omenti

why?

One of the reasons I chose Stony Brook as a grad school was its proximity to New York City.  I wanted to be close to live music.  I'm a terrible musician but that doesn't mean I can't love it.   It is deeply embedded in who we are as a people and influences how I think.  I can't imagine being without it.  The same is true for the visual arts.  I'm terrible at that too (not that being terrible stops me), but the internal language I use to think is based on drawing and images.  

 

While these components of culture we're proud of have some economic consequences, most artists are driven by a deep need to create and preform. A Picasso, a Dylan song, a Beethoven piano trio, a New Yorker cartoon, a dumb variation of a happy birthday song - they are celebrations of our culture making our lives richer.

 

Some "artistic" areas are overlooked as central to our culture.  I would argue sport is one.  Athletes paint  us a picture of human potential - what a few dedicated people can do at their physical and mental limits.  Movement to the point where it's a kinetic art form.  Many of us are active, or have been.  The professionals encourage us to move - to just do it.  Like all good artists they allow our minds to soar for awhile.  Most of them do it because they have to.

 

The March for Science champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity.We unite as a diverse, nonpartisan group to call for science that upholds the common good and for political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest.

from the March for Science's mission statement

 

The organizers stress how important science is, but that misses something central.  What is the common good and who defines it?  While applied science is extremely important and is a connection between discovery and practical invention, pure research is different.   It is not a list of facts that can be applied and it is connected with technology indirectly.   Science is a process for finding out how Nature works.   It is based on empirical investigation, reason and skeptical testing.  It is fueled by curiosity.  It is possible to send people off  in rough directions, but what will be found, who will find it and the implications are often surprises.  These surprises have the pleasant side effect of fueling technology, medicine.   More importantly they help us we see ourselves in the universe.  They are beautiful art by themselves. 

 

Most of what you see listed as corporate R&D is really applied research and development.  It has huge economic implications.  It has direction and is important to fund if we want to move forward on the one to ten or fifteen year horizons.  Basic research also needs funding and a greater degree of freedom.  Most of it won't pan out, but something is learned from the failures. A few pieces do pan out - sometimes decades later.  This is where our future comes from.  One convenient truth is there is a good deal of cross fertilization between basic and applied research.  Organizations with both are rare outside of major national, international and university environments and that may be a mistake. 

 

I've always had to do some basic research.  For a long time I worked as a technologist and applied researcher. I managed to squirrel away some time stumbling along at the frontier.  I can't claim anything world changing, but it did make me a very different and perhaps even better technologist and applied researcher.  It provided  me with a remarkable tool set.

 

What I hope for - what I'll march for - is the support of fundamental research.  It even has some short term benefits one can point to - nearly all medical tools originally came from instrumentation invented to get a better look at Nature, it educates the next generation and some of the people it trains bring an interesting and powerful way of thinking into a variety of businesses.   And of course for the passion... 

 

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it

Richard Feynman 

 

I'm guessing the artists, musicians and athletes are nodding.  All of these activities allow us to see ourselves and the world around us in new and deeper ways.  They speak to what makes us human. 

  

I'll end with an animation of  Feynman in the mid 60s 

 

sending a message

My first week in grad school was disorienting.  It was the first time I had been East of the Denver, an introduction to serious heat and humidity,  and I didn't know anyone.  With all of this the letter in the department mailbox was welcome.  An invitation to have dinner with C.N. Yang - Stony Brook's only Nobel laureate .. and one of the really significant physics Nobels at that.  It said 7:00 PM sharp and noted nine others would be attend due to space limitations and asked us not to mention it as the other incoming students would be for dinners later in the semester. 

 

Another student and I had arrived early and rang the doorbell only to find a confused Professor Yang.  We had been set up.  As we apologized another student arrived.  He was probably busy, but he smiled and invited us in.  I didn't know what to expect. He was important as the chief liaison for Sino-American physics exchanges.  A few years earlier he had been tasked to lead the scientific exchange component of ping-pong diplomacy and now he was establishing a new center for theoretical physics and mathematics.  Add to that two graduate students and his own research and you wondered how he found the time for some lowly grad students.

 

He had a nice laugh and made us all at ease slipping out of the room to order several pizzas and beer.  He told us his childhood hero was Ben Franklin and we were to address him as Frank as that's what his friends called him.  The night was great.  We learned where everyone came from - only four of us were native-born Americans.  We learned some Chinese songs and a few of us stumbled through our own regionals pieces (I know you're wondering Jeri -- it was "I Ride and Old Paint").  We talked about simple physics that most of us hadn't thought about - like how does a train stay on the tracks. And I learned East Coast pizza was much better than anything I had in the West.

