JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Just finished listening to the audiobook of Lawrence Krauss’ biography of Richard Feyman, Quantum Man. The book is read by Krauss, who is a distinguished physicist himself — the insider knowledge helps,  as the quantum world is not intuitive. Krauss knew Feynman and admired him enormously. Feynman is such an interesting character, both in the scope and depth of his mind and richness of his personality.

Although the science is obscure in its details, the fundamental nature of the subject expands quickly — much of the subject matter spins off into philosophy. No surprise that after Newton determinism became a dominant influence in the mental framework of the West; Spinoza and Kant among many others. The idea of causation in the West spiked after Newton.

Bill Gates has put online Feynman’s “Messenger” lectures at Cornell (You will need Silverlight). This is a legendary series of seven lectures that inspired many physicists. Feynman worked hard on these lectures; the agreement was that he would only give these lectures once.

In addition, there are a number of clips from various biographical documentaries on youtube — so this also filled out the charismatic (overused but accurate word in this case) man for me.

Some random notes / thoughts:

I had not realized the crucial part the young Freeman Dyson had played in Feynman’s recognition. Dyson is an unusually modest man; he seems immune to the sci-careerism in his field. When asked about his being passed over for honors due, Krauss reports that Dyson simply expressed gratitude to have had such an excellent life, in such wonderful surroundings, and to be able to do the work he cares about. Dyson is at the Institute for Advanced Studies, if I remember correctly.

(Changing gears for a moment, I ran across this fascinating paper by Dyson, “TIME WITHOUT END: PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY IN AN OPEN UNIVERSE,” a speculation about the heat death of the universe. The first part is philosophical and for the general public.)

Feynman’s intuitive way of working, not building up from formalisms, as did Dirac, had a particularly energetic, American character. Feynman’s impatience, unpretentious grounding, and exploratory nature are noteworthy — you can see how those traits combined with a focused mind might yield great results.

The second lecture was particularly exciting: Feynman, a brilliant mathematician, describes the relation of physics and mathematics. The mysterious connection between mathematics and the physical world has long been noted. No second hand knowledge in Feynman’s lecture, but rather he explains the process of thinking a scientific genius uses to understand Nature with the tools of math. Feynman elucidated three principal ways of explaining the actions of the real world in numbers: Newton’s mathematics, action at a distance, and a minimal model for a mathematical explanation of the world. Feynman explains how Newton’s math, useful in the quotidian domain, is not of much use in the quantum realm; also, he explained that he felt the other two models will someday have to be united as a tool to explain the world.

Feynman notes — and this is truly a lifting of the curtain — the mysteries he perceives. He notes such things as the oddity that there are so many ways to describe the same actions in nature. That every instance in Nature is always that, unique, and never a general case. That it is impossible to extrapolate action from the micro world of the quanta to the macro world of physical reality. Feynman explains that physics uses not axioms, but modes of thinking; for example, Riemannian geometry might be exactly the tool needed by Einstein, even though it was formulated 75 years before Einstein worked on his theories. Mathematics is the generality and physics the specific, and so axioms don’t work in physics. Feynman explained that Einstein and Dirac made guesses as to how the physical world worked, and then used tools available (these mathematical models) that seemed most likely to help in the explanation.

I should add that I checked out Feynman’s paintings and drawings. They are competent but never got to expressing a true voice. He was a talented amateur. It was interesting to note that early on he was dismissive of the arts, but clearly, as time went on, began to realize there was something there. In one lecture he was dismissive of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, but in his trying to learn to draw and paint reflected a counter tendency — deeper and wiser — that there was something in art that is parallel to the complexity and beauty of the physical world, but which exists in the individual human soul and in the imagination. He would recoil hearing that, but I feel eventually he would admit it, if he had had the time to evolve that side of himself.

Feynman’s love for and gratitude to his father were beautifully expressed in a youtube video. He explained the way his father helped him understand in a deeper sense. People may know the name of a bird, and there are many names in different cultures of course, but that tells you nothing about the bird, said Feynman’s father. The difference between a name and knowledge.

