This is a story of a set of events that seem unrelated...

Is everyone familiar with the Monty Hall problem? This is probably a much more humane way to start thinking about our Quantum world, rather than locking Schrödinger's cat in a box with a radioactive decay triggering poison mechanism, which has a 50/50 chance of killing the poor animal.

Imagine that you are a contestant on a game show, and you are presented with 3 identical closed doors, with a prize behind each door. Behind two of the doors is a goat, and the third door has a brand new car (or some other more desirable prize than a goat).

So, as the contestant, you are allowed to choose one of the three doors. That is a 1 in 3 chance of picking the good prize, right?

Imagine if the game show host - after you have picked your door - then opens one of the other doors to reveal one of the two goats. Now, you are given the choice: are you going to stick with the door you picked, or switch to the other door?

If you believe individual events in reality are probabalistically unrelated, you might be thinking "it makes no difference". Perhaps you have even gone as far as to think that "it's 50/50 now that there are 2 doors remaining". In other words, it seems like there is no advantage to switching your choice, according to our intuition.

What if I told you that I could be twice as successful at this game show than you, if you went with your intuition, to 'stick' because it makes no difference?

Yes, that's right... 'sticking' with 1 in 3 odds means you'll be right just over 33% of the time.

However, there is a 2 in 3 chance that we would have picked a door with a goat, so when the gameshow host shows the other goat, I will definitely get the car if I switch. This means that I can win the car, nearly 67% of the time.

Tags: #physics

This is a story of a sabbatical that I never got to take...

Anybody who says I'm ungrateful for my life needs to have their head examined. My life has been paired down to the nth degree. Anybody who has lived aboard a 22ft boat for weeks knows how to live a small life.

In 2003, I asked HSBC if I could take a sabbatical, so that I could backpack around Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. The important thing about the trip, for me, was that I needed to make more friends and do a bit of independent growing up, away from the Angel Islington and Canary Wharf, which my whole life revolved around.

My old boss, an Exeter graduate who had completed an M.Phil (Master of Philosophy degree) in Epidemiology at Oxford, was a brilliant guy and did his level best to get this agreed with Human Resources. The rule at the time was that you had to have been an employee for 2 years, which I had been. It had been agreed and I started to get excited about tying my knapsack to a stick and setting off on the road to secure and happy adulthood, with some brilliant travel stories to tell when I got back.

Sadly, HR decided to change the rules under our feet, and the trip of a lifetime became a choice between resignation or cancelling my trip. I chose the latter, as I had a secure job with a conservative bank that I have loved since being a Griffin Saver, in the days of Midland Bank. Working for HSBC was very personal for me. Also, memories of the Dot Com crash and 9/11 were fresh in my memory. I valued my job, and I liked working for my boss. He's a great guy: so disciplined and inspiring.

Possibly as some kind of compensation (I'm totally speculating here) my boss allowed me to ride his coat tails into a very important project, whereupon I sulked for months and months, because I hadn't fully comprehended what he might have done, in light of the clear importance of the project that I was a part of. My boss exposed me to the very best people within HSBC, and perhaps tried to pair and mentor me - perhaps deliberately, who can say? - with people who are still to this day an inspiration in everything I think and do. I can't help but well up with tears thinking about what an amazing time that was, even if I was sullen and sulky for so much of it.

When the pressure really ramped up on the project, towards the go-live date, I flicked the switch from 'zoned out' to 'warp drive' and started putting in the hours I should have been. I had wasted a lot of time, so this was hardly anything more than working as hard as I should have been all along, but nobody should underestimate the effort that was put in, either.

Anyway, I was eventually ranked - quite fairly - on my average effort over the whole year, rather than just on the 'heroic' efforts towards the end. There was one issue that I was very very tenacious with, having to work with operations, software vendors, networks, sysadmins and security to track down a particularly nigglesome problem. This taught me some well-needed discipline, but not, however, much humility.

My boss did his very best to knock a streak of arrogance out of a jumped-up young upstart: I found it very easy to do the work that was asked of me, but I was lazy, sloppy and work-shy, to be honest. Nothing was much of a challenge, so instead, I filled my time reading the BBC News website, chatting with my friends on the Kiteboarding forums and planning my next weekend trip to the beach or overseas Kiteboarding trip.

I suppose you could say that I had my cake and ate it. I got to continue my career in London, and I also got to travel the globe and meet a set of friends who became a part my life, almost like University or "gap-yah" friends (gap year to those who don't speak posh) would be in the lives of my rich upper-middle-class white spoiled brat peers.

