously “reinventing the wheel”. Because a huge part of the results from the research and invention being done in the world are considered to be commercial business secrets, the same things are being discovered several times by different people around the world. Other discoveries are kept secret by the various governments because they are of great value to the military or various clandestine agencies.

All this is necessary from a business perspective, or a security perspective. However, it greatly slows down the accumulation of human knowledge, and thus also the commencement of mankind.

We could expand our combined knowledge base virtually exponentially if we didn’t have to worry about revealing our discoveries and research papers to the public.

Imagine a free (as in beer), well organized, easily searchable central database storing everything mankind currently knows about everything - stored in such a way that it’s easy to follow every piece of information from conception to current version. A perfectly organized Wiki, so to speak… If there are things scientists disagree upon, then there would be different pages describing each view, and you could easily trace each piece of information backwards and see every other piece of information it builds on. You could see where each view on a subject parts from the path taken to reach the other views. Everything would be well documented (explained in extreme detail) with all available proof or evidence (or references to such).

This is, of course, only a vague description of how such a database should work – but you get the picture (I hope). With everyone having access to such a database people would be free to build on the research and discoveries of others, without worrying about patent issues or copyright infringement.

This could never become a reality, of course, in a world where any research is focused on making a weapon intended to be used on Earth – or in a world ruled by capitalism.

Regarding the weapons thing: I wish people would just grow up and work things out peacefully (which is theoretically possible in EVERY situation). Regarding the capitalism thing: I believe the best solution we currently have is a mix of capitalism and socialism. Pure capitalism would end in disaster and so would pure socialism. So we can’t, at least currently, rule out capitalism. That in turn means that we can’t currently make this system where all knowledge is in the public domain a reality. We can still try to work towards it though. The more knowledge in the public domain the better.

Google is currently, to the best of my knowledge, the company doing the most about achieving a similar goal. Their ultimate goal is to make all information (with a broad definition of information) freely searchable. Achieving that goal is probably the closest we can come to the utopia I just described - since this world is mostly ruled by various degrees of capitalism.

Feel free to debate!

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Lately I’ve been going through (yet another) phase where I’ve been fascinated by two concepts: nothing and infinity.

These are concepts the human mind can comprehend, but not accurately picture in our minds. Nothing is, of course, a very simple concept. It’s tempting to say that nothing is 0 of everything, but that’s not really the case – as 0 of everything means you have something to compare with, something to count. Something is not nothing. Empty space is not nothing. We can understand the concept, but not visualize it – naturally…

Infinity is a fantastic concept. In math it’s common to refer to infinity, for instance: from 0 to infinity - meaning all possible positive numbers. That’s a whole lot of numbers! And yet, it’s still an infinitely limited definition of infinity. That’s because you can’t actually put infinity on a linear structure.

(Well, we just like to ignore that and do it anyway, because many times it’s practical to do so. That means using the light version of infinity…)

If you take all the possible positive numbers, then add all possible negative numbers you have infinity squared, right? Um… No. Infinity is an absolute constant. It can’t be multiplied by anything. You can’t have infinity + 1. If you were to do that then you didn’t really have infinity to begin with. Consider the following childish “argument”:

Person1: “Yes” to infinity!
Person2: “No” one more time than your “Yes”!

In the above case Person2 would be out of the game before he/she got started, because Person1 would have reserved all available answers. Person2 could use the light version instead and say “No, to infinity”, but he/she still wouldn’t win the “argument” because Person1 would always lead the never-ending race.

It’s fun to contemplate various logical consequences of nothing and infinity. It’s quite possible to write beautiful poetry about, which I’m not going to attempt – I’m no poet. However, one of the most famous quotes of all time can be applied to this subject, and it sums it up quite nicely:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Popularity: 6% [?]

I’m continuously astounded by the strength of people’s conviction when they talk about the universe. The universe is so and so billion years old, it’s so and so many billions of light years wide and so on. Sure, many of the assumptions made by science are reasonable if you take into account the knowledge we currently posses. It seems people aren’t willing to consider that we might be completely off on a great many things. Of course, building on previous discoveries is the most efficient way of expanding our knowledge and make new discoveries. All I’m saying is that it’s important that we, at the very least, be open to the possibility that a previous discovery was faulty, or just plain wrong, even if it was proven to be true based on our knowledge at the time.

For example, the theory of the Big Bang - that the universe is expanding and has done so ever since it originated from “the primordial atom” - is supported by quite a bit of evidence. It could very well be perfectly true. Then again, it might not be. It could be sort of a half-truth. The universe could be truly infinite, meaning in every conceivable (and non-conceivable) direction. That doesn’t have to contradict the evidence we currently have of an expanding universe. The universe could be expanding “outward”, and at certain stages in this expansion there are cataclysmic events that cause the expansion from that point to speed up dramatically. From “the outside” this could be viewed as a Big Bang, but in reality the universe continues on “inward” infinitely, just as it does “outward”.

There could be and infinite amount of dimensions, parallel universes and so on. It’s simply impossible (I HATE that word, but here I believe it’s appropriate) for us to even begin to understand it, because we’re such an infinitely small part of it and we’re “right smack in the middle”. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand any of it of course, it just means we should try to be more humble in our beliefs regarding what’s true and what’s not.

There are certainly lots of humble scientists out there, but there is a disturbingly large amount of arrogant ones out there too.

Here’s a neat trick if you’re having trouble falling asleep at night. Simply make a serious effort to visualize a universe infinite both outward and inward (there are probably infinitely many other directions, but thos two should suffice… ).

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