Wild Dreams and the Matrix Reloaded

Perhaps I have been thinking too much about thermodynamics the past week, as we have been discussing entropy and free energy in my last three to four chemistry class periods. Maybe you’ve experienced this before, it happens to me every now and then. Sometime in the middle of the night, you’re in a hazy state in between waking and sleeping and having strange wild ideas. I started to think about the ergodic hypothesis and moments later I was imagining scenes from The Matrix Reloaded. I think these strange dreams might be connected to my reading a couple of chapters of Harry Potter Book 5 every night before bed.

Whoa! Let’s back up. How might these things even be connected in one’s wildest dreams?

First, the ergodic hypothesis is worth repeating. I’ll use the Wikipedia definition: “In physics and thermodynamics the ergodic hypothesis says that, over long periods of time, the time spent by a system in some region of the phase space of microstates with the same energy is proportional to the volume of this region, i.e., that all accessible microstates are equiprobable over a long period of time.”

We were discussing in class how improbable it was that all the gas molecules in a room simultaneously all move to one corner and how it was much more probable they would be “spread out”. One way of thinking about the macroscopic quantity of entropy is that we “chunk” our microstates in such a way that randomly distributed states are grouped together. We can’t distinguish these microstates from each other and so the random spread out state is assigned a high overall probability since there are many, more ways to generate microstates of the “spread out” state versus the “clumped together” state.

Over a long period of time though one should eventually visit a microstate of the “clumped together” variety (if you could wait long enough). This might be the “anomaly” (Neo) in the Matrix. When Neo finally reaches the Source and meets the Architect, he discovers that he is yet another iteration of a series of events that have cycled through. Each of these rare events, when the anomaly reaches the source, might be one of those rarer “clump together” events where the anomaly becomes significant. And then things go back to the “spread out” state as part of the cyclic series of events.

Since I hadn’t seen the Matrix Reloaded in ages, and I had been thinking about anomalous and rare events, I decided on a whim to check out the DVD from the local library and watch it yesterday night. I’m a fan of action movies and don’t mind watching something with lots of neat special effects and nice choreography that go along with the action sequences. I had also forgotten all the cheesy lines in the movie, which were very amusing, for example: “You don’t really know someone until you fight him” (or something to that effect). I also have a bad memory when it comes to what happens in the storyline so much of the movie feels novel to me again.

In the movie Neo keeps having this recurring dream (which I assume is connected to his being the anomaly). The same thing happens to Harry Potter in Book 5. Neo is looking for the special door (the one that takes him to the source although he doesn’t know it yet) while Harry, in his dream, is looking for and trying to get past a door in the Department of Mysteries. While Neo is in the Matrix, you could say in a sense that he is “dreaming” – he’s plugged in and somehow the electrical impulses from his brain animate his character in the Matrix. In the non-dream world, Neo looks like he is in a deep sleep, although one might categorize him as lucidly dreaming and strongly able to control the actions in his dream. He can also be physically negatively affected by his dreaming. If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world.

Harry’s situation is different in a sense that he does not seem to be controlling the dream. However he is hooked up in some way to Voldemort, and able to experience what Voldemort feels and what he sees (when possessing the snake at least). Because the two are not in proximity it is unclear why they are “entangled”. Maybe the magic of the curse that joined them together was indeed some sort of quantum entanglement. So when Voldemort feels or thinks something, there might be a change in some of his quantum states. The corresponding entangled particles in Harry react to those changes. These changes seem passive although once Voldemort recognizes the connection he actively uses it to plant a false scene into Harry’s consciousness. There are some similarities to Legilimency because Occlumency is what Harry needs to learn to “block” the connection.

What happens when we dream? Clearly there is a fair amount of brain activity. There’s actually an interesting study with a graph that has made its rounds over the Internet. Here’s a link to a blogger that shows the graph and also has a link to the research paper. Where do you see the flatlining? When the student is watching TV or IN CLASS! Given that Lab and Homework are separate categories and have plenty of activity, "in class" might be passively sitting in class listening to a professor lecture. Perhaps those active strategies I’m trying to employ in class do aid learning – that’s not so easy to tell in this study. It does show us a certain type of brain activity of one student over seven days. I wonder what we would see if the student listened to a lecture while sleeping!