 

It was after ten when it was time to leave and he drove a few of us who didn't have cars back to the dorms.  We were asked to return the next week.   He sent a note around to all of the students telling them they would all be invited during the semester.   My little group went back a few more times and some of us had become friends.

 

The department was young.  He was setting the tone by example and had turned what was to have been a nasty prank into something that touched all of us.  He also showed us he was curious about nearly everything.  I had seen this in a few others, but he was so delightfully open.  

 

Some years later, when I was working at Bell Labs, a major earthquake struck an area of China where a visiting scholar my wife and I had become close with lived.  That evening Frank called us up to let us know he didn't know what had happened to Ge, but he knew we were close and would let us know as soon as he heard news.  A few days later the phone rang with happy news.

With all of the xenophobia and nastiness these days it is good to remember there are a lot of good people from everywhere.

 

 

saturday the 22nd and beyond

People have asked if I'm going to demonstrate on Saturday.  

 

It began when the incurious new President of the United States called climate scientists "hoaxsters", made daily verifiably false statements and began to dismantle pieces of the government that support science.  He, his administration, his party and millions of followers couldn't handle real evidence.  And it isn't just the right - unwillingness to weigh evidence extends across the political spectrum.

 

The scientific community quickly reacted.  An uncentralized and largely apolitical group came together and a march was scheduled for Washington D.C.  Additional marches popped up around the country and the movement went worldwide. At last count over four hundred marches will take place around the world - including at least one in Antarctica.  

 

I'm torn.  

 

I'm no stranger to protests and have been arrested in my youth, but I've learned enough to ask what they accomplish.  Some, like Earth Day, spoke to the dramatic events of the day - oil washing up on a beach in Santa Barbara, a river catching on fire in Ohio and burning two bridges, and smog that had made Los Angeles the butt of jokes around the world.  They resonated with large and diverse segments of the public.  The demonstrations and buy-in from the voting public were large enough to frighten a President and Congress into enacting dramatic change in law.  Other movements - civil rights, women's rights and the anti-war movement - all brought change.   But what about this protest?  Is it about society, the scientists or science?  That seems to be an open question at this point.

 

At its core science is skeptical inquiry and reliance on empirical evidence.  It is not a collection of facts, but rather a process for uncovering how the world works.  It may not perfectly describe what is going on, but it can tell you how certain it is about what it finds.  While it is constantly being tested and improved, it has given us a large body of useful knowledge that is more than good enough for much of what we do.  Not only that,  it has bestowed upon us the ability to illuminate unknowns that had been impossibly hidden.  Unknowns that we could investigate and learn even more.   New and larger untouched beaches filled with diamonds luck on the horizon.  Basic science is the tip of the arrow with practical change sometimes decades off, but the elucidation of known science like global warming is very much in the present. 

 

Reality is that which continues to exist even when you stop believing in it. - Philip K. Dick

 

Eventually the lies of Trump and his minions will catch up to them, but the cost may be extremely high.  I'm not claiming insight into political alternatives - that's not my wheelhouse.   But although I will be attending the march in New York City, I have some serious doubts about what will be accomplished.

 

I worry that scientists are often painted as elitists.  Those who know me (I hope) know otherwise and the same is true of nearly every STEM person I know.  What I am worried about a tendency that many, including myself, have  that may fuel this belief.  We don't know how to communicate.

 

There was a time when I though I was a good teacher.  I believed the way to address scientific illiteracy and innumeracy was education and spent a good deal of time lecturing and writing.  I put an emphasis on introductory level courses, but learned while some loved it, most were uninterested.  I tried to modify my approach, but it was still education based.  It continued to fail.  It was like I was trying to get through to a non-English speaker by  S P E A K I N G   S L O W L Y  A N D  L O U D L Y.  

 

Social scientists refer to my approach as the deficit model - someone's opinion differs from scientific consensus because they lack scientific knowledge.  hmmm... that sounds rather elitist, doesn't it?   I can enjoy watching a beach volleyball match, but I'm an awful player. I don't need deep volleyball education, although a bit makes it more enjoyable. 

 

There is strong evidence that increasing scientific literacy can be independent of opinion on a subject that is somehow associated with someone's value system.  A conservative may strongly reject global warming even though they've had science and math classes from a good university. Similarly a liberal may reject vaccination or the safety of any GMO.  Both groups may wildly miscalculate a variety of issues that science speaks to.  And then there's the wisdom of Upton Sinclair:  It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.  

