JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

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.

Macbeth struggled with the milk of human kindness; current evolutionary theory is predisposed towards the mechanical survival mechanism as paramount in explaining compassion. If kindness is there, it is there for a purpose, so they say.

In this NYT article about a study of empathy in the young it is suggested that the young are hollow careerist vessels…

In a decisively everyone-for-themselves manner, [the young] are less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” …
Previous studies have documented an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s. And Americans in general perceive decreases in other people’s kindness and helpfulness.

Given that studies like this are at the edges of what could even loosely be called science…and so might only be an expression of a general despair about the way things are going in this age…we can still speculate about the general proposition:

…these days, a transference of empathy is apparent: people love their pets with a fierce empathy. Then again, those pets might not be the real focus, but the extension of ego that the pet represents. A proxy narcissism. And pets aren’t people, which is the real target of meaningful empathy.

…there is tribal empathy: people show empathy towards and make excuses for those they see as members of their affinity group — in our time, conformist partisans are particularly prone towards enabling. But aren’t they affirming the tribe, and their group membership, not their fellow tribalists? Look at what nastiness ensues when the tribal conceptual bond is broken, even slightly. Thought police always lurk in partisan climes, always ready to ostracize and expel from the hive.

The milk of human kindness appears of no benefit in a competitive society — although the appearance of kindness can have its cynical value. But that would not be an empathic insight. Or would it?

This NYT article about the Human Genome Project says,

…after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

The expectation that knowledge equates to resolution is part of the contemporary mindset, where concept equals expression.

… with most diseases, the common variants have turned out to explain just a fraction of the genetic risk. It now seems more likely that each common disease is mostly caused by large numbers of rare variants, ones too rare to have been cataloged…

The problem arises in raising hopes and playing to the crowd (media), which causes scientists to overstate the potentials of their enterprise and diminish the difficulties. In some ways this diminishes science itself.

The public wants hope, the media wants a feel good sound bite, so some scientists will abide. Hollywood’s “high concept” approach to pitching films has permeated the culture.

The value of understanding, even if we are currently powerless to do much, is still of value though:

The slowly emerging explanation is that humans and other animals have much the same set of protein-coding genes, but the human set is regulated in a much more complicated way, through elaborate use of DNA’s companion molecule, RNA.

What this scientist says about genome mapping and hopes for cures could be a useful credo:

“One can prefer to be an optimist or a pessimist, but the best approach is to be an empiricist.”

Scientists at Fermilab have found suggestive evidence that might help answer an age old mystery. The scientists working at the National Accelerator Laboratory,

…found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

The question why there is something rather than nothing sounds philosophical. But the way science has been going: more abstract, more conceptual rather than intuitive, more mathematically derived rather than observational, makes the question no longer solely a resident in the dominion of philosophy.

I doubt that the answer scientists provide to the great questions will be any more authoritative than that offered by philosophy — or even satisfying. But science is still hanging onto some credibility in a world that challenges common sense. So the discovery might be a revelation of sorts, explaining the mechanics of creation itself. And with knowledge comes hope.

Freeman Dyson’s doubts about global warming were dismissed, ridiculed, and he was attacked personally. Such is science these days — in many ways, little different than the raucous general society.

Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”

The insights in Dyson’s statement should be the basis for all education: the development of critical intelligence. The uneducated run to and give credence to experts, but make no distinction; ultimately true believers parrot what they hear, using the expert as the unassailable proof. People forget that they are quoting people, expert or no, with all their frailties.

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I have to include this anecdote about Dyson — it has a theatrical feeling. It is almost a set piece, except it is true, and funny:

…taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.” When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, “the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.” The meal then ended with men who tend to be described with words like “brilliant,” “Nobel” and “MacArthur” quietly retreating to their offices to work out what Dyson just knew.

Dyson is smart, and then some, but more importantly, Dyson seeks insight.

The Large Hadron Collider, the LHC, made news:

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider managed to make two proton beams collide at high energy Tuesday, marking a “new territory” in physics, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

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Charlie Rose replayed some interviews about the enterprise:

Do you believe in a Theory of Everything?

I really don’t know.

It sounds funny, but I felt the scientist’s response to Charlie Rose’s question was spot on. Too much trying to prove things in the air these days, too little modesty or objectivity about it all.

Seeking supersymmetry and the Higgs Field seems a glorious realm with which to occupy yourself. A vacation from reality at the same time that it is an investigation of that self same baseline. Factoid: the LHC tube is thought to be “the coldest area in the universe. Colder than outer space.”

You have to admire the dedication of the LHC team and envy their involvement in this deep yet fundamentally playful search for reality.

The expression of psychological conflict is woven into normative behavior in a society. Even behavior that is damaging can be shuttled into its expressing itself in certain ways, based on consensus expectations.

“In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”

This article suggests that America is exporting its concept of mental illness to the rest of the world and that the world is the worse off for it.

Although the article itself seems mediated by its own cultural bias, the side stories are fascinating:

In Zanzibar, schizophrenics are believed to be suffering from intermittent bouts of spirit possession. …this belief affects those around them, especially family members, which affects how they treat the individual with the condition: …It turns out that interaction patterns with a person possessed by spirits are actually healthier than those of family members in the West who believe the individual has a ‘mental illness.’ In fact, with US families, the more they try to ‘care’ for the schizophrenic family member, the more they fall into an unproductive interaction pattern with the individual with the illness. The issue is not just the belief, but the emotional quality of family interaction with a suffering individual; treat them one way, and it’s not just that you believe they’re different — the individual actually becomes different.

There are fashions in approaching mental illness: In the 1960s outlier psychiatrists would sentimentalize schizophrenia. What are they telling us? They have a right to their reality…that sort of interpretive bias. It was meant as sympathy and respect. But they were ignoring the pain of the victims of these afflictions and affecting a morally superior, self-congratulatory stance.

There is probably a subset of emotional issues that are culture bound but American imperialism isn’t responsible for the interplanetary insane asylum known as Planet Earth.

According to this NYT article scientists have discovered evidence of the actual color of the plumage of the theropods — the bipedal ancestors of birds. Scientists examined the feathers, which “contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes.”

It turns out they look like chickens:

Anchiornis had a crown of reddish feathers surrounding dark gray ones, and its face was mottled with reddish and black spots. Its body was dark gray, but its limbfeathers were white with black tips.

Goodbye to the sepia haze of the imagined past.

How about starting in the Himalayas and flying through The Known Universe?

My gosh. A dreamscape. Computer graphics have jaded us, but this video has the probity of fact.

Cosmology, physics, genomics and proteomics, evolution, mathematics, all give a sense of context to our little lives that merges with the awe great art inspires.

What to make of it all? Why do we feel awe and respond so deeply to beauty and mystery?