Tag Archives: science

Brightness Knob

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The oddest memories come bubbling up to the surface when you least expect them. While I was brushing my teeth, quite out of the blue, mind you, I recalled a pair of personal experiences that I’ve never shared before. The first memory was when I was in middle school. The assignment was to write a paper on something historical and I chose Hitler, the Halocaust, and I used a complicated word because at the time it fit with the theme of what I was writing about. The word was “schizophrenic” but what really was a surprise to me was the teacher at the time, who I don’t really remember beyond being rather older and probably a sports coach more than a teacher picked my paper to read to the class. I think, as I remember it, he was trying to shame me or belittle me in front of my classmates by singling me out and demonstrating a poorly written paper. I sat back and took it and chuckled to myself, inside my head when he got to that big word and couldn’t pronounce it. My argument was cogent and valid and I was supposed to feel bad because I didn’t use real words in my writing. I think it was this first thing that struck me, that first real strong signal that adults were really full of shit. I was a kid, he was a teacher, so that was that, but it stayed with me. The whole part where I was supposed to feel chagrined but actually what I felt was pity for this older man, that he struggled and stumbled over this one word and since he didn’t understand it, that I obviously just made it up.

This memory carried a very particular emotion with it, which called out to another memory which came on the first one’s heels. I remember I was on a bus, I was in my mid-teens, and I was going on some sort of class field trip. I brought along a book I was reading, which just happened to be Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. I was making quite a bit of progress reading the book and I was minding my own business when the teacher, a different one from the first in this story, chatted me up. He was curious about the book I was reading and he asked me how much of it I understood. I was taken aback by this as I figured that everyone who wanted to read this book could progress through its contents without too much trouble. That if you were curious about Stephen Hawking, you’d likely have some background ideas about what you were getting into and that anyone in that state could manage just fine. Then the teacher told me that the book I was reading was beyond him. I closed the book and put it away and left it like that until I got home. I felt strange that I was working through a book that a teacher confessed he couldn’t even think of tackling.

It may have been these things, and just life in general as I grew up that I realized that for some, people like me, a little bit at least, just had to go through the motions before I could do things I wanted to do, things I wanted to study, and the only person I had to impress with my wit and intelligence was myself. I kept to myself in grade school, middle school, and high school. I was never included and it was just part of what had to be. It was unpleasant but I knew that it was terminal. The unpleasant students that surrounded me, the unpleasant (except not all of them) teachers, and in general the entire situation was something that I just had to endure.

I used to think that school was a trial by fire and that all kids had to walk the same path. As I grow older I see things with a more mature perspective and I feel now that it was needlessly awful. So much of my potential was ignored or belittled, and I knew I was right and these adults were fools. There is no reason to weep over spilled milk, but now, when I see such brightness in kids I want to stop and clear a space for them to explore and think and blossom in a way that the rigid structure I was in never had room to allow. But these aren’t my kids and I don’t have a place or the power to effect the real change that my impetus calls for. One thing I will take from these memories is a respect for some young kids, that they can wrap their minds around really complicated ideas and to always be vigilant when evaluating the intellectual passion of others. Just because you don’t know a thing doesn’t mean someone who is *supposed* to be a learner and has a firmer grip on things than the teacher should be made to feel small, wrong, or awkward. Kids that carry around books that are, let’s say, atypical, really should get more focus and more to work on.

Just because someone is young and perhaps foolish doesn’t mean they aren’t bright. Sometimes people you never expect shine brightest of all.

Too Much

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Anytime I walk into a library, a bookstore, or any other place where a lot of media is all concentrated together either for lending or sale or just browsing the same thought occurs to me: How can anyone have any hope of seeing what is to be seen?

I’ve mused about this for a very long time. It strikes me that the entirety of the human oeuvre could be represented by Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. That thoughts and ideas occupy another sphere overlaid on the Earth, created by thinking creatures. This is very handy as it brings the idea of a sphere right in to the concept at the center of my writing. Is it possible anymore for any one of us to possibly see the entire sphere from one side to the other? I think there is a personal horizon that each of us is chained to, we can only see that part of the noosphere that we are either local to or interested in. Ultimately this question becomes a concern for answering the really big and important questions. The sense that we won’t cure cancer, we won’t stumble into room-temperature superconductivity, or practical fusion energy without some sort of broad synthesis across multiple disciplines. The way it feels to me, and I don’t have any proof of any of this, it’s all just intuition here, is that humanity has created a huge repository of ideas and that if the right person at the right time had access to the perfect constellation of ideas that some of the answers to the really big questions would pop out in a kind of ‘eureka’ rush of creativity and development.