 

So what do you do?

 

I'm not a good storyteller, but I've been spending time with people who are.  I've learned you  have to gain trust, find common ground and speak to the heart.  I've worked on some projects that didn't manage to scale, but I've been learning and will continue trying.  And at the same time there are people of all stripes who might enjoy the getting involved in amateur science.  Although areas are specialized and rarified, may aren't.   There is a lot of Nature out there.  You don't have to do anything  novel. There is great joy to be had from observing, asking simple questions and then seeing if you can answer them by observing or experimenting.  If you're really lucky you're rewarded with a question you hadn't considered.  With practice you'll get better.  

 

People say children are natural scientists.  It isn't true.  They're curious and ask questions, but the rest of the process hasn't developed.  Their curiosity needs be be encouraged - eventually the rest can follow.  People told my parents I was too curious for my own good.  That I'd put my eye out or something.  That was a long time ago.  I'm way more curious now and am still alive.  It isn't a bad thing. 

 

I'm still conflicted about the march.  It may even be counter-productive, turning off a segment of the population it needs to win over.  But I'll talk with others and - well - that is usually a good thing.  Down the road my focus needs to shift a bit towards science literacy to common ground and story telling.  I won't drop talking about science and will be writing about learning how to ask Nature questions on your own rather than just reading about it or seeing a show on TV.

 

Ideas and help are always welcome and thanks to those who have helped me so far.  With luck the focus is better now.

 

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

 

discovery and moving out of the cave

Mr Wolff was one of those special teachers you listened to.  Upon learning many of us had been assigned Fahrenheit 451 in our utopia and dystopias class, he saw an opening and got us to go to the source for later discussion.   We made the pilgrimage to Val's bookstore for a copy of The Republic and read the Allegory of the Cave.  I can't say much Plato stuck with me - but the Allegory led to an epiphany.

 

You probably know the story.  If you're a bit rusty, try the video. It's just the surface, but no need to worry about that -  how the prisoners see the world in 2d shadows is the point for now.

 

The image haunted me at first.  Rather than worry about what Plato was trying to teach all I could think about was a simple case - a ruler held up to the light.    All the prisoner would see is the shadow Rotate the ruler and the prisoner would see it's length change.  The concept of length would mean nothing - it was far too variable.

 

But what if one of the prisoners was exceptionally curious and a bit mathematical?  What if he imaged another dimension perpendicular to the only two he knew and worked out a three dimensional trigonometry.   The ruler could rotate in this new three dimensional space producing a two dimensional projection that changed in length.  It would have been a fundamental discovery for them - that the real world had three dimensions, but the they could only experience it as projections of two.  

 

Science is about moving out of the cave.

 

In the early 1800s a bookbinder's apprentice named Michael Faraday started down a path that fundamentally changed the world.  While Faraday had no formal education, he was insanely curious and inventive.  He sat in on the lectures of Humphrey Davy and presented the great man with a beautifully bound set of the notes he took.  Davy knew a good thing when he saw it and took on the young man.  It was a good choice.  He grew in his post and turned into the best experimentalist of the century - arguably one of the two or three best of all time.  

 

Physicists of the day had been working with magnets and electricity.  Bits and pieces were being learned but the underlying picture was elusive despite some tantalizing hints.  You probably did it in grade school -  run an electric current through a wire you get a magnet.  There seemed to be a connection between these two forces and dozens were on the case.   In one of the most important accidents in the history of science Faraday had two coils of wire near each other when he connected a battery to one and happened to notice a momentary current in the other.  Disconnecting the battery produced another current.  The light bulb came on before the invention of light bulbs (what was the representation for an idea back then?)  In other words a changing magnetic field produces an electric field.

 

Unschooled in math, Faraday created visual model.  He imaged lines of force connecting or repelling changes.  These lines bunched up where the field was high and thinned out where it was weak.  Like charges attracted (a) and unlike charges repelled (b). Lines didn't cross.   While it seems simple the intuition displayed is astonishing.  It turned out to be right - not only mathematically, but it hinted at a much deeper view into how Nature works .. one outside the cave.¹ 

 

There's an apocryphal story that Gladstone visited Faraday's lab and asked why his work should be funded - of what use is it?  Faraday was said to have replied  "Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it"  What Faraday had discovered led to the invention of electric generators and motors.  Almost as soon as that happened people started working on electric motors and lamps - and this other invention called the telegraph which led to the multiplexed telegraph which became the telephone. You get the picture... Trillions of dollars and huge changes in nearly everything we do.  It also sparked James Clerk Maxwell.