However, I still harboured a bitter resentment against the world for having 'conspired' to deny me a year of diminished responsibility, casual sex with sun-kissed young women with sand in their hair, and generally having fun in the playground of World's backpacking hostels. I felt I was entitled to this, like all the University-educated upper-middle-class twentysomethings in Banking.

I couldn't see that I had kind of won. I had kind of gotten both. I couldn't see that my life was awesome already.

When my boss told me that I been ranked just below the very top performing employees of the company that year, I was mighty p1ssed off. He did a very good job of staying calm and not telling such an arrogant little sh1t to p1ss off. Partly at issue, was that entitlement is bred into us by our upbringing and society around us.

We are told what to expect depending on our position in the World. Perhaps we also misunderestimate (sic.) the effort that is going on beneath the serene surface: some of us are wild swans, with our legs frantically paddling under the surface, while we glide along the surface looking cool, calm, collected & awesome.

Tony Blair told the world that 50% of people should get to go to University. I wanted to go to University, but always felt such a deep sense of responsibility to be self-sufficient and work hard, it seemed decadent and profligate to spend so much money, geting into debt, just drinking and reading books. I have always been excellent at cramming for exams and words seem to flow out of me like so much water in a sieve, so that part didn't exactly worry me.

It's always been a bugbear of mine that people think that education is a right. It's not. It's a privilege, but it is also essential to advance civilisation and humanity. It can improve lives and society more than any other gift that we can give to the developing nations. Teach a man to fish etc. etc.

People have tried to gently, and not-so-gently steer me towards teaching. I loved my teachers and I love teaching. I can remember all the names of my teachers, and I still fondly recall so much of what they taught me in life, and how they inspired me. I hated school though, because the bullying was so unbearable. But then again, I was always terrified of electricity and ended up becoming an electrician, so fears can be overcome.

I think I know now that, when I'm done with wearing a suit, I want to teach - so much that it makes me absolutely sob my eyes out as this realisation dawns on me - Physics, Maths and Design/Technology/IT working with underpriviledged kids in state comprehensive schools in Inner City London. This doesn't have to be soon. It's something to aspire to for semi-retirement, I think.

The only way that I can think to make that a reality from my current situation of zero cash, zero assets and massive debts, is by draining the swamps in banking, as an IT contractor, and by changing the political landscape of the UK so that we pay Teachers a decent living wage and top up the salary of those working in London so that they can afford to live here.

Ideally, I would like to finish the project I'm on, and deliver of a stint of many months and years of steady high-quality work for the global bank I have always loved admired and respected the most. HSBC really is a great place to work, and you really can be reassured that when we are all done, it's going to be good for another 150 years of helping people and businesses to achieve their full potential.

Maybe I'm just a hopeless dreamer. Answers on a postcard if you've got a better idea.

Anyone who says 'narcissist' to somebody who has decided to wear a grey suit for 18 years is going to get a punch in the mouth (Winter 2014)

Tags: #career #london #banking #university #hsbc

This is a story of a dinner out with friends, planning my retirement...

I went to the book store with my friend Lesya. I bought 2 books. I was pretty insistent that I buy one of them. Out of all the books in that book store, I couldn't imagine walking out of there without this one. I knew that it would haunt my idle thoughts and dreams if I didn't have this book.

But, strangely though, as I leafed through the book, trying to build up the courage to buy it - and not repress my general urge to p1ss all my money away - I found a deeper and deeper connection with it. Every page I opened, I fell more and more in love with the content... perhaps I have always loved it?

So, a headhunter recently asked me what I really want to do with my life. I was surprised how unhesitatingly I answered that I want to retire at the age of 45 and become a Therotical Physicist. It just tripped right off the tongue, even though I hadn't made that plan - at least in my concious mind - until that point in time.

But what is time? What is conciousness? At dinner later that evening, we conducted a kind of experiment which was quite enlightening...

There are 1,099 pages in Penrose's book. I asked my friends to open the book at any page, and I would attempt to explain the theory on the page that the book was 'randomly' opened at. Why do I put 'random' in quotes like that? Well, I have a working theory that there is no such thing as a random number, in reality as we can possibly experience it... which leads on to the first page.

The Anthropic Principle is where the book was first opened, by Lesya, which nobody wanted me to explain, as John believed I had rigged the game. Anybody with a reasonable grasp of Greek or Latin or whatever the f**k language that poncey word "Anthropic" is rooted from, will know that basically what this is saying is Humanity is at the centre of the reality we all experience. In the catchphrase of the Moneysupermarket Meerkat.... SIMPLES!!