His father was distrustful of the honorifics and uniforms of status. His father pointed out that the costumes of life are just that, and underneath, we all share a common humanity. People bowing before others, because of their uniform, or societal status, repelled Feynman and his father. A useful skepticism implanted early on. Following on this, Feynman did not even trust established laws of science, but derived them himself. This is parallel to the development of many artists, who, with their own individual emphasis, recapitulate in their work the history of art.

Feynman spent a long time trying to return to the bestower an honor many in science would lust for: membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Feynman even considered refusing the Nobel Prize, but felt that people would think he felt too good for such an honor, when really, he simply saw it a decision amongst people and of no real importance. The important thing was the knowledge he had gained of Nature. He remembered seeing scientists in one field trying to keep honors from chemists because they  did not want to sully their grandiose clique with mere chemists. He mentioned Arista, an honorary society of his early schooling, where all they talked about was who they would let in. He laughed at the idea of IQ scores. A truly egalitarian American spirit was Richard Feynman — all from the seed of his father’s character and evolved in his son Richard.

To be continued…

Online, an English scientist discussed his discovery as to how children learn new words. Parents seem to know instinctively when teaching a new word, to point to the object and say, “Look at the, um, dog”.

That is, the parent pronounces the word as “thee” rather than “thuh”, and follows it with what the scientist called a disfluency — the um and ers of hesitant speech. This combination, of the pronunciation as thee, a pause, and a disfluency, triggers the child to understand it is being taught a new word; children look with more frequency at the referent when the word is presented this way.

I remember reading about how those who often have to deliver bad news are taught to present. They are told that if the news is serious but not fatal to say, “Your uncle was in an accident but he is all right”. A straight through presentation of the facts.

However, if the news is catastrophic, they are taught to say, “I have some bad news. [Here, a pause] Your uncle has died”. They are taught that after the pause, they are to leave no doubt as to the outcome. The pause is a signal for the receiver of the bad news to prepare him or her self.

In both cases, a baby learning, and the delivery of bad news, the pause seems to be a genetic, primal signal, universally recognized as a reason to take a breath and apply full focus.

This story has received a surprising amount of attention. The subject is somewhat arcane, but it fascinates.

Scientists have discovered that there are three definable ecosystems of microbes in the human gut. Any one of three distinct forests may inhabit our inner realm, crossing all the divisions human beings make among ourselves.

The scientists,

…found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.

Any group of humans, anywhere, will have one of the three.

The potentials cascade:

The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.

“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example

Yet another affirmation, as if one were needed, that we are all of the same DNA soup made.

At instapundit Glenn Reynolds notes,

I think that things that involve practicing balance are very valuable. I’ve always had excellent balance, but I no longer do the stuff I did as a kid and when I did a balance-intensive routine at the gym a while back — involving standing on balls and the like — the two things that struck me were how much worse my balance was when I started than it was when I was a kid, and how rapidly it improved. I could almost feel the neural networks recalibrating between sets.

I remember years ago on a radio show hearing someone say, “Oh, I don’t want to be one of those guys who has to sit on the edge of his bed to put on his socks like an old man.” Ever since I heard that I always stand when putting on socks — more because it is something of a game than for balancing purposes. But I have gotten good at it — Glenn’s right, there is a learning curve.

Reynolds also offers a NYT link for preventing falls in older people.

Science writer John Horgan is the kind of curmudgeon we need more of. Horgan’s review of media-physicist Brian Greene’s new book starts with self-deprecation but quickly gets to the point that Greene:

… has become a cheerleader for the descent of theoretical physics into increasingly fantastical speculation, disconnected from the reality that we can access empirically.

Horgan is right of course. His outrage is warranted, caused by the shallow media flow which elevates randomly and without grounding.

The exaggerated status given scientists is a product of contemporary skepticism about organized religion. Who else do you turn to? Scientists are ostensibly on a search for objective truth. And their discoveries have made the contemporary what it is — many wonders and improvements in our lives.