 

Maxwell was the century's greatest theoretical physicist.  Trying to come up with something comprehensive, he built on Faraday's insight and added work by Gauss and Ampère.  In the process he realized electricity and magnetism weren't separate forces, but were really pieces of the same thing.  Depending on your frame of reference you might see one or the other.  They were manifestations of something deeper - he called the unified force electromagnetism.  

 

Maxwell didn't stop there.  Usually in the sophomore year a physics major learns what may be the first really beautiful thing she'll learn about physics.   Shake an electric charge.  Now you have a current starting and stopping. You do a bit of math and imagine in your mind what's going on.  The shaking produces a changing electric field that, in turn, creates a changing magnetic field, but that produces a changing electric field that produces a changing magnetic field that produces a changing electric field ... you get the idea - a disturbance in electric and magnetic fields moves out from the charge you had been shaking.  Now go into the lab and measure the the strength of electric forces between two changes and the strength of the magnetic force between two magnets.  You plug these experimentally determined values into the simple wave equation you found by using Maxwell's equations and the simple thought experiment and you get the speed of the disturbance moving through the electromagnetic field.

 

The speed turns out to the the speed of light.  Maxwell had shown light was an electromagnetic wave.²  

 

These fields that Faraday imagined because he couldn't do the math turnout to be real.  Maxwell had created the first great unification in physics and something unexpected and totally wonderful fell out - the connection between light and electromagnetism.  Two decades later Hertz showed you could create and receive radio waves and physics departments in Europe and the US began to teach the theory of electromagnetism to physics and engineering students.

 

This electromagnetic field was real ... all we had to do was crawl a bit out of the cave.  Real and useful ..  trillions of dollars since then. 

 

Some of us are like that dog who has to chase the tennis ball all the time.  You ask the dog why and he looks at you like you just don't get it.  "It's the most thrilling and glorious thing!  How can you not do it?"  Scientists often  have difficultly communicating the beauty.   If I really know the subject I should be able to describe it with words and pictures rather than the math, although that is beautiful too.   I continue struggling as I work on improving.  For me one on one is better - stop me and take a walk some time.  Better yet is letting someone discover on their own.

 

I'm torn on the upcoming science marches.  I'll write something addressing it directly soon, but experience with protests tells me my time is better spent communicating locally and not lecturing.   Maybe if you can shake someone's imagination ...  In the meantime I'll try on neat things you can observe or do - amateur science on a personal level from bats to a sport like volleyball to a number of things.  stay tuned.

__________

¹ This addressed one of the fundamental problems Newton had with gravity - how did one mass manage to communicate with another?  It turns out something even deeper was at work, but fields are how much of Nature works at a fundamental level.  It seems a little weird, but you're made up of field disturbances.

² From the chalkboard during one of Feynman's freshman lectures.  If it isn't clear consider the conceptual model from shaking a charge.  I worry that too many of us find representations like this so beautiful that we stop there and assume people have the background to appreciate what's going on.  Although the special case of the shaking charge doesn't allow you to calculate anything , it does give insight to the non-physicist.  

 

Recipe Corner

 

Spring is here.  Asparagus!  Rather than offer a recipe I suggest you go out and experiment.  It is great steamed, roasted, pan fried, blanched, grilled and even raw.  Roasted nuts go well and, if you can find good early blackberries....

  

it's not easy being green

The lovely little cherry in front of our place says Spring is finally here.  It's beginning to leaf and currently is generating a bit north of a watt per square meter.  In a few weeks it will  throttle up to max cherry tree power.

 

Photosynthesis generates about three times as much energy per year as humanity uses. All of our food and most of the energy we purchase comes from it, but we usually don't walk by a tree and think - oh what a lovely oak and such a sunny day.  It's probably up to three or four hundred watts at the moment.¹   Photosynthesis never had to be extremely efficient, and it never evolved to anything close to the theoretical maximum.²   SciFi films sometimes show green skinned aliens who do photosynthesis, but it would be barely enough to charge their phones - if you were close to nude you'd be lucky to present a square meter  If you spent your time outside every day  might average about 25 watt-hours a day -- maybe a watt of power.  But throw on clothes and go inside and it falls apart quickly.  Anything that moves around and has a brain can't easily harvest power passively -- storage key to our existence.

