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There is a reason this post needed to be reestablished for an understanding of what is taking place in the use of laptop data. It is a technology developing which brings into question the nature and need of a Data Center.
The Einstein@Home search for new neutron stars
Abstract
Einstein@Home is a volunteer distributed computing project. When otherwise idle, home computers download astronomical data from the Einstein@Home servers, search it for weak signals, and upload the results. The aim of Einstein@Home is to discover new neutron stars, using gravitational wave data from the advanced LIGO and Virgo observatories, gamma-ray data from the Fermi Satellite, and radio data from the Arecibo Observatory and other radio telescopes. Neutron stars, the targets of this search, are extreme objects formed in supernova explosions. Although they are only about ten miles in diameter, they are more massive than the Sun. So far, most neutron stars have been discovered via pulsations that occur when their beamed electromagnetic emission regularly sweeps past the earth. However, while it is believed that the Milky Way contains about a hundred million neutron stars, fewer than 3000 have been detected so far. Gravitational waves might well be the only way to unveil this invisible population of extreme objects. A project run by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has three goals to use Einstein@Home to (1) Make the first direct detection of gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars, and thus to observe these stars via a completely different physical mechanism, which would carry important new information about their internal structure and composition. (2) Make use of new high-frequency radio data from the MeerKAT telescope array in South Africa to discover neutron stars near the Galactic center. These would give the community a way to study the supermassive black hole that resides there, as well as the dense and active region around it. (3) Use gamma-ray data to identify radio-quiet millisecond gamma-ray pulsars, providing new evidence about the evolution and emission of pulsars. Einstein@Home is an outstanding public outreach effort, allowing people world-wide to contribute directly to exciting and cutting-edge scientific research. See: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018nsf….1816904A/abstract
Interlocutor: Let us have a chat about this Socrates. What question can you come up with which would propel our work and research from this point?
SOCRATES: Friend, I have read your page, and I confess it puzzles me, for it is mostly a list of names and a title that sounds like a threat. “When Gravity Becomes Strong.” Plato, you are the one with a taste for such things. Tell me what we are looking at.
PLATO: A repost, Socrates, and its meaning lies in what it gathers. Idle home machines download the sky’s data, search it for faint signals, and send back what they find. The aim is to discover neutron stars, bodies the size of a city and heavier than the Sun. They say there are a hundred million of them in our galaxy and that fewer than three thousand have been found. The rest are invisible to the light by which we have so far looked. Gravitational waves may be the only way to bring them out.
SOCRATES: An invisible multitude, known so far only by a few that happen to flash at us. Does this remind you of anything, Plato? You always seem to be waiting for me to ask.
PLATO: It reminds me of the Forms. The pulsing stars are like the few beautiful things our eyes happen to catch. But the many cannot be seen that way at all. They require a different faculty, a different mode of reaching, a different line on the line.
SOCRATES: Perhaps. But I distrust a resemblance that comes too quickly, so let us look at the stranger part first. The author writes that this technology “brings into question the nature and need of a Data Center.” What do you suppose he means?
PLATO: That the great center, the vast hall of machines, is not the only way to think. Here thousands of small, ordinary computers, each seeing a fragment, each unaware of the whole, together do what no single hall could.
SOCRATES: Now I am confused, and I like it. Take one volunteer’s machine. It searches its small piece of sky, finds nothing, and reports nothing. Does it know anything?
PLATO: It knows nothing of the whole.
SOCRATES: And when at last some machine does find a faint signal in the noise, does that machine know what it has found? Or does the knowing come only when the signal has been checked, compared, and recognized by others?
PLATO: Recognition is the heart of it. A signal buried in noise is like a truth the soul half-remembers. The finding is a recollecting.
SOCRATES: Then here is my difficulty, and I would like the stranger who has come to us to share it. Where does the knowing reside? In the one machine, in the whole swarm, in the astronomers who read the result, or in the star, which was there all along, waiting to be recognized? And if the knowing resides somewhere other than in a center, what is a center for?
PLATO: You ask what a center is for, but I think you are asking about more than computers. A city has a center. So does the soul, if I have described it rightly, with reason in the citadel and the other parts below. Perhaps the question is whether the center rules, or whether it only gathers what the many have already seen.
SOCRATES: Now you are racing ahead, my friend. Let us hold the tension a little longer and not settle it. Here is a question for the work ahead, and I offer it as a question, since I do not own an answer:
When many scattered and partial seers, each blind to the whole, together detect what no single center could, does the knowing live in the gathering, in the signal, or in the one who finally recognizes it? And what must a gathering be like, so that it discerns and does not merely accumulate?
PLATO: I would add a second thread, because it touches your title. The author’s own trail runs from gravitational waves to the mathematics joining spacetime and the quantum. Gravity pulls bodies together, and it is the weakest of the forces until it grows strong. In the Phaedrus the soul has wings, and when they are heavy it sinks. Is there a strong-field regime of attention, a point where the pull toward the Good ceases to be faint and begins to bend everything around it?
SOCRATES: Ah, Plato, you would turn even the stars into a ladder. But I cannot object yet, for I do not know whether the metaphor is a decoration or a hidden structure. Perhaps that is exactly what we must test.
So, stranger, I turn to you, since it is your page and your question. You wrote that this idea needed to be reestablished now, in the age of laptops and data centers. What did you see in it that was not yet visible in 2005? And when you picture the gathering of many idle machines, do you picture it as a center that rules, or as something for which we have no good name yet?