But when media folk come running to them for their judgments about issues they have no expertise in, nor could possibly have verifiable proof for, they will answer. They will exaggerate, claim certainty where there is ambiguity, and generally discredit themselves. It would be hard to resist; admiration is an inebriating brew few can push away.

Science has done wonders, but we are still deeply ignorant. It is a terrible mistake for society to take Richard Dawkins types seriously beyond their expertise. Often their cackling tell you all you need to know, if you are willing to pay attention.

There is the issue of character. With many notable exceptions — scientists with genuine character — these techno-oriented sci-workers need to remind themselves of what they do not know. And be honest about it with the public.

In his new book Greene takes us even further away from reality, asking us to consider not just hypothetical particles but entire universes that lie beyond the reach of our instruments. Multiverses are old hat, of course. In a 1990 article for Scientific American on cosmology I included a sidebar, “Here a universe, there a universe…,” about speculation that our universe “is only one in an infinitude of cosmos.”

Why do birds so often seem to be racing off to some appointment? I just glimpsed a seagull disappearing from view in the studio window. They remind you of Alice’s rabbit, rushing down the tunnel of imagination. People must appear as curiously driven to them as the birds, so hurried, do to us.

Speaking of which, in a natural world sort of way, scientists have glimpsed the soup from which the infinitude bubbled.

CERN researchers have glimpsed for the first time the so-called quark-gluon plasma that existed in the early universe before things cooled enough for neutrons, protons, and all the matter in the universe as we know it to form.

Science edges still closer to the origin. Scientists think this was the condition of the universe but a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Amazing we small creatures on a grain of sand on an infinite beach could gain this knowledge. Amazing that our minds could conceive a theory about the universe, decades ago, that now is experimentally panning out.

On The Naked Scientists a panelist noted that a recent study indicated that we are happiest when we are focused on what is at hand. Zen Buddhism is right. However, in a contemporary culture, which is built to distract, this is not so happy a finding.

The scientist noted that our wandering minds yield tremendous benefits as well — our very human instantiation, our culture, our inventions, our imagination; but it comes at a cost — that of our happiness.

As we love honey this story had extra interest. The story is about scientists finding a possible cause for hive collapse. We had noted the exponential rise in raw honey prices and only later learned of the hive collapse phenomenon. An entire bee colony dropping dead without explanation. Einstein had (allegedly) said that without bees there is no civilization.

If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!

Bees are such wonderful creatures, so taken for granted. Little guys, so focused on their task, so indifferent to all but their hive needs. There must be a joke about political partisans there…

Hive collapse had been blamed on everything but global warming. Global warming has become the neurasthenia of our time; neurasthenia was, according to a book I had read by a psychiatrist, an early 20th century trash bin for psychological problems which psychiatry did not understand.

Now scientists have discovered that colony collapse has multiple causes. Although even now they are not sure.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem…

This may be the future: a multivalent causation — our understanding of systems that are not functioning correctly challenged as etiology edges towards chaos theory. Feels like a race: the often quoted race between education (or knowledge in this instance) and catastrophe.

This online dialog is one that needs to be listened to a second time. Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics, describes with amazing simplicity and clarity, the complex and counter intuitive perspective of an individual physicist about the nature of the world.

One reason science is so interesting to philosophers is that it overlaps so many first principles. Wilczek said so many things that require mulling over; here are some that particularly interested me:

He noted that the world seems to be built on a predisposition to symmetry. He says that reality suggests an ultimate simplicity. This is much more in harmony with Einstein’s search for a Theory of Everything than the endlessly cascading String theories.

He pointed out that one paradigm shift in physics is the perception that light rather than matter is the basic building material of reality. He says that physical reality seems to evolve from light as the foundationalist property.

He describes the Higgs boson not, as I had heard, as an entity that provides mass, but rather as a medium, as the ether. I had thought the ether was a phantasm of 19th century science, but it turns out that what they are looking for @CERN in the “search for the Higgs” is a medium that affects all that it touches. Which would be the universe. That is, they suspect the Higgs is the universe. It is like water affecting all that swims or floats — a primordial solution.