I did a quick Google search for "number of books in a book store" and the first simple answer I came up with that doesn't sound unrealistic was "upwards of 1,000" which is a bit of a sh1t answer, because 1,160,000,000,000,000 is a number which is upwards of 1,000 so let's use 999 as the answer to be on the safe side.

So, there was a 1/999 chance that I would pick that book, and a 1/1,099 chance that Lesya would pick that page, which means there was a 0.0001% chance that I could have preplanned that 'stunt'. Not likely, but still a chance.

So, then John had a go opening the book. I'm going to try and write the formula that was on that page, from memory:

Δp Δx ≳ ½ ћ

Now, I'm not sure, but I'm just going to go with my gut instinct and avoid cheating, but I'm pretty sure that looks like the Uncertainty Principle to me. The first symbol is easy - delta - the little triangle means 'the difference between two values'. So the first side of the equation says "what is the total area that could be covered by something with a known momentum AND a known location"... where in the world could the thing we are looking for be found?

So, I'm going to explain the other side of the equation in a minute, but for now let's just work out the odds of me being right. It's another 1 in 1,099 chance that John could have picked the page I wanted him to, at 'random'. That makes a statistical probability of 0.00000008% that the events of the evening went in my favour.

So, the other side of the equation is super easy. It's half the Planck constant. I reconised the h-bar symbol and what it meant immediately. We can work out the odds of that. There are 26 letters in the Roman alphabet, and let's imagine that there are 26 kinds of mark applied to them, each with a specific meaning in Physics (this obvious simplification ignores all the Greek characters... but it will suffice). So that's 1/26 times 1/26, which is 0.15% probable that I would match the correct meaning (assuming I knew them all) with the character.

So what kind of probability have we gotten to now?

0.0000000001%

I'm not sure, but I hope that is Six Sigma statistical significance. I was never that great at Maths.

Tags: #physics #friends

This is a story of personal development, mistakes and unanswerable questions...

I wrote something on the platform of King's Cross, doing the minimum necessary research, all from my smartphone. It wasn't me being smart, or my phone, but the programmers, engineers, physicists, philosophers and authors of all the content, who selflessly published into the public domain, via the Internet, which enabled me to do this.

Of course, there had to be a seed too. That seed was Oxford, and the academic sons & daughters who attended state comprehensive during my childhood, including Ben Werdmüller (CEO of Known, where you are reading this post) who taught me how to program a computer and not just use it for consuming video games. Technology then became both my means of consumption for literature (e.g. Cornell University's ArXiv library) but also low-fi tech, such as the Microfiche film I used to view the first photographs of the Middle East, at St Anthony's College, Oxford Univesity.

Ben's father, Oscar, was at St. Anthony's, with my mother, Gillian. This connection has serendipitously given me a career, a love of photography and an appreciation for the physical books, photographs and human relationships, which can be obfuscated by computer screens and Microfiche viewers. Oscar & Ben also inspired in me a love of sport and teamwork, which is only coming to the fore in the 36th year of my life. Debbie, Ben & Hannah inspired in me a love of writing, drawing and creativity that would normally have been stifiled by my move into a technical industry.

The Werdmüller/Monas family's book of drawings by the children - Ben & Hannah - was one of the most precious objects I have ever had the priviledge of handling. Now my own mum looks after priceless manuscripts and first editions of every book ever printed, for the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. These connections are easy to overlook, if you hadn't lived 36 years in my shoes, which is understandable. We all have our own outlook. We are all independent and unique observers in the Universe.

Thanks to a great piece of writing by Ben, it dawned on me that what I do with my 'head start' in computing is often indistinguishable from magic for the vast majority of people, who are playing catch up. Ego and humility always duke it out in my brain, depending on whether I consider my own unique experiences and opportunities, or whether I compare myself to an 'average' set of experiences and opportunities.

So are ordinary people able to stay abreast of developments in theories pertaining to the fundamental nature of reality? Can a kid from a state comprehensive school read and understand the literature that is published in books and academic papers? The jury's out, but I can highly recommend J S Bell's Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics for anybody who would like to read about the probability of a Physics PhD's socks being of different colours.

In the interests of my own reputation... I don't think I've 'solved' or 'discovered' anything. Just a curious mind.

Nick Grant repeating the classic "Quantum Eraser" interferometry experiment with a laser and polarising filter, at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK (July 2011)

Tags: #physics #parents #oxford #childhood