I’ve spoken of these things with some friends especially when I’m in a pensive mood and the situation for such deep discussions are ripe. One thing that is a recent turn is the advent of social networking. We are relating more and more to each other, communicating more, writing more, talking more, sharing more. There are structures that have formed like Wikipedia which to me resembles a coral reef of information more than how it’s plainly stated, a free online encyclopedia that is crowdsourced. I suppose it’s the romantic in me that sees information not being added to Wikipedia as a matter of some dedicated purpose but rather that it’s information that washes up onto Wikipedia and builds over time. In Clive Barker’s Great and Secret Show the principal characters had something very much akin to how I consider Wikipedia (and other sites, really, that operate like it) in the dead-letter office. That little chunks of Art wash up over the years and collect like cruft in this office. That information created by all of us washes up on Wikipedia and collects like cruft on this site.

It is important to get back to the beginning again, that when I walk into my local Barnes & Nobles that I have the distinct feeling that I won’t be able to read and understand the contents of that building. That’s just the start. Then you expand it out to Waldo Library, and then the Kalamazoo Public Library, and it keeps on going all the way out to the Library of Congress and then kind of crashes upon the concept of the Internet as a whole. There is no time, there is not enough energy in my life to do any of that and that life demands so much else from you that even if you wanted to do anything of the sort there just isn’t any time, hope, or inclination for it. In a way, I posit that the content that humanity has created has defeated humanities hope to encompass it. So there may be the answers to life, the universe and everything out there, it’s just that none of us have hope to put the threads together and start drawing some of those big conclusions.

Perhaps however there is some hope in social networking and Wikipedia, structures where disparate information washes up and because it’s concentrated the threads are closer, easier to tie together and maybe we can move forward using those systems to help us. A lot of this is covered by Wolfram Alpha as well as some other artificial intelligence projects where information scientists have sensed this potential problem and maybe a machine could encompass human content and help us understand what it is that we’ve created.

This all may be the pressure behind the next stage of human evolution. First we took care of the needs of our genetics, making survival a triviality. Then we exploded with ideas, creating a noosphere too large for us to handle, and then the next pressure is based on encompassing and cultivating that noosphere. We need to get to the next stage of development which isn’t so much expanding as concentrating what we have already discovered about the world and about existence. In a way, perhaps the next stage of human evolution, the continued pursuit of ever more complicated cortexes in our brains will come in the generations to come. Children born with the tools needed to begin the pursuit of collection and concentration, eidetic memory, highly efficient relationship cognition. Children able to walk into a library and in an afternoon consume every ounce of information contained within the walls. It’s going to be those with those innate talents who may be able to bring what we imagine and what we dream about into reality.

How about the rest of us? In that perhaps technology will provide us a shortcut, perhaps a preview of what is to come for us all. That we can get peeks into what may be to come through things like Wolfram Alpha, through the AI projects, hell, even through something as quaint as Wikipedia. If nothing else, it is interesting to think about and engaging to talk about.

Inconstant Heart

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Reading the most recent report about how neutrinos have been observed moving faster than the speed of light. An entire section of both classical and quantum physics is founded on C, the symbol for the speed of light, to gracefully be the maximum limit that any physical object can move in our universe. Now we see that this may not actually be the case, at least for neutrinos.

This got me thinking about a few things that are upsetting about science. First is this, second is the classical reference for a kilogram is somehow decaying and isn’t what it used to be. I have to admit to not being a expert but I think I may have spotted a pattern. Perhaps the values for these constants are not constant. Perhaps the expansion of the universe is itself having an effect on the overall shape of spacetime. Perhaps that with expansion comes a vastly fluctuating (or maybe dropping) of all physical constants. Perhaps everything is “on the move”, so you have h, C, G, and other constants that aren’t really cemented down but actually drifting around with the universal shape of spacetime. As the universe expands, the shape changes. We think of C and G at least as perfectly constant, but what if that isn’t the case? What if C and G were vastly higher in the deep past and their rate of change is imperceptibly slow, however still occurring? What does that mean for all these mathematical structures we’ve developed, when the constants that we have come to depend on fluctuate over time? E=MC2, when C isn’t a constant?

Perhaps if G isn’t a constant, and it was much stronger in the past, then could that explain why when we look at the most distant objects in the universe, and therefore backwards through time itself be the cause for every object to be so redshifted? Perhaps the “expansion” of the universe isn’t like we imagine it, perhaps that the universe is indeed a static size but that the dimensions are changing all on their own, that the overall size of the universe is static, but that spacetime geometry itself is changing (somehow) and causes these previously thought constants to shift. That the value of G, which is now 6.67×10-11 N. What if it was something like 2.7×10-2 N in the deep past?

If the geometry of spacetime is indeed changing over time, perhaps that would help explain why string theory which demands eleven or more dimensions in order to work properly may have been very obvious billions of trillions of years ago but over time these dimensions have shrunk down to almost nothing. We can’t prove our theories about the structure of the universe and the physics of it easily because we’re so “late to the game”.

I have to believe that I am not the first person to think about this possibility and I have to assume that there is something I’m forgetting or don’t know that would preclude this possibility. In either case, it is engaging to think about before I’m shot down by a real physicist. 🙂