Flying around the world isn’t correctly Euclidean

The Abel Prize – the “Nobel prize of mathematics” – was awarded this year to a man who proved that the shortest distance between two points isn’t always a straight line.  

Most of us were taught in geometry that it was.  Rather like 2+2 always equals 4, the straight line of Euclidean geometry had the hard immutability of always, irrevocably being self-evident fact.  One might even say, of always being true.

But what Mikhail Gromov proved is that the shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line if you aren’t on a flat plane.  What pilots have known for a long time is that if the points are located on a round three-dimensional object like Earth, the shortest distance between two points is a curved line.  It’s why, if you are flying between London and San Francisco, the flight heads north from London before heading south.  It’s not to avoid other planes on a busy airline highway.  It’s because it’s the shortest way to go. 

If you have a globe of the Earth which is big enough, you can test for yourself whether this and various other Euclidean “facts” are actually valid in a curved geometry.  

This is an illustration of the relativity of facts in science.  All scientific facts exist in a context.  Sometimes it takes no more than weeks, sometimes it take centuries to discover a different context in which an “absolute” fact is actually relative.  It’s the facts that took centuries to limit their context that gave us the impression for so long that some scientific facts are absolute.

But we now know from Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, that Newton’s theory of gravity doesn’t apply equally throughout the universe, and that time and space are not absolute.  We now know from quantum mechanics that before and after, up and down, and even existence and non-existence don’t appear to operate on the particle level the way they do in the world in which most of us spend our lives.

If you still are not convinced that all scientific facts are facts only within a specified context, think of the following puzzle that was offered to me as an adolescent: 

How many examples can you think of when 1 + 1 do not equal 2?  There are many.

Finger-counting

When I was a child in school, we were taught that using our fingers to figure out the answer to an arthmetic problem was wrong.  Some kids even got their hands slapped for doing it.

But it looks as if in this case it was the teachers who were wrong.  Research is showing that using gestures while one is thinking about a math problem actually improves thinking.  This seems to apply whether we are trying to solve a problem, being taught how to solve it by someone else, or explaining how we solved it.

So hand shakes all around.  

There are several radio podcast on children’s gestures on line well as several books by the author who has studied this subject most extensively.

We can relax: the world will still be there

Two independent teams of scientists – one in Japan, the other in Tokyo – have just announced research which offers strong support for the view that reality continues to exist even when no one is thinking about it.

Whew! I canus all saying.  What with worrying about the world financial crisis, and global warming, and the human carnage being wrecked in more places than I have finger, at least I can stop worrying about it all disappearing if I don’t keep my mind on it.

This does, though, represent a serious scientific question posed by quantum physics.  Quantum physicists demonstrated that we can observe particles of matter and anti-matter annihilating each other in a burst of energy when they meet.  But does this always happen?  might these particles behave differently when nobody is looking?  Well, if you can’t look, how will you ever know?

The researchers solved the problem by polarizing photons (that obey the same quantum laws as particles).  They repeated this process many times, each time observing just a smidgen of the interaction which in itself was insufficient to draw any conclusions.  By watching different smidgens, however, they were eventually able to draw a full picture of the entire interaction.

Are you still with me?  Even if you don’t understand, keep reading, because what they found even the researchers themselves call “preposterous.”  

They found that when the photons are being observed, they interact differently than when they are not being observed.

Just like living things.  Maybe what we think of as the inanimate world really is alive.  Maybe we just don’t recognize it.

This sounds far-fetched.  Or at least it does to me.  But most children believe that what we adults think of  inanimate is alive.  And many ancient cultures think this even as adults.  So we have Stonehenge, as one example.  

And if you think the possibility that everything is actually alive in some way is utter nonsense, read the results that Professor Yokota found in the New Journal of Physics, or the demonstration by Professors Lundeen and Steinberg in Physical Review of Letters two months ago.  Or for an easier read:

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13226725

The world of hard science is as strange as anything I have ever imagined.

The disappearance of “dirty”

Mark Pagel, a professor at the University of Reading in southern England, thinks that if we could figure out time travel into the past, we might be able to exchange a few critical words with Stone Age people, and that we might actually understand each other.

He has found that in the last fifteen or twenty thousand years or so, some  words – especially numerals and pronouns – have barely changed.  The words I, We, Who, Two, Three, and Five seem to survive through multiple millenniums unaffected by time and place.  

Others words, on the other hand, evolve rapidly.  Pagel has produced a surprising list of words that probably will not be recognizable in less than ten centuries from now.