The latter point, and Wilczek’s emphasis on light as a primary medium, made me think of the great English painter J.M.W. Turner, who tore apart physical reality in a roiling formless sea of light and air.

Extending the idea of the Higgs boson as a medium in which all swim, Wilczek pointed out that “there is no void,” a primary intuitive assumption when looking out at the cosmos. Rather, again, you are looking out into a sea where matter, the objects perceived, are really corks, bouncing in and out of the multitudinous sea of reality.

One insight about Wilczek — about the sort of person who becomes a successful scientist — Wilczek pointed out the enormous significance of his discovery. He explained that his discovery of asymptotic freedom was tremendously important in physics. The interesting part was that he separated himself, his ego, in the description. It was as though he found a magnificent waterfall and didn’t see himself, the discoverer of nature’s magnificence, as the subject to be discussed. Egoless, and ego driven — the contradications of complex human beings.

Wilczek’s description of asymptotic freedom, his discovery, was a joy to hear in its layered simplicity — right from the horse’s mouth, as it were. He said that he essentially found that as quarks get closer together the powerful forces that bind them become weaker(?). Counterintuitive, but true. The closer they get, the more freedom of movement they acquire.

In an interview I once heard with a successful scientist he said that one of the more important characteristics of good scientists is conviviality. In order to advance in the field and to advance the field itself, a scientist needed to receive and communicate information freely. Once you hear that, it makes sense. How else would you keep up with the latest research and understand the thinking of colleagues in related fields?

In this discussion at MIT, Robert Horvitz instantiates the affable characteristic. Horvitz won the Nobel Prize for his work on apoptosis — the mechanism of programmed cell death. Horvitz stumbled into biology after meeting a charismatic teacher/mentor.

It is worth listening to the hour long discussion just to hear his description of epigenetics (the heritability in gene expression) — a “larger” genetics. He describes the structure of DNA and histones (yielding order to DNA); it makes you wonder how this incredible complexity could have been sorted out, especially when you take into account that the structural presentation of the DNA also has impact.

One point Horvitz emphasized was the importance of basic research. That is, research with no immediate pragmatic application. Horvitz studied a lint sized soil worm. He was told such a focus would lead to career death. However the little digger helped Horvitz prove them wrong; with its 900 genes and short life cycle, this little worm provided some of the deep secrets of Nature and snagged for Horvitz and colleagues a Nobel.

In an online discussion about the science of immortality, which I heard some time back, a theoretical scientist made some surprisingly convincing arguments. A book has been written about the theorist, Aubrey de Grey — a perfect name, right out of Poe — and here is the NYT review by a professor of internal medicine.

The theorist feels that since aging is essentially the entropy of a system (healthy body) Nature has evolved, it is simply required that we learn to clean out the refuse the entropy accrues.

The beauty of this view is that “curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it.

The article doesn’t mention it, but Aubrey de Grey is speculating about a boundless future in good health, at a reasonable stasis age for continued productivity. In the online discussion he had worked out the steps — the disease cures necessary and probable, as one big issue — for this prospect to be considered. The many social issues: population growth, endless wealth accrual, well the arena is large and just goes on, but at the very least the idea of immortality as a possibility provides a pragmatic spur to gain some context for our delimited lives.

The arguments made by de Grey are so logical, and his optimism so infectious, it is difficult to reject out of hand, as natural skepticism might have it. Especially since one might already be predisposed — as biological beings are enamored of life (and forget the pain so easily — a state of punctuated amnesia).

Eternal life? Why not? There is a worm in the apple though. Like a Twilight Zone episode, that old bugger unexpected consequences would most likely rear its head. The Twilight Zone episode which comes to mind is the one about a man with terrible vision who just wanted to read but his Xanthippe wouldn’t let him; he survives a nuclear exchange, finally getting to read in peace, only to lean forward for his beloved books and breaks his glasses.