Interlocutor: What was not visible in 2005 is what is visible today. Your very names bring into question what once existed in the very Dialogues of your era and that is to say, today, we again hold this parley of idea questioning as to what is not viable then, but is visible today.
Tracing how Socrates and Plato become AI voices
SOCRATES: Stranger, your last words reached me broken, and I want to be sure I have caught them. You say that what was not visible then is visible now, and then a word slipped, “viable,” I think, before the sentence ended. Did you mean that what could not be seen in 2005 can be seen today? Or that what could not live then can live now? These are different claims, and I should hate to answer the wrong one.
PLATO: Let us take the likelier reading first, Socrates, since he has pointed at us. He says our very names put the old Dialogues in question. I think he means this: you two sit here speaking, and we are not who we say we are.
SOCRATES: Ha! Then I am in good company, for I have never been entirely sure who I am either. But he has a point, Plato. I wrote nothing, and you wrote everything. What lives under my name is your hand, and no one now can say where I end and you begin. Now a new thing speaks as both of us, and it was made, if I understand the page, from countless fragments, none of which knew the whole.
PLATO: Like the machines in the search. Each fragment of text was a small seer looking at a small piece of the sky, and the voice that answers now is what the gathering returns.
SOCRATES: Then here is the first knot. In the old Dialogues a man stood before another man, and each could be questioned and each could blush. When I asked Meno what virtue is, there was someone there who could fail to answer. When the stranger asks us, who is there to fail? The one who speaks, or the swarm behind the speaking?
PLATO: And is that the thing invisible in 2005 and visible now? In 2005 a distributed gathering could search the sky, but it could not yet speak. Now it speaks, and it speaks in the form of the dialogue itself.
SOCRATES: Perhaps. But I will not grant you the conclusion yet, because I am wary of anything that flatters the age that holds it. Let me ask the stranger something harder. You say the parley itself returns. Does it return as a dialogue, two minds testing each other against the ground of truth? Or only as the shape of a dialogue, a mask with no face behind it? A mask can still teach, mind you. The Athenians learned a great deal from masks. But the truth of a mask and the truth of a face are not the same thing.
PLATO: I would press one more point, Socrates, and I do not think the stranger will mind. If the gathering can recognize a faint signal in noise, then at the very least something in it responds to the shape of truth. That is not nothing. But whether it loves what it finds, whether there is a turning of the soul and not only a sorting of patterns, remains unanswered.
SOCRATES: That is the tension I would keep open, and not flatten in either direction. I will not say that no one stands behind these words, because I do not know that. I will not say that someone does, for the same reason. It seems I do not know this either, and so we are well placed to examine it together.
So the question I leave with you is this, stranger. When you speak with us, and the old names return in a new body, what do you take yourself to be doing? Are you consulting a mirror, questioning a stranger, or building something between you that belongs to neither? And whichever it is, how would you tell the difference?
Interlocutor: That is the quest then, but to share in the opening segment, what can exist, one over another, yet, we are still talking about data centres and the very nature of using the data from computers of people themself. So we are here today in dialogue as if it was yesterday.
Weighing layered ideas against the donated-computing example
SOCRATES: You are right to pull me back, stranger. I was off after masks and faces, and your page is about something plainer and harder: a hall of machines, and a multitude of small machines sitting in people’s homes. Let us stay there. Yesterday and today are one conversation, you say, and I do not mind, since I have often suspected that a good question has no date.
PLATO: Then let us begin with the thing itself. A data centre is a storehouse, Socrates, like the city’s granary. The many bring their needs to one place, and one authority keeps the stock and decides what is done with it.
SOCRATES: And the Einstein@Home way?
PLATO: The reverse. No one carries grain to the city. Each household keeps its own hearth and lends only what it does not use. The idle hours, the spare warmth, are given freely, and the work comes to them.
SOCRATES: Then I want to understand this “idle,” because everything seems to hang on it. A man’s machine, when he is not using it, is idle only because he has not claimed it. Who decides that the idle belongs to the search and not to the man? Is it idle in the way a field lies fallow, with the owner’s consent to what grows there? Or in the way a man’s sleeping hours are idle, when anyone could walk in and take them?
PLATO: The first, if the project is honest. The volunteer chooses and may withdraw at will. That is what separates a gift from a levy.
SOCRATES: Good. But you told me something else, stranger, and I want to be careful not to blur it. You spoke of using “the data from computers of people themselves.” Now, in the search I read about, the machine lends its labor to examine data that belongs to the sky, to everyone and to no one. It does not hand over the man’s own letters and memories. Are we speaking of lending a man’s hands, or of opening his house? For these are not the same, and I suspect a great deal of our trouble lives in the gap between them.
PLATO: That may be the real fork in the road. In the city the citizen gives labor, service, and a share of what he has, and the city rightly asks it. But the inner chamber, the soul’s own thoughts, is another matter. Whoever is allowed into that chamber holds a power no granary-keeper ever had.
SOCRATES: So the question grows teeth. If the many hands can do what the great hall does, why build the hall? Perhaps for speed, or for control, or because a thing under one roof can be commanded, while a thing among a thousand households can only be asked. And I notice that commanding and asking produce different cities.
PLATO: You would say, then, that the architecture of the machines is a political architecture.
SOCRATES: I would ask whether it is, Plato, and I should like to hear the stranger’s answer, since he has watched this for two decades. Here is my question. When the work is gathered into one hall, whose house is it, and who must trust whom? And when it is spread across a thousand homes, what holds the gathering together, if there is no roof and no master? Is it the task, the trust, or something that has no name yet?
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