 

For an idea of scale you need about a hundred watts of power to run your body - that's close to 2,000 nutrition calories a day.  If you could plug into a tree with perfect efficiency, you'd need a good sized one to keep going.  We do this by eating green plants or things that green plants eat, but you begin to get an idea of scale. 

 

Systems of all flavors and change radically with scale and purpose.   A car is a wasteful means of moving a person around ... payload to gross vehicle weight is often under five percent while something like a bicycle  is usually above eighty five percent.  Since most of us are unwilling and unable to spend more than an hour a day commuting and we like traveling by ourselves,  a car gives convenient range and energy costs have been low enough to justify enormous growth of the transportation mode.    

 

Now everyone is talking about autonomous vehicles.  Many assume we'll see something like Teslas or other conventional electric vehicles with the appropriate sort of computation.  I've written about such things - get in touch or check out Horace Dediu and Jim Zelmer's excellent Asymcar podcast.  Moving people in cities doesn't scale with payload to GVW ratios below a third or so.  Rethinking the vehicle is essential and there are reasons to think something like it could happen. 

 

I've done some work looking at single and two passenger vehicles with GVWs under 500 kg - sometimes much smaller.  If you keep the speed under about 40 km/h you're fine for most cities with good crash survivability and less expensive autonomy. Electrics and regenerative braking are a must in this regime, but aerodynamics are unimportant. Parking is a much smaller issue and navigation is easier.  Hybrid navigation schemes involving buried cables can happen.  With modest engineering thirty plus year life cycles outside of batteries and tires is possible, so you would probably wouldn't own one.   Not that this would happen, but it is probably much more practical than the Uber/autonomous schemes.   There are still some rather large social, data ownership, security and privacy challenges and none of this is going to happen overnight - the timescale of fleet replacement is about an order of magnitude longer than smartphones.  Along the way we're likely to see much of what we have now with much more computation for safety.  

 

Rather than write a book on the subject I'll stop here, but if you're interested there are reasons why the future could be different from the popular vision - in fact historically it almost always is.

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¹ There are a couple of ways of getting at this.  The quickest is to consider the surface area of the tree covered by leaves - the two dimensional cross section normal to the solar direction is a good first approximation, multiply that by the solar power per square meter at the time.  On a clear day at altitude with the Sun perfectly overhead it's about a kilowatt per square meter, but usually it's 500 watts per square meter or so in the Summer on a clear day at mid latitudes...  averaging for clouds and night and solar scatter gives you 150 to 300 watts per square meter in mid latitudes... about 240 world average.   Now plug in the photosynthetic efficiency of the tree..  generally 0.2 to 0.5 percent for deciduous trees.

Another way is to look at the biomass tree produces in a year and recognize the metabolic needs of a tree aren't huge.  It isn't moving around or thinking. 

° the average solar energy per day for this part of the country for April through September is about 4 kWh/m² per day and trees are in leaf about 220 days a year.  

° an average mature oak is about 50 feet tall.  I approximate the leaf area by a disk with a radius of 6 meters or an area of about 100 m²

this → 88,000 kWh for the oak per leaf season

° a 50 foot oak has a dry mass of about a ton - I'll call it a metric tonne.  It produces about 100 kg of new dry wood a year

° dry wood has an energy content of about 16 MJ/kg or about 4.4 kWh/kg

this → 440 kWh of energy from the dry wood and an efficiency of 440/88,000 or 0.5%

440 kWh/leaf season → 440kWh/(220 d * 24h/d) or a bit over 80 watts average

² Caltech is working on that one

 

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Vegan Meringue

 

I'm not kidding...  I tested the claim that you can substitute the brine from chickpeas.  Here's what worked .. better is probably possible.  I've had a couple of edible disasters and a couple of successes .. the trick on the oven door is important!

 

Ingredients 

 

° 6 Tbl of brine from canned chick peas 

° 1/2 tsp cream of tartar

° 3/4 cup of fine sugar (the finer the better)

° bit of salt

° 1 tsp vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

° oven to 250°F

° in a mixing bowl wisk the brine and cream of tartar with an electric mixer for a few minutes until it foams.  Add the sugar a bit at a time and keep wisking, when the sugar is mixed in add a pinch of salt

° as peaks begin to form mix in the vanilla after an eternity - over ten minutes for me - stiff peaks formed. 

° pipe it to a cookie sheet and bake about 45 minutes.  You need to do the meringue trick of not opening the door - just turn off the heat - for an hour or so to let them dry.