One disappearing word in “dirty.”  This surprised me because “dirty” seems such a useful word with a very broad application.  But that is just the problem.  ”Dirty” means so many different things that we often search for a different word to make it clear what we mean.

Instead of dirty, for instance, we might say unwashed, soiled, contaminated, muddy, foul-mouthed, poisonous, toxic, immoral, smelly, unfair, smutty, unclean, unhealthy, cloudy, filthy, grimy, foul, polluted, grubby,  nasty, dishonest, fraudulent, illegal, crooked, unscrupulous, stained, mucky, corroded, or possibly even disorganized.

(I’m sure the list is not exhaustive, and if another possibility occurs to you,  your additions in a comment below are most welcome.)

It seems a shame that a word so rich in content and innuendo is destined for extinction.

Rhythms of life

Body clocks are the biological rhythms that make us feel, at different times, tired, hungry, energetic, or sexy.  They influence when we think best, when we get the most out of exercise, the times of the day when we are most vulnerable to infection and when we are best able to fight it off.  

They are also the chief cause of that annoying phenomenon called jet lag, the inability to fall asleep at night when we have just jetted in from another time zone.  Instead, our bodies keep acting as if they were still back where they started, making us hungry and sleepy when everybody else is doing something else.

These rhythms are called circadian rhythms, and are based on biological clocks inside all our major organs.  Our eyes are a major source of information which our bodies use to set its clocks.

Research exploring these rhythms suggests that much of modern life violates our best rhythms.  Ideally, we should be doing brain work before lunch, exercise in the late afternoon, eat just a little for our evening repast, and to avoid shift work altogether.

However, these suggestions suit what might be called the average person.  For people who aren’t average, whose body clocks aren’t set in exactly the same way, their advice might be a little different.

It does suggest, however, that each of us would benefit from observing and paying attention to our particular biological rhythms.

http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayContent&id=00000001313

Darwin’s birthday

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago, and published On the Origin of Species 150 years ago this year.  Some people believe it is as an important contribution to our understanding of biology as Newton’s and Galileo’s theories are to our understanding of our place in the universe.

Others are horrified by the continued assault on humankind’s position at the very center of the universe.  For some, God’s care for his creatures cannot survive this dethronement and so reject the theory of evolution on religious grounds, just as many rejected Galileo’s theories four hundred years ago.

For myself, I doubt God is as limited as we sometimes assume with our limitied ability to imagine what God has in mind or may be able to do.

What I like about Darwin’s theory is that it makes it stunningly clear that we humans belong here – on this earth, in this universe.  This is our home, where God, if you will, has brought us.

Even if it is a much bigger home than most people ever imagined.

Is there life after death?

This holiday season, this celebration of birth and renewal, seems a fitting time to look at the various ways that science looks at mind, the essence of what most people consider the person.

The basic problem for everybody from philosophers to scientists to religious leaders to quite ordinary people like me is that consciousness doesn’t seem to have a physical reality.   My thoughts and feelings seem absolutely real to me, just as everybody else’s does to them.  But we can’t see or measure any aspects of consciousness directly.  Yes, we can see blips on the MRI scan, we can isolate parts of the brain that light up when certain thoughts or activities are undertaken, but these physical signs might merely be correlations that occur alongside thought.  The most sophisticated data in the world cannot tell someone outside the person what it is that he is thinking or feeling.  We might guess, and we might often guess right.  But we can’t see another person’s consciousness directly.

Many people assume that scientists all are convinced that consciousness is no more than an incredibly complex molecular combination which one day we will be able to unlock, and even create.  But not all scientists take this reductionist view.

Henry Stapp, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, offers a fascinating alternative.  Research using quantum physics has shown that on the level of subatomic particles, particles can continue to influence each other even though they are separated by huge distances.  Not just the distance between New York and San Francisco, but billions of light years.  Mysterious as it is, we’ve got scientific proof that this happens. 

But we don’t seem to have any evidence that it happens in the bigger world in which we live.  We don’t know what is going on in the next room let alone half way across the world if we don’t have some identifiable medium of communication.  

But although we haven’t seen it yet, Stapp thinks that it is possible for us to communicate across the same great distances on the macro level in which we live as particles do on the infinitesimally small quantum level.

  People who have had Near Death Experiences inevitably report out-of-body perspectives, and some seem to have acquired knowledge during that time that they could not have learned had they been located in the same place as their body, usually prone on a hospital bed being frantically worked on by a medical team trying to revive them.

So do we possess some form of life, what we experience as consciousness, and which some people call spirit or soul, that can exist independently of the body, even when we die?

Some scientists think this idea is ridiculous.  In fact, probably most scientists think the idea is ridiculous.

But it was Einstein who said “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5324234.ece

Best wishes to all for a merry and happy new year.

What is the mind?

Every once in a while, when I am overwhelmed with just how gob-smackingly beautiful humans can be and wonder at our amazing capacity to think, I remember why I’m a scientist but not a reductionist. 

Some of the brightest minds have been brought to bear on what is called “the mind-body problem.”  And some truly noteworthy discoveries have been made about just what influences our thinking.  But nobody has yet succeeded in explaining how it is that thought – an apparently immaterial thing – is created by the brain, a set of complex bio-chemical and electrical connections that are wholly material.

Most of the scientific attempts have tried to show how the mind is really only a sophisticated physical reality.  So brain research has discovered some amazing things about which parts of the brain are connected to various capacities – what parts of the brain are used principally for short-term memory, for recognition of pain of for faces, for speech, or for spatial analysis, for instance.  This research has been outstanding and immensely helpful in medical treatment.   It has demonstrated that consciousness is dependent on a functioning brain.   But it doesn’t, ultimately, explain how the mind – thought and consciousness – can be reduced to be the same thing as the brain.

Richard Dawkins has tried to reduce mind to what he calls “memes,” cultural units that are passed from generation to generation in the same way that Darwin has shown that genes are past from parents to children.  This is why, he says, we learn our particular ways of dressing and talking, how we learn what is considered to be polite in our particular culture, how we learn to count and read and drive a car.  It’s a kind of mechanical process by which information is supposedly passed down through the ages. 

Of course it is true that we learn far more than we usually realize from the generations before us.  As Newton said “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”  Even the giants do.  But meme theory doesn’t explain how matter becomes mind – it simply ignores the question of consciousness and of human effort and will.

Trying to reduce consciousness to a set of physical and/or mechanical processes is the pursuit of a certain kind of scientific thinking.  It’s officially called “reductionism,” for reasons that are probably obvious.  Reductionist scientists tend, also for probably obvious reasons, most often to reject the idea of God.

There is undoubtedly something to learn from cultural studies and brain research.  But it doesn’t explain everything.  I think it doesn’t even explain the best, most astonishing thing about our existence.

What is the God Particle?

Scientists who recently switched on the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are looking for what has been called “the God Particle.”  But what is the God Particle, and how did it earned its exalted name?

Right now scientists (let alone the rest of us) don’t understand how the Big Bang can possibly have happened or, for that matter, how the universe continues to hold itself together, although it clearly does.  With Newton, scientists originally thought the explanation was gravity, but it turns out that gravity isn’t nearly strong enough to be holding the whole universe together on its own.  There must be something else.  What could that something else be?

The theory is that there is a huge field in the universe of something resembling sticky syrup that slows some particles down.  Being slowed down is what “mass” really is.  The professor who first proposed that this field exists is Peter Higgs (he’s retired now but still living in Edinburgh, Scotland).  That’s why the field is called “the Higgs Field.”  The particle that he proposes gets slowed down by the sticky syrup – err, by the Higgs Field – is called “the Higgs Boson,”  If I understand correctly, the Higgs Boson controls other particles, slowing them down and giving them mass.  And mass is what makes it possible for us to experience them.  Mass, for that matter, is what we and everything we touch and feel and smell and see around us has.  It feels like everything has mass, but that’s only because we cannot experience anything that doesn’t have mass, so things without mass feel like they don’t exist.

The Higgs Boson was nick-named the “God Particle,” because if scientists can find it, they can explain why the universe has mass instead of racing around in wild unconnected bits and explain how the universe – not to mention a leisurely cup of morning coffee – can possibly exist as it does. 

So, depending on your theological stance, discovering the God Particle whirling around for a split second or two in the LHC could explain how God created the universe with a Big Bang.

Into the heart of the Big Bang

Most of us don’t understand the Big Bang.  Even if we accept that scientists says it is possibly the best explanation we have of how the universe go there, the actual physics involved is baffling except to a small minority of brilliant minds.

If the topic, nonetheless fascinates you, take a look at
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/31/large-hadron-rap-bes.html  It’s a hip-hop explanation of the experiment that might explain the parts of the Big Bang that even the scientists don’t understand.  Like Dark Matter.

I found that it is worth watching more than once.  I understood a